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Well, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez removed her pronouns from her twitter bio. Does this represent Democrats coming to see the extremes of gender ideology as a political liability? In addition to her we have a representative from Massachusetts, Seth Moulton facing criticism over expressing sympathy with the anti-trans in women's sports position, and in part blaming the election loss on some of the demands of ideological purity on this issue in particular.
Even Reddit seems to be sensing this shift and top comments are reflecting unease with trans orthodoxy. Even the comments from many Democrat supporters on Reddit seem to be avoiding a full-throated defense of trans orthodoxy and instead blaming Republicans for making an issue out of something that hardly affects anyone.
Is this a sign of things to come? Will they actually move against gender orthodoxy or just make it slightly less visible while pursuing the same policy goals behind the scenes?
Edit: Just wanted to share this clip as well as it seems germane
Is there a way to crawl profiles for pronouns? Just ran into a therapists saying she noticed it as a wider trend in her profession
I expect it will be rationalised as being the revised way to protect trans identifying people.
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Two years ago, AOC didn't have pronouns on her Instagram profile, and when called out on it by rabid wokeists, she quickly apologized and put them in. It will be interesting to see if she will make a similar about-face here or if the pronouns are gone for good.
It's worth noting that she also changed her job title from “Representative” to “Congresswoman”, which could be viewed as either a return to sanity (it's okay to call women women again, rather than forcing gender-neutral terminology) or as a way of doubling down on her gender identity as a way to distinguish herself from the evil male majority. We'll see.
If she took them down, she's probably prepared to tell anyone calling her out to pound sand. But I don't think it will even be necessary, it's really starting to feel like this election result knocked the wind out of the Blues.... which I don't quite understand, it wasn't really a landslide so I don't see what warrants a repudiation of their old strategy, Trump didn't manage to take away power from them in his first term, so I don't see a reason why they should fear that this time around, and yet it seems like they feel the need to fall in line somehow.
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The reddit link has its top post reading "Removed by Reddit." God I hate what that site has become.
https://archive.is/TrSMG
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Damn, it was a pretty common take.
The user said something like he’s fine with adults doing whatever they want to do, but encouraging kids into trans stuff was a bridge too far for him, and that’s why Democrats lost his support.
A disproportionate percentage of Reddit powermods are trans, so of course dissent from trans-worship is not going to be welcome there.
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AOC has just generally been on the ‘serious soul searching’ end of the election postmortem, and while I don’t give the lion’s share of the blame to democrats being the party of retarded gender shit, it’s pretty easy to see how AOC can overweight that factor. Like it’s very unpopular and doesn’t entail asking serious questions about the party’s stance on immigration, why abortion isn’t a magic bullet, or whether government economic statistics are fully trustworthy. Plus- disclaimer I am not a progressive and don’t move in very progressive spaces- it seems like trans activists are …difficult allies on a good day.
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In terms of AOC, this clip of hers asking Trump voters for who they follow came up on my Twitter feed the other day, so she could be actually trying to figure out why the Dems failed this election. Of course, many have called this just a Hundred Flowers Campaign, though I'd think, as a NY representative, she just couldn't do a whole lot to negatively affect these podcasts and internet celebs, so I'd actually take her at her word on this, which is surprising to me. I don't keep track of her, so I'm not sure how much of a woke true believer she is versus a leftist socialist making shrewd use of the advantages bestowed upon her by her genes within the woke environment that she inhabits, but I could believe she's the latter and ready to drop the trans ideology stuff if they seem to be disadvantageous to her political career (edit: I also stumbled on some rumors that she's pregnant, which certainly could transform her views very quickly - we'll find out within 9 months, I suppose).
Whether or not this represents Democrats coming to see the extremes of gender ideology as a political liability, I honestly think it might. When I've checked out clips from CNN, MSNBC, or NYTimes, Washington Post podcasts, i.e. media where I'd expect the mainstream Democratic view to be heavily overrepresented, I've been pleasantly surprised by how much actual self-reflection there is about how not distancing themselves from the woke side of the culture wars hurt Democrats and how little of the more expected "it's all the racist/misogynist white/black/Hispanic men's fault" narrative there is (still too much of the latter and too little of the former). In terms of high budget failures, 2024 has been the year of the woke, with a number of films, TV shows, video games, and a political party that fit the woke profile having essentially wasted literally billions of dollars. In any given failure, it's been easy to cope by pointing to non-woke reasons for the failure, but if you're greedy or power-hungry enough, that kind of pattern won't escape your notice.
I don't think this represents some major pivot by the party, though. They're coming to see it as a liability and making small corrections. What I'm hoping for is that in 2026, we'll see Democrats in contested local and Congressional elections finding success from specifically distancing themselves from the extremes of gender ideology and the like, allowing them to defeat other, more extreme Dems in the primaries, and the Republican opponents in the close 50/50 races. That'd be a sign that some actual progress is being made. However, if the next 2 years turns out to be disappointing for the electorate - which I think is the modal case for any presidential election - that'd leave the Republicans vulnerable to losing to extreme Democrats, which could embolden the extreme gender ideologues once again.
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I think it kind of smacks of desperation to take a politician changing her twitter profile as some kind of great paradigm shift. This reaction alone makes me think we have not yet reached "peak woke."
Aren't lots of high-profile people leaving twitter anyways? It might be more of a prelude to her jumping ship off the platform than anything else.
To add onto the other replies, pronouns on the modern Internet contain much more information than the literal direct conveyance of gender identification. It's a potent nugget of information if you're willing to read between the lines...or letters, in this case.
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A prominent, vocal greengrocer taking down his "worker's of the world, unite!" sign is a big deal.
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On one hand I agree.
On the other this took serious intent from AOC or her Twitter admin. It only took seconds, but why remove it at all? Thousands of software suites have been updated to allow pronouns and gender spectrums whenever dealing with people. They fought so hard for this - why back down on the signal?
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AOC is gearing up early for a 2028 run. It’s obvious how the Democratic Party can increase its appeal to young men. Stop trying to overthink it.
When will the Dems learn? Coastal elites lose elections.
America only has 2 swingable regions that matter:
Includes Mich, Wisc & Eastern PA. All 3 states have swung together for decades.
This includes Arizona & Nevada. Both states are growing rapidly and have a massive (30+%) swingable Latino population. The tiny black population means that an alienated white populace + unenthusiastic Latino population will certainly lose you both states. They tend to swing together too. Both went Blue-senate, red-presidency this year.
AOC would be horrible for both these regions. AOC is young. No reason to force it. Show your wider appeal by becoming NY Governor. That's America's 4th most powerful elected position after President, CA Governor & Texas Governor. Big improvements to NY state should give her enough visibility and time to become a Presidential candidate.
