Anonymous asked:
4thwavenow answered:
I have read every post on “Transgender Reality,” and there is no question that some in the transgender community are heavily indoctrinating young teens who just have questions about their identity and gender. I think kids who are socially isolated are especially vulnerable to online pressure.
I agree—it is terrifying, and the most scary thing is that very few people are raising the issue as you just have. Thank you. Here is a link to the site for those who are not familiar with it:
Do we, as multiple societies, need to have a discussion on how the internet affects young people to such a marked degree? My society has rules on how advertisers are and are not allowed to market to children using television, but the internet seems to be much more influential and is completely unregulated.
I don’t know if there’s a way to regulate the Internet reliably though.
The only alternative I can see is from the medical side, trying to make it standard that a kid who seems to be intentionally threatening suicide to get what he/she wants is denied transitioning until that behavior stops.
Although, given that one of the preeminent gender therapy pediatricians in the U.S. has been abandoning long-accepted standards for treatment of dysphoric children (administering cross-sex hormones to kids as young as 12, against the accepted standard of 16), I’m not really sure how well that will work either.
In the end, I think this is likely to be “settled” in civil court when adults start suing doctors for sterilizing them as children.
I think there may well be lawsuits in the future brought by people sterilized as children, but I also have to wonder about young adults over the age of 18 (the age of consent in the US for medical decison-making) and into their early 20s, making such permanent choices. I heard from a parent recently who only learned of her 21-year-old daughter’s/FTM’s complete hysterectomy via her offspring’s YouTube channel. I’m sure there are many similar stories.
As far as I (used to) understand it, young adults are generally discouraged from making decisions about future child-bearing, the conventional wisdom (until recently?) being that those decisions might change; destroying one’s opportunity to reproduce is not a decision to be made in youth unless there is a compelling reason to do so (e.g., it would be dangerous to get pregnant due to health reasons). While it may not be lawsuit territory, it seems strange that many doctors seem to be going along with these sterilization decisions, if the confessional YouTube evidence (and I’ve watched many of these videos) is to be believed.
I have a friend who, at 23, was certain she didn’t want to bear children and planned to get her tubes tied. She is now (at 41) the excellent and proud mother of a 9-year-old son. He is the light of her life, and she is very glad she didn’t go with her original plan. I just generally don’t understand why, on the one hand, neuroscience has reached a consensus that neuronal adolescence lasts until the mid-20s, but on the other, we are allowing younger and younger people to make such monumental, permanent medical decisions.
That may well be a side-effect of the child-free movement. I’ve heard many of them complain that doctors won’t sterilize them in their twenties. Of course, most of them are not looking for a full hysterectomy, just tubal ligation, so I could be wrong.
It’s stunning to me that the childfree movement pushes for women in their 20s to be able to get tubal ligations without question. “I’ll NEVER change my mind! It’s insulting to me that you would ever think so!” they insist. Has everyone forgotten/dismissed that the full spectrum of reproductive freedom includes the right to have children as well as not to have them? Have they forgotten, or dismiss, the coercive sterilizations of “problem” patients as a very real issue? I’ve tried talking to transactivists about this and the face goes blank - apparently nothing matters except getting the right, pretty/butch “look” by taking puberty blockers early enough. It couldn’t be more apparent that this is mental illness; and children (or adults) deep in the throes of delusional mental illness should not be given directive to make such deeply life-altering medical decisions that aren’t necessary for their continued survival and health. Other non-necessary surgical procedures have the same guidelines - gastric bypass, for example, is not supposed to be performed on people who are seriously mentally ill or who are at risk of suicide. This isn’t “ableism” but a life-saving decision made by doctor.
