Netherlands Puberty Blocker Review Comes to Opposite Conclusion, Dismisses Cass Review

I think you are conflating two different things.

Saying someone experiences their body as incongruent is a description of their subjective experience.

In order to experience this a person doesn't need to believe that there is a biological defect in their body, or that their anatomy is objectively abnormal. A trans person may well fully recognise and acknowledge that there is nothing objectively "wrong" about their body, but yet they still experience profound incongruence.

So "delusion" isn't quite the right word for it. Clinically, a delusion is a fixed false belief. Gender dysphoria doesn't depend on holding a false belief about one's anatomy; it describes a subjective psychological experience of distress or incongruence. Whether that experience has one explanation or another is a separate debate, but simply experiencing incongruence is not, in itself, a delusion

@Sunnibee

This is a good article about a similar condition to gender dysphoria - Body integrity identity disorder (BIID) or body integrity dysphoria.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/

Archived here: https://archive.is/OsvZ6

The people who suffer from this condition often feel that they have a limb which doesn't belong to them, or that there is something else wrong with one or more of their body parts. This sounds very similar to your description of gender dysphoria being focused on healthy and normal body parts.

The article also makes the comparison with gender dysphoria.

Thanks I'll take a read

The distress appears as an immediate, embodied sense that something is wrong about their sexed body or being treated as a member of that sex category. It isn’t reasoned into existence.

Yet this is not an analysis that can be applied to all people who identify as trans.

For some people it is very clearly no more than being gender non-conforming (according to the cultural norms around them) and finding a tribe.

If you provide a medical solution to a problem, you need to be able to define the problem objectively, and that will necessarily exclude.

A trans person may well fully recognise and acknowledge that there is nothing objectively "wrong" about their body, but yet they still experience profound incongruence.

Gender dysphoria doesn't depend on holding a false belief about one's anatomy; it describes a subjective psychological experience of distress or incongruence.

Can you explain what you mean by 'incongruence' in these two sentences?

For there to be incongruence there must be two things which are expected to match or be 'congruent', which are not doing so. What are those things?

I've only just skimmed so far, but this does sound very similar. The underlined bit also very interesting and tracks.

Like Robert Smith, I have been struck by ....the language.... in describing their desire to lose a limb. "I have always felt I should be an amputee." "I felt, this is who I was." "It is a desire to see myself, be myself, as I 'know' or 'feel' myself to be." This kind of language has persuaded many clinicians that apotemnophilia has been misnamed—that it is not a problem of sexual desire, as the -philia suggests, but a problem of body image. What true apotemnophiles share, Smith said in the BBC documentary, is the feeling "that their body is incomplete with their normal complement of four limbs." Smith has elsewhere speculated that apotemnophilia is not a psychiatric disorder but a neuropsychological one, with biological roots. Perhaps it has less to do with desire than with being stuck in the wrong body.

Read on ...

Yeh I don't agree with the journalists framing/ analysis, but I'd def be interested in looking into more clinical literature on the psychological condition.

Yes. The belief that gender dysphoria is somehow a different class of dysphoria or obsession has been asserted many times on this thread but no reason to believe this to be the case has yet been given.

It appears to be a deeply held conviction rather than anything based on an actual known qualitative difference.

No evidence posted for this conviction. Just opinions. A bit disappointing really

Even if you can settle on an objective diagnosis, the purpose of 'puberty blockers' is still murky, given that it is impossible to go through opposite sex puberty.

The point seems to be to make boys appear more feminine by keeping them in a prepubescent state.

It's much less clear what girls gain from suppressing puberty.

Serious doctors are honest about side effects and the limits of treatment, but there seems to be a lack of serous doctors in this area of medicine.

I am reminded of the man who mistook his wife for a hat.

He undoubtably truly experienced the knowledge that his wife was a hat. The incongruence between his knowledge that his wife was a hat and knowing the reality that his wife could not be a hat was undoubtably extremely distressing for him.

Nevertheless, no one seems to have suggested the best way to deal with this was for his wife to pretend to be hat in line with his experience of her being so to relieve the gap between reality and her husband's conception of it.

