When do you think it would be harmful to a person who identifies as transgender to have their feelings acknowledged as real?
This is a very touchy subject so hear me out. Anorexic can be caused by a type of body dysphoria; meaning you always see yourself as fat -- a disconnect between who you are and what's in the mirror. Same goes for people who feel like they need a part of their body amputated in order to be complete. Some surgeons preform amputations on these people, more out of fear that they'd try to preform amputation themselves. But is this healthy? This gets into a very complex discussion on what is health/mental health.
I'm totally for people changing their gender roles or adding things from opposite gender roles. Throughout history we see major roles associated with either men or women change. From the Greeks to the Sumerians to the Romans, the idea of what men and women do in society can change quite a bit. Today we might acknowledge it's more fluid and we don't have to be locked into these social constructions. We redefine gender as the social construction and sex as the biological XX/XY chromosome types.
When people throw around "mental illness" with "transgender" it is never to uplift, but almost always to denigrate. It's a conservative thing and it's terrible. If they are having trouble identifying with themselves, and want to change their bodies drastically, essentially mutilating themselves (to quote South Park, "You mean I'm just a man with a mutilated penis?") we should ask ourselves .. is that a good thing? Maybe you can look and act and be like a woman/men, but accept what you were born biologically as a man/women.
I wish there was a way to talk about body dysphoria in a way that was helpful and not hateful, and maybe talk about how progressives can be for gender role fluidity and transgendered individuals, yet also acknowledging that reassignment surgery may be a bad thing and a sign people's view of themselves may not be in line with reality or beneficial to their overall well being.
It's a very dangerous issue to touch.
I know we are on Hacker News where everything must be done from first principles with whatever knowledge happens to be rolling around in the head of the person writing the comment, but this stuff is pretty settled folks.
The long-term implications of sexual reassignment surgery are far from settled.
Being transgender, even if we accept your premise, doesn’t.
Johns Hopkins got taken over by McHugh, who had a very clear (and stated) agenda to shut the clinic down. The evidence he compiled to do so was very sketchy - it didn't look at things like happiness or suicide rates. It looked at things like having heterosexual relationships (in the new sex) vs having homosexual ones. Nobody can quite figure out how it was scored and it overall feels very much like cherry picked junk statistics.
Also, not everyone who is trans needs or wants SRS, and many are happy without it. There used to be a lot less understanding of this, and it made things more difficult for a lot of people.
And ultimately? Yes, it would be great (and possibly change my own desire for it) if SRS was better, and allowed you to be fertile. This is true of most transgender treatments. It doesn't mean we should stop doing the not perfect things we have and stop pursuing better surgical options.
Also, if an individual, for good or ill, cannot be trusted to make the permanent decisions about their body - who can?
This is a form of survivorship bias - people who have meaningful things to say don't bother to speak on such a politicized topic. The same kind of reason freenet is full of criminality.
A person with schizophrenia may imagine and feel things that aren't strictly real, but are nonetheless "real" in terms of what they experience. In that case, it would be harmful to legitimize those things, and it's important to help the person distinguish between what feels real and what is real. In no way am I equating transgender feelings to schizophrenia, but those same principles should apply.
No, but people like to misrepresent metaphors when it suits their worldview.