I do rather wonder if the lack of certainty creates more mental health issues for people who might otherwise live happily without confusion. A question I would ask is how we might guide people, but not rigidly constrain them or punish them for being different?
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Donât tease!
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Exactly, I have so many friends who just like heterosexuals deserve to be allowed to live long and happy lives with their loved ones. I do however believe it does not have to be centre stage of our lives, some seem to want the focus on them just so they can complain.
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Ghastly. I much much preferred the Greeks, polytheism all the way 
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Beware low-flying swans. 
Zeus would be on Operation Yewtreeâs Top 5 Most Wanted List today.
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Or who was never there in the first placeâŚ
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My favourite is The God of Small Things - very useful.
I think I made my point very clear. Dysphoria is a recognised mental health condition suffered by many people for many reasons. This is undeniable. To claim the gender based dysphoria is somehow different from other forms of dysphoria and to conflate gender dysphoria with gender incongruence is simply wrong.
And pederasty. Apart from the Spartans.
Youâre kind of losing me. Gender dysphoria is a mental disorder because there are no physical symptoms? Then are you saying you think homosexuality should still be classed as a mental disorder?
Thatâs a great question, @Earthdave , because it shows up the Emperorâs New Clothes aspect of the current thinking.
What is defined as a mental disorder is simply what the various groups of psychiatrists define it as at the moment you ask. Itâs as circular as that! Definitions change frequently, as with homosexuality: only in 1973 did the American Psychiatric Association remove that from the DSM.
(If psychiatrists were consistent, they would consider someone who was distressed by being gay as suffering from dysphoria. However, psychiatrists decided that such a condition (called ego-dystonic homosexuality) wasnât a mental illness and removed it from the DSM in 1987.)
Where conditions relating to the new cult of Identity are concerned, the choice (of whether itâs a mental disorder or not) is not based on science, but on ideology.
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Without certainty there has to be something driving it. Whether itâs mixed messages in the brain from hormonal influence or other. Take the situation of my nephew/niece and another long term friend. Both growing up had no signs but did have some pretty outrageous outbursts. Both have received surgery to make them appear as women and both have moved in with their women partners. Would that make them proxy lesbians?
This is outside of my ability to rationalise the situation. If they wanted to be women, surely then they would complete the move and meet up with a man?
This is one aspect that makes me think that this is about perception and not reality. Iâve had one friend transition m to f who did want to meet a man, but have known some living as females with female partners, and that suggests the sense of being the wrong gender was quite incomplete.
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My perception IS my reality.
I recommend Tales and the City and More Tales of the City, with the quite splendid Olympia Dukakis for an insight into the world of gender fluidity.
Women love women. So, it is entirely possible for a transwoman to love a woman. Why not? Jan Morris became a woman and continued to love her wife.
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Thatâs another term, itâs not fluid itâs surgery and a lot of chemical intervention.
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Iâd say thatâs a neat definition of madness.
!
And it puts an intolerable burden on people, especially children.
Itâs a peculiarly post-modern fad, this Manic âThis is my truth, now tell me yoursâ idea. Derrida and Foucault were only being playful: I donât think they intended for that aspect of theory to be taken seriously.
One thing that is noticeable - in a society which talks of there being a gender spectrum - is that people who transition never transition to a non-binary sex. Itâs always to male or female.
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Sue, Iâm very aware of gender fluidity and perception being reality, and itâs one reason why the idea of a womanâs brain in a manâs body seems unlikely.
It isnât necessary for you to rationalize it; itâs someone elseâs lived reality. But if you canât bear to be confused, just think of them as a lesbian, attracted to women, but the body they are in feels alien? They donât want to be called a woman or look more like a woman, to attract men. That assumes everyone is hetero, which they are not.