Why was gender dysphoria changed from being a mental illness?

[LittleWhingingWoman]

www.nhs.uk/conditions/gender-dysphoria/

But I would imagine that most people still see it as a mental illness - what qualifies it not to be?

Oh yeah, there's no doubt about it. For some it's definitely. not a mental illness.

Cockblockingcowboy

I'm so sorry for your loss. Your grief is yours and yours alone, it's personal, and no one else can quantify it or qualify it.

💐

Thanks for the reference hhh333hhh.

As you say, it does not suggest a 'test for trans'. I suppose we agree there is no such thing.

I think your claim based on this ref, '... it is possible to predict which scans belong to a trans person well above chance' is a little premature, in the light of the authors' own caveat that '... the results should be taken cautiously because of the small sample size and [also because] the brain statistical maps showing significance were at an uncorrected level.' ( How much above chance, hhh333hhh ? -- Always a good question.)

More importantly, the results summarised in the conclusion you quote are of comparisons between gay men ( 'untreated homosexual MtFs' in the authors' words) and heterosexual controls. Which being so, there seems no principled reason for thinking the differences due to transsexuality rather than homosexuality.

From your quoted conclusions, '... the studies ... strongly suggest that MtFs have their own brain phenotype ...' could, given this latter point, equally be read '... the studies ... strongly suggest that gay men have their own brain phenotype ...'

This is a point made by Transgender Trend , from which I see you sourced this article. (Good for you for this; brave considering your expressed views!) They also have further criticisms and caveats, as you might expect.

As ever, much more might be said. Have you considered at all the confounding effects of neuroplasticity on your thesis of brain-coding trans, I wonder? And so on. I assume you have read some relevant books, Gina Rippon, Cordelia Fine and so on?

[For those coming to this arena for the first time, Eight Things You Need to Know About Sex, Gender, Brains, and Behavior might make a good start.]

Otherwise, probably time for me to bow out. This has been interesting hhh333hhh. But now my Covid-induced bed-rest is over and I am going back to the real world.

A summary? --

We still have no way of detecting the presence of gender identity in the sense outlined upthread. In fact, it still seems there is no such thing as gender identity .

Oh, and hhh333hhh supposing you wish your views to be taken at all seriously, it is probably behoves you, once you have said something explicitly on an internet forum, not to deny it later in the same terms on the same forum.

As for the main topic of this thread, DelurkingLawyer has it about right, I think:

Why was gender dysphoria changed from being a mental illness?

<strong>1) to make the T appear to align with the LGB (much harder if three are sexualities and one is a mental health issue).</strong>

<strong>2) to pave the way for unrestricted affirmative treatment. If it is a mental health condition/disorder/illness, that leaves the door open for treatment rather than affirmation (we don’t affirm anorexics or people with body integrity identify disorder)</strong>

<strong>3) to decouple obtaining a GRC from any kind of objective diagnosis by reference to specific diagnostic criteria, of a specified condition.</strong>

-- The discussion between me and hhh333hhh , just a side-show.

@RobinMoiraWhite

How is it similar to being same sex attracted? Is there a sexual element to it?

Because being transgender is not a mental illness, just a feature, for some, of the rich tapestry of being human. Society is learning that, just as it had to with different expressions of sexuality.

If it's not an illness, why does it require medical treatment? This is where it diverges from expressions of sexuality, which require no medical treatment.

The nonsense that gender identity is a “belief” akin to belief in the soul ignores years of research which demonstrate that gender identity has a a heritable polygenic component, like sexuality and other traits, as this review of the literature shows.

The belief that you haven’t got a gender identity is the pseudo-religious one. If you are arguing that a well-established medical and psychological science is wrong, then you have a high standard of proof to reach.

www.researchgate.net/profile/Isabel-Esteva/publication/323261652_The_Biological_Contributions_to_Gender_Identity_and_Gender_Diversity_Bringing_Data_to_the_Table/links/5c66cecca6fdcc404eb43ad5/The-Biological-Contributions-to-Gender-Identity-and-Gender-Diversity-Bringing-Data-to-the-Table.pdf

[quote DadJoke]The nonsense that gender identity is a “belief” akin to belief in the soul ignores years of research which demonstrate that gender identity has a a heritable polygenic component, like sexuality and other traits, as this review of the literature shows.

