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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.
There's a difference between fixing a broken car and converting your car into a boat or vis versa. Fixing the car brings it closer to the Platonic ideal of what the car is supposed to be, converting it into a boat is something different.
I think Christians have a level of innate bioconservatism, Adam was directly made by God. You're not supposed to mess with God's vision, maleness or femaleness.
Adam was made directly by God. But his children were not. Obviously, claiming to know the will of God better than the Catholic church is hubris and heresey... But to me it seems obvious that the Nature of Man is to transform, evolve, create, adapt, and so on.
To create something that God needed to create you in order to create, is to act as his pen, His Glory. So why do we call the things that only Humans could have build Unnatural when they are clearly part of His design?
The Catholic argument, I believe, is that, given Free Will it is entirely possible to do things that are not explicitly part of his design. But I don't buy it. At least not in the context of humans engaging in self-creation. Even when I take Natural Law as an axiom, it only serves to make me intuit transformation and metamorphosis as being said nature.
Man's nature isn't to have legs, its to have legs until he grows great enough to Glorify god in greater ways. Why didn't God create man perfect to begin with? Because then Man would be God and God would have created nothing. It is the process of becoming itself that glorifies God. It is the realization of man that he needs to be more like God that proves God's relational greatness.
And... here I assume, is where the preacher throws me out for being some kind of weird Unitarian instead of a Catholic and also for giving long heretical speeches in Church.
The question is, without a solid goal of "perfection" you can't really meaningfully pursue it. One man cuts off his own leg because he believes that will make him more perfect, is that glorifying God through an act of self-creation? If your goal is merely to transform, then cutting off your own legs is as good a goal as growing five more of them. But if your goal is perfection, to get better and better, to "grow great enough to Glorify god in greater ways" then you need a fixed goal to be working towards. Chesterton put it well in Orthodoxy:
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