Transgender Documentary on BBC2 Thursday 2100 "Transgender Kids: Who Knows best?"

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

Looks like an interesting watch, that does not just accept the trans children or they will kill themselves rhetoric. I just hope the BBC actually do show it and aren't bullied into not showing it.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b088kxbw

The blurb:

Around the world there has been a huge increase in the number of children being referred to gender clinics - boys saying they want to be girls and vice versa. Increasingly, parents are encouraged to adopt a 'gender affirmative' approach - fully supporting their children's change of identity. But is this approach right?

In this challenging documentary, BBC Two's award-winning This World strand travels to Canada, where one of the world's leading experts in childhood gender dysphoria (the condition where children are unhappy with their biological sex) lost his job for challenging the new orthodoxy that children know best. Speaking on TV for the first time since his clinic was closed, Dr Kenneth Zucker believes he is a victim of the politicisation of transgender issues. The film presents evidence that most children with gender dysphoria eventually overcome the feelings without transitioning and questions the science behind the idea that a boy could somehow be born with a 'female brain' or vice versa. It also features 'Lou' - who was born female and had a double mastectomy as part of transitioning to a man. She now says it is a decision that 'haunts' her and feels that her gender dysphoria should have been treated as a mental health issue.

fish - I hadn't picked up on that on the girl guide thread. Sorry. So even someone very close to the issue, particularly involving children, didn't sway the poster's opinion. All I can say is for every person on the thread there are many more lurking and soaking up the information. It's one of the reasons why I often repeat myself, add links, stay logical and try not to get frustrated or lose it!

Your articulate, rational posts will definitely have had a positive effect.

It's happened more than once. I've been called transphobic and then told them I have a transgender child and they just stop talking to me. I don't fit in with their opinion, they can't cry transphobia at me, they can't call me an evil bigoted feminist, they don't like it because I have experience of living this which 99% of them don't so they just don't talk to me.

I've also said on a couple of threads how much support I've had from all the 'bigoted feminists' and that has been ignored too.

I repeat myself a lot on these threads too. I do end up losing my cool on occasion, but that helps nobody really. I find it frustrating that all the people who think they are helping by shouting transphobia at every turn don't realise the harm they are doing to families like mine.

I think a lot of them just don't think about it very much and just blindly support online what they think is progressive and right on. It's nothing personal against you.

Most of us FishIn... post our random thoughts on MN just for a laugh or to speak our brains. Your posts have the chance to really influence people's thoughts and to make them step outside their preconceptions.

If it works for you, please continue to post while maintaining your anonymity. I learn something new every time I read one of your posts.

I honestly thought that girl guide thread must have been trolled by a bunch of activists. It seems inconceivable to me that regular people think like that.

There was one poster in particular on the girl guide thread who just had me going WTAF? Her position seemed to be "lady brains... definitely the case, that's what explains trans, but there are no physical differences, none, none at all, if we admit that women are on average smaller, weaker and can't run as fast, then feminism is done for."

So - pink sparkly brains, no threat to women's rights at all (despite well documented history of denying women's access to education and employment because their brains are feeble, despite ample scientific evidence showing that any cognitive differences have tiny d-values - i.e. the statistical distributions look incredibly similar, and in any case are probably nurture rather than nature due to brain plasticity, la la la la la, fingers in ears, can't hear you...). Admitting Usain Bolt runs faster than Flo Jo ever did - the whole edifice of feminism collapses.

Like I said, WTAF?

An inclusive society does sound great, if you don't look any deeper than the word inclusive I can see why people would think it's a brilliant idea.

I have learned a lot from these threads, I only hope they make other people take notice too.

I know being ignored because I don't fit into the 'transphobic' box isn't really personal, I guess some people want to think they are helping and realising they might be doing more harm than good is a reality they don't want to face, understandable really since they are generally coming from a good place.

I've also said on a couple of threads how much support I've had from all the 'bigoted feminists'

Yeah, I loved that.

