OK. Let me reword, taking into consideration that transpeople kill themselves more often:
I think if you’re born with a healthy body, but you feel like killing yourself without medically altering your body’s appearance, then that’s a mental illness.
More agreeable? If not, then what’s your objection really about?
OK, let’s take that a premise.
Then the question becomes what is the most effective way to treat such a mental illness? For a long time the treatment was to try to convince these people to live in the body they were born with. The results have been a lot of suicides.
We are now trying to bring their bodies more in line with their mental state. If that results in fewer suicides and better functioning for these people then it can be argued that that is the appropriate treatment as it relieves suffering and prevents harm.
Of course, there is the problem that at least some of the mental problems suffered by the transgender people is due to prejudice, discrimination, and other people reacting to them as if they were a crawling bug on the dinner table. I’m sure that’s a confounding factor.
There is new research that indicates the lack of any structural differences between a “male brain” and a female brain" — which has implications for trans people and cis people as well. I’ll be blogging on that theme on Monday.
OK. You win that argument. It’s a mental illness, and there’s an appropriate treatment to reduce their suffering. I think I already said as much.
If.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes. If. There were several if’s in my post.
If we could get some solid, objective research on all this it would be grand, but there are all sorts of hangups involved with that.
If there were people who risked blindness in order to have their eyes operated on to make them blue-eyed, and who were suicidal if they could not become blue-eyed, I can see how that could look kind of nutty to some observers.
But suppose blue-eyed people were treated in a massively different way than (let’s say) brown-eyed people?
Well, that would be silly, to treat people massively different on the basis of their eye color, wouldn’t it? And some folks might say that, instead of changing people’s eyes (at nontrivial expense and with medical risks etc), we should change society, precisely because it’s silly to treat people differently based on their eye color.
But suppose the tendency to do so — to treat people differently based on their eye color — was really deepy rooted, culturally ingrained, with zillions of people declaring “But they really are different, of course they should be treated differently, what’s wrong with you knee-jerk politically-correct puppets?”, and so on? Changing society, in that situation, kind of starts to look less easy than changing one’s eyeballs. Especially if you want to get there in your own lifetime instead of spending your life in a perhaps-futile attempt to eradicate a deeply embedded social belief system and its resultant behaviors.
And besides, what if there really was a tendency for a difference to exist, and not just a batshit insane cultural notion that it did? You stop and realize you aren’t 100% sure, because so many people do think there’s a difference, at least a general-rule / aggregate difference-between-the-populations kind of thing. So maybe these folks who want their eyeballs changed are outliers, misfits among those who share their eye color who would fit in quite nicely among the blue-eyed folks. Or would, if they had blue eyes.
Yeah, sure, just because it could be true doesn’t mean it is true, and maybe to your perceptions it doesn’t seem very bloody likely. Nope, there’s no freaking difference between the blue-eyed and the brown-eyed (etc), you’re pretty damn sure of that. But there’s no denying that zillions of people think there’s such a difference, and they do behave accordingly. And among those who believe in such a difference are a large percent of those who seek these eyeball operations. Do you wish to mount a campaign to convince them that they shouldn’t do this because there’s no difference, it’s just cultural bullshit, and therefore they should just accept that they are who they are, brown (or grey or whatever) eyes and all?
But let’s say you did that — successfully, I mean. And they still tell you “OK, now convince the other zillions of people, including the blue-eyed folks we want to fit in with, because they see us as Different with a capital D because they believe there is such a difference.” And they say, “Built in innate difference or not, having this operation is going to mean I am perceived as who I really am. You say that is a bullshit perception on their part, based on erroneous beliefs, but the fact remains, people believe this stuff. And they way they will perceive me post-op will be a far better fit for who I am than how I am perceived with the eyes I was born with”.
OK, point out the crazy thinking.
None of it’s crazy. Mental illness is not ‘crazy’ or ‘nutty’, if that’s what you were alluding to.
That makes no sense. Are you using some peculiar definitions of the terms “know” and “sure” that you’re not explaining to us?
Nobody’s disagreeing that, for example, the vast majority of people who believe that they have XY chromosomes, based on their physical anatomy and their gender self-identification, actually do have XY chromosomes.
But since there is a small percentage of people who, for instance, sincerely believe from their physical anatomy and their gender self-identification that they have XY chromosomes but actually have XXY chromosomes without realizing it, it is not possible to definitively know or to be 100% objectively sure that you have XY chromosomes without genetic testing.
If what you’re trying to say is merely “Having a penis correlates very very very strongly with having XY chromosomes, and the vast majority of people who infer from the fact of their having a penis that they have XY chromosomes are absolutely correct”, then yeah, nobody’s arguing with that.
