I've definitely noticed a trend of people on the spectrum suffering from mental health problems, self-diagnosing as gender dysphoric and then launching themselves down a one-directional, miserable path that ends in their suicide.
Being Autistic myself, and having goine through complete dysregulation as a 15-16 year old (it's way more common than you'd think, especially as most government support just stops when the kids turn 18), I completely understand the mental processes that both lead to the depression/anxiety/emotional dysregulation as well as the absolute certainty with which the epiphany of gender dysphoria is reached.
Hearing the specific linguistic choices common on trans reddit/twitter/tttt, and knowing the exact state of mind that cause this language to be used just sends a shiver down my spine. All it would have taken is for me to have been born 5 years later, and I'd be a dead trans woman rather than a fulfilled husband and father of two.
If there's anyone reading this who's on the spectrum themselves, or has a kid on the spectrum who's talking about gender issues, feel free to reach out and I can elaborate a bit more on exactly how this specific failure works.
As a child I was diagnosed with a slurry of ADHD/ODD/ADD/OCD/many more.
I came to your exact same conclusion but with a 15 year difference. I am also quite confident I would be on the spectrum instead with a 5 year difference.
The medication I was put on at age 8 permanently fucked me. I went from teaching my grade 8 buddy algebra while completing his homework for fun (at age 8) to a completely fucked education from grade 5-8 and I cannot even remember grade 4 because I was in and out of hospitals for various new potions.
I have a file from my family doctor at the time, Dr. Karen Lo of London Ontario. Where she stated that as an 8 year old I was manipulating/controlling my mother, teacher, and multiple other adults. That was the basis for the medication.
The reality was that my Mom was so drunk off her ass that she couldn't stand up most of the time. I had to cook my own meals or starve, among other things.
I recall the look of one of my "special" teachers when she asked for ways to cook french fries. I told her to fry it in a pan with a tiny bit of oil. That's how I did it after all, she fucking laughed. Laughed.
You'd think you've heard the worst of it maybe but the reality is far far worse. Worse than being illegally and forcefully injected with drugs even. I would know.
My heart goes out to the victims of this treatment. You certainly don't deserve it.
Why do so many stories of psychotherapistic fuckery come out of Canada? There's your story here, there's the tragic story of David Reimer, there's the Montreal Experimemts by Donald Ewen Cameron... It's like something has been ideologically and institutionally wrong for a long time. It's like there's no human dignity or sovereignty, but instead people are just objects or problems to be managed. Some horrible Skinnerian-Taylorist worldview.
It might just be a metaphor, but would you treat people this way if you thought they had actual souls?
I will say, autism is super common among trans folk, as is ADHD. There is a high rate of comorbidity between them.
Having said that, I do not believe that it is fair to assume a person who believes themselves trans to be mistaken based purely on a personal hypothetical anecdote.
Isn't it at all possible that having a more detached view of your own brain, and a disconnection from society causes one to be more likely to be aware of the distinction between gender and biological sex.
And therefore be more willing to go through transition, instead of being more concerned with the impact the process has on your social standing, your friendships, your relationships.
I genuinely wonder if the incidence rate of transgenderism amongst autistic folks is actual the real incidence rate in humanity, but the rest of us (I am mostly neurotypical, just ADHD, and cis-hetero) are more likely to repress any transgender thoughts or worries.
> I've definitely noticed a trend of people on the spectrum suffering from mental health problems, self-diagnosing as gender dysphoric and then launching themselves down a one-directional, miserable path that ends in their suicide.
Are you saying that the gender dysphoria self-diagnosis was the only factor in the suicide, and without it the mental health problems and difficulties of being neurodivergent in society wouldn't have been an issue? If not, why is it the important one of the three?
Every problem a person deals with will contribute to stress and influence their choices, but it feels a little weird to list 3 big challenges and then say "and the last one is why they killed themselves".
>Are you saying that the gender dysphoria self-diagnosis was the only factor in the suicide, and without it the mental health problems and difficulties of being neurodivergent in society wouldn't have been an issue?
No, not at all.
I think the real reason that so may Autistic people end up depressed, anxious and suicidal is a mix of social difficulties (leading to isolation), coupled with an inability to recognise our own emotional states (making self-care a lot more difficult).
The real problem in misdiagosis of gender dysphoria amongst Autistics isn't so much the additional stress caused by transitioning (not just medical issues, but things like the discrimination that non-passing trans people experience too) but the fact that it provides a false solution to the problem of our depression/anxiety.
So many young Autistics really, genuinely, believe that the solution to their problem isn't learning the hard way how to achieve a certain level of social success, or ceding some of their independence to people they trust to help manage their physical and emotional needs, but instead hormones and surgery.
And once someone's gone down that path, that's it. No coming back.
>I would love to hear more about you're experiences growing up and especially the dysregulation.
Dysregulation[1] was Hell on Earth, in the literal sense. Very little in life works the way you think it should, and the reaction to these things constantly going wrong is extremely intense, negative, emotional unable to be controlled in any real sense. You lose the ability to reliably form even basic episodic/autobiographical memories, and with it any sense of the past or future. Entire chunks of your life go missing and you don't know what day it is, where you've been or where you're going. All you know is that you're constantly exhausted, nothing makes sense and everything just feels wrong. You don't know how long you've felt like this, and you don't know how long you'll continue to feel like this. As far as you're aware, past and future suffering will keep going on for eternity. And you will do anything, literally anything, to make it stop.
For me, I was fortunate that my mum took me to a sleep specialist, who recommended getting my adenoids removed and prescribing an extremely specific sleep schedule which I followed to a T (all screens off at 9:00, in bed by 10:00, I don't remember if there was a specific constant time I needed to wake up by but I suspect that was part of it to. As an adult, I now supplement this routine with melatonin). This was enough to get me from a state of complete dysregulation to "garden-variety" depression, which eventually I overcame with the help of a supportive network of friends and parents who (semi-forcefully) steered me down a path where I could succeed.
A hypothetical AussieWog98 might have convinced himself that the cause of the dysregulation was gender dysphoria, cut himself off from the people who really care and spent all his time online with other people just like himself until one day he couldn't take it any more.
I really, genuinely believe that this is what is happening today, at least in the case of some people. For others (especially people who transition later in life), it really can help them be comfortable in their own skin, and this is of course where the trans "debate" gets hairy.
[1] This is not technical language, but is the best and most concise word I can use to decribe it. There may be a more appropriate technical term, or a more scientific description of what is happening (seizures in the amygdala?). Feel free to comment if you have any scientific information or proper terminology, I'd love to read the literature on it.
No surgeon should be removing healthy body parts, in my opinion. You wouldn’t fit a gastric band to an anorexic person, no matter how badly the patient wanted it, and that’s not even permanent.
