treatments and cures and bodies and brians

[thestory]

Okay.
First of all I believe altering the brain is too dramatic of an option to prefer over dealing with GID. Of course that is if you are forcing the brain to function opposite of its perceived gender. You would be destroying synapses and cells to achieve that sort of result, and in turn destroy a whole chunk of that individuals personality.
Unfortunately I have seen the results of brain damage, and even what simple medication can do to a person and who they are. My father had a brain injury when I was 10.
I don't believe in that sort of treatment.

Of course if there was some sort of magical drug that made oneself comfortable with their body, but didn't change them other than that, that would be fine by me. But we wouldn't really change.
It is our behaviors that upsets society and is unacceptable. even when our behavior is acceptable we are misread and misunderstood because of what people assume off of our bodies. Men will still be annoyed by being called a woman and vice versa. i think we end up at a similar dilemma.

[metal angel]

yeah the ideal cure would probably be to somehow just make the person and society accept the missmatch.... seems impossible even to write that as a sentence though... so the cances of turning that hard to catch concept into a cure seem phenominally low.

i guess changing the male brain to a female brain or however you'd see it, would be almost akin to murder of the conciousness etc.

man, you could start so many grand philosophical conjectures over transsexuality...

[thestory]

man, you could start so many grand philosophical conjectures over transsexuality...

Oh yes. We can also enjoy endless bickering over answer-less questions. Oh, how I do love debate.

[Just Kate]

The idea that we will somehow lose ourselves if we lose our GID is an interesting one, but not one that I believe is healthy.  There are deaf people who believe cochlear implants will cause them to no longer be who they are - they feel the idea of being able to hear, even remotely, will damage their identities.  Are they better off for remaining deaf?  In all honesty, probably not, but they have spent so much of their lives identifying as such and bearing the brunt of the shame of it, that cognitive dissonance has dictated that they be proud of and become one with their condition.  This is unhealthy.  I call it unhealthy because they could be living far more fulfilling lives and be able to experience life in dramatically new and more convenient ways, yet they refuse such life improvements because of their warped sense of identity.

Refusing the pill seems to smack of the same type of attitude.  Is our GID really who we are, or just a condition, something that, once removed, would dramatically improve our lifestyles?

My wife struggles with depression, pretty intense depression.  She used to struggle with the idea of taking medication for it as she felt by taking it, she might not be being true to her identity.  She later rectified this belief with the understanding that the depression meds (which make her faaaaar happier of a person and better able to cope with the world) actually were RESTORING her true identity, the identity robbed from her by her condition.

I feel a pill (gosh, if it only existed) would restore us to being the whole being we could be without the psychological distress brought on by GID.  Refuting the previous example, no this doesn't mean MTF's are suddenly going to want to tromp off to football games (if they otherwise do not now), but it does mean we'll be comfortable in our own skins.

EDIT: I used the "pill" terminology after reading a few posts.  To better fit with the OP, replace "pill" with "mental treatment".

[metal angel]

hrmmm... i think my hypothetical was a solution which would make their brain match their bodies, which would by definition change a part which is more them than their body seems to be. Based on the "wrong body"/"wrong mind" concept.

Is your solution more of a "happy with the missmatch" solution? which seems like the best one if at all possible, and yes, in that caseyou wouldn't loose any of the identity, it would be just happier about it's earthly avitar.

You could argue that if the mind and the body are both perfectly good in their own right, neither of them can really be "wrong"... you could argue that the whole concept of a "wrong body" essentially makes no sense... whereby you are treating a percieved missmatch to unleash the true self. Maybe this is applicable in some cases. But my question was based on the premis, for the purpose of my hypothetical, of the "wrong body" concept being vallid.

Post Merge: September 05, 2009, 06:44:40 AM
As for whether treating a condition makes you less "you" and removeds any identity, i think it depends on whether the condition has any advantages along with the dissadvantages, and how much extra "you" the treatment takes with it.