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[Tiruin]

[...]However exact numbers are hard to find, especially behind the modern narrative of trans people being so very brave for embracing mental illness who they are, in the face of apparently near-constant assault and discrimination, etc.

Wow. Even if that's supposedly a tongue-in-cheek comment, it was never even a mental illness at all.

Anecdotally, gender dysphoria is also frequently a temporary condition and there have been a number of trans people admitting that they regret their decision. Not a point against so to speak, but be aware that it doesn't have to be permanent. Neuroplasticity is a thing. Your mind can be changed.

Anecdotal evidence doesn't serve objectivity; while I get you're making it aware of 'regret'--put detail after it rather than putting forward a vague number without context or backing details towards it. While there has been regret--it consists of quite a deeper context that doesn't particularly relate to neuroplasticity or changing one's mind, rather more focused on external factors affecting one's life.

In any case, it is worth noting that hormone therapy in particular has a slew of health risks associated with it, including an advisory by the WHO warning of greatly increased risk of cancer.
It is also very important to remember the can of worms that is your mental health. Transgender people are at at massive risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide. The exact causes here are up for debate - activists will argue that it's because society reviles trans people, others argue that it's because messing with hormone balance in the brain is actually very damaging.

"Exact causes up for debate" not actually being up for debate as it's like you say there's an uncertainty to these causes in the present. These causes are taken into listing and acknowledgement rather than 'debate the possible causes due to perspectives' or behavioral/biological and internal factors. There isn't a divergent perspective between "activists" and "others", that only exists if there's categorization or generalization of what's actually happening in reality. Including the matter that mental health professionals as well as medical professionals are engaged in counseling or giving of advice in regards to making sure the client is informed of health risks and otherwise connected to the procedure--including a specialization course in regards towards aiding people within the LGBTQ group, it's a completely disjunctive statement to mention that there is an attributed can of worms to hormone therapy in itself.

... I think my opinion is pretty clear. I'm going to bed before I abandon what's left of my objectivity.

I think you left it by the door with those snarky comments back there. This is supposedly Life Advice, rather than type and post side commentary.

[helmacon]

@helma: Mind if I send you a few PMs? ._. There's a few details I see that worries me in your post...like the note of mental stress due to issues.

Not at all. It might be a while before i can respond though. I have a lot of finals in the next few days.

Ps. Also, it's possible to start on HRT and then stop. One of the few things that article gets right is that hormone changes happen very very slowly. In fact, you barely have any noticeable effects until three to six months.

Edit: And no, it doesn't take 5 years. It takes 2 to 3, with the majority of changes happening between 6 and 18 months.

It is possible to stop HRT after starting, but constant starting and stopping is not good for your health.
2-3 years for most of the changes, but you can still see effects for up to 5.

Now that I've caught up reading...yeah ._. Fully agree with Sky here. The context and tone of how information is delivered isn't...

(tldr: screw that article)

I am well aware that this is not all that great of an article. It should by no means be your only source. I just like it because it presents a view and opinions on the subject that you don't normally find. In my personal experience, everything I initially found felt like it was pushing me towards transition (which is not necessarily a bad thing) but it is important to have alternative views. I would have posted links to some of the other stuff, but it was late and i just posted the ones I had bookmarked.

Err, Helma, have you been more exposed to a clinical perspective rather than a humanistic one? I'm wondering where you got info about exact age and years there.

I've never seen a therapist in my life. (my parents didn't believe in mental illness) and i don't have health insurance to do so even if i wanted to. That being said, i have read just about everything on the internet I could find, and a good bit off the internet as well. The article i posted was certainly at a slant, but it's not the only one i've read. I feel like I understand the issue fairly well.

[Tiruin]

Err, Helma, have you been more exposed to a clinical perspective rather than a humanistic one? I'm wondering where you got info about exact age and years there.

