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"Transgender-ism"
On 8/25/2015 at 11:09:31 PM, Compy01 started the thread:
This website has been slow, so I thought I’d get things up and running again with a good old fashioned (friendly!!) debate. Basically, there was a huge flame war on a Facebook post the other day about transgenderism, probably brought on by Caitlyn Jenner, who has been in the news lately. About the nature of transgenderism. According to the NHS website here in the UK, transgenderism is regarded as:
‘A condition where a person experiences discomfort or distress because there is a mismatch between their biological sex and identity.’
It specifically says that it is not a mental illness; yet the very definition of a mental illness according to the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘a condition which causes serious disorder in a person’s behaviour or thinking’.
The debate seemed to be divided along these lines, with people in the two camps. One group arguing that transgenders are perfectly in their right to identify as the sex they feel comfortable with, and to alter their bodies chemically or cosmetically. These treatments are free on the British NHS. The other side of the debate said, yes, it is a mental illness – or a mental disorder – and the NHS refrains from calling it as such because of political correctness. In fact, some critics want to declassify ‘gender dysphoria’ (the proper term) because of the stigmatism that accompanies it.
My viewpoint is cloudy and open to interpretation: I could not imagine what it is like to be transgender and I don’t know an awful lot about it to consider myself an expert, but right now I find myself on the side that is probably is a mental disorder. How can it not be? It seems that the term ‘mental illness’ carries a lot of baggage with it – people probably think of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest but I wouldn’t necessarily say a mental illness is a bad thing, objectively. We, as a society, can overlook the shit that everyday life throws at us, and can rally together with state support. For example, obviously it is a disadvantage to be disabled, I wouldn’t judge someone if they were, but that is not to say I couldn’t recognise their significant disadvantage for fear of some sort of backlash. The same goes for paedophilia. Paedophilia is a recognised mental disorder, but if a victim of this disorder refused to act on his urges, and turn himself over to the authorities to undergo therapy, would that make him a bad person? I don’t think it would.
What I’m trying to say is, I don’t judge people for being transgender, that’s the cosmic card they pulled out of the deck. I wouldn’t judge someone if they felt the need to dress as a woman and call themselves a feminine name, but I wouldn’t allow them into, say, the women’s toilets. Or to compete in female only sports. Allowing that generates all sorts of problematic circumstances. Should Caitlyn Jenner be relinquished of his awards from men’s competitions if he ‘always thought himself as a woman’? Should he now be allowed to enter into women’s athletics? He may also go to jail for manslaughter. Will it be a women’s jail, or a man’s?
Why is paedophilia a mental disorder, but being transgender is not? Both types could be considered sound, mentally, as in ‘all there’, except one wants to have sex with children and the other thinks they are the opposite sex. Is it just because paedophilia is an extremely negative taboo in our western culture? Some strong arguments are that we should not ‘cater to the delusions’ of the transgendered and allow them to cosmetically mutilate themselves and pump their bodies full of hormones to try and correct the problem. For me there is no problem, biologically. It just isn’t possible to change sex and sex changes should not be allowed. If you’re born a man, you are a man. There are significant organic differences between a man and a woman, and no hormone therapy or artificial vagina will make it otherwise. (Unless in the future cosmetic surgery allows for the cultivation of fallopian tubes and wombs from stem cells and their incisions.) It probably is unhealthy to propagate the idea that they are ‘locked in’ another body. I don’t doubt their sincerity, but surely it must be recognised as some sort of mental disorder?
And what about that ‘transracial’ woman, who thought she was a black woman, but in a white woman’s body? Would she have still been ‘transracial’, had she been born in Elizabethan England, where she would never have encountered a man of different race?
Discuss.
Msg #1: On 8/26/2015 at 6:01:55 PM, Ostromite replied, saying:
I'm only going to post in this thread once. I spent enough time in college talking about transgender issues to last half a lifetime. I wasn't even going to touch this because you're starting out with a lot of bad faith, but you seem at least genuinely curious.
It specifically says that it is not a mental illness; yet the very definition of a mental illness according to the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘a condition which causes serious disorder in a person’s behaviour or thinking’.
