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?

I think it is sometimes a mental illness, which we now call gender dysphoria, but in older men it is much more likely to be a fetish such as autegynophilia - the arousal of oneself by the thought of being a woman.

I do believe this can be the case for 'cross dressers' but how does this work for the men who live as (pretend) women as they can't be aroused the whole day whilst at work

The body is you and you are your body. You do not 'live' in it, you are it. We are not meat puppets, IOW.
Homosexuality can be falsified, it is not just a feeling, it has real world consequences which can be seen. But trans identity is unfalsifiable, it cannot be disproved, it is just whatever the person who identifies as trans says it is. He says he is a woman - there is no objective way of disproving this, therefore it is a belief, not reality. The idea that the body is a vessel for the spirit is a form of gnosticism, a theology that places the material world at odds with the purer spiritual reality.
I am sorry for your friend because instead of being helped she was given substances that will ruin her health. Would you give Mounjaro to an annorexic?

"Gender" is a social construct and has nothing to do with biological sex. Therefore, anyone who claims to have a "gender identity" is simply talking about adhering to certain socially constructed stereotypes, and most often the most crude and simplistic stereotypes

The more sophisticated understandings were actually in the past, when the people who had mental health issues and believed they were the opposite sex and wanted "sex-change surgery" were known as transsexuals, while men who got off on wearing fishnet tights and bodices were known as transvestites and understood as having a fetish.

From what I understand, it was an early 1970s court case involving a transsexual man who wanted to divorce his wife that co-opted the word "gender" from language grammar and tried to use it to mean something allegedly more "sophisticated" (i.e. would help this biological man who claimed to be a woman win his court case). Before that, the word used for biological sex was simply sex (hence sexism, sex roles [as in the socially prescribed behaviour associated with the two sexes], sex as the category for male or female on birth certificates, passports and other forms of ID).

My memory of this court case is hazy and I may have the details wrong, so if anyone knows anything more I'd really appreciate it if you could give more info.

The idea that "gender identity" is some kind of complex thing that most of us are too simple-minded and prejudiced to understand is complete claptrap. That's some rubbish that trans activists put out to make it seem to their "allies" that they are fighting the good fight and the "allies" are wise and sophisticated and on the right side of history, unlike the mass of plebs who still believe that there are only two sexes and dressing a bit differently from stereotypes doesn't change that.

In the future, the "gender identity" nonsense is going to be seen as akin to giving people lobotomies or obscure theological debates from the 16th century.

I don't even own a handbag. I do have 3 axes and 2 chainsaws. And decent size tits.

What is this utter mince you are banging on about?

Do you know what one typical female behaviour is? Being agreeable. We are taught from infancy to be nice and quiet, to not make waves, to accommodate others even at our own expense.

Now look at transwomen as a group: do they strike you at being naturally agreeable? Do they demonstrate a tendency to be nice and quiet? Do they hate making waves? Do they accommodate others even at their own expense? Hell no.

If they did, they wouldn't insist on entering spaces where they are not wanted.

If they did, they would feel bad when they receive awards they know they are not qualified for.

If they did, they would refrain from entering competitions they know are not designed for them.

So that's one majorly typical female behaviour transwomen neither naturally exhibit, nor strive to master. Because they are male, through and through, physically and mentally.

While this transman would collect all the handbags if he could, and wouldn't trust himself with an axe or a chainsaw.

Utter mince indeed...

@Zoonosis 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.

Yes. That is one of the greatest triumphs of the trans activists.

They created a situation where any organisation with a different view is defunded, any person expressing a different view loses their job, any group trying to organise a meeting to discuss a different point of view is deplatformed.

It truly was a masterful battle they fought.

The same way any businessman/woman attends a business meeting with someone they find incredibly sexually attractive, by focusing on the work.

Alternatively, according to Grayson Perry, by wearing big floofy skirts that hide the perma-erection.

I have been reading through all the responses, trying to put into words how on earth I would answer the question, or if indeed I could.

Along comes your post, which is exactly what I was trying to find the words for. Exactly. Thanks for this.

Fantastic! Misogyny on steroids here: handbags AND boobs 😀We see you, Bailey! Thanks once again for the AI incoherence!

