This topic was inspired by the move TRANSAMERICA. I would highly suggest you take the time to hunt it out and see it.
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Male. Female. Gender-neutral. Trans-gender. How do we define 'gender' these days? Do we decide by clothing (cross-dressers)? Or by physical appearance (trans-sexuals)? Genitalia (gender re-assignment surgery)? Or perhaps, the most basic and least accommodating-the way you're born is what you are. What is my question ultimately.....

'With all the extremes that a person can go through to make themselves more comfortable in their own body, along with the increasingly open-mindedness of society in regards to sexual activity, is the relative value of a gender label worth anything?"

**this thread is not designed to discuss sexual intercourse or morals/ethics in regards to such. Please keep this in mind when posting. Thank you.

When you take a physiologically normal person with a mental illness, and surgically mutilate his or her genitals, you have a mutilated person with a mental illness.

you classify the gender-confused as mentally ill?

Just guessing but I think the point he has in mind is that anyone who isn't standard-hetero is mentally ill. Please do correct me if I'm reading you wrong on this Rasczak.

For my two cents worth, this is a very interestign issue - gender is two separate things - physiology and personality. Most people are born with the two in sync. Some are not and that is where things get messy (for them). On the side issue of sexual preference (I do think it is related), I think both homosexuality and heterosexuality are choices. Neither is normal - if there is a 'norm' (it's not a very useful word in this context), I guess it would be gender neutrality, or bisexuality. The choices people make on sexuality are fed by all kinds of things and can be both conscious and sub-conscious decisions.

I don't think there is a 'gay gene' as such, though it is feasible that there is some gene that affects people's decisions in one direction or the other, either directly or indirectly.

I'm not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but gender identity disorder is listed in the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which is used internationally for diagnosing mental disorders.

Kevmartin, to my knowledge homosexuality is not listed in that book and hasn't been considered a disease by mainstream mental health professionals for decades. That you would lump homosexuality in the same category as gender disorders is surprising to me.

Hi Ras, I think you hit the bullseye to me. What blows my mind is..what if the hetrosexual male transforms into the female..then a hetrosexual female transforms into a male, all through operational transformation..Then one day they meet each other.. fall in love. Then to me that is a personality disorder..and could be quite precarious through the duration of time with this particular situation..surely it has happend.

I have a friend from the very early years..she is a homosexual..In her presence, its like being with a man, talking to a man..and she knows all and I mean all the man things..I have seen her come into this form of living from a child..I dont understand it all, I use to think she was a tomboy,,well she was actually and just lost her way along the path and since the opposite sex didnt take to her well because of being a tomboy, I have often wondered if she didnt slip into another form of acceptance with her born gender. Havent seen her for years now..but I do know that I know the girl/boy liked men..on the other hand, performing like them was not going to win her a boyfriend..I digress

Sherri

Sherri

I don't lump them together as you put it at all, though I think you would find that many people who identify themselves as homosexual would certainly draw parallels between the two, perhaps because of the commonality between their experience of prejudice on the basis of sexual identity (the reason you often see the phrase "transgender, bisexual, lesbian and gay communities" and variations on that)

As for the DSM-IV, I am also not a psych doctor, but do note that in looking for it online, I found the current edition to be 1994 with 2000 revision (no revisions relevant to this issue as far as I can tell), in itself nearly a decade old, so its difficult to use it as a benchmark of current thinking.

Also from what I can see, this DSM does not paint much of a picture of hope if one is to accept their limited attempt at understanding this phenomenon.
This seems to add up to "we don't really understand this, so this is what we think might be going on and how to best guess a 'treatment'".

This sums up for me the question of validity over the DSM on this issue:

I understand what you're saying, but it is worth repeating that there really is no "transformation." It just mutilation.

What surprises me is the animosity directed at me for pointing out that its a mental illness. That indicates to me kevmartin and the other have some stigma against the mentally ill. I don't. I feel sorry for someone with this disorder we're talking about, just as I feel for someone who is experiencing depression or other disorders, and I'd like to see them treated and their symptoms improve.

Some are just happy to have them get their genitals mutilated as if that's a cure. Anyone heard about the disease where people get obsessed with having limbs amputated? They basically have an allness, another form of dysphoria, where they can't stand the presence of their legs, and their legs feel unnatural. Would anyone consider for a second that its acceptable for a doctor to surgically amputate the person's limbs for them and call them cured? I guess if someone shows up suicidal, the cure in their mind would be putting a bullet in their head for them, by that logic.

If someone thinks they're an elephant in a human body, or wants to be an elephant, the cure isn't plastic surgery to add a trunk where their nose was and big floppy ears, they need to be treated.

Healthy homosexuals aren't attracted to the same sex because they identify with the opposite sex. I know lesbians, and none of them wanted to be a man. Some of them don't feel they have to follow all the social norms regarding women (like wearing makeup, feminine clothes, carrying purses, etc) and they don't. That's not a mental illness, those are just choices about how one presents themself. The same is true of gay men.