I sympathise with all people who have issues accepting the body they were born with. If someone believes their body should be different, but otherwise their body is healthy, I think it’s fair to say that whatever is causing the feeling of mismatch is happening in the mind. It’s no surprise to me that a significant fraction present with other mental disorders.
In an ideal world, there would be some form of therapy that helps people come to terms with and accept themselves with what they’ve been given. But again I do sympathise, because contemporary medicine simply isn’t very good at treating mental illnesses.
I think the key thing is that these permanent procedures should not be performed on children / minors.
Personally, I was a very different person at 15 to 20 to 25.
I don't really think a young person can make a rational decision on something that is going to affect the rest of their lives in such a dramatic way.
A 30 year old deciding to get gender reassignment surgery is very different to a 12 year old.
Would you support a woman having breast reduction surgery, or would you say “sorry your body doesn’t match your mind; get therapy”?
I suppose you can argue the tissue here is not “healthy” because it’s causing physical distress for the woman, but the same seems to apply to a trans person. Distress is never ‘just’ mental, it has physical effects on the body (and vice versa - pain is ‘just’ mental). The decision of what’s healthy doesn’t seem so simple to me.
The argument you are making would hold up better if there was evidence that post-op trans people have dramatically lower suicidal thoughts, but multiple studies have shown suicidal thoughts is virtually unchanged after operation.
Now the argument becomes something like 'a body part of yours is causing mental distress, let's cut it off even though there's zero evidence it'll help'. Seems very flimsy and predatory to me.
As for breast reduction, there's actually evidence that large breasts can cause physical problems in women, so it seems reasonable to allow that along with the evidence that women with large breasts experience a better quality of life after surgery (absolutely not the case for trans people removing body parts).
"The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up"
Should people born with a cleft palate be forced to leave it alone? What about people with breathing problems due to their anatomy? If a kid has teeth grow in improperly and start causing jaw problems, should they be prohibited from having their wisdom teeth removed or teeth realigned with braces? Should tonsil removal be prohibited? If a woman has severe back pain due to oversized breasts, should it be prohibited to get a reduction surgery even if it improves quality of life? Should vasectomies be prohibited if a person with testes wants to be able to have sex with their partner without the risk of pregnancy?
Should it be prohibited to medically disable "healthy" body parts as well? As an alternative to vasectomies you can use drugs to similarly disable that body part, in many cases effectively forever. Should that be illegal too? What about anti-androgens like Spironolactone - used on-label for multiple different purposes - should we ban those since they are also used for MtF HRT? Birth control also is functionally disabling healthy parts of the body.
Why does a problem "happening in the mind" somehow mean that no treatment can occur outside of the mind? Do you think mood stabilizers and antipsychotics should be banned because we're treating an "in the mind" problem with physical, body-altering interventions?
As a though experiment I've thought a lot about the black alien project. Specifically the removal of his fingers. I'm not sure I know where to stand. Should he be free to do what he wants? Should doctors be required to avoid removing healthy fingers ( I don't think they were doctors but I've altered the situation for my thought experiment)?
My conclusion is I have no idea how to even approach it.
I'd be interested in others thoughts.
I like this topic as it's less politically charged but explores similar ethics.
There will never be a clear cut definition of health, but most people can innately tell what a well regulated body looks like for their culture.
For instance, most Americans know they're fat or obese and that this is not good for their long term health outlooks and will have detrimental affects on other aspects of their lives. Some may choose to be okay with this, but very few sincerely argue that being fat is 'healthy'. Most will try to lose weight (excess fat) at some point in their lives.
Sometimes we remove body parts that are no longer well functioning within an understood ordering of the body. Inflamed tonsils can be removed, large wisdom teeth pulled, even ovaries can be discarded if they're found to be hosting cancers, but all of these are examples of organ dysfunction. We know what is regular, non-painful, and non-disruptive about the human body because many human beings spend a lot of time in that state and most begin life in that state before transitioning to a disordered state. When that transition happens, medical science seeks an explanation for the dysfunction: how did these tonsils become inflamed?, why do wisdom teeth crowd the mouth?, how did this woman's ovaries come to carry so much cancer?
We look for the cause of a dysfunction in order to treat it.
If instead we remove the well functioning breasts of a 15 year old, or replace a healthy penis because a patient informs us that they abhor their member, or prescribe a blocker for an otherwise well regulated puberty, then we have inverted the entire thrust of centuries of medical understanding. We are taking a healthy body and searching for a malady that we have been told must be there. Once there is no longer a discernment between the regular and the dysfunctional for a human body then an explosion of maladies abounds all begging for treatment.
If enlarged breasts are causing spinal issues then perhaps they should be reduced in order to correct those issues. But why not removal? We remove enlarged tonsils, why not enlarged breasts? Surely the removal of them would also correct any spine issues. In fact, it may even be ethically easier as the doctor and patient do not have to contemplate a correct breast size. But of course it is unlikely the patient or doctor ever considered the wholesale removal of the breasts in these cases because both approached the question with an idea already in mind of what a healthy human body would look like despite they're not having any precise agreement on the topic beforehand.
And in fact, we should question the ethics of both vasectomies and birth control. In 2023 these treatments are mostly, though not entirely, considered mostly in the pursuit of carefree pleasure and fun. Why should either be condoned? We condemn being fat on entirely the same terms. Often Americans are fat because they eat too often and always in excess due to eating feeling good. If one doesn't praise obesity, then what ought they find desirable about self-imposed sterility?
Of course what compounds these ethical concerns is that in these cases the subjects are children. On the whole this takes the acts from merely questionable or wrong-headed to monstrous.
> No surgeon should be removing healthy body parts, in my opinion.
There are a metric ton of medical procedures surgeons do outside of medical transitioning where people alter/adjust/remove healthy body parts. This seems like a pretty blanket statement to say; and I say that as someone who would be extremely cautious about telling someone that they "should" medically transition if they feel that social transition would be sufficient for them. I'm all aboard the train of telling transgender people that they're valid whether or not they choose to transition, and I definitely would advocate that transgender identity and body dysphoria are not necessarily the same thing, and that many trans people are blessed to be able to both embrace their transgender identity and celebrate aspects of their bodies that don't "align" with their gender in strictly hetero-normative ways.
Even with that perspective, this framing of "we're perverting the role of doctors/surgeons by cutting healthy flesh" -- it just doesn't really match the reality of how many procedures there are in the US that already fit that definition. Everything from the stereotypical examples of cosmetic surgery, to non-essential dental procedures, to limb lengthening, to circumcision, to sex-assignment surgery for intersex infants, the list goes on and on.
