Transgender Q&A

[liminal_luke]

46 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

 

 How do you protect a teenager, let alone a child (it's puberty blockers for children as young as 6, 7, 8 that are part of the current approach that make me go, Jesus quilt-knitting Christ...)   

 

 

Thanks for your reply, Taomeow.  There´s recently been a lot of laws, or attempts at making laws, to limit gender-affirming care for minors.  Interestingly, these laws are portrayed in popular media as anti-LGBT.  I don´t think that´s necessarily the case.  I think many people are just genuinely concerned for kids and worry that a politically/ideologically biased medical establishment is not doing right by their young patients.  Of course it´s also possible that in states with these laws some kids who really need gender-affirming care wouldn´t get it.  I´d generally favor leaving everything up to parents and doctors but maybe this isn´t always for the best.   

[Maddie]

7 minutes ago, liminal_luke said:

 

Thanks for your reply, Taomeow.  There´s recently been a lot of laws, or attempts at making laws, to limit gender-affirming care for minors.  Interestingly, these laws are portrayed in popular media as anti-LGBT.  I don´t think that´s necessarily the case.  I think many people are just genuinely concerned for kids and worry that a politically/ideologically biased medical establishment is not doing right by their young patients.  Of course it´s also possible that in states with these laws some kids who really need gender-affirming care wouldn´t get it.  I´d generally favor leaving everything up to parents and doctors but maybe this isn´t always for the best.   

 

In regards to the topic of transgender children I thought this video might be interesting. 

 

 

I'm in Texas btw.

 

Edited April 13 by Maddie

[Maddie]

[liminal_luke]

37 minutes ago, Maddie said:

 

In regards to the topic of transgender children I thought this video might be interesting. 

 

 

Yes, I can see how families with transgender kids in Texas and elsewhere would move in order to be able to get their kids the care they need.  It´s a complicated situation and I don´t pretend to know what´s best.

[idiot_stimpy]

2 hours ago, Maddie said:

A transgender person is born with a brain that is one gender and a body that is another sex. This isn't just speculation MRI scans show that the brain is actually different in transgender people. 

 

Yet if you believe in reincarnation, there is something that survives the brain at death of the physical body. During introspection within the mind, thoughts are born and die, just as in the gross physical, the body is born and dies. What I am getting at is, self indentification with the changeable, be it thoughts or the body will bring suffering. Yet there is something changeless within. This is not something that is born or dies, it's not of any gender or identity, it is completely free.

[Maddie]

6 minutes ago, idiot_stimpy said:

 

Yet if you believe in reincarnation, there is something that survives the brain at death of the physical body. During introspection within the mind, thoughts are born and die, just as in the gross physical, the body is born and dies. What I am getting at is, self indentification with the changeable, be it thoughts or the body will bring suffering. Yet there is something changeless within. This is not something that is born or dies, it's not of any gender or identity, it is completely free.

 

I agree that the Buddha taught that identification with any of the aggregates led to suffering and yes I did think about this as I fought this. 

 

It's important to remember that the letting go process is a process and we can't consciously choose to let go of suffering because there's isn't a self to do the letting go. 

 

That being the case sometimes we have to realize where we are in the present and try to make the best of our situation. 

 

I tried to let go of this identification but apparently there was too much clinging and the suffering was too much. 

 

It's important to remember that we let go by knowing the mind, not through controlling it. Therefore I continue the process of mindfulness but am suffering significantly less in the mean time.

[idiot_stimpy]

I am glad you are suffering less.

[Nungali]

 

https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/content/two-spirits_map-html/

[Rvel]

Sorry, slightly off topic, TCM tends to split between male and female. How does this relate to those who have yet transitioned? Or nonbinary people? 

I completely understand if you do not know TCM or want to answer this question lol.

[Maddie]

4 minutes ago, Rvel said:

Sorry, slightly off topic, TCM tends to split between male and female. How does this relate to those who have yet transitioned? Or nonbinary people? 

I completely understand if you do not know TCM or want to answer this question lol.

 

I'm actually an acupuncturist LOL.

We treat people according to pattern differentiation.

[Nungali]

I could not find the map on line  I was thinking of, it is in a book I have .  But I found this ;

 

 

 

https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/content/two-spirits_map-html/

 

 

[Nungali]

7 hours ago, Sahaja said:

Curious whether there is any impact or change  at the chromosomal level to transition. - xx to xy or xy to xx. I realize there is a small percentage of the population don’t fit into these general  chromosomal categories. 