The belief that you haven’t got a gender identity is the pseudo-religious one. If you are arguing that a well-established medical and psychological science is wrong, then you have a high standard of proof to reach.

www.researchgate.net/profile/Isabel-Esteva/publication/323261652_The_Biological_Contributions_to_Gender_Identity_and_Gender_Diversity_Bringing_Data_to_the_Table/links/5c66cecca6fdcc404eb43ad5/The-Biological-Contributions-to-Gender-Identity-and-Gender-Diversity-Bringing-Data-to-the-Table.pdf[/quote]
You could start by reading this reply I made to a similar post of yours a year ago.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/a4177994-an-inclusive-way-to-be-gender-critical?msgid=105231218

It's a long post with several links, so I'm not going to copy it here. The short answer is that the term 'gender identity' used to be used to refer to a child's understanding that they were either a boy or a girl, and that this was a fixed attribute. At one time, as Katie Alcock explains in the quote in my earlier post, this was referred to as 'sex identity', until people started to get squeamish about the word 'sex' and used 'gender' as a euphemism.

I'm not sure why I'm bothering to reply to you when you clearly can't be bothered to read my posts, but maybe someone else will find it useful.

[quote DadJoke]The nonsense that gender identity is a “belief” akin to belief in the soul ignores years of research which demonstrate that gender identity has a a heritable polygenic component, like sexuality and other traits, as this review of the literature shows.

The belief that you haven’t got a gender identity is the pseudo-religious one. If you are arguing that a well-established medical and psychological science is wrong, then you have a high standard of proof to reach.

www.researchgate.net/profile/Isabel-Esteva/publication/323261652_The_Biological_Contributions_to_Gender_Identity_and_Gender_Diversity_Bringing_Data_to_the_Table/links/5c66cecca6fdcc404eb43ad5/The-Biological-Contributions-to-Gender-Identity-and-Gender-Diversity-Bringing-Data-to-the-Table.pdf[/quote]
DadJoke, you offered a reference to this paper also on a thread on which I had pointed to the implicit challenge – explain a way of detecting the presence of gender identity in the required sense – contained in Alex Byrne’s little article, What is gender identity?:

[ Byrne: ‘If there is some kind of “gender identity” that is universal in humans, and which causes dysphoria when mismatched with sex, it remains elusive. No one has yet found a way of detecting its presence, and verifying that it is causally responsible for dysphoria.’ ]

Here is a short(-ish) response to your claim that this challenge was answered in that paper by Polderman et al on behalf of the International Gender Diversity Genomics Consortium . It can serve here too.

-- Nowhere do the authors, or as far as I can tell, the studies they consider, offer a way of detecting the presence of gender identity, although they do assert its existence and offer, albeit somewhat warily, some suggestions of things they claim correlate with it.

A few (fairly typical) extracts to illustrate:

About half of the studies investigated “masculinity” and “femininity.” … Masculinity and femininity are usually measured with items reflecting sex-specific behaviors, feelings, or even cultural stereotypes as part of personality questionnaires (e.g., “I am often the leader among my friends”, or “I am a kind and gentle person”)

In a large longitudinal study in 7 and 10-year old Dutch twins, two items of the Child Behavior Checklist were summed (i.e., ‘behaves like opposite sex’ and ‘wishes to be of opposite sex’) to measure cross-gender behavior and cross-gender identity (van Beijsterveldt et al. 2006).

It is important to note the limitations of the instruments used to measure gender identity. We must recognize the possibility that they may conflate true gender identity with gender expression.

– Indeed we must.

A gender diagnosticity score is computed … gender diagnosticity is a Bayesian probability that an individual is male or female on the basis of gender-related indicators.

– But we might note that neither the Bayesian priors nor conditions include gender identity.

I do not have time to give a thorough critique. There is lots to say. Too much.

