I stand by my claim. The online echo chambers that children, including my own, seek out very much push the ideology that any claim to be male, female, non-binary or whatever must be accepted at face value. And that the person who is making the claim should have the right to any treatment that they wish, up to and including surgery.
As for criticism of the research that exists, I agree that it isn't very good. But then again, most research in the social sciences isn't very good. See the Replication Crisis. Or as we used to say, news at 11.
I can understand some caution around the latter part of this quote, given how traumatic, invasive, and costly surgery can be. It is a defensible and reasonable position that there should be _some_ barrier-to-entry to such major decisions (especially for children), even while there's also a simultaneous reasonable concern that such barriers will be used to prevent access to folks who genuinely do need, want, and would benefit from it.
But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part? How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do? Even the position of "they are confused" or "this is a phase that will pass" or "they have been pressured into that belief" doesn't hold water - until that phase passes, that person's gender, their self-image, _is_ whatever that phase dictates. That doesn't make the current situation any less true. If you told someone "I like broccoli" and they responded "that's just a phase, you'll grow out of liking broccoli soon", your response would, presumably be "...so? I like broccoli _now_, what does your guess about the future have anything to do with it?"
Does your position on "accepting gender at face value" change if the statement "I am male" is replaced with "I see myself as male"? Are you more comfortable accepting the fact that someone's self-image can change over time, rather than imagining that gender is some abstract immutable inherent property?
How do you define denying the first part?
According to my child's world view, I need to ask them every day what their pronouns are today. And any accidental slip-ups on any adult's part are a demonstration of transphobia, which justifies a raised voice and lecture.
While I'm perfectly OK with making an attempt to treat people as they wish to be treated, at what point does the inconvenience and stress that your constant demands make on others become an unreasonable ask of them? (Which is a question that every parent of teenagers winds up asking at some point, for some reason...)
I agree that their request is unreasonable, and I'm sorry for the stress it's causing you. I can't really justify their behavior on a rational basis (teens, right?). And obviously I don't know your child, and I don't know you, but as a trans person who went through a similar phase, maybe consider what they might be thinking if you want to understand why they might be behaving like this?
For one thing, they almost certainly know your opinions about the persistence of trans identity and online echo chambers of gender identity. If (real if) you're hostile to the idea that they could really be trans, it's possible they feel hostile to the idea that you could really be making a good faith best effort to support them, which is what this sounds like to me: defensiveness. I had a very similar dynamic with my parents for several years. We came out of it understanding each other a lot better, but it was certainly rough in the thick of it. I really hope you can find a way to resolve the tension.
True, you don't know me.
When my child came out as pan, a few days later we had arranged for a trip to an old friend of mine who is a trans-woman, a lesbian, and who had a non-binary friend who was staying with her.
I regret the fact that you had a difficult relationship with your parents. I've seen that story play out. However I'm pretty confident that I'm not actually transphobic. My concern is not that I don't want a child who is trans, my concern is about what is best for my child's long-term well-being.
It’s one thing to be supportive and empathetic. It’s another thing to bow down to worship your child and let them run the show.
The trans issue has risen to a point where society must face it and figure out the bigger questions of how can we accommodate them and yet balance and find natural limits. We are so fucking far away from that point. And we will get there eventually.
I agree with the parent comment saying the trans issue is way over sampled and is or has become some kinda trend. It just is. Clearly their child showcases the main point of children know nothing when the child mis-understands what true transphobia is versus a childlike ignorance of parroting a concept they just heard about. Why is that? Well it never changes from generation to generation. If you have kids at some point they learn about attention and how to use it.
It’s kinda like personal preferences. Is it transphobic to say you are only attracted to the opposite sex and would never date or consider a trans person in a romantic relationship? Nope. But it’s a sure fired way to keep eyeballs on the screen and people in their rigid political groups.