Ok so to clarify this.

the diagnosis I was given subsequent to this was CRPS (complex regional pain syndrome).

essentially I was in an accident and my foot was smashed up and operated on and then in a cast for six months.

this caused major physical damage to my foot (obviously) including broken bones, severed ligaments and muscles and nerve damage.

now what is interesting here is the level at which “belief” operates.

as my foot basically was sending pretty much no sensation to my brain my brain at a level underneath the conscious level essentially re-organised the perception centres of my brain.

i (consciously) believed I had a foot because I could see it. But when the plaster came off I had no motor control (couldn’t move it) and no sensation (couldn’t feel anything).

it took a couple of years of physio and slow work on motor imagery to recover some motor control and some sensation,

now in our current way of splitting things normally we don’t say things like strokes are mental illnesses even though they affect the brain and the mind.
a stroke literally cuts of blood supply and kills part of the brain, but people after stroke can by physio and speech therapy etc relearn the skills that they lost when that part of the brain was damaged.

in the same way I’m not diagnosed with a mental illness because I lost motor and sensation in my foot - this is considered a neurological thing ie to do with the functioning of the nerves and brain.

equally, if someone loses a limb in an accident, their brain has developed motor control and sensation experiences for the limb and often people experience sensation in alimb that is not there anymore. This is known as phantom limb pain. Again, this is not considered a mental illness largely because it’s the brain not being able to adapt very well to a new bodily reality - it’s considered neurological.

you can get psychological therapy for stuff like CRPS and phantom limb syndrome but it focuses on changing the inputs into the brain so that the brain is able to re-organise itself - so my CRPS therapy was imagining moving my foot.

not the sort of talking about childhood/CBT stuff which is generally advised to mental health.

Of course it isn't, but I think it's useful to have so many TRAs on the same thread. Now we know who's who and how many there are, at least for now.

It was Friday night, it's bound to happen. We'll survive 😉

I'm now wondering if physiotherapy could help realign my mental map of my body with the reality of it. Huh. Food for thought, thank you for sharing!

Medieval people would have understood it as someone having visions from either God or the Devil.

if different societies see things differently it’s a social construct.

(most things are)

I agree this is a great post. And highlighting how being trans is essentially just about thoughts and ideas, explains social contagion.

Also that it makes sense that a thought that one really is the opposite sex inside somehow, given weight, can lead to MH problems because struggling to accept reality to this extent/ living in a world that doesn’t agree with your thought is highly distressing.

If I feel that I have more in common with a cat than the species I was born as, and therefore want to be treated as such, does this make me mentally ill?

Do I really have a right to demand that everyone around me treats me as though I were an actual cat? Haven't we already dealt with that particular "mentally-challenged" phenomenon?

Why am I not allowed to demand that everyone around me treats me as though my understanding that sex is immutable and "trans" is not real is a fact? It's what I want!

Ed. SP

But humans are messy and do not fit into neat categories. Sure, risk-taking is a more typical male behaviour (because of testosterone) but that doesn't mean that there are males who don't exhibit risk-taking behaviour, or that there aren't any females who exhibit risk-taking behaviour.

There is a fairly obvious difference between saying 'this is typically male behaviour' and 'if you do this, you're a man'.

Someone who does something extremely risky is, at a cohort level, more likely to be a man. But that's a cohort level prediction, an average. And you don't apply averages to individuals and then say that if they don't match, something is wrong. That would be stupid.

Well people can think they are having visions from God/Devil, so still the same. The difference is that they are now disbelived as we don't have the same overriding belief in god. That is medical progess

And presumably, the same will happen with the whole "gender identity" idea: medical progress will figure out what's going on with trans people, and everyone will shake their heads at the weird idea of gender identity.

Very well put. I am horrified that young people are damaging their healthy bodies to try and conform to regressive stereotypes of what it is to be a man or a woman.

"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. "

What evidence?

Genetic factors or hormones in utero can cause any organ to malfunction. To say fragile skin or a misfiring heart or allergies are not physical illnesses would be an unreasonably strict definition of the word "illness". If some aspect of the brain has failed to develop correctly, and the brain isn't functioning properly as result, that's an illness in my book.

You're asking (mostly) non-medical people on a forum for opinions on what constitutes a mental illness or disease? How could we possibly know?

This forum is largely Gender Critical and many of us have concerns about a number of things - medicalisation of otherwise physically healthy children, erosion of single-sex spaces, the affirmation of a body dysmorphia that would be unthinkable for others such as EDs, loss of hard won Women's rights, co-opting of small numbers of DSDs to justify a breakdown in understanding of sex, redefining of language etc etc. I can't speak for others, but I don't think that holding those concerns qualifies me to know anything about what constitutes a disease or mental health problem or how to treat them if they were. I'm not a doctor. People thinking their feelings are more important than the professional, academically researched, data-driven theories of actual scientists is how we ended up with all of the concerns above.

So it doesn't matter what I think about something I'm not qualified to speak on. It only matters that I speak out when the (considerable) implications for society that experiments or conclusions drawn from them don't fit with what I think a just, caring, safe country should countenance.

I have heard a number of reports of people with sex dysphoria talk about taking actions to get in touch with their body in a healthy way through physical activity which they said really helped. Particularly it seems where they were in nature or working with animals. Hiking, gardening, horses, etc.

Not quite the same as physiotherapy but I suspect it would work to some extent through the same mechanisms.