Ranita Devonr
I don't get transgender and I don't hate them..what I don't get is why do they get all these surgery to feel like something their not..ur DNA will always be male and to be a real woman u have to have the blood of a woman..not fake boobs and surgery!!! its a psychological identity issue! if he wants to be a woman have a period and get overies or have a baby!! I believe the media praises these mental issues so they can get paid! all those doctors and .photographers get money off of ppl sickness!!

Auzeus
One does not identify their gender by body parts, you sort of know it in the brain. This isn't a mental disorder, read a book.

deathtokoalas
+Ranita Devonr i don't think this is the right argument, but i don't blame you because it's the way the issue has been framed to you and the way things are generally framed to us in a binary-thinking society. black or white. right or wrong. male or female.

to really understand this, you need to acknowledge (at least) five categories here.

1) cis men
2) cis women

these are genetic men & women.

3) transvestites (people comfortable in their birth sex, but who like to role play as the opposite gender from time to time)

these are a sub category of cis men and cis women. i believe this is the correct category for bruce jenner, and that he's acting on impulse in a way that a doctor should have intervened to prevent.

3) trans men (genetic women who have transitioned to living as men)
4) trans women (genetic men who have transitioned to living as women)

these are transgendered people.

there are categories of people in between with extra chromosomes and unusual combinations of organs and stuff, but these are legitimate birth defects and should not be included in discussions of transgender identity.

i am a trans woman. i am not a cis woman. i do not have a uterus. i do not go through cycles. i'll never have an unwanted pregnancy. there are plenty of things of this nature that i'll never understand, and i don't pretend i ever will. i will not speak as a cis female at public events, represent cis women or attempt to tell stories from the perspective of a cis woman.

suggesting that transwomen identify as cis-female and then tearing them down for it is a strawman argument. again: the media has spread mass ignorance on the point. but, in truth, you will meet very few transgendered people that will not differentiate between cis and trans; most fully acknowledge the difference and are very careful in clarifying it. the few that don't have a clear understanding of the difference have either transitioned extraordinarily well (and probably quite young...) or suffer from schizo-affective disorders. and, you're right: you'd have to be a little off your rocker to not realize there's a difference.

but, that does not mean that not(female) = male. there's a wide spectrum in between, and it includes people entirely cognizant of their birth gender that have made an entirely conscious and autonomous decision to modify it, without pretending to identify as cis-gendered members of the sex they weren't born as.

it's complicated. but just understand this: generally speaking, transwomen do not claim to be cis women. we understand that we're transwomen.

Auzeus
Hmmm, I guess that came out a bit wrong. Yes, males have penises, women have vaginas and all that jazz. But your brain is your core. You wouldn't know penis associated with male unless you were told about it, right?

deathtokoalas
well, it's kind of intuitive. i don't think the male/female physical distinction is a consequence of agricultural society. i think this is a base biological distinction, and we can mostly figure it out without being taught.

what's a little more true is that we need to be taught that certain mental traits are associated with gender. we wouldn't know being tough is associated with being male unless we were told, or being compassionate is associated with being female unless we were told.

the physical aspect is biology; it's the mental aspect that is a social construct. falling somewhere in the middle or off to the "wrong side" of this spectrum is partly a result of conditioning, and partly just a result of natural human variation.

but, recognizing that doesn't change the reality of the situation - which is that if you're born with a penis and happen to end up with a very "effeminate" personality, then you're going to have difficulty identifying with what society teaches you to identify with, have difficulty succeeding relative to social expectations of you and try to seek a way out of it, in order to align the physical and mental and reconnect the body with the mind. pointing out that it's a social construct doesn't abolish the social construct, or make it easier to adjust to it.

i'm fairly sympathetic with the feminist position that argues that gender identity issues are essentially the same thing as gender roles, and that abolishing gender roles will mostly abolish gender identity issues, in the sense that letting people adopt the roles of the "opposite sex" will mostly alleviate the desire to actually physically alter themselves. it's a function of the polarized nature of our extreme gender roles and how hard it's pushed down on us to conform to one extreme or the other. it's just that getting past this as a medical procedure is really on the extreme end of that emancipation. and, the biological aspect may be too strong to ever really abandon to the point where gender transitions ever disappear.

again, it's complicated. the literature refers to genitalia as sex and gender as mental. and that's a useful distinction to make if you're writing an essay because it allows you to differentiate between the two different ideas you mean. but, it's entirely ad hoc, shouldn't be interpreted at the level of a scientific definition and ultimately kind of gets the causality a little messed up.

i actually like the roman analogy, but this is a bad interpretation of it. rather, rome is london - and the british empire was the roman empire. the revolution is the partition into "east" and "west" - not a revolution at all, in fact, but a civil war within the british empire that resulted in partition and eventual usurpation. if america is rome, it is byzantine rome; washington is more comparable to constantinople.

now, here's the funny twist: byzantine rome is known to history as the collapse of greek culture into christian ignorance. the same people that invented philosophy and science were reduced to arguing over icons and launching holy wars against the persians, and then the muslims. revolutions were based on minor and irrelevant details in jewish scripture. and, in the end, they stood down and let the city fall - because they truly believed it would put the apocalypse in motion, and they preferred that outcome over the horrible conditions that puritanism places on existence.

america is indeed the new rome. but it's the new new rome. the rome that lost itself to fundamentalist christianity....

for those that aren't aware, this is a psychological test (of somewhat dubious value) to determine self-awareness. it clearly demonstrates what is becoming a widely held consensus: elephants are smarter than chimps. beside that, it's pretty much expected behaviour, with the exception of the gorilla, who would actually be expected to "get it" pretty fast. but gorillas demonstrate variation like every other species. it looks like this particular gorilla is not the hardest chest in the forest.

you're making a very subtle argument, and you're correct on the semantic detail that "gender nonconformity" is not a mental illness - it's just personal expression. but, i think what you're likely coming up against (i haven't read your comments...) is an inability to distinguish between the identity and the dysphoria. and, in truth the difference is pretty blurry having lived through it, to the point that i couldn't imagine somebody with no experience being able to actually understand it. the point of confusion is really quite understandable.

i think it's disingenuous to try and argue that 100% of the negative aspects of dysphoria are from outside sources. a big part of it comes from the reality that the person looking back at you in the mirror is not the person you want it to be, and that's entirely self-perpetuating. the actual medical argument that justifies medical treatment is to prevent depression, which is seen as otherwise unavoidable. one of the primary causes of the dysphoria is the identity mismatch. people that don't have that dysphoria can likely live happy lives as occasional crossdressers, meaning you're dealing with a different issue; the transgendered condition is explicitly defined by the dysphoria caused by the mismatch in perceived and actual identity, which to me sounds an awful lot like a mental disorder.

if there's not a disorder underlying it, it becomes a mere cosmetic procedure, and "gender dysphoria" becomes just another kind of teen angst. i think it's imperative that "i'm in the wrong body" is not understood as the same thing as "this dress makes me look fat".

obviously, it doesn't follow that there's a "cure", or at least not on the terms presented by the right. logically speaking, there are two answers: you can either try and stamp out the mismatched identity, or you can facilitate transition. the general perception is that the latter is usually more successful, and generally preferable, in an ethical sense. but, it doesn't negate the possibility of the first option - although it would require pretty heavy tactics, leaning towards an implementation of the brainwashing scenes in a clockwork orange or some other horrific shock tactics.

but, on a semantic level, the argument presented here is accurate. playing with gender is not a mental illness. rather, gender dysphoria is a type of depression with transition as it's only known (and ethical) solution.