 

An  X represents the shape of a chromosome , they pair to make   XX  . We have 23 pairs of them  so a woman is  ' 46 XX '   . What distinguishes a man is that on the last chromosome pair , on one of them ,  the shape of it seems to have one 'arm' missing , hence a ' Y ' shape .  It is designates as  46XY . 

 

The 'dont fit in to those categories '  , you might be thinking of what is termed ' 46 XO ' , that is, the last pair has an X and not a Y but it is missing or  ( I am bit rusty on this, going off memory here )  it might have a different shape ? 

 

This is also the genetic designation for  ' Turner syndrome '  .

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_syndrome

 

 

[snowymountains]

8 hours ago, liminal_luke said:

 

Thanks for your reply, Taomeow.  There´s recently been a lot of laws, or attempts at making laws, to limit gender-affirming care for minors.  Interestingly, these laws are portrayed in popular media as anti-LGBT.  I don´t think that´s necessarily the case.  I think many people are just genuinely concerned for kids and worry that a politically/ideologically biased medical establishment is not doing right by their young patients.  Of course it´s also possible that in states with these laws some kids who really need gender-affirming care wouldn´t get it.  I´d generally favor leaving everything up to parents and doctors but maybe this isn´t always for the best.   

 

It may occur that parents aren't doing what's best for their kids too, parents may have biases too.

Parents though may also protect their children in other cases.

 

Imo everyone should be involved, the parents, psys and of course the children themselves.

Now, what is the best way to vet these views is the difficult question, eg should someone be able to veto? for now long would a veto be in effect? should there be a requirement for a unanimous decision or a majority vote? How do conditions such as depression affect the process? etc

 

It's a very complicated topic that unfortunately has no easy answers and currently there's no policy that's a perfect fit for all cases.

[blue eyed snake]

13 hours ago, snowymountains said:

the therapist holds zero power, and actually they should not hold any power.

 

thats naive,

there's a scarcity of therapists, waitinglists of a year are not unusual, they can do whatevers.

Their patients often are desperate for help, i know parents...ah well

 

the whole setup is unbalanced, the therapists always holds power.

 

I will not go further into it, it's deranging the thread

[blue eyed snake]

10 hours ago, Maddie said:

I think before things get to sidetracked and go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy or whatever else I want to redirect to what the actual issue is. 

 

A transgender person is born with a brain that is one gender and a body that is another sex. This isn't just speculation MRI scans show that the brain is actually different in transgender people. 

 

That being the case what doctors and psychologists say is the best and the only solution to what is called gender dysphoria is to transition one's body. 

 

I can attest that this is correct due to my personal experience. I tried to fight it over a long time by working on my mind and that did not work in fact it made my anxiety and depression much worse. Almost as soon as I acknowledged that I was transgendered and began hormone therapy and came out to live as I truly am this anxiety and depression ended immediately and I'm a much happier person in spite of all of the friction I get from society and my family. 

 

This is why people transition.

 

 

yes, and that is the experience of people I know too. That's not data, it's only three persons, but seeing how they transformed from sad, struggling people, shoulders hanging, to vibrant personalities was a joy to look at.

 

But somehow we need to take care that we are sure that youngsters presenting with a wish to change their body are truly trans people.

the other thing that worries me in that regard is the young age, as yet it is not known what pubertyblocker do with your body in the long run but there are some red flags waving at me.

 

[blue eyed snake]

8 hours ago, idiot_stimpy said:

 

Yet if you believe in reincarnation, there is something that survives the brain at death of the physical body. During introspection within the mind, thoughts are born and die, just as in the gross physical, the body is born and dies. What I am getting at is, self indentification with the changeable, be it thoughts or the body will bring suffering. Yet there is something changeless within. This is not something that is born or dies, it's not of any gender or identity, it is completely free.

 

I do think reincarnation is a fact, but at the same time everybody that comes blabbing to me about suffering and how to deal with it i invite to walk a mile in my moccasins and after that we 'll pick up the conversation.

 

(tip of my thoughts, when you break your leg will you not have it set but just meditate on it that hurt is a passing thing? that it does not matter that from now on you will not be able to walk as the body after all is just a vehicle et cetera))

 

and regarding reincarnation, I once read theory that transgender people have changed sex after a long row of incarnations with the other sex. For me that would mean that after a long row of male incarnations I now walk this earth in a female body. Still many "hooks" in those former incarnations I will feel like a man. I think it's plausible.

[snowymountains]

20 minutes ago, blue eyed snake said:

 

thats naive,

there's a scarcity of therapists, waitinglists of a year are not unusual, they can do whatevers.