But for the next decade, the democratic candidate must identify with one of the above 2 regions.
The 3 nationally recognized candidates from this region are:
Well, look at that. They are also the 3 most liked active democrats.
I am biased towards Pete because he's charismatic, doesn't treat republicans like idiots (has a solid fox news relationship) and is a pro-transit YIMBY. He is also Gay in a lowkey, pro-family way. I don't much about Whitmer. Kelly's dedicated husband + Top gun + Astronaut story is an incredible sell. If only he wasn't bald.
It's still very early, but among those who are more tuned in, how do people around you perceive these 3 politicians ?
Random insane stat:
In the last 50 years, every Republican president has been a coastal elite (Trump, Reagan, Bushes) and no Democratic president has been both coastal and elite (Carter, Clinton, Obama, Biden).
That loses too much of the crucial black and Latino vote.
I would bet more on Whitmer. They really want a female president, it’s pretty clear. They’re itching for it.
Wouldn’t Obama count as coastal due to his Hawaiian roots?
Black Americans are like 30% at least bisexual imo and Latinos are just hiding it through machismo.
Pete would be down low enough for them
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A nickname like "Momala" attached to AOC will take on a whole different sheen with Zoomer men, that's for sure.
Being hot worked for Trudeau.
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Yeah they’re gonna run in 2028 on “man isn’t all this culture war shit about abortion and god and deporting random Mexicans kind of lame and cringe and try hard? Why not just, like, be chill, live and let live maaan”…and it’s going to work. The public has a short memory.
I’m okay with the DNC pivoting to “no step on snek,” but I’m not holding my breath.
We’re getting Newsom 2028 and we’re going to like it.
Dems must really be counting on Trump crashing the economy to go with Newsom
They don't need Trump to crash the economy, it's running on fumes already. He's just the one holding the bag when the music stops.
What’s wrong with the economy. All the big hedge funds and banks are projecting major growth for the next two years
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Well, this entire red-hot and starting to backfire economy is propped up by the laptop class looting federal money to subsidize their lifestyle spending. There's nothing else propping up demand, so if Trump kicks the chair out I suspect we're in for a crash just in time for 2028.
I have to say that the thought of letting Kamala have her win being the more prudent choice long-term did occur to me.
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I guess I'm not a political consultant, so I might be very wrong (then again, so are the consultants sometimes), but my visceral feeling here is that politicians that have previously staked out now-seen-as-extreme positions won't be able to just sweep history under the rug. Harris tried, and while it wasn't the only argument against, plenty of Trump campaign hay was reaped from her stated 2020 policy positions and Senate votes. I can't see AOC winning without a huge vibe shift back to 2016-2020 Democrats' values (not impossible if the next term goes very poorly, I suppose) or explicitly talking about why crying in front of border fences was good then but doesn't conflict with an immigration stance that isn't "open borders" now.
But of her generation of left-leaning politicians, I don't find her the worst.
Honestly, the immigration thing is the easiest issue on which to thread that needle. The people crossing the border are mostly normal people in really desperate situations who hope they can have a better life in the US. While there are practical reasons why we can't let everyone in, Trump and the Republicans lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and have dehumanized them almost completely, giving them license to enact whatever brutal policies they can dream up. His political career literally rests on his belief that the vast majority of illegals are rapists and fentanyl traffickers who are only here so they can commit crimes. Her earlier positions were merely a reaction to Trump's policies at the time, and she was also young and idealistic. Ten years in politics has taught her the practical realities of governance, but we at least need to acknowledge that we're dealing with real people here and not faceless monsters.
Some of her other positions are going to be harder to backtrack from, but she has the advantage of coming into office young enough that she both gets a pass for her earlier positions and develops into a shrewd politician by the time she needs to.
This is the type of hyperbole that makes me find it completely impossible to hang out in online forums dominated by lefties for very long. Like, have you ever talked to a Republican? In person?
I dont think that was supposed to be Rov_scam's voice; rather, they were telling the hypothetical story of how AOC would sell the position shift.
Ya know, I had that in my mind at one point, and I know I had gotten busy and distracted last night, and I partially forgot it. And yet, I think I still had a point. We've talked here recently about how generally hyperbolic and castastrophizing many left-wing online spaces are (which is why I called that out in my comment). Like, just look at reddit. And then, if a potential normie waltzes into the space (think what's happening with young voters), they see that all this hyperbole is Obvious Nonsense if you've ever touched grass (or, ya know, watched a Pens game with a Republican). But they also learn that if you even think about disagreeing with the hyperbole, it's the banhammer for you. It's radicalizing, one way or the other; either you're radicalized to join the herd and spout hyperbole... or you're radicalized to hate those folks. In captured spaces, the hyperbole just ratchets one way, up ever further. They're not just wrong; they're dehumanizing or threatening your existence.
Honestly, the last thing folks like AOC need to do is quadruple down again with the catastrophic rhetoric. Especially because you're saying this in the process of moving your own position closer to theirs! Simply say what they're actually wrong about and why and how you'd do something better. Tarring everyone who has ever supported anything like what you're moving your own policy position closer to as having dehumanized entire groups of people is just gross and insulting.
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Lol, I hang out with Republicans all the time. I watched election returns with people actively rooting for a Trump victory, and I watched the Pens game last night with a guy I often get into arguments with (though we didn't talk politics at all last night). By "Trump and the Republicans" I was referring to the habit of politicians to assign the attributes of the most visible leader to the party as a whole. There could be some media bubble where Fox News et al are repeatedly expressing compassion for migrants and the mainstream media simply isn't reporting on it, but to my knowledge, if any such rhetoric does exist, it's drowned out by statements about migrants all being criminals.
Does the guy you watched the Pens game with last night lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and dehumanize immigrants almost completely?
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If AOC had been running this year, she could have threaded the needle between "we don't need to enforce our borders" and "Trump's border enforcement was nothing to cry about" by asserting that Trump just did it badly. Harp on things like kids unable to be reunified with families because they didn't collect enough data when separating them.
How well that plays in four years will depend on how badly Trump's border policy is carried out over his second term, but since the worst case for her is "Trump's Executive Orders don't make any big photogenic mistakes and the civil service who has to carry out his orders also don't make any big photogenic mistakes", I'm betting she still ends up with some swing-voter-friendly territory to stake out.
On the other hand, the "I'll do what you want but I won't screw it up" card works in any player's hand. Even if Trump does end up taking the blame for any big problems, he won't be the one running in 2028, and it'll be easy enough for any Republican (except Vance) to simply say "well, he had good goals, and I'll be the one to achieve them, without any mistakes this time."
