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Notes -
When discussing pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in the treatment of gender dysphoria, the gender-critical among us often draw parallels with bodily integrity identity disorder. This is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person experiences profound distress because of the presence of one or more of their limbs, and requests to have these limbs amputated to alleviate said distress (or tries to amputate them themselves). Colloquially, one might say that people with this condition are able-bodied but identify as disabled.
Given that no one thinks that surgical amputation is the correct treatment for this psychiatric disorder, we gender-criticals argued, it follows that surgical intervention is the wrong approach for people with gender dysphoria. If it's wrong to amputate a mentally ill's person's arm just because they say it's causing them distress, how can it be right to do the same for a penis or breast?
Sadly, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, the medical establishment has noted the parallels, and it is coming to a rather different conclusion:
Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured. It doesn't matter if the Tavistock is shuttered and there's a rash of lawsuits directed at youth gender clinics in the US: if you're a medic who's internalised (or been made to internalise) the gender ideology worldview, the implications of that worldview and the role of the medical establishment it affirms have far-reaching implications in medical domains unrelated to gender medicine itself. At this point I honestly can't rule out psychiatrists prescribing anorexics appetite suppressants to aid them in achieving their "bodily attainment goals".
*Other than why the fuck are Canadian doctors so keen to help their fellow citizens maim or destroy their bodies??!!
Touching on this subject, and also following on from the previous Culture War thread where I was asked how I feel about the current state of the Catholic Church, here we go - something to offend everybody!
Declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith “Dignitas Infinita” on Human Dignity, 08.04.2024
The RadTrads are already heresy-hunting, the media will be all over the bits about abortion, surrogacy, and transgender rights, and of course the Spirit of Vatican II types are disappointed, sorely and gravely disappointed, as per usual.
Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! As someone allegedly said, the Church may be a whore, but she's my Mother 🙆♀️
I don’t understand the distinction between curing congenital defects and sex changes? Surely the person undergoing the procedure would consider them one and the same? If the one doesn’t affect the unique dignity of the person, why should the other? Why does the natural order of the human person exclude some chromosomal ”abnormalities” but not others?
I’m not Catholic, but I’d readily accept some argument to this end. This one feels really light on God.
Because having a congenital disease is a disease and being a man or woman isn’t.
They would be wrong. God made some men and some women, being mentally ill or preferring to be the other doesn’t change it.
Thank you for translating.
What would you say the pope would say if we had actual etiology with a highly predictive biological test for trans? I also wonder what progressives would say for those who tested negative and want to claim the identity.
Symptom alleviation and palliative care towards conformity with biological sex?
Catholic doctrine does not have room for trans as, like, a real thing. It might be a mental illness contracted through no fault of the individual’s own, but the onus is on the individual to seek to conform with biological sex roles. It might be a hormone disorder, but treatment would be to adjust trans women’s hormones towards a more typical Hetero-male profile. It might be a social contagion, but the onus is on the individual to seek to conform themselves to the will of God. What it most certainly isn’t is women in men’s bodies that society has to accommodate. Some individuals- like the entire LGBT community- simply have a hard time conforming to the will of God, but that doesn’t make God’s will the one that is wrong.
But do the genitals at birth necessarily correspond to God's will more than experienced gender identity does?
(also, given the Church's recent history, concerning themselves with the genitals of infants is, as they say, Not A Good Look.)
It seems likely. I mean, if someone says they're actually a fish, and if we had the technology to turn them into a fish, we'd still probably err on the side of their mind having a problem as opposed to their bodies having a problem. If someone is physically male but claims to be a female, either their body or their mind is wrong. Given all the ways the mind can go wrong, and given that there is nothing obviously abnormal about their body, it seems reasonable to assume the abnormality is in the mind. Especially since we can't actually physically change someone from a male to a female or vice versa, we can make them look and feel a bit more like the other gender.
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