Are Transgender People Really Trapped In The Wrong Body?

Do you propose that paedophilia, sado-masochist torture/sexual slavery, incest and the like are also accepted and promoted with a ban on any form of questioning them? What about animal abuse perverts and "suicide fetishists" and other cranks?

Its a very sad society when some form of "fashion police" start making all the rules, and toss aside millenia of almost universally accepted values and principles.

Abnormality and perversion are that, now matter how loud you shout and harrass people into accepting them.

 

Again, you are an angrier than average, perceivably mostly straight male of a certain age range.

You can say stuff like that till you are blue in the face

The majority will still put you in the highest risk category with most of those things you listed

And the angrier you are about it, the bigger the hole you dig for yourself

Millennia of accepted values never existed, if anything the most vulnerable in our society are better off than they have ever been, especially compared to a millenia ago

 

You can disagree without attacking.

 

Nothing that you listed has any moral correlation with being transgender.

Pedophilia- involves the sexual abuse of people deemed unable to give consent
sado-masochist torture- between consenting adults? fine, be safe kids.
sexual slavery- See pedophilia: sexual abuse without consent (also kidnapping and holding against their will)
Incest- Usually always without consent or with diminished ability to give consent owing to abuse of position of trust.
Animal abuse- Cruelty to animals is morally objectionable for obvious reasons.
Suicide fetishists- There is no moral component to a fetish, just as there is no moral component to a phobia. A fetish can cause one to act in an immoral way. therefore not relevant to an discussion of morality.

Fail to see how you manage to make the leap between the examples that you have listed (which for the most part involve actions taken against other people either against their will or in circumstances where they are unable to give consent) and a situation in which a person makes a decision about their own body which has no effect on anyone else's well-being.

Furthermore, there is no such thing as a millennia of universally accepted values and principles, and even if there were that would have no bearing on whether or not those principles were valid and just.

No-one has to shout anyone into accepting anything, they just have to wait for history to bury them.

 

I think that the reality is some transgender people might have made the wrong decision for themselves. I say might have. It's not for sure that they did or didn't. Perhaps some of them made the right choice for themselves, but those choices adversely effected others around them like their family or their friends. Is it right to try and force reverse transitions? Is there some intervention that's going to reverse the process? I think not.

 

NO! Your first paragraph...NO! I am against ANYTHING that hurts another human being or animal!!!!!!!!!!! NOT ACCEPTABLE!!!!!!! I worry about those kinds of people, and they should be getting help.....but do whatever the hell you want with yourself for yourself to yourself...but do not hurt anyone else.....It is not the same thing......
Even bullying people is wrong....wrong.....wrong.....wrong......

 

Where do you draw the line? People get piercings......I have none, so I do not mutilate my body at all.....Some cultures bind their feet, so they cannot grow and are small....some cultures put so many necklaces...metal ones on the neck, so it has to grow and stretch to abnormal porportions.....there are many things going on.....in this world.....Asian and African culture do things that are normal for them, like I said....and so many people pierce many things about their bodies.....I will never police what someone else wants to do to their own bodies.....and then there are very sick people who are cutters.....another sick symptom like so many other symptoms of a sick society...anorexia, etc.....Why are we so focused on transgenderism?

 

My counter to this would be to say that, for the most part, the "adverse effects" that their family and friends suffer are rarely particularly terrible. Sometimes they are confused, or maybe it runs counter to political or religious beliefs which they hold. It's hardly the end of the world.

On the other hand the adverse effects suffered by the transgender person by not making the change are often much, much worse. Suicidal depression being a fairly common one. Asking someone to live with that kind of misery just because their friends don't want to have to remember a new pronoun or their mum doesn't know what she's going to tell all her friends at bible study seems a bit harsh.

While it seems likely that some people who undergo gender re-assignment eventually come to regret the decision, in THE VAST MAJORITY of cases, this is not a decision which is taken lightly. It usually comes after many years of soul-searching, and consideration as well as research into the surgery and the implications of it. People who undergo the surgery in the vast majority of cases are much happier with the outcome, particularly as education about the issue grows and there are clearer guidelines on the best way to approach the surgery (for instance, most advocate living as the target gender for one year before surgery.)

We now have standards set in place by the World Professional Organization of Transgender Health Professionals called SOC (standards of care) which, when implemented, keep regret levels very low. Regret is usually associated with the trauma of the transition, and the SOC keeps this to a minimum.

Here are some peer reviewed papers which prove how Sex re-assignment surgery is generally NOT something that people regret, and is reported to have positive outcomes on peoples mental well-being:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3219066
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1158136006000491?via=sd&cc=y
https://www.skane.se/Upload/Webbplatser/USIL/Dokument/Sjukhusbibliotek/Johansson,%20Annika.pdf (95% satisfaction levels!)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2265.2009.03625.x/abstract?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20461468
http://www.iiav.nl/ezines/web/ijt/97-03/numbers/symposion/ijtc0502.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15842032

and here are 71 more: http://www.cakeworld.info/transsexualism/what-helps/srs

More or less every modern study puts surgical regret rates at one or two percent.

