The Great Gender Blog Series 2: Gender Dysphoria, Transgender, Transsexual

In light of recent events regarding President Trump's tweet regarding transgender individuals and the military, I decided go on and make the second post in my blog series. Before you read this blog, please read part 1, there is a lot of important information vocabulary. You may find it here

Imagine you woke up tomorrow and found yourself suddenly found in the body of the opposite sex, nothing changed about your mind, you are still psychologically you, but physiologically you now have the body of the opposite sex. Not only that, everyone you ever knew suddenly began referring to you as if you had always been the opposite sex. If you're a man, you know you're still a man, but you now have the body of a woman and everyone thinks you're a woman and always have been. Likewise, you know you're a woman and you now have the body of a man and everyone thinks you're man and always have been. How would you feel? Trapped? Alone? Angry that people think you're someone you're not? Do you think you would come to just live with it or do everything you can to fix it so you can return to who you are? That's the reality that gender dysphoric people live and have lived with every single day of their life, or at least since they've been aware of their dysphoria.

That is not the best metaphor, many people with it and their therapists that treat them will all say it's hard to describe to people who do not have it. I remember seeing a post on Reddit where people with gender dysphoria would describe it, and this is what they said...
"Like looking in the mirror and not seeing yourself. You see a body, and it mirrors your movements. You logically know that is you, but that is not you."
"being homesick for a place you've never been"
"A box I was put into without my permission. It's restricting, and suffocating, and for most of my life it completely obscured who I was, like a cloud of pink that hides my inner colors from the world. It often feels like I'll never really be able to break out of the box, so instead I do my best to change its colors and make the box a place I can survive in."
"A complete detach from myself. Like watching myself in third-person view. Now, add in that someone switched your favorite controller settings to the opposite"
"(You feel) all the time, you don't fit or belong, things just aren't right, but it is all the time because what isn't right is your own skin. You can't look in the mirror, or get dressed, or sometimes even look at your own hands, without the feeling of things being off."
"A hideous mask that I cannot take off. It doesn't matter what compliments I receive, how confident I feel, I just do not like what I see in the mirror or a photograph. It's not that I think I look ugly, just that I think I look, for lack of a better term, off."
"It feels like being trapped alone inside an invisible prison that nobody else can see, and you're screaming for help and to be let out but nobody can hear you."

That is why almost all of them identify as transgender, because that is what it feels like for gender dysphoric people when they identify as their own gender. Why even for most of them, that is still not enough and so they undergo hormone therapy, and a number have sex-reassignment surgery. Now, not all transsexuals actually have SRS, in fact, the goal of gender therapy isn't to change the person's sex, that's a common misconception, it's to alleviate the gender dysphoria. Yes, some do go the whole nine yards and have everything done, but some only receive hormones, some receive hormones and maybe only have facial feminization but no genital surgery, and some may only crossdress and not receive any medications or therapy. Contrary to popular belief, there is not a one-sex fits all approach to gender therapy, and there is not just one solution. The solution is what is best for the individual. For a very small number, they can learn to live with and manage their dysphoria symptoms through psychotherapy, which for the record, is a key competent of treatment and a psychologist has to sign a letter of recommendation for hormones and surgeries before that either of those happen, but that is a minority. There reason why that is a minority is because of how debilitating of a condition this can be before one transitions. Transgender individuals have the highest rate of suicide among any other group of people in the world (40% of transgender individuals have attempted suicide at some point in their life, 92% of them were before age 25 and likely to have not transitioned).

This is not a choice
, and I cannot stress that point enough. When people choose to do something, it's to gain personal benefit from it. People don't choose a "lifestyles" or whatever you want to call it that it's going to make it more likely to kill themselves, become social ostracized, and that's going to cause them to feel like what I describe above. People don't choose a harder life, even "just for attention". It is also not the result of a moral falling, and I don't mean like this isn't the result of a fallen world, that will be covered in a later post, but what I mean by that is that this isn't rebelling against God or some other authority such as parents. There are transgender Christians because transpeople come from all walks of life. I remember hearing a story from a Christian therapist who had parents come to him because their daughter had gender dypshoria and what they told him is that every pastor they've talked to about this called it a "willful rebellion", and they said that it was so unrepeatable to their situations because that is not even remotely who their daughter was. It is not simply "gender confusion", which to be honest, I am not even entirely sure what that means, but I've never talked to a transperson who sounds confused about who they are inside. People who are confused don't make strong statements like ones mentioned above.

What does cause it? The simplest answer is "we don't know", which I think too often both everyone is too afraid to admit, but there's no shame in not knowing. It's not that we're completely clueless on this issue, there are theories out there about the cause of this. The first I'll call the "Brain Theory". As you may or may not know, men's and women's brains are shaped differently in different parts, and what we have found studying brains of deceseased transpeople is that their brain tends to be aligned with the sex they identify with as opposed to their birth sex. (transwomen had brains shaped like women, and transmen had brains shaped like men). How we think this occurs is that when we're in the womb we develop our sex organs, gonads, etc. during the first of fetal development, and these parts of the brain develop in the second half of pregnancy. What this theory says is that when the brain is developing, something goes wrong and the brain does not match the body. This theory seems to makes sense, but these areas of the brain that are shaped different are odd if we think about them in terms of identity. The second most common theory is "Environment", is that for one reason or another someone identifies with the opposite sex as opposed their assigned sex. While this theory is a bit better at explaining identity due to how brains work and develop, it falls short when it comes to their not being a clear theme or factor in transpeople's enviroment growing up. If I had to guess, I would personally argue both theories are partially true and partially wrong, I think this is a complicated condition that has complicated causes.

Transgender individuals and people with gender dysphoria are truly hurting, and it is partially because of a lot of misinformation out there regarding them and what they are going through. For the sake of keeping this blog short, I am not going to go into what I think the Church's response should be to Transgender individuals and their families, those both in and out of the Church. I will say that they are just as much children of God as much as everyone else.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments! This is an educational blog series, I will not respond to argumentative statements.
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