If there is no room on your foot to attach an actual, physical sixth toe, where and how do you feel a phantom toe on that foot? Why couldn’t, theoretically at least, a real toe be put where you feel your phantom toe to be? And if this phantom toe is between two other toes and it starts itching, just scratching between those two toes wouldn’t relieve the itch? Or what does that feel like when you do do that?
[toejack]
It’s really hard to describe phantom sensations (as, possibly, you can relate!). The “toe” feels like it should be between my third and fourth toes. When it itches, I can scratch my third toe and it feels like I’m scratching my third toe, and I can scratch my fourth toe and it feels like I’m scratching my fourth toe. And I can squeeze my finger between them to scratch in the middle and feel it on both my third and forth toe…but I’m missing the toe that itches, the one that isn’t there. And it’s not just itching - sometimes I feel like I desperately need to “crack” or massage those toe joints, but I can’t. There’s nothing at all wrong with the sensations in the toes that are there, I just apparently have a wayward nerve - maybe in my feet, maybe in my brain - that makes it feel like I have another toe. When I mentioned it to a podiatrist once, just making small talk when he was digging out an ingrown toenail, he said it’s not the first he’s heard of, but that’s it not very common and it’s just so weird and ultimately so inconsequential that people don’t talk about it much, except to podiatrists.
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Cite please. I can find some studies that document some differences documentable by microscope (subtle volume and neuron number in particular brain regions) and brain scan but by naked eye?
My discomfort is calling it a disease or illness. A biological state sure, but calling it an illness seems akin to calling being gay an illness. Also treis’s cited article states that there is only “very low quality evidence” that gender reassignment treatment “improves gender dysphoria, psychological functioning and comorbidities, sexual function and overall quality of life.” Should an aggressive course of action be advised for a biological state or difference based on very low quality of evidence?
Maybe I have to back off from saying this is hateful. That’s assigning intent or motivation, and contradicting these various statements could be motivated in various ways. Bringing “asshole” into the conversation still strikes me as ill-intended, but that’s not what you are saying.
But it does offend many transgender people. If they say they feel offended, well, we pretty much have to take their word for that.
There’s a pretty widespread understanding of physical sex and gender identity being two separate things, which are typically but not always aligned with each other. I have a sex (male) and, in my view, I do also have a gender identity. I’m a man, and I feel like one inside. I don’t feel white in the same sense that I do feel like a man. I think I would feel misunderstood or misrepresented by being considered a woman, and that it would bother me in a way that being considered nonwhite would not.
But this is just me trying to understand and imagine. People I know who are transgender tell me they feel this way, and don’t have to use their imagination to feel it, and I have no reason to doubt them.
And, besides, our tradition is to accept people as the gender they present as. We don’t pull down their pants to check. I’m only too happy to accept them as they say they are.
I call bullshit.
Show me a single reliable cite that doctors can see such differences with the naked eye as opposed to with a microscope.
I won’t hold my breath waiting for you to respond but like most reasonable people I’ll assume that you not responding is proof that you made a moronic statement that you can’t back up.
Edit: Just to be clear, I’m not accusing you of lying, merely being guilty of making a jaw-droppingly stupid statement that you can’t back up.
I think Der Trihs is referring to research suggesting the brains of transgendered people have some structurally similarities with the brains people who belong to the gender they identify as rather than their biological genders. I don’t know if those differences would be visible to the naked eye, but I also don’t see why that matters.
Yes, they are visible to eye; easily. In fact they show up to the eye but not (yet) on any kind of brain scan we have.
I certainly have. One of my good friends had a parent who was transgender. (This person had formerly been his father and he now just called him his “parent” because he still had a mother.)
And you might be surprised to know that less than a week ago, I got up before our local City Council meeting to argue for passage of a human rights ordinance, the controversial portion of which is the protection of LGBT rights. I do support rights for the mentally ill!
I believe the brain research several posters have referred to regarding observable physical differences in transgender vs. cisgender brains is the 1995 article in Nature “A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and its Relation to Transsexuality” by J.-N. Zhou, M.A. Hofman, L.J. Gooren and D.F. Swaab. My old link to the article no longer seems to be working, perhaps someone can find an on-line link to it.
