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HarryStotle
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Neither are corruption, sin, evil or bad ideas. Contagion isn’t the only way stuff spreads.
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PetraG
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If someone has a perception problem, like seeing double, you have to help them to cope with the difference between what they perceive and reality, including how exhausting it is to have to constantly compensate for perceiving one thing and then having to adjust the perception to reality. When someone has only ever seen double their entire lives, that is a tall order, but I hope we can agree it is unavoidable. If they have their faculties, though, it is possible. It is a disservice to tell them that their perception is correct when it is not correct, not when they are capable of understanding that it is incorrect.
This is different than when someone is demented. Such a person cannot possibly understand that their perceptions are incorrect or that they have to make adjustments between their perceptions and reality. No matter how many times you tell your dementetd grandmother that her mom didn’t have lunch with her because her mother died 30 years ago, she’s never going to adjust to that. She can’t. She doesn’t have the capacity to make that adjustment. Everyone around her has to adjust to her. What they don’t do, however, is to spread the belief among themselves that she really did have lunch with her mother the previous day. When reality is being denied even among those who can perceive and remember reality, that’s when we know we’re dealing with an untruth rather than an accomodation of a mental disability.
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Rau
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Again, you are opposing arguments not put. ”Correctness”, and telling people what is correct, is not in debate here (though may well be elsewhere).
As I said: “The debate is about what one may do to cope when the situation is severe.”
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PetraG
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I think what has not been tried is for people to widely accept that some of us have this perception. Didn’t ask for it, aren’t looking for attention by having it, and in some cases have a lot of difficulty in coping with it. I am not saying that someone struggling with the perception that they don’t belong to the sex that their body is ought to be told “ooo, that’s weird.” That’s not what I would want in that situation. Still, I don’t think that telling them, “That’s OK, if you say you’re a woman, then you are a woman” works, either. Telling them they got the wrong body, as if the car dealership sent the wrong car? That drives a wedge into the person, between their self perception and their body. The two aren’t two separate things. It is one person, the body every bit as much as the perceptions of the body that come from the brain.
Telling someone with this perception difficulty that their perception is correct and their body is wrong isn’t true. You can go along with a story when someone is demented and can’t do any better. When someone has a perception problem or just a non-stereotypical outlook on life for someone of their sex instead of a mental illness, though, you don’t attempt to hide reality in an attempt to make their perception seem correct. That is a false solution and you’re leading them down a false path by telling them that.
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Rau
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The sufferer does attempt to hide their bodily reality when they choose these surgical and hormonal paths. No question about that.
This solution (horrendous as it is) is only pursued because it assists to relieve grave distress. Because no “true” solution is known to exist.
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HarryStotle
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Assuming it is the brain that is the genesis of such thoughts or attractions.HarryStotle:
To use another example, gay men’s brains tell them that they are sexually attracted to other men …Rau:
Okay, point taken.HarryStotle:
No. If you believe that, please find a biological male experiencing gender dysphoria who thinks his genitals are those of a biological female!
Their brain is not speaking to biology - not denying the self-evident. Rather, it’s as though the brain has an expectation of the body, which it can’t reconcile with the reality. The reality is not denied.
Let’s revise the claim to…
…their “ brain is telling them their biology is not what it ought to be .”
How does that answer my original point? What is the role of mind as arbiter of the truth? Does the mind have any say in what ought to be, or what is? The brain wiring just dictates what the mind must accept?
It isn’t clear to me that a brain would simply throw up such notions in complete isolation from the social environment that the person has grown up in. Social interactions, impressions, pressures and tensions are far more likely to be the sources of those ideas and emotional associations. Perhaps the brain itself processes the information, impressions, pressures and tensions in a manner which it deems the most likely to “fit into” or adjust to the overall picture to ensure survival at some level?
I keep thinking of John Calhoun’s work on the behavioural sink. As a society begins to lose its bearings in terms of specified social roles, individuals in that society begin to lose all sense of their own part in that society. There is so much moral and social confusion in current modern western society that from a very young age individuals have fewer and fewer guidelines about acceptable behaviour and any defined sense of who they, in fact, are as individual aspects of that society.
