In commenting about men competing as pretend-women, on his blog, Divemedic wrote this:
Divemedic is correct, and his analogy accords with the situation of men pretending to be women, and allowed to compete in women's sports.
Guy wants to play sports?
His birth certificate dictates where he competes.
Allowing genetic men in women's sports is clinical insanity, and should occasion the end of any sport or organization supporting it.
They're lunatics.
The response to Divemedic from Angus:
"The button he pushed is only tangentially related to his point about the athletics problem.
Let's say that letting you pretend you're a gorilla alleviates nearly all of the internal symptoms of your species dysphoria and lets you function at a normal level.
There's a few things that I keep ramming into when seeing the trans issue coming up, but far and above is whether it's a mental illness or not.
The LGBT party line is that it is not a mental illness and it's completely normal.
I don't think that it is correct. Seeing the wrong person in the mirror is not normal. If it's not normal, then it's abnormal and likely a state of mental illness. If you want to get technical, being left-handed is an abnormality too.
The problem of admitting it's a mental illness comes from the people who use this to attack and demean the persons with the problem. You have a cure? An effective cure that does less psychological damage than the affliction?
No. No you do not.
When there's no cure for a disease, you're left with treating symptoms.
Letting the trans person dress like the person they think they are and using the pronouns of that person is treating the symptoms. It doesn't turn a man into a woman, but it allows that person to feel human again. That's something that people with gender dysphoria don't get dressing as the chromosomes dictate.
It's not near so extreme as human v gorilla. Let's try another analogy:
Let's say that I believe myself to have a full head of hair.
No matter how strongly I believe it, I am still bald.
Let's say that I take pills to make myself grow more hair. I still have male pattern baldness.
If I hire a surgeon to perform an operation to implant hair from elsewhere to my head. I still have male pattern baldness.
If I get a million people to say that I can be whatever I identify myself as, and declare I have hair, I still have male pattern baldness.
If I were to believe myself to have hair and took the steps above, would people would say I am crazy?
Genetics says I should be bald. Yet we have how many technologies that allow the bald to pretend they have hair?
Something I learned about basic human kindness and politeness AS A CHILD was to not make fun of someone's toupee to their face. That pretending that an obvious rug was hair was just something that we did because compassion for others is the right thing to do.
I can make the same analogy about hair color. How many people dye away the gray?
Gender dysphoria is something without a cure. While there are several treatments, none are 100% effective and none are universally applicable. What worked in one case will fail spectacularly in another.
That's just how psychology works."
Now it was my turn to enter the conversation.
"Treating the symptoms" acknowledges that reality is not what we wish it to be.
That's sane coping.
Believing that your wish is reality is a psychosis.
Which, by definition, isn't just "abnormal", it's clinical insanity.
Left-handers are abnormal, but their function is real: they use their left hand better than their right.
Their belief that such is true absolutely comports with reality.
Abnormal means different, not crazy.
That's just how psychology works.
Someone who wants to dress differently is within the societal bounds their own business.
First Amendment, free expression, etc. etc.
Demanding to be referred to, and allowed to function as, a genetically different sex than biology dictates, not only steps over the line into clinical psychosis, it compels me to join in that psychosis, by pretending an insane fantasy is reality.
That is tyranny, by way of insanity.
I decline to participate, on both counts.
Forcefully, if need be.
And if someone can't deal with the reality that they are the sex they are, no matter how, or how well, they try to camouflage it, they have the problem; I do not.
It not my job, nor society's, to kowtow to such insanity, let alone enforce nor reinforce it.
They need professional help.
And if they cannot deal with reality and behave appropriately in polite society, they need institutionalization.
Guy wants to wear a wig and a dress? Couldn't care less.
Guy in a dress goes into a bathroom used by women and little girls, he's going to jail.
Not even a hard decision.
Angus' reply to that:
Sorry Angus, but having a firm grasp on reality, and
refusing to mollycoddle someone else's clinical psychosis, isn't "being a
dick".
