4thWaveNow

GenderTrender is a must-read site for anyone interested in the negative impact of trans activism.

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…The “Transgender Chicken Circuit”, for the uninformed, is a patchwork of media appearances, news and feature articles, talk shows, documentaries, convention and seminar appearances that savvy parents can weave together into a modest cottage industry of transgender child celebrity. Think of it as a Munchausen-marinated transgender version of “Toddlers and Tiaras.” …

…None of the children who have been subjected to these treatments have been followed into adulthood, nor the results of such treatments tracked, even though they have been going on for nearly two decades. No follow-up data of any kind, physiological or psychological, has ever been collected…

The problem with medical data collection and oversight is that it tends to introduce accountability: the dreaded paper trail. Which is what inconvenienced our twelve-year-old friend Leo last week when her mother approached her family doctor to administer the experimental pre-pubertal chemical castration injections. Her physician performed due diligence and researched the medication. What she found is that the long-term effects of puberty blockers have never been studied. The manufacturers of the medication warn that the long-term effect on children is unknown…

Breast binders are a common early step for females transitioning to male, but they come with health risks.

Dr. Ralph Vetters, who treats transgender teens at the Sidney Borum Jr. Health Center in Boston, says binders make breathing more difficult, increase the risk for lung infections and, “by compressing the breasts, they can cause a sort of fibrosis. Scars may be a word for it. It hurts.”

‘Looking For Certainty Where It Doesn’t Exist’

What feels like a sudden burst of interest in transgender medical treatment leaves many parents dazed and confused. 

“I don’t know if I’m just being the ignorant mother who’s saying, ‘Dammit, not my kid,’ ” Jackie says, slapping her leg. “I’m delighted for Nate to be a boy if we’re sure. But I’m totally torn about it.”

Jackie wants evidence, some research that will tell her what Nate’s life and health might look like in 20 years.

“So much has changed in my life since I was a teenager,” says Nate’s dad, Tom. “I never wanted to have kids. I didn’t even think I wanted to get married.”

So how, Tom wonders, can Nate be sure he won’t regret beginning testosterone as a teenager? 

Within months of starting weekly shots or a daily cream, Nate’s vocal cords would get longer and thicker, giving him a deeper voice. He would see new facial and body hair, all permanent changes. And the increased testosterone in Nate’s body might make him infertile.

“Even if you stop taking it, there are things that don’t change,” Tom says, throwing up his hands. “I also don’t think they know everything they think they know about hormones and how they affect bodies — and will these kids all develop cancer?”

There is no indication that long-term hormone use increases the risk of cancer for transgender men or women, but there’s very little rigorous research. However, transgender men and women do face an increased risk of heart disease, Vetters says.

…there is a noticeable increase in teenage girls who say they want to become boys. He isn’t sure why, but says there is some indication that these girls “develop the perception that being a lesbian is heavily stigmatized. They realize that if they present in the male gender role and have a girlfriend they are left alone more and it’s safer.” This is just a theory. But it’s one I heard several times while reporting this story.

The MDs quoted in this surprisingly skeptical piece (about a year old) from WBUR Boston–docs who have been in the trenches with kids and teens who have gender dysphoria–have taken LOTS of heat recently;  Zucker and Drescher in particular have been demonized by transactivists.  And I wonder how much hate Nate’s parents have absorbed.

[–]repugnent said:

“Research has shown that children form a gender identity as young as 18 months to three years of age. It is widely agreed that at this point that gender, including gender as it is experienced by gender variant children, is solidified early on.”

Where are people getting this misinformation? FFS, this child is five. My mom works at preschool, and she told me not too long ago that she had to explain to a child that a teacher with short hair was in fact, a woman. Or what about the research showing that most children with gender dysphoria lose it after puberty? This is what disturbs me most about the phenomena. The research that has been done is very clear and yet is routinely ignored, even in mainstream news outlets.

I find these childhood transgender accounts disturbing. It’s one thing when adults decide to transition, but to pigeonhole a 5 year old and relegate them to a lifetime of hormones, surgery and infertility, one should expect caution. Instead it’s the exact opposite; Louis Theroux asked this of a psychologist in his recent documentary, and she responded more or less “it’s this or suicide.” And this mother seems downright giddy about having a trans child.