Many of these procedures aren't strictly speaking medically necessary. Precocious puberty for example is primarily harmful because of its psychological and social effects. The physical consequences of early puberty are comparatively minor (not non-existant, but then-again neither are the effects of puberty blockers. We're mostly talking about stuff like "you might be shorter when you grow up"). And yet, I've never once seen someone advocate that it's morally wrong or that it should be illegal for a doctor to prescribe puberty blockers to a cisgender child with precocious puberty. There's no shortage of conditions that really don't have physical health-effects or side-effects other than that society has decided that we don't really like them or that they're inconvenient to live with (either because of social stigma or because of the increased need for accommodations that society is unwilling/unable to provide) -- and we generally don't tell people with those conditions that they need to just learn to live with them. Instead, we give them choices (including medical interventions) to address both the social effects of their conditions and the internal psychological effects of their conditions.
What we don't do is we don't take a purely physical view of things. Heck, one of the justifications for why doctors prescribe puberty blockers to cisgender girls with precocious puberty is because there's limited research suggesting that delaying puberty lowers their risks of being raped. That's about as far into the "its a social problem, not a medical one" category as it's possible for a medical intervention to be.
And look, all of this is even taking the most charitable view of the statement statement above and assuming that it is specifically talking about medical interventions among minors. But if I take that statement at its face value as saying that no surgeon should ever operate on healthy tissue, then it just kind of becomes absurd, honestly. There are so, so many medical procedures that fall under that umbrella.
I think everyone would love to have less invasive ways of helping people who suffer from gender-disphoria and I think everyone is hoping that as social stigma continues to decrease that some of the psychological downsides of not transitioning might also decrease. That's not to say that medical transitioning is bad; it's not. But it does carry some risks, and obviously it's good to have multiple available paths for the transgender people who don't want to take those risks.
But arguments that boil down to "it's in the mind, so treat it that way" sound good at face-value but are ultimately way too simplistic to work even in a purely cisgender world. Our medical profession hasn't really worked that way for a long time, if it ever worked that way at all. So any debate about whether or not a surgery procedure is moral needs to be engaging with the issue on a deeper level than just whether or not there's a physical risk involved.
Your opinion, based on absolutely
nothing but your armchair philosophizing, is completely incongruent with the actual science.
Gender dysphoria is not a mental illness; it is a condition, like pregnancy. Unlike anorexia or body dysmorphia, when you address the issues causing gender dysphoria it simply resolves itself.
Leave this to the experts, please (ie not a receptionist). Unless you're trans or an expert there is very little substance in your opinions.
edit to respond: a mental illness is a disorder that causes harm to yourself or your interpersonal relationships. Gender dysphoria doesn't by itself do that. Transphobia in society does.
More research should be done around detransitioners. Doctors need to evaluate the whole patient and in the case of informed consent they should confirm that the patient is aware of all the potential changes.
That being said, gate keeping what I do with my body is wrong. I knew all the potential side effects when I transitioned. I read the wpath in full. I was comfortable with all the risks.
This type of critical judgment of children's health care is needed and I hope the doctors are being more rigorous than what the author suggests.
I feel terrible for the girls who made a decision they regret and lost parts of their body that made them happy. Their doctors, and parents failed them. I am also happy that so many people were able to successfully transition.
The timing of the article is concerning with so many states trying to withhold life saving care I worry that the nuance of this article will be lost.
Gatekeeping is one of the central aspects of modern medicine. Maybe a hundred years ago, when we had a free country and you could buy heroin over the counter, there was nobody gatekeeping what you did to your own body. But now we’ve corrected a pretty long way in the other direction.
In principle I think consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want with their own bodies, but consent needs to be informed and the person needs to be mentally capable of consent. You need some degree of gatekeeping just to reach that bar. And this is going to be an even bigger concern with children.
> heroin over the counter, there was nobody gatekeeping
I wasn't there, though I have learned that generally the local pharmacy would do the gate-keeping. Now the local pharmacy does what the computer says to do based on whatever regulations were input by the back office.
Children do stupid things. Gate keeping them from touching a flame or walking off a balcony or any other experience they have no concept of is what parents do. It is to indoctrinate until children learns their own way and that generally happens once they understand the world better.
If we let children do as they do because it was their body then where would we be as responsible parents.
I hate the idea of making a kid take a test of knowledge on what transitioning entails before starting or going through some other form of gatekeeping, but my gut tells me that only people who are enthusiastic about the process and all of the nitty gritty details should be candidates for medical transitioning.
What's missing from this post is a sense of timescale and the steps taken throughout a patient's journey. There was no mention of patients publicly presenting as their preferred gender as a first step towards transitioning, prior to any medical intervention; I'm not sure if that's a red flag or if I just have outdated knowledge on treatment practices. I understood that the doctors seemed to be improvising with the treatment of patients, but the inconsistencies between patients' treatment weren't highlighted.
If a seventeen year old bio female comes to a 40 year old doctor and is prescribed chemicals that alter her genitalia for life, it is “gate keeping” to prosecute or regulate said doctor.
However, if a seventeen year old decides to have sex with a 40 year old, we would find it morally reprehensible and all agree that she could not consent to use her body that way.
I don’t know how to rectify these two commonly held beliefs.
>I don’t know how to rectify these two commonly held beliefs.
In the former case the doctors conflicts of interest don't seem so strong, in the latter case the doctors conflict of interest is overwhelmingly self-evident, so there is much higher risk of the doctor consciously working against his patients interests when the patient is still a minor in a major power differential.
One causes sterilisation, one causes pregnancy, western society is specifically very very against 17 year olds being pregnant and are anti-natalist and sex-negative more broadly.
I'm curious whether earlier accommodations or therapy can ease the pressure to move forward with surgical transition, and thus reduce the number of people who feel regret for their decision.
That said, I'm not sure these articles are intended to improve treatment options. Rather, the goal seems to be eliminating transgender care altogether.
"Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone."
That's what's so striking. Why is that happening? There's a controversy over this.[1] It's been observed in (at least) Australia, Canada, the UK, France, Sweden, and the US. People involved in studying this have been attacked, and as a result, there's not much new data since the big controversy in 2018.
I witnessed this first hand in a close relative who, in the throws of a multi month long bipolar psychosis, concluded that the source of her mental health problems was gender dysphoria. The internet was very influential in her reaching this conclusion. The internet also allowed her to locate a dr who didn’t restrict sexual reassignment to those without mental health comorbidities. Thankfully the very liberal dr she found was too far for her to travel, since she could not drive and Uber wasn’t yet a thing.
She was stabilized on antipsychotics a few months later and completely dropped all discussion of gender dysphoria, something, to be clear, that she had never talked about or hinted at prior to her psychotic episode.