Their patients often are desperate for help, i know parents...ah well

 

the whole setup is unbalanced, the therapists always holds power.

 

I will not go further into it, it's deranging the thread

 

Waiting lists are approx a month in most places.

 

If the wrong type of transference develops and is persistent, the therapist should refer the client to someone else, a good therapist will do this and actually always keep their eyes open for what type of transference is occurring.

 

It's a misnomer to develop a complementary therapeutic relationship and a red flag, which is sufficient to change therapist.

 

I don't want to go into details but sometimes the method itself can cause a complementary relationship eg CBT sometimes can make people feel they're in a complementary relationship, the therapist should be able to synthesise and in such cases apply different techniques.

 

Anyhow this is off topic 

[blue eyed snake]

15 hours ago, Taomeow said:

So what I'm gleaning from some of the responses is that talking therapies that used to attempt to change the mind were horrible and unnatural (couldn't agree more), but sex change treatments currently used are natural and problem-free.  And also, that those surgical and hormonal treatments treat something that is not a disorder to begin with.  

 

Good to know.  

 

 

 

 

well that starts with the concept of disorder- what is a disorder

I've had many conversations about that with youngsters who were deemed ' disordered' and rightly did not like that one bit

 

I always told them that to me it means that you do not manage to live live independently once you're grownup and that there were still years to see whether that outcome would be reached.

 

Same with homophilia, no, that's not a disorder, its a variation

 

then onto this topic, I do not regard "living in the body of the other sex" as a disorder.

I do however, see a girl that wants to be a boy quite suddenly after she has been abused and raped as ' temporarily disordered', here menaning, needing loving care and speaking out and whatevers. In need of recognition and help.

 

are intersex children disordered, is there something wrong with them? do those babies need to have cut there genitalia and stamped male or female ( mostly female, cutting off is easier)

The are not average but as long as the biological functions are okay, meaning they can pee and poop, to me there is no reason whatsoever to cut in these kids.

 

the reason sits with a society that does not tolerate people diverging from the mean.

 

story I heard last year, a lady had one of her boobs removed due to cancer, already  before surgery she had told the surgeon she did not want a reconstruction tit but please make it a nice flat chest. So after surgery, radiation and chemo the cancer was gone. What happens at the next consult with the doctor, he wanted to make an appointment for reconstruction surgery, well no she said, we've covered that topic.

pressure was added, she should really consent to reconstruction it would make her happier et cetera, well no she repeated, I am mighty glad you all managed to remove the cancer from my body and now I've planned a holiday, this episode is now hopefully behind me

More pressure.

No

well, I send you to a psychologist to talk this over as you're making a decision that is not in your interest.

 

this lady had thought it over, was intelligent, well spoken and chose something that did not fit in with the societal norms. She was treated like she was not able to make up her own mind.

 

so she had to fight to prevent getting a silicon tit,

were it's seemingly not a problem to do double mastectomies on teenagers.

 

 

who said something about making an easy dollar

 

 

[Maddie]

With the recent topic being about being responsible in vetting trans people before transitioning I absolutely think that kids should see a therapist and a doctor to make sure that it's a legitimate thing. I'm pretty sure it's a good idea for adults as well. 

 

I will say that since I began transitioning (although I can't say for sure) I feel like I have come across people who don't understand what it means to be trans and are transitioning any way. What I mean by this is I feel like to some people it's a fetish and the reason I say this is because they never talk about being trans without it being in a completely hypersexual context. And it causes me to think that there's a small percentage of people that basically just want to live a sexual fantasy but they don't actually identify as a different gender. Granted I'm not a mental health expert but if you spend time at the trans community I have a feeling you would know what I'm talking about. 

 

I've even had a couple of these ask me when I say that I am asexual, "then what's the point of transitioning if you're not interested in sex?" Yes I have a literally been asked to this by so-called trans people and it leads me to think that it's just a fetish for them.

 

This is why I think a responsible vetting process is vital before people transition.

Edited April 14 by Maddie

[snowymountains]

53 minutes ago, blue eyed snake said:

I do however, see a girl that wants to be a boy quite suddenly after she has been abused and raped as ' temporarily disordered', here menaning, needing loving care and speaking out and whatevers. In need of recognition and help.

 

This is different, if gender changed due to trauma, then healing the trauma may re-establish the original gender.

The same applies to changes in sexuality due to to trauma.

But this is trauma therapy, not gender nor sexuality therapy, as there are no such things.

It's also not as straightforward as it sounds, eg therapy cannot completely heal trauma.

