Conversion Therapy and a Survey of 25,896 LGBTQ youth

It was one thing whilst it was 10s of children

The sudden growth to thousands of children wanting to follow this path should give you great concern

If capacity was available it would be more again

Something has changed

Yes there are multiple things happening in the world today , Straight body problems as well as gender problems. I am only talking about gender problems.

There is a community who supports the whole idea that children should be supported with beast binding & puberty blockers ( to give them time to think) and surgery ( if it's right for them ) , when in fact it seems to be in practice steering them down a specific path , as puberty blockers seems to lead inevitably to surgery

Alternatively, puberty blockers are rarely prescribed to youth, so unless someone is absolutely sure that a child had either precocious puberty or gender dysphoria, they aren't prescribed, thus meaning that children with gender dysphoria who are prescribed them are significantly more likely to proceed on to HRT and/or surgery.

There's groups of lesbian and bisexual girls who wear binders who aren't trans and who don't proceed on to use testosterone or get surgery. There's girls with precocious puberty who aren't trans and use puberty blockers who don't proceed on to use testosterone or get surgery. There's an overlap in those groups who don't proceed on to use testosterone or get surgery. Which suggests it's not binders and/or puberty blockers that lead to someone starting testosterone or getting surgery, but the overlap does appear to be the reason why they're prescribed it in the first place.

Funny that.

Yes yaboo exactly!! All detrans people say the same thing. Adults should have explored it more with me, talked about why I felt the way I did and been more honest about the physical impact of hormones & surgery.

How can a 14 year old girl possibly know about the impact of vaginal atrophy for example especially when it’s described euphemistically as “vaginal dryness”. It isn’t it’s the effect of permanent & irreversible loss of oestrogen causing vaginal & vulval skin to thin & tear, the shrinking & shortening of the vaginal passage making smear tests which a TM would still need painful, accompanied by itching and burning. It’s bad enough as a menopausal woman when you’ve had a lifetime of vaginal hoohah but how could a 14 year old understand the effect of it? They couldn’t.

It’s sad that adult trans people often struggle with the fear of not passing and feel if they had had surgery at a much younger age then they would but that’s the basic fundamental problem. Wanting to be a different sex to the one you were born is a circle you can’t square. Even with the best surgery in the world, a TW or TM will not be the opposite sex but the approximation of it.

I hear you midge.

As someone who also wanted to be the opposite sex as a child, and am eternally grateful that I was a child today, I do wonder why there are those who argue so passionately for early transition. Particularly those who will then minimize the lack of sexual organ development for males as being done because that young person could be asexual.

Helping anyone learn to love their body for what it is rather than yearning for it to emulate something it can still not be, is a far better strategy for better mental health. If that person still feels the same as an adult, then they have an adult’s understanding of what they are doing to themselves.

There is a community who supports the whole idea that children should be supported with beast binding & puberty blockers ( to give them time to think) and surgery ( if it's right for them ) , when in fact it seems to be in practice steering them down a specific path , as puberty blockers seems to lead inevitably to surgery

Even the very existence of the community messes with your head as it makes you think things that are actually impossible are possible . Now you know what you want is possible ( ish) and it's just a matter of "what do in need to do to get it"

I would never accept a gender identity of woman.

What do you mean when you say this?

On this forum at least, you’ll find that the majority of women reject gender and sex-based stereotypes. So we also reject a “gender identity” of woman.

And in real life, I don’t know anyone who 100% accepts the stereotypes of their sex. What is it you believe you’re rejecting exactly? Do you not think it’s possible to be a woman unless you’re a walking stereotypes of a woman?

But I find the group of people who would suggest I make physical changes threatening. Those changes would have sterilised me. They would have taken away my reproductive capabilities.

Who is doing so? I'm part of a community of trans people who embrace all of them, who think it's horrible and wrong to suggest, especially to force, someone down a path that they themselves don't stand behind. Where trans people deserve respect regardless of the choices in their transition and where forcing them onto hormones or to have surgeries against their will is a human rights violation.

