Nobody's saying they can't go out and act like the opposite sex. Live and let live. I'm saying they don't need expensive plastic surgery in order to live, and more importantly that their elective surgery shouldn't be covered by my tax dollars as a Canadian citizen. I'm not saying they should be forced into some kind of conversion therapy or that they should even be banned from having their procedure done. I'm saying it shouldn't be immediately accepted as the default way to deal with this.

My only issues are these.

1: I'm not paying for their surgery
2: I'm calling them what they actually are, not what they say they are

And just because a disease is caused by their neurology and not by their life experiences doesn't make it not a psychiatric condition. We still refer to downs syndrome as a mental illness even though it's caused by a problem with the chromosomes. Not comparing them to people with downs, just using that as an example.

This offense to being considered mentally ill shows up a lot and maybe if there wasn't such a stigma against mental illness we wouldn't even be having these arguments.

Let's remember that the establishment can be wrong. You said it yourself that they considered being gay mentally ill at one point, which is compeltely incorrect, and if you look at the soviet union they used psychiatry to claim that anyone who disagreed with communism had mental problems. And let me be clear that I don't intend to compare them to schizophrenics either. As someone with my own diagnosed conditions(ASD and OCD) I want to be clear that I'm not using mentally ill as an insult, just a statement of classification.

My stance on why it should be considered a mental illness is that it often results in depression and often suicide due to a problem originating in the brain, and it often leads to them seeking to damage their bodies(I know you'll disagree on the definition of damage but you can't disagree that tissue is harmed in the process) The only two critera that should be necessary for it to be a mental illness is that it causes harm to the individual, and originates in the brain.

I understand the people who write the DSM may disagree with me, but if I'm not mistaken they still include it in the DSM-V under Gender Dysphoria.

And although you can prove that their brains are superficially similar, you can't make the statement that that means they require horomone injections, silicone implants, and their little buddy turned inside out. They've done studies on gay brains and seen similar results on their scans, too. All you've been able to prove is that they're more masculine or feminine, not that they are literally as you often put it "Born in the wrong body type".

Either way, at some point this becomes an argument of semantics, and most people seem to care less about accurate terminology than they do about people's feelings. Hell, literally is now defined in the dictionary as figurative. Thanks for your time, I'm going to click save before I hit the character limit.