I would love one person--just one--to explain to me why we have to pretend body dysmorphia in transgenderism is normal, even to be celebrated, while body dysmorphia in eating disorders is destructive and even a disease process.
Well, for starters, they are a bit different. Eating disorders can kill you, far to often. Transgender not so much, though they have a higher rate of suicide and other mental illnesses.
Is it worth trying to discuss seriously? Seems to me we should pay some attention to the medical side of this instead. In the end we are talking about a minuscule percent of our population that are being thrust into prominence in both the left and right-stream media. The attention…”oh the horror!” Or “oh look the first transgender blah blah blah” has blown it all out of proportion to actual numbers.
You have a tiny, long marginalized and despised group of people who just want to be treated like anyone else and that include receiving appropriate medical treatment. It should be families and doctors, not politicians or internet “experts” who determine what the right course of treatment is. The idea of “normalizing” it in our society seems to really upset a lot of people, but I don’t see it as any different than the way we “normalized” cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, learning disabilities, Downs syndrome in our society. Why is this a bad thing? Why is it we have no issue with a deaf person getting a cochlear implant but feel a transgender person getting hormone therapy crosses a line?
Going back to your original body dismorphia comment: the medically accepted treatment for transgender body dysmorphism ends up reducing suicide rates and possibly rates of concurrent mental illnesses. If that is the case, why reject it and call it “normalizing delusions”?
If we treated eating disorders the way we treat transgenderism, we would all have to play along with the 70 lb woman who thinks she's fat. We would have to let her into Weight Watchers and etc. You realize this?
It is two different illnesses that happen to have a common symptom. Why would you treat them the same?
And don't tell me that eating disorders are dangerous but trans ISN'T. It most certainly is, by all measures. It's a body dysmorphia with all attendant mental and physical side effects and conditions.
I will tell you that, untreated, one is much more dangerous to the individual than the other. And even with treatment relapse is much more common in eating disorders.
The comparison your making is more like two people presenting with a bad bronchial cough. One has pneumonia, the other lung cancer. Different causes, different treatments, different prognosis.
People have the right to live at 70 lbs or to deny their basic biology, they do. But we do not have to pretend along with them, especially if we can see it's to their detriment.
Of course.
But what if marginalizing them, curtailing their access to appropriate treatment, is more detrimental to them?
You are really trying to make false equivalencies here.