De-transing

[SusanBunch]

Apologies if there was a thread about this at the time (I'm sure there was but I can't find anything from AS due to the massive number of threads on this subject).

I was searching for some clips on youtube and came across this video from 2017 about an Australian boy who was diagnosed as gender dysphoric as a young child. His mum agreed to him going on puberty blockers at age 11 because he threatened to kill himself if he couldn't. I had some compassion for her- it must have been a horrible situation. Then, and this is the bit I really struggle with, she decided to let him take HER estrogen medication (presume it was the pill or something). He developed breasts and apparently his bones fused because estrogen stops bone development. So she was letting her young son take medication that was having a permanent effect on his body and had not even been prescribed for him and was doing god knows what else to his body.

The boy is now 14 and surprise surprise has decided that he was not a girl after all. He is left with permanent effects of the hormones, including the breasts. Mum is now paying for him to go to South Korea to have an op to remove the breasts and let him 'go back to normal'. Doctors in UK/Aus will not operate. She has also fled Australia to the UK to give him a 'fresh start'. She says she has no regrets and did what she thought was right at the time.

A gender expert on the clip makes the well-known statement that the vast majority of 'trans' kids grow out of it during puberty, many realising that they are gay. I suspect that this boy will also come out at some point. But I feel so desperately sad for him. His body has been permanently altered because he said some things when he was a child and the idiotic adults around him fed him drugs. When are people going to wake the fuck up? How can we be letting this happen? He says he does not resent his mum now, but I bet he will in a few years. I would feel pure and utter rage if I were him. It's not his fault and he will never know what he could have been now.

Oh and predictably the gender expert has been subjected to abuse from the trans lobby. Wtf. This is so fucking dangerous. Owen Jones harps on about history judging TERFs. I think there will be a large number of furious and permanently disfigured young adults who will be enraged at what adults subjected them to just because they indulged some childish fantasy. There may even be lawsuits about it. I hope there are.

Sorry for the long post/rant but I don't have anyone in real life that I can share my frustration with as I am not 'out' as a TERF (yet).

(While I was searching I also saw a clip from This Morning about some fucking idiot who said her daughter was trans at age 2 because she wanted to wear a fucking superhero costume. Words fail me).

That is why we are shouty and won't shut up about it, Susan.
I think that Lupron will be this generations thalidomide, and the more children we can save from a lifetime of misery and medical treatment the better.

I too think that giving children puberty blockers and other drugs will, in the future be viewed with real horror. As in “how did this happen ?”

I just cannot get my head around what kind of person would feed their child dangerous drugs that have not been prescribed to them. A few years ago that would have resulted in social services being called. Now you're a hateful bigot if you dare suggest that these kids should be given counselling instead of hormones (e.g. LM's attempt to oust yet another person in Labour, who was handing out packs to schools telling them how to deal rationally with the issue).

After watching that clip I feel like I am living in a dystopian fantasy novel. I think that any doctor who is complicit in giving hormones to a child should be struck off and imprisoned. Jesus fucking Christ.

Estrogen can also be a carcinogen. What if this poor boy goes on to develop breast cancer when he is older? Presumably he is also infertile now.

open letter by a detransitioner

Twitter thread on Lupron

Thanks, Tallulah. That letter is so sad, especially the bit about losing your own voice. I hadn't even thought about it- it's something that we all take for granted. We might gain weight, dye our hair, get wrinkles, but our voice is a constant. I can't imagine opening my mouth and the voice of someone I no longer recognised came out.

This needs to be given so much more attention. How dare they try to stifle any research into detransitioning? It's so horrifying.

I think that Lupron will be this generations thalidomide, and the more children we can save from a lifetime of misery and medical treatment the better.

Exactly. For anyone who hasn't looked up what Lupron does to people who use it, you should - the side effects are horrifying. People in their 20s who were given it for precocious puberty now have bones like they were 80 and massive dental problems. A lot of adults prescribed it stop taking it before they're meant to because they just can't tolerate the side effects, and the same drug is now being given to kids for years instead of the few months it usually would be in an adult. It's a disaster waiting to happen.

For all the "wrong side of history" stuff Owen Jones and friends like to spout I think it's the people who campaigned for Lupron to be given to children who'll be judged harshly by future generations.

