I want the believers in “truly transgender” kids to answer this one, simple question. Give me your answer. One kid? Two? Fifteen? Come on, step up, be brave. It’s so damned important that these kids get on puberty blockers and then cross sex hormones ASAP so they don’t have to experience their dreadful natural puberty.
What’s your plan for the kids you–oops–accidentally misdiagnosed as “trans” who actually weren’t? What do you have in mind for their need for services? What about their rate of suicidality when they eventually realize the horror that was perpetrated on them by the adults who were supposed to protect them, not give in to their every demand?
Do you give a damn about those kids? If so, what’s the plan?
Well what about your own kid you can’t handle or respect their ferlings about transition on? What about the fact that most of the incredibly fake youth transition fighting is over MtF’s in which modt of you in any others trans discourse are utter poop to? No….4thwavenow and others are freaking over their kidd and everyone else is freaking over the fact that a generation or two of youth transition will break down a whole lot of radfem arguments.
Well, if this is the level of discussion your side can engage in (”ferlings” and “modt” and “kidd” aren’t actually words) and three or four garbled strings of words that you think are sentences, but aren’t, I’m thinking that a whole lot of adults are going to see this debate for exactly what it is: Concerned adults with real arguments on one side and childish tantrum-throwers on the other.
And they don’t answer the question: How many kids is it OK to sterilize? The answer is a number.
If your answer is “zero,” then you can’t justify blockers+cross-sex hormones for any kid, because it’s impossible to prevent false positives. You do the ethical thing and only allow medical transition for adults. Full stop.
If your answer is a number greater than zero, then you are saying it’s perfectly fine to sacrifice the future fertility–and overall happiness–of a person who will one day realize they are not “trans.” You are saying it’s more important to continue the clinical crap shoot that bets some of these prepubescent kids are going to be hunky-dory as adults with all the hormones and surgeries you are setting them up for–as well as destroying their fertility.
The fact that no one in the media or in trans circles is even publicly discussing this as the huge ethical dilemma it is speaks volumes about who is really being served by the medicalization of supposedly “trans” children. Hint: It’s not the children.
‘If your answer is “zero,” then you can’t justify blockers+cross-sex hormones for any kid, because it’s impossible to prevent false positives. You do the ethical thing and only allow medical transition for adults. Full stop.’
OK, I’ll bite. Must be post-Xmas haze … I’m going to talk about Australia, because that’s what i know. Firstly, there’s never been a 12 year old that has been sterilised because of the use of cross sex hormones. Not Ever. I doubt there ever will be. Here’s the current legal and medical situation:
Children who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria MAY be prescribed leuprolin or puberty blockers. They will not be prescribed this without psychiatric and psychological counselling first. The waiting time is anywhere between two months and two years, depending on where you are in the country. Children between sixteen years and eighteen years, depending on the State they live in - again after extensive counselling and approval from psychologists, psychiatrists and medical doctors - can apply with parental approval to the Family Court. Everyone has to agree that cross sex hormones are in the best interests for the health of the child before they are prescribed. This child will not be twelve. They will be sixteen or seventeen and they will have to prove Gillick competency. They will have to have identified as the opposite to their biological gender for many years. This is all, of course, to ensure that false positives don’t happen.
This system is not without its flaws. It is time consuming and incredibly stressful and costly. Many young people will seek hormones through illegal channels in the meantime. Others are of risk of self-harm and suicide because they are developing irreversible secondary sex characteristics while waiting for treatment. Many parents are trying to change these laws for the well-being of their children.
I imagine we disagree on the need for medical intervention and the very existence of children who are transgender.
What we agree on is that the acceptable number of false positives are zero. I believe that I can assert that it would not be possible to get a false positive. leading to sterilisation in a minor, in Australia. Not ever. It has never happened. I do wonder how many cases you are aware of in the US (where I assume you are) where a 12 year old has been ‘mistakenly’ sterilised by taking cross sex hormones. Has this actually ever happened anywhere? Can you cite the cases?
From all I’ve cited above about the Australian situation I conclude that the most pressing ethical question to address is the very real distress experienced by transgender children who lack access to treatment. What the most ethical treatment for this distress looks like is the debate society needs to have. I certainly don’t have all the answers to this issue because it’s a very difficult one and so much is not known. But I have little time for arguing that transgenderism doesn’t exist and, ergo, shouldn’t be treated.
