Is being trans a 'disease'/mental health issue?

[SolveMyPrombles]

I'm asking on this board for deliberate considered responses so please do share your thoughts.

A lady on a local group has described being trans as a mental illness that should be treated with compassion not pandered to because it's a disease.

Looking into it more deeply I believe she's wrong and there is no current diagnostic manual that agrees with her take.

What do you think?

This is it.

There are thousands of physical differences between the sexes that are part of the sexed body cues.

Me having huge hands makes no difference as to whether I am male or female. That my hands are also in the range of female variation and are a different palm shape etc to typical male hands also is important to know.

Someone with a long philthrum and a long neck is likely a common combination. Along with a particular skull shape. Still doesn’t mean that those specific features seen with all these other female body cues will lead to a different decision.

Picking out a feature or two to discredit the reliability of female people’s (in particular) ability to interpret other’s sex category is not plausible.

Not all female people will have the ability to quickly interpret body cues for identifying the sex category of someone. But those who don’t should not assume that is a universal inability in others. So much will also have to do with how focused a person is and how relevant it is at the time.

This entire discussion becomes endless. The point is a male person stating that no female person has correctly identified his sex category would have so very very rare and / or remains in a limited environment, or is simply not being truthful with us or himself.

is like the constant framing that when we say that there will be one female person who will at some time correctly identify that male person as being male, that we are somehow saying that every female person can correctly identify every male person 100 % of the time. This is not what we are saying.

That's is exactly what many posters on this forum have said in the last few months including on this thread.

@Helleofabore I think this is why I find it unfathomable that TWs, and even TMs, have been lead to believe that the mere supplementation of a couple of hormones will materially counter genetic and chromosomal programming. I feel angry that cynical, finance driven drug companies and clinical practitioners have sold them this lie. And ‘sell’ is what they have done - because even the money that could be made from offering several years therapy does not come close to the profits they have made by spinning this ideology.

I have read about trans women on dementia wards who wake up screaming and hysterical every day of their lives not understanding why they are missing body parts and are presenting as female. Because they only remember their former selves/identities. It is heinous, but this may be the future for those stalwart transitioners who manage to live that long. I hope the bastards who colluded in all this are made to pay for the anguish these people may one day experience.

I hope I didn’t come across as saying that - I only intended to convey that women are significantly adept and much more likely. I think (from memory) the stats were 87% accuracy amongst female participants compared to 50-something% accuracy amongst male counterparts in gender and facial recognition studies. I should perhaps have included those stats to be clear and less emphatic.

I get mis sexed “mate“, "sir“ by service people about 6 times a year, usually quickly corrected. I get mis sexed in female spaces only from behiind. Open challenge a few times a year until this trans nonsense, which halted it. I'm sure it will start again now, I have no problem with that. I get second glances to confirm I'm not trans nearly every time I go to the gym changing room when there is anyone there who has not seen me before. I don't look spectacularly male but I do look like the more convincing trans people.

Reassurance depends on the situation. It's not difficult.

Not you, no, but seriously plenty of others insisting they can spot every genetic male every time.

Why do you doubt that they can though?

Of course, focus level will vary and sometimes they might not be taking any notice of who they are passing etc. but if they are focused, why do you doubt their word and instead give credence to the male people who claim that they, the male people, will be not correctly identified by at least one female person at some stage ?

The accuracy rate is very high for correctly identifying faces as being male or female, even without skin / eye colour etc and a neutral 3D model is used. I think it is above 90-95%.

I will look for the study later this afternoon.

That would be brilliant @Helleofabore I did read it all in-depth as part of a perception module for a Psychology degree 12or so years ago so am going entirely off memory and a google search didn’t bring up anything academically robust that I recognised.

It is in fact really hard to do any searches now on ‘research that explores whether women are better than men at recognising the male phenome’ as the algorithms all seem to be skewed to not offending the trans agenda and many of the answers seems to wilfully misinterpret my very clearly phrased questions to talk about facial recognition and recall!

@Helleofabore , the more I look at that video, the more annoyed I am.

How can the takeaway from that short video clip possibly be that the trans-identifying man in the clip doesn't feel 'safe'? It's the woman who's running away from an enclosed space with a man. The man doesn't look scared, just pissed off.

The Victoria government obviously set out to guilt-trip women who don't accept men as being women. But even they couldn't come up with a scenario where a trans-identifying man is scared of a woman.

