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Given the response to my post below about culturally bound illnesses I figured it would make sense to write out a top level post specifically discussing gender dysphoria, since I expressed a desire to avoid that topic initially. I was inspired by Scott Alexander's recent post on culturally bound illnesses.
The basic idea of my previous post is that some illnesses which seem quite common in our society, things like anorexia, depression, chronic pain, and gender dysphoria, seem likely to be highly culturally mediated - i.e. they would not exist if the cultural norms we are inoculated in didn't account for them. This goes against the standard narrative for LGBTQ+ people, who often put forth the idea that before a minority gets social approval, there are a ton of 'closeted' individuals who simply live in suffering. Under this model, the social approval actually creates the urge to, for instace, sleep with the same sex or transition gender. (I'm less confident about homosexuality being highly cultural.)
I'm sure someone here could give a better history of rough numbers of trans individuals/gender dysphoria cases over time, but the gist seems to be that numbers have exploded recently. A quick search shows laughable results such as:
And then on the exact same website:
This is some of the most clear double think I've ever seen, and I tend to be much less invested in the trans debate than many here. Other studies are more honest explaining that:
I think this whole topic presents a clear problem, but I'm less sure about the actual solution. I'm sure many would jump at the chance to say we should just tell people who have gender dysphoria to suck it up and keep it to themselves, but I doubt the feasibility of that given how easy it is to create subcultures on the internet. Also, if you try to apply that frame to other problems like say anorexia, or depression, the failure modes become extremely clear.
Then again we can't just let these culturally created illnesses run rampant through our culture, and I predict they will only become increasingly problematic as our communication infrastructure and leisure time scales up. Ideally we want to replace these unhealthy cultural memes with healthier ones, but we run into a chicken and egg problem.
So - what are your recommended solutions to the issue of transgender ideation and other culturally bound issues?
Being cruelly blunt? Treat it like mental illness. Nobody thinks anorexia is an identity and it is treated as an illness. Even if it is to an extent culturally-bound (and I wonder about that; there is certainly the element of social contagion, but excessive fasting and problems with food intake have been around for a long time even if not described as a tidy syndrome called 'anorexia'), we don't just nod along helplessly that of course, we must give them their very own flag and add them in to a month of celebration.
Same with transgender issues. Go back to so-called medical gatekeeping; if you really are suffering from dysphoria so severe you would try to cut off your breasts or your penis, then this is a mental issue that needs treatment the same way as if you tried chopping off a hand. Maybe the treatment is helping you find ways to live in your body (and fuck off with the notion of 'conversion therapy'), maybe the treatment is surgery and drugs when you're adult enough and this is long-standing enough that it's not changing any other way. And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts (oh sorry, I mean whatever today's term for alternate sexualities is).
On the other hand, if someone who looks like this insists they are too a real woman and should therefore have access to female-only spaces, that's mental illness. Maybe the best you can do is go along with their delusions, but that does not give them the right to be treated as if they really have changed sex, not alone gender. Transgender competitors in sports? That can go several ways, but mostly that there should be a separate league or division or whatever where all trans athletes can compete against each other. If you changed genders five years ago and have been beating out cis women ever since, I think we can all recognise that something is going on due to natal biology.
I'm doctrinaire enough I'd even row back on changing birth certs because fuck it, those are identity documents. If I can legally have mine changed to pretend my parents had a son not a daughter, why can't I legally have it changed that I was born in the US and so am an American citizen? Or that I was born five years later so I'm younger? Or that I'm a different race because you know, I've always identified deeply with Tibetan culture? Either it's a legal document or it can be switched around to include/exclude elements at whim, in which case it should be as binding as Monopoly money for use in any kind of official context.
That being said, treating it like mental illness should also mean de-stigmatising it like mental illness. No, it's not normal, but it's a condition people suffer from. If we don't blame people for suffering from schizophrenia or depression, we don't blame them from suffering from delusions that they're a different sex. We treat it, we help and support them, we don't mock them - but we don't invent a flag and a celebration month, any more than we have a "Happy Global Bipolar Disorder Day! Hurrah for you, you perfectly ordinary normal person!"
People absolutely do, particularly on social media. It's a well-known problem.
Yeah, but that's part of the mental illness aspect. There aren't (I hope) people rushing to proclaim themselves "allies" and that this is something to be celebrated, not treated.
The day we get to "starve yourself to death day" as a national celebration, then we can throw in the towel.
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