Just one thing, as follows. The notion of gender identity as used by DadJoke and others is essentially causal (hence the claim to scientific status, of course): ‘gender identity causes dysphoria when mismatched [how? hmm ] with sex’ etc. But in none of these studies cited by Polderman et al on behalf of the International Gender Diversity Genomics Consortium (or any others I have seen) does it ever get a specific mention in any causal role. Claims are made for its heritability, but it is only the heritability of ‘behaves like the opposite sex’, ‘sex-specific behaviours’, ‘cultural sterotypes’, ‘I am a kind and gentle person’ and the like that are even claimed to be measured.

Why not measure gender identity itself in a study purporting to be about gender identity? It must be because we have no way of detecting its presence. But, then, this means we have as much reason to believe in its existence, DadJoke , as we do in guardian angels and all the rest.

Or, DadJoke , prove me wrong. Show me where someone claims to have found a way of detecting its existence. We still have no satisfactory answer to the question, How do we detect the presence of gender identity?
.
.

Once again, DadJoke. Are you not ashamed to keep posting the same thing in attempted support of an assertion without paying any attention to what look like clear refutations of this assertion as well as explanations of how the article you refer to just does not support it?

The challenge stands, DadJoke. Do you have a satisfactory answer to the question, How do we detect the presence of gender identity? (Where “gender identity” is taken to be something universal in humans, and which causes dysphoria when mismatched with sex, as Byrne explains it.)

If you have an answer, it is time to give it. If not, you may think it appropriate, DadJoke , just to shut the fuck up about this and stop wasting people’s time with spurious references to productions of the International Gender Diversity Genomics Consortium.

-- Without an answer, of course, we are forced to the conclusion that there is no such thing as gender identity .

RobinMoiraWhite :
"Because being transgender is not a mental illness, just a feature, for some, of the rich tapestry of being human. Society is learning that, just as it had to with different expressions of sexuality."

No, will not wash. There is a particularly nice (modal) asymmetry with sexuality.

Suppose I am a man:
Sexuality : 'I am attracted to men'... necessarily true if sincere, because of what 'attracted' means.
Transgender : 'I am a woman' ... necessarily false if sincere, because of what 'woman' means.

Transgender thus in many cases is not a way of being; it is a way of pretending.

(-- Cue foolish tergiversations around the meaning of 'woman'?)
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.

In some other (sad) cases, transgender is a way of being mistaken :
Anorexia : 'I am fat', said by a thin person. (A mistake about oneself.)
Transgender: 'I am female', said by a male person. (A mistake about oneself.)

Being anorexic may indeed be described as a feature, for some, of being human. Likewise, and precisely so, being transgender. 'Rich tapestry,' though? Not my description of choice in either case.

I am not au fait with all the research. I had a quick look at some of the links here - I'm going to do some more reading. I have a gut feeling that there will be physical differences or changes in the brain, whether or not it can be measured using current technology - just as an illness like depression has a physical cause. Everything is physical when it comes down to it, because that's all we are. Bodies with brains running on chemicals.
Doesn't matter though. Whatever the reason for someone feeling they are transgender - that still shouldn't allow a male body full access to female-only spaces just because they want it, or feel they belong there. Not if the women feel otherwise. Women should both be, and feel, safe in their spaces. And of course, women on this forum are approaching this debate from this standpoint.
What this thread has made clear to me though, is that everyone stands to gain from more research and open discussion. Can I thank everyone who has posted, whatever your opinions, because I'm still learning and you are all helping me. I intend to educate myself further, because so far I feel I have a visceral reaction to things that are happening, and I need to understand more of everybody's viewpoints.
But, gender dysphoria, mental illness - if it's no longer a useful way of categorising it, that would be a good reason to change it. The problem here is that it's hard to trust that the change has been made for the right reasons because the whole subject has become so politicised. Which makes it look like yet another Trojan horse. But it's important to remember that there are real people with real feelings here, who deserve to be heard respectfully. Even while we do our damnedest to protect our spaces.
Sorry, a bit rambling, I'm on my phone.

