I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle
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I've definitely noticed a trend of people on the spectrum suffering from mental health problems, self-diagnosing as gender dysphoric and then launching themselves down a one-directional, miserable path that ends in their suicide.
Being Autistic myself, and having goine through complete dysregulation as a 15-16 year old (it's way more common than you'd think, especially as most government support just stops when the kids turn 18), I completely understand the mental processes that both lead to the depression/anxiety/emotional dysregulation as well as the absolute certainty with which the epiphany of gender dysphoria is reached.
Hearing the specific linguistic choices common on trans reddit/twitter/tttt, and knowing the exact state of mind that cause this language to be used just sends a shiver down my spine. All it would have taken is for me to have been born 5 years later, and I'd be a dead trans woman rather than a fulfilled husband and father of two.
If there's anyone reading this who's on the spectrum themselves, or has a kid on the spectrum who's talking about gender issues, feel free to reach out and I can elaborate a bit more on exactly how this specific failure works.
Is there any other things about your life you would be willing to share?
Dysregulation[1] was Hell on Earth, in the literal sense. Very little in life works the way you think it should, and the reaction to these things constantly going wrong is extremely intense, negative, emotional unable to be controlled in any real sense. You lose the ability to reliably form even basic episodic/autobiographical memories, and with it any sense of the past or future. Entire chunks of your life go missing and you don't know what day it is, where you've been or where you're going. All you know is that you're constantly exhausted, nothing makes sense and everything just feels wrong. You don't know how long you've felt like this, and you don't know how long you'll continue to feel like this. As far as you're aware, past and future suffering will keep going on for eternity. And you will do anything, literally anything, to make it stop.
For me, I was fortunate that my mum took me to a sleep specialist, who recommended getting my adenoids removed and prescribing an extremely specific sleep schedule which I followed to a T (all screens off at 9:00, in bed by 10:00, I don't remember if there was a specific constant time I needed to wake up by but I suspect that was part of it to. As an adult, I now supplement this routine with melatonin). This was enough to get me from a state of complete dysregulation to "garden-variety" depression, which eventually I overcame with the help of a supportive network of friends and parents who (semi-forcefully) steered me down a path where I could succeed.
A hypothetical AussieWog98 might have convinced himself that the cause of the dysregulation was gender dysphoria, cut himself off from the people who really care and spent all his time online with other people just like himself until one day he couldn't take it any more.
I really, genuinely believe that this is what is happening today, at least in the case of some people. For others (especially people who transition later in life), it really can help them be comfortable in their own skin, and this is of course where the trans "debate" gets hairy.
[1] This is not technical language, but is the best and most concise word I can use to decribe it. There may be a more appropriate technical term, or a more scientific description of what is happening (seizures in the amygdala?). Feel free to comment if you have any scientific information or proper terminology, I'd love to read the literature on it.
In this light, gender comes to the fore not in the sense of being "tempted" after seeing something online, but as a particular mask to wear 24/7, regardless of which one you choose; something which autistic people have long been known to struggle with. It isn't outrageous to conclude that switching masks might be a relief if the assigned one isn't working out; consider that autistic women are historically underdiagnosed, and then flip it around to the context of MTF transition: suddenly, autistic man behavior would "pass" as neurotypical woman behavior. That makes it seem like transitioning is the way to be normal!
Of course, normative masks have consequences for people who lean into their assigned gender, too, creating a context for all kinds of medical interventions: steroids to look big, diet drugs and surgeries to look small, study pills to pass exams, and so on. It's a promise of purification which has gradually targeted younger and younger ages. Gender in this light isn't so unique, it's just a particularly scapegoated expression of the culture.
The parents bear some responsibility because in happily going along with a diagnosis of this sort, they're most likely being all too eager to make their child be a better product on the market. Whatever the intervention was, they can go to bed that evening telling themselves "my kid will be successful now." Which in turn results in prolongment of mental health issues and ad-hoc coping mechnaisms.
Where the Autism comes in, though, is that a young person on the spectrum won't know how to recognise internal signs that they need to sleep, possibly won't even understand that they need to sleep (unless they've explicitly read/been told about sleep health/hygeine), and likely have difficulty sleeping as is.
The net result is, where a neurotypical person would just realise the early warning signs and slow down/go to bed earlier, the Autistic person can literally continue to ruin their mental health for a decade or more without ever putting two and two together.
The reason I specifically mentioned the Autism rather than the sleep deprivation is that this failing to meet needs can occur in many aspects of one's life and present itself in weird ways. You might see Autistics socially isolate themselves for years on end, then assume that the reason they're plagued with depression and anxiety is because they're not getting laid.
> Like if they could sleep a lot and go camping in nature with not many people and not many expectations for a month and avoid overstimulation, would a lot of these problems clear then?
Do you have a kid in a situation like this? Getting away from technology would probably be an effective treatment temporarily, but you'd need to follow it up with solid, rigorous information about sleep hygeine and its importance.
Poor sleep leads to worse stress regulation (also in neurotypical people), and chronic stress leads to difficulties in situational and bodily awareness, which leads to poor sleep hygiene, which reinforces the stress regulation problems, rinse and repeat until your life is in ruins.
So by putting someone in nature, which can be sensorily calming for some, along with the social expectations and such, and nature being known to help people's sleep I would put it all together with what I suggested.
For me it would more be a debugging thing. Like if sleep in nature worked, then that is a hint, if it didn't and an indoor equivalent didn't work, since for some the nature stuff can be anxiety provoking for other reasons, then it's something else, etc.
Are you saying that the gender dysphoria self-diagnosis was the only factor in the suicide, and without it the mental health problems and difficulties of being neurodivergent in society wouldn't have been an issue? If not, why is it the important one of the three?
Every problem a person deals with will contribute to stress and influence their choices, but it feels a little weird to list 3 big challenges and then say "and the last one is why they killed themselves".
No, not at all.
I think the real reason that so may Autistic people end up depressed, anxious and suicidal is a mix of social difficulties (leading to isolation), coupled with an inability to recognise our own emotional states (making self-care a lot more difficult).
The real problem in misdiagosis of gender dysphoria amongst Autistics isn't so much the additional stress caused by transitioning (not just medical issues, but things like the discrimination that non-passing trans people experience too) but the fact that it provides a false solution to the problem of our depression/anxiety.
So many young Autistics really, genuinely, believe that the solution to their problem isn't learning the hard way how to achieve a certain level of social success, or ceding some of their independence to people they trust to help manage their physical and emotional needs, but instead hormones and surgery.
And once someone's gone down that path, that's it. No coming back.
For younger people it's often preferred to use fully reversible blockers that don't even nudge someone along the transition path, which further reduces the risk of any kind of long-term regret.
The problem isn't the medical effects but the fact that the certainty a misdiagnosis brings blocks people with mental health issues from actually treating the root of the problem. And this decision, practically speaking, isn't reversible. Once someone on the spectrum decides to go down this path, there's no stopping them.
If you have an Autistic kid and they're asking questions about gender, you should absolutely be worried. Hell, I'd be worried about an Autistic 25 year-old.
If a problem isn't severe, that might be a reason to avoid medical intervention so you don't take on that risk. But if you're really struggling to cope or it seems like you might have a serious problem, you should probably see a doctor. If their diagnosis makes you ask more questions, get a second opinion, or a third one!
Similarly, basically any surgery has the risk of complications, and lots of interventions we perform on a regular basis have a small but real risk of harm. It's something that comes with medicine, and overall, people live longer and happier lives because medicine usually works out. I postponed wisdom teeth extraction for years because the first dentist I saw about it put the fear of god into me about the terrifying risks of anesthesia, and ended up regretting it because they had to come out eventually anyway. But if I had been that rare statistic to die from anesthesia, maybe it would've been the right choice? I lean towards no, personally.