It concerns me that had she had this episode a few years later, when the medical ethics had changed and Uber made it possible for a mentally ill person to travel to the city where the dr she found was located, she likely would have undergone some form of reassignment surgery with lasting physical effects and potentially catastrophic effects on her psychological well being. She has been happily married, well more or less happily, for more than a decade now, to a nice man. No sign of gender dysphoria and no recent psychotic episodes.
You seriously misunderstand how hard it is to have sex reassignment surgery.
Even in states where beginning an HRT regimen is based on informed consent, there are many steps one must go through before having this procedure done. Multiple letters of recommendation from licensed therapists and having been on hormones for years. Not to mention the exorbitant costs even with insurance.
Your suggestion that one could Uber to another city and have SRS performed is a gross mischaracterization of the reality trans people face.
Glad to hear your close relative is doing well now, and it sounds like she was in a tough situation.
If you did more research though you'd understand that the thing you feared is not especially common or even possible under normal processes, so it's not really worth fearmongering about it on a public forum.
In most first-world medical systems there are years-long waiting lists for surgeries, or even to see a specialist at all. Most people I know who've seen specialists about gender issues had to wait months to even talk to someone. Getting surgery on a whim within a few months simply doesn't happen unless you're a wealthy person flying overseas for at-your-own-risk surgery, which is also available for many other purposes.
This is similar to how you'll see people fear-mongering about things like teenage children getting surgeries, which simply does not happen. The processes don't allow for it because it would be wildly irresponsible, but you can still find lots of people talking about it as if it happens on a regular basis. In reality, adults in their twenties and thirties sit on waiting lists for years.
Note also that even if you were to schedule surgery on short notice, in many cases they require you to have been on the relevant medications for a while because if you were to have sex-related organs removed or modified surgically without having adjusted to your own hormone levels it would be a pretty nasty adjustment.
There are a few non-controversial reasons that this could be the case:
1. The study on Rapid-onset gender dysphoria could be flawed -- it asked parents, and not youths themselves, which might skew the data on the prevalence and incidence of gender dysphoria
2. The number of transgender youth in the US is small[1], estimated at around 300,000. A small absolute increase would result in a large relative increase, even though transgender-identifying youth are a small percent of the population
3. Improved acceptance, awareness, diagnostics and treatment may result in transgender youth seeing more options for themselves, and thus being more public in announcing their status or seeking treatment. It's not that more people are trans or genderfluid, but rather that they're more comfortable being public with their status
I agree with all of these points. "Rapid-onset gender dysphoria" is a bunch of baloney, but I do think there is probably a decent amount of teenagers who misdiagnose based on the internet, since this happens with a lot of other mental disorders as well.
I think the issue is that the annoying culture of the left of rejecting all "transphobic" arguments, (i say this as one of these people), means that some clinics are going too far and not being as careful as they should. The answer is probably government regulation, but we have to be careful not to be like the UK, and not just to "ban everything associated with trans healthcare at all" like Republican states are currently trying to do.
This quote from the source you linked seems to suggest an obvious reason why it might be a controversial "diagnosis":
> Lisa Littman, at the time an adjunct assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, coined the term rapid-onset gender dysphoria in a 2018 study based on an online survey of parents on three anti-trans websites who believed that their teenage children had suddenly manifested symptoms of gender dysphoria and begun identifying as transgender simultaneously with other children in their peer group.
Doesn't sound terribly scientific. I do look forward to seeing a robust conclusion drawn from studies over the coming years, though, so we can find out how real it is!
I noticed it happening to the pre-teen kids of friends that played a lot of online games. When I asked the kids about it, they said they felt more comfortable online being a different gender because it better matched their personality and expectations.
I've known a couple of people who masqueraded as the opposite gender online and eventually discovered that they fit more as that gender in reality as well. Online is an interesting playground to experiment with gender identity, because there's less stakes and you can experience people referring to you as a different gender.
As a current medical student, I can confirm that school in the US teaches us “gender affirming” ideology acceptance without really much question or giving alternative perspectives. There was an entire required session where a “gender affirming” care doctor said we should imagine “cis people” as being “just as weird as trans people” and to reflect on our own idea of self-gender. When a Q&A question was posed about if gender transition is medically necessary (which is not easy to post about, btw, as during these sessions you are recorded in a zoom and anonymous questions are turned off; so everyone can see the full name of the person who asked, and it is recorded in a transcript also). The doctor responded dismissively about any doubt in the necessity of gender transition.
Medical education and the medical institution is full of agenda pushing and ideology by the way, do not get me started on the day they introduced nurse practitioners as fellow “providers” who only want to make our jobs easier, while laws are being passed giving them full practice authority and expanding their scope to the detriment of doctors.
Do you object to the “cis people are also weird, gender is weird” bit? Why? It’s always seemed very weird to me that the vast majority of people DO align with gender roles and DO enjoy the sexually dimorphic body they have, even though that body had a 50-50 chance of being the other sex and cultural ideas of gender seem to be pretty randomly assigned (the clothes men and women are supposed to wear change over time, for example). Why aren’t more people unhappy because they are not the other sex? Either there’s something innate that tells you you are a certain sex and makes you want to imitate others of that sex - in which case obviously it can go wrong, hence transgenderism, and that’s a completely neutral thing to happen - or it’s all cultural brainwashing and we might as well let people choose their bodies and gender expression anyway.
>It’s always seemed very weird to me that the vast majority of people DO align with gender roles and DO enjoy the sexually dimorphic body they have, even though that body had a 50-50 chance of being the other sex
Prior to conception there is a 50/50 chance of being a man or a woman, but once a child enters development, being non-gender-conforming is very rare. I think people confuse the little arbitrary cultural details here (eg: girls like pink) for deeply-seated traits which are innate to gender. (eg: women have periods, and can carry children)
As a non-Muslim, I wonder about the medical necessity of male or female circumcision, especially as it is commonly practiced without the consent of the patient. The latter is illegal in the US as of 2021, but the former seems a much larger and more pressing issue than gender affirming care.
I just don't get the obsession with this topic. If you're a parent, your kids are being told things you don't like all the time, including being propositioned or being offered recreational drugs. This is very low on my list of worries. Talk to them to help them make better decisions, using logical arguments instead of groundless religious commandments. Problem solved.
As I detailed in another comment, I definitely think that the pendulum has been swinging too far to the unsafe side of medical opinion about trans people, because of the somewhat toxic culture of the left. (this is an introspective by one of these people). I think the answer is probably more government regulation that strikes a balance between requiring diagnosis and the crazy stuff like the UK NHS or banning all trans healthcare.
