[Serious] Straight people of Reddit, what do you not understand about LGBT people?

I'm sorry - I just have to interject something really quick, and I know it'll get downvoted to hell, but... well that's life, right?

I think there's a bit of a jump in your logic. I know that case study you're talking about, shit it came up in nearly half of my psych courses during undergrad (and I'll bet it'll come up again in my graduate studies), but I think there's a huge difference between being told a lie at birth with an unethical procedure to cover it up and saying your internal gender is male or female.

Before I go on, I just want to say that I fully support gay rights and the queer community. I've gone on marches, had gay friends. and I was raised by them as a kid (babysitter was this crazy gay guy). I really do just see them as other people, nothing more or less special about them than a straight person.

But, I feel like there's still this question that isn't being answered (and admittedly, this is what makes me uncomfortable with the trans community): Why can't - and I'm going to phrase this horribly I'm sure, but know I mean no disrespect - why can't you just accept who you are? Medical atrocities aside, if you were born a healthy male/female but felt like you were a girl/boy, why not just try to assimilate those two things into one identity as opposed to forcing it through medications and surgery? I could understand 40 or hell, even 20 years ago... but these days, I feel like - generally speaking - people are pretty open to all men and women on the masculine-feminine continuum. We all fall on it somewhere, just obviously, there are outliers (which isn't a bad thing). And we all have aspects about ourselves that we don't like that we can't change, and other things that we can. Being a healthy person is all about change and acceptance. And I guess I just see it as, if you have to get cosmetic surgery on your body so that you can appear like the other sex (but biologically, you never will be), then there's this thing you can't actually change that you're trying to force. And I guess that just doesn't seem healthy to me.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent