Just imagine being you but everyone treats you as a woman. Refers to you using female pronouns. Assigns traditionally female traits to you. You were brought up wearing skirts, dresses and makeup etcโฆ
Wouldnโt you tell everyone to get tae fuck and treat you the way you perceive yourself?
indeed.
Being pro-trans is simply being pro-human, pro-freedom and pro-individuality.
indeed.
the dolphin comparison is a classic
reductio ad absurdum and it fails because it doesn't actually engage with the argument it's trying to mock.
gender dysphoria is a clinically recognised condition, documented across cultures and throughout recorded history, characterised by a persistent and profound disconnect between a person's psychological sense of self and their biological sex.
it causes measurable suffering.
it is recognised by every major medical and psychiatric body in the world, including the american medical association, the american psychological association, and the world health organisation. the treatment approach (transition)is supported by decades of research and has the strongest evidence base of any intervention for the condition.
nobody experiences species dysphoria. there is no documented clinical condition characterised by a persistent, distressing belief that one is a dolphin. there is no body of peer-reviewed research into dolphin transition and outcomes. the comparison isn't clever. it's just a
category error dressed up as wit. you're equating a well-evidenced medical phenomenon with something that has never been observed to exist outside of a bad-faith thought experiment.
the people being mocked with that comparison are real human beings dealing with something genuinely difficult, in a society that makes it considerably harder than it needs to be. using their experience as material for a gotcha says a great deal more about the person making the comparison than it does about the validity of trans identities.
there are substantive arguments to make about trans rights. the dolphin thing isn't one.
regarding "
imho a mental sickness"
gender identity disorder was classified as a mental disorder in the dsm (the american psychiatric diagnostic manual) for many years. so the idea that it's "mental illness" has an actual historical basis. but it's worth understanding why that classification existed and why it changed.
the key shift in psychiatric thinking was the recognition that the distress trans people experience comes primarily not from their gender identity itself, but from the mismatch between their identity and their body, and from social rejection, discrimination, and stigma. that's a meaningful distinction. the condition causing the suffering isn't the identity - it's the incongruence and the social context surrounding it.
as a result the dsm-5 replaced "gender identity disorder" with "gender dysphoria", deliberately shifting focus to the distress rather than the identity itself. the
w.h.o. icd-11 went further and moved gender incongruence entirely out of the mental disorders chapter and into a sexual health chapter.
the current medical consensus is that being trans is not a mental illness. gender dysphoria (the distress arising from incongruence) is a recognised condition that warrants treatment, but the treatment is transition, not attempts to change the person's gender identity, which have been shown to be both ineffective and harmful.
"
mental sickness" is not an accurate characterisation by current medical standards, and hasn't been for some time. it's a framing that selectively (and maybe deliberately) uses outdated classification to pathologise an identity rather than engage with what the clinical evidence actually shows. someone genuinely interested in the medical picture rather than a rhetorical point would acknowledge that the science has moved on.
alasdair