 

This is one of the things that the team responsible for the decision needs to opine on, along with a few other factors, which is why it's important to have a well-structured process.

[snowymountains]

Also to be clear, gender need not be different to sex due to trauma, and there clearly trauma therapy will have zero impact on gender.

[Taomeow]

15 hours ago, Nungali said:

Somewhere in my anthropological studies I came across a map of the world showing  ' permanent transgender identification in indigenous societies'   .... 'across the board'  , apparently , or as I like to say  ' across time and locations ' .  Seems its always been a part of the 'human condition' .

 

I will try and find it and post it .

 

 

 

I read about it a while ago, and I think I even mentioned it here on TDB at the time.  The article I recall was about Native American tribes where trans folks were thought of as special, sometimes became shamans because they were thought of as naturally talented toward  "straddling both worlds," and so on, and not discriminated against in the least.

 

The difference from the modern approach being, they didn't resort to surgical and hormonal sex change, they just accepted the fact of this dichotomy (body and mind of different "worlds" in the same person), much the way people accept other things about their own and other people's bodies that may not correspond to the ideal body they would prefer -- shorter or taller than average, thinner or fatter, asthenic type or hypersthenic type, boobs of all sizes and shapes with no particular size or shape fetishized, and so on.  There was no inner conflict and no outer bias, pressure to conform, activism to promote, or any social disadvantages to just feeling a particular way inside one's body and making those feelings known to others.  And above all, no money changing hands as a "side effect" (or as some cats would suspect, as the root cause of an exponential growth in the number of such occurrences.)  

Edited April 14 by Taomeow

[liminal_luke]

3 hours ago, blue eyed snake said:

 

 

well that starts with the concept of disorder- what is a disorder

I've had many conversations about that with youngsters who were deemed ' disordered' and rightly did not like that one bit

 

 

Nobody wants to be labeled "disordered" in our society because there´s so much shame around not being perfect.  To me, this is the root of this controversy.  I´m living in a body with several diagnosed disorders, and, well, I´m not exactly OK with that, but at some point most of us just get on with the living.  Bottomline: it´s OK to have a disorder or two.  We won´t be thrown off the island.

 

If someone feels good about their sexuality and gender, all that good stuff, then I figure there´s no reason to say they have a disorder.  On the other hand, those who are ready to jump off a bridge probably do have a disorder, just a bit.  Several of my gay friends attempted suicide in their youth because they were upset about being gay.  I figure they had a disorder.  Which is not to say that being gay, ipso facto, is a problem.  It´s not.  Neither, I figure, is being trans.  But, for gosh sake, put away the razor blades.  

 

We´re all just trying to get along in this life and, contrary to appearances, nobody is doing it perfectly.  Let´s forgive ourselves our disorders.  They are marks of our humanity.

Edited April 14 by liminal_luke

[Maddie]

Here's another perspective to consider when it comes to hormones and surgery. I mean obviously I want my physical body to match up with my gender for my own peace of mind, but there's also practical safety issues as well. I live in Texas it's a very religious and conservative state and I don't really have any problems because thanks to hormones and such I basically look like any other woman. On the other hand however if I looked like some kind of in between anomaly there's actually people who would be inclined to potentially hurt me. So aside from the psychological benefits I get from causing my body to match my gender there's also practical and safety issues.

[snowymountains]

1 hour ago, Taomeow said:

 

I read about it a while ago, and I think I even mentioned it here on TDB at the time.  The article I recall was about Native American tribes where trans folks were thought of as special, sometimes became shamans because they were thought of as naturally talented toward  "straddling both worlds," and so on, and not discriminated against in the least.

 

The difference from the modern approach being, they didn't resort to surgical and hormonal sex change, they just accepted the fact of this dichotomy (body and mind of different "worlds" in the same person), much the way people accept other things about their own and other people's bodies that may not correspond to the ideal body they would prefer -- shorter or taller than average, thinner or fatter, asthenic type or hypersthenic type, boobs of all sizes and shapes with no particular size or shape fetishized, and so on.  There was no inner conflict and no outer bias, pressure to conform, activism to promote, or any social disadvantages to just feeling a particular way inside one's body and making those feelings known to others.  And above all, no money changing hands as a "side effect" (or as some cats would suspect, as the root cause of an exponential growth in the number of such occurrences.)  

 

It is true that a large percentage of shamans are speculated to have been trans.

But there were no hormonal therapies available nor surgery at today's level in hunter gatherer societies though, so can't really compare.

 

Back then people died from what antibiotics treat today.

It's a different world.