Transgender child and parents

[Viviphilia]

“Therapeutic medical reason” means that a doctor does not have to preserve your reproductive organs any more than a doctor would have to preserve other organs or body parts that might become diseased and pose a serious threat to your overall health.

I’d like to know more about where you got your understanding of the phrase “therapeutic medical reason.” My understanding is that phrase means that the surgery must be scientifically validated as a medical therapy. Given that hormone therapy and sex corrective surgeries are overwhelmingly successful at reducing or eliminating gender dysphoria, how could anyone deny their validity?

The treatment, whether surgical or pharmaceutical, would not change the person’s gender or grant the person permission to pretend a different gender. The Church, for instance, will not allow the gender on a person’s baptismal certificate to be altered after the fact unless the original information about natural gender had been falsified.

I really appreciate your last sentence. The diagnosis of intergender (transsexuality) does indeed falsify the original information about the gender assigned at birth. A new born child cannot assert that she has the wrong external genitalia, but as she develops language, she can begin to make such an assertion. Once she asserts her claim to her true gender, the gender assigned at birth is falsified.

For instance, your reaction at finding you were growing dark hairs: We women get heavy hair under our armpits and on our legs and pubic area, too. If you had been born a girl, this would still have happened to you.

But women don’t normally get hair on their face or chest, which transwomen often have discomfort with.

Is laser hair removal frowned upon by the Church? What about plucking one’s eyebrows?

As far as I know, there has been no connection made between parental behaviors and transgender issues.

There is a long and discredited history, starting with Freud, of psychologists blaming the parents for transgenderism. It was only in the 1990s, with Milton Diamond’s revelation of the truth about David Reimer case, when it became clear that gender identity is something we are born with and gender dissonance is a biological disorder.

Your view of yourself is distorted, and you have not been able, for whatever reason, to accept what you are in reality: a male.

How do you know that it is her view of herself which is distorted, rather than the possibility that she is correct, and she really does have the wrong genitalia? The condition of being intersex shows us that sometimes the “wrong” genitalia develop. CAIS individuals show that a man can be born with a vagina. So why not give women born with a penis the benefit of the doubt about their claims?

None (or few) or us here are psychologists, and even psychologists are not at all sure how to treat this difficult problem, save to indulge the fantasy.

Psychologists are more likely to ignore transgender issues or to pass the buck to a “specialist” than to “indulge” the patient. Even psychologists who claim to be friendly to trans people will usually try to talk a patient out of transitioning. That’s called “gatekeeping” and is a common complaint in the transgender community. Some of us believe gatekeeping is actually medical negligence. Try asking some transgender people and you’ll find out that it’s very difficult to find a sympathetic psychologist or primary doctor.

 

[Viviphilia]

The Church does not say it is forbidden to relieve psychological symptoms through medication or surgery. The Church has not forbidden this treatment outright–it could be morally permissible in extreme conditions. The Church only teaches the truth, which is that hormone treatment and surgery do not accomplish a gender change. The person remains their natural gender. The idea that the truth is otherwise is what is politics.

If a woman is born with a penis and mistakenly assigned male at birth, then it isn’t really “changing” the gender so much as it is correcting the original mistaken assignment.

 

[SwizzleStick]

If a woman is born with a penis and mistakenly assigned male at birth, then it isn’t really “changing” the gender so much as it is correcting the original mistaken assignment.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you have any idea how difficult it is to take that sentence seriously? I would guess that to most people, that sentence is just :whacky:.

If a person is born with a fully formed penis and thinks of himself as a female, that person needs correction to take place between his ears instead of between his legs UNLESS further DNA testing actually indicates the person is a female with a birth defect.

 

[Viviphilia]

Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you have any idea how difficult it is to take that sentence seriously? I would guess that to most people, that sentence is just :whacky:.

If a person is born with a fully formed penis and thinks of himself as a female, that person needs correction to take place between his ears instead of between his legs UNLESS further DNA testing actually indicates the person is a female with a birth defect.

Why do you require DNA testing, why not take the person at their word? It is that kind of invalidation which drives transgender people to having some of the highest suicide rates.

