Dysphoria by Any Other Name

My wife and I were watching the ITV Wales News last evening and two items covering very similar stories followed each other in quick succession. The first put a positive spin on plans to open Wales’ very own gender identity clinic, which will be the first in the country. The report, which you can read here. said:

'It’s a step forward which many in Wales’ trans community have welcomed, including one 20-year-old [transgender person]. He transitioned from female to male at the age of 14, but waited five years to see a gender specialist on the NHS. He eventually opted for private treatment, costing him £7000.

“Knowing that you should look different to how you look, it’s so traumatising”, he said. “At the end of Year 11 I just thought I need to start hormones. I can’t go to college not starting hormones. I knew I wasn’t going to start taking them until I was 19 on the NHS”.'

There followed a report about a model and TV presenter from Aberystwyth, who has spoken out for the first time about the pressures she experienced whilst working in the fashion industry and how she subjected herself to laxative abuse in order to try and lose weight.

You can read the report here, which goes on:

'Shortly after [one particular] experience, [the model] received a message from a modelling agency which expressed an interest in representing her. After sending her measurements to the agency, she was told that they would only be willing to represent her if she lost weight and slimmed down to a “genuine size 8”. This particular experience made [her] turn to extreme lengths to try and get the “perfect figure” by taking laxatives.'

Having learned her lesson the hard way the model reports:

“If I’d have realised before that I could do all this as me and embrace who I am, rather than trying to change to suit the industry, I would never, ever have done it and my body would still be working as it should be.”

The first story concerned plans, at great expense to the NHS, open a clinic to treat self-identified gender dysphoria with extreme surgical procedures, an acceptance, even a celebration of dysphoria, the second concerned efforts to persuade young models to avoid taking extreme measures, such as laxative abuse, and learn to be happy with the body in which they were born, an attack on a dysphoria.

Both reported on the trauma of thinking they don't look the way they should look. Both took extreme measures to 'fix' what they imagined was wrong. One is in the vanguard of making their extreme measures more readily available to others, at great expense to the taxpayer, while the other issues a stark warning of what can happen if you take extreme measures to change how you look, and urges young people to accept their bodies.

Both 'suffer' from a dysphoria, but the approach to each is very different. One is accepted, the other rejected. The extreme measures to treat the one are embraced, those to treat the other met with dire warnings.

Dysphoria is defined as 'a state of feeling very unhappy, uneasy, or dissatisfied.' (Merriam Webster Dictionary. The Concise Oxford gives the same definition) There seems to be a cognitive dissonance between how we regard gender-based dysphoria, and how we regard other forms of dysphoria. Both stem from the same place, a feeling of dissatisfaction that can so trouble someone that they are driven to extreme measures, but one is treated as a physical problem, while the other is regarded as a psychological problem. One declares, 'your body shape is wrong, nature has made a mistake,' the other declares, 'your body is naturally what it is intended to be, you have made a mistake.'

The prefix dys means abnormal, impaired. It is used to describe something that has gone wrong with body (dystrophy, dyspepsia), mind (dysthymia, dysphasia) even society (dystopia), it is a dysfunction. In the case of the model the dysfunction is mental/emotional, is 'it's all in your head,' while for the transgender person the dysfunction is physical, 'your whole body is wrong.' Both are dysphoric, but one regards radical surgery a reasonable solution, the other considers a change of mind a better solution. If you were to advise the model that she is making unhealthy choices you might be regarded a caring friend. If you were to offer the same advice to the transgender person, you might be accused of hate speech and prosecuted.

To my mind this demonstrates we are an increasingly dystopian society as we cherry pick which problems we identify, how we describe and diagnose them, and what treatments we prescribe, not according to sound medical and psychological knowledge, but according to a frighteningly overbearing ideology of the left that thinks it can reshape the whole world in its own bizarre and dysfunctional image.

Society has to pick up the bill for the proposed clinic, but that same society will have to pay again, it seems to me, to undo the terrible wrong being done to vulnerable people whose issues are being identified and resolved according to an ideology. Perhaps it will take a lifetime's therapy and support to deal with the outcome of a momentary ideological fallacy.