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Do I know any psychologists on here? I'm wondering if there's been significant study of the variety of ways trans people relate to and think/feel about their pretransition selves. If that's even psychology!

(I could just go diving in, looking for papers, but that often fails in subjects I know little about because I lack the terminology to know what I'm looking for.)

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in reply to Alexandra Lanes

That is such an interesting question. On where to find such research, being trans has been so pathologised by the medical and mental health professions that I'd go looking for research done specifically by trans people, or more likely autobiographical writing, rather than research as such. I'd not trust anything else.
in reply to Zumbador

@Zumbador I think I agree. I think there are a lot of great counsellors in this space with kind of "meso" scale experience, things they've learnt from many patients, etc. I think this and support groups etc is probably the best place to look.

But psychology in the paper-mill" "Professor of Brainiology, OBE, CBE, bar, bar, sense at the University of Old", I'd be very skeptical about.

Throughout history, as a profession they always seem to be playing catch up with reality and enabling lots of horrible things done by states. It seem like quite a foetid hunting ground.

in reply to kæt

@Zumbador
I don't like to be abstract political, so here's a concrete example from a paper on Autism.

There was an experiment which showed that autistic people were more consistent in applying professed beliefs in private (a faked experiment where subjects were asked to eat taboo-animal meet in exchange for money, in company and alone).

This increased consistency was pathologised as autistic people failing to adapt to social situations by not being hypocritical in private. They did brain scans and stuff to show the hypocrisy nexus and suggested interventions to fire it up in autistic people.

I suspect this is very likely how that kind of psychology works in the trans space too.