On the contrary I've been told on numerous occasions that not wanting bottom surgery is a sign of fraudulence and all real trans people have had it, that a trans man who's not sterilized because he wants his own child can't be a man and that it should be mandatory to begin with to protect children from confusion, mockery towards men with breasts because 'how can they demand to be called men when they're clearly women' and more by the same 'gender critical' people.

The thing with a watch wait ( and I think support ) approach is not that I would expect the trans nature of someone to change

I would however expect that in the vast majority of cases the child finds a way to understand and live happily with themselves without the need for interventions ( physical conversions) that are physically harmful

I still have dreams where I am a man. It's a natural part of who I am. I still find i am most likely to fit in better and more easily with a group of men than a group of women. I would never accept a gender identity of woman. I would not choose she/her pronouns. It would feel wrong /disgusting

But I find the group of people who would suggest I make physical changes threatening. Those changes would have sterilised me. They would have taken away my reproductive capabilities.

What's so wrong with me that people want to do that? Who is really feeling threatened by people like me?

Why is anyone so desperate to transition kids, anyway?

For kids, the toys they want to play with, the clothes they want to wear, the way they want to wear their hair, does not matter, they are all still kids. They will be treated like kids, no matter what they do.

I think that a lot of the ideas behind transitioning are to do with the role you play in society, what society expects of you. If you think you somehow fall short of what society expects then you begin to think surely you must actually belong to the opposite sex? Well, society doesn't (or shouldn't) expect anything from kids except just to be kids.

I also think a lot of the drive behind transitioning is to do with sex - from a range of paraphilias to confusion about who you are sexually attracted to; but kids should be protected from the adult world of sex.

Then there is the argument that the younger you transition, the better the effects will be, the better you will 'pass' - so is this all about aesthetics, then? It would be unconcienable to allow a child to have a nose job, liposuction, even botox or fillers, so why are we pushing them into transition?

OP, I've just spent a few hours reading the stories on reddit/detrans. And I actually cried. Do you want to know why?

Because, on-site, there's countless first-hand accounts of people who decided as children, that they were trans, all of which eventually de-transitioned, and the majority of these people all say similar things:
they wish that somebody, anybody, had gently explored their issues with them and hadn't just assumed they were trans.

All of them had reasons for wanting to transition: they were groomed by older people to think trans was the answer to their problems, they were immersed in online communities encouraging them to consider their gender identity, they wanted to protect themselves from further rapes, abuse and sexual exploitation and thought that transition would be the ticket, they talk about internalized homophobia, about how they were pushed into identifying as trans based on outdated stereotypes about what boys/girls should do and feel, they had autism and were misfits and a new tribe told them they would fit in 'here'...

It didn't help these people. Some of them mourn their missing wombs, their excised breasts, their removed penis' that they never even had the chance to use.

These people are not lying. They all wish that somebody had helped them explore their reasons for being trans rather than simply accept their declarations and push them into the medical pathway which, as de-sisters and de-transitioners, they woefully regret.

If you're an adult and have crippling gender dysphoria and you think that medical intervention will help you be less dysphoric, then I'm okay with that.

But if you're a child, making big decisions which legally you cannot begin to understand the eventual repercussions of, I would hope that somebody, somewhere, would gently explore the reasons for your decision to transition with you, unpick that internalised misogyny and homophobia and self-hatred and address those comorbid psychological issues before you made a massive, life-changing decision that you may very well regret.

That's not 'conversion therapy': that's good therapy.

It is likely that they are seeking this conversion therapy because they feel suicidal? Rather than the other way round?

' A trans child isn't the same concept as a child with a trans identity ', you say. That says what a trans child is not , but not what a trans child is . No?

Later, you say, ' A trans child is any child that identify as trans. ' That looks like an explanation of what a trans child is that uses the term 'trans', so it seems circular. It cannot work as an explanation because it requires we already know what 'trans' means when applied to a child in order for us to understand what 'trans child' means. But we do not already know this: if we did we would not need an explanation, would we?

This all seems to be connected in your mind with a kind of feeling. But what feeling? How do we identify this feeling?

You say, ' They don't feel they belong with group girl s, they mix more easily with group boy so they identify with /see their tribe as boy .' Hmm.

