Is a sex-change a constitutional right?Follow

Part of me suspects if we could make people happy by turning them into peacocks we'd probably do it, science just isn't there yet. Species distinctions can be pretty arbitrary anyway.

Edited, Aug 28th 2013 1:39pm by someproteinguy

Since always.

It's unfortunate that one word is used to refer to two completely different things, that are in 99% of people identical. Gender can indeed be synonym for sex, but it also has another meaning. In the context of this discussion, it has nothing to do with sex.

No we don't. Species is determined by physical characteristics. So is sex. But gender is not.

It's not that simple. It's a combination of the two.

Well not quite, you have a person who's chromosomally male, with a brain that's irreversibly wired as if they were female.

That's my understanding, you have a mind that has the opposite gender differentiation as the genitalia. That difference, and the inability to reconcile it, leads to the mental disorder.

Or something like that...


Edited, Aug 28th 2013 2:53pm by someproteinguy

This fact doesn't support your argument. Because gender is not determined by physical characteristics, there is no reason to provide medication to alter your sex, just because you have a different gender.



It doesn't change your sex. So therefore, you can't consider it a "cure" to the problem, if it doesn't actually do what you're proclaiming it to be doing. You're merely making physical alterations to appeal the mind. With that being said, the attention is on the mind, not the body. So, the "basic treatment", i.e. cheapest, is mental therapy.



As before, you can't change definitions to support your agenda. That statement is misleading, because you're not clearly differentiating sex from gender. The correct answer is that the person is a male sex with a female gender. The sex came first in life, not the gender.


It really is. If the body didn't physically change or differ from the norm, then it isn't physical. Having a different gender from a sex, doesn't mean that anything is inherently wrong with your body.



How is that different from anything else? If there were a man who was wired to think he were a child and wanted to act as such, people would label him crazy.

Edited, Aug 29th 2013 12:04am by Almalieque

Then why the need to have a sex change? Why not just go drag? The sex change thing seems to indicate that the trans person is unhappy with his/her sex, in which case we're back to the peacock situation where someone with species dysphoria wants to be turned into something of the avian kind.

Generally speaking, the vast majority of trans individuals don't go through with SRS. Plenty of them don't do it because cost, risk, cons, etc. And plenty of them just don't want it, because the organs aren't something they particularly care about (or they care about the cons far more than the pros).

But there are other considerations. To get the bluntest of them out of the way, in most countries, you cannot change your official gender until after you have had SRS. This is increasingly less common, particularly in the EU, but only one US state allows you to change your gender without SRS. And there's no significant action on that front, that I'm aware of, to change that.

But there's also the fact that we live in a world where most cultures directly link the gender identity to the organs. So trans persons who want to transition more fully, or "pass," often want to go as far as possible with the actual physical transformation. The specific emotional feedback they get from that varies wildly, but if you've been raised in a culture that insists on telling you that your gender is what's between your legs, its not surprising if it would be hard to shake that (even if your actual understanding of gender identity surpasses that idea).

But it's ultimately an extremely personal decision made based off of many rational and emotional factors specific to each individual.

We can't turn men into biological women either.

But we can address down some of the most socially relevant biological differences between males and females. And since gender is a social construct, that's what matters.

That I don't know. I tried looking up species dysphoria on google scholar to see if there were any papers on causes, but there weren't many from what I can tell. That and I'm not touching the couple I did find, because not comfortable reading a paper on bestiality at work, even if it is a scientific paper.

Edited, Aug 28th 2013 3:54pm by someproteinguy

The problem is that you are conflating gender and sex in a way that doesn't actually work psychologically. It's understandable why you'd do so, but it's not historically sound. Western culture has only had two gender identities for quite some time, but other cultures have not. Many Native American cultures had four gender identities, present-day Iran has a sizable third gender identity, many oceanic cultures have 3 or 4, etc.

Essentially, in really basic terms, your gender is the set of cultural traits that you identity with. Our own culture realistically has far more than two gender identities, but we break them down into subgroups within a gender instead of recognizing them as distinct.

The reality is that gender itself is a personal sum of your own cultural understandings and identifications of masculinity and femininity, and most people have various measures of each to their own identity, falling along a spectrum of gender that they define (with heavy cultural influence). Some individuals, who generally use the term of genderqueer, do not have a gender identity that falls along this binary at all (either possessing no gender identity, or possessing one that's not defined by masculinity or femininity).

So a gender dysphoria is a fundamentally cultural issue. Overwhelmingly, trans persons care about their sexual organs because they've been raised culturally to care about their sexual organs in that way. If the genitalia were held to be culturally distinct from your gender (separating sex and gender in a manner that matches the psychological understanding of each), SRS would probably be something very few trans persons cared to pursue.

So, in simplest terms, it's because gender dysphoria is not sex dysphoria, but having the sexual organs that match the cultural bias of gender can be comforting to someone who holds genitalia not culturally associated with their gender.

If there was a better, more complete way to change someone's sex, that'd be great, but there's not yet. But we can still get pretty close.

That's about right.

Other than because it's required to fit into society? I don't know. it's complicated. At least for me, yes, I'm unhappy with my sex. I don't really feel like not trying to change it is an option. I'm not sure i could really explain why.