GC: Are there specific alternative treatments to SRS and HRT that have proven effective for successfully treating the most severe forms of gender dysphoria or transsexualism?

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[–]MarkTwainiac 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Sorry, but your questions are impossible to intelligently answer coz "gender dysphoria" is not one thing. "Gender dysphoria" which really just means "distress/discomfort about your sex" (aka DAYS) varies considerably depending on a person's sex; the age at which it started; whether you are same-sex attracted, heterosexual or bi; and - especially in males - how bound up it is, or has become, in your sexual fantasies, solo masturbation habits and sexual behaviors with others.

I tried lots of forms of therapy and medication, abused drugs and sought solace in clean, healthy living to try to cure myself. None of it touched my conviction and self perception.

From what you said in other posts, it sounds like you haven't stuck with any therapy for very long - and medical providers have unfortunately put you on a whole lot of psychiatric drugs. Sorry to say, it also sounds like you are looking for quick fixes. Therapy that, in my opinion, could be of help to you is a long-term process, one that doesn't provide or involve an immediate or even short-term cessation of pain.

There's an old saying about therapy, first you feel more, including more pain, and only after that do you begin to feel better.

A request: please don't call cross-sex hormones and hormone suppressants such as puberty blockers or anti-androgens that people take for trans-related reasons "HRT." I think trans people would find it offensive, and understandably so, if women started calling the double mastectomies, oophorectomies and hysterectomies that some of us have for reasons having nothing at all to do with "trans" as "SRS." I wish people who take exogenous cross-sex hormones and blockers would show women, particularly older women, respect by coming up with your own term for what you are doing rather than appropriating HRT from women.

I suggest reading some Carl Jung and Karen Horney. Good luck.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Yes! Transsexualism, expanding into Gender Identity Disorder, expanding into Gender Dysphoria was specifically meant to accommodate people who weren't classically transsexual, but so that they could access and receive treatment reserved for transsexualism, or as you say, "distress/discomfort about your sex". I will admit, this condition is so awful I did indeed do anything I could to get rid of it, or quick fixes. It seems as if you believe that had I taken less medication and more therapy that my condition could have been improved or cured, which is a possibility--but without research, who knows? Do you have a specific form of therapy in mind that may be of help to me? I should actually disclose that I have been consistenly in therapy still yet for the past six years to address various problems and symptoms of trauma, much of which has been attributed to growing up with untreated transsexualism. And I agree that indeed therapy is most effective and beneficial when followed through in this manner. I personally don't find it offensive if you call any procedure anything, I don't have attachment to the names. HRT is what all medical professionals and researchers named it and call it, and I understand that it upsets you. I'm not sure what you would like me to call it, but I would like to ask if you could elaborate on how and why you find it disrespectful. I'm sorry if what I said offended you, I was just referring to the treatment the way that medical professionals named it and call it.

[–]MarkTwainiac 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It seems as if you believe that had I taken less medication and more therapy that my condition could have been improved or cured

Please don't think I am faulting you for taking medication. I'm not, at all. You only did as medical professionals told or advised you to do. As most of us would do, and most of us have done.

I just think that since the 1980s, mental health professionals have relied way too much on medications - and that many of the psych meds on the market have done more harm than good for a large number of people who've been on them. This is especially the case for people put on psych meds in childhood or the teen years, before the brain has had a chance to fully develop.

I dunno if any one of us is ever fully cured of the psychological conditions that trouble us, particularly if we had troubled or traumatic childhoods. Sometimes our conditions go into remission, only to rear their heads again. But I do think perhaps you - and many other people - might have been helped to better manage your distress, and to lessen it and learn to deal with it in healthier ways, if mental health professionals offered better forms of therapy and emotional support instead of just meds and gender ideology.

Also, age seems to be a cure for a lot of "gender issues" that plagued people when young. By age here, I don't just mean adolescence and early adulthood. I mean middle and old age. AGPs seem to get worse with age, coz they're dealing with what seems to be an ever-worsening form of addiction. But a lot of same-sex attracted persons who developed distress over their sex in childhood seem to come to terms with it later in life as middle age sets in, sometimes sooner. Like that famous actor who in Sweden was the "poster child" for male-to-female transsexualism for years, and now after adamantly insisting he was a woman for ages, he says he realizes he's a gay man who was never masculine and if he had to do his life over again, he'd just live as a gay man without the surgeries and cross-sex hormones. Now he "identifies as" a gay man whose body has been feminized by cross-sex hormones and surgeries.

