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Stella Maru · Joined: 11 Feb 2007 Posts: 2248 Location: Brighton

Scaeme wrote:

So the doctors all think we're nuts?

This kind of generalization is perhaps not very helpful, but certainly the grounds for treating GID on the NHS is that it is a mental disorder.

If it were not, what grounds for treatment at public expense could there be?

I am myself opposed to the medicalization of gender variation, but recognize that medicalization is a two-edged sword. Without it, there would be no gender reassignment on the NHS.

However, as the NHS continues its downward spiral, gender reassignment will fall further and further behind in budget priorities, so that fewer and fewer operations will be performed as time goes by, until, in the end, the medicalization of gender variance will have outlived whatever usefulness it might once have had to the trans community.

Megan · Joined: 12 Apr 2007 Posts: 192 Location: Northampton

Government Policy concerning Transsexual People

http://www.dca.gov.uk/constitution/transsex/policy.htm wrote:

Transsexualism is not transvestism or cross-dressing for sexual thrill, psychological comfort or compulsion.

It is not an orientation towards people of the same sex.

It is not related to paedophilia.

It has nothing to do with drag queens.

Transsexual people do not choose their gender identity. Transsexualism is an overpowering sense of different gender identity rather than any sexual orientation: transsexual people may be heterosexual, gay/lesbian or celibate.

It is not a mental illness. It is a condition considered in itself to be free of other pathology (though transsexual people can suffer depression or illnesses like anyone else).

But then we could tit-for-tat over this point all day and not achieve anything other than disharmony, which I'd rather not do. And besides it deviates somewhat from the original subject.

**thedreadpersephone** · Advisor Joined: 09 Feb 2007 Posts: 913 Location: Dundee

la_glitch wrote:

i know non-trans women who don't put any effort into trying to pass as women, and some who wind up not really passing as women. and, you know, who cares? if you want to look pretty, make yourself look pretty. if you can't be arsed, then whatever. if you're more into a disheveled girly appearance, like me, and you think the notion of passing for it's own sake is intensely vacuous then, well, we're probably going to get along.

Being a fairly ordinary looking non-trans woman I know I can make as much or as little effort as I like, without my identity as a woman being called into question. I'd like to see the same apply to any woman, whether she's a trans woman who doesn't pass well or a butch woman who looks quite masculine. I don't think it's too much to ask to claim your own identity no matter what clothes you happen to be wearing. After all, for all I know, you are all wearing chainmail and clown shoes as you sit in front of your computer screens.

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**Helen** · Advisor Joined: 08 Feb 2007 Posts: 22 Location: UK

After all, for all I know, you are all wearing chainmail and clown shoes as you sit in front of your computer screens.

Ermm ......???? flat cap, string vest and wellies, actually.

Shocked