And of course, this example of body dysphoria:

https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/surgeon-neil-hoppers-twisted-world-10476298

Presumably it will be spun as "look what people are driven to do if we don't let them change their body to fit thrir obsession".

Yes, this is a great article.

Someone shared it on a thread a long time ago and I bookmarked it.

The main difference with gender dysphoria and any other body dysphoria is that society is telling people that, in the case of the former, their belief that a part (or parts) of their body is wrong for them is perfectly plausible.

Clinically, a delusion is a fixed false belief.

There are some trans people who claim to be the opposite sex, exemplified by their demands to access services reserved for the opposite sex. It's very well documented, even under oath. This is a fixed false belief.

Gender dysphoria doesn't depend on holding a false belief about one's anatomy

It may not, however, there are plenty of trans people that have these fixed false beliefs. You continue to steer the conversation to a particular sub group of trans people that you carefully define. It's as if you are actively trying to ignore the many other trans voices.

I think you’re misunderstanding what that claim is and what it’s doing.

These people generally aren’t claiming to have the opposite anatomy. They’re perfectly aware of what their bodies are. The disagreement isn’t over the physical facts; it’s over how "sex" should be defined, recognised and applied in different social, legal and scientific contexts.

Some trans people argue that birth sex shouldn’t be the sole determinant of a person’s legal or social classification. Others argue for a more nuanced account of sex scientifically, based on different biological processes. Still others—including some trans people—take a more sex-realist / gender critical position. There is no universal agreement about these conceptual , scientific and social / policy questions- including among trans people.

What remains constant, regardless of those disagreements, is the experience of dysphoria itself. That experience doesn’t depend on adopting any particular theory about sex or gender.

So I don’t think it’s accurate to characterise this as a fixed false belief. A fixed false belief would be believing something demonstrably untrue about one’s body despite evidence to the contrary. That’s not what’s happening here. The dispute is over how we should interpret biological facts, define categories such as “man” and “woman”, and determine what follows socially or legally from those facts. You may disagree with many trans people on their conclusions to such questions , but that’s a conceptual and political disagreement, not evidence that the person is deluded about their anatomy.

What remains constant, regardless of those disagreements, is the experience of dysphoria itself. That experience doesn’t depend on adopting any particular theory about sex or gender.

This isn't true for the fetishists. Obviously this thread is about children and the majority of the fetishists are adult men. Unfortunately though, some adolescent males are being drawn towards this lifestyle way of "being" trans.

The (initially*) difficult part is how to spot the difference between a fetishist who feigns having distressing dysphoria and someone who really does have distressing dysphoria.

An adult fetishist's experience of "dysphoria" is actually a much-enjoyed exercise in sexual gratification. Positioning it as distressing to garner sympathy is part of the gratification. Getting called out on it can also be a part of that, similar to a dominatrix/submissive fantasy.

*This gets easier the more aware one becomes of the clues that give away the fetish.

This is an interesting blog that was written by an adult male fetishist who recognises why this problem is damaging for women's rights:

https://archive.is/2pQIq

He doesn't cover the impact on children, so it's not directly relevant to this thread, but it provides some interesting insight into a world that is indirectly relevant to all the children who believe themselves to have a gender identity that differs from their sex: to borrow a quote from his blog "to my mind, it's the key, heart, core and crux of the problem with the trans movement today."

Note that he concedes it's not always easy to know whether someone's dysphoria is actually a fetish or not. In a few of his named examples of people who aren't fetishists, he is hesitant to say for certain.

Edited to remove superfluous words/repetition.

Young children often experience dysphoria before they have any sophisticated ideas about gender identity, gender roles, or philosophy.

That was my case.

Trans people are not under the illusion that they have different sexual anatomy.

A part of my brain absolutely is. The part that is responsible for the mental map of my body is convinced I've always had a flat chest, narrow hips, a penis, and so on. The parts that get to deal with the real world can tell it all they want that no, I don't have any of that, my mental mapper just does't listen.