First of all, a lot of the stuff you talk about in your post boils down to arguing with doctors, psychiatrists, and other health professionals about the definitions of medical conditions. Your posts elsewhere on this board make me think that you value scientific expertise in other matters (climate change, evolution, etc.), so why are you so quick to try to refute medical science using dictionary definitions and word logic?
Drunkenness, severe pain, stupidity, and the guilt you feel after cheating on your spouse are all "conditions that cause serious disorder in a person's behavior or thinking," but they're obviously not mental illnesses. That's because the dictionary definition of a "mental illness" is too broad to be medically useful. To try to levy this against medical associations like the NHS as a serious criticism is ridiculous.
If you were forced to dress as a woman every single day of your life, would you feel "discomfort and distress"? If you did, would you consider yourself mentally ill? Or would you identify that as an external problem that could be fixed without the kinds of treatments mentally ill people receive (i.e. medicine and therapy)?
Part of your problem seems to be a total misunderstanding of gender itself. Gender is arbitrary and performative. There is no inherent, logical reason why biological females should wear skirts and make-up and long hair while biological males where boots and jeans and short hair. This is all academic at this point and it's really not debatable. You can read a book by Judith Butler if you're not convinced.
Anyway, you mention biological sex a lot in your post, but the truth is that most transgendered pepole never undergo a "sex change" operation. The reason is that most transgendered people are primarily trying to make their external appearance comply with their internal understanding of their identity. That's what gender is, and why the term transgender is now almost universally preferred to transsexual. Gender is what defines your "sexual" identity in society, regardless of what your biological sex is, and, for almost all human interactions, the "real" biological sex behind someone's gender identity is utterly irrelevant. That's why it's not a mental illness to feel discomfort and distress when your gender identity does not match what you want to be: if you can "fix" the discomfort and distress by changing your clothes and pronouns, you're not actually ill.
The other side of the debate said, yes, it is a mental illness – or a mental disorder – and the NHS refrains from calling it as such because of political correctness.
In other words, people with no medical expertise claim that people with medical expertise are wrong about a medical issue and are politicizing it out of their own (ignorant) beliefs. To give this credence by calling it "the other side of the debate," as if it had equal merit simply by being in opposition, is misleading and wrongheaded. There are analogous arguments against climate change and evolution and they're simply wrong, and this is no different.
For example, obviously it is a disadvantage to be disabled, I wouldn’t judge someone if they were, but that is not to say I couldn’t recognise their significant disadvantage for fear of some sort of backlash
This is a common sentiment, the whole "I'm not judging them" idea, but, whether out of deliberate duplicity or naive misguidedness, it's an ignorant and bigoted viewpoint, and a condescending one, at that.
It's an empty statement to say that you don't judge someone for being disabled. Nobody does, nor does anybody judge a disabled person for taking steps to overcome their disadvantages. Here, though, you're saying you don't judge a paralytic for being paralyzed or for using a wheelchair to get around, but, while you won't judge someone for experiencing gender dysphoria, you may judge them for transitioning their gender to alleviate it.
Here's the difference: a paralytic can't regain their ability to walk by putting on a different pair of pants. They have to use a wheelchair, but, even then, they're still paralyzed. A transgendered person no longer experiences gender dysphoria after they transition, so, even if we accept the idea that gender dysphoria is a mental illness, the most obvious "cure" is gender transitioning. From a purely medical perspective, the simplest and most reliable treatment for a condition is clearly the best one.
However, that doesn't make gender dysphoria a mental illness just because it can be "treated" with gender transitioning. Homosexuality was once considered a mental illness: it caused "discomfort and distress" because a person's sexual desires did not correlate with what they were "supposed to" feel with their biological sex. The reason it was declassified as a mental illness wasn't political pressure, but because all the anxiety and discomfort for a person with homosexual desire is alleviated when they practice a homosexual lifestyle and are accepted as someone with a homosexual identity. You don't "cure" homosexuality by engaging in homosexual activity.