@9toenails

RobinMoiraWhite : "Because being transgender is not a mental illness, just a feature, for some, of the rich tapestry of being human. Society is learning that, just as it had to with different expressions of sexuality."

No, will not wash. There is a particularly nice (modal) asymmetry with sexuality.

Suppose I am a man:
Sexuality : 'I am attracted to men'... necessarily true if sincere, because of what 'attracted' means.
Transgender : 'I am a woman' ... necessarily false if sincere, because of what 'woman' means.

Transgender thus in many cases is not a way of being; it is a way of pretending.

(-- Cue foolish tergiversations around the meaning of 'woman'?)
.
.

In some other (sad) cases, transgender is a way of being mistaken :
Anorexia : 'I am fat', said by a thin person. (A mistake about oneself.)
Transgender: 'I am female', said by a male person. (A mistake about oneself.)

Being anorexic may indeed be described as a feature, for some, of being human. Likewise, and precisely so, being transgender. 'Rich tapestry,' though? Not my description of choice in either case.

Nailed it.

@Ereshkigalangcleg

It's difficult to know how to class it, but I think it's a psychological issue and I'm not convinced enough research has been done into therapies other than transitioning.

There's been actual research into transitioning?

You detect gender identity the same way you measure any inner trait - you ask questions. No one denies that happiness has a strong heretitable component, but no one denies that happiness is real. - this is also true of many personality traits

The fact that gender identity has a heritable component should be enough on its own to put to bed the idea that it's "made up." When you say that you need to be able to detect something directly in order to measure it, I can hear thousands of research scientists chuckling.

Is this all made up?
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080304103308.htm

Quoting gender critical philosophers who have entirely ignored the literature on the subject and seem to the think the idea of an inner sense is somehow novel are as valid as "intelligent design" philosophers.

I addressed this in my previous post on the issue. Look at the literature and engage with the fact the gender identity is not in doubt, and has a heretible component. There is no point in trying to persuade me of it, any more that you need to attempt to disuade me that climate change is real. There is an enormous evidentiary barrier for you to overcome - not me.

This is not the "trans agenda" any more than it was the "gay agenda." It's years of research conduct by mainstream scientists from national and international bodies, and published in reputable scientific journals subject to peer review.

Once again you have conflated gender identity and gender expression.

Transgender people, like gay people, for years had no language to describe their inner sense. Now they have.

Yeah I respect that this is your belief. It isn't mine.

I'm not sure homosexual animals have language to describe their inner sense but they seem to manage just fine.

This article is also coming to mind:

genderarguments.com/openletterbiologicalsex/

Particularly this bit:

"Lately, I’ve seen a lot of debates break out on Twitter over biological sex — what defines it, how it can be measured, whether it exists at all. The men who dominate these debates are often experts in their fields, meaning they use terms like “bimodal distribution” and “nonstandard karyotypes” to make their otherwise mundane points....It seems more and more obvious to me that even entertaining the debate is a concession, an assent to women’s lives being made the subject of thought experiments and counterfactuals plucked from the air by some post-grad who, coincidentally, has never once worried about pregnancy from rape."

"It’s the only type of body that gets you thrown on the funeral pyre when the husband dies. It’s the only type of body that gets your feet bound and your breasts ironed. It’s the only type made pregnant through rape and burned with acid, the only type expected to sit quietly and listen while we redefine it away, the only type men have spent millennia criticizing and critiquing and buying and selling until the moment we decided we couldn’t figure out what the fuck it even means."

"This is an emergency. This is three and a half billion human beings tied to the tracks, and you’re riding on the train."

@DadJoke

You detect gender identity the same way you measure any inner trait - you ask questions. No one denies that happiness has a strong heretitable component, but no one denies that happiness is real. - this is also true of many personality traits

The fact that gender identity has a heritable component should be enough on its own to put to bed the idea that it's "made up." When you say that you need to be able to detect something directly in order to measure it, I can hear thousands of research scientists chuckling.

