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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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