You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

0
9

[–] Tancred 0 points 9 points (+9|-0) ago 

Imagine you have a mentally ill guy who thinks he's Napoleon.
You give him a national twitter account with a huge audience of 100k followers, which he labels as "@sweden / Napoleon".
A few people tell him that he's not Napoleon, but most of the 100k followers yell at them and tell him that he is right to call himself Napoleon Bonaparte.
Are you helping him find his way to reality or are you enabling him in his confusion?

As to why transgenderism is a mental illness: it's a denial of biological sex differences.
The difference is much more far reaching than just the sexual organs. One important example are the visible differences in the brain (Ingalhalikar et al (2013)).
There's a host of resources available on this topic.
Take the mentioned girl in the original post. She has XX chromosomes in every single cell of her body and cutting her hair short and calling herself Gavin is not gonna change that.

Quoting Dr. McHugh (former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital)

policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention.

Post op trannies have a 20 times higher suicide rate.
Tell me what's more compassionate towards them:

  • treating their mental illness, at the cost of hurting their feelings

or

  • enabling their confusion to the point of surgically rearranging their anatomy and letting them spiral into depression and suicide when they realize that the operation didn't alleviate their confusion

0
2

[–] Rb8623 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

This pretty much summed up what I've been arguing for for years in a single post. Thanks.

0
0

[–] Fact_Checking_Alien ago 

In point of fact, what you are doing is denying neurological sex differences. People who are quite solidly diagnosed as "trans" have all the neurological traits of being the gender they think they are, and I find your use of biological sex difference particularly ironic in that case. Therefore, would I be right in saying you are mentally ill as well?

You aren't wrong about suicide, however. In fact I've been rather aggressively loathed for my suggestion that we might find it more therapeutic to fix the brain instead of trying to fix the body. Insofar as I am aware, no attempts have been made to study the effects of various drugs on perception of gender since the 1960's, save a single case study.

You also aren't wrong about the particularly egregious bias that is seeking to outright ignore biological sex as a reality. The real problem here, the deeper problem, is that often times on Voat people make erroneous statements or claims on the basis that by merely contradicting people you don't like you'll arrive at the truth. Which, as stated in the first paragraph, is clearly not the case on the basis that transgendered people have numerous brain abnormalities (for their biological sex) matching the opposite sex. Try as you might, you aren't going to fix that by reasserting physical reality, because the brain is quite set on disagreeing.

I would also quite like to know what you think "treatment" for this "mental illness" would entail.

0
1

[–] Tancred 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

I don't know how to treat these people, but I know that ignoring a problem by calling it normal is not a solution.
The first steps are probably to admit that it's an illness and to get talk therapy.
Ask the experts what comes after that.