[–]generibusGrammatical Gender[S] said:

It seems to be one of those things that people just repeat over and over until everyone thinks it’s true. I have a four year old and he is NOT very clear on the differences between the sexes, yet alone some mysterious “gender identity”.

[–]DoubleXMarksTheSpot said:

My younger daughter refused to let me buy her a girl’s swimsuit, insisting on the trunk-like suit for boys, and a tank top sort of shirt on the top. She also wanted “boys’ skates,” and wanted to play ice hockey. She wore baggy clothes and even changed her name for a couple of years.

Go forward half a decade or so, and she’s into manicures, make-up and colouring her hair.

What did we do? Exactly nothing.

This media coverage is so damaging for some families, who feel that if they don’t do something about their child’s experimentation with their identities, they’ll kill themselves. There’s even a local politician who has introduced legislation she has dubbed “Leela’s Law,” that professes to ban conversion therapy for gays, lesbians and transgender kids, but basically targets this one clinic that has come under fire from activists for not promoting transgender identities at the expense of all other treatments for troubled kids in its care.

People are terrified their kids are going to die. I have spoken out against Leela’s Law on Facebook, and the first reaction I got was from the 16 year old daughter of a friend who said, “Kids are killing themselves from dysphoria every day. Don’t discount dysphoria.” (I replied that I feel children should be allowed to express themselves independent of the straightjacket of socially determined gender identities, and she agreed.)

I have slowly started to speak out against these misconceptions in RL (with a mostly positive response). There needs to be pushback in the mainstream media and not just in subreddits and radical feminist blogs.

[–]generibusGrammatical Gender[S] said:

“We tried to steer P’s choices of boy clothing to days when it would not be too problematic”

What on earth would be “problematic” about a girl wearing “boy clothes”? This is another family with extremely rigid gender roles.

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“Widely agreed”  that a child of 18 months has a set gender identity??

I have recently posted links to research studies that are even acknowledged by WPATH, the main organization focusing on transgender health, refuting the idea that toddlers have a set gender identity. Most (75% or more) “dysphoric” children outgrow their feelings of body dissociation and grow up to be gay or lesbian!

Why is the mainstream media falling in line with this garbage?

“I wanted to slice off my breasts with a bacon slicer…Fortunately, I made it through puberty with my breasts intact, but had my parents been less no-nonsense, had they heard of transgender children and had we been living in America today, I might have been given a mastectomy…

At the end of the programme, Theroux says the choice to transition is, “a chance to exercise the most fundamental right we have - the right to be ourselves.” But the children are already being themselves - and we need to accept them as they are.

Instead of shoehorning children into prescribed gender roles, and “reassigning” them when they don’t fit, we need to question our adherence to gender roles. Force feeding children puberty blockers and cross gender hormones and putting them on the path to gender reassignment surgery, when they fail to conform, is actually an infringement of children’s rights to be themselves, as they are. As a society, we need to accept that sometimes boys like to wear dresses and sometimes girls like to wee standing up.“

As a former tomboy, I’m leery of all this transing of children. I recall it was normal to find puberty traumatic and be unhappy in your body as a teen. We even learned that in health class. Whatever an adult want to do with their body is their choice, but slicing off a teenager’s breasts because she feels “dysphoric” is horrifying.

“In a study of pre-pubertal male and female children with gender dysphoria followed-up approximately 10 years later, only 27 percent of children with gender dysphoria remained gender dysphoric at follow-up [10]. Of those individuals who no longer expressed gender dysphoria at follow-up, a significant portion (all female and half the male participants) expressed a non-heterosexual sexual orientation [9]. Thus, gender concerns in neurotypical children prior to puberty may represent a developmental process related to both gender and sexuality for many individuals. 

…Facilitating an exploration of sexuality seems especially pertinent given recent findings that most children with gender-related concerns eventually identify with their natal gender following puberty and frequently adopt homosexual or bisexual identities [19]. It is possible that individuals with ASD may experience similar trajectories in their gender narratives, but potentially follow a different timeline than normally developing individuals owing to reduced social interaction and fewer opportunities to explore their sexual identity.”

