BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Sun Feb 17, 2019 12:12 am
Interesting take.
Now, just following through with this, it's kinda reminiscent about the issue of assessing suspected cases of ADD (or ADHD?) where a lot of people speculate that the signs that professionals look for are, say, nebulous?
Not really wanting to challenge the consideration for transgenderism or anything, and I'm not sure that respectable social consideration needs to be challenged by medical consensus, but yeah I guess I'll ask how would you deconstruct that comparison.
I'm not as well versed on ADHD as I'd like, but just off the cuff.
Anecdotally it's reasonable to conclude that ADHD is over-diagnosed in children and under-diagnosed in adults. As best as people can figure, the diagnosis criteria aren't calibrated for how turbo-fucked our current approach to public schooling is, but because of various cultural attitudes most adults that display diagnosable symptoms don't get checked out and thus just struggle on.
So definitely it seems like we do need to fine tune the criteria (I think the DSM5 has done so to some degree? That'd require more research/specialized knowledge than I have), and hopefully if we can untangle the knots that are public schooling and medical coverage in the world we'll make that job easier.
I do hate to draw parallels between being trans and psychological conditions in a way though, because while we're only a few years removed from that being how it's medically understood (Gender Identity Disorder WAS retired for the DSM5, most psychological organizations are adopting the WPATH standards of care) that is traditionally how transition was treated and understood. And even as we move away from that, there will always be that degree of overlap because gender identity, like mental health issues, rely in large part on self-reported information. But while trans folk do generally have one form or another of dysphoria, which is best understood and treated as a psychological condition, there are absolutely a percentage of people who discover their gender identity via euphoria in their gender rather than dysphoria at their assigned sex.
Rephrasing for simplicity, it's more accurate to say that being trans is not a mental disorder, but that trans people typically (though not always) do develop psychological symptoms when forced to live as their assigned sex. Additionally, there seem to be different intensities (and indeed it is entirely likely that 'trans' will one day be understood as an umbrella term for multiple distinct variations that cause mismatch between assigned sex and gender identity) for this dysphoria, where some are sufficiently debilitating that medical intervention in the form of surgeries or hormone replacement are required, while milder forms may simply elect to have these things for comfort or safety.
I'd also want to draw another distinction between most mental health conditions and being trans. Setting aside the multi-faceted beast that is dysphoria (which aside from being difficult to describe to a cis person even in the most clear-cut cases, also tends to manifest as other mental disorders without having a clear, definable cause), in simplest terms because trans people are so rare, and because information about them was systematically destroyed so often, and because history often misreports clearly trans persons as crossdressers or gay or several other things, until the rise of the internet many people simply had no access to the information they'd need to realize their own experiences weren't matching their assigned sex. And indeed only in the past few years, as an actual trans community has grown, has the public understanding of what being trans is like advanced enough for many trans people to figure themselves out.
And with that in mind, the distinction here is that most forms of mental disorders are pretty clearly disordered. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, ASD, day to day interactions with people will generally cue you in that oh, what I'm experiencing is not typical, perhaps I should see someone. And if you don't pick up on it, someone else eventually will.
But unless you talk to a lot of trans people, you aren't typically going to realize that actually, cis people *don't* frequently wish they'd been born another gender, or have persistent daydreams or fantasies about living as another gender over a period of years. So if someone reaches the point where they actually say "I am/want to be [gender different from assigned sex]", they are pretty goddamned sure about it. We culturally don't really make that distinction between sex and gender y'know.
