is transexuality a mental illness?
If the first French medical description dates back to Esquirol (1838), "transsexualism" is a term invented by the medical community during the first major studies on human sexuality on child prisoners who serve as guinea pigs for bourgeois theories. To found this concept, doctors are inspired by the religious ideologies with which they are impregnated; these make the body the place of all the perversities that corrupt the human spirit, the seat of God. Modifying one's body then amounts to modifying one's relationship to God, and thereby the nature of God...
"Transgender is really something against nature."
A television personality
transsexual disease
During these studies on sexuality, medical ignorance and the peremptory opinions of doctors in need of notoriety result in a long-held confusion among the public between transsexuality and transvestism. By making the penis the central element of human relations, psychoanalysis reduces humanity to a society of neurotic patients. From then on, popular belief permanently grants an unhealthy fetishism for feminine attributes and an unbridled sexuality to transsexuals. However, scientists demonstrate much later that sexual attraction is not linked to the personality of an individual, any more than transsexuals are specifically affected by instinctual sexual perversity; this is why we no longer speak of transsexualism but of transidentities or "transgender" for people who do not correspond to the binary norm of gender.
"A transsexual is not a woman but a man. Tolerance is not the negation of reality."
Internet user
The causes of suffering
The insistent and non-reducible nature of transgender people's demand to be able to live in the gender that they feel has led to the belief of an obsessive personality or identity disorder. Indeed one cannot impose on a person to be exclusively what those around him want. It is as absurd as wanting to demand the psychiatrization of a person for insistent refusal to be a chair, under the pretext that a group decides that this person must be a chair. A young child is more inclined to affirm his gender identity because he is not invested by those around him with taboos and unhealthy ideologies. Some psychiatrists and doctors have largely theorized on an educational deficiency as the cause of this disorder, accusing in turn the parents or the entourage, which has never been demonstrated. However, no psychological or psychiatric practice has been able to reduce this demand in the case of transgender people, despite the violence and social discrimination. However, some doctors still intend in 2020 to validate the request of transgender people by resisting this violence, which is akin to torture. The latter are now recognized as the main cause of their suffering by the International Psychiatric Association. They not only generate significant costs for society but they also motivate for many the matching of physical appearance with perceived gender, to integrate the norm in order to reduce the risk of aggression and exclusion.
The end of psychiatry
The causes of transidentity have been the subject of much sociological and psychiatric conjecture by people in search of recognition. Some extremists do not hesitate to pass off medical refusals of sexual reassignment operations for de-transitions claiming to validate "conversion therapies" in . But no psychological theory has achieved consensus to date among scientists and researchers. And asserting individually in a categorical way using the bias of legitimacy, never constitutes a scientific demonstration. This is why transidentity comes out of the psychiatric field, no longer being considered a mental illness. In the same way, it is recognized in sociology as in history the existence of transgender people integrated into their societies long before their pathologization by medicine and their demonization by religions .
“If you were more discreet too, no one would bother you; you cause transphobia”
A well-known instagrammer
Is transidentity a physical illness?
Several clinical researches have been carried out on transgender people which range from the administration of more or less pharmaceutical products, to surgical observations of which it is very difficult to obtain the literature. The medical experiments to which they have been subjected remain a tacit oversight which medicine in particular and society more generally put up with, without any of them being able to provide a scientific answer."You can have yourself completely redone; it will never change your chromosomes"
a heterosexual cisgender
But a study by Lauren Hare of Prince Henry's Institute of Medical Research reported in 2008 that transgender women had a longer androgen receptor gene than cisgender men, making it less efficient to bind to testosterone, and therefore this which could prevent complete masculinization of the brain. It was already known since 1990 that the SRY gene on the Y chromosome acts on the sexual differentiation of the fetus between the fifth and the twelfth week of pregnancy, which made it possible to affirm that sex was a variation on a scale where male and female are the ends that no one reaches.
For researchers at Augusta University, one of the factors that could explain gender dysphoria could come from estradiol , a primary estrogen that we all produce very briefly during the perinatal phase. Their scientific studies show in 2019 that gender dysphoria comes from alleles on the X chromosome whose estrogen receptors react like women for MTF people and like men for FTM people. The brief release of estradiol would result in two possibilities:
- either the presence of stimulation of estrogen receptors, which would lead to a “male brain”,
- or the absence of stimulation of estrogen receptors, would give rise to a “female brain”.
"transsexuality is a disease; it's normal not to want to catch it"
Internet user
But the results of the scientific study go even further: the researchers focused on sex-specific brain development. Around the twenty-second week of pregnancy, the brain is in a bath of estrogen necessary at the beginning of life. This bath solicits more or less the estrogen receptors of the genes which respond to it in an individual and variable way. DNA verification tests have revealed more than 120,000 possible genetic variants between biological sex and brain sex, helping to contradict the gender binary.
For John Graham Theisen, researcher in Endocrinology and Genetics, these results show that sex, or more precisely gender, is one of the genetic variants responsible for our individual traits, such as eye color or foot size. Genetic reality shows us that gender is an individual human variable for which today's society is not adapted. For this reason, forcing humans to adapt to this society, by going against their genes, is against nature.
