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.

"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."

Can I ask where you got that from?

The female clinician who used to work in Zucker's clinic who spoke on the documentary said that the 'severity' of the gender dysphoria in childhood wasn't a predictor of persisting or desisting. So, how on earth can you distinguish between the gender dysphoric child who IS trans and the gender dysphoric child who will go on to be a happy straight or gay/bi adult without transitioning.

There isn't subterfuge here - incorrectly diagnosing people to make the stats look good. The whole argument Zucker made is that gender identity is complex, dysphoria arises for lots of reasons and that many people grow out of it. Based on clinical observation, i.e. science.

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 maybe the children just grow up and their thoughts mature.

I know at the age of 10 I wanted to be and do all sorts of things that I haven't the slightest interest in now. Even though I was insistent at the time.

Choices about your body that last for the rest of your life shouldn't be made at that age.

Hell you aren't even allowed to get a tattoo until you're 18 and they are a lot easier to reverse.

I was reading the Guides and trans thread FishIn... and I was struck at how Self Identify supporters just won't engage with your posts.

nauticant they never do on these threads because they can't call me transphobic when they realise my child is transgender.

It's a curse and a blessing that they don't engage really

If that's the way they have to carry on in order to maintain their beliefs then surely at some point it'll all start to unravel. As ever, the question is: when?

Hugh 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.

Then let's get rid of the box.

Not reinforce it by "transing" people.

You are also confusing sex and gender identity. Suppose someone did have a half male/half female brain. It doesn't change their sex. There loads of us on here who have no internal sense of gender identitiy, but identify as women because we are women - it's a biological fact. I'd be much less concerned about all this if they had new words for gender identity rather than hijacking the ones for biological sex. Having a "female gender identity" isn't the same as being female or a woman!

Regarding desistance rates Hugh there is a list here

www.sexologytoday.org/2016/01/do-trans-kids-stay-trans-when-they-grow_99.html?m=1

Of all of the studies where these rates come from.

That doesn't explain how a young child is aware of gender norms which vary over time and place
How did the baby boy know the pink sippy cup indicates girl
This can only come from external forces. You like pink dresses- you must be a girl

Last year, Dion Lim, a reporter from a Florida based TV station, joined our Facebook group, and used some of what she found there in putting together this short news item that was broadcast last May:
www.wtsp.com/news/health/can-a-drug-make-you-transgender/215234337

In addition to DES victims, we now have a couple of natal women in our group who were masculinised by progestin exposure. Considering how widely these drugs were used, there must be a very large number of people similarly affected, most of whom will know nothing of their prenatal hormone exposure, nor that it's the cause of the various physical and psychological problems they've been experiencing all their lives.

Although DES is no longer used in human medicine, and androgenizing progestins aren't supposed to be given to pregnant women any more, nonetheless, synthetic hormones that potentially have gender bending properties are still in use. There's one in particular called hydroxyprogesterone caproate, which I think is highly likely to be capable of inducing female brain development in male babies. In the US, it's sold under the brand name Makena, and is given as a weekly intramuscular injection. There are probably others too, but that one in particular looks like it's being given in a high enough dosage to cause suppression of testosterone production, and it's being administered right at the time when the differences between male and female brains are thought to arise.

Here's an article I've found which answers many of the points people here have raised:
thinkprogress.org/american-college-pediatricians-transgender-kids-falsehoods-384716df13c5#.2m14t2myn

Here's an article that deals specifically with desistance, and the reasons behind Zucker being sacked:
www.huffingtonpost.com/brynn-tannehill/the-end-of-the-desistance_b_8903690.html

Also, an oldie but a goodie, the original article in Rolling Stone magazine that first revealed how things hadn't gone quite according to plan in the case that supposedly proved you could turn a boy into a girl:
<a class="break-all" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090331071817/www.infocirc.org/rollston.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20090331071817/www.infocirc.org/rollston.htm

I don't understand how someone would know that they feel like the opposite sex when they have no experience of being the opposite sex and neuroscience tells us that there is no such thing as a male Brain or a female brain?

"One of the tricks Zucker & co. pull is that they diagnose kids that aren't trans, as trans, and then proceed to "cure" them."

Is that what you tell yourself? Yeah, right. Parents love to take children who are not saying they are the other sex, who are not in distress, and who are not persistent to gender clinics. Because they love to spend time in psychologists' waiting rooms, and spend their time & energy going to psychologist appointments, sometimes for years.

That must be why, because gender dysphoric children could not possibly grow out of these feelings with the right kind of help. Oh no. That would be disaster for your dogma worldview, wouldn't it? It is best to ignore those children and call them Not Real Trans.

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.

This is balls but I guess you need to tell yourself something.

couple of natal women in our group who were masculinised by progestin exposure
Progestin is a synthetic form of progesterone, which is a female sex hormone. How would that "masculinise" a woman? This makes no sense at all.

Hugh - "CoteDAzur I'm not sure how to post images here"

Really? It says "Images" right under the box where you write a post. Click on "Choose file".

