:rolleyes:
I would much rather someone cut off a large part of my body than a small part of my brain. Just for the record.
And you think brain surgery wouldn’t be? Have you really thought about this? I mean, I’m sure sex reassignment surgery isn’t a walk in the park and that it must be pretty awful for the patient if things go wrong, but if given the difficult choice between risking my genitals to a surgeon’s skill and risking my brain then I’d rather protect my brain.
Even if it were possible (and it isn’t, and likely never will be) to identify transgendered people at birth and “correct” this via neurosurgery, I can’t imagine that performing neurosurgery on an infant is any easier than performing sex reassignment surgery on an adult. And if this neurosurgery is to be performed on babies then the actual patient, the person whose life will be affected by this procedure and perhaps severely handicapped if things go wrong, wouldn’t get to have any say in the matter at all.
You couldn’t even spare a couple of words to explain what you meant. I guess it’s time to say…bored now.
One of the big problems, as noted by others, is that the level of physically indentifying the brain requires the person in question to be dead. We don’t know in the first place whether those identifiable attributes exist, or that we are successfully altering them. Really, there’s a difference between “better” and “more easy”. It sound simple - and we have actual evidence of altering the body being difficult and not as good as nature even when 100% successful - but it’s difficult to the point of impossibility to alter the brain in the kind of way you’re suggesting.
Even then, i’d tend to say that altering the brain is a bigger deal than altering sexual nerve endings. One is the loss of ability, the other might well be the loss of self. It doesn’t do you much good if you now have the right brain for your body, but it’s not you in there anymore. Even from a newborn perspective, i’m *really *uncomfortable with the idea of matching the mind to the body, rather than vice-versa.
OK -
I will begin with an absolute - that allot of bigots may have an issue with and frankly all I can say is, one day in your life you will be faced with a dilemma that will be earth shattering and you will need help and I pray that someone will see you as a human being instead of a pile of measurements that just don’t seem to match up with theirs. If the whole world feels that way and sponsors such beliefs, then we are ALL in a huge pile of kiss our asses goodbye. If you don’t get what is being said here - then your already there and well I wish you the best of luck.
For the one who used the term “claim they are women” I believe you should take the time to research and learn what GID is and also see that it as real as all the feelings you are having right this very second that you are reading this and how wrong you feel I am. It’s as real as you are. There is not a claim to be, it is a fact that a woman is a woman and weather that woman developed in the uterus external male genitalia or internal female genitalia the fact is you were female and all of the human race starts off as female in the fetal stage. Some develop into males both brain and genitalia matching some do not. Some of then develop male brains but not genitalia.
I will not go deeply into educating you on how this takes place however it is interesting reading if you take the time to educate yourself in exactly what is being spoken of here.
What i do want to point out here is, anyone claiming to be another person, no matter who that person is or whether that person is alive or long deceased, well yes they are delusional unless there has been some magical brain transplant I have not heard of yet.
however
A person who feels that the body they developed into is not congruent with their brain and emotions, feelings and I want to pause for just a second here and point out that these are not just passing thoughts, these are ever present feelings of displacement that are firmly rooted within the persona of the individual.
A person at the age of two does NOT decide that they are Napoleon, but a child at age of 2 will show symptoms of GID and express themselves in a fashion that may appear to others on the outside as not be congruent with the other children within that gender.
By now you have stopped reading because I have spoken about things that you honestly do not want to hear or believe…it’s easier to remain ignorant and speak loudly in commanding tones isn’t it…
QUESTION:
A persons gender, how does that affect YOU? What does it do to YOU when they change the outside to match the inside? Are you fearful that you may not be able to tell who is who, are you fearful that you may fall in love with a woman and marry her only to find out years down the road that she was born in a male gendered body? What ever will you do? One day you come home and find your wife wearing your boxers and smoking a cigar and now she has a battleship tattooed on her chest…lol
Its ridiculous all the arguments for and against, maybe, just maybe these people are taking care of their business and they are focusing on their futures and their families and they don’t really give a rats ass what you feel say or think. They serious do not need your approval and they seriously do not want to be …ANYONE but themselves. And that is WHAT they are DOING.
