Such an interesting article about the psychological burden of performing “gender”

How does a trans-identified male know what ‘womanhood’ is? How can he learn what it is to be a woman when he is (and always will be) a man?

I can't help feeling that if they didn't know perfectly well what they were in reality as opposed to in their imaginations, they wouldn't kick up such a massive fuss about other people knowing it perfectly well too.

And the mere use of trans shows they know they are not the thing.

Now Willyboy has abandoned that and claimed to be a woman with a cervix, but the rest of us know he is as mad as a fish.

You made me laugh!! Did he just buy himself a cervix?

Haha, no, he thinks he has one. It grew apparently. Lammy thinks men can grow them in their surgical cavities too.

No gynaecologist is going to find a cervix in any transwoman.

David Lammy thought that some men could grow a cervix

He can stick a piece of calamari up there if he likes but it's not a cervix.

I’ve read that! How can an ‘intelligent’ man think that?

He 'identifies' as intelligent.

🤣🤣

Whether it be a penchant for perfectionism, adventure, knowledge, competition, masculinity, femininity, spirituality, creativity etc they all demand expression. The reality is you can't push back the tide of who you really are without there being damaging consequence

That is bullshit, quite frankly. We cope quite normally without expressing every aspect of our personality, and that personality isn't fixed. It changes throughout our lives.

People change who they are all the time. Our brains' plasticity is well documented. What we think, want, believe, value, enjoy, admire can and does change.

How we react to the world changes too - and thank goodness for that, or all those with poor mental health would be condemned to live like that forever. Fortunately, many of us recover, learn how to alter our unhelpful ways of thinking and interpreting the world, and go on to live happy and engaged lives.

In treating trans-identifying patients in the opposite way to other patients in distress, the article's author was musing that we do them a disservice. We treat them as if their wish to present as someone (or something) they are not is a reasonable route to go down.

We'd rightly decry practitioners who took that approach to any other cause of mental distress. He gives the example of OCD but anorexia, body dysmorphia, body integrity disorder or believing you're the Queen of Sheba are the same... We don't pander to the mental illness, we challenge its roots and help the patient accept themselves in material reality.

If someone were hearing voices I doubt that anyone in the psychiatric profession would affirm that they were real people living in his or her head and chatting if what they were doing (as it too often seems to be) was encouraging suicidal or violent impulses. If they are neutral or positive and doing no harm, then affirming them might be fine, but not if they lead to self-harm or hurting others.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-to-Extremes

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35834197/

"Consistent with earlier meta-analytic findings, the rank-order stability of personality traits increased significantly throughout early life before reaching a plateau in young adulthood. These increases in stability coincide with mean-level changes in the direction of greater maturity. In contrast to previous findings, we found little evidence for increasing rank-order stabilities after Age 25. Moreover, cumulative mean-level trait changes across the life span were slightly smaller than previously estimated. Emotional stability, however, increased consistently and more substantially across the life span than previously found. Moderator analyses indicated that narrow facet-level and maladaptive trait measures were less stable than broader domain and adaptive trait measures. Overall, the present findings draw a more precise picture of the life span development of personality traits and highlight important gaps in the personality development literature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)."

False equivalence. The context isn't mal adaptive traits….as much as you delude yourself into believing gender expression is. If it was all most of us would be 'suffering' from this 'disease'.

I believe that generally people with an internal locus of control have better mental health.

Agreed. Building an internal locus of control can help you manage anxiety by shifting your focus to actions and thoughts you can actually change.

@Northernlightsss “you can actually change.”

You CANNOT change sex. It’s IMPOSSIBLE!!

This. You’d wonder how often it needs repeating. Services, spaces etc are separated, when necessary, on the grounds of sex. Knock yourself out playing at being a different gender, or no gender, whatever that means to you. There is no relevance to anything separated by sex.

And if the men’s rights activists want to argue that nothing should be separated on the basis of sex, then have the honesty to make that argument.

It's funny how being told I am delusional influences me against the rude person making that accusation.

Particularly when what I am accused of being delusional about is a simple fact of nature.

("Don't blame me for gravity! I voted for Velcro.")

It certainly is a maladaptive trait when it prevents you from thriving, particularly if it takes massive effort to maintain.

Very well. Let's not be extreme. Let's take a not-unusual social problem.

X feels most himself (or herself, it doesn't matter) when he is holding forth at length and in detail about one of a very few subjects that fascinate him. It never occurs to him that other people don't find the subject fascinating and his exposition of it rivetting.

I (and many others) experience this as excruciatingly boring.

So: do I have to sit there and put up with him "expressing an important aspect of his authentic self"?
If so, for how long do I have to put up with it, and how often? Am I allowed to make a polite excuse and extricate myself when I begin to feel bored?

Am I allowed to ever actually tell him that he's boring me to oblivion and that I want him to stop, or do I have to maintain the polite fiction that he isn't boring at all?

Do I have to convince myself that what he says must be interesting and that if I don't find it so, the fault is in me?

Do his feelings and needs take priority over mine? If so, why?

Ubiquitous gendered behavioural traits are widely viewed by evolutionary biologists and psychologists as evolutionary adaptations designed to solve ancestral survival and reproductive challenges so that's hardly maladaptive. Human males and females facing different ecological and biological pressures for millennia, natural and sexual selection favours distinct behavioural strategies. That there maybe a 'cost' to maintaining evolutionary strategies doesn't necessarily out weigh the benefits.

Th obtuseness is off the charts here. Its gender not sex that's why its 'trans gender'.

Typical GC entitlement: Centering themselves incessantly. And yeah that's boring.

The context here is the anxiety of trans people & how best they manage it not how bored or ignorant you are.

You have completely missed the point I was making.

Do people have to protect the feelings of a boring person who is very wrapped up in their interests, by pretending they are not boring, or even by trying to persuade themselves that it is their own fault that they are bored? After all, that person is "expressing their authentic self" by holding forth about what interests them, and it may be painful to them to discover this is not particularly welcome.

In other words - without resorting to an extreme example, since you objected to that: Are we entitled to disengage and avoid, or even disagree and complain, when manifestations of people's "authentic selves" are tiresome, objectionable and oblivious to their effect on others?

If so, there is no reason to pussyfoot around just because "it's somebody expressing their authentic self" when people manifest their gender identity in ways that infringe on other people.