You have fallen for propaganda my friend. The first surgery trans people have access to is breast reduction surgery which requires the sign off of a guardian at age 16… the same time surgery is available to cis kids. You don’t get access to bottom surgery options until you are an adult able to sign off or unless you basically have a consensus of desperate need - essentially those who are a high suicide risk and that is where the social workers, therapist, pediatrician and endocrinologist all need sign off on it and in that case the age limit is still 16.
The problem a lot of people do not realize is how confident the diagnostic and projected outcome needs to be for anything to be done to children. There is solid reason why the system has not faced litigation by a bunch of trans kids who have gone already gone through this system and are now adults.
A lot of people think transness comes from some sort if woo woo belief but in actuality the diagnosis is based out of consistent reactions to stimuli and often a host of quality of life destroying mental health conditions that arise from being forced to not express their identity. The field of psychology has been obsessed with trans people since the beginning of the field and we are approaching the century mark of the first bottom surgeries. It is a fair constant (that baring a few specific mental disorders) that people do not take medicine unless the side effects and risks are lesser than the pain they are experiencing or will experience.
We need cis people to stop reacting emotionally to trans health care with some kind of existential terror that there are mad scientists itching to hurt kids and remember for a second what it is like to seek treatment in a healthcare system and the chain of ethics and liability that exists in the field.
Thank you for taking the time responding. I appreciate your thoroughness. If that’s the case with the surgeries, than it doesn’t seem as bad considering it’s the age limits that are regularly there.
From what I’ve experienced, people just say I’m wrong, not explain themselves. Most people in the comment section seem to have painted me as outright evil and done the exact same thing.
I do have some reservations due to how I see the trans movement portraying themselves as a whole. I’m being called for completely falling for the propaganda, but that goes both ways. For example, I’m pretty sure there isn’t sufficient evidence to prove puberty blockers are completely reversible. That would take at least maybe 10 years to get good initial data, but it would probably need to be a long term study that goes even longer.
Back to my original point I was making, there are extremes on both sides I think are absolutely crazy. Just as you point out that the information from the side I lean on more definitely has some ridiculous things stated, same is for the other side. Unfortunately, those are the loudest usually.
I just want to reiterate how much I appreciate the time you took to write out your response. It was refreshing to see.
Well you are in luck on the side of puberty blockers. They were introduced and approved for human use in the early 90’s first for precocious puberty but trials for trans kids using them for a longer period was a thing in the early 2000’s. Wr definately have our ten years of data. The only thing is that trans issues were not a political talking point at the time. It really is the case of people hearing about this thinking it is new because they just learned it existed. Also it has been demonstrated you can go through another puberty at any age with horomone therapy which we have been refining for trans usage since the 60’s so we got some good long data on that.
There are dimensions of the fight for trans kids that lie in other places. If you do not pass as your gender as an adult due to a society that polices rigid gender expression you face things like soft travel restrictions because someone might harm you abroad or detain you mid transit, you face higher incidences of harassment, assult or exclusion by strangers because your transition is visible at a distance. You have more likely to have higher instances of digestive issues because you can develop massive anxiety around public bathrooms. If you are a woman whose puberty caused you to grow to be over 6 ft and have wide shoulders and a chiseled jaw there is no available elective surgery that takes you out of that box. Overall if you stick out you risk getting hammered down and that is a lot scarier to trans people than a loss of fertility which is the only solid side effect. There is also hope that in the future gender related surgeries will one day support full reproduction capability but nobody is particularly holding their breath.
If you want to stop the pressures on trans kids to make acceptance of themselves more viable supporting non-binary identities and non-traditional presentations and taking a hard look at the effect of gender policing is a good start. Some trans people are surgery and medical intervention adverse so there are options for those in healthier more accepting societies to find middle ground. A lot of the propaganda totes up the more whimsical non-binary identities as being signs of delusion but the reality is that there are underlying coping mechanisms being used to accept a social and physical half way space. If you can construct social safety for those groups you reduce the overall pressure to physically conform.
I think you’ve brought up some good points for me to think about. Could you point me in the right direction for the studies you are referring to? I wouldn’t mind looking at them myself.
If you are interested in specifically long term prospective effects of puberty blockers the reason we had support for the trials on children is because there are naturally occuring conditions like Androgen insensitivity syndrome where people grow up with the chromosomes of a male person but their body develops as phenotypicly female because their body chemistry cannot read their horomones. These and other intersex conditions meant we weren’t going in blindly because we studied adults into advanced ages who never actually went through a regular puberty so we have a raft of information of different forms of naturally occurring puberties outside of the male and female binary. In the case of blockers the idea is not to use these measures very long term because there are escalating side effects for folks once they hit their mid 20’s but nobody is advocating for anybody to mimic intersex conditions artificially for that long. Sixteen- seventeen is considered the upper end and those are the ages kids with the signoff of their adult guardians can start making decisions about HRT.
