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[Dunamisdeos]

But wouldn't that be like, the only real cause for such a thing? If we can detect binary genders, shouldn't some other gender (or variation) be like, super apparent? Or at least possible to detect?

And if there is no physical evidence of a non-binary gender being present, isn't that like.... the definition of some kind of mental illness? Because then all you have is emotion/feeling guiding it. Akin to thinking one is in fact a dolphin trapped in the body of a human? If it was, isn't that something that should be acknowledged? Is it unethical to address it in that fashion? I guess mental illness might be the wrong term, that sounds automatically negative or dangerous, and that's not at all what I'm trying to say here. I'm not talking about a goal of forcing someone to one gender or another, or even of providing services for a person to alter their physical gender, but it seems important to define it before we can understand.

And of course, when the government starts deciding things based on genetics, it raises the specter of eugenics. What they're trying to do is far enough away that it doesn't raise immediate red flags, but it does seem like it's opening the door to the path towards the slippery slope.

I would shy away from the memo on this basis alone. I have no alternative to put forth, except that we do have modern instances of chemical imbalances/physical issues that cause mental problems or behaviors that are not abused by the gov. For instance, bi-polar disorder can be managed (in many cases, mind you) with regular medication. I use this example because I know a person who is one of the most wonderful people I know, but she absolutely has to be on her meds or she loses control of herself.

I mean what if we are dealing with something similar? Shouldn't the option to manage it be available? Ipsil's article insinuates that it can be brought on by pollutants etc, what if this is an unavoidable issue that is becoming more prevalent as we become more developed? We would almost have to address it politically before societal/personal relief is found.

Thanks for bearing with me here, it's an important issue for me to explore and frankly I trust you folks.

[Max™]

Per the kansas one, (Since I live in that wretched hive of scum and villainy) --

The local attack ads against Paul Davis are literally Ad Hominems about his being caught in a strip club.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/oct/01/congressional-leadership-fund/did-paul-davis-vote-allow-strip-clubs-open-nears-h/


Personally, I find that when a group with literally hundreds of millions of dollars invested into finding dirt comes out with something so shallow it means they cannot really find anything of any real substance to charge with, and shows how weak their hand really is.  "Oh noes! He was caught in a strip club! Woooo!"

*le gasp*

*clutches pearls*

Heh. Noice.

I read that as *clutches penis* like six times before my brain clicked out of woodworking mode into proper text parsing mode.

[hector13]

Per the kansas one, (Since I live in that wretched hive of scum and villainy) --

The local attack ads against Paul Davis are literally Ad Hominems about his being caught in a strip club.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/oct/01/congressional-leadership-fund/did-paul-davis-vote-allow-strip-clubs-open-nears-h/


Personally, I find that when a group with literally hundreds of millions of dollars invested into finding dirt comes out with something so shallow it means they cannot really find anything of any real substance to charge with, and shows how weak their hand really is.  "Oh noes! He was caught in a strip club! Woooo!"

*le gasp*

*clutches pearls*

Heh. Noice.

I read that as *clutches penis* like six times before my brain clicked out of woodworking mode into proper text parsing mode.

... what does woodworking have to do with clutching penises?

[Dunamisdeos]

Per the kansas one, (Since I live in that wretched hive of scum and villainy) --

The local attack ads against Paul Davis are literally Ad Hominems about his being caught in a strip club.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/oct/01/congressional-leadership-fund/did-paul-davis-vote-allow-strip-clubs-open-nears-h/


Personally, I find that when a group with literally hundreds of millions of dollars invested into finding dirt comes out with something so shallow it means they cannot really find anything of any real substance to charge with, and shows how weak their hand really is.  "Oh noes! He was caught in a strip club! Woooo!"

*le gasp*

*clutches pearls*

Heh. Noice.

I read that as *clutches penis* like six times before my brain clicked out of woodworking mode into proper text parsing mode.

... what does woodworking have to do with clutching penises?

Answer: Say wood-working again, but slowly.

[Max™]

Oooh, slower, yeah... that's hot, and it's more that I was busy working on cutting some joints and thinking in terms of grain and angles and whatnot so parsing text hit a weird brain thing.

[smjjames]

But wouldn't that be like, the only real cause for such a thing? If we can detect binary genders, shouldn't some other gender (or variation) be like, super apparent? Or at least possible to detect?