There are still people today who consider homosexuality a disease that can be treated with therapy, and those people are unambiguously wrong. "Conversion therapy" is being banned in many states in the United States because it is so contrary to medical science and ethics. The same is true with transgendered people. The vast body of medical literature on the subject has proven that therapy and medicine simply do not work - in fact, they make gender dysphoria worse. Hundreds of suicides have proven it over and over again. If it can't be treated with therapy or medicine but can be with different clothing and an accepting social environment, it is clearly not a mental illness.
I wouldn’t judge someone if they felt the need to dress as a woman and call themselves a feminine name, but I wouldn’t allow them into, say, the women’s toilets.
Why not? Where should they go? Should a person dressed as and identifying as a woman go into the men's toilets? Whatever you say your reasoning is, you are effectively discriminating against them, rejecting their identity, and potentially putting them in a dangerous situation.
The most common reasoning is that trying to exclude transwomen from women's bathrooms is to protect ciswomen. The underlying assumption, of course, is that transwomen are actually men and, therefore, pose a threat of sexual violence against "real" women. However, there have been zero documented reports of a transwoman assaulting a ciswoman in a bathroom. None. On the other hand, there are hundreds and thousands of assaults against transgendered people in public bathrooms, and countless more that go unreported.
The bathroom issue is one of the most extensively documented in transgender politics, and I suggest you read up on it. Transgendered people are constantly discriminated against and harassed just for trying to go to the bathroom. Your chromosomes and physical genitals are irrelevant when you're going into a locked stall to take a shit. You may come up with some other reasoning why transgendered people should be excluded from the bathrooms, but all the data show that letting transgendered people use the bathroom for the gender with which they identify poses no danger of violence or hygiene to anyone else. The fear of transgendered people in public bathrooms is pure transphobia.
The compromise a lot of people suggest is that transgendered people use the unisex or "family" bathrooms to avoid this, but there are several problems. First, most places don't even have them. Second, if this were the unwritten rule, then such bathrooms would effectively become transgendered bathrooms, and anyone going in them could potentially mark themselves as transgendered (which is dangerous and humiliating whether you're actually transgendered or someone else trying to use the unisex toilet). Third, asking transgendered people to not use the bathroom of the gender with which they identify is just another way of telling them they're not really that gender, which is, at best, an unnecessary source of stress and anxiety to have to confront when you're just trying to go about your day and have to use the restroom.
Or to compete in female only sports. Allowing that generates all sorts of problematic circumstances.
This is a slippery slope argument. The issue of transwomen competing in female sports is a difficult one, and nobody has an easy answer for it, but it's irrelevant to everything else because it only concerns a person's biology, not their gender. A transwoman may have a clear, objective advantage over cisgendered female athletes because of her biologically male muscle structure (though I tend to doubt it with hormone therapy), but that in no way negates the transwoman's identity as a woman.
Will it be a women’s jail, or a man’s?
This isn't even really a question. Transgendered people go to the prison for the gender they identify with. It obviously works a little differently depending on your local government, but, as long as you have some kind of medical documentation showing your gender transition, you can get a new driver's license or passport or whatever identifying you as the gender you identify as. Therefore, you are legally that gender, so you go to the prison for that gender.
Why is paedophilia a mental disorder, but being transgender is not?
This is what made me not want to post in this thread at all. The question is self-evidently ridiculous and I would normally assume that you're being deliberately disingenuous to obfuscate your underlying transphobia, but I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Both types could be considered sound, mentally, as in ‘all there’, except one wants to have sex with children and the other thinks they are the opposite sex.
First of all, transgendered people don't think they are the opposite sex. They identify as a different gender. They know which biological sex they are, but they do not identify with the gender normally associated with that biological sex. Your rhetoric throughout your post, I think, reveals a lot of transphobic sentiments that you're either not aware of or are desperately trying to rationalize with logical arguments. Saying that transgendered people "think they are" whatever gender implies that they are mistaken, and they're not. Again, gender is arbitrary, performative, and socially constructed. It has no inherent link to biological sex, and you are whatever gender you perform as.
Second, this entire statement is a preposterous false analogy. I could just as easily say that John Wayne Gacy and Sammy Davis, Jr. were both mentally sound, except one wanted to rape and murder young boys while the other thought he was Jewish. Wanting to have sex with children is in no way comparable to identifying with a different gender.
