I just don't understand why these little details are a big deal. If people want things and it doesn't hurt anybody then let them have it, who cares? If you want to label yourself trans because it communicates that you'd rather be something other than the gender assigned at birth, sounds good to me. The subsets of that are mostly details that explain how you're trans to someone curious. Why does it need to be more complicated than that?
It would be nice for things to have clear definitions.
So trans either means specifically man-woman dysphoria or it means "not feeling like a gender I'm supposed to be", then all non-binaries are also called trans. But not "whoever wants to call themselves whatever". Because then I just gotta ask follow up questions if I actually wanna know. E.g. you'd say something like "I'm queer". Yeah, great, so, where do we start?
Plot twist, I'm telling people I'm queer even though I'm a straight dude because I believe in gender equality, which defies gender identity as a concept, so essentially I'm non-binary, so I'm trans, so I'm oh boy so queer. True story.
Definitions change based on who they are useful for. The medical definition used to say dysphoria only, and now its starting to say euphoria too. Because thats valid.
And saying you're queer while claiming to be a straight male to prove a point might be... Rebellious, but Im glad youre trying the labels on for size. Youre valid.
I came up with an analogy pertaining to this matter:
Imagine there exists a small lake with two groups of fish who are nearly identical except in one way. One of the two groups has scales, and the other group doesn't. Above their waters is a fisherman who wants to catch as many of them as possible and turn them into a crispy seafood dish. The fisherman doesn't care if they have scales or not, as they are edible in the same exact way, and scales or no scales, he will eat any of the fish he catches.
Unfortunately, the fish with scales started conjuring up imaginary ideas to enable disassociation from the fish who don't have scales. They falsely claimed to the scaleless fish, "You're not like me at all, and you don't understand the struggle I'm going through! He won't care to eat you because you don't have scales that make yourself look tastier!" (or some illogical mental gymnastics like that lmao), so they reject the fish that don't have scales and leave them to fend for themselves instead.
Little did the scaled fish know, the fisherman doesn't give a shit, and this divide only hindered their ability to plot a way to avoid him, as he caught them and feasted on them all anyway.
(It also makes sense because no cisgender onlooker observing this kind of discourse within the trans community would think it makes any sense. It's an exclusively intracommunity struggle that's also extremely terminally online and shouldn't exist at all, to a point where only very few people beyond the community would know it's a divide that exists to begin with. It's that nonsensical.)
Okay, I’ve been seeing more and more of these “dysphoria or no trans” references being made and all I’ve been able to glean is that people with diagnosed G.D. seem to be saying that anyone who…doesn’t have dysphoria can’t be trans?
I don’t understand. The people who are living a different gender identity than was assigned to them at birth are trans. Trans-itioning their outward gender…I mean, right? What am I missing?
Is it people that didn’t get diagnosed by a clinician with gender dysphoria? Or that they don’t have gender dysphoria at all and became trans?
Can you break down the controversy a little for me? I feel like I get some of what is happening, but I don’t have the whole picture, the actual reasoning for what’s happening, just what I’ve pieced together from the posts on lemmy. I mean, you don’t have to, it’s not your job. Only if you feel like letting a cishet dipshit in on the story.
I don't agree with trabsmedicalists but it since insurance and or public health services have to pay for care there is a intractable issue here of "who pays for it?" that is hard to avoid.
As OP who is very clearly anti-transmedicalist, I still classify gender dysphoria as a mental disorder that is medically necessary to treat. That doesn't really have anything to do with transmedicalism per se, though. On this subject specifically, what's more important is to support a destigmatization of the term mental illness, clearly understand what it means and what are actual diagnostic criteria for it, and not weaponize it to support restricting people from accessing gender-affirming care just because of the myth that a "mental" illness inherently cannot be treated through more medical and physiological means.
Because definitionally they believe 'the diagnostic criteria for transgender is dyspgoria. The cure to dysphoria is HRT. Take the medicine.'
And I think this message was helpful to me, to read "take the medicine, you need HRT to feel better." - I'm a trans female. This message doesn't apply to like more than half of all trans people, and for some odd reason they also use it to exclude those trans people. Euphoria is also diagnostically trans, and HRT isnt the right treatment for most trans people. Youre valid.