Firstly, stop stating things as fact that are just your opinion and wishful thinking ( the kind of thinking you do so you don’t have to look back in regret when science proves you were horrifically, terribly wrong about transing your child). You have no way of knowing whether there has ever been a 12 year old that has been sterilised because of the use of cross sex hormones. And no way of knowing whether there ever will be. You don’t have perfect knowledge of what’s going on all over the world and you have only trans propaganda guiding you about what doctors should be doing for children who are suffering around gender issues. The results of these chemistry experiments on children will fall directly on your and other parents’ shoulders when it is proven that these artificial chemicals damaged children’s brains and bodies.
And you completely misunderstood my original post, orlando. First, it is a FACT that the administration of GnRh agonists followed immediately by cross sex hormones results in permanent sterility. No one disputes this. There is no legal age restriction in the US on when these drugs are administered. In fact, several doctors, notably Johanna Olson at LA Children’s Hospital, advocate for **skipping** blockers and going straight to cross sex at Tanner Stage 2 (pre-puberty). And follow this link for a case of a “trans girl” who went on cross sex hormones at age 11.
PLENTY of females start puberty at age 12 or younger. So absolutely some of these younger kids are being sterilized. It’s not a matter of conjecture. It’s a matter of the standard practice these doctors are engaged in. The whole point of what they do is preventing the “wrong puberty.” That sterilizes these kids. Full stop. And even if cross-sex hormones are started at age 16? You think a 16-year-old whose physical AND psychological development have been arrested for years understands the gravity of these decisions? They know for sure that they won’t change their minds? Puberty isn’t just about secondary sex characteristics, as this important review article points out. You block puberty, you also block the ability to make more mature decisions and judgments.
The point of my “false positives” post is that all these kids who are being “socially transitioned” and put on blockers because they insist they are or want to be the opposite sex aren’t necessarily “true trans.” (In fact, the very act of helping them pretend they are the opposite sex–down to encouraging 4-year-old girls to wear “packers” FFS–is a form of conditioning, but no one wants to talk about that). I don’t even believe in true trans, but my post, for the sake of argument, asks, “What if there are true trans? What about the false positives?” Because there is no way that every single one of these kids who are currently being diagnosed as trans are going to be happy about being sterilized and turned into permanent patients. Some may. But you can bet some won’t. You, and all the others who are constantly advocating for CHILDREN to be “transitioned” don’t ever express any concern for the kids who are going to mourn what was done to them when they were too young to make an informed decision. You assume that these doctors are gods who would never, ever harm a child, even though EVEN THEY admit they DON’T KNOW which of these kids is going to regret or not.
http://4thwavenow.com/2015/11/04/skeptical-gender-therapist-a-medical-doctor-is-not-a-candy-seller/
Don’t know. Get it? They don’t know, but by continuing to do what they are doing, they are consigning some people to a mangled, drugged, sterilized adulthood. I personally don’t think a single person deserves this outcome, but clearly, you disagree.
Why don’t you stop and think about the magnitude of what you are all over social media peddling: extreme surgical and hormonal interventions for kids and teens–with no evidence of positive long term outcomes. By that I mean, proof that these kids aren’t going to feel regretful as adults. Frankly, I don’t know how the gender doctors sleep at night, knowing that they are effectively experimenting on the next generation.
As a parent, I want least harm done to my kid. That actually amounts to her being left alone to grow up, with her body and brain intact and untampered with. She can make her own decisions as an adult, and if that involves changing her mind again and deciding she’s “transgender,” so be it. Natural puberty is not some horrible tragedy as the trans activists like to present it. But if everyone around a kid is agreeing that it is, you can be sure that kid will see no way out apart from double mastectomies and testosterone.
I sleep well at night, knowing that I am not ushering my CHILD down a permanent passageway leading to plastic surgery and endocrinologists. Knowing that I love and understand my daughter better than a bunch of activists and the medical professionals who now grant them their every wish. I sleep well knowing that the history of medicine and psychology is littered with former miracle cures now understood as grave mistakes.
