This was already posted yesterday and ended up being an absolute disaster of a thread, filled with many people expressing their conviction that transgender individuals are suffering from a delusion. I really hope dang is paying attention this time, because if this is the kind of discourse Hacker News and by extension, YCombinator considers to be reflective of the beliefs of the community, it says a lot about whether or not trans members are welcome here or at YC at all.
My experience is extremely relevant, as transgender individuals are an extremely small portion of the population (1/300th of the population) and those reported experiences are key to building viable info sets required to better improve treatment strategies. And I can say definitively, transitioning has significantly improved the quality of my life. Minus having to deal with conversations like this where I’m forced to defend my position to a stranger who is convinced I’m delusional (and while I’m not required to, it is unacceptable to see this position go uncontested and therefore I am compelled to refute it), my daily life has gone from extreme depression and social isolation to being a social butterfly and exceedingly positive. At this point, most people who have met me in person have done so after transition, and so it’s not something people know unless I tell them.
Note the figure above. 1 in 300 (while small) can be a lot more people in your life than you think, but if you are the type to share opinions like that in public rather than solely in pseudonymity, they know better than to mention it to you.
> The recommended medical treatment for gender dysphoria is not based on mental therapies, but physical surgeries and hormonal therapies, so I'm not quite sure what you are attempting to imply here.
You would in fact be wrong, as therapy is absolutely a part of the comprehensive standard of care recommended by WPATH, and is required by practically every surgeon willing to perform any transgender related surgery.
> There is a very big difference: a homosexual person is not depressed and inhibited in functioning per sē, and this is why gender identity incongruence absent any gender dysphoria is not classified as an illness.
You’re quite close to recognizing the crucial distinction: gender dysphoria is a grouping of symptoms related to a gender incongruence, and thus itself is realistically just a poor evaluation of the condition of transgender individuals’ reality — of course they experience dysphoria, gender incongruence can do that. So we treat the problem, not a symptom. We realized that homosexuality wasn’t a mental illness because their suffering was a byproduct of society’s view of their innate sexuality, and reasonably removed the diagnosis. Likewise this will happen (and is happening) with gender dysphoria.
> I’ve yet to receive a single explanation as to why this is, other than “experts know better”. No, that’s not good enough.
That likely is because asking these questions of a general forum of people who are highly unlikely to be qualified to speak on the subject are highly unlikely to have an informed answer. But you’re conflating, confusing, and distorting two completely separate ideas here.
What you described is called Somatoparaphrenia, which is not a dysphoria at all, but classified explicitly as a delusion. And while we can certainly agree that physical intervention is not the right strategy, at the behest of the individual suffering from the disorder, they would also be physically impairing themselves were it to be carried out.
Transitioning does not produce such impairments, and in fact leads to a significantly improved quality of life, reduction or complete remission of depression, and overwhelmingly thus produces a better overall mental health in most cases.
And again, I’m speaking from _experience_ on that.
This post’s comment section is rapidly turning into a train wreck, so allow me to help. The highest suicide rate in any cohort of transgender individuals is for those who are not undergoing treatment, which is typically a combination of some or all: hormone therapy, social transitioning, counseling, and surgical interventions.
As far as surgical “regret” is concerned, of all elective procedures, sexual reassignment surgery has the lowest regret rate of all.
Because simply put it is arguing that people who are proven to be physically wired in a particular way are merely living a delusion. It is easy to not be fully aware of the state of research on this topic if it doesn’t affect you, but as a trans woman, I am extremely familiar with what I’m talking about.
The issue with categorizing gender dysphoria as a mental illness is no different than categorizing homosexuality as a mental illness. The gender dysphoria is a problem derived from what is effectively a birth defect. If someone had a malformed limb and because this has clear impediments in their life in social and physical terms, they experience depression with their physical condition. We don’t say “oh, your body dysmorphia is a mental illness, you just need therapy”, as not only is that a shit take, but now prosthetics are more viable and advanced.
You’re right. Hormone therapy, surgical interventions, etc. — they all fail to meet the absolute goal of transition. But they’re good enough until we have something better. What is not better, is arguing that a discussion still needs to be had on whether or not we should consider transgender individuals as if they are deluded and mentally ill.
I really hope it doesn’t. I miss the office. Workplace environments prevent myself from socially isolating beyond weekends at best — I know I’m not alone in that.
Even the situations that you argue are clearcut are not. Say for example two teams in separate locations were working together, solely through email. One had a lead, who effectively lead both teams. One day they all met together in the same location for a team building event, and the other team discovered that lead was black. Suddenly when working together the lead was met with scrutiny, hostility, and even aggression. But because they never said the explicit gotcha words, there is no clearcut situation. And while that lead can raise attention to the problem with management, their only hope is an empathetic manager — which is rarely the case, especially without shared experiences of that kind of problem. Inevitably, that employee quits, because they find themselves stuck in performance reviews that are subpar, courtesy of having uncooperative coworkers (or worse, they poison the well behind this employee’s back), with no real hope for rectifying the situation.
That doesn’t make what they did okay — if anything it shows exactly how much power and influence they wielded in suppressing a news story at a critical point in informing people during an election cycle. That cannot be understated.
That wasn’t what was in question, it was whether or not Twitter censored them, which they did. See the sibling comment to your post here for additional info from Twitter even on the topic. Even though they reversed the censorship, they _did_ do it.
We put our faith into systems built by PhDs every day. People don’t have to understand why airplanes stay in the air in order for them to be the only practical means of rapid international transport.
They’re actually adding interests now as part of their matching algorithm, but the top picks are unique to each person, based on a number of different data points.
As a woman that uses Tinder, I can say first hand that the experience for women on the app is completely different. Paying for Tinder Gold lets you see the likes, infinite swipes, etc. like it does for men, but the value of that data is less useful. I buy Gold because I liked the features nonetheless, but the list of likes is useless - I’m constantly pegged at 9,999+ likes, the list freezes every five seconds, and there’s no meaningful way to sift through it.