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While this article is specifically about autism and gender identity, it cites multiple research studies that confirm, once again, that MOST children who question their gender in childhood end up as gay or bisexual if left alone. Also, socially immature/isolated kids, or kids with ASD, probably need even longer to figure out who they are, which makes a good argument that dysphoric adolescents and even young adults with social anxiety or other similar issues should not start medical transition, as they too often do.

On April 8, 2015 the New York Times reported that President Obama has called for an “end to conversion therapy for gay and transgender youth.”

Somebody explain to me, please: If most children–especially girls–resolve gender dysphoria and grow up to be non-heterosexual adults (and study after study corroborates this finding), how is childhood “gender reassignment” not proactive conversion therapy to prevent adult homosexuality? 

Given these findings, why do doctors, psychologists–and increasingly, compliant parents–assign gender non-conforming children as trans until proven otherwise?

And can it even be “proven otherwise” if they spend their entire childhoods  being told, and treated as if, they are actually the opposite sex?

Your thoughts, President Obama?

roslynholcomb:

roslynholcomb:

4thwavenow:

roslynholcomb:

4thwavenow:

Of course, life is easier for males - there’s no getting around that. Being a woman is like playing on “hard” mode. It sometimes sucks. But it doesn’t have to suck to the point of constantly (emphasis on constantly) wishing you were born otherwise.

Tomboys, unite.

I read these notes especially the kids talking about their parents and it sounds like something out of another century. It’s incredible to me that with all these fabulous female athletes around that parents are still telling their kids that being a female jock is “masculine.” Or that no guy will like them. It’s crazy because I remember my sister being a phenomenal athlete back in the 70s and it was no big deal. The softball team she was on was even called The Tomboys. Yeah, we had to wear froufrou dresses, but that was only for Easter or Christmas. The rest of the time we wore what all the kids wore; jeans and t-shirts. My niece who grew up in the 80s was a terrific athlete as well. Played on the boy’s basketball team, and no one made a thing of it except that she was small and everyone was afraid she’d get hurt. 

So what in the holy hell has happened in the past few decades that we now have folk talking like it’s the 1950s again? (Not even the fifties because my aunt was a “yardman” back then because the pay was better than being a maid and she preferred to be outside, and no one called her a man, though she wore overalls every day and was a butch lesbian.) Is this some kind of backlash against feminism? Because it’s depressing as all hell to read these posts where a girl thinks because she likes science and jeans that she’s somehow not a girl. People have personalities. I didn’t like dolls either. My mama loved them, but never said we had to be boys because we didn’t. Something has gone terribly awry here and it’s just sad to read about.  

Every day I wonder how we went so far backwards in terms of women’s liberation. If you’d told me in 1985 that this is where things would be 30 years later, I wouldn’t have believed it.

The scary thing is, it happened to quickly. While women were being distracted by all manner of fuckery our daughters have been left to fend for themselves. And yeah, here there be dragons. 

I guess it’s sort of like “hipster racism.” We had a generation of parents who believed that being “colorblind” was the way to deal with racism. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. You have to openly address differences and explain to your children why treating people differently because of them is wrong. If parents simply accepted their sons who want to wear nail polish and daughters who want to play baseball as they are there would be no “dysphoria,” because it seems in all these cases thus far the so-called gender norms are being policed by their own parents. 

When my son was about a year and a half old he asked for a baby doll we saw in the discount bin at a big box store. It only cost $5 so I got it for him. He loved that doll and though I thought his dad might have problems with it, he was like “how else is he going to learn how to be a dad?” And that was that. He also had a tea set and loved to have tea parties. He played sports and other people often comment that he’s “all boy,” (yeah, that’s annoying) yet he can sing all the songs from Frozen and berated me for calling it a “girl movie,” (I know, bad feminists, but dammit I can only listen to those damned songs for so long.) 

In other words, it would seem to me that maybe dysphoria, at least in these very young kids could be very much an issue with parents and parenting. It’s typical at these ages to rebel and reject parental norms. If parents are very focused on gender norms, it may well be possible that dysphoria is informed by that. Sounds to me that if these posts are valid, rather than treating the kids with drugs and surgery, we might want to do some type of treatment with the parents instead.