They are not attempting to be NAPOLEON…lol When you argue a fact with fiction, you have lost your focus.
To answer the original question and this is the SHORT answer btw for those who thought someone else had the short answer…lol…um…tick tock tick tock, wow it got really quiet in here…
Therapy is a part of the treatment - there are various stages of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) and some folks only sitting down and talking it over solves allot of the issues they are having, kinda like you feel an urge to try on your wifes undies just to see what they feel like and that just freaks you out and you need to go ask if you are having a GID moment.
OK - along with therapy there is hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and this is not recommended or suggested to a patient, it is requested by the patient in most cases. Then there is surgery for more extreme cases where that is the only solution to bring peace in that persons life. Which enables them to go on and live a normal healthy life doing the things that they truly love such as music, art, medicine, science what ever . The same things you like doing.
Can the person that thinks they are someone else do the same thing? The sad answer is NO. WHY NOT? Because they think they are someone else, which means they are going to be attempting to do the things that the person they think they are did or is doing.
Go out and find a woman or a man who has changed their gender and ask them what they do for a living and what their hobbies are and ask them do they choose to do those because they are a male or female now…lol You will find that that woman rides her Harley just as much as she did when she was living as a male and that man plays golf on Saturday just as he did when he was living as a woman.
Its 2010 folks - I think its time that we start seeing each other as human beings and stop objectifying each other and stop trying to place each other in little boxes.
BE YOURSELF IS WHAT WE ARE TOLD - MUST IT HURT TO BE SO BOLD!?!
Well…It is widely recognized enough that even Iran, of all places, allows sex-change surgeries.
IMO it’s quite simple: if you feel you should be a woman instead of a man or vice versa, the technology is there to make it happen. AFAIK it’s not even that complicated. And after that you’ll still have plenty of stuff to deal with (speaking as someone with fairly limited experience with trans-gendered people) but at least - if you made the right choice - you’re on your way. Good for you.
We can’t make you into Napoleon, because Napoleon was a specific person in a specific time.
Now you bring in ‘gender’ as being different than sex. What a mess. Is there some physical characteristic of gender outside of the chromosomes? If you read the OPs question, it’s about feelings. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. There really isn’t much to delve into. If a biologically male person believes he is biologically female, as opposed to feeling like a female, he is as delusional as someone who believes he is Napoleon. I don’t see any difference between surgery for a man to look more like a woman, and surgery to make him look more like Napolean either. And I don’t think everyone who feels like a member of the opposite sex wants surgery either. Frankly, this whole area baffles me. If there wasn’t a residual predjuice about peoples sexual choices and identity representation I don’t think this area would warrant much discussion. The only sex lives I care about are my own and certain porn star’s. Otherwise, why should I care how other people feel, act, etc.?
Mycat, the issue I wanted to raise was not whether to tolerate transgendered people, or whether to discriminate against them. I think we may not be heading in the right direction when it comes to addressing the issue. Is it a disorder? Almost everyone, probably transgendered people included, would agree that NOT addressing the issue of gender identity crisis is unhealthy. The only question is whether we are currently addressing it correctly. Isn’t it possible that altering a person’s physiology to match their emotional and psychological state might not be the best way to handle gender identity crisis in most cases?
Yes, as John Mace just said, the physical characteristics of gender manifest themselves in the chromosomes and the sex organs and the brain structure, separately.
In the majority of people, of course, all of these three gender indicators match up. That is, a typical person with XY chromosomes also has a penis and testes, and also has, for instance, a comparatively large central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc) in the brain. (AFAICT, there are other brain structures believed to be associated with gender too, but this is the one I found some data about.) Such a person is biologically male in every respect (irrespective of whether he’s heterosexually or homosexually oriented in his sexual relations), and doesn’t feel any discomfort about his gender identity.