It was a pretty good argument against. "My values have not changed" probably sounded like a tough focus-group-approved thing to memorize out of context, but without some explanation for Harris' changing positions it was just an obvious attempt to weasel out of an incredibly important question when she was asked about the changes. When someone is obviously trying to mislead you, the only safe thing to believe is that an honest answer would be the one you didn't want to hear, so it wasn't too crazy that many moderates and progressives concluded that Harris wasn't to be trusted.
Se my comment above, but AOC will have it a lot easier than Kamala, if only because it's a lot easier to backtrack from a position you took a decade earlier as an idealistic 29-year-old who was new to public office than from a position you took in the last election cycle as a 55-year-old sitting US Senator who had been in politics for 15 years by that point.
I mean, the "my values haven't changed" schtick wasn't good, but I can't imagine her saying anything that would have played better. California is an oil-producing state so she couldn't use ignorance as an excuse. The technology was old enough by 2019 that most of the specific arguments in favor of its environmental benefits had been made. There was no new information that came out between 2020 and 2024. If she'd been against fracking in 2012 and changed course in 2019 it would have been easy to give her a pass, but there's really no good explanation. The real explanation is probably that she's against a fracking ban now for the same reason she was in favor of one in 2019 — because that's the position her advisors told her would give her the best chance of winning, which leads one to wonder what her actual thoughts on the matter are.
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No. The worst case is that the left makes mistakes and punches itself out trying to stop deportations of the wrong sorts (they love a lost cause) and blow all their powder.
Then Trump's deportations proceed and go even further, the numbers drop compared to Biden and the Overton Window is shifted because people feel deportation wasn't so bad. Maybe let little Elio stay but still.
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It's one more iota of evidence that we're past peak woke.
I was a little worried after the election that leftists would see it as vindication that moderation doesn't work, given how Harris had pivoted to the center. But overall that doesn't seem to be the case. Thank goodness.
Check the immediately preceding top level post before you celebrate.
"Past peak" only means the first derivative has turned negative, not that there will be no new examples.
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Even the trans community has been somewhat bothered by the "pronouns in bio/email" stuff, so I'm not surprised to see it fading. There were a lot of complaints that, in practice, it just drew attention to the least gender conforming people in the office - plus it's not a fun question when you're still in the closet (do you lie? are you comfortable lying?)
So howcome they did absolutely nothing about it for all these years? Why did they participate in dogpiles on anyone who did voice their concern (including the occasional trans person, funnily enough)?
In lefty circles in the UK (and I assume the US is similar) the dogpiles were led by clueless cis allies and tumblrgendered headcases, not by actual trans people living as the opposite gender to their birth sex.
I can buy that cis allies were the majority of participants just due to relative sizes of each population, but if you're telling me that trans people were sitting it out, I'll need something tangible. Like, if I go to some trans subreddits and look up what they were saying about Gina Carrano's bip/bap/bop joke, do you think the prevailing sentiment is going to be "who cares"?
I'll also need a definition of "actual trans person" that is accepted by the trans community itself. If you're angling for limiting them to trans-meds, that is already dismissed as bigotry by the trans community itself.
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We're not a hive mind. Some of us did speak up. Most of us have more important issues to speak up on. And we didn't want to get dogpiled either.
(And honestly, for a lot of us, when we do speak up, we don't get heard. The loudest 1% dominates both sides of the conversation right now, which sucks)
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Which would be more compelling if people weren't still getting fired because "it was obviously written in bad faith by a man."
Pity, where we've ended up. Oh well.
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I've long since lost the reference, but probably 6 years ago I saw some segment on The Hill about a study done by a trans advocacy group. And basically it was a policy document pointing out that putting penises in women only spaces, especially women only spaces with minors, is about the most unpopular policy you can possibly run on. So what needs to happen is that trans friendly politicians need to lie, and then quietly do it anyways. Don't worry, trans friendly advocates in media, and trust and safety teams on social media will cover for you.
No matter what mouth sounds Democrats make, I will never trust them on this subject ever again. And unfortunately for them, until all my children are over 18, it's literally my number one priority. We already live in a world where Democrats sanctioned the state taking kids away from parents, and putting them on a path towards mutilation and sterilization. You don't just get to walk away from that and hope nobody brings up all those children you sterilized.
What if one frames it as "Outside the bedroom or the doctor's office, other peoples' genitals are none of your business, and should not be taken as an input to whether $PERSON is allowed to $VERB_PHRASE."?
The problem with that, naturally, is that one’s genitals are an unusually effective predictor of certain undesirable behaviors when they introduce themselves into places where the opposite genitals congregate, especially when they insist upon a certain kind of obvious lie.
Now, of course the same argument naturally applies to racism too. But for racism we sacrifice that predictive knowledge on the pyre of “so that maybe advantaging the people of race X that don’t act as predicted eventually changes the circumstances”, and that’s very emphatically not what’s meant to happen in the genital cases (because it’s pushed with the intention of bullying everyone else by proxy).
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That was the propaganda they lead with. A few obviously preventable rapes later, people started to see through it.
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I think even if they “distance themselves” this one is going to be hard to get trust back on. They’ve already been caught several times outright lying on this issue, and worse, lying about exactly what they’re doing in schools. Millions of parents are not only aware, but angry. I know a person I’m working with who has a daughter who briefly decided she was queer. Her mother was absolutely terrified of this because she knew what would happen the minute a psychiatrist heard any sort of gender confusion from her daughter. At school, this stuff was encouraged. The girl seems to be growing out of it now, bullet dodged. But multiply that by all the parents out there knowing that the schools are teaching this and going behind their backs, who know that trans identified men can go into any locker room they want, and that books that are nearly pornographic are available to grade school kids. I don’t think you can slip one by here.
What books are you referring to?
At the time that Ron Desantis was running for president, there was a huge controversy about him banning books. Specifically many of these kids books were pro-LGBT. They also contained very graphic descriptions of sex acts. There was also a series of fantasy books written by Sarah J Maas that contained descriptions of sex acts.
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/roughly-300-books-were-removed-from-libraries-in-florida-last-school-year-heres-the-full-list/3113184/
Note this is school libraries, not public libraries.
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I've noticed that trans advocacy seemed to be copying along with the successful gay marriage advocacy of the past, and this looks like another possible example. Back in 2008, when presidential candidate Barack Obama came out explicitly against gay marriage, it was considered just common knowledge among my peers that he was lying in order to help the good guys gain power. Obama's stance on gay marriage hasn't been relevant in a long time, but as of the last time I talked about it with friends, they seemed to still believe that Obama had been lying at the time, rather than that his position changed at some point while he was in office.
