LogFAQs > #886034029

Tmk posted...

The body can malfunction as well. Plenty of people are born with things wrong about their body.

So the question remains: why side with the body over the brain?

Because, in this case, the malfunction seems to be with how the brain perceives the otherwise healthy, functional body. Similarly to people with Body Integrity Identity Disorder, in which those people's brains perceive their own limbs as being alien to the rest of the body. Should we "side with the brain" and happily start amputating their otherwise healthy arms and legs because they have a mental disorder? Is their body malfunctioning because they were born with fully functional limbs?

Soviet_Poland posted...

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?

As I said, I'm fine with HRT and SRS as long as it's the best treatment method we have. But I stand by my opinion that we shouldn't rule out finding other methods that fix the malfunction in the brain. I don't particularly have any personal reservations about "fixing" homosexuals either, but homosexuality seems otherwise harmless and doesn't require complicated surgeries and a life time of hormone therapy to accommodate.

I don't think we can really compare how the mind erroneously perceives how the body should or should not be compare to how it actually exists and whether or not you, say, support a progressive tax rate or a flat tax rate.

I draw the line at how fixing how the mind perceives reality. Whether it's perceiving voices or visions that aren't actually there or the brain erroneously perceiving healthy body parts are alien to it or feels dysphoria over the body's sex not aligning with the mind's mental image.

I hope I'm explaining my position well enough. I don't oppose HRT and SRS as long as their more effective than doing nothing. If it makes you feel better, I'm even in favor of Medicaid and private health insurance paying for them as they would other conditions. I just don't think we should write off looking for solutions that could repair what seems to be going wrong in the brain.
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