I'm sorry to hear what you're going through fish

But I want to thank you for sharing your experience with us. Insights like yours are very helpful to finding permanent solutions to this problem.

Datun
I for one really like you repeating your points on various threads. It's like revision/consolidation to me. Your links to pertinent, reliable resources are so useful to refer back to.

Fish
Your posts are so important and heartfelt.
Real, relevant, lived experience.
I love the way you shout out your appreciation for the support you find here!

Prawn how dare you keep educating me!

Personally, I need to learn and absorb and my shitty short term memory lets me down without continual reinforcement.
So if it helps me and informs some lurkers (so important) it's all to the good imo.

I am not really keeping up with this thread, but I am thinking about second wave concerns about reproductive technologies limiting choice rather than expanding it.

So, things like prenatal testing and the ability to use IVF, surrogacy etc to overcome natural issues within the reproductive process - which is seen as increasing choice (despite the push with antenatal testing being towards termination within a context of descreased social support for disability) - is just being extended here to scientific ability to overcome natural issues like what sex baby a woman actually has. The language of 'rebirthing' is pertinent because it is like the first birth was not good enough - you know, the birth gestated and born by a woman. So, it is about male control of the reproductive process extended to control over children's bodies.

If you take the dichotomy historically of science as rational, male worldview and female as natural to be overcome by science, then it is part of a longer story of scientific control over reproduction (and child-rearing).

Problems of infertility in children who have transed can be overcome by science - by co-opting the eggs or sperm and indeed wombs, through surrogacy - of natal females.

Choice - but it only works in a market context where sex and reproduction are seen as commodities to be bought and sold. So you can sort of see why religious conservatives might oppose this on different grounds to feminists but with the same end - which is work with what is natural and God-given or born of woman, not change it through science.

Again, may make no sense.

Cocoa - I got chills reading that. It's like "The Handmaid's Tale" coming true.

Although the documentary makes out Zucker to be a straight thinking person under attack by a medical establishment gone mad, that's not the case at all. His theory is not new. It's really just a rehashed version of a now disproved theory that's been around since the 1950s, that used to actually be the prevailing theory of how gender identity develops: Dr Money's "gender neutrality" theory.

Money's theory maintained that people were born "gender neutral", and whether you identify as male or female later in life depends on whether people treat you like a boy or a girl during your early childhood. On the basis of that theory, thousands of babies with damaged or abnormal genitals were surgically reassigned to whatever sex suited doctors best (usually female), and the parents told to raise them as the assigned sex. However, follow up studies of those children showed that, once they were old enough to assert themselves, many of them ended up rejecting their sex of rearing, and reverting to living as the sex they were born as. This is despite having been given surgery (and if they'd reached their teens, hormones), that made them look completely fine as the new sex. The best known of these cases is that of David Reimer, but there are many others that had similarly disastrous outcomes.

From the disastrous failure of these infant sex reassignment cases, we now know that gender identity isn't learned, it's an instinctive thing that you're born with, it's hardwired into your brain during your prenatal development, and it can't later be changed by hormones, reparative therapy or anything else. So Zucker is continuing to flog a horse that is well and truly dead, and that's why he was sacked.

As to why there are suddenly all these people about whose gender identity doesn't match their biological sex, based on my own experiences and chatting online with other people whose mothers were given hormone treatment during pregnancy, I think it's the end result of a colossal medical and pharmaceutical industry blunder whose effects have been quietly building ever since WW2, when the first mass market hormone-based medicines were developed. Rather than try to paraphrase the whole thing here, I invite you to check out a facebook page I recently set up: www.facebook.com/synthetichormonesaredangerous/

Hugh what have those cases of intersex or injured babies got to do with non-intersex/non-injured children?

I don't think you can say that gender identity is an instinct that's hardwired. The David Reimer case supports nothing other than the fact that he and his twin brother were traumatised and treated abysmally by medical practitioners.

