[leadingthenet]

> We don’t say “oh, your body dysmorphia is a mental illness, you just need therapy”

In some cases, we do. It’s called Body integrity dysphoria, and although it is a slightly different situation than the one you presented, there are people who really, really wish to have limbs and other body parts amputated.

Guess what, most experts do not recommend going forward with it, despite it generally improving their mental condition.

[Blikkentrekker]

Which has certainly been put forward in many cases as an example of double standards that are pervasive in medicine, and of how much cultural norms influence recommended choice of treatment.

Other such double standards are the severe hurdles one must go through to obtain puberty blockers, for their theoretical, possible adverse effects and the supposed idea that a child cannot give informed consent, ignoring that letting one's puberty progress naturally is also something one consents to, yet, children are given a variety of medicaments whose destructive, structural side effects are far less theoretical and far more severe every day to alleviate mental conditions that are fare less severe, and have a far lower risk of suicide than gender dysphoria.

The readiness by which specialists are willing to resort to various surgeries and treatments seems to have a very big cultural moral component to it, and is not purely determined by what is best for the patient by an objective measure.

[leadingthenet]

But that is exactly my point. All over this thread you have people suggesting that this is a completely solved issue, the science is settled, and the experts agree. Therefore, shut up and think as you’re told.

Whether or not the claims are true is irrelevant. The fact that we’re now in a position where voicing the tiniest bit of dissent over this issue is enough to relegate you to the “clueless bigot” bin, or maybe even qualify as “hate speech”, is where the real problem lies. Imagine if we did that back when lobotomy was settled science and had expert consensus.

Nothing, no single human idea, is above criticism and pushback.

[Blikkentrekker]

> But that is exactly my point. All over this thread you have people suggesting that this is a completely solved issue, the science is settled, and the experts agree. Therefore, shut up and think as you’re told.

Ah yes, I see what you mean, I am definitely not one to agree with that.

For one to say that a science as vague and muddy as psychiatry can be so “solved” is quite an audacious statement, — much of it is indeed semantics, classification, and social perception changing over time and how much the psychiatrist likes the patient on a personal level will no doubt play a significant influence in how much he will recommend that the latter transition or not.

> Whether or not the claims are true is irrelevant. The fact that we’re now in a position where voicing the tiniest bit of dissent over this issue is enough to relegate you to the “clueless bigot” bin, or maybe even qualify as “hate speech”, is where the real problem lies. Imagine if we did that back when lobotomy was settled science and had expert consensus.

I have not seen any such responses in this particular train of discussion, however.

Amazon would perhaps be so inclined, yes.

> Nothing, no single human idea, is above criticism and pushback.

I find that formally verified mathematical proofs are rather hard to disprove in practice.

If a man claim he has found an error in one of them, I would dismiss it out of hand, unless it come with a show of a bug in the proof assistant or hardware.

[leadingthenet]

I think the two of us are essentially in agreement, then. I’ll just add a few thoughts.

> I have not seen any such responses in this particular train of discussion, however.

Thankfully, neither have I, but it’s a particularly sensitive issue for me as just today I found out that one of these “hate speech” laws was passed in the country I currently reside in, Scotland. I find this, and other recent attempts at authoritarianism, deeply troubling.

> formal proofs

In a way I agree, but in another, even mathematics isn’t on as sound footing as one might first imagine. For instance, we know of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (which says that NO system of mathematics can be both consistent and complete), and then there is the fact that none of us can agree on what mathematics even is, from a philosophical point of view.

Truly, I’m often astonished at both how much, and how little, we actually truly know as a species.