That subtilely implies it’s a decision to view oneself as a different gender from what was assigned at birth, but it’s not entirely clear it’s a choice in every case. Edge cases in biology get wild and sex assigned at birth can be a near arbitrary decision. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)

Parents making major medical decisions has a huge precedent in a wide range of procedures with significant risks and consequences. Separating conjoined twins for example.

It is entirely clear that it can be the case, as proven by the existence of people "detransitioning".

It is also entirely clear that there have been parents (usually mothers) who wanted to have a trans child because it was cool.

There is a logical flaw in suggesting that something that occurs with a small percentage of a population such as “detransitioning” implies anything about every member of a population.

Child abuse exists, but doesn’t imply anything about every parent.

> There is a logical flaw in suggesting that something that occurs with a small percentage of a population such as “detransitioning” implies anything about every member of a population.

> Child abuse exists, but doesn’t imply anything about every parent.

This is funny because that's the exact argument that transphobic opponents say about trans people themselves and the argument as to why gender fluidity or gender outside of sex doesn't exist. "Just because an extremely small number of people believe they are a different gender than their biological sex doesn't mean that gender is different from biological sex" is almost exactly the argument that transphobes use.

I think you fundamentally fail to understand what I just said. Proper unbiased random sampling allows you to create sub populations that tend to reflect the characteristics of a larger group, biased populations don’t share that relationship.

“Because some animals hibernate, all animals hibernate” is just as flawed as saying “Because only a small percentage of hibernate, no animals hibernate.” Instead the relationship is “Because some animals exist that hibernate, there exist animals that hibernate.”

I do not suggest that detransitioning can indeed extrapolate to the whole group.

I am saying that it exists, therefore at least some people regret their transition, therefore they should not be allowed to make that decision at 12, or for their parents to do so.

That’s pretty flawed argument on the face of it, very few things win a cost benefit analysis if you disregard the benefit and thus require exactly zero cost.

The real question is whether detransitioning or other negative outcomes are greater than the number of suicides prevented by allowing early transitioning, and that’s a rather more complicated hurdle to jump.

So-called "detransitions" represent way less than 1% of the trans population. In particular, the proportion of people regretting their transitions is much smaller than that of mothers regretting having their kids. They receive massively inflated media attention because their stories are picked up and turned into propaganda in service of bigoted narratives.

So-called "trans" represent way less than 1% of the world population. ... They receive massively inflated media attention because their stories are picked up and turned into propaganda in service of [self-serving] narratives.

The vast majority of trans people wish their demographics received much less media attention... The issue is with right-wing bigots who feel it is their life missions to make their lives as miserable as possible, when they just want to be left alone.

>from what was assigned at birth

The passive voice language here is really bizarre. Who is doing the assigning?

>Separating conjoined twins for example.

This is not, in any way, comparable to a 12 year old taking medications that permanently sterilize them.

> The passive voice language here is really bizarre. Who is doing the assigning?

Typically the parents and doctors.

"You have a beautiful baby girl!" Is assigning a gender

No, this is an observation. What, do the parents and doctors flip a coin or throw darts before "assigning" a "gender"?

It is quite common for babies to come out of the womb with blonde hair, only for it to darken to brown later in life. The baby isn't blonde, it just looks blonde right now.

Same with gender. Doctors observe a flavor of genitals, make a reasonable assumption, and legally assign the gender which seems appropriate.

Not just that, start talking hundreds of millions of births and you get clerical error.

Which could then become rather complicated if there are laws saying the sex assigned at birth has significant lifelong legal consequences.

Clerical errors get corrected. Because they are errors.

Only in theory is it so easy to separate clerical errors from other issues.

So in practice clerical errors cause all kinds of long term havoc. Once declared dead it can be a monstrous effort to prove to various systems you are in fact alive.

My sweet summer child.

What? Hair color and gender are not the same thing. This is a bizarre argument.

Because it isn't an argument. It is an assertion

Sometimes people use something called analogies or similar examples to help explain a foreign concept. In this case, the poster was trying to explain that our traits are birth do not always reflect who we are as adults. Gender is one such trait. Hair color is another.

There’s this phenomenon in this thread where commenters are taking something that’s superficially similar and then making an extreme claim that, upon inspection, does not hold up at all or is completely irrelevant to the argument being made. That is what is happening here. “An adult’s hair color can be different than what it was at birth” is a true statement, but of course is not relevant at all to the claim that one’s gender is just as malleable as one’s hair color, which is what this so-called analogy attempts to do. Real analogies do not do this, and when people deploy the above formulae it’s easy to recognize as bad faith.