"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""

We heard all about how you are such a woman, have always been a woman with a lady brain, even before birth etc and yet the above looks awfully similar to mansplaining. I was actually hoping you would do that. Thank you for giving me this opportunity

First of all, fetus development and other stages of pregnancy are measured in weeks of amenorrhea, not weeks since conception. You really should understand the basics before you lecture a group of mothers about the baby making process.

I can't know what Williams Endocrinology means by "differentiation" without actually reading that chapter, but speaking as someone with practical experience on the matter who has seen the ultrasound doctor predict the sexes of both my son and daughter during the 12-week scan, I can assure you that the genitals of both male and female fetuses are external and virtually identical at 12 weeks. The only way male and female genitals can be differentiated at that time is by observing the "angle of dangle" - i.e. the angle of the genital tubercle.

Read this website on fetal sex determination to learn all about it. There, you will also see that
"there is no appreciable difference in the size of the penis and clitoris until after 14 weeks gestational age".

So yes, there is of course some differentiation between the genitals of male fetuses and female ones at 12 weeks. No, it is not true that this differentiation is complete at 12 weeks.

ageingrunner "... and neuroscience tells us that there is no such thing as a male Brain or a female brain? "
No it doesn't. It;s been known for decades that there are significant structural differences between male and female brains that arise during your prenatal development, and drive many of the differences between adult male and female behaviour. In primates, whether you get the male or female version depends on whether there are high levels of androgens present or not during the time your prenatal development is taking place.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3146061/

The point I'm trying to make is that doctors are happily giving women synthetic female hormones as treatments for preventing miscarriages and premature births, when if you were to give exactly the same drug in exactly the same dose to an adult man, his androgen production would be profoundly suppressed. The usual uses for these drugs in adult men are for chemical castration of sex offenders, and as part of transgender hormone treatment to turn a man into a woman. Check out the note I put together explaining why exposure to these substances disrupts normal male development. I've included links to some of the research where they produced animals with opposite-sexed brains, just by administering hormones to the pregnant mother.

www.facebook.com/notes/protect-the-unborn-child-from-synthetic-hormones/how-synthetic-female-hormones-can-interfere-with-male-sex-determination/1637590369877264

What are the significant differences between male and female brains? Does this mean that it is possible to accurately determine whether a brain is male or female e.g. at autopsy or via brain imaging?

What are adult male and female behaviours?

DeviTheGaelet "Progestin is a synthetic form of progesterone, which is a female sex hormone. How would that "masculinise" a woman? This makes no sense at all."

One property of synthetic hormones is that they tend to cross-react to a certain extent with non target receptor types. This is particularly a problem with progestins and androgens. Most progestins cross react with androgen receptors, and many anabolic steroids cross react with progesterone receptors (I guess the two receptor types must have a fairly similar structure).

When they were testing their various newly developed progestins for hormonal activity, they must have trialled them on adults and just assumed that their hormonal activity would be no different in a foetus. However, that assumption turned out to be disastrously wrong for progestins (and it probably didn't help that the two first mass-market progestins, ethisterone and norethisterone, are actually derivatives of the testosterone molecule!). I now have an option to attach images, so I've attached a screen shot of a page from one of the case reports I have. This particular one was reporting on babies masculinized by ethisterone and norethisterone, however I've obtained other case reports showing that several other progestins do it too. Doctors at the time were entirely focused on effects on the genitals, and it looks like nearly all the affected babies were operated on to make them into normal looking girls (however, that won't have fixed the masculinization of their endocrine system and brain!).

"One of the tricks Zucker & co. pull is that they diagnose kids that aren't trans, as trans, and then proceed to "cure" them."

So.... what you have done just there, is you have admitted that there are a lot of kids who are gender dysphoric as kids and do not go on to be transgender as adults.

Which is exactly the point Zucker was trying to make.

"transgender hormone treatment to turn a man into a woman"

Except that nothing can "turn a man into a woman", as per dictionary definitions below:

Woman = Adult human female
Female = Of the sex that can bear young or make eggs

Man = Adult human male
Male = Of the sex that can make sperm

Artificial hormones push a man's body to resemble that of a woman externally - softer skin, rounder features, breast growth, etc. They don't "make* a woman.

Mary - No, what Hugh did there is called cherry picking in science: Selective blindness to evidence that doesn't fit his preconceived ideas.

No trans person could possibly find their way back from gender dysphoria without altering their bodies. It can't possibly be a phase of confusion for anybody. That would be a disaster for Hugh's dogma that all gender dysphoria is because brains are "the other sex" (which if course is nonsense, since brain cells are the same sex as all the other cells in the body).

Didn't that professor of neuroscience on the documentary say there is zero difference between men & women's brains? I'm getting really fed up of the pink brain/blue brain thing. Next we'll be told we aren't really suited to work and hard thinking & should get back to the kitchen...

"It;s been known for decades that there are significant structural differences between male and female brains that arise during your prenatal development, and drive many of the differences between adult male and female behaviour"

No. In reality, there are variations that cross over between the sexes. Many males exhibit at least some "female behaviour" alongside typical "male behavior" and vice versa for females.

Is there anything as close to definitive as anything can be about whether there are men's brains and women's brains? I thought that they were indistinguishable.