This has nothing to do with "oughts". It has to do with what your brain has actually mapped your body as being composed like. Deciding that it would be nice to have wings, or that I ought to have wings, is vastly different from my brain thinking I do have wings, which is exactly what I'm talking about.
To reiterate, this has nothing to do with what people want. It has to do with the brain mapping itself to parts that aren't there, or aren't there in the form that the brain expects. It's like how amputees get phantom limb pains and stuff like that; it's nothing to do with "I should still have a leg" and more to do with "god dammit I REALLY FEEL LIKE A LEG SHOULD BE THERE".
To reiterate, again, this has nothing to do with personal choice or preference in any way, what we're talking about are very fundamental aspects of how the brain maps itself to different parts of your body. The hypothetical wing-person I'm talking about doesn't "choose" that he "should" have wings any more than you "choose" that you "should" have two feet with toes on them. You cannot just will away the brain's somatic mapping, or will new parts into it. It doesn't work that way, and has absolutely nothing to do with choice, "ought"s, or desires. It has nothing to do with the conscious mind at all, or even with the more cognitive aspects of the unconscious mind.
Okay, I think we may have a misunderstanding going on. I'm not talking about deciding or personal preference, either, but I have difficulty mapping the language to the concepts I wish to express. For that, I apologize. I was very careful to avoid the word "choose" for this reason, and that was also the reason for the first of my two edited-in clarifications (which you might not have seen before making your post).
What I'm saying is that I doubt a person who believes herself to be a woman despite having a man's body believes she has a vagina. She believes she
ought to, and that her body is not correctly constructed; she is aware that she has a penis, because (EDIT: many of) her senses indicate that it is so. That is the definition of "ought" that I've been using. And I don't see any reason to deny her this; to classify it as a
mental disorder seems to me to be indicating that the problem lies in how her mind is put together, and that her body is fine the way it is. If it must be classified, it's far more sensible to call it a physical disorder, because you're not insisting that a person's identity is somehow wrong.
Now, if my assumptions about what such a person actually experiences are wrong, then that doesn't hold, but if that's the case then it's news to me.
It is unprotected speech in Germany to deny the Holocaust. Publicly doing so nets you three years in jail.
Opinions?
I don't think it's right for that to be the case, but I see the reasoning and I'm not sufficiently familiar with the culture to guess whether or not there actually is a possibility of glorifying Nazi rule, starting with a denial of their crimes. So while I don't think it's ideal, my pragmatism is okay with it, and I'd add that the fact that it applies to a very specific category of speech (leaving little wiggle-room) resolves a great deal of my worries about abuse.