As far as blocking people from treating the root of the problem - while this is a real issue, if the secondary problem is seriously lowering someone's quality of life, there's something to be said for stopping the bleeding (so to speak) long enough to start working on everything else that's causing issues. It's a matter of triage - sometimes root causes simply cannot be dealt with fast enough to postpone dealing with everything else. A non-surgical gender intervention like blockers to get someone onto stable footing for a year or two could be a great step in order to refocus on everything else, and maybe at the end of that time they decide they don't need meds or surgery.
It's far more important that someone resolve their gender dysphoria than concerns like needing lifelong treatment. Plenty of political detransitioners are still dysphoric, they've just chosen alternative treatment modalities that we know lead to less happiness (which is fine as an individual decision, it's just bad to set public policy based on that).
Blockers are fully reversible in the medical sense only. As in if you stop taking them, the hormones go back to normal levels.
They are NOT reversible in how the general public uses the word. As in carching up with the missed out puberty.
So, no, it isn't fully reversible despite what a lot of people want you to believe.
Keep in mind that blockers can be prescribed for reasons other than transgender identity, do you think that should be prohibited too?
And it makes no sense to me to ban the prescribing for what the medicine was actually developed for, too early puberty.
Also, why is it that almost always when I voice my dislike for puberty blockers as a form of trans treatment there is the "counter argument" that I want it blocked for all purposes? Just because I dislike one use of it, doesnt mean I dislike all uses.
Some people probably are just fully resistant to the idea that blockers shouldn't be used. I think guardrails are appropriate, but it's quite common to see people oppose a given treatment in gender care when it is freely used in other - often quite similar - circumstances and the opposition is ultimately rooted in discomfort with gender care and not based on any unusual or serious proven harms.
In the end a lot of this is between the child, their parents, and their physicians. It doesn't matter much how we feel about it as uninvolved individuals as long as safety processes are being followed and there's appropriate consent.
A good point of comparison for blockers, IMO, would be Spironolactone - frequently prescribed for trans HRT and other forms of gender care, but also used on-label for other purposes. This drug has lots of very inconvenient side effects, people dislike it, and it can in some cases cause serious harm due to the side effects. You could argue that it shouldn't be prescribed for any purposes due to those side effects, but at that point, you have to weigh one harm against another. Physicians have generally decided it's worth it.
I came to your exact same conclusion but with a 15 year difference. I am also quite confident I would be on the spectrum instead with a 5 year difference.
The medication I was put on at age 8 permanently fucked me. I went from teaching my grade 8 buddy algebra while completing his homework for fun (at age 8) to a completely fucked education from grade 5-8 and I cannot even remember grade 4 because I was in and out of hospitals for various new potions.
I have a file from my family doctor at the time, Dr. Karen Lo of London Ontario. Where she stated that as an 8 year old I was manipulating/controlling my mother, teacher, and multiple other adults. That was the basis for the medication.
The reality was that my Mom was so drunk off her ass that she couldn't stand up most of the time. I had to cook my own meals or starve, among other things.
I recall the look of one of my "special" teachers when she asked for ways to cook french fries. I told her to fry it in a pan with a tiny bit of oil. That's how I did it after all, she fucking laughed. Laughed.
You'd think you've heard the worst of it maybe but the reality is far far worse. Worse than being illegally and forcefully injected with drugs even. I would know.
My heart goes out to the victims of this treatment. You certainly don't deserve it.
Why do so many stories of psychotherapistic fuckery come out of Canada? There's your story here, there's the tragic story of David Reimer, there's the Montreal Experimemts by Donald Ewen Cameron... It's like something has been ideologically and institutionally wrong for a long time. It's like there's no human dignity or sovereignty, but instead people are just objects or problems to be managed. Some horrible Skinnerian-Taylorist worldview.
It might just be a metaphor, but would you treat people this way if you thought they had actual souls?
Everywhere is super messed up, to one degree or another.
Having said that, I do not believe that it is fair to assume a person who believes themselves trans to be mistaken based purely on a personal hypothetical anecdote.
And therefore be more willing to go through transition, instead of being more concerned with the impact the process has on your social standing, your friendships, your relationships.
I genuinely wonder if the incidence rate of transgenderism amongst autistic folks is actual the real incidence rate in humanity, but the rest of us (I am mostly neurotypical, just ADHD, and cis-hetero) are more likely to repress any transgender thoughts or worries.
I sympathise with all people who have issues accepting the body they were born with. If someone believes their body should be different, but otherwise their body is healthy, I think it’s fair to say that whatever is causing the feeling of mismatch is happening in the mind. It’s no surprise to me that a significant fraction present with other mental disorders.
In an ideal world, there would be some form of therapy that helps people come to terms with and accept themselves with what they’ve been given. But again I do sympathise, because contemporary medicine simply isn’t very good at treating mental illnesses.
Should people born with a cleft palate be forced to leave it alone? What about people with breathing problems due to their anatomy? If a kid has teeth grow in improperly and start causing jaw problems, should they be prohibited from having their wisdom teeth removed or teeth realigned with braces? Should tonsil removal be prohibited? If a woman has severe back pain due to oversized breasts, should it be prohibited to get a reduction surgery even if it improves quality of life? Should vasectomies be prohibited if a person with testes wants to be able to have sex with their partner without the risk of pregnancy?
Should it be prohibited to medically disable "healthy" body parts as well? As an alternative to vasectomies you can use drugs to similarly disable that body part, in many cases effectively forever. Should that be illegal too? What about anti-androgens like Spironolactone - used on-label for multiple different purposes - should we ban those since they are also used for MtF HRT? Birth control also is functionally disabling healthy parts of the body.
Why does a problem "happening in the mind" somehow mean that no treatment can occur outside of the mind? Do you think mood stabilizers and antipsychotics should be banned because we're treating an "in the mind" problem with physical, body-altering interventions?
My conclusion is I have no idea how to even approach it.
I'd be interested in others thoughts.
I like this topic as it's less politically charged but explores similar ethics.
For instance, most Americans know they're fat or obese and that this is not good for their long term health outlooks and will have detrimental affects on other aspects of their lives. Some may choose to be okay with this, but very few sincerely argue that being fat is 'healthy'. Most will try to lose weight (excess fat) at some point in their lives.
Sometimes we remove body parts that are no longer well functioning within an understood ordering of the body. Inflamed tonsils can be removed, large wisdom teeth pulled, even ovaries can be discarded if they're found to be hosting cancers, but all of these are examples of organ dysfunction. We know what is regular, non-painful, and non-disruptive about the human body because many human beings spend a lot of time in that state and most begin life in that state before transitioning to a disordered state. When that transition happens, medical science seeks an explanation for the dysfunction: how did these tonsils become inflamed?, why do wisdom teeth crowd the mouth?, how did this woman's ovaries come to carry so much cancer?
We look for the cause of a dysfunction in order to treat it.
If instead we remove the well functioning breasts of a 15 year old, or replace a healthy penis because a patient informs us that they abhor their member, or prescribe a blocker for an otherwise well regulated puberty, then we have inverted the entire thrust of centuries of medical understanding. We are taking a healthy body and searching for a malady that we have been told must be there. Once there is no longer a discernment between the regular and the dysfunctional for a human body then an explosion of maladies abounds all begging for treatment.
If enlarged breasts are causing spinal issues then perhaps they should be reduced in order to correct those issues. But why not removal? We remove enlarged tonsils, why not enlarged breasts? Surely the removal of them would also correct any spine issues. In fact, it may even be ethically easier as the doctor and patient do not have to contemplate a correct breast size. But of course it is unlikely the patient or doctor ever considered the wholesale removal of the breasts in these cases because both approached the question with an idea already in mind of what a healthy human body would look like despite they're not having any precise agreement on the topic beforehand.
And in fact, we should question the ethics of both vasectomies and birth control. In 2023 these treatments are mostly, though not entirely, considered mostly in the pursuit of carefree pleasure and fun. Why should either be condoned? We condemn being fat on entirely the same terms. Often Americans are fat because they eat too often and always in excess due to eating feeling good. If one doesn't praise obesity, then what ought they find desirable about self-imposed sterility?
