Thanx for the newsclipping service.
Care to converse?
You’d need to reform tort law for that to have any chance here, and how much money will it save people to have medically unecessary surgeries that are incredibly expensive like sex change operations?
How much do repeated hospitalizations from repeated suicide attempts and self-harm episodes cost, Stevenova? Because for about 1/3 to 1/2 (or maybe more) of these people that’s the alternative, not “they don’t need care at all”. Have you considered that perhaps a treatment, however objectionable you might find it, that puts a stop to suicide/self harm might, in the long run, actually be cheaper?
I had a friend once who was a “cutter”. She regularly racked up six-digit hospital bills from her propensity to not only cut herself and swallow razor blades, but also to create third degree burns, all of it paid by taxpayers over the course of about 15 years where this was an almost annual circus (do the math). Yes, a seriously messed up individual, definitely mentally ill, but the answer wasn’t to deny her treatment but to try different things until something was found that WORKED. I’m happy to say that something was, eventually, found and she’s hasn’t been a medical patient for about a quarter century, yay for psychiatry when it actually works. She wasn’t a transsexual, but maybe she’s one of the reasons I put “relieve suffering” ahead of “make me comfortable with this”.
When someone is unhappy enough - regardless of cause - they are actively hurting themselves to that point any discomfort I might feel at an effective course of treatment is nothing compared to alleviating the abyss of suffering that person is living in. I do understand that if you have never confronted such a thing in real life you might not understand it - and if you haven’t, I sincerely wish you don’t have to confront the unvarnished reality of that sort of situation. I do, however, wish that more people would have empathy for the suffering rather than condemnation.
A person who cuts themself with a blade is mentally ill, but a person who wants to cut off their genitalia, perfectly fine, working, healthy genitalia is not mentally ill?
If a doctor gave cutting techniques to a cutter, to minimize scarring, the doctor would be enabling the patient just like doctors do with transgendered folks.
Start answering the questions people have been putting to you, stop setting up false dilemmas, learn the foundations of logic, and at least attempt to back up your bombastic assertions. You can start back on Page 3 and work your way forward at your own pace.
Do you really think it’s all about what’s between the legs? Are you so devoid of any sexual identity of your own that you have to look at yourself nude in a mirror every morning before you remember whether you’re more comfortable in a skirt or in pants? Do you need to reach down and give yourself a feel before you ask a woman out, to remind you of whether you actually want to date her or her brother? If that’s what life is like for you, it must be really frustrating. Me, I know what I am: I’m a straight male with the usual male plumbing, and I gotta say it’s convenient to have everything match. But I’d rather have a mixed-up self-image than no self-image at all.
Good one!
Just ran across this interesting storyabout a study on monkeys about sex and toy choice.
The researchers gave toy options to monkeys. Male monkeys picked trucks and balls, female monkeys picked dolls. These are monkeys, not human children, so human social influences are not a factor. There is a sex-related factor in toy type preferences.
How does it relate to this topic of transgender people? The results of the above studies indicates that there are differences in the two brain biochemistries between the sexes. If the brain biochemistries can show a difference based upon hormones, and hormones can get out of synch between the genetalia and the brain, then brain biochemistries can get out of synch with the genetalia. Ergo, evidence that supports that gender is more than your gonads.
Yeah, the toy test has been frustrating the hell out of certain types of doctrinaire feminist for nearly a century now. I hadn’t heard that it had been extended to monkeys, though.
If anyone has access to the study (“Sex differences in response to children’s toys in nonhuman primates” was the 2002 study), did the researchers account for demand characteristics? For monkeys I imagine it would take the form of food rewards for appropriately sex differentiated play, or even something subtle like smiling.
I downloaded it. The Procedures section says:
A person with a penis is (for the sake of argument) indeed physically male. But that person (assuming an adult) may or may not be a man; that person may be a woman. Gender (man vs woman) is a mental construct, not a physical one (i.e., sex: male vs female).
How many times do we have to repeat this simple concept?
Powers &8^]
As many times as you want, but it doesn’t make it true. Because even if one belived the whole gender/sex dichotomy, we still get the same range
man----woman and that is only rooted in biology.
Thanks for the information, sounds like a solid method. Perhaps they could have put their characterisations on a slightly firmer ground by operationalising their gender scale, perhaps by asking a sample whether certain toys were masculine, feminine or neutral and using whichever toys were rated highest in each category.
