theprincess
Allowing a trans child to go through their natal puberty is not a neutral act. A trans person who "passes" has a much better lifetime outcome thanks to facing less discrimination and having less body image issues (not many people living as females would enjoy being called a man in a dress and harassed regularly based on their body proportions regardless of their chromosomes).
> and not the shallowly insulting straw man argument you present as the only option.
It's not a shallow straw man. Anti-trans activists want to ban care for trans people outright. They want conversion therapy - or what they have slickly labled "gender exploratory therapy" - to be the only treatment available.
If we hadn't lived through many decades where such treatment was already the only option and seen how disastrous it was I may be less inclined to say they are acting in bad faith, but, alas, we know exactly what conversion therapy does: it creates incredibly traumatized adults who are still trans.
You've really been running wild in this comments section, as have I. I can see that we're both very interested in this topic, but from different sides.
What I'll point out here again, is that you continue to paint reputable organizations that disagree with you as "ideological" while maintaining yourself as some sort of unbiased outside observer. This is blatantly untrue.
You are the one trying to change the facts being reported by reputable sources. You are the activist who is engaged in a campaign of attempting to ideologically modify unbiased institutions.
I think the trans topic can really rile people up, and there's no shortage of think pieces of conspiracy theories about it. Same as has existed around lots of minority groups that caught the attention and ire of the larger public.
You aren't the unbiased observer however. You are an activist, and it shows in your writing.
> any legitimate discussion or criticism about gender-affirming care, possible social cause that's driving the increase of trans-identifying teenagers
Trans-identified is a term created by anti-trans activists initially as an "in joke" because calling someone a trans identified male or trans identified female created acronyms that spelled traditionally female and male names: TIM and TIF, where TIM would be applied to trans women and TIF would be applied to trans men. A group that is serious about improving the world wouldn't choose their terminology so as to make fun of or harass people. A hate group would.
> or how certain trans rights infringes on women's rights
It's not at all clear that trans rights infringe on women's rights. The right to segregate yourself from elements of the population that you find distasteful isn't guaranteed. Otherwise we'd still have Jim Crow laws in the American South and lesbians would still be barred from women's sports due to concerns about them being predatory in locker rooms - yes this was a big concern in the 1980's.
> the capture of cultural institutions by radical activists
This is conspiratorial thinking. "Institutions" are made up of individuals and operate under some guiding principles. They aren't captured like territories in a game of risk.
> This would also mean that statements made by countries that are arguably more progressive than the US (i.e. UK and European countries) about the current trans issue would fall into that category as well.
The UK and EU have different politics than the US. They are economically more egalitarian, but socially can be very conservative.
> it's hard to believe that the medical and activist organisations in the US are actually acting in good faith
Why would you conflate medical and activist organizations? Isn't it possible that you are the activist, and that you'd like to bend medical organizations to your will because they disagree with your own prejudices?
> Anyone of sound mind can clearly evaluate that my point isn't transphobic. The reply to this comment is a demonstration of what's wrong with the US.
Saying that nobody can disagree with you unless they are mentally unwell, and then calling someone who disagreed with you an example of "what's wrong with the US" is very odd behavior. It doesn't seem like the way someone operating in good faith would behave.
The UK and EU are hardly a paradise for trans people. Until recently they even REQUIRED trans people to be sterilized, I suppose under the dual assumptions that 1.) they weren't fit to have children and 2.) if there's a genetic component to being transgender it's best to weed it out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/world/europe/european-cou... (this was only stricken down in 2013)
These days, you'll notice a lot of europeans calling to clamp down on transgender people because they'd prefer for them to be gay. Conversion therapy is conversion therapy, however, and whether you do it US style where you try to make someone a good straight Christian or European style where you try to make them a feminine male or butch female, it's still wrong.
As for sterilization, people bring this up without pointing out that we can bank sperm and eggs. A treatment plan for trans youth can wait until they reach a tanner stage (these are the stages of puberty) where they can bank before starting puberty blockers. That is more reasonable than an outright ban.
As for Lupron's side effects, parents are informed about possible side effects. Just like with precocious puberty. It remains telling that families are allowed to access these treatments for some reasons but not others. The double standard betrays prejudice and political meddling in the affairs of parents and doctors.
