[PureParadigm]

Regardless of your thoughts on whether this particular case qualifies as mental illness, we need to work to de-stigmatize mental illness. Being diagnosed with a mental illness should not be considered any more harmful than being diagnosed with any other type of illness. When you hear someone has an illness, you probably feel compassionate towards them, and mental illness should be no different in this respect.

[bscphil]

I'm in agreement with you about this, obviously, but I have the following additional thought.

The word "illness" refers to a disease or disorder. When you have an illness, that means that there is something wrong with you, and you should try to fix it, or seek help to have it fixed. And if it's not a curable illness, it is still generally obvious to everyone, including the person with the illness, that it would be desirable for it to be cured.

Mental illnesses are a bit more complicated, but the same principle still mostly applies. For instance, I have diagnosed major depression. I accept that this is an illness, something wrong with me, that I want to get better, and have taken medication and therapy to help it get better. Some sorts of extreme mental illness that affect how a person interacts with the world (claiming to be Jesus Christ, for example) aside, mental illnesses tend to be much like other illnesses.

For this reason, even if you completely remove all stigma associated with mental illness, it would still be misguided and harmful to say that LGBTQ people have a mental illness. The reason is that this implies that something is wrong with them, and that they should want to change this. This is emphatically not the case for the overwhelming majority of LGBT people.

* LGBT people generally do not want to be cured (with a few exceptions, mostly religious people who believe their identity is "sinful"). The "solution" to discovering that one is LGBT is generally to accept that for what it is.

* Most psychiatric experts agree that LGBT people cannot be cured, but can only repress.

* LGBT identities are not generally harmful to the people who have them (outside of violence and bigotry they receive from others). Trans people often want to modify their bodies, but this comes from dysphoria (which is not the same concept as being transgender), which is arguably similar to an illness - but it's widely accepted that sex reassignment surgery is the best available solution.

In other words, the fact that mental illness currently carries with it a stigma is not the only reason why it's harmful and hurtful to refer to LGBT identities this way. It's also simply inaccurate.

[shantara]

>LGBT people generally do not want to be cured (with a few exceptions, mostly religious people who believe their identity is "sinful"). The "solution" to discovering that one is LGBT is generally to accept that for what it is.

I don't claim LGBTQ to be an illness, nor do I presume to speak for everyone, but it's disingenuous to claim people don't want to be cured, when there's no realistically available "cure".

What if in a near future a new drug becomes available that would allow people to change their gender identity? If people get offered a voluntary choice to either take a medicine and alter their mind to fit their body, or undergo a physical surgery and alter their body to fit their mind, or do neither - can you claim to know which percentage of people would pick which option?

I don't, and I won't assign a label on any of the groups, or declare them traitors to some abstract cause just because their decision won't fit my own mindset, or currently prevalent liberal ideology.

[bscphil]

> I don't claim LGBTQ to be an illness, nor do I presume to speak for everyone, but it's disingenuous to claim people don't want to be cured, when there's no realistically available "cure".

It's absolutely not.

Ironically, your sibling comment tried a similar "gotcha" with color blindness, but that is actually a perfect test case. Color blindness is the result of a physical imperfection that means that a person with color blindness is not able to do things that most people are born able to do. I take this to be obvious enough that I'm not even going to respond to that comment.

But the point is that it's (usually) not curable. And yet I guarantee you just about every person who's colorblind would elect to eliminate that if they could. It's much harder to see how being homosexual, for example, lessens one's life experience in anything like a similar way. It's a different experience of life, certainly, but not really one most people are going to want to "cure".

Your example is keyed only to the "T" of the "LGBTQ", which is unfortunate and unfair because they're the only one of the 5 which typically wants to modify their bodies. This, as I said in my comment, is body dysphoria, not the same thing as being transgender. Some transgender people don't experience much dysphoria, so your question wouldn't even apply to them. Dysphoria is illness-like, as I said in my comment, because it is a state of suffering that people really do want to stop. Sex reassignment surgery is often called a "gender affirming surgery" because it realigns their physical body with their gender. But it's recognized by most trans people that this is an imperfect solution to the problem.

What your question poses, essentially, is whether they would give up their trans identity (something many of them value greatly) in exchange for getting rid of dysphoria perfectly as opposed to imperfectly. Let's grant for the sake of argument that many of them would make this difficult choice in the way that you pose. In this case I still disagree that their transgender identity would be an illness, even to them. They would be choosing to change who they were as a person to get rid of great suffering.

In effect, it's like you asked me if I would choose to get rid of depression by taking a pill that would also make me aggressively outgoing to the point of being sexually adventurous, something I'm very much not now.

I think a far better question for trans people is whether they would take a pill to simply get rid of all genital dysphoria, full stop, no side effects, so that they wouldn't need SRS. A trans woman could continue to be a woman, dress as a woman, act as she perceives women to act, and so on, while remaining satisfied with her genitalia (for example). You might argue this is impossible for severe cases of dysphoria, but that's every bit as speculative as the "new drug" you suggested in your comment.

[istinetz]

Daltonism also cannot be fixed (for now). Do you want to celebrate it?