Quote (Handcuffs @ Feb 14 2024 01:12pm)
Given your legitimate curiosity, I'll give a legitimate answer. Firstly, it's not about avoiding a stigma of "mental health", but that it historically has been viewed as a mental illness and subsequently treated as such (a point that most people either want to ignore or are ignorant about), and it did not "work". A simplified explanation of "work" in the mental health field is the idea that the goal is an alleviation of symptoms and return to a statistically normalized baseline (ie. To go from depressed to not-depressed, psychotic to not-psychotic, etc.). The belief that most people have in this thread is that the experience of being transgender, or of having Gender Dysphoria, is a mental illness that needs mental health treatment-- but specifically in a way that would result in people being comfortable and identifying with their natal/assigned sex in exactly the same way that you and I do. They are unable, however, to explain the rationale for that other than "Well it just seems wrong", and they are unable to articulate what effective treatment would then look like that actually "works" from their perspective (ie. that the person would no longer experience dysphoria and identify with their natal/assigned sex). Again, we have tried approaching it from that perspective, and those forms of treatment did not "work" in the same way that approaches in which being gay was seen as a mental illness (and the goal was to make people straight) did not "work".
As a result, the field has two main ways it can go: Either we just haven't figured out the right way to treat it as a mental illness, or it is perhaps not a mental illness and should be understood in a different way via a different branch of medicine (ie. human development). The former has been tried many times without different results (and worse outcomes), so it is not simply because of a "woke invasion of the sciences" that explains why the latter is the path the field has chosen anymore than it was a "woke invasion of the sciences" that made being gay no longer designated as a mental illness. It also seems that people in this thread are of the opinion that the movement to move this out of the psychiatric literature and more into a human development literature is suggesting that "nothing is wrong", which is not the case. We have different fields of medicine for a reason, and just because we're saying that the way that this is "wrong" is not best understood as mental illness does not mean we're saying that therefore nothing is "wrong". There definitely is something "wrong", but this wrongness is better understood as a developmental incongruence that we don't fully understand yet but have enough research and information to securely arrive at this conclusion at this time. Just like we don't fully understand why some people are gay, but are secure in recognizing that being gay is not a mental illness.
ok i understand what you mean now in the distinction.
im still looking at a picture of two massively overlapped venn diagrams, in which trans people are overwhelmingly clinically depressed. we may need therapies well outside of the purview of a psychologist to treat those (hormonal treatments, gender reassignment surgery, a rom com style makeover montage, etc) but the underlying depression is still there. and what is the cause of that depression? well it seems to me that it is far more extensive than just the mind/body disconnect around sex and gender. Blaire White is the unicorn that can go about life without extensive therapy with a psychologist, the vast majority require that.
the math of that just adds up to me as "being trans isnt a mental illness, but the vast majority of trans people are mentally ill, and need treatment for mental illnesses that exist because they're trans". perhaps 100 years of growth in societal treatment of trans people will change that.