Is this all made up?
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080304103308.htm

Quoting gender critical philosophers who have entirely ignored the literature on the subject and seem to the think the idea of an inner sense is somehow novel are as valid as "intelligent design" philosophers.

I addressed this in my previous post on the issue. Look at the literature and engage with the fact the gender identity is not in doubt, and has a heretible component. There is no point in trying to persuade me of it, any more that you need to attempt to disuade me that climate change is real. There is an enormous evidentiary barrier for you to overcome - not me.

This is not the "trans agenda" any more than it was the "gay agenda." It's years of research conduct by mainstream scientists from national and international bodies, and published in reputable scientific journals subject to peer review.

Once again you have conflated gender identity and gender expression.

Transgender people, like gay people, for years had no language to describe their inner sense. Now they have.

Still you have not understood, DadJoke . You simply do not understand . Your proffering the example of 'happiness' could not make this any clearer.

Look.
"You detect gender identity the same way you measure any inner trait - you ask questions. No one denies that happiness has a strong heretitable component, but no one denies that happiness is real. - this is also true of many personality traits."

But ... but ... (I really thought I had made this point clear) ... If you feel happy you are happy. So if I ask you are you happy, and you do not lie, your answer must be true. That is not the case with being trans or having a gender identity in the required sense, any more than it is the case with being Elvis, or being thin ...

Being happy is like being hungry or being gay in this way. Being trans or having a gender identity is not.

As for gender identity having a heritable component: -- Again, I pointed out, never in any of the literature you reference ( which amounted to one dubious parti pris review article, time after time ...), nor in any of the other literature supposedly about gender identity, is gender identity itself directly measured.

Why is that. do you think? Why do I keep asking this question? Any idea?

One article, DadJoke . One paper, report, letter, footnote ... Can you find just one that refers to a way of detecting the presence of gender identity?

From all the 'years of research conduct by mainstream scientists from national and international bodies, and published in reputable scientific journals subject to peer review' you cannot find a single one that offers us a way of detecting the presence of gender identity in the sense delineated by Alex Byrne in that little article. Not one.

Sorry, DadJoke . I give up.

Look again at that point about being happy. Do you get the idea? At all? Any clue what I am saying about how being happy is similar to being gay but dissimilar to being trans?

Even if you disagree, do you understand the point? Huh? Any clue?

-- And the point about a lack of direct measurement of gender identity? Why do you think I framed the challenge in that particular fashion? Any idea?

Oh dear. I am sorry.

This has been an interesting experience for me. Thanks for that, at least DadJoke . Of course it would not matter, except that the baseless foolishness you espouse so irrationally has tendencies to affect others.

Thanks Phobiaphobic .

I suppose RobinMoiraWhite agrees. Let us see.

You detect gender identity the same way you measure any inner trait - you ask questions.

What questions would you ask to detect gender identity?

What questions would you ask to detect gender identity?

Yes, a simple question like "do you feel male or female" doesn't cut it, because too many people will just think they're being asked about sex and respond with their actual sex, regardless of presence or absence of "feelings".

The assumption that most people are "cisgender" relies on this elision - that the people who answer a "gender" question with their actual sex are doing it because of "feelings".

It would need to be something like "regardless of your actual sex, what gender do you feel like - this can be male, female, neutrois, moongender, etc, etc. Do not answer this question with your sex unless you truly feel that this is an inner identity, rather than simply describing your physical body."

(Or maybe DadJoke is no fully on-board with modern genderology and is assuming a binary gender model? I can't imagine there's much scientific support for the stuff like moongender.)

@LangClegIn Space

"Money was respected as an expert on sexual behavior, especially known for his views that gender was learned rather than innate."

This is from Wikipedia. Do you believe that gender is learned rather than innate? I don't. And the reason why I don't is because of A Review of the Status of Brain Structure Research in Transsexualism which I quoted from earlier on this page.

@wasibat

More importantly, the results summarised in the conclusion you quote are of comparisons between gay men ( 'untreated homosexual MtFs' in the authors' words) and heterosexual controls. Which being so, there seems no principled reason for thinking the differences due to transsexuality rather than homosexuality.

