Re: What Gender Are You Internally?
why would homosexuals need 10 years do decide what they like? are you backing up condescending prejudice like that? america is no argument.
I'm honestly surprised by this question, and all I can gather is that you have no experience in your culture with that kind of social suppression if you are expressing a rudimentary confusion over why this is so.
When you're brought up to hear a particular kind of preference/inclination bashed, and you're taught that God didn't make you this way, and that if you end up this way, you must have been either influenced by bad people or bad media, or that the devil [insert random diabolical influence here] is making you feel these things and it is otherwise unnatural, and the people you rely on to provide you with a home and food and clothes (who you are supposed to love) are all telling you that those feelings are not natural and in fact debased and evil and just another selfish desire...
... yes, you're going to get VERY confused. Reperssion for inclinations outside the norm is very common in a society like the USA and especially states with strong religious mores. (It's not isolated to just us; look at any culture with strong religious underpinnings, which basically will label some feelings and desires as "BAD" in order to tide the behavior.) The political and social abuse and repression of homosexuals in USA culture also is well-documented.
Feelings themselves are something we learn how to manage by comparing our experiences with others who we trust. When everyone we depend on and trust tells us that certain feelings are bad, we repress because we don't want to be bad. Or we are told that if we just follow the prescribed behavior, or believe harder in God, or whatever solution is tossed out there, that these bad feelings will go away, then we will try out that solution. That's why here in the states it's not an uncommon narrative at all to hear that someone had same-sex attractions and behaviors as a kid, but tried to get married and be straight anyway, and eventually became so miserable that they had to try something else.
What effect does defining transgender as a mental illness have? It does nothing to improve understanding of the condition or its treatment, and it certainly does nothing to dispel negative preconceptions about it.
Its only purpose is to have a clear definition between whether or not it's a mental illness, or to have a clear definition between genders. Neither have anything to do with truth, since mental illness is totally contextual and so is gender.
There's no positives for labelling it a mental illness, but there are negatives. There's no negatives for just leaving it at the truth: transgenderism is feeling like the wrong biological gender.
I don't see why there's a need to classify it further, especially when further classification is only going to spread more misunderstanding.
That was what I was going to address, as you've noted. It's a needless classification. There are other things that could represent a mismatch in some way as well, but why is there a need to classify them with the stigma of a mental illness? Because it serves no point to classify them if the person is functioning as fine as everyone else in society. 'Illness" is a term used when we think someone is unhealthy and we want to make them well. Here you want to slap a derogatory term on something that depends on merely how much hormonal influence aligned with your karotype that happened to wash through your body and brain at week 5 of gestation (for example); it's more a variation rather than something that demands to be "fixed," especially because it's liable to not be fixable anyway (restored to karotype, presumably, by your past comments) based on clinical experience.
This is why "functioning" has become a stronger litmus test. It allows for natural diversity in the gene pool and culture, but focuses its curative efforts only on the divergent elements where the patient is unable to function normally.
Moving on, if society is demeaning and punishing people for diversity's sake, when they are functioning just fine in society and with themselves, then it makes a lot more sense to remove the stigma to reduce side effects from social stigma/cultural abuse, rather than once again blaming the person who is different.
This is the reasoning applied in efforts resulting in the destigmatization of homosexuality as a preference and transsexualism. If the person is exhibiting clear signs of mental illness where they cannot function, then they should be treated psychiatrically; but the sexual orientation and gender identity issues aren't actually the illness... it's the side effects of growing up in an aggressively negative culture.