I've never seen a therapist in my life. (my parents didn't believe in mental illness) and i don't have health insurance to do so even if i wanted to. That being said, i have read just about everything on the internet I could find, and a good bit off the internet as well. The article i posted was certainly at a slant, but it's not the only one i've read. I feel like I understand the issue fairly well.

It isn't firstly a mental illness at all, and the stigma of mental health profession only for mental illnesses is very pervasive (covering the therapist, psychiatrist, psychologist, Guidance Counselor ["There's something wrong with you and you need guidance"], commonly). It is always best to seek counsel from the right medical professional for furthering understanding. (ie I say 'the right one' pertaining to one who is the best qualified one to give them [for example, even if an endocrinologist is a key professional in hormone therapy, they aren't sometimes the best in certain contexts due to the people they serve and their specializations, and that they may not be trained in this particular setting])

[Sonlirain]

TBH it might count as a mental illness if you think about it.
There are people out there who literally blind themselves because they think they should be born blind for example or crazies that think they should be born as cats or dogs (basically severe cases of furry) and act accordingly.
So then you get downright tragic cases like those.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3356084/I-ve-gone-child-Husband-father-seven-52-leaves-wife-kids-live-transgender-SIX-YEAR-OLD-girl-named-Stefonknee.html
(I still think this one is an april fools)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3256029/Woman-dreamed-blind-DRAIN-CLEANER-poured-eyes-fulfil-lifelong-wish-says-happier-ever.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3419631/Woman-says-s-CAT-trapped-human-body.html

Being transgender could be a tame variation of those cases where the body does not quite align with what your mind wants to perceive as "you".
So the crazies in those articles and transgender people at large suffer from the same type of "crazy" but have directed their "crazy" in ways we don't find acceptable despite those being roughly similar desires (body not aligning with what our mind wants).

[Harry Baldman]

I'm not sure there's many non-sarcastic points you can prove with three Daily Mail links.

However, dysphoria does nevertheless sound like a mental health issue. At the very least it seems analogous to depression, except more specific and thus ostensibly simpler to cure (though if the data presented are to be believed, seemingly a great deal more lethal than your average case of depression).

[Sonlirain]

Daily mail or not it's still some crap that happened and i doubt they made up the stories wholesale.

[Harry Baldman]

Daily mail or not it's still some crap that happened and i doubt they made up the stories wholesale.

That's technically true. It's merely likely that the places, people, circumstances, actual events or, really, all of the preceding factors involved in the story have been changed to improve overall infectivity.

So from your average Daily Mail article you can indeed deduce that something may have happened to someone somewhere and that it happened because of some reason.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, that's basically the extent of it. It's mental illness, but in the case of trans folks it's close enough to issues of sexual orientation that people argue for self-determination rather than against it, since "woman in male body" and vice versa are relatively compatible with extant gender politics (though note that this wasn't always or universally the case), while people whose fixation is on a self-image of them as an animal, as being physically different in a way not related to biological sex, &c. don't fit into any major social movements, so they get treated as mental illness instead.

Mechanically it's not really different from someone who thinks that they're a cat, Napoleon, or a different race, but it's an expression of dysphoria which is more or less harmless (since both men and women are ultimately human beans who interact with the world, society, and other individuals in largely the same ways). Once we get to the point where we can grow new mindless bodies wholesale there's basically zero reason for it to ever be an issue (and the same, ultimately, for a lot of other issues of dysphoria).

The main distinction, I think, is related to self-harm, harm done to others, and ability to function in society. Each of those cases Sonlirain mentioned involved the individual in question causing measurable harm to themselves, to others, or to their ability to live normal lives (or some combination of the three). Swapping your biological sex doesn't affect any of that, unless you live in a shithole where conservative social dogma will ruin you.

Hell, never mind trans people, if we can grow cat bodies capable of hosting human minds, communicating easily, and maybe possessing opposable thumbs, let someone with species dysphoria do as they please too.


One interesting point is the question of racial dysphoria. I seem to recall it being a thing, but you don't see support for it, because it doesn't align with the authoritarian false-progressive dogma--a trans-race individual would be derided and shamed worse in those circles than anywhere else.


