Children of 12 to be allowed gender drugs to prepare for sex change

[femtastic]

Do you consider this to be a positive development?

Children of 12 to be allowed gender drugs to prepare for sex change

CHILDREN as young as 12 are to be allowed drugs to prepare them for changing sex.

The controversial treatment halts puberty, stunting sex organs and preventing the growth of facial hair and sperm in boys, and breasts in girls.

The injections, previously available only to over-15s with gender identity disorder, are being made available to younger people under an NHS study after pressure from families and doctors.

Doctors admit most children with the problem do not go on to have a sex change, often turning out to be gay. But blocking puberty hormones can make surgery easier if they need it.

Dr Polly Carmichael, who runs Britain?s only GID clinic in London, said several under-16s were prepared to sign up for the jabs, until now available only in the US, Holland and Germany at that age.

She said: ?The majority of our referrals are 15-plus. Of the children aged 12 and 14, there?s a number who are keen to take part.?

The study was approved by the ­National Research Ethics Service, which oversees hundreds of NHS projects.

i adressed that before

but no reply AitchtwoOh I agree

must have need difficult for lockets to post about

'maybe that's how you approach discussions'

i think anyone reading this thread can see how your need to be right outweighs your need to be polite or considerate of anyone else's feelings. if you wished seriously to raise the issue of child sexual abuse in lockets' family, to flag that to her as a genuine concern of yours, there is the PM system.

The way you asked lockets seemed more like an accusation or assumption rather than an actual concern to find out what is troubling the person involved, It could have been less aggressive.

for the record I think delaying puberty is wrong.

Dittany: You say that referring to breasts as tits is sexist. Is it also sexist to refer to them as boobs or norks? Should other MNers be alerted to the fact that referring to their vulvas or vaginas as fanjos or ladygardens makes them unwitting Tools of the Patriarchy? My point is: do you object to all slang and informal terms for body parts? Or is tits, for some reason, a particularly abusive word for breasts?

i've not ventured an opinion on the subject at hand, in fact dittany, i merely pointed out that you behaved like a bit of a shit to lockets, so don't waste your time telling me what i do or don't think about it.

millyr, was your sister unhappy?

would any parent take a child to the gp if that child was quite happy and comfortable with their appearance and behaviour?

Baskingseals: TBH quite a few parents would take a child to the GP to have that child 'fixed' if the child was behaving in an unconventional way and the parents were narrow-minded morons.

I think the patriarchal medical establishment has hit a new all-time low with this corker (if that was even possible)

Chopping up adults and dosing them with unecessary drugs is one thing, but targeting children is quite another.

Transsexualism is CONSERVATIVE because it doesn't allow boys to play with dolls or girls to climb trees. Effeminate will be labelled as 'trans' and given hormone blockers to stop them developing properly.

I can't believe the lesbian and gay communities have accepted trans propaganda because the essence of trans ideology is so homophobic.

Effeminate chidren or boys who identify with girls and vice versa simply shows how unnatural heterosexuality is.

BUT BECAUSE the basis of patriarchy is heterosexuality, and making that into the norm, with the male as dominant and female subordinate, the gender binary must be upheld for male domination to continue.

As radical feminists would say, gender is the last bastion of female oppression. We need to get rid of the binary. The trans activists are trying to uphold it at great profit to the medical industry

dittany, you have behaved admirably as always on here. I don't know how you do it.
Surely children are sacred. Surely children are safe from medical experimentation. Surely children should be exempt from the trans madness that states that boys must be blue and girls must be pink.

Apparently not.

And I really worry about where this is going.

yes children are sacred, as are all human beings male and female.
imho one of the basic tenets of gaining a sense of self, and an acceptance of that self, is by accepting the validity of one's own feelings.

who are any of us to deny how another peson feels? how is how i feel more true than what somebody else feels?

I think that it is pertinant to have a feminist response to this type of medication in terms of development, safety, protocols around use, age of consent - as that this intervention would need to be pretty comprehensive - in terms of feminist activitists, feminists in the medical industry, feminists involved in developing governance and protocol development. However it is a very different thing to say, we will engage in the treatment of this condition to saying 'this condition is invalid/does not exist' - which is what I appear to be hearing.

Yes, it is a rare condition, yes you would not want to medicate inappropriately.

Yes, as others have said on this thread that there may be be transpeople who use patriachal constructed power to their benefit, and that abuse of power should be challenged and addressed.

Similarly, I do strongly believe that the binary split between feminine and masculine socially constructed behaivours, is harmful to us all. For me the material reality of being a woman, is not the actual possession of overies, breasts and vagina - is is patriarchal's response to it both medically and in terms of social construction. You remove that response (which we are nowhere close to) - and actually it is a completely different discussion.

I just have seen nothing in this discussion that convinces me for a few (statistically rather than actual number of) people - their experience and reality is that they have been born in the wrong body, at great distress to them (rather than anyone else)

Futhermore, when the discussion about how this should be approached starts to include reductive arguments about trans simply being an invalid concept, that it must be the result of abuse (and in effect accusing another poster's family of this), that people who dis-agree with this stance are 'submissive women' who are ' used to catering to men's needs' and 'do not understand feminism'. I think we head into a completely different debate, and and for me (and I do not say this lightly) reads like prejudice against another minority - and also plays straight into the hands of any aspect of the trans community that would like to undermine feminsm and would like to sustain the patriarchal power structures.

Although I possibly risk antagonising everyone of every thread, regardless of their position, and am also going off the original topic of children, I do think the issue of trans is more complex than simply transsexual people who are keeping in place a gender binary.

Transgender is a range of perspectives and behaviours of which transsexual is one very small group (who themselves have diverse opinions). The broadest definition of transgender is:

"Of, relating to, or designating a person whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender roles, but combines or moves between these."

That seems to me to have a huge overlap with both feminist thinking and with thinking around sexual orientation and identity which is anything other than entirely heterosexual. There are clearly women born as women who take aspects of masculine identity, would consider themselves transgender, but who also sees themselves as women and feminists. I do believe that many transgender people are trying to break down the gender binary by combing male and female aspects of gender.

So I think there is a difference between accepting transgender experiences as being of wider value and accepting the thinking of some binary based transsexual thinking and medical perspectives. It is inevitable that some trans people will reinforce the gender binary, just as many other people reinforce the binary.

yes i see the body as part of myself.

but not all of it
do you think that everything i feel is because of my sex?

This is something Andrea Dworkin said about transgender people (note terminology has changed!).

?One, every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition.
Two, by changing our premises about men and women, role-playing and polarity, the social situation of transsexuals will be transformed, and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no longer persecuted and despised.
Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disppear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.?

Excellent quote charitygirl .

She's basically saying that with society as it is, with clear male/female divide, it's humane to operate for the wellbeing of someone who feels transgendered, but that in an ideal society without such a divide, the condition would cease to exist.

Surely everyone can agree with this? It seems eminently sensible.