The letter is heartbreaking isn't it.

I'm really glad you started this thread, it's such an important topic.

The Lupron thread is terrifying. Given that it's so easy to get hold of prescription drugs on the internet, I am sure there are many parents like the mother in the clip who will be swayed by the trans-lobby's insistence that the earlier you start hormones the better so that you get a 'realistic' result. Yet the trans lobby largely consists of men who would not dream of taking hormones or permanently disfiguring their precious penises. But hey, let's all experiment on the poor innocent kids who expressed a preference for dolls over toy-cars.

People say that gender-dysphoria is living in the wrong body. Ironically, taking these hormones is literally condemning these children to a lifetime of living in the 'wrong' body. Their body will never be natural- it will be a permanent reminder of trauma, as that letter points out.

Death is ranked at #8 in top 20 adverse events associated with Lupton

At the risk or repeating myself I am
my GP stopped my HRT saying it would be too damaging after 5/6 years.
So WTF is this stuff doing to children ?
I would have it enshrined in law that no child (under 18) could be given medical intervention for transitioning.
After all if you are actually in the wrong body, and your ladybrain is telling you that, surely you can wear the uniform of a million other teenagers
The wonderful sexless grey tracksuit other colours are available

Patodp I am very sorry I x posted with you, and I didn't intend to come across as making a joke of the whole situation. I hope some MP's are watching and listening. WE are damaging a generation - and this damage cannot be undone.

My DM was offered thalidomide during pregnancy, and she decided it was not worth the risk

Exactly. If we were got rid of stupid gender stereotypes, it would be fine. Men could wear dresses and lipstick if they wanted to. They could even adopt feminine names. They would still be men of course, but their biology would not define how we expected them to act.

The problem is that these kids are told that they literally ARE the opposite sex and that it is their body that is wrong and needs to be fixed asap. They are told that they are in a race against time to make sure that they don't face an adulthood of ridicule and isolation.

The trans lobby like LM often use the suicide stat as an excuse why kids should be given hormones, with the suggestion that if you don't 'pass', your life will be awful. Given that the vast majority of children grow out of it and identify with their birth sex, giving hormones is surely going to be highly detrimental to future mental health. Had the boy in the clip just been supported and encouraged to talk about his feelings when he was younger, he would probably be enjoying a happy teenage life now. Instead he has a pair of breasts that he hides, faces painful and invasive surgery abroad and his mum has uprooted him and moved him half way across the world. Poor kid.

I just cannot get my head around what kind of person would feed their child dangerous drugs that have not been prescribed to them.

I remember this when it all first surfaced. To be fair to the mother, the child had become at risk to the extent of not just threatening suicide but behaving dangerously. They had had to lock up or remove all the knives from the kitchen and all sorts of stuff.

The mother was in extremis and I don't think she supplied illegal drugs to the child out of any belief in trans ideology or anything like that, it was out of desperation.

That said, I sure do hope if anything like that had happened to me, I'd have found a different way through it. I'm not approving of her actions.

That poor child It is so difficult to explain to a distraught young pre teen or teenager that they really can't know how they will feel in ten or fifteen years' time, no matter how much they believe they do. There has to be other ways to help children get through this without such massive, appalling risk.

Did anyone see The Good Doctor this week? The story was of a transgirl of 14 or so, very convinced and taking puberty blockers, with testicular cancer, with the main issue being parents/grandmother and child deciding with doctors whether to do the minimal medical necessary treatment or to do the full castration the child was determined to have as soon as they reached 18. I was expecting it to be whole heartedly give the meds, do the full surgery promotion, but the script was quite a balanced picture. The parents were pro full castration as the child had attempted suicide before being allowed puberty blockers and were desperate to keep the child safe, while the grandmother was not convinced the child would not at any stage in the future change their mind, or was able to really know how they would feel as an adult about the loss of their fertility. In the end despite the child not agreeing, the parents consented to medically necessary only with the child reassured that if as an adult that was still what they wanted then they would have full support.

She should be in prison for child abuse IMHO. Giving a child prescription tablets that aren't prescribed for them surely isn't legal.

This makes me so sad. But I guess that makes me an uneducated bigot.

