Transgender kids article in today's Guardian

I watched the programme and found it quite disturbing. There was a 14/15 year old who had had a double mastectomy.

This is an interesting article written by an eminent psychiatrist who is concerned about medical treatment of transgender disorders.

www.wsj.com/articles/paul-mchugh-transgender-surgery-isnt-the-solution-1402615120

The idea of a female penis is ridiculous. Do we talk of a male womb? male ovaries? Male vulvas?

I accept that some people are unhappy with the roles that society has imposed on them, or at any rate their own perceptions of their roles.

I don't really care how they wish to live their lives or what sort of sexual partners they prefer, any more than I am interested in the sexual antics of the rest of the people who live in my street.

But I don't see why anyone else should be expected to believe in their assertions. A man does not become a woman, no matter how much surgery he has or how many hormones he takes. Frankly, the medical professionals who collude in this deception should be ashamed of themselves. These people might need some sort of therapy - I don't know what - but lying to them is not the answer.

I am horrified that children might be seen as transgender. Children should be allowed to just be children, given room to explore their identities with no rigid stereotyping that says "girls do x, boys do y".

A lot of children are unhappy with the changes their bodies go through at puberty. It is a difficult and confusing time. But we should be helping them to learn to accept themselves and to understand. Not perpetuating their fears by refusing to let puberty happen properly, thereby reinforcing the idea that it is something to be afraid of.

By no means very familiar with her work either but, yes, that is my understanding of her point with that piece. But in some contexts the state of the genitals does matter.

The problem arises is that treatment for transgendered individuals includes therapy that is patient led. The starting point of this therapy is the exploration of feelings. One can "feel" like anything, but it won't necessarily make it so in an external sense.

What we have are individuals who have worked through their issues and reached a degree of peace with themselves (which on its own is fantastics).

Problem is with a small number they now seek to force on the rest of the world their own internal beliefs about themselves, with a zeal that is practically religious in its nature.

First of all a tremendous number of the trans community are self supporting perfectly well adjusted individuals who wouldn't dream of forcing penises anywhere they are not wanted, and will quietly support feminism without any fuss.

This small number of zealots however get a lot of exposure and seek to start a lot of fights.

I'm not overly familiar with Serano's work, but isn't her main point highlighting the intrusiveness of how transgender people are permanently asked about the state of their genitals?

WidowWadman there is Julia Serano's 'Cocky' that talks about her female penis making all her heterosexual female ex partners into lesbians (presumable before she had taken estrogen her penis was female).

Number four only makes sense if you replace 'lesbian transgender woman' with 'man'. I feel very sorry for lesbians caught up in all this crap, made to feel wrong and bad for only finding women sexually attractive.

I think the trend to say that non gender conforming children must belong to the 'other' sex rather than rejecting the huge amount of gender stereotyping that is currently being pushed is very worrying. I have no doubt that there are some children with serious body dysmorphia and needing lots of help with that. I'm really not sure that feminising their bodies is the way to go because you can't actually become a woman if you are genetically a man so it's not really a solution. I'd like to see more research on the prevalence of conflicted gender identity and gender dysmorphia to see whether there is a connection with how strongly gender differences are pushed, and how early that happens.

I'm also generally uncomfortable with medicalising what to me are primarily social problems, better to change society to accept that there are many ways to live life, that 'butch' and 'effeminate' are unnecessary terms, gender is itself a unhelpful construct and we are all individuals to be celebrated in our differences as much as our similarities.

I'd be interested to see Louis documentary though, he usually makes very thoughtful pieces.

No I can't, it was clicking through from several other sites, may have started from something posted on Stavvers' (?) site and may have been a comment rather than a blog.

I don't do any social media/Facebook / twitter . I am not making it up. Possibly the person who posted it is.

I can't because I don't have it saved but I've seen a blog linked on another thread which said exactly that. I'll have a look.

Can you link to that blog, because the alleged trans woman who doesn't take hormones and wants to penetrate lesbians with her penis is frequently wheeled out by those who reject transgender but I've not come across her anywhere else.

Okaaaayyy... I have said this on just about every transgender thread I have seen on here... time to break out the bold

there is no such thing as female penises in our species

aaannd.... rest.

Yeah the 'female penis' concept. Yeah.

What I take from this and it could be completely wrong is

1. body dismorphia would involve say a man looking at this penis (or leg or arm) and thinking it's a horrible, ugly penis (or leg or arm)but not that he isn't a man.

