There is an entire medical framework built on physics, chemistry and biology to start with to qualify as a doctor. To become a psychiatrist one must become a doctor first. If you are suggesting that psychiatry is a black art then I agree. The maths and science is so complicated that it devolves into art. However to suggest mental illness has no basis in science is ludicrous. In particular psychiatry involves rigorous use of scientific method like any other branch of medicine.
I’m no expert in the history of psychiatry, however I am well aware that it has a very chequered past. The history of psychiatry has largely been rendered irrelevant due to the pace of technological and scientific advancement.
Those example certainly spring to mind. As somebody with two of those disorders I can assure you that there is a lot to be said for those medicines that are developed my medical scientists.
A mental illness is problem with ones brain functioning incorrectly. That it is highly stigmatised where you come from is a great shame, and seemingly a massive source of paranoia on your part. The US does indeed have a problem with mass incarceration and observing the mindless hate towards transgender people in the US, I shudder to think how the mentally ill are treated across the board. Still, you are projecting the US’s societal ills onto a medical profession that dwarfs the United States.
Mental illness is unresolved. I have limited regard for the social sciences in that their conclusions should not be used to bully scientists (including medical professionals and psychiatrists) into what they may conclude. Primarily I am referring to the demand that transgender people be declared not mentally ill because the social scientists think its mean. Tough. The science goes where it goes.
I don’t see how insisting transgendered people aren’t mentally ill helps them. If you need a team of psychiatrists, lawyers, surgeons and anaesthetists to help you cut your nuts off then there is probably something wrong with you.
lol. I’m a fan of both disciplines however I think describing either as a branch of science is being a little over generous, and that is being kind. Both disciplines do employ scientific method and are supported by science, i.e. physics, chemistry, biology and so forth.
The true sciences though are by their very nature unimpeachable. Take psychiatry in the US: Psychiatrists in the US are bystanders, cuckolded by their own deluded self importance and financial interests as a lunatic threatens life on earth. If psychiatry was really a science, the entire discipline would not be cowed to silence. Since they are so easily cowed by the social sciences on transgender issues it is hardly a surprise though.
Feel free to share a collection of concise articles detailing your revelation that being transgender is not a mental illness though. I expect a broad consensus of psychiatrists and the majority of neuroscientists as well.
Then the people who really care would find some other way to find potential partners. I’ve learned from this thread that okcupid asks both whether you are trans and whether you are okay dating someone who is trans. Maybe, if you have need for a dating site, that would be a good one for you.
I would say that we use age as a proxy for maturity because it is convenient. And in cases where it is critically important, we allow the courts to declare otherwise.
So, minors can sue to be emancipated from their parents, or can ask the courts (themselves or via proxies) for permission for medical care their parents don’t approve. In many states, minors can marry with their parents consent.
On the flip side, some people are legally recognized as incompetent despite their biological age.
For less critical matters, like drinking, the proxy is good enough.
Yes, and I think that’s a form of mental illness, especially if it’s serious. Some trans people suffer from gender disphoria. Some successfully transitioned and no longer suffer from gender disphoria.
Others are born feeling a disconnect between body and brain, but don’t suffer from it and aren’t made ill by it. The child of a college friend says that he is really a guy, but he is okay with his female body, except for feeling a little impotent during sex. He has parents who met him where he was, and friends who are supportive and think of him as a guy, and I suspect those are reasons he doesn’t suffer from gender disphoria.
Yes, there probably is. But it’s something that might be cured or alleviated by those actions. That’s why people do it.
Speaking of that child-of-friends… It’s very weird to be with him. Physically, he is the spitting image of his mother when she was in college. Psychologically, he is the spitting image of his father, who has a very distinctive personality. It’s as if someone grafted the father’s soul into the mother’s body.
So in alleging that transgender people are “mentally ill” you’re embracing them as people akin to yourself, people with the same ailments that you consider yourself to have. The difference is, you’re armchair-diagnosing people who aren’t complaining about their own mental status. You are observing a cognitive and behavioral pattern that you (not them) find provocatively disturbing and concluding from that that there is something wrong with their brains. Couldn’t be any other explanation.
