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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".
No one thinks of children this way. Adults are responsible for what happens to children under their care. A school can say they didn't "drug kids" when some students start smuggling weed into school, but that works only as long as they can plead ignorance. If they have designated smoking rooms covered with weed-themed flags and slogans, and teachers keep track of who smokes and when, but hide that information from the parents, that means the school is actively participating in the child's drug consumption, and therefore "schools are drugging children". Same applies to transition.
And the law in question explicitly demand that the courts weigh favorably the parent that affirms a child's gender and negatively against the one that doesn't. And I gave you an example where a court did take away a kid, any way you slice it.
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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.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/
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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.
Kids don’t have privacy from their parents, especially not at the behest of a third party institution.
Wait, really? What country do you live in where the church is obliged to break the sacred seal of confession and rat kids out? I'm used to people talking about doctor-patient confidentiality and the like.
I certainly think that's a horrible idea. The alternative to kids having someone trusted they can talk to is... not having anyone they can trust to talk to.
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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?
You're moving the goalposts. The question was whether the school was making an active decision, not if the decision was good. I would agree that if the school "helps the kid" get chemo, the school is making an active decision there.
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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:
You're getting responses like that because you're talking to a group that is notorious for screaming at people who are driving the direction they want, but at the speed limit rather than smashing the accelerator. See the current redditrage blaming Harris' loss on not Centering trans persxns in her campaign.
Eventually it always converges on the rationalist "well they won 70% of this fight by calling us cis-demons enough times, you need to follow their rules now"
I'd actually be curious if you'd ban gwern for his 2012 comments linked in that thread, btw. It'd be a good demonstration of how far the Overton window has shifted left even in a place dedicated to resisting forcible shifts.
Maybe! But Gwern seems pretty cognizant of context in those comments:
Gwern perceived IRC as a sort of "locker room," speech-wise, while Startling disagreed. I wasn't there so I have no opinion as to who was right, beyond a tendency to suspect that it's always a bad idea to bet against Gwern. My guess is that a hypothetical Motte-posting Gwern would express himself a little differently, when posting here.
The SSC subreddit and the Motte are different contexts, too. Has the Motte shifted left? I don't think so, but then I am pretty regularly accused of bearing some personal responsibility for this place shifting right. We're not explicitly conservative, so Conquest's Laws say we will eventually become progressive. But maybe the foundation counts as an explicitly conservative alignment, for such purposes? We've definitely had more mods bail because they found this space insufficiently progressive, than because they found this space insufficiently conservative. On balance, I remain pretty satisfied with this space (when I'm not feeling surprised that it has managed to continue existing for as long as it has!).
But like... if you don't like entryists, you really should stop giving the mod team shit over moderation decisions, ever. We're not perfect, we make mistakes. But even our most progressive moderators are much more committed to the foundation than they are to advancing any particular political narrative.
Yes, we are; that's what the rules of this place do. "Conservative" is far too overloaded a word to really be useful ('progressive' is the same but a bit less so, and I find 'traditionalist' much more useful).
I think progressivism and traditionalism are the same thing when stated this way. Of course, because the original design of this place has so far been conserved, the traditionalists haven't taken over the forum (and the traditionalists that are moderators, and there's at least one of these, have yet [as far as I'm aware] to act in a way that privileges traditionalism over those principles).
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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.
We moderate on tone, not content. Your post was uncharitable and antagonistic.
More like "a never ending stream of users," actually. Bad faith posters who use "just asking questions" rhetoric to troll the forum are a dime a dozen; in the parlance of the age, "ya basic," sorry. "New" users who jump in on election day and seem immediately comfortable navigating various community norms are suspicious enough. Following up by "just asking questions" rules lawyering in response to moderation dramatically increases my suspicion that you are a repeat customer. We've had hundreds of new users over the years, and to put it mildly--you do not fit the profile.
But it's not impossible, so... here we are.
