When you compare someone with gender dysphoria who gets hormones and affirmation surgery to schizophrenics who want to make their delusions real, it sounds like a critique of current treatment for gender dysphoria rather than support. It seems to imply that the medical establishment harms them by confirming their delusion, instead of tr…
When you compare someone with gender dysphoria who gets hormones and affirmation surgery to schizophrenics who want to make their delusions real, it sounds like a critique of current treatment for gender dysphoria rather than support. It seems to imply that the medical establishment harms them by confirming their delusion, instead of training them to reject it . But if they are to reject it, we are back to the awful conversion therapies that were also used on gay people. If you are fine with society affirming them, then what exactly are you objecting too? What do you want trans people to acknowledge or do differently?
"When you compare someone with gender dysphoria who gets hormones and affirmation surgery to schizophrenics who want to make their delusions real, it sounds like a critique of current treatment for gender dysphoria"
Again, you're saying this because you're assigning different moral weight and validity to different types of psychological distress. Schizophrenia = crazy. Gender dysphoria = valid. No. Both schizophrenics and people with gender dysphoria simply want their distress to stop.
What if I compared gender dysphoria to body integrity disorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria) instead? Where people identify as disabled and feel powerfully compelled to amputate healthy limbs or paralyse themselves so they become the wheelchair users the deeply feel themselves to be? Can we then have a conversation about whether these people should be unquestioningly affirmed?
I'm not saying that treating people with gender dysphoria harms them. I'm saying that the current affirmation only model is potentially harmful (as evidenced by the increasing numbers of people, mainly young girls, coming forward to say how they were let down by their gender health care providers).
I'm saying that comparing counselling for young people who are about to make life-long, life-altering changes to their bodies, to gay conversion therapy, both trivialises the horrors of conversion therapy and fails our duty of care to minors.
I don't want trans people to do anything. Well, except get the care they need and live happy lives. But I want the medical community to act responsibly.
I want us to continue being able to talk honestly about biological reality (in the case of sport for example) so that the needs of both women and trans people can be addressed.
And I want us to fully recognise the influence we have over the thinking of young children. And to stop telling them that a preference for stereotypically male/female things means there's something wrong with them that needs to be fixed through lifelong medicalisation.
It's widely known that ~80% of trans identifying children will stop identifying as trans after puberty. And this saves them from a lifetime of hormone therapy and surgery that, as we can see in Feffy's case, absolutely does not guarantee good mental health. I don't think we should make these facts taboo.
I want trans people to *think* about what they're doing, ask themselves what they *really* want, question whether being trans will address and solve underlying problems they may have, and stop listening to what everyone else is telling them they should think, do or feel.
There's an awful lot of peer pressure in this movement that transfolk need to take responsibility for.
The post-surgical regret rate for reassignment surgery is about 1%, one of the lowest. I would bet that's because of the rigor of the diagnosis.
If everyone going through a "nonbinary" phase was granted reassignment surgery there would be a hell of a lot of regret once the latest fad turned to, oh, having antlers grafted in, or vertical pupils.
"The post-surgical regret rate for reassignment surgery is about 1%, one of the lowest. I would bet that's because of the rigor of the diagnosis."
I really wonder if this is still the case. I believe this figure is based on a time when there were still actual safeguards in place. Individuals who wanted to transition received counselling and spent time living as the opposite sex before they had hormones and surgery. These simple, logical steps obviously weeded out the people who might have regretted transition.
This is all the sane people are arguing for.
I recently saw a podcast with Buck Angel and Blair White saying the same thing. It's not that I don't think trans people exist or that they'll all regret surgery (I know you're not accusing me of this), it's that the real condition of gender dysphoria has been turned into a fad with little to no concern for the children caught up in it.
Your last sentence is far and away the most important issue for me. Any gender reassignment treatment should be absolutely illegal until adulthood and psychiatric evaluation.
The adherents of this fad will not be moved by science. To even suggest a medical dimension to GD sends them into apoplectic rage.
Is it like treating mental illness like other dysphorias, or like conversion therapy, or neither? That should be a question.
I think we need to avoid jumping to an emotionally driven quick conclusion. I'm tired of the arguments which proceed like "this has to me a whiff of (something bad that once happened) so we should shut down all critical thinking and run away". Instead study it and see if it really IS like that bad thing or not. Otherwise we'd also reject psychological treatment of body dysmorphia because it's sorta maybe similar to gay conversion therapy (but only if one looks at it very superficially or with an ideological bias).
Just for the record, if we allow people to get gender reassignment surgery or cosmetic surgeries to make them look like a cat, I think we should allow adults to voluntarily seek certified professional therapy to modify their sexual orientation. The abuse was in coercively forcing people (especially children) to undergo often wildly unscientific processes to supposedly change their orientation. This is another of those cases of expanding from "avoid a specific abuse" to "avoid anything which can be construed to have any similarity to it" - politically driven overshoot, not well considered abatement of abusive situations.
Other examples are citing the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to justify Black people avoiding Covid vaccination, based on a tremendously tenuous asserted connection., or avoiding modern professional genetic counseling because some eugenicists a century ago went dark places with forcible sterilization.
We need to engage the cortex too, not just the amygdala.
Let's go back to the days when transitioning was a long, slow process beginning with living as the opposite sex for a year or two and then getting hormones and surgery and all that. Especially for kids, this will give them some breathing space to make up their minds and perhaps outgrow the GD, which 80% of them will do if not interfered with too young. The fact that the trans movement is so hell-bent on railroading anyone who exhibits interest in transitioning points to the need to have their own personal feelings validated rather than any concern for whether they're harming others.