Comprehensive mental health treatment needs to be generally available in a non-threatening, universal, single-payer way. "Managed care" has an awful ring to it when you are mistrusting. I suspect that many cases being treated as gender dysphoria are actually other mental health disorders, such as self-loathing, borderline, schizoid personality disorder, substance abuse, or one or a combination of many others.
I personally believe that only a licensed, Ph.D. psychologist, or in some cases psychiatrist providing short courses of medicine, without pecuniary interest, is qualified to treat these kinds of non-gender dysphoria disorders.
Transgender medical care usually involves medicine, and the trans rights movement had a moment in the 2010s. I believe it inappropriate to use victim status to force others to provide an inappropriate treatment. It is also inappropriate to rush an inappropriate treatment because of the ticking clock argument.
I draw a comparison to how many people go to the emergency room, which cannot turn them away, because they do not have first-line care like a family doctor, or basic health upkeep such as not smoking and eating healthy food.
For clear or severe cases of gender dysphoria, early treatment is essential. Pharmaceutical and surgical. However gender transition only changes your gender! You still have to deal with whatever mental issues you had, integrate into society, and work hard to become a whole person.
The gay rights movement came of age around 1980 in my view, but everybody agreed that how inappropriate it is to attempt to treatment that medically, except for self-harm or AIDS.
I suspect that what we need is mental health to have its moment. Not "pride", or boasting about how many pills you are on. Maybe psychology programs need to be subsidized and promoted. We spent the past decade focusing on our smartphones, and I don't think it made us much happier. I suspect that we have the courage to turn some of that focus inward.
While I personally think gender related care is far too restricted in most places, I agree that comprehensive mental health treatment is the biggest priority. People will have a much easier time dealing with gender-related stresses and issues if they're not ALSO staring down a bunch of other problems in their lives without access to care.
It's also my understanding that trans and non-binary individuals tend to have other co-morbid problems going on, mental health or otherwise. This may be a data problem - the other problems being diagnosed more often because they go for treatment, etc - but from the specialists I've spoken to, it probably is an actual connection, induced by stress or otherwise.
As with gender dysphoria, patients flipped from being majority male to overwhelmingly female in just a few years. They also tended to know others with the symptoms either directly, or from social media feeds whose algorithms fed them more and more content around the topic.
And ADHD. Could be that there is a lot of it, but I know a few folks self-diagnosing. At least two of them went off meds and are fine, which raises questions if they were truly ADHD in the first place.
Experiments are supposed to be carefully designed. Hypotheses are supposed to be tested ethically. The doctors I worked alongside at the Transgender Center said frequently about the treatment of our patients: “We are building the plane while we are flying it.” No one should be a passenger on that kind of aircraft.
Late to the party, so no one is going to read this comment, but I can't help but wonder how much the explosion in Trans stuff is related to changing gender roles generally. We used to have fairly clearly separated roles, clothing styles, etc and I wonder if we just lack an adequate framework for sorting that out properly and it helps nudge some vulnerable individuals down odd pathways in unfortunate ways.
I'm really not expecting progress. That suggests improvement and it's nigh impossible to even have a meaningful discussion about anything having to do with sex or gender without it going sideways.
My magic 8 ball does not predict good things here.
In my experience, it takes at least a few days before a popular HN story fully burns out. There is a huge peak of activity in the first few hours, and then a looooong period of simmering. I've seen up/downvotes for comments days after I wrote them.
Besides, there is empirical evidence that at least 1 person read this comment ;-)
Readit News
I've definitely noticed a trend of people on the spectrum suffering from mental health problems, self-diagnosing as gender dysphoric and then launching themselves down a one-directional, miserable path that ends in their suicide.
Being Autistic myself, and having goine through complete dysregulation as a 15-16 year old (it's way more common than you'd think, especially as most government support just stops when the kids turn 18), I completely understand the mental processes that both lead to the depression/anxiety/emotional dysregulation as well as the absolute certainty with which the epiphany of gender dysphoria is reached.
Hearing the specific linguistic choices common on trans reddit/twitter/tttt, and knowing the exact state of mind that cause this language to be used just sends a shiver down my spine. All it would have taken is for me to have been born 5 years later, and I'd be a dead trans woman rather than a fulfilled husband and father of two.
If there's anyone reading this who's on the spectrum themselves, or has a kid on the spectrum who's talking about gender issues, feel free to reach out and I can elaborate a bit more on exactly how this specific failure works.
I came to your exact same conclusion but with a 15 year difference. I am also quite confident I would be on the spectrum instead with a 5 year difference.
The medication I was put on at age 8 permanently fucked me. I went from teaching my grade 8 buddy algebra while completing his homework for fun (at age 8) to a completely fucked education from grade 5-8 and I cannot even remember grade 4 because I was in and out of hospitals for various new potions.
I have a file from my family doctor at the time, Dr. Karen Lo of London Ontario. Where she stated that as an 8 year old I was manipulating/controlling my mother, teacher, and multiple other adults. That was the basis for the medication.
The reality was that my Mom was so drunk off her ass that she couldn't stand up most of the time. I had to cook my own meals or starve, among other things.
I recall the look of one of my "special" teachers when she asked for ways to cook french fries. I told her to fry it in a pan with a tiny bit of oil. That's how I did it after all, she fucking laughed. Laughed.
You'd think you've heard the worst of it maybe but the reality is far far worse. Worse than being illegally and forcefully injected with drugs even. I would know.
My heart goes out to the victims of this treatment. You certainly don't deserve it.
Why do so many stories of psychotherapistic fuckery come out of Canada? There's your story here, there's the tragic story of David Reimer, there's the Montreal Experimemts by Donald Ewen Cameron... It's like something has been ideologically and institutionally wrong for a long time. It's like there's no human dignity or sovereignty, but instead people are just objects or problems to be managed. Some horrible Skinnerian-Taylorist worldview.
It might just be a metaphor, but would you treat people this way if you thought they had actual souls?
Having said that, I do not believe that it is fair to assume a person who believes themselves trans to be mistaken based purely on a personal hypothetical anecdote.
And therefore be more willing to go through transition, instead of being more concerned with the impact the process has on your social standing, your friendships, your relationships.
I genuinely wonder if the incidence rate of transgenderism amongst autistic folks is actual the real incidence rate in humanity, but the rest of us (I am mostly neurotypical, just ADHD, and cis-hetero) are more likely to repress any transgender thoughts or worries.
Are you saying that the gender dysphoria self-diagnosis was the only factor in the suicide, and without it the mental health problems and difficulties of being neurodivergent in society wouldn't have been an issue? If not, why is it the important one of the three?
