Transgender kids article in today's Guardian

[TerraNovice]

Did anyone see this article about Louis Theroux's documentary that airs tonight? www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/05/transgender-kids-children-change-sex-families

Admittedly I have some issues with it. Is it really good to give kids hormone blockers from childhood? And I do find one of the mothers' statement problematic where she says she felt like she had a little girl because her son liked her shoes and "feminine" things and wasn't interested if you put a truck in front of him. I find these ideas of gender really reductive. A child who is uninterested in traditional masculine or feminine toys etc may not necessarily be transgender, they could be an effeminate boy or a butch girl. Why pump them full of hormones when they are very little?

Any thoughts?

Okaaaayyy... I have said this on just about every transgender thread I have seen on here... time to break out the bold

there is no such thing as female penises in our species

aaannd.... rest.

Can you link to that blog, because the alleged trans woman who doesn't take hormones and wants to penetrate lesbians with her penis is frequently wheeled out by those who reject transgender but I've not come across her anywhere else.

I can't because I don't have it saved but I've seen a blog linked on another thread which said exactly that. I'll have a look.

No I can't, it was clicking through from several other sites, may have started from something posted on Stavvers' (?) site and may have been a comment rather than a blog.

I don't do any social media/Facebook / twitter . I am not making it up. Possibly the person who posted it is.

Number four only makes sense if you replace 'lesbian transgender woman' with 'man'. I feel very sorry for lesbians caught up in all this crap, made to feel wrong and bad for only finding women sexually attractive.

I think the trend to say that non gender conforming children must belong to the 'other' sex rather than rejecting the huge amount of gender stereotyping that is currently being pushed is very worrying. I have no doubt that there are some children with serious body dysmorphia and needing lots of help with that. I'm really not sure that feminising their bodies is the way to go because you can't actually become a woman if you are genetically a man so it's not really a solution. I'd like to see more research on the prevalence of conflicted gender identity and gender dysmorphia to see whether there is a connection with how strongly gender differences are pushed, and how early that happens.

I'm also generally uncomfortable with medicalising what to me are primarily social problems, better to change society to accept that there are many ways to live life, that 'butch' and 'effeminate' are unnecessary terms, gender is itself a unhelpful construct and we are all individuals to be celebrated in our differences as much as our similarities.

I'd be interested to see Louis documentary though, he usually makes very thoughtful pieces.

WidowWadman there is Julia Serano's 'Cocky' that talks about her female penis making all her heterosexual female ex partners into lesbians (presumable before she had taken estrogen her penis was female).

I'm not overly familiar with Serano's work, but isn't her main point highlighting the intrusiveness of how transgender people are permanently asked about the state of their genitals?

The problem arises is that treatment for transgendered individuals includes therapy that is patient led. The starting point of this therapy is the exploration of feelings. One can "feel" like anything, but it won't necessarily make it so in an external sense.

What we have are individuals who have worked through their issues and reached a degree of peace with themselves (which on its own is fantastics).

Problem is with a small number they now seek to force on the rest of the world their own internal beliefs about themselves, with a zeal that is practically religious in its nature.

First of all a tremendous number of the trans community are self supporting perfectly well adjusted individuals who wouldn't dream of forcing penises anywhere they are not wanted, and will quietly support feminism without any fuss.

This small number of zealots however get a lot of exposure and seek to start a lot of fights.

By no means very familiar with her work either but, yes, that is my understanding of her point with that piece. But in some contexts the state of the genitals does matter.

The idea of a female penis is ridiculous. Do we talk of a male womb? male ovaries? Male vulvas?

I accept that some people are unhappy with the roles that society has imposed on them, or at any rate their own perceptions of their roles.

I don't really care how they wish to live their lives or what sort of sexual partners they prefer, any more than I am interested in the sexual antics of the rest of the people who live in my street.

But I don't see why anyone else should be expected to believe in their assertions. A man does not become a woman, no matter how much surgery he has or how many hormones he takes. Frankly, the medical professionals who collude in this deception should be ashamed of themselves. These people might need some sort of therapy - I don't know what - but lying to them is not the answer.

I am horrified that children might be seen as transgender. Children should be allowed to just be children, given room to explore their identities with no rigid stereotyping that says "girls do x, boys do y".

A lot of children are unhappy with the changes their bodies go through at puberty. It is a difficult and confusing time. But we should be helping them to learn to accept themselves and to understand. Not perpetuating their fears by refusing to let puberty happen properly, thereby reinforcing the idea that it is something to be afraid of.

I watched the programme and found it quite disturbing. There was a 14/15 year old who had had a double mastectomy.

This is an interesting article written by an eminent psychiatrist who is concerned about medical treatment of transgender disorders.

www.wsj.com/articles/paul-mchugh-transgender-surgery-isnt-the-solution-1402615120

You have to subscribe to read it, Flora, can you tell us one or two things that he says?

Do we talk of a male womb? male ovaries? Male vulvas

Well I wouldn't but Australian health records have 54 men got pregnant and gave birth.

au.ibtimes.com/more-50-australian-men-got-pregnant-gave-birth-babies-2013-advocate-predicts-trend-last-1389830

alex, have you ever actually met a transgender person? You make it sound as though someone would want to put themselves through hormones and surgery on a whim.

I found the programme a bit disturbing, particularly Cole's mother who came across as disappointed that Cole seemed to be settling on being Cole rather than Crystal. Possibly Cole's conservative father was correct in dealing with it as a phase which needed time to be worked through one way or the other rather than leaping right in.

