Is being trans a 'disease'/mental health issue?

[SolveMyPrombles]

I'm asking on this board for deliberate considered responses so please do share your thoughts.

A lady on a local group has described being trans as a mental illness that should be treated with compassion not pandered to because it's a disease.

Looking into it more deeply I believe she's wrong and there is no current diagnostic manual that agrees with her take.

What do you think?

You believe she's wrong. Why?

Hmm.

i was in an accident which resulted in some problems with my foot. This caused my brain to decide my foot wasn’t part of me.

it was a distinctly odd feeling but generally this sort of thing is not considered a mental health issue as such.

see also phantom limb syndrome where even after a limb has been cut off/amputated/lost in an accident the brain still thinks it is there and will generate sensations from it.

in the same way if someone genuinely believes they really are one sex when their body is actually the other I’d be reluctant to classify it as a mental health issue.

I think it’s like being gay, you just are, my dh’s nephew knew he felt differently as a little girl, didn’t know what it was then, long before the current “trend” and transitioned 15 years ago

I think it's more that it seems to overlap with various conditions such as autism. I think that's what we should be looking into from a health perspective.

It can be a source of mental distress for some but it’s not a mental illness.

Ah, my comment was more along the lines of this sort of thing is very tricky for modern medicine generally because the split between physical ailments (leg hanging off, chicken pox) and MH ailments (psychosis, schizophrenia etc) is problematic when it comes to things that appear to have elements of both.

there are a lot of issues that people can have which involve their brain not accepting their bodily reality of which phantom limb syndrome is one, anorexia is another (but more socially influenced via the concept of fat)

trans arguably could be seen as the mind at some level refusing to accept bodily reality. Whether you’d classify that as a MH problem I’m not sure but it certainly is a problem,

trans arguably could be seen as the mind at some level refusing to accept bodily reality. Whether you’d classify that as a MH problem I’m not sure but it certainly is a problem,

Isn't "the mind not functioning normally" the definition of a mental health problem?

What evidence would have to exist to prove her wrong?

Diagnostic manuals in themselves are limited as proof, especially for conditions where measurable physical evidence is lacking or hard to come by. They just show the attitude currently taken to a particular condition, which may or may not be the real explanation for it.

They can't, for example, include a diagnosis (for anything) that we don't yet know about, even if it's the correct explanation. Eg if they had manuals or equivalent before we knew about bacteria, no explanation for anything that actually involves bacteria would have mentioned bacteria at all.

Being gay means you are exclusively attracted to your own sex. What exactly are you just if you say you're trans? The opposite sex? Born in the wrong body? A male person with a female soul. Your DH's nephew will always be female and will never be male.

The reality is that trans people are not what they believe they are - they are not the opposite sex and never can be. They are the sex they were born as and always will be. The question then is why do they reject their body and believe it should be something else?

I think it's a mental health issue and one that is externally caused (i.e. it's not an "innate sense" but is externally caused). Reasons can be trauma caused by abuse, confusion about sexuality, not feeling comfortable with expected gender stereotypes, autism, the general struggles of adolescents, low self-esteem, family dynamics, and the suchlike.

How does this work though?

The two things are not comparable states of being. Being same sex attracted is about being attracted to the same sex. If you are not attracted to the same sex, you are not. You are not making a philosophical belief claim that you are experiencing something you are not experiencing.

If a male person is making a claim that that are female, they are making a claim that about their perception of how female people interact with society with a female sexed body which they don’t have and can never have. The entire statement from that male person rests on that perception. It may even be that they have decided that they believe that they are not experiencing their life as a ‘male’ person for what ever reason so the only other option is to believe they must be female.

That male person has no accurate and lived understanding of how a female interact with society and any situation they find themselves in. How likely do you think it is that a male person can accurately describe their interactions with society as being as a female person would, when that male person has no accurate and provable reference point that what he is experiencing is a ‘female’ experience?

The same applies for female people claiming to be male.

There is no logic at all to underpin the claim. None.

It also doesn’t matter how long a person holds that ‘belief’, long term belief doesn’t make the belief any more accurate of the material reality of their interaction with society.

It's complicated. Head injuries, trauma, a lot of LDs and NDs, neurological conditions, are not strictly mental disorders. But they affect the brain, and therefore the mind.

Okay, I think I see what you mean. Then could we say it's some kind of as yet unidentified brain disorder?

Kind of. I do believe that gender dysphoria is a thing, and someone can look at their body and their brain can go 'that's not right, it should be the other way'. That was considered a mental disorder until very recently when it was removed from the DSM5, after a lot of campaigning.

I do think it should have remained considered a mental illness. In the same way that we can understand that someone with depression has a chemical imbalance in their brain and can view it as the medical condition it is, if we considered dysphoria to be a mental illness and worked on curing it instead of jumping straight to the affirmation model, then perhaps people who feel that incongruence could learn to accept their actual bodies.

It does seem to be the only mental 'issue' where instead of encouraging the sufferer to see reality and pull themselves out of their fear, delusion, anxiety, depression etc, we instead tell them to dive right in and demand everyone else tells them that reality isn't really real.

I can't see any difference between gender dysphoria and anorexia, apart from how they are treated.

Trans is body dysmorphia which could be equated to an eating disorder, so a mental health condition. It is also gender dysphoria which is much less explored.
There is a lot of evidence that people with neurological conditions such as autism and developmental disorder are more likely to be trans (3-6 times) but causality is not proven and more research needs to be done.
I realise I sound like AI, I am just trying to present the evidence that has been observed rather than my held belief that one cannot change sex.

I always think that why does a man who think he’s a woman, or woman who thinks she’s a man get pandered to, and it’s cruel/illegal/hateful not to go along with it, yet if I demanded I be accepted as Cleopatra, this wouldn’t happen?

Trans is not one thing imo.

Take out the men who are just plain lying for their pervy reasons or to cosplay as women on social media for attention and cash or just to take the piss and you are left with people with gender dysphoria and people with autogynephilia

Of course it is. It's a normalised mental illness. To some extent, a mental illness is a social construct just like gender.

Of course

As long as they keep out of women’s single sex spaces I frankly do not care.

It’s up to them to accept themselves as they are and live their lives as they choose, or seek treatment, counselling, whatever.

If anyone cares about actual science, the increasing evidence is that feelings of gender incongruence are related to the part of our brains that deal with self-perception and self-image, which can be influenced by genetic factors or hormones in utero to be misaligned with the way our bodies develop. People who feel this incongruence to such a degree that they are made happier by taking steps to help their bodies align with their internal self-image are what we call trans people. It is not a mental illness because the brain is functioning perfectly normally, it's just part of its software is programmed for different hardware, if that makes sense.

Just to emphasise before someone jumps on me this is NOT as popularly suggested anything to do with having a "male" brain in a female body or vice versa as there's no such thing as male or female brains, but there are extensive networks in your brain that deal with bodily perception, and we know from neuroimaging that these parts of the brain differ in transgender individuals.

It's worth stressing that absolutely no reputable medical organisation considers being trans to be a mental health disorder anymore, and nor is gender dysphoria considered to be a type of body dysmorphia as pps have claimed. Nor have any efforts to "cure" trans people apart from allowing them to transition ever been successful or caused anything other than harm and distress.

Of course it is, what else could it possibly be?