Both are conditions in which the person doesn’t feel as though the body they were born into is the “correct” body. Those suffering from BIID often feel that the correct state of their identity is that of a disabled person. Transgendered people often feel that the correct state of their identity is different from that which they were born with.
Even some transgendered people acknowledge the similarities between the two conditions. So what, other than a desire to not further ostracize them from society, explains the distinction between the two conditions?
I am only posting this in GD because of the controversial nature of my question. However, a desire to understand transgenderism is the only impetus for my query.
A point I may be implying in my OP is that if Transgendered people are not considered to be mentally ill, why is the same consideration not given to those with BIID?
Just guessing, but I would expect that Body Integration Identity Disorder is a recent addition to the DSM.
Added, IMO, so that conservative (or money-hungry) psychologists can continue to charge for treating Transexuals, and get paid for it by insurance companies. Just a in previous years, when they finally removed homosexuality from the DSM, they added other diagnosis’s with about the same meaning, so they could continue to treat (and charge) those patients.
Well, as numerous cites in many previous threads on the subject have shown (and I can go look up some of them if you want specifics), research on brain structure has found significant differences between the physical characteristics of the brains of transgender and cisgender people, with transgender brains showing crucial similarities to the brains of cisgender people of the opposite gender rather than to those of cisgender people of the same birth-assigned gender.
In other words, for example, transgender women think (validly) that they are women apparently because they’ve got physical brain structure that corresponds to a female gender identity, even if the rest of their anatomical structure conventionally corresponds to a male gender identity. From a naive cisgender point of view, it does seem extremely weird that your brain can have a gender identity that’s different from the gender of your anatomy, as though your brain somehow doesn’t understand what’s in your underwear.
But AFAICT, the issue is that the hormones affecting the development of genitalia operate during a different stage of fetal development from the hormones affecting the development of gender identity and sexual orientation in the brain. So it is physically possible, although relatively unusual, for people to wind up with a gender identity in their brains and a gendered anatomy in (the rest of) their bodies that don’t “match”.
Now AFAIK there is no similar physical brain-structure explanation for mental illnesses such as BIID. If there were, or if there someday turns out to be, then I would agree that it’s appropriate to stop considering people previously diagnosed with conditions like BIID as “mentally ill”.
For one thing (and this is only the beginning of the argument), neither gender is a disability, neither is “less than” the other. And what about the apparent opposite of BIID, a disabled person thinking that they were meant to be able-bodied? Is that a mental illness?
I also think arguments about the brain developing on a separate path from the body are marginal to the case.
There are many things regarded as aberrations, disfunctions and disabilities that can be traced to some form of inappropriate development, even if some part of that development would be normal under other circumstances. While I in no way want to suggest that there is anything “wrong” or lesser or inappropriate with individuals who have different mental/neurological and physical genders, why is this mismatch - whatever the cause - not classified with the thousands of other developmental deviations that are considered - for lack of a better word - “flaw”?
Got interrupted and missed edit window - make that ‘…considered “flaws” in the individual’s makeup?’
There is a difference between acknowledging that something went wrong in the development process and castigating the individual for having that difference, flaw, change be part of them.
What would be the point of calling transgender a “flaw”, any more than we call, say, heterochromia iridis (having two different colored eyes) a “flaw”? As you say, it’s not as though being transgender is inferior to being cisgender, any more than being homosexual is inferior to being heterosexual.*
Transgender people (generally) are not delusional or irrational. It’s not like they believe they were born with a penis when what they actually were born with is a vagina, or vice versa. Nobody advocates encouraging transgender people born with penises to believe that they were instead born with vaginas, or vice versa.
If being transgender isn’t a bad thing in itself, and if it’s founded in physical developmental realities that make it impossible to “cure” or eradicate, then why should we treat it as a flaw or disability or illness?
