Frankenstein monster is kinda like Trans folks or people

[Belacqua]

That's good to know. I'm glad that the professionals are coming around.

Psychiatry is notoriously subjective in its diagnoses. The fact that something can be a disorder one year and not one the next is a little troubling.

I know a psychiatrist in the US who works in a big hospital. One of her duties is to interview patients who are seeking gender reassignment surgery. Her job is NOT to determine what gender the person really is, but simply to say if the person is in a sufficiently rational and calm state of mind to make a big decision. After all, there are manic-depressives who can decide things in a manic phase which they wouldn't decide at other times. During the manic state it's dangerous for them to have access to a credit card, much less major surgery. 

She tells me that in a very small number of cases she has recommended that the person not be approved for the surgery yet. She has recommended a longer waiting period and further counseling. But she says that in every such case the patient has simply gone to a different psychiatrist and gotten the answer they want. So apparently even professional opinions of this type are not cut-and-dried, but include a large subjective element.

No human method can be infallible of course, and the reliability of branches of science vary of course, but this does not mean that they are entirely subjective. Thus science's insistence on keeping an open mind, and that all facts must remain tentative in the light of new evidence, and its ability to admit of an error, and rethink their position in the light of new evidence, is in fact one the methods greatest strengths. 

Knowing something was wrong  or incorrect, still advances knowledge. Clinging to unfalsifiable or demonstrably incorrect doctrine and dogma has the opposite effect. 

Lets remember your claim was that all we had was the subjective opinion of the patient, this clearly is not the case. This is also a complex issue, as we are not just dealing with objective facts, but subjective moral judgments.

OK, that's fair. 

We have the subjective testimony of the individual, and then we have the judgments of the professionals, which may change over time. And we have a sort of cultural consensus, a sort of Overton window, as to what we hold to be true concerning gender. Though we don't want to determine truth through majority vote, of course.

Knowing that something was wrong or incorrect does indeed advance knowledge. But we want to distinguish between advances in objective knowledge and changes in what we hold to be acceptable culturally. If someone were to say "It's wrong for a man to dress like a woman," this is not objectively wrong like a geocentric universe. It's held to be morally wrong, and this is not an objective question. 

Well clearly if there are objective markers for identifying gender dysphoria, this demonstrates that gender a) does not always reflect biological sex, and b) that we are not limited to entirely subjective claims about gender, as you claimed.

See Paleo's response above.

He says that the symptoms of the dysphoria are caused by cultural conditions, not by the person's gender. So I don't think that the presence of gender dysphoria can be taken as objective evidence that a person is one gender or another. Only that they feel a certain way about their gender, and that society causes them to react in certain ways to those feelings. "I feel that I have a body of the wrong gender" is subjective testimony. What they used to call a disorder is simply the stress caused by society's reactions to that testimony. 

I agree that we have to keep an open mind, and just accept that we hold some things to be true despite a lack of objective evidence.