lol Is that your way of saying you are a Tory? Theresa loves Donald 
The UK has as much moral backbone as the US right now.
Shame on you.
So your response to a claim that you have posted incoherent nonsense is to post yet more incoherent nonsense?
If it is incoherent to you that is a reflection on your education. Nothing to do with me thanks.
What happened to the famous English sense of humour?
Apparently it is.
Medicine is a science. Psychiatry is a branch of medicine. Or are dictionaries insufficiently reputable for you?
And yes, it must be my fault that the fact that you responded to a discussion on transgenderism with “Theresa loves Donald” appears to be a total non sequitur.
I think we’re done here.
Cite?
Unless a schizophrenic says their condition is unpleasant and undesirable, it isn’t an illness, just a mental difference.
Yes, but you’re attempting to derive the existence of a problem with their brain from your starting point of believing them to be irrational and incoherent, mentally nonsensical, when they opt to get sex reassignment surgery and transition.
I am special and there is nothing wrong with my brain.
Here, also, we have the equivocation between “these people are suffering emotionally and something needs to be done for them” and “mental illness” which keeps getting defined (by the profession itself as well as within this thread) as a brain malfunction.
A condition of being profoundly unhappy, or obsessed with a set of thoughts and ideas that they can’t untangle to their own satisfaction, is most often the result of a perfectly fine nonpathological brain trying to process a very difficult social situation.
It is politically offensive to me to see anyone and everyone who is other than happy with their circumstances as someone who has a brain defect. That basically defines dissatisfaction and unhappiness as defective. If you don’t understand why that is politically problematic you probably haven’t given it much thought.
Are a lot of trans folks in a state of emotional turmoil? Yes. There is not, generally speaking, a damn thing wrong with them.
That is hilarious and horrifying at the same time.
I’m sorry if that went over your head. That wasn’t a comment on transgenderism, it was a comment on the UK’s failure regarding Brexit and how the world is laughing at you for getting into bed with Donald Trump on trade. How is that working out for you?
How about “I don’t want to disclose that I’m a transwoman because doing so could risk my livelihood or life?”
Better that a few should die or be ruined than that millions should have to have to tick a box on their dating profile.
Thats the first sensible thing you have written since I joined.
I can only talk about my own experience here. I can’t attest for anyone else but I am eternally grateful for the medication that is available to me. Furthermore I know and trust that it will continue to improve. I’m very lucky to be alive at this time and have the kind of privileged access to mediation that I do.
If I stop taking medication then I become quite unwell. There is no source to cite here.
hmmm.
I don’t think so. i’ve never met a transgender person to my knowledge (though there are obviously two in my suburb - they look ridicious). I don’t think of transgender people as being irrational, incoherent , nonsensical or any of the things that you talk of. Quite the opposite actually. They are obviously very convincing.to talk to from what I can gather.
The best piece of advice I think my psychiatrist ever has given me is that nobody is special.
I don’t think that being transgender means you are mentally ill. But I think a large fraction of transgender people are mentally ill.
If you are sad because your spouse died, it is most often the result of a perfectly fine nonpathological brain trying to process a very difficult social situation. If you are so sad that you can’t function, you are mentally ill. We don’t usually treat that except be giving the person some time, because it usually resolves on its own. Just like we don’t usually treat the common cold or other common self-limiting physical diseases.
But if someone is still emotionally crippled a year after their spouse dies, it’s probably wise to seek professional help for that depression.
I think many trans people are mentally ill. In many cases, it is because of the way society reacts to them. Just as a large fraction of gay people were mentally ill back when that was socially unacceptable.
But I do think it’s important to distinguish between “mentally ill as a consequence of being trans where you are” and “mentally ill, because trans means broken.” I think the former is often true, and the latter is a destructive idea.
Editing since more posts came in after I read this one.
I’m not clear on what being a Tory or not has to do with anything here, the same for T. May or Trump, so much so that this seems like it’s in the wrong thread. Shaming other posters however personalizes the argument. Please do not personalize your arguments in this fashion.
ETA:
This is a warning for personal insults. If you feel you must, the BBQ Pit is right around the corner.
[/moderating]
I want to reply to that part all by itself.
CrazyTiger, I am sorry for being disrespectful of your personal experience with your own condition, and I also apologize quite sincerely for anything I said that comes across as denigrating your choice to utilize psychiatric pharmaceuticals if they allow you to function.
I am coming to the table from a different experience. Although I did go though a period where I was miserable and worried that something was wrong with me, and sought out counselors and therapists to help, I received neither brilliantly effective non-medical help from them nor was I prescribed any psychiatric medication that did me a bit of good. (Mostly I was not prescribed psychiatric medication period, but in the semester immediately preceding my coming-out event I was given a prescription for Stelazine, a pharmaceutical similar to Thorazine. I did not like how it made me feel and did not choose to keep taking it).
