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Maybe for some people gender dysphoria goes away, but for many it never does. "John 50" is a meme for a reason. I mean, the claim that it will go away eventually is unfalsifiable, but at some point you can be reasonably confident. Do you think there's some kind of fancy psychotherapy, or maybe medication of some kind, that could free more people of dysphoria, that is being slept on?
I'm going to need you to clarify what exactly your condition was, because "phantom-limb gender dysphoria" doesn't mean anything. In any case, I can provide anecdotes of people "repping" (repressing) for over a decade until they gave in.
It's imperfect now, but it's going to improve as technology advances, and it's only going to improve if we keep doing it. The fact that it's imperfect now and doesn't work for everyone is no reason to give up, otherwise we wouldn't have most of modern medicine.
Apologies for taking a while; I'm not at 100% these days. Victorian winter, and trying to sort out a likely major career change.
Yeah, I phrased that overly-strongly. The point was that the amount of non-desisters looks larger than it is because some just haven't desisted yet.
There probably are some true non-desisters. How many there are I don't know, because lol nobody's done the 40-year longitudinal RCT. Almost as important, I don't know if there's any way to tell them apart from the "haven't desisted yet but will" group. I mean, sure, post-Singularity you can have an AI do it, but post-Singularity you have Clarketech reversible transitions and nigh-infinite resources so the treatment is obviously "try it, see if it works, and go back if it doesn't, no harm done" and the point is moot.
As in, I had phantom limb of having a vagina and often was a girl in my dreams. I hated my penis and once wound a hair strand around it and yanked (this left a scar internally, such that for years when I had a mild erection that part would stay floppy with the overall impression being roughly that of a broken bone).
There's more I can give, but while my cued recall's excellent my free recall is lousy so you're going to have to ask a lot more precisely to dredge it all.
A lot of those people seem to be counting from when they started showing effeminacy or the reverse, due to the human tendency to pull things together into a coherent narrative. I obviously don't see this as a coherent narrative any more, just a degree of effeminacy (which is real and still there) plus a period of intense gender dysphoria (which had a much-later start date and had an end date, and was probably the result of psychological abuse). If I were to count from first signs of effeminacy to the point where I slowly realised I wasn't trans, which would be a better fit with how they're counting, it'd be probably around 17-20 years.
Well, no, a lot of the stuff we would need for proper transition is not related to surgical technique at all, but rather to success at lab-growing new organs, which doing current SRS will not help with. Obviously, lab-grown organs would be awesome for a whole lot of other things as well (infinite cloned organs for rejection-free non-donor-limited transplant, lol) so they're something we should be (and are?) working on anyway. Potential retroviral therapies to alter tissues in situ are also a completely-different technology to what we're using now. Current transition therapy is a bad kludge with many inherent limitations, not a step on the road to the proper version. Iron lungs were irrelevant to how we beat polio.
On the other hand:
Well, maybe. Bit hard to find out when psychologists and doctors are too terrified of being cancelled for "conversion therapy" - cancellation with actual teeth, because of SJ's control of their licensing organisations! - to experiment with it, isn't it?
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