Not in the military, no. But young gay people are still disowned by parents after coming out, or experience homophobic bullying. The incidence of both is still high.
New Call of Duty game let's players be Non-binary
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
- Start date
So, the problem with involving people like Jordan Peterson or Tucker Carlson is that, to some extent, these people are provocateurs. Their careers as public figures are in large part based on eliciting a negative reaction from people who don't have the social influence or media training that they do, and who have far more to lose within the public "debate" given that their access to basic rights and services are very much in question. If you're basing your opinions on the reactions these people recieve, how conscious are you of the implications things that they actually say and do?
I appreciate that you're trying to communicate this respectfully, but it's not an argument. It's just a fairly unsubstantiated attack on the credibility of anyone who might disagree with you.
If you want to imply that anyone who believes differently to you must be the result of mental defects, just bear in mind that can also be turned back. We might ask what your personal motivation is for needing to believe in a rigid binary model of gender, and come to all kinds of unflattering characterizations as a result. It wouldn't mean anything though, because it's not enough to just claim that anyone who disagrees with you is crazy, we have to be able to explain what is wrong with their beliefs.
Right, but hormones don't actually evidence a particularly clear sexual binary.
Hormones are extremely complex and vary enormously within individuals even of the same sex. For example, did you know there is an enzyme called aromatase whose entire function within the body is to convert androgens to estrogens. That's why people who use anabolic steroids (anabolic steroids being synthetic androgens) sometimes undergo physical feminization, because androgens aren't magic man juice, they're part of a complex endocrinological system which is highly mutable and individual.
Secondly, there's also no clear consensus on the psychological or behavioural effects of sex hormones. Even very basic assumptions like "testosterone causes increased aggression", which is so commonly believed as to represent a truism, is actually very controversial when you look at the evidence.
Finally, hormones produce intersexed people. A few intersexed people are intersexed because of some genetic feature like a non-functioning androgen receptor, but the vast majority simply have unusual hormone profiles, which results in ambiguous or unclear sex characteristics. At the endocrinal level at least, sex is very much not a binary, there are natural variations within the sexes and also a very clear space between the sexes.
That's the thing. Gender is not really "linked" to biological sex, at least not in a way that would require them to align.
At the very most, you could argue that gender is a body of social information which was historically related to biological sex, but even that's not actually true, because gender predates any kind of modern understanding of biology. The actual reality of biological sex is quite different from the way most people imagine it, and is actually very complicated. "Biological sex" produces intersexed people, "biological sex" produces huge variation within the binary sex categories. In short, biological sex is only binary at the cellular level, and even then it's complicated.
But in the modern understanding, gender is specifically a set of features which are either only tangentially related to biological sex or entirely unrelated. The fact that people imagine themselves to be these things called men or women may broadly align with their sexual characteristics, but there's little evidence to suggest they're inherently related. The fact that men and women wear different clothes, adopt different modes of presentation and occupy different social positions is entirely unrelated to their sex.
So, this is speculative, but the distinctive thing about all of these "disorders" is that they tend to be comorbid and they tend to produce intrusive thoughts. If you have gender dysphoria, then having loud or intrusive thoughts can make it much harder to deal with and thus, probably make you more inclined to seek treatment. Some people on the autistic spectrum can also be more imaginative and less constrained by social convention.
It's worth noting that a significant proportion of people with gender dysphoria will remain closeted for most or even all of their lives due to stigma or a lack of understanding, which is why the rates of people being referred for gender dysphoria seem to be increasingly so massively. It's not that people are turning trans suddenly, it's that a lot of people who always had gender dysphoria are now able to come to that understanding and seek treatment.
The fact that people with conditions like autism were overrepresented among the outliers should really not be surprising.
Everybody knows that autism is a mental defect. Nobody is claiming that it devalues who you are as a person, or that you should be treated as lesser, or that you shouldn't have as many rights, or that you are obliged to have corrective brain surgery, or that you should just die.