Likewise, a typical person with XX chromosomes has a vagina, uterus and ovaries, and also has a comparatively small BSTc region in the brain. Such a person is consistently biologically female.
However, a small minority of individuals have various kinds of mismatches between these different physical gender characteristics. Someone with de la Chapelle syndrome, for example, has XX chromosomes but has a penis and testes, while someone with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome has XY chromosomes but female sex organs (as well as undescended or partly descended testes), and usually develops breasts at puberty.
And, based on post-mortem analyses, a small minority of people with XY chromosomes and male sex organs can have small (female-typical) BSTc brain regions, while some people with XX chromosomes and female sex organs can have large (male-typical) BSTc’s. These people may experience contradictory gender identity, since they know that their external body presents one gender but they feel a strong mental/psychological identification with the other gender.
As far as we can tell from the level of scientific knowledge currently achieved, such people are (mostly) not delusional or mentally ill. Their feelings of identification with the opposite gender are a natural consequence of the (probable) fact that they have physiological brain structures typical of the opposite gender, instead of the structures typical of the gender that matches their sex organs. (I say “probable” because at present we can’t know that for sure about any individual unless and until we dissect their brain after death.)
All that these statements show is that you evidently know very little about the biological complexity of sex and gender. The interaction of brain structure, sex-linked genes, hormones, and sex organs is extremely complicated. Yes, if someone with a penis believes he has a vagina, he’s delusional, but if someone with a penis believes he’s really female “on the inside”, he’s probably not delusional. Claiming that “there isn’t much to delve into” in this subject only advertises your own ignorance.
I think you are missing my point (which may be due to my lack of clarity). A person who has XY chromosomes should be free to ‘feel like a woman’. It doesn’t sound like a disorder to me. We have a culture that loves to put labels on people and make people feel bad for not fitting into a predefined slot. I don’t think increasing the number of labels helps anyone. That may be overly idealistic, the real world isn’t cooperating in that regard, but it doesn’t matter why a person feels the way they do (outside of an actual disorder). ‘There isn’t much to delve into’ sounds like I’m dismissive of the possibilities, when I’m just dismissive of manufactured explanations. Heading down this road leads to absurd ideas like the ‘gay’ gene (it’s absurd because identical twins can have different sexual preferences). So then it’s okay to be ‘gay’ if you have the gene, but then you have a disorder if not. Is it the hormones? Look where that idea got Alan Turing. What about the person who feels ‘gay’, but in some different way? How many labels would you need to create to put everybody in some slot, or diagnose their behavior based on their physiology?
Finally, I find when people call someone ignorant for disagreeing with them to be a sign of both ignorance and intolerance. I’m sure you must have meant something else.
Okay TriPolar, sorry if I misunderstood you, but your question “Is there some physical characteristic of gender outside of the chromosomes?” did seem to indicate a fair bit of ignorance on your part on the subject of gender and biology.
Well, looks like your argument just shot itself in the foot there. Yes, I completely agree that we as a society should in general be more accepting of different kinds of self-identification, and more willing to just let people be themselves.
Outside, that is, of an “actual disorder”, as you put it. Well, but how do we tell what feelings and self-identifications constitute an actual disorder? Well, we try to study them scientifically, which inevitably involves creating a lot of “labels” and excessively rigid classification schemes.
It’s easy and pleasant to be all groovy and tolerant of infinite diversity in the abstract. But in practice, psychiatrists and surgeons are confronted with many suffering people who sincerely want drastic changes made to their bodies. How are the doctors supposed to figure out what’s the right thing to do in any particular case? They need information from medical studies about how to understand what’s likely to be causing this suffering and what is likely to be the best strategy for relieving it.
Condescending hippie-speak about the evils of “labels” and “predefined slots” may be good for raising our social consciousness in general, but it isn’t really very useful in helping us figure out what’s an “actual disorder” and what isn’t. Sorry, but “it doesn’t sound like a disorder to [TriPolar]” is not particularly helpful as an objective diagnostic tool.