Of course what compounds these ethical concerns is that in these cases the subjects are children. On the whole this takes the acts from merely questionable or wrong-headed to monstrous.
Perhaps we should question the ethics of kids playing casual sports because it’s in the pursuit or carefree pleasure and fun
It is self-evident that reversing a decision to play freeze tag is orders of magnitude easier than reversing a dental tooth cleaning; a mundane medical procedure.
I don't think almost anyone in this thread, including the person you are replying to, has any issues with 40 year olds doing whatever they want to with their own body. They are adults who can accept full responsibility over their actions and consequences, no matter how irreversable or disastrous they could end up being. Children are an entirely different story, as they, by definition, have no ability to provide informed consent to a lot of things, and rightfully so.
> Or are you simply more interested in bending and controlling people with your personal moral views where “pleasure and fun” are sins [?]
You are fighting windmills here. At no point had anyone in this chain of comments exerted any moral judgement against people transitioning or even suggested that it was sinful.
And to be extra clear, I have no issues with adults transitioning, and I would have no issues with minors either, if the process was fully reversible. Most western countries don't consider minors being legally able to give consent to getting tattoos due to their (near-)permanency, but no one has any issues with adults getting those. I, personally, would consider transitioning to have a much higher bar for "minors should be able to consent to it" than I would for getting a tattoo.
> Of course what compounds these ethical concerns is that in these cases the subjects are children. On the whole this takes the acts from merely questionable or wrong-headed to monstrous.
FROM wrong-headed TO monstrous. Sounds like they have a pretty negative and judgmental opinion regardless if it’s an adult, that just intensifies when children are involved. So yeah, I do think GP has issues with said 40 year olds. How many minors are getting vasectomies anyway? How it is comparable to a gender transition except in the most vague and useless ways?
> You are fighting windmills here. At no point had anyone in this chain of comments exerted any moral judgement against people transitioning or even suggested that it was sinful.
Not even talking about people transitioning . Why the fuck is this guy comparing it to vasectomies and obesity in the first place.
Personally, I was a very different person at 15 to 20 to 25. I don't really think a young person can make a rational decision on something that is going to affect the rest of their lives in such a dramatic way.
A 30 year old deciding to get gender reassignment surgery is very different to a 12 year old.
I'd be more open to medical intervention post-18 if this problem didn't exist.
That's pretty much the exact same reason for being against such hormonal treatments for minors as well.
There are a metric ton of medical procedures surgeons do outside of medical transitioning where people alter/adjust/remove healthy body parts. This seems like a pretty blanket statement to say; and I say that as someone who would be extremely cautious about telling someone that they "should" medically transition if they feel that social transition would be sufficient for them. I'm all aboard the train of telling transgender people that they're valid whether or not they choose to transition, and I definitely would advocate that transgender identity and body dysphoria are not necessarily the same thing, and that many trans people are blessed to be able to both embrace their transgender identity and celebrate aspects of their bodies that don't "align" with their gender in strictly hetero-normative ways.
Even with that perspective, this framing of "we're perverting the role of doctors/surgeons by cutting healthy flesh" -- it just doesn't really match the reality of how many procedures there are in the US that already fit that definition. Everything from the stereotypical examples of cosmetic surgery, to non-essential dental procedures, to limb lengthening, to circumcision, to sex-assignment surgery for intersex infants, the list goes on and on.
Many of these procedures aren't strictly speaking medically necessary. Precocious puberty for example is primarily harmful because of its psychological and social effects. The physical consequences of early puberty are comparatively minor (not non-existant, but then-again neither are the effects of puberty blockers. We're mostly talking about stuff like "you might be shorter when you grow up"). And yet, I've never once seen someone advocate that it's morally wrong or that it should be illegal for a doctor to prescribe puberty blockers to a cisgender child with precocious puberty. There's no shortage of conditions that really don't have physical health-effects or side-effects other than that society has decided that we don't really like them or that they're inconvenient to live with (either because of social stigma or because of the increased need for accommodations that society is unwilling/unable to provide) -- and we generally don't tell people with those conditions that they need to just learn to live with them. Instead, we give them choices (including medical interventions) to address both the social effects of their conditions and the internal psychological effects of their conditions.
What we don't do is we don't take a purely physical view of things. Heck, one of the justifications for why doctors prescribe puberty blockers to cisgender girls with precocious puberty is because there's limited research suggesting that delaying puberty lowers their risks of being raped. That's about as far into the "its a social problem, not a medical one" category as it's possible for a medical intervention to be.
And look, all of this is even taking the most charitable view of the statement statement above and assuming that it is specifically talking about medical interventions among minors. But if I take that statement at its face value as saying that no surgeon should ever operate on healthy tissue, then it just kind of becomes absurd, honestly. There are so, so many medical procedures that fall under that umbrella.
I think everyone would love to have less invasive ways of helping people who suffer from gender-disphoria and I think everyone is hoping that as social stigma continues to decrease that some of the psychological downsides of not transitioning might also decrease. That's not to say that medical transitioning is bad; it's not. But it does carry some risks, and obviously it's good to have multiple available paths for the transgender people who don't want to take those risks.
But arguments that boil down to "it's in the mind, so treat it that way" sound good at face-value but are ultimately way too simplistic to work even in a purely cisgender world. Our medical profession hasn't really worked that way for a long time, if it ever worked that way at all. So any debate about whether or not a surgery procedure is moral needs to be engaging with the issue on a deeper level than just whether or not there's a physical risk involved.
Gender dysphoria is not a mental illness; it is a condition, like pregnancy. Unlike anorexia or body dysmorphia, when you address the issues causing gender dysphoria it simply resolves itself.
Leave this to the experts, please (ie not a receptionist). Unless you're trans or an expert there is very little substance in your opinions.
edit to respond: a mental illness is a disorder that causes harm to yourself or your interpersonal relationships. Gender dysphoria doesn't by itself do that. Transphobia in society does.
"The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up"
I can tell you that for me, now that I've addressed the issues causing me gender dysphoria it has completely resolved itself.
Then you have transgender activists routinely attacking people in their own community who regret the surgery, and papering over the inconvenient truths about hormone blocking drugs (they cause permanent bone damage in children).
I'm not taken by arguments that routinely include tactics like death threats towards campaigners who speak out against dangerous hormone blocking drugs.
It isn't "completely ineffective", there is a solid evidence base that people who want it and get it are happier than people who want it and don't.
> at preventing massive suicide rates
A large part of suicide rates is hostility from society. For example, what if society forces people who don't want surgery to get it just to update their IDs? This is a eugenicist human rights violation, and it was the case in Sweden for the time period studied.
Note that in the time period, Sweden also required trans people to prove that they didn't have any gametes in storage! This was such an egregious instance of eugenics that the Swedish government should be paying millions of USD in reparations to anyone affected.
> why is it an option?
Because it works and makes people happier.
> Post-op transgender people still have extremely elevated suicide rates
Due to hostility from society. Suicidal ideation and behavior is a well-known component of CPTSD, and almost every trans person I know has CPTSD from social hostility. (There is one trans person I know who doesn't -- she's 20 and grew up in a supportive, left-wing environment.) That doesn't reflect on any kind of surgery. Rather, it's a damning indictment of society.
> therefore the surgery is ineffective.
False. This absolutely does not follow either logically or empirically.
> Then you have transgender activists routinely attacking people in their own community who regret the surgery
First off, there is not just one "the surgery". Saying that just exposes your ignorance on the subject matter. (And you really should spend a few weeks learning about trans healthcare before commenting any further.)
Besides, your claim is false. The objections are only to the people who regret it and use that as an excuse to attack trans healthcare generally. I know trans people who were forced into a surgery they didn't want, regret it, and everyone I know has full compassion for them.
> and papering over the inconvenient truths about hormone blocking drugs (they cause permanent bone damage in children).