We can't moderate every comment, and queue approval should not be taken as a sign of endorsement, beyond perhaps "this isn't obviously spam." Moderation is qualitative and adaptive; we usually mod comments directly, but sometimes we have to take into account a pattern of commenting instead. This is a reputation economy; post lots of good stuff that isn't rage bait, then occasional rage bait will get a shrug.
Many of your previous posts are bad. But the goal is not to try to get away with being just enough of an asshole that you are allowed to continue being an asshole. Rhetorical brinkmanship is bad. At a glance, your comments with negative karma scores should probably be taken as a sign, to you, that you did something wrong. (This isn't always the case--some substantive positions just get downvoted, which is annoying--but if you can't spot the difference, I don't know what to tell you.)
For some examples, this comment, if I had seen it when you posted it, would probably have gotten you a short ban. This comment's "citation needed" snark honestly tempts me to ban you now.
Be charitable. Be kind. If someone else is breaking the rules, report that instead of breaking the rules in response. The more closely I look at your profile, the more I am inclined to permaban you rather than go through the motions with what appears to be a (so far) consistently garbage level of engagement. If you really would like to continue posting under this account, knock it off.
Okay fair enough. I will say for the record that I am a new poster (jumped in for the discussion after election day as you noted) but have lurked reading every so often for at least a few months so I'm not unfamiliar with the forum as a whole.
I somewhat disagree with the characterization of my behaviour as 'just asking questions', but I understand how it appears that way. I do have a habit of questioning people to poke at underlying disagreements, and I can acknowledge that sometimes I do this too much or with somewhat inflammatory rhetoric, but it is usually with a goal relevant to the discussion in mind.
In this particular case, the questions regarding moderation were genuine. If there's something in the forum's history thats relevant to my moderation I wanted to know it. I did receive a message from another poster yesterday, that in hindsight, makes me think they also suspected me of being a specific different user evading a ban.
I want to stress again at the end here that my picking apart of this moderation may come across as being in bad faith, but I am genuinely attempting to understand the rules of engagement and how I would have to change my rhetoric in order to consistently participate. If I engaged less now, I might misunderstand something else down the road. The impression I get is that my familiarity with the forum is suspicious and also my asking questions is suspicious, but I felt that not asking questions would make it more likely that I was banned in the future for a reason I did not fully understand.
In any case, I will endeavour to make future posts acceptable.
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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)?
The charity failure in cartman's comment was that WhiningCoil argues that children consenting to sex acts is analogous to children consenting to treatment for reasons of sex or gender preferences, i.e. "if children can't consent to sex acts then children can't consent to puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or sex-altering surgeries, and if parental authority does not extend to vicarious consent for sex acts then it also does not extend to vicarious consent for puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or sex-altering surgeries."
People can argue about whether that analogy is a good one. But if one person builds their argument on the validity of the analogy and another person builds their response on the invalidity of the analogy, then they are not really talking to each other, they are just competing for who can make their take on the analogy into the consensus by being loud and insistent about it.
This is a complicated thing to moderate because we moderate on tone rather than substance, but like most informal fallacies, it's hard to recognize this one without some grasp of the substance of the argument.
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Never has been?
I might honestly think a lot of things people post here are absolutely retarded, but I am not allowed to say that. Also note that the ban went to the parent comment, and this is just a warning to not make the conversation worse.
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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.
Comment on the obvious parallels between castrati and trans children. The glaring, obvious parallels, and why one would be not morally good while the other is somehow more morally good.
Castrating boys is what we're referring to, and what is being called sinister.
I laid out the differences in another comment, the distinction is the reasoning and intent behind the act.
Society deems that killing is murder unless you kill the right person in the right context (self defense). Cashing a check that you stole from someone is fraud/theft, while cashing a check that you were given legitimately is a business transaction. I believe that the vast vast majority of doctors providing gender affirming care through therapy, puberty blockers, and in very rare cases surgery, are doing so with the best interests of the child in mind, which was not the case for castrati historically as I understand it.