When you compare someone with gender dysphoria who gets hormones and affirmation surgery to schizophrenics who want to make their delusions real, it sounds like a critique of current treatment for gender dysphoria rather than support. It seems to imply that the medical establishment harms them by confirming their delusion, instead of training them to reject it . But if they are to reject it, we are back to the awful conversion therapies that were also used on gay people. If you are fine with society affirming them, then what exactly are you objecting too? What do you want trans people to acknowledge or do differently?
"When you compare someone with gender dysphoria who gets hormones and affirmation surgery to schizophrenics who want to make their delusions real, it sounds like a critique of current treatment for gender dysphoria"
Again, you're saying this because you're assigning different moral weight and validity to different types of psychological distress. Schizophrenia = crazy. Gender dysphoria = valid. No. Both schizophrenics and people with gender dysphoria simply want their distress to stop.
What if I compared gender dysphoria to body integrity disorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria) instead? Where people identify as disabled and feel powerfully compelled to amputate healthy limbs or paralyse themselves so they become the wheelchair users the deeply feel themselves to be? Can we then have a conversation about whether these people should be unquestioningly affirmed?
I'm not saying that treating people with gender dysphoria harms them. I'm saying that the current affirmation only model is potentially harmful (as evidenced by the increasing numbers of people, mainly young girls, coming forward to say how they were let down by their gender health care providers).
I'm saying that comparing counselling for young people who are about to make life-long, life-altering changes to their bodies, to gay conversion therapy, both trivialises the horrors of conversion therapy and fails our duty of care to minors.
I don't want trans people to do anything. Well, except get the care they need and live happy lives. But I want the medical community to act responsibly.
I want us to continue being able to talk honestly about biological reality (in the case of sport for example) so that the needs of both women and trans people can be addressed.
And I want us to fully recognise the influence we have over the thinking of young children. And to stop telling them that a preference for stereotypically male/female things means there's something wrong with them that needs to be fixed through lifelong medicalisation.
It's widely known that ~80% of trans identifying children will stop identifying as trans after puberty. And this saves them from a lifetime of hormone therapy and surgery that, as we can see in Feffy's case, absolutely does not guarantee good mental health. I don't think we should make these facts taboo.
I want trans people to *think* about what they're doing, ask themselves what they *really* want, question whether being trans will address and solve underlying problems they may have, and stop listening to what everyone else is telling them they should think, do or feel.
There's an awful lot of peer pressure in this movement that transfolk need to take responsibility for.
The post-surgical regret rate for reassignment surgery is about 1%, one of the lowest. I would bet that's because of the rigor of the diagnosis.
If everyone going through a "nonbinary" phase was granted reassignment surgery there would be a hell of a lot of regret once the latest fad turned to, oh, having antlers grafted in, or vertical pupils.
"The post-surgical regret rate for reassignment surgery is about 1%, one of the lowest. I would bet that's because of the rigor of the diagnosis."
I really wonder if this is still the case. I believe this figure is based on a time when there were still actual safeguards in place. Individuals who wanted to transition received counselling and spent time living as the opposite sex before they had hormones and surgery. These simple, logical steps obviously weeded out the people who might have regretted transition.
This is all the sane people are arguing for.
I recently saw a podcast with Buck Angel and Blair White saying the same thing. It's not that I don't think trans people exist or that they'll all regret surgery (I know you're not accusing me of this), it's that the real condition of gender dysphoria has been turned into a fad with little to no concern for the children caught up in it.
Your last sentence is far and away the most important issue for me. Any gender reassignment treatment should be absolutely illegal until adulthood and psychiatric evaluation.
The adherents of this fad will not be moved by science. To even suggest a medical dimension to GD sends them into apoplectic rage.
Is it like treating mental illness like other dysphorias, or like conversion therapy, or neither? That should be a question.
I think we need to avoid jumping to an emotionally driven quick conclusion. I'm tired of the arguments which proceed like "this has to me a whiff of (something bad that once happened) so we should shut down all critical thinking and run away". Instead study it and see if it really IS like that bad thing or not. Otherwise we'd also reject psychological treatment of body dysmorphia because it's sorta maybe similar to gay conversion therapy (but only if one looks at it very superficially or with an ideological bias).
Just for the record, if we allow people to get gender reassignment surgery or cosmetic surgeries to make them look like a cat, I think we should allow adults to voluntarily seek certified professional therapy to modify their sexual orientation. The abuse was in coercively forcing people (especially children) to undergo often wildly unscientific processes to supposedly change their orientation. This is another of those cases of expanding from "avoid a specific abuse" to "avoid anything which can be construed to have any similarity to it" - politically driven overshoot, not well considered abatement of abusive situations.
Other examples are citing the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to justify Black people avoiding Covid vaccination, based on a tremendously tenuous asserted connection., or avoiding modern professional genetic counseling because some eugenicists a century ago went dark places with forcible sterilization.
We need to engage the cortex too, not just the amygdala.
Let's go back to the days when transitioning was a long, slow process beginning with living as the opposite sex for a year or two and then getting hormones and surgery and all that. Especially for kids, this will give them some breathing space to make up their minds and perhaps outgrow the GD, which 80% of them will do if not interfered with too young. The fact that the trans movement is so hell-bent on railroading anyone who exhibits interest in transitioning points to the need to have their own personal feelings validated rather than any concern for whether they're harming others.