Look. ' I don't feel I belong with group 'poor people' -- I mix more easily with group 'rich folk' ' would seem clearly insufficient to make me rich. So what would it be to ' identify with/see my tribe as rich folk ', given that I would anyway remain poor? Likewise, what would it be to ' identify with /see my tribe as boy ' if I were a girl, given that I clearly could not be a boy?

I think you are a bit mixed up with the idea of what it means to identify as something. You are not alone in this, of course.

But still, there are no trans children.

[Yes, I think a look at the notion of 'identity' would help all round. I would suggest, for starters, a consideration of how the idea of 'personal identity' (which you refer to above) relates to the relation of 'identity ' -- of being ' the same '. The philosopher John Locke got all this going at the end of the seventeenth century. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a good place to start, although he is far from having the last word. Much talk of 'identity' nowadays would benefit from some perspective on the connections between what we think of as 'ID' and this relation of 'identity' as 'the same', I think. But that is a lengthy study, and meanwhile we can sort matters out well enough if we are careful. I hope so, anyway.]

And it's no good deferring to the tiny number of "GC" people who claim to be trans and who almost all other trans people will tell you do not represent their experience.

You mean, "GC people who are trans". There is no such thing as claiming to be trans without actually being trans, is there? That's gatekeeping someone's identity.

Old enough to legally consent. Old enough to understand that there are clear reports that medical therapies don’t improve mental health. Old enough that puberty has progressed enough to allow them to experience libido, sexual pleasure, can produce sperm or eggs for fertility, and their bone density has reached adult levels. Old enough to reach an age at which their dysphoria may have ceased with puberty, in line with what used to happen for years before children were al put on puberty blockers.

The “desire” is to not see children have permanent harm inflicted upon them for no mental health gain. It still shocks me that people don’t think this is a worthwhile cause.

What's your desires with the 'watchful waiting' approach?

I believe that watchful waiting is just one option. It also allows treatable comorbidities to be treated which may have effect on decision for the next appropriate treatment.

Three high court judges believe that people under 15 cannot adequately understand the future issues they will face with medicalised treatment. And that people under 17 are also unlikely to understand in depth.

While there is debate that the rate of desisting after puberty is the published 85%, it is likely a high enough proportion to warrant watchful waiting for some patients. Why would you not wish to save a group of young people the harm of starting medical transition that they regret later? Because they were the group that would have desisted?

And you obviously know that the effects of medicalised transition is less reversible in females. And that a very large proportion of females have underlying conditions, often complex. Why would you advocate early medical transition for this group if there is absolutely no proof (as we have seen from the court case with the Tavistock) that this treatment is the best for this group.

Why would anyone advocate a single treatment path when alternatives should be sought and suggested as needed?

So far, no one has come up with any studies that show the Trevor Project survey is wrong,

Well, there has been a particular problem in collecting this data. We don’t need studies to show this report is very problematic for the purpose you wish it to be used.

You might have read about the very poor records kept by Tavistock etc. Surely the lack of these vital records for being able to establish the best treatment plan is of concern to you too, just like it is for us? However, we have got reports written by experienced clinicians that report that suicide statistics that are often reported should be evaluated with very critical eyes and to make sure that simplistic conclusions are not drawn.

In these clinicians experience the suicide risk is not greater than other segments of the community. There is however, evidence that a) some young people come in and use suicide as a lever for treatment and b) that groups such as mermaids have in fact coached young patience to do this (ie. There is evidence of them doing so)

Again, these clinicians acknowledge the risk is high, but also draw on a wide range of reasons.

and whilst plenty of you have plenty of doubts

Which have not been addressed at all but have been attempted to be minimised.

the conclusion thus far must be that the best evidence we have is that conversion therapy attempts on trans kids are harmful and that therefore banning them is the safest policy.

And, we again point out that conversion therapy is undefined at all in this study. And I personally have seen definitions that mean anything but affirming only is considered ‘conversion’ therapy. This included watchful waiting.

