I have no such bias. I sympathize with those who suffer from psychiatric disorders. I have a highly bipolar wife. It can be difficult at times living with her, and it is psychotropic drugs that allow her condition to be kept under control. You obviously have not done the research.
The Cleveland Clinic is doing PET scans of men, women, and transgender women using stimuli that cause their brains to light up differently. Women’s and transgender women’s brains light up differently than those of men when exposed to the same stimuli. Psychologists have long used testing of boys and girls and men and women to pinpoint differences in the ways that the sexes view the world. When children are given such tests, the transgender ones answer them in the same way as the gender with which they identify, not their sex assigned at birth. The same is true of adults. Harvard has been doing post mortem studies of the brains of transgender people since the mid 90s. They have observed that the structural differences between men’s and women’s brains are also apparent in those of the transgender brains they study. These are just four examples. There are hundreds more if you are willing to do the research.
And then there are the genetic variations. There have long been women with XY genes. There are women who are intersex or males who are intersex. They have ambiguous genitalia or a set of both. Gender and sex are not binary. Many individuals have genes that match the sex with which they identify and not the sex they are assumed to be at birth. In my own case, I have a female AR gene, which is very different than that present in men. Like other women, I do not process testosterone very well. Prior to embarking on HRT, my base estradiol was 122. My testosterone was 100. Men have testosterone in the range of 300 to 900 and women 18 to 96. Men have estradiol levels less than 20. Women fall into a range of 115 to 200. My hormonal profile was far more female than male. I also have a pelvic structure which has both male and female characteristics. My hands and feet are very feminine. I do not have the prominent brow or square jaw of most men’s skulls. Mine is more androgynous. If someone were to examine my skeleton, they would scratch their head because they would not know which one I was. Yet before I transitioned, anyone who ever met me would have assumed I was male and they would have been wrong.
Finally, for decades, the American Psychological Association classified both being gay and transgender as mental disorders. They tried to come up with therapies to properly treat this “disorder”. After much research and experience, they realized that being gay or transgender is a fundamental characteristic of certain people and not a mental disorder. They tried conversion therapy. It did not work. It is now viewed as a form of mental abuse by the professional community. Do you think you know better than thousands of experts who have spent decades studying this and who have the training and expertise to draw the proper conclusions? I think you are a tad arrogant.
Let me diverge for a moment. In your original response to Tara, you made the somewhat illogical argument that if gender dysphoria is not an illness, there is nothing to treat. It is elective. This makes no sense. Every day, medical practitioners treat people for conditions such as cleft palate, faulty optical nerves, spine deformities and many other things. These are not illnesses, per se. These are structural problems in the human body. In the case of trans people with severe dysphoria, the appropriate treatment is medical intervention to correct the incongruence between their body and mind.
The fact that you are ignorant of what is available and is being done does not mean that it does not exist. Before you make such ridiculous pronouncements, you really need to learn more about the phenomenon of being transgender. You obviously know very little.
The real danger in people like yourself pushing theories and assumptions they know nothing about is that it feeds into the hateful bigotry so prevalent in the public arena at the moment. The theocratic radical right views transgender people as being dangerously disordered. They view it as a choice. It is not. Someone cannot be groomed to be transgender any more than a transgender person can be converted to being “normal”. Until society wakes up to this fact, we will continue to see more and more hateful legislation being passed in an attempt to marginalize or extinguish the transgender community. We are a small, but normal variation of the human species. It is time that people woke up to this fact. It is not a matter for debate. It is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of science.