You lumped them together, intentionally or not. You also seem to have the predjudice that its an insult to say someone has a mental illness.

The fact that people are prejudiced towards homosexuality and persons with gender dysphoria do not make the two the same. Kev, you really need to put some effort into critical thinking. You make these fantastically stupid leaps of logic that make me embarrassed for you.

If the phsychiatric/mental health community felt it needed revised, I'm sure they'd have done it.

From what I understand of this tool, its purpose is not painting pictures of anything, its not an exhaustive how-to on treatment, its for diagnosing disorders, and it is employed universally by the mainstream mental health community.

I'm only guessing, but I expect this is a fairly "new" disorder - by that, I mean there probably weren't a lot of people coming forward fifty years ago to be studied. The psychiatric field itself is relatively new.

Hopefully, they'll find ways to treat these people. I'm sure the methods employed to treat those with depression are far more advanced today than they were fifty years ago. Shock therapy or a labotomy anyone?


This seems to add up to "we don't really understand this, so this is what we think might be going on and how to best guess a 'treatment'".

This sums up for me the question of validity over the DSM on this issue:[/quote]

Several things are wrong here:

1. The logical fallacy of presupposing the conclusion. That is, they present the legitimacy of SRS as a premise, while trying to prove something that would legitimize SRS as a treatment.

2. The claim that listing the disorder isn't "fair" bothers me. That's just a dumb argument. If its a disorder, it would be unfair not to list it. The question is whether somene who believes they're something they aren't is mentally healthy. Its not.

3. Loss of civil liberty?

Perhaps you misunderstood when I said "I do think they are related" - I was referring to the issues, in terms of bringing up sexual preference at all in the thread. "Lumping them together" implies to me interchangeability or something along those lines, which is quite different. I also absolutely do not have any prejudice against those who experience mental illness, having been there myself. Indeed, I believe the majority of people do have some degree of what science calls 'mental illness' (whether they acknowledge it or know it, or not).

No, that is correct - the fact that people are prejudiced against two things does not make those two things the same, but it does mean they have a commonality, which can be useful in understanding (the basis of all communication and knowledge). Probably you see my explaining as 'leaps of logic' because you don't gasp interconnectedness at all, meaning for you to follow something, every infinitesimal step would need to be laid out in front of you. Which admittedly I don't do - I do tend to assume that people can connect some of the dots themselves as they communicate.

I don't think there is much point in getting in to a deep argument over the validity of the DSM - I had never heard of it until yesterday, and have nothing against it specifically for that reason. I only mentioned it in terms of checking what you had claimed as the rationalization of your point that gender identity 'issues' are a mental disorder. I brief, I simply don't accept this as fact. Anecdotal evidence suggests to me that there is more to it - and my own interpretation is that I originally mentioned: Gender is two separate things - physiology and personality. Most people are born with the two in sync. Some are not and that is where things get messy (for them).

To number 1, I would think you would need to take the whole statement in context, rather than as a brief excerpt. I would have just posted the URL in the first place, but posted the excerpt just for you, since you expressed a dislike for references without quotes or paraphrasing (even if just for the sake of it).

To number 2, I think you are missing a factor, stemming from oversimplification once more. You are assuming that gender is a simple thing that can obviously be determined by the X-Y chromosomes. That, to me, is a dismissive approach to trying to understand what we do not know. Hence my personal belief that there seem to be two aspects to gender - physicality and personality. And in the case of personality, I'd go further and say it seems to be a sliding scale, rather than a simple yes/no attribute. For some, their sliding scale is balanced somewhat away from their physical attribute, and we just say that makes them a 'masculine woman' or a 'feminine man'.

So where does science lie when that sliding scale goes further in that direction. Could it not be that this is when they experience the serious gender identity question? Who are we to say that the physical attribute should be dominant over the personality/emotional one? To me, I believe that such a decision should ultimately be in the hands of the individual.

I was born with female genitalia and I am comfortable within my own body. Having breasts, having a vagina, being called a female, wearing female clothing isn't uncomfortable for me. Therefore I classify myself as a female.

To be born with a body that makes you feel lost, out of place, broken, disgusting, must be a horrible experience. And I wouldn't call that a mental illness, I would simply say that the body, soul and mind aren't in sync. In some cases it is totally biological.

I don't give a rats arse what someone identifies them self as, as long as whatever they choose to be gives them as much comfort in their identity as I have.

To take that away from someone and label their feelings as a mental illness, is just selfish and ignorant. They just happened to be born in the wrong body - imagine if it happened to you

So, if someone believes they are an elephant, or wishes they were an elephant, is the answer to have plastic surgeons fashion a trunk where their nose used to be and give them big floppy ears?

That was a question.

I don't think it's a realistic analogy in the context you are trying to suggest it. However, it does seem to relate a little to the whole concept of cosmetic surgery. Would you say someone is mentally ill because they choose to have cosmetic surgery to radically change the appearance of their nose for example?

That's an outstanding question.

In the case of a gross deformity where something isn't working correctly, like a cleft palate, or an injury that causes a gross deformity, repairing the problem is certainly not a case of mental illness.