I have no idea how many people actually believed his lie, assuming that it was a lie, but certainly telling such lies in order to sneak in more "extreme" positions wasn't disapproved of and, by my perceptions, quite lauded. So it does seem reasonable to suspect similar things going on with trans advocacy. However, this doesn't seem to be working in this case for a variety of reasons, including the fundamental physical differences between what gay marriage and trans advocacy demand. There seems to be a sort of cruel cosmic joke here with trans advocates trying to follow in the successful footsteps of the gay marriage movement but as a cargo cult just copying along the superficial aspects.
Ezra Klein actually brought up Obama's lie to the Pod Save America guys who worked for him. No one contested that it was a lie btw.
He identified a different reason the trans stuff sunk Harris: both Harris and the ACLU are fucking stupid.
That sounds harsh but that was the tone. He was as angry as Klein gets, furious that the ACLU would even send out an exam (a paper trail!) on a policy that was almost designed to be maximally offensive and that Harris was dumb enough to say she supported and actioned it on tape instead of ignoring it or simply handing it in.
In essence, they didn't lie as good or as smart as Obama did.
I think the trans thing legitimately is a heavier lift but I think he has a point.
It's harder to get away with a lie the second time.
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Obama had a somewhat similar paper trail https://time.com/3816952/obama-gay-lesbian-transgender-lgbt-rights/
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Agreed. This is more than people with dicks dominating women's sports. And it's more than a few perverts stealing women's underwear or using women's locker rooms.
Those stories understandably get the most engagement, but they are relatively rare.
The bigger issue is how the spread of trans ideology has resulted in some pretty huge number of children getting placed onto the trans gender track which, if not quickly arrested, results in awful life outcomes. I think the best comparison is anorexia, which is similarly terrible for one's health and mostly the result of social contagion.
In my mind, Democrats are permanently tainted on this issue. We need more than a minor pullback in wokeness. We need investigations. We need groomers to get fired and potentially prosecuted. And we need clinics performing gender surgery on minors to be shut down, their owners sued into bankruptcy, and their practitioners delicensed.
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Assuming that instead of trans advocates losing ground, it's shadow-speak, or fingers crossed in the background.
Seems like a particularly miserable way of viewing the world. It's a victory for your team. Take the W.
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I really doubt you can find anything from a major politician that supports that claim. This isn't even "making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike", it's just plain making things up.
This is not sufficiently charitable. Specifically,
It's fine to raise questions about source veracity, but if you're going to respond to others, you need to actually be responding to the substance of their posts--not ducking into your motte when they raise points you don't care to substantively address. Actually several of your comments in this thread do the "law of merited impossibility" and "Russell conjugation" thing, where you oscillate between "this isn't happening" and "it's good, actually" while rhetorically re-framing specific concerns. This kind of engagement creates frustration and lowers engagement quality, even though it basically keeps to the rules on tone. If done deliberately and repeatedly, it amounts to a kind of trolling. Please engage with what people are actually saying, rather than substituting your rhetoric for their substantive concerns.
I am responding to what was literally said. They picked the word "mutilation", not me. There is no actual mutilation happening.
If you want to discuss "children are transitioning", we can have a conversation about that. But that's a very different conversation from "children are being mutilated."
Would you really allow this sort of insulting language to fly in the other direction? Can I talk about how conservatives are routinely voting to kill women? Is it fair to say conservatives have once again elected a fascist rapist?
Your response was insufficiently charitable.
First, other people's bad behavior is irrelevant to your own. Second, I already banned WhiningCoil for comments in this thread. If that wasn't enough to stifle your whataboutism, then I don't know what else I could possibly do to assuage your persecution complex.
There are ways to make substantive assertions along these lines, and people often do. But they have to do so within a context of following the rules, which you have failed to do here.
Okay, fair enough. My complaint was entirely that if "child mutilation" was considered acceptably charitable, I think I was more than matching that level of charity. If we're in agreement that "child mutilation" is an insulting and deeply uncharitable description, then my objection is pretty well resolved.
I do think I've been consistent in my stance: SRS is a surgery like any other, and calling it "mutilation" is ridiculous hyperbole. Calling it "child mutilation" is doubly ridiculous, since as far as I know, kids under 18 genuinely are not having surgery. I'm not saying kids don't transition, I'm saying they don't get surgery under 18, and that it's not mutilation.
If someone really has a source for SRS being common in kids, I'd love to see it. I've tried to find numbers, and basically every source has said "low enough to basically round off to zero."
I agree that "mutilation" can be unnecessarily inflammatory rhetoric. I would stop short of calling it inflammatory per se, however. Referring to the removal of healthy organs for aesthetic purposes as "mutilation" seems like a supportable framing, but context and charity matter.
That can be your stance, but you aren't entitled to its adoption by others. Many humans object to cosmetic surgery generally, and those kinds of surgeries do not usually interfere with bodily functioning. Interfering with bodily function seems to raise the stakes. "Mutilation" may be ridiculous hyperbole in some contexts, but it does not seem per se to be so.
The main reason I am replying to you again, here, is that you still don't seem to have grasped where you went wrong in the first place. WhiningCoil did not say "children are being mutilated," but rather that children were being put "on a path towards mutilation and sterilization." You cannot charitably read this to say "children are being mutilated," but rather "children are being channeled toward life outcomes that eventually include sterilization and the removal of healthy organs." Demanding evidence of children having functional tissue removed for aesthetic purposes is failing to address what WhiningCoil actually said, and hence a rules violation.
(For whatever it's worth, "gender affirming mastectomies" clearly involve the removal of healthy organs for aesthetic purposes, and do not appear to be terribly rare in adolescents aged 12-17. If someone were to call that "child mutilation" I would probably need to spend some time weighing whether I regarded the rest of the comment as inflammatory, "boo outgroup," or otherwise rules-violating, but that characterization of the data in isolation does not look like a per se rules violation to me.)
Referring to a major medical condition as "aesthetic purposes" also seems pretty uncharitable.
I disagree. A lot of posters here are in fact doubling down on "actual under 18 children ARE having surgeries". "Children are on the path to making a consenting decision, as a legal adult" really lacks the same oomph, but it would be a lot more honest if that's really what you meant to convey.
When people talk about tobacco companies putting kids on the path to a lifelong smoking addiction, I don't think they mean "kids might take up smoking when they turn 18." They're worried that actual kids are actually smoking cigarettes, right now, as kids.
To quote the source: "A total of 209 patients underwent gender-affirming mastectomy between January 1, 2013 and July 31, 2020."