Every problem a person deals with will contribute to stress and influence their choices, but it feels a little weird to list 3 big challenges and then say "and the last one is why they killed themselves".
No, not at all.
I think the real reason that so may Autistic people end up depressed, anxious and suicidal is a mix of social difficulties (leading to isolation), coupled with an inability to recognise our own emotional states (making self-care a lot more difficult).
The real problem in misdiagosis of gender dysphoria amongst Autistics isn't so much the additional stress caused by transitioning (not just medical issues, but things like the discrimination that non-passing trans people experience too) but the fact that it provides a false solution to the problem of our depression/anxiety.
So many young Autistics really, genuinely, believe that the solution to their problem isn't learning the hard way how to achieve a certain level of social success, or ceding some of their independence to people they trust to help manage their physical and emotional needs, but instead hormones and surgery.
And once someone's gone down that path, that's it. No coming back.
Is there any other things about your life you would be willing to share?
Dysregulation[1] was Hell on Earth, in the literal sense. Very little in life works the way you think it should, and the reaction to these things constantly going wrong is extremely intense, negative, emotional unable to be controlled in any real sense. You lose the ability to reliably form even basic episodic/autobiographical memories, and with it any sense of the past or future. Entire chunks of your life go missing and you don't know what day it is, where you've been or where you're going. All you know is that you're constantly exhausted, nothing makes sense and everything just feels wrong. You don't know how long you've felt like this, and you don't know how long you'll continue to feel like this. As far as you're aware, past and future suffering will keep going on for eternity. And you will do anything, literally anything, to make it stop.
For me, I was fortunate that my mum took me to a sleep specialist, who recommended getting my adenoids removed and prescribing an extremely specific sleep schedule which I followed to a T (all screens off at 9:00, in bed by 10:00, I don't remember if there was a specific constant time I needed to wake up by but I suspect that was part of it to. As an adult, I now supplement this routine with melatonin). This was enough to get me from a state of complete dysregulation to "garden-variety" depression, which eventually I overcame with the help of a supportive network of friends and parents who (semi-forcefully) steered me down a path where I could succeed.
A hypothetical AussieWog98 might have convinced himself that the cause of the dysregulation was gender dysphoria, cut himself off from the people who really care and spent all his time online with other people just like himself until one day he couldn't take it any more.
I really, genuinely believe that this is what is happening today, at least in the case of some people. For others (especially people who transition later in life), it really can help them be comfortable in their own skin, and this is of course where the trans "debate" gets hairy.
[1] This is not technical language, but is the best and most concise word I can use to decribe it. There may be a more appropriate technical term, or a more scientific description of what is happening (seizures in the amygdala?). Feel free to comment if you have any scientific information or proper terminology, I'd love to read the literature on it.
I sympathise with all people who have issues accepting the body they were born with. If someone believes their body should be different, but otherwise their body is healthy, I think it’s fair to say that whatever is causing the feeling of mismatch is happening in the mind. It’s no surprise to me that a significant fraction present with other mental disorders.
In an ideal world, there would be some form of therapy that helps people come to terms with and accept themselves with what they’ve been given. But again I do sympathise, because contemporary medicine simply isn’t very good at treating mental illnesses.
Personally, I was a very different person at 15 to 20 to 25. I don't really think a young person can make a rational decision on something that is going to affect the rest of their lives in such a dramatic way.
A 30 year old deciding to get gender reassignment surgery is very different to a 12 year old.
I'd be more open to medical intervention post-18 if this problem didn't exist.
I suppose you can argue the tissue here is not “healthy” because it’s causing physical distress for the woman, but the same seems to apply to a trans person. Distress is never ‘just’ mental, it has physical effects on the body (and vice versa - pain is ‘just’ mental). The decision of what’s healthy doesn’t seem so simple to me.
Now the argument becomes something like 'a body part of yours is causing mental distress, let's cut it off even though there's zero evidence it'll help'. Seems very flimsy and predatory to me.
As for breast reduction, there's actually evidence that large breasts can cause physical problems in women, so it seems reasonable to allow that along with the evidence that women with large breasts experience a better quality of life after surgery (absolutely not the case for trans people removing body parts).
"The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043071/
Should people born with a cleft palate be forced to leave it alone? What about people with breathing problems due to their anatomy? If a kid has teeth grow in improperly and start causing jaw problems, should they be prohibited from having their wisdom teeth removed or teeth realigned with braces? Should tonsil removal be prohibited? If a woman has severe back pain due to oversized breasts, should it be prohibited to get a reduction surgery even if it improves quality of life? Should vasectomies be prohibited if a person with testes wants to be able to have sex with their partner without the risk of pregnancy?
Should it be prohibited to medically disable "healthy" body parts as well? As an alternative to vasectomies you can use drugs to similarly disable that body part, in many cases effectively forever. Should that be illegal too? What about anti-androgens like Spironolactone - used on-label for multiple different purposes - should we ban those since they are also used for MtF HRT? Birth control also is functionally disabling healthy parts of the body.
Why does a problem "happening in the mind" somehow mean that no treatment can occur outside of the mind? Do you think mood stabilizers and antipsychotics should be banned because we're treating an "in the mind" problem with physical, body-altering interventions?
My conclusion is I have no idea how to even approach it.
I'd be interested in others thoughts.
I like this topic as it's less politically charged but explores similar ethics.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
For instance, most Americans know they're fat or obese and that this is not good for their long term health outlooks and will have detrimental affects on other aspects of their lives. Some may choose to be okay with this, but very few sincerely argue that being fat is 'healthy'. Most will try to lose weight (excess fat) at some point in their lives.
Sometimes we remove body parts that are no longer well functioning within an understood ordering of the body. Inflamed tonsils can be removed, large wisdom teeth pulled, even ovaries can be discarded if they're found to be hosting cancers, but all of these are examples of organ dysfunction. We know what is regular, non-painful, and non-disruptive about the human body because many human beings spend a lot of time in that state and most begin life in that state before transitioning to a disordered state. When that transition happens, medical science seeks an explanation for the dysfunction: how did these tonsils become inflamed?, why do wisdom teeth crowd the mouth?, how did this woman's ovaries come to carry so much cancer?
We look for the cause of a dysfunction in order to treat it.
If instead we remove the well functioning breasts of a 15 year old, or replace a healthy penis because a patient informs us that they abhor their member, or prescribe a blocker for an otherwise well regulated puberty, then we have inverted the entire thrust of centuries of medical understanding. We are taking a healthy body and searching for a malady that we have been told must be there. Once there is no longer a discernment between the regular and the dysfunctional for a human body then an explosion of maladies abounds all begging for treatment.