When I did come out, I disturbed some people. They could not figure out WTF I was all excited about, what I was babbling about. Didn’t make sense to them. They wondered if my mind was slipping some gears. It’s something that people do wonder about concerning anyone who doesn’t seem to be making sense or whose behavior is distinctively atypical. Anyway, they asked me to go across the street to the university hospital and talk to the staff there to “clear up any questions about my state of mind”. I agreed to do so and the people at the university hospital, in turn, spent maybe ten minutes talking with me and then asked me to sign a consent form agreeing to be “treated” by the psychiatrist — a permission form I found amusing! (Dentists and dermatologists have you sign forms acknowledging that they’re going to do this or that procedure. A psychiatrist, as I thought of it at the time, would talk to you and they were silly enough to have me sign a consent form to be talked to!) It was regarded as a self-commitment although nowhere on it did it say anything about considering myself to be in need of incarceration. I received a psychiatric diagnosis.
I did not, at that time, consider myself to be in any shape way fashion or form impaired, ill, sick, nuts, messed up, confused, traumatized, stressed out, suffering from a brain disorder, emotionally disturbed, cognitionally challenged, batshit insane, or even ill at ease. All of those kinds of worries had been quite effectively dispelled during my coming-out event, which involved realizing I was OK and the world around me was rather messed up about gender. And that despite being male, the person that I was was effectively akin to who the women were, and always had been, throughout my life. I wasn’t sick: society was.
I didn’t get my brain tested for internal structural issues, nor was its chemistry tested for inappropriate biochemical levels, or an overabundance or deficit of sensitive responsive points in my neurons that would cause my brain to react inappropriately to the normal kinds of brain biochemicals, for that matter. That’s because they don’t do that. They don’t have those kinds of tests. They also weren’t very intent on examining my behavior and my thinking carefully to rule out or confirm that yes, I did or no I did not have a brain issue. Nope, like most people who encounter institutional psychiatric care, I received a diagnosis based on superficial evaluations of my behavior as described by others, and I was kept in a locked-ward setting despite my presense there being technically and officially voluntary.
So unlike you, I have no pleasant experience of psychiatry or its pharmaceuticals.
My experience is my cite, just as your experience is yours.
I am not trying to take away your access to pyschiatric help that you feel you benefit from.
But not all people experience that “help” as helpful, and this is largely tangential to the point that attributing someone else’s thoughts and perspectives to mental illness is a way of discounting what they are saying.
I would prefer that the Straight Dope Message Board not tolerate anyone discounting the thinking of any other poster as due to them being “mentally ill”. It’s far more insulting than disparaging another person in other ad hominem ways that the board does not permit.
Special means “other than normative, ordinary, typical”.
It is neither a compliment nor an insult. It pertains to the extent to which somebody or something is, or is not, an outlier, a peculiar and unusual exception to what you would typically encounter.
Your psychiatrist is wrong. Many people are special. Some people are special in unfortunate ways, others in more favorable ways, and quite a few of us in ways that are neither better than normative/typical nor worse than normative/typical, just…different.
What “special” means is that applying the everyday understandings and assumptions, the ones that work quite well when dealing with the normative/everyday situation, may not be appropriate in this case.
Yes, I’m special. If you don’t like that, take your normality-worshiping, lowest-common-denominator insisting, exception-hating bland little beige-world mind to safer quarters. Whatever your shrink may think, being typical is not in and of itself a good thing.
I have asked for a cite at least half a dozen times for an example when disclosing transgender status has led to murder. I haven’t gotten a response yet. I’m not saying examples don’t exist but I haven’t found any (but I only tried a few google searches and only went through the first page). Would you care to give it a try?
This is not about ticking a box. I can see how you could come to that conclusion given the way people on the transgender side have been presenting it. I stated earlier and quite clearly that it wouldn’t bother me if part of the profile process is stating whether or not you are OK with dating transwomen. Hell make it a mandatory part of the process if you want.
The burden that Una and Miller wants to impose on people who don’t want to date transgender is for people to state “no trans” after “I enjoy long walks on the beach” in their profile description.
I said that it is unreasonable to insist on this when almost no one even thinks of this while creating their profile.
If surgically removing healthy parts of a body to satisfy a brain’s perception of what that body should look like is not evidence of some form of brain abnormality than what is? That specific treatment to please the brain wasn’t realistic until recently, historically speaking. So treatment being available shouldn’t be a criteria in diagnosis of a condition.
How is that even relevant? Do you have examples?
I have not said anything like this, in this thread or anywhere else.
Are you kidding? They’re trivially easy to find:
Far more common than murders (which are still far too common) are beatings, firings, and other traumatic and life changing consequences to simply revealing that one is transgender. Considering all these very frequent horrible consequences, how can you be critical of someone for choosing to not disclose their status until they’re very sure that someone is a decent person and a reliable and trustworthy steward of this fact?
The women in the links above may or may not have revealed their trans status prior to or at the beginning of their dates; we probably can’t know for sure for most such murders, because they’re dead. And for safety reasons it’s wise for trans folks to refrain from intimate encounters with anyone unless they’re certain that their partner is fine with being intimate with a trans person. But none of that takes anything away from the very real and very reasonable fear that many trans folks might have for revealing their gender identity to anyone that they’re not as sure as possible will be a safe and respectful steward of this fact.