Troubled by NHS gender dysphoria page

[CollatalieSisters]

Linked in the "born in wrong body" thread. Sorry if already done to death, but I was shocked by this. Are others?

How would it be if the NHS identified a condition whereby sufferers of the condition found it painfully difficult to confirm to, say, a social expectation that they should have sex only with people of the opposite sex? or of the same race?

My question is, at what point does it cease to be a medical condition and start to be a symptom of a fucked up society?
www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Gender-dysphoria/Pages/Introduction.aspx

"Signs of gender dysphoria

The first signs of gender dysphoria can appear at a very young age. For example, a child may refuse to wear typical boys' or girls' clothes, or dislike taking part in typical boys' or girls' games and activities.

In most cases, this type of behaviour is just a normal part of growing up and will pass in time, but for those with gender dysphoria it persists into later childhood and through to adulthood.

Adults with gender dysphoria can feel trapped inside a body that does not match their gender identity. They may feel so unhappy about social expectations that they live according to their anatomical sex, rather than the gender they feel themselves to be."

Other parts relate to problems of physicality, which I find it easier to conceptualize. And I don't begin to understand how painful this condition must be.

But playing with the wrong toys? Really?

Why not "The first signs of gender dysphoria a child's individual personality can appear at a very young age. For example, a child may refuse to wear typical boys' or girls' clothes, or dislike taking part in typical boys' or girls' games and activities.

In most cases, this type of behaviour is just a normal part of growing up and will pass in time, but for those with gender dysphoria the stubbornness to ignore the arbitrary rules of society it persists into later childhood and through to adulthood.

Adults with gender dysphoria an interest in gender equality can feel trapped inside a body society that does not match their aspiration for a life unconstrained by norms about gender identity and behaviour. They may feel so unhappy about social expectations that they live according to their anatomical sex, rather than the gender they feel themselves to be their own principles and interests."

I love your rewrite.

Yes so do I. I am quite disturbed by the fact that there is an expectation that wearing clothes traditionally worn by the opposite sex or playing with toys aimed at the opposite sex 'will pass'. As if it is wrong to do that. Seriously?

Also gender and sex appears to be conflated. Gender dysphoria is not the same as feeling trapped in the wrong body. Gender being a social construct and all.

How would you define feeling trapped in the wrong body? "Wrong " in what sense?

How would it be if the NHS identified a condition whereby sufferers of the condition found it painfully difficult to confirm to, say, a social expectation that they should have sex only with people of the opposite sex?

Actually it did until quite recently. In fairness it was the WHO rather than the NHS but the ICD coding system used to classify clinical conditions had homosexuality classified as a mental disorder. (This is a bit of a simplification of the reality - you can read something about it here if you wish).

However, what I would say is:

• the NHS Choices pages are aiming to present clear and straightforward medical information
• if you disagree with the wording, let them know. Their Editorial Policy is available.

I was the one who linked to it in the last thread and I found it very disturbing. Would be great if we could replace it with your version.

I agree

It is barking mad IMO. I cannot fathom, how that ever got written and put up on the site

I think we need to lobby to have it changed. It totally reinforces gender syereotypes

Yes. Let's get in touch with them. Is it better to write as individuals, or some sort of collective lobby, do you think? Thanks for the link tribpot.

I really do feel that this period will be judged very harshly by history, in the manner we are all shocked by past treatment if homosexuality.
I wonder how other NHS material - e.g.the resources available to GPs, often the first port of call - reads.

I find it so sad that in the past, mums of gender-non-conforming children could have gone to the early learning centre and bought gender-neutral toys, bought primary-coloured lego etc or a (I certainly thought at the time) gender-neutral fisher price little ladybuggy instead of flimsy plastic feminised 'nurturing' toys and black/khaki macho-coded action toys.
The problem of sexism was clearly named.
Now, if children don't want to conform to sexist stereotypes it's a health condition. It's absolutely terrifying.
I'd have been put on hormone-blockers and potentially rendered infertile if I was a pre-teen today. It's so awful.
I'm a perfectly happy lesbian who still wears jeans and flannel shirts. I know I'm not a man in the 'wrong' body although I hate having a body that's coded as vulnerable to rape and objectification. I think most girls have dysphoria. We're all told by the media and often our loved ones that our bodies are wrong.

While I do tend to think that the transgender activists triggering these threads are irrational, and that much of the 'genderqueer' phenomenon is indeed down to an increasing stereotyped and sick society, it's worth remembering that they may not be the whole story. Someone linked this article ona previous thread ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TS.html#anchor266486

Intersex is a real phenomenon and I wouldn't want to claim that all transgender feelings in everyone are solely down to bad parenting. It's a complicated area with all sorts of motivations and biological/ social interactions in play.