Except gender is as malleable as hair color. Sex isn't, but gender is. Gender is the social expectations for a human in the context of a specific culture.

If I live in Virginia until adulthood, then move to American Samoa, my gender expression is going to radically change. I'll start wearing skirts. If I then move to Qatar, my gender expression will change again. I might still think of myself as a man through those changes, but whats expected of me and how I view myself with those cultures will shift. "What does it mean to be a man?" Is very different, globally.

So even if I consider myself a man, that definition regularly changes for different contexts. Clothing, conversational style, physical affection (it's common for men to hold hands in parts of the Middle East, and considered uncomfortable in the states.)

Given gender expression and identity can change as you transit cultures, surely you can see that some people might belong to cultures whose definition of "what does it mean to be a man" might be "whatever the fuck you want". Punk and queer subcultures, for instance, have different gender expectations than say, the Vatican.

For some cultures, genitals have little to no bearing on one's social expectations. Fit into the role that feels right, who cares about what is in your DNA.

>Except gender is as malleable as hair color.

Incredible statement, and you contradict yourself later on in your response. If I go put on a skirt that does not change my gender. You are, perhaps intentionally, injecting commentary on differing cultural norms on gender expression in order to deflect from prior statements that are more definitive on the malleability of gender itself. There's that motte and bailey, again.

>For some cultures, genitals have little to no bearing on one's social expectations. Fit into the role that feels right, who cares about what is in your DNA

This is fantasy, but I'll play a long for a minute. If one's physical characteristics have little to no bearing on one's social expectations [for gender], then why is it necessary to implement significant physical alterations via medications and surgery to "fit" into a role that feels right?

> why is it necessary to implement significant physical alterations via medications and surgery to "fit" into a role that feels right?

Good question, there's three answers here:

1) It's not necessary. Many trans people do not want or do not get bottom surgery. It's an incredibly difficult surgery, and many folks also believe it's unnecessary to be trans.

2) The cultural group that the trans person belongs to will only accept them if they have the surgery, so the trans person must perform it to be recognized.

3) Some trans folks experience sexual dysphoria, seeing one's birth genitals causes anxiety, discomfort, and depression.

One cannot ask a baby what social role they would like to have. Typically, in approximately 97-99% of cases, that aligns with the genitalia. So no, no coin flip. It's typically done by looking at genitalia. You'll be right almost always.

Which is why puberty blockers are prescribed to transgender children, delaying puberty until later in life when a "good decision" can be made, usually closer to the mid to late teens.

Sadly, it's not possible to "delay puberty" until later in life without permanent consequences. Puberty cannot simply be resumed later. Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases. The changes can't be reversed later as if hormones were not altered during critical phases if the person changes their mind.

It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades.

> Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases.

Which is generally the goal. It is of course not possible to retroactively have allowed puberty to progress as though the blockers had never been taken, but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again, as is done for cisgender children who take them.

It almost feels like you're arguing definitions.

> It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades

Precocious puberty is a condition in which puberty happens earlier than it's supposed to.

The goal of puberty blockers in precocious puberty is to delay puberty until the correct age and physiological growth window.

Puberty blocker in precocious puberty are also not used to induce hormonal profiles that are different than the body's eventual genetic set point, just to delay them until typical puberty ages.

Delaying puberty until it aligns with the body's expected pubertal ages is completely different. You cannot extrapolate and claim this as evidence that we can safely delay puberty until adulthood, well beyond pubertal age.

> but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again

I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.

You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim. The usual approach with puberty blockers is prescribing them around the onset of natural puberty and one way or another stopping them around the age of 16. While there are sadly some cases of people who started hormone therapies and later regretted it, I'm aware of no cases of long term health impacts that are attributed to delaying puberty until 16. If you do know of some reports please let me know.

I asked Claude to see if it could find anything and the only reports it could find was some long term bone density issues, but only in trans women and it seemed potentially related to estrogen dosing

> You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim.

> I asked Claude...

There are no double-blind studies, RCTs, or otherwise on this topic because it's not a situation that lends itself to that type of study. Please don't try to ask AI to summarize the situation because its training set is guaranteed to have far more discussion about it from Reddit and news articles than the limited scientific research

Of the papers out there, many are either case reports or they're studies that look into the case where people go from puberty blocker therapy into gender-affirming care, not the cases where they change their mind and discontinue with hope of returning to their baseline state.