Like this parent (although I will be more brutal) I could give two shits if they felt they were a trex or were a girl or a boy. I don’t care. What matters is that I raise a kind hearted, compassionate human being who understands the world is not your friend. And can find their grit and true will when they need it. There’s book loads more to this but boiled down I’m doing my best to not raise an inconsiderate asshole. Because they must be held to account and told when they are in fact acting like an inconsiderate asshole.
Sorry to say it that harshly, but this is basically shutting down any discussion.
To what end?
Being a teenager is really confusing to begin with, and the last thing children need is more ways to categorize and divide people into clumps.
When your kid's demands are as simple as "hey support my identity, which requires nothing but thinking slightly more about the words you use" how could they not be frustrated when their parent can't even clear that low bar.
I can imagine thousands of reasons why teenagers would lie, and maybe they'll come up with new pronouns just to annoy you. Because that's what kids do, they constantly test the limits of acceptable behavior and the limits of your patience.
That said, I agree with you that people can choose what gender they feel like and others should accept it as an opinion. But trying to force others to change their behavior to accommodate your opinion very quickly becomes unreasonable.
So gender is fine, but pronouns are already a slippery slope.
Do you believe a horny teenage guy would be willing to lie and say he identifies as female, if that means he gets to see all of his female classmates naked?
It's a tradeoff between people living out their believes and the inconvenience that this causes for others.
No, I don't. Living out that type of switch for any length of time is an enormous investment, which will change the way your peers view you forever. It is worthwhile if you're actually trans, but anyone else would be so much better off just browsing the internet.
That said, I also think single-gender spaces are in need of an re-think. Same-sex locker rooms inherently assume that people of the same gender can't be attracted to one another, which is simply not the case. So what's the point?
Same sex locker rooms don't only assume people of same gender are not attracted to each other, but also that women are disproportionally exposed to potential sexual abuse from men than the other way around. Protecting women from men specifically is very central to the idea.
What "switch" are you talking about? The trans-rights movement frowns on requiring trans people to make any sort of "switch" beyond a mere declaration. The whole concept of self-identification is that a man need do nothing more than declare that he's now a woman, and he should promptly have access to spaces and resources reserved for women, such as girls' scholarships, women's bathrooms, women's shelters, women's sports teams and athletics, women's prisons, women's healthcare, women's dating websites, etc. Requiring any sort of physical transition is said to be a violation of trans people's human rights, and thus men-- biological males with penises-- should be allowed access to these spaces by simply "checking a box".
Getting self-identification enacted in laws is a primary goal of the most prominent and powerful trans rights lobbies:
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/09/22/gender-recognition-act...
Unless someone really really commits, it's going to be terribly obvious who is acting in bad faith.
Do you know of any examples when this became a problem in practice?
- Lesbian dating sites are facing an influx of men-- biological men with penises-- who have declared that they are lesbian trans-women, and are angry when they don't get any attention from the females on the site. This has become a significant controversy in these communities, because apparently many lesbians on lesbian dating sites are attracted exclusively to other females. Now, I'm sure some of these guys actually are earnest trans-gendered women, who are honestly and in good faith seeking to fully transition. But others are just incels trying a new strategy.
- The English and Canadian prison systems are currently dealing with the ramifications of allowing men into women's prisons-- biological men with penises who declare they are women, and demand to be placed into women's prisons. In many cases these guys have assaulted women in prison. These cases are easily googleable.
- 18 male candidates from the The Force for Mexico party registered as women for this year's municipal elections in Tlaxcala, in order to get around quotas requiring equal numbers of female candidates. These are men, just straight up men, who declared themselves women just for the registration, and defended by trans rights activists saying that self-identification must be respected with no questions.
- This guy: http://www.daniellemuscato.com/. This is a biological male with a penis who has no intention of transitioning (he has a medical excuse it seems). In legal trouble and homeless at times, he demands to be let into women's shelters and placed in detention with women. He works diligently and successfully to folks critical of him banned from twitter.
Jessica Yaniv (I know, an easy target, but he's a huge influence in Canada).
Etc.
Easily implemented for newly built places, can be retrofitted to some, hard to retrofit for some.
But make it a new standard and let time solve the rest.