About 2% want to transition back. 98% are quite sure, and are happy with being treated. Trans youth who are not treated tend to be miserable as adults, with many committing suicide since their bodies have been shaped by the puberty of their natal sex in such a way as to draw constant negative attention. While it is very reasonable to want to lower that 2% rate down even further, attempting to rip care away from that other 98% is not reasonable. Just prejudice, masquerading as concern for children, same as the 80's when "save the children" was having a national campaign against homosexual rights.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S188898912...
They have a serious problem. The level of hubris in assuming that all these heterosexual parents, many of them conservative, would just up and decide to "trans" their kids is outstanding.
Whatever makes people trans is immutable. Every possible way has been tried to "fix" them, by making them happy as their assigned sex. All the attempts just led to broken people, many of whom killed themselves.
The gall to just insert yourself into the lives of these kids and their families, without understanding their struggles or knowing them, and trying to take away the one proven path to them having a happy successful life is really something to behold.
Agnes Torres was not intersex, she was merely classed as such which allowed her to live a normal life. Funny enough, your comment itself shows why this was successful. You see intersex as more legitimate and because of that you "give it a pass."
Agnes Torres was transgender, but was treated as legitimate back in the 1950's. Being treated like a normal human being allowed her to live a good life back then, free from hate.
It goes to show, if people would just allow trans people to live their lives, they could blend in with society. The thing holding them back is just... prejudice. How sad.
Yes, I was pointing out how the conversion therapy works. I know lots of happy feminine gay men and butch gay women for example, but they don't have gender dysphoria. Trans people aren't the same as feminine gay men or butch gay women.
Zucker himself, whose conversion therapy included punishing boys for playing with barbies, said he supported the idea of someone being a feminine man and saw his therapy as a way of achieving that. He would straight up tell parents that their children would most likely be gay, but that being gay was better than being trans.
So, ironically, we have a conversion therapy, where the aim was to turn trans kids gay. I guess they thought that if you punished gender non-conformity early on you could instill a sense of maleness or femaleness into a kid, and then later they could just be more femme or butch as they liked. Sick stuff.
Many homophobes have made "medical" arguments about why sodomy should be banned. Aids was seen as a "gay disease" and as proof of how homosexuality caused and spread diseases. A good friend of mine's mother refused to have her hair done by a gay man in our small town because she said she was scared he may cut his hand while cutting her hair and give her hepatitis or aids (what's more, she was a nurse).
Beyond that, pathologization of gender non-conformity is why homosexuality was classed as an illness until relatively recently, and it's been a common source of medicalized discrimination shared by gay and trans people.
> why are there so many detransitioners coming out recently
Because the same few are being trotted about by conservative media outlets and political action committees to stir up hate.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/former-detransitioner-fights-anti-...
good info here too:
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/media-s-detransition...
A study showing the rate of desistance in trans youth, using more recent cohorts, showing that it still hovers around 2% where it has basically always been:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S188898912...
tl;dr 98% of trans youth are well served by receiving medical care and 2% are not. Conservative media blows up coverage on the 2% in order to try to ban treatment for that other 98% instead of doing the sane and humane thing, which would be to try to screen out more of the 2% from getting care and allowing that 98% live happy lives.
Conversion therapists like Ken Zucker know full well about gender dysphoria and helped create the old "gender identity disorder" diagnosis in DSM IV. The "conversion" they are trying to achieve is to change the child's gender identity so that it's congruent with their sex via conversion therapy. This has failed spectacularly time and time again, and yet, prejudice against trans people, keeps folks interested in "treating" gender dysphoria in this manner.
There was an article on Zucker and his practices in 2008.
https://www.npr.org/2008/05/07/90247842/two-families-grapple...
What it comes down to is just punishing gender non-conforming behavior. Kids treated in this way have been prone to commit suicide as adults, or, to transition anyway but then have to deal with a lifetime of ridicule for having the marks of a male puberty on their body. Outing them as transgender at a glance, whereas if they'd have had access to gender affirming care they'd have been able to blend in and, you know, go buy milk at the store without being gawked at or harassed.
