Tuesday, January 05, 2016

God's mistake?

The transsexual issue is big at the moment. My main concern is that the issue is being used by liberals to further attack the significance of our biological sex - the fact of being born a man or a woman and what this means for our identity and our way of being.

However, another concern is that children are being encouraged to change sexes. I've been reading the life story of an American woman called Rachel Reiland and it illustrates the dangers involved here. Rachel Reiland tells early on in her book that she believed she had been born in the wrong body:
I wasn't like the other little girls. I hated dolls and other “girly,” pink toys. I hated being a girl more than anything. I wasn't any good at it. If I had been a boy, things would have been different. But somehow God put me into a girl's body by mistake. I wondered if I would go to hell for daring to think God made a mistake.

You might think from reading this that Rachel Reiland might be a candidate for the sex change procedures that are currently being encouraged and that this would then solve "God's mistake".

Rachel Reiland grew up, married, had children and then had a mental health collapse. She went to see a psychiatrist who was clever enough to recognise what the real, underlying problem was. The "gender dysphoria" was a symptom of something else, namely a condition called borderline personality disorder, which is thought to affect about 5% of the population.

With the help of her capable psychiatrist, and intensive therapy, she eventually recovered. The point to be made is that if she had undergone a sex reassignment it would not have cured what was really ailing her. She would still have suffered from a confusion in her identity; from periods of dissociation; from a sense of not fitting in; from periods of depression; and from a sense of failure in life - as these stem from the borderline disorder and not from chromosomal issues.

9 comments:

  1. This is exactly the problem. The incidence of personality disorder is approximately 10% in the general population and in most cases the prime aetiological factor is not genetic but developmental ie. it is caused by dysfunctional family life and impaired psychological development where the normal psychological development of the child is stunted.

    Transgenderism and homosexuality are psychological disorders which are exacerbated by societal acceptance, normalisation and surgical and pharmaceutical manipulation. The best treatment is accurate diagnosis, psychological treatment and firm boundaries. A man or woman forced to accept that their genes, and not their emotions determine their sex, will over time, accept that biological fact and adjust to it.

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    1. You are correct - personality disorder is estimated to be around 10% of the population and though there may be some genetic predisposition, the decisive factor seems to usually be a disruption to early childhood development.

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  2. And yet you get the likes of Bernard Gaynor (a devout Catholic) who are being vilified for refusing to adhere to the correct narrative here: he was dismissed from the Defence Forces (among other stances) for refusing to use the new and amended pronouns to a superior transgender person.

    I think a lot to do with borderline personality disorder Is in regard to personal gender-role expectations and presumptions. Look closely at Rachel's quote, and there's a lot of gender-based presumption there. For example, she presumes she would be better off being male. She presumes that because she's not typical in her female behaviour, she must not really be a girl. Can you be certain of that? Just because you don't quite feel like a typical girl?

    We are all a blend of gender, personality and experience (and undeniably other attributes, but those mentioned are for ease of comment). Therefore, if we presume there is any one emphatic definition of maleness or femaleness, we set ourselves up for failure. For example, not every man will be the highly confident, extroverted, alpha male. Is he the epitome of masculinity? If I am an introverted, reserved, beta male, am I any less a man? Is that wherein our definition of masculinity may lie? Some may say yes; the pop culture around us may say yes. The leftist progressives definitely say yes.

    For this reason, if such attributes provide a spectrum for our masculinity and femininity, they run the risk of being inconsistent and variable, and therefore unreliable. This is where biology should ground us. Maybe there are genuine cases of transgenderism (I'm no expert) but when sex-change surgery seems to be on the rise, this seems to speak moreso of psycho-social problems, rather than physiological "mistakes", or heaven forbid, God's mistake. Being told by progressivism that our hard-wired sex is merely a blank slate, is fraught with dire psycho-social problems.

    No, I am a man because of the bits I own based on my genomes. Even though, if I lost my bits in an accident, I would still be a man, because I am more than my sex organs. My masculinity is still in my genes.

    Sexual confusion is not something that should be celebrated; it is something for which an underlying ailment ought be identified. I think too often we delude ourselves, or let ourselves be deluded. As an aside, I have read news articles about regressive hypnosis as a means to identify childhood trauma, of which I am sceptical. If a father bathed his daughter as a child, with the right amount of suggestion to the girl, it could be turned into a story of sexual exploitation, I suspect. The brain is a powerful and (at times) quirky machine.

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    1. "She presumes that because she's not typical in her female behaviour, she must not really be a girl."

      Yep. There's a lot of silliness around on this subject. I have a female friend who claims to have a "male brain" because she likes fixing cars. I tried to explain to her that she just happens to be interested in cars. That doesn't make her male.

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  3. "She went to see a psychiatrist who was clever enough to recognise what the real, underlying problem was. The "gender dysphoria" was a symptom of something else, namely a condition called borderline personality disorder"

    The problem with people with borderline personality disorder (who are overwhelming female) is that they tend to be very hard to reason with. If they get a foolish idea into their heads, such as thinking they're the wrong sex, they cling to it very tenaciously. They are very stubborn.

    They are therefore very vulnerable to these foolish ideas, and they latch onto such ideas as a way of explaining why they're unhappy. They want to believe there's a simple solution - "I'll just have a sex change and then everything will be fine."

    Most "lesbians" (possibly all) are also merely women with borderline personality disorder. They become lesbians because they see it as a magical solution to their unhappiness. Women with borderline personality disorder are incredibly attached to magical thinking.

    The whole LGBTQWERTY thing simply exploits unhappy people with psychological problems. It lures them into an unhealthy self-destructive lifestyle that ends up making their psychological problems much worse. Encouraging people into living out their delusions is incredibly evil.

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    1. In my experience it's not the case that all lesbian women have BPD. I know some lesbian women who are, at least, on the same plane of reality as me and who have stable family, work and personal relationships, whereas BPD women inhabit a different kind of subjective reality and find it difficult to maintain relationships at all.

      I agree, though, that BPD people are difficult to reason with. In part, this is because they run on the principle that "this is how I feel, this is my reality" and so are impervious to normal tests of logical consistency in their thought; they also tend to be black and white in their way of thinking. A normal person trying to argue with a BPD person is likely to end up feeling puzzled.

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    2. Women with borderline personality disorder are incredibly attached to magical thinking.
      True in my experience.

      I looked up the stats in regard to bpd and homosexuality. In one survey 10 of 19 men and 7 of 61 women. In another larger and longer survey, one third of both sexes.

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  4. Most men with personality disorders who meet the criteria for BPD also meet the criteria for Anti Social Personality Disorder and the latter diagnosis is the one which is formally applied in the majority of cases. Hence statistical comparisons for BPD and other sexual disorders between the sexes are not reliable. Overall the incidence of sexual and identity disorders is much higher in males with Personality disorders than females and personality disorders in males are more severe with higher rates of co-morbidity and suicide.

    BPD individuals tend to show intermittent psychotic symptoms with delusions and overvalued ideas compounded with profound identity disorders. They are also more common in mixed race people. Overvalued ideas are more prevalent than magical thinking which is a more benign abnormality of thought.

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  5. Anglican Pentecostal wrote a post on "The Demonic Origins and Confusion of the Transgender issue." that you might find interesting at http://anglicalpentecostal.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/the-demonic-origins-and-confusion-of.html

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