CMV:I think being transgender is a mental illness

Just to preface this, I am trans. Anyways, I'll give it a shot.

Generally, when we think of someone having a mental illness, there is a sort of problem or disability that the person has. Someone with depression has difficulty functioning for a variety of reasons, including lack of motivation. They often commit suicide. Someone who is schizophrenic suffers from visual and audible delusions. Someone who is bipolar experiences frequent mood swings. In all of these cases, we can clearly point to a problem that co-exists with the mental illness. After all, if there was no such problem, we might say the person simply deviates from the norm rather than saying they have a mental illness.

For example, those people who experience a higher level of visual acuity or hearing than the average person do not suffer from illness, because we see these things as beneficial rather than detrimental. But if a person has a lower level of visual acuity (blindness) we do say they have an illness, because the condition is seen as causing disability.

But something like say, homosexuality or transsexuality, you can't really point out the "problem" without being self-referential. For example, your argument that a transgender woman believing she is a woman is circular and self-reinforcing. The reason that the transgender person has a mental illness is because only a mentally ill person would be transgender. But in order to make an effective argument, you must point out why specifically it is a mental illness to identify as the opposite gender. Sure, it's not normal, but neither is being ridiculously attractive. Deviating from the average population is not necessarily an illness or a negative thing.

In the most technical of terms, one might call gender dysphoria (rather than transsexuality) a mental illness, but it is one that is both treatable and manageable. I, for example, am a relatively happy person. I pay my taxes, work hard, and live a fairly ordinary life. What exactly is my mental illness? Mental illness requires there to be a sort of problem, but I don't have one. I'm healthy, happy, and enjoying my life. I pass as my gender fairly well and so I go fairly unnoticed in my everyday life.

The people that have the problem here really seems to be other people instead of myself. For I am high functioning and do not have any symptoms that would be associated with illness. I am living a healthy and happy life. People sometimes claim I'm mentally ill, but I just cannot for the life of me figure out what my illness is without a circular reference, which you originally gave in your post. "It's not normal because it's not normal."

You state "just accepting that as it is" as if that is a bad thing. But is that usually not exactly what we do when people are different from ourselves? If someone likes apples and you HATE apples, that's fine, don't eat the apple. Just accept that other people like apples. It really is that simple.

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