This is a well-known side effect of low sex hormones (also happens in post-menopausal women). There are also serious side effects to not intervening. As always, you have to balance the benefits with the costs of intervening versus non-intervening.
> I'm not taken by arguments that routinely include tactics like death threats towards campaigners who speak out against dangerous hormone blocking drugs.
Plenty of medications have side effects. Accutane can cause depression. Hormonal birth control can have serious side effects. Focusing on this over anything else shows your biases.
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If you're engaging in good faith and would seriously like to learn more about trans healthcare, https://medicine.yale.edu/lgbtqi/research/gender-affirming-c... is a good starting point. There are over a hundred citations in the paper, and you can use any of them as a starting point. Sci-hub is your friend.
I suppose you can argue the tissue here is not “healthy” because it’s causing physical distress for the woman, but the same seems to apply to a trans person. Distress is never ‘just’ mental, it has physical effects on the body (and vice versa - pain is ‘just’ mental). The decision of what’s healthy doesn’t seem so simple to me.
Now the argument becomes something like 'a body part of yours is causing mental distress, let's cut it off even though there's zero evidence it'll help'. Seems very flimsy and predatory to me.
As for breast reduction, there's actually evidence that large breasts can cause physical problems in women, so it seems reasonable to allow that along with the evidence that women with large breasts experience a better quality of life after surgery (absolutely not the case for trans people removing body parts).
"The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up"
> there are a fair number of trans people on social media who seem happy with their surgery
Are the people that are unhappy embraced by the community, or are they deplatformed? Are they happy with the surgery itself, or that they're now 100% part of a community of some kind?
Once someone has surgery, do they in their mind feel completely the new gender, and go about their lives as such, or are they now some elevated status within the trans community itself?
I don't have a problem with how people decide to live their lives, and while I'm generally against unnecessary surgery, adults are free to do what they want. I am against quack science and unethical behavior that might be exploiting the mentally unwell and even just confused children. I also am against using the power of the state to levy the quack science in the case of custody battles.
Higher than population average. Do you have any evidence that it is higher than people who are denied treatment?
- suicidal ideation, which is bad in and of itself
- anxiety, e.g. social anxiety
- depression
Besides, the study does not account for the fact that until 2013, Sweden forced people to have surgery to get updated IDs. If a trans person does not want to have a particular surgery and yet is forced to have it, you can imagine why that would cause a great deal of suffering. That isn't gender-affirming care, that's forced sterilization (which is a human rights violation with a sordid history).
The idea that gender-affirming care doesn't have a large evidence base behind it is preposerous. See e.g. https://medicine.yale.edu/lgbtqi/research/gender-affirming-c...:
> As evidence for the proposition that “[t]here is no evidence that long-term mental health outcomes are improved or that rates of suicide are reduced by hormonal or surgical intervention,” the AG Opinion cites a 2011 Swedish study by Dhejne et al. that, the AG Opinion claims, “monitored transitioned individuals for 30 years [and] found high rates of post-transition suicide and significantly elevated all-cause mortality, including increased death rates from cardiovascular disease and cancer, although causality could not be established.”49 In fact, the 2011 study by Dhejne is badly out-of-date and does not support the AG Opinion’s claim.
> The Dhejne study compared post-gender-affirmation transgender individuals with cisgender individuals from the general population, as opposed to transgender individuals who did not receive gender-affirming care. Therefore, as the study’s author explicitly cautions in the body of the text, it is impossible to conclude from this data that gender-affirming procedures were a causative factor in suicidality among transgender individuals.50 Rather, the study shows only that transgender adults were more likely to experience suicidal ideation/attempts and risky behavior when compared to the general population in Sweden between 1973 and 2003. Further, the Dhejne study is not generalizable to a modern American population or to adolescents. During the study period, Swedish law required that individuals seeking gender-affirming surgery be sterilized. The presence of this law alone might account for the higher risk of suicide attempts and risky behavior in the transgender population compared to the cisgender population at the time.51
This was literally the first result when I googled "post op trans suicidal thoughts study" (n > 27k)
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstrac...
So, seems like there is indeed evidence?
The study was performed online and links were posted exclusively in transgender support forums.
Your standards for "evidence" reach the heights of biased activist SurveyMonkey CSVs? I'm convinced!
Seems like a great way to get a lot of datapoints is to use a transgender forum. Seems like a great way to measure suicidal thoughts is to ask "do you have suicidal thoughts"
So seems like a great approach to gather a lot of evidence for the question at hand?
Seems like you just don't like the evidence because it doesn't reach the rather bigoted conclusion you want it to
> Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group.
That being said, gate keeping what I do with my body is wrong. I knew all the potential side effects when I transitioned. I read the wpath in full. I was comfortable with all the risks.
This type of critical judgment of children's health care is needed and I hope the doctors are being more rigorous than what the author suggests.
I feel terrible for the girls who made a decision they regret and lost parts of their body that made them happy. Their doctors, and parents failed them. I am also happy that so many people were able to successfully transition.
The timing of the article is concerning with so many states trying to withhold life saving care I worry that the nuance of this article will be lost.
In principle I think consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want with their own bodies, but consent needs to be informed and the person needs to be mentally capable of consent. You need some degree of gatekeeping just to reach that bar. And this is going to be an even bigger concern with children.
I wasn't there, though I have learned that generally the local pharmacy would do the gate-keeping. Now the local pharmacy does what the computer says to do based on whatever regulations were input by the back office.
There was a huge decline in morphine addiction simply by requiring that products containing morphine be labeled as such.
I don't know why you'd trust them any more than a drug dealer, and historical anecdotes about opium addicts suggest it's a valid comparison.
If you look critically at the research papers being published on these topics as a means to champion it, your hopes will be dashed.
If we let children do as they do because it was their body then where would we be as responsible parents.
However, if a seventeen year old decides to have sex with a 40 year old, we would find it morally reprehensible and all agree that she could not consent to use her body that way.
I don’t know how to rectify these two commonly held beliefs.
In the former case the doctors conflicts of interest don't seem so strong, in the latter case the doctors conflict of interest is overwhelmingly self-evident, so there is much higher risk of the doctor consciously working against his patients interests when the patient is still a minor in a major power differential.
One causes sterilisation, one causes pregnancy, western society is specifically very very against 17 year olds being pregnant and are anti-natalist and sex-negative more broadly.
That said, I'm not sure these articles are intended to improve treatment options. Rather, the goal seems to be eliminating transgender care altogether.
What's missing from this post is a sense of timescale and the steps taken throughout a patient's journey. There was no mention of patients publicly presenting as their preferred gender as a first step towards transitioning, prior to any medical intervention; I'm not sure if that's a red flag or if I just have outdated knowledge on treatment practices. I understood that the doctors seemed to be improvising with the treatment of patients, but the inconsistencies between patients' treatment weren't highlighted.
That's what's so striking. Why is that happening? There's a controversy over this.[1] It's been observed in (at least) Australia, Canada, the UK, France, Sweden, and the US. People involved in studying this have been attacked, and as a result, there's not much new data since the big controversy in 2018.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_c...
She was stabilized on antipsychotics a few months later and completely dropped all discussion of gender dysphoria, something, to be clear, that she had never talked about or hinted at prior to her psychotic episode.
It concerns me that had she had this episode a few years later, when the medical ethics had changed and Uber made it possible for a mentally ill person to travel to the city where the dr she found was located, she likely would have undergone some form of reassignment surgery with lasting physical effects and potentially catastrophic effects on her psychological well being. She has been happily married, well more or less happily, for more than a decade now, to a nice man. No sign of gender dysphoria and no recent psychotic episodes.
Even in states where beginning an HRT regimen is based on informed consent, there are many steps one must go through before having this procedure done. Multiple letters of recommendation from licensed therapists and having been on hormones for years. Not to mention the exorbitant costs even with insurance.
Your suggestion that one could Uber to another city and have SRS performed is a gross mischaracterization of the reality trans people face.
