Are transgenderism and transsexuality mental illnesses?

[Something Amyss]

I don't think it should be. You should ask; Why do you want such a surgery? To me, there are only two major answers; because of societal pressure to conform to their standards of what is Male and what is Female. Or two, an overriding desire to be rid of the body part in question.

To you.

Someone who is not trans.

Or a medical professional.

Dude, you've previously posted about having a disability and how you wish to be treated, maybe share some of that empathy with others.

The similarities between both procedures is in their high rates of suicide after the procedure is carried out, typical of the BIID illness.

Except for that not being true. In fact:

I suggest that anyone prescribing the surgery is either aware of the societal issues and sees it as currently the path of least resistance, or is financially incentivized not to suggest alternatives.

he opposite of the latter is true. So few doctors will deal with trans patients because we're already considered a medical liability. If the suicide rate was high, nobody would touch us.

A person employed in plastic surgery, save for their own morals, has every reason to encourage you to be unsatisfied with your body. Because they make a living through mutilation, whether that is removing your genitals, or to change your face, give you a tummy tuck, or what have you.

Except a plastic surgeon isn't required to transition. Who who is? Hint: they do not have any financial stake in the outcome because they're not surgeons.

 

[Terminal Blue]

I disagree that the two are different, in the situations I have described above and in my previous posts.

Well, as mentioned, you're factually wrong in that. They have completely different diagnostic criteria, in fact the only relationship between them is this completely arbitrary similarity between "cutting off" parts of the body which you have utterly fixated on even though it's actually fairly peripheral to both cases.

I think they haven't considered to treat it as BIID.

Well, no because it's not the same.

But people have certainly tried to "cure" transgenderism by all kinds of weird and wonderful therapeutic means, generally with a pretty atrocious failure rate and high rates of suicide.

You think you're a Man in a Woman's body? What makes a man a man, and a woman a woman? I think you're you, in your own body, and it's society that thinks one is a Man and the other is a Woman. It's society that needs to change, not you, because clearly society was wrong, what a shocker.

Can you think of a single mental illness about which the same thing could not be said?

Mental illnesses are, at the basic level, states of mind or ways of thinking which do not fit in with society. The thing is, society kind of exists and therefore things which exist in society can be meaningful or important. Whether you think that men or women actually exist as stable ontological categories (and I agree that there is no evidence that they do), the fact remains that being male or female has a quantifiable impact on people's lives. It is, in most cases, literally the first question asked when a child is born and it will continue to affect them until the day they die.

You can sit here and pretend (as I did for a while) that gender is all just arbitrary and doesn't impact on you, and that is fine, but the rest of the world doesn't see it. There is no neutral position as regards to gender, and indeed the only way to even attempt to live outside of gender is, in fact, to be trans (specifically, genderqueer), because that is the only way such a state will ever be recognizable.

 

[JimB]

You are in this way, reinforcing your own oppression, if my view is actually correct.

So the psychiatric community, the researchers and practitioners peer reviewing one another's work, the surgeons performing the work, the doctors prescribing it, all these professionals with their years of training, they are all wrong in their assessment of what transgenderism is and how to treat it, but you have a bead on it. You have its number.

Okay.

I'm not going to ask you for your qualifications here. I don't care about that. I am going to ask, though, since you seem to have some critical piece of information or another the lack of which has deluded medical consensus into prescribing prohibitively expensive hormone therapies and unnecessary surgeries that confuse voluntary mutilation for an appropriate course of treatment, what actions are you taking to spread that incredibly important piece of information throughout the medical community so men and women will quit paying thousands of dollars to have their bodies violated by leechcraft? Because in the face of the plague of doctors preying on delusional subjects and causing them permanent injury, I think your data is something the trans community flatly needs, don't you?

 

[s0denone]

I appreciate the informative responses, though I was rather interested in opinions than that - but having the textbook definition is certainly good too. I suppose it is a yes/no question, but I rather thought my "utopian scenario" was an interesting way of looking at it. In my view if something needs "treatment", be it physical or mental, then it would be an illness. Perhaps it isn't an mental illness, then, but a physical sickness?