Is it just because paedophilia is an extremely negative taboo in our western culture?
Let's get this straight: pedophilia is a mental illness because it can only manifest as sexual predation on children, which is a crime. I have tremendous compassion for pedophiles because they truly are mentally ill, and many seek treatment, but those who don't or who are too weak to resist their urges molest or rape children. Unlike being homosexual or transgendered, there is no way to live a fulfilling, happy life as an active child rapist. It is inherently unhealthy, not to mention immoral.
I don't think you'd disagree with me on that, but that's why I find a lot of your reasoning disingenuous. Whether you meant to do this or not, I've seen this line of argument before, and it's often used as a distraction tactic by transphobes to put LGBT activists on the defensive and make them look like fools. The idea is that, by calling child molestation a "taboo" in our society, you falsely equate it to how homosexuality and being transgendered used to be taboo. When the other person argues (as I just did) that it's not comparable because child molestation is inherently unhealthy and immoral, you mention that other societies around the world, some of which accept homosexuality and transgendered identities, consider pedophilia and pederasty perfectly normal. This leads to a logical trap where the LGBT activist has to wrangle with the knot of cultural relativism without being able to engage the core argument.
In short, it's a load of horseshit, and I would hope we can all agree that a compulsive desire to have sex with children - like the desire to torture animals or murder people or dismember yourself - is inherently bad because it has no healthy, moral, or harmless manifestation as a lifestyle.
Some strong arguments are that we should not ‘cater to the delusions’ of the transgendered and allow them to cosmetically mutilate themselves and pump their bodies full of hormones to try and correct the problem. For me there is no problem, biologically. It just isn’t possible to change sex and sex changes should not be allowed.
What are these arguments? Are they being made by doctors or transgendered people themselves, or by people who have no idea what they're talking about? Transgendered people are not deluded. Regardless of whatever preconceptions you may have about sex and gender, the scientific literature is overwhelming and undeniable.
This is also another example of your inflammatory rhetoric. Using the word "mutilate" not only equates sexual reassignment surgeries with female genital mutilation, but it also implies that such surgeries are unhealthy and that the people getting them done don't know what's good for them. Likewise, saying they "pump their bodies full of hormones" makes it sound horrific, but your gonads are already pumping your body full of hormones to make you look like you do to begin with.
It seems like you're simply disgusted by the medical procedures a lot of transgendered people get, and I can understand that (I'm disgusted by a lot of cosmetic surgery), but, if you're willing to accept, as you said earlier, a transwoman dressing in women's clothes and using a woman's name, why is it somehow bad for her to get hormone therapy or cosmetic surgery to look more like a biological woman? Gender is external performance, but it's not just clothing. It's your face, your voice, your skin, your hair, everything external. What right does anybody else have to say what these people should and should not be allowed to do to their bodies to make their appearance match their sense of identity?
You say sexual reassignments should not be allowed because it's not possible to literally change someone's sex and that there is "no problem, biologically," but (a) that's not the purpose of a sexual reassignment, and (b) you can't argue with overwhelming scientific data with principles and logic. Just because you use a logical proof to show that a sexual reassignment surgery can't actually change someone's biological sex doesn't mean that those surgeries haven't helped thousands of people overcome a problem that no therapy, medicine, or other medical procedure has ever been shown to help them with. The ethics of cosmetic surgery are a larger debate, and, increasingly, transgendered people aren't even getting sexual reassignment surgeries, but I'd say you'd be pretty callous to argue that the thousands of people whose lives have been greatly improved by these surgeries should have not been allowed to do it because you think it doesn't make sense.
If you’re born a man, you are a man. There are significant organic differences between a man and a woman, and no hormone therapy or artificial vagina will make it otherwise.
Again, this is either ignorance or bad faith. Transgendered people aren't trying to literally change their biological sex. It's not really about biological sex at all, except in the sense that their biological sex does not correlate with the gender they identify as.
