Being lgbt isn’t a mental illness. Not medically speaking, anyway. Maybe they were considered such in the past. Go far enough back and we used bloodletting as a common treatment, our understanding generally improves with time. I have no desire to go back to an era where lgbt people were persecuted.
With respect to your other point. “Children” is a broad category. Pre-pubescents are not “changing sex”. Instead we are being encouraged to respect their gender identity, and not reject gender-non conforming behaviors [1]. Teens may take puberty blockers to buy time, this also isn’t “changing sex”. Perhaps HRT is what you mean by changing sex, and yes some teenagers are able to access the HRT of their preferred gender. The science on this is pretty clear, that suicide rates of trans people is drastically lowered when in a gender-supportive environment, and their mental well-being is infinitely better.
[1] I implore you to watch this video: https://youtu.be/h60YLGDJ6n0
Edit: despite what a child comment I cannot reply to is saying, while over-medicalization and misdiagnosis is definitely something to watch out for (being gender-nonconforming is not the same as being trans and this is why education about lgbt issues is important), the vast majority of transgender youth do not suffer from an overabundance of societal and medical acceptance for their issues.
Puberty blockers are indeed not a drug to prescribe lightly. Same with SRS, it should not be handed out like candy. People who have only had gender dysphoria for a short time may indeed be better served by a “wait and see” approach. All of these things I can agree with.
If you are under the impression that being trans isn’t stigmatized enough and all the kids might turn trans if we aren’t careful, I’m simply going to disagree with you. There’s no evidence of this.
Medically defining what an "illness" is can get into a lot of squirrely philosophical questions that aren't really scientifically or objectively answerable. We basically just define a mental illness as something that significantly impairs your ability to function happily in life. If society, in general, is intolerant and hostile to you due to that orientation it's not far off to think maybe that's something people might want to take a pill to fix if that was actually possible.
We do recognize, now, that pathologizing being LGBT didn't really do the people with those orientations much good and attempts to reverse or suppress the impulses tended to just lead to worse mental and emotional outcomes. It turned out that simply carving out space in society to accommodate it worked a lot better than turning it into an individual problem to be "solved." And, it turns out, it wasn't that big of a deal to let people live like that after all.
But I'm not sure to what extent a lot of stuff we think of as mental "illnesses" aren't like that as well. Like perhaps a lot of ADHD or anxiety disorders are actually fairly reasonable responses to sociological stressors, but we just treat them as individual problems to fix rather than wide-scale issues to address at a higher level.
All that said, I think awareness of mental illness and self-mis-diagnosis largely isn’t the primary problem. The successful person who became a crippling OCD shut-in was convinced OCD was a myth until it was far too late. If only they took it seriously while they still had enough functioning to follow therapy instructions, they might be in a much healthier state right now.
So, for instance, shepherd breeds’ herding instincts come from a combination of a sort of compulsive desire to keep things together and a deep suspicious of aberrant. Consequently, these breeds are prone to neuroticism and anxiety when those traits present too strongly.
Sure, there are those that use that as a reason for why they think they have ADHD or an excuse for drug seeking, but it's not the sole symptom, and in some cases not a symptom, for those who legitimately struggle with it. Those who have it, know how crippling it is dealing with the rumination, confusion, irritability, insecurity, regulating emotion, depression that can and often does result from these aspects, among a list of other issues. Not everyone deals with every aspect as it's more of a spectrum than anything, but personally I deal with the ones listed among other things and daily life's been far from an issue of "not being able to sit in a seat/getting bored easily".
Please don't minimize it to a frivolous cliche.
No one in this thread was claiming that. With the possible exception of aspects of trans, but don’t conflate that with the larger LGB community. Separate issues, and not being discussed here.
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I, too, can rephrase bad things in superficially-positive language to make them seem like good things.
>The science on this is pretty clear
Ah, off course. THE SCIENCE^TM. The single, monolithic, Science; which by very happy coincidence happens to hold the opinions you deem acceptable.
>[1] I implore you to watch this video
I implore you to understand how bias and cherry picking works, for every heart-wrenching sob story about brave and stunning joe or jane finding their "true self" there are 10 heart-wrenching stories about kids being misled into mutilating their bodies irreversibly by their peers, teachers and caregivers as they chase their mythical true self, and the overwhelming power of state and mass media are on 1 side and not the other, namely that of trans activists.
>If you are under the impression that being trans isn’t stigmatized enough
I'm always amazed by the ability to live in parallel realities that human minds have, it's like sensory data is just an abstract high-level description that isn't enough to determine reality, and each person constructs their own reality by filling in the blank. Like, judging from my experience online, being trans is really really privileged. Is there any other groups (besides the usuals, which are also privileged) that can make public discourse salty against a comedian for 6 or 7 months straight because they made fun of the group ? Is there any case of people being outraged that comedians make fun of men ? Men literally had one of the corporations marketing products for them to shit on them in an ad in 2019, and the whole incident was forgotten in days. Yet, here you are, apparently the group that is coddled and put on a pedestal seemingly everywhere is oppressed and stigmatized.
Just to add some context the parent author is might be trying to refer to "rapid onset gender dysphoria" ( https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... ) which, while far out of my understanding, is a rather new topic that's still being studied.
What are you trying to say here? Problematic isn't a scientific quantity but maybe you're throwing this in from some other context? Personally, these days I see people of all walks invoking science when they just mean "my own common sense."
People confuse their own preference with science. Also, because preference is political, what to research and what science is focused on is a political question.