"To be a woman you have to have a uterus; it's basic biology"
a woman in the street
A normative bias can suggest a genetic mutation, which would make transgender people symptomatic aberrations of a decadent humanity. But this is to ignore that History proves to us the existence of these people at different times, in different social groups and in different places on the globe. However, Humanity has not been replaced or has not disappeared.
Gender is therefore neither a desire nor a choice, nor a diabolical or psychological perversity and even less a disease. To claim the opposite is delusional and to impose on someone to be what one believes is psychic rape. Since gender is dependent on estrogen-responsive genes, anatomy is not a relevant criterion for imposing lifelong behavior on a person. But then the visualization of reproductive sexual organs can in no way constitute irrefutable and definitive proof 's gender identity . No body allows the imposition of an identity.
"I tell you her because I still have a woman in front of me."
a transfriendly endocrinologist
“There is a social stigma that transsexualism is simply a lifestyle choice, but our results confirm a biological basis for how gender identity develops. »
List of bibliographical references
Why are transgender people evil creatures?
Are transgender women women?
1 As early as the late 19th century, the transgression of gender norms by children was seen as an indication of latent criminality in need of correction. A first test supposed to measure masculinity and femininity was developed in the 1930s by Lewis Terman and Catherine Miles in prisons. But almost a century later, a study in 2019 found that transgender children showed strong preferences for toys and clothes typically associated with their gender identity, not their sex. Their preferences did not seem to differ based on their lifespan as the current gender. Transgender children also did not appear to have significantly different preferences from cisgender children with the same gender identity, according to the report in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."
2 Contrary to what opponents of gender diversity claim, the case of David Reimer, treated by the psychologist John Money, actually demonstrates that gender dysphoria is not only dependent on an education or a environment, since the latter rejected the forced assignment to an imposed gender. On the other hand, his adult testimony highlights the violence with which we receive the injunction to conform to the binarity of gender and the social taboos that surround them. David Reimer has never been a transgender person. It is a little boy who, following a failed circumcision, was forcibly assigned to the female gender by those around him under the social pressure of gender binarity. And it doesn't work.
3 Studies on the violence encountered by transgender people show that transgender women experience the same violence as cisgender women, in addition to racial, homophobic, transphobic, religious and medical violence. Economic and professional/school violence were the least frequently reported (25.0%). There are several reasons for this: the effect of authority when there is a link of subordination, the group effect which will protect its own interests in a schoolyard as in a company, the difficulty of proving this type of discrimination and fear of reprisals.
4 The European Network for Gender Incongruence Investigation (ENIGI) is the largest study launched in 2010 on transgender people worldwide, and it is unique: most of the studies were small and looked at the outcomes of people who have already undergone hormonal treatment and surgery. The studies are much larger at the present time.
https://epath.eu/enigi-publications/
5 Jonathan Vanhoecke, a neurobiology researcher at the University of Southern California, says:
“Part of the challenge is the wide variety of brain structures in people in general. Researchers have found differences between the brains of cisgender men and women, for example, but the variation within each gender is also considerable. idea of binary health care, whether you're male or female, it's only in the last few years that researchers are starting to say that's just not true."
6 Simón(e)D Sun is a PhD candidate at the Tsien Lab of the Neuroscience Institute of New York University
"While brief and coordinated solicitation of SRY initiates the process of male sex differentiation, genes like DMRT1 and FOXL2 retain certain sex characteristics which, if inactive, could exhibit characteristics of the opposite sex...In terms simple, the idea of a sex binary is not scientifically useful, and nowhere is it more evident than in the brain."
7 Bioethics: AMENDMENT No. 2472 http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/15/amendments/2243/AN/2472
"the Myosotis study conducted by David Cohen and Agnès Condat on the psycho-emotional development of children conceived through medically assisted procreation whose father is transgender has shown that the gender identity of the parents has no impact on development of children. Transidentity is therefore in no way a contraindication to parenthood."
8 Female sex hormones in men with migraine -Willebrordus P.J. van Oosterhout, Guus G. Schoonman, Michel D. Ferrari-https://n.neurology.org/content/91/4/e374
"According to a team of researchers from Leiden University Medical Center (Netherlands), men who suffer from migraine have significantly more estrogen in their blood than those who do not. The researchers found that men with migraine had an average estradiol concentration of 97 picomoles per liter (pmol/L), compared to 69 pmol/L in those without." This finding explains, at least in part, why migraine is much more common in women than in men,” the researchers conclude.
9 Innumerable Sexes by Thierry Hoquet, professor of philosophy at Jean-Moulin Lyon 3 University, gender put to the test of biology. https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/continent-sciences/le-genre-l-epreuve-de-la-biologie
"When public opinion affirms that there are two sexes, it maintains that there are, in each species, two types of individuals and only two. It claims a determining naturalism. But when science evokes the binarity of the sexes , she is much more circumspect. When science and opinion meet, it is on a misunderstanding in fact. Sex cells do exist in nature. But dividing individuals into only two categories, male and female, is a reductive practice, disrespectful of what is biologically."
10 "Genetics is much more complex than civil status," recalls Joëlle Wiels, biologist and director of research at the CNRS in the Signaling, nuclei and innovations in oncology laboratory4, whose work challenges "the overly well-established dogma of gender binarism" and the political use made of it. “It is not a question of calling into question the biological reality of sexuation, but of contesting its absolute duality. »
