Ive moved the discussion about whether being a transgender person in and of itself is considered a form of mental illness, and how that might affect the way that discussion is moderated.

This thread is not a catch all transgender issues thread. Rather it is specifically focused on the intersection of transgender people and mental health, and if posting that all transgender people suffer from a mental illness should those posts be moderated in recognition of how many people have used that statement as a basis to justify discrimination and bigotted actions targeting transgender people.

Thanks.

Lately we have had issues arise in the topic of transgender people. There are valid societal issues about things like participation in sports, at what level, at whether puberty concluded before or after transition. Or the topic of at what age should medical intervention occur to assist in transitions and who gets to make those decisions. But I am concerned about the line of discussion that states that either there is no such thing as having a difference between gender identity and physical anatomy or that anyone who feels that way has a mental illness than a medical condition. I don't see how anything can be more insulting or denigrating to a group then saying to them they dont exist or are crazy. So where do we drw lines on these types of discussions?



Thanks.

Gender dysphoria is listed as a mental disorder in DSM-5 (the current fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). So is autogynephilia, which comes under the 'transvestic disorder'. Nobody is claiming that people who feel that way do not exist. The 'existence' trope is a rhetorical device, generally used by activists in order to override women's rights.

Least bigoted conservative

@ Browser:

https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-...omen-are-women


https://www.theguardian.com/society/...times-magazine

Would this be off limits? If someone agreed with the latter link, and stated they didn't wish to see transgender people discriminated against but didn't regard who they identify as, as the same as being a biological sex, would that be considered hateful or transphobic?

If someone agreed with the first link and another poster argued that say a transwoman wasn't the same as a biological woman due to having a Y chromosome, not experiencing periods etc then would that person arguing be considered transphobic? Even if what they said was correct regarding the actual biological sex?

I have even seen sympathetic articles written about particular trans people where it us said that they started suffering from gender dysphoria at a certain age. One just in the past week where the subject herself said "I started to have feelings of gd at whatever age".

It definitely is a mental disorder, and it makes people who suffer from it unhappy. The only debate is about whether or not transitioning will help improve or fix the condition.

It is not a value judgment to say someone suffers from a mental disorder, anymore than it is to say someone suffers from any other disease or negative medical condition. I am very open with the fact that I have suffered from depression on and off since I was in my teens, and do not get offended by people discussing which treatments may work to improve my condition.

If you don't believe someone when they talk about their identity then they become invisible.

Ok. A couple of notes to keep this on track. First the dsm specifically states that not all transgender people have the gender dysphasia condition described. It is not the simple fact that someone has a difference between their mental perception of their gender and their physical anatomy that means someone suffers from gender dysphoria. Rather only those for whom that difference creates a level of loss of function due to things like the anxiety caused are consider to have GD. So they entire notion that all transgender people have a mental illness is simply wrong.

But for the purposes of this discussion I don't want to have people state positions and others rebut them, as just occurred. Rather I want to hear opinions on whether any topic should be open or restricted from discussion or if everything should be open for discussion.

Thanks

Couldn't have said it any better .

We were rebutting what you seemed to be stating as your policy about discussing a mental condition being completely restricted from discussion. While it may have happened, I haven't noticed anyone using GD as some kind of insult, so it can't be a major issue here.

The first definition I found on Google was from the National Health Service of the UK, and it seems succinct and easy to understand:
"Gender dysphoria is a term that describes a sense of unease that a person may have because of a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity."

My understanding is that nearly everyone who decides to transition does it because they are suffering from gender dysphoria. If they weren't, I guess they just are doing it for kicks? I recently underwent TMS treatment in hopes of helping my depression. Someone could get TMS treatment without suffering from depression (or a few other mental illnesses), but it would be pretty silly for them to go through an uncomfortable expensive treatment just to see what it was like. This would be even more true for something far more difficult to go through like hormones or surgeries. Can you imagine anyone going through that if they didn't at least have a "sense of unease"? Do you know any other reasons someone might want to transition? The DMS uses the phrase "clinically significant distress", but does not define it, nor does it explain why someo

I would agree that some (most?) trans people do not have gender dysphoria (anymore), because they have gone through a treatment which hopefully was successful.

Personally I don't know why anything in particular should be barred from discussion here. I agree that the discussion should not be allowed to devolve into insults, but I am starting to come to the opinion that it's really not possible. I would estimate at least 80% of the semi-regular posters here sink to personal insults here occasionally. A significant number seem to be here only to mock and insult others. Even after you have banned some of the worst examples of posters who do that, there are still several more who spew insults constantly and have nothing done about it. I stopped participating in one thread myself because it was basically taken over by a single poster who was making more than 50% of the posts, and 95% of his posts contained insults. I reported that person twice but nothing was done about the problem, so I stopped reading the thread.