1. Sex dysphoria would involve looking at the penis and thinking that's a damn fine penis if I wanted to be /felt like a man but as I'm not/don't feel like a man I'm not thrilled by it.

3.My friend's daughter on the other hand ,as far as I know was perfectly happy with her physical body,was happy being a girl but simply didn't want to wear feminine clothes.

4 where I lose it completely was in a blog by a lesbian transgender woman who loves her penis, has no intention of getting surgery or even using hormones and wants to use her penis on other lesbian women (lesbian women clearly being from how she described it women with vaginas , not women like herself women with female penises)

Sorry trans women in the last sentence not trans men.

As said, there is no decisive evidence that there are any innate gender qualities that are present at birth. The trans orthodoxy states that there are 'male and female brains' as if this is fact which has become very hard to challenge.
I cannot understand how anyone can be a feminist and accept this as fact. It also fails to stand up to any sort of critical analysis.
Feeling like a woman is not something that women in general can quantify. What makes men believe they feel like a woman when they have never had the experience of being one? All the things that we understand to be female or feminine are either biological which a male cannot experience or socialised which a male also cannot experience.
The gendered traits that trans men envy in women are not innate, they are developed through socialisation and as such cannot be 'felt' by someone who has never been socialised female.
And vice versa.

There is no definitive research on the brain, which is by its nature plastic, that can prove physiological differences independent of the environment and society in which that brain has developed.

Whether the assumed basis of the difference is sex, gender, skin colour, eye colour, hair colour or whatever.

What people disagree on is how much socialisation can be stripped out from any brain studies. What they also disagree on is how much any physical differences within the brain correspond to behavioural difference.

Flora, you might find this interview with Louis Theroux more nuanced and responsible than the Guardian article:

www.vice.com/en_uk/read/an-interview-with-louis-theroux

There's a huge amount of homophobia underpinning a lot of stories of transgender children, particularly in the US. The Guardian article includes this gem: "In the US the treatment of transgender children is arguably more accepted and advanced than it is in the UK." How about encouraging children to love themselves as they are?

As usual no mention of the most "accepted and advanced" place for transgendered adults: Iran.

"Cases I've heard of where children are transgender are very much child-led. I would imagine it's incredibly rare for a parent to push their child into something like this."

Child led at 18 months?? Rare for parents to push gender??

I've just been sent some photos of a new family baby. A sea of pink with a baby lost in the middle. Genderfication starts from birth. Every transgender story I've read about talks about rejecting the stereotypical behaviours imposed, nothing else.

Yonic - not so much a question of what would convince me, I assumed there must be some definitive research given how the statement I quoted was phrased. And I was interested to know what it was, given that I could only find conflicting viewpoints.

Also, something of a redundant question on your part since if I knew that there was an authoritative source to support the PP point, I wouldn't need to ask what it was

I think my problem with the treatment of transgender children is the explicit propagation of strict gender roles. At present we live in a highly gendered society - as much as I believe in gender as a social construct, it is a reality for a lot of people, and I can understand adults wanting to change the way they are perceived in order to feel comfortable in their clothing/behaviour/roles. But by treating children who naturally challenge gender stereotypes (as many many children do before having it trained out of them) as being transgender, it seems the opportunity to say, yes, my son is feminine and that's ok, is lost, and it acts against the idea that society will ever allow gender non-conforming people to be themselves.

Sorry, am referring to the Jezebel article not the Guardian ones.

The only difference between BDD and gender dysphoria in that article are the way medical professionals have decided to label and treat them.

If someone who has a BDD and believes they are smelly wants surgery (issues of smell are a common form of BDD), who are we to label them mentally ill and deny them surgery? Neuroscience shows their brains are different, smelliness is a spectrum not a binary, it is up to the individual to decide how smelly they feel they are or want to be, lots of people have surgery for psychological reasons, and cis bodied people use deodorant all the time without having the buying of deodorants policed by psychologists.

Yes, here's a different Guardian article summarising the research on brains being 'softwired' by socialisation www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/15/girls-boys-think-same-way . Brain scans are a red herring, they just show how we've been socialised not created by biology. You can see that same result in studies showing how learning languages extend brain connections, how survivors of abuse have parts of their brains atrophied, and so on.

Deciding an 18 month old was 'born into the wrong body' is really odd, and you don't then need to look very far to wonder why the 5 or 10 yr old might be unhappy with their gender.

*Sorry, when, not where! As in, at what age.