Please quote where I said it was. You are wholly misrepresenting my argument.
Not to mention that in order to undergo the operation, you must devote a good chunk of your life to living the role, therapy, hormone treatment, etc - and have a huge wad of bills laying around. You don’t get it these days unless you really want it.
Anyway, I’ve read this thread with interest. My father is transgendered. It fragmented my whole family and caused a lot of pain all around (my mother thought she could somehow help him live through it as a man, so their marriage lasted 30 years). I’m the only member of our family who will still talk to her, though his side of the family is still responsive to him.
One interesting thing is how tightly knit the community is. I’ve been around the LGBT community for a while, but the transgenders in particular form very close groups, which I suppose isn’t terribly surprising given the amount of social backlash against them, loss of families, amount of therapy they have to go though, etc. But I also know many who have perfectly normal family lives, and who have succeeded (reassignment surgery or no) in living the life they should be living. It is awesome.
Then I suggest you restate it. Your argument is fallacious for the several reasons I’ve already offered; rather than flatly deny the fallacy, kindly either address the allegation or withdraw the argument.
As to the statement you demand I prove you said: I do not claim you said that. I claim that your argument relies on that assumption (which you have not stated, but which you falsely rely upon). I pointed it out to show that your argument is invalid. An argument can be rendered invalid by defeating an implicit premise as readily as defeating an explicit one.
There is evidence that there are real physiological differences between the brains of those of one physical sex and a different brain sex. Does that mean it’s still just within their “perception”? Are mental illnesses that have a proven physiological basis also just within the patient’s “perception”?
I believe I already have stated it twice, but third time’s a charm. I’ll type slowly this time.
Although eight-month-old David Reimer obviously could have no gender identity issues, Money had a vested interest in presenting the result that surgery and hormone treatment resulted in a complete assignment of gender identity. Otherwise, why lie about it?
What was this vested interest? His institution was at that very moment pushing their transgender surgical techniques as a cure for gender dysmorphics. A skeptical scientific community would naturally wonder whether the treatment was indeed a cure, in that it created a real gender identity, or merely a band-aid that failed to heal a more serious underlying problem.
By showing that a person with presumably no gender identity could be assigned one wholly through surgery and hormone treatments, Money hoped to win over the skeptics. After all, if a boy with no gender issues could be assigned the identity of a woman solely through these techniques, how much more beneficial for a man with a woman’s identity already to receive this wholly successful treatment, bringing his physically reality in line with his mental reality. Success in this case would be as conclusive as could be hoped for. And it worked. Perceptions were changed.
Except the success was a lie, the fact of which must now throw into doubt the new perception. We must now allow that surgery may not be a real cure. We must accept the real possibility that gender dysmorphia is not simply a “mistake nature made” that can be surgically corrected, but something more serious. With that in mind, I no longer feel the widespread use of surgery to treat gender dysmorphia is a good thing.
I am not trying to needle you, but your argument has a basic fallacy: David DID NOT HAVE GENDER DYSMORPHIA. He was not treated for gender dysmorphia. He was a genetic male surgically made female. In his brain, he remained male. As a baby, his body was remade to NOT match his brain. It is the exact opposite of real SRS. You cannot change the brain to match the body.
A transgender person is born, say, genetically male. But the brain is female. SRS changes the body to match the brain - not the other way 'round.
I am interested. Is there a web page I can look at?
Only to the extent that we don’t really know how perception works. I have no doubt that there is a physiological basis for gener dysmorphia. Like homosexuality, given the social climate, it is hard to imaging a person choosing that life if the choice were theirs to make.
If, like Dr. Money, however, you are trying to push surgery and hormone treatment as a way to cure this condition, whether or not there is a known physiological basis (AFAIK, there wasn’t at the time Money was pushing his agenda), isn’t as important.
We now know that surgery can NOT be concluded to result in a complete gender reassignment. Knowledge of a physiological basis serves to provide with a possible path to a surer treatment.
I said as much in the post you quote.
Please quote where I said he was.
In fact, one could say he artficially induced gender dysmorphia within him. The problem is, those were not his stated results. What he claimed was that, in the absence of any other influencing factors (key for any scientific result), gender identity could be completely re-assigned through surgery.
