I don’t think it’s possible currently to get a person to change their brain’s gender identification. Some people don’t necessarily want to change their physical sex either, just their societal presentation status, so changing the body is not necessarily correct. If all that needs to happen for people to feel better is to present in public something that doesn’t match their original designation, that shouldn’t be hard. Unfortunately, too many people don’t like the idea of it.
I haven’t read all 1000 threads on that. Sorry.
The point is there is still a disconnect between the two and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to think about every avenue of treatment. We aren’t always going to be constrained to 2017 technology.
Perhaps, it will always be best to treat the rest of the body minus the brain. Maybe not.
I get the discomfort with addressing the brain because that’s where the sense of self is manifested and usually people are protective of their current version of self.
Ok, what are the arguments for saying it’s *not *an illness. I mean, being deaf is an illness, right? We shouldn’t hate deaf people or discriminate them, but compared to healthy humans of the past million years, deaf people are not as functional as fully able bodied humans. And, we can treat being deaf and have invented prosthetics.
Having the wrong set of desires and the wrong “script” for the genitals you’re born with…how can you say it isn’t basically a mistake made by nature? Sure, we cannot do anything about it, yet, since you’d basically need to send nanotech magic snakes into someone brains and force rewire it or something, but just because we can’t fix…or even understand the exact details of the problem, doesn’t mean we can’t infer that it is a problem.
Yes really in the case AHunter3 was responding to. I was talking about the legal situation in Spain, not the DSM. The Spanish government requires a psychiatric diagnosis for gender dysphoria: they are treating gender dysphoria as a mental illness. Pregnancy gets “detected” or “confirmed”, not “diagnosed”: it’s not considered an illness (you know what’s worse than the fury of a scorned woman? That of a voluntarily-pregnant woman who’s told pregnancy is an illness).
By requiring that gender dysphoria get a diagnosis the government is classifying it as an illness. Part of it is a translations problem? Well maybe, yeah - but still it’s a problem with definitions. It’s not a matter of whether gender dysphoria means that person is too mentally unstable to be allowed near fire trucks or not, it’s an issue with the language used and the definitions used. Again: firepeople and police who have obtained the diagnosis post-acceptance can transition and keep their jobs but you cannot join either force with a gender dysphoria diagnosis; the military is ok with diagnoses both pre and post entry, and don’t tell me tanks are less dangerous than panda cars.
From what you said it sounds to me like Spain needs this diagnosis if the person wants the state to pay for re-assignment surgery.
What happens if the person is willing to pay the costs on their own for gender reassignment in Spain?
IANA neuroscientist, but from what I’ve read as a layperson about transgender neurobiology, I’m not convinced that your notion of a straightforward brain/body “disconnect”, where the problem can be reduced to a simple mismatch between anatomy and gender identity and we should be able to change either one to match the other, is a valid description of reality.
AFAICT, transgender people perceive themselves as a different gender than their genital anatomy indicates not because they’re “confused” or “mentally ill”, but because that perception reflects something real about their physical brains that differs from the physical brains of most people born with similar genital anatomy.
This isn’t unique to the phenomenon of transgender, of course. For example, a minority of people spontaneously tend to use their left hands for tasks that most people naturally perform with their right hands, even though the so-called “left-handers” look the same anatomically as the “right-handers”. The left-handers aren’t confused or mentally ill concerning their physical functioning. It’s just that their perception of which hand it’s “natural” to use to manipulate objects reflects something real about their physical brains that differs from the physical brains of most people.
That sort of brain-structure difference does not seem like a candidate for an easy “fix” or “treatment”, no matter how advanced our “technology” becomes. Consider, for example, how much work it takes even to successfully “treat” the brain of a left-hander so they can achieve the comparatively simple and straightforward ability to function like a “normal” right-hander.* It requires the treatment subject to constantly resist and re-train perceptions that are based in their brain’s physical reality.
Imagine how much more work it must be for transgender individuals to constantly resist and deny gender-identity perceptions that are also based in the physical reality of the brain, even if they are statistically “abnormal” in terms of matching with bodily anatomy.
- Naturally, I’m not seriously advocating that left-handers actually should receive “treatment” to overcome their left-handedness and function more “normally”, i.e., in a way that matches majority tendencies. That sort of “treatment” used to be standard practice, of course, but AFAICT current neurological science advocates accepting left-handedness as a variant rather than a pathology of brain-body functioning.
Sure, but the same could be argued to a lesser extent for left-handedness, for example. Not being able to use standard tools and layouts with the same facility as the right-handed majority is to some extent a disability. So is, say, being tone-deaf or having color vision deficiency.
But because such “abnormalities” are relatively trivial in their impacts, we just include them in the category of normal variation and provide technological solutions to cope with the functional limitations that they entail, rather than insisting that they are “mistakes” and “illnesses” that need to be “treated”.
If transgender people want to not be transgender, and at some point neuroscience comes up with “nanotech magic snakes” or some other solution that can successfully change their brain structure to bring that about, fine. In the meantime, though, ISTM that we as a society will be much better off just including transgender identity, like left-handedness and color vision deficiency, in the category of normal variation, rather than insisting it’s a “mistake” or “illness” or “problem” that needs to be “treated”.
For starters, being able to do it “in” Spain would be a bitch. Moving to a different country to do it would probably be easier than finding a clinic that’s got the skills and can figure out how to bill you for it.
And you’d never be able to get your ID corrected.