Any bathroom wouldn't be able to accommodate everyone. For these exception there can be single cabin room or something else.
There are a lot of bathrooms for both sexes, mostly in places where space is limited. But having segregated bathrooms is in no way a problem anywhere and I think many people are happy with that.
Also, I agree that any bathroom won't accommodate everyone. But no current bathroom does that either.
For unisex purposes it depends on the bathroom design surely.
People have this idea you have some semi-public space because people might see each other in a state of undress.
But almost all westernised bathrooms contain a bunch of toilet stalls.
If everyone is going into a toilet stall to do their business - standing or sitting - then the only shared space is for washing hands or preening in front of a mirror. And if that's an issue, optionally put that in the stall too.
If security is a problem - many toilet stalls have limited doors/walls around them - then make it secure. This effort would benefit everyone.
Then humans - whatever their persuasion - could simply do their business in peace and get on with their life.
Granted, I really appreciate urinals and I feel like they might be a casualty of switching over to unisex bathrooms in a lot of cases.
I doubt that's coming anytime soon. Would be big dumb and have no real support
Your example is way off because they are not equal processing tasks obviously and resources may not be mostly idle you just made that all up
And even if there is an inefficiency or inequality that doesn't mean the answer is unisex bathrooms I could come up with an equally contrived example for how inefficient that is
When I'm out at the theatre with my partner - we don't go back to our seats until both of us have taken care of business - I'd be happy to accept a bit of a personal delay in order to speed up the process overall (and I'd be even happier if an appropriate amount of urinals still existed - I don't know what that ratio is, maybe a quarter of the floor space or so, but eliminating them would likely make restrooms less pleasant for everyone).
Intelligent building would forecast demographics and optimize for the future I guess if you really just want "max efficiency" I assume this is already being done to an extent, but changing things already built sounds expensive af for little to no value in my opinion.
As for the headline "Teenager finds way to push parental buttons: this never-before-seen act is the fault of liberals" yes, can confirm that toddlers start practicing early.
Back in my high school days, we had some bathing events and also shared sauna. One could either voluntary use the nude beach, or walk a bit and go to an outdoor pool with proper changing rooms and dressed people.
I think the split was roughly 50/50 and there also wasn't much gender skew.
But that was a time before smartphones. When people still walked over to each other's house to hang out.
> [I am opposed to the situation that] any claim to be male, female, non-binary or whatever must be accepted at face value
That is exactly what GP was implying - that their self-image does _not_ have to be accepted.
Would you be for puberty blockers so that puberty can be delayed until 18 and automatic sex transformations be paused until the person can make a decision which way they want to go?
An open conversation and a working plan for what they want to do later in life is a good thing. I'm not opposed to hormone therapy as an interim measure. But I'm opposed to catering to teenage whims that aren't thought through very well, or discussed well, or which are driven by a desire to be part of a popular group, because I've seen the results. Confusion and self-hate and self-destruction can happen as a result of not being able to express yourself, but they can also happen as a result of too much unrestrained emancipation for a teenager, who doesn't understand the consequences. I'm not even speaking about trans issues here, just about teenage decisions in general. They're not fully rational people. I wasn't, either.
Think of the concepts of "citizen", "resident", "immigrant", "ex-pat", "DREAMer", etc - all terms related to where someone lives and what set of laws applies to them. Regardless of how the person feels, the label isn't just for their own sake. Someone can be a citizen and an immigrant if they are naturalized, saying someone is a resident implies (but not definitely) that they are not a citizen, ex-pats are assumed to be temporarily in the place where they reside.
Labelling trans women as women is a lossy translation that ignores a lot of societal edge cases.
Saying someone is a cancer surviving resident doesn't add anything to my knowledge of their medical history or which laws apply to them, but resident vs ex-pat tells me a lot.
There's no debate I'm aware of about lowering the age for getting a tattoo, or drinking, or acting in porn, or other things which are fine for adults, but which we don't permit 12 year olds to do.