Developing brains could very quickly latch onto whatever feels safe or least likely to put them into positions of vulnerability. Social stigmas regarding homophobia, transphobia , etc., might incentivize the very vulnerable to “play it safe” by adopting a place in the world least likely to get them pilloried by their peers.
Look how colleges and universities are falling over themselves to provide safe spaces to even the ostensibly elite young adults. We seem to be creating a society of very vulnerable individuals who will do virtually anything to fit in or at least not stand out from the current PC culture.
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HarryStotle
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I think this post gets at when a sincere misunderstanding or physiological condition actually becomes a delusion. If the person seeing double hasn’t worked through the symptoms to the point of knowing their perception of reality doesn’t correspond with reality they aren’t deluding themselves. They are honestly mistaken about reality. That error may have psycho-neural or perceptual causes, but no one is living a delusion.Thorolfr:
No, I’m not saying that a person doesn’t really have the perception that they’re a woman when they’re actually a man. I’m saying that the perception is a processing artifact of the brain. It isn’t a reality, not any more than seeing double and then looking at your dog means that you suddenly have two dogs. You aren’t lying about seeing two dogs. You really are seeing two dogs. I can’t tell you “don’t see two dogs, there is only one!” and expect your visual picture to change! If you believe your eyes, though, you would be wrong about how many dogs there actually are. It is your perceptions that are incorrect. You really are percieving what you say you are, it is a debilitating misperception and it would be very hard to suffer having it, but your perceptions are false.
On the other hand, if that individual continues to reinforce the error after knowing it is an error of perception or due to some psycho-neural cause, then the person is engaging in self-delusion. If others around them are fostering the delusion, they too are deluding the individual and perhaps, even, themselves.
If an individual who is male views himself and the world around him in ways that are contrary to his real biological sex, merely realizing that he is doing so or being blissfully unaware of the contradiction would not make him deluded. However, once aware of the dissonance, if he were to continue to act as if he were not male but one of the other 92 or so “gender options,” we could then safely say delusion is operative. We could also say anyone around him who fed his delusion is both deluding him as well as themselves, especially those who specialize in understanding the human psyche, who have let their sympathy for the individual get the better of them in terms of recommending what is best for the individual, in reality.
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If an individual looks at a dog and sees 2, the answer is to provide glasses or some other correction to the perception of the individual.
But it seems with the transgendered, the treatment doesn’t at all address the false perception but instead seeks to make the false perception a reality.
But it seems with the transgendered, the treatment doesn’t at all address the false perception but instead seeks to make the false perception a reality.
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PetraG
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Double vision can’t always be corrected. Not every perceptional problem can be corrected. Our physicians cannot do everything. You are right: that includes that they cannot make men into women or women into men. It is not ethical to tell patients that this can be done. It can’t. (If it could be physically accomplished, then it would be illicit and would still be a violation of the person; as it is, it cannot be done at all.)
I don’t blame anybody for whatever they are willing to do to correct this condition. It must be very difficult. My issue is with physicians who are willing to resort to unethical treatments (as defined by Catholic medical ethics) when they do not see an ethical option that they think is going to work. When a treatment violates a physician’s own set of ethics, I think this distinction is very clear to the physician. As we know, however, physicians do vary greatly concerning the ethical boundaries they are willing to cross, all the way to being so lacking in any submission to a higher power than themselves that there isn’t anything they won’t do if they think they have a reason. (Being a skilled physician or surgeon or scientist and having a moral compass are two separate matters.) In this case, I think there are physicians who do mean well and intend to submit to medical ethics, but they do not understand that this is wrong, just as some physicians performing other immoral procedures might not understand that they are not accomplishing a good but quite the opposite.
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PetraG
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The degree to which the young are being denied the information that they are resilient is a separate issue, but it is a contributor to the mental distress felt by many young people.
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HarryStotle
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The supposed treatment of individuals who claim themselves to be gender dysphoric would be akin to insisting that those who see double should be provided with a new set of eyeballs since their existing set don’t seem to be aligned with reality.
Seems a bit of overkill, especially since very little is known about the condition to begin with. Sure, let’s all jump on board with gender re-assignment surgery even for adolescents AND let’s make it funded by the taxpayer. A very odd proposition.