But that’s not the same as claiming that somebody can incontrovertibly know or be sure what their genetic sex is without genetic testing.
I don’t disagree exactly, but I just think that doesn’t fully take into account the callous Catch-22 that society’s gender-binary conventions foist on trans people.
Transgender woman: I have a penis but it feels natural to me to think of myself as a woman. I want to live and be accepted as a woman.
Society: Sorry freak, you can’t be a real woman unless you have tits and a vagina! Ha ha ha ha weirdo freak!
Transgender woman: Okay, I want treatment and surgery to get tits and a vagina so I can live and be accepted as a woman.
Society: Why are you trying to mutilate your healthy body, you freak?! Off to the funny farm with you! Ha ha ha weirdo freak!
It doesn’t surprise me at all that so many transgender people are tempted to kill themselves. What surprises and impresses me is that they don’t end up killing more of the rest of us who are doing this to them. :dubious:
Umm, :dubious: The entire premise here is that “these people are not behaving like people whose brains are working in a non-mentally ill fashion”.
Unless you anticipate sticking a probe into someone’s brain and examining it for those alleged “chemical imbalances”, exactly how the fuck else would you be diagnosing “mental illness” aside from inferring from their conclusions and decisions that their cognitive processes are a bit off?
My point is that the behavior being tagged as “indicative of them being mentally ill” makes perfect sense in context. It is entirely rational behavior. Reread post# 87.
Indeed, and he would typically be the first one to try to score pedantic points if it were an issue near and dear to him. The Intersex Society of America has a table showing that intersex conditionsare not nearly so rare as people would like them to be.
In a typical high school of 1,000 kids, 10 of them wouldn’t be incontrovertibly “male” or “female,” and 1-2 of them would have had to have surgery as a result. This is actually a greater rate than that of transgender persons for whom their degree of “transness” is such that we will seek medical transition (about 1 in 4,000 for AMAB; about 1 in 8,000 for AFAB). But fewer than the number of people under the greater umbrella of transgender.
I don’t even know if I should address the fallacy in the thread of the motivation for suicide, as you already did address it. But in our practice, where the therapists have treated a total of more than a thousand transgender patients over a total of something like 50 years of practice, they have never seen a person nor heard of one locally who committed suicide solely due to body dysmorphia. It played a contributing factor, but in general the top reasons seem to be:
The 1959 Midtown Manhattan Survey found that 81.5% of people had some form of psychpathology. 23.4% were severely impaired. In the 70s it was claimed that 66% of Americans suffered from psychotic or neurotic disorders into which they had no insight. President Carter’s wife said: “My primary concern is the mental health of the American people”. Around that time several journalists speculated as to what would happen if a psychiatrist became president. In 1999 the Surgeon General of the United States declared that “All mental illness is biological”. Around the same time psychiatrist Dr David Kaiser commented: “Psychiatry has lost its mind, and with it the minds of its patients”
I’m wondering why accepting a third gender (or fourth, fifth and beyond) bothers people so much? It’s not like anyone who identifies outside of what is “normal” would want to have relationships with people who can’t accept/dislike/hate the concept.
I could not care less about who does who, how someone dresses or what they do to their own body since I am in a committed Hetero relationship.
As a lot of very smart people have been pointing out for a while now, mental illness is socially defined. American society right now is at least at official levels, accepting of gender dysphoric people, so no, it’s not a mental illness.
Is social anxiety a mental illness? How about depression, or ADHD? Because probably most people I know have one of those to some degree.
Just did. (It’s in IMHO)
Ben Shapiro is one of the more lucid, logical conservatives today. If you can’t handle him them you simply cannot communicate with conservatives.
No doubt being transgender is tough. I don’t think society has a very good understanding of that transgender means. I know I don’t.
BUT, I don’t know what you do about rejection by people who don’t want date a transgender person. I don’t think you can blame people for that.
No of course not, but if we as a society stop making such a big deal about transgender identity (and gender norms in general), then the number of people open to dating transgender people will naturally increase. We as a society don’t get to tell individuals what their dating preferences should be, but it’s a fact that general trends in dating preferences follow societal norms.
Back in the days of Jim Crow, for example, a large proportion of white Americans had very negative feelings about dating a black person. Now that our society is more (though still far from entirely) integrated, many more white people are willing to date interracially.
Nobody went around forcing or exhorting individual white people to date black people if they didn’t want to, and nobody’s going to make cisgender individuals date transgender people if they don’t want to. But in all such cases, societal acceptance generally results in higher levels of individual acceptance.