A lot of us remember similar mistakes from their own teenage years. I had a short phase where I thought I was gay, because my classmates were starting to date girls but I had a close guy friend and wasn't very interested in girls. Then I looked it up, found some resources clearly explaining that's not what being gay is, and walked away more secure in my identity. If someone had told me that I couldn't be wrong, because nobody knows how I feel better than I do, I would probably have come out and then been confused and insecure for years.
2. None of this is even remotely new, Im not sure where you're getting that impression from. Germany had an entire institute dedicated to studying trans people at the turn of the 20th century [1]. I'd agree that for a variety of (usually discriminatory and religious) reasons it hasn't been well studied, but trans people certainly arent new.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/24702897188036...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...
2. Transgender is not new. But the broader public debate about the distinction between sex and gender is recent.
Your specific exposure to the public "debate" is recent, sure. But just because you hadn't heard of it before the heritage foundation spent millions of dollars to insure you did didn't mean it wasn't happening.
Surely, if we're trying to group people by biological sex, we'd use chromosomes and ternary logic: male / female / intersex.
You won't easily find support for that on hacker news =)
Like yeah, Im aware HN (as a population) hates women, and GSM in general, but somehow im always surprised by how much yall do.
You shouldn't believe me you should believe science. I'm not arguing any of that go read about it yourself.
Some people claim to be cats. The argument is fairly leaking too. You might argue it is different for gender and to a degree that is true. Doesn't But this argument is pretty leaking too.
Because people lie about themselves all the time. Especially teenagers. We don't take every claim made by teenagers about their feeling as true on face value. We know they're practicing how to deceive people as part of growing up.
I removed that part as I agree it wasn't relevant.
> As for criticism of the research that exists, I agree that it isn't very good.
Unfortunately it's so poor that I judge it as being insufficient to use to form an opinion on this issue. It's much worse than the replication crisis at large, it's not clear that their methods prove what they claim in the first place if you look at their work. The pages I linked go into greater depth about why this is a difficult question to study and what the existing research gets wrong.
> The online echo chambers that children, including my own, seek out very much push the ideology that any claim to be male, female, non-binary or whatever must be accepted at face value.
That's as may be, but I suggest you read the WPATH standards of care if you're interested in what the medical community in general thinks about the medical treatment of trans people, including kids. It's a little out of date (2012), but if you can't find a knowledgeable medical professional nearby it's pretty much the gold standard, and is very well supported by evidence: https://www.wpath.org/publications/soc In particular, adolescents seem much less likely to desist than younger children.
In not saying that applies to all cases, but definitely a good number of them among young people, especially girls.
It wouldn't be easy to prove something like that, because you're claiming the causation is inverted. You can't very well construct a controlled study out of people's social connections or gender identity.
I don't think either of us can do more than an educated guess here.
It seems rather obvious that something like social contagion is going on, similar to anorexia. There may be cases with other causes, but a lot of them at the moment are probably social contagion.
If you think about it, onset of puberty is when the bodies of kids undergo drastic changes, and it is normal that they struggle to come to terms with it. Maybe worse for girls because their bodies change in more obvious sexual ways.
So they are in a vulnerable state where their bodies feel wrong until they have adjusted to their "new world".
I don't find it surprising that they are vulnerable to people telling them the reason their body feels wrong is because they are really trans, and they desperately grasp for an offered cure.
That is just me thinking, not "medical research", mind you. However, I think parental common sense is underrated when it comes to such issues. Too much expert bullshit has been injected into child rearing over the centuries.
This is frequently claimed but is untrue, or at the very least highly uncertain. The studies most often referenced have serious methodological errors, including inconsistent definitions of dysphoria (owing partially to problems with the Gender Identity Disorder diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV that have since been fixed with the DSM-5) and desistance (in some cases counting anyone who didn't follow up with the clinic conducting the research as having desisted) https://www.gdaworkinggroup.com/desistance-articles-and-crit...
Julia Serano has also written extensively on this topic with much depth and nuance, at least in my opinion: https://juliaserano.medium.com/detransition-desistance-and-d...