AssassinatedBeauty I can't speak for trans people in general, but there is a big overlap between intersex and transgender in people who were exposed to DES. I, along with most of DES "sons" I've talked to, have symptoms of hypogonadism (chronic below normal male testosterone production), and "eunuchoid habitus" (a type of body structure that's usually associated with intersex conditions, and makes you look a bit like a cross between a man and a woman).

Also, most of the people I've talked to with a history of DES exposure have genital anomalies of one kind or another associated with incomplete male development, including things like hypospadias, undescended testicles, and micropenis. In my case, although I developed normal male genitals and my testicles did fully descend, I was born with a hydrocele, which is an abnormality associated with testicular descent - it occurs when the channel the testicle descends through fails to close up afterwards. I have the eunuchoid body structure as well, and when I was younger, was very androgynous looking. No one ever said anything about it to me though, I think everyone was just seeing a feminine looking man with female body language, and immediately assuming I must be gay rather than thinking of intersex conditions.

Genital development is largely complete by the end of the 12th week after conception, and the way DES and other miscarriage preventatives tend to be prescribed means that most or all of the exposure occurs later in the pregnancy, during the second and third trimesters (by which time it's too late to have much effect on genital development, but it can still affect brain development, since brain development continues right up until birth). I think that's why you often end up with people who look male, but identify as women.

The David Reimer case on its own doesn't prove anything, however there have been plenty of other cases where male babies were surgically reassigned to female, with similarly disastrous outcomes, e.g.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421517/

So there's now plenty of clinical evidence showing that your gender identity is hardwired into your brain, and not learned. Zucker's theory is wrong, and you can't beat the trans out of kids (or use electroshock, hormones, reparative therapy or anything else). The only way to change someone's gender identity would be to go back in time and expose their developing brain to the correct hormones. Since there's no way of doing that, unfortunately we're stuck with the results.

One thing I will say though, is that it is an intersex condition. It's entirely possible to end up in a situation where some of your brain development has occurred as male and some as female, so you don't fit in very well as either sex. The system doesn't currently cater at all well for those of us in that situation, it seems to be geared towards pushing everyone into a nice neat male or female box.

Hugh I'd be interested to hear how your very interesting theories work with the argument that around 80% of gender dysphoric children end up well adjusted gay or lesbian adults?

Or the considerable number of mothers on this site who were tomboys as children, and have grown up into contented women and mothers. They argue that they just preferred boys' toys and activities, because they were more interesting.

Looking forward to hearing about it.

Hugh - "Genital development is largely complete by the end of the 12th week after conception"

This is absolutely not true. You forget that you are on a forum populated mostly by women who have had children. Many of us have had ultrasound scans during pregnancy and know exactly what a fetus looks like at each stage.

FYI at 12 weeks, genitals of both male and female fetuses are outside. They look exactly the same. The very few doctors who can tell the sex of a fetus during ultrasound scan at this time do it by examining the "angle of dangle" relative to the spine and it is not 100% reliable.

And anyway, those are the genitals and their development in vivo might be impaired in very rare cases. But even then, your undescended testicles etc are male, in a fully male body, with XY chromosomes in every cell, including the brain, which is also male.

I understand that it is a problem when you think your body should be female and it clearly (and understandably) isn't. But it is a problem that has been possible to solve in the majority of gender dysphoria cases without permanently altering their bodies and rendering them infertile.

Oh I have heard it all now.
A hydrocele is not an intersex condition, it's a condition that affects the genitals of lots of boy children. It's pretty unremarkable.
The BBC programme was balanced and showed no evidence at all that Dr Zucker was trying to "beat the trans" out of kids. Instead he was following common therapeutic practice for a range of MH issues which is to try to understand the cause and deal with it.
Are you suggesting that the baseball team girl and the little boy who lived with his gran and mother would have been better going through a gender affirmative approach and put on blockers/cross sex hormones? Surely helping a child come to terms with their healthy body if at all possible, is a better outcome than taking them down a pathway that means they will be a lifelong medical patient?

