In case it wasn’t clear, the previous post was a cautionary tale to others, not an invitation toncontinue the behavior you received a warning for. Here is another warning for trolling.
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In case it wasn’t clear, the previous post was a cautionary tale to others, not an invitation toncontinue the behavior you received a warning for. Here is another warning for trolling.
[/moderating]
Felt like I was the wrong sex since about 12, now 27 and was depressed for most of this period. I didn’t transition because I knew I wouldn’t be happy with the results and nothings going to hide my ridiculously deep voice. I would just be a slowly balding dude in a dress… If I could take a pill to actually be a woman then I would take it without hesitation.
Think there’s a trend of people doing it because their fetishistic tendency more than something more deep down.
Luckily for me I met a girl who was very open minded me and said something that really stuck with me. “It wasn’t until my father was in his late 40s, he figured out what type of man he wanted to be”.
I’m learning to accept myself and my masculinity, slowly but surely. By not calling it a “mental health” issue, you’re robbing people of getting help and accepting themselves.
Nobody is claiming that transgender people can’t have mental health problems. Of course people with depression, whatever their gender or gender identity or anything else, should be able to get help and accept themselves.
Yes, there are plenty of people for whom resolving their psychological issues with gender identity doesn’t mean identifying as transgender. And that’s fine. But it is not helpful to them or anybody else for society just to slap a one-size-fits-all “mentally ill” label on transgender identity.
What you should have been told back when you were 12 is not “If you ever think or feel that you’re somehow ‘the wrong sex’ then you’re mentally ill and you should get treated right away”, but rather “If you have feelings of depression or dissatisfaction about your gender identity, there are a lot of possible reasons for that, and you should probably talk to a mental health professional knowledgeable about gender-identity issues to figure out how to resolve them”.
Well i’m certainly not arguing against people getting professional help, I feel like it’s gone so far the other way. Transitioning people seem to be pushed onto taking the pills before they’ve exhausted physiological help, should be a last resort.
I can’t help but think if you’re talking to a mental health professional, then by definition, you have a mental health issue.
On an aside. Suicide rates are distributing high, maybe encouraging these people to transition isn’t always the best thing to do. The biggest challenge transgender men in particular is loneliness. I would say most of these men are straight and lesbians aren’t interested in MtF. Transitioning in my opinion, is a short term fix to a long term problem.
What exactly do you mean by “exhausted physiological help”?
How much time and/or money should be spent on this before they are allow another option?
The existence of biological male humans and biological female humans does not require the existence of a male gender and a female gender in society, just as languages can have varying numbers of genders of no genders at all.
Gender is like the existence of “the” in English, il/elle in French and der/die/das in German.
A human doesn’t have to have a gender any more than the word “the” needs to have a gender. Or needs to have one of only two unchanging genders defined by biological sex.
A gender is a role in society. Roles in sciety need not be defined by whom you want to have sex with or whom you can conceive a child with biologically.
Do you have any reason to believe that this feeling is justified by facts?
But that doesn’t mean that your transgender identity is the source of your mental-health problem. The problem could instead be having to cope with all the shit that gets dumped on you because of your transgender identity.
Compare the situation for transgender people now with the one that existed for homosexuals just a few short decades ago. Most gay people struggled with anxiety and depression and problems with self-acceptance, because they were constantly told that their sexual orientation was abnormal and unnatural and against the will of God and yadda yadda yadda. Identifying as homosexual was almost universally considered to mean that there was something wrong with you psychologically.
Things have changed a lot since then, although there’s still way too much shit dumped on homosexuals for their sexual orientation. It’s now at least somewhat possible for, say, an adolescent boy (at least, one who happens to live in a very supportive environment) to realize “Woo-hoo, I like the D, hubba hubba*” and just go on living his life with his preferred orientation as an accepted and normal thing. Since he doesn’t feel bad about who he is, and isn’t constantly being told to feel bad about it, he doesn’t need mental-health counseling.
If we stopped attaching so much stigma to transgender identity, we might similarly find that people could identify as transgender without feeling depressed, dissatisfied, etc. about it, and therefore wouldn’t automatically need help coping with mental-health issues because of it.
I’m going to repeat something I wrote on page 1 of this thread:
It’s important to get the causality the right way round. Yes, people with gender dysphoria can suffer from mental illness, but there are lots of reasons why, only some of which may be directly due to the gender dysphoria. And if you’re going to use suicide as a metric you’d damn well better consider external factors as well.