Mental defects are, for a lack of a better term, okay. They're not ideal, but it's not a death sentence either.
Even if being gay or trans or non-binary or anything other than "cis and happy about it" is a mental defect... so what?
I wasn't talking about autism at that point, rather CriticalGaming's assertion that the behaviour of trans or non-binary people can be chalked up to frustratation, confusion or difficult finding their place in the world. My point is that such an ad hominem attack can easily be inverted to characterize cis people, for example, as infantile neurotics clinging desperately to gender normativity to the point of literal self-destruction, living sad boring lives in empty Freudian emulation of their parents and so perversely obsessed with preserving their privileged status as to be driven to irrational hate and violence by the mere possibility of anything existing beyond their experience. It's easy to do that, after all we've all met cis people who fit that definition perfectly, but it's not fair and it doesn't actually mean anything.
If you're going to claim that people only think the way they do because of personal failings, then you still need to actually show how it's wrong to think that way, by attacking the argument itself, not just the people who hold it.
Define a mental defect?
Again, I was using the term as synonymous with some imagined personal failing (which may or may not be accurate). You seem to be defining it in terms of an actual mental or neurological illness which implies a flawed or inaccurate perception of reality.
Autism can be very debilitating, hence why it is considered a disability, but it does not inherently degrade your ability to accurately understand yourself or the world you live in.
Being trans is not debilitating, hence why it's not considered a disability. It also does not inherently degrade your ability to accurately understand yourself or the world you live in.
In the past, conservatives would define a "mental illness" as anything which impaired a person's ability to integrate with what they saw as normal society, regardless of whether it caused that person distress or impaired their ability to function as an individual. If that is how you define a mental illness, then sure, trans people are mentally ill, but calling them such merely betrays an obsession with conformity that could itself be regarded as pathological.
Houseman is a mental defect.
Mod disclaimer: He literally just said that isnt a bad thing.
Mod disclaimer: He literally just said that isnt a bad thing.
Tucker Carlson might be a provocateur as his program revolves around making the news sensational for views. But Peterson started as a professor and you can see his early works and video clips of him where he is merely trying to educate and question the demands that his university was trying to enforce based on the whims of some children who thought that their gender identity granted them special treatment. Which of course blew him up due to social media, which also I think is partly to blame as to why these public freakouts are so much more prevalent today that ever before.
Well you see the difference is right here in your own words. There is science that backs there simply being two genders biologically, since science uses sex/gender interchangably. And you are saying that there isn't a rigid binary of gender because of BELIEF. Facts don't care about your beliefs. People believed that if they threw virgins into volcanos, then the volcano wouldn't erupt, but we all know that doesn't work. People believed you could make it rain by dancing, but we all know that doesn't work. Beliefs change over time and this is the current meta-game of beliefs at the moment.
Well force feeding yourself hormones that are only minimally present in your body will of course undergo physical reactions. I don't understand your point here. Injecting the shit out of hormones from the OTHER sex/gender into your body of course causes your body to react to it. We are all human after all.
That's because hormones are akin to drugs and people react to drugs differently. Sometimes there are side effects with the natural drugs in the body are inbalanced to what they should be, either too much or too little. Again though this represents defects in the body because something somewhere isn't working correctly.
All of what you describe here is biology going wrong.
Life is incredibly fragile, a lot of people forget that. There is an incredible script that DNA has to follow to build itself correctly and by some miracle for the most part it does. So that fact that there are situations in which hormones don't fire off correctly is true, but it's a DEFECT. It's the something going wrong within the body during development that leads to a situation either at birth or later down the line when certain pubic hormones should fire off to promote growth or reproductive activation that simply don't, or don't provide a high enough level.
Natural variation within the sexes doesn't change the fact that there are two sexes. Levels of hormones don't usually vary to such a degree that someone can be both sexes biologically. Male or female are you only options. Your variations manifest in that sometimes you become a male powerhouse like Lebron James, and sometimes you are just "technically male" like Pee Wee Herman. (that's a joke by the way, but you get the idea i hope.) Same goes on the female side.
