Transexuals

[SteelCurtain]

Seriously, the logical conclusion to your argument is that Prozac shouldn't be covered for people with depression.

[I_am_not_mafia]

Then you clearly do not understand the consequences of not being able to have SRS.

           You can have SRS surgery to remove a cancerous lump, I disagree with employers having to pay for it. These surgeries should be self-funded, it's their problem that they feel like a different gender are about to die. I can understand the fear and the self-hatred that can come with Gender Identity issues cancer. You can always finance SRS operations, I would just hate the fact of having to pay more for the sake of others in this regards. Now, since I'm not a complete ass-hole I have a idea for employers to be able to cover a operation.

Changed your quote. Why is this different to what you originally said?

[I_am_not_mafia]

Again, if you think it's strictly cosmetic, you do not understand it.

         How else could you classify it?

Life saving surgery.

[Regina]

How much more would people be paying though? I mean come on, it's not like people are rushing out in their droves to get SRS. This is something that only affects a vanishingly small proportion of people. Transgender people are probably less than 1% of the population, and even then not all trans people seek SRS. Having insurance-funded healthcare for SRS is hardly going to make a difference in any individual's pockets.

I don't see people going this hard against obese peoples' self-inflicted heart attacks and diabetes either, a category tens of millions of Americans fall into. Interesting.

[I_am_not_mafia]

If a baby is born with under or over developed genitals, it used to be common practice to perform surgery to change them to either male or female and raise them in that gender. Luckily this practice is not so common now because they often made the wrong choice and it had to be corrected later in life. But no one complained about it being paid for. Yet in the same way the wrong gender is identified for transsexuals and they also have to correct the problem later in life yet people complain.

The problem comes from ignoring the brain because it is not as visible as the body.

[Alex K]

The odd thing is - and I don't mean that in any way representative for anyone else's experience - that while I do feel perfectly comfortable and at home with my current gender, if I were to wake up tomorrow in a woman's body, I would be very surprised, but I cannot imagine that I would be terribly troubled by it.

Seriously, I'm pretty sure I'd just go on living precisely as I do now - with some amount of unusual changes in lifestyle, obviously, but I am quite confident that I wouldn't worry about it too much unless I'd suffer from sexism in society. Whether I'm male or female doesn't obviously (to me) figure into most of the things I do. To quote our Chancellor, I don't walk around all day thinking "man! man! man!".

Not knowing too much about it, I still suspect for that reason that there is more to dysphoria than just being "trapped in a man's" body or vice versa.

[SteelCurtain]

If you woke up tomorrow feeling like your penis was wrong, and that it isn't supposed to be there, though, that would be different. The dysphoria describes the separation between the physical body and the mental state.

It must be terribly unnerving. And unrelenting.

[Alex K]

If you woke up tomorrow feeling like your penis was wrong, and that it isn't supposed to be there, though, that would be different. The dysphoria describes the separation between the physical body and the mental state.

It must be terribly unnerving. And unrelenting.

Yes, that's exactly what I imagine dysphoria to be like, and I'm not saying that that's not a thing. I just don't think it can simply be reduced to "being stuck in the wrong body"...

[I_am_not_mafia]

The odd thing is - and I don't mean that in any way representative for anyone else's experience - that while I do feel perfectly comfortable and at home with my current gender, if I were to wake up tomorrow in a woman's body, I would be very surprised, but I cannot imagine that I would be terribly troubled by it.

Seriously, I'm pretty sure I'd just go on living precisely as I do now - with some amount of unusual changes in lifestyle, obviously, but I am quite confident that I wouldn't worry about it too much unless I'd suffer from sexism in society.  Whether I'm male or female doesn't obviously (to me) figure into most of the things I do. To quote our Chancellor, I don't go around all day thinking "man! man! man!".

Not knowing too much about it, I still suspect for that reason that there is more to dysphoria than just being "trapped in a man's" body or vice versa.

I've heard that said before. But if you were to wake up in a woman's body tomorrow, then you've already lived many years as who you were meant to be. You were raised from birth without any problems with gender and without years of being forced to act and think like something you are not. Without the repression or all the associated problems of trying to fit in and failing, such as lack of self esteem and the self hatred etc. You have already grown up well adjusted and with the confidence in who you are.

Waking up in a body of woman the next day would be a novelty at first. Hey! Breasts! But then try living your life as a woman when you have been raised as a man. You'll find lots of things no longer work any more that did work before. Like the kind of language that you are supposed to use, how you are supposed to interact with people, body language, what people expect you to value, what people expect you to be capable of and what they think you'll be crap at regardless of what you can actually do. You don't realise how much you have been conditioned by society because it is consistent with your physical gender and your own values.

These things aren't so obvious if you're not trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. We live in a society with strict gender codes. I like to refer to Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion here (My fair Lady). They educate the heroine to act and think like an upper class lady but they never treat her as if she is so her transition is never complete.

It's harmful the same way that all forms of prejudice are, because people treat others as a stereotype rather than who they actually are. But the cause is your own body rather than necessarily because of other people's prejudice.

That's not to say that it's all about how people think of you. Most men would enjoy being more muscular and most women prefer having a curvy figure. And no one would like having a massive growth stuck on their forehead regardless of all the social problems it would incur.

[Alex K]

Like the kind of language that you are supposed to use, how you are supposed to interact with people, body language, what people expect you to value, what people expect you to be capable of and what they think you'll be crap at regardless of what you can actually do. You don't realise how much you have been conditioned by society because it is consistent with your physical gender and your own values.

Those are basically the things my physicist wife complains about regularly. Ever since she's a mother, a whole new set of expectations and stereotypes on top of the other ones came into play...

These things aren't so obvious if you're not trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. We live in a society with strict gender codes. I like to refer to Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion here (My fair Lady). They educate the heroine to act and think like an upper class lady but they never treat her as if she is so her transition is never complete.

It's harmful the same way that all forms of prejudice are, because people treat others as a stereotype rather than who they actually are. But the cause is your own body rather than necessarily because of other people's prejudice.

That's not to say that it's all about how people think of you.

If gender based dysphoria were mainly caused by societal expectations, that would suck even more.

Most men would enjoy being more muscular and most women prefer having a curvy figure. And no one would like having a massive growth stuck on their forehead regardless of all the social problems it would incur.

If I were transformed into a woman overnight, I would of course like to be somewhat attractive, and if I weren't that might distress me more so than as a man precisely because of expectations from society.