Transgender Documentary on BBC2 Thursday 2100 "Transgender Kids: Who Knows best?"

Last year, Dion Lim, a reporter from a Florida based TV station, joined our Facebook group, and used some of what she found there in putting together this short news item that was broadcast last May:
www.wtsp.com/news/health/can-a-drug-make-you-transgender/215234337

In addition to DES victims, we now have a couple of natal women in our group who were masculinised by progestin exposure. Considering how widely these drugs were used, there must be a very large number of people similarly affected, most of whom will know nothing of their prenatal hormone exposure, nor that it's the cause of the various physical and psychological problems they've been experiencing all their lives.

Although DES is no longer used in human medicine, and androgenizing progestins aren't supposed to be given to pregnant women any more, nonetheless, synthetic hormones that potentially have gender bending properties are still in use. There's one in particular called hydroxyprogesterone caproate, which I think is highly likely to be capable of inducing female brain development in male babies. In the US, it's sold under the brand name Makena, and is given as a weekly intramuscular injection. There are probably others too, but that one in particular looks like it's being given in a high enough dosage to cause suppression of testosterone production, and it's being administered right at the time when the differences between male and female brains are thought to arise.

That doesn't explain how a young child is aware of gender norms which vary over time and place
How did the baby boy know the pink sippy cup indicates girl
This can only come from external forces. You like pink dresses- you must be a girl

Hugh It's entirely possible to end up in a situation where some of your brain development has occurred as male and some as female, so you don't fit in very well as either sex. The system doesn't currently cater at all well for those of us in that situation, it seems to be geared towards pushing everyone into a nice neat male or female box.

Then let's get rid of the box.

Not reinforce it by "transing" people.

You are also confusing sex and gender identity. Suppose someone did have a half male/half female brain. It doesn't change their sex. There loads of us on here who have no internal sense of gender identitiy, but identify as women because we are women - it's a biological fact. I'd be much less concerned about all this if they had new words for gender identity rather than hijacking the ones for biological sex. Having a "female gender identity" isn't the same as being female or a woman!

If that's the way they have to carry on in order to maintain their beliefs then surely at some point it'll all start to unravel. As ever, the question is: when?

nauticant they never do on these threads because they can't call me transphobic when they realise my child is transgender.

It's a curse and a blessing that they don't engage really

I was reading the Guides and trans thread FishIn... and I was struck at how Self Identify supporters just won't engage with your posts.

Because it's a completely made up statistic. One of the tricks Zucker & co. pull is that they diagnose kids that aren't trans, as trans, and then proceed to "cure" them.

Or maybe the children just grow up and their thoughts mature.

I know at the age of 10 I wanted to be and do all sorts of things that I haven't the slightest interest in now. Even though I was insistent at the time.

Choices about your body that last for the rest of your life shouldn't be made at that age.

Hell you aren't even allowed to get a tattoo until you're 18 and they are a lot easier to reverse.

The female clinician who used to work in Zucker's clinic who spoke on the documentary said that the 'severity' of the gender dysphoria in childhood wasn't a predictor of persisting or desisting. So, how on earth can you distinguish between the gender dysphoric child who IS trans and the gender dysphoric child who will go on to be a happy straight or gay/bi adult without transitioning.

There isn't subterfuge here - incorrectly diagnosing people to make the stats look good. The whole argument Zucker made is that gender identity is complex, dysphoria arises for lots of reasons and that many people grow out of it. Based on clinical observation, i.e. science.

"Because it's a completely made up statistic. One of the tricks Zucker & co. pull is that they diagnose kids that aren't trans, as trans, and then proceed to "cure" them."

Can I ask where you got that from?

Because it's a completely made up statistic. One of the tricks Zucker & co. pull is that they diagnose kids that aren't trans, as trans, and then proceed to "cure" them

If you have a solid test for the 'transness' of a child, I think we'd all like to hear it?

I don't think trans is something to be cured, I think that therapy to help people learn to live in their bodies must be the ideal case though? Just as it is with any other dysphoria

CoteDAzur I'm not sure how to post images here, but according to Williams Endocrinology 12th Ed., male genital differentiation is complete by the end of week 12, and the only events still ongoing after that as far as genital development are concerned are "external genital growth" and "testis descent".

DES was typically prescribed in a dose that was progressively increased as the pregnancy continued, and I think what often happened is that there wasn't enough present during the first trimester to have much effect on a male baby's testosterone production, but from the second trimester onwards, his testosterone production was heavily suppressed. Since male development is driven by the action of testosterone (and a hormone derived from it called DHT), this results in male development during the first trimester, but female development for the remainder of the pregnancy. It produces a person who is genetically male and has male reproductive organs, but whose brain has predominantly (or overwhelmingly it seems in a fair number of cases) developed as female. That's what I think is happening anyway. Since testicular descent and penile growth are still ongoing during the later stages of the pregnancy, the main physical signs that something went wrong are likely to be abnormalities associated with penile growth and descent of the testicles.