You flat-out do not know that.
Not really, no. The entire world in which psychiatry operates as a profession uses “mental illness” in roughly the same way.
I have limited regard for the biomedical scientists in that their conclusions should not be used to discredit the insights of social activists and social critics.
No one anywhere should ever need to be declared “not mentally ill”. Mental illness is not a default — you don’t get to assume it. Everyone, everywhere, is owed the courtesy of not having their thought patterns disparaged by conflating atypical content with “meaningless brain static caused by the fact that your brain isn’t working correctly”. The only meaningful exceptions are where people identify themselves as people with thinking/feelng/behaving problems. (They may do so in concurrence with a trained psychiatrist to whom they’ve gone for a diagnosis. The key point is that they themselves consider that a mental problem exists).
Social scientists aren’t declaring transgender people to have been misdiagnosed as “mentally ill” beause it is mean. They are declaring it to have been a misdiagnosis because it is factually incorrect. They are saying that the mental processes of the people in question make rational and coherent sense and that there is not a problem with the behavior of their brains.
If they aren’t asking you for “help”, you don’t get to “help” them.
I’ve listened to people who wish to receive sex reassignment surgery and to people who have had it done, and their reasons for doing so are coherent sensible and appropriate to their situation. Just because someone wants to do something that you can’t imagine wanting to have done, yourself, doesn’t make them “sick”, “wrong”, or dismissable as folks suffering from brain disease.
I do not happen to be a person who opted for the surgery (or hormones or any other physiological modification geared towards allowing me to present as female-bodied). But I gave it consideration. I understood what it could do for me. There were advantages and disadvantages. In my case the advantages did not outweigh the disadvantages. There wasn’t a goddam thing wrong with my brain at the time that I thought about it.
Then there is no such thing in science as a “mental disorder”, because there is no scientific discipline, at least according to you, that deals with the issue.
I would say I see dramatic similarities yes. From personal experience I regard them as manifestations of a wildly different problem (not the same ailments) but via what I regard as the similar mental stupidity.
I am making a pretty obvious observation. To group all transgender people as not complaining about their mental status is something that I would never do. You have no right to make such an assertion.
I don’t find it provocatively disturbingly. At the risk of sounding sociopathic, it isn’t me who is profoundly unhappy and has to mutilate my body to appease an errant mind. I find it astonishingly that I am mentally ill, but if I decided I was a woman and wanted to cut my nuts off my psychiatrist would supposedly say, “thats entirely normal, so is anything else troubling you.” It is patently absurd.
The world exists outside of the US.
I have the highest regard for biomedical scientists since they make me a functional human being. Social activists and social critics should keep their uneducated bibs out of science.
So unless a schizophrenic agrees he is is schizophrenic it aint so?
Appearing rational and coherent does not necessarily mean someone doesn’t have a problem with their brain.
You take being mentally ill as a person insult. It probably is in the US judging from the political state of your country. However, it really isn’t. Your body and mind will eventually fail and you will die like everyone else. You aren’t special, there is something wrong with your brain.
So to sum up, you want scientific evidence but will reject any scientific evidence provided by the scientists most relevant to the research area in question, for a reason that is incoherent nonsense. Unless you have some scientific evidence for the following, of course?
I don’t think that the vast majority of the population should regulate their behavior to avoid something that is so rare, rather I think the burden is on the person with the rare condition or rare requirement to make this known. So if you want to date trans, you should say so. If you are trans, you should say so.
They also ask if you’re woman and if you believe as Miller does that transwomen are women. Full Stop. Then why not just answer that you are a woman, full stop?
When if ever was our focus “how do we need to change our collective behavior to better accommodate them as they’ve requested”
Some requests are reasonable:
Hey, I have lady parts and I look and dress like a woman, I’d like to use the ladies room.
Some requests are not reasonable:
Anyone that doesn’t want to date a transwoman should explicitly say so on their dating profile because I don’t want to disclose that I’m a transwoman on my dating profile so I can go out with guys that probably don’t want to date me but maybe they will change their minds after they get to know me.