[ExI] sex again

Dan TheBookMan danust2012 at gmail.com
Fri Dec 13 23:35:06 UTC 2019


On Dec 13, 2019, at 2:16 PM, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 1:30 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Dec 13, 2019, at 1:03 PM, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>> side note on gender - the sad facts are that people who go for the full operation to another sex are rarely happy with it.  They were psychologically messed up (new trendy term) before and after.  They did not need another sex. They needed therapy.  Which they got but did not work well for them.
>>> 
>>> Personal anecdote - the few I know who went through the whole process seem quite happy with the result.  I know, anecdotes are not data; this only shows that the success rate is non-zero.
>> 
>> I’ve seen studies that show low dissatisfaction rates with gender affirmation surgery (also known as SRS). And, like you, the folks I know who’ve gone through it seem happy with the result.
>> 
>> This isn’t To say there are no folks who aren’t dissatisfied. But I think there’s a push by conservatives to push the view that almost everyone is dissatisfied with this surgery. In the same way, they push the narrative that most women who get abortions experience severe depression from that. (Studies seem to show the overwhelming majority of women do not.)
> 
> "Damn the facts, my gut instincts must be right!"
> 
> That attitude seems to be entirely too common these days.

I’m not so sure Bill W suffers from that here, and I hope will provide some substantiation for his reckoning of trans folks being unhappy with their surgical outcomes. To give one example of a study supporting the opposite (to his) position, see:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4261554/

>   I suspect that's part of where the "OK boomer" meme came from: those who insist on lies will not acknowledge the truth where it opposes their preconceptions, and so can best be simply acknowledged then ignored.

Well, I do see Boomers doing the usual hating on younger generations that seems to go back forever. I thought Boomers were supposed to be the generation that broke with traditions, but that’s kind of a stereotype too. (I’m guessing I’m surrounded by Boomers, so I mean no offense and I hope I don’t come across as agist.)

>>> That said, in all such cases, there was much psychological counseling as part of the process, apparently in part to screen out those for whom gender reassignment would not solve their problems, despite their belief that it would. 
>> 
>> There’s also a view floating around that somehow someone — usually someone preteen — might feel they're the wrong gender on Monday and they’ll be prescribed meds by Tuesday and prepped for surgery by Wednesday and have the surgery before the weekend, and then, of course, regret this once they’ve had a good talking to by their pastor if not sooner.
> 
> Ah, yes.  "Rapid onset gender dysphoria", was it?  Which was entirely concocted by interviewing people who had reason to be willfully ignorant of prior signals, such that the only "rapid onset" was some step that could not be ignored?

It goes along with “when I was young, no one did X.” Well, they didn’t do X openly because you’d get beat up and cast out of your family if you openly did X back then. Doesn’t mean X wasn’t happening.

> I might be willing to support more counseling for these cases (both to ease transition, and to screen out any for whom SRS would not actually solve their problems) - but then, I think more mental health services in general would be a good idea, not just in this case.  I'd even go so far as to say that ingrained denial reflexes are a widespread mental health issue that it would be useful to society to fix.

Less stigma would be great all around. In the trans community, too, there’s a problem because trans is often seen as a mental health issue because that’s how trans folks get access to treatments and assistance. This isn’t to say trans people never have mental health issues or that there might be misdiagnosis, but there is a problem with categorizing trans itself as pathological. (And the analogy with homosexuality is obvious: once it was categorized as pathology. We know where that went with persecuting gays and lesbians via coerced therapeutic interventions.)

Regards,

Dan
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