The column addresses the exact same question as the title of this thread. As for whether the opening paragraphs are a fair encapsulation, they’re probably not intended to be. To know what’s in the column, anyone can read the column.
If you believed that the opening paragraphs were probably not intended to be a fair encapsulation of the the column, why did you quote them? Rather than, say, simply linking to them with the question as the link, or quoting a fair encapsulation, if that’s practical.
I don’t disagree, I am just pointing out that even if you were to consider it an illness, we have a cure (or at least a pretty effective treatment). And it is the cure that many are complaining about.
Actually… there are some rare post-stroke disorders that result in people being unable to recognize a body part as belonging to their body. Oliver Sachs wrote an essay or describing such phenomena.
However, it’s not so much “is this a real or imaginary disorder?” as “what’s the best way to treat this problem?” What approach makes the person more functional in society and more happy as a human being? While there is no 100% guarantee, it currently seems that transsexual people who undergo gender transition do better on average than those who don’t (there are, of course, some epic trainwrecks who probably wouldn’t have been helped by anything we have to offer them).
The jury is still out on BIID as to whether allowing them to undergo amputations would really give better outcomes than counseling or something else.
For that matter, there are probably people out there with some gender identity problem or other who don’t need full gender transition. It should never be a situation where we go from diagnosis to multiple surgeries over night, and many treatments have side effects. If someone is content with being socially a particular gender and not having major surgery that should be OK, too, not every transgender or genderqueer person seems to need that. Perhaps, if society continues to get more accepting, well see a continuum of people with non-standard gender identities rather than a false yes/no male/female situation.
Likewise, not everyone with BIID may need the same treatment to become off. Right now the only cases we’re hearing about are the extremes, those not so extreme are probably in hiding due to the social and other costs of coming out of the closet.
Part of the problem is an implicit false equivalence between transgender surgery (SRS) and BIID. Usually this is because people are very highly focused on “hurr hurr, they chop their dicks off.” Which, as an aside, is a patently false and deceptive description of SRS, which is a re-shaping and re-using of the genital material. Some is lost, such as the testes, for obvious reasons.
The difference is that SRS takes a person who likely was NOT functional in a physical and emotional way, and makes them into a functional person. While yes, many transgender women can and do use their “male” genitals for sex, and some choose to keep them (largely due to lack of funding), it normally is very distasteful and demoralizing. For many (most?), either emotional distress, hormone impacts, or both yield them impotent. Note though that while transgender men don’t have to necessarily have their body “respond” (save lubrication, a problem cisgender women who sometimes do want sex suffer from as well) to have the physical act of sex, that by no means implies they want it via that means to any extent.
A transgender person who has been through SRS will be a functioning individual afterwards, whereas before they likely were NOT a functioning individual. It’s actually open to interpretation whether or not a part which cannot be used for its intended purpose is “healthy and normal” any more, and whether the newly re-shaped parts are the healthier ones. Whereas a person with BIID who has a perfectly healthy hand which functions but has emotional distress over it is actually destroying a perfectly good hand by having it removed. While this may (or may not) alleviate their emotional distress, the net result is a body with less function than before.
You could summarize that a person who undergoes SRS is striving towards a fully functional body (of their gender), as opposed to a person with BIID who is striving to destroy function. Seems like a pretty big difference to me, speaking from experience.
A phallocentricist will say “but you chopped his[sic] dick off, so the body is less functional” and I guess if your criteria is that the only way a body can function is to always and forever have its original equipment…shrug. I note that very few of the people who pick on transgender women have any problem with cisgender women getting breast implants, face lifts, lip collagen injections, tummy tucks, nose jobs, eye “Westernization”, liposuction, permanent hair removal, or a variety of other cosmetic procedures to make them feel better.
Trying to equate us with BIID persons seems misguided at best.
Have you ever read blogs from a person with BIID? It seems like the distinction you’re making is a technical one at best. Having ones body match their mental identity is at the heart of both conditions. Both conditions also usually feature people whose lives are improved, made happier, after undergoing surgery.
So is there in fact a hormonal/brain structure explanation of the “mental identity” for someone with BIID, as there is for transgender gender identity?
I mean, we understand to a significant extent (although much more research is required to make the understanding complete) that people have male or female gender identity based on hormones and brain structure. And we have explanations, involving the process of fetal development, for why some people end up with a gender identity that is different from their anatomical sex.