A "man," as you understand it, is not a biological term, but a gendered term. A "man" wears "men's" clothing, uses the "men's" bathroom, has an M on his driver's license. You are not born a "man." You're born a male and then society gives you all these things you are supposed to do because that's what "men" do. Obviously, the vast majority of biological males identify as men, but being a "man" is still a gender performance.
It probably is unhealthy to propagate the idea that they are ‘locked in’ another body.
How is it "probably" unhealthy? Unhealthy for whom? Certainly not for the millions of transgendered people in the developed world who are no longer treated as sick people who need to be cured and are legally and medically allowed to perform as whichever gender they wish (barring lots of widespread social discrimination, of course). You have no basis for this statement other than your own belief that it doesn't make logical sense - a belief that is, of course, not substantiated by any scientific evidence. The entire medical community in the developed world disagrees with this statement.
I don’t doubt their sincerity, but surely it must be recognised as some sort of mental disorder?
I don't want to call you a bigot, but you should seriously ask yourself why you are so adamant about this when every major medical association in the Americas and Europe says otherwise. You may think you're just trying to be logical and reasonable, but, to a transgendered person, you are being deliberately ignorant and discriminatory, using what amounts to some word games to deny not only their identity, but their right to that identity. The acceptance of transgendered identities as a normal part of human society is one of the great triumphs of modern psychology, but you're resisting it out of ignorance and principle.
And what about that ‘transracial’ woman, who thought she was a black woman, but in a white woman’s body? Would she have still been ‘transracial’, had she been born in Elizabethan England, where she would never have encountered a man of different race?
The transracial argument has been a favorite strawman for transphobes for years, and that recent Rachel Dolezal story has brought it back with a fervor. Simply put, there is no such thing as "transracial." Yes, gender and race are both socially constructed and assigned to you at birth based on unrelated biological features, but they are otherwise completely dissimilar.
Race is entirely socially constructed, based on superficial clusters of unrelated features like skin color and hair. There is no real difference between a black biological male baby and a white one. However, gender, while arbitrary and socially constructed, is still linked to biological sex, which is a clear, objective difference between male and female babies. Transgendered people almost invariably sense the discrepancy in their identity before puberty, often around four or five, which is far too young to understand the complex differences between male and female genders. To grossly oversimplify it, it ultimately stems from a biological cause, a sort of discrepancy between the brain and the body, which is one of the reasons it's not considered a mental illness. In other words, if you have a female brain and a male body, you are essentially a female because the brain is the part of you that's you, i.e. the part with all the thoughts and feelings and memories, so it recognizes this discrepancy almost as soon as it becomes aware of the difference between male and female.
There is nothing like that for race. There is no such thing as a black brain or a white brain, and there is no such thing as a transracial person. You may have your occasional fluke like Rachel Dolezal who deliberately performed as a black woman for years, but, even if there were no clear difference between the two concepts, there just aren't any people who identify as transracial. Gender dysphoria pops up consistently, all the time, across all societies where it's understood, but "racial dysphoria" does not. I can see the connection between them and why people would compare them, but it's just another disingenuous way to put trans rights activists on the spot to explain away something that simply doesn't exist. Transgendered people are everywhere, facing discrimination every day, and the problems they face are heavily documented in the scientific literature, but there are no transracial people. The same goes for trans-species, trans-age, trans-whatever else you can think of that doesn't actually exist. It's purely hypothetical, and trying to call transgendered people's identities into question with it is more than a little insulting.
Replies: 4
Msg #2: On 8/27/2015 at 12:20:37 AM, Narrator replied, saying:
well this was fun while it lasted
Replies: 3
Msg #3: On 8/28/2015 at 8:40:28 PM, Trainwreck replied to Msg #2, saying:
That'll teach people 'round here to bring shit up.
Everyone! Just stop posting! This website will die quicker that way.
