The only problem I can see with this solution is that the whole point of gender disphoria is that the sufferer *cannot* embrace their difference.
Like I said, it's a old tough world.
It is exactly the pain of knowing their difference that they are trying to assuage.
That is entirely cultural, as far as I can tell. If our culture embraced trans women as Samoa embraces fa'afafine, that problem wouldn't exist. It certainly doesn't in Samoa. I've known a lot of fa'afafine and not one of them wanted their dick cut off. They were what they were.
You don't tell a schizophrenic to just embrace the paranoia and the irrational voices. The whole problem with schizophrenia is that the voices have a force that cannot be reasoned with or resisted.
You're comparing a psychological issue with a psychiatric illness. Schizophrenia has more in common with cancer than trans issues.
But if I had a deep psychological horror of the knowledge of my own penis? I don't think that's something embraceable. I'm pretty sure that's a psychological problem that needs to be treated as such.
I've asked many people how wanting your dick cut off differs from wanting your leg cut off, which some people do to the extent that they self-amputate. Nobody's managed to tell me so far.
As you say, that's a psychological issue and it seems to me like something best served by some deep and meaningful CBT.
You don't tell someone who suffers from Munchausen by Proxy, "just embrace it! And also stop making other people sick."
Again, does not apply. Trans women aren't hurting anyone, and it's not an illness. Embrace it.
A person who suffers from suicidal depression can certainly say, "I'm suicidal, and that's okay." But they're still suicidal. It's not actually okay. It's something they still have to suffer through, and fight against, every hour of every day. They don't need validation, or tolerance, or whatever. They need treatment.
You could probably stop comparing transgender issues to actual diseases about now. A hit though, on trans suicide, which I'm told is higher than some other groups.
Transgenderism is problematic is largely because, unlike homosexuality (for example), it's not a question of embracing an alternative lifestyle without shame or fear. Transgenders don't want an alternative lifestyle. They want the mainstream lifestyle that society attributes to the gender they're not. And that's problematic because the mainstream lifestyle doesn't really have room for transpeople. Not without deconstructing the mainstream lifestyle, anyway.
See above re: harsh old world.
There's a word that means "biological gender" and it might be quite handy to use it to avoid ambiguity. Also saves three characters on twitter.
I'm sick of that, too.
There is no ambiguity, unless you try to think it's ambiguous, and the idea that "gender" means one thing while "sex" means another, is bunkum. There are two: male and female, plus a mutation allowing intersex people to exist.
I had an argument here some years back about whether they were "transgender" or "transexual". Americans and Poms prefer transgender, Kiwi and fa'afafine prefer transexual.
A funny thing just occurred to me: I've never heard a single Kiwi woman complain about a fa'afafine using their toilets, despite most of them being somewhat bigger than me. (6'2" & 200 lb) In cases where women I've been with have used a bathroom simultaneously with a fa'afafine, they've found it companionable rather than confrontational.