The re-write does sound pretty neutral until the last paragraph.

I am really freaked out by how many people that I thought were really nice and clever have become so awash in such a pro-trans fury. I mean there is a real outrage, and rage, at anyone who questions all this, in certain circles, and it freaks me out, because the people i am thinking of are the ones I think of as the good guys. I feel frightened and betrayed by this.

I am really shaking with sadness and fear at the moment because someone very young and very close to me is now calling herself "gender fluid" and I am scared shitless some doctor will get their hands on her while she's young and confused. She is absolutely nuts about my little children and has been since they were babies and if she loses the chance to have her own children one day, just because of this pathetic trend, then it will be the saddest thing in the world. I don't care how short she cuts her hair (it looks really good by the way) (shallow) that is no reason to fill her with dangerous ideas while she is fearful and overemotional and struggling to find her place in the world in a town where girls her age (14) routinely dye their skin orange and wear hair and nail extensions and tights as trousers. If she thinks that is what women or girls are then I don't blame her for feeling a bit "gender fluid" but oh my god I am scared for her right now.

If you had offered me drugs or surgery to be someone else at 14 I would have bitten your hands off. Doesn't make it right.

Anyway the overheated tone of the trans stuff is making me far too chicken shit to speak out about this. I am apparently "erasing" people or effectively wishing them dead or in some sense making them dead (?) if I question that trans women are women in exactly the same way as I am a woman. I don't wish anyone dead. I want trans women to have happy and fulfilled lives without suffering discrimination. I don't even question their right to call themselves women if they want to and act as women in a social sense. But they aren't women in exactly the same way as I am - how can they be? - and in some senses in some philosophical and political contexts this matters - at least to me. And even to say that is now hate speech.

I don't want to be hatey so I won't say this out loud in public under my own name and I'm ashamed of how craven I am.

Clarifications: I do not think that gender non-conformity is a pathetic trend, I mean the quickness to "treat" it medically with hormones / surgery

BAD TASTE COMPARISONS #1

Post Holocaust the Western world is riven with guilt over how it has treated its Jews. Palestinians pay:
Centuries of rigidly policed gender and sexual normtivity have taken a terrible toll on people. There is a collective sorrow and guilt among the white straight men who have been the ones to deal out the punishment. Hence the rush to validate trans stuff (at the expense of females and feminists)

The traditional way to manage different groups with different interests is allow them to get on with pursuing their own interests in their own space without bothering anyone else. the difficulty is that born-women space (in which to discuss born-women stuff) is by definition offensive. It can't be allowed to exist. i feel terribly claustrophobic at the thought of this (even though I have never actually been to a womyn only festival at which we discuss the taste of our menstrual blood).

I feel like I felt when I had a boyfriend who snored who considered it an insult when I was exhausted and needed to sleep apart from him. His outrage wasn't that I kicked him out of anywhere: I was the one that moved, in a sleeping bag, to a piece of floor in another room. the outrage was that I dared to consider myself an autonomous being who required space that he wasn't in. A separate existence in which I could sleep peacefully, unsnored at, was an arrogance on my part that could only be parsed as a direct and deliberate insult to him.

I feel desperate and suffocated.

Years ago I have shed more tears than I am prepared to admit to - I am ashamed of them - over my own body's failure to live up to patriarchal standards. I do not consider myself a noble victim because I have stared at my thighs, loathing them, fantasising about slicing thick strips off them with knives. I consider myself a pathetic over privileged egotist who should have got over herself a lot sooner. and got out more and focused on someone other than myself.

Hence the rush to validate trans stuff (at the expense of females and feminists)

At the expense of? How so? Haven't even noticed a rush, letalone an expense.

Other tears I have shed over my body's "failure": when I was expecting my second child while breastfeeding my first and working full time with spd, I cried with exhaustion most mornings and most evenings. My body was not capable of the pregnancy and the work and the commute and the insomnia and the breastfeeding, while maintaining a decent equilibrium or even happiness. It was grit through misery and the occasional strategic sicky that saw us through that time. I am sure this is pretty normal. I would like to be able to talk about this with other women (I did, at the time, on here).

The actual limits of the body are real and painful to me, I feel I have been forced right up to the edge of them; I feel that society wanted more of my body than it could do and my spirit was straddling the gap, and tearing palpably, daily. The primacy - the moral centrality and in fact sort of current monotheism of trans issues - leaves this particular unfashionable miserable experience of physical dysophoria very hard to talk about.