It's a shame that this person was in such a difficult situation, but, barring some extraordinarily rare reaction, a few months would not cause long term problems. The full impact takes several years, by 3-6 months the very first changes are only starting to become visible and many of them are things like changes to skin quality and fat distribution which revert after cessation.
It's still possibly a failure that your acquaintance got on HRT or Lupron in the first place. Given that long term follow ups show, consistently, that less than 2% of trans youth "desist" and are happy with their treatments, the reasonable solution to that failure would be to require some sort of evaluation by a therapist who has been trained to spot when someone has gender dysphoria and belongs to that 98% of happy transitioners versus someone from the 2% group that will desist because their issues came from somewhere else.
Instead of that sort of reasonable response, we see calls for outright bans on all treatment with many also calling for banning treatment for adults and a reversion to conversion therapy as the only "treatment" - it's not a treatment because it doesn't work and just hurts people.
The reason for this, is that the vast majority of people who suddenly have such strong opinions on trans health care are not actually concerned about people's health. They've just found a way to make their prejudices against transgender people sound like reasonable concerns.
When the people against it are only against it for one group of people, and doctors by and large disagree with them, it makes me suspicious that their motives are not based in concern for health and instead are based on personal feelings that are being projected onto an external cause.
No, we'll look at what's happening today the same way we look at the satanic panic or the lavender panic in the 80's - the groups against gay rights were even named things like "Save the Children" which mirrors the rhetoric today where people falsely claim that transgender people are "turning" children trans despite all evidence pointing to transgender identity being something innate.
> As usual, those people are trying to address the symptoms, not the cause.
This comment implies that you support conversion therapy. Conversion therapy has been tried, in every possible fashion, and has never worked. It is functionally just torture that leaves people shattered emotionally and sometimes physically. Supporting it is inhumane.
The Alan Turing lie is laughable, Lupron wasn't even invented until 20+ years after Alan Turing was given hormone injections. The falsehoods you're spouting have the hallmarks of coming from Twitter infographics meant to enrage you. Trans care has been made into a wedge issue by US politicians as a way of taking advantage of people's ignorance about the topic, and their knee-jerk dislike of gender non-conformity. An incredible amount of non-sense is being spread, the same as it was about gay people in the 70's and 80's.
> In fact, "trans kids" has never been a thing until about two or three years ago.
Another blatant lie, but it's a fun opportunity to talk about the first trans kid in the US, Agnes Torres. She started taking hormone therapy as a child in 1950. Nearly 80 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Torres
Doctors declared her intersex and she was given a fast track to having her documents changed. She went on to marry and have a nice normal life, because people left her alone. Trans people today could have the same if not for the vicious ignorance propagated by political parties looking for fresh meat.
What you call "gender ideology" - a dogwhistle similar to Trans Identified Male and Trans Identified Female, acronyms specifically chosen to aggravate trans people by spelling out stereotypically female and male names - is, in some ways, everything that conservative gays and conservative straights disliked about stereotypical homosexuals distilled into its purest form. It violates the taboo of males being overly feminine (queens) and females being overly masculine (d*kes). It's also why drag queens, who are not transgender, are being swept up into the current moral panic.
It's strange to watch anti-trans activists make a big fuss about trans people changing their physical appearance, then go out and support things like drag bans which are also being used to prevent trans people from appearing in public [1]. Those bans are 100% about forcing people to wear certain clothing. I feel like legislating people's wardrobes according to the sex they were assigned at birth really gives away what's really going on here.
Even if all trans people stopped getting any hormones or surgeries tomorrow and even if they stopped using the pronouns that they feel fit them, and even if they stopped using the restrooms that fit them they would still be hated and attacked. They would be attacked for the same reason that feminine gay men and masculine gay women have always taken the brunt of homophobia.
Because what people hate is gender non-conformity. They want males to be reasonably masculine and wear clothing that is considered stereotypically male, and vice versa for females. The talk about scary medical procedures and men and women being erased and even fairness in sports is just a way of making that impulse sound reasonable and justified.
[0] https://daily.jstor.org/ernst-rohm-the-highest-ranking-gay-n...