I'm not really sure what to do, though. I stressed an inordinate amount of times in my OP that I would never be against equal rights for trans-folk, yet I am still purported to have some kind of agenda or secretly being a transphobe. It is honestly quite frustrating, but I'm still happily reading the thread. I think it is a shame that several regulars here are genuinely intelligent, insightful and also actually quite interesting, but just so rabid in their view that they view everything as a battle. Maybe that could be another question for the thread:

Why is it wrong to be ignorant? You can call me daft, dumb, stupid and anything to the like, if that makes you happy - but why does it make me a transphobe? How does it oppress anyone?
I think a certain soul-searching has to happen here. If you dismiss people who aren't as knowledgeable as you would like, you're only going to make it worse for yourself.

Do you not understand that engaging in discussion with people who may be ignorant is how you help them?
If you don't want to do that, why the hell are you responding at all?
"You are ignorant", yeah fucking hell, man. That must have been supremely important for you to type out, rather than adding anything of value.

Where I am from it is very common to have discussions of whatever the fuck; and you can have diametrically opposed viewpoints on several issues and still be mates. This is the Internet and nobody here has to face eachother. Why are you being so riled up because of insignificant shit?

 

[JimB]

Why is it wrong to be ignorant?

On its own, it's not. It's a trifle annoying that with all the resources of the internet, you'd try to start a debate about transgenderism rather than just Google "Is transgenderism a mental disease" and get the clear-cut answer, but that's only annoying. Where it becomes offensive is when you use your position of ignorance to propose a stigmatized label be applied to transgendered people. If you don't know the answer to the question you're asking, don't act like you do know the answer and then use that as a platform to propose sweeping changes from.

Why are you being so riled up because of insignificant shit?

In more American states than not (I forget the precise number), it is not a crime to murder your lover for being transgendered. Never mind how many states allow employers, businesses, adoption agencies, and housing authorities to discriminate against the transgendered; let's for now only think about the number of places where if you're transgendered and your lover decides to murder you for it, the law will tell him, "No, we totally get it, bro, you got tricked into fucking a dude, I'd have killed him too."

This is not "insignificant shit."

 

[DudeistBelieve]

from my understanding, something is only a mental illness if it causes a person harm and affecting one's ability to live.

and from my understanding, the transgenderism is because they're not born normal. I'll fully cop to that I don't know exactly what I'm talking about here, but that in the womb the development of the brain goes one and the body goes the other so the person comes out not feeling right. And it's not a societal construction either, cause of that one study I read about where person got a sex change at birth and never knew it, but somehow did know that things weren't right. Ended up killing himself.

So it's the default birth state that's the problem, that's what's keeping one from living naturally. This is my convoluted way of saying it's not a mental illness.

As for the hacked off limb thing... Look I can see how people could look at it that way, I think if I had to choose between losing my eyes or losing my johnson that be a real tough call. But I also think it's important to note that not every transgendered person undergoes hormones or even get the surgery. It's really about getting one's body to the level that they're comfortable with and feel okay in.

And also keep in mind it's not like they just do the deed. They gotta jump through a lot of hoops to convince these doctors to even consider the surgery. So it's not like a rush decision.

So I'd go as far to say it's a legit physical medical condition, not a mental one. And certainly something that should be mandatory required coverage on all insurance.

Now why anyone even gives a shit what another person does with their own body is just a completely 'nother bizarre thing I'll never understand.

 

[JimB]

You know, that same argument is always made. They made it back when the psychiatric community recommended chemical sterilization for gay people. Or "conversion therapy" for that matter, as somebody else used in a false dichotomy argument above you.

It's about as effective an argument then as it is now.

So, your argument is that since the community in general was wrong sixty years ago, it's wrong now? Is there a reason the questions you missed on your first-grade spelling test don't disqualify your position, since any instance of past failures is proof of current failure?

Would you say I've been very effective at spreading it so far?

No, not least because you have not shared data. You have shared no hypothesis, no method of testing that hypothesis, no results of that test. You have just made a generalization that some mental illnesses are caused by social pressure, and treated the possibility as fact without any effort I am aware of to back it up.

If you have something to share, let's see it.