What I think should be done is stop calling it a diagnosis. I do consider that a psychological evaluation is needed*, but not everything a doc can detect is an illness. Change the terms.
- If, and having encountered two cases already it does happen, you one day decide you want to be a woman but you still expect to be treated exactly as a man, maybe what you need isn’t so much hormones as a cold shower. If you combine the above with taking offense at the notion that your body felt wrong, “I never had the wrong body, I’m a woman by choice!” (link in Spanish), then you may also need a good smack from every not-by-choice woman you ever treated like a second-class citizen without thinking about it.
There are many excellent autobiographical accounts from transgender people availale at Amazon or your local library or independent bookstore. If you read them, you will be able to follow along with the main character and see through their eyes. I think you’ll find them quite rational and coherent people, and their evaluations of their situation to make compelling sense.
Calling someone crazy (or “mentally ill”) when it’s based on finding one priority or perspective of theirs to be foreign and disturbing to you is a form of argument ad hominem (or ad feminem in some cases) — it’s essentially saying “anyone who can possibly think that isn’t really ‘thinking’, their brains must be messed up”. That put it in the same ballpark as “la la la la, I can’t HEEEAR you” as a discussion device.
Transgender people may occasionally be nuts (just as cisgender people may occasionally be nuts) but stating that you are transgender doesn’t mean you’re nuts. Transgender people are people who are saying things that some folks have difficulty wrapping their heads around. And the cognitive and emotional difficulties in that situation lie in the latter set of heads. They’re the ones getting upset and feeling cognitively bent out of shape by their thoughts.
Latin homo does not mean “male human being”. It means “human being”; in fact, it is the root of the word “human”. “Male human being” is vir (root of, for example, “virile”).
The homo in homosexual is from Greek and means “the same, equal”. Linguistically speaking, homosexual includes lesbians.
What are the studies that establish the suicide rates of pre- and post-transition transgender people, that show that transitioning is a nearly perfect cure?
TIA.
Regards,
Shodan
You have my deep sympathy - it must be excruciating feeling the weight of other people’s problems as well as your own.
Don’t you give up. 
I think the comparison to soldiers is very apt. A lot of trans people probably are suffering from PTSD because of the way transgendered people get treated in society. Society practically does to them what Charles Boyer did to Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight.
Although, I was heartened two weeks ago when I met a 10-year-old trans girl, who was being allowed to live as she wanted by her parents. She had long hair and girl’s clothes, and at her request, her parents called her by the name they would have called her by if she’d been born without the “boy parts.” As she explained it, and she was pretty articulate for 10, she wasn’t sure if she was just a regular girl, or “non-binary.” She said she didn’t like skirts, but she liked leggings, and jeans from the girls’ department.
I told her not liking skirts meant nothing, because I didn’t like them either; the one I was wearing that day was out of respect for my mother.
She was in a situation with a lot of people (my mother’s memorial) whom had not seen her since she was a toddler, so she felt the need to explain herself, and she actually brought the topic up.
I thought her parents could not have been handling it better.
So there’s hope for the future.
If the cure sometimes includes very drastic surgery and chemical intervention my take is something is being treated. If something is being treated then there is a perceived problem by someone. It seems that the issue with labeling is the stigma associated with the label not the accuracy.
With regards to how society treats people, I think people should be left to do as they wish for the most part and society should respect that.
It’s all “mentally ill.” But transsexuals may be on the lower end of the mentally ill scale. Certainly lower than anyone who thinks about them a lot and gets upset.
Perhaps just a couple? Because this really has been done to death on here, and in the medical world as well. Sure, just like you can find anti-vax physicians, you can find anti-transition physicians. But the established best practice is transition is the cure. Dr. Benjamin, who while not the first nor not the only was the person who exploded this issue into publicity in the 1960’s, ultimately was motivated out of compassion to do the least harm. Benjamin, like Hirschfeld before him, did try to “cure” transgender persons with drugs, intensive psychotherapy, negative and positive reinforcement, etc. He found that crossdressers could be discouraged from crossdressing if they were loaded up with some drugs, but ultimately the best option for transgender persons was to transition.
Transition would be neither that controversial nor difficult if most would just cease their laser-like focus on our genitals and get over their fragility over their own masculinity or femininity. We’re not born bigots - when I work with classes in school where a young person must transition, 95+% of the kids have the attitude of “so what? Mike was a girl and now he’s a boy. Boys rule! We got an extra guy for football now.” It’s not until the kids go home and tell the parents that suddenly it becomes a “problem.” Something we all have to be “deeply, DEEPLY concerned about!” Something that requires segregation, shaming, ostracism, and violence.
Thank you. My Facebook-focused post was just to show that the gender dysphoria isn’t the killer for us, not nearly as much as the lack of support and the discrimination. The only thing that will cause me to give up is if Fierra’s cancer takes her life.
I’m not anti or pro transition. However, if science says that the least harm and best outcome is transitioning, if desired, I won’t argue with that. I do believe in the least harm principle with regards to medicine.
Really? Because people sometimes get pretty drastic surgery or chemical intervention for purely elective reasons: they want bigger breasts, for example, or increased muscle mass. Nobody says you have to get a doctor to diagnose you with “mammary developmental disorder” or something to obtain that kind of “treatment”.
As Una pointed out, if people just stopped being so dogmatic about gender binarism, a lot of the current “problems” surrounding transgender would just go away.
Some forms of body modification do actually indicate mental illness.