It'd be nice to have literature or deeper investigation on this.
Information about people seeking gender affirming care in different places and stages of transition is not refutable based on this article.
And it is anecdata - how many patients had positive outcomes? Article doesn’t tell you. What did the (brand new) centre learn from these cases with negative outcomes? What protocols was it using? Are they the same now? Are they common elsewhere?
I wouldn't be surprised if for most girls, treatment starts with wearing a binder, which is clothing.
If you did more research though you'd understand that the thing you feared is not especially common or even possible under normal processes, so it's not really worth fearmongering about it on a public forum.
In most first-world medical systems there are years-long waiting lists for surgeries, or even to see a specialist at all. Most people I know who've seen specialists about gender issues had to wait months to even talk to someone. Getting surgery on a whim within a few months simply doesn't happen unless you're a wealthy person flying overseas for at-your-own-risk surgery, which is also available for many other purposes.
This is similar to how you'll see people fear-mongering about things like teenage children getting surgeries, which simply does not happen. The processes don't allow for it because it would be wildly irresponsible, but you can still find lots of people talking about it as if it happens on a regular basis. In reality, adults in their twenties and thirties sit on waiting lists for years.
Note also that even if you were to schedule surgery on short notice, in many cases they require you to have been on the relevant medications for a while because if you were to have sex-related organs removed or modified surgically without having adjusted to your own hormone levels it would be a pretty nasty adjustment.
You are saying this is impossible, or that she was on the waiting list for years (as a minor).
If it happens, it's people breaking the rules and possible medical malpractice - both of which can happen in all areas of care.
You can't simply dismiss reality based on one or two outliers. For example, if you look at the typically used standards of care https://www.wpath.org/publications/soc :
* Criteria for surgery
a. Gender incongruence is marked and sustained;
b. Meets diagnostic criteria for gender incongruence prior to gender-affirming surgical intervention in regions where a diagnosis is necessary to access health care;
c. Demonstrates capacity to consent for the specific gender-affirming surgical intervention;
d. Understands the effect of gender-affirming surgical intervention on reproduction and they have explored reproductive options;
e. Other possible causes of apparent gender incongruence have been identified and excluded;
f. Mental health and physical conditions that could negatively impact the outcome of gender-affirming surgical intervention have been assessed, with risks and benefits have been discussed;
g. Stable on their gender affirming hormonal treat- ment regime (which may include at least 6 months of hormone treatment or a longer period if required to achieve the desired surgical result, unless hormone therapy is either not desired or is medically contraindicated).*
This simply does not support any claims that teenagers are easily getting surgeries, if at all. Any doctor following these standards of care would not approve it. People breaking the rules to approve it is tragic, but generalizing based on this is unhelpful because it distracts from the real problems.
1. The study on Rapid-onset gender dysphoria could be flawed -- it asked parents, and not youths themselves, which might skew the data on the prevalence and incidence of gender dysphoria
2. The number of transgender youth in the US is small[1], estimated at around 300,000. A small absolute increase would result in a large relative increase, even though transgender-identifying youth are a small percent of the population
3. Improved acceptance, awareness, diagnostics and treatment may result in transgender youth seeing more options for themselves, and thus being more public in announcing their status or seeking treatment. It's not that more people are trans or genderfluid, but rather that they're more comfortable being public with their status
[1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad...
I think the issue is that the annoying culture of the left of rejecting all "transphobic" arguments, (i say this as one of these people), means that some clinics are going too far and not being as careful as they should. The answer is probably government regulation, but we have to be careful not to be like the UK, and not just to "ban everything associated with trans healthcare at all" like Republican states are currently trying to do.
> Lisa Littman, at the time an adjunct assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, coined the term rapid-onset gender dysphoria in a 2018 study based on an online survey of parents on three anti-trans websites who believed that their teenage children had suddenly manifested symptoms of gender dysphoria and begun identifying as transgender simultaneously with other children in their peer group.
Doesn't sound terribly scientific. I do look forward to seeing a robust conclusion drawn from studies over the coming years, though, so we can find out how real it is!
"ROGD has not been recognized by any major professional association as a valid mental health diagnosis"
Calling it a controversy isn't accurate. There is no controversy. Someone made some stuff up. It's called Rapid-onset taurus cacas.
Medical education and the medical institution is full of agenda pushing and ideology by the way, do not get me started on the day they introduced nurse practitioners as fellow “providers” who only want to make our jobs easier, while laws are being passed giving them full practice authority and expanding their scope to the detriment of doctors.
I just don't get the obsession with this topic. If you're a parent, your kids are being told things you don't like all the time, including being propositioned or being offered recreational drugs. This is very low on my list of worries. Talk to them to help them make better decisions, using logical arguments instead of groundless religious commandments. Problem solved.
Prior to conception there is a 50/50 chance of being a man or a woman, but once a child enters development, being non-gender-conforming is very rare. I think people confuse the little arbitrary cultural details here (eg: girls like pink) for deeply-seated traits which are innate to gender. (eg: women have periods, and can carry children)
When you estranged
Faces look ugly
When you're alone"
J. Morisson
(Everybody is strange and weird in their own ways)
I personally believe that only a licensed, Ph.D. psychologist, or in some cases psychiatrist providing short courses of medicine, without pecuniary interest, is qualified to treat these kinds of non-gender dysphoria disorders.
Transgender medical care usually involves medicine, and the trans rights movement had a moment in the 2010s. I believe it inappropriate to use victim status to force others to provide an inappropriate treatment. It is also inappropriate to rush an inappropriate treatment because of the ticking clock argument.
I draw a comparison to how many people go to the emergency room, which cannot turn them away, because they do not have first-line care like a family doctor, or basic health upkeep such as not smoking and eating healthy food.
For clear or severe cases of gender dysphoria, early treatment is essential. Pharmaceutical and surgical. However gender transition only changes your gender! You still have to deal with whatever mental issues you had, integrate into society, and work hard to become a whole person.
The gay rights movement came of age around 1980 in my view, but everybody agreed that how inappropriate it is to attempt to treatment that medically, except for self-harm or AIDS.
I suspect that what we need is mental health to have its moment. Not "pride", or boasting about how many pills you are on. Maybe psychology programs need to be subsidized and promoted. We spent the past decade focusing on our smartphones, and I don't think it made us much happier. I suspect that we have the courage to turn some of that focus inward.
It's also my understanding that trans and non-binary individuals tend to have other co-morbid problems going on, mental health or otherwise. This may be a data problem - the other problems being diagnosed more often because they go for treatment, etc - but from the specialists I've spoken to, it probably is an actual connection, induced by stress or otherwise.
As with gender dysphoria, patients flipped from being majority male to overwhelmingly female in just a few years. They also tended to know others with the symptoms either directly, or from social media feeds whose algorithms fed them more and more content around the topic.
Late to the party, so no one is going to read this comment, but I can't help but wonder how much the explosion in Trans stuff is related to changing gender roles generally. We used to have fairly clearly separated roles, clothing styles, etc and I wonder if we just lack an adequate framework for sorting that out properly and it helps nudge some vulnerable individuals down odd pathways in unfortunate ways.
Besides, there is empirical evidence that at least 1 person read this comment ;-)
My magic 8 ball does not predict good things here.
And now we’re castrating millions in the name of diversity. Ironic.
Sounds super insensitive, but I don't mean to be. I feel awful for these people that are truly miserable and need help, but there is more going on here from a crony-capitalism and big-pharma perspective than people are willing to admit. It seems like every where I turn I am trying to be convinced it IS the answer and Gay or Lesbian people are also being forced to get in line on what is happening(if you're a gay male who only dates other biological males, you're transphobic...yeah)...
I feel this is so damaging to a large group of a future generation of our youth and creating contention even between communities that are otherwise united on the other 98% of issues that we face.
However, the general internet culture of teenagers misdiagnosing medical disorders means that there is indeed too many of the wrong people receiving gender affirming care.
