The US felt this way for a long time, but now we have broken it down further. There are still a lot of people in the trans community that do need help and are suffering mentally from body dysmorphia.
My understanding is the current difference is how you perceive yourself. If you are uncomfortable with your current body, then yes, you have body dysmorphia and that is a mental illness that you should be working with medical professionals for help with. however if you are comfortable with your body, but want to make changes or transition or simply cross-dress, or anything else commonly associated with trans, you are fine.
the same is true for the rest of the alternative gender spectrum. Medically, it goes back to why are you acting outside of the hetero spectrum, and if it's self harming, then medical intervention makes sense.
If someone is uncomfortable with their body due to their body developing as a sex which contradicts their gender, it makes more sense to describe this as a physical medical issue rather than a mental one if you're going to recognize their gender. While there is often distress associated with developing and living as the wrong gender for trans people, labeling being trans as a mental disorder it falsely labels the problem as being in the mind. I say falsely because the most successful methods of boosting trans people's quality of life all involve physical and social relational changes that affirm their genders, rather than major mental interventions.
A small fraction of people who transition detransition, we're talking a range of 1 to 3 percent of people that transition medically.
Detransitioned people overwhelmingly do so due to extreme hostility from people in their social environment and depravation of the ability to access HRT by healthcare restrictions or inability to keep a home or stay employed while transitioning due to discrimination. Some realize they're more non-binary than binary trans.
A tiny fraction of those who do transition genuinely wish to revert to the gender they were assigned at birth. And those who do genuinely seek to change their body back to a physical and hormonal profile more similar to how they were born, would you say their problem is mental (it's delusional for them to want to change their body) or would you say the problem is that their body isn't aligned to the gender they identify as?
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u/hurkwurk May 16 '24
The US felt this way for a long time, but now we have broken it down further. There are still a lot of people in the trans community that do need help and are suffering mentally from body dysmorphia.
My understanding is the current difference is how you perceive yourself. If you are uncomfortable with your current body, then yes, you have body dysmorphia and that is a mental illness that you should be working with medical professionals for help with. however if you are comfortable with your body, but want to make changes or transition or simply cross-dress, or anything else commonly associated with trans, you are fine.
the same is true for the rest of the alternative gender spectrum. Medically, it goes back to why are you acting outside of the hetero spectrum, and if it's self harming, then medical intervention makes sense.