To think that this book should not be sold to young girls?

[WandaWomblesaurus]

twitter.com/Waterstones/status/1623584986740953091?s=20&t=WU0D0fzc6ClGJC5R-gJnuw

Waterstones tweeted celebrating a book that is about transing girls. Here is one of the illustrations from the book.

AIBU to think that this is directly promoting self harm to young vulnerable girls?

YANBU

www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-saving-trans-kids

Whatever. I'm actually not that bothered about men and their dicks. Cba to argue about that.

This thread is about young girls. I posted several times, long posts about my experiences and about girls of different ethnicities being taught to hate their bodies in different ways.

That's what we are meant to be talking about.

I’m reading the Judy Blume books to my youngest now. The books discuss normal puberty, body changes, anxiety around whether or not normal changes are actually normal. No where do any of them normalise wanting healthy body parts/organs removed.

The author who has considerably more lived experience on this issue clearly disagrees.

Why do you think he should not be allowed to share his lived experience?

No one is getting mastectomies at 14 in the UK.

For crying out loud, you don't get your cock cut open and turned inside out for fun do you?

Adult men, who have reached sexual maturity and had an orgasm and have preserved fertility can do what they like with their bodies.

Did you know that a male child, who has been on puberty blockers since early puberty will never have sexual function, never have an orgasm, never father a child and have a micro penis.

do you think an 11 year old boy can consent to that?

'Lived experience' is not (only) how we measure the effects of medical treatment.

Sure, anyone can share their experiences.

There is actual medical science that disagrees.

No, but they're having them under -8 @TeaKlaxon

They can't vote or get a tattoo but can have a double mastectomy

I have the lived experience of being on a plane - many, many times over - does that make me a pilot?

Lived experience does not equal professional (and neutral) expert. What a ridiculous argument.

*The author who has considerably more lived experience on this issue clearly disagrees.

Why do you think he should not be allowed to share his lived experience?*

The author may have experience of puberty blockers (surely lived experience is tautology? You can’t have dead experience). But that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate or responsible to represent them casually in a cartoon as something that’s no big deal to take, and is reversible.
This is misrepresentation that will have serious consequences. These drugs are actively harmful to growing children.
The human body is designed to go through puberty. It is important to go through it for a number of physical, endocrine, and neurological reasons. Pausing puberty on an otherwise healthy child, using drugs, will impair them.

We can all spout our opinions on all sorts of things. What I expect from a reputable publisher like Scholastic, and what I would hope would be carefully considered before shortlisting a controversial book for a high-profile award, is whether those opinions are backed up by fact.

This is a book aimed at a particularly impressionable age group. Lewis has opinions which are at odds with those of many health care professionals and others with professional training and experience in working with young people and children. Fine for Lewis to write a one-sided book aimed at adults. Not fine for this to be published and pushed towards teenagers without any attempt to point out that Lewis is just plain wrong in saying that puberty blockers are harmless, just represent pressing a pause button, etc etc.

"Lived experience" only ever seems to count in the current fashionable areas of identity politics. It never counts for women (adult human females) nor does it count in disability. It used to in the latter - "nothing about us without us" - and occasionally we were allowed a view in the former. But not now.

MY EYES!!! 😵

See also: words of disagreement = violence unless its actual violent threats made against women.

They always know who the women are really, and our lived experience doesn't count.

Returning to the enormous difference between the fast-growing number of teenage girls and very young women identifying as male vs the tiny number of older women doing it - here we are on Mumsnet, largely used by women who came through puberty some years ago. I wonder how many of us here look back on our teenage years and think 'If only I'd been allowed to have a double mastectomy and a hysterectomy as soon as I turned 18?' I wouldn't. I had a horrendous time with endometriosis, but that pales into comparison besides the fact that I was able to have children. I could never have understood fully when I was in my teens what that would mean to me.

No, there isn't.

And anyone should be entitled to share their lived experience. I know those who want trans people to have fewer rights and less access to healthcare desperately think we should only hear from the small minority of trans people who detransition or regret their transition - but that would not be reasonable, fair or representative.

Young trans people deserve to hear the stories of people like them, just as any minority group deserve to hear from people like them.

No.

But it probably would make you fairly well qualified to tell your friend who is scared of flying that the experience is actually fine or even pleasant.

Someone saying 'here is my story and here is its (positive) outcome' is entirely reasonable.

They do not become unreasonable just because some transphobes desperately want all trans people to have awful outcomes to justify their campaign against trans healthcare.

Fucking hell. I’ve had an absolute shedful of this.

As if puberty is not hard enough, and has already been made 100x harder by the internet and social media, now we have this absolute bullshit to deal with as well.

I used to be completely tolerant of genuine body dysmorphia, but not anymore. The way it’s being pushed and normalised so heavily is impacting non-dysmorphic young people, which is totally unacceptable. We don’t improve the life experience of a small number of people by making the life experience of a larger number of people worse.

Had enough, and the trans community have entirely lost my support.

That post screams your agenda from the rooftops 🙄
You're all transphobes, You want trans people not to have medical care, Want to see awful outcomes rather than positive...
It's all there.

What do you mean when you say 'healthcare'?

Nobody thinks trans people should have less access to 'healthcare'.

