SAM writes:

In his famous book, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, the psychologist Oliver Sacks described a phenomenon called “alien leg syndrome.” Someone suffering from this malady fails to perceive one of his own legs as an integral part of his body. Such people might, at times, try to toss a leg out of bed and thereby tumble onto the floor. This is treated as a pathological condition by the medical health community.

Now, let’s suppose it wasn’t treated as pathological, and let’s suppose that psychologists insisted that the person suffering from “alien limb syndrome” was “really” a one-legged person trapped in a two-legged body. In this case, it would be cruel to call this syndrome a pathology. In this case, the right thing to do would be to cut off the person’s leg so that they could be their “true self” as a one-legged person. This sounds utterly mad, and, in practice, the the mental health profession tries to cure the delusion rather than catering to this delusion through destructive surgery.

But the mental health profession treats transgendered persons as if they are “really” a man in a woman’s body or a “woman” in a man’s body. With alien leg syndrome, the mental health community does not advocate cutting off the person’s leg; they advocate trying to reorient the person’s mind so that it becomes reintegrated with the body. But when it comes to people who suffer from the (unacknowledged) pathology of “gender confusion” or “gender mismatch,” mental health professionals do not treat it the same way. Rather, they advocate mutilating the person’s body through destructive surgery so that the deluded person is able to “feel” at one with themselves. So a woman who “feels” like a man should, on this view, have destructive surgery so that her body might match her delusion, as opposed to trying to cure her delusion. Medical practice says that the two-legged man who “feels” like he is one-legged gets sent into therapy, but the woman who “feels” like a man gets mutilating surgical treatment.

This shows that the homosexuality ideology about sexuality and sexual identity has now crossed the line into insanity and delusional thinking. Rather than accept the fact that sex is essential to one’s identity, the mental health profession and the culture at large choose instead to cooperate with delusion. If they didn’t, it would follow that homosexuality is pathological and should be treated as a disorder.

The mental health profession recognizes that similar forms of mind-body non-integration are pathological and tries to treat them. But the establishment ideology within the mental health profession is now incoherent at a deep and fundamental level.

Laura writes:

Well said.

Sam’s point has been made here before, but it can’t be stated often enough. The humane response to someone who suffers from a confused identity — and this suffering is real — is to orient him patiently to reality and to accommodate his identification with the opposite sex in innocent and harmless ways, not to enter the realm of fantasy and pretend he actually is a member of the opposite sex. No amount of surgery or hormonal therapy changes a girl into a boy. The transgendered person never becomes the opposite sex. Some of the people who undergo surgery or hormone therapy in late adolescence are bound to wake up years later and realize that they have been the victims of a cruel hoax and have been damaged for life.

One of the ironic things about transgenderism is that it denies that there is a spectrum of male and female behavior, that naturally includes qualities and traits of the opposite sex. In a weird way, transgenderism exalts and exaggerates sexual differences.

—- Comments —

Perfesser Plum writes:

I’m not sure what anyone might mean—assuming that they mean anything at all—when they say, “I feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body.”

“Which woman do you feel like?” I ask, in Socratic fashion. Then the clever follow-up. “And besides, my gender-obsessed friend, how do you know how a woman feels, since you aren’t a woman? I could understand if you said that you feel like a moron, since that is what you are.”

But I make little headway.

It’s moderately interesting that, whatever a person feels who says”I feel like (or as) a trapped woman,” he can’t be feeling anything like the pain of someone who is always hungry, or who has rheumatoid arthritis, or who has lost a child. But no fraternity that I know of raises 18,000 bucks to get food for the hungry or treatment for someone crippled with arthritis and living in a homeless shelter. There’s nothing about helping these folks that resonates with the poseur-givers’ cool.

To a narcissist, attention-seeking goober who says he’s tormented (“Oh, the horror. Not tormented?”) because he isn’t what he wants to be, I say, “Tough. I feel like a cowboy trapped in a city slicker body. And I could use some fries. But do you see me whining? No. I just get a hat and a spud or two. Now shut up before I make you feel like a person with a fat lip.”

Laura writes:

What if someone said, “I feel like a rich person trapped in a poor person’s body?” Would we give him money? What if someone said, “I feel like a smart person trapped in a stupid person’s body?” Would we automatically give him a perfect score on his SATs?

Terry Morris writes:

How about “I feel like a combat soldier trapped in a body unfit, and incapable of becoming fit, for the rigors of combat.” I think we have our answer on that one. To the tune of opening upwards of 250,000 new “combat opportunities” for women.

I feel like a fiscal and moral Traditionalist Conservative trapped in a fiscally and morally bankrupt society doing its utmost to destroy me in the process of destroying itself. Where shall I find my relief? What parts of the body shall we sever first?

Seriously though, I’m not sure which of the principals in this twisted story is the more pathologically insane – the girl who mistakes herself for a boy, or her fraternity “brothers” who refuse to acknowledge what she really is, while fully acknowledging what she really is.

Alissa writes:

How can a person feel that he is a woman or that she is a man, if there is no such thing as men and women? If there are no sexual differences? How can you be something, or someone, if it doesn’t exist? Are you even a person in the first place? And why can’t you, pardon my words, evolve beyond these things since you believe in Enlightenment values and modernity, of which evolution is a part?

Besides in the English language there are no major links between gender and sex, unlike Latin derived languages (in Latin there is no such thing as “male sex” and “female sex,” only “masculine sex” and “feminine sex”). I may feel like I am Marilyn Monroe or Napoleon Bonaparte a couple of days but I will never be them.

Hannon writes:

It seems to be a popular idea nowadays that human sexuality is a “spectrum” of orientations. It is not a linear, zero to one hundred “super straight” to “super gay” scale since it must include “transgenderism,” asexuality and other disorders. The spectrum idea neatly categorizes all sexual expression as inherently valid not only for the individual in question but for all of society. Sexual variance is nothing new and, relegated to the personal domain (sexuality is personal if nothing else), it is an issue that any society can accommodate. The fact that we are now subject to the extremes of political homosexualism shows that unbounded sexual deviation is far more than a personal choice that demands acceptance from others.

The spectral approach seeks the normalization of most all sexual afflictions, including paedophilia, and grows more outlandish and destructive every day. Well, OK, human sexuality runs along a spectrum with various nuances. But this argument requires qualification lest we come to believe that heterosexuality is merely one of many “options” and forget that it is the condition of the vast majority of men and women. Instead, the “spectrum” argument may be likened to the “rainbow society” argument where all possible conditions are equal and must be celebrated after centuries of persecution.

Sam’s comment is thought-provoking but I think it is a mistake to conflate the “gender identity” problem with homosexuality. Homosexual men do not typically harbor a wish to be women as far as I know. They are as secure in being physically men as they are in their sexual attraction to men. Both conditions are fundamentally abnormal no matter how society regards them socially. We can regard such abnormalities as “normal” in that we expect them to occur occasionally, and we know that these forms or orientations are not permutations pointing the way forward for the species.

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