In the vein of "thoughts I can't muse on elsewhere"...

I wonder if we aren't too quick to lump all people together into one bucket. In general, I mean things like people talk about "a cure for autism", but as the father of a mildly autistic kid, I can tell you that autism is a set of symptoms, not a disease, so there isn't one cure. My son's autism is due to an allergy to wheat and dairy proteins, and if we keep them out of his system, he's more or less neurotypical. My good friend from college has a child who is autistic and so far they have found NOTHING that helps. They've tried elimination diets to rule out food allergies, they've tried all of the typical treatments, their child is about 10 and he's almost entirely non-communicative. Autism is not ONE thing, and lumping all autistic people into one bucket doesn't really help.

So, in the same light, is it impossible to believe that there could be more than one type of transgenderism? That while we agree and support that SOME transgender people really do have the wrong gender brain (or whatever) in their head, so too OTHER transgender people might be suffering from some sort of "gender dysmorphia disorder"?

This is not a discussion I'd want to have among the unenlightened, because I wouldn't want to give anyone any ammunition for dismissing the people who truly are trans, but I'm just saying that the community of people who are trans (or who have trans urges, whether they've made any strides in the direction of changing or not) is large enough that it's possible, even likely, that there are more than one cause for it.

Are there women who claim rape for attention? Yes. Is it most of them? No. Are there people who claim to be trans for attention? I'd bet yes. Is it most of them? Almost certainly not.

Are there people who DO in fact choose to be gay, due to a severely traumatic experience with the opposite gender? Yes, I've known a few of them (I have one lesbian friend who talks openly about when she CHOSE to be gay, because she'd been abused one too many times by ex-boyfriends and (as I recall) also by her father as a child). Does that mean that every gay person is just choosing to reject the opposite gender? Certainly not.

So, is it possible that SOME number of transgender people are suffering a psychological delusion, rather than an actual biological fact? I'd say it's likely.

Of course, it's academic, because unless we have a way to distinguish who is who, there's no reasonable way to figure out who needs treatment for their mental illness and who needs gender reassignment surgery to correct a real problem. Clearly the real problem DOES exist, or else why would the case of that boy whose circumcision was botched, so they reassigned him as an infant and raised him as a girl be so clear, why would that one case be someone who felt absolutely, life long, that they were in the wrong gender body?

And by the way, I'm not suggesting we should force anyone (even the ones who are having a psychological problem) into treatment instead of being trans, but I do wonder if someone who is trans for some other reason than an actual physical mismatch between brain and body or soul and body or whatever might not find that the transition really solves the problems they think it will solve.