Stella O'Malley, Trans Kids: It's Time To Talk

[drum123]

Apologies if there is already a thread about this. Channel 4, 10.00 tonight. 'Stella O'Malley considers the huge rise in numbers of young people embarking on gender transition, through the prism of the gender identity issues she experienced when she was a child.' According to The Times no TRA groups were prepared to contribute to this . Stella feels this may be because she was a tomboy as a young girl, (even insisting she was a boy until she hit puberty), and is now a confident, mature woman who believes that nowadays she would be pressured to go down the transition route. Sounds like it will be worth watching.

How much, and how one distinguishes the genuine/ permanent from the assumed/ temporary, I don't know.

I assume with high quality research and MH support and cracking down on the terrorists who are trying to stop both of these.

One thing that is crystal clear to me is that trans people are not one homogeneous group. Some are born male and others female, some are teenagers whilst others are middle aged, some are autistic others neurotypical, some have other mental health problems but others don't, some seem to have a fear of growing up and others appear to have a sexual motivation for change, etc etc

In short a really diverse group so why are they all treated in a similar manner ie the affirmation approach and why do individual members of that group feel they can speak for them all. How is the experience of a middle aged, male born transitioner in any way relevant to the experience of gender questioning teenage girl?

Thingybob; good stuff.

How is the experience of a middle aged, male born transitioner in any way relevant to the experience of gender questioning teenage girl?

For the middle aged transwoman we are supposed to accept that they are a woman and the suggestion that they might have to undergo some sort of medical assessment is regarded as hate speech.

For children there is a demand that they should be medicated right away.

Either transgender people need to physically transition, or they don't. And if adults don't want a medicalised route, why force it on children?

Thingybob 2; the psychiatric team at such as the Charing Cross Gender Clinic seem to be pretty good at weeding people out. Most do not go on to hormones and surgery, and some are enraged to find that hey are not allowed to. They never see the reason why, but others often do. Having a skilled team, and making sure there is a wait for treatment , and so on, has it's advantages.

But despite that, I still agree with your post. Many trans people get angry if anyone "doubts" any other "trans identifying" person. So you are spot on.

Well that's rather the essence of the difficulty here, isn't it Kay? Regardless of the wider ideological issues involved in the transgender movement and notions of femininity etc. there is a hugely important case to be made that there needs to be more research and that simply 'affirming' someone's beliefs about themselves is unhelpful when they are an adult, never mind when they are a child displaying behaviour and beliefs that could indicate much deeper problems.

Yes.

Florabunting, affirmation has not always been the policy. In the 50s/60s/ 70s the NHS used what would now be called conversion therapy.

Hormones were used to boost natal sex not alter it. Psychotherapy and suggestions to go away and get married and have kids were common (which likely led to some of the distressing cases in the really sad trans widows thread here that all should read). And electro convulsive therapy was attempted to shock the brain into compliance.

Affirmation was always a last resort and about 90% of those saying they were transsexual were not so diagnosed and deterred from an NHS transition path way.

Seeing things from the 21st century perspective misses that dangerous shifts have occurred in recent decades.

A move away from the idea that this is not obviously a serious medical problem that needs extensive psychiatric assessment to find out why someone argues they are the wrong sex whilst knowing their true biology.

As a transsexual this is obvious and cases need fully investigating not simply accepted as true because.

Also transition is now the first option instead of the very last resort after other means have failed.

We have moved further and further away from psychiatric assessment and consideration of various possible causes and doctors having to be dragged kicking and screaming to transition as the only remaining option.

I do not think it is a coincidence that 'old school transsexuals' were generally aware of the importance of boundaries, that nobody changes sex and have assimilated into society easily and rarely claimed transophobia.

Whereas today all that has changed.

The erosion of therapy and making transition easy and not hard to get approved and extensive effort to eliminate and try to treat other possibilities that might lead to gender non conformity has coincided with the activism we are seeing now.

And which is demanding the removal of final barriers with government approval.

This process was meant to be hard. It should never be easy. It is madness to turn it into a choice.

That attitude within government has led to the appalling laxity of consideration over the consequences for children.

We cannot simply remove all obstacles or not look for causes that might be triggering psychological or medical conditions.

Anybody viewing this objectively can see that.

Yet it is exactly what we are doing.

Sadly I would recognize what you describe as a form of conversion therapy but that isn't what the transactivists of today call conversion therapy. They suggest that letting a girl express herself as she wishes and help her come to terms with her body as it is, or as it is changing is conversion therapy. The tunnel vision is staggering.

Out of interest, I've just done a search under #detransition on Tumblr. There are so many responses and blogs by young women who are detransitioning; I'm totally taken aback.

www.tumblr.com/search/%23detransition

So many of their experiences echo what we discuss here - sexual abuse, internal misogyny, homophobia and the sheer problems around being a young woman growing up in today's society. Evidently, none of these issues were confronted.

