There's an article in First Things by a psychiatrist arguing that transgendered people are the way they are because they got stuck in some stage of psychological development and that they need psychotherapy to cure them.
I agree with the author's argument that people who think they're a different sex from what they obviously are by genetics and anatomy clearly suffer from a kind of mental illness--and that it is political correctness that keeps us from recognizing this, not science or logic. However, these kinds of explanations don't sound plausible to me--whether they're applied to this or any other kind of mental or emotional problem. The whole idea of the unconscious mind as something which is, on the one hand, outside of consciousness and free will, and thus operates according to laws that are discoverable by science but not obviously having to do with material bodies, seems unlikely. At best, you're dealing with a very rough proxy for underlying material events, so that the further you get away from "x happened to this part of your brain, so that's why you suffer from y," the shakier ground you are on for showing the kind of clear, reproducible, causation, which could lead to any kind of effective treatment.
It could just be that we're so far away from bridging the gap between the physical brain and the conscious mind and human behavior and that these realities are so complex that postulating "laws" about them at this point is like predicting and controlling the weather--but with only the knowledge and instrumentation of 200 years ago. (And, if human beings are truly possessed of free will, then, even if we figured that out, at some level, their behavior is ultimately only predictable and subject to laws on a broad statistical level.)
In any case, it seems to me that such claims of causation of mental aberrations don't even rise to that level. They're easily refuted by counter-examples. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're complete bunk, but it may mean that they have more in common with the philosophical or religious psychology employed in the tradition of spiritual direction than they have to do with modern medicine.