The parallels may seem glaring and obvious, just like a self defence killing might look like murder, but there are quite substantial differences.
I inquired about what OP meant by sinister purposes, your answer refers to an act and not a purpose and does not reference abduction. I am still unclear what they meant by abduction for sinister purposes.
"I believe that the vast vast majority of doctors providing gender affirming care through therapy, puberty blockers, and in very rare cases surgery, are doing so with the best interests of the child in mind, which was not the case for castrati historically as I understand it."
While I'm sure that a great many of the people in the process have good intentions, I do not think that they are often acting with good judgment. In your example, killing is murder unless you kill the right person in the right context. But it does not merely suffice that you think that what you're doing is the right situation ("they really had it coming"), but that it actually be that.
I don't really have a good sense of what things were like for castrati. I think they (or at least, those who were successful) were not infrequently of fairly high social status, but I'm not at all sure of that.
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I didn't mean more or less than the common definition.
sinister /'sɪnɪstər/ adj.: stemming from evil characteristics or forces; wicked or dishonorable.
Solely intent based moral (or legal) system are rare for good reason. Not only are we not mind readers, evil has a pernicious tendency to believe itself righteous and we ultimately have to live in consequence, not in intent.
In any case, any such coherent deontological system that would base itself on intent (such as Kantianism) would still have to recognize parental authority as it has to deal with the subhuman quality of children and appoint someone to protect them against themselves and the world.
Institutions such as the State, Church or any other large scale administration with no ties of blood is inherently unable to provide the same incentives as family, and is therefore only recognizable as legitimate in edge cases of parental tyranny.
The only debate being had here is if making certain medical decisions for your children can be such a tyranny and which specific circumstances trigger it.
Any reasonable answer to this question must remember the initial incentive base and can not be tantamount to seizing decision power from parents altogether, as that would simply be seeing them supplanted by a worse protector.
There are essentially two ways of thinking about transgenderism. Either it is a medical condition, for which there are medical interventions available, or it is a lifestyle choice.
Let's immediately evacuate the second one. If your child is tucute, you have full authority to deny them this choice by the same justification you can deny them tatoos or particular forms of dress.
What if your child is trutrans, however?
The problem then is one generalizable to many decisions about mental illnesses: treatment decisions can not be vested in the patient (for many reasons, and even more in this case) and we must then decide whether the family or medical experts prevail if there is a strong disagreement.
Since the legitimacy of family is to be defaulted to for reasons we discussed earlier, we are left to ask one question: do experts know this disease well enough to make decisions that have levels of confidence high enough to override personal knowledge of the patient. It is not right that a child would have his TB prayed away if antibiotics are available.
And here (as in, for GD) the literature is quite clear for whoever dares look: the confidence that was had in the Dutch protocol was very much unearned and our understanding of GD is ridiculously primitive. To the degree that none of the available procedures and treatments provide such obvious benefits that a person of sound mind wouldn't seriously consider the very significant side effects. And that medical decisions in this case are not obvious medical questions but rather important life choices.
It seems then, to me, that "good intentions" in removing parental authority from such decisions would be more negligent than it would be reasonable. Which is thankfully now the position of basically every medical authority on the matter outside of the Americas.
Okay. I'm unclear what distinction you're trying to make between evil intent and what you described as sinister purposes, or 'stemming from evil forces'. Is something done for a sinister purpose if those performing the act do it with good intentions but another participant may be affected negatively by the act? If this is not what you mean and simple evil intent is not what you mean then I still don't understand what you're getting at without more specific elaboration. I'll also state for the record that intention is not the be-all and end-all of my moral philosophy but it still plays a significant role. Intent is by far the best predictor that I'm aware of for whether someone is a generally morally 'good' person who is likely to do 'good' things.
The meaning of abduction that I am familiar with involves taking someone somewhere against their will through violence or threats. If what you were asking me was whether I support minors being taken against their will through violence or threats to surgeries that are done with sinister purposes (I'm reading this part broadly here since I don't understand your meaning) then yes, I am against that. If what you meant by abduction was that the parents of the hypothetical minor did not give consent for whatever the procedure is, then my answer will again depend on the specific context and details. This leads into the next point.
