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Re:Body integrity identity disorder patient satisfaction aft... by fzeroracer on Sunday July 24, 2022 @11:43AM (#32214538)
I mean as a bisexual male, I can definitely state I've had my fair share of mental anguish over having a thing for men in the past so I don't exactly buy your post about being in 'homeostasis' as you've described. That feels more like post-hoc rationalization for a terrible thought experiment than anything else. Especially since people that suffer from gender dysphoria tend to have worse outcomes due to external sources and lack of validation, much like what would happen to severely repressed gay people in religious communities.

And to further play the devils advocate there were plenty of people at the time that believed gay people were a blight on society for multiple reasons. Hence why conversion camps were a thing.

Re:Body integrity identity disorder patient satisfaction aft... by Teever on Sunday July 24, 2022 @12:03PM (#32214725)
but is the source of the mental anguish that you've experienced internal or external?

Like if you were born in a society where religious zealots who espoused bisexual bigotry just didnt exist, toxic masculinity wasnt a thing and there was a bunch of bisexual representation in media would you have had that anguish? very unlikely.

People with gender dysphoria face the same negative external influences as you do, arguably worse (lets be real, much much worse) but if it would be removed and they lived in a world without it they would still be discontent with their state, to the point of depression which would result in a poor quality of life and for many suicide.

Thats the hallmark of the disorder. thats what gender dysphoria is.

Lets do another thought experiment, what if we lived in a society where gender reassignment surgery was impossible. like lets ssay we just didnt have the advancements in surgical techniques necessary, but we had much better pharamcuticals. If surgery was impossible, but giving someone a pill like I described in the first thiufht experiment was possible that would be the morally correct thing to do as opposed to doing nothing, right?

Re:Body integrity identity disorder patient satisfaction aft... by fzeroracer on Sunday July 24, 2022 @12:12PM (#32214801)
To address your final thought experiment: In a vacuum? Maybe. But there's a simple and easy response to your second thought experiment that completely blows it apart, and that's lobotomies.

Lobotomies were used as a cure for all kinds of different things. If you knew something was a problem and lobotomy was the only thing that seemed to cure it, is it morally correct to do so as opposed to doing nothing? That's why these simplistic thought experiments are bad because there are examples of what happens when you take it to their logical (and often sadly real) conclusion.

Re:Body integrity identity disorder patient satisfaction aft... by Teever on Sunday July 24, 2022 @05:51PM (#32218123)
Is your issue with lobotomies is that they are a crude, irreversible surgery that doesn't always work?

Now you understand the reticence towards gender reassignment surgery and why someone would be looking for much lower risk pharmaceutical treatments for gender dysphoria, which is exactly what we ended up doing with brain disorders?

It's worth noting that we still do brain surgery on people, and that we're even moving towards using implants to modulate how the brain functions, as opposed to the crude technique of severing parts their brain with rods jammed into their noses or holes drilled into their heads.

I have a feeling that we'll look back on this time when we cut off penises and inverted them into crude vagina like canals, jammed silicon bags full of salt water into chests and pumped people full of hormones as barbaric as the lobotomy era.

They're things that we do out of convenience because they're the best that we have, not because it's what we want to do.