That's 30 people a year. Out of 150,000 trans adolescents, and, what, 25 million adolescents overall. So literally one in a million. I'll admit that's a lot more than I thought, but it's still incredibly, vanishingly rare. Those are exceptional cases, and I'd be extremely shocked to learn that a single one of those was done without parental consent.
I did say "low enough to basically round off to zero", in case you want to argue this is somehow moving the goalposts. I dare say 0.0001% rounds off to zero. Even 209 patients over 150k trans kids gives us 0.1%. So even given your kid is trans, this is still a vanishingly small subset of the discussion.
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There is written record of the Secretary for Health demanding that the WPATH removes minimum age requirements from their Standards of Care so that the Biden administration can better pursue their goals related to trans issues. WPATH did comply, in violation of their own procedures of how the SOC is supposed to be determined.
Removing obstacles from a path is not "putting them on a path". Do you object to roads, because they put criminals on the path towards bank robbery?
Which "mutilations" had the minimum age requirements changed? What are the new requirements?
I'm sorry, but analogies are really not your strong suit.
That public roads can be used by bank robbers to escape from robberies is an unintended, unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of the existence of said roads.
Small children receiving "gender-affirming" surgeries is not an unintended consequence of Levine calling for the age limits on minor transition to be removed. That outcome is the sole purpose of Levine having done so. It is exactly the outcome Levine is trying to bring about.
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It sounds like arguing semantics to me. If one hand the public health administration is removing obstacles, and on the other the education system is telling kids they might be "born in the wrong body" if they don't fit into a given mold, and than hide the information about the child's transition from parents, that sounds like it all adds up to putting children on a path to transition.
Draft of SOC8:
vs. published SOC8
There's also points A-E, but everything about minimum ages has been removed.
Edit: I think they mention the 18 years for phalloplasty when they elaborate on the chapter.
So, again, for starters: none of that is mutilation, just regular surgery.
Second, right there in the guidelines: this is the section for adolescents. Children is section 7. When your actual source makes the distinction between kids and teenagers, I feel like it's a bit disingenuous to keep calling them "kids"
Third, that's the section on "treatments requested by the patient". It's not putting someone on a path when they are already on that path and merely asking for help.
I don't see how this is different from anyone else trying to get medical treatment for their illness. Would you be horrified to learn that we also let children be treated for cancer and depression? Should there be a minimum age for those, too?
There is nothing "regular" about surgery to remove healthy organs and tissue with the ultimate goal of ameliorating psychic distress. You're welcome to defend this practice, but don't pretend it isn't a major departure from the common practice of surgery as generally understood.
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Unnecessary surgery that removes healthy body parts is mutilation, as are unnecessary hormonal treatments.
When people say "kids" they mean "minors", performing these treatments on even younger children is even worse, but a mastectomy performed on a 16 year old girl is still atrocious.
No one cares, the patient is a minor that doesn't know anything about what they're talking about.
There is no evidence that any illness is involved. The only criteria necessary to get a dysphoria diagnosis is:
Say you're trans
Don't change your mind for a few months
Even those loose criteria aren't always followed.
Cancer has proper diagnostic criteria, so no on that, but if a doctor insisted I have to give drugs to 14 year old for "depression" (or "anxiety" or ADHD) I'd find it absurd.
Probably. Psychology is very unrigorous, and we should not let these kind of doctors make decisions about children, that go against the wishes of parents.
I certainly didn't think it was unnecessary. What makes you the expert here?
That might be believable if there was a huge number of people who regretted these decisions, but people actually seem pretty consistent. I challenge the idea that a 16 year old doesn't have any idea what they want - 16 is young enough to be tried as an adult or apply for emancipation. In most states, two 16 year olds can have sex, get pregnant, and have a child - a massively life changing decision that involves significantly more severe medical risks. We even allow kids to drive! Traffic accidents are one of the top ten leading causes of death, but we trust kids with it.
Are you saying that's all a mistake? We need to keep kids away from any sort of responsibility or freedom until they're a legal adult?
There's plenty of evidence that this intervention results in positive outcomes. You're talking to one of the positive outcomes right now. I'm not sure what else to call it when you do a medical intervention and it fixes a problem?
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What if the parents are wrong?
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Washington State literally passed this fucking law last year, please just stop lying to our faces that it's not happening (and also it's good), if only to prove you can notice it doesn't work and try some other tactic.
Funny how you can't actually quote the law or provide any reference to it. I bet the word mutilation isn't in there even once.
Of course the Washington Democrats aren't going to use the word mutilate, they'll call it gender-affirming, and you will fall for the parallax.
Castration is mutilation. It's always been mutilation. It will always be mutilation. Calling it gender-affirming care doesn't change the thing one whit.
And the laws in WA are abominable and should be changed.
Are you opposed to all surgeries, then? Cutting out someone's heart is mutilation. It's always been mutilation. It will always be mutilation. Calling it a "pacemaker installation" doesn't change the thing one whit. We are creating heartless cyborgs out there! Why aren't you concerned about that too?
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What on earth is this meant to prove? "In their official communications, the IDF have never referred to their military operation in Gaza as a 'genocide': ergo, it can't possibly be one". Would you expect anyone in the world to be persuaded by such a facile argument?
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Some schools secretly socially transition children. Some locales will take children out of parents' custody if they fail to support transition. This is not all right wing paranoia.
Can you provide a source for the claim that schools are forcing uninterested, non-consenting children into transition? Or are you just searching for the maximally inflammatory way to say "some kids don't trust their parents not to disown them"?
Really? "Fail to support" transition, or "try to block their kid from accessing the relevant medical treatments"?
Neither of those is an example of "mutilation"
In the state of California there was a bill governing custody disputes between divorced parents, which would make a parent's decision to affirm the child's stated gender identity (or not) a factor to take into consideration in said disputes. Essentially, if a married couple gets divorced and their child has announced that they are trans, if one parent affirms the child's stated gender identity uncritically and the other parent is more sceptical and prefers a watchful waiting approach - all things being equal, the judge is meant to rule in favour of the former parent.
What do they mean by "affirmation"? "Affirmation includes a range of actions and will be unique for each child, but in every case must promote the child’s overall health and well-being." - so this isn't as simple as providing a child with medical treatment which has been recommended by a qualified professional.
This bill was voted on and passed in both houses, before being vetoed by Governor Newsom. Elected representatives in the state of California believe that if a child announces that they are trans, the correct position for the child's parents to adopt is to uncritically affirm the child's gender identity without question.
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Without doubt, the former. There's a high profile case of a sex-trafficked teenager that the authorities refused to release to her grandparents, because they used her birth name, which resulted in her being sex-trafficked again.
This is without going into the question of whether there are any relevant medical treatments to begin with, or if it's just glorified cosmetic surgery/intervention.
