Sure, but I think we as a society don’t do a great job of coming up with consistent criteria to evaluate that.
If, in general, the population of transgender people seems to you to contain a tangible percent of people whose thinking is mentally impaired, I invite you to make a distinction:
Between conceptualizing of one’s self as being of a gender that doesn’t match your physical sex, on the one hand, and a set of behaviors related to seeking a physical transition, on the other hand.
a) Do you think it is nutty (delusional, indicative of neurocognitive impairments etc) for a person to conceptualize themselves as being of a gender that doesn’t match their physical sex?
this is all in the mind — no behaviors are being mentioned yet, body modifications or otherwise
b) If, for the sake of argument, you think it is entirely within the bounds of rational and reasonable thought for a person to conceptualize themselves as being of a gender that doesn’t match their physical sex, is there anything about the set of behaviors involved in seeking transition that do not seem rational and reasonable under those circumstances?
The argument I hear from conservatives is that believing yourself to be a different gender than what you were assigned at birth is “delusional.” But I don’t think it is. To my knowledge, transgender people are fully aware of the fact that their physical anatomy doesn’t match their image of themselves. They aren’t confused about any facts. They just FEEL like they are a different gender.
Someone with phantom limb sensations isn’t delusional. They know they are missing an arm. But nonetheless they feel like they have one.
But people with phantom limbs used to be treated as delusional. We now have some idea why phantom limbs exist, but I’m sure there are still people who think amputees are “imagining” things. And it turns out it has to to with the stumps of those nerves leading to the non-existent limb still firing. It’s an action of the nervous system you can’t see.
Likewise, some brain dysfunctions are a result of the actions of the central nervous system you can’t see at work.
And it looks like there’s evidence that transgenderism is, again, a result of something in the brain (part of the central nervous system) you can’t see at work - but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
Do you have examples of people who experience phantom pain who claim that they have two legs?
Correct. Many brain dysfunctions cannot be observed directly.
It isn’t whether or not it can be directly observed that makes an idea real or not - it is whether or not the idea corresponds to reality.
I cannot directly observe the dysfunction that causes a paranoid schizophrenic believe that space aliens are monitoring his thoughts thru the TV, and I don’t doubt that he really believes it. But that doesn’t make it real.
They may not be confused about facts, but they are asserting (on some level) that their feelings are what established their gender, and not the physical facts of anatomy and genotype.
Regards,
Shodan
As Blalron pointed out, the vast majority of transgender people are not suffering from any delusions about their physical anatomy, in the way that your hypothetical amputees with “phantom limb” sensations would be if they claimed that the amputated limb was actually physically present.
Transgender women, for example, are not claiming or imagining that they were born with vaginas when they were actually born with penises. They don’t exhibit inaccurate claims or beliefs about what their birth genitals look like.
In some superficial ways it might be easier psychologically if they could believe that their birth genitalia and other physical characteristics corresponded with their gender identity instead of contradicting it, but they can’t. That is why many of them seek to change their physical characteristics to match their gender identity.
But there’s nothing at all intrinsically delusional about such an assertion: it just depends on how society chooses to define “gender”. Gender is a social construct, as opposed to anatomical sex, which is a physical characteristic (although not always a completely unambiguously binary one).
As I noted, transgender people don’t assert that their feelings of gender identity somehow magically alter their genital anatomy. That would be an objectively falsifiable delusion akin to the schizophrenic’s belief about being mind-controlled by the TV.
Instead, what transgender people maintain (and AFAICT modern neuroscience supports this claim) is that their feelings of gender identity are based on the physical reality of their brain structure.
IOW, what primarily makes you “feel like” a man or a woman is not your conscious awareness of your physical penis or vagina, respectively, but rather the structure of certain parts of your brain. For the vast majority of people, these typically “male” and “female” brain structures correlate with having a penis or vagina, respectively. But for a small percentage of people, they don’t.
That doesn’t make that small percentage of people delusional about their gender identity. Any more than experiencing sexual attraction to men while having a penis makes a gay man delusional about his own gender identity.
And besides, just because you may LOOK like you have an XY or an XX in your genotype doesn’t mean you DO. I’ve seen that something like 90% of people have no real idea what sex they actually are because they assume that their phenotype is determined binarily and they’ve never had genetic testing done. There are many genetic disorders that make one’s physical sex and genetic sex at odds. Not everyone has XX or XY.
Transgender people believe they are one gender or another because their feelings do not correspond to their physical reality. It would be the same as if an amputee claimed “I am not an amputee” because he or she had phantom pain - i.e. the feeling that he or she had two legs. We would not accept such a claim from an amputee, because feeling doesn’t change the facts.
Actually the claim would be something like “I am not an amputee - I just have one leg” if it were going to be analogous to a transgender person.
90%? I am going to need a cite on that.
Regards,
Shodan
No, transgender people’s gender-identification feelings do not correspond to the physical reality of their genitalia and other anatomical sex characteristics.
Current thinking in neurobiology, AFAICT, strongly suggests that transgender people’s gender-identification feelings do correspond to the physical reality of the cortical regions and other structures in their brains.
Where you’re making your mistake is in incorrectly assuming that genital anatomy and other anatomical sex characteristics reliably correlate to those gendered brain structures. They don’t, any more than genital anatomy reliably correlates to sexual orientation.