So far as Camille I'm still not sure how an 18 month old baby can have expressed feelings of dysphoria.

I know of a transgender child, it is a difficult and heartbreaking condition for families and the individual, and I would like to see a bit more acceptance and tolerance.

Yes I have avocado.

I didn't say that it was a whim. I said that these people need some form of therapy.

I also stated that a man cannot become a woman. He might want to, but it isn't going to happen. So surgery is not helping these people, it is making them false promises as treatment for their problems.

StillLost That article is complete madness. Those 54 people who the article refers to were women getting pregnant and giving birth. Biologically female human beings, in case that wasn't clear enough, who for whatever reason thought of themselves as men.

But that just illustrates the point I have already made: a woman doesn't become a man and a man doesn't become a woman. They just become someone who thinks of themselves as belonging to the opposite sex. It doesn't make it true.

This is a tremendously difficult issue to pick apart. First of all the science isn't really conclusive one way or another. There had been research, which only really indicates more scientific inquiry might be fruitful.

Elements of the trans activist community have leapt on what little has been done and paraded it around as proven scientific fact. As has already been said up thread the brain is incredibly complex and our understanding of it is incomplete.

A little less rigid thinking, and a little more compassion is what is needed all round here.

Oh I am totally sympathetic to those caught up in this, hating their bodies and their perceived role. My worries are not about them at all, except for the small number of women hating activists (and I'm not sure all of them even could be described as transgender except when that category is wide open - there seem to be some very strange people who have been attracted to the 'fight') my concern is the approach of the medical and therapeutic community, and especially with regard to children.

When I was an adolescent I didn't want to be a girl at all. I wanted to be a boy, with all the prospects and none of the fears (as I saw it). The changes associated with puberty frightened me, I didn't want breasts and I certainly didn't want periods (haven't much changed my mind there!). I wore boys style clothes when I could and was very happy to be mistaken for a boy, having been a tomboy when I was younger. But no one said anything about it, it seemed to be accepted one of those things some children go through, and as I grew up I got accustomed to my new body and discovered that plenty of other people fought against the stereotypes. My parents had a strong religious view of us as being special unique individuals created by god which I think probably also helped (and were both accepting of homosexuality which I suspect matters quite a lot too).

Now in theory many of the barriers I worried about have gone, but the stereotypes seem to be so much stronger now that I imagine some people may feel more locked into their persevered prescribed roles and much less able to give them the two fingers. We had a big pride thing at the university I work at and some of the publicity linked to the 'gingerbread person', which starts off it's quick talk about gender with an allusion to Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and the website has a whole bunch of people saying how great it is, with I think only one person saying what a load of hooey that whole concept is.

It's not 'feminine' to be caring nor 'butch' to be aggressive etc etc, these are just human characteristics that some of us have more than others, dependent on a huge range of factors of which gender is only one.

I need a "like" button for nooka's post!

This is a link to Stavvers' blog on why it's bigoted to have a preference on genitals. www.donotlink.com/framed?43198

That blog post is so boggling. It's Orwellian doublespeak to me. So if you prefer, as a person with a vagina (let's not go crazy and call them women!) to have sex with someone with a penis, you're sexist, or you've been badly-educated? Why is it The Thing to want to be everything (male and female) and have sex with everyone, and the Bad Thing to not want to? I can't understand how this even matters, except that it means some people don't get laid as much as they would want. But someone's else's sex life is not the whole world's problem. Some people like to have sex with cars. Am I bigoted because I do not fancy my Focus? What about if I went around calling myself a Vauxhall Viva. Would the car sexual be bigoted then because he didn't want to have sex with me? After all, I define myself as a car now.

Is Stavvers for real??

She? He? Whoever it is really can't understand why you might have a preference for a sexual partner to have a particular sort of genitals? Do they think that gay people don't exist? That heterosexuality is just a figment of our collective imagination?? That post just beggars belief. Stavvers might be bisexual and enjoy sex with both men and women, but it is ridiculous to pretend that that is the case for everyone.

I don't go through the world looking at people and wondering what their genitals are like either. Disagreeing with trans ideology and worrying about other people's genitals are not the same thing. I think they are being deliberately obtuse.

Man, some of the comments on that blog are so very very odd (and unpleasant). This exchange in particular:

A: Lesbian here. Not interested in having sex with someone with a penis. Not even if its attached to a male body that’s been made to look female and no amount of blogging or tweets is going to change that. No idea why some people (on the internet, I doubt if said people would tell that to someone’s face) seem to have a problem with that. What you like in bed is your own business.

B: OK, genuine question: would you have sex with a man with a vulva?

A: I’m trying to imagine this scenario. I’m chatting with some guy to whom I’m not attracted at all (transmen usually pass 100%) and then he’ll tell me he has a vagina and wouldn’t I want to have sex with him because of that. I think I would assume he wasn’t in his right mind but be able to politely refuse with a straight face. Anyway, thanks for making me laugh

C: If you’re a woman who only likes vaginas and literally nothing else influences your sexual orientation, then you’re not a lesbian. You’re a very weird (and creepy) bisexual.

To me A's position is just normal for a lesbian isn't it? She fancies women, and finds male bodies a turn off. Not fancying a transman surely just means she isn't pansexual (why invent this term after all if there isn't something different about trans people). I do think lesbians get attacked incredibly unfairly in all of this. Must be really shit.