I'm curious what your level of expertise is with the LGBT community that you can casually toss out empirical studies in favor of your personal feels.

Your definition of trauma may be much stronger than mine and that of the person whose post you were replying to. Trauma can include any discomfort.

How many people do you think would go through with gender reassignment surgery hormone changes, and lifestyle changes if their previous life gave them no discomfort at all? I believe no one would do that. Just like no one would take anti-depressants and TMS treatment if their depression was not giving them at least some discomfort.

I don't like the word "disorder' for anything having to do with different thought patterns, let's try mental status. I would also not use the word disfunctional.

Being trans is a mental status, right? It's nothing a doctor would be able to discern from a thorough examination, even including any technology currently available.

Everything is based on the individual's thoughts. If a person thinks he is trans, then he is trans.
He doesn't necessarily need "fixing" if he is suffering no discomfort from these thoughts, but if something changes and he no longer thinks he is trans, then he is now cis gender, right?

Neither I nor the person you originally responded to are claiming transgender people don't exist. They do exist, as they believe they are trans. Exactly what here do you disagree with?

That's such a watered down definition of traumatic that I won't accept it. Any amount of discomfort can be considered traumatic? Really?

I agree with this, but that's not what's being discussed. It's not what this thread is about (see title) and is not what the original post I was responding to said.

Ok, fine. Please show me an empirical study that says that there are no people that identified as trans and changed their minds about later.

I think you're not getting the point.
It doesn't matter if you call it trauma or unease or discomfort.

It is a negative feeling. Don't you think anyone who goes to the trouble of gender transition had some negative feelings about their previous life?

Are you sure that the only way possible to remedy those negative feelings is to switch genders?

Should that really be the accepted default? Should it really be encouraged as the primary solution, when lesser measures might prove to relieve those negative feelings in a different way?

I don't know how you think anything I said is not on topic of the thread.
The title is 'mental health categorizations...'. It's not trauma, or dysmorphia, it's mental health.
Any negative feelings can go under the category of mental health.

You did not address the rebuttal of your claim that saying this issue is related to mental health is in some way a denial of the existence of trans people. If I say depression is related to mental health, do you think that is denying the existence of depressed people?

Yes, people are really trans, because their brain tells them they are trans, which causes them discomfort living their lives as their a gender assigned at birth. Gender reassignment is one possible remedy for that discomfort. Do you really believe it is the only possible remedy?

You also failed to answer my question about if you think anyone would transition who didn't have at least some discomfort with their previous status.

Depressed people aren't an officially recognized identity category, so there is a difference.

Who is the person or organization officially recognizing categories?

Ok let's call it 'semi-official'. There is no organization officially recognizing them but 'trans' is a generally recognized category and 'depressed people' are not.

I'm not answering a lot of your questions because they're not what this thread is about. You're taking my comments that are in the context of discussing if being transgender is a mental illness and trying to apply them more generally. Of course, what I write doesn't make sense when you change the context, so why should I even bother addressing that?

I emphatically disagree. As a psychiatrist, I feel strongly that most emotions are just a normal part of the human experience and not really part of mental health in any meaningful way.

By diagnosing someone with depression, I am saying that many of their depressive thoughts aren't true (their thoughts that no one likes them or that they're worthless are false and stemming from the mental disorder). Similarly, if I said that being transgender is a mental illness, I'd be saying that their thoughts of being transgender are actually untrue.

Is that what depression is like for most people? I would assume it's feeling sad all the time, not wanting to do anything, and drowning one's sorrows in their vice of choice. Do negative thoughts really come into play that much?

By the way, below is the post that I replied to that led down this path. You can see that he clearly links trauma to an impairment in ability to function. We have not been discussing minor discomforts and my posts should be read with this proper context.

I take it from your inability to answer my question that you don't have much experience with the LGBT community. Which is perfectly fine, but your appeals to "common sense" aren't terribly convincing.

I have a crap ton of experience. Ask me whatever you want to know.

It's part of my contract that I'm always to have one lesbian bff drinking buddy type in my life.

This is, sadly, very true. I've worked with a lot of trans patients. There used to be a time when they had to undergo therapy prior to being approved for surgery and hormones. Now, they get hormones on the first visit, no questions asked. I have yet to have a trans patient who did not have a host of psychiatric problems that were not being effectively managed.
Now comes the kids. There are places where laws are being passed or proposed that would allow a kid to start hormones, etc, without parents' knowledge. Think about this. We're saying a child does not have capacity to consent to having a tooth pulled or a vaccine without parental consent, but they have capacity for them to start injecting hormones that can forever alter their body's equilibrium in spite of the fact that their frontal lobe isn't even fully developed?

They don't. Their default response is to congratulate the patient and get the ball rolling right away on drastic procedures without fully exploring if they are actually doing their patient a favor.

I disagree with your assertion that nothing productive comes from discussions about whether being transgender is real, etc. Take pronoun usage, for example. The choice of language you use reflects your internal thought process. Your feelings. Your beliefs. If I wrong you in some way, whether you say to me, "Meisner, I'm disappointed in you" is a lot different than you saying, "Meisner, I'm f*cking p*ssed off at you right now!" Neither I, nor my actions, dictate that. Your responses, your feelings, your thoughts do. So, if I look at a woman, doesn't matter what the woman is trying to present to people or that she's trying to resemble a man. To me it's a woman and the appropriate linguistic pronouns are her/she.
And let us not forget, some aspects of language exist to simplify understanding and make it so we others can understand us. If I'm talking about buying a new couch because my old one is worn out, you know exactly what item I'm considering purchasing. At no point will you think I'm on my way to buy a bushel of apples. So, if I'm talking about a person you do not know and I refer to that individual as "he", you already know I'm talking about a man. You would not meet that person and expect to be meeting anything but a man. No confusion. We do not each have our own pronouns. Sorry to break it to you.

So gender is entirely determined by how someone appears to you?

Yeah it's easy. You just look at them and then know that gender is pseudo science

Ok, fine. Please show me an empirical study that says that there are no people that identified as trans and changed their minds about later.

Gender is closely aligned with biological sex and that, my friend, is determined by biology.

I never said that, however, most people it is obvious what their sex is. There isn’t much ambiguity.

"closely aligned" kind of implies it's not completely aligned.

Society > Biology.

You can have baseline difference between males and females but those are molded by society. This is why we say that gender is socially constructed and not biologically determined. And if "gender" were indeed biologically determined, you wouldn't have so many wanting to change it.

Elon Musk has just announced that saying "cis" or "cisgender" on twitter is a slur. No mention of any slurs targeting trans people, of course. It's been pretty sad to see the person with arguably more influence on discourse than anyone else in society continue his slide into anti-trans BS.

Because when you're talking about something such as "gender roles" while they are often related to sex, this isn't always the case. To this day, women tend to do more of the cooking and cleaning. This doesn't mean it has to be this way or it should be this way. It just is. Whereas once this was viewed as "women's work" we now don't view it that way. Men are perfectly capable of cooking (which I do in my marriage) and other domestic chores without feeling they are not in the right role.

However, if you are a man (sex), you cannot become a female any more than a Caucasian person can become black. If you're human, you cannot transition into a cow. Some things just are and that's that. We call that reality. Reality does not change. Your perception of it might, but your perception does not change reality itself.