Transgenderism is a mental illness.

Thank you for your argument. Yes, I did say more than "I accept". I ask the voters to analyze the rule: "The first round is for acceptance only." One can deduce that the only action permitted by anyone in round one is the act of acceptance. My opponent did not follow his own rule as he spelled out more than his acceptance. One could argue that there is an implicit meaning behind "acceptance only" that could further the sentence to read: The first round is for acceptance only for my opponent and does not apply to anyone else. That might be in fact how this community works, however, I am very new to this community and therefore have not learned implicit speech contained within your vernacular. I ask the the voters to consider that my opponent did not follow the explicit instruction in their own rule and therefore I was not out of school not following it either. Definitions: Sex: Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and many other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions. https://www.google.com... Gender: The state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones). https://www.google.com... Point 1. "I may believe that I am a duck, but that does not, in itself, make me a duck." This premise is flawed in that this example deals with existence or state of being and not social identity. Transgenderism is not the denial of the state of being human. Transgenderism is the human not identifying with the gender expectation of social normalcy. My opponent then errors again by conflating a person's sex with their gender. Man is a reference to sexual identification, as is woman. His argument might better apply to transsexualism. Therefore his correlating transgenderism with the denial of ones sex is a moot point. Point 2. Schizophrenia is a recognized brain disease and transgenderism is not. Schizophrenia can be proven with brain scans, transgenderism can not. Furthermore, schizophrenia can be acquired from external forces, such as heavy metal toxicity. transgenderism can not. Therefore I patently dismiss this example as mere hyperbole. http://www.schizophrenia.com... http://www.alternativementalhealth.com... Point 3. Dysfunction and mental illness are not one in the same. We do not generally accept modality based dysfunction because the dysfunction inhibits purpose. i.e. The hand is meant to move and if it no longer moves as designed it is dysfunctional. Gender has no intrinsic function, only socially constructed ones. Therefore there can be no dysfunction. We would not declare a father that stays at home to raise his children dysfunctional even though he is not functioning within his generally assigned gender role. Point 4. Social maladjustment simply means that a person is not what society considers normal. People who feel anxious in crowds are considered to suffer from social maladjustment. Because so many people break from social norms in one way or another, one can argue that there is no such thing as normal. At least from the societal normalcy perspective. "No society has ever embraced cross-dressers and "gender-benders" as entirely normal." This is blatantly false. Men from nearly all cultures used to play female roles in plays and other such artistic expression. This practice was viewed as normal and accepted by society. In fact, it would have been abnormal to have a woman play a female part. http://news.harvard.edu... In England during the 18th century, men would adorn themselves with long-haired wigs and copious amounts of makeup. Often these same men wore high-healed shoes. Such practices would be considered abnormal for men today. We have normalized those customs with women only. https://18centurybodies.wordpress.com... In conclusion, my opponent has failed to meet the burden of proof for his claim that transgenderism is a mental illness. He has made the case that transsexualism is a disorder instead. A conclusion that has been settled by medical science for quite some time under Gender Identity Disorder (GID). We are not talking about transsexualism though. So the case he has made against it is not valid within the purview of this debate.