At one point I considered the same argument. It’s not that it has no validity at all, but once you consider it, it eventually breaks down. Belief that transgender people are just the result of mental illness is not a logically tenable position that holds up under scrutiny.
In general, I’ve found that people who want to argue over whether X is a “mental illness” are those who tend to stigmatize mental illness.
You don’t see long debates over whether someone who wants a mole removed has an “illness”, or whether high blood pressure is an “illness” vs merely a “risk factor for illness”. It doesn’t really matter what you want to call it, what matters is what you want to do about it.
Anyway, since gman hasn’t produced any useful data for this exercise, I’ll present an article that actually addresses the issue:
Psychiatric morbidity and mortality were identified by data from the Danish Psychiatric Central Research Register and the Cause of Death Register through a retrospective register study of 104 sex-reassigned individuals.
RESULTS:
Overall, 27.9% of the sample were registered with psychiatric morbidity before SRS and 22.1% after SRS (p = not significant). A total of 6.7% of the sample were registered with psychiatric morbidity both before and after SRS. Significantly more psychiatric diagnoses were found before SRS for those assigned as female at birth. Ten individuals were registered as deceased post-SRS with an average age of death of 53.5 years.
Exactly.
It’s hard to assess, even though that paper has a good crack at it, success of SRS (and why/why not). Mainly because getting a solid control population would be ethically questionable.
“Transgenderism” isn’t in the DSM-5, but gender dysphoria is, which means unhappiness with your gender that is debilitating. Depression and anxiety are also mental illnesses that, as we established, have incredibly higher-than-normal frequency among transgender people, both before and after dramatic surgical or hormonal options are pursued (although the data is new and inconclusive because of limited sample sizes, so no one can say with perfect certainty). So, yes, again, a very huge number of transgender people have mental illnesses, compared with the general population, and those illnesses don’t go away enough with treatment.
The idea that we can solve this mental health crisis simply by treating transgender people better, of course, is untested and unproven, and comparisons to homosexuality are not airtight and risk being biologically and logically (a) unsound and (b) dangerous without more research.
Do you actually believe that the purpose of hormonal therapy and sexual reassignment surgery is to treat depression and anxiety??
Depression and anxiety are treated in high-risk populations just as they are treated everywhere else, mostly with medication and behavioral therapy. It is woefully naive to suggest that surgery should simultaneously solve every problem.
Was going to make a similar point but I see you already made it earlier in the thread, and probably better stated.
It’s to treat the depression (or dysphoria) linked to the gender issue, yes. Without the dysphoria no doctor would do the procedure.
Gender dysphoria and depression are not the same thing. You can have one and not the other. You can treat one and not the other.
For reference:
Yeah, Northern racisim in the Jim Crow era could be even worse:
Remember that the state of Oregon banned black people…
Could you acknowledge that a treatment for dysphoria that simply results in major depression (or does not solve major depression comorbid with dysphoria) is an unsuccessful treatment? And that perhaps a different treatment for the dysphoria should have been tried?
Are there other, more successful treatments?
Uh… did you read that page?
Yes. One of the key goals of psycotherapy is to figure out what the person really wants that would make them happy. Sometimes it’s not, in fact, swapping genders.
I feel the need to point out, again, that you are taking a position that is virtually identical to that taken by people who advocated similar treatment for gay people.
I think pumping someone full of hormones to change their physical sex characteristics can be far more akin to gay conversion therapy than simply advocating increased talk therapy to make sure people are aware of all the risks that are quite unique to the process, which in many cases produces more negative results than were anticipated, and may not even be necessary. I’m not even really sure what you’re disagreeing with here.
The main treatment for gender dysphoria is counseling + hormone replacement + more superficial things, and if desired, surgery (though my understanding it rarely comes to that). That is from the link you provided.
I ask again, is there a more effective treatment? You haven’t demonstrated that there is.
I love it when someone with no fucking clue hits a few wikipedia pages and regurgitates it as if they have a clue. Please stop. You’re embarrassing yourself. A lot.
Treatment for gender dysphoria is not intended to “solve depression”. It is intended to treat gender dysphoria. So treatment for dysphoria that improves symptoms of dysphoria is a successful treatment, regardless of whether it also improves symptoms of depression.
I haven’t seen any good evidence that treatment for dysphoria increases the risk of depression. If anything, the opposite is true.
Right, but there are signs the more complicated treatments are simply ineffective or harmful. See this, from the Guardian, citing researchers: Sex changes are not effective, say researchers | Health | The Guardian
Quoting:
With so much uncertainty, I think it makes sense to err on the side of not comparing people who are skeptics of these treatments as bigots or 'gay conversion 2.0" crowd. I think more emphasis should be placed on counseling.
Like I said, there’s so little long-term data about the effectiveness of some of the treatments (like surgery), that it’s hard to say if there’s a “more effective” treatment. There can be so many other mental health concerns going on at once, that sometimes what appears to be a person who would benefit from hormone therapy or surgery, may not in fact be one.
Sure, but if it causes depression – for example, by enhancing social isolation, or leading to feelings of doubt – that’s not a great outcome, right? Sort of like solving a leg injury by giving someone persistent heart attacks.