Above I was addressing the implication that puberty blockers are a safe way to press pause on puberty until much later without consequence. That's simply not true.

Those studies you found about bone density also note that they can reduce height, and along with it other growth changes that occur during those ages in conjunction with puberty. Someone who takes puberty blockers until 16-18 will have a different physical anatomy than someone who does not. You cannot resume growth in adulthood after discontinuing the medications.

So the studies you found are consistent with what I'm saying: You cannot delay puberty without also impacting the growth that happens during that phase. That's one of the main reasons why people take the puberty blockers! As someone gets older, the window for that growth does not stay open forever.

I'm not asking for a double blind study. I'm asking for examples of someone who took puberty blockers, regretted it and stopped, and then went on to not be able to live the life they wanted to live. I'm not aware of any such stories and I'm pretty familiarly with the population of people who regret taking hormones. When I double checked with Claude it also failed to find anything accept the issue around bone density I mentioned.

There are plenty of studies that point to strong evidence that this protocol results in better mental health outcomes because for whatever potential consequence there is for delaying natural puberty, there are plenty of known irreversible impacts of allowing it to progress.

If you have other evidence, even just observational studies it would be good to share that.

And again the recommendation is to continue until 15 or 16, not until 18

It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years. If the "correct" age is what we see today, then there's thousands of generations of humans who had puberty naturally occur "too late" yet we're all still here to talk about it. If the "correct" age instead is when it used to occur, then everyone should go on puberty blockers for a few years to avoid this unnatural surge of precocious puberty.

> I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.

Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes. For young trans people, access to blockers can save them from a lifetime of dealing with the consequences of a puberty they did not want. Likewise, blockers can save a cisgender child from unwanted consequences of a puberty happening too early.

That doesn't mean "until adulthood", it could just be a few years. But even then, I think blockers are a compromise to appease people who doubt the ability of trans kids to make their own decisions about their bodily autonomy. I think trans people should be able to go on cross-sex hormones basically at will, but certainly after no more than a cursory chat with a therapist.

> It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years.

The change over the past couple hundred years is measured on the order of a couple years at most.

This has nothing at all to do with hormonal intervention until adult ages. Once someone reaches adulthood the window for a lot of changes has closed.

> Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes.

You're either not understanding, or trying to avoid an inconvenient point: Once blocked during critical periods, many of those changes simply cannot happen at a later date.

Puberty cannot be delayed until adulthood and then resumed as if nothing happened.

I feel like you ignored my entire last paragraph. I don't know how to respond to this without just pasting it again.

I read it, but you keep moving the goalposts around so much and introducing irrelevant detours that I can't respond to everything you write, sorry.

I've been consistent about my point, but you've introduced so many other topics including the "maybe it's only for a year or two" point that this is just one big gish gallop

Your point about puberty happening earlier and earlier also contradicts your arguments about how it might only be for a year or two

Puberty only lasts a couple of years. First menstruation usually happens between ages 9 and 18 - that's a spread longer than the duration of puberty! Look at any puberty-age high school class and you'll find one kid who has basically finished puberty, while another has barely started.

In other words: the "window" isn't as crucial as you make it seem.

I had a brain injury when I was 12 that knocked my testosterone levels way down.

In my 20s this was discovered and I went on testosterone replacement. My hands are still the same size as my mom’s. My feet didn’t get back to the size they were before the accident. I didn’t regain the height I lost. God only knows what it did to my brain.

Maybe if you’re only on them a little bit you’d be fine, but the whole concept is bad. My wife fainted when she got her first period. Why? She didn’t want to be a woman. She was a tomboy. It turns out that the flood of sex hormones during puberty can actually make you feel like a woman/man, which should surprise no one. To block that from happening and potentially effectively treating the dysphoria is madness.

Your anecdote is a bit of a tangent. Trans kids wouldn't be on blockers as long as your hormone levels were out of balance, and they generally want to avoid the changes which you bemoan the loss of.

But do you even find your life to be significantly harmed by your smallish stature? There are short people who never had brain injuries, and it's generally not such a concern that we feel the need to make them larger. Lots of them even wish they were taller.

And it's a pretty frequent straw-man to compare tomboys to kids with persistent gender dysphoria. They only seem superficially similar to people who really haven't engaged with the huge breadth of research on trans people over the past century. It also ignores the fact that there are feminine presenting trans masculine people (those born female, who medically transitioned, but still present femininely), or tomboy trans feminine people (born male, medically transitioned, still present masculinely).