 

[SwizzleStick]

Why do you require DNA testing, why not take the person at their word? It is that kind of invalidation which drives transgender people to having some of the highest suicide rates.

It seems reasonable that if someone is suffering from a mental issue, it should be treated, not complicated by body mutilation too.

What if someone thinks he is a cat? Would that person benefit from therapy to help him understand he is a man or should he just go ahead with his desires to mutilate his body so that he can look like a cat? Is that a mentally healthy thing to do?

View attachment 14114View attachment 14115

Sometimes someone is just confused and has a mental health issue. One can have multiple surgeries and take hormones, make alterations, mutilate, etc., but at the end of the day, one is still who he or she was at birth. The man in the pictures thinks of himself as a cat, he thinks he needs to climb trees and eat raw meat, but at the end of the day, he is still a man who has issues, who has mutilated himself and who has an unusual diet, along with an unusual hobby for a grown man.

 

[EasterJoy]

I’d like to know more about where you got your understanding of the phrase “therapeutic medical reason.” My understanding is that phrase means that the surgery must be scientifically validated as a medical therapy. Given that hormone therapy and sex corrective surgeries are overwhelmingly successful at reducing or eliminating gender dysphoria, how could anyone deny their validity?

I really appreciate your last sentence. The diagnosis of intergender (transsexuality) does indeed falsify the original information about the gender assigned at birth. A new born child cannot assert that she has the wrong external genitalia, but as she develops language, she can begin to make such an assertion. Once she asserts her claim to her true gender, the gender assigned at birth is falsified.

But women don’t normally get hair on their face or chest, which transwomen often have discomfort with.

Is laser hair removal frowned upon by the Church? What about plucking one’s eyebrows?

There is a long and discredited history, starting with Freud, of psychologists blaming the parents for transgenderism. It was only in the 1990s, with Milton Diamond’s revelation of the truth about David Reimer case, when it became clear that gender identity is something we are born with and gender dissonance is a biological disorder.

How do you know that it is her view of herself which is distorted, rather than the possibility that she is correct, and she really does have the wrong genitalia? The condition of being intersex shows us that sometimes the “wrong” genitalia develop. CAIS individuals show that a man can be born with a vagina. So why not give women born with a penis the benefit of the doubt about their claims?

Psychologists are more likely to ignore transgender issues or to pass the buck to a “specialist” than to “indulge” the patient. Even psychologists who claim to be friendly to trans people will usually try to talk a patient out of transitioning. That’s called “gatekeeping” and is a common complaint in the transgender community. Some of us believe gatekeeping is actually medical negligence. Try asking some transgender people and you’ll find out that it’s very difficult to find a sympathetic psychologist or primary doctor.

Go back to post #10 and read the attached article. Although mistakes can be made on a baptismal certificate, and those can be changed later, the Church does not believe that gender is changeable. Physically ambiguous gender is another matter, but most people who want gender re-assignment do not fall into that category.

 

[EasterJoy]

Why do you require DNA testing, why not take the person at their word? It is that kind of invalidation which drives transgender people to having some of the highest suicide rates.

Many people are confused about their identity. What about them? Is a person’s opinion about himself or herself automatically a fact? Of course it isn’t. False validation might be done in extreme cases, if it is the only way to placate the patient, but why is it wrong to fail to validate a false self-concept? Is it the failure to validate that drives a person to suicide, or the delusion itself that does so? If I had chemicals in my brain telling me I could fly, that is no judgement on me that I want to try to take to the skies, but is it “invalidating” to keep me away from windows?

I could believe I can sing like Frank Sinatra, I can think I am Queen Elizabeth’s lost twin sister, I can feel like some wandering band of nomads must have left me on my parents doorstep because nobody in my family thinks remotely like I do, and that doesn’t make it a fact. Giving me a faked Romansh birth certificate might make me feel better, but it doesn’t make me Romansh. The truth is, it wouldn’t be fair to the integrity of the Romansh people to do that, either, would it? They are what they are, and the other billions of us can’t become what they are by the actions of man. Neither can a man make himself into a woman, or vice versa.

 

[TheRealJuliane]

It seems reasonable that if someone is suffering from a mental issue, it should be treated, not complicated by body mutilation too.