But is there similar evidence to explain the body identity experienced by people with BIID as a natural “innate” condition? Is there a physical brain structure that naturally corresponds to missing a limb, or similar? How does that come about?
If there is in fact such a brain structure, I’d be more favorable to the notion of elective amputation for people with BIID. It may seem needlessly destructive to amputate a functioning limb, but it’s certainly a lot more feasible and less invasive than trying to actually change the physical structure of the brain.
But I’d definitely want to see more research on the subject first.
In your opinion it’s a technical one. In my opinion, who has actually had surgery to modify my body, as well as innumerable other transgender persons who I know who have done the same to various levels, it’s not a “technical” difference at all. Not only is our mental status greatly improved, but our bodies function as they are meant to (or else function better, as many of us are not done with all our surgeries, myself included).
I’m curious what your motivation is for comparing me to someone who has an urge to have their arms, legs, hands, or other normally functioning body parts removed.
I think I made myself clear in the OP. I made the comparison because, to my eyes, the two conditions shared a similar foundation. In a desire to understand the difference, I inquired here. I appreciate your feedback, I only question what you say in a desire to make sense of an admittedly complex subject.
Very little. This would be considered gate keeping. See “truscum” controversies. Nor is attempting to transition required. If you say you’re a trans person, you’re trans. If you’re a masculine woman or an effeminate man, or have ever felt uncomfortable with your body, sexuality, or societal roles you might be a repressed trans person or suffering from internalized transmisogyny.
Under this framework, sex would not be based on gametes or even futuristic brain scans. Instead, male and female are different types of qualia. This puts sex beyond the scope of empirical investigation.
If it makes you feel any better, “transgender ideology” as a political influence is fairly illiberal. It champions regressive gender norms and stereotypes and has otherwise sensible liberals talking about female brains. Or conflating sex (biology) and gender (social roles). Or thinking gender is a natural spectrum of personality instead of an artificial and enforced social hierarchy, with masculinity at the top and femininity as the ball and chain dragging women to the bottom. These colliding issues are train wrecks in feminist circles.
Er… I think that’s a distortion.
Being an effeminate man or masculine woman in some traits is NOT the same as being transgender. Everyone I’ve ever met has been uncomfortable with their body at some point or other (like puberty). Societal roles can be chafing to the most gender-conforming people as well as those less so.
It’s like saying if you’ve ever been sad you might be suffering from repressed clinical depression - no, that’s not it at all. Two different things.
Well, it can be, if the effeminate man or masculine woman experiences their atypical personality & behavior etc as a fundamentally different gender identity. Usually that would mean that the effeminate “man” does not identify as a man / that the masculine “woman” does not identify as a woman, which would qualify them under the wider “umbrella” definition of transgender (i.e., “having a gender identity other than the one assigned by others to one at birth”), regardless of whether they have physiological dysphoria about their body and/or wish to transition.
It’s all about the sense of identity.
Transsexuality, the phenomenon of transitioning, is not the same thing as transgender. But despite the warm welcome from the trans community and their use of the wider “umbrella” definition, this is a distinction lost on most people, and it’s the reason I prefer the term “genderqueer”. If I join a message board or facebook group “for transgender individuals”, I’ll be welcome but most of the participants will be transitioners, i.e., transsexual people. If I join those advertised as “for genderqueer individuals”, there will be some transitioning people but a much higher percent of gender-variant people who aren’t doing that.
Anyway, my point being: please don’t be dismissive of folks who are “merely” feminine male-bodied folks or masculine female-bodied folks as if we have no relevant concerns or issues.
Correct. Being an effeminate male/masculine female CAN be a trait of a transgender person but does not HAVE to be. One can also be an effeminate male/masculine female and be very comfortable being male/female while not conforming to societal expectations. One can also attempt to conform to social roles and even do a good job of acting the part and be so miserable on the inside suicide starts to look like a valid option.
I did not intend to be dismissive.
