Socialization could have a lot to do with gender roles and sexual orientation as well. I mean, society is a by-product of biology... But, for direct cause there's a whole nuture vs nature aspect to this as well.

I think someone posted a source citing a brain center somewhere.

Simply put, these people feel from an early age that they were born into the wrong body. I was watching a program on it a while back and standard procedure in America is like five years of counseling before they're allowed to have the operations. An alarming number of them hop on a plane and go to Thailand to get it done before that because they just can't take it anymore.

Also of interest are boys who end up raised as girls due to botched circumcisions. They still show all the same interests as boys do, much like transgender girls.

Gender identity is simply the way people are born. What makes this boy a girl? What makes you a boy? It's how you identify yourself. It's a core part of your being. Going and telling this kid he has to be a boy instead of a girl would be like telling you your eyes had to be blue instead of brown. Sure, you can cover them up with contacts. This kid can cover it up with clothes. But it doesn't change what's underneath the mask.

but that doesn't explain why they think they are born into the wrong body. Besides for horomone levels and sex organs there is no real differance between men and women.

If its purely something wrong with the brain that somehow forces them to deny the facts of their biology then psychotheropy and medications sounds like a better fix. What you describe sounds more like intense dilusion, inwhich case plastic surgery would be counter productive as it reinforces their dilusion.

For the record this is not simply apply to sexchanges. I find just about any type of plastic surgery as an easy and shallow solution to what is in fact a psychological issue.

see now I get why your posts in this thread are grating on me, this is basically about the exact argument to used to declare that homosexuals are a bunch of delusional nutjobs, which was so endemic a few decades ago.

Well, therapy and pills sound fine until you factor in that no amount of therapy is going to help if a shrink can't convince them in five years. Really, with pretty much any therapy, after one year, what you see is pretty much what you get.

Pills are an even scarier idea. If you can just give a person a "boy pill," what's to stop from giving someone a "straight pill?" Homosexuality pervades the entirety of recorded history, and I find it hard to believe that that indicates it's a choice, given that many societies punished it with death, including, to an extent, recent America. Put simply, I can find no reason to believe homosexuality is a choice. Giving a pill to "fix" it is treating it like a disease. Worse yet, it could be considered brainwashing. You are actively putting chemicals into another person's body to alter the way their mind works when they aren't even harming anyone. Not only that, but any chemical you put in your body causes a degree of damage. Some medications are downright toxic. The idea that one would suggest that a person take pills that could make them sick or shorten their lifespan to make them think a certain way is absolutely abhorrent to me.

Frankly, if a person's brain is structured female, I see it as far less damaging overall to change their body, since our understanding of the mind is still piss-poor. The person gets to feel good about who they are, they don't have to live a lie, and they don't have to have pills shoved down their throat just to force them to conform to society's expectations based on whether or not they were born with a penis.

Edit: A final concern about pills, coming out with "cures" for benign issues only results in those issues not being seen as benign. It reinforces the idea that there is something wrong with those people, and especially the ones who choose not to take the pills. If a pill to turn gay people straight came out, it would set all the gay community's efforts back to the stone age, with religious nuts likely seizing control of the air waves to condemn them. Treating people who are simply different as freaks breeds intolerance and hatred, which lead to violence and an overall shittier world.

Blue thats slippery slope, a logical falacy, this isn't homosexuality. The nature of homosexuality is still debatable. This is definative, he is a boy, this is unalterable medical fact, he thinks he is a girl, this is a psychological dilusion. You yourself said it was a problem with the brain that causes them to think this. I do not think mutilating his body to fit his mistaken view of reality is the healthiest solution. All you are doing is reinforcing it.

Your missing the point entirely. Yes there are overt structural indicators of your gender. However, the absolute core of your personality is set from birth by brain structures. You can fiddle around a bit on top of that but such basic things as preferring a more feminine nature are pretty well hard coded into the physical structure of your brain. There is variability in how each person builds and expands on top of this structured mental gender and rarely do you get people with absolute masculine or absolute feminine mental gender. Transgender in the serious "not going away been that way since 5 years old sense" is no more a delusion than being homosexual or not liking chocolate. While your overt structural indicators and your internal mental gender are usually highly coordinated that is not always true. Those areas are controlled with different genes and different hormones and if everything isn't prefect you get mostly male brains in female bodies or mostly female brains in male bodies. This wouldn't be that huge of a problem if as a society we didn't build on top of basic gender identity with expected gender roles.

but there is no such thing as a "girl brain". Personality quirks, preferances, thats stuff our society has determined belong to a gender arbitrarily. If thats it, then they should realize that relating to the other sex doesn't mean you are. Can you give even one example of something that is definitively 100% a male or female trait? Because excluding obvious biology I cant think of any

If my logic is false, then please explain to me how homosexuality has nothing to do with the brain. Homosexual males think they are sexually attracted to other males, and the same for females and other females. What we know about the chemistry of attraction is pretty definitive at this point. Simply put, it all boils down to chemicals in the brain.

So unless you can find a way that chemicals in the brain does not equate to chemicals in the brain, I think my point stands. By all means, people have made the same arguments about homosexuality being a delusion that you're making in this case, based on the same logic concerning outward physiology.

The fact of the matter is having a body is fine, but who we really are is determined entirely by our brains. These people were born with brains featuring characteristics of the opposite sex. It is who they are. If the body doesn't match the brain, it's ultimately the body that's wrong, because physiologically speaking, the only parts of the body not there to benefit the brain are the sex organs, which are there to benefit the continuation of the species. Everything else is there to allow the brain to travel in, sense, and interact with the world, or protect it while doing so.

I am not who I am because I have a penis. I am who I am and the penis just happens to match up. Most people have the benefit of a body matching the mind. Those who don't feel understandably trapped. However, making the mind match the body is ultimately backwards logic. The mind is the most important part of a person, and if they don't want their mind "fixed," which means that the world is judging them entirely on appearance, I think they're within their rights to fix their body. It's the most direct route to them being appreciated for who they are rather than what they are.



Edit: I'll give you a trait: identity. That's about as basic as you can get, and it just so happens to be the one in question. Trying to boil down an entire gender to one idea is like trying to boil down physics to one number. Nobody is exactly the same. However, a combination of traits can lead to the formation of an identity. For instance, I happen to like gemstones, but that doesn't instantly make me a girl. It just makes me take a passing interest in geology. I also have other traits, like liking girls, liking martial arts, liking cars, liking to pose in front of a mirror (yes, I totally admit it), and various other traits that define me as an individual. None of them have any solid bearing on my gender identity, but as a sum total, the better portion of them would lead to others defining me as a male. I couldn't care less what other people think, but I happen to identify as male, so it really doesn't matter. Trying to boil down WHY I define myself as a male leads back to a simple "because I do." It's just a part of who I am. I'm comfortable being male. Other people aren't. Maybe they like all the exact same stuff I do and simply identify as female. Maybe they have a vagina to go with it, maybe they don't.

To turn this question around, why do YOU identify as male or female? I think you'll find it's a bit harder to pin down than words indicate.

its a logical falacy because homosexuality is not the topic, doing something about this does not automatically mean the same approach will be taken with homosexuality because it is not the same thing.