These variations don't create an entire realm of different genders inbetween. Because regardless of someone's desires you are or boy or a girl biologically end of story. Almost.......there are very very very very very very very few people that are born "intersex" as you describe it, usually this is a women born with an abnormally large clitoris or a vestigial penis, and is usually corrected by doctors at birth. Those that aren't correct are even rarer, however even these people with technically both genitals will grow into men or women.
No. I'm sorry I can't agree.
Gender is no social anything. Because this existed in biology well before humankind ever had labels for any of it. Your point here is because mankind labeled it as such, makes it social and not based strictly within biology. That's like saying that Math is an abstract perception of labels that mankind has created, thus 2+2=4 is only social labelling.
People have to give names to things in order to identity them, but that doesn't make them socially constructed because the this existed before it got a name.
Biological sex produces different desires in people, that's why you have men and women going into different fields of study, have different interests, have difference desires. There reason men and women wear different clothing is that clothing is designed with body types in mind, because biologically men and women are built pretty damn differently. You could argue that the fashion of the two is socially created but that isn't intrinsic to some hormonal behavior.
Remember that humans are animals. There are certain primal aspects of us that manifest even without us knowing. We all want to attract a mate, and since the dawn of time Men have attracted mates by being the provider, being stronger to protect and hunt and feed. While women have been the nurturer the host of the offspring, attracting a man by highlighting breasts and hips, breasts to show health and the capability to feed young, hips to showcase the ability to birth many children.
I wonder if that still happens today.....hmmm...
EDIT: continued below because post was too long.
Why disorder in quotes? It's literally a disorder. By putting it into quotes you are effectively "closeting" the issue. There is nothing wrong with having a disorder and if we can all acknowledge that we can move forward faster as a society and help those who need it.
I will point out that nothing you have said has gone against the idea I present that these issues are strictly mental disorders. These feelings that people have, are totally fine to have, but they are disorders and as such do not require the entire human zeitgeist to create a whole new language just to satisfy them. Instead what should be happening is more study into the causes of these issues so that we can better treat them.
I don't know about you but a 40+% increased suicide rate of trans folks POST operation doesn't speak highly of a situation in which surgery is the easiest fix. There is something deeper within the mind of these people that needs addressing so that they can be who they want to be (even if they still want the operation) and live a full happy live with it. Right now that isn't happening, and if the whole answer to why suicide rates are so high is because they aren't accepted in society, then that's a mental instability not a gender issue.
Sex Reassignment Doesn’t Work. Here Is the Evidence.
Sex “reassignment” doesn’t work. It’s impossible to “reassign” someone’s sex physically, and attempting to do so doesn’t produce good outcomes psychosocially.
www.heritage.org
A longitudinal study conducted in Sweden found that, even after…
A longitudinal study conducted in Sweden found that, even after gender reassignment surgery, suicide rates were higher among transgender people than among the…
www.kialo.com
Transgender people and suicide
Transgender people have significantly higher instances of mental illness than the general population. They are also at a greater risk for suicide.
www.suicideinfo.ca
All of these studies seem to showcase one thing. Transgender people are highly highly dependent on the acceptance of their new gendered lifestyle. Which I feel like is a problem that the science should be looking into. Social acceptance is fine and dandy but your life shouldn't depend on it, and there should be better counseling for Transfolks and people to help them control these feelings. Whether through medication or whatever the medical field figures out.
Surely through this you can see that this is a disorder for sure right? These aren't things a normal brain goes through.
I hope you can understand my POV, and know that I mean no hate or resentment towards anyone's chosen lifestyle. So long as your lifestyle doesn't fuck with anyone else's.
Yes, but not necessarily a "flawed or inaccurate perception of reality".
People enjoy all sorts of odd things. The show "My strange addition" is proof of that. One is married to a human doll, one eats glass, one eats couch cushions and another eats toilet paper.