What if someone thinks he is a cat? Would that person benefit from therapy to help him understand he is a man or should he just go ahead with his desires to mutilate his body so that he can look like a cat? Is that a mentally healthy thing to do?

View attachment 14114View attachment 14115

Sometimes someone is just confused and has a mental health issue. One can have multiple surgeries and take hormones, make alterations, mutilate, etc., but at the end of the day, one is still who he or she was at birth. The man in the pictures thinks of himself as a cat, he thinks he needs to climb trees and eat raw meat, but at the end of the day, he is still a man who has issues, who has mutilated himself and who has an unusual diet, along with an unusual hobby for a grown man.

Dear Lord, what a freakshow!

 

[SwizzleStick]

Many people are confused about their identity. What about them? Is a person’s opinion about himself or herself automatically a fact? Of course it isn’t. False validation might be done in extreme cases, if it is the only way to placate the patient, but why is it wrong to fail to validate a false self-concept? Is it the failure to validate that drives a person to suicide, or the delusion itself that does so? If I had chemicals in my brain telling me I could fly, that is no judgement on me that I want to try to take to the skies, but is it “invalidating” to keep me away from windows?

I could believe I can sing like Frank Sinatra, I can think I am Queen Elizabeth’s lost twin sister, I can feel like some wandering band of nomads must have left me on my parents doorstep because nobody in my family thinks remotely like I do, and that doesn’t make it a fact. Giving me a faked Romansh birth certificate might make me feel better, but it doesn’t make me Romansh. The truth is, it wouldn’t be fair to the integrity of the Romansh people to do that, either, would it? They are what they are, and the other billions of us can’t become what they are by the actions of man. Neither can a man make himself into a woman, or vice versa.

Thank you for articulating facts more clearly than my poor attempt.

 

[SwizzleStick]

Dear Lord, what a freakshow!

I think he would have been much better served with competent mental health professionals to aid him rather than the folks who validated his idea that he is a cat by aiding his mutilations of himself.

 

[TheRealJuliane]

I think he would have been much better served with competent mental health professionals to aid him rather than the folks who validated his idea that he is a cat by aiding his mutilations of himself.

The cosmetic surgeons who did this should have their licenses yanked. I guess the lip implants, cheek implants, and whatever other implants he’s had are surgical and everything else is basically tattoos and piercings.

He probably makes a living from doing live appearances, eh?

 

[SwizzleStick]

The cosmetic surgeons who did this should have their licenses yanked. I guess the lip implants, cheek implants, and whatever other implants he’s had are surgical and everything else is basically tattoos and piercings. …

No doubt, though I think the “work” he had done at first was begun by an artist. Maybe that just means his tatoos, though I have a vague memory that his artist friend also did a surgery of some type at the beginning of his alterations.

…He probably makes a living from doing live appearances, eh?

Yes, though he also works/worked as a computer programmer in an office.

I used to be a bloke but I’m all right MIAOW
thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/woman/real_life/article1656320.ece

Cat Man - the human ‘tiger’ who enjoys climbing trees and eats raw meat every day
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1052934/Cat-Man–human-tiger-enjoys-climbing-trees-eats-raw-meat-day.html

 

[TheRealJuliane]

No doubt, though I think the “work” he had done at first was begun by an artist. Maybe that just means his tatoos, though I have a vague memory that his artist friend also did a surgery of some type at the beginning of his alterations.

** Yes, though he also works/worked as a computer programmer in an office. **

I used to be a bloke but I’m all right MIAOW
thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/woman/real_life/article1656320.ece

Cat Man - the human ‘tiger’ who enjoys climbing trees and eats raw meat every day
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1052934/Cat-Man–human-tiger-enjoys-climbing-trees-eats-raw-meat-day.html

Well, his co-workers must be thrilled.

 

[Viviphilia]

It seems reasonable that if someone is suffering from a mental issue, it should be treated, not complicated by body mutilation too.

What if someone thinks he is a cat? Would that person benefit from therapy to help him understand he is a man or should he just go ahead with his desires to mutilate his body so that he can look like a cat? Is that a mentally healthy thing to do?

