.

What Dan got wrong is (A) his belief that transition unquestionably helps people with gender dysphoria and (B) that the analysis of gender proposed by the trans party line—which suggests that men can be or become women—hurts no one. That what trans people do has no effect on anyone but themselves. Well, it hurts women and girls. Read on if you dare...

Regarding (A):
according to Paul McHugh, a psychiatry professor who worked at the clinic at John's Hopkins that pioneered "sex-change" surgery: "The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people—extending over thirty years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—documents their lifelong mental unrest. Ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to twenty times that of comparable peers." Having a surgery that promises something it fundamentally can't deliver (a true sex change, which is impossible) and which destroys healthy body parts (in order, in the case of MtF, to create wounds that are purposefully kept from EVER healing) certainly would cause mental unrest and remorse in the long run, one would think.

There are many trans people speaking out about how harmed they were by SRS surgery and other current "givens" of transition. Their voices are not heard because they are inconvenient to the current trans narrative that we must furnish surgery and hormones or else (or else suicide, they claim, but surgery does not help with that)!

Regarding (B):
Dan can't see how trans people's decisions "impact [anyone else] in a real, immediate, and material way." What he fails to realize is that women and girls are put at risk by this. We live in a society that has allowed women and girls protection from men (segregated bathrooms, schools, rape crisis centers, homeless shelters, hospital beds, and other facilities) because of the high rates at which men victimize women, and men's historical systematic oppression of women. 90% of violent crime is committed by men, and men who want to become women and/or transition commit crimes at that same rate. Again: **With regard to violent crime, men who 'transition' are indistinguishable from all other men**, i.e. no safer for women and girls to be around in vulnerable spaces. But if we allow any man to just declare himself a "woman," there is no protection in those woman-only spaces anymore.

Women and girls HAVE ALREADY been attacked in public bathrooms by men dressed as women, and those men sometimes claimed to have a genuine belief that they are women:

http://www.sptimes.com/News/92599/Pasco/Cross_dressing_man_se.shtml

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Police-Man-in-bra-and-wig-found-in-women-s-3414089.php

http://www.cwarkansas.com/mostpopular/story/Update-Friends-of-man-arrested-for-sexual/ehozQqRzrEmKVIfjZgGHLQ.cspx

...But does it matter what their belief is, when the reality is that they molest, rape, and otherwise harm women and girls, and use a "trans" status to achieve access to those victims? Even though most trans people aren't registered sex offenders any more than most average people, why don't trans activists care that their demands for unfettered access to women and girls' spaces has the downstream effect of puting those women and girls at risk to sex offenders? Why are we not even allowed to question whether trans people's subjective feelings matter more than the very real violence perpetrated on women and girls? Why does no one bat an eye when women and girls are harmed, violently?

Similarly, it is harmful to women when men declare themselves to be women and then use that status to promote anti-feminist, anti-woman beliefs (like that womanhood is about nail polish, looking like a pinup, etc. (Bruce Jenner); that child prostitution can be empowering (Janet Mock); that trans women who dress up in a man's porn-inspired fantasy of what a woman is, is a "better woman" than natal women; that women have no right to say "no" to men who wish to penetrate their spaces (including rape crisis centers, homeless shelters, etc.)

See the recent article in The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/what-makes-a-woman.html

Anothershape sounds like a Duggar.

I admit, I've had the same questions re: transgender issues as NSFM does... if gender is a learned or socially constructed and inculcated thing, as I've head and believe it to be, how can a person's need to be a man or woman be "innate"?

If a person was raised in a different culture, would they automatically have been drawn to those gender norms? I understand the draw to a certain gender after societal norms are "ingested" for lack of a better term, but am having trouble parsing this dichotomy.

Obviously, a person has a right to self-determination regardless of the answer, but it doesn't seem to gel with the other stuff I've learned on gender.

From what I've read, getting ones' sex changed is nowhere near the claim Dan makes here: "almost always happier and healthier".
Maybe the stats have changed since I read up on them a couple years ago, but then it was certainly no panacea, by any stretch of the imagination.
And the post-surgery suicide rates were horrendous.
Maybe the stats have changed though.

I would suggest on a subject so critical that Dan back up his assertions. If nothing else, for the relief of anyone considering this surgery.

I am in agreement here. Cutting off body parts or constructing new ones cannot possibly make a person happier (not unequivocally anyway) than a truly supportive social health program. So there are doctors who will cut off your arm just so you don't do it yourself? To me this represents a huge failure on the part of the medical establishment including self-proclaimed sex experts. Doctors take an oath that starts with "do no harm". I think its s big stretch from accepting what you were born with to advocating life altering surgery in lieu of effective counseling. Why can't a woman in a man's body just be a woman with a penis? Or vice versa? Castration to a male or female is sexual violence. Self acceptance is much healthier. I know plenty of cross gender people who are perfectly happy with what is going on downstairs. Advising them to undergo surgery rather than encouraging them to be who they are is plain irresponsible.