After all, “being a man” or “being a woman” is a psychosocial construct. (Having a penis or having a vagina, on the other hand, is an anatomical fact, but the whole point here is that gender identity doesn’t always correlate entirely and reliably with genital anatomy.) Why should we commit ourselves to the impossible task of trying to modify the physical realities of transgender people’s brains to conform to a mere psychosocial construct, instead of adapting the psychosocial construct to accommodate the diversity of physical realities of people’s brains?
*To forestall kneejerk complaints about how being homosexual or transgender could be described as inferior from a specifically reproductive standpoint: First, reproductively fertile homosexual or transgender people are perfectly capbable of using the bodies they were born with to produce offspring, though they may not feel comfortable with some parts of the process. Second, just because society couldn’t survive if everybody were homosexual or (postoperative) transgender doesn’t mean that it’s in any way “inferior” for a minority of people to be homosexual or transgender.
I don’t know. AFAIK the research on the subject is by no means complete, and I don’t know to what extent the “transgender brain structure” is a necessary component of transgender identity.
And of course, if gender identity (like sexual orientation and most other manifestations of the human brain) is a spectrum rather than a simple binary, we would expect to see some percentage of non-cisgender people with some kind of intermediate trans identity.
Personally, I think that by far the most effective and constructive approach for ordinary social interactions is simply to accept that people have the gender identity that they say they have, just as we accept that they have the sexual orientation they say they have.
Maybe, for example, you know some people who you think are “faking” being gay, but is there any point in requiring gay people in general to “prove” the validity of their claimed orientation by showing you their homosexual brain structure? Likewise, why should transgender people in general have to prove anything about the validity of their gender identity?
AFAICT, identifying as a different gender from the one indicated by your birth genitalia is not such a merry carefree lark that it would tempt a whole lot of non-transgender people to try it just for fun. So I don’t see any reason to worry about having to police the genuineness of transgender people’s claims about their gender identity.
Well, in what I consider some ethically questionable experiments, people have induced what appears to be BIID in primates by doing things to their brains that make them not recognize not of their limbs as “self.” This is what usually happens in BIID-- they have a limb that is healthy, but that they reject as not being a “correct” part of their body.
Right now, there doesn’t appear to be a fix for the damage done to the primates brains, and there’s even less likely to be a fix in the near future if people with BIID are born with some tiny portion of their brain actually missing, or with a lesion that formed in utero or perinatally.
However, that doesn’t preclude a fix someday. By defining it as a problem, it allows for grant-writing to look for a treatment.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be considered a mental illness, though, but a neurological disorder, like paralysis or epilepsy. It could still be in the DSM, because the DSM covers things that are not strictly speaking, mental disorders. Autism is not a psychiatric problem, it’s a neurological disorder, but because it manifests behaviorally, it’s in the DSM, because it can be confused with mental illnesses. Also, there’s a lot of cross-over among what is treated by psychiatrists and neurologists, and it’s legitimate to include many neurological conditions in the DSM. Because often a disorder in the DSM states that a diagnosis B can be considered is the symptoms are not better-accounted for by diagnosis A, and diagnosis A is a physical illness-- this opens the window however, for including the differential for A in the DSM.
The DSM is formally The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Maybe it should be called The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric and Related Disorders. It’s arguable that anything that causes stress or distress and tends to bring people to the attention of therapists could be in a retitled DSM without bogging the label down with the baggage that goes with “mental illness.”
First, a mental illness is socially constructed: it’s gotta be a condition that prevents happy functioning within the society (if any) one lives in. If transgender people can function happily within their society, that makes it very difficult to call it a mental illness. (If they can’t, the question then arises: is it something that society is unfairly imposing? I suspect some folks who’ve thought much more about mental illness than I have some guidelines for this).
Second, and more importantly, is there any mental illness (let’s exclude transgenderism for now) whose most effective treatment comprises changing the body and/or clothes and other social expressions? If schizophrenia were treated by piercing ears, if depression were treated by wearing yellow clothes, if bipolar disorder were treated by ordering from the vegetarian entree menu, they might have some analogy to transgenderism. But as far as I know, transgenderism would be unique among mental illnesses in how it’s treated.