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/library-cancels-trans-sp...
You even illustrate this point yourself when you say:
> Very few conservatives in 2023 are riled up by homosexuality.
but also...
> the current trend of medicalizing gender as a form of gay conversion therapy
Kenneth Zucker's whole practice was geared, in fact, toward converting trans kids into gay kids. He says himself in his writing that being homosexual is preferable to being transsexual, since the latter requires medical intervention. The thing is, trans people and gay people have different needs and desires. They aren't the same group. So it's wrong to try to force gay kids to be trans or trans kids to be gay. But these days what you'll find is trans kids being pushed to be gay. A perfect inversion of the image you've painted.
The reason I "conflate" transsexuality (the word has two s's, also nobody uses it anymore, you should just say 'being transgender') with being gay is because the very same arguments and tactics used against gay people in the 80's - it's a mental illness, a social contagion, they're grooming kids, etc... - is being used again against trans people today. There was even a bathroom and women's sports panic in the 80's around lesbians in women's sports "preying" on straight girls.
Trans people had been considered merely a part of the gay community, along with other gender non-conforming people who may today identify as non-binary, until relatively recently. The fight for gay rights benefitted trans people, but we're at a point now where they have their own struggles, like the struggle for medical treatment.
It's a struggle that's been fought since the 70's when Janice Raymond wrote "The Transsexual Empire" and worked with the Reagan administration to make it more difficult for trans people to get medical treatment. Nothing about it is new, except for the alliance between conservative Christians and secular anti-trans activists - an unholy union if I've ever seen one.
On one side, you see adults who believe that sexuality and cross-gender identification are immutable, or at least practically immutable. Their goal is to expose e.g. heterosexual kids to the idea that some of their peers will be different from them so that they aren't shocked and scandalized by it later, then lash out unfairly as a result of prejudice against the unknown.
On the other side, you see adults who equate deviations from acceptable expressions of sexuality and gender - you don't see many conservatives boycotting national brands over young boys at hooters or child beauty pageants featuring little girls - as being inherently obscene. They naturally want to protect children from what they see as obscene and abnormal.
They both believe that they have children's best interests at heart.
That said, based on all available data, it seems like sexuality and gender identification are mostly immutable and that truth will slowly win out in the end. For example, nearly every conservative has met a little boy who acted remarkably girlish since toddlerhood and grew up to be gay unsurprisingly. Seeing that process play out, then claiming that gayness is a social contagion requires cognitive dissonance.
It's a part of the process of social change.... The last huge wave of homophobia that had legal consequences was in the 1970's and was led by a group called "Save the Children" -- it's all just the same dynamics repeating, except today it's more-so around broader gender norms, as opposed to a narrow focus on "men sleep with women". This video does a great job of laying it out through that sort of lens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6qUxa30SFA
Okay.
> Feminism is a hate masquerading as a fight for women's rights. And I am not engaging any further.
But then you follow up with this, which makes me even more confident that I didn't misunderstand you. From the start my impression has been that you're a little shy about saying exactly what you mean, thus my attempts to read between the lines so that we can have a real direct conversation in lieu of beating around the bush so to speak.
I don't know you, but when I read your responses I can't help but imagine that you're in a dark place. When life has hurt us in some way it's easy to project that negativity out onto the world, but a part of healing is separating what's inside of us versus what's outside. I hope we can all get there. Sending good vibes.
What are their un-modern interpretations of gender equality that you'd like to see emulated in the USA, Australia and Western Europe?
It's also curious that you're noting that some groups have high birth rates, also global population growth is still rising, while also worrying about underpopulation. The subtext is that you're concerned about white and northeast Asian people in particular yes? I can remember reading Steve Sailor and some other such people when I was younger and being persuaded by them. After thinking on it for a few years I came to the conclusion that they've just made "Human Biodiversity" into a weird little religion and haven't actually thought much about the consequences of their beliefs beyond some romantic vision of a glorious Evropean golden age -- that their proposed policies would never be able to create, since they'd destroy everything unique and interesting about the same groups that they want so badly to 'save' from themselves.