What stuck in my mind was a series of illustrations showing the relevant brain area in several individuals and it is clear, even to a layperson, that the area in question is similar in ciswomen, whether hetero or homosexual, and FtM transwomen, but has a different configuration for cismen whether hetero or homosexual.
The study does suffer from a very limited sample, but then, transexuality is not common and the research relies on the brains of such rare people being donated to science.
There was supposedly another study done after that one with the same results but I have not been able to find out any information on it.
I notice that when I cite the head of psychiatrics at Johns Hopkins from the 1970s, that is dismissed as 40 years out of date; yet I regularly see Piaget, Erickson, et al cited in discussions of child psychology. What’s up with that?
I’m impressed that you have the gall to sit on your high horse when you just dismissed mental illness as not representative of “real medical conditions” but instead assert that people with mental illnesses are “flakes or nuts”. Yet I’m the one being offensive? Really? Just, wow.
Lol, true dat.
Leave me out of that. I am an atheist and a strong supporter of gay rights. To me there is a big difference between being gay and thinking that your sex is not what it actually is. Which is not to say I don’t think such people have rights, because I do strongly support rights for the mentally ill, including those who have delusions of whatever sort.
I find this viewpoint refreshing, although I would add that if a schizophrenic person is happy living as they do and they are not a threat to anyone else, they should be left alone if they choose.
This is such a great point. Note the reference in my OP to “a sex stereotype…a male caricature of women’s attitudes and interests”. McHugh does not sound to me like some 1950s throwback conservative. He is representing an enlightened 1970s “free to be you and me” perspective here.
There’s the end of women’s sports, tennis especially.
That you would target that post in particular as hate speech really floors me. Do you think a real conservative hater of gays would say something like that?
Could you please provide a link to a citation for this? I assume— and really pray— that it’s not based on your original research.
I’d also be interested to see a cite for the claim that sex reassignment surgery can “fool gynecologists,” which I’ve seen come up a few times on this board and which I find dubious, if it means a full examination (as opposed to simply an observation of the exterior genitalia) by a competent doctor.
See post #69 where I reference such a study that is not based research by Der Trihs
There are anatomical differences between male and female brains. Most studies focus on the corpus callosum, as it was what was more easily visible by dissection prior to the use of advanced imaging and it provides the most visible cue to anatomical differences attributed to sex in the brain, aside from overall size (brains tend to be proportionate to body size, ergo male brains are bigger than female brains, however the corpus callosum-to-brain-size ratio is reportedly larger in females).
The Corpus Callosum (CC) is the neurological webbing or bridge that connects the two hemispheres in the brain and allows them to communicate. The CC in females is found to be wider and shaped different in the posterior (splenium) which is theorized to increase communication between hemispheres, particularly language.
As Broomstick noted, very few people donate their brains to science for dissection, let alone transgendered people, so studies are limited. However, there are studies on transgender brains using MRIs (much easier to do since the patient is still alive) which reflected that the shape of their CCs strongly correlated (~73%) with their mental sex (i.e. gender) rather than physical sex.
More here:
Callosal Shapes at the Midsagittal Plane: MRI Differences of Normal Males, Normal Females, and GID (2006)
SlackerInc’s assertion appears to be “it is crazy* to believe you have a gender identity other than the one that is normative for your biological sex and then seek out reassignment surgery to fix it”
I can’t tell from any post made in this thread so far whether or not SlackerInc believes that it is crazy to believe you have a gender identity other than the one normative for your sex if you don’t wish for or seek out sex reassignment surgery. Let’s start there and circle back afterwards to whether or not seeking surgery as a solution is nuts in and of itself.
BrainGlutton tosses out an interesting question early on: is it nuts to have a gender identity at all, or only if it contradicts the one that’s normative for your biological sex? If you believe that there are no significant built-in differences in personality and behavior between the sexes, and that therefore it’s kind of silly to embrace a collection of stereotypes about those supposed differences and then declare that who and how you are makes you one of the other gender despite your sex, then for consistency’s sake you should also believe that it’s silly to embrace such stereotypes and believe that who and how you are means you’re normal for your own sex. In other words, by those ground rules BrainGlutton’s question should be answered in the affirmative: anyone who has a gender identity is bonkers.