YET I did so in incredibly privileged conditions: in paid work, with maternity leave and sick pay, in an office job mainly sitting down, with public transport, with plenty to eat and drink, with free maternity care on the NHS. (To be bearing a wanted child was in itself a privilege, one I never take for granted.)

All of those things - (except the conception of my child) - were won for me by hard fighting feminists and trade unionists of the past and I feel like even the language to fight these battles is being taken away. To say that as women qua women - as the child bearing sex bearing children - we are suffering - in ways that society can ameliorate - is no longer permissable.

BAD TASTE COMPARIONS # 2

Trans rights is a jealous god.

Katharine I guess we move in different circles. Do you hang out with a lot of people into philosophy and leftist politics?

I know we all experience the world in different ways depending on who our friends are, whcih is why I mention that one of the unsettling things to me is how very trans gung ho so many people are that i tend to think of as generally right

• not that trans rights aren't important in my view (they are)
• but the other stuff that i said above gives me pause

Do you hang out with a lot of people into philosophy and leftist politics?

No. Not if I can help it!

I see nothing wrong with the NHS description. One of the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria is that it has been present for a long time, indeed from early childhood. The NHS site points out that refusal to conform is normal for children and on it's own is not indicative of gender dysphoria.

OP do you deny that gender dysphoria exists or that for some it can remedied by gender reassignment?

I mean I read this interview with a prominent trans activist in which she said basically that there can be no spaces for women without trans women. the article basically approved of everything she said and then ended in this mealy mouthed way saying something about how "we all have to make room for each other". i mean the transwoman being interviewed had just specifically said that she did not intend on principle to allow room for any women where trans women couldn't go. how is that everyone making room? That's one group being made to agree that ALL THE ROOM belongs to the other.

I have had this often before with controlling people. You say "blue or red cup? take which one you want" (having had experience of them always drinking out of your cup, so you give them the choice hoping that you will get one to yourself) and they go "er, blue I guess" so you take red and then find a little later they are drinking out of the red one. you say "oh ok I guess the red one is yours now. I'll just go and wash the blue one and take it for myself" and they go "NO YOU CANT HAVE THE BLUE CUP IT'S MINE" and you realise they are pretending to want to say which one they want, but really they want to say THEY'RE ALL MINE but they don't actually realise this themselves half the time, and think you're the one being unfair for trying to get them to acknowledge that there is one cup they can't have

Katharine, this is a mainstream leftist journalist in a mainstream newspaper

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/18/stonewall-trans-issues-neglected-progressives

things to note about this

• Obvious guilt

• fear at being found to be "on the wrong side" - this is a hasty response to his sense of the "rush" I mentioned, and you questioned

• throwing feminists under the bus - attributing the violence and oppression trans people have suffered to them (when it is overwhelmingly men who do this) - "But these issues aren’t taken seriously enough because even some progressives are debating the legitimacy of trans identity". get this? Violence against trans people continues BECAUSE OF THE WRONG KIND OF PROGRESSIVES (made clear he means feminists elsehwere). if feminists are so good at influencing who gets beaten up, why don't they stop violence against women? Do we really think they have this power, to determine who suffers under patriarchal violence and who gets to mete it out?

Even the NHS page itself, as quoted by Callatalie, is evidence of a rush to validate trans activism. This is a new attitude. In many ways it is very welcome - no discrimination is acceptable. In some ways I think a sincere desire to be inclusive and open is being inflected in some very worrying ways (by people, dare I say it, who simply haven't thought about it enough, but hav ea lot of inflience)

BAD TASTE COMPARISON # 3

we live in a world which increasingly demonises fat - non-comformist sized bodies - and uses health as an excuse (although hypertension, etc need not be present in a fat person and often aren't). Some of the measures that are offered fat people - stomach stapling, medicines which cause food to be improperly digested and fat to be excreted - are very dangerous and lead to long term health problems. sometimes the supposed health issues of the fat were never present in the first place, it was purely a cosmetic "problem". Perhaps a better answer is for society to love all bodies and for healthful activities and foods to be available equally to all people of all shapes and sizes.

:

People who feel that their bodies are "wrong" in sex and suffer dysphoria can often in the medium to long term find that the physical measures they too, lead to health problems and other kinds of dysphoria. Perhaps we need to love all bodies and work towards a complete and holistic love for - not acceptance, not tolerance, but actual love - of all human bodies and all gender expressions of those, and all the marvellous and mysterious workings of who we are. we are all rich and strange