Some people with penises, for example, are sexually attracted to men, and some people with penises instinctively think of themselves as female in their personal gender identity. Both types of people know perfectly well that it is much more typical and conventionally “normal” for people with penises both to think of themselves as male and to be sexually attracted to women. But that doesn’t mean that their feelings to the contrary are in any way a denial of physical reality.
No, it would not be the same. Transgender people are not making factually incorrect claims about the physical bodies they were born with. Amputee status depends only on one’s bodily physical characteristics. Gender, as it is understood and used by psychologists and neurobiologists today, does not.
Again, the analogy doesn’t make sense because amputee status, unlike gender, depends only on easily identifiable bodily characteristics.
Does it really surprise you that as much as 90% of people have no definite knowledge of their genetic sex, because they’ve never had any physical tests to determine it?
I very much doubt that jayjay was trying to claim that as much of 90% of people don’t actually fall into the standard XX/XY gender-binary categories. The point is that you can’t always tell your genetic-sex category just from your physical anatomy and/or personal gender identity.
YOUR point is exactly what I meant and didn’t convey clearly. Unless you’ve had gene testing done, you don’t necessarily know what your sex chromosomes actually are. Not everyone has two, and not everyone who presents as male or female IS.
The DSM-V defines gender dysphoria as a mental illness.
So if you ask the established mental health community, then yes, by definition, all transgender folks are mentally ill; the term isn’t being used in a negative way here - “Wow, you’re so freaking crazy, you mentally ill psycho.” - but just as a statement of fact.
If you have gender dysphoria, you are mentally ill, and transitioning is the treatment to help mitigate the effects of that mental illness.
Of course, there are plenty of people who believe that you can be transgender without having gender dysphoria, who reject the mental health establishment’s definitions of gender dysphoria, who believe that being transgender is a choice that people can make rather than a congenital or developmental issue, etc. The whole truscum/transmedicalist vs tucute/transculturalist debate, and stuff.
Technically you can’t get a C-section unless the Ob/Gyn diagnoses the mother as having some type of problem requiring one. So it’s definitely a treatment for an illness. The pregnancy may not be an illness by itself, but if the baby’s stuck in some way, that’s a serious problem.
So getting your genitals carved into a different configuration…same thing. It’s not the same thing as getting a tattoo. Surgery has a significant risk of death, so the medical system needs to formally declare that it is necessary.
As I noted above, though, no medical necessity needs to be formally declared to get your breasts carved into a different configuration. Or even to get your genitals carved into a less drastically different configuration (see, e.g., labiaplasty, vaginoplasty, scrotoplasty).
All these surgeries also carry risks of negative outcomes including infection, sexual dysfunction and death, but people are allowed to choose them with no medical necessity at all.
Cite? AFAICT, in the US elective caesareans are still permitted although medically discouraged, with probably something less than 3% of all births in the US being elective caesareans requested by the mother rather than recommended by the obstetrician.
But having a brain structure abnormality doesn’t preclude a disorder from being classified as a mental illness: autism, ADHD, and childhood schizophrenia are all in the DSM and they are all associated with brain structure abnormalities.
Not all abnormalities are considered illnesses, though - being left handed is statistically abnormal, but instead of retraining them to be righties we let let them be lefties, and even make some common tools (like scissors) in versions for their use.
Other things society does not accommodate.
I guess the question is which sort of society you think proper - one that accommodates transgender people or one that doesn’t.
Related to this is the question of whether such accommodation has successful outcomes, and how much burden is placed on society by making such accommodation.
Which is why it seems so bizarre to me that we as a society are so reluctant to adopt the incredibly simple and low-effort accommodation of just accepting people’s declared gender identities.
For the approximately 15-20% of transgender people who apparently don’t want genital surgery, that would pretty much solve the whole problem. And for the rest, it would at least vastly reduce the stress and distress of their gender dysphoria or whatever we want to call it.
You say you identify as a man and want to present as such even though you don’t have a penis? Okay, you’re a man. You identify and present as a woman? You’re a woman. There, that was easy.
For the tiny minority of situations when the law or some other authority (e.g., sports competition leagues) is actually going to have to make decisions based on a transgender person’s birth-assigned gender, we can work out the rules as we go along. In the meantime, the default is that you are the gender you say you are, and it’s nobody else’s business what’s in your underwear unless they’re your doctor or you’re in a consensual underwear-exploring situation with them.
Problem (well, at least a significant part of the problem) solved. You’re welcome.
The notion that someone does not know their genetic sex without testing is what I am questioning.
If you have a penis, the gigantically overwhelming majority of the time, you have XY chromosomes. The idea that “you can’t be sure without being tested” is absurd.
Regards,
Shodan
I think if you’re born with a healthy body, but you can’t be happy without medically altering your body’s appearance, then that’s a mental illness.
But so what? We have medical treatments to get a person’s body aligned with what their mind needs it to be. When you get your sex properly assigned, then you don’t have the mental illness anymore.
To me the more interesting question is why there is so much more empathy for gender-reassignees than for say, women who get breast implants. Is it a mental illness for a woman to be obsessed with having their breasts enlarged? Are people or society better served when medicine is casually complicit about feeding the cultural fetish for big boobs?
I wonder what it would look like if we had a world where men could be born with women’s brains and everybody could just be OK with whatever that means for gender.
I might see your point if women routinely killed themselves over their breast size.