No treatment for anything is 100%, especially with psychological disorders.
That's why that's a completely ridiculous standard of care, adopted by no one nowhere and at no time.
I suspect you knew that already.
So why lay it out as if it's really a thing, let alone reasonable?
The problem is pretending that humoring lunatics helps them, or anyone else.
It doesn't.
When confronted by a sick person, I'm suggesting they need serious psychological work, but as long as they're not a danger to themselves or others, it's not my problem.
Trying to coerce me into humoring and coddling their lunacy is.
I'm not going to do anything confrontational with crazy people, unless I'm on the job.
If I'm in public, I'm calling a cop, if they're breaking a law.
If I'm on duty, and they're where I work, they'll behave, or be ejected.
If they're patients, they'll behave, or be restrained.
That's what I get paid to do, and I have the safety of everyone else to consider.
It's not their world, and they don't get their own reality, except inside their head, just like anyone else. When their crazy leaks out, and they start doing things against the rules, anyone sane would know there will be a problem. Anyone not sane needs an intervention. If that involves handcuffs, so be it.
In civil society, you act civil, or you don't get to go out and play with others.
Life has been like that pretty much for 6000 years of recorded history, and back before it into the misty past.
Some guy wants to pretend he's the Queen of Sheba, it doesn't affect me.
His attire is as free for him as my disdainful looks are to me.
He wants to be called something other than what he is?
Not happening.
He wants to go into a multi-user ladies' room?
He's going to have a date - with a judge.
You don't get to forcibly compel speech in this country, ever.
Noting that, or living according to that, is also not "being a dick".
It's called liberty.
That's the gist of the whole "your right to stretch your arm ends where my nose begins" theory of personal freedom.
We were told thirty years and more ago that demands from society's sideshow freaks for recognition and acceptance would lead to compulsory approbation.
"Today, psychosis is accepted. Tomorrow, it will become mandatory."
Now, exactly as warned, it's here.
I refuse.
"Being a dick" about all this would be publishing their names in the newspaper, or making them wear pink triangles on their clothes, or worse.
Noting that crazy people are indeed crazy, however, doesn't begin to approach dickishness, and instead goes by the handy name "sane". Noting insanity is neither an attack, nor demeaning. It's simply calling a nutbag a nutbag.
Being free-range crazy in public is generally punishment enough.
No treatment for anything is 100%, especially with psychological disorders.
That's why that's a completely ridiculous standard of care, adopted by no one nowhere and at no time.
I suspect you knew that already.
So why lay it out as if it's really a thing, let alone reasonable?
The problem is pretending that humoring lunatics helps them, or anyone else.
It doesn't.
When confronted by a sick person, I'm suggesting they need serious psychological work, but as long as they're not a danger to themselves or others, it's not my problem.
Trying to coerce me into humoring and coddling their lunacy is.
I'm not going to do anything confrontational with crazy people, unless I'm on the job.
If I'm in public, I'm calling a cop, if they're breaking a law.
If I'm on duty, and they're where I work, they'll behave, or be ejected.
If they're patients, they'll behave, or be restrained.
That's what I get paid to do, and I have the safety of everyone else to consider.
It's not their world, and they don't get their own reality, except inside their head, just like anyone else. When their crazy leaks out, and they start doing things against the rules, anyone sane would know there will be a problem. Anyone not sane needs an intervention. If that involves handcuffs, so be it.
In civil society, you act civil, or you don't get to go out and play with others.
Life has been like that pretty much for 6000 years of recorded history, and back before it into the misty past.
Some guy wants to pretend he's the Queen of Sheba, it doesn't affect me.
His attire is as free for him as my disdainful looks are to me.
He wants to be called something other than what he is?
Not happening.
He wants to go into a multi-user ladies' room?
He's going to have a date - with a judge.
You don't get to forcibly compel speech in this country, ever.