If you can only provide one example, that's hardly supporting your case. If anything, that suggests the opposite: this is so incredibly rare that it made the news.
The medical community, the scientific community, and the community of people who have actually undergone the process all recommend it, so I'm not sure on what grounds you would claim that it's not a valid medical treatment.
Originally you said it doesn't happen, and the reason why authorities do it, is because the child is denied medical care. At the very least I'd expect you acknowledge that it happens sometimes given the evidence. The reason this was such a big story was it's particularly egregious nature (the double sex-trafficking part), but there were other stories of custody disputes based on nothing more than pronouns / identity affirmation. It was almost enshrined in law in California but for a veto.
This is false. Anybody that made a comprehensive review of evidence came to the conclusion that the evidence is of poor quality. This includes WPATH, which commissioned several systematic reviews, and refused to publish them when the evidence didn't say what they wanted to say it.
No, I said no one is getting mutilated. That has nothing to do with custody. I expressed skepticism about the idea that the majority of these cases, or even a significant minority of them, are really just "failing to support".
The California law said that pronouns could be a factor, not that they were the only factor. That seems reasonable to me. If I kept misgendering you, I'm sure you'd consider it insulting. I'm not sure why insulting your kid and being generally hostile to their medical needs wouldn't be a factor in such a decision.
A custody case also isn't a locale "taking a kid", it's a court deciding which parent provides the better environment for the kid. The whole process is initiated by the other parent, not the courts. If courts were just swooping up and fostering kids because a teacher reported a pronoun violation, we'd be having a very different conversation.
There's a recurring theme here, where responsibility is out-sourced from the people actually initiating things. "Schools" don't transition kids; kids transition. "Courts" don't take away kids, the other parent is bothered enough to demand a divorce and argue for full custody. The courts aren't responsible for someone's wife thinking they're a shitty husband. This doesn't just happen out of the blue. Another adult, one deeply involved in the situation, looked at it and said "I need to protect my child from this person".
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I certainly never claimed that, so I won't be championing it. You may not take my statements, make an exaggerated looney version of them and then foist that wild view onto me.
Whether these are valid medical treatments for minors or horrific butchery that we will look back on like elective lobotomies for strange children is the matter under dispute.
You're the one that said the schools are "secretly transitioning" kids, like the kid wasn't involved in the process.
You haven't made any argument for butchery - it's not like kids are getting surgery. The usual treatment for under 18 is hormone blockers at most, and often just a safe space. My understanding is that it's still illegal to prescribe actual HRT without parental consent. All of this ignoring that people on HRT generally stay on it, and prefer their new life.
Secretly transitioning as in a secret from the parents. How could a socially transitioned child not be aware of their new name and gender presentation?
Some minors get sex reassignment surgery. We've moved past "that never happens" to "its not that common". Next stage is "of course that happens and its a good thing". And of course there are advocates for more minor sex reassignment surgery. Such as the leaked documents from Biden's Department of Health and Human Services.
Or much more commonly these kids get irreversible and badly harmful puberty blockers. A parent failing to support this harm of their child can lose custody in some locales.
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There are laws that require public employees lie to parents about what their children are doing at state institutions.
Yes, they are. They literally are, hundreds if not thousands a year.
These drugs are abhorrent, and only made less so by comparison to the absolutely insane cosmetic surgeries that are more extreme. You can't pause puberty, and disrupting it because children don't like the changes is malpractice.
You are wrong. This is not the case.
As always: citation needed? What jurisdiction are you in that allows this? Do you have any actual articles speaking to that? The world is a big place, and I'll admit I don't know every region of it.
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Surely it's obvious to you that he meant secret from the parents? It's clearly logically impossible to transition someone secretly from them themselves.
Again, it's not the school doing this. The school is not "secretly transitioning" anyone. The kid is secretly transitioning, and the school is merely respecting their privacy.
The alternative is that the kid doesn't tell the school because they know their privacy won't be respected, and has absolutely no adult support. That seems way worse to me.
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To be fair, the parent poster only talked about a "path towards mutilation". I assume that the "mutilation" in question is gender reassignment surgery, which typically involves cutting off external sexual characteristics. Is it not fair to say that this is a typical or at least commonly desired endpoint of transitioning, so actions that make it more likely that someone will reach this endpoint in the future could be fairly described as putting them on a "path towards mutilation"?
I figure the assumption of the anti-trans side is that children can't meaningfully consent, nor be held accountable for their interest or lack thereof in the context of a managed social environment like school that may encourage or discourage said interest. Either way, the poster you are responding to didn't claim anything about interest or consent, did they? They are only talking about secrecy, presumably from the parents.
Mind you, it also seems strange to first claim that the driving concern is parents disowning the kid, but then to also defend a forced disowning if they refuse to let the kid access transition-affirming medical interventions. In a scenario where the parents find out anyway and are not willing to "own"/support a transitioning kid, your preference is evidently for the kid to be separated from the parents anyway. If you are willing to use deception to make the parents make a sacrifice (of money? time? support?) that they would not make willingly, why can't you instead support a policy that at least respects them as adult citizens and simply says that they will lose visitation/influence rights if they interfere with the transition but will still be compelled to provide financial support for the kid?
In the sense that it's fair to describe doctors as "horrific butchers who have somehow gotten away with a brazen series of stabbings and mutilations", sure. Which is to say, no, that's not a fair way of phrasing things at all. That's an incredibly insulting way of phrasing it, and I can't imagine anyone who says that actually has a good opinion of trans people / doctors.
They said the school was transitioning them. The school is not the active party in this. The kid is. The kid is transitioning. The school is merely keeping that secret. That is a fairly important distinction.
I don't really have any sympathy for the parent's "unwilling" sacrifice here. I expect adults to handle their obligations responsibly. Where I come from, becoming a parent means you're signing up to support the kid until they're 18. Sometimes that means dealing with twins. Sometimes that means dealing with a disability. That's what you signed up for when you became a parent. Six months of supporting your kid isn't likely to be anywhere near as bad as what you're putting the kid through.
I also think kids deserve a space where they can safely explore the idea without committing. I'd much rather a kid try on dresses for 6 months and work it out of their system, then go back to being a proper upright conservative. It would be awful if instead, that same kid get disowned and lost their family over what turned out to be a pretty typical childhood phase.
And, in the end, I'd absolutely support a process where kids could get placed in a safe alternate environment as needed, but sadly we do not have such a system yet. Foster care sucks. I can't blame a kid for trying to sneak by until they turn 18, get a job, and can move out safely. Even if you only expect to get a few months before you're caught, that's still time to try and line up someplace safer to go.
