| > So in fact with things like transgender it is things like the hypothalamus-pituitary link that is interfered with to shut down endogenous sex hormone production If by "interfered with",you mean "corrected to adjust for an otherwise-torturous feedback loop where the brain is hardcoded from birth to interpret the body itself as pain", then yes, this is an accurate statement about dysphoria. Zhou et al (Nature, 1995) is my favorite study where this fact about trans people has been confirmed via brain scans or postmortem dissection, but I've got about 20 more if anybody's got questions about whether gender dysphoria is actually a thing. One could also defer to the piles of statements from medical organizations attesting to the scientific fact that trans people exist and are born like that and are merely receiving medical treatment for a bona fide medical condition. For some inane reason, this extremely painful condition is politically-incorrect to discuss in plain terms, because it is literally so bad that people will "turn pain into a contest" when talking about it. We see this in the statistics. 41% is the lowest suicide attempt rate statistic that you will find in any respectable study on the amount of suffering involved here. That particular statistic has a tendency to go down if people are allowed to receive medical treatment for their medical condition, but I need people on the internet to understand that gender dysphoria is absolutely worth killing oneself over. P.S. For the woke kids in the audience who would accuse me of "transmedicalism" because I'm willing to mention that this stuff literally shows up on brain scans, please refer to the opening discussions in "Comprehensive Care of the Transgender Patient" regarding DSDs and the large diversity of known etiologies for gender dysphoria. Just because your dysphoria doesn't show up in the bNST doesn't mean that it's not there, or not measurable. Nobody is excluding your pain by acknowledging that diagnostics and imaging are literally part of medicine. Cancer patients also get tests, and if their cancer doesn't show up on one particular screening exam, it probably shows up on another. If your scan hasn't been invented yet, you can in the meantime defer to psychometrics like GIDYQ-AA, UGDS-GS. Those instruments are also options to measure clinically-significant gender dysphoria, and if your clinician is uneducated or unwilling to use established psychometrics, find a doctor who follows AMA recommendations. Doctors who don't oughta lose their license. |