Yes, that's right, I'm a philosopher, and my job is analysing concepts and their relations.

And the thing is Oz, clinical psychology and psychiatry and very often not about analysing actual material artefacts, it's about looking at people's behaviour, and their reported

experience, and developing and applying diagnostic *concepts.*

'Gender dysphoria' is just a diagnostic concept, applied by medical science, when people report distress with their body and gender.

Here's the diagnostic criteria.

I would have met five of those as a child, if I

has experienced a strong hatred of my sexed body, which *many* many teenage girls do, because we live in a woman-hating society, then I would have qualified...

This criteria leaves wide open the possibility of gender non-conforming kids being diagnosed with a medical condition

for being gender-conforming. For many of those kids, if they are experiencing distress with their bodies, that distress will resolve as they come into adulthood. Many of those kids, we know, will be gay.

Medical science cannot provide any specific account of a single underlying

material mechanism that causes gender dysphoria. We don't know what causes gender dysphoria, and we don't know if it is even one phenomena with one aetiology. Clinicians working in this area, and testimony from detransitioners, suggest there are multiple factors that produce

the experience, including being homosexual, autism, and sexual trauma.

What is happening here is that the practice of treating kids with gender dysphoria - which has risen several thousand percent in a very short time, which should in itself warrant research that is not being

done - is being singularly dominated by *one* explanatory scheme for this phenomena which is centred on the notion of 'gender identity.'

Gender identity is also not a mechanical or material artefact which can be known to medical science

in the manner of a heart valve. Gender identity also, is a *concept.* And it's a really shit concept insofar as no-one at all, in the course of nearly ten years of really bitter argument, has been able to produce anything like a coherent or substantive definition.

It's just some kind of indefinable gender essence that you infallibly 'know' you have which is posited to be the reason people have gender dysphoria. Because their gender essence got 'stuck' in the wrong body.

Yeah, very scientific, and definitely a notion that only medical

doctors have any right to make pronouncements about, and certainly not something that people with expertise in analysing concepts, and their history, who has read really quite a lot on how this concept developed and what it might mean, should say anything about at all.