Do you?
Wow. So much shouting. So many ad hominems. Parents who choose to put their children on blockers and/or permit them to proceed to cross-sex hormones do not love their children less than you, 4thWave. They are not less enlightened, less educated or less well informed.
I have been very carefully (I thought) talking about the situation in Australia, not the rest of the world. I do not claim to know what goes on in every country. The reason I said that no twelve year old has ever been mistakenly sterilised in Australia is that it would be illegal. I find what Kristina Olssen has reportedly done in the US to be extremely troubling. If she put a prepubescent child on cross sex hormones then I think it is very wrong.
It is disingenuous to say that blockers are sterilising because they’re not. Are they ‘completely reversible’ and ‘without side effects?’ I very much doubt it. After agonising, we chose them for our child because they do the least harm. By that, I mean that he identified completely as a boy and the thought of menstruating and growing breasts was unbearable for him. Yes, I do worry that they are, in effect, a ‘gateway drug’ to later cross sex hormones - and that’s where I’m inclined to agree with you. This is experimental - worryingly so - and we don’t know where it will end up. Having said that, it is not quite as experimental as you suggest, since leuprolin has been on pharmaucetical lists for about four decades now. We can map long term effects in children who have taken them for premature puberty (as well as - less ethically - gymnasts that took them in the 70s).
As to whether a child would find it too difficult to transition back - yes, that’s something I worry about too. But I think our situation was different to yours. That’s something that I feel you don’t give enough attention to: everyone’s situation is different. There is no common trans narrative, despite what activists from every side might have you believe. For our kid, it was more like the cross sex identification was a force, gathering speed, until we had to acknowledge that it was beyond the realms of what we could ever have imagined, or expected. We supported gender nonconformity and would be far far happier if our child felt able to live in the body they were born in. That’s not the reality we were faced with.
Part of my solace is that I do indeed trust our medical team, particularly our counsellors who are slow, careful, precise and always advise caution. They’re not perfect, of course, and the situation is far from perfect.
Two other things that the first counsellor said to us that have helped. One is that the whole world is ‘reparative therapy’. I think that’s true. Everybody and everything - explicitly and implicitly - told our child it would be much easier for him to be gender conforming, including us. He was rewarded every day for being a “pretty girl” as well as a “feisty, athletic girl”. To identify fully as the opposite gender has been a very very hard path for him. It is not a path we encouraged him to take, but still he persists. He rages about how much easier it would be if he was a girl. He wants to be. He is angry about being transgender and feels that life has cheated him. But still he insists that this is what he is.
The other thing that I keep in mind is that if he has been allowed to live in the world as a boy for six or seven years before taking cross sex hormones, then that is about the best test drive anyone could have. Think about it. I know I would maybe last a week insisting I was a man. I just couldn’t do it. I can’t imagine doing it in the environment of a state school system. Yet for my son it’s comfortable and right, even though it’s so difficult. Nonetheless, if he changes back he changes back. We will change schools and even addresses to make that happen if it needs to happen.
Am I certain about any of this? 100%? Of course not. But everyone I know is committed to being as certain as it’s possible to be. It’s still horribly scary and sometimes heartbreaking. That’s why it’s so upsetting to see you imply that parents like myself are unthinkingly and casually ‘sterilising’ our beloved children.
You had a potential ally in me. I might have been one of those seeking support in the community you’re gathering around you, 4th Wave. I’m a feminist, I have always tried to teach my kids to spurn stereotypes and essentialised thinking around gender and I’m emotionally and well as ideologically opposed to body modification, particularly in minors. But life has led me down a different track.
The thing is, not everyone has had your experience 4thWave, and we’re not lesser human beings for choosing differently, or for seeing things differently. You’re obviously well educated so I wish you wouldn’t sacrifice accuracy for hitting emotional nerves and encouraging ranting. It’s bad activism and, sadly, it makes you much like those you claim to be different from. You might want to be more intelligent and better informed than the most extreme of the trans activists but to my mind you become more like them every day. You’ve driven me away when I would have liked your help and support.
So I stated very clearly that blockers followed by cross-sex hormones were sterilizing, not blockers alone; you should re-read what I wrote. And I think pretty much everything I said was “accurate” (even supported with research links), not “emotional ranting” or “ad hominems.” I do my homework.
