The title explains it all. I don’t understand why one is a psychological disorder and the other isn’t. Why shouldn’t we treat transgenders with psychological therapy instead of surgery and hormones?
Well, there is some evidence suggesting that brain development in transgendered people is more akin to that in the gender that they think they are than the gender whose chromosomes they carry.
I predict much scoffing and exaggeratedly sad shaking of heads in this thread, followed by little or no answer to the question.
ETA: though I didn’t see horsetech’s link just now – that’s informative.
I think the question is then why don’t we treat the brain and not the body. If it’s a physical characteristic that can be identified then treat it with hormones or some other therapy rather than hack up the body into something that is less functional than it originally was.
Because barring time travel, you can’t possibly be right. And because pandering to people who think they are Napoleon makes them worse, while helping people who feel like they are in the wrong-gendered body be more like they imagine they should be makes them better.
Because psychological therapy doesn’t work.
We don’t have hormones or any other therapy that can change the brain like that, any more than we can make gays straight, left handed into right handed, or chemically induce a love for black leather and discipline. Our ability to modify the brain is very, very limited; much worse than what we can do to the body, and much riskier as well.
There’s also the ethical position that mind trumps body, which I hold.
Maybe would should just respect the rights of the individual and let them decide what they want to do.
Sure we do. For left handed versus right handed, a severe schoolmarm with a fast ruler across the knuckles is all it took for my grandfather. (Don’t have any idea if he was into black leather, though.) Any number of behavior modification techniques could produce the desired outcomes. It wouldn’t necessarily be ideal for the individual (my grandfather had atrocious handwriting, and I doubt that Oscar Wilde had the happiest of marriages), but from society’s standpoint, the required behaviors & roles have been successfully applied.
But it’s a social and political question as to whether society should respect the rights of the individual in these particular cases. Currently, the political consensus is that the individual trumps society’s interest in these questions.
No, all society did was force a left hander to pretend badly to be a right hander, and for a gay man to pretend to be straight. Brutalizing someone into pretending to be something else isn’t the same as changing them into that something else. You could torture me into confessing that I’m a Vulcan, but I’ll still be human and Vulcans will still be fictional.
Why should society have any interest if some guy wants to call himself Dorothy?
“to be something” is a loaded phrase here. Again, I think it’s a political and social consensus that leads us (almost unconsciously) to focus on questions of “identity” versus questions of behavior.
For societies that have reached a different consensus, you might as well ask, “what if two different people look at the sky and both say it’s ‘blue’, but each of them is respectively seeing something different from what the other sees, but have learned to individually identify it as ‘blue’?” Traditional society might say, “huh, how about that” and then shrug its collective shoulders at the question as being unanswerable and irrelevant. As long as they don’t differ from one another in accurately pointing out what “blue” is, then who cares? If that makes sense.
Because most of the time, it doesn’t work and they end up killing themselves?
Here’s an American cite on “the medical necessity for sex reassignment surgery”.
Not really. Reality is reality, no matter how hard anyone pretends otherwise. The white consensus that blacks were inferior didn’t make them inferior. Just as a gay person really is gay even if others threaten or torture him into pretending otherwise. “Consensus” in this case is just collective self delusion; a falsehood remains a falsehood. The “consensus” here is the consensus of the torturer, who doesn’t care about the truth as long as you scream the lie he wants to hear; his lack of concern makes it no less a lie.
You’re dodging my point: there are around 6 billion individual “realities” on the planet at the moment, but it’s society’s collective decision to recognize which common aspects of those “realities” are grouped into a socially-recognized “identity.”
A hundred years ago or more there were probably the same percentage of people as now engaging in homosexual behavior; and then, like now, a sizable proportion of those had little choice over their sexual preferences. But nobody back then upheld this characteristic as a marker of a common “identity,” fundamentally defining who and what a person is.
Perhaps it is completely appropriate and just that a new social construct called “gay” has evolved: but that’s not to ignore that fact that it is indeed a social construct.
The goal in both situations is to improve the quality of life for the subject though.
Nonsense; society has no choice in the matter. People are what they are regardless of whether or not society or even the people in question themselves decide to pretend otherwise. All that changes is what society is willing and able to do about it.
This isn’t some social construct, nor is homosexuality or handedness. It’s a biological fact. If ten billion people claim otherwise, then those are ten billion people who are wrong; “consensus” or not.
now your,cookin
But what if you know that you are Napoleon? Trapped in a non-Napoleon’s body? What shall society do then? What shall YOU (the individual who knows that they are Napoleon) do?
Schizophrenia, polydactylity and hare lips are all “medical facts” as well. But so far I haven’t seen rallies by polydactyl Americans defending the right to six-fingered-ness. There could very well be in the future, but that will depend on social developments, would it not?
Get medical help, since there’s no chance it’s true. The transgendered however are perfectly correct in feeling that their body and brain gender don’t match. That’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a medical fact.
You already have the right to seek cures for schizophrenia and anatomical defects. You do realize that’s what we are talking about? The right of people with brains and bodies that don’t match in gender to go for the only cure we know how to perform.
If we went around insisting that schizophrenics were mentally healthy but just lying about their mental problems, or that people with six fingers really had five then your analogy would work better, but as it is, it doesn’t.
Unless you yourself are a medical researcher, Der Trihs, I’m wondering if your absolutism on this point is warranted.
And to address the OP’s point more directly, take (1) a schizophrenic hearing voices and (2) a pre-op transgendered person. From a certain standpoint, couldn’t you say that (probably for reasons of brain chemistry) each person’s mind is telling him something that is at divergence with reality? Patient #1 is hearing voices that demonstrably are not there, and Patient #2 is convinced he ought to be a woman when he is demonstrably a man.
That is not to say that it would be justified for Patient #2 to be treated the same as Patient #1: but what I’m saying is the reason he isn’t done so is due to our societal perceptions–namely, #2 has the privilege conferred by “identity” while #1 does not.