Robert Winston Radio 4 Today Programme

Great posts binterested

I don't understand why gender dysphoria is treated by changing the body, rather than by psychological treatments.

God yes, the brain is full of all sorts of bizarre phenomena that can be very compelling. Once, in the grip of psychosis, i believed I could fly. For a great many years I had persistent suicidal ideation because I believed I was utterly damaged goods, worthless and that my sexuality made me degenerate.

I was completely in error in both these sincerely held beliefs. I'm very glad no one suggested a skydive without a parachute, or suggested I follow through taking my life, and instead helped me come to terms with reality. I can't quite believe we are still in a place where sincere but obvious nonsense beliefs are being treated by body modification, to use as neutral a term as possible.

I think gender dysphoria probably has far more in common with the various disorders that mean the brain can’t interpret the body properly.

I had a similar experience fleetingly when I had DD by CS and was numb from the waist down. After she’d been born she was taken away briefly and I was lying on the surgery table waiting to go to the recovery room and I looked down and saw this rather disgusting pink thing - the shape of a large triangle in front of me. I couldn’t make any sense of it but it felt repellant. After a few seconds I realised It was my leg, which had been propped up. It was the oddest sensation not to recognise my body as my own - it became an abstract blobby pink shape rather than a part of me - and to feel completely alienated from it.

My aunt who has had an amputation also suffers from appalling phantom limb pains and her foot which isn’t there gets terribly cold. She feels better putting a blanket over her nonexistent foot. The parallels with discomfort being eased by dressing as the opposite sex strike me quite strongly. The difference is nobody tells my aunt she actually does have a foot and she doesn’t shout at people who acknowledge the fact that she doesn’t actually have a foot.

That’s my take on gender dysphoria - at least for adults. For children it’s 99pc horror of puberty I think.

I know we are not supposed to mention the other thing that goes on with adult men - the lace dresses and all that. That’s a whole other story imho.

Isn't it that some people want to be or feel an association and identification with the opposite sex and that they therefore chose to adopt the sex stereotypes associated with the opposite sex whatever those may be?

So it isn't that a little boy actually particularly likes princess dresses and ballet for themselves but that he feels an affinity with girls and wants to be like them so copies the stereotypical behaviour norms.

There probably is a link with being gay given how many children with dysphoria will grow up to be gay if left alone.

No idea if it could be caused by hormones in the womb. But like many human behaviours there are probably multiple causes both genetic and environmental.

Anyway as per gay people, why would it matter why people are as they are unless there is a reason to want to cure them as with a painful or lifelimiting disease. Gay people have rightly fought shy of ‘a cause’.

The only issue with feeling more feminine or masculine than is typical for your sex is that society gets antsy about it. So why don’t we go back to the original motivation of Stonewall et al and accept people as they are and in the bodies they are in. Let’s do that and let’s also stop pretending people are born in the wrong body and can change sex. Let’s do those things and then we’re done and can get back to whatever matters we had in hand before this bullshit took hold.

Well, I think hormone washes rather fail Occams razor, tbh. What is the most simple explanation for males or females in our culture feeling a sense of disconnect with their bodies which may relate to their preferences for certain activities and personality traits which the society around them has coded for the opposite sex? Is it the society around them coding these things erroneously, or is it a mysterious, unproven theory about hormone washes in the womb?

littlecabbage

(Sorry, missed how much thread had moved on since this excellent turn of phrase was presented by Datun)

Sadly I didn't invent it, cabbage. But it called to me, instantly, and vehemently.

It encompasses, 100%, what many men do.

Hormone wash is b/s.

When my dd came out as trans, this was the 'explanation' given to me by pro-gender support organisations. They could never explain the mechanism of 'hormone washing', let alone provide me with citations in support of it.

'Hormone washes' is just a way to blame mothers, and for homophobic men to make sense of butch women and feminine men.

Oh come off it. His speech is fine and actually accurate. In 2004 being transgender was relatively uncommon and I don't think there is any argument that some individuals have a strong and settled sense they are the other sex (psychological sex, maybe?)
I think many of us have refined our understanding and have a different view if transgenderism than we did in 2004 - I know I have.
None of what he said then is incompatible with being concerned about the affirmative transition process in place in 2020. And people are allowed to change perspective as more info becomes available.

