Lukecash12 wrote:
This is another "flat-earth-ism" that plagues the general consciousness and has been hampering a doctor's ability to make medical decisions. The same university in Chicago that began performing sex "change" operations has come out with a thirty year study demonstrating a marked increase in suicide rates, drug addiction, etc. and most importantly the symptoms of BDD, in the vast majority of cases, do not subside but rather become worse instead. This is because we are performing drastic surgical procedures on people and then giving them an excessive amount of hormone therapy, which for obvious reasons can be emotionally confusing and have a number of serious physical and mental side effects. Also, this is because we are trying to treat every other part of that person's body but their brain.
Interestingly, I have been up and down Pubmed on this subject and have not come across any "thirty year study" out of
Chicago. In 2011, a study was published that came out of
Sweden, which compared post-op transsexual people to controls in the general population and was a follow-up over a 30-year period, but in that study since the post-op transsexual people were not compared to pre-op transsexual controls or to how they were before surgery one cannot draw any conclusions regarding the effectiveness of sex reassignmnt (emphsis added):
Sweden study wrote:
For the purpose of evaluating the safety of sex reassignment in terms of morbidity and mortality, however, it is reasonable to compare sex reassigned persons with matched population controls. The caveat with this design is that transsexual persons before sex reassignment might differ from healthy controls (although this bias can be statistically corrected for by adjusting for baseline differences). It is therefore important to note that the current study is only informative with respect to transsexuals persons health after sex reassignment; no inferences can be drawn as to the effectiveness of sex reassignment as a treatment for transsexualism. In other words, the results should not be interpreted such as sex reassignment per se increases morbidity and mortality. Things might have been even worse without sex reassignment. As an analogy, similar studies have found increased somatic morbidity, suicide rate, and overall mortality for patients treated for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.[39], [40] This is important information, but it does not follow that mood stabilizing treatment or antipsychotic treatment is the culprit.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043071/If this was
not the study you meant, then please provide a citation.
For your next paragraph:
Lukecash12 wrote:
For some backwards reason, even though there are mounting medical findings on this, it is not "politically correct" to suggest these people receive cognitive behavioral therapy or possibly prescribe them a medication to deal with what are mental symptoms. The mounting popularity of this "politically correct" position on the issue is understandable, but the actual results of these medical measures have had negative results. It is not helping these people because you can't change how someone understands their "gender" with drugs. There is no physical basis for it after all.
Cognitive behavioral therapy, medication to "cure" severe, persistent gender dysphoria in adults, or as you call it sex dysmorphia? I don't think there are any "mounting medical findings" at all. In fact, I think evidence for this approach is close to non-existent. The APA in its 2012 literature review mentions this (PDF; emphasis added):
APA literature review wrote:
The possibility of stopping the process of gender transition prior to completion, or of reversing some of the physical changes that have been attained, has gained more acceptance in recent years. Some individuals find that a measure of bodily change, without genital surgery, clarifies their understanding of their gender identity and desired gender presentation. For example, some adults who begin FTM transition discontinue androgen use after some physical masculinization has been achieved, finding that a masculine female (butch) identity is more authentically representative of the self than living as a man. Some adults who initially present with transgender concerns decide, during the process of psychotherapy, not to proceed with any form of public gender transition (31). This can be a reasonable outcome to an exploratory psychotherapy, but elimination or “correction” of transgender identity is no longer considered a reasonable therapeutic goal. Pfafflin and colleagues (48, 127), for example, describe the evolution in treatment of gender dysphoria from historic psychoanalytic approaches aimed at achieving gender congruence through resolution of presumed intrapsychic conflict, to a contemporary model of offering psychotherapy or mental health evaluations that are often followed by hormonal treatments and surgeries.
http://www.psych.org/File%20Library/Lea ... 12_GID.pdf
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"You have a responsibility to consider all sides of a problem and a responsibility to make a judgment and a responsibility to care for all involved." --Ian Danskin
17 Jun 2015, 5:15 pm
