At the risk of derailing this conversation, do you have resources to show that transitioning works? The debate on both sides has muddied the water for me and I'd love to see evidence for this. Thanks in advance.

I know this is largely anecdotal and not very scientific, but just listen to [what trans people have to say about it][]. There are some people who do regret transitioning, but usually the reason they give is the discrimination they experience because of transitioning, not any genuine dissatisfaction with themselves.

There is [a small propaganda war being waged by transphobic conservatives][] to create the illusion of a large percentage of trans people that regret their transition, but just look at their references. You'll find every link is either to the Daily Mail or some other hate group referencing even more hate groups in a big web of circular reasoning.

Generally, there's not a lot of hard data to work with on issues relating to the trans community right now, which is a little frustrating, but hopefully there will be more soon as the scientific community is finally starting to recognize the LGBT community and conduct real science on this stuff.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/search?q=regret&rest... [2]: http://www.sexchangeregret.com/

Thanks for posting. It would be more interesting to see better studies without sampling bias, but it was still interesting to see otherwise.

I like to think of this as the opposite way.

The identify of the person is the mind; the being that thinks.

If the body is not a match for the mind, then the correct solution is to repair the body.

I think that approach is a little too simplistic. A lot of people have aspects to their minds that they would change in a heart beat if there was some way to do so. I say we let the person decide which way they want to go.

> Sure, in an ideal world where we had full knowledge of human biology and an ability to edit the brain, we'd treat gender dysphoria simply by making people believe they were the "correct" gender. But lacking that ability, we do the next best thing possible that we can do.

Why are you more keen to edit the brain than the body? If I can switch around your body parts to make you feel more comfortable, that seems less invasive than surgery or drugs which make you think different thoughts - especially when those thoughts are a core part of your personality (your sexual identity) and are only pathological within the context of the body you were born with.

Both should be options. It's hard for me to say a priori which one I would choose given that I don't actually know what gender dysphoria feels like, and it definitely seems like something you'd have to experience to truly understand. One major advantage of changing the mind over the body is that a lot of people want their own children (independent of gender), and transitioning removes that possibility modulo some work-arounds.

But just because someone has a specific mind now doesn't mean that they'd want to change it. There are lots of people who want to change their minds. I suspect that most people with depression and other mental disorders would love to have the option to get a treatment that changed their mind to remove that condition. I bet most of us here would change our minds in order to be smarter, and indeed some people are already taking drugs that claim to be able to do so (though the entire field is in its infancy). More to the point, at least one transgender person I know says she wishes she could've simply changed her mind to agree with her body rather than go through the entire process of changing her body. Our minds are maybe more malleable than you think.