The modern definition of a mental disorder is only warranted if it causes harm or distress to the individual or others. Pedophilic disorder is an example of this, listed in the DMS-5. But, having a sexual interest, in, say, microphones wouldn't be listed as a disorder, because one could presumably purchase and enjoy microphones without hurting themselves or others.
Are these disorders? Are only some of these disorders?
If something is not strictly recognized as a disorder according to the latest Diagnostic Manual, does that mean it's "normal"?
CriticalGaming's post above makes good points about how debilitating being trans can be.
I wanted to go at this from a different direction.
Let's say there's a society in which there is only one gay/trans person. Their sexual advances are always rebuffed, because they're the only one like them in their society.
Can they, without doing harm to themselves or others, act on their sexual urges?
If not, would this cause distress to the person?
If so, would this be classified as a disorder?
Are disorders classified as such because they are inherently harmful, or is that dependent on the society in which they live?
Is "society" the cause of the disorder, and also potentially the cure?
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Did, did you actually read these links?A longitudinal study conducted in Sweden found that, even after…
A longitudinal study conducted in Sweden found that, even after gender reassignment surgery, suicide rates were higher among transgender people than among the…
My dude, "these people depend on society not treating them like abject monsters or fundamentally broken people in order to not commit suicide, so that's obviously a mental disorder" is a bad argument.Transgender people and suicide
Transgender people have significantly higher instances of mental illness than the general population. They are also at a greater risk for suicide.
All of these studies seem to showcase one thing. Transgender people are highly highly dependent on the acceptance of their new gendered lifestyle. Which I feel like is a problem that the science should be looking into. Social acceptance is fine and dandy but your life shouldn't depend on it, and there should be better counseling for Transfolks and people to help them control these feelings. Whether through medication or whatever the medical field figures out.
Surely through this you can see that this is a disorder for sure right? These aren't things a normal brain goes through.
I hope you can understand my POV, and know that I mean no hate or resentment towards anyone's chosen lifestyle. So long as your lifestyle doesn't fuck with anyone else's.
You realize that those articles link a correlation to mental illness with transgenderism too right? I'm not trying to argue the cause of the suicides, I'm trying to highlight the illness in general and point out that these people need more study and treatment. Societal acceptance is a completely secondary thing to that, because the whole concept is "treat my illness like a normal thing" which isn't helpful to anyone.
It's the same principal as someone with delusions or schizophrenia, you wouldn't believe someone who insists that they are regularly kidnapped by aliens and probed for experimentation. Yet you're willing to believe that someone is actually a man/woman in the wrong body because of what.....they say so? Fine if that's the route people want to take, but I'd rather err on the side of getting folks like this real treatment instead of just expecting everyone else to roll with whatever.
What about the people who believe themselves to be "Otherkin", not even human but some human embodiment of whatever animal they feel like? Are we believing them too? If so, what's the physical transitional process in regards to that?
Look it doesn't even matter at this point.
This is a video game forum, let's talk about video games because this discussion is just gonna go in circles until someone gets too pissed to be rational. So forget it.
So if you hit the random button of an rpg and ended up with a fish with legs and a quiff haircut you'd take it?
Tried that. It's called "conversion therapy", and it's both inhumane and entirely ineffective, doesn't matter how gentle you make it. People try it because western culture is under the delusion that people fit comfortably into two and only two boxes and any deviation from that is illness
I'm all for better diagnostics to reduce the already tiny rate of misdiagnosis, but that's true of literally any situation. Also true is that alienation is fantastically bad for one's mental health. For another example of this: check out the autism community's general opinion of Autism Speaks. Turns out, when people like how they are, having people advocate they be changed at a fundamental level, cured, isn't help.
- Nov 27, 2009
- 5,792
- 712
- 118
- Country
- The Dreamlands
- Gender
- Lose 1d20 sanity points.
*Reads title*
An empty gesture from corporate shills but at least it's the right thing to do.
