What is with this website sometimes?

Not seeing much hate in there aside from the OP who's clearly just a random jackass if you look at his post history of nothing but politics. Did you even read the comments? The two most awarded ones are from right-wingers talking about having compassion for trans people and their struggles or sharing a story about their best friend who is trans. It's an open and largely supportive discussion. Is it not the point of forums like these to have people counter hateful speech with empathetic speech?

PrivateTechquity 🚀GME🚀

OP I disagree with calling them weirdos in your title, it's uncalled for. It is literally a mentally illness (gender dysphoria) that negatively impacts these people's daily lives. Think of it as akin to an extreme case of body dysphoria not unlike what people with bulimia or anorexia experience. People who actually have this condition deserve compassion (not the 50+ non-binary genders/anything-but-straight/cis people, those are attention whores). They will struggle deeply with their identity for their entire lives by no fault of their own. They need to have access to mental health counseling, something that I think needs to be more widely available in general. But instead they're being used as a political cudgel as though they're the second coming of the gay rights movement when gender/self-identification has has nothing to do with sexuality. They are being taken advantage of by people and businesses that directly benefit from supporting their delusion, encouraging them to sterilize and mutilate themselves in ways that they will never recover from, and often abandoning them in a vastly worse-off mental state than they were pre-operation (as shown by negligible differences in self-harm rates pre and post-op - clearly it's not as simple as a surgery or some pills). I guarantee in 20-30 years we will look back at these artificial hormones and barbaric surgeries the same way we look at lobotomies now. 

Think of it this way - body integrity dysphoria is something readily recognized that we try to treat people for. It's characterized by a desire to have a sensory or physical disability or having discomfort with being able-bodied, resulting in patients wanting to cripple themselves in some fashion such as by cutting off perfectly healthy limbs in order to achieve what they deem their "correct" body. It doesn't sound too dissimilar from a less popular but still emerging social phenomena called transableism. It is unbelievably unethical to take a person with a mental illness that has them convinced they need to cut off their arm or leg and actually go through with the procedure.

Explain to me then how it makes sense to take anyone, let alone a child and cut off their penis or breasts because they are confused about their own bodies. It's insane. My heart goes out to the thousands of kids who have been sucked into this madness and gone the surgical route or started taking hormones like leuprorelin and chemically castrated themselves. It will add a whole host of additional medical problems that they will have to treat for the rest of their lives and they were too young to actually consent to any of it in the first place. Parents who do this, in my opinion, should have their children taken by CPS for child endangerment and abuse. Doctors who recommend or encourage minors or their parents to do this, in my opinion, should have their licenses revoked and be sued into oblivion by every patient who decides they were not properly informed and evaluated before being told to have these procedures/take these drugs.

Edit:

A few resources I felt are worth including because of my last points:

• Detransitioners: 55% say clinicians didn’t give adequate evaluation before gender transition
• List of Detransition studies & articles

And to reemphasize since some people seem to think I am attacking transgender people - I'm not. If an adult wants to do something with their own body I do not care - I may not agree with it, but it's a free country. But as someone with younger cousins growing up through this wild time of social media and general heightened youth mental illness + having previously been interested in being a doctor, informed consent is extremely important to me when discussing any sort of medical procedures. Especially ones that involve children, are permanent, and carry a host of long-term health risks that have not been fully studied or discussed in open forum within the medical community due to the political controversy surrounding the topic. 

GoingToBeAnMD

Oh, it's going to be one of those weekends on WSO . . . 

I'm sure that this conversation is headed in the direction that I think it's headed so I'll keep my comments limited. Bottom line: I would like all of you to consider the opening lines to "The Big Short" - "Its not what you don't know that kills you, its the stuff you think you know that just ain't so". It would benefit all of you to evaluate your first-hand experience with the trans community. If you don't have any then maybe you should limit your comments too. 

I consider myself to be a pretty conservative guy. I'll even admit to voting against gay marriage (at least twice, or however many times CA voted on it). But I'm also in a position where my best friend is transgender. We've known each other longer than some of you on WSO have been alive and he came out to me as transgender in the last 3 years. I can absolutely assure you that it is not a mental illness and not something that is just body dysmorphia or whatever other nonsense you guys are going to spout off. The guy has more academic degrees than you can imagine and a resume that all of YOU would cut your dick off to have. He's literally one of the smartest people I know - he also just happens to be transgender.

The same stereotypes that you are expressing here are what make life difficult for my friend. His kids won't talk to him, his church kicked him out and expelled him, I see the stupid looks people give him when we're out in public. Contrary to popular belief, he's not flooded with job offers just because he's transgender. But if he's happy with it and he feels better with his choices, then why should anything between the two of us change? It makes me more educated about the community and he'll always be my friend. I still make pronoun mistakes and I recently had to look up what "deadname" means, but hey, you don't abandon a friend, ever. Some of you little fuckers would run for the hills, but that speaks to your weak character.

That's all I'm going to say about that. Just make sure you are sharing first-hand experience before you start spouting off.