I have seen a number of these transsexuals and cross dressers on the internet and these people are always flaunting their freakiness in public. This is not the way people with serious afflictions act. They are not going about their new lives in a quiet manner. Instead they are acting like everyday is a freaky mardigras parade.
I don't think these people are encouraged to first seek psychiatric help which is what they really need. The “doctors” who perform these operations are no better than the doctors who would bind women's feet in old China, so that women could have fashionable tiny feet. How about those cultures that put large wooden disks in their bottom lips or would put many metal rings around women's necks so that they looked like giraffes. This is just madness.
Another possibility is that this is a kind of distorted view of the self. People with anorexia see themselves as always fat no matter what they really look like. Even if they look like skeletons, they will always see a fat person when they look in the mirror. Would a doctor go along with this delusion and encourage them to starve themselves to death so that they could be “happy”. Anorexics are never happy no matter how much weight they lose because the problem is not really their weight, it is something in their mind that is deeply wrong.
I think for most of them, they just aren’t doing particularly well in life, and feel like something’s wrong with them because other people around them seem to be happier and more successful. Then when no concrete problem can be pinpointed, they want to believe they have some “special” problem, and in our current culture, this claiming to be the other gender fits the bill. It excuses failure to succeed as compared to one’s peers, and it demands attention and sympathy.
There are exceptions, and as I’ve said, I’ve had passing acquaintance with two “transsexuals” (one who was born anatomically a hermaphrodite) who had had the surgery. I think it was the right choice for both of them, but both seem to have had realistic expectations — not imagining they’d be suddenly happy and problem-free — and both HAD pursued psychiatric treatment extensively before deciding to go the surgery route. One was already very successful academically and professionally, and had no need of excuses for anything. The other was the one born a hermaphrodite, and after growing up with an abusive father who insisted on making her male against her wishes, it’s little wonder she’d hit her early 40s with little concrete success — but last I heard, she was in law school. The case of that city manager, in Florida IIRC, struck me as another one where, inspite of no mention of inborn anatomical anomalies or diagnosed chromosomal anomalies, it didn’t seem to be an attention-getting stunt by a chronic loser. The guy had pursued a normal and successful career, and intended to continue pursuing it — no expectation that a sex change would be some magical problem-solver. When people like that say they’ve felt all their lives that they’re “in the wrong body”, and they’ve persevered for many years, and been responsible productive citizens, I’ll take them at their word.
But the ever-growing parade of clearly emotionally confused people, many quite young and still devoid of any real life experience, who are suddently claiming to be the opposite sex from what they clearly are, is obviously a culturally-induced phenomenon. I recently met a college student who is claiming to be male — she’s looks ridiculous in her attempts to look male, speaks with a soft feminine voice, and is attending an all-women’s college! It’s not doing this confused young lady any favor when her friends, professors, college administrators, etc, politely go along with this nonsense.
Chastity Bono dropped out of college to pursue an improbable career with some performing music group, and has never done or attempted to do much of anything else besides vague sex/gender-related “activism”. 15-20 years ago, she was “coming out” as a lesbian; and now she’s “coming out” as a man. She’s just an overall failure (probably even a social/sexual failure as a lesbian), largely for lack of ever really attempting to do anything worthwhile, and she’s grasping for excuses for her failure. It’s sad that our society validates this bizarre excuse, and sadder still that she’s got the money at her disposal to forge ahead with surgery.