I couldn't find any research where they'd administered DES to animals in a way similar to DES miscarriage treatment in humans, but there's plenty of research in which scientists created the opposite situation by exposing female foetuses to testosterone. There are links to some of that research in this note:
www.facebook.com/notes/protect-the-unborn-child-from-synthetic-hormones/how-synthetic-female-hormones-can-interfere-with-male-sex-determination/1637590369877264

It certainly appears from that research that if you delay the hormone treatment until after the critical period for genital development has ended, you can end up with animals with a normal female appearance, but with male brains and male behaviour.

Because it's a completely made up statistic. One of the tricks Zucker & co. pull is that they diagnose kids that aren't trans, as trans, and then proceed to "cure" them.

I'd be interested to read the testimonies of people who experienced such treatment at the hands of Dr Zucker.

I am very interested in a throw away comment in the documentary about right wing and religious parents preferring their child to be trans gender than gay. Their thinking being, presumably, that as you can't try to "cure" gay people any more, if their child transitions they will end up with a partner of the "right" gender........

I agree with some of what Hugh says, actually.
It is entirely possible there is an intersex element to gender dysphoria and it involves brain development. The jury is still out but it's a plausible mechanism.
The problem is twofold. Firstly, the expansion of the transgender umbrella to include people do not have dysphoria about their sexed bodies, with all the bullying that has come to involve, and secondly, the fact that we can't reliably tell which are the kids that are going to grow out of it at puberty and which aren't.
It would be interesting to see what happened to transgenderism as a movement if we did at some point establish a reliable test, thus excluding from the definition many of the people who currently consider themselves trans.
(All that flipping anachronistic transing of historical figures can stop for a start, if it turns out to be related to DES and other 20th century drugs.)

NappiesNappies
"I'd be interested to hear how your very interesting theories work with the argument that around 80% of gender dysphoric children end up well adjusted gay or lesbian adults?"

Because it's a completely made up statistic. One of the tricks Zucker & co. pull is that they diagnose kids that aren't trans, as trans, and then proceed to "cure" them.

"Or the considerable number of mothers on this site who were tomboys as children, and have grown up into contented women and mothers. "

I'm not the best person to comment on gender dysphoria because in my case it's only partial, but I bet none of those women had an inner sense of being a boy from a young age, that there'd somehow been a mistake and they'd ended up with a girl's body when their body should be male.

Surely helping a child come to terms with their healthy body if at all possible, is a better outcome than taking them down a pathway that means they will be a lifelong medical patient?

This. Precisely this. For the life of my I cannot understand how this can possibly be controversial, and yet if you state it, allegations of transphobia rain down.

Oh I have heard it all now.
A hydrocele is not an intersex condition, it's a condition that affects the genitals of lots of boy children. It's pretty unremarkable.
The BBC programme was balanced and showed no evidence at all that Dr Zucker was trying to "beat the trans" out of kids. Instead he was following common therapeutic practice for a range of MH issues which is to try to understand the cause and deal with it.
Are you suggesting that the baseball team girl and the little boy who lived with his gran and mother would have been better going through a gender affirmative approach and put on blockers/cross sex hormones? Surely helping a child come to terms with their healthy body if at all possible, is a better outcome than taking them down a pathway that means they will be a lifelong medical patient?

Hugh - "Genital development is largely complete by the end of the 12th week after conception"

This is absolutely not true. You forget that you are on a forum populated mostly by women who have had children. Many of us have had ultrasound scans during pregnancy and know exactly what a fetus looks like at each stage.

FYI at 12 weeks, genitals of both male and female fetuses are outside. They look exactly the same. The very few doctors who can tell the sex of a fetus during ultrasound scan at this time do it by examining the "angle of dangle" relative to the spine and it is not 100% reliable.

And anyway, those are the genitals and their development in vivo might be impaired in very rare cases. But even then, your undescended testicles etc are male, in a fully male body, with XY chromosomes in every cell, including the brain, which is also male.

I understand that it is a problem when you think your body should be female and it clearly (and understandably) isn't. But it is a problem that has been possible to solve in the majority of gender dysphoria cases without permanently altering their bodies and rendering them infertile.

Hugh I'd be interested to hear how your very interesting theories work with the argument that around 80% of gender dysphoric children end up well adjusted gay or lesbian adults?

Or the considerable number of mothers on this site who were tomboys as children, and have grown up into contented women and mothers. They argue that they just preferred boys' toys and activities, because they were more interesting.

Looking forward to hearing about it.

AssassinatedBeauty I can't speak for trans people in general, but there is a big overlap between intersex and transgender in people who were exposed to DES. I, along with most of DES "sons" I've talked to, have symptoms of hypogonadism (chronic below normal male testosterone production), and "eunuchoid habitus" (a type of body structure that's usually associated with intersex conditions, and makes you look a bit like a cross between a man and a woman).