I dont have a cite handy but I’ve read reports that those suffering from BIID do actually report increased happiness as a result of treating their disorder by becoming disabled (either actually become disabled “wannabe” or simply living as a disabled person “pretender”).
To me, “illness” implies a separate outside source (such as germs) that spreads “disease” through your mind/body such that those outsiders/germs are responsible for changing you. With the implication that once the foreign cause of the illness is removed, you would go back to being your old healthy self.
With transexuality, gayness, left-handedness, those born schizophrenic or depressed, etc… their natural state, their true original self, is that way of thinking/acting. Thus, I feel that all drugs/therapy to change their nature should instead be considered the “illness.” That is not to say that society is wrong in enticing/forcing people to act/think in certain ways over others.
I am just equivocating the feeling of difference from what is regularly expected from the individual as “illness.” To feel sick from the flu, to feel happy from pills, to not have severe gas after drinking milk because you ate a lactase pill, to view the world in a better light from therapy, to write with the wrong hand; they are all temporary things that require outside sources, and a continual inner effort, to keep up. With the person quickly returning to their natural state if they lapse.
I feel that an example of mental illness would be body dysmorphia -such as anorexia- because that is the result of a purely (outside one’s self) sociological brainwashing over time that needs to be beaten back by psychological therapy which undermines all the harmful marketing.
So I prefer mental dysfunction as closer to the truth. In that society judges what is normal and what it means to properly function in that society. It passes judgment on what things are too far off of the ideal, and tries to correct the dysfunctioning of its people, be it: handedness, sexuality, thoughts, beauty, morality, etc… Thus, “mental dysfunction” helps us look at the problems from both viewpoints; that the transexual’s mental form does not align with their bodily function and should be corrected, and again society sees the transexual’s bodily form does not mesh with their mental function. Rather than the medical view that “mental illness” starts us at, which is that both viewpoints see the brain as the problem to be fixed, with switching the body only as a last resort.
Or perhaps, mental disorder is better still, as it implies a societal stance on what deviates too far from the status quo. While disorder implies something that needs to be changed to preserve the past/today, we can at least appreciate/acknowledge that every society needs to be shaken up with new ideas every so often, and the old order challenged to meet the changing future.
to the OP; absolutely, yes. Transgender ideology is really an attempt to eliminate all stigma against homosexuality by saying that we can all be any gender we want at any time, and thus makes the concept of a problem with same-sex relationships moot. Its also a way out of being gay, for some who can’t handle being gay.
It’s well intentioned in that it seeks to help homosexuals, who are a legit borne situation, but there are other ways to do that. Transgender ideology merely is just a new cause celebre for the left since most of their other ones are largely won (race & sexual orientation).
No, not at all. Mostly because these tests to discover the brain structure of a patient requires physically sectioning the brain. It’s not something you can do to a living person.
Secondly, this is one possible explanation for why some people are trans. It does not preclude the possibility that there are other etiologies that lead to the same condition, that do not display the same symptoms.
Lastly, and I think this is the big one, someone “pretending” to be trans in America today makes about as much sense as someone “pretending” to be gay in the 1950s. It gets you absolutely no advantages, and opens you up to an enormous range of legal prejudice and potential violence. People who undergo transition almost never are able to keep their jobs. They rarely are able to find employment at the level they held it before they transitioned. The process can be hugely destructive to personal relationships, family relationships in particular.
Una got some stories about women she knows who went from six figure salaries as men, to street prostitution after they transistioned, lost their jobs, were divorced by their spouse, shunned by their children, and turned away from even the most menial employment. If, when one of these women died, someone were to slice up their brain to check for female structure, and they didn’t find any, would it make any sense at all - after everything they gave up and suffered through - to say they were “faking” it?
ETA: As always, ignore anything DerekMichaels has to say on the subject. He’s got absolutely no fucking clue what he’s talking about.