Surely helping a child come to terms with their healthy body if at all possible, is a better outcome than taking them down a pathway that means they will be a lifelong medical patient?

This. Precisely this. For the life of my I cannot understand how this can possibly be controversial, and yet if you state it, allegations of transphobia rain down.

NappiesNappies
"I'd be interested to hear how your very interesting theories work with the argument that around 80% of gender dysphoric children end up well adjusted gay or lesbian adults?"

Because it's a completely made up statistic. One of the tricks Zucker & co. pull is that they diagnose kids that aren't trans, as trans, and then proceed to "cure" them.

"Or the considerable number of mothers on this site who were tomboys as children, and have grown up into contented women and mothers. "

I'm not the best person to comment on gender dysphoria because in my case it's only partial, but I bet none of those women had an inner sense of being a boy from a young age, that there'd somehow been a mistake and they'd ended up with a girl's body when their body should be male.

I agree with some of what Hugh says, actually.
It is entirely possible there is an intersex element to gender dysphoria and it involves brain development. The jury is still out but it's a plausible mechanism.
The problem is twofold. Firstly, the expansion of the transgender umbrella to include people do not have dysphoria about their sexed bodies, with all the bullying that has come to involve, and secondly, the fact that we can't reliably tell which are the kids that are going to grow out of it at puberty and which aren't.
It would be interesting to see what happened to transgenderism as a movement if we did at some point establish a reliable test, thus excluding from the definition many of the people who currently consider themselves trans.
(All that flipping anachronistic transing of historical figures can stop for a start, if it turns out to be related to DES and other 20th century drugs.)

I am very interested in a throw away comment in the documentary about right wing and religious parents preferring their child to be trans gender than gay. Their thinking being, presumably, that as you can't try to "cure" gay people any more, if their child transitions they will end up with a partner of the "right" gender........

Because it's a completely made up statistic. One of the tricks Zucker & co. pull is that they diagnose kids that aren't trans, as trans, and then proceed to "cure" them.

I'd be interested to read the testimonies of people who experienced such treatment at the hands of Dr Zucker.

CoteDAzur I'm not sure how to post images here, but according to Williams Endocrinology 12th Ed., male genital differentiation is complete by the end of week 12, and the only events still ongoing after that as far as genital development are concerned are "external genital growth" and "testis descent".

DES was typically prescribed in a dose that was progressively increased as the pregnancy continued, and I think what often happened is that there wasn't enough present during the first trimester to have much effect on a male baby's testosterone production, but from the second trimester onwards, his testosterone production was heavily suppressed. Since male development is driven by the action of testosterone (and a hormone derived from it called DHT), this results in male development during the first trimester, but female development for the remainder of the pregnancy. It produces a person who is genetically male and has male reproductive organs, but whose brain has predominantly (or overwhelmingly it seems in a fair number of cases) developed as female. That's what I think is happening anyway. Since testicular descent and penile growth are still ongoing during the later stages of the pregnancy, the main physical signs that something went wrong are likely to be abnormalities associated with penile growth and descent of the testicles.

I couldn't find any research where they'd administered DES to animals in a way similar to DES miscarriage treatment in humans, but there's plenty of research in which scientists created the opposite situation by exposing female foetuses to testosterone. There are links to some of that research in this note:
www.facebook.com/notes/protect-the-unborn-child-from-synthetic-hormones/how-synthetic-female-hormones-can-interfere-with-male-sex-determination/1637590369877264

It certainly appears from that research that if you delay the hormone treatment until after the critical period for genital development has ended, you can end up with animals with a normal female appearance, but with male brains and male behaviour.

Because it's a completely made up statistic. One of the tricks Zucker & co. pull is that they diagnose kids that aren't trans, as trans, and then proceed to "cure" them

If you have a solid test for the 'transness' of a child, I think we'd all like to hear it?

I don't think trans is something to be cured, I think that therapy to help people learn to live in their bodies must be the ideal case though? Just as it is with any other dysphoria