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?

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I kind of simplified by saying I knew I should’ve been born female. I recognise what you mean when you say you felt like you were really a boy. It’s very hard being a child and not knowing why you’re not developing in the way you think you should be. As a child, did you ever pray to wake up as a boy? I’m not religious but I still remember doing this.

I felt dishonest presenting as a woman when "really" I'm a man - even though at the same time, I know that technically I'm not a man! I have a female body, so I'm a woman - who thinks she's a man 😅
I follow this logic. I feel like the real me is a woman, but I also know that logically that’s not true because I’m male. It’s a strange and complicated thing. My life is a lot better now I’ve transitioned, but do also sometimes wonder if you made the right decision? I don’t feel like I can articulate the decision any further than I know I’m a woman, and that doesn’t make much sense, right? 🤣

The laws concerning burglary, theft and many other crimes do not talk about the consent of the victim either, though? They state that breaking and entry is a crime, that theft from the person or property is a crime, that scamming a person is a crime. Rights of the victims are universal and protected - they do not require consent or, therefore, allow the rights of a person to be waived by extracting their consent.

So, no, no-one needs to consent to the presence of a natal male in a single sexed provision. And no woman can give consent on behalf of another.

The law is clear - if you are male, you must use male single-sex spaces or gender neutral spaces. No discussion with other users is implied as being required or negotiable.

I feel like they've got it right when they refer to me as a woman because they are reading my visual and social reality accurately. At the same time, I am completely aware of my biological sex and that I am male. For me, those two realities coexist: I am biologically male, but socially, practically, and visually, I live my life as a woman. Letting people refer to me as a woman is just an honest, accurate reflection of how I fit into the world every day.

I don’t see how I live as particularly political. We will definitely have to agree to disagree on this because I don’t see how me making the choice to live this way redefines the female existence, but it is a complex and nuanced issue.

I’m communicating in a direct and honest manner. Are you just upset I’m not #beingkind? Would it help if I used “sorry” and “kind” words? The message would be the same

Without using sexist, offensive stereotypes, how would a male live as a woman? Which woman are you living as? Your gran? Katie price? Margaret thatcher?

Have a day evening

As a child, did you ever pray to wake up as a boy? I’m not religious but I still remember doing this.

No, but that's because I discovered the very concept of praying when my mother got us into a rather fundamental church when I was 6.5yo. It taught very strict gender roles, so I got told again and again and again that I was a girl, I was going to grow up to be a young woman, then a woman, who would marry a man, and have babies. I couldn't pray to wake up a boy when I believed that it was God's will that I be a girl :/

My life is a lot better now I’ve transitioned, but do also sometimes wonder if you made the right decision?

I don't doubt that I made the right decision based on what I knew at the time. Would I make the same decision now, if I knew everything I know now? Maybe not. Maybe I would look for the right therapist to help me reconcile my female body and my male mental map. But by definition, I couldn't know what I know now without having made the decisions I made, so this is entirely a theoretical exercise :P

Have the evening you deserve.

We will definitely have to agree to disagree on this because I don’t see how me making the choice to live this way redefines the female existence

Don't you?

You really, honestly do not see that a definition of "woman" that is "a person with a male body who socially, practically, and visually lives his life as a 'woman'" is a political position as to what a "woman"'s life does or does not entail?

As a female person who considers herself a woman simply because that is the name of my sex, I can tell you I honestly, genuinely have no idea what "living life socially, practically, and visually as a woman" even means. Other than physical sex I literally cannot envision what would come under that definition and what would come outside it.

Can you give some example of things you do that are "living as a woman" and some things female people might do that are not?

Do think there is a connection between your being taught very strict gender roles with your path as a female laid out for you, and the fact that you rejected that by transitioning?

We don’t walk around as just a collection of chromosomes. We interact based on visual sex presentation. Your experience is shaped based on people recognising you as a woman because X, Y and Z.

Can you give some example of things you do that are "living as a woman" and some things female people might do that are not?
It has nothing to do with how I dress or what hobbies I have. It’s purely that because I have certain characteristics people read me as a woman.

This is still very vague. You've said it's not dress or hobbies, it's "certain characteristics" but not what those actually are.

it reads like when you say "living as a woman" you mean the experience of others treating you as "a woman"?

Can you give some examples of "X, Y and Z"?