I fundamentally disagree that parents have some inherent incentive structure to care for their children that is superior to the incentives of social institutions. Parental incentives go wrong all the time! (as do institutional ones). You acknowledge this with your reference to cases of 'parental tyranny'. I would likely acknowledge that in the current world, parental incentives are more probable to be aligned with their child's than other institutions, but I dont think this is an inherent property of parenthood. In a different worldly circumstance with different institutions, it could easily be the case that the State is more aligned with child interests than parents are.
We already recognize the right for minors to escape from the potential tyranny of their parents in a variety of scenarios. The common practice of minor emancipation in Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere points to this phenomenon. My understanding (which could be wrong, i haven't looked at it too much) is that these emancipated minors are able to make all sorts of legally binding decisions for themselves, including medical ones. What are your thoughts on this practice?
Treatment decisions about mental illnesses are vested to the patient all the time! There are certain circumstances where this is not the case (imminent risk of suicide or psychosis, etc.) but I am confident that the vast vast majority of mental illnesses experienced by adults (excluding the subset of minors that we are directly disagreeing about) get treated based on decisions made by the patients which are informed by their medical team. If you were talking only about minors here, then again, I disagree.
I'll skip any factual argument and just agree that the scientific literature now demonstrates what you say it demonstrates about GD. Do you think doctors (especially in America) were making these medical decisions with the full knowledge that the medical literature did not support these decisions? You can say they were wrong about the facts, but do you believe that all these doctors were performing procedures that they knew were likely to be on average harmful for the patient? If the answer is no, then I object to the framing of this state of events as 'abduction for sinister purposes'. Making a decision that turns out to have negative consequences but was done with the best of intentions for all involved (and not simply on a whim but based on some amount of research) is not what I would consider sinister. If the answer is yes, then I guess we have a big factual disagreement that I don't know how to resolve.
If your sole point was that such decisions were perhaps too hasty in some cases given the relatively limited quantity and quality of research on the topic, then I would have a hard time disagreeing.
A hypothetical for you: A doctor has a patient who is a minor and is heavily depressed and suicidal. They have attempted to commit suicide in the past, and are still at high risk in the present. The doctor now learns that the minor's parents inflame this suicidal ideation by repeatedly making comments that the minor is trash, that they'd be better of without them, that the minor's death might solve a lot of problems. They leave sleeping pills open and in plain view on the kitchen table regularly. The doctor now faces a choice: does he intervene through some legal process in order to take parental authority away from these people to protect the minor (with the minor's approval), or does he stay silent and try to help the minor as best he can without changing the predicament?
You might say this hypothetical is hyperbolic and unrealistic. I agree. I bring it up only to poke at the fact that in certain circumstances, mental illnesses and their surrounding complications are more than enough to warrant considering revoking some or all parental rights.
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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'.
You are correct, I perceive no difference between children "consenting" to sex or "consenting" to sterilization.
I will repeat: do you think children can consent to surgery for appendicitis? treatment via antidepressants? Antibiotics?
I actually don't! I think without a parent involved in the decisions, malicious actors could convince a child to get any surgery or take any drugs. And sometimes even then!
So no, I do not believe a child can consent to any of those things, which is why parents make those decisions for them.
Right, but these 'malicious actors' could be anyone, even the parents themselves. I don't think parents should have a special right to make these decisions for their children if their interests are not aligned with their child's. I can't remember the exact details, but there was a news story a year or two ago about a couple whose child died because they refused to get a basic medical treatment for religious reasons.
In such a case, do you think the parents have the moral right to refuse treatment for the child? (I believe in the case I'm thinking of the child was a newborn, so the question of consent was obvious).
If you answer negatively to the above (as I do) then we switch from having a discussion about what is absolutely allowed or not allowed to one in which we must judge the pros and cons of taking away agency from parents depending on what the issue is.