I’m pretty sure a brain tumor is an actual disorder, as well as delusional behavior. Excessively rigid classifications based on things you, I, and nobody else actually understand are a symptom of a disorder you might have. The problem isn’t in the study, it’s in the conclusions based on societal acceptance. When you can give a consistent definition for gender outside of genetics, you may have something.
I didn’t intend to sound condescending, but you sound to me like you have that intention. I don’t care at all about your social consciosness. I do care about any people who are suffering because they feel like they are from a different planet, for whatever reason. There’s nothing wrong with using accumulated knowledge to make the best decision at the time, but today’s best guess has a tendency to turn into tomorrow’s institution.
You’ve mischaracterized my statements far beyond any lack of clarity I introduced, so I don’t see the point of discussing this with you further. Sorry, but I hope people aren’t making life altering decisions based on Kimstu’s infallability and omniscience.
Well, that just brings us back to the question of what counts as delusional behavior, and how that category should be determined. Yes, we can probably all agree on what a brain tumor is, but it’s much harder to reach a consensus about what a delusion is.
Why? AFAICT, the whole point of this digression on biological gender is that it’s not necessarily consistent “outside of genetics”. That is, certain aspects of gender that are different from its genetic aspects (i.e., the sex chromosomes) don’t necessarily match up with the genetic aspects themselves, or with other non-genetic aspects. So why should we expect ever to have “a consistent definition for gender outside of genetics”?
ISTM that the best remedy for that problem is not decrying “labels” for gender identity issues in general or automatically rejecting increases in the number of labels, but rather refining our studies to make our labels more accurate.
Oh, I don’t think we need to worry about that. 
Well since you’ve dropped the attitude, we can discuss this further, but not tonight, I’m all done. I’m not advocating a point of view in opposition to yours. All I intended to do was point out that ambiguous definitions of gender can muddy the problem. Gender seems to be a catch-all for differences people percieve from the ‘sexual norm’. I’m sure that good science is developing better definitions. I only threw in the parenthetical ‘actual disorder’ to distinquish definite physiological disorders from the topics under discussion (there are a lot of nit-pickers on this board).
Perhaps you could tell me why you think delusional behavior is difficult to define. I’m sure there are some difficulties at the edges, but it doesn’t seem difficult to tell the difference between someone who ‘feels like Napoleon’, and someone who thinks they ‘are Napoleon’. I’m sure extreme stress can distort ‘feels like’ into ‘is’ in some cases, so it wouldn’t necessarily be a simple process to get a diagnosis. But I’m not familiar with cases where the distinction is less apparent.
At or near birth is sooner than most transgender people notice the problem. Are you suggesting massive brainchecks in babies? And what do you do with people who have genetic problems, such as hermaphrodites or physically-appearing-females who are genetically XY?
And there’s no reason to think that would even work, anyway. The basic gender of the brain appears to be laid down before birth.
There seems to be some talking at cross-purposes going on here.
A biologically male person, who thinks they are biologically female is delusional, because they are not seeing reality. (They could be transgendered too, if they thought this state of affairs was the correct one for them… but that’s another question.)
A biologically male person who thinks they should be biologically female is not delusional, they just want reality changed to match their desires as much as possible.
I also think the OP is missing the fact that transgendered people do go through a lot of purely psychological therapy before anyone whips out a scalpel or even a vial of hormones. The surgery is only done when then all other therapeutic options have been tried and (presumably) failed.
It’s also worth noting that it’s not as though we always have “biological males” and “biological females”. It’s quite possible to have biologically male factors and female factors. Evidence seems to suggest that transgendered people have a brain with great similarity to that of the brain of their opposite sex; in such a case, speaking of a biological male who thinks they are biologically female in terms of brain and mind may well not be delusional. They’re quite right.