But I’m not going to argue with you. Instead, what I want to do in my response here is focus on your desire to connect with me, mother to mother. Look, I know you love your kid and believe you’re doing the right thing. I don’t think you are “casually” doing anything. I’ve read your blog, and I know you are intelligent and you worry. I get that.
My frustration with you is this: You don’t seem to be looking for help and support, as you claim here, although I actually believe that may have been your original intent. You seem to think you can convince me I’m mistaken by repeating the same mind-numbing trans activist pap I hear every day. (How can I not hear it? Anyone who picks up a newspaper or reads news online is inundated). You come to my blog with links to self-appointed “experts” that I am all too familiar with. For instance, you wanted me to provide a platform for Zoe Brain, an MTF who spews his cherry-picked “research” on each and every news article that is ever published on the issue of transgenderism. You come into a thread critiquing elective surgery for “nonbinaries,” trying to convince us that we should think it’s a good idea. You repeatedly tried to bait me into arguing with you on Twitter yesterday.
Here’s the thing. I am blogging because I have come to hold a very different opinion about the transitioning of children than I was being fed when my own daughter was insisting she was trans. I only came to this opinion after doing a fair bit of research. I know know a lot more than I did before, and my opinion, which is based on actual evidence and science, has only grown stronger. I’m not here to provide a platform for you to bombard me and my readers with, frankly, the usual flimsy, Orwellian rationale for “transitioning” children. Yes, of course, your situation is unique. Every family’s situation is different, but what you say is echoed all over the Internet. You have plenty of other places online to get all the validation you seem to need, places where you will have an enthusiastic audience who will applaud you in your parenting decisions.
So if your aim in interacting with me is to try to get me to change my mind, it won’t work–and I’m not interested. My blog is intentionally a place for skeptical parents and others who have virtually no support. I provide a haven and a place to talk for parents who literally have nowhere else to turn. I also write about things that I don’t see anyone in the mainstream media even minimally addressing. Do you understand what I’m saying here? I’m not here to endlessly debate you or anyone else.
I understand you think you are doing the right thing by your child, but if you have anything to gain from me, my writing, and the intelligent people who gather on my blog at all, it’s the chance to stop and think whether you are, in fact, making the right choice.
I don’t know you or your family. I’m sure it’s been very difficult. But when you say things like your child can’t live “inside the body they were born in,” and “he rages about how much easier it would be if he was a girl. He wants to be,” I must honestly tell you that I think that’s delusional. The latest brain studies point to very little difference between males and females–which doesn’t even matter, because a brain inside a female body is a priori a female brain.
We don’t “live inside” our bodies. We ARE our bodies. Your child IS a girl. You and your child may progress to full-on medical transition (and unlike you, I don’t think these years of your child “living as a boy” are proving anything, so much as cementing an identity in place via conditioning), but it won’t actually change the fact that your child is a girl. Female. That is heresy to say in this day and age, but it’s what I believe; it’s what all my searching has led me to understand. And I think what I say is supported by facts, far more than the incessant droning to the contrary by activists, the media, and the gender doctors.
I also have come to see how damaging the transgender paradigm is to women, as a whole, and lesbians, in particular. I would suggest, with no malice, that you think about listening to some of those women. Actually try to understand why they are so upset about this whole thing. Read what they write. Read what women who were extremely dysphoric as children write; about how they overcame it, to become strong and self-loving women today.
You’ll do as you wish, of course. If you choose to listen mainly to trans women, you won’t hear the less strident voices of actual females who are being drowned out by the constant crowing of transgender advocates. You will continue to think that your girl child is really a boy.
And maybe that’s how it has to be for you.
I wish you no ill, orlando. I am just frustrated, because all I really have to offer you is an alternative view to consider. I honestly don’t have the time or the desire to argue fruitlessly with you. So please, if that’s what you want to do, take it elsewhere. But if you think, after reading what I’ve said, that you can find something of value in the 4thWaveNow community, stick around. We don’t march in lockstep, but certain core issues are pretty well settled for most of us.