The kid's decision doesn't mean the school isn't active, because the kid is a minor and the school is responsible for him at school.
I mean, if we follow that line of reasoning, I still don't see the problem. You've abandoned your parental responsibility and put it on the school while he's there. Fair enough. I don't see how you get to object when the school then acts in a responsible manner? The school agrees with him that he has a medical condition, and followed normal channels for helping him get help with it. The school has reason to believe you might endanger the kid if you find out, so they're doing the responsible thing and keeping him safe.
If the school runs a cancer awareness program, are you outraged when it turns out one kid does have cancer and gets treatment? What if the kid's parents are big believer in New Age healing crystals, and didn't want their kid to undergo chemo?
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I was thinking, gun to my head, I'd rather my daughter was molested by a catholic priest (unlikely as that is, being a girl and all) than fall in with your ilk. But that got me thinking... what if the Catholic Church leaned into LGBTQ+ shit 30 years earlier than they did?
What if, instead of covering up the priest abuse scandals, they leaned into it. Claimed they were just protecting young gay boys. In fact they had a moral duty to keep these young boys sexual behavior a secret from their parents. They might not accept them after all. Furthermore, the Catholic Church should probably just take custody of them from those bigoted parents.
It's preposterous and totally insane. But that's what you sound like.
Your first comment got a lot of reports, which opened a mod conversation about whether to ding you for it. One mod said "not bannable, but warnable," another said "not even warnable." I tended to agree that it was not a great comment, but that it ultimately fell on the permissible side. The meta-moderation system agreed with me on this. However the low-quality responses you've generated certainly lend credence to the inclination toward moderation there.
This comment, though, fails the test of "write like everyone is reading, and you want to include them in the conversation." In particular, "your ilk" is a quintessentially antagonistic framing; we're here to engage with ideas above people, and watch our tone in preservation of content.
And this, of course, is worth moderating all on its own.
You do your substantive position no favors by cranking the rhetoric to 11. Your occasional AAQCs only get you so much lenience. It has been a while since your last ban, after which you became a quality-content machine for a bit! But recently your warnings have been arriving with increasing frequency. Let's try another week-long ban.
Were literally the product of a troll single-purpose-account, and you know it. But you can't let the place stray too far from leftist Orthodoxy, can you?
I appreciate you.
It honestly warms my heart to know that I can still generate responses like this in the same thread where I'm getting responses like this:
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Would you dare say that to your daughter?
You'd really rather her undergo a horrific, traumatizing experience that basically no one recommends... rather than do a relatively safe medical process that has numerous positive recommendations?
And you think this is a rational decision based on the facts, that your daughter should suffer horribly rather than grow a beard? What would you have done if the poor kid had PCOS or something?
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It's preposterous and totally insane sounding because you analogized a situation where a child is raped without consent to one where the child willingly undergoes a medical procedure (regardless of whether you think it's warranted or not). That is a preposterous and insane analogy to make so it's no wonder that's what your conclusion is.
Hello, and welcome to the Motte!
This response is not sufficiently charitable. You may note that I have banned the user to whom you were responding; one big problem with rule-breaking comments is that they tend to proliferate by encouraging further rule-breaking responses. But responding to a rule-breaking comment in a rule-breaking way does not excuse you!
...actually, looking through your rather fresh comment history, you seem to have a remarkable knack for sussing out problematic posts and making the discussion even worse by responding, not to the substance of the post, but to its rhetoric. Somehow that is, actually, most of your posts! The odds of this are so low as to not be worth contemplating.
Still, in the interest of charity, I will hold off perma-banning you as a suspected alt until the next time I notice this peculiar pattern. Once, after all, may be happenstance.
Hello, thanks for the welcome.
I won't deny I have a habit of responding to the posts that seem egregious to me with rhetoric in kind. This is true. I can work on my charitability.
I don't want to come across as if I'm complaining about the moderation (I think it's fine) but I am a bit confused about the rules of engagement here and would like some clarification before posting further so that I don't get unceremoniously permabanned. If this comment is unacceptable on the forum please feel free to delete and continue the convo in messages, but I am actually asking for clarification in good faith.
First of all, am I being moderated for the tone/content of my posts or for ban evasion as a suspected alt? I'm assuming from your comment that there was a previous user on this forum who used to engage similarly to me and was banned for it. If that's the case and you think this person is me, then what can I actually do to make you believe otherwise? I recognize as a moderator the need to restrict ban evasion from problem users, but from my perspective I am unaware of previous users having similar rhetoric (and it seems onerous to expect me to write deliberately in a different tone or avoid certain topics) so what is my recourse to avoid a permanent ban for this reason?
Secondly, my understanding was that as a new user all my comments have to be approved by moderators before becoming public. Until this comment I had not received any mod feedback. If it is not just ban evasion I'm being modded for, is it only this most recent comment that goes over the line into being problematic? If not, does this comment act as a warning that all of my previous posts were unacceptable?
I'm not trying to be deliberately difficult here, I actually don't understand or know the answers to these questions. I'd like to retain the ability to post here, and in order to do that I need to know where the line is.
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Is it not charitable anymore to honestly state your opinion on the analogy a user made (as opposed to their beliefs or character)?
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Frankly I find it more preposterious and insane that you don't see removing parental authority as the salient category.
What's your position on castrati? Willing undertaking of medical procedure or abduction of minors for sinister purposes?
Can you elaborate on what you want me to respond to? Are you referring to singers who in the past were castrated for their singing voices? I don't think that was a morally good practice.
I obviously would agree that 'abduction of minors for sinister purposes' is bad, you literally put sinister in the description. I suspect we disagree on what sinister purposes refers to, so you need to describe something more specific if you want to prompt my thoughts to see our differences of opinion.
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Your right, i forgot to include the priest telling some wild yarn about how the kids actually want it. Despite everything we know about kids not being able to consent to that. Good call. Now its perfect.
Do you actually not understand the difference or did you just want to get a cheap dig in?
Do you see all medical interventions in under-18's as 'grooming'? No? Just the one you already have a prior about not liking?
If I'm wrong please tell me how. There's a huge host of reasons why they are different, but I'm only going to bother explaining them if you're not going to respond with another sarcastic one liner that is indistinguishable from an inflamed partisan spouting nonsense about 'the transgenders grooming my kids to want to be raped'.
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Do you think parents who love their children and will not disown them, but refuse to go along with either social or medical transitioning, should lose their parental rights? Do you think they should not be allowed to veto the school facilitating transition, without their knowledge or approval?
If a kid is in horrible pain, and their parent refuses to do anything about it, and the kid is actively looking to escape? Yeah, I think it's pretty reasonable to remove the kid. Would you tolerate a parent neglecting a broken leg because they think all surgical intervention is blasphemous butchery? Are you okay just watching a kid die from cancer, a totally preventable cancer, just because surgeries carry a bit of risk?
