LogFAQs > #886029565

Esrac posted...

The brain can malfunction. As the case with people who feel their body is "wrong" because they have all working limbs, so they want to get some amputated. Or people who are bipolar or schizophrenic.

We don't just write those people off as "who they are". We try to treat their mental disorder through therapy and/or medication. I don't think we should regard people with Gender Dysphoria much differently.

As long as hormone therapy and surgery are the most effective ways to treat them, fine. But I don't think we should stop trying to learn and repair whatever has gone wrong in their brain to cause the dysphoria between their actual body and their mind's self-image.

The only reason we treat bipolar and schizophrenia symptomatically is because those symptoms often come with significant occupational dysfunction that causes undue distress. The pharmacologic and behavioral interventional treatment modalities address these symptoms.

Gender dysphoria is only considered a mental disorder in the same manner such that the discrepancy between their gender identity and sex recorded at birth are different and this causes undue distress. As such, treating them with HRT or SRS helps address this and reduces dysphoria.

To say otherwise would be imparting values onto patients, which is a huge no-no in medicine. What is the moral difference between "fixing" what's wrong in a patient's brain that causes them to identify differently versus "fixing" a homosexual person?

Perhaps we can fix certain political ideologies as well. See the slippery slope here? Where do you draw the line?
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"He has two neurons held together by a spirochete."