| >> | I know this is an ancient thread and OP has probably long since died of a brain aneurysm but since other people are clearly keen to keep hashing this out
>helped by the legions of psychologists and surgeons who are willing to ignore studies on the subject that very clearly paints a picture of transpeople as having severe psychological problems that will persist even after SRS
Where is this research? I'm talking papers in peer-reviewed journals that haven't been retracted, corrected, or misconstrued. The actual research points towards transitioning and recognition improving the lives of trans people by every conceivable metric.
https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/
that's what I don't understand about this angle of pretending to care about the facts, it's very easy to see that what you're saying is demonstrably untrue. I'm not being one of those "the science is settled" people, it's very much not, there's a lot we still don't know, and a lot of important research that still needs to be done and promising studies that ought to be replicated, research in this field is plagued by small sample sizes, and other logistical challenges to doing research on such a niche population, but the preponderance of evidence that we have right now suggests transitioning is the only remotely effective treatment for gender dysphoria and it improves the lives of trans people across the board, reduces suicidality immensely, improves mental health, reduces the likelihood of substance abuse, etc. The problem is though it also needs to be accepted, like if you just transition and you get kicked out of your house because of it or beat up or ridiculed for it of course that's not going to improve things that much, it still does marginally, but recognition and support is a necessary part of the process.
So here's my turn to be problematic though, and I'm really trying to actually have a good faith discussion, I want to learn I don't have a point to defend.
I think it's very clear that there are such a thing as trans people in a strict medical sense, you know dysphoria experiencing, never felt at home in their own bodies or at least after puberty, persistent desire to be the opposite sex, etc. it's a real condition that's been very well documented for at least a hundred plus years, they were doing medically transitioning all the way back in the early 20th century I mean. We know transitioning helps THIS population but do we really know that 100% of this next generation of trans identifying people actually have the condition?
Like I'm actually asking, I dunno, because to go down this line of thinking kind of goes against what I said in the previous paragraph, to automatically doubt people who say they're trans, but the thing is this radical, permanent treatment, this big, complicated, life-long medical procedure is worth it for people who experience tangible gender dysphoria, and have consistently, because the evidence suggests that they will continue to and transitioning is in an effort to abate that.
We know that their minds won't change because that's a feature of the condition, a condition which is at least as "real" as bipolar or enthusiasm, so we can say in that case the benefit is much greater than the risk and say go for it, the same way you would recommend psychiatric drugs for a mental illness, despite the fact that those drugs can have profound negative side-effect. We don't need to run expensive tests on every patient to look for neurological indicators of mental illnesses, because we see a variety of mental illnesses conform to specific patterns, and we can recognize those patterns and that's good enough to say someone has X condition, and in a lot of cases such tests just don't exist anyway.
The stakes a lot higher though with transitioning. If you start taking an antidepressant or something and you don't really need it you take it for a few months you feel a little funny you stop taking it, but if you transition and it wasn't actually the right choice you have to detransition, which has got to be an even more horrendously difficult thing to do and I really hope we don't see a wave of now-trans people doing so in the future.
I would imagine though that maybe if you're not actually trans you might realize what you're doing is not the move before the major physical changes start, just from the psychological changes. User is currently banned from all boards |
