TRANSGENDER

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post 'Nashville school shooting - Audrey Hale ':

Re: “trans is a mental illness nothing more”

This is a gross oversimplification in my view.

Millions of individuals around the free world ‘choose’ or ‘are pushed’ into adopting/inhabiting a vast and wide range of ‘remarkable’ personalities, self-identities, behaviors, practices, and world-views that the majority of people could regard as ‘atypical’, or even ‘abnormal’.

These include, for example, individuals who engage in minor or drastic changes of physical appearance involving (for example) cosmetics, fake tan, skin bleaching, maintaining a very large weight, maintaining a very slight weight, ‘extreme’ or unusual hairstyles, use of hair dye, hair removal, hair transplants and extensions, extreme workouts, plastic surgery, Botox, tattoos, body piercings, pharmaceuticals, ‘extreme’ clothing, absence of clothing, and/or many other interventions to the body, hair and face that we see in society which fall outside of societal norms.

These can also include individuals adopting religious or moral positions, and/or cultural or political views, that wider society would regard as ‘unconventional’ or even ‘abnormal’.

Individuals adopting or inhabiting living situations that the majority would consider ‘unconventional’ or even ‘abnormal’: such as living ‘homeless’ on the streets, squatting, inhabiting a boat, barge, tent, makeshift camp, car, van or trailer; or perhaps drifting from one couch, town, or country, to the next every few days or weeks, without ever gaining a fixed address or seeming ‘roots’.

Is it ‘mentally ill’ to be itinerant or a vagabond?

Some individuals experience no or few long lasting relationships. Some experience little or no sex drive, or a heightened sex drive and dozens or hundreds of sexual partners. Some individuals divorce and marry multiple times, while many others never marry at all.

Are lifelong singletons ‘mentally ill’? Are people with multiple sexual partners ‘mentally ill’? Are gay people ‘mentally ill’? What about straight people who consciously decline to reproduce? How about people who have many kids instead of just 1 or 2?

Many individuals are convinced Mormons. Members of a cult? Christian Scientists. Cultists? Scientologists. Cultists? Jesuits. Cult members?

Mainstream Catholics. Cultists? Christian Evangelical churchgoers. Cultists? Mainstream Protestant churchgoers. Cultists?

Jews. Cultists? Muslims. Cultists? Hindus. Cultists? Buddhists. Cultists?

Are many or all religious folk ‘mentally ill’?

How about agnostics and atheists? Are they ‘mentally ill’ because they ‘deny the divine’?

Is Communism such an unusual position as to signify mental illness?

What about dogmatic adherence to the tenets of Capitalism?



Are political right-wingers and conservatives ‘mentally ill’ because they lack compassion or empathy? Or, should we regard leftists and liberals ‘mentally ill’ because they set their faces against tradition, social order, and the family?

Or, are libertarians ‘mentally ill’ because they ‘fail to grasp the duties and responsibilities individuals have to one another as members of communities/society’?

Are artists and creative types who refuse or are unable to hold down a ‘regular job’ or lifestyle ‘mentally il’?

Or, are office workers who spend years working for bosses or companies, performing paid labor, ‘mentally ill’?

Are women who choose to be homemakers rather than taking part in the workforce ‘mentally ill’? Or, are working mothers who place their kids in childcare ‘mentally ill’?

Does watching TV for 40 hours a week signify ‘mental illness’? What about 20 hours? 1 hour?

What about regularly eating ‘junk food’ (‘non food’)? Does once a week count?

Are people who engage in dangerous sports such as boxing or MMA ‘mentally ill’? What about those who enjoy skiing? Or skydiving? Or are people who never exercise, ‘mentally ill’ since a lack of physical activity would seem to be contrary to what a human body requires to function optimally?

At 28 March 2023 at 05:34 , Anonymous said...

Very quickly, we can diagnose everyone in the entire world as ‘mentally ill’. Certainly Jesus and the prophets, the saints and the spiritual.

What useful purpose does it accomplish to simply label & brand hundreds of millions, or billions, of global citizens in this way, even if, in a sense, true?

‘Mental wellness’/ ‘mental health’ / ‘mental balance’ — if the concept has any practical meaning at all — is surely a continuum that each and every one of us is on.

I’m not arguing that someone who identifies as a sex and/or gender other than their birth sex/gender is, or is not, ‘mentally ill’.

I have no idea.

I’m saying that ALL of us fall somewhere on a spectrum of mentally well—mentally unwell. And where we fall will change over the minutes, hours, days, months, and years.

And few if any of us are qualified to define precisely *which* opinions, attitudes, worldviews, self-identities, appearances, behaviors, and practices denote ‘mental wellness’, and which speak to ‘mental illness’.

Above all, how would a ‘normal’ person survive in this ‘abnormal’ crazy world, anyway, without getting — in the words of the singer Seal — “a little crazy”?

Surely even (especially) the most truly ‘normal’, or ‘mentally balanced’, among us could only dissent from the ‘madness’ we see everywhere by acting up and refusing to ‘play the part’ and pretend as if everything were perfectly okay, when it is not?

So, for example, the historical figure referred to as Jesus choosing to ‘take his own life’ as it were (through submitting to extreme torture and painful death which he might have avoided by playacting ‘normal’), might be a signifier of his mental insanity. Or, it might be signify the opposite.