h/t McThag
In commenting about men competing as pretend-women, on his blog, Divemedic wrote this:
"Let's say that I believe myself to be a gorilla. No
matter how strongly I believe it, I am still not a gorilla.
Let's say that I
take pills to make myself grow more hair to look more like a gorilla. I am still
not a gorilla.
If I hire a surgeon to perform an operation to make myself
look more like a gorilla, I am still not a gorilla.
If I get a million people
to say that I can be whatever I identify myself as, and declare than I am a
gorilla, I am still not a gorilla.
If I were to believe myself to be a
gorilla and took the steps above, people would say I am crazy."
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:
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.
"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."
Now you're just trolling.
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:
The topic
of dressing wrong and using the restroom came up in comments on gender
dysphoria.
A long time ago in a city, far far away...
There lived
a woman, a lesbian, who dressed much as a man would. She cut her hair short,
much as a man would. She was stocky of build, a typical "bull-dyke".
She
used the women's room one day, as she had her entire life.
She got the
shit beat out of her by a couple of "men" who decided that no "fucking tranny"
was going to use the same restroom as their precious "women folk".
They
quickly discovered that, even in rural and often conservative Iowa, that assault
is assault and it's a felony and felons go to prison.
This is why I
despise the bathroom "police".
She was never the same after and I miss my
friend.
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:
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."