The book A Comprehensive Guide to Intersex by Jay Kyle Peterson is a good place to start if you want to understand the various forms of conditions that contribute to our understanding of sex development.
Getting into the weeds of the history of Transgender DSM and puberty blocking treatment trials is not the easiest to do because there is a lot of politically motivated hijacking of the algorithm but here is an early documentation from an early trial in 1998 and a guide developed for paitent selection criteria from 2001. You will notice some outdated nomenclature and the DSM has since been refined and updated since :
Anecdotally it’s not a bad idea to get to know some trans folks who share their experiences about going through the system to get a sense of what the system is like and what the problems experienced by the people in the system are.
Jamie went through the UK system and now has his PHD in Psychology specializing in studying transgender development and wellbeing. https://youtu.be/lWngA08D9LU His videos center around either information or trans/annti-trans memes.
And Abagail Thorn has an MA philosophy , is a playwright and actress in the UK who uses the medium of philosophy to expound on many aspects of trans life. She does a very good job citing her sources but is also very entertaining in her presentation on subject matter. This is her video about going through the system as an adult. https://youtu.be/v1eWIshUzr8
Thank you for the links. It’s going to take me some time to go through it all. Have an upvote!
I watched most of video from Alexander so far and plan on finishing it. Seems like good stuff from a fairly reasonable person so far. Its giving me topics that I can use for further research on this to help develop my opinion.
I think my fav is Abagail’s stuff because at some level I never got over being a theater nerd and she places all her citations on screen! It is more heart wrenching in this video though because the UK is an extremely rough place to be trans. Jaime’s stuff is more scattershot so I picked a slightly more random vid.
I must say it is extremely refreshing to see anyone be willing listen. The people using trans people as an example of "how the left are insane/misguided " and often a lot of folks on the left themselves are usually more used to treating our advocacy like some kind of shuttlecock in badminton. It becomes more about who is factually ir ethically right in some kind of 2 dimensional sense than focusing on the actual nuance of living with what is a pretty complicated psychological condition where experts have drawn conclusions for treatment that can seem counter intuitive from the way we handle other psychological conditions.
I really want to thank you. It gives me a lot of hope when someone just shows some actual curiosity. Advocating for my community’s quality of life is kind of like fighting a hydra and 9/10 times people just want to rip a chunk out of you about their singular beef instead of taking the time to see how it all ties together.
You have fallen for propaganda my friend. The first surgery trans people have access to is breast reduction surgery which requires the sign off of a guardian at age 16… the same time surgery is available to cis kids. You don’t get access to bottom surgery options until you are an adult able to sign off or unless you basically have a consensus of desperate need - essentially those who are a high suicide risk and that is where the social workers, therapist, pediatrician and endocrinologist all need sign off on it and in that case the age limit is still 16.
The problem a lot of people do not realize is how confident the diagnostic and projected outcome needs to be for anything to be done to children. There is solid reason why the system has not faced litigation by a bunch of trans kids who have gone already gone through this system and are now adults.
A lot of people think transness comes from some sort if woo woo belief but in actuality the diagnosis is based out of consistent reactions to stimuli and often a host of quality of life destroying mental health conditions that arise from being forced to not express their identity. The field of psychology has been obsessed with trans people since the beginning of the field and we are approaching the century mark of the first bottom surgeries. It is a fair constant (that baring a few specific mental disorders) that people do not take medicine unless the side effects and risks are lesser than the pain they are experiencing or will experience.
We need cis people to stop reacting emotionally to trans health care with some kind of existential terror that there are mad scientists itching to hurt kids and remember for a second what it is like to seek treatment in a healthcare system and the chain of ethics and liability that exists in the field.
Thank you for taking the time responding. I appreciate your thoroughness. If that’s the case with the surgeries, than it doesn’t seem as bad considering it’s the age limits that are regularly there.
From what I’ve experienced, people just say I’m wrong, not explain themselves. Most people in the comment section seem to have painted me as outright evil and done the exact same thing.
I do have some reservations due to how I see the trans movement portraying themselves as a whole. I’m being called for completely falling for the propaganda, but that goes both ways. For example, I’m pretty sure there isn’t sufficient evidence to prove puberty blockers are completely reversible. That would take at least maybe 10 years to get good initial data, but it would probably need to be a long term study that goes even longer.
Back to my original point I was making, there are extremes on both sides I think are absolutely crazy. Just as you point out that the information from the side I lean on more definitely has some ridiculous things stated, same is for the other side. Unfortunately, those are the loudest usually.
I just want to reiterate how much I appreciate the time you took to write out your response. It was refreshing to see.
Well you are in luck on the side of puberty blockers. They were introduced and approved for human use in the early 90’s first for precocious puberty but trials for trans kids using them for a longer period was a thing in the early 2000’s. Wr definately have our ten years of data. The only thing is that trans issues were not a political talking point at the time. It really is the case of people hearing about this thinking it is new because they just learned it existed. Also it has been demonstrated you can go through another puberty at any age with horomone therapy which we have been refining for trans usage since the 60’s so we got some good long data on that.