In regards to the biological male thing, no sane person would say that this is transphobic. Attraction has many factors, it's just being mean about it to trans men that is hurtful, not "not being attracted to them," which is normal imo.
TERFs are a different beast entirely, because of the "accepting" part, not just the attraction part.
I also generally dislike TERFs because they're partnering with right wing reactionary groups that might be helping now but don't want women's rights in the end either.
It's the Internet, I'm not going to say that nobody feels that way, but... I mean, the LGBTQ+ movement is not traditionally a fan of the argument "pretend you're attracted to someone." That was historically a pretty big issue for them. So it's certainly not an argument that I run into, but I'm sure it's popped up on forums before.
I have seen some conversations talking about the degree to which the question of "are they datable" reveals some level of both societal transphobia and serves to reinforce gendered roles and expectations about women. I've seen people suggest that an aversion to dating transgender men/women might be something to self-examine, the same way that an aversion to dating Asians would be. But that's a very far cry from saying that someone should be obligated to date someone even though they're not attracted to them.
----
TERFs are... well, that's a different subject. I think a lot of it is exclusion and community policing of gender norms and gender alignment dressed up as feminism. That would have to be a longer conversation, but it's hard for me to understand what the "feminist" angle is of a philosophy that often strays into biological essentialism; and I've seen even cisgender women get caught in the cross-fire of communities deciding whether they present too masculine or work out just slightly too often and are therefore worthy of suspicion. I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush, but I don't think TERFs are as a whole are tearing down gender norms; I think they're reinforcing them.
It's curious how often when I read TERF literature that it falls into this trap of describing men and women as almost different species, and species that are naturally hostile to each other. I very often have to take a step back and check on what I'm reading. If someone had sent me "Pronouns are Rohypnol" before I knew that it was an influential piece, I would have assumed the piece was trying to set up a straw-feminist to tear down. If somebody had sent me passages of "Irreversible Damage" to read without the full context of the entire book, I would have assumed the book was intended primarily to argue for Christian Complementarianism.
But again, much longer conversation to have there.
If that's transphobic then surely as a gay man I'm a misogynist for not wanting female partners as well.
I have such dysphoria whole my life: why I don't have body of Schwarzenegger?
And don't laugh at me: it's actually source of many psychological problems, it's quite painful.
But everybody feels the same. Women even more
Your experience of pain in relation to your body shape is also valid, but it's different than your psychological gender and brain not matching up with your body.
I don't feel anguish over having the body I have, and I don't feel like I would be a better "man" if I had the body of Schwarzenegger. I can honestly say that I am happy with my body; I'm not perfect and I'm not muscular, but I am fairly healthy and I don't have a huge number of complaints about myself. I don't dislike seeing myself and I don't really want to look like a body-builder. Certainly I'm not covering up mirrors in my house.
I would not describe any experience I've had wanting to exercise more or to be able to get away with shaving less often as "painful" and I wouldn't say it gives me mental anguish. Not to say that anyone who says otherwise about themselves is lying, but... I don't know, I'm not sure that's as completely universal or typical as people are suggesting. Maybe if you're in that boat that's something to talk to someone about.
I think body positivity among transgender communities can be a real issue, and there's a huge number of ways that issue can be tackled and there are a number of real conversations to be had about how society reinforces body dysphoria among trans people. My understanding is that self-acceptance is a really big part of being trans and I've seen accounts of transgender people talking about how transitioning was only one part of accepting. And not to make the issue too grey, but I have seen transgender people talk about how self-acceptance and self-acknowledgement of their gender did lesson their dysphoria; that learning to stop saying "I would be gender X if I did Y" and to start saying "I am gender X regardless of whether I do Y" helped them accept their own body more. So of course there's a role for counseling in this.
But that's a conversation that HN is really just not ready to have at all. Looking at this post and looking at the amount of people arguing about whether or not gender dysphoria exists -- I did not realize that was a thing that this community was still debating; that's a pretty large amount of disconnect for this forum to have from the real world. There is room for subtlety and nuance in talking about how self-image affects transgender identity, and if you go into transgender communities, you will see people having that conversation. Genuinely, medically transitioning isn't the right choice for every transgender person and it doesn't magically solve every problem for every person, there is a psychological level of acceptance that needs to happen for a lot of transgender people.
But if you want to have that conversation... I mean, you've got to get the basics out of the way first; you have to be able to understand that there's a difference between general disappointment with your body or goals about your body and full-on dysphoria and disconnection from that body.
It's a little bizarre to read and it reminds me a lot about the conversations that happen sometimes about ADHD. "Everyone has trouble focusing", "everyone gets distracted", "I get distracted all the time constantly and can never follow up on tasks and I feel intense anguish about it and am constantly restless and need to be moving to feel calm and I don't have ADHD" (well maybe you should get that checked, friend). If someone is genuinely feeling dysphoria about their body to the same degree as a transgender person going through puberty, that's not normal and you should talk to someone about it.
It doesn't mean you're transgender or that you need surgery (although there is a lot of gender affirming care that we offer to cisgender people, from laser hair removal to hair growth/plugs, and honestly the assumption that people need to be transgender or have dysphoria to get gender-affirming care is not really accurate in our modern-day society, we spend an intense amount of time in our society consuming products and taking actions that are primarily designed to make ourselves look a certain way). But I want to get across that most people don't have a physical reaction when they see themselves in the mirror. That level of extreme experience is not universal, it's not something that everyone goes through.
Sure, lots of people have aspects of their body that they would change, but... not to that level of extreme. Not to the level where it interferes with their daily life or increases their risk of self-harm.
Another "leader" - Iran. Muslim authorities are strongly contra for homosexualism but gender correction is a right thing
Hijras/Transgender are still relegated to an inferior status and it is still treated as a "mental illness" in Iran legally speaking.
But, then again, if you are a closeted gay man in a very traditionalist household in a conservative town and from a lower class background, you could either remain closeted your whole life, openly come out and get lynched, or choose to transition and then "only" get shunned and stigmatized.
Misdiagnosis of a genuine need to change gender is just adding justification for transphobia - it allows people to say "look, these people were wrong in their decision", which can then be misused as an argument in all cases.
The law needs tightening - this isn't to prevent the changes, this is to assess proper mental faculty in separating the perceived post transition fantasy of what it's like Vs the reality, and not provide fuel for the anti trans fire.
I skimmed both.
It feels kind of shitty to be asking for a tldr or a summary.
It's missing the forest from the trees, and non persuasive to me.
I actually found the misgendering part relevant. If Jamie Reed was as progressive as she claims, wouldn't that be something she would do "correctly?" I suppose you could say she no longer believes in trans identities, so that's why she isn't willing to do it anymore. But it feels like she is attacking the medical establishment and not the people, and as such would support what I'm assuming 100% of her patients desire, no? And, if you were to accept that she is writing for a conservative audience, it follows that that crowd would be turned off by using she when talking about someone born with a penis.
I found the rebuttal compelling and I'm struggling a lot with this issue. The fact that so many medical organizations support the current care guidelines feels very contradictory to the assertions made by JR.
And as the rebuttal author notes, JR was an intake worker, with limited access to the full story of these patients, and without proper medical training to do a full assessment.
All in all, both articles are worth a read.
After reading them both, I did feel like JR's was a well coordinated hit piece with dubious assertions, but would love to hear a rebuttal of the rebuttal!
The thing is we don't know what "correct" is; we don't know the patients, we don't know how she interacted with them, we don't know what they preferred, etc. The author sees patients in quite early stages, and many may well have referred to themselves by the biological pronouns.
It gets much more complicated around the edges than some people pretend. It's an easy enough cudgel to use, and sometimes it's appropriate, but here it's just a distraction at best, and FUD at worst.
> And as the rebuttal author notes, JR was an intake worker, with limited access to the full story of these patients, and without proper medical training to do a full assessment.
