This analysis is not unsympathetic towards people who suffer from a condition that is harmful to the individual sufferer and systemically within society. It is a warning to modern society, who have turned a mental illness into a civil rights movement for personal and political gain.
Statistics (Williams Institute UCLA):
Suicide attempts of transgender men: 46%
Suicide attempts of transgender woman: 42%
Suicide attempts of transgender young people (18-24): 45%
Facts - what there isn’t:
There is no such thing as a man being born a woman.
There is no such thing as a woman being born a man.
There is zero scientific evidence to support either of these claims.
Facts - what there is:
There is such a thing as a person being born with a mental illness that makes him/her believe that they were born with the wrong set of sexual organs, the wrong chromosomes and ultimately the wrong sex.
But, importantly, the brain does not define sexuality. Biology defines sexuality and more specifically, chromosomes within biology define sexuality.
Chromosomes are a thread-like structure of nucleic acids and proteins found in the nucleus of almost all living cells and they carry our genetic information in the form of genes.
For humans, sex is determined by the presence of a Y chromosome - humans with an X and a Y chromosome are male and those with two X chromosomes are female. No amount of surgery or hormone injections or any current technology can replace a chromosome in all of our trillions of cells and therefore a man cannot become a woman and vice versa.
Theoretical example:
If a man crashed his car and his penis was chopped off, that does not make him a woman.
If a man was born with high levels of oestrogen in his blood stream… That does not make him a woman.
If a man was born with miss-firing neurological components in his brain that make him believe he is a woman… That does not make him a woman.
If a man is born with miss-firing neurological chemistry, has had his penis chopped off in a car accident and was born with high levels of oestrogen in his bloodstream… That does not make him a woman. Unlucky, yes. But a woman, no.
As a society, pretending that having miss-firing neurological chemistry can make said person a different sex and allowing them to undergo extreme surgery and ignoring the fact that this is clearly a mental illness, is harmful. Not only to adults suffering with this mental illness who are being driven towards suicide at astonishing rates, but dangerous to children entering a world where we fuel this non-sensical notion.
Practical example:
Imagine if your grandfather is a schizophrenia sufferer and he believes he is the King of England.
He believes this to be true, his brain believes this to be true, he confesses with every fibre of his being that this is true... but of course, no matter how much he feels it, no matter how much he professes it, no matter how often his brain tells him he is... He is simply not the King of England.
The way to best help your grandfather is for him to receive psychiatric care. This will gauge the severity of the problems in his brain and use the best medicine and phycological understanding we have available to allow him to live as normal a life as possible, while minimising damage to himself and others.
On the other hand, the worst way to help your grandfather would be to indulge the miss-firing neurological components by playing up to his mental illness and telling him he truly is the the King of England. Then passing laws that force everyone else to go along with the charade and punish them by law if they don’t.
This would only lead your grandfather to confusion, depression and moulding of a believe that was stemming from a sever mental illness.
If I was to wake up tomorrow, feeling alien in my own body, unable to live in my own skin because I believe that I am a woman, this unfortunately does not make me one.
Society forcing you to call me a woman, to refer to me as a Miss or Mrs and to condemn you if you don’t abide by those rules, in the end, is going to cause me the most harm.
You wouldn’t tell your grandfather he is the King of England, so why do we not apply the same reasoning to a man who believes he is a woman, or to a woman who believes he is a man?
The answer is because being transgender has become a civil rights issue, rather than a medical one and there is little to no study looking at transgender issues as an illness.
But treating this condition as we do has many benefits to many people, far over and above 'helping' transgender sufferers. This gives politicians something to get behind, a movement they can back, something to base their principles on, something to fight for and ultimately, a reason.
Overall there is an astoundingly high 41% rate of suicide attempts in transgender people and a huge percentage who undergo surgery want to revert back to their original sex.
As a society, indulging people who are transgender and using transgender people to fuel a civil rights movement for personal gain, is pushing people, young and old, towards suicide and this is why the 'transgender civil rights movement', is the most dangerous of the last century.