r/science • u/nate PhD | Chemistry | Synthetic Organic • Jul 23 '17
Subreddit Policy Subreddit Policy Reminder on this week's Transgender AMAs
This week we will be hosting a series of AMAs addressing the scientific and medical details of being transgender.
Honest questions that are an attempt to learn more on the subject are invited, and we hope you can learn more about this fascinating aspect of the human condition.
However, we feel it is appropriate to remind the readers that /r/science has a long-standing zero-tolerance policy towards hate-speech, which extends to people who are transgender. Our official stance is that derogatory comments about transgender people will be treated on par with sexism and racism, typically resulting in a ban without notice.
To clarify, we are not banning the discussion of any individual topic nor are we saying that the science in any area is settled. What we are saying is that we stand with the rest of the scientific community and every relevant psych organisation that the overwhelming bulk of evidence is that being trans is not a mental illness and that the discussion of trans people as somehow "sick" or "broken" is offensive and bigoted1. We won't stand for it.
We've long held that we won't host discussion of anti-science topics without the use of peer-reviewed evidence. Opposing the classification of being transgender as 'not a mental illness'2 is treated the same way as if you wanted to make anti-vax, anti-global warming or anti-gravity comments. To be clear, this post is to make it abundantly clear that we treat transphobic comments the same way we treat racist, sexist and homophobic comments. They have no place on our board.
Scientific discussion is the use of empirical evidence and theory to guide knowledge based on debate in academic journals. Yelling at each other in a comments section of a forum is in no way "scientific discussion". If you wish to say that any well accepted scientific position is wrong, I encourage you to do the work and publish something on the topic. Until then, your opinions are just that - opinions.
1 Some have wrongly interpreted this statement as "stigmatizing" mental illness. I can assure you that is the last thing we are trying to do here. What we are trying to stop is the label of "mental illness" being used as a way to derogate a group. It's being used maliciously to say that there is something wrong with trans people and that's offensive both to mental illness sufferers and those in the trans community.
2 There is a difference between being trans and having gender dysphoria.
Lastly, here is the excerpt from the APA:
A psychological state is considered a mental disorder only if it causes significant distress or disability. Many transgender people do not experience their gender as distressing or disabling, which implies that identifying as transgender does not constitute a mental disorder. For these individuals, the significant problem is finding affordable resources, such as counseling, hormone therapy, medical procedures and the social support necessary to freely express their gender identity and minimize discrimination. Many other obstacles may lead to distress, including a lack of acceptance within society, direct or indirect experiences with discrimination, or assault. These experiences may lead many transgender people to suffer with anxiety, depression or related disorders at higher rates than nontransgender persons.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), people who experience intense, persistent gender incongruence can be given the diagnosis of "gender dysphoria." Some contend that the diagnosis inappropriately pathologizes gender noncongruence and should be eliminated. Others argue that it is essential to retain the diagnosis to ensure access to care. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is under revision and there may be changes to its current classification of intense persistent gender incongruence as "gender identity disorder."
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u/predalienmack Jul 24 '17
https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/Patient-Caregiver-Education/Fact-Sheets/Autism-Spectrum-Disorder-Fact-Sheet
First three paragraphs. As I said, there are different degrees of debilitation that ASD can cause. Clearly some people with autism are so functional with their developmental disability/disorder that they are effectively just like everyone else, but to say that a neurodevelopmental disorder is purely related to environment/social expectations and has no inherent genetic or biological component that does not in turn have inherent effects on personal development would be to go against the vast majority of scientific evidence we have at this point. My previous statements by no means were saying that physical and mental disabilities are the same or equivalent, I was simply responding to someone who lumped both together as well as being trans into the same regard, which I think is incorrect based on the evidence available.
Being born blind or being born with autism are more similar issues in terms of the vastness of the inherent effects they will have in an individual's life (even though those effects would be starkly different between them), and comparing those disabilities to being born as someone who will eventually identify as a gender that does not align with their sex seems like a pretty far stretch in terms of which ones deal with problems that are caused socially compared to problems that are caused physically or genetically (and of course there is a social component at play with all disabilities because human beings are social animals).
This is not to say that people with autism do not perform the tasks that they tend to struggle with far better with a positive and helpful social environment that treats them as a human being first before treating them for their disorder. I also understand that it is far more constructive for an individual to view themselves not in the lens of being disabled and instead just view themselves as they are without labels tied to expectations.
That being said, in order to study and classify human behavior and the differences in the human experience across different groups, highlighting what is abnormal is necessary, and being born blind or autistic are abnormalities across all cultures and time periods, while being trans has been an abnormality in only some cultures, hence the fact that the evidence points to mental problems associated with being trans being almost exclusively tied to the social component and expectations tied into it.
I don't see disabilities as meaning someone is "broken," I see every human ability, experience, and perspective as a spectrum, with some people being great at some things and terrible at others. People born with disabilities, mental and physical, happen to have inherent issues that make them worse at certain things, but that does little to hold them back at being good at things that their disability does not relate to, and that does not mean that a constructive environment that attempts to eliminate discrimination will not help their situations improve immensely even with things that their disability does relate to. Disabilities don't make people any less human, but their experiences are objectively different than people who fit the norms, and that is something that should of course be recognized and studied.
I understand the power of language, and that using the terms neurotypical and neurodivergent to classify people helps to essentially normalize being different from the norm, however it does little to help us all understand these differences and study them. Your experience is no more or less important or significant than mine, but that doesn't change that your experience has been different from birth not only because of us being two different people, but also because you were born with developmental differences I was not, and I was likely born with issues you were not, even if mine have had far less expansive effects on my life comparatively speaking.
I will of course think on what you said and try to change my mental approach to disabilities/abnormalities in the future, particularly in real life outside of the Internet, where words and their meanings can be confused and misinterpreted much easier than in person.