Gay\transgender -- not by genetics, not by upbringing, not by choice

Included in your absolutely correct denouncement of using outlier-extremes to craft strawman arguments should be your own suggestion that gender reassignment surgery is given to "anyone who says they're transgendered."That's absolutely not the case, and it's important to accurately represent the process given how much ignorance on the subject already exists.Gender reassignment surgery is only performed after a very long series of prerequisite steps have been completed to ensure that the patient is actually experiencing gender identity dysphoria and not some completely different mental condition, and also to ensure that the patient is actually capable of and fully intends to live as the desired gender, full-time.One does not simply contract a surgeon to perform the procedure. It cannot be done on a whim.So you're right :

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Just because the christians hate lgbt people doesn't mean giving surgery to anyone who says they're transgendered is a good thing.

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But nobody is actually suggesting that gender reassignment surgery should be performed on just anyone who walks in to the surgeon's office and says they're "transgendered."The reality, of course, is something apart from that "extreme."

1) I didnt
2) The example fearandloathing gave is at least a real-world example. It's something that is in fact proposed and believed by many individuals. As opposed to your suggestion that we just "give surgery" to anybody who says they're transgender, which is not something that happens or is seriously proposed by anyone.Fearandloathing made a tangentially-related, possible red-herring post regarding a news story. You latched on to it and in the process posted an extremely topic-relevant strawman of the actual pro-transition-availability position. In a post that itself ironically decried the use of extremist strawman positions.Focus on reality. Nobody actually suggest we should "give surgery" out upon request. In the case of gender reassignment the process is extremely long and complicated with constant evaluation along the way to ensure that the person is committed to their intended lifestyle and is prepared and capable of going through with it long before a surgeon picks up a scalpel.Your amateur psychoanalysis of your tiny sample size is irrelevant. Even if a person is "not quite right" by your standards, that doesn't mean that the person is not medically and legally of sound mind. People are diverse. Some individuals will have behaviors and make decisions that seem odd to others. That doesn't actually make them crazy, nor should it prevent them from undergoing gender reassignment if they meet the qualifications established and are determined to be psychologically sound by actual professionals.Then don't make posts, even in jest or in exaggeration, where you specifically say that we're "giving surgery" to anybody who says they're transgender. And as you've also stated from the beginning, you're not qualified in the least to make the determination of whether those people are "all there up there." Your opinion is irrelevant. In order to have the procedure, those individuals had to be passed through by actual professionals whose opinions do matter, significantly more than you or I playing Armchair Freud. Irrelevant. Friendship and interaction does not convey competence to evaluate mental stability, soundness of mind, or the appropriateness of gender reassignment.Didn't you yourself just post in another thread a suggestion to a cdesign proponentist that she look up the Dunning-Kruger Effect?Why do you believe that you're immune from that particular bias? Why do you believe that your personal evaluation of the soundness of a person's mind has any relevance when compared to the professional evaluations of actual psychiatrists? Or are you simply insufficiently competent to recognize your own incompetence to make such evaluations? Again - I didn't. But - again - the example fearandloathing brought up is a real-world example of real-world opinions on the subject. Yes, it's an extreme example, but your counterexample, that we just "give out surgery" to anybody who says they're transgender, is not based in reality, extreme or otherwise. Indeed. Perhaps instead of questioning their mental competency you should be questioning your own competency in evaluating their competency in the first place.Because honestly, Taz, if a psychiatrist tells me that Person X is of sufficiently sound mind to begin the transition process, and Taz comes and says "I dunno, that person doesn't seem quite right to me," I'm going with the psychiatrist's trained, expert opinion.

He's saying that, if we're using body parts to define a person, he'd rather choose the mind as the defining part than the genitalia.I rather agree.

...because brain surgery is inherently very risky to a person's life as compared to genital reassignment surgery. And because the patient wants to fix the body and doesn't consider there to be a problem with his/her mind or identity. But mostly the inherent greater risks involved in brain surgery, not to mention the fact that not all brain-structure "problems" are possible to solve surgically.Just a guess.

