What possible harm can it cause to call somebody the name they want to be called. Practically everyone has nicknames anyway. If I want to be called The Boy Named Sue, or Obi-Wan, or X-Box, who the hell cares? How is that any different than calling my Benny or Ben or Benjamin?
Yeah, at one point I had the knee jerk reaction against transgender folks, that they were just being troublesome or some kind of bullshit. But eventually I realized that really it was just due to the fact that it was strange to me, and I was reacting to that strangeness. Having someone who was born a boy identify as a girl doesn’t hurt me, so whatever. Let folks do what they want to do.
However, I think I still draw the line at actual genders. I tend to reject the folks who make up new genders and pronouns (like Xir or some such garbage). Not really because it hurts anyone, but rather, because I think they are just kind of… full of shit. Like, their heads are so far up their asses that they’re just making up stupid bullshit. They really need to be worrying about real stuff, rather than childishly fixating on imaginary gender words.
Again, probably still just a factor of me being an old man now, but still… seems like stupid hipster bullshit.
Zero harm. But bigots…erm…I mean people with strongly held religious beliefs about LGBTQ issues, are going to continue to test the limits of their bigotry…erm, I mean religious beliefs.
It will take the Supreme Court agreeing that sexual preference/identity counts in Title II for that to stop the never-ending string of bullshit…erm, I mean challenges by people who believe strongly that gays are going to hell.
This logic can’t really hold, because many people with mental illnesses want to do things that are actively harmful for themselves. (Unless you advocate letting the mentally ill do what they want to do?) The statistics on transgender depression – even after going through re-assignment surgery – are incredibly alarming, and they need to be talked about.
The use of imaginary pronouns is a little less problematic than the misuse of existing ones, e.g., people who prefer to be called “They” in the plural, even though they are singular entities. It actually frustrates communication, as in news articles (“They were killed,” referring to one person…).
Not that this pertains to law whatsoever, but I am a big proponent of the singular “they” in most grammar. It’s less clunky than “he or she,” more inclusive than the default “he,” and more indicative of how people actually talk. Wizards of the Coast just recently started using it on Magic cards.
100% agreed. English needs a generic singular pronoun, and singular ‘they’ has a long-established provenance in both writing and speech, and is much easier than trying to invent a new one. Here’s a good summary of the history.
That’s a fun article (pun intended). I hadn’t realized that the singular form of “you” is “thou”. Yet another excuse to sound like Thor all the time.
Even setting aside your kind of offensive assumption that transgender folks are mentally ill, it seems weird to me that you would be advocating against personal liberty here. Are you saying we should restrict people with mental illness from doing certain things?
Why is it strange? If I walk into a doctor’s office under a delusion that I’m talking to god and need to kill my infant son, I would hope my liberty would be restricted until I get back.
And yes, a substantial amount of transgender people are mentally ill, and regardless of whether that offends people, it’s important to talk about it:
That distress is overwhelmingly common among transgender people, before and after gender reassignment.
Dude, you just posted a statement by the APA which says that’s not true.
Yeah, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the mental illness, it’s about the intent to cause harm. We’d restrict anyone’s liberty in that case, whether they’d been diagnosed with something or not.
But right in the thing you quoted, it says that gender conformity itself isn’t a mental disorder, just that there is distress associated with it. Are you saying that a gender nonconforming person should be treated as a danger to themselves because their gender nonconformity puts them at higher risk of depression and possibly suicide? It’d be like treating smokers as suicidal because they are knowingly putting themselves at higher risk of cancer.
Also, even if there is a correlation between depression and transgender status, which direction does the causation go in? Being perceived as other by a chunk of the population in my view has the potential to contribute to depression, anxiety, etc.
This is what I’m trying to get at. You could explain the correlation in a lot of ways, not just “transgender people equal depression.”
? I accurately summarized what it says. A huge majority, but not all, transgender people suffer from mental illnesses. It’s astronomical.
Not sure anyone has the final answer to this, but it would be catastrophic to dismiss any legitimate arguments in this context as ‘offensive’ without knowing for sure.
