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Let's say that I believe myself to be a gorilla. No matter how strongly I believe it, I am still not a gorilla.The button he pushed is only tangentially related to his point about the athletics problem.
Let's say that I take pills to make myself grow more hair to look more like a gorilla. I am still not a gorilla.
If I hire a surgeon to perform an operation to make myself look more like a gorilla, I am still not a gorilla.
If I get a million people to say that I can be whatever I identify myself as, and declare than I am a gorilla, I am still not a gorilla.
If I were to believe myself to be a gorilla and took the steps above, people would say I am crazy.
Let's say that letting you pretend you're a gorilla alleviates nearly all of the internal symptoms of your species dysphoria and lets you function at a normal level.
There's a few things that I keep ramming into when seeing the trans issue coming up, but far and above is whether it's a mental illness or not.
The LGBT party line is that it is not a mental illness and it's completely normal.
I don't think that it is correct. Seeing the wrong person in the mirror is not normal. If it's not normal, then it's abnormal and likely a state of mental illness. If you want to get technical, being left-handed is an abnormality too.
The problem of admitting it's a mental illness comes from the people who use this to attack and demean the persons with the problem. You have a cure? An effective cure that does less psychological damage than the affliction?
No. No you do not.
When there's no cure for a disease, you're left with treating symptoms.
Letting the trans person dress like the person they think they are and using the pronouns of that person is treating the symptoms. It doesn't turn a man into a woman, but it allows that person to feel human again. That's something that people with gender dysphoria don't get dressing as the chromosomes dictate.
It's not near so extreme as human v gorilla. Let's try another analogy:
Let's say that I believe myself to have a full head of hair.
No matter how strongly I believe it, I am still bald.
Let's say that I take pills to make myself grow more hair. I still have male pattern baldness.
If I hire a surgeon to perform an operation to implant hair from elsewhere to my head. I still have male pattern baldness.
If I get a million people to say that I can be whatever I identify myself as, and declare I have hair, I still have male pattern baldness.
If I were to believe myself to have hair and took the steps above, would people would say I am crazy?
Genetics says I should be bald. Yet we have how many technologies that allow the bald to pretend they have hair?
Something I learned about basic human kindness and politeness AS A CHILD was to not make fun of someone's toupee to their face. That pretending that an obvious rug was hair was just something that we did because compassion for others is the right thing to do.
I can make the same analogy about hair color. How many people dye away the gray?
Gender dysphoria is something without a cure. While there are several treatments, none are 100% effective and none are universally applicable. What worked in one case will fail spectacularly in another.
That's just how psychology works.
"Treating the symptoms" acknowledges that reality is not what we wish it to be.
ReplyDeleteThat's sane coping.
Believing that your wish is reality is a psychosis.
Which, by definition, isn't just "abnormal", it's clinical insanity.
Left-handers are abnormal, but their function is real: they use their left hand better than their right.
Their belief that such is true absolutely comports with reality.
Abnormal means different, not crazy.
That's just how psychology works.
Someone who wants to dress differently is within the societal bounds their own business.
First Amendment, free expression, etc. etc.
Demanding to be referred to, and allowed to function as, a genetically different sex than biology dictates, not only steps over the line into clinical psychosis, it compels me to join in that psychosis, by pretending an insane fantasy is reality.
That is tyranny, by way of insanity.
I decline to participate, on both counts.
Forcefully, if need be.
And if someone can't deal with the reality that they are the sex they are, no matter how, or how well, they try to camouflage it, they have the problem; I do not.
It not my job, nor society's, to kowtow to such insanity, let alone enforce nor reinforce it.
They need professional help.
And if they cannot deal with reality and behave appropriately in polite society, they need institutionalization.
Guy wants to wear a wig and a dress? Couldn't care less.
Guy in a dress goes into a bathroom used by women and little girls, he's going to jail.
Not even a hard decision.
Get professional treatment, fine. What's the 100% works every time, on everyone treatment?
DeleteThat's the problem here. Gender dysphoria isn't a single disorder, but a family with the same overt presentation. A myriad of causes means there's a myriad of cures... *IF* it can be cured at all. It doesn't seem certain it can be in many if not most cases and it's tragic.
What you've said you're going to do when confronted with a sick person is to be a dick about it.
Think about that.
Sorry Angus, but having a firm grasp on reality, and refusing to mollycoddle someone else's clinical psychosis, isn't "being a dick".
DeleteNo treatment for anything is 100%, especially with psychological disorders.
That's why that's a completely ridiculous standard of care, adopted by no one nowhere and at no time.
I suspect you knew that already.
So why lay it out as if it's really a thing, let alone reasonable?
The problem is pretending that humoring lunatics helps them, or anyone else.
It doesn't.
When confronted by a sick person, I'm suggesting they need serious psychological work, but as long as they're not a danger to themselves or others, it's not my problem.