---

Basically what I'm saying is that the problem is that there's a stigma attached to "mental illness". A lot of types of dysphoria are more or less harmless, so there's no problem with the treatment essentially being the acceptance of the changed identity.

[helmacon]

No people, please educate yourselves.

Read and understand this:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0083947

It's literally already in the thread. Transgendered individuals actualy have a brain structure closer to that of the gender they identify with.
A mental illness is a condition that impacts a persons mood/feelings/behavior. For transgendered individuals, there is nothing impacting thier brain, that's just the way thier brain is!.
What your doing is the equivalent of telling someone they are mentally ill for not having 20-20 vision. Sure, it poses a problem, but then they take steps to fix it using either glasses or contacts or laser surgery. but sure, laugh at the people with glasses. Call them 4 eyes, tell them thier stupid for needing glasses. After all, maybe if they just tried to see normally they would find that they could.

[spümpkin]

Oh geez, this thread has gotten into a pretty big debate about "What is Gender Identity/Transgenderism?".

I really don't know anything about the answer to that, because I don't know if there is some certain things that can be applied, cause everyone's situations different. I know basically nothing though, so yeah. Don't take my word for it.

[Sonlirain]

Oh geez, this thread has gotten into a pretty big debate about "What is Gender Identity/Transgenderism?".

I really don't know anything about the answer to that, because I don't know if there is some certain things that can be applied, cause everyone's situations different. I know basically nothing though, so yeah. Don't take my word for it.

Keep your cool and head down. People are triggered by TG talk in general and people with strong opinions on the topic like helmacon and Orange Wizard are common.

No people, please educate yourselves.

Read and understand this:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0083947

It's literally already in the thread. Transgendered individuals actualy have a brain structure closer to that of the gender they identify with.

Some researchers tend to ask "How do we prove this?" instead of "What conclusions we can draw from the test?" that often leads to wrong conclusions.
Furthermore research that aims to disprove something already well established will often just not get any funding. And even if they pull through on a shoestring budget they won't get much exposure because people won't take their results seriously anyway.
The Ozone hole research that ended up being a false positive because no one dared challenge the apocalyptic rhetoric until it suddenly was proven that the hole is not only growing and shrinking seasonally but also getting smaller each year.
And then things went strangely silent.

tl;dr
Don't blindly believe everything modern science says and take everything with a grain of salt.
And remember that not that long ago lobotomy was considered a legit cure for many psychological ailments... see where that bandwagon ended up?

[Orange Wizard]

Wow. Even if that's supposedly a tongue-in-cheek comment, it was never even a mental illness at all.

Not at all. Gender identity disorder was originally considered as very closely linked to body dysmorphic disorders (where are person feels like their leg shouldn't be there, or lost their leg and can still feel it) and identity disorders like FD mentioned (I'm a cat, miaow).
It was recently (this decade, I'm fairly sure) reclassified as gender dysphoria because it is now considered to be more closely tied to sexuality (i.e. not a disorder) rather than the above.
Classification aside, IMO it's rather silly to argue that it's not a disorder, on the principle that a person thinking they're something that they're not is generally a cause for concern.

it's a completely disjunctive statement to mention that there is an attributed can of worms to hormone therapy in itself.

Not... really? Mental health issues are par for the course with trans people in general, but messing with your hormones absolutely causes issues as well. Take menopausal women for instance - having their oestrogen production halt can result in mood and other problems, and may need to take hormones to deal with it.

I think you left it by the door with those snarky comments back there. This is supposedly Life Advice, rather than type and post side commentary.

Sadly, I am of the opinion that other people are giving bad advice.

A mental illness is a condition that impacts a persons mood/feelings/behavior. For transgendered individuals, there is nothing impacting thier brain, that's just the way thier brain is!.

Not sure what your point is here. Trans people have a brain structure that doesn't match their body. This negatively impacts their mood, feelings, and behaviour. Hence disorder.