I very much wish I was still (at least) 6 feet tall, yes. Luckily puberty hit me early and I developed "down there" quickly, otherwise that would also really bother me.

The point is that my wife has said she very well might have been confused and thought herself trans (at the time) when she very much is not. She liked to do boy things. She didn't want to be a woman. That's pretty much what the lines are.

But surely puberty, not just maturity, is necessary to fully understand the sexual experience and whether your feelings about yourself crystalise differently in the presence of sexual drive. Not to mention, the idea of delaying puberty seems like an invitation for unrelated and/or unforeseen downstream consequences on biological health.

It is not. Precocious sexual drive is possibly amongst the worst things there is for gaining sexual maturity. Also known as 'thinking with your dick'. CSA aside, you can do a ton of damage to your life by just going along with your sexual drive.

I am a virgin at 27 years old. What am I missing about the sexual experience? Is it somehow locked out to me? Or… can I access it intellectually, and reason about it with its ups and downs?

There's a reason the consent age does not start at puberty.

I’m really scratching my head at the response to this one. Do people around here really believe consent should start at puberty?

I’m aware that’s kind of a meme in certain highly religious and/or conservative communities but it’d be shocking if it were a mainstream position.

> I am a virgin at 27 years old. What am I missing about the sexual experience?

Sex.

> What am I missing

Sexual identity is an important component of gender identity. Encouraging people to make conclusions about their gender identity before they understand their sexual identity seems risky to me, especially when a child is being asked to make decisions with potentially life-altering medical consequences.

To be clear, a person does not need to have had sex to understand their sexual identity. They need to know what they find attractive and how their sexual identity relates to their own body. Even if someone feels like the opposite gender, that does not necessarily mean their sexual identity will automatically align with that.

It may be true that the transgender experience is something more fundamental to the self than “mere” sex. But when the choice is between one set of trade-offs and another, such as intervention versus non-intervention, I would contend that understanding one’s sexual identity is a critical piece of information.

Yup. Absolutely insane that university "educated" people have been telling us that kids who believe in Santa Claus are capable of making decisions like this.

Have you considered that due to their education and research those people may know more on the subject than you do?

Regret rates for transition remain notoriously low (within 2%) with main reasons for regret stated to be transitioning too late or environmental lack of acceptance or support.

Besides, despite some orgs claiming there is a "transgender trend", we are just not seeing this in the data.

It's hard to impossible to go back. But the suicide rate is high.

It is high because primarily a minority stress of being a transgender person in unaccepting environment:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266656032...

After reading the above I don't believe they concluded stress of living in a non-accepting world is the primary reason.

30% think about killing themselves and 4%+ try each year is shocking. I think whatever side of the debate you are on we can agree things aren't working out for too many people who go through this process. If this was a drug or vaccine or hair shampoo it would have been pulled off the market.

> people who go through this process

Through what process? This was a study about trans and nonbinary people, not specifically about people who have “transitioned”

I would imagine the rate of depression and similar disorders in trans people is extremely high. To be so unsatisfied with one’s own body that you consider (or go through) major treatment and surgery to change something so fundamental.

Demonstrably false. Transgenderism is a cult ideology intentionally inducing trauma to recreate multiple personality disorder in children. They are easier to abuse, and commit suicide.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200523211027/https://www.acped...

In 1979 Johns Hopkins Hospital had banned all sex-change operations permanently at their facilities due to rates of suicide having skyrocketed amongst transgender post reassignment surgery. Suicide is twenty times greater among adults who used cross-sex hormones and underwent gender reassignment surgery.

According to Johns Hopkins Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry Dr. Paul R. McHugh, “Hopkins stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, producing a ‘satisfied’ but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for amputating normal organs.”

John Hopkins concluded...

Transgenderism is a mental disorder

Sex change is biologically impossible

People who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder

The suicide rate among transgendered people who had the surgery is 20 times higher

*70%-80% of children who expressed transgender feelings, overtime, lost those feelings.

In 2017 Johns Hopkins Hospital has reopened its transgender care clinic as the Johns Hopkins Center for Transgender and Gender Expansive Health.

2022 research into Hospital's archives found the decision to cease operation in 1979 was political, not evidence based:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36191317/

> *70%-80% of children who expressed transgender feelings, overtime, lost those feelings.