Sometimes someone is just confused and has a mental health issue. One can have multiple surgeries and take hormones, make alterations, mutilate, etc., but at the end of the day, one is still who he or she was at birth. The man in the pictures thinks of himself as a cat, he thinks he needs to climb trees and eat raw meat, but at the end of the day, he is still a man who has issues, who has mutilated himself and who has an unusual diet, along with an unusual hobby for a grown man.

There is no long and documented history of people thinking they are cats. In contrast, there is a long and documented history of gender non-conformists. The population of such “cat-people” is probably not above a dozen in all of history, whereas there are millions of gender variant people living today, across all cultures. There is no documented diagnosis of trans-speciesism. Transsexualism has been diagnosed in Western culture for over a hundred years. It is unfair to substitute such behavior with the established medical condition of intergender (transsexuality). That would be similar to me holding up the Quran and judging Catholics by it, since both are religions.

 

[Viviphilia]

Go back to post #10 and read the attached article. Although mistakes can be made on a baptismal certificate, and those can be changed later, the Church does not believe that gender is changeable. Physically ambiguous gender is another matter, but most people who want gender re-assignment do not fall into that category.

I read the super-secret supposed document which might not even exist, and at best, the Church feels uncomfortable about making public. While it seems consistent with the current state of the Church, I find it an unpersuasive philosophical argument.

As for your claim that people who are transsexual and people who are intersex fall into two different categories, you are mistaken. There is some overlap between the two groups. And what that tells us is there is likely to be a mental condition similar to intersexuality, where a person has an ambiguous gender identity within their mind. That condition explains transsexuality and is supported by empirical evidence.

What I am suggesting here is that trans women be taken at their word, that they really are women who were born with the wrong hormones, and that their birth certificates and other documents should be changed at their request, given a sound diagnosis.

 

[Viviphilia]

Many people are confused about their identity. What about them? Is a person’s opinion about himself or herself automatically a fact? Of course it isn’t. False validation might be done in extreme cases, if it is the only way to placate the patient, but why is it wrong to fail to validate a false self-concept? Is it the failure to validate that drives a person to suicide, or the delusion itself that does so?

Transsexuals usually repress their identities for years and even decades before inevitably reaching their conclusions about their gender. This isn’t some over night process where a person decides on a whim. It’s a lifelong, often debilitating disorder that requires medical treatment, not invalidating talk therapy.

Your assumption that transsexuality is a delusion shows both a misunderstanding of the transsexuality diagnosis, as well as a misunderstanding of what a delusion is. A delusion is a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary. As mentioned above, transsexuals are usually in total denial about their condition for years before they begin to understand it. You can’t simultaneously have a delusion and be in denial about it.

If I had chemicals in my brain telling me I could fly, that is no judgement on me that I want to try to take to the skies, but is it “invalidating” to keep me away from windows?

I could believe I can sing like Frank Sinatra, I can think I am Queen Elizabeth’s lost twin sister, I can feel like some wandering band of nomads must have left me on my parents doorstep because nobody in my family thinks remotely like I do, and that doesn’t make it a fact. Giving me a faked Romansh birth certificate might make me feel better, but it doesn’t make me Romansh. The truth is, it wouldn’t be fair to the integrity of the Romansh people to do that, either, would it? They are what they are, and the other billions of us can’t become what they are by the actions of man.

Not a single one of those is a medical condition. Gender variance has many known causes and appears in many different forms.

 

[EasterJoy]

Transsexuals usually repress their identities for years and even decades before inevitably reaching their conclusions about their gender. This isn’t some over night process where a person decides on a whim. It’s a lifelong, often debilitating disorder that requires medical treatment, not invalidating talk therapy.

Your assumption that transsexuality is a delusion shows both a misunderstanding of the transsexuality diagnosis, as well as a misunderstanding of what a delusion is. A delusion is a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary. As mentioned above, transsexuals are usually in total denial about their condition for years before they begin to understand it. You can’t simultaneously have a delusion and be in denial about it.

Not a single one of those is a medical condition. Gender variance has many known causes and appears in many different forms.

You seem to have this idea that the theories of psychiatry define the physical world and that a patient’s self-assessment can be known to true when it makes the patient feel validated. Where did we agree on that belief as axiomatic? I don’t doubt that some in the world of psychiatry believe it, but to be blunt, that world view seems to me to be a recipe for sending the world to h*** in a handbasket.