*Reads discussion*
Oh, not this again.
An empty gesture from corporate shills but at least it's the right thing to do.
*Reads discussion*
Oh, not this again.
I love how you just assume this is true, as if the concepts of sex and gender that are clinically applied today (for example in the treatment of people with GD) are not themselves the product of scientific research.
People also believed that if women wore men's clothes the vital heat in their bodies would be excited and they would start to physically transform into men. People believed that women being educated or participating in public life would divert magical animating energies from their wombs and cause them to become infertile.
There are many things which people believed about sex which turned out not to be true. "Biological sex" is a relatively recent invention. Creating a concept of "biological sex" inherently meant excluding a huge amount of non-biological information about sex, because we now know that men and women do not have different souls or vital energies which determine how they behave, or dress, or what areas of life they can participate in. That is just a thing people believed. However, it's a belief that has important material consequences, and which people find very hard to let go of. Biological sex does not give us any real clues as to how we should operate or function as a society. Heck, as discussed biological sex is not even a binary.
All gender is belief, just like all money is belief or all nation states are beliefs. Cis people are not more correct in believing that they are men or women, and that this determines the role they should occupy or how they should behave, than trans people are, because their biology has absolutely nothing to say about the vast, vast majority of the things they probably consider integral to the concept of being a man or a woman.
The point is, if you're a man using anabolic steroids, you're injecting yourself with male sex hormones (androgens), the same things which were responsible for you having a male body in the first place, but the end result is that those androgens will be aromatized into estrogens and you can end up physically feminizing yourself by injecting male hormones. It's an example of the way in which the hormones in our bodies exist in a complex and individual balance that doesn't really facilitate simplistic ideas about a sexual binary.
Define "going wrong" scientifically.
Hormones don't care about your feelings. Hormones are unthinking chemicals which drift around mindlessly forming chemical bonds with receptors. Whether or not the end result meets with your personal approval matters absolutely not one bit to the actual mechanism.
"Biology", the physical processes of the body, do not not actually care about producing men or women. Only you care, with your set of silly human beliefs about what a man or a woman is. Take those beliefs away, and the bodies would still exist independently of your personal judgement.
They don't create genders at all. We're still talking about sex.
But they do create a category of people of indeterminate sex. We call those people "intersexed".
Morphological sex, the sex that is produced by hormones, is very literally a spectrum (possibly even several spectra, depending on how you measure it). It is a spectrum in which the vast majority of people lean strongly to one side or the other, but it is nonetheless a spectrum, because it produced by the actions of chemicals that are present at different levels in all human beings, with every point of natural variation represented within the human species. Your belief that certain people are "defective" and thus don't count means absolutely nothing, because there is no intentionality to this process. It is a physical process, and physical processes don't care about your feelings.
Your belief that you, a bag of mindless hormones, can will yourself into being male, and that doing so makes you a special discreet class of person, is just as irrational as anyone else's belief regarding sex/gender. But that's okay, our world is full of irrational things which we need to survive.
How amazingly convenient!
How does biological sex do all these things?
I mean, if that true, that means trans people post-surgery have about the same risk of suicide as cis men..
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Seriously, this thread has become one big cluster fuck. It's long stop being about COD. Like I said before, it's always good to add guidelines or limits for a reason.*Reads title*
An empty gesture from corporate shills but at least it's the right thing to do.
*Reads discussion*
Oh, not this again.
The wording there is a bit unintentionally misleading, and is giving the impression it's an increase from pre-op, which isn't the case. It remains a higher incidence than the general population, but the incidence still represents a decrease when compared to pre-op (or non-op). So GRS is still the most effective approach by that indicator (as well as quality-of-life, and pretty much every other indicator available).
That the incidence remains high is explicable as a result of the enormous stigma, threat of violence, prejudice & discrimination they face as a community. It doesn't invalidate GRS.
That's even worse... How can Terminal Blue say that "being trans is not debilitating" with such a high suicide rate?