But not gender surgery for a gender problem.Less sarcastically - brain surgery is not all-powerful, and neither is it particularly risk-free. Even when a problem can be specifically traced back to a specific region of the brain, we still cannot just "surgery" the problem away. Cutting does not create new neural connections. Gender identity problems are not like tumors. What, precisely, would you have a neurosurgeon do to the brain to resolve a problem of gender identity?Therapy has similarly proven useless. It's akin to trying to use therapy to alter sexual orientation - harmful tot he patient and useless for the intended purpose.What remains is gender reassignment surgery, which (even if you doubt how effective it is) is still both safer and more effective than nonexistent neurosurgery or wrongheaded therapy.So why, precisely, should we not use the treatment that is available? Even a 20% success rate is better than 0%.It seems to me that the real basis for arguing against gender reassignment is an emotional reaction of distaste toward the "mutilation" of genitals. I wonder if those who have used that term have ever actually seen the results of a successful modern gender reassignment?

No, you are the one suggesting that brain surgery be used if gender identity disorders were traced to a physiological brain issue.So assuming that is true, what would you like a neurosurgeon to do about it? Most brain-based disorders cannot be resolved through surgery. Surgery cuts and removes, it does not reassign faulty connections. You can use surgery to remove a tumor, but you cannot use surgery to predictably alter one's identity.Therefore, even if gender identity disorders are caused by a physiological difference in the brain, it is highly unlikely that surgery would be able to "correct" the problem.So why use an incredibly risky form of surgery that will be unlikely to ever be able to solve the problem, when another treatment is available? If that were the case, ringo, you wouldn;t be calling it "mutilation." Gender reassignment surgery is not mutilation. It's gender reassignment. Granted, female-to-male isn;t so great at the moment, but you'd actually be hard-pressed to identify a surgically created vagina. They have normal sexual sensitivity, and even self-lubricate. Other than reproduction, they're basically fully-functional...and they look as perfect as only a cosmetic surgeon can create. Tissue is not so much removed (only the erectile tissue is removed through microsurgery to retain the fine blood vessels and nerves) as it is repurposed.As opposed to actual genital mutilation, which involves the removal of tissue, often for the express purpose of removing the possibility of sexual pleasure and for degrading the victim with no medical benefit in mind.I think your association of an actual legitimate form of surgery with a valid medical goal with genital mutilation is both offensive and factually incorrect.I;m not being politically correct - there's an actual distinction between gender reassignment and genital mutilation. Rather, you are minimizing the horror of genital mutilation and projecting your own discomfort onto transgendered individuals.Surgically turning a penis into a vagina at the behest of the patient after long years of therapy and in conjunction with hormone treatments with the intent of actually providing a real improvement to the patients life is not at all equivalent to scraping off the clitoris and labia of a screaming, unwilling pubescent girl with a rusty razor blade and no anesthesia! Associating the two with the same terminology is beyond offensive, it's detached from reality and plain wrong.

No, we are not.A transwoman is already a woman, before ever seeking treatment. Likewise a transman is already a man.I don't believe this to be a matter of misunderstanding, but that you fundamentally disagree with the actual experience of transgendered people.But it's simple fact: this isn;t about "men who want to be women." A transwoman is already a woman. She identifies as a woman. She feels like a woman. In fact, see this study:

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Antonio Guillamon's team at the National University of Distance Education in Madrid, Spain, think they have found a better way to spot a transsexual brain. In a study due to be published next month, the team ran MRI scans on the brains of 18 female-to-male transsexual people who'd had no treatment and compared them with those of 24 males and 19 females.

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They found significant differences between male and female brains in four regions of white matter — and the female-to-male transsexual people had white matter in these regions that resembled a male brain (Journal of Psychiatric Research, DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2010.05.006). "It's the first time it has been shown that the brains of female-to-male transsexual people are masculinised," Guillamon says.

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In a separate study, the team used the same technique to compare white matter in 18 male-to-female transsexual people with that in 19 males and 19 females. Surprisingly, in each transsexual person's brain the structure of the white matter in the four regions was halfway between that of the males and females (Journal of Psychiatric Research, DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2010.11.007). "Their brains are not completely masculinised and not completely feminised, but they still feel female," says Guillamon.