This number most likely comes from a study that classified girls as transgender based on behaviors like preference to wear their hair short of wear pants instead of dresses or skirt:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21216800/

Those children did not self-identify as transgender and further more, research could not contact 41% of them for the follow up:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-end-of-the-desistance_b_8...

I doubt that is the main reason why transgenderism has been promoted so much in recent years. Most of the ones pushing this ideology appear to fit the profile of autogynephilic males who wish to flaunt their paraphilia in public and gain access to the spaces of unconsenting women while doing so.

You created this account exclusively to articulate transphobic misinformation?

What misinformation?

Media research points to transgender topic being spun primarily by traditional media and social media as a political wedge issue to mobilize right-leaning voters, akin to abortion rights before:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/politics/transgender-c...

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/Anti-trans-attitudes...

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/right-dominating-faceb...

That sounds like appeal to authority, it is classified as a fallacy.

it's only a fallacy in purely logical arguments. Appeal to authority makes sense in medical, scientific, engineering, and other contexts when the arguments necessarily depend on ambiguous data and subjective conclusions.

Why is it okay for OP to question authority in the subject matter while me pointing out they research it more isn't?

I have also pointed out that regret rates for transition are within 2%.

> despite some orgs claiming there is a "transgender trend", we are just not seeing this in the data.'

Rapid-onset gender dysphoria is a well documented phenomenon.

https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(16)30765-0/abst...

https://statsforgender.org/since-the-turn-of-the-millennium-...

It is not.

Lisa Littmans research behind „rapid onset gender dysphoria” is a survey amongst parents recruited on three anti-trans internet sites and communities:

https://psychcentral.com/lib/there-is-no-evidence-that-rapid...

    The study was based on 256 responses to an online survey of parents recruited from these three websites

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_c...

That by itself means its heavily biased research on a weak sample.

„Stats for Gender” site is ran by Genspect, which is also a biased source on the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genspect

> Genspect, which is also a biased source on the subject:

Organization that supports position <x> supports position <x>.

If Genspect can be discarded as being a biased source, then so can WPATH and every other org supporting gender ideology.

Given the fraught nature of the debate, Wikipedia seems like a poor source for determining the bias of players in the debate - the most passionate debaters have plenty of time to just edit Wikipedia.

Can you explain what „gender ideology” is supposed to mean?

The primary issue with Genspect is poor scientific rigour applied to their publications, as I have shown above. Pretty much „if it fits our platform, we will spread it”.

WPATH : if it fits our platform, we will spread it.

How old are kids when they get their foreskin lopped off?

Indeed, that’s a barbaric custom, akin to genital mutilation, that should be reserved for a real medical necessity, never for religious reasons

It is literally a form of genital mutilation. The foreskin is homologous to the hood of the clitoris.

Hey, you aren't supposed to question our glorious metzitzah b'peh!

They do not make that decision, and it is entirely irrelevant to the discussion.

And yet we cannot stop time, and a decision has to be made. It seems natural to involve the child in this decision.

Of course, the next best thing (if a decision can't be made now) after stopping time are puberty blockers. Which are not completely without risks, but this applies to the other two options just as well (if not more so).

You can't not make decisions, and to claim so is to frame choosing one particular option as not-a-decision.

> At 12 you simply do not have sufficient capacity to make a good decision on the matter.

At 12 kids do not have sufficient capacity to handle any major decision, including any medical procedure.

That does not take away their right to see their best interests represented and defended.

and yet trans children exist and deserve medical care and social acceptance just like anyone else

Yes. Psychiatric care, counseling for past abuse, treating difficulties from ASD and/or ADHD, and acceptance of their feeling different or scared or confused, and that there is nothing wrong with who they are or the body they were born with.

So what about the kids who already get all of that and still say they are transgender? Should they perhaps be treated like they actually are transgender, or do you propose forced conversion therapy - like we tried in the past with gay people and left-handed people?

Puberty blockers aren't being handed out like candy. There's a rather intense psychological diagnostic process before it.

Give them love and care, and let them grow out of it. Do not sterilize and mutilate them—a most extreme form of “conversion therapy”.

You assume they will "grow out of it". You are ignoring the fact that the majority of them won't grow out of it - even when given love and care.

Then we should prescribe puberty blockers to everyone until they can make such a decision.

The obvious solution is to prescribe puberty blockers to 100% of children. After all, how can a 12-year-old decide that they are cis - they don't have the capacity for that yet. They can undergo the right puberty, whatever that may be, once their brain has matured.

That suddenly looks like a very silly argument, doesn't it?