More fundamentally, contending that gender isn't "real" highlights another misunderstanding. No one is suggesting that gender is an independent object in the world. Gender identity is simply the language given to describe a psychological experience.

That's simply not true. The existence of an independent "gender identity" is a fundamental tenet of gender ideology.

That's simply not true. The existence of an independent "gender identity" is a fundamental tenet of gender ideology.

TBF "gender" (without the word identity) isn't an independent object. It's simply a word used to describe observable patterns of stereotypical behaviours, expectations and limitations related to each of the two sexes.

But yes, "gender identity" very much is a fundamental tenet of belief. It's the concept that one can internalise and "be" a particular gender. To non-believers like me, it's impossible to be a gender. People can only be a sex and this is immutable. In this context, "being" a gender is a performed activity and declaring it as an identity is meaningless.

From my non-believer position, I have seen that some people will be honest about the way they demonstrate either their performance* of gender or their belief in gender identity as a thing you can "be", taking on board how it impacts others that don't share their belief, and some people will seek to deceive.

*I fully recognise that this word is rather blunt, considering some people genuinely need this "performance" to alleviate distress. I just can't think of a better word.

Edited for typo, clarity.. and empathy.

A part of my brain absolutely is. The part that is responsible for the mental map of my body is convinced I've always had a flat chest, narrow hips, a penis, and so on. The parts that get to deal with the real world can tell it all they want that no, I don't have any of that, my mental mapper just does't listen

Thats really interesting and I don't doubt that is a very real neuro cognitive experience- entirely independent of any beliefs you have about gender stereotypes, and I would argue it's difficult to imagine how such a fundamental neuro cognitive experience could have been caused by socialisation . But the aspect that I would suggest separates it from a delusion is that you are simultaneously aware that you don't actually have these body parts.

Experienxe of a phantom limb might be an analogy.

A phantom limb is a well-established neurological phenomenon. After an amputation, many people continue to experience vivid sensations—such as touch, movement, itching, warmth, or pain—in a limb that is no longer physically present. This happens because the brain’s representation (or “body map”) of the limb persists even after the limb has been removed.

the crucial distinction is between having an experience and holding a false/ delusional beleif. A person with a phantom limb may say, “It feels like my hand is still there,” while fully understanding that the hand has been amputated.
A delusion, by contrast, is a fixed false belief that is maintained despite overwhelming evidence. For example, if someone insisted their amputated hand was actually still physically still attached despite seeing otherwise, that could be considered delusional in the appropriate clinical context.

That's simply not true. The existence of an independent "gender identity" is a fundamental tenet of gender ideology

I would disagree with you here and suggest you have mischaracterised or misunderstood the way gender is used . Most people wouldn't argue that "gender" is a physical independent entity. Gender is real in the sense that is it a real psychological-/ neuro cognitive experience . That "body map" in your brain and what it's telling you- that experence is real- whatever ideological beliefs you hold, that body map persists , and that it is what people refer to as "gender identity".

That "body map" in your brain and what it's telling you- that experence is real- whatever ideological beliefs you hold, that body map persists , and that it is what people refer to as "gender identity".

This is a very interesting way to put it. It's one of the best articulations I've seen of what gender identity is. However, "whatever ideological belief you hold" is a moot point because the belief is already there in the first place: the belief that everyone has a gender identity and that it's possible for this to differ from one's sex.

An analogy would be a Christian who believes in god but also believes that the big bang happened.

In both cases, the believer finds their own personal balance and acceptable level of cognitive dissonance to accommodate or push back on scientific facts.

An analogy would be a Christian who believes in god but also believes that the big bang happened.
In both cases, the believer finds their own personal balance and acceptable level of cognitive dissonance to accommodate or push back on scientific facts.

@BonfireLady Sorry, I'm going to have to push back on that analogy. You can be a Chrisitian and also accept mainstream cosmological theories.
Science addresses the how. Religion addresses the why.

Looks like you missed part of the question, buddy! If you don't want any honest discussion, leave. Go back to reddit.

India Willoughby has stated that he has a cervix. Is he delusional, or is he just a liar?