I am going to reply briefly now because I don't have much time today. I may reply more fully another day. In the meantime I suggest you read the report that I linked to because it quite clearly states that when a transwoman is attracted to a man she may be termed 'homosexual' but she does not regard herself as homosexual but as a heterosexual woman.

Below is a quote from the report.

"However, Gooren had reservations about the use of the terms
‘‘homo’’- and‘‘nonhomosexual’’because MtFs do not view themselves as homosexuals, considering themselves women in their
sexual interaction with men.

@wasibat

More importantly, the results summarised in the conclusion you quote are of comparisons between gay men ( 'untreated homosexual MtFs' in the authors' words) and heterosexual controls. Which being so, there seems no principled reason for thinking the differences due to transsexuality rather than homosexuality.

Now it is the weekend I can give this subject my full attention.

There has been a lot of research into the brains of gay cis men. They consistently show a pattern of feminization. However, it is a different pattern to trans women (by 'trans women' I mean males who have transitioned to females). Although the study I referred to earlier would have been better if it had included gay cis men as controls, the study still stands because we know from other studies that gay cis men and trans women have little in common in terms of their brain structure.

So I still say that it is possible to look at scans of people and to say that this is likely to be that of a trans woman. You can predict that with success well above chance. Not only is this possible but it is also possible to predict which brain scans belong to a gay cis man.

This does not mean that there is a trans test or a gay test. If you took 100 people, half men and half women, and you measured their height, it would be possible to predict which are men and which are women even knowing nothing else about them. You would guess that the tallest are men and the shortest are women. You would not be correct 100% of the time but you would be correct most of the time.

We know that there is an overlap between the heights of men and women. Some women are taller than some men. Despite that fact height difference is a reality. So too being trans is a reality and not just social contagion. Gender identity is a reality. A biological reality.

That doesn't mean that you can tell who is a man and who is a woman just using a tape measure. Measuring someone's height is not a test of whether someone is a man or a woman. You can't tell reliably who is trans and who is gay just using brain scans. There is no trans or gay test.

People have known about the height difference between men and women forever. It's easy to see. We knew about it even before we knew about Y chromosomes, testosterone and growth spurts. The structure of the brain is hidden, but now we can see the differences between cis and trans, heterosexual and homosexual. We still don't know yet how these structures control impulses but that doesn't mean the differences aren't real.

Below are two links to articles about peer reviewed search involving brain scans of both gay and trans people. I can't find any similarity between the brain structures of the two groups apart from some kind of feminization.

Gay brains structured like those of the opposite sex
www.newscientist.com/article/dn14146-gay-brains-structured-like-those-of-the-opposite-sex/

Transsexual differences caught on brain scan
www.newscientist.com/article/dn20032-transsexual-differences-caught-on-brain-scan/#:~:text=They%20found%20significant%20differences%20between%20male%20and%20female,male%20brain%20%28Journal%20of%20Psychiatric%20Research%2C%20DOI%3A%2010.1016%2Fj.jpsychires.2010.05.006%29.

How do you explain those of us that spent some time when young being heterosexual but became lesbian ? I really don’t think brain scans have any relevance .

Brain structure doesn't determine everything. Brain structure is just one part of us, just one of the things that make us who we are. It isn't the only thing that is relevant, but it isn't irrelevant.

When we are young we try different things and we work out what gives us pleasure. Then we tend to stick with what we know turns us on. If you have found that having sex with a woman gives more pleasure than having sex with a man then that's what you will do.

Or it could be that you think that you are less likely to suffer from domestic abuse if you have a female partner. The evidence though is that is not true. Or you may have been persuaded by the ideas of Sheila Jeffreys and others who tried to persuade all women to become 'political lesbians'.

All of this bending and twisting and possibly finding bits on scans is all used to serve one aim: to force team females and TW and force the end of sex based rights.

No. This advantages male people. It actively disadvantages and harms female people. Brain scans, inner beliefs, no. Biology is a thing and pretending otherwise is purely to remove stuff from females. Get off. Go make new stuff if you want it.