When it comes to something along the lines of a breast enlargement for a woman, cologen injections, etc., my own, very personal opinion, which I won't push on anyone else in this particular case, is that there is a little mental illness involved.

I worked with a woman who had a breast enlargement some years back. The military did the surgery for free, but she had to pay for the implants. Anyway, she asked my opinion on it before she decided on the surgery.

Now, this person was already an attractive woman - she may not have been super model material (neither am I) but she had nothing to be embarrassed about. I asked her why she wanted larger breasts. She said it was to look better or something. I asked why she wanted to look better. Eventually, we got around to her saying something like more men would be attracted to her. I then asked her what kind of men she was trying to attract. You can imagine the rest.

Incidently, I've come to suspect she may have been lying. I have begun to wonder if women have this kind of surgery to impress other women somehow more than to attract men.

Either way - there are problems there. It's a much milder form of dysphoria. But dysphoria nonetheless. Even if its just vanity, vanity to the extreme you'd go under the knife - surgery is always risky - is just that, extreme. Not healthy in my humble opinion.

Then there are exceptions like a women I saw in a documentry. She had been morbidly obese, underwent gastric bypass surgery, lost something like 300 pounds, and had a lot of extra skin hanging around when she reached her healthy weight. She had some surgeries performed that repaired the damage caused by the obesity. I wouldn't call that ill.

I forgot to bring it all back around to your first remark. It's a fine analogy. Its wanting a plastic surgeon to make you into something are not. In a sense, so is breast enlargement surgery - its making a smaller breasted woman into a large breasted woman. There are, however, degrees. The former is a significan disorder, the latter indicates some emotional problems.

I never meant to dispute Ras' belief in regard to mental-illness and these gender issues, I was simply trying to clarify what i though may have been an important misrepresentation. Clearly, it was not.

I did have some initial argument against it, but that was largely due to my own non-standard distinctions between social-illness and mental-illness. A personal distinction predicated by nature-vs-nurture. A brief explanation; Mental-illness--a child has a chemical imbalance and is diagnosed with ADD. He is given chemical balancing drugs to return him to the 'norm'. Social-illness--a child is brought-up in an environment that places no importance on attention to 'the task at hand' and is diagnosed with ADD. He is coached through the issue and returns to the to 'norm'.
I see that this may not be shared and the science community considers them the same. Given this wide grouping, i can also see how a presence of 'degrees of illness' could also be evident, if not official. 'Acute' and 'Advanced state' are terms often used to express such. Rasczak, you've clearly given this fair amount of thought and chosen a clinical standpoint.

Gender issues don't seem to be well covered at all according to Kev findings (be it whatever reason). However, the research done by Dr. McHugh (psychiatrist-in-chief at John Hopkins) has lead him to take a blatant position against SRS. While he doesn't label it 'clinical mutilation' (or any other defaming term) he does say that it's not treatment as much as collaboration with an illness. ( Johns Hopkins Psychiatrist Urges End To Sexual Reassignment Surgery )

The scientific community seems to have come (or is heading to) a definite conclusion to the question of 'What sex am i really?'
Good.

Does it really matter though?
When i fill out a job application, a loan request or want a credit card, I check the little box that says [Male]. Why? Anti-discrimination laws make this a moot point. The only laws that this remains a defining factor in are marriage laws. Society is clearly changing with recent cultural concepts. So, does asking me what gender I am really serve any purpose other than asking 'What genitalia do you have?'? A purely medical question at best.

**BTW, in defenese of Ras' 'elephant' example... Catman

I have to say I am of a similar opinion when it comes to the majority of cosmetic surgery, but wouldn't feel comfortable calling it (necessarily) a characteristic of mental illness. It's just personal choice really - to change one's appearance. Otherwise, where do we draw the line? Is Botox a sign of mental illness? Dying out your grey hair? Wearing makeup? All are things that we could easily say are a sign of dysphoria, and would not seem necessary to one who is genuinely happy. But I think dysphoria can sometimes be put simply in the realm of normal mood ranges, rather than mental illness. Where the line is, who knows - probably there is no hard and fast line.

There are degrees. Remember, I said just a "little" mental illness. They don't need institutionalized. By the time you let someone put you under and cut you open, and deal with all the pain of recovery for weeks, so your boobs appear larger, there's a little something wrong there.

Indeed. As I said earlier, I think the majority of the population suffers from some degree of 'mental illness'. We can make similar illustrations about addiction for example, and see that as a mental illness. For (a legal) example, someone foregoing health insurance or medical treatment because they can't afford it, while at the same time spending hundreds of dollars a month on cigarettes, or nightclubbing. Or, where does the line lie between 'staying in shape' and an 'eating disorder'?

I think to be considered legally insane, one has to not know something is wrong. But that doesn't even apply to what we're talking about. You ask good questions.

I know people who obsess about exercising and eating right. Then, like you mention, there are those with eating disorders. People addicted to alcohol or cigarettes are addicted.

The real question is "what do we do for them?" Someone who goes to the doctor and