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?

Do I know no one has seen me as male in the last 5 years? No, but my day to day experience is pretty indicative of how I am seen by others or at the very least treated. And no, I haven’t noticed anyone going out of their way to avoid sexed language for me. It’s not that subtle when you do it and I still haven’t experienced it.

I don’t know why you’re so insistent on this. The changes and results are different for every trans person and it’s very dependent on genetics and your starting point. There is such a huge variation in human appearance that I think it’s utterly ridiculous for you to claim you have a superhuman ability to detect male people.

“You’re asking me to ignore the evidence of my eyes and ears for the last 5 years and believe that everyone I’ve interacted with and use gendered language just decided to collectively humour me.”

We are living in 1984.

For the last five years, we have living through a period where everyone has been terrified to speak the truth. You demanded that they call you she. Stonewall demanded that they call you she. Every public institution demanded that staff and the public call you she.

Why?

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command"

So yes I am damn well saying that everyone has humoured you for the last five years, because they are living in a state of fear and serious ramifications to them if they don't. Or think they have to be super polite because otherwise you will report them or go off and kill yourself. Or because they fear being ostracised as a bigot. Because that's what's been told they have to.

Such is the power you have over them. All this most vulnerable in society nonsense is just that. Nonsense.

The fact you don't see or recognise this - despite this thread telling you this and the many others on MN which has gained itself a reputation for this - talking about The Fear says a huge fucking amount.

The fact you don't see or recognise this - despite the numerous court cases about this exact issue of The Fear says a huge fucking amount. All those trippings up in court over pronouns. All the he's behind backs...

It is all about you. The Emperor has no clothes. Everyone is a a yes man telling you what you want to hear whilst you are naked walking down the street. You can deny it all you bloody like but you are still a man and still are recognised as a man even if no one says anything

It is part of the structure of this insanity.

If you recognise the fear you have to recognise your enormous privilege and power over women.

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.

It's not honest though, is it? It's fundamentally dishonest. You are a man pretending to be a woman, and you seem content to attempt to deceive everyone you meet through this pretence.

It’s not a superhuman ability to be able to identify a male - its a polygenic, innate natural ability. Decades of cognitive psychological research has shown that women possess better facial recognition skills than men and that they can also distinguish between the male and female phenome much more accurately and quickly than male counterparts. The research that shows that women can identify a male from even a blurred image, from a distance and in poor lighting more quickly than a male and that accuracy increases when 3d and moving presentations are viewed (video or live test candidates are viewed in person). Women have demonstrated this cognitive skill even where the test stimuli are individuals completely shrouded in burka style outfits and male/female test stimuli are matched for height/build.

Gait, hand/shoe size, the ratio of head size/height, the thickness of the neck due to musculature etc are all processed as a whole, even before factors such as vocal tone are added to the complex picture. No ‘one’ aspect of a male physiognomy is responsible (or thus fixable with facial surgery or oestrogen supplementation): it is a cognitive capacity hardwired into the neurological structure of developing female brains and born from observing the many many variables of physical data when a women encounters another human.

It is much debated why there is this ability, but the most compelling argument IMHO is that it is evolutionary: women are more vulnerable to physical and sexual assault by males, thus need to be able to quickly identify a potential predator or even just a hostile person. In past millennia, when women were usually assigned roles within the tribe that involved care giving/tribal homestead maintenance/food prep etc - ie that required them to remain unarmed within the tribal compound, and whilst males left the tribal village to hunt for food or to secure the territory from other potentially hostile tribes/men/animals - the ability to identify an interloper, and male interlopers especially, was crucial to both personal survival and also potentially to the survival of the tribe and any young being protected therein.

You’re forgetting this I also know what it’s like to be early in transition and have people mess up because they immediately classify me as male. I was very obviously trans at that point and people weren’t so afraid of what would happen that they always called me ‘she’. I wonder what changed to make that stop happening?

You can’t claim sexing someone is an automatic thing based on instinct but then also claim some convoluted thought process or risk analysis goes into how you refer to someone. If it was an infallible as you say there would be a lot of visible friction obvious in daily life.

The amount of change in volume may be significant but they are more like a fat man's than a woman's and created the same way, an abnormal hormone balance with low testosterone and high oestrogen, caused by being fat in the case of a fat man.

They cannot feed a baby.

Who decided they messed up for correctly sexing you?
when was this? As @RedToothBrush correctly says we are living in 1984 and in the past few years not giving a male a cervical smear on his demand would have ended up with a nurse being de-registered or having to give a grovelling apology.

How does it feel going through life deceiving people like this on a daily basis?

I'm not forgetting anything.

I am telling you, you are ignoring every single women telling you they actively lie even when they see someone in later stages of transition because of The Fear.

And as I say you will never admit this because it shows up the entire problem of your ongoing male privilege.

These threads are made up of women who have, over the course of many years, said they will be polite and humour makes because they feel they have no choice.

Why is your 'lived experience' so dismissive of hundreds of women openly but anonymously saying they lie?

We know why.

Because you want to be in denial because if you admit it, it shatters everything.

