Transitioning or therapy as the treatment for gender dysphoria

[FairHippopotama]

Most trans rights activists will tell you that all who claim to have gender dysphoria are valid in their feelings and the best treatment for gender dysphoria is always transitioning--both socially (e.g. pronouns, clothing) and medically (e.g. hormone therapy, mastectomy). These transitions should be accepted by society.

As far as I can tell, the typical gender-critical view is that while gender dysphoria may be a genuine condition, in all cases therapy or some such is a much preferred treatment to transitioning. Accepting transitioning is seen as requiring society to affirm certain falsehoods and harming women's interests. Am I right about this though? What are your thoughts?

Personally, I think the truth is slightly more moderate: gender dysphoria is a real condition, but should only be treated with transitioning in some cases--transitions which society should accept (but not be forced to do so). It depends on whether the cause is neurological and unchangeable (a sort of brain-body mismatch) or social and able to be treated with therapy (in my opinion).

Apologies if this is worded poorly and doesn't make sense.

Yes good point.

I wonder if there is any contribution also from cultures where sex is more strictly boundaried and segregated in terms of who does what, that has also increased hugely over the last 40 years.

The typical gender-critical view is that reported gender dysphoria may be genuine distress, but it doesn't mean anyone can change sex. You can't change biological sex, and sex matters for things like privacy and dignity.

I'm also sceptical of the idea of an "internal gender identity", which is often built into the definition of gender dysphoria. To me, that's an unfalsifiable and unhelpful ideological concept.

An analogy: I could be distressed about my height and want to be taller, even have surgery. But I don't have "height dysphoria" or an internal "height identity" that doesn't match my genetics.

There are many reasons someone might be distressed about their sex — including stereotypes, body image, sexual assault or sexuality-related harassment. Some may also want to present as the opposite sex and be distressed that they can't.

So I'm wary of framing all of this as a mismatch between "gender identity" and "assigned sex", because that can turn a source of distress into an apparently fixed identity with an obvious solution: transition. That may help some people, but it can also come with costs.

Don’t forget the impact of porn, especially sissy porn. Porn is not harmless fun.

There was very strong stereotyping of children's toys in the past - have a look at any ad for a Hornby toy train set from the 1950s, and it will have a little boy in short trousers with a Fair Isle pullover and a dad with a pipe clenched in his teeth - guaranteed!

Toys'r'Us etc had very distinct separate aisles of Boys Toys and Girls Toys [yes, minus the apostrophes]. The Argos catalogue rigidly divided boys' and girls' toys into different sections.
[The last Argos catalogue I saw had removed the labels 'boys' and 'girls' , but the girls' toys all had pastel colours, and the boys' toys all had dark colours! flames! exclamation marks! - stereotyping is subtle....]

In the early 1990s I actually saw a woman in a shop tap/smack a little girl's hand away from a toy car saying 'NO, that's for boys!'

There was, as posters have pointed out, a period around the 80s when the challenge to gender stereotyping of children had some effect - kids with similar haircuts, similar clothes with dinosaurs on them, similar Kicker-style boots.. a brief period when kids could just be kids.

What we are seeing now is the result of a huge backlash against that - pink, glitter, fairies, princesses, butterflies, came back with a bang to reassert the girliness of girlygirls, and the boys will be boys-ness of real boys.

The Disney Princess franchise - see? commercialisation - was relentless in the mid2010s, there's even a 'National Princess Week' which was started in 2012.

The reinforcement of gender stereotypes which is evident to anybody who grew up in the 70s or 80s didn't just happen accidentally, it was a backlash against the limited advances that feminism had made.

The return of gender stereotypes has been seized on by the trans movement - if you're a boy and you like glitter and princesses, maybe you're not a real boy and have you thought about transitioning to being a girl instead? - and the tradwives movement.
All rocket-fuelled by social media of course.

What's wrong with calling trans-identified males 'women' or 'she'?

Two things. First, calling male people "women" or "she" confuses and misleads other people. It misleads people when a male person is called a "woman" or "she" in a newspaper article, like the Scottish man who put some dodgy substance on a trans-rights sticker and was arrested and was initially reported to the public in the press as a woman because the Scottish police told reporters they had arrested a woman when they knew they had arrested a trans-identified male

Second, do you know the story of the Little Mermaid - the original Hans Christian Andersen fairy story, not the Disney film? In the original story, part of the price that the mermaid pays the witch for taking away her tail and giving her feet is that every time she takes a step it feels like walking on knives.

If you have autism and need to say what you see or know; if you have a lifetime of memories with someone as their birth sex; if you are the relative of someone you love who is wilfully harming themselves; if you are an ex-wife or child of a man living out a sexual fetish; then calling him "a woman" or "she" feels like stepping on a sharp knife. Every time.

I do know people who don't admit to hurt, people who even "buy in" to their relative's story and get very insistent that everyone else in the family has to join in too. You may have noticed this already when you talk about your DSis. You may force yourselves to use wrong-sex pronouns, like the little mermaid forced herself to walk. But doesn't it hurt?