Should we block everyone's access to the surgery because there are some who come to regret it? when 98% of people who undergo it find that it impacts their lives in a positive way?

In light of this, I feel like even the classic "they are just mentally ill and we are enabling them" argument falls down. These are people who went from suicidal depression to being happy, well-balanced, productive members of society. That tends to be the goal of mental health care, right? The argument just becomes "Well, they aren't happy In the right way." or better still "They just think that they're happy"

It all just comes back to the same thing- people trying to stop something that makes them uncomfortable while pretending to do so out of concern for those who it actually effects.

In answer to what (I think) might be the question that you are posing: should concerned friends and family be allowed to reverse the surgery against the individuals will?
my answer is a resounding FUCK NO.

At it's heart this is a matter of individual freedom, and people should be allowed to decide what to do with their own bodies even if that makes other people uncomfortable.

 

First of all, I'm not saying that anyone should be allowed to reverse the surgery against the individuals will. That would be really weird. Lol.

I am saying that it looks to me like it could be a classic example of enabling a behavior that has been learned by the transgendered individual or potentially trans individual. This argument seems really sound to me, BUT I'm not saying this is ALWAYS the case. I don't know nor do I care but I do like the conversation we're having about it.

As for blocking everyone's access to the surgery... No. But I do think it is a very serious issue and that someone should probably question their motives about it so that at least the person is able to take themselves seriously into consideration.

 

Excellent post, Phobe.

 

Apologies, I must have misread you ( i did think that it was a strange position to take up)

I think that if we talk about "enabling" a behavior, we have to justify that by demonstrating that the behaviour is harmful or unhealthy, not merely unusual. In this case, the evidence seems to point to the behavior being beneficial in the majority (the huge majority) of cases.

as regards people making the decision hastily without proper consideration, well, I could be flippant and say that if you're gonna chop your dick off you're probably gonna have a think about it first, but tbh the SOC that I mentioned is primarily concerned with making sure that people understand the full implications of the surgery, are mentally and physically prepared for it and have thought about the long term effects both physically and socially.

And it works, which is why, as I say, only 1 or 2 percent of people who have had the surgery have any regrets at all.

For comparison, around 45% of people regret having cosmetic surgery done (UK sample) I would suggest that the reason we don't care about dissuading people from cosmetic surgery but do care about dissuading people from gender re-assignment has more to do with our societal squeamishness about the sanctity of our trouser-danglers than it does with genuine concern for those affected.

 

Thank you. You are too kind! Lol. I think that it's wonderful that someone can make that sort of self discovery and have a new start at life.

 

Pedophilia is wrong for the reason that children cannot give proper consent, due to their age, toward the sexual acts. Homosexuality is not wrong between two consenting adults. The fact that you would make such an embarrassing and illogical comparison shows that you cannot reason properly.

Also, there is nothing wrong with incest, so long as it is between two consenting adults. The same can be stated with BDSM.

Just because one personally has a disliking for a particular lifestyle between two consenting adults does not make it wrong in any logical sense.

Your "ewwness" response does not make something wrong.

 

transgendered people are doing a better thing for this world, then those who invent imaginary excuses to object to them.
all the bullshit excuses for objecting to them, are just that, bullshit.

 

She doesn't cause thought for anything. I don't mean to be rude, not celebrating her enough. But I see no reason to celebrate anyone. Everyone knows equally jack shit. Caitlyn Jenner is just another douchebag. Don't get me wrong, I don't care if she's a girl. I really just don't care. I tire of sensationalizing people who don't know jack shit. The shit we fill our mundane lives with...it just drives me bonkers. The horror. The horror.

 

Ironically I think most of us in this thread were not specifically speaking of "her" but of those who are transgender. Of the issues that face all transgenders rather than any specific person.

 

All of Andy Warhol's Girls who are mentioned in the Lou Reed song: Take a Walk on the Wild Side, have their own pages on Wilkpedia!

check out Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis; in song, and on Wilkpedia.

 

lol The Andy Warhol museum kinda frowns on Transgender people visiting there. Its 15mins from my house. bunch of hipster snobs run the place..

 

[SIZE=11pt]You seem to be suggesting that our lives don’t revolve around CJ and that every word that emanates from her/him/it’s mouth isn’t necessarily newsworthy – That’s heresy you should be drawn, emasculated,[/SIZE] [SIZE=11pt]disemboweled, beheaded and [/SIZE][SIZE=11pt]quartered [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]Hotwater[/SIZE]

 

Okay, take me on to the Tower of London. I find her new show to be a step down from the standard Kardashian TV shit, which I will only watch late at night when nothing else is on. I view it as a comedy, laughing at a lot of things they meant to be serious.