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As previously mentioned, male and female brains have slightly different structure - and quite literally, a transwoman has a female brain in a male body, and vice versa.In absolutely every relevant sense of what defines a person, who they actually are, trangendered individuals are the gender they identify as, regardless of the presence or absence of a specific chromosome, or the genitalia they happen to be born with.I have seen absolutely nothing from you in the way of an actual reason why this is not the case, unless one were to believe that identity is actually defined physically, that we are what our bodies are, as opposed to our minds. You do, after all, consider gender reassignment to be genital mutilation, in which case repairing a cleft palate or other birth defect is also "mutilation."The "problem" of transgenderism presents us with individuals who, quite literally, have a brain/body mismatch. They don;t jsut think they are a different gender than what a blood test or physical examination of genitals would suggest - their actual brain structure is that of the opposite gender.The solutions, then, are to either try to change the brains or the bodies to resolve the mismatch.As of yet, we cannot alter the structure of a male brain to make it female, nor can we do the reverse. No amount of therapy or surgery or medication seems to be capable of such a feat, and even making the attempt to do as much is typically extremely harmful, risky to the patients life, or both.We can, however, perform high-quality gender transition treatments in some cases, particularly male-to-female transitions. A combination of long therapy, repeated analysis from doctors and psychiatrists, hormone therapy, and eventually surgery has proven in many cases to significantly improve the lives of patients (with the caveat that the patient's experience corresponds to the quality of the transition).It doesn;t work 100% of the time. Sometimes it negatively affects the patient. But this isn't any different from just about any treatment to any disorder you can name - there is always a chance for failure, and quality-of-life is particularly subjective, dependent on the patient's expectations going in, the results of the treatment, and the specific problem being treated. Even something as common as depression cannot be solved consistently, and sometimes not at all regardless of drugs or therapy.Saying "but look, it doesn't always work, and sometimes it's harmful" is an argument that can be used agains tthe entirety of the medical profession. You can go into surgery after a car wreck, and contract HIV from a transfusion. You can go in to get your tonsils removed, and wind up with an antibiotic-resistant infection. You can go to a doctor for depression treatment, and be given medicine that actually drives you to attempt suicide. I've known people personally who have taken medication that was intended to improve their lives but actually made the problem worse - risk is inherent in all medical procedures. It's why informed consent is used for any medical procedure - and with gender reassignment, that informed consent is set at a far, far higher standard than for just about any other treatment you could name.So we have a problem, and we have exactly one solution that is shown to work at least some of the time. Other solutions are fantasies, and have never worked at all.Yet you choose to insist that we should use these fantasy solutions. You say that "it's a brain problem, so we should fix the problem in the brain." But we can't. We lack the ability to rewire a female brain into male structure, or vice versa. We lack the medication to cause the problem to be resolved. There is no therapy that actually alters the identity of the individual in such a way, and attempts to do so, similar to attempts to treat and "cure" homosexuality, have proven to be disastrously harmful and cause a number of new and/or worse conditions to develop, including suicidal depression.If a person is absolutely sure that they want to undergo gender reassignment even knowing the risks, and because that person legitimately has a brain/body mismatch that is not at all a fantasy or a delusion but is actually rooted in the actual structure and behavior of their brain, and because modern gender reassignment surgery is relatively safe and (particularly with male to female transition) very successful in terms of form and function......what possible reason could you have to deny them such a treatment?All I see are the typical emotive reactions, labeling transition as "mutilation" and the dog-whistle assertion that those afflicted are either crazy or have a brain defect.Transgender individuals do not need brain surgery. They are not crazy, and do not require psychiatric treatment beyond therapy to ensure that they are acting of sound mind and are capable of coping with the treatment itself.They need to be allowed to be who they are. For some, that includes surgery to alter the body so that it matches the mind.I don't see any problem with that.

