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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?
I think the burden of proof is on the person arguing for the removal of healthy body parts, and the arguments haven't been convincing.
There is a decent amount of people loudly regretting these surgeries, and there are obvious reasons for why others might not want to do it so loudly - the ones that did come out have been rather ruthlessly attacked. I don't know how you determine that people seem consistent, there isn't good long-term data on the outcomes of these interventions, particularly on the new cohort of patients that showed up around 2015.
All of these require extraordinary circumstances that need to be argued in front of a judge. 16 is not enough to vote, not enough to drink a beer, and not enough to sign a contract without the parents' consent, not even enough to get a tattoo. All of these things are far less risky than any part of gender-affirming care, except social transition.
At 16 you're either still going through puberty, or barely out of it. You're still figuring out basic things about your place in the world.
The long-term consequences of pregnancy is precisely why this behavior is discouraged in teenagers. People with my worldview even discourage sex outside of marriage, even if it can be reasonably assured it will not result in pregnancy, and that's regardless of whether we're talking about teenagers or adults.
That said, the big differences is that sex resulting in reproduction is part of the healthy life-cycle of any sexually reproducing species on this planet, not a medical intervention. A better analogy here would be a 16 year old going through IVF, and in that case I'd say it's absurd, and any doctor encouraging it has no business in medicine or psychology.
You need to pass a test proving you're competent, and that you understand the rules of the road, in order to be allowed to drive. The high amount of deaths is a result of the raw number and frequency of people driving, rather than the risk to the person once they make a decision to drive with a car.
No, like you see, I think most of these are bad analogies. These examples also conveniently ignore the far less consequential things we do legally forbid teenagers from doing.
There actually isn't. The evidence for positive outcomes if often inconclusive, where it's positive it's low-confidence. The lack of long-term follow up is endemic in the literature.
People also swear on the effectiveness of homeopathy, crystal healing or reiki, but that is not enough to declare these therapies as effective. There are people who seek out exorcists, and likewise swear that it helped them, but we don't usually take that as evidence of demonic posessions.
When it comes to physical illnesses we have developed a robust protocol to assess effectiveness. The fact that physical ailments are externally verifiable - so we can tell that the patient has it and isn't just imagining things, or is free of it and the treatment actually worked - is of great help. None of that is available for psychological issues, and so the evidence tends be pretty poor. Even for non-political issues like depression you often end up with stuff like "oops, our miracle drug turns out to be no better than placebo".
Things get even worse when body image issues are involved. An anorexic is going to report satisfaction from losing weight, but we tend to not accept that as a valid reason for going along with their decision.
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