I largely agree with you that children can be convinced of anything depending on the right context, but here is my main contention with your points: The key difference between a groomer targeting a child and a doctor performing a surgery is their interests; the latter is doing so based on what they believe to be in the best interests of the child based on medical/scientific literature, the former is doing so for personal reasons.
Malicious actors can convince children of things, but that does not mean any expert telling any child about a solution to their medical issues is grooming them. You might want a parent to sign off on antibiotics, but I hardly believe that if a doctor came up to a severely sick child and recommended they start antibiotics, you would label them as a groomer.
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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.)
Fairly-boring story TBH (which I have told elsewhere, but not IIRC anywhere that's not login-gated).
My mum's a misandrist (as in, she literally taught me the Y chromosome is a defect), she divorced my dad when I was 3 and got custody, and I'm effeminate in some ways. Fast-forward to puberty and she's accusing me of sexist abuse every time I turn around because now I start registering to her as "man" rather than "child". I developed dysphoria, wanted to transition.
Around this point, I ran away from Mum (who was not supportive of me transitioning; she was at the time a TERF although she's objected to transphobia since so I don't think she still is), because she confiscated my computer for a month and semi-starved me for a week, I ran amok and manhandled her (for the first and only time), and she called the police on me. Went on finasteride, got permission from a psychiatrist for cross-sex hormones, but procrastinated over the fertility problem long enough for the dysphoria to dissipate (and stopped taking the finasteride). Still probably qualify as "genderqueer" - I'm not exactly upset at having moobs from the finasteride - but the intense dysphoria, with phantom-limb and disgust at my penis, is gone. Hence, I qualify as ex-trans although not really a detransitioner.
Thank you!
Given that you have more experience than most, then, what do your opinions look like on trans-related issues?
As I said to @TokenTransGirl, this isn't really my cause area and I don't have sufficient trustworthy information to be able to opine on the big Ought questions of proper treatment. There certainly exists a population that will desist if not "supported", and there almost certainly exists a population that won't; trustworthy data on how big these two populations are and whether it's possible to distinguish between them is the key determinant of the correct answer, but it would seem extremely difficult to acquire and I certainly don't have it. Some of the experiments you'd want to run don't even seem like the experimental protocol could successfully be followed (e.g. the obvious and central "what percentage of people who want transition in current Western society will resolve positively if transition is denied long-term"; in current Western society, how are you going to stop them?), and the studies that can be (and are) done frequently have huge bias issues (in both directions, depending on the allegiance of the researchers).
On the smaller questions, I oppose pro-trans censorship (both in the academic publishing system and more generally in social spaces) and I oppose people who try to portray the anti-trans movement as being inherently senseless and hateful. No surprises there. My personal stance on pronouns is "I won't use a pronoun someone doesn't like in front of that person, but I won't intentionally use neopronouns or singular "they" under any circumstances and I occasionally won't use a he/she/it pronoun if I think it's inappropriate (e.g. if the person is clearly insane in other ways and I suspect it's just a phase/delusion); I am prepared to spam names if necessary to thread that needle" (as noted above, my position on other people using pronouns is "free speech lol"), and my stance on deadname-erasure (on e.g. Wikipedia) is "fuck off with this Orwellian shit" although I'm willing to use the new one going forward.
If you want something else, ask.
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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.
Everyone who brings up the suicide discourse to score a point is contributing to the problem. We know that suicide, like many other things, spreads socially; that's why newspapers try not to cover suicides too much. But for some reason, we decide to convince teenagers that the proper way to spite people who won't give them the gender treatment that they want is by suicide. No wonder suicide rates are astronomical.
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The issue here is that one side of the trans debate controls the education system, which means that if they're right there's no systematic error here but if they're partially or wholly wrong there's a systematic error of kids underestimating desistance rates.
I'm not going to engage you on the studies; that's not really my area of expertise. I think @ArjinFerman and maybe @gattsuru might be more interesting to talk to on that one.
