TW who supports the SC ruling - AMA

That's very interesting about your development @VanishingVision

A lot to think about. There's a podcast (yes I listen to a lot of podcasts!) interview with a young man who had a serious development delay so he had to take male hormones to progress through puberty, and he did it later and faster than would have happened naturally. He talks about how the delay affected him and how things changed once he started the hormones, and how not going through a natural puberty at the usual time can affect people.

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(This is from the recent "Beyond Gender" series which I mostly don't find as interesting as the older "Gender a Wider Lens" series, but this episode is very powerful.)

I have another question if you don't mind: what's your relationship to physical acitivity? Do you do any sports, or exercise, or dance? And do you take part in any of these activities with other people?

How many people go to the doctor pretty sure of what is wrong with them? What they want is a prescription or a referral.

What they don't want is to be told they are wrong and that their problem is all in the mind. Especially when there is so little help available when the problem is all in the mind.

Richie Herron stayed on the transition pathway because it gave him access to therapy and treatment. A hope of a 'cure'. It was the wrong therapy and the wrong treatment but people were listening to him.

This is the danger when something becomes the fashionable 'cure all'. It gets attention and attention means resources. This means resources get pulled from 'old fashioned' treatments.

The difficulty is finding therapy without agenda. And then the person has to engage with that therapy. Therapy which doesn't affirm the patient's feelings is going to be uncomfortable and challenging. To an extent doesn't the patient have to start from the premise that their feelings are in some way wrong or incongruent?

I listened to Richie Herron talking about his experience of therapy which seemed to be directing him towards surgery. Add to that he was also deep down a rabbit hole of social media which also constantly affirmed the idea of surgery.

His story is an object lesson in what can go wrong when therapy has an agenda.

Using wrong-sex promouns is a type of activism

It is for the faint hearted - it is for the people who haven't got the emotional strength to realize that facing your own mental health issues face on is hard but worthwhile, and instead choose the "easy" option - get hormone prescribers and surgeons to put in the graft, not themselves and their mental health. It is for the people who want a short-cut to being special.

I agree that there are probably different types of dysphoria, some sexuality-based, others not.

I'm a bit confused by this, though:

" That childhood dysphoria is based on a childs view of the world, and isnt a body dysphoria at all?"

My own childhood dysphoria was a body dysphoria. It wasn't about how I viewed the world, rather the opposite: how I viewed myself.

Most people seem to agree that, historically, any experiences a young child may have around 'GD' likely/often disappears around puberty.

Also, people say that their GD developed around puberty.

Given this, isnt the most obvious scenario that GD in young children is not related to GD in teens and adults? That childhood dysphoria is based on a childs view of the world, and isnt a body dysphoria at all?

If, true. Surely it follows that, historically, the dysphoria in adults is triggered by sexual factors, and not innate?

”I truly don't believe it's a path anyone would go down if they didn't feel they had to”

I think we as a society need to accept that there are people who make the decision to have surgeries and hormones that don’t feel ‘they had to’. I think we have covered some of the groups in this thread already. Those with paraphilias for instance. The transmaxxers is another group. There is great danger in making such blanket statements which has also led to mantras such as ‘most vulnerable and marginalised’.

This is going to be difficult to say without appearing to judge you, so I apologise if I get my words wrong. You appear to be saying that unconditional love requires you to call your child (yes, 39, I know) "son" and "he". Why is this?

For me, unconditional love for my son does not require me to lie by pretending that he is my daughter and calling him "she". Doing so would, in my opinion, be colluding with a damaging ideology which is leading him on a difficult and probably unnecessary path. Of course, I have to accept the consequences; my son currently appears to believe that I don't accept him and that I am a transphobic bigot. In fact, I do accept him as I perceive him, as my gentle son in a dress, on the autistic spectrum, and surrounded by people cheering on every step he takes towards rejecting his physical nature and damaging his body.

How is it that parents are expected to accept every action taken by their children, or they are perceived as rejecting them as people? My parents disagreed with some things I did, and would have struggled if I had taken a different religious path from them, for example. They would not have rejected me if I had become a Moonie, but they would not have affirmed that choice in any way. It is the cult that makes demands, and if they are not fulfilled rejects the parents.