• I always kind of liked Tommy Szasz’s take on it: brains can perhaps be ill, as can other body parts, but a mind is an abstraction and abstractions don’t get illnesses, which by definition are physical — unless you’re making a metaphorical statement, akin to saying someone has a disease of the spirit or something.
• The psychiatric profession’s line on it (for quite some time now) is that a mental illness is a disorder of the brain. In which case we should call them “brain illnesses” not “mental illnesses”. Anyway, the notion here is that we are not talking about mental or emotional states that can be explained by the events in the person’s life, or their general circumstances (because then it would be appropriate and healthy for their minds to be doing what they’re doing, although it might not be pleasant for them or pleasant for others to be around).
• And yet the same people backpedal on that and allege that someone may be suffering from mental illness as a direct consequence of some horrible tragedy that happened to them. So much for consistency. Mostly it means what they say it means when they say it.
Umm, all designations of anything that is essentially a behavior as an “illness” is a social evaluation.
Get a critical mass of people who “have” that body integration identity thing going on, clamoring for their right to be perceived as non-ill people deserving of folks’ respect, and if they are lucid and convincing in their explanations of themselves as they see themselves, and enough of society ends up nodding, then it ceases to be an “illness”.
Not that it was ever an illness. It was a weirdness. It was a behavior that made people uncomfortable. No behavior is an illness. One could, admittedly, hypothesize that there is an underlying brain disorder that causes that behavior, and that the behavior is therefore a symptom of the illness. I suppose that’s what the shrinky folk are doing by designating it as a diagnosis in the DSM. There’s no evidence for that, though.
You may feel that it is batshit crazy with or without agreeing that it is an illness. Which may be your real question — How and Why is Transexuality Less Batshit Crazy than Body Integration Identity Disorder? (is it?)
I’m not transsexual myself. Julia Serrano, in her book Whipping Girl, posits the theory that there is a part of the brain that is a schematic diagram that the rest of the brain uses to understand the body, and that for some people the sex of their body feels wrong on that level, that the built-in schematic diagram calls for a different set of equipment than what they’ve actually got.
I don’t know if that’s any more true than the notion that “mental illness” explains this, but let’s go with it at least as a thought experiment.
Is the proper identification of the problem in that situation “This person has a faulty schematic diagram in their brain” or is it “This person has a faulty body that doesn’t match the schematic diagram in their brain”? Well, which one can you fix? Our surgeons can do pretty impressive things with the body nowadays. I’m not aware of any meaningful interventions that can fix the other side of the discrepancy.
Now let’s try the alternative thought experiment: suppose Julia Serrano is wrong. That there’s no such part of the brain, no schematic diagram exists. That what we have here is a person who identifies with the rest of society’s complex of notions and ideas about what it means to be a certain sex, but it happens to not be the sex that their body actually has.
Is the proper identification of the problem in that situation “This person has a faulty identification with a socially-maintained and socially-shared gender insofar as it does not match their sex” or is it “This person has a faulty body insofar as it is at odds with the socially-maintained and socially-shared gender with which they identify”? Well, which one can you fix? As I already said, our surgeons can do pretty impressive things with the body nowadays. Going the other direction, one could set out to change the world instead. Upend everyone’s notions of what it means to be male, what it means to be female, so that male ceases to imply masculinity, manhood, boyhood, etc; so that female ceases to imply femininity, womanhood, girlhood.
Back to the batshit crazy question. It’s none of your business, IMO, up until the allegedly batshit crazy person is overstepping your legally recognized boundaries. If they ain’t violating the law, get over yourself, since these people are not designating themselves as messed-up in the head. Assessments of what is and what is not batshit-crazy (and/or mentally ill) are social and political in nature, not medical.
While most transwomen are attracted to men (and the same for transmen and women), there are translesbians(/gay for transmen), trans* bi people, and even trans* asexuals.
What would be the point of calling transgender a “flaw”, any more than we call, say, heterochromia iridis (having two different colored eyes) a “flaw”? As you say, it’s not as though being transgender is inferior to being cisgender, any more than being homosexual is inferior to being heterosexual.*