The study referred to in the article is relatively fresh, so didn't make it to any of the systematic reviews published in the last years, and I can't even access it on sci-hub.
Studying desistence and detransition is a tricky subject. Clinics don't necessarily want to hear from detransitioners (who wants to parade an unsatisfied customer in front of potential ones?), and for that matter detransitions don't necessarily want to talk to people who feel they wronged them either. Criticism of the older studies on regret rates has reflected this - typically they're criticized for low follow-up rates (there was one popular study going around citing a 94+% satisfaction rate, but had a 63% dropout rate), another issue typically cited is short follow-up periods.
On the flip side there's a recent German study showing a >50% rate of desistence of medical treatment over a 5 year period, but this also needs to be studied further before it's declared a slam-dunk for the anti side.
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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.
Depends what you mean by that. There've been about 5,700 gender affirming surgeries performed on minors between
20172019 and 2023. Some might call ~1K per year it "basically no one", but I've heard claims from pro-trans people claiming it's single digits annually, so I want to make it clear that if this is what you meant to imply, you're off by 3 orders of magnitude.Also, @Amadan - in case you wanted a source.
Yeah, that's some suss methodology
i.e. there's absolutely no reason to think these codes aren't also used for other things, they just happen to show up commonly in gender-affirming care.
The article itself notes that this contradicts basically every other study out there.
"We just assumed this stuff was accurate" should not inspire any confidence in these results
The explicit disclaimer...
The other explicit disclaimer...
Oh, okay, are we including intersex people in this? I thought this was a conversation about transition.
This is listed under surgical codes...
Electrolysis.
I'm sorry to say this report is hot bullshit.
Looks like naraburns link is a lot more reliable: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9555285/ gives us 209 patients over a 7.5 year period, so 30 instead of 5,7000
His paper is from a single clinic, not the whole country, and it's for a single type of surgery. A rough eyeball-extrapolation of that into the entirety of US would give you roughly the number from my link.
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Your source says 2019-2023, not 2017-2023. The latter would only be two orders of magnitude bigger than "single digits annually".
Thanks for the correction.
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In practice, the motte has- numerous times- provided sources showing that this is not what actually happens.
There are exceptions, yes. The ones I've seen all involve parental consent.
Is your complaint just that the SOC aren't being followed rigorously enough? Or would you still be upset even if they were being followed to the letter?
At least post-WPATH SOCv8, the standards of care no longer require an age of 18 or majority at any point, and have largely reframed talk therapy into a very strict division between required 'gender-affirming care' and prohibited 'conversion therapy'. At the risk of self-citation, I think the summary of distinctions from v6 to v7 to v8 here is pretty decent, and if you've grounded your expectations around personal experiences interacting with the system before 2020 or summaries from before 2018 you may be surprised.
There are a number of good (and pro-trans) doctors that are skeptical about surgical or hormonal interventions within the earlier limits of the new SOC, especially before puberty (and, from the other direction, I'm not convinced that 16-18 is that big of a deal), and there are a number of (sometimes unintuitive) serious flaws with the v6-era rules, but it's a lot harder to just point to the SOC and motion around them being uncontroversial.
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You know, it does not convince me you are arguing in good faith when you say "It basically never happens" and when someone points out it does happen, you say "But that involves parental consent." First of all I'm no more convinced you're being accurate (or honest) about parental consent than you were about it happening in the first place. Second, we're having a whole discussion about parental consent where scared parents are convinced by medical professionals that they can choose between "a dead son or a live daughter." It's hard for me to be convinced that it's informed and non-coercive consent.
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So here's the problem - I hear that this is how it works. This is how it is supposed to work. A child with gender dysphoria will receive multiple, comprehensive counseling sessions and only after a long and deliberate, informed process will the child and his/her parents elect to move forward with transition. That seems reasonable.
