Why gender dysphoria is lie

[BettyBooper]

Couldn't see this article posted elsewhere and found it very interesting.

https://x.com/Psychgirl211/status/1808825717204922755

Very interesting article, thanks for sharing

You're welcome. When it's set out so clearly, I can't see why anyone would even want to argue against it.

What a brilliant article, this is such a good description.

Lots of really clear points in that article, such as this one:

“Gender Dysphoria as a diagnosis also lacks what psychologists call ‘face validity’, namely is something measuring (in this case describing), what it appears to be describing? How can a six-year-old with precocious puberty, a 16-year-old autistic boy, a 30-year-old lesbian, and a 50-year-old married autogynephilic (AGP) man who secretly wears his wife’s knickers, who are all at different developmental stages and who have quite dissimilar psycho-social experiences, all be suffering from exactly the same clinical condition? This simply lacks credibility!”

I’m not sure if I agree with that. Gender dysphoria is a symptom. An anxious kid, someone who’s eaten bad prawns, and a patient having chemo can all suffer nausea. It is the same symptom even though the patient groups and the clinical causes are wildly different.

I agree @Motorina . That article is pretty flawed. Those people listed, 6 year old , 16 year old etc could all have anxiety. That doesn’t mean anxiety lacks credibility. They could all have OCD too. And many other clinical conditions

Yes but the question is, what is it a symptom OF?

Is it a symptom of having a brain in a wrongly sexed body for which the only cure is to medicalise and change the body to match the brain?

Or is it, as many of us suspect, actually a symptom of unresolved trauma, or anxiety, or depression, or undiagnosed autism, or any other host of conditions?

The insistence on treating gender dysphoria as a thing in itself which can only be treated by coralling the body into obedience, is the problem imo. Rather than seeing it as a symptom of another form of distress and searching for and treating that distress.

A six-year-old with precocious puberty shouldn't be in that list. A child with precocious puberty has a real medical condition, not a gender issue.

They are probably there because a pubertal six-year-old might be a person who should get hormonal treatment to suppress and delay the puberty. Though my understanding is that the balance of dangers there is still under debate.

Two of the other three probably need a talking therapy. Knickers man needs to be told he can wear what he wants but that other people are not his sex aids.

They are probably there because a pubertal six-year-old might be a person who should get hormonal treatment to suppress and delay the puberty.

Yes, but she's saying that that child has gender dysphoria. They don't. They have a medical condition unrelated to gender.

I think she's made that error for the reason you suggest, but it is an error to suggest that a child with precocious puberty has gender dysphoria.

I think all of the people in that list presented with gender dysphoria and the author is saying how can they all be the same, that's just my take though.

A number of excellent and thought provoking points. Thank you.

I think the issue is that the same people are ending up with the same 'diagnosis' (if I can even call it that), which is gender dysphoria, when in fact it could very well be anxiety and a whole host of different things

Its an issue with calling it a diagnosis rather than a manifestation of the anxiety/autism/trauma/sexual abuse/sexual preference

Thank you.
I also recommend the Dr Soh, Chloe Cole podcast. It talks about how chloe was groomed online by adult activists. Chloe is a bio female who is now a de transitioner

Excellent article.

Autistic teenagers, young lesbians and middle aged AGP males are all well known as types of people who are frequently diagnosed with gender dysphoria. I wasn't aware that large numbers of children with precocious puberty were being diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

Anyway, this is a derail. I thought it was an interesting article. I think seeing gender dysphoria as a symptom rather than a diagnosis is the right way to view it, so although she says at the end "We must drain Gender Dysphoria from our symptom pool", I don't think gender dysphoria as a symptom is the problem. The problem comes from thinking that the symptom can be a diagnosis of something real.

I guess if a child has started to sexually mature at 6 then that probably would cause them to be uncomfortable with their body, which could then be diagnosed as "gender dysphoria" @OldCrone but i'm no psychologist.