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Rau
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And could that be because no such solution is known?
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PetraG
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Well, no, sometimes the solution is pursued because the person is convinced that they truly belong to the sex that their surgeon can make them resemble. They don’t think their body is “true.” They refer to sex defined according to physical characteristics as one’s “assigned” sex, as if the “assignment” were made on the basis of arbitrary or superficial qualities.
They have been lead to believe that their perception is the truth and anything that doesn’t reinforce their perception is wrong. This is different than what you’re describing, which seems more like capitulating to a compulsion that one understands is incorrect but cannot change. Sayoing that the solution is “only pursued because it assists to relieve grave distress” is not usually the narrative that accompanies these processes. That narrative is “of course I was gravely distressed; I had been ‘assigned’ to a sex that is not my true sex.”
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Rau
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Not sure why there is s sudden need to demonize both sufferers
As you say, sometimes, this may be the case. And that is appalling. That any medical professional would advocate for such extreme treatment in anything but cases of considerable distress is beyond me.
Or choosing a course in desperation because the “do nothing” course is intolerable.
I don’t think the distress is attached to an assertion of a clerical error. But to the here and now dissonance the person endures. Like you, I bristle at the ''assigned sex" terminology. In some cases it is proper terminology - eg. when the biology is ambiguous - relatively rare. But in others it’s only “assigned” because it was determined by observation.
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Thorolfr
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Sometimes people who are suffering feel like they don’t have any choice but to do something and not everyone thinks that something is wrong just because the Catholic Church disapproves of it.Rau:
Which again falls into my earlier post.And could that be because no such solution is known?
People think they have to do something, even if it is wrong.
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PetraG
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I agree that the whole matter of when the question is ambiguous has been wrongly broadened to include having a brain that “does not match” one’s physical sex.
Ah, well, I’m not in the field of psychiatry. I’m not going to blame patients for what the psychiatrists are telling them that surgeons can accomplish. If they’ve been told they’ve changed sex and they are trying to live as if they have changed sex, I don’t think it is charitable to challenge that premise directly. Having said that, I think it is simply unethical that this perpetuation of falsehood is so quickly becoming the standard of care. Hard cases often make for bad solutions; this is an example of it. I hope the bishops continue to stand fast with teaching the truth in charity. That’s about all we can do.
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Thorolfr
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Some psychologists used to think that children were a “blank slate” and could be shaped almost exclusively by their environment. But more recent research shows instead that our behaviors are influenced much more than originally thought by our genes. And some things like our internal sense of gender is thought to develop late in pregnancy when an infant’s brain is becoming more fully developed.
In general, too, how we turn out involves a complex interaction between our genes and our environment. Our environment can switch some genes on that would otherwise have remained dormant. This explains why many mental conditions like ADHD or schizophrenia or OCD, etc. show a strong genetic component and people are more likely to have them if they have close family members who also have them. But having the genes does not insure that someone will end up having the disorder since those genes might not end up being switched on by their environment.
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Thorolfr
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A lot of problems that have to do with the brain and the mind make for hard cases because there’s still quite a bit we don’t know yet about how the brain works and even when we have some idea, there often isn’t a lot that psychiatists or psychologists or neurologists can do, and rarely is there a real cute. The actual etiology of most mental disorders is still not known for sure and the DSM only describes symptoms. That’s why psychiatry more than any other branch of medicine suffers from a certain disrepute.
Even the diagnosis and treatment of something like ADHD is surrounded by controversy. A neurologist wrote a book a few years ago with the title, ADHD Does Not Exist and a lot of people think that way too many children are being given this diagnosis. Many parents are also opposed to giving their children stimulant medications like Ritalin or Adderall, both of which are Schedule II Controlled Substances like the opioids and other addictive and frequently abused medications. Moreover, Adderall and other amphetamine based stimulants have been found to cause psychosis in some individuals. Nevertheless, despite their dangers, stimulants are still the most effective treatment for ADHD, much more so than any kind of talk therapy. There are no easy answers as to how this or many other mental conditions should be treated and many of the treatments available can be helpful at times but also potentially dangerous or harmful.
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Rau
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I’ve not read anything particularly addressing surgery in these cases. Is there any material from the church?
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