Trans-FUCKING-everything

[Aractus]

I wouldn't call them 'strikingly similar'.

I'd call them nearly-fucking-identical. They're different only because of the subject matter of the discomfort and dysphoria.

And, just like not every transgendered person needs to "go all the way" (as it were..) to be happy... I reckon plenty of people with BIIID can live fulfilling lives without "going all the way". Not all of them. Perhaps not even most of them. Perhaps even only a few of them... but some of them, for sure.

I think that treatment for both conditions needs to reflect that there is a spectrum on this kind of thing... to which some people are pretty low key, and fewer/less invasive modifications (including behavioral)/medications are required, and some people are well beyond the severe end of that sliding spectrum. It's just something of a nuanced approach that needs to be kept in mind (and I'm not saying that it isn't necessarily: i'm not a psychologist, and I don't speak for every psychologist, or to every psychologist).

Well yes, different patients have a different level of change they feel is needed, I wasn't trying to suggest that everyone with BIID "needs" to physically mutilate part of their bodies in order to feel at peace with themselves. What we do however know from transsexualism is that therapy and medication was tried for a long time to "cure" the patients and it didn't work.

The lady who's been blinded with drain cleaner perhaps could have been given access to a reversible medical procedure instead - this would have meant she could have restored her eyesight at a later time, and that might make people feel more comfortable with her transformation. But I'm guessing that she would not have been able to find a surgeon willing to perform such a procedure, and that it would have been a waste of medical time since that would only make onlookers/outsiders/commentators feel more comfortable about it - she wouldn't want to go back to having her eyesight even if she could.

It's a huge flaw of the disease-model of mental health. Even people with gender dysphoria (GID) are formally labelled by the medical profession as suffering from a disorder (gender identity disorder). This is further exacerbated by the fact that diagnostic manual is called the DSM-V or in full the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th Edition), so even if you did rename the condition to explicit remove "disorder" the manual still says it is one. How did we ever decide which is "normal" and which isn't? How do we decide what is really a "disorder" and what isn't? Some say there's no such thing as a mental disorder.

The biggest lie of modern mental health is that it's understood. How can you have one manual? Some mental health conditions are brought on by environmental factors or life experiences. Others people are born with - or are genetic - or are triggered by a disease or infection (alzheimer's, autism) - how can you lump them all together into a single manual? Some so-called disorders are certainly not disorders: in 2009 France formally declared that GID is not a psychiatric condition, whilst assuring affected patients they would continue to receive the same medical benefits as before.