There's a lot of FUD surrounding that in the rebuttal; obviously the author of that knows even less about the case than Jamie Reed, and there's lots of assumptions about how good she was or wasn't familiar with the case.
Besides, we can do this the other way too: is Erin Reed a doctor? Does she have medical training? Does she do full assessments? The entire point of Jamie's story was that not everyone with vague issues surrounding gender at a fairly young ages has gender dysphoria. I don't know if that's true or not, but merely being transgender doesn't mean anything here; your experience doesn't really provide any value, and is quite likely to bias you. What worked well for you doesn't necessarily work well for others.
That is probably a good summary of the entire allegation/conflict: "the trans community is very biased towards what worked well for them personally, and refuse to consider that it doesn't work for everyone".
Your last statement was interesting: "the trans community is very biased towards what worked well for them personally, and refuse to consider that it doesn't work for everyone."
You could add "non" in front of trans and it would probably be true as well, no? I just happen to know a bunch of trans people who feel like the dominant culture doesn't really serve them well. I trust that they have thought through it well, and know how it impacts them more than you have.
To me this whole conflict really seems less about trans people and non trans people. It's about people that don't trust the medical establishment and those that do. There are a lot of questions all over the place if you look there, and I'm not sure where I stand there.
Read the first one starting with "Jamie starts right out of the gate with right wing talking points designed to paint transgender people as being a “trend” or “social contagion.”"
If you are okay with the provided debunk proofs then...
This is in general why I’m always skeptical of these moral panics. When something is destigmatized and it’s a thing that has been there beneath the surface the whole time, it is going to suddenly look like there’s an epidemic of it.
The history of left handedness is a rabbit hole I encourage people to go down. It’s truly bizarre and fascinating and sometimes downright sadistic.
Going off on rants about "whistleblower" in scare-quotes, "manufactured controversy", "right wing talking points" and "anti-trans scree" is not helpful, it's part of the problem.
The write-up is comprehensive, goes through all Jamie Reed's points and discusses why she isn't a reliable narrator. It doesn't read as a rant at all to me.
These laws are terrible.
They've released lace underwear for guys in Japan lately.
When you get right down to it, "gender" is really just a categorization of behavioral traits. This is what we mean when we say that gender is a social construct. I mean, what are people so worried about with trans people? That they use the "wrong" bathroom, wear the "wrong" clothes, use the "wrong" pronoun? These are all arbitrary bullshit.
If we had genderless bathrooms and accepted that people could wear whatever they want and got rid of gendered pronouns, maybe we really wouldn't need special gender-affirming care.
I have it on good authority that having the "wrong" genitalia for your gender is legitimately distressing, but perhaps that is just part of the expression of the social construct of gender and if the person had grown up without the concept of gender they wouldn't care what their genitalia were. Regardless, it wouldn't be an different than any other form of plastic surgery as far as I'm concerned.
> Hand-grip strength has been identified as one limiting factor for manual lifting and carrying loads. To obtain epidemiologically relevant hand-grip strength data for pre-employment screening, we determined maximal isometric hand-grip strength in 1,654 healthy men and 533 healthy women aged 20-25 years. Moreover, to assess the potential margins for improvement in hand-grip strength of women by training, we studied 60 highly trained elite female athletes from sports known to require high hand-grip forces (judo, handball)
> 90% of females produced less force than 95% of males. Though female athletes were significantly stronger (444 N) than their untrained female counterparts, this value corresponded to only the 25th percentile of the male subjects.
> The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men.
Which would still be pretty impressive and unlikely.
This whole “actually there’s a big overlap” misconception is easily defeatable by noting that no women play in the NBA, NHL, MLB, or MLS. If there is a big overlap in physical capability, why haven’t women started going for the millions of dollars available in these open leagues? Are they too lazy, or too stupid?
The big overlap is with the rest of the population. Of course little advantages in a population are going to be exaggerated if you only sample the top 1% of people!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17186303/
> The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men.
The data from this study is helpfully visualized here: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/4vcxd0/alm...
You said "in any sport" and not bouldering, so this finding will apply. You can also consult the rest of the literature such as it is. Or spend some time in a mixed-sex group strength training program and just observe.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7253873/
> Results indicate that untrained men have greater upper and lower body strength than trained women athletes in terms of both absolute and relative strength.
Irrelevant, because it requires training, which is not at all what we're talking about when we're talking about the general population.
> Results indicate that untrained men have greater upper and lower body strength than trained women athletes in terms of both absolute and relative strength.
Let me know when half of men can iron cross their way across a difficult move with their "greater upper body strength".
You’ve chosen an arbitrary and niche sport and athlete because you literally don’t have any other examples at hand and have conveniently made it impossible to test. No one is foolish enough to boulder at this level without training.
She would lose a simple wrestling match against the vast majority of men regardless of their training.
This is all a flimsy as fuck excuse to hate on trans people.
I don’t care about the rest of whatever you’re on about. Pseudoscientific nonsense is pseudoscientific nonsense no matter what the motivation or source, and I’m glad to see you’ve apparently conceded that your pseudoscience is nonsense and have moved on to the predictable red herring ad hominems.
I disagree, but perhaps that's because the term "sexual dimorphism" was used, which is really a very minor effect in human biology compared to a lot of animals. Besides which, we have tools which can negate brute strength in a confrontation anyway.
> your climbing-specialist counterargument is insufficient to overcome that.
I concede this. I did not do a particularly good job making my case.
> have moved on to the predictable red herring ad hominems.
This entire thread is about trans people and the subject of "female safe spaces" was brought up as an argument against allowing people to transition. Forgive me if I assumed your arguments were ultimately in service to that, but you made no claim otherwise.
No, it was brought up as a counter to your claim that single-sex spaces have no value (“the ‘wrong’ bathroom… arbitrary bullshit” in your comment).
Nobody in response mentioned anything about transitioning or trans people at all.
You are welcome to make the case that the strength dimorphism shouldn’t be taken into account for individual scenarios, but the idea that it doesn’t really exist or is generally insignificant is frankly gaslighting and insulting to people born female.
That you and others would decide to attack my bad argument without attempting to make a statement about trans issues in itself is... well, something I can respect actually, I just find it difficult to believe, and also it is beside the point of the entire discussion thread.
> but the idea that it doesn’t really exist or is generally insignificant is frankly gaslighting and insulting to people born female.
...maybe. Worth considering. Anyway, I've conceded that I have made a bad argument, which is what you are claiming is all you care about in this instance.
There's a reason that sports are separated by sex. There's a reason why men are the perpetrators and victims of most crime.
Suffice it to say, I don't buy that this is all a good argument for why people shouldn't be allowed to transition.
But it is bad science to point out individuals in a population as the rule rather than exceptions to the rule.
This is exactly what parents have been fearing. They were told that cases like this are non existent. What these clinics are doing to children is criminal.
I'm as left leaning as they come and I'm also very worried and irritated by what is happening here. I hate that I have to make a new account for plausible deniability as well.
I don't really understand what doctors and a section of society is playing at. This is an issue that needs therapy not surgery. I'm sorry you feel you're in the wrong body, welcome to the club of the ugly short bald people who have a similar problem. You can do xyz but you'll never be what you want to be. It's tough but there is is, let's do some things to make you more comfortable and make life more positive.
See feelings don't have to be dismissed, but they also don't have to be pandered to. Using state funded medical services (or insurance funded if you're USA) is immoral imo. Sure if you're rich enough you can do whatever bizarre things you like to yourself, I don't care.
Otherwise you're denying other people access to the same care even though you might believe they need it - reconstructive plastic surgery for cancer survivors, androgen or estrogen suppressors for people with various hormone regulation problems, hormone replacement for post-menopausal women or men who no longer have functioning gonads, etc.
Incidentally the latter is why Californian insurance typically covers surgeries for trans people: They already cover the same surgeries for other cases.
