"Normal" people are also straight and not gay

I think the argument can be made that transexuals and gays are both in a category of mental illness

Wait, so, Cosby, to you gender is a separate idea that has nothing to do with the biological sex of a person?

Are they not valid?

Nobody is arguing here to let people identify as different people or organisms

I don't agree that transsexuals are mentally ill at all.

No?

Weird

No.

Why is that weird?

Gender Dysphoria is a thing

Recognized by the medical community

There are physiological reasons why they develop to be transsexuals.

I agree with that.

I don't agree with the notions that being transgender or transsexual necessarily means being mentally ill.

Hopefully you don't decide to throw the science out on this one, just because you think they are "icky"

I personally know trannies who are as healthy as they can possibly be.

Both physically and mentally.

So what is mental illness?

@Vlad Are you referring to transgender people as transsexual or do you mean those who have undergone a sex change operation

If a Down Syndrome is "perfectly healthy" - they aren't mentally retarded? lol

Either way goes, Rocket.

Just healthy individuals.

That's still not really an answer regarding gender studies' usefulness as a class nor an argument against other classes covering all of those skills better. Yes liberal arts classes are harder to make a career out of, but gender studies *itself* has virtually nothing that allows for upward progression beyond college. It's a completely redundant class that is rife with over-politicization and pseudoscience, which is not really what other liberal arts classes do. Again, there is a reason as to why these classes do so poorly.

Highly functioning autistic people aren't mentally ill?

Regardless of how you want to define it.

Transgender and transexual are not the same thing though

That's false equivalence, Cosby.

I know they're not.

There's just a massive dispute over what's what and what exists and what doesn't.

That's what I mean.

Right, so I'm trying to figure out why you make the exception for this one particular type of illness. You don't think it's an illness?

What is gender dysphoria? Did doctors make it up?

Okay, for two reasons:

1) There are physiological roots to transsexualism;

I'm eager to see you debunk a recognized medical condition

2) Not every transsexual suffers from any subsequent mental illness.

gender and sex meant the same thing up until about 4 years ago btw

I've seen professionals describe it as not being a mental illness

So, if you cannot tie every single transsexual to a mental illness, you cannot equate transsexualism to a mental illness.

@Cobra Commander I personally don't know enough about the degree tract itself to say for sure how it is different but I still think people who want to take it should be able to as long as their university offers it