What I have actually seen, in multiple cases, is schools and counselors alike uncritically jumping on board the transition bandwagon with very little intake process or evaluation beyond the child's self-evaluation and expressed desires. Usually expressed as you do, that it's such an urgent and immediate need that you risk the child committing suicide if you don't immediately affirm and validate them and let them do what they want.
I would like to believe that the first case is the usual and standard procedure and these latter cases are exceptions, but that does not appear to be the case in the US. It did not appear to be the case in the UK and Sweden and several other countries until recently, when a plague of scandals forced lawmakers to reevaluate the agencies they had given responsibility for these decisions.
This is one of those claims where each side claims "Yes it's happening" or "No it's not," and I am not well-informed enough to say who's right, but there seems to at least be enough anecdotal evidence that it has happened that I am skeptical of your blanket denial that it ever happens.
No one here is a minor (at least to our knowledge) and no one here has parental authority. People are not allowed to be rude to you; they are allowed to say they don't believe someone born with a penis is a woman. You might perceive that to be rude, and a child might perceive that to be emotionally distressing.
So your answer is yes, parents who refuse to go along with a child's self-identification as the opposite sex should risk having the child taken away from them for abuse?
I mean, c'mon, you're pretending this is about objecting to an article of clothing? But yes, sure - parents are allowed to make decisions for their children, including controlling what they wear. By the time they are teenagers it's usually counterproductive to try tell them what they can and can't wear, but parents do still exercise this authority ("You may not wear that in public!") And binders specifically have a lot more significance than merely stylistic expression, and they do pose a risk. So yes, I think parents are entitled to expect that schools will not secretly encourage their children to wear binders without their knowledge or approval.
Honestly, I am allowing for the possibility that it might make medical sense to allow a minor to transition in some rare cases. My actual belief is that this is a terrible idea in pretty much all cases and I think it shouldn't happen, but with sufficient evidence I'd be willing to defer to medical authorities on this. I would not be willing to allow them to supersede parental approval on this, however.
Sure, and I'm sure they all think being trans is wonderful and they should all be validated. If you hung out in Christian communities I'm sure you'd be very aware of what Christians think and how wonderful Jesus is and how God truly manifests in people's lives. If that sounds a little bit snide, it's because I do actually think that trans ideology has much in common with religious belief (including a vibes-based conviction in things that make you feel good without any rational evidence).
There's a whole subreddit about detransitioners. Multiple detransitioners and regretters have YouTube channels. They may be a minority, but they certainly exist. And a common story from them is how they essentially got shunned by the trans community when they detransitioned because they are seen as having betrayed trans people, or are potentially giving ammo to their enemies. If you are a trans person who has doubts but know that if you detransition you will lose essentially your entire social network, and you are already a psychologically vulnerable person (as most trans people are), it's not hard to see how the actual numbers are probably greater than what might show up in the surveys that allege regret is something ridiculously low like <2%.
I am not arguing that most trans people regret their transition. I am arguing that enough do that children shouldn't be allowed to make permanent decisions about their bodies, and that parents shouldn't be judged unfit for refusing to agree with their decisions.
I mean, he's got a Twitter account, he's got a Substack, he's published dozens of articles over the years. No, I don't expect you to do a deep dive on him, but since you're clearly familiar with him, I'd like just once for someone to pick apart one of his studies (or his picking apart of studies) with more than just ad hominems and bad faith impugning of his motives. Because from my perspective, he goes into the numbers and the research methodology in detail, in every case finds serious, objective flaws in the studies, often finding that they literally say the opposite of what activists say they do, and the response is never "Here's why you're wrong and here's what you missed, you misunderstood these numbers, you made an error here," etc., but essentially "You are bad person for asking these questions and we don't need you to tell us about trans lived experiences." Jesse Singhal isn't a perfect person (he cares too much what people think of him, he's argumentative, and he probably is obsessed on certain topics), but I haven't found him to actually be in error on this topic. Not only that, he's clearly not anti-trans, and yet he gets the JK Rowling treatment for questioning the narrative.
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