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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26074 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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I don't see a lot of emphasis on safety/reversibility. Like, there's one line in a parenthetical toward that end on one particular, but there's also:

The possibility that children might make irreversible decisions on this particular question that they later regret is, for many people, simply intolerable. Transition, to borrow a phrase, should be safe, legal and rare.

We allow children to make irreversible decisions about their lives all the time, ideally with the guidance and support of the communities that care for them. Sometimes they regret those decisions. The stakes vary, but they are real. So what are we saying, really, when we worry that a child will regret this particular decision, the decision to transition? And how is it different, really, from the decision I made to quit competitive swimming? To many people — I am guessing most — this question is absurd. How could you possibly compare something as fundamental and consequential to one’s life as gender to something that seems comparatively trivial, competitive sport?

and

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, in 2020, more than 44,000 people between the ages of 13 and 19 got a rhinoplasty, the most common surgical cosmetic procedure performed on teenagers. Thousands of kids went under the knife for chest surgery — 3,200 girls got breast augmentations and 1,800 girls got breast reductions, while 2,800 boys had surgery to remove breast tissue from their chests, presumably to help them conform better to their gender identities. Indeed, many if not most of these often irreversible interventions on children’s bodies are designed, in one way or another, to help children feel better about their appearances in a way that is inescapably bound up with gender.

Maybe not so much in this piece, but generally the "puberty blockers are safe and reversible" belief fills the same role as "gays are born that way" did - it's the factual belief that needs to be true for the social change to be accepted. So there's a huge amount of effort poured into insisting that it is true regardless of how strongly the evidence supports it.

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