I'd guess there are biological females who genuinely benefit from transitioning with testosterone, much like how there are many males who benefit from it due to hypogonadism/similar issues. I would have a serious problem if people started pushing testosterone on vulnerable young boys and telling them it would fix their problems, while vehemently attacking anyone who remotely questions those claims. How you think that's acceptable in girls, and compare it to informed adults getting botox for wrinkles or rogaine for hair loss is astounding.
None of the drugs you listed have significant effects lasting longer than a few months after their usage is stopped. With regard to plastic surgery, I'm not aware of any widely practiced cosmetic surgery that permanently and drastically changes one's entire endocrine system. If you're talking about cosmetic surgeries like breast implants, I don't think anyone has a problem with either trans or non-trans adults spending their money to look the way they want to. There is certainly no law to prevent it.
Article: https://erininthemorn.substack.com/p/missouri-anti-trans-whi...
> She is not a doctor, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and does not have direct medical diagnostic experience with patients.
Author of "debunction" is "Trans queer news and history content creator". Author is not a doctor, not a psychologist, not a psychiatrist too..
Instead we encourage magical thinking around identity and strip people of ability to reason about their feelings effectively.
The high rates of mental health struggles and suicides in the general US population (including but not limited to people struggling with gender issues) are used as a tool for arguing that gender care somehow leads to people's deaths instead of as a tool to argue for comprehensive, no-cost mental health care for people of all races, genders and identities.
We're just handed the latest most fashionable bogeyman - drag queens doing book readings at the library, gender-questioning kids going to gender clinics, etc - and told that if only we Put A Stop To this, maybe things will be alright again. When in reality millions and millions of people are experiencing untold suffering right now, and we could make fundamental fixes to our medical system to help all of them instead of fixating specifically on a small subset of the population and helping extremist lawmakers ban entire categories of care, whether it be gender care or abortions or birth control.
Most of the evidence I've seen around transitioning is for older cohorts who were outliers in terms of their motivation to transition - most of the push I've seen is to transition younger cohorts for which the effects of transition are unknown and experimental since we are transitioning kids in populations that we never would have transitioned before. I don't think this is necessarily WRONG, just risky and experimental and requiring tracking, but I see it being portrayed as a scientific fact that putting kids on hormone blockers as preteens makes their lives better.
> A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.
Regarding the whole notion of "Transgender kids are really just confused autistics", first what is considered an Autistic child itself is a moving target since Autism is not consistently diagnosed and we diagnose autism more broadly than we did even 10 years ago and the autistic population growth is pretty rapid itself. It's hard to get insight from something poorly understood by pointing out a correlation to another thing poorly understood. Second I've seen zero evidence that autistic populations are at any particular risk of adverse effects from gender affirming treatment or whatever, this just seems to be presumed because of condescending views towards autistics and their competence to guide their own care.
>My concerns about this approach to dissenting parents grew in 2019 when one of our doctors actually testified in a custody hearing against a father who opposed a mother’s wish to start their 11-year-old daughter on puberty blockers.
Gender identity is something rather famous for changing as you hit adolescence and this is something which has been noted throughout history to the point of being ritualised in some cases, and we even have the concept of "genderfluidity", but people seem to have this very deterministic view that whatever gender identity you had at 8 years old you have forever and you should intervene early before hormones kick in. Yet fucking with somebodies hormones at like 11 years old can't help but modify somebodies natural development of their gender identity, and that makes it hard to evaluate the effectiveness of early interventions without a control. We should make the treatment open to kids from 14 up, but below that kids should with both parents consent be allowed to enter an experimental trial on the condition that some of them will be controls. Unless we do that, we're going to keep hurting kids in ignorance, either due to under treatment or over treatment.
In regards to the claims that patients aren't being informed of the risks of gender affirming care, I think political influence is fucking with proper medical care of transgender people in both directions, both outlawing supportive and sceptical medical care alike but in different areas, and I really wish politicians would frig off of such a fast changing, poorly understood, and charged issue.
Maybe this clinic is saving trans kids, maybe it's not, but I personally would like society to stop pretending that it actually understands what will happen after they subject a significantly larger slice of the population to hormone treatments at increasingly young ages when the treatment population has multiplied several times over in short-order and we literally haven't even had time to do long term retrospectives. It's an experiment being portrayed as scientifically validated best practice. I would like to see more emphasis on medical freedom for doctors, controls, and proper long term tracking and research on patient outcomes but to allow these early interventions so long as they're being conducted as ethically as possible. That way we might even be able to identify nuances like "oh, if somebody has X issue, we should be extra cautious or extra aggressive about pursuing gender affirming care"
If anyone has at least some speculation, I would like to read about it.
https://hub.jhu.edu/2022/07/01/johns-hopkins-expands-gender-...
> "Gender-affirming care is evidence-based medical best practice that, for transgender, nonbinary, and gender diverse people, is essential health care that enhances quality of life and overall well-being," wrote Pierre Joanis, JHU's vice president for human resources; Kevin Shollenberger, JHU's vice provost for student health and well-being; and Inez Stewart, senior vice president and chief human resources officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine, in a message to the Johns Hopkins community.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/long-...
> Many scientists subsequently challenged the methodology behind Meyer’s study, as well as his interpretation of the results.
People smear Dr. Paul McHugh today for ending it, but unlike the doctors at the clinic described in this article, he cared about whether his patients were actually being benefited.
Now we've come full circle and people are beginning to study the results, just like he did in the 70's. Not surprisingly, the same conclusions seem to be popping up around the world.
As I showed, people studied the same results that McHugh studied and came to the opposite conclusion. After studying more results, JHU reversed his decision. Not surprisingly, people biased by religious dogma come to wrong conclusions despite evidence to the contrary, and this has been true since the time of Galileo.
This has been the case since… the first man.
Edited to add that the most recent studies are saying exactly what McHugh said, and you can find them discussed in other places in this thread.
People who aren't religious just can be swayed by logic and reason. People who are, can't. It's that simple. They have to break out of their culture of denying reality themselves.
Unfortunately, everything attested in this article is the direct consequence of adopting philosophical tenets of the currently-victorious contender in the Kulturkampf, namely Liberalism. Save for some cataclysmic distraction (like a war total enough to drain our resources and attention to the point of bringing us back to nature, as it were), this situation will not improve unless Americans begin to challenge the liberal dogma of bodily autonomy. Of course, no one wants to do that because that would mean admitting that the will of each individual is corrupt - and that's, like, original sin, or whatevur...
According to a study with a ~12 month follow-up period after transitioning? I read something similarly misleading recently.
I’ve certainly gotten dressed up to go nowhere, and I know women who put on makeup just for themselves too. I realize this doesn’t lie in exactly the same realm, but I hope you can see my point. Are we deluded? It seems to me that nature is a slippery slope.
Forgive me for being extremely suspicious, given the multitude of other research to the contrary.
"The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up"
Wrong. It was funded by a grant from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which has no affiliation with any transgender activists. https://www.pcori.org/about/about-pcori
Forgive me for being extremely suspicious of your ability to evaluate evidence to come to rational conclusions.
Your study compares sex-reassigned people to the general population, not those who had surgery against those who wanted surgery but didn't get it. It is cited multiple times with a correct interpretation by the paper I gave you. The author herself points out you're using it wrong. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6q3e8v/science_ama...
>Forgive me for being extremely suspicious of your ability to evaluate evidence to come to rational conclusions
Did you read your own link? It cites the NCTE study clearly.
Yes, I did. The study wasn't commissioned by the NCTE, unlike what you claimed. It uses data from a survey by the NCTE. The people answering the survey have no reason to lie, and the NCTE had no reason to believe that its data would be used in this study years later. You're grasping at straws trying to make your initial claim make sense.
Would you trust a survey on sugar done by Coca-Cola? This is the same thing. Activist surveys are worthless. Conflict of interest doesn't even begin to describe it.
Are you talking about the author, who says at the start of the article that she is married to a trans man and spent years of her life working with and helping trans people? No matter what you think of the article, that claim is obviously wrong to anyone who read it.