Although David was not gender dysmorphic himself, such a result, if true, IMPLIES that surgery and hormone treatment can be seen as a real cure for gender dysmorphia, because the surgery leaves no trace of the former gender physiologically. If not true, then there must remain some significant doubt about the effectiveness of the treatment when applied to actual dysmorphics, as some trace of the former gender may remain in some way. If such doubt remained, the treatment espoused by Money’s University might be slow to gain acceptance. Hence the complete lie.
You didn’t, and that’s my point. His results are invalid in this discussion, which is exploring SRS for the transgendered.
But transgendered people DO have other influencing factors.
You just said he artificially induced gender dysmorphia in David. Which he did - he tried to alter David’s brain to match his mistakenly altered body. Look, if you whack off a guy’s penis, he’s still a guy. His brain is still a guy’s brain. Surgically alter him to have a vagina, he’s still a guy - with a vagina. Give him female hormones, and he’s STILL a guy, only now he’s a guy trapped in the wrong body. Transgendered people are born where David ended up after his alterations. They start where he stopped, so to speak.
There is no “former gender” in a transgendered person. Gender is in the brain, which in transgendered people does not match the body.
Gender dysphoria = the gender of the mind/brain does not match the physical sex of the body. The cure is to somehow make them match. Since trying to change the mind’s gender has IIRC been tried and (thankfully IMO) failed, the only remaining solution is to change the body surgically.
A person with a female gender identity and female anatomy is a person with no gender dysphoria, and if said anatomy is the result of SRS then the dysphoria that existed before is now gone.
So, basically, scotandrsn, your argument is that John Money was a liar so everything he said and did is inherently suspect. Since John Money supported SRS as a treatment for transsexualism, we must therefore dismiss the use of SRS as a treatment for transsexualism.
Guess what? This is a fallacious argument. You can’t disprove something simply by proving that your opponent was wrong about something else. At best all you’ve done is discredit John Money’s contributions to the field. You still haven’t touched Harry Benjamin’s, or any of the hundreds, if not thousands, of other researchers, which, taken as a whole, totally eclipse those of John Money – and which, pretty much uniformly, stand in opposition to your thesis.
You seem to think that by destroying John Money’s character (which wasn’t that hard to do) you have destroyed the idea of reassignment as a legitimate treatment. John Money was not the first, nor the last, nor even close to the most important, researcher to do work in this area, and his failings in no way lead to the conclusion you, bafflingly, insist must hold.
All that assumes that gender identity is NOT fixed at birth - which it might well be. It may be that a person’s gender identity is fixed in early development, in the first trimester of pregnancy when physical gender forms. Or later in the process. We don’t know when gender identity becomes fixed.
I’m sorry - I missed the part where surgeons were advertising these services as asprin is advertised on TV. It’s not like drive-through botox treatments. NO ONE is out recruiting for this surgery.
A candidate has to go through a couple years of counseling at a minimum, live in their new role prior to surgery as a “trail run”, as it were, and in general go through much bother and expense before the first knife makes the first cut. Even among the transgendered, not everyone opts for surgery - they are free to stop at any point prior to surgery, saying “this is enough change for me”. No one gets this surgery by accident or on a lark.
Maybe there IS a better treatment out there, but *right now *it’s the best medical science has to offer. Is it perfect? No - there is no way to surgically replicate all the female organs, or alter a skeleton after maturity to make it more female in structure (for FtM enough testosterone will have some effect, although not that much). No is saying SRS is perfect… but if we can’t “cure” gender dysmorphia then we are obligated to reduce suffering. Does SRS reduce suffering? Apparently yes. If yes, then it’s a treatment option until something better comes along.
Maybe this isn’t the thread for this, but the mention of prostates prompts me to ask:
Have any SRS surgeons found a post-op use for the prostate? I know it produces seminal fluid, after all, and it seems like that would be useful if you could connect it to the neovagina in some way.
It would be useful, but the prostate isn’t very easy to operate on, and there’s no simple way to duct the secretions from the prostate to the neovagina.