Secondarily, why do you think birthrates need to be increased above replacement level? A lower population along with technological developments, particularly recent ones around improving AI, would likely create much higher standards of living so long as the correct economic policies were laid into place.
> I'm going to steer clear of the gender inequality debate. It has been hijacked by reactionary comparison-justifying women trying to claim there are no differences between men and women and try to fight gender inequality without having an accurate idea of what gender equality looks like.
Any examples of this that aren't just Twitter hot takes? Gender roles are alive and well all over the world.
> Instead, I'm going to claim if the strength of women cannot be respected, their abilities are not recognized, and their high functioning roles as mothers are not honored, and yet the male obligations are held in higher regard, the female will be stretched too thin in trying to have equal authority and importance in matters. This is pure distortion and not rectifiable by authority.
The point is that every group has outliers. 80% of women might have dispositions that lend themselves very well to mothering but some 20% will have dispositions that lend themselves better to other things. Similarly about 80% of men seem drawn to developing stereotypically masculine traits, but some 20% will have a more stereotypically feminine disposition. It makes no sense to attempt to organize all of society around pretending that 100% of men and 100% of women fit into the same mould as that 80%. It's equally delusional to the idea that men and women have no differences at all.
It's trivial to measure just about any trait that varies between the sexes and notice that they form two overlapping normal distributions. You've accused 'modernity' of pretending that the distributions overlap completely while simultaneously pretending that the distributions have no overlap at all.
Steve Sailor, Curtis Yarvin, Bloody Shovel [Biological Leninism, lol], even blog (dot) jim (dot) com, I've read them all so I know where a lot of the ideological basis for being against modernity is rooted and it's ... well ... as delusional as any other fringe ideology. I hope you'll spend some time thinking for yourself about the shortcomings of the theories presented to you by such people, or those who've been influenced by them and repackaged their ideas.
I assumed that you are against gender equality. Gender equality meaning that men and women are given the freedom to do as they wish without being sanctioned. I think you'll find that men and women tend to gravitate toward very different lifestyles in the most egalitarian societies - look at gender ratios in various job fields in Norway or Sweden - but life is much easier for those men and women who are not typical. It seems rather wasteful to organize society around the needs of 80% while forcing 20% into a box that doesn't fit them. Better to let people self sort.
If you think gender equality means that women are being sanctioned for doing traditionally womanly things like home making or mothering I'd have to ask where you got the information that led you to that conclusion because it doesn't fit with my own experiences growing up in the United States.
> A culture where both men and women are expected to work and have the same roles and responsibilities is the worst treatment. It does not respect gender differences and strength differences.
This comment is just a roundabout way of saying that you believe gender equality is bad.
> You asked me to quote birth rates so I looked up birth rates of Russian minorities.
Why minorities? What makes them substantially different from, say, an Orthodox white Russian who lives in St. Petersburg, or one who lives in Yakutia for that matter?
Russia is rather socially conservative and their birth rates are low as well. It's quite a stretch to blame low birth rates on gender equality given the scope of cultures and societies where low birth rates have been a problem. Some other common factor would seem much more likely. Maybe economic incentives.
Unless you also think Russia is too progressive for you tastes. If so, what does your ideal social system look like with respect to the enforcement of gender roles, where women are expected to bear 3 or more children? What would enforcement of these roles look like in the society you're envisaging?
If you could honestly and clearly answer those questions I'd be very impressed. Then, I would follow it up with: and do you think many people would enjoy living in the society you've just dreamed up?
If yes, is there a status quo ante that was similar to what you're describing (seems likely given that women's emancipation is fairly recent and lots of different patriarchal structures have been tried out over the millennia)? Can you try to trace out why that status quo was left behind in favor of where we are now?
If no, how do you plan to persuade people to live less comfortably so that birth rates are as high as you'd like to see them? Persuasion is your only tool, because you've already said that you don't think government is the answer, and, without persuasion, you'd need to use force. To use force you'd need the government to act in some capacity, or at least _not_ act in a way that's complicit e.g. by not prosecuting honor killings carried out against anti-natalist daughters and sisters or at least condoning discrimination against childless women.
Does it make me a jerk to call you out for being a jerk? No....