And if there is no physical evidence of a non-binary gender being present, isn't that like.... the definition of some kind of mental illness? Because then all you have is emotion/feeling guiding it. Akin to thinking one is in fact a dolphin trapped in the body of a human? If it was, isn't that something that should be acknowledged? Is it unethical to address it in that fashion? I guess mental illness might be the wrong term, that sounds automatically negative or dangerous, and that's not at all what I'm trying to say here. I'm not talking about a goal of forcing someone to one gender or another, or even of providing services for a person to alter their physical gender, but it seems important to define it before we can understand.

And of course, when the government starts deciding things based on genetics, it raises the specter of eugenics. What they're trying to do is far enough away that it doesn't raise immediate red flags, but it does seem like it's opening the door to the path towards the slippery slope.

I would shy away from the memo on this basis alone. I have no alternative to put forth, except that we do have modern instances of chemical imbalances/physical issues that cause mental problems or behaviors that are not abused by the gov. For instance, bi-polar disorder can be managed (in many cases, mind you) with regular medication. I use this example because I know a person who is one of the most wonderful people I know, but she absolutely has to be on her meds or she loses control of herself.

I mean what if we are dealing with something similar? Shouldn't the option to manage it be available? Ipsil's article insinuates that it can be brought on by pollutants etc, what if this is an unavoidable issue that is becoming more prevalent as we become more developed? We would almost have to address it politically before societal/personal relief is found.

Thanks for bearing with me here, it's an important issue for me to explore and frankly I trust you folks.

While gender dysphoria is a thing, transgender and non-binary people being linked to mental illness is probably a can of worms that we should stay away from. I mean, theres a difference between something debilitating that would affect your daily life vs being off the norm but able to function just fine.

The problem with addressing it politically before societal/personal relief is available is that said politics don't neccesarily take the considerations of the people into account, and there is a pretty strong religious desire to crack down on it. Things like bi-polar mental illness don't suffer from religious views codified in religious texts, but LGBT+ does, that's the problem with finding a political solution to it. Obviously the answer is to put more Democrats in power, but as long as such religous views exist, politicians will have views based off of that.

edit: Not meant as an attack on religion, it's just a fact that as long as such views are present in any form, politicians with those views will do policy based on that.

[Dunamisdeos]

I think that is a well reasoned and logical response. Thank you for presenting it, that makes perfect sense to me.

I wish I now had an alternative course of action to present, but hey. Maybe we simply aren't ready as a society to fully address the issue. I think for now the only thing to do is be as accepting as possible to anyone with a differing view of the world or themselves. Which of course obviously the current administration has no interest in bridging divides of any kind.

[Dunamisdeos]

Ya basically that. I think our society (globally, mind you, not just here in the US) has a long way to go before we are really capable of understanding.

Until then I'll vote against anything that looks like it's targeting someone unfairly.

[Trekkin]

No no, my mistake, I wasn't just including practicing physicians when I said doctors. Sorry about that.

My point is that there is no room for opinion if you include hard evidence involving genetic markers. Also, there should be no room for opinions if we have the ability to use such things to define it. I'm not saying we have regular doctors (with opinions of their own) show up at congress to tell them what to do, I'm saying we get the necessary peer-reviewed research into what range or spectrum exists, then make informed decisions thereof, which would be enacted by the medical community under guidelines put forth according to the aforementioned research.

No offense taken; I tend to overreact to this sort of thing, being both a PhD who has to work with a lot of MDs and interested in GSRM medical issues on a more personal level. Trying to bring the scientific/medical consensus on these issues into the law is a laudable goal, but I still just don't think we're ready scientifically to present as concrete a case as we want legislatively.

I mean, say you bring in the experts and the first question some Senator asks is, quite reasonably, "are there two sexes?" The most honest answer is probably "in a statistical sense, mostly yes, but to get there you have to include enough different anatomies and physiologies under the two umbrellas that they aren't really informative anymore, so not really in any actionable way."

Okay, perfectly reasonable question two: "How many sexes are there?" Here's where the shrugging starts. It depends how you define sexes; if you go purely reproductively, you can start implying that lesbians aren't women because they're behaviorally reproductively isolated from men (leaving aside trans women purely arguendo), or men who have gotten vasectomized aren't men anymore, and so forth. Anatomically, physiologically, and (epi)genetically there are too many exceptions to count and no clear way to tell which are actually maladaptive in and of themselves.