If enlarged breasts are causing spinal issues then perhaps they should be reduced in order to correct those issues. But why not removal? We remove enlarged tonsils, why not enlarged breasts? Surely the removal of them would also correct any spine issues. In fact, it may even be ethically easier as the doctor and patient do not have to contemplate a correct breast size. But of course it is unlikely the patient or doctor ever considered the wholesale removal of the breasts in these cases because both approached the question with an idea already in mind of what a healthy human body would look like despite they're not having any precise agreement on the topic beforehand.
And in fact, we should question the ethics of both vasectomies and birth control. In 2023 these treatments are mostly, though not entirely, considered mostly in the pursuit of carefree pleasure and fun. Why should either be condoned? We condemn being fat on entirely the same terms. Often Americans are fat because they eat too often and always in excess due to eating feeling good. If one doesn't praise obesity, then what ought they find desirable about self-imposed sterility?
Of course what compounds these ethical concerns is that in these cases the subjects are children. On the whole this takes the acts from merely questionable or wrong-headed to monstrous.
There are a metric ton of medical procedures surgeons do outside of medical transitioning where people alter/adjust/remove healthy body parts. This seems like a pretty blanket statement to say; and I say that as someone who would be extremely cautious about telling someone that they "should" medically transition if they feel that social transition would be sufficient for them. I'm all aboard the train of telling transgender people that they're valid whether or not they choose to transition, and I definitely would advocate that transgender identity and body dysphoria are not necessarily the same thing, and that many trans people are blessed to be able to both embrace their transgender identity and celebrate aspects of their bodies that don't "align" with their gender in strictly hetero-normative ways.
Even with that perspective, this framing of "we're perverting the role of doctors/surgeons by cutting healthy flesh" -- it just doesn't really match the reality of how many procedures there are in the US that already fit that definition. Everything from the stereotypical examples of cosmetic surgery, to non-essential dental procedures, to limb lengthening, to circumcision, to sex-assignment surgery for intersex infants, the list goes on and on.
Many of these procedures aren't strictly speaking medically necessary. Precocious puberty for example is primarily harmful because of its psychological and social effects. The physical consequences of early puberty are comparatively minor (not non-existant, but then-again neither are the effects of puberty blockers. We're mostly talking about stuff like "you might be shorter when you grow up"). And yet, I've never once seen someone advocate that it's morally wrong or that it should be illegal for a doctor to prescribe puberty blockers to a cisgender child with precocious puberty. There's no shortage of conditions that really don't have physical health-effects or side-effects other than that society has decided that we don't really like them or that they're inconvenient to live with (either because of social stigma or because of the increased need for accommodations that society is unwilling/unable to provide) -- and we generally don't tell people with those conditions that they need to just learn to live with them. Instead, we give them choices (including medical interventions) to address both the social effects of their conditions and the internal psychological effects of their conditions.
What we don't do is we don't take a purely physical view of things. Heck, one of the justifications for why doctors prescribe puberty blockers to cisgender girls with precocious puberty is because there's limited research suggesting that delaying puberty lowers their risks of being raped. That's about as far into the "its a social problem, not a medical one" category as it's possible for a medical intervention to be.
And look, all of this is even taking the most charitable view of the statement statement above and assuming that it is specifically talking about medical interventions among minors. But if I take that statement at its face value as saying that no surgeon should ever operate on healthy tissue, then it just kind of becomes absurd, honestly. There are so, so many medical procedures that fall under that umbrella.
I think everyone would love to have less invasive ways of helping people who suffer from gender-disphoria and I think everyone is hoping that as social stigma continues to decrease that some of the psychological downsides of not transitioning might also decrease. That's not to say that medical transitioning is bad; it's not. But it does carry some risks, and obviously it's good to have multiple available paths for the transgender people who don't want to take those risks.
But arguments that boil down to "it's in the mind, so treat it that way" sound good at face-value but are ultimately way too simplistic to work even in a purely cisgender world. Our medical profession hasn't really worked that way for a long time, if it ever worked that way at all. So any debate about whether or not a surgery procedure is moral needs to be engaging with the issue on a deeper level than just whether or not there's a physical risk involved.
Dead Comment
Gender dysphoria is not a mental illness; it is a condition, like pregnancy. Unlike anorexia or body dysmorphia, when you address the issues causing gender dysphoria it simply resolves itself.
Leave this to the experts, please (ie not a receptionist). Unless you're trans or an expert there is very little substance in your opinions.
edit to respond: a mental illness is a disorder that causes harm to yourself or your interpersonal relationships. Gender dysphoria doesn't by itself do that. Transphobia in society does.
"The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043071/
Dead Comment
That being said, gate keeping what I do with my body is wrong. I knew all the potential side effects when I transitioned. I read the wpath in full. I was comfortable with all the risks.
This type of critical judgment of children's health care is needed and I hope the doctors are being more rigorous than what the author suggests.
I feel terrible for the girls who made a decision they regret and lost parts of their body that made them happy. Their doctors, and parents failed them. I am also happy that so many people were able to successfully transition.
The timing of the article is concerning with so many states trying to withhold life saving care I worry that the nuance of this article will be lost.
In principle I think consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want with their own bodies, but consent needs to be informed and the person needs to be mentally capable of consent. You need some degree of gatekeeping just to reach that bar. And this is going to be an even bigger concern with children.
I wasn't there, though I have learned that generally the local pharmacy would do the gate-keeping. Now the local pharmacy does what the computer says to do based on whatever regulations were input by the back office.
If you look critically at the research papers being published on these topics as a means to champion it, your hopes will be dashed.
If we let children do as they do because it was their body then where would we be as responsible parents.
What's missing from this post is a sense of timescale and the steps taken throughout a patient's journey. There was no mention of patients publicly presenting as their preferred gender as a first step towards transitioning, prior to any medical intervention; I'm not sure if that's a red flag or if I just have outdated knowledge on treatment practices. I understood that the doctors seemed to be improvising with the treatment of patients, but the inconsistencies between patients' treatment weren't highlighted.
However, if a seventeen year old decides to have sex with a 40 year old, we would find it morally reprehensible and all agree that she could not consent to use her body that way.
I don’t know how to rectify these two commonly held beliefs.
In the former case the doctors conflicts of interest don't seem so strong, in the latter case the doctors conflict of interest is overwhelmingly self-evident, so there is much higher risk of the doctor consciously working against his patients interests when the patient is still a minor in a major power differential.
One causes sterilisation, one causes pregnancy, western society is specifically very very against 17 year olds being pregnant and are anti-natalist and sex-negative more broadly.
That said, I'm not sure these articles are intended to improve treatment options. Rather, the goal seems to be eliminating transgender care altogether.