Anyway time for bed 🥱

Also I'm bisexual so there was never any issues with when he was female about being lesbian. So not that old chestnut of transing the gay away. Girlfriends were always welcomed here.

I did state in my first post that I was a parent to a trans man. I didn't say I believed my son was a man either. I will call him he/him and his new name because I love him and I wouldn't want him not to have that unconditional love no matter what that we have for our children. He was a lesbian as a female but has always seemed male so it wasn't a massive shock when he transitioned but it's still very difficult and it's not a path I would have wanted him to take because it makes life harder in lots of ways and it worries me a lot that he could be attacked or worse. But the main thing is he is much happier, so that's what matters and has a female partner.

well i am sorry for what you must have had to deal with and obviously i do not know any of your details.

you do sound like an activist it is always helpful to state why first. You appear to believe your child is a man, when in all likelihood she is a lesbian, but not a man for sure

Unless you can tell me otherwise of course.

I can't see where I've said anything that makes me a trans rights activist at all.

I'm not a TRA at all, that's ridiculous! Just speaking as a parent of a 39 year old trans man. Other than that I have no involvement with any trans activities whatsoever and he just leads a quiet life and doesn't make a thing of it at all, he's not involved in any activism or groups either. Sounds like you don't want to hear another point of view from a personal perspective - fine I won't engage with you either, very childish though.

Nice black and white analysis but it is realy not a simple as that is it. There is a long list of people who regret the decision, did not receive therapy, or were so influenced by the internet, at a very early age, that we are yet to learn about, but i frankly cannot be arsed to engage further with you as a TRA it is a pointless activity.

Any person serious about transitioning would or I should say should have intensive therapy to try and work through it. Only after that if it's not solved and the person is in genuine distress should they start on the transition path. Therapy unfortunately doesn't work for everyone but I truly don't believe it's a path anyone would go down if they didn't feel they had to. They have so much they could possibly lose, friends, family, work, social ridicule etc. It's not for the faint-hearted.

An adult person has much better memory recall of their own children than a child of said adult.

simple fact.

Do i think a person transitioning is just for fun, no, but i do not think that denying your sexed body is the answer to incongruence between mind and body, we need to address the mind in such situations, since we can change our mind.

We can never realistically change our body, because our body is , our body.

@Bannedontherun

I see what you mean, but I have to point out that "transexual" is not about a sexuality, unlike, say, "homosexual". In my case, it definitely had nothing to do with sexuality at all; it was purely to do with how I wished to be perceived, which sex I felt I belonged to.

However I do not believe any child should start on any transition path until they are fully adult.

But parents can also look back on their children so it's not just the trans person looking back at themselves through adult eyes. Do you really believe people go through transitioning just for the fun of it? Because I don't, it's a hard thing to go through.

I'm sorry but we did have GD 20 or 30 years ago. My trans male son had it from a very early age and there was absolutely nothing on TV or in schools about it and I certainly didn't know or really understand anything about it so there were no outside influences. You may not know anyone who had it back then and even earlier - that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

@Seethlaw I studied psychology before i switched to law.

as i had small children at the time i was quite fascinated about child development.

the other thing that interested me was child learning and memory.

I read an awful lot around the subject that was not required in my degree.

My take is that we can believe we thought this or that from an early age, and i have asked my children along the way about this, and also thought about my own childhood memories.

We actually do not have complete memories of our childhood our brains are not a tape recorder. Childhood brains do not have fully formed memory wiring.We rework our memories to fit in with our adult narrative, it is like a colouring book.

So you are looking through the lens of your adult self upon your own childhood.

I do not buy and studies back me up that you can know you are a transexual, homosexual, or heterosexual at the age of six

i would go as far as to say that children are completely uninterested in sex, and sexuality until they are heading for pubert

To say otherwise becomes suspect if you think about it, because it suggests that children are sexual beings and that leads us to the idea that sexual interest in children should be normalised

i am not suggesting people with gender dysphoria are perverts at all but hope you can see what i am saying