Heck, let's go mental illness specifically. A kid is starting to develop schizophrenia. We just invented a magic pill that can prevent it from getting any worse. The parents refuse to medicate them. You're cool with this? You don't think, at some point, somebody should step in and help the poor kid?
If a kid is terrified their parents will find out about them getting a tooth fixed, wouldn't you be a bit concerned about how the parents are treating that kid? Would you really feel guilty for sneaking your son's best friend to the dentist to help him deal with a cavity that's been getting worse for years?
I'm not saying every kid is right, but you don't get that sort of fear of your parents from nowhere. I was a horrible gremlin of a kid and I never went anywhere near that far to cover something up.
If you can point me to an epidemic of kids getting abducted against their will, I'd probably change my tune. But I get the sense that most of the kids in question are quite happy with the decision. I haven't seen anything that suggests they're particularly prone to regretting it later, either.
There are a few issues with convenience-sampling transfolk in trans-friendly spaces and claiming this to demonstrate effectiveness of the treatment.
Oh, woah, I hadn't realized that you were ex-trans. Have you given a description of what things were like for you somewhere? Your life history? (If so, where? If not, I'd be interested.)
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I mean, you can say #1 about everything. We can never know the counterfactual of any decision we make. We still have to make decisions. And it's not like there aren't TONS of decisions out there that people DO regret.
#2 doesn't explain the general absence of ex-trans spaces. Keep in mind I'm the sort of person who does look in places like this.
#3: If the suicide rate goes down post-transition, then we have clear evidence that transition helps even if it isn't a perfect cure-all. We have no evidence that "alternate" treatments work. From my own biased standpoint, I'd say we actually have plenty of evidence against alternate treatments. Can you pull up a study from any sort of vaguely-neutral (or positive) organization that suggests a specific alternate treatment actually has anywhere near the success rate in reducing suicide rates?
I'll throw out #4: There are scientific studies on regret rates, and they suggest remarkably low numbers: https://theconversation.com/transgender-regret-research-challenges-narratives-about-gender-affirming-surgeries-220642
I will admit, I have not checked the methodology, but I also haven't seen any studies that suggest a concern here. I'll also say that number is low enough to make me a bit suspicious. I think the real number is probably higher than 1%. But I do think this is pretty solid evidence that, in general, transition results in good outcomes and that if anything, we're being overly cautious.
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Here's the problem - it's very much debatable whether this "horrible pain" is actually something requiring medical treatment. I know you think it does. We are all familiar with the rhetoric that gender dysphoria is so real and urgent and painful that not allowing the child to transition is likely to lead to suicide, and akin to refusing to let a child receive treatment for schizophrenia. So you frame it as, essentially, parents letting their children die because of their bigoted religious beliefs. But this is almost never the case. Parents almost always treat a child being "trans" as a psychological issue, a child in distress who needs help - but you will not accept that "help" could be anything other than affirming their entity and even allowing them to begin medically transitioning, when there is good reason to think help should actually be helping them work through their gender dysphoria (if it is really gender dysphoria), becoming comfortable in their bodies, and perhaps choose to transition when they are an adult if they still feel that's what they need. Can you at least acknowledge that this is a reasonable, loving, and non-abusive response, even if you think it's not the correct one?
Again with the "terrified." I'm sure there are children in abusive households who still face abuse, or being thrown out on the streets, if they are revealed to be gay or trans. This happens and those are extreme cases that may require state intervention, as with any other abuse. But almost all the cases I have seen are not of trans kids with parents who will reject and abandon them for being trans, but parents who simply don't agree with putting their kids on hormones, wearing binders, planning to get surgery, etc. Refusing to change the pronouns they use for their son or daughter might upset the child, but it's not abuse!
I don't agree with @WhiningCoil's framing of hordes of children being abducted by the state, but I would ask you in return, do you have any numbers regarding parents who are actually abusive and neglectful of their trans children, such that state intervention is required? Do you think schools should socially transition children secretly if the child says their parents won't go along?
You "get the sense" that most of the kids are quite happy with the decision, but this seems to be vibes and personal bias. I think the actual level of regret is very hard to evaluate. I'm sure you hate Jesse Singhal, but I have yet to see a trans activist who can actually dispute his numbers and his deep dives into studies on the subject.
That's... basically exactly what the actual standards of care say to do? You start with therapy and just discussing the issue to get a feel for where the kid really is. You don't just drop them on HRT instantly. There's puberty blockers, so that they can make an informed choice as an adult in either direction, rather than make any permanent changes. For the kids who have a really clear sense of who they are, AND whose parents support it, you might see HRT before 18, but again, the parent IS actually involved in that decision. Basically no one is getting surgery before 18. Getting surgery usually takes YEARS of waiting, even as an adult who knows exactly what they want.
What part of that process are you objecting to?
Would you be okay if I consistently misgendered people on this forum? You're an adult who can walk away from the conversation, so presumably this is a thousand times less bad than having it come from your own parents. I think most people here would get pretty reasonably upset with me if I leaned into trolling like that.
And if you won't tolerate it here, why in the world should we expect kids to tolerate it?
I mean, c'mon, you're objecting to an article of clothing? Teach the kid how to do it safely rather than forcing them to risk it with ace bandages and overly tight compressions.
What happened to "perhaps choose to transition when they are an adult if they still feel that's what they need"?
I read scientific studies, hang out in trans communities, keep my ear out for about news, and so forth. I mean, if nothing else, I'm involved in numerous trans communities, have numerous trans friends, and presumably have a much better vantage point into the community than you do. I'm the sort of person that shows up here, looking for people who disagree with me, so I'm clearly not cherry-picking my sources. Short of being a credentialed expert, I'm not sure how you get a better perspective than mine?
If people really regret it so much, it should not be nearly this difficult for me to find those people.
Is there some specific source here, or am I just supposed to spend a week deep-diving him? I'm happy to take a peek, but I will absolutely admit that I don't think he's a source worth investing a lot of time in, right now.
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They almost certainly know that. It's just mouth sounds.
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UK left under Starmer already dropped the extreme pro-trans position before the election. Keir Starmer literally said he wanted to protect female-only spaces and that he would make sure “gender ideology” wasn’t taught in schools.
In general, positions adopted over the past 10 years in relation to trans issues and bail reform can be dropped pretty quickly. Positions that are 50+ years old on immigration (etc) are much harder to deal with and reverse.
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My understanding on the basis of social media messages is that pronouns in bio have been on their way out in the American corporate world for months now.
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