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Why do you think trans is a mental health disorder.
I really need to explain why a man thinking he’s a girl is a mental health disorder? Isn’t it obvious.
If you crux with 90% of trans people, they aren't going to have object level disagreements about the facts.
They'll agree that trans women do not have wombs and so on.
And if you break down their claim that they are a girl, it's probably going to boil down to their definition of 'girl' being different than yours.
I do think it's common for trans people, particular youth, to lack nuance with regards to this.
I do think fearful people (as in the case of many trans women) are susceptible to clinging to safe, oversimplified un-nuanced defensive ideologies. ("trans women are women")
I do think this has led in many cases to unfair expectations of how other people have to treat them to be ethical.
And- this is a 'mental illness', in the sense that it would be good for them and for everyone else to fix those issues. But those mental failure states occur in most of the human population around various hangups. It's hardly a trans thing. Removing the 'illness' would stop the trans twitter presence from being cancer, but it wouldn't change the fact that they like taking estrogen and getting f*****.
Trans girls know that they have XY chromosomes and no wombs, but they also know that they have Breasts, Soft Skin, Fem Voices, and that they feel euphoria when they are refereed to using the pronoun "she" and treated in accordance to the norms historically afforded to people with XX chromosomes.
There is a category that splits reality at the seams here. "They are just men" is not a very practical use of language. "Men" don't inject themselves with estrogen and pop Spiro. "Men" don't have a girl-smell. And I don't go looking for them when I want a good time.
I admit gladly, that "they are just women" is just as inaccurate. The based trans girls I know wear the trans label with pride and will gladly differentiate themselves from cis women among their dating group.
Their definition is usually incoherent, because their position is that the word 'girl' under current usage doesn't have one place where it cleaves reality at the seams. Question, is Barbie a Girl? No. She's a simulacra of a girl. But we call her one. If we can call a plastic simulacrum a girl, then we can call a male simulacrum a girl.
But you don't want to. I'm trying to empathise and understand myself.
I wonder if it's that you're holding onto it tightly because people have tried to forcibly pry you away from it.
Perhaps things would have gone differently if it had been a friend of yours politely asking the first time, just to make a small exception in how you treat men for them.
lol. look. it's fine. I don't think any of this will matter in a decade. And I don't think your language should be policed.
But when you look at a trans girl, please don't be too cruel when calling her a boy?
All I can think of is a girl named Alice, who lives alone in a small cabin secluded behind a group house, recovering inch by inch, from the scars the gay conversion camp left her with. Reading 'Men Trapped in Men's Bodies' of all things. And swearing by it. I get unreasonably caught up sometimes. With the trans people I've met. It's been very nice, heh. annoying? chatting here. The prediction error you see. When the people here describe their experiences with the contemporaries of the Alices I've met.
This argument pushes me the opposite way. I'd rather just stop calling Barbie a girl. If you're going to use my previous charity to grasp for more concessions, I'll rescind it all.
If you ask me for 50p, and I give it to you, and then you ask me for 50p more because "you already gave it to me once, how hard is it to do it again", well fuck you.
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Because it makes you reject the material reality of your own body, and compels you to modify it in ways that are detrimental to your health.
I don't buy this. I don't think choosing to trade off life expectancy for something you value more constitutes a mental illness.
Even if you go full natural law I don't think you can reasonably argue that maximizing lifespan to the exclusion of exploration or ideals is man's nature.
Hell, I took estrogen for years just because I perceived the world as having two Ice cream flavors that I was only allowed to have one of, and I still endorse having done that, even now that I've stopped. It seems like depriving yourself to me if you don't try the other feel at least once in your life. Do you really want to die without knowing how that flavor you've had in front of you your whole life tastes?
And- the material reality of the body is that you can alter it with hormones. Why pick on people who take hormones instead of people who work out to get buff? They're also battling a material reality.
What would make you consider something consider a mental illness then? Depression driving you to suicide is "trading off life expectancy for something you value more" under your approach.
As long as you're aware of what you're signing up for, it's fair enough, but under the current ideology "trans women are women", which implies the material reality of the body is not accepted.
Yeah, depression is an illness. I could posit my standard natural law argument (the human telos throughout western history and each human life has been that of ascension and transcendence, which subverting gender is another example of, whereas depression is a lack of motivation that drains that telos- yada yada) But really I know it when I see it.
"I, a trans women need to transmute myself such that I am a perfect cis woman in order to be able to function."
That- is a mental illness. That's the sort of thing that leaves Contrapoints in a ditch for months.
"I, a trans women need to transmute myself such that I possess a perfect cisgender female morph. I will not stop. I'm working on my bio doctorate. That Y chromosome's days are numbered."
That- is Metal. Get me more girls like that I want to marry those. A whole start-up of them. We'll build our children together like proper engineers.
So even as a trans advocate I appreciate people attacking the precept that "trans women are [cis] women!" ... in theory.
The thing is- the way the lines are drawn right now,
I don't think any of the people trying to tear that down have any real interest in helping trans people find the replacement I'd like them to have.
And if it were torn down, I don't think it would be followed with a reasoned, evidence based cultural conversation on the safest place to redraw lines for bathrooms or sports.
I think, if either side gives an inch right now, the other will take a mile. So naturally, no-one gives an inch.
Fair, but so do others, and they might draw the line somewhere else.
You're mostly right, but there's a handful of people who are trying to have a reasonable and compassionate approach to this issue. I don't rate their chances of being listened to when the whole thing comes to a head particularly high, but they are out there.
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