If, on the other hand, you yourself do believe that there are meaningful gender differences, that they aren’t just stereotypes, then there’s nothing at all illogical about the notion that one could be of one sex but have the characteristics of the other sex. It might be an empty set (i.e., you could deny the existence of any such people) but as a category it would not be a meaningless construct.
So assuming that you happen to believe gender differences are valid and real, you can’t know that people who believe that their gender is not the one that normally correlates with their sex: by stipulating that you believe there tend to be differences other than the physical sexual dimorphism, you’ve definitely left the possibility that someone could have physical architecture A but have personalty-and-behavior pattern B that generally corresponds with physical architecture B.
Might as well take their word for it.
How about those who do not believe there are meaningful & relevant differences of that sort between the sexes in general? If that is your belief, then all gender identity is an artifact of a widely shared nuttiness, a sort of historically rooted crazy belief system that imposes those culturally shared notions on people. A consequence of that is that people will treat you differently according to your sex, exposing you to a different set of experiences. That much may be nutty but it’s a collective nuttiness that few of us can escape from.
Insofar as you’ve been exposed to that throughout your life, you have, historically, had a reaction to that exposure all your life as well, and perhaps your reaction has been to believe that you are normative for your sex (thus participating in the shared craziness) but perhaps instead your reaction has been to believe you are more like the other sex (thus inverting the shared craziness). Having that belief about yourself and seeing the events of your life through the lens of that belief as you’ve had your life’s experiences will have had an effect on you as well.
So from this angle, having a belief that you have a gender identity at odds with your sex is kinda nutty, yeah, but so is having a belief that you have a normal gender identity. Face it, in a social context you can’t really be non-nutty al by yourself.
Now let’s get back to sex reassignment surgery. When considered all by itself, with the beliefs discussed above bracketed off, what’s wrong with it? one does not have the power to change how one is treated based on the sex one is observed to have. If one can change the sex one is observed to have, however, that could make a real and discernable difference. Who are you to judge whether or not that’s sufficient reason?
I venture to guess Piaget and Erikson’s theories were groundbreaking at the time, and still currently well regarded. Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development is still widely cited across a wide variety of disciplines from Gerontology to Public Health.
Because their theories have held up, to one degree or another, for many years. They’ve been modified by some later theorists, but they’re still interesting and largely accurate models which do indeed predict at least some areas of child development. They haven’t been entirely supplanted by new information made available by newer research.
And those founding fathers have certainly been put through the wringer, believe me. Their theories have been tested, and sometimes found wanting (specifically in culturally transmitted morals/ethics) and, and if those particular aspects found wanting come up on the board, believe me, I speak up.
But the great truth is that child development was a lot more interesting to researchers for the last 100 years, and so it has received a lot more research and while we’re still finding out really cool new details, we’ve got a good grasp on the general process. Research into transgenderism is a lot further behind - so we’re at the ugly bickering stage which Piaget’s theories experienced in the '60s and '70s when Vygotsky’s papers and Kohlberg’s studies really put his theories to the test.
Likewise, Erickson’s stages of psychosocial development have been closely scrutinized and studied, and alternative theories put forth…but they still hold up pretty well, with a little bit of tweaking and some caveats about individuality of timelines and cultural bias.
“Out of date” isn’t an accusation slung simply because a theory is old, it’s levied when a theory is old AND newer theories seem to better describe or predict reality.
IOW, McHugh is not so much out of date as out of fashion; while Erickson is the “little black cocktail dress” that stays en vogue year after year. Got it.
Would you feel the same way about someone who insisted on having their ears removed because they were certain their ears are actually sophisticated devices that control their thoughts?
Sure, if by “out of fashion,” you mean like Chinese foot binding is out of fashion - ugly, painful and caused death and suffering to innocent people out of a paternalistic sense of beauty and ownership.
Are you using some other definition of the phrase “in other words,” that means “not at all what you were saying”? Because that was not at all what WhyNot said.
Comparing people who are transgendered to people who are delusional makes you look ignorant. Continuing to make that comparison, after several people have explained to you why it’s an inaccurate comparison, makes that ignorance look deliberate.