I am a transsexual woman, and I find this thread horribly depressing. Most people haven’t met a transsexual person, and that puts us at a severe disadvantage when it comes to acceptance and understanding. There aren’t even any real transsexuals on television that aren’t the son of Cher. I’m a comedian, and with a lot of luck, I may be able to change that a bit.
I consider transsexuality a birth defect. My mind is wired to be female. My body, to be male. The problem is that my mind is everything that makes me who I am–my soul if you will. My body is just the fleshy bit that keeps my mind alive. So if there is something to be changed, it is the body.
Don’t give me some crap about why can’t people want to be sharks. Humans are born with instincts that control how they act and who they emulate. My instincts demand that I am female. I really have no choice in the matter. If I did, I would probably choose the road without the horrible internal and external strife. In fact, I tried to for 30 years. Didn’t stick.
Unfortunately, we don’t get the same sympathy as other people with birth defects. Surely, if God meant me to be male by giving me a penis, he also meant Joaquin Phoenix to have a cleft palate, and the surgery to correct it was an abomination unto the Lord.
I know I won’t change anyone’s mind about people like me here. People who think they are experts after getting a B- in Mrs. O’Mally’s 8th grade biology class aren’t the type of people that can be reasoned with. I just wanted to chime in, because I’m tired of people discussing transsexuals without talking to any actual transsexuals.
If anyone wants to see my work including a YouTube series I call Ask A Tranny, visit my website: http://www.sarahmaywalt.com
Sarah
With respect, you probably find it depressing because you didn’t read all of it. You didn’t see at all the lengthy and spirited defense put on by myself and others? You missed the times I and other spoke of knowing and even working to help counsel transsexuals?
Good grief, in the next week not only am I meeting a transwoman tomorrow to talk, but I’m playing pool with another and have a bowling date with a couple of others. I have talked, lived, played, and danced with more transwomen IRL than I can easily count, and 10 times that number online. Please don’t throw out blanket statements that no one here has “talked” to any “actual transsexuals.”
It is interesting that you yourself call it a defect.
how can you decided if it’s your body or your mind that is the “wrong” one?
How is transexuality different from other dismorphic defects (using your own term)?
It is depressing, because it has to be defended, and that people and a columnist on a site that is supposed to be about fighting ignorance choose to be so ignorant.
The people defending are great! I have no problem with you, Una. It is depressing that myself and others have to argue for my mere existence.
You are awesome, Una. Carry on! 
The question isn’t which one is “the wrong one.” The question is how are we going to treat the defect while A) reaching the best outcome possible and B) preserving the human consiousness under it all.
What do you suggest? A lobotomy? Whatever happened in utero, my mind is me. I could call it a “defect” or a “problem” or a “disorder” or an “anomaly” or even “a point on a spectrum,” but the issue is clear trans people have a great and unchangeable aversion to living as the gender suggested by their genitals.
The really sick thing is that life doesn’t have to be hard for us. It is people like you who try to trap us and pin us to a gender, often times going so far as to have us committed, that cause our great pain. If people could let us be ourselves and treat us like human beings, a grand majority of our problems would be solved. We wouldn’t feel the need to ask honestly and logically if suicide might be the better option.
The other dismorphic events? Anorexia/bulimia is based on fear for instance. Treat the fear, fix the patient. Duh. No trauma caused me to be trans. In fact, most of my life’s trauma pushed me not to be. Didn’t work, and I wish people would stop trying.
Sarah
The question is partially academic, but the answer is evidenced by the fact that both historically and today, attempting to change the “mind” of transsexuals has a lower success rate - in some cases, abominably lower - than the path of hormone treatment and potentially SRS. Treating the body has a high rate of success for improving the self-image, emotions, mental abilities, depression, and other negative outcomes from gender dysphoria. Psychoanalysis and drug approaches can work with some, but are not nearly as effective in general.
From a personal experience, for nearly all transwomen I have known, starting hormone therapy has an enormous impact on their happiness and self-satisfaction, all for a $10/month Wal-Mart prescription which has very few negative side effects (even the risk of DVT is recently being found to be diminishing with the greater use of sub-lingual and trans-dermal 17B-estradiol.) In some cases the effect has been profound and lasting, like an entirely new person stepped out who is suddenly happy and full of life. This is an improvement in mood and patient health which I have never witnessed among those who choose to try antidepressants and psychological help. Hard statistics on the efficacy of treatments were presented by myself on Page 1.