Also, most of the people I've talked to with a history of DES exposure have genital anomalies of one kind or another associated with incomplete male development, including things like hypospadias, undescended testicles, and micropenis. In my case, although I developed normal male genitals and my testicles did fully descend, I was born with a hydrocele, which is an abnormality associated with testicular descent - it occurs when the channel the testicle descends through fails to close up afterwards. I have the eunuchoid body structure as well, and when I was younger, was very androgynous looking. No one ever said anything about it to me though, I think everyone was just seeing a feminine looking man with female body language, and immediately assuming I must be gay rather than thinking of intersex conditions.

Genital development is largely complete by the end of the 12th week after conception, and the way DES and other miscarriage preventatives tend to be prescribed means that most or all of the exposure occurs later in the pregnancy, during the second and third trimesters (by which time it's too late to have much effect on genital development, but it can still affect brain development, since brain development continues right up until birth). I think that's why you often end up with people who look male, but identify as women.

The David Reimer case on its own doesn't prove anything, however there have been plenty of other cases where male babies were surgically reassigned to female, with similarly disastrous outcomes, e.g.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421517/

So there's now plenty of clinical evidence showing that your gender identity is hardwired into your brain, and not learned. Zucker's theory is wrong, and you can't beat the trans out of kids (or use electroshock, hormones, reparative therapy or anything else). The only way to change someone's gender identity would be to go back in time and expose their developing brain to the correct hormones. Since there's no way of doing that, unfortunately we're stuck with the results.

One thing I will say though, is that it is an intersex condition. It's entirely possible to end up in a situation where some of your brain development has occurred as male and some as female, so you don't fit in very well as either sex. The system doesn't currently cater at all well for those of us in that situation, it seems to be geared towards pushing everyone into a nice neat male or female box.

Hugh what have those cases of intersex or injured babies got to do with non-intersex/non-injured children?

I don't think you can say that gender identity is an instinct that's hardwired. The David Reimer case supports nothing other than the fact that he and his twin brother were traumatised and treated abysmally by medical practitioners.

Although the documentary makes out Zucker to be a straight thinking person under attack by a medical establishment gone mad, that's not the case at all. His theory is not new. It's really just a rehashed version of a now disproved theory that's been around since the 1950s, that used to actually be the prevailing theory of how gender identity develops: Dr Money's "gender neutrality" theory.

Money's theory maintained that people were born "gender neutral", and whether you identify as male or female later in life depends on whether people treat you like a boy or a girl during your early childhood. On the basis of that theory, thousands of babies with damaged or abnormal genitals were surgically reassigned to whatever sex suited doctors best (usually female), and the parents told to raise them as the assigned sex. However, follow up studies of those children showed that, once they were old enough to assert themselves, many of them ended up rejecting their sex of rearing, and reverting to living as the sex they were born as. This is despite having been given surgery (and if they'd reached their teens, hormones), that made them look completely fine as the new sex. The best known of these cases is that of David Reimer, but there are many others that had similarly disastrous outcomes.

From the disastrous failure of these infant sex reassignment cases, we now know that gender identity isn't learned, it's an instinctive thing that you're born with, it's hardwired into your brain during your prenatal development, and it can't later be changed by hormones, reparative therapy or anything else. So Zucker is continuing to flog a horse that is well and truly dead, and that's why he was sacked.

As to why there are suddenly all these people about whose gender identity doesn't match their biological sex, based on my own experiences and chatting online with other people whose mothers were given hormone treatment during pregnancy, I think it's the end result of a colossal medical and pharmaceutical industry blunder whose effects have been quietly building ever since WW2, when the first mass market hormone-based medicines were developed. Rather than try to paraphrase the whole thing here, I invite you to check out a facebook page I recently set up: www.facebook.com/synthetichormonesaredangerous/

Cocoa - I got chills reading that. It's like "The Handmaid's Tale" coming true.

I am not really keeping up with this thread, but I am thinking about second wave concerns about reproductive technologies limiting choice rather than expanding it.

So, things like prenatal testing and the ability to use IVF, surrogacy etc to overcome natural issues within the reproductive process - which is seen as increasing choice (despite the push with antenatal testing being towards termination within a context of descreased social support for disability) - is just being extended here to scientific ability to overcome natural issues like what sex baby a woman actually has. The language of 'rebirthing' is pertinent because it is like the first birth was not good enough - you know, the birth gestated and born by a woman. So, it is about male control of the reproductive process extended to control over children's bodies.

If you take the dichotomy historically of science as rational, male worldview and female as natural to be overcome by science, then it is part of a longer story of scientific control over reproduction (and child-rearing).

Problems of infertility in children who have transed can be overcome by science - by co-opting the eggs or sperm and indeed wombs, through surrogacy - of natal females.

Choice - but it only works in a market context where sex and reproduction are seen as commodities to be bought and sold. So you can sort of see why religious conservatives might oppose this on different grounds to feminists but with the same end - which is work with what is natural and God-given or born of woman, not change it through science.

Again, may make no sense.