Justine Greening delays ‘divisive’ plan for easy gender swaps

Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation.

This is some serious question begging. First the assumption that anyone is "trans" in the first place. Whereas the DSM says there are two different kinds of males who want to transition. Assuming transgender is one thing and that everyone should be treated the same way is not warranted. Now we suddenly have a huge number of teenage girls wanting to change sex and we should just treat them like all the others too? That's insane.

What's the evidence that transition improves all "trans" people's quality of life in the long term? Not just self report but depression, comorbidities, ability to live an independent employed life? Has anyone done a controlled trial versus therapy? Nope. Why not if you're so certain?

Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that.

There is a big big difference. Schizophrenia is not defined as a desire to have a particular medical treatment. "Gender dysphoria" is.

Diseases that the medical profession made up in order to justify a particular treatment often have the amazing property that they get better when you give the treatment. If you can persuade people they'd feel better if they stuck a unicorn horn on their head, you would get people with unicorn dysphoria. And they would probably be happier for a year or so after they got the horn stuck on their head. Hey presto, putting a unicorn horn on people's heads is a miracle cure for unicorn dysphoria!

In reality all you've done is create a neat little closed loop between the desire for a treatment and a disease which solely exists to justify giving the treatment. But it doesn't actually help anyone except the pockets of the doctors.

There's medical evidence

Only convincing to those who want to be convinced.

/r/ukpolitics Thread Parent Link - thetimes.co.uk