@1137
I think you need to consider whether in seeking to treat or cure people you are necessarily trying to enforce conformity to a sense of reality. A good psychologist knows they don't have all the answers and must necessarily show some humility towards their patients. We are not born with innate ideas (such as over gender identity) and therefore by studying a patients thought patterns you can learn to see the world from their point of view. By getting a person to unravel the source of these ideas, they therefore unrepress the feelings which are associated with them. The task of treatment is to understand what ideas a person has developed which is contary to their well-being and to amend them so there are more in line with their own happiness and achieve an inner eqilbrium.
Trying to compell someone to accept 'reality' is not treatment but represents your own repressed hostility in that you have been compelled to live according to other people's rules and rather than deal with your own fears by conforting these authorities who have perscripted this "reality", you therefore feel that to ease your own discomfort to enforce that reality on others. Consider whether your own ideas regarding the innate nature of gender identity come from and I promise you, you will find yourself have a long inner discussion on your own past and how you yourself have reached a conclusion which is not only harmful to the people you are treating, but to yourself by denying your own spontaneous capacity for feeling, including empathy with your patients.
If you are currently practicing or studying to practice for psychology, you will come accross situations where someone uses an appeal to "good intentions" as a way to exercise authority over another person by denying them what they want. Speaking as someone who has been the victim of psychological abuse, good intentions do not redeem the harm that people can do to each other, but in recognising that the harm is done unconsciously and driven by fear it can be forgiven because you realise that what they do to you has been done to them. forgiveness in this sense is not nessecarily a weakness when it restores some inner balance. We can give ourselves permission to accept our hostility as a healthy response to a situation and re-discover our boundaries and sense of control over our lives which was violated by the abuser. Recovering from abuse means fundamentally challanging the distorted nature of what is "good" and learning to trust your own inner mechanisms rather than those standards of what is good that have been imposed upon you by others.
Psychology can be the attempt to enforce a measure of "good" in which mental illness is thought of as a dysfunction and therefore the "cure" is to eliminate this dysfunction so that a person conforms to the standards of their society. It can also be the search for the inner measures of good by promoting the happiness and inner well-being of a person. In trying to perscribe that a person is biologically determined to be male or female, consider the cultural diversity of the definitions of masculinity and feminity and how those concepts- such as masculinity as dominance and feminity as submission- are contary to the well-being of a person and perpetuate abusive sterotypes in rape culture, in which the victim is blamed for being 'weak' rather than the perpetrator because we implictly accept sadomasochistic conceptions of violence as strength even when it may necessarily conceal deep-seated feelings of inferiority, self-loathing and insecurity. In most cases, abuse takes place between people who know each other and untangling the genuine affection for the sentimental and idealised projection which conceals a person's fear and hostility is the hardest part of a therapists job.
Take a step back and consider whether in attacking your patient by forcing them to accept reality, you are infact blaming the victim for reminding you of your own feeling of insecurity. Sometimes if we are going to be part of the solution, it is necessarily to recognise that we are part of the problem. In an area as difficult as psychology, what is "normal" is not necessarily what is good for your patients as it was precisely the acceptance of a destructive normality which made them ill in the first place. Patients are not the only ones who project their own insecurities on to others and therapy involves projection in both directions. as a psychologist you have a responsibility not to enforce what you think is good, but to help th patient discover what they believe is good inorder to be free to be themselves and thereby overcome the inhibitions which made them ill in the first place. To do so, you need a very deep level of self-knowledge and that will give you the insight to see what a patient may be hiding from themselves.
Your welcome to say I am projecting (I am and will spend the rest of today thinking and processing what this reply tells me about my own boundaries and processing the guilt for expressing my own anger), but by blaming people who are transgender for not conforming to your standards of what is good because you think it is self-evident and irrifutable means you are showing the "red flag" since an idea or an authority that is beyond challange is one which is free to be unnacountable for the harm such perfectionist and compulsive stanards can do. Those who most want power over others are those least able to stand alone; they derive strength from the relative power of enforcing dependence on others whilst hiding from their own dependence on those who submit to them. You already know the answer to your question but want someone to help you overcome the guilt of asking it. it is ok to feel hostile towards transgender persons- but is that what you are really angry or frightened of?
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