At the end of the day, the truest and most confusing thing we can say is that life is a hugely successful way of capitalizing on stochasticity on scales from the molecular to the planetary, and as a very successful species we have robust and adaptable ways of dealing with whatever our sex chromosomes throw at us so there's not a clear basis for calling one outcome a disorder and another a different sex, and even at our most viscerally biological our reproductive fitness as haplotypes doesn't necessarily correlate with the number of children to whom we personally pass them on so even that doesn't work as a guide. None of this is to say that there aren't, in fact, actual mental disorders regarding sex and gender, of course.

I'm just saying that if you want indisputable science on which to build a law that provides everyone with what they need by category, we don't know how to draw all those categories yet.

[Kagus]

Technically speaking, Gender Identity Disorder was included in the DSM until fairly recently, where it was replaced by Gender Dysphoria. However, despite being listed as a mental illness, the treatment recommendations were still just to help the patient come to terms with the situation, help them with improving their body image (which can include transitioning), and try to foster positive communications with their closest relations.

Still plenty of stigma associated with it being referred to as a "mental illness" in shorthand, but it's not the "lock them up and drug them down" kind of mental illness. Not that any non-professionals really makes that distinction about anything in the manual...

[misko27]

I had a post I had written just before SalmonGod's post, and after coming back to it a day or so later I clicked preview to see if I could edit it into relevance with the new direction of the thread. I don't think I can...

Warning - while you were typing 44 new replies have been posted. You may wish to review your post.

At least thread is active and civil, a pleasant surprise.

[EnigmaticHat]

Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, being trans isn't.  Transitioning can cure gender dysphoria but the person is still trans.

More broadly, gender dysphoria is in the DSM for the same reason Autism is: trans people often require medical intervention and that's the only way for insurance to cover it.

[Dunamisdeos]

Actually, according to the American Psychiatric Association, a person who has gender dysphoria is basically considered trans. The consensus on "trans" seems to be when a person's gender identity does not match their physical gender.

The dysphoria refers to the feeling of being extremely uncomfortable for psychological reasons, and can also be applied to (to bring up the same example) bi-polar disorder. Gender dysphoria refers to this condition with the assigned gender being the cause. The intent of transitioning would be to relieve the symptoms.

I believe the primary ideological debate is what methods are acceptable to use to relieve the dysphoria. I always feel iffy saying we can "cure" mental illness from my own experiences. Not because mental illness isn't a sickness or a negative thing, but because they are caused by chemical imbalances and various life experiences. We often can't permanently correct a chemical imbalance without regular meds, and you certainly can't remove life experience, so we are only treating the symptoms.

Also this is such a great discussion.

[Trekkin]

I believe the primary ideological debate is what methods are acceptable to use to relieve the dysphoria. I always feel iffy saying we can "cure" mental illness from my own experiences. Not because mental illness isn't a sickness or a negative thing, but because they are caused by chemical imbalances and various life experiences. We often can't permanently correct a chemical imbalance without regular meds, and you certainly can't remove life experience, so we are only treating the symptoms.

Also this is such a great discussion.

Cynical aside: yes, bearing in mind it's a debate between surgery and therapy on one side and murder and erasure on the (extreme) other and we should probably take the latter off the table first.

But while I do see where you're coming from, it's probably worth noting that gender dysphoria tends to have a continuously recurring cause that's specifically identifiable, if not necessarily consistent across all cases, so it's less a cure and more an attempt to stop the dysphoria getting continuously worse. Broadly speaking, depression can work similarly with regard to medication; there's still a need for therapy in many cases, but the medication can make the problem relatively stable instead of consistently reasserting itself.

In other words, if there's a rock in your shoe, it's going to hurt with every step you take, often in different places, and it's never more than a step distant in your memory. Your foot will still be sore no matter what you do, but it's probably a really good idea to take the rock out of your shoe.

[Dunamisdeos]

Yeah exactly that, and I also feel like any kind of forcible treatment for (term for the sake of argument) mental illness is terribly unethical save in cases where it moves into criminal territory.

If a person's got the dysphoria, and they are going to cope with transitioning or whatever else, that's their decision. Let them do them. Maybe it's the healthiest option, maybe it's not, but I fail to see where it has to affect me. Their coping with the way they feel about themselves and with an issue I have no way to comprehend, not sinking into some kind of ridiculous degeneracy.

Anyway that's why I feel like the more we know the more we can educate and that will lead to acceptance. But yeah it's a true slippery slope and I also feel like we aren't in a safe place to address the issue in a way we can be sure is ethical at this time.