You are saying that it is impossible that a person who has difficulty because they do not feel typical of what is a societally-narrowed description of what their own gender ought to be could possibly seek relief in the incorrect belief that they actually are the wrong gender? You are saying that it is a psychiatric impossiblity that people with conditions other than schizophrenia could incorporate incorrect beliefs into their belief systems, such that they become very threatened when their beliefs are challenged?

I’m not doing therapy on anybody. I’m just objecting to the idea that diagnosing a male as a physical male without consulting asking his feelings about it is “invalidating.” I also don’t believe that having the deep feeling that you are in the wrong family or have been given an identity that doesn’t fit you is something that people decide on a whim.

I am still deeply unconvinced that whatever belief somebody has to explain their real unhappiness must be the truth. The unhappiness can be totally real without the current diagnosis for how to fix it being correct. I’m also not saying that the disorder doesn’t require medical treatment.

There is such a thing as a true physical gender. There is such a thing as a gender identity. You are saying that when the two do not match, the solution is to use hormones and surgery to allow the pretense to be made that the physical gender was wrong and has been “fixed”–only you are saying that this is no pretense, that a real gender switch has been accomplished! The Church is saying that even if you use hormomes and surgery to give the patient relief from their symptoms, you have not magically changed their physical gender. A man who is given hormones and has his penis reconstructed to look like the female anatomy is still a man. He may be very upset when his belief system to the contrary is challenged because somebody says this out loud, but that doesn’t change the truth.

I know somebody who wants to take the drugs and have the surgery and go through life living as a woman. He’s going to give himself a new name, disavowing his old identity. I’m telling you that this is what he will be doing: living as a woman. He was born a male and that is what he is. You can say he was in denial then and is living in reality now, but I say it is the other way around. I certainly don’t believe that whatever version he feels best about is more likely to be true than the one he feels upset about. I can understand that he can have a medical condition that makes this reality deeply upsetting, but that doesn’t mean he’s not in denial about the nature of who he is, nor that the doctors he is seeing aren’t bringing good feelings by validating choice to deny what he actually is.

If he is not pretending, then I don’t see how what he’s doing is not a form of suicide. Certainly he is trying to erase every vestige of his past self, trying to make everyone pretend he is not a man and has never been a boy. That person is going to be treated as if dead to him, dead to his family, dead to his children. This is not supposed to cause psychic harm to anyone who knew this man who is being taken off the face of the earth?

Perhaps our problem is that we start from such different axioms that we are just not going to agree.

 

[EasterJoy]

Cat Man - the human ‘tiger’ who enjoys climbing trees and eats raw meat every day
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1052934/Cat-Man–human-tiger-enjoys-climbing-trees-eats-raw-meat-day.html

How do you know what his real species is? It’s not like you could test his DNA, or anything like that. Obviously he must be sane, because he can hold down a job.

 

[Jordan719]

It seems reasonable that if someone is suffering from a mental issue, it should be treated, not complicated by body mutilation too.

What if someone thinks he is a cat? Would that person benefit from therapy to help him understand he is a man or should he just go ahead with his desires to mutilate his body so that he can look like a cat? Is that a mentally healthy thing to do?

View attachment 14114View attachment 14115

Sometimes someone is just confused and has a mental health issue. One can have multiple surgeries and take hormones, make alterations, mutilate, etc., but at the end of the day, one is still who he or she was at birth. The man in the pictures thinks of himself as a cat, he thinks he needs to climb trees and eat raw meat, but at the end of the day, he is still a man who has issues, who has mutilated himself and who has an unusual diet, along with an unusual hobby for a grown man.

Exactly. A man is a man and a woman is a woman, period. To say that we need to fix a mistake is to say that God doesn’t know what he is doing. We are all called to carry our cross, whatever that may be. Our cross may be pornography, alcohol, or thinking we are the opposite sex. We pray and carry on just as our Lord did.

 

[feed_me]

If a woman is born with a penis and mistakenly assigned male at birth, then it isn’t really “changing” the gender so much as it is correcting the original mistaken assignment.

Is that truely even possible without surgery?