Do I think you should be put in prison for being a jerk? No....
But I'll be honest, if you refuse to be kind to transgender people I'll find you distasteful and untrustworthy the same way I would a homophobe or a racist to be.
I realize from conversations with conservatives that many people consider supporting trans people as a form of virtue signaling, but from my experience it's the opposite. I live in a small town in a deep red county in a deep red state and the trans topic has become a shibboleth where not extending the basic respect of labeling trans people how they wish to be labeled is something that people do with prideful smiles and jolly laughter. It's a public display of cruelty that people bond over. There's nothing about it that smacks of protecting dignity or truth. It's just the same old human meanness that's popped up time and time again in history and always leads to nothing good.
I hope you'll grow as a person and treat people from outside of your experience with kindness and openness rather than callousness and suspicion. It's not the easy thing to do, but it's the right thing to do.
You don't know anyone's medical history. You haven't given anyone a karyotype test. You'd use a new set of names for people in many circumstances and even pronouns likely in the case of an obvious intersex condition. Your decision to call Eliot Page she against his wishes is clearly ideologically driven and hateful. A petty snub more or less.
Doing it makes you a cruel person. I'm sure you don't see yourself that way, but, newsflash, humans generally want to be "good" so most cruel people think they are good and justified in their actions. They just have some toxic/anti-social ideas rooted into their sense of morality.
In this case it seems you've convinced yourself that by snubbing transgender people you're somehow protecting... truth? BiOloGiCal ReAlItY? Gendered terms predate any concept of sex chromosomes or even gametes. Jeez Ottomans worried about their concubines getting pregnant from EUNUCHS because they didn't fully realize that testes created sperm or that sperm was separate from semen. That's why they preferred dark skinned eunuchs, so they could tell if a baby was illegitimate.... Which is just to say that if you want to be "traditional" gendered terms are about surface level assessments of a person's physical appearance and social roles considered appropriate to such an appearance, not biology. If you transported Patti Harrison[1] (a very passable trans woman) back to King Arthur's court she'd be treated like a lady I assure you.
The even more fundamental thing though is respecting people's autonomy. It's a very aggressive act to call someone by labels that they dislike. Try continually getting someone's name wrong on purpose, maybe call a guy named Ted Bruce all the time, and see how your relationship with that person develops....
I see that you're not ideologically motivated here. ^_^
It's decidedly not "criminal" for an adult to get a surgery that is commonplace for men with gynecomastia just because they have an "F" on their birth certificate. Breast tissue is breast tissue and there is no regulation that says that anyone has to have a minimum amount of it based on their sex assigned at birth.
Peterson's objective was to slur Eliot Page by casting him and the doctor who treated him in a negative light. It's slimy trolling and provocation. Not speaking truth. Just thinly veiled hate.
Here's a right leaning site with screenshots of the tweet if that makes you feel better: https://nypost.com/2022/06/30/twitter-suspends-jordan-peters...
Matt Walsh trolls transgender people and enjoys making their lives miserable because he believes their existence is a threat to his personal code of morality. He also wishes to ban transgender people, even adults, from receiving any sort of care beyond conversion therapy which is considered abusive and banned in many countries.
https://www.mediamatters.org/matt-walsh/daily-wires-matt-wal...
None of them are simply saying "men are not women."
It's like the difference between saying you think homosexuals are deviants who should burn in hell and saying "marriage is between a man and a woman." In both cases you're trying to be a jerk, but in the former you're being a lot more aggressive about it. There's a reason why even most homophobes don't like the Westboro Baptist Church. Only the biggest jerks support openly harassing and trolling people because of things that they can't control. Even if you think being gay or trans is a mental illness, a mental illness is still something you can't control. Trolling people is obviously not an attempt to help them. It's an attempt to make them suffer because you hate them.
> "fellow white people"
Is oddly specific.
Were you referencing this by chance? https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fellow-white-people-arent-you...
If so, I got the reference and I'm unimpressed by your trolling, dude.
It's meant to convey a sense of defeat. So in this case the sentence would read as implying that the author wanted Mastodon to replace Twitter but that it's not able and that fact is causing her emotional pain.