I'm for open speech and not turning this into another trans thread

You can still say it's an ideology and not disrespect a movement . We do it with every religion

There also has to be aline

This for example is way ott imo. Having a mental disorder is not remotely comparable to being deemed to have one just because of who you are.

Of course the later is a value judgement and it's one that can be incredibly harmful to the group being judged.

Did you think my explanation of what I thought was the case was offensive, harmful, or incorrect?
I said GD would be the reason for transitioning, being trans is the possible cure.

If I told someone I have undergone TMS treatment, saw a therapist and psychiatrist for many years, and have taken several SSRI medications, I don't think it would be harmful to determine that I have suffered from clinical depression at some time. I also don't think it would be offensive to debate how helpful TMS is in the treatment of depression.

I’ll get to a reply to browser when I have a chance, but this is pretty silly. Being trans isn’t ideological. No more than being gay or being black is ideological.

Instead, this accusation is a form of minimizing the existence of trans people to suggest that instead of being something that one is, it is some ideological “movement”.

It’s transphobic as ****, and you should do better.

Sorry just adding my 2c that imo it's way ott to judge this group as having a mental iillness.

The way I see things, having gender dysphoria is like being gay or being black, or having depression, or being perky, or being very muscular, or having cancer. Those are descriptions of characteristics a person has, are not chosen by the person, and are not indicative of the person's moral character.

If you think that saying someone has gender dysphoria or depression is saying something bad about the person, the problem is with you - that you view mental states differently than physical states.

Being trans is a choice, the choice to live your life as a different gender than the one originally assigned to you. Would you call someone trans if they had not made that personal decision?

BTW, I did do a little searching for any reasons why someone would transition other than because they had gender dysphoria. I found a few articles stating that GD was not the only reason, but not much clarity about what other reasons there might be.

The only other reason I found was that someone could be trans because they don't believe in the societal / political treatment of gender. That sounds pretty ideological to me, and it's an ideology I agree with.

Some people are just born in the wrong body.

Just like one can't help being gay, one can't help being born in the wrong body.

God assigns all the souls a body, and sometimes they end up going in the wrong one.

And that's your opinion .

And comparing it to gay or being black is nuts

You can't come up with one bit of science to back up your arguments

No gay person is asking you to believe they are a women
And no black person is claiming to be Asian

All be told you can have an idealogy and I'll still be kind to you .

There was an entire documentary done where a single (simple) question was asked to this group and the doctors enabling their choices. None of them were able to answer the question. What is a woman? And now we live in a world where that is an "offensive" question. How did we get so far off the rails?

Yet Uke and the left wing media declares it's hate speech and disgusting but has never watched it

It's simple. If you don't know what a women is then you're not one of them. It's a club and if you have to ask then you're not in it.

Who says that's an offensive question?

Everyone who gets stumped by it I'm guessing

I think uke found it offensive when he was asked.

Firstly, you are right at some level to be concerned about these two things. Two common modes of attacking trans people are one to weaponize mental illness in how it is used to characterize trans people and two to imply trans people don't exist due to various pseudo-intellectual babble about gender not existing. These are anti-trans tropes because of how frequently they are used to attack trans people. That said, it isn't like every discussion along these lines is bad, people certainly can talk about mental health and trans people, and about what exactly gender means in a respectful and interesting way; for instance, mental health challenges in trans people motivate part of why I care about helping trans people.

So what is a moderator to do? Balancing the dual laudable goals of embracing free speech while creating spaces that are safer from hate speech and constant attacks against marginalized communities is a tension basically every social media platform, big and small, is having to grapple with. It isn't trivial.

For myself, I think it is less about deciding on a set of statements that are allowable/not allowable in a vacuum, but instead the test is whether someone is making a pattern of rhetoric to attack a marginalized community. This is an advantage over something like Facebook which has to have a sort of per-statement level of analysis, we can do per-individual analysis because we are much smaller and know each other better. We can see when someone is obviously trolling to try and say the most bigoted things possible just this side of the line over and over. We had a version of this with the misgendering conversation; people can quite reasonably accidentally misgender someone or articulate a genuinely held belief about pronoun usage, but the problem we had was someone deliberately trying to be disrespectful to trans people by means of misgendering them.

I'm also someone who tends to see politics through rhetorical narratives. So for instance, the same factual statement (say about crimes committed by black people) could be totally neutral, but could also be part of a systemic pattern by the person to weaponize selective statistics to constantly attack black people.