Msg #4: On 8/31/2015 at 12:55:38 PM, Compy01 replied to Msg #1, saying:
A lot of the things I wrote about weren’t necessarily my opinion; I just wanted to list them to generate a discussion. The things I did state, you addressed them clearly and I’m glad to hear the other side of the debate. I am admittedly, very ignorant of these issues, but you just can’t seem to ask them without being torn apart with people who are – maybe understandably – exhausted of constantly trying to defend a position. I’m aware of gender being a social construct. I read a great book called ‘Living Dolls’ by Natasha Walter to explored the topic, but I never thought about the possibility that men’s or women’s toilets were segregated based on gender. I thought they were segregated based on biological sex. The same goes for prisons.
For the driver’s license bit, I attempted to prove you wrong by grabbing my driver’s license, but it doesn’t even state my sex on it anywhere! Although it’s a bit weird that it asks you to declare a social construct your driver’s license, anyway. Maybe it should state sex on it, or base on a XX XY system or something. (Haha.)
I like that you said I seemed ‘genuinely curious’, and then went on to say that I was ‘being deliberately disingenuous to obfuscate [my] underlying transphobia’. I’m not a transphobe, I’m just ignorant, and these are probably the easiest questions that surface under these circumstances. Obviously I agree that it is immoral and wicked to have sex with children, and maybe like me, you think things can be objectively wrong. I imagine we would both find the stoning of a man to death in Saudi Arabia to be abhorrent, but to a Saudi that is a just and fitting punishment. There are castes in India were village priests rape and impregnate pre-pubescent girls. There are traditional societies in South America where the woman is to be strangled by her next male relative if she is widowed, so she can follow her husband to the grave. As you can see, I’m not disagreeing with you, and obviously all that is I think objectively immoral, but there are people out there who could argue the whole ‘if it’s part of their culture you can’t say whether it’s right or wrong’ topic. There was even a conference in Cambridge University that concluded paedophilia was 'natural and normal'. Britain's very own Minister for Women and Equality wanted to water down child pornography laws, making the images legal if it seemed the child was in no harm. That’s why I asked the question.
Cosmetic surgery is bothersome to me, so I guess that’s already twisted my viewpoint here. I’m a non-mover on this one. Having your genitals go under the knife and pumping unnatural levels of hormones into your body that only exist in the opposite biological sex sounds like insanity to me. If, as you say, most transgenders get the surgery – not to physically delude themselves into believing they had changed sex – but for their ‘gender [as a] external performance’, then that sounds like something that shouldn’t be free on the NHS. Actually, I’m terrified of going bald in the future. Hair transplants cost tens of thousands of pounds and aren’t available on the NHS because, like other cosmetic surgeries, they aren’t necessary. What happens if I get depressed as my hairline begins to recede? They offer me therapy. I’ve read the contrary to what you have said; that the suicide rate in transgenders post-op is exceptionally high.
When I said ‘if you’re born a man, you’re a man’, I didn’t mean to sound like a dick. Maybe I should have said male to be clearer. I’m not one of those types who would force my baby boy to play with action figures because ‘that’s what men do’. And I can’t believe you said ‘I don’t want to call you a bigot’. Yeah, right. I can almost imagine you adding my name to a list next to your computer.
This recent transracial thing was the first case I had ever heard about it. I get what you’re saying about how all these trans-abled, trans-fat cases dilute the transgender campaign for acceptance, but it’s easy to see how the layman can link them and put forward a (however ignorant) argument. But what would you say to them, then? What’s wrong with these people? You say it’s hypothetical and it doesn’t exist, I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with you, but would you tell one of them what they’re experiencing doesn’t exist? I find it a bit odd that you say it’s insulting to call into question the identities of transgenders while potentially dismissing a whole catalogue of trans-types.
Anyway, I’m glad I posted this thread because you’ve forced me to think about the topic in ways that I hadn’t before. Which was surely your aim and it was a successful one.
Replies: 5
Msg #5: On 9/14/2015 at 12:53:32 AM, Bryan replied to Msg #4, saying:
Holy shit. Someone take a screenshot. A Dan's convo that actually ended with amicable thought-changing progress. It's a damned miracle.
Msg #6: On 11/7/2015 at 10:24:58 AM, Compy01 replied, saying:
Hey Ostro, what do you have to say about those who think pedophilia is a sexual orientation and not a mental illness?
I hope you will reply as this is not intended to link back to the above comments on transgenderism.
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