Comment by 239847823971 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 239847823971 | Hacker News Reader

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Gender dysphoria is a real thing though. If you are male, all you have to do is imagine you woke up with breasts and hips. There is a lot of science on this beyond gender. There was a famous case where a guy had his leg amputated because he didn't feel like it was his leg.

I think OC left out sexual preference too. All you have to do is imagine that if you like women now and think its completely normal, then suddenly the entire world thinks this is strange and rare, and not natural.

Cis-females already do tons of plastic surgery to modify their body to fit an idealized image even though they have the actual chromosomes and hormones. So your beef is with the female plastic surgery industry as well.

The tricky part is that if early intervention ends up having been the right choice, then it's good. If there is regret later in life...then its absolutely terrible. But if early intervention was avoided, and it was the wrong choice, then it's not optimal.

Would be good to see some research on this. But I think taking action and it being the wrong choice is far worse than any other negative scenario.

>Gender dysphoria is a real thing though

So we should call that sex dysphoria, gender would be a misnomer here (see above). And that may be the case, but it is hard to imagine that it is innate as transgender (another misnomer) proponents claim. And even if it is, it's hard to say that a surgery is the right solution. As you say it is like the leg amputee, clearly that is not the right course of action. Same with plastic surgery and steroids. But even there at least there one can say they now are strong or pretty (still debateable) but what can a male that removes his genitals say? I am female? Clearly not. I am a woman? A "woman" gender taken as the emotional state of a female is already a problematic idea, as I explained above. So we are left with nothing.

All this to say that feeling that you want to remove your genitals should not imply that you want to wear a dress. If it does then we must say that there is some innate difference between men and women beyond sex. Especially if we describe the "woman" social construct to be the result of a domestication process. If this were true, feeling that you are a woman would certainly not imply any domestication, as the person was raised as a man.

The last atempt would be to say that wanting to be a woman is a second order effect of sex dysphoria (in a male) caused by society. But then we have already given up on him being a woman to now wanting to be a woman as a sscond order effect of sex dysphoria. And it is of course counter to the claim that the surgery is gender conforming, as the surgery first order (ie. sex dysphoria) and gender is second order. Rather the gender change is sex conforming in this line of thought.

Now I agree that more research needs to be done on sex dysphoria, but unfortunately I don't think any unapproved conclusion will be allowed to be published or if it is we be labled transphibic and ignored.

> So we should call that sex dysphoria, gender would be a misnomer here (see above)

Agree.

> As you say it is like the leg amputee, clearly that is not the right course of action

When you talk about the "right course of action", this is subjective. How do you evaluate that? Surely it is personal long-term day-to-day happiness, and with some consideration for the happiness of family members and then society.

I think there are cases where people actually live a happier life from this amputation. It's a really strange thing. Like they are happier even though they now are disabled. I think normal people simply cannot grasp this because they don't have any analogous situations. Perhaps it could be simulated in virtual reality. It's really interesting to read interviews with these guys. https://www.thecut.com/2015/01/what-its-like-to-crave-amputa... They seem like normal people.

Regarding surgery, you could also imagine that one day you grew breasts and large female nipples/areolas. Would you be embarrassed to be at the beach with a top off? Would you want them removed if you could? Absolutely yes for me. And this is very different from manboobs. I just googled that and yeh it looks very weird and its a thing.

> Rather the gender change is sex conforming in this line of thought.

Hmm, interesting to think about. An interesting thought experiment is to imagine having lived a life as a male, and then waking up as a female. What would you do? How would you modify your life? Would you look at surgery?

I think its different with male to female and female to male. I always view the "female gender" as kind of a "male+". In that men are kind of like a default gender and then women have all these extra societal expectations. Like females can easily be males by just doing less female stuff - makeup, clothing, etc. Women dress in men's clothing all the time, but not the other way around.

What's interesting is when you ask the question to trans people: "why don't you just go along with the sex you were assigned", they always talk of a very strong inner feeling that they simply can't. I haven't been able to find someone to present it in a way that is understandable for a cis person...which does make me skeptical of the need to be seen as a societal woman, vs it being related to other issues (general depression and homosexuality).

But I think you are right in that a sex change shouldn't really require a gender change.

Cutting off one of your two perfectly functional legs, to match your mental image of having one leg - that is objectively crazy. You can rationalise and claim this makes that person happy. Maybe it does, but that would be indicative of a very serious mental disorder. Rather treat the mental disorder than cut off the leg, is what I propose?

> rather treat the mental disorder

Obviously.

But what if this doesn't work?

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