Noting that, or living according to that, is also not "being a dick".
It's called liberty.
That's the gist of the whole "your right to stretch your arm ends where my nose begins" theory of personal freedom.
We were told thirty years and more ago that demands from society's sideshow freaks for recognition and acceptance would lead to compulsory approbation.
"Today, psychosis is accepted. Tomorrow, it will become mandatory."
Now, exactly as warned, it's here.
I refuse.
"Being a dick" about all this would be publishing their names in the newspaper, or making them wear pink triangles on their clothes, or worse.
Noting that crazy people are indeed crazy, however, doesn't begin to approach dickishness, and instead goes by the handy name "sane". Noting insanity is neither an attack, nor demeaning. It's simply calling a nutbag a nutbag.
Being free-range crazy in public is generally punishment enough.
Just don't expect mandatory grazing rights and a watering trough on my front lawn.
And if anyone cannot handle the inevitable sane people laughing and pointing at their antics, it's probably too late in the summer for such Special Snowflakes to be outside without a sun umbrella.
Insanity itself has been a good way to know whom to avoid from time beyond reckoning.
UPDATE: We had made our point, but Angus apparently wants to move the goalposts all around and try again. And again. And again.
"Sure is a long winded way to say, "Yup, I'm going to be a dick."
You're also ignoring that I specified a particular disorder... But you lumped in everyone who dresses differently than you demand in your diatribe. I noticed."
"100% isn't fair, you're correct.
What's the treatment that's most effective? How often is it applicable? Will pursuing this line of treatment make some forms of the disorder worse? Can you determine that before you begin this line of treatment? Do you demand that everyone with the disorder be subject to the most effective treatment of the most patients even if there's a plurality of patients it is ineffective on, or will cause more problems for the patient?"
"Then, what if there is no effective treatment?
Just be a dick?
You must be fun around people in wheel chairs who have no more effective means to walk than many forms of gender dysphoria have of seeing a person who matches their chromosomes in the mirror."
No such dickishness was expressed nor implied. You evidently just choose to describe any contrary opinion as that equivalent.
How does that approach work for you offline, face-to-face? Just curious.
I make no demands regarding treatment.
I definitely suggest it, from a surfeit of compassion.Whether they choose to follow up on that, and how, is between the psych patient and their psychologist/psychiatrist.
And frankly, I couldn't care less what they choose; nor whether it's effective or not.
That's their problem, and likely not any of my business.
Their behavior in public is.
If they just want to let their freak flag fly in private, I couldn't care less.
And if they want to walk out in the town square, as long as they don't jaywalk, block traffic, or spit on the sidewalk, they have as much freedom to parade their dysfunction as anyone else.
But if transvestites of any of a myriad of psychological dysfunctions can't stay in their own biological lane, I'll call a cop.
And at any point, I'll use whatever pronouns in addressing them as I see fit.
People in wheel chairs are in wheel chairs.
No one is demanding they walk.People with gender dysphoria are demanding we carry them on our backs, and tell them they're walking.
That's where that analogy runs off the rails and over the cliff.
Not yet content, we are now treated to a wholly irrelevant tear-jerking tale:
Which is germane to the topic because I totally said that the answer to the problem is to beat the shit out of people...oh, wait, holy f**k, nowhere at all, ever, at any point in the discussion. Well-played.
OTOH, in my entire life, I've never yet witnessed anyone run in for calling a cop for someone else disturbing the peace by entering a restroom to which they were not biologically entitled.
When the facts and the law are against you, Angus, pound on the table and cry.
Let's try that in reverse:
Someone once got shot by a mugger, so we should ban all guns, because I'm sad for my friend the minimart clerk.
In short, my feelz trumps all reality and common sense.
That's the level to which you've taken your topic.
If that's all you've got, quit while you're behind.
And stop telling people they're being dicks just because they don't agree with you.