OK, thank you. I fully appreciate that you don’t have the time to argue back and forth. In fact, I have no idea how you find the time to do as much as you are doing. This is one of the issues for me: I find that I’m taking too much time online that at this point I need to be spending with my kids and getting my career back on track. I won’t say that this will be my last post (as I’ve made the error of saying “I’m going” before, only to be drawn back) but I’m preparing to leave. I’m also frustrated. We have far more in common that we have differences but I think I’m just going to be treading a different path with my kid, at least for the time being.
It’s been a year for me when I’ve tried to learn as much as I can and to hold off as much as possible from fixed positions. So, I do talk to as many people as I can. I have friends and colleagues who are lesbians and who were radfems (although I think most of them would say they’ve moved on). There are three lesbians in my immediate family. I get it - at least I think I do. I certainly try.
The trans guys I’ve talked to have mostly said that they begun by being lesbians but did it ‘badly’ or it felt wrong, somehow. I suspect that in a former time my son would have identified as a lesbian. And that would have been OK, more than OK.The group of people that I’ve probably talked to least in the last year are the Christian conservatives. That’s partly because my family of origin identify this way (although not to be confused with American political conservatism - they’re not Limbaughs or Trumps). However, I’ve talked to quite a few religious people, including those that think we’re approaching things the wrong way. I begun this year by feeling very very sorry for Leelah Alcorn’s parents (a point which needs more space than I can give it right now). At present, I take heart from the devout Muslim woman I talked to last week who said, “above all things, compassion.”
As an English graduate, my own aphorism tends to be (with apologies to Shakespeare): “there’s more things in Heaven and Earth than dreamt of in my philosophy.” What you’re saying about my son being somehow innately female makes sense in one way. It just doesn’t match with what I see everyday and what he says. Nobody in our family likes what’s going on. I would agree that we *are* our bodies. I challenge Cartesian mind/body splits where I can. And yet whatever I do or don’t think, something else is going on with my child, something I couldn’t have anticipated.
Do I know what is going on? No - we are trying to work it out. As for Zoe Ellen Brain - I hadn’t intended to platform someone that you find objectionable (although I’m still not exactly sure why). I find what she says about intersex conditions interesting and compelling. The science is far from conclusive right now, as you and I have found out, but I do suspect (and hope) that our understanding of other forms of intersex and trans conditions will expand in the coming years.
Anyway, I feel like defending myself endlessly and that’s hardly the point here. I do appreciate that you do as much research as you can. I do too - although I make no claims to be a scientist or even a social scientist. My background is in literature and delving into stats is not my forte. I came to your site initially because I felt that suicide stats were being held over my head and were making it impossible for me to work out the best way to support my child. I think there’s more work to be done there and when I’ve got time I will put something about suicide and young trans people on my blog, but I would far prefer to return to creative writing and exploratory journalling.
Having said that, I often feel some obligation to parents who are trying to work out how to support a gender nonconforming child, because I do have enough education and access to peer reviewed journals to try to cut through the ‘pap’ (as you call it). I am aware of struggling parents in places like the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Tasmania. They have never met anyone else in a situation remotely like theirs and they are utterly on their own. I often do my research partially, as I lack time as well as other kinds of agency. I think you also cherry pick, but I concede it’s very very hard to escape confirmation bias when we are both so emotionally invested in what we are trying to discover.
I think you and I have both discovered that no one knows what the suicide stats are for trans people, before or after transitioning. No one knows how many kids who identify as trans persist or desist after puberty, with or without blockers. No one knows how many kids will regret taking blockers and/or proceeding to more permanent changes. No one knows if identifying as trans is culturally inscribed or neurologically determined. We just don’t know.
I wish you no ill will either. I have heard your view. i reject it but I have considered it carefully and I’m grateful for it. Spending less time lurking on your sites will probably be mentally healthier for me and will give you more time to build your own community. And maybe one day we’ll actually meet and like one another. Who knows? Life is endlessly surprising.
We do have some areas of commonality, and I appreciate the opportunity we’ve had here to discuss things without ripping each other to shreds. Our experiences and research have led us to very different conclusions about parenting a “gender nonconforming” kid. But I’m glad we cleared the air. I think it will make our interactions, when/if we do “meet” again, much more productive than in the past. Thanks for engaging here.