And the dispute is over whether having a particular brain structure is "something wrong."The problem is not at all the brain structure. Neither is the problem "the body." Neither are ill. Neither are defective.The problem is that the brain structure and the body do not match.Currently the only available method of treatment for that mismatch is to alter the body, because we cannot with any success alter the brain on this level.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

Sure.Here's the deal: neither the brain nor the body are ill. They're simply mismatched. To resolve the mismatch, the patient can choose to have one of the two altered. The decision of ich is fairly arbitrary if we don't take into account any other concerns - we have a square and a triangle, and we can either change the square into a triangle or change the triangle into a square.Currently we can only change the body, and we're getting pretty good at it.But if some new miraculous treatment were available that would alter the brain structure instead, with lower or equal risks to the patient than standard gender reassignment, then I would support the patient's ability to choose either method to resolve the disparity.If brain treatment were significantly safer and more effective, then I would view it as potentially the preferable form of treatment.The important fact that seems to be the crux of the issue however is that neither body nor mind are ill. There is no "problem" that resides in either one. Both are healthy. The only problem is in the mismatch. The mismatch could hypothetically be resolved either way. Currently the decision is moot simply because only gender reassignment is at all effective. That may change some day.

Sexual orientation is completely and totally separate from gender identity.Sexual orientation concerns the gender(s) you are sexually and romantically attracted to.Gender identity concerns who you are. A gay man does not identify as female. A lesbian is not a man trapped in a woman's body.Transgendered individuals run the full gamut of sexual orientations. There are transwomen (biologically male with a female identity) that are heterosexual (attracted to men), homosexual (attracted to women) and bisexual.The two are entirely indepenent of one another. GLBT individuals have not affected a single sector of life beyond the simple demand to be held equally with every other subset of the population. It is illegal and morally wrong to discriminate based upon religion or race when hiring for a job (for example), and homosexuals have only desired that they should enjoy the same protection, as they are a historically persecuted minority. It's illegal to refuse to hire Christians simply for being Christian, and likewise it is (and should be) illegal to refuse to hire homosexuals simply for being homosexual.Imagine, Buz, that Christians were actually persecuted the way that homosexuals have been. It's been an awful long time since a Christian in America was beaten to death for the great sin of being Christian. Never in American history that I'm aware of have Christian meeting places been invaded by the police and everyone arrested for being Christian. These things have happened to homosexuals, and often. If Christians were treated in that way, would you not want the law to recognize the Christian right to marry, to practice their religion, to meet and congregate without fear of being arrested, to have equal opportunities for employment?That's the entirety of the "homosexual agenda," right there. That's it. They only want the exact same rights that you have enjoyed every day of your life.Whether you view their "lifestyle" as "sinful" or not (for surely there are belief systems that would count your own beliefs as "sinful" as well), is it wrong for them to seek true equal treatment under the law? In what way, exactly? Are you talking about the myth that homosexuality is somehow "contagious" and that children will become homosexual simply because they see a gay man on TV? Or are you referring to the even more offensive and false myth that homosexuals tend to also be child molesters (most pedophiles are, of course, heterosexual, even after correcting for representation in the population)?The GLBT community is getting no more (less, in fact) press than the race-based civil rights movement received a few decades ago. Homo/bisexuals and transgenders are simply the latest in a long line of traditionally suppressed and persecuted minorities standing up to demand equal treatment under the law. That doesn't make sense, in large part because one would not expect "female hormones" to have an effect on lesbians. Or bisexuals. Or transmen (female-to-male transsexuals). "Homosexuals" are not at all exclusively gay men, remember.

The current discussion is not, but the thread title does include the word "gay."

What do you think it is? How do you think of yourself - as a "he" or a "she?"

Then if we really want to label you, the closest term I could use would be "asexual," although that term is already used for those who have no sexual orientation (ie, they feel no sexual attraction at all).But unless you find yourself experiencing trauma or distress over your personal identity and its relation to your physical biology, there's not really a problem.Perhaps the point you're attempting to make is that we should not put so much significance on gender identity, since you yourself seem to get by just fine without doing so? Perhaps those experiencing gender identity dysphoria should just "get over it" and "accept themselves as who and what they are?"That would be a valid point, if everyone were like you. But your ability to disregard gender with regard to your own identity does not mean that others are capable of doing so, or that they would want to. And there seems to be no great social or personal harm in allowing them their own choice in the matter.

Would it be fair to say that any perceived opposition to gender transition on your part is primarily due to what you believe to be a low success rate for patients who undergo transition?

That didn't really answer my question.Is the success rate of gender transition the primary concern behind any opposition you might have toward it being performed? Is there a different primary factor? Do you not actually oppose it at all?