I think people can harm themselves, too, through mutilation for instance. Or just being depressed and being unable to work and not seeking treatment.
The key question is dysphoria. Are smokers so unhappy that it impairs their daily life and mood? That’s the key element. For many transgender people, they are suffering from depression as well, which leads to the gender dysphoria disorder diagnosis.
What you stated was not at all an accurate summary of the portion that you yourself chose to quote. It directly refuted your statement. And this was the quote chosen BY YOU.
If you want to make a statement that a huge majority of transgender people suffer from mental illness, then you need to provide actual evidence to back that up. Please post that evidence so we can analyze it. What you posted actually refuted your claim.
No one’s dismissing your statement on the grounds that its offensive. They’re dismissing them on the grounds that they’re not scientifically supported statements.
You are really reaching here for some reason. Nothing I posted “refuted” what I said. Here’s the stats you want: Anxiety and depression in transgender individuals: the roles of transition status, loss, social support, and coping - PubMed
There’s more data to show that these rates may even go up post-reassignment therapy and surgery. You can easily find that on google, but I’m happy to google that as well.
Mental illness does not indicate anything about being a danger to oneself, or others.
The treatment for gender dysphoria is usually aimed at eliminating the associated distress. There are a variety of treatments, ranging from counselling to gender reassignment.
When you bring up the point that many transgender people are mentally ill, what point are you actually trying to make? You seem to be hinting at lots of different things.
For instance:
But ‘talking about it’ is very vague.
Are you accusing the medical profession of offering quack treatments? Do we need to talk about providing more funding for counselling, better surgery or prosthetics? Do we need to campaign for society to be more accepting of people following gender-reassignment?
There are lots of things we could talk about. Stop hinting, and just say what you mean.
The opposite of what Timex suggested – just letting people ‘do what they want to do,’ get all the reassignment therapy/hormnes/surgery they want. In many cases, that may be the equivalent of letting someone harm themselves, based on data showing depression soaring post-surgery. Exploring therapy as an option first, in more depth.
It might be, but taking away someone’s liberty on those grounds is a very serious thing (not to mention expensive for the state!).
Plenty of people engage in self-destructive behaviour (some by what we’d formally diagnose as mental illness and some not), and we very rarely take active steps to intervene until things get very serious (at which point, it’s usually medical intervention unless others have been harmed or put at risk).
If people are self-medicating or self-prescribing treatments, there’s little we can do to stop them prior to them, say, ending up in hospital, without seriously intrusive state intervention (the easiest starting points are things like regulation of sale of medical treatments or drugs, which is one such reason these regulations exist). That’s possible, but expanding state intervention is an argument I would be surprised to hear you make.
If, on the other hand, you’re suggesting the medical profession is engaging in prescribing treatments with low efficacy - well, that’s a different discussion.
I’m curious as to what position you’re actually taking.
From your source:
The rates of depressive symptoms (51.4% for transgender women; 48.3% for transgender men) and anxiety (40.4% for transgender women; 47.5% for transgender men) within the current study far surpass the rates of those for the general population.
Again, you are posting sources which don’t really agree with you. 51% is certainly not a “huge majority” much less “astronomical.” Further, having depressive symptoms is not actually the same as having a mental illness. It just means that you demonstrate some symptoms which coincide with mental illness. That’s an important distinction.
Your source absolutely does not support the notion that, in your exact words, “a huge majority of transgender people suffer from mental illness.”
More accurately, it would be stated that transgender people suffer from certain symptoms at a rate which is higher than the general population, but from a purely logical perspective, this would be expected. For most of history, transgender people have been ostracized and told that their views of themselves are “wrong”. That would, naturally, create a major source of stress and depression for them.
Further, that specific study does not at all suggest that their transgenderism itself is a mental illness. It’s talking about how to treat them for those symptoms while they undergo their transition. That implies that the doctors writing it do not view their transgenderism as an illness at all.
You would need to provide such evidence.