It's not only poor form, but it stands language on its head, and you reduce all language and all persons to either "things with which I agree" or "things that are done by dicks".
You reduce every question to one of vanilla vs. chocolate, as if there were no more nuance to any topic than that, and your taste buds the sole arbiter of common sense, while you beggar the language of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Twain.
And because it's being a dick, right?
UPDATE II: Nope. He's still not done:
"You did demand they get treatment. I am trying to see if you understand what that means. You don't.
You're ignoring the disorder I named and focusing on something else entirely.
You sure can write, can you read?
And you still insist in being a dick about it in every reply. You're apparently seeking agreement that being a dick about it is the correct response. You're not going to get that agreement here.
You don't understand the disorder, but have convinced yourself you do and have all the answers, but the behavior you've said you will exhibit make the problem worse, not better.
But I bet you don't go after people who dye away the gray and get offended that they're not acting their age.
Someone has a problem... It's you." - Angus
Angus, really.
I made no such alleged "demand". Disprove that, and win: Kindly specify the quote wherein I "demanded" anyone get treatment. Any treatment at all.
You'll discover instead that I merely identified a need.
Language is precise, and "need" does not equal "must get or else". Logic fail.
If you misunderstood, that's on you. I made no demands, whatsoever, by any stretch of the imagination, except in regard to actual behavior in public.
We call those things laws.
Legislatures pass them, not I.
I'm not ignoring the disorder you specified, I'm doing exactly what you did with Divemedic: ignoring the smaller subset of cases he was refering to (transvestites competing as alleged women, in his comments), in order to address the larger issue: who gets to claim womanhood in public at all.
I took the quaint notion of using biological fact as reality.
That is not, ergo, "being a dick". (Throwing the "dick" flag is a weak crutch. Sticks and stones.)
You can think what you like about that, and on your blog, you get the only vote.
That does not, however, comport with either rationality, nor best course of action for the disorder, but it's a free country.
I understand the disorder, and I also know that patronizing insanity and delusion never works.
I even have some wee amount of real-life clinical experience with dealing with crazy people, but it was once considered so common-sense an approach that they even made a movie about dealing with people based on reality, rather than humoring their behavior, called The Miracle Worker, and honored the lead actress in that work with an Academy Award, IIRC.
You might check it out on Netflix.
If you're truly open-minded, read Hellen Keller herself on how reality-based treatment allowed a blind and deaf person to figuratively see, hear, and experience the actual world, versus the prior failed efforts to humor her dysfunction.
People who dye away the gray don't attempt to attend grammar school as students.
You continually keep pulling out inapplicable analogies, and then misapplying them.
Logic has rules.
To make people dyeing their gray hair equivalent to people with alleged gender dysphoria (miniscule out of the population of current transvestites as that number is), people with gray hair would also have to be trying to be treated as school-age youths or earlier.
They are not.
They merely don't wish to appear to be decrepit, disposable elderly persons.
Not an unreasonable desire on the part of someone still in full possession of their faculties, despite the advance of years, or inevitable physical decline.
(I had a friend in High school who was completely naturally grey by our senior year, at age 17.
Should he have acted old, by your standard? Show your work.)
Dyeing one's hair is not breaking any law nor disturbing the peace, btw, and dates to long before you or I came upon the scene of civilization.
And they make no demands on others as to how they are to be addressed, let alone demands that do not comport with reality.
So your analogy of that with gender dysphoria has zero points of contact with the situation you're trying to make more familiar.
Analogy fail.
Sorry if that's uncomfortable, but like Martin Luther, "Here I am. I can do no other."
Reality is a harsh mistress, but I thought you were in her fan club.
That's the problem here. Gender dysphoria isn't a single disorder, but a family with the same overt presentation. A myriad of causes means there's a myriad of cures... *IF* it can be cured at all. It doesn't seem certain it can be in many if not most cases and it's tragic.
What you've said you're going to do when confronted with a sick person is to be a dick about it.
Think about that."