braidycat replied to your post: for you, is transsexualism a medical condition or an identity?

Gender identity disorder is being removed from the DSM for the next edition. That probably just confuses me more, how a person can be born with that sort of disconnect. I guess it’s just an “it happens” sort of thing, but why?

braidycat replied to your post: for you, is transsexualism a medical condition or an identity?

I guess in better terms I was trying to say, “medical condition” tends to be negatively connotated but idk how the sort of disconnect between gender and sex happens at all, whether it’s biological or psychological or both, but clearly it’s there.

Because gender is a societal construct invented by mankind and has no real bearing on actual medical science.  Being born with a vagina doesn’t make you like dresses and being born with a penis doesn’t make you like trucks.  The disconnect comes from your genitalia not matching society’s perception of how they think you should be.

For the average person, that pretty much just means falling in line and allowing ourselves to be conditioned to act a certain way, wear certain things and like other things.  However, there are people whose hormones and brain activity are simply too opposite of their expected role.  That’s where the disconnect starts.

Would transgender people exist if gender wasn’t lauded as this all important guideline everyone must follow?  I have NO idea.  Not being transgender causes me to lack the experience necessary to even hazard a guess.

As for how it happens… How does any medical condition happen?  Some people have deseases that turn their muscle into bone.  Some people get into car accidents, hit their head and have a totally different personality.  The brain in particular is strange and unpredictable.  One tiny dent in the wrong part of the brain and suddenly, you can’t remember anything from the year 2005.

So to me it’s not that strange that it happens, though, being cisgendered, the concept of gender dysphoria itself does seem foreign to me.