She actually suggests that gender dysphoria should be classified as an anxiety disorder. I agree that the article isn't perfect (I've already mentioned one thing which I think is an error), but I think that describing gender dysphoria as an anxiety disorder is more appropriate way to look at it than attributing it to an issue with their 'gender identity', which is a feeling which some people claim to have but which lacks an objective definition.

I am not saying that people who think they have Gender Dysphoria are not feeling something. Their unhappiness and distress is often real. But this is being ascribed to the wrong cause. A calamitous and ruinous misattribution is being made. Namely that there is a mismatch between a person’s presumed gender identity and their supposedly incongruent physical body. Thus, the ‘born in the wrong body’ trope.

I posit instead that Gender Dysphoria belongs in the family of anxiety disorders and should be renamed ‘Body Anxiety Disorder’ (BAD). Psychologists are well able to treat anxiety disorders through talking therapy and behavioural modification. Treatment for BAD would be no different than standard psychotherapy for, say for depression, or anxiety, or relationship problems.

Yes, I like the idea of Body Anxiety Disorder. However does the world need more labels? More disorders? It just seems to go on and on

I agree that gender dysphoria should be viewed as a symptom, not a diagnosis. The problem is that gender dysphoria is currently viewed as a medical condition to be diagnosed, rather than a symptom. If you make gender dysphoria the diagnosis, is it really rational to apply this same diagnosis to both a teenage girl who is distressed about becoming a woman and a middle aged man who wants to have his penis inverted because he's watched too much sissy porn?

There are multiple people already diagnosed with different kinds of body anxiety disorders. I’m not sure why you wouldn’t simply move the diagnosis into the Body Dysmorphic Disorder category. It seems to me that it more or less fits.

Like others, I see the biggest problem with all this lies in the so-called “treatment”. Having invented a “treatment” that creates medical patients in a country where medical patients create cash, there’s an immediate conflict of interest. It wouldn’t be such a negative thing if the proposed “solution” actually worked, but I’m fairly sure, in its current form, it likely does more harm than good, when we remove the placebo effect created by an ongoing intervention that appears like (and is indeed referred to as) “a journey”. Patients feel like they are going somewhere, but the end point is not the one most will be expecting as (I strongly suspect) their expectations are not being managed.

Transitioning in its current format falls down because it requires external validation. Back when it was started, there was a huge effort to make patients understand that their body changes were only for them, that there were profound limitations on what could be achieved in terms of fooling the world around them and they couldn’t control the reactions of the around them and must learn to live with that. Medics now appear to be ignoring that aspect, thus creating a time bomb which will go off only when these psychiatric patients realise that all that’s been created is a new problem.

Gender dysphoria exists, people experience these thoughts therefore it exists, I think the problem is people are trying to question the diagnosis rather than the treatment.

The problem we have, is to believe that medical transition is the solution to gender dysphoria, and the conversion therapy ban reinforces this belief that medical transition is the only solution.

Even AGPers are being misled, they have a gender dysphoria that's resulted from a mis-wiring in the brain over sexual attraction, but the trans lobby are not telling this, but rather that they were born in the wrong body.

“Gender dysphoria exists, people experience these thoughts therefore it exists,”

People have thoughts, some of which converge in a fervent desire to gain a treatment involving body changes. I think that’s part of the problem.

It seems to me that the current situation has moved to one where the “diagnosis” hangs upon the desire for an invasive treatment, or alternatively a hatred of one’s body or attributes.

I suspect, if you burrowed into those thoughts you claim people are experiencing, they would be hugely varied and would not genuinely fall into any cohesive group.

It could perhaps be argued that the diagnosis does exist, but that is being massively over-diagnosed, but I think, as others have commented, the whole thing hangs upon the very dubious framework of the concept of having a “gender identity”, as stated in the original linked article.

“The addition of Gender Dysphoria to the symptom pool is fed by the concept of gender identity, an unprovable, metaphysical belief that we all have an innate sense of our ‘gender’. That our gender exists outside of our physical bodies.”