I agree. But if you look at what changes the Vic government has made law wise etc over the past few years, it figures that they really seek to control people’s reactions to male people with transgender identities.

That whole ad campaign was poor messaging when you consider it. But that segment was absolutely fucking deplorable.

But hey… apparently none of this messaging has been happening in media, news and court cases. And no female people keep their reaction completely neutral out of fear or even just politeness. And no male person ever attempts to censure women who don’t comply.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004269892200133X

this is a paper from 2022 and builds on one from the 90s.

I misremembered, it was in the 90s% for skin on. The reason they give is because it gives greater highlight to shapes.

Even the reliability though of the skin off 3d model was very high.

So, despite some of your features that make you 'look like the more convincing trans people', it seems that people can pretty quickly tell that you are female on a second glance.

Because none of the studies anyone quotes prove they can every time and nobody can personally prove they can.

People only know the people they think they've spotted, they don't know who they have missed and they can't actually be 100% certain they haven't clocked a masculine female.

I do make sure for their sake that women in women's spaces understand I'm female. I'd be pretty sure that I could convince most of them I'm male and trans.

And by the exact same logic, not one of those male people you give the benefit of the doubt to can prove that they pass 100% of the time either.

Yet you are more inclined to believe them than female people who may have that ability.

You talk about studies, has there been a study where a group of female people has been asked to correctly identify the sex of numerous people? I don’t believe that I have ever seen such research. It doesn’t mean that it has not been done of course.

The study should be done by placing each volunteer female participant in a state of semi-undress in an empty room at the end of an empty corridor, and then introducing various people of either sex one at a time. That is the situation that is causing the friction, not passing some random trans person on the high street, and that is the situation in which women's ability to determine sex will work most effectively.

There really is a difference between someone not taking any notice and not identifying someone in passing and being focused and interacting with the person.

Given a choice between a small boned short male who's been on female hormones and presenting as female for years passing as female, and any woman being able to correctly identify 100% of the time when she has been in close proximity to a fully clothed male presenting as female, on balance one seems far more believable to me than the other.

And that is your choice.

Of course, others will choose differently. Frankly, having seen males who were puberty blocked and on hormones for decades age in their photos shared on line, I believe the opposite. And I don’t believe that small framed and short males are any different to other males at all in that regard. They are simply short and light build males not males with ‘female’ body cues.

Even reading the accounts of males who have have facial surgery having to have further surgeries as they age makes me doubt that ‘decades’ of hormones means that a male person who might have had fewer people correctly identify him as a young person will still be in a similar situation as they age.

But each to their own.

Helleofabore
Even reading the accounts of males who have have facial surgery having to have further surgeries as they age makes me doubt that ‘decades’ of hormones means that a male person who might have had fewer people correctly identify him as a young person will still be in a similar situation as they age.

Being fair, a lot of women have increasing amounts of botox and plastic surgery as they age, in the vain pursuit of youth. And after a bit, they start to look (to my eyes) slightly inhuman and unnatural.

(I think I will leave that there.)

The existence of a few women who claim to be able to tell sex with 100% accuracy (and we cannot say whether or not they are correct), does not mean that most people can't tell, most of the time.

Its faulty logic.

A quick view of most reality TV shows that plastic surgery leaves a hell of a lot to be desired...

This has all reminded me that there used to be a fashion for taking a photograph (old-fashioned type) of a face looking straight at the camera, cutting the negative in half and developing each side twice, once reversed, so you ended up with two pictures, one face that was the left side and its reversal and one face that was the right side and its reversal.

This mostly showed that the "symmetrical features" so beloved of wromance writers looked completely wrong for a human being and were strangely horrible, as well as showing that nobody actually had them thank goodness. (It was especially noticeable how few people's ears were both at the same height relative to their mouth.)

Just thinking about pictures of people that look All Wrong. Sorry; total sidetrack.

Yes the logic is faulty.

And the argument is flawed that not one female will have correctly identified the sex because no one can tell 100%. In the many interactions a male person has over a period of time, it is likely that a female person (even if she cannot tell 100% of the time) will have correctly identified that male person.

The probably has to be almost zero that not one female in all that time has correctly identified that male person from one visual perspective or another, hearing a voice, seeing skeletal proportions in movement.

Even a slightly built male will have male leverage points in his skeleton. Those don’t need to be seen without clothes. Gait is always a good give away.

There are so many. But apparently, no one can tell….