Afro Cheese
Senior Member
Originally posted by Adam_PoE
It is not conjecture. That is the finding of the psychiatric literature. Moreover, where are you getting this notion that the suicide rate remains the same whether dysphoria is treated surgically or not? If it was not a net benefit for a plurality of patients, it would not be a recommended course of treatment.
That's what I had read somewhere. If it's true what DarthSkywalker said then I am open to it... though I would like to see the citation. If nobody posts one I will try to look it up myself.
But assuming it does reduce the suicide rate I am no necessarily opposed to sex reassignment. Hell, even if it doesn't I'm not trying to tell people what they can or can't do with their own bodies. It just makes me nervous is all. Just like I wouldn't tell people not to get a boob job... something about it strikes me as them just failing to find contentment with their real bodies. It's a sort of tricky subject though since it seems less controversial if they have an obvious deformity which they seek to correct through cosmetic surgery. But when it's just a matter of they would rather have huge breasts etc... it seems like a slippery slope to me. Virtually all of us have things about our looks/bodies that we might like to change. At what point do you just learn to accept what you were born with?
But I'm still curious to hear anyone answer my hypothetical question: if it were possible at some point to prevent someone from being transgender in the first place by preventing whatever it is in the womb that causes the condition, would that not be the ideal solution? Or would we shy away from that because it seems to suggest that being transgender is actually a sort of birth defect/deformity? In other words, part of what makes me nervous about the whole transgender thing in modern society is I get the feeling we are sometimes more beholden to emotion than to facts, or to ideology rather than to science. We will seek out answers that seem more "accepting" because that reflects our modern values. And to be clear, I do hold those values in high regard. I don't want to make life any harder for any marginalized group than it needs to be. But I also hold the ideals of scientific reasoning and objectivity in high regard.
So I tend to wonder about where this is all heading. Is this not a first step towards the path of also accepting things like "trans-racial," "trans-species," etc. I know many will decry this as a slippery slope fallacy, but it seems to me that's the direction it's going. Broader acceptance of different sexual orientations has allowed room for things like furries, objective sexuals, etc to gain acceptance alongside gays and lesbians. Once you apply the logic of acceptance and normalization to one group, it gets more and more difficult and hypocritical to deny it to other, more obscure groups.
Also... with regard to children... It seems to me there is a decent argument to be made that if you start the intervention before or as soon as puberty begins it will be more effective. So if we normalize the idea of transgender children it doesn't seem like a huge leap to think that could eventually lead to the emergence of children starting the physical transition phase as preteens rather than as adults. It might just require parental consent... and in the modern era I don't find it too hard to believe there are parents who would offer that consent.