Did anyone see The Good Doctor this week?

Yes. I prepared to cringe but didn't.

Also, last week's episode of the Jo Brand social work comedy Damned featured a boy whose mother was FTM. The boy was about to be expelled from school for anger outbursts and the social worker went along to advocate for him and suggest that the school could handle the impact of mum's transition better. At the meeting, the head teacher was indignant - everyone at the school was in full support of mum's transition and so were all the boy's classmates. There was no problem of that nature, the head said. Then it came out that the boy was not entirely happy with mum transitioning and it was the blind support from everyone that was leading to his anger and frustration. Nobody had bothered asking him how HE felt about it. It all ended nicely with boy not getting expelled and having a productive and positive conversation with his mother, but I thought it made some excellent points very well - more people are affected by someone's transition than the transitioner, but family are just expected to suck it all up with all the attention and concern given to the transitioner.

Yes I saw that lang and thought it was very well written (by Jo Brand I think?)

I'm sorry, but I 100% believe that any parent who claims they've had to lock up the knives and scissors due to a child attempting to chop off their own penis is lying, and very likely to be a Munchausen's-by-Proxy perpetrator.

There are MANY of these stories about young transitioners, and they all go the same way: "I was walking into the kitchen when I saw precious Freddy (now Frieda!) trying to cut off his willy with a carving knife/safety scissors/etc. while the tears flowed down her cheeks. I bravely rushed in and stopped her just in time, and that's when I knew how VERY SERIOUS this all was!"

Tell me, parents of mumsnet, you've been here a while:

How many childhood accident types are there where the parent is always able to avert disaster just in time? Normally, for every "caught them just in time" story, there's a story where the outcome was much, much worse, involving a hospital stay at minimum. For every parent who's caught their child playing with scissors at a very young age and nearly cutting their hand, there's other parents who have had to take their child to get stitches for cutting their hand.

There are no cases in the medical literature of children either seriously harming themselves to the point of needing A&E, or of actually mutilating their genitals in any way, due to this kind of gender issue ... even though one quick snip of a sharp scissors would be enough to inflict life-changing injuries on a young child. Medical journals would be totally fascinated by such a case study, and it'd be highly unusual, so if it's happened, it would have been written about.

I have come to the conclusion that this is a common story that has spread memetically among parents of children deemed to be trans, as a legitimizing tactic for whatever else they choose to do to their child afterward. "Well, you don't understand, my daughter would have cut off her own willy and maybe even died, we had absolutely no choice but to embark on this journey!"

Very particular stories are recycled over and over by these parents, wherever they live, and they seem reasonably likely the first time you hear them, and you think, oh, that must be rough. But the more parents who use the same language and near-identical stories (that all involve parents discovering self-harming behavior in the nick of time and heroically averting suicide or mutilation), the more it seems like there's something else going on.

Having a child who has told me time and time again that he wants to be a girl, this is heartbreaking. I have family and friends calling him trans and judging me for not taking him seriously (He's 4!). He doesnt want to be a girl, he doesnt want to have periods, a vagina, ovaries, give birth etc he doesnt even know about those things all he wants is to have long hair, wear pink and glittery clothes and play with dolls which is all he has to answer with when I ask him why he wants to be a girl.
With adults it is different but when a child is saying they want to be the sex opposite to their own they do not understand what they are saying. Of course let you child wear and play with what they want, you can even make their name feminine/masculine and call them he/she but they dont need to be subjected to physical irreversable harm that could potentially be for nothing. I was born female and I didnt have any breasts untill I paid for a boob job as an adult, a child does not need breasts to be happy.

upside your child is very lucky to have you as a mum

tell your family and friends to FUCK OFF

I was on Zoladex (the same sort of drug as Lupron, just a variant) for two years in my mid 20s. The drug completely wrecked me physically and hormonally and I’m still suffering a decade on. I am horrified it’s being described as safe and reversible. I’d already gone through puberty when I was on it and have had so many issues, can’t imagine what it would do to a child, it fills me with horror. I hope the parents who have been duped and misled by these doctors sue, I hope the children who’ve been misled sue, and I hope anyone giving non-prescribed drugs to their children face legal action.