I'm not being obtuse here. I am someone whose only touchpoint for womanhood is being an adult human female and for whom "living as a woman" sinply means living however a particular adult human female happens to live. To me, there is so much variety within that already that if you take away the female sex part there's literally no common thread left.

So I'm fascinated to understand what "living as a woman" might mean if the physical sex element is simply taken out altogether.

What characteristics are those? Please say not sexist on
es like boobs, being “nurturing” or as one TRA put it, “crying easily”

Maybe I’m not explaining this well. Your sex is responsible for your secondary sex characteristics which form a large part of how people identify your sex. Most secondary sex characteristics are driven by oestrogen, and a trans woman taking oestrogen develops those characteristics is some form. The amount of change is different from person to person, but it can be quite significant.

Posting from page 22 before the thread fills up with steaming piles of ....

Seethlaw
Any message that goes, "Do this and you'll have exactly the same life as someone of the opposite sex" is a massive lie

It's also rather silly. It depends which someone, surely? Many women have absolutely shit lives, and I can't imagine why anyone would yearn to have the same.

I mean, women are just human beings; they have fears and doubts and sudden failures and terrible unhappiness and painful diseases and so on, and, since men are are also human beings, men too have those things. Changing from masculine-presenting to feminine-presenting seems to me like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, much of the time.

nevernotmaybe
Every single societal shift and civil rights adjustment involves friction, where the dominant group feels they are losing something

Do be sensible: when were women ever "the dominant group"? The people who have historically been dominant have been men for at least two millennia in this country, and I would postulate more like four millennia that we know about, possibly as many as ten world-wide. So men taking something away from women is nothing new: it's been a constant. Pretending to be female as they do it is a new twist, though.

CornishDaughteroftheDawn
Every post of yours leaves me more and more confused as to the foundation of your beliefs and I feel like things are getting all tangled and confused. I am seeing contradiction and ever shifting generalisations that move me further away from understanding the core of your belief.

I find that simply scrolling past anything written by Baileyonice greatly improves my day, and also any thread. His use is that since anything he states as fact is likely to be either false, out of context or wildly inaccurate, I am saved a lot of reading up on things; I can simply ignore them instead.

Told you! Told you it’d be boobs! So you’re saying you’re a woman because you’ve got boobs? Does that mean women who have mastectomies are no longer women?
wasn't there a TRA who claimed he was a woman cos he was short and a size 6? So therefore my woman over 5 ft 10 was not a woman but a man. Isn’t it funny how every TIM on here states they pass perfectly and everyone assures them they’re a woman. I must be womanning wrongly because no one has ever come up to me and assured me that I’m a woman.

Oh well done, you got me, congrats. But I actually secondary sexual characteristics. Plural. Boobs are just one characteristic and no where do I say that is what makes someone a woman.

It's nearly all boobs on a trip to a certain airport.

So for you, having some physical features other people associate with the female body is "living as a woman" even when you yourself know your body is not a female body?

Interesting. To me it seems very reactive, very much based on other people's perception of you. (It also suggests an explanation as to why you do not correct people who mistake your sex.)

Certainly, it sounds like a very different experience to what I understand "living as a woman" to mean from my perspective of simply being female.

Bother, lost the quote.... my post above was in reply to this.

can you answer my question , if its a natural process for a person to want to be a man or woman, then why do they need sience ?

why do they need oestrogen ?

if it is a natural thing eg the whole born in the wrong body then why does the body not try to fix itself ?

because of this can we conclude the body was made the way nature intended ?

Oh yes. Definitely. It’s not like they can grow a vagina or ovaries is it. Wasn’t it DH who wanted on about the bigger the boobs, the more powerful the woman or something?

I think so, yes.

No one has ever come up to me and assured me I’m a woman either btw

Indeed, because those secondary characteristics only occur after puberty with the injection of female hormones. The prepubescent, natal female body - with its, vagina, womb, ovaries, hip angles, clavicle shape and size, shoulder/ribcage ratio, forehead/jaw/eye ratios - are all genetically and chromosomally determined in utero and develop through childhood. Can’t get those by taking hormones. All you can get is a bit of boob and some extra fat to soften the features.

Yes, because the sum total of womanhood is oestrogen, isn’t it? Rather as Rachel Dolezal felt that the sum total of African American-ness was skin colour, from a bottle.