Comment by lsiebert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lsiebert | Hacker News Reader

You can still buy this book from the publisher if you really want to.

You shouldn't buy it though, not if you want a real look at the experiences of the majority of transgender people, the views of the majority of the medical community, or the science that disrupts traditional western views about gender and biology.

Nobody chooses to be a transgender person. It just happens sometimes, like being born with 6 fingers on your hands. It might be difficult to fit in, but it's not bad or harmful intrinsically. Some people are different, and sometimes other people treat those who are different as a threat to them, instead of a chance to question their assumptions about what it means to be human and the diversity of human experience.

Unlike a person being transgender, that type of judgment of others is a choice. And sometimes people who make that choice then choose to write books about transgender folks to promote a political agenda, finding anecdotal situations to to justify their views.

Instead of assessing the experiences or actions of the majority of a group, they treat something deeply personal and difficult and subject to discrimination as an intellectual debate and look for ways to justify harmful policies, ignoring the demonstrated psychological benefits of gender affirming treatment for transgender people¹, or the differences in the brains of transgender people².

Sometimes people make a choice not to carry those kind of books. Amazon being huge and the effects of that is an entirely separate issue from their choice not to carry a particular book.

1. https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/news-releases/study-find... 2. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgend...

> Nobody chooses to be a transgender person. It just happens sometimes, like being born with 6 fingers on your hands.

Does that explain the existence of people who regretted it and detransitioned?

Do people who transition and later regret it explain transgender folks who are happy to have transitioned?

Not really, because they are different groups.

But different how? Did they just imagined they were transgender, but they really weren't?

More likely that they have multiple reasons to be unhappy, and transitioning was insufficient to solve it. They may have been misdiagnosed in the first place, or were correctly diagnosed but attribute their remaining difficulties to the transition. Or they found difficulties being accepted in their new gender.

This is a problem throughout medicine: some treatments work, some don't, and we don't always know why. The vast majority of people who transition are helped by it, in part because of the extensive screening. Despite the hysterical tone of books like this, it's not something people do on a whim.

That doesn't mean it will help everybody, and those are unfortunate. But it's irrational to withhold a treatment that helps most patients because of a tiny number of negative outcomes -- especially when those outcomes are artificially given outsized influence by ideologues who have entirely un-medical reasons for opposing them.

It does seem inherently distressful ("bad") because what trans people seem to want isn't an alternative concept of gender. They want to, in fact, switch sex. They are born in psychological tension with their own body.

It would be another matter if trans people simply have an alternative concept of gender.

Regarding gender, there is another thing that confuses me. I was told all this time that gender is a social construct, a set of behaviors for a particular gender that might differ between different cultures, ie. it's not real. But reading the Wikipedia article on gender dysphoria, it says that it's a mismatch between the biological sex and gender, which was supposed to be a social construct. Are children being diagnosed with gender dysphoria just based on the fact that they don't express themselves in a way that we traditionally associate with either males or females? Do I understand it correctly?

Not just “traditionally”, but there are so many differences in how society treats males vs how they treat females that most people don’t even see them any more. All the way from calling a baby in pink ‘pretty’ and a baby in blue ‘active‘ to looking to a male first when help is needed to lift something or to lead and to looking to a female first when help is needed to regulate someone’s emotions.

And those are not even mentioning the far more subtle things like disapproving looks when females do or say certain things.

When people talk about things as constructs, they aren't saying that they are completely artificial or fake. They are saying that our understanding of gender is a construction, built on top of human bodies which are incredibly complex and different from each other.

Like if I had to pick a metaphor, as I understand things, for HN, think of it an imperfect binary classification for assigned gender at birth API, a leaky abstraction on top of society understandings that are themselves constructed the messy analog physicality of people's "biological sex" which is not as simple as two options male and female, not even just in terms of chromosomal sex. Add in hormones levels, hormone sensitivity, genetic differences, brain structures, body hair etc, and even what people think of as basic "biological sex" is actually multifaceted and variable.

So in talking about gender as a construct, rather than something innate and natural and binary, it becomes possible to talk about how the API was developed, and maybe say, hey this API is a little simplistic.

I don't really agree with the biological sex thing, as the rules of how reproduction works are generally pretty straightforward and pretty much the same across most of the mammal species. But it's beside the point.

My question is specifically how do we diagnose gender dysphoria. Is it just based on the fact that a person might express himself in a way that society associated with one gender or another?

That would make sense to me. For what it's worth, from my observations of this community it appears to me that at the very least a significant part of self-{identified,diagnosed} transgender population seems to have an unrealistic, hypersexualized portrayal of what being a woman means, most likely influenced by pornography.

But why obscure and attack the concept of biological sex then? Doesn't that only reaffirm that what we've been doing this entire time is a right thing to do? Imposing the correct gender role (or as you called it, assigning gender at birth), seems exactly like the way to go, as it lowers the chance of child developing gender dysphoria and having all the problems associated with it.

I suggest you read up on intersex people if you think biology is straightforward.

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

As for diagnostic criteria, they vary from country to country. Here's whats in the DSM 5

https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphori...

Anomalies and people born with defects do not disprove the overall rule. Just like people being born with 6 fingers do not change the fact that humans have 5 finders at each hand. I'm not sure if there is a name for this type of argument, but this is a fallacy. In science virtually nothing is true 100% of the time. This is not what science is about.

The second link basically confirms what I suspected.

It's dehumanizing and problematic to classify people's healthy bodies as anomalous or defective.

I don't see how your appeal to tradition is sufficient to justify your view.

Science generally accepts that the identities it discusses are nominalist and conditional. We humans create boundaries and classifications by grouping elements, but no such group or organization is objectively correct, some are just subjectively useful for particular purposes.

Simply recognizing that, let's say, a down syndrome is a genetic defect and something that's generally abnormal does not dehumanize people with down syndrome. Genetic and birth defects are a thing. It's a common scientific term.

I'm not appealing to tradition, I'm arguing for it based on what I've understood about gender dysphoria or the concept of gender in general so far. To reiterate, gender dysphoria comes with all sorts of potential problems, like medication, surgeries, depression, discrimination etc. And that makes me believe that the best way to go about it for parents is to make sure (to a reasonable degree) that the child will not develop gender dysphoria and that the biological sex of the child will match the gender (a social construct, so we can influence it by controlling the environment). Unless you want to argue that what we've been doing up to this point actually makes gender dysphoria more common and the 'new way' suppresses it, or that I'm missing something important, I don't see any gaps in my reasoning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com