Polygamy-Porter wrote:I agree.Water Dog wrote:by the way, still not a single shred of actual scientific evidence presented to support the idea that this male is actually a female.
I am very open minded.
Polygamy-Porter wrote:I agree.Water Dog wrote:by the way, still not a single shred of actual scientific evidence presented to support the idea that this male is actually a female.
I am very open minded.
Jersey Girl wrote:Good. Then who decides the gender of an intersex child and on what basis?
Polygamy-Porter wrote:Jersey Girl wrote:Good. Then who decides the gender of an intersex child and on what basis?
Please read and reply to my thread about a girl born white, but now identifies as black:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=46635
Polygamy-Porter wrote:I agree.Water Dog wrote:by the way, still not a single shred of actual scientific evidence presented to support the idea that this male is actually a female.
I am very open minded.
Xenophon wrote:Probably worth noting that in that AMA I linked to just a little up thread there is a plethora of data and research offered to support the idea of gender dysphoria. You may say you are unconvinced or that you don't buy it, but it is rather disingenuous to make the claim that there is no scientific evidence for this.
Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:The odds that either one of them read that thread (as I'm doing right now; thanks for the link), seriously contemplate, and then reconsider their positions are virtually nil. I'm not going to re-post links and search queries for them where they could get a better understanding of their position vice science. They just keep repeating something along the lines of "he's not a she and you have proven otherwise" which is a straw man. No one is suggesting that. We're asserting the issue is much more complex than sex-to-genitalia determination.
Although we're far from understanding the details, the key point is that gender identity contains a biological component (perhaps there's a gene, or a group of genes, or some structure in the brain).
For most people, gender identity and other sex characteristics are aligned. For some people, one or some sex characteristic(s) are not aligned (they have a different gene(s) -- or other factor -- and therefore have one or more parts of their body develop differently from the sex/gender of the rest of their body). Gender identity is one of those things.
We are beginning to call that Gender Incongruence .. which for all practical purposes means the same thing as Transgender .. that is, someone whose gender identity does not match other body parts.
This calls into question if we need to even have the term Gender Dysphoria. Do you need a mental health diagnosis? Perhaps the mental health diagnosis should be reserved for those who need mental health support for transition, etc.
You can be transgender without being dysphoric .. then we're not really treating the dysphoria but the gender incongruence (the fact that your identity and body parts are not aligned). How we treat that becomes a collaboration between the patient and the medical people. Some will do nothing, some hormones, some surgery, etc. .. the same as for many medical conditions.
Water Dog wrote:Data for people being confused isn't the same thing as those confusions having a basis in biological reality. Again I repeat, show me one shred of scientific proof for a female brain in a male body. I don't give a crap about pseudoscience surveys churned out by all the non-scientist psychologists. Hooray for them, a hundred people filled out their stupid form and checked off the box "I feel like a woman."
Water Dog wrote:Although we're far from understanding the details, the key point is that gender identity contains a biological component (perhaps there's a gene, or a group of genes, or some structure in the brain).
For most people, gender identity and other sex characteristics are aligned. For some people, one or some sex characteristic(s) are not aligned (they have a different gene(s) -- or other factor -- and therefore have one or more parts of their body develop differently from the sex/gender of the rest of their body). Gender identity is one of those things.
So I'm going through this AMA right now, jumping through running text searches looking for specific keywords. From what I can tell he admits what I've said - there is no scientific proof. This guy believes that gender has a biological component (no ____ sherlock), that it's genetically independent of sex (dubious), and acknowledges no proof for any of it. Overall this AMA is pretty ridiculous. It's really just a trans circle jerk, there is very little in terms of substance. And the little bit of substance there is is riddled with qualifiers like "perhaps" and "maybe." Perhaps there is a gene, but, oops, we don't actually know of one. Perhaps there are people on the moon.
by the way, some people have fun things to say about this Safer guy online. It would seem not all of his patients are happy.
[–]Dr_Josh_SaferM.D., FACP | Boston University | Transgender Medicine Research[S] 389 points 20 hours ago
The medical consensus is that gender identity includes a major biological component. We have no idea what the details are (a gene, multiple genes, etc?) -- but we have pretty strong data that it's something durable and biological.
In my view the data categories in order of strength are
The attempts by the medical establishment to surgically change body parts of intersex children based on what seemed easiest surgically. The thinking was that gender identity was not biological. When the data are carefully collected, a majority of kids treated this way have the predicted gender identity that goes with their chromosomes .. not with their surgically created body parts or with their upbringing. That is, we cannot change the gender identity someone already has innately.
Twin studies show that identical twins are more likely to both be transgender than fraternal twins.
A minority of people have gender identity clearly influenced by intra-uterine exposure to androgens (male hormones).*
Some brain studies do show differences associated with gender identity rather than with external body parts - even though none of these studies are good enough to be use to actually diagnose a person.
[–]brekus 21 points 13 hours ago
The link TheManWhoPanders originally linked to does actually cite a few examples of that.
Notably among our responding twins were three sets who had been reared apart and were concordant in transitioning. One was a male set within which the brothers were separated at birth, another was a set of males separated at age 4, and the third was a female pair separated at 14. Each had independently and unknowingly transitioned and found out about each other’s switch as adults after the gender shift.
Though more importantly there's no correlation between fraternal (non identical) twins both being transgender if one is, both being raised in the same environment.
Doc wrote:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105355/
Which then leads to a plethora of research that provides studies, hard data, genome research, so on and so forth.
A major concern raised by physicians is anxiety about the legitimacy of hormonal treatment. Many physicians share the misconception that transgender treatment is a psychologic issue best managed with psychiatric intervention (behavioral therapy, psychotropic medication, or both). The assumption is that gender identity can be reversed. Nevertheless, available data do not support the notion that gender identity can be reversed by external forces. Rather, the data in the medical literature to date are consistent with gender identity being fixed.