As to my kvetching about HRT: I'm really not "upset" or "offended" by your/the trans community's use of the term, so no need to apologize. I've dealt with much worse things and experienced all sorts of disrespect in my life. I'm more annoyed by what I see as the hypocrisy when it comes to "HRT" than personally upset and offended.

I just think it's only fair to ask that trans people and gender ideologues - who are so quick to insist that others bend over backwards not to hurt their feelings - come up with new terms of your own for that suit your situation. Instead of stealing terms created by/for specific groups and certain situations, then changing the meaning of the terms entirely as has been done not only with HRT, but with AFAB/AMAB. To me, this is adding insult to injury - or rather, adding obfuscation to appropriation.

HRT is short for "hormone replacement therapy." It's usually used to refer to exogenous estrogen (or combo meds like Estratest of yore) prescribed to women during/after menopause, oophorectomy or ovarian failure caused by disease to replace the estrogen levels our ovaries previously made. By the strict definition, people who take insulin for diabetes, synthetic thyroid hormone for Hashimoto's, and exogenous T for testicular disease, after orchiectomy, or for the bogus diagnosis "low T" could be said to be on HRT as well. Coz in each case, they are replacing hormones their bodies are supposed to make under conditions of normal health.

But people who take sex hormones, and/or hormone-blocking meds, for "gender identity" issues are not on HRT. Such people are not replacing sex hormones in the concentrations that their bodies naturally make, are supposed to make, or once made. Trans people are taking sex hormones in the quantities that only persons of the opposite sex would naturally make. What's more, male trans people often take androgen blockers for the purpose of suppressing the hormones naturally made by their male gonads, the testes. This is the exact opposite of HRT!

Is it really so hard to understand why many women would find it offensive for physically healthy adults, particularly males but females as well, who choose to take medically unnecessary sex hormones in concentrations meant to mimic the hormone profiles of opposite sex, and hormone suppressants as well, in order to achieve cosmetic changes coz of "gender issues" to appropriate from women the name devised for a female-only medical treatment meant for women in/after menopause or following surgeries or disease that caused us to lose our ovaries or our ovaries to fail? To me, trans people calling their use of hormonal intervention HRT is akin to someone who loves riding around on an ATV sports vehicle for fun calling their ATV a "mobility scooter." It's appropriation and punching down that shows total lack of awareness of other people with real medical issues and and lack of empathy for them. Sorta like the way in many public places, ramps meant for wheelchair users and handrails meant for people with balance problems have all been taken over by kids on skateboards.

Back to the topic of therapy: I think the most effective for everyone is long-term psychoanalytically oriented "talk therapy" with a therapist well versed in a wide variety of schools of thought and therapeutic approaches but who isn't wedded to any one way. And who doesn't buy into gender ideology, or advocate sexism, sex stereotypes, wrecking your endocrine system and radically changing your body the way today's "gender therapists" do. As practiced by thoughtful therapists such as Sasha Ayad and Lisa Marchiano. But of course, that kind of therapy is not available everywhere, nor is it affordable for a lot of people.

The fact that you say you have been therapy for six years

to address various problems and symptoms of trauma, much of which has been attributed to growing up with untreated transsexualism

Suggests to me that you need better therapists. Coz I don't think any is born with, or naturally develops, "transsexualism," and therefore I don't think it's possible for a child to "grow up with untreated transsexualism." Going trans is a decision people make to deal with the condition some call "gender dysphoria" and I call DAYS, meaning "distress about your sex." Transition is a treatment, or an attempt at a treatment, not the condition. Just like chemotherapy, surgery, radiation and bone marrow transplants are treatments for and responses to cancer; they are not diseases themselves.

There are all sorts of reasons a person might feel distress about their sex - including trauma - just as there are all sorts of reasons someone might develop clinical depression, paralyzing anxieties, OCD, BDD and so on. But to have the hope of lessening whatever kind of distress we as individuals suffer from, we have to understand what the causes and contributing factors of our distress are. (I say "causes" plural coz IMO, most human unhappiness and mental illnesses have multiple causes operating in concert.)

There are many books out there that show the failings - and sometimes looniness - of the psychiatry and the helping professions. I recommend the memoirs I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can; Girl Interrupted and Running With Scissors (which is hilarious).

I also recommend Anatomy of An Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America," Crazy Like Us and the works of such iconoclasts in the field of psychiatry as Thomas Szasz. And one of the great books about human psychology - and suffering and survival - of all time, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. (Excuse the sexist title; it's reflective of the fact that it was first published in the 1950s, and the author was born in 1905).

Again, good luck! And best wishes.