Well tough shit. That's the reality.

This this and this again.

It has been the utter triumph of the trans rights campaign that such a tiny group managed to gain such power over people and organisations, through fear, that they were able to demand that we all agreed not to say what we knew to be true.

It took people with guts and independent wealth to begin to overturn it. Thank heavens those people existed.

One thing that you have no experience of is being a woman and being confronted by a huge bloke in womanface who thinks he passes.

You have no idea what it's like to be in our shoes and what we'd do in this situation. The risk analysis is done in a split second and we react accordingly.

mess up because they immediately classify me as male.

What an interesting way to describe people correctly calling a person who is obviously a man "he".

If it was an infallible as you say there would be a lot of visible friction obvious in daily life.

There is. You don't want to see it, so you don't see it. The rest of us are deafened by the grinding of teeth every time we get a communication from a government department with Ms Administrator (they/them) and the mental screams of employees threatened with the loss of their jobs if they call a man in a dress "he".

By the by I am hated by some women because I don't believe sex identification is infallible. What I do believe is that the number of men who could not be correctly identified as male by a woman is a tiny, tiny fraction of female identified trans people and the vast majority of you are fooling yourselves, quite likely because you are surrounded by male and female sycophants celebrating the bravery of your very existence.

have people mess up because they immediately classify me as male.

But you were/are. So how is that a 'mess up'? They got it right.

Over time, more women have faced serious risks to their lives, not just livelihood, hence why people are now too afraid.

Given we know here about rolling pin threats and die in a grease fire threats, the assumption that we would be honest and reveal gender critical views and stand up to men invading our spaces seems totally mental when you think about it.

I'm teeny tiny. Even small transwomen are much bigger than me. And I'm very familiar with the aggressive attitudes from what's happened in my family.

The idea that I'd start challenging someone at work or in public in this context is frankly nuts.

It’s so off that every TIM who comes on here claims to always pass perfectly and never get misgendered or clocked as a man. Despite women explaining why people are polite. The thing is, they’re not being treated as women, they’re being treated as males who claim a trans identity.

I don’t doubt that many people do go along with it when they identify someone as obviously trans and decide it’s easier to just go along with it because they’ll be in prolonged contract with that person. But I doubt that you never slip up in very casual immediate circumstances when interacting with someone.

Because you want to be in denial because if you admit it, it shatters everything.
I’m not in denial and I won’t admit it because it just isn’t logical. There is no way I have been lucky to encounter just the people who will humour me over the last 5 years, especially when there are a lot of stories of trans people experience harassment for being visibly trans in daily life.

As a woman of above average height, with short hair, an android pelvis and broad square shoulders I am regularly given a second glance to check whether or not I'm trans.

I think it would be very difficult to pass as female to most females unless you are well below the average height of a man.

I doubt you would notice the glances I get. Men simply are not programmed to scan constantly for the micro reactions of others around them as women are. This has been widely researched.

You, therefore, would likely believe that you had gone unnoticed, whereas I know I'm being evaluated.

Honestly. This stuff about trans people being harassed. I don't buy it.

There's far too many who class people who 'misgender' them as literal violence and harassment. They think that being recognised as the correct sex will cause them to evaporate.

The degree to which there is exaggeration in this area is insane. We have too many very public examples and I have too many private examples of being accused of things including DH being accused of 'almost certainly being transphobic' BEFORE my brother even came out!

It's the boy who cried wolf at this point.

The lies and the enforcement through fear. Na. I just don't buy it anymore.

I could say it is utterly ridiculous for you to claim that you have not caused any harm in using female single sex provisions when you have used them.

And that it is just as ridiculous to deny that people will have correctly identified your sex category because they have not shown any outward indication that they have done so. Again, you show how little you know about female people while telling people you are a woman.

No superhuman powers needed to be able to distinguish who is male even with surgeries. I am not surprised though that you believe it requires those powers though.

“But I doubt that you never slip up in very casual immediate circumstances when interacting with someone.”

Female people are very very good at acting in compliance when needed. Very good indeed. And yes, even in very casual immediate circumstances when interacting with someone.

Any trans person who divulges anywhere that they are trans and use female only spaces is causing harm to traumatised women and deeply religious women who are afraid of not being able to prevent male people from using their spaces or prevented from using those spaces on religious grounds.

You do harm simply by writing or talking about it. You don't seem able to grasp the female point of view on this one despite claiming that you are female.

Every single time women are told there is no problem with transwomen in women's space and that women aren't just being polite that's a harm.

It is a deliberate removal of power from women. It is the removal of the power of women to speak for themselves about themselves.

Stories can be made up. I'd want to see evidence rather than just accepting stories as facts.

As for people humouring you, women do it out of fear. Some men may genuinely think you're a woman as they're not as good as women at recognising sex (I don't know what you look like so I have no idea whether this is a possibility).

Recognising someone's sex isn't "slipping up".

I work with male people with transgender identities. There is no way that they would even know that I have identified their sex category because why would I indicate that I know they are male if the issue isn’t pertinent? Particularly since I am hyper aware that I should not give them any cause for complaint.