It has also not been addressed in any way that affirming only treatment can lead to early medicalisation. And there is little evidence (re the Bell vs Tavistock) that the pathway to full transition is deviated from once started.

And again I point out that the negative side effects, the life shortening potential effects of these treatments for females has not been acknowledged.

Also, the lauded study that indicated that medical transition helped mental health was proven to be false within a year of its being published. So, do you have one that has successfully gone through peer review and dissemination by experts?

So. There is no evidence available that mental health is improved by transition. There is also no clear and defining data in this report so it is indicative at best but also, it is already known there is a high risk associated with gender disphoria.

We know that medical pathways for female transition has many little discussed negative health issues. We know that the majority of the current cohort of young people seeking treatment are female.

Can you please explain what you consider is a conversion therapy? Do you mean anything but affirming only is conversion therapy?

And if you think anything other than affirming only is conversion therapy, can you explain exactly how you see affirming treatment that ignores any underlying issues as being the only option available as being the best for all young trans people?

Because, I think that anyone currently reading along might also need this explained.

Data on rates of suicide attempts in trans and nonbinary youth who have undergone conversion therapy is presented alongside a graph showing higher rates of suicide attempts in all LGBTQ youth who undergo conversion therapy compared to those who don't. But the figures in the graph aren't broken down into separate rates for trans and nonbinary youth and gay/lesbian/bisexual youth. We have no way of knowing whether the quoted suicide attempt rate of 57% after conversion therapy in trans and nonbinary youth is higher or lower than the comparable suicide rate for trans and nonbinary youth who haven't undergone conversion therapy.

Even if the suicide attempt rate is higher for trans and nonbinary youth who have undergone conversion therapy versus those who haven't, all that this would prove is an association between conversion therapy and higher suicide rates. Association does not prove causality - i.e. higher suicide attempt rates may co-occur with conversion therapy, but that doesn't prove that conversion therapy is the cause of higher rates of suicide attempts. There are plenty of other factors that might play a causative role in higher suicide attempt rates in this context, e.g. mental health co-morbidities, strong religious beliefs, age, sex, socioeconomic disadvantage. The Trevor Project report doesn't tell us whether or not any of these factors differed in the conversion therapy vs no conversion therapy groups, so the conclusion that conversion therapy causes suicide attempts simply isn't scientifically valid. That conclusion would never get past peer review on the strength of the data presented.

And that's before we even get to the lack of definition of "conversion therapy" in the report and the conflation of sexual orientation and gender identity as the targets of "conversion".

Why are you ignoring the problem of gay conversion therapy? Why, @Shizuku, do you appear not to give a shit about this?

I think we are having a violent agreement?

It seems so.

In the meantime, the best evidence on the effects of conversion therapy on trans kids posted in this thread remains the Trevor Project survey.

Yet. This is not evidence at all! We keep saying this is a self selected survey and there is absolutely no depth to the data that they present.

It doesn’t define it terms. What is conversion therapy in regards to this survey? How does this relate to current treatments?

And how many of those participants were identifying as the opposite sex and how many were non-binary?

If anyone took this survey and used it to recommend treatment standards or policies, they should be held liable. This would cause significant harm to children and teenagers who are suffering from dysphoria. Do you actually want to set treatment standards based on such poor evidence?

You have not addressed any concerns about the data feeding this report yet call for lurkers to believe it unquestionably, and you want treatment plans to be set using it.

Again, there are clinicians who state that suicide risk remains high or even higher after medical transition has started due to any number of things. Some are, the lack of treatment of underlying mental health issues including trauma, poor outcomes of surgery, negative side effects of medication, a feeling that transitioning has not helped them cope with their dysphoria as they thought it would (or had been led to believe). These are just some of the reasons. Do you have any thoughts on this?

There is no denying that trans people deserve and need a higher standard of care. That is something many posters here are very concerned about.

Why? Because it is (for some) and it could very well be (for many others) our own children on or will be on the waiting list for treatment.

Please do not try to tell us we do not really care, or that we do not have valid concerns. On the contrary. And to present our interest as otherwise is lacking the understanding of the current cohort of transitioners.

I think we are having a violent agreement?