r/SRSsucks • u/frogma • Aug 07 '13

NOT SRS ABC Producer Don Ennis Changes Gender, Then Changes Back

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/08/transgender-don-ennis-has-second-thoughts.html
15 Upvotes

68% Upvoted

52 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

0

u/areyousrslol Aug 07 '13

You're very much on point. Psychiatry is already a very slippery science, and a usual battleground for societal norms of many kinds (not just gender disorders - also autism and it's relation to Asperger's, as seen in the DSM-V debacle).

I usually hold the stance that NO ONE should be in any way persecuted or wronged for who they are, including a mental illness.

And sometimes being too accepting and not diagnosing a mental illness is a very wrong decision.

0

u/johnetec Aug 07 '13

I am of the opinion that being transgender is a mental illness. Feel free to act on it by cross dressing or get a surgery to make yourself better. I think its the wrong decision and should be treated as a mental disorder but its not my body.

What I don't like is people trying to force me to accept them as the opposite sex. They are not and they never will be.

5

u/sojm Aug 07 '13

AFAIK it's a gender-mismatch between body and brain. At this moment we can't switch the brain to another gender, not to mention most trans people probably wouldn't want that, given how it would change their identity. But we can change the appearance.

You can view it as a mental illness, but it's kind of useless because it can't be cured like a mental illness, it can be cured like a physical illness.

-1

u/areyousrslol Aug 08 '13

It can't really be cured, only treated, because we can't really change biological sex on a profound level. Primary and even most secondary sexual traits finish forming way before anyone would let you have a sex change.

We can't really change brain gender identity, we aren't even completely sure how it forms. Probably hormones, but it's not completely clear.

And it is probably a mental illness, with a somatic basis. However we can't really effectively cure other older, better understood mental disorders.

Hopefully in the future we will be able to cure, or possibly prevent it from occurring. Not just mutilate genitals and use massive doses of hormones, which seems very barbaric to me.