Trying to coerce me into humoring and coddling their lunacy is.
I'm not going to do anything confrontational with crazy people, unless I'm on the job.
If I'm in public, I'm calling a cop, if they're breaking a law.
If I'm on duty, and they're where I work, they'll behave, or be ejected.
If they're patients, they'll behave, or be restrained.
That's what I get paid to do, and I have the safety of everyone else to consider.
It's not their world, and they don't get their own reality, except inside their head, just like anyone else. When their crazy leaks out, and they start doing things against the rules, anyone sane would know there will be a problem. Anyone not sane needs an intervention. If that involves handcuffs, so be it.
In civil society, you act civil, or you don't get to go out and play with others.
Life has been like that pretty much for 6000 years of recorded history, and back before it into the misty past.
Some guy wants to pretend he's the Queen of Sheba, it doesn't affect me.
His attire as as free for him as my disdainful looks are to me.
He wants to be called something other than what he is?
Not happening.
He wants to go into a multi-user ladies' room?
He's going to have a date - with a judge.
You don't get to forcibly compel speech in this country, ever.
Noting that, or living according to that, is also not "being a dick".
It's called liberty.
That's the gist of the whole "your right to stretch your arm ends where my nose begins" theory of personal freedom.
We were told thirty years and more ago that demands from society's sideshow freaks for recognition and acceptance would lead to compulsory of approbation.
"Today, psychosis is accepted. Tomorrow, it will become mandatory."
Now, exactly as warned, it's here.
I refuse.
Sure is a long winded way to say, "Yup, I'm going to be a dick."
DeleteYou're also ignoring that I specified a particular disorder... But you lumped in everyone who dresses differently than you demand in your diatribe. I noticed.
100% isn't fair, you're correct.
DeleteWhat's the treatment that's most effective? How often is it applicable? Will pursuing this line of treatment make some forms of the disorder worse? Can you determine that before you begin this line of treatment? Do you demand that everyone with the disorder be subject to the most effective treatment of the most patients even if there's a plurality of patients it is ineffective on, or will cause more problems for the patient?
Then, what if there is no effective treatment?
DeleteJust be a dick?
You must be fun around people in wheel chairs who have no more effective means to walk than many forms of gender dysphoria have of seeing a person who matches their chromosomes in the mirror.
Now you're just trolling.
DeleteNo such dickishness was expressed nor implied. You evidently just choose to describe any contrary opinion as that equivalent.
How does that approach work for you offline, face-to-face? Just curious.
I make no demands regarding treatment.
I definitely suggest it, from a surfeit of compassion.
Whether they choose to follow up on that, and how, is between the psych patient and their psychologist/psychiatrist.
And frankly, I couldn't care less what they choose; nor whether it's effective or not.
That's their problem, and likely not any of my business.
Their behavior in public is.
If they just want to let their freak flag fly in private, I couldn't care less.
And if they want to walk out in the town square, as long as they don't jaywalk, block traffic, or spit on the sidewalk, they have as much freedom to parade their dysfunction as anyone else.
But if transvestites of any of a myriad of psychological dysfunctions can't stay in their own biological lane, I'll call a cop.
And at any point, I'll use whatever pronouns in addressing them as I see fit.
People in wheel chairs are in wheel chairs.
No one is demanding they walk.
People with gender dysphoria are demanding we carry them on our backs, and tell them they're walking.
That's where that analogy runs off the rails and over the cliff.
You did demand they get treatment. I am trying to see if you understand what that means. You don't.
DeleteYou're ignoring the disorder I named and focusing on something else entirely.
You sure can write, can you read?
And you still insist in being a dick about it in every reply. You're apparently seeking agreement that being a dick about it is the correct response. You're not going to get that agreement here.
You don't understand the disorder, but have convinced yourself you do and have all the answers, but the behavior you've said you will exhibit make the problem worse, not better.
But I bet you don't go after people who dye away the gray and get offended that they're not acting their age.
Someone has a problem... It's you.
Having had more experience dealing first-hand (and with no backup) with the mentally ill, I can see several sides to this. Being profoundly conservative about surgery, particularly irreversible surgery, I would much prefer that these people at least try to get counseling and treatment, rather than running off to the surgeons.
ReplyDeleteI'm also afraid that when this whole thing passes, there are going to be some very suggestible people who were talked into "transitioning" who will find that they regret it. Kind of like how the same sort of people were conned, knowingly or not, into making terrible accusations based on "recovered memories" that proved to be bogus. Real gender dysphoria is, as I understand it, very rare indeed.
I decided a long time ago that I just don't care anymore. LGBTQ people are going to do what they're going to do and they really don't care what I think anyway. So why worry about something I can't do anything about? I've got plenty of more important things to worry about.
ReplyDelete