Deleted Comment
That's what's so striking. Why is that happening? There's a controversy over this.[1] It's been observed in (at least) Australia, Canada, the UK, France, Sweden, and the US. People involved in studying this have been attacked, and as a result, there's not much new data since the big controversy in 2018.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_c...
She was stabilized on antipsychotics a few months later and completely dropped all discussion of gender dysphoria, something, to be clear, that she had never talked about or hinted at prior to her psychotic episode.
It concerns me that had she had this episode a few years later, when the medical ethics had changed and Uber made it possible for a mentally ill person to travel to the city where the dr she found was located, she likely would have undergone some form of reassignment surgery with lasting physical effects and potentially catastrophic effects on her psychological well being. She has been happily married, well more or less happily, for more than a decade now, to a nice man. No sign of gender dysphoria and no recent psychotic episodes.
Even in states where beginning an HRT regimen is based on informed consent, there are many steps one must go through before having this procedure done. Multiple letters of recommendation from licensed therapists and having been on hormones for years. Not to mention the exorbitant costs even with insurance.
Your suggestion that one could Uber to another city and have SRS performed is a gross mischaracterization of the reality trans people face.
If you did more research though you'd understand that the thing you feared is not especially common or even possible under normal processes, so it's not really worth fearmongering about it on a public forum.
In most first-world medical systems there are years-long waiting lists for surgeries, or even to see a specialist at all. Most people I know who've seen specialists about gender issues had to wait months to even talk to someone. Getting surgery on a whim within a few months simply doesn't happen unless you're a wealthy person flying overseas for at-your-own-risk surgery, which is also available for many other purposes.
This is similar to how you'll see people fear-mongering about things like teenage children getting surgeries, which simply does not happen. The processes don't allow for it because it would be wildly irresponsible, but you can still find lots of people talking about it as if it happens on a regular basis. In reality, adults in their twenties and thirties sit on waiting lists for years.
Note also that even if you were to schedule surgery on short notice, in many cases they require you to have been on the relevant medications for a while because if you were to have sex-related organs removed or modified surgically without having adjusted to your own hormone levels it would be a pretty nasty adjustment.
1. The study on Rapid-onset gender dysphoria could be flawed -- it asked parents, and not youths themselves, which might skew the data on the prevalence and incidence of gender dysphoria
2. The number of transgender youth in the US is small[1], estimated at around 300,000. A small absolute increase would result in a large relative increase, even though transgender-identifying youth are a small percent of the population
3. Improved acceptance, awareness, diagnostics and treatment may result in transgender youth seeing more options for themselves, and thus being more public in announcing their status or seeking treatment. It's not that more people are trans or genderfluid, but rather that they're more comfortable being public with their status
[1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad...
I think the issue is that the annoying culture of the left of rejecting all "transphobic" arguments, (i say this as one of these people), means that some clinics are going too far and not being as careful as they should. The answer is probably government regulation, but we have to be careful not to be like the UK, and not just to "ban everything associated with trans healthcare at all" like Republican states are currently trying to do.
> Lisa Littman, at the time an adjunct assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, coined the term rapid-onset gender dysphoria in a 2018 study based on an online survey of parents on three anti-trans websites who believed that their teenage children had suddenly manifested symptoms of gender dysphoria and begun identifying as transgender simultaneously with other children in their peer group.
Doesn't sound terribly scientific. I do look forward to seeing a robust conclusion drawn from studies over the coming years, though, so we can find out how real it is!
"ROGD has not been recognized by any major professional association as a valid mental health diagnosis"
Calling it a controversy isn't accurate. There is no controversy. Someone made some stuff up. It's called Rapid-onset taurus cacas.
Medical education and the medical institution is full of agenda pushing and ideology by the way, do not get me started on the day they introduced nurse practitioners as fellow “providers” who only want to make our jobs easier, while laws are being passed giving them full practice authority and expanding their scope to the detriment of doctors.
Prior to conception there is a 50/50 chance of being a man or a woman, but once a child enters development, being non-gender-conforming is very rare. I think people confuse the little arbitrary cultural details here (eg: girls like pink) for deeply-seated traits which are innate to gender. (eg: women have periods, and can carry children)
Deleted Comment
When you estranged
Faces look ugly
When you're alone"
J. Morisson
(Everybody is strange and weird in their own ways)
I just don't get the obsession with this topic. If you're a parent, your kids are being told things you don't like all the time, including being propositioned or being offered recreational drugs. This is very low on my list of worries. Talk to them to help them make better decisions, using logical arguments instead of groundless religious commandments. Problem solved.
I personally believe that only a licensed, Ph.D. psychologist, or in some cases psychiatrist providing short courses of medicine, without pecuniary interest, is qualified to treat these kinds of non-gender dysphoria disorders.
Transgender medical care usually involves medicine, and the trans rights movement had a moment in the 2010s. I believe it inappropriate to use victim status to force others to provide an inappropriate treatment. It is also inappropriate to rush an inappropriate treatment because of the ticking clock argument.
I draw a comparison to how many people go to the emergency room, which cannot turn them away, because they do not have first-line care like a family doctor, or basic health upkeep such as not smoking and eating healthy food.
For clear or severe cases of gender dysphoria, early treatment is essential. Pharmaceutical and surgical. However gender transition only changes your gender! You still have to deal with whatever mental issues you had, integrate into society, and work hard to become a whole person.
The gay rights movement came of age around 1980 in my view, but everybody agreed that how inappropriate it is to attempt to treatment that medically, except for self-harm or AIDS.
I suspect that what we need is mental health to have its moment. Not "pride", or boasting about how many pills you are on. Maybe psychology programs need to be subsidized and promoted. We spent the past decade focusing on our smartphones, and I don't think it made us much happier. I suspect that we have the courage to turn some of that focus inward.
It's also my understanding that trans and non-binary individuals tend to have other co-morbid problems going on, mental health or otherwise. This may be a data problem - the other problems being diagnosed more often because they go for treatment, etc - but from the specialists I've spoken to, it probably is an actual connection, induced by stress or otherwise.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51806962
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-56539466
As with gender dysphoria, patients flipped from being majority male to overwhelmingly female in just a few years. They also tended to know others with the symptoms either directly, or from social media feeds whose algorithms fed them more and more content around the topic.
Dead Comment
Late to the party, so no one is going to read this comment, but I can't help but wonder how much the explosion in Trans stuff is related to changing gender roles generally. We used to have fairly clearly separated roles, clothing styles, etc and I wonder if we just lack an adequate framework for sorting that out properly and it helps nudge some vulnerable individuals down odd pathways in unfortunate ways.
My magic 8 ball does not predict good things here.
Besides, there is empirical evidence that at least 1 person read this comment ;-)