Transgenderism or Gender Dysphoria?

Here is a story from where I used to live, Fairfax County, Virginia, about parents who want to confront the school board there about sex education, including transgenderism, so called. The extremist school board decided to table that discussion until later in the summer, presumably when more concerned parents will be away on summer vacation. The story tends to support my theory that government schools are no place of children (see my political agenda here). The story provides an adequate jumping off point for me to pontificate on my views concerning gender dysphoria.

I prefer to use the term "extremist" above rather than "liberal" because that's what these people are, they're extreme. Normal, middle-of-the-road, middle-class people have ceded the language over to the extremists, which gives them a huge advantage in the war over social policy. They call themselves nice words like "liberal" and "progressive," while calling these middle-of-the-road people "conservative."

Same with "transgenderism." Such a newfangled term sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? It gives the whole thing an air of legitimacy. But what is it really? 

It's really a mental illness called "gender dysphoria."

My beef is not with people with gender dysphoria. These are people with a mental disorder who are due all the love and empathy that anyone else deserves. And it's a free country. People can do what they want with their lives. It's a crazy world out there and it's easy to get confused. People need to have the space to figure it out. Children are another matter, of course. Parents need to guide their children, not government school employees, and children need to wait until they're adults to make life-altering decisions like this.

My problem is not with people with gender dysphoria. It's with the unscrupulous, self-serving "professionals" of the healthcare-industrial complex who profit off of these people by selling them their most expensive products--unnecessary major surgery and life-long drug dependence, including not only hormones, but also anti-depressants to keep them from ever waking up to what they've done to themselves. And allow me to take back the language again. This is not "surgery" we're talking about, it's doctor-assisted self-mutilation. Welcome to E-ville.

Frankly, gender dysphoria is nothing the LGB&Q+ religion should include in its ranks. All the other letters stand for groups of people who are trying to say there's nothing wrong with us. And yet these evil doctors are getting away with telling this handful of people that there IS something wrong with them, something that only their surgery and drugs can cure. Think about that! May I suggest a different approach? May I suggest that the first and only line of therapy be to help people with gender dysphoria to understand that they're perfectly fine as they are, rather than to be encouraged to purchase the evil doctors' products? And that their unusual attachment to gender is misplaced--that it is not the source of their troubles?

There are people out there who for some reason enjoy cutting themselves. Is the therapy for these people to say, "Well, if you want to cut yourself, here let me help"? No, you try to get to the root of that problem. The cutting isn't going to help solve that inner problem, which is a problem of elevating mind over soul.

 (But now I've gone too far, since none of the people involved probably believe that we have souls, so I'll real it back in and I'll try to stick to the subject, although if someone were interested, it's a pretty easy task to get the process started to restore soul to its rightful place atop the inner food chain, so to speak. But that's all I'll say about it here. See other articles on this blog for more on that.)

And incidentally, isn't there something about an oath? What is it, first do no harm? No harm! You're lopping off perfectly good appendages and sending a person out into the world to try to pass as something they're not. I call that harm. And Frankensteinian. Hacking into the body to try to cure a troubled mind went out with the ancient Egyptians' practice of drilling holes in skulls to let out the evil spirits, and more recently with lobotomies. 

It should surprise you to know, but probably doesn't, that electric shock therapy is still a thing. What do you do when the people treating the people with mental issues also have mental issues? Some of you will say, "They're doctors, they know more than you do." Come on, they don't. Nor do they know more than you do about these things. These are the same guys nodding as their cohorts lop off perfectly good appendages. It's up to normal people to rein them in.

I love this from Wikipedia, which is about all the depth anyone would need to debunk all of this if they--that is to say he or she--thinks anywhere near critically. It says, "Some researchers and transgender people support declassification of the condition because they say the diagnosis pathologizes gender variance and reinforces the binary model of gender."

And the answer to that is, of course it does! Because there are only two genders. That's it. Two. These extremists have co-opted the language again, this time by assuming something that simply isn't true. It's one of those "the emperor has no clothes" situations. There are only two genders and if you're confused about that, you have a mental disorder. There's nothing "progressive" about this, it's wacky. And people who support it are wacky. Don't argue with them because they're not grounded in reality.

Let me repeat: There are only two genders, male and female, and if you're confused about that you have a mental disorder called gender dysphoria. This makes sense to most people, so how does a misconception like this gain any traction. One word: academia. Academics in certain "disciplines" drive all of this "new thinking." They need this new way of thinking in order to remain logically consistent. How can academics--who are also all extremists--argue that doctor-assisted self-mutilation is a perfectly acceptable practice if what's being treated is a mental illness? They can't, so in order to remain logically consistent, they simply declare that gender has nothing to do with biology. You can accomplish absolutely any kind of mental acrobatics in the virtual space of mind because that space isn't real. Gender is now merely an identity and not a way to describe physical characteristics. In other words, they equivocate upon the meaning of the word "gender." They've changed its meaning in the middle of the argument. Remember, these people are smarter than we are.

This is why it's so important to institute one of the pillars of my political agenda, which is to make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. When you do that, lenders will have to scrutinize these loans to help ensure that they'll be paid back. One aspect of that scrutiny would be the marketability of the degree to be conferred. On Day One of this policy change, whole university departments would be completely eliminated, the very departments that spew this kind of nonsense. But I digress..... 

Alas, there's a problem with the aforementioned approach of these extremist academics: Money.

A controversy exists over whether insurance should pay for doctor-assisted self-mutilation. Here's a little something from Wikipedia on the subject:

Because gender dysphoria had been classified as a disorder in medical texts (such as the previous DSM manual, the DSM-IV-TR, under the name "gender identity disorder"), many insurance companies are willing to cover some of the expenses of sex reassignment therapy. Without the classification of gender dysphoria as a medical disorder, sex reassignment therapy may be viewed as a cosmetic treatment, rather than medically necessary treatment, and may not be covered.

Now we get down to it. This is what it's all about, money. It's a classic Catch-22! If we can't call it a mental disorder, then insurance companies don't have to pay the evil doctors. So the evil doctors can't charge as much money. So which is it? Normal behavior or a disorder? The extremists will get around this easily enough eventually. When no one's looking, they'll simply attach a little sentence to a bill that has nothing to do with the subject telling insurance companies they have to cover this type of mutilation anyway.

That's the way I see it. Let the cancelling begin!...I can't really back that up. I'm not a big enough fish that I can be cancelled. Well, it sounded kind of cool, anyway, very cavalier, all devil-may-care and what not.

Image courtesy of Walmart.com.