But the gruesome activity of blocking puberty, injecting cross sex hormones, removing reproductive organs, removing breasts of kids/teens/young adults is not 'care'. It is the very opposite of 'care'.

The only “lived experience” with regards to the long term effects of puberty blockers and wrong sex hormones that is acceptable to hear is the “positive” ones. The experiences of those harmed, like detransitioners, are widely ignored.

Children who are puberty blocked at Tanner stage 2 who progress onto wrong sex hormones are sterile. They’ve been rendered sterile by doctors. On purpose.

Children who are puberty blocked at Tanner stage 2 who progress onto wrong sex hormone are anorgasmic. They’ve been rendered anorgasmic by doctors. On purpose.

The evidence this helps children is very poor.

These are indisputable facts.

Many of these people are only realising the implications of what has been done to them as they reach their 20s.

They will require a lifetime of medical supervision.

We are in the midst of one of the greatest medical scandals ever known.

So... as this book is in my house already, owned by my DD (age 12, bought I think when she was still 11 from our local Waterstones where it was part of a 'gay book section', as she calls it, display), I sat down last night and read it from cover to cover. My thoughts:

1. This is a rather clumsily-done autobiography.
2. I feel very sorry for the author, who clearly had an awful time as a teenager and has now - as an adult - essentially produced this graphic novel for his own therapeutic reasons. The art work is not particularly good, the way in which the story is told isn't particularly great. 15 years ago it would have remained self-published with a very narrow readership at best. Most likely it'd have been sitting on a shelf at the author's house, never to see the light of day again.
3. The author was what most of us would call a tomboy who, during puberty, became what most of us would call a butch lesbian.
4. The author recognised, aged 11, that being a girl who looks like a boy would mean social death at high school. So he deliberately tried to adjust his personal appearance to look more feminine, although he didn't/couldn't go as far as shaving his legs or armpits. This appears to have made him even more miserable.
5. Outside of school, he dressed in a goth-like and fairly masculine way and this was fine except that, when he realised he was attracted to girls, he also felt this was socially unacceptable.
6. He developed a serious eating disorder and had serious body dysmorphia and gender dysphoria. The author feels that the eating disorder was an attempt to have a more masculine, less curvaceous body. He was anorexic to the point of it threatening his life.
7. I am not in a position to judge, but it seems to me that the author MAY have developed gender dysphoria as a result of feeling completely unable to be their true self i.e. a masculine-presenting lesbian. I think it's also possible that the author, as an adult, STILL believes that being a butch lesbian would not be OK. Being a trans ('straight') man is his happy ending.
8. The author appears to feel that medical transition is the only solution to gender dysphoria and feels that he would have had an easier time of it and better outcome if he'd been able to obtain and take puberty blockers as a young teenager. He makes only passing reference to any negative effects of medical transition.
9. The bit referencing Keira Bell (not by name) is presenting in a really worrying way. Like her experience and court case has ruined everything for 'true' trans teens.
10. The book ends with him starting his 'real' life with the first injection of testosterone.
11. Overall, this is a really sad tale of a young woman who felt such crippling social pressure to be someone other than her true self that she set herself on a path of self-mutilation (deliberate starvation and over-exercising, then medical transition) in order to become somebody that she/they/he felt was socially acceptable. If being a tomboy/butch lesbian was something they felt accepted as then they could have had a very different teenage experience and would now have more options open to them as an adult e.g. pregnancy/breastfeeding.

I told DD about this thread and we had another life-affirming hour-long discussion about the whole thing! I don't think anything, including this book, is likely to suck her into identifying as trans any time soon. 🤞 This is really important to me as I believe that medical transition is not a panacea and should only be embarked upon when the patient feels there is really no other option after years of therapy etc. This book, which presents medical transition as the only way forward and to be started on ASAP if you don't feel like a 'proper' boy/girl, could be very dangerous in the wrong (young) hands.

Someone saying 'here is my story and here is its (positive) outcome' is entirely reasonable.

But is true? Is it backed up by fact? If a heroin addict wrote a memoir saying the dangers of heroin were exaggerated, would that be reasonable? It would be an opinion, it would be lived experience, and it would also be dangerous and potentially harmful to present to impressionable people as fact.

Assume you meant under 18, not under 8.

Yes, the law on this is generally that anyone over 16 is presumed competent to consent to healthcare (or to refuse healthcare). This has been the case for forty years.

It's bizarre that the law literally allows a 17 year old to choose to refuse life saving treatment and die, but folks obsess about a tiny number of 16 or 17 year olds choosing to have mastectomies.

But key question - how many double mastectomies have actually been carried out on people under 18?

If an equivalent book was talking about how unhappy a girl was to have a flat chest, fat tummy, and masculine jaw and athletic figure - because everything everywhere says women have to have big boobs and flat stomachs and long legs and be feminine please! - it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing - unless they then got cosmetic surgery and called that the beginning of really being themselves.

I don't see how enforcing the idea that someone's body is "wrong" is ever helpful. Women have to look like THIS and men have to look like THAT is just a shitty message.

If anyone feels that their body is the "wrong" amount of feminine (too much or too little) then that's a problem with our society, not with their body.