Myself, I am a very butch, tomboy, ciswoman with a lot of masculine traits and interests who is very much female in my gender identity, very comfortable with it, and really can’t imagine myself as a guy. I’m also heterosexual. It has been a long-standing annoyance in my life to be told I’m a dyke in denial, or I might be transgender, or whatever. So while I’m not in the same situation as you or Una I have had to deal with my own issues in regards to who I am and how society views me. Maybe that gives me more sympathy for the genderqueer and the transgender than average, maybe not. I do know it’s not just about how you act, or what “roles” you play, and saying that is both a simplification of a very complex subject and dismissive of the mental agony some people endure.
I don’t like the wider “transgender” umbrella being used to describe me in most cases. I’m a very strongly gender-binary femme transsexual woman. My transition is basically done, and it involved a lot of risk, sacrifice, expense, and physical pain and transition. But much more joy, in the end.
Thanks to “transgender” being almost like a “great vehicle” of every gender presentation or identity, even fleeting transitory ones, I feel my identity is almost diluted. For example, there’s a local activist who was a drag queen for a year or so, but is otherwise a cisgender gay male, who proudly calls himself “transgender” - despite never having nor having to go through any part of transition. Yet because he’s “charismatic”, he’s often asked to come speak on the aspects of transition - something he knows personally ***nothing ***about, and doesn’t know hardly anything even by association - because the public considers us all the same.
I do normally use the word “transgender” because it’s more understood and accepted. “Transsexual” is increasingly being considered “quaint” or even, oddly, “offensive.” The aforementioned gay male “activist” even told me that by my OWN use of the term “transsexual” to describe myself, I was “being offensive to transgender people who are not in transition.” :rolleyes:
Just off the top of my head, I’d say its something like gender is more fluid, more vague and less defined, so its perfectly possible for a person to fall somewhere on the middle of that scale while their bodies are biologically the opposite. You can’t say the same thing about having multiple bodies, which is something nobody’s ever had
Yeah, I can totally see that. Transsexual activists were here first, and deserve a specific term for themselves. All this “big tent” / “big umbrella” stuff may be good alliance-building politics but it makes it harder to express an identity that people will understand, and wasn’t having a recognizable identity the original idea? Trans people have been very supportive of me, but in addition to me feeling like I am giving folks the wrong impression when I say “transgender”, I also feel like I’m appropriating someone else’s experience, coasting on someone else’s decades-long efforts to make that identity understood by society at large.
:rolleyes: indeed. So you’re supposed to go [del]back into the closet[/del] under the umbrella lest too much specificity offend someone else? How does that empower anyone?!?
That sort of preaching prescription of identity language is not intended to empower the oppressed, it’s intended to empower the speaker who typically is not a member of the oppressed.
I don’t know if it’s an age thing or a regional thing or what, but the younger pacific northwest trans-people (and by that I largely mean binary transmen and women who either have, are, or plan to medically transition) really don’t like the word “transsexual”. It has its uses in formal literature, but (Una excepted, naturally), when somebody says the word it’s usually a preface to some sort of anti-trans (or, at best, very tone deaf) screed.
People in the queer communities around here almost always use “trans” or “transgender” and if more specificity is required “binary trans<man/woman>” is generally understood to mean what Una uses “transsexual” for. Other identies use “non-binary transperson” “agender”, “genderqueer” and so on, of those, only non-binary and agender people generally fall under trans, genderqueer/gender non-conforming tend not to consider themselves as falling under the trans umbrella.
(And agender and non-binary often do medically transition, I know a few non-binary peeps who took T and one agender person who’s getting top surgery this summer, but isn’t going to take hormones).
In this location and age range, at least, “transsexual” is considered about the same as “the gays” or “transgendered”, not necessarily a sign of things to come, but it causes most LGBT+ and allies to instinctively flinch and assume the worst. It’s possible it’s because it’s often used as its own unit like “transsexuals” rather than in phrases like “transsexual people”, which doesn’t sound quite as bad (but is also a phrase I don’t think I’ve ever heard, it’s usually either “transsexuals” or “trans(gender) people”, never “transsexual people”).
Ok,then hypothetically speaking, if a person were to be shown to lack these structural brain differences and still identified as trans, would this or wouldn’t this be an example of a mental illness? In your opinion?
Forgive me if this is stupid but how do we know that these brain differences are inherent or an effect of mentally “living” as the opposite gender? The argument is that gender isn’t a hard-wired reality but a cultural one. Why then is the gender of a transgender person not also culturally developed?
As far as BIID, how could those with this condition not have key brain differences than those without? What else would account for the condition?