theprincess

> the argument against irreversibly treating children is still a reasonable position

Allowing a trans child to go through their natal puberty is not a neutral act. A trans person who "passes" has a much better lifetime outcome thanks to facing less discrimination and having less body image issues (not many people living as females would enjoy being called a man in a dress and harassed regularly based on their body proportions regardless of their chromosomes).

> and not the shallowly insulting straw man argument you present as the only option.

It's not a shallow straw man. Anti-trans activists want to ban care for trans people outright. They want conversion therapy - or what they have slickly labled "gender exploratory therapy" - to be the only treatment available.

If we hadn't lived through many decades where such treatment was already the only option and seen how disastrous it was I may be less inclined to say they are acting in bad faith, but, alas, we know exactly what conversion therapy does: it creates incredibly traumatized adults who are still trans.

> If you're not ideologically invested in this topic and are sincerely interested in the truth, I'd urge you to look at your own country from an outsider's point of view. The point being, many sources in the US that were reputable (i.e. scientific american) are parroting misinformation about this topic in service of ideology.

You've really been running wild in this comments section, as have I. I can see that we're both very interested in this topic, but from different sides.

What I'll point out here again, is that you continue to paint reputable organizations that disagree with you as "ideological" while maintaining yourself as some sort of unbiased outside observer. This is blatantly untrue.

You are the one trying to change the facts being reported by reputable sources. You are the activist who is engaged in a campaign of attempting to ideologically modify unbiased institutions.

I think the trans topic can really rile people up, and there's no shortage of think pieces of conspiracy theories about it. Same as has existed around lots of minority groups that caught the attention and ire of the larger public.

You aren't the unbiased observer however. You are an activist, and it shows in your writing.

I think you're ideologically motivated, and arguing from a position of emotional distaste for trans people rather than unbiased concern about medical practice. Here's why:

> any legitimate discussion or criticism about gender-affirming care, possible social cause that's driving the increase of trans-identifying teenagers

Trans-identified is a term created by anti-trans activists initially as an "in joke" because calling someone a trans identified male or trans identified female created acronyms that spelled traditionally female and male names: TIM and TIF, where TIM would be applied to trans women and TIF would be applied to trans men. A group that is serious about improving the world wouldn't choose their terminology so as to make fun of or harass people. A hate group would.

> or how certain trans rights infringes on women's rights

It's not at all clear that trans rights infringe on women's rights. The right to segregate yourself from elements of the population that you find distasteful isn't guaranteed. Otherwise we'd still have Jim Crow laws in the American South and lesbians would still be barred from women's sports due to concerns about them being predatory in locker rooms - yes this was a big concern in the 1980's.

> the capture of cultural institutions by radical activists

This is conspiratorial thinking. "Institutions" are made up of individuals and operate under some guiding principles. They aren't captured like territories in a game of risk.

> This would also mean that statements made by countries that are arguably more progressive than the US (i.e. UK and European countries) about the current trans issue would fall into that category as well.

The UK and EU have different politics than the US. They are economically more egalitarian, but socially can be very conservative.

> it's hard to believe that the medical and activist organisations in the US are actually acting in good faith

Why would you conflate medical and activist organizations? Isn't it possible that you are the activist, and that you'd like to bend medical organizations to your will because they disagree with your own prejudices?

> Anyone of sound mind can clearly evaluate that my point isn't transphobic. The reply to this comment is a demonstration of what's wrong with the US.

Saying that nobody can disagree with you unless they are mentally unwell, and then calling someone who disagreed with you an example of "what's wrong with the US" is very odd behavior. It doesn't seem like the way someone operating in good faith would behave.

Children with gender dysphoria are not "perfectly healthy."

They have a serious problem. The level of hubris in assuming that all these heterosexual parents, many of them conservative, would just up and decide to "trans" their kids is outstanding.

Whatever makes people trans is immutable. Every possible way has been tried to "fix" them, by making them happy as their assigned sex. All the attempts just led to broken people, many of whom killed themselves.

The gall to just insert yourself into the lives of these kids and their families, without understanding their struggles or knowing them, and trying to take away the one proven path to them having a happy successful life is really something to behold.

> Being intersex is very rare and unfortunate, and I am sympathetic to those with such birth defects.

Agnes Torres was not intersex, she was merely classed as such which allowed her to live a normal life. Funny enough, your comment itself shows why this was successful. You see intersex as more legitimate and because of that you "give it a pass."

Agnes Torres was transgender, but was treated as legitimate back in the 1950's. Being treated like a normal human being allowed her to live a good life back then, free from hate.

It goes to show, if people would just allow trans people to live their lives, they could blend in with society. The thing holding them back is just... prejudice. How sad.

> Not really though, it's perfectly possible to be gender non-conforming without undergoing drastic medical procedures. In particular, all the women and men who reject the societal impositions of femininity and masculinity, while still being comfortable with their bodies.

Yes, I was pointing out how the conversion therapy works. I know lots of happy feminine gay men and butch gay women for example, but they don't have gender dysphoria. Trans people aren't the same as feminine gay men or butch gay women.

Zucker himself, whose conversion therapy included punishing boys for playing with barbies, said he supported the idea of someone being a feminine man and saw his therapy as a way of achieving that. He would straight up tell parents that their children would most likely be gay, but that being gay was better than being trans.

So, ironically, we have a conversion therapy, where the aim was to turn trans kids gay. I guess they thought that if you punished gender non-conformity early on you could instill a sense of maleness or femaleness into a kid, and then later they could just be more femme or butch as they liked. Sick stuff.

> pushed into taking these experimental treatments for a few months

It's a shame that this person was in such a difficult situation, but, barring some extraordinarily rare reaction, a few months would not cause long term problems. The full impact takes several years, by 3-6 months the very first changes are only starting to become visible and many of them are things like changes to skin quality and fat distribution which revert after cessation.

It's still possibly a failure that your acquaintance got on HRT or Lupron in the first place. Given that long term follow ups show, consistently, that less than 2% of trans youth "desist" and are happy with their treatments, the reasonable solution to that failure would be to require some sort of evaluation by a therapist who has been trained to spot when someone has gender dysphoria and belongs to that 98% of happy transitioners versus someone from the 2% group that will desist because their issues came from somewhere else.

Instead of that sort of reasonable response, we see calls for outright bans on all treatment with many also calling for banning treatment for adults and a reversion to conversion therapy as the only "treatment" - it's not a treatment because it doesn't work and just hurts people.

The reason for this, is that the vast majority of people who suddenly have such strong opinions on trans health care are not actually concerned about people's health. They've just found a way to make their prejudices against transgender people sound like reasonable concerns.

And yet, Lupron has been used since the 1970's to treat precocious puberty and every single ban on using it for gender affirming care still allows it to be administered for that purpose. Medical associations also approve its use, in both cases.

When the people against it are only against it for one group of people, and doctors by and large disagree with them, it makes me suspicious that their motives are not based in concern for health and instead are based on personal feelings that are being projected onto an external cause.