There are dimensions of the fight for trans kids that lie in other places. If you do not pass as your gender as an adult due to a society that polices rigid gender expression you face things like soft travel restrictions because someone might harm you abroad or detain you mid transit, you face higher incidences of harassment, assult or exclusion by strangers because your transition is visible at a distance. You have more likely to have higher instances of digestive issues because you can develop massive anxiety around public bathrooms. If you are a woman whose puberty caused you to grow to be over 6 ft and have wide shoulders and a chiseled jaw there is no available elective surgery that takes you out of that box. Overall if you stick out you risk getting hammered down and that is a lot scarier to trans people than a loss of fertility which is the only solid side effect. There is also hope that in the future gender related surgeries will one day support full reproduction capability but nobody is particularly holding their breath.
If you want to stop the pressures on trans kids to make acceptance of themselves more viable supporting non-binary identities and non-traditional presentations and taking a hard look at the effect of gender policing is a good start. Some trans people are surgery and medical intervention adverse so there are options for those in healthier more accepting societies to find middle ground. A lot of the propaganda totes up the more whimsical non-binary identities as being signs of delusion but the reality is that there are underlying coping mechanisms being used to accept a social and physical half way space. If you can construct social safety for those groups you reduce the overall pressure to physically conform.
I think you’ve brought up some good points for me to think about. Could you point me in the right direction for the studies you are referring to? I wouldn’t mind looking at them myself.
If you are interested in specifically long term prospective effects of puberty blockers the reason we had support for the trials on children is because there are naturally occuring conditions like Androgen insensitivity syndrome where people grow up with the chromosomes of a male person but their body develops as phenotypicly female because their body chemistry cannot read their horomones. These and other intersex conditions meant we weren’t going in blindly because we studied adults into advanced ages who never actually went through a regular puberty so we have a raft of information of different forms of naturally occurring puberties outside of the male and female binary. In the case of blockers the idea is not to use these measures very long term because there are escalating side effects for folks once they hit their mid 20’s but nobody is advocating for anybody to mimic intersex conditions artificially for that long. Sixteen- seventeen is considered the upper end and those are the ages kids with the signoff of their adult guardians can start making decisions about HRT.
The book A Comprehensive Guide to Intersex by Jay Kyle Peterson is a good place to start if you want to understand the various forms of conditions that contribute to our understanding of sex development.
Getting into the weeds of the history of Transgender DSM and puberty blocking treatment trials is not the easiest to do because there is a lot of politically motivated hijacking of the algorithm but here is an early documentation from an early trial in 1998 and a guide developed for paitent selection criteria from 2001. You will notice some outdated nomenclature and the DSM has since been refined and updated since :
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9879847/ http://www.genderpsychology.org/transsexual/hbsoc_2001.html
Anecdotally it’s not a bad idea to get to know some trans folks who share their experiences about going through the system to get a sense of what the system is like and what the problems experienced by the people in the system are.
This is Alexander who went through the US system and describes what it was like. https://youtu.be/a4r0CoXsGmk
Jamie went through the UK system and now has his PHD in Psychology specializing in studying transgender development and wellbeing. https://youtu.be/lWngA08D9LU His videos center around either information or trans/annti-trans memes.
And Abagail Thorn has an MA philosophy , is a playwright and actress in the UK who uses the medium of philosophy to expound on many aspects of trans life. She does a very good job citing her sources but is also very entertaining in her presentation on subject matter. This is her video about going through the system as an adult. https://youtu.be/v1eWIshUzr8
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/a4r0CoXsGmk
https://piped.video/lWngA08D9LU
https://piped.video/v1eWIshUzr8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Thank you for the links. It’s going to take me some time to go through it all. Have an upvote!
I watched most of video from Alexander so far and plan on finishing it. Seems like good stuff from a fairly reasonable person so far. Its giving me topics that I can use for further research on this to help develop my opinion.
I think my fav is Abagail’s stuff because at some level I never got over being a theater nerd and she places all her citations on screen! It is more heart wrenching in this video though because the UK is an extremely rough place to be trans. Jaime’s stuff is more scattershot so I picked a slightly more random vid.
I must say it is extremely refreshing to see anyone be willing listen. The people using trans people as an example of "how the left are insane/misguided " and often a lot of folks on the left themselves are usually more used to treating our advocacy like some kind of shuttlecock in badminton. It becomes more about who is factually ir ethically right in some kind of 2 dimensional sense than focusing on the actual nuance of living with what is a pretty complicated psychological condition where experts have drawn conclusions for treatment that can seem counter intuitive from the way we handle other psychological conditions.
I really want to thank you. It gives me a lot of hope when someone just shows some actual curiosity. Advocating for my community’s quality of life is kind of like fighting a hydra and 9/10 times people just want to rip a chunk out of you about their singular beef instead of taking the time to see how it all ties together.