What your doing is the equivalent of telling someone they are mentally ill for not having 20-20 vision. Sure, it poses a problem, but then they take steps to fix it using either glasses or contacts or laser surgery.

Yes, a person with poor eyesight has poor eyesight. It's completely unrelated to mental health. We can also take steps to address transgenderism. Hormones and surgery are popular. IIRC there have been instances where other medication has completely cured the condition, but they're rare and haven't been trialled successfully as far as I know.

People are triggered by TG talk in general

THIS GAVE ME PTSD

people with strong opinions on the topic like helmacon and Orange Wizard are common.

I certainly hope not. It'd suck to be around arseholes like me all the time.

...

Oh geez, this thread has gotten into a pretty big debate about "What is Gender Identity/Transgenderism?".

I really don't know anything about the answer to that, because I don't know if there is some certain things that can be applied, cause everyone's situations different. I know basically nothing though, so yeah. Don't take my word for it.

Honestly you can probably just ignore what everyone else is saying here. If you're confident with your situation and have solid professional support, then I'd say you're fully capable of making your own decisions. Don't let me or anyone else dissuade you from doing what's best for you - whatever that ends up being.

E: Wow, look at this wall of text. I thought I was being concise.

[Reelya]

The problem with bringing up mentally ill people who also happen to be transgender, is that there are mentally ill people everywhere, in every walk of life. So you meet someone who's into punk music, who happens to be mentally ill, you meet a fellow D&D player who happens to be mentally ill. You meet a religious person, who's religion masks their mental illness / compulsive disorder. None of those hobbies are attributable to their mental illness, but their mental illness will pervade whatever thing they happen to be into.

So of course, some transgender people will be mentally ill, because mental illness is a common thing, and of course whatever mental illnesses they have will affect whatever is going on in their life. But such anecdotes aren't evidence that transgender identity is correlated with mental illness.

Personally, my main view is that gender and sexual identity are primed before birth, so they're inherent. These are set up by the normal hormonal pathways designed for the job (male and female brains are plastic and both derive from the same template, so there are a wide range of different possible "settings". Some configurations can be said to be more common, but none are more "natural" than any others. They're all natural).

Additionally, we have some known biological conditions (the fraternal birth order effect) which increase the chance of a (male) child being gay. But this does not correlate with transgenderism at all. Transgender people's sexual identity is distributed on the same curve as cisgender people's sexual identity when compare with the Fraternal Birth Order Effect. This strongly suggests that transgenderism is also a real biological phenomena, and not a social one (otherwise it would probably correlate with being gay, as that would be more socially acceptable. But it really doesn't seem to do that).

Given that however, Body Integrity Identity Disorder is a thing, with a wide range of different symptoms and types. Clearly, there's no standard prenatal brain priming for thinking you're really a cat, or a blind person, or a quadriplegic. It's possible that some gender dysphoria is caused by the same types of things that cause Body Integrity Identity Disorder, rather than the usual mechanisms (prenatal hormone development). But I'd think these instances would be very rare and would be vastly outnumbered by the regular gender dysphoria cases, because Body Integrity Identity Disorder itself is pretty damn rare.

[helmacon]

Quote from: helmacon on Today at 05:20:02 pm
A mental illness is a condition that impacts a persons mood/feelings/behavior. For transgendered individuals, there is nothing impacting thier brain, that's just the way thier brain is!.

Not sure what your point is here. Trans people have a brain structure that doesn't match their body. This negatively impacts their mood, feelings, and behaviour. Hence disorder.

Yes, your brain effects how you act? A mental illness affects the brain. It is not the brain itself. How can you tell someone that who they fundamentally are is wrong?

[Orange Wizard]

How can you tell someone that who they fundamentally are is wrong?

Um. A man is not a woman. They're different things. What you are is determined by what you are, not what you think you are. A person who thinks they're a cat is wrong because they're a person, not a cat.

But such anecdotes aren't evidence that transgender identity is correlated with mental illness.

If it isn't, I've been lied to from both sides of the argument.