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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.
No--this would require your interlocutor to assume the conclusion under debate. Here you are treating a genuine disagreement as "uncharitable." That is not how charitable discussion works. You should be trying to read the best possible version of the argument being made, without actually departing from the substance of the argument.
Then you are wrong; I just gave you a more charitable reading which adheres to the substance (and literal wording!) of the line under discussion, and you have furnished no warrant for believing your less charitable reading to be true. This may be a problem with your perspective on "charity," since you don't seem to grasp what "charity" means in this context--maybe this is why you also have failed to read others charitably.
Indeed, several have provided you with evidence of this actually happening. You seem to have learned something from them about the world, though you do not seem interested in revising your beliefs accordingly. That's okay, you're under no obligation to do so. But you remain under obligation to read others charitably. I have done my best to explain what that requires; at this point I don't know how I can make it more clear what you did wrong. So hopefully you've figured it out and can avoid it, next time.
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