Transexuals

[Esquilax]

Do I think this is the healthiest way of dealing with the disorder? I admit I'm no expert, but just from a personal common sense type perspective, it just seems to me like the healthier approach would be to treat the disorder through therapy/etc and help these people accept themselves for who they are. Rather than taking synthetic hormones and undergoing extensive surgeries to try to change.

See, I noticed this line of reasoning in Wooters' post too, this "accepting themselves as they are," thing, and I think it assumes a connection between your "proper" gender and your physical body that really doesn't need to be there. Essentially, why assume that who you "really" are is what your physical body dictates, rather than your mind? I've yet to see an answer to this, but even if one could be made, isn't there an equal argument we could make that, since the brain is also a part of the body and that brain, in transgender people, is telling them that their body doesn't match their internal model of themselves, that their bodies are suggesting a "who they really are," that doesn't match their physical sex? I mean, at most you now have two competing physiological impulses- the brain and the genitals- fit to inform who a person "really is" in this model: why on earth would you preference the genitals over the brain?

I mean, this is kind of an irrelevant line of reasoning anyway, since a proper understanding of gender (the mental state, as opposed to physical sex) puts paid to the idea that there's little actual connection between one's internal gender and one's exterior sex anyway: I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking that the transgender community are just people surgically correcting their physical sex and nobody else, because that's how the media and common understanding tends to play it, but in truth there's a far greater scale than that. There are transgender folks who don't want reassignment surgery and are okay with their genitals the way they are, genderqueer people whose gender identity fluctuates and occasionally aligns with their body, agender people who feel no particular affiliation to either gender, and so on. Examining the reality reveals a gender spectrum without even a guarantee that any given individual will have a fixed place upon it, and to suggest that, no, all of these gender identities are wrong, all of these brains are just wrong, but the penis and vagina have it perfectly right all of the time merely because that happens to align with conventional wisdom on the subject (which, notably, transgender people have not historically had much of a voice in to begin with) reeks of special pleading. Not only does it stand on a lack of understanding of the distinctions between sex and gender, which we're still only really starting to discover, but it appeals to traditional views of gender for no adequately justified reason at all.

Sorry if that sounded standoffish, CL: I know you didn't suggest a lot of this in your post, just some of your language snagged in my mind and got me off on a tear, here.