Like Jazz Jennings. At 2 years old and undoing the poppers on the baby grow to create a dress, my kids undid poppers on everything but we'll ignore that, how did the infant know that girls should wear dresses in that particular time and place
What if we were back 50 years and boys wore dresses
It's a poor argument

Hormone wash or similar makes no sense to me
Girls do not like pink because they have a girl brain, they like pink because that is what out culture presents as suitable for their sex. How does the girl brain in the boy body know intrinsically what cultural norms there are in that particular time and place
Is it not more likely that a parent or other influence is telling them they shouldn't like pink because they are a boy?

(Sorry, missed how much thread had moved on since this excellent turn of phrase was presented by Datun)

"Intellectual wanking"! 😁

I shall be using this phrase in my everyday life now, going forwards.

I mean a deeply held belief about the sex one feels one is or should be.

Fieldofgreycorn Are you going to explain why you think this belief system should be imposed on others who don't share it?

an expert in ethics and society

Made a misstep with that ethics part then.

I salute your creativity Barracker.

I like Winston, he’s an expert in ethics and society.

So if Robert Winston is coming to regret, 15 years later, that his earnest 2004 appraisal of spectrummy sex and ladybrains has led to the irreversible damage of hundreds of children and thousands of adults who believed him when he advocated we should encourage people to try to change sex?
Too little, too late.

Thank you Barracker - I was reading the thread with mounting frustration because I know about his part in it (probably from here, likely from you) and I was going to say similar only less eloquently no doubt.

No wonder he was being careful with his words, I hope he actually feels the world of guilt he should and Barracker is right he needs to say he was wrong. But he wont, none of them will actually own up to this spectacular fuck up.

Is there any real science behind this hormone wash theory? Surely if someone who have ‘long since retired’ in 2004 came up with this idea in their working life (so 1980s?) then by now, with all the advances of science, there should be rather more conclusive proof? This Australian Prof looked at transsexuals ‘later in life’ so how did he obtain evidence of ‘hormone washes’ in the womb (so took place in 1940s or so)?

Have any twin studies been done? Frequency of gender variance in mixed sex versus same sex fraternal twins? Or offspring of athletes who had been doped or transmen? Or animal model studies? If so why are these never linked by TRAs?

Exactly. If a man 'should be' a woman, the next question is based on what?

Belief about "what one should be?

This makes no sense.
Its unjustifiable.
There's no 'because'

Like this:
I should be still ovulating in my late forties, because I am a biological female with ovaries, and most but not all females of my age still ovulate. However my ovaries failed early therefore I am an atypical member of my sex, which is female.

Should be is a concept that relates to what one is and what one might realistically be.

"I should be Hillary Clinton/have three legs/be a different species". These are nonsense, fantasy, impossible claims. No one should respect such claims.

"I should be X", needs a "because Y" to follow. People will then assess the "because Y" to see if it sensibly justifies the belief, or if it's a delusional belief, or false reasoning.

If someone cannot provide a "because" it's because they do not understand or acknowledge the nature of X and how it relates to themselves.

the sex one feels one is or should be

I feel I should have been born Male. I can tell by looking that I wasn't. No big deal.

They're are two issues though in the hormone in the womb theory - one is that certain hormones might predispose you to have a certain personality - I can go with this - and the other is the meaning that that personality is given out in the world. The GC argument is with the second part of this presumably rather than the first, I.e. it can be challenging to be a "masculine" woman or a "feminine" man, particularly for children finding their way in life.

I mean a deeply held belief about the sex one feels one is or should be.

Fine. Hold that belief. Live by that belief. But do not expect everyone else to live by your beliefs.

Obviously it's TOTALLY TRUE Floral

I was washed in utero
It really isn't fair
My mother cruelly laundered me
And now I've too much hair
She didn't read my label
For proper foetus care
And rinsed me in testosterone
Then spun me for a dare
It's why I am the way I am
A willy like my brother
But I have got a ladybrain
I blame it on my mother

It's quite surprising how pervasive this idea that there is a special trans hormone wash in the womb is, despite most of the activism being based on very different suggestions.

It's almost as though people are trying to back-rationalize this in a quasi-scientific manner without any actual back up. I'm sure Field will be happy to furnish us with the science about how it is definitely the very best current theory, but my fascination is that i have heard it suggested by people who are on the very peripheries of this, haven't done any reading, are not scientists, but have come up with the idea as a sort of supposal.