Most are from the US but some from the UK too - the themes are common anywhere

I don’t know any other condition that is treated by affirmation. If you went to a therapist suffering from depression they aren’t going to say you are right, life is shit.

Therapists are never going to tell you ‘Forget the holiday, if you get on that airplane, you’ll have a screaming, fiery death. Avoid social situations because you’ll just embarrass yourself. Your neighbours are spying on you and you are right about clowns and spiders.’

It looks to be conversion therapy today but at the time was not. It was just a way to try to resolve serious problems. It was only ever done of patients agreed and we were desperate to escape from the dysphoria so often did.

They did not do this on children then, In fact children were not treated openly at all and there were no special clinics. There were not even any for adults until I was about 18.

I was seen as a child before then and tried some of the less invasive methods (lifestyle changes) as a child. But medical intervention of any kind was strictly not done on a child and it was only at 18 that I faced the other methods.

Worth remembering that there was no major reporting of surgical intervention. Cases of 'sex change' were still rare then. Birth certificate changes and marriage happened on a one to one basis as it was treated as a individual anomaly. That only altered through a famous trial in the early 70s.

So there was not the obsession with just one way out - transition - as now. Patients were more willing to try 'cures' if it meant removing the dysphoria and getting some kind of normal life back.

Doctors spoke of transition and surgery as a 'tragedy' and families were always involved in a joint decision on steps taken because if it reached that point it meant other options had failed and the future was uncertain as this was all very new.

Medicine then had no idea about long term cross sex hormone use and its consequences. There were some as it turned out.

This is so different from the attitude today but also chillingly like what is happening with the medicating of children now. Treating them as a science experiment much like we were (willingly - of course - as clearly are the children now).

But today with children this is happening without them having gone through any of the softer options to treat less invasively first. Which in the case of children today should be to just let them be kids and see what happens.

As with the adults back then most will grow out of it and for every genuinely transsexual child who benefits from blockers (and there will be some) the risk is that 10 times as many who should not have gone near this route might be taken along with the promise of an easy way out.

However misguided those methods of the past look to us today they were only trying to do the best for the patient by trying to treat symptoms without drastic consequences. Because they knew the risks of taking the more drastic route were incalculable.

Having been there once less than half a century ago it is worrying that the lesson of history has seemingly been forgotten.

So many sad stories on that site
So many struggles

Instagram has just over 200 posts on #detransition but 130K+ on #binding and 70K+ on #F2M as well as many other transitioning hashtags so it’s still being pushed heavily on there. The cutting hashtags you get a warning if you try to search these days, but cutting both tits off is A OK and cause for celebration. People need to be sending this shit to their MP’s, Schools and local safeguarding and asking WTAF is being done about this massive global scandal.

Reading what R0wantrees linked to about trans boys being a bit like Biebers - I can, if I put my teen head and eyes on, completely relate to this.

I definitely went through a phase where I was confused about sexual orientation and I can see that I'd probably have been very attracted to a trans boy. I had huge crushes on boys but sometimes girls too. That might have been wanting to be^^ them also. Pre teen I certainly loved George in the famous 5, I loved that she did everything a boy did but I also thought she was very cute too. (Massive crush on Dick also, couldn't work out who I'd want to go an an adventure with more.) Retrospectively an unfortunate name.

But I actually now know that my confusion was seated in a gut feeling that boys/ men could be dangerous, (I always as a teen fancied cute, quiet, meeker or shorter boys). I'm not sure where it came from; probably media and hearing about football hooliganism.

Thingybob totally agree. Very diverse group.

lass, oh, don't get me wrong, what's done is done, I appreciate that there are lessons to be learned from the past, negatively and positively.

Not just Instagtam.
Tumblr. Twitter. Facebook. There is a social media mass hysteria gong on.

Affirm all trans ideology! Delete and remove all thoughts critical of trans ideology!

All non-conforming, all misfits, socially awkward, body-critical, body-dysphoric, rebellious... Here is your answer.
You are trans.
We will elevate you to status.
We are your new and better family.
Just repeat after us.... Mantras... Slurs against the unbelievers... We understand you. No one else will.

Well it's all very convincing when you are a vulnerable young person. And is working. For the time being.

It's the parents transing their very young eg 3-4 year olds I can't feel sympathy for because they should know better.

You're right serf.

I'm in a massive fb off topic sling group but I don't follow it at all not sure why I joined but decided a few weeks ago to just search for anything related to the GRA after I was surprised that an arty mum type page suddenly promoted stonewalls advice for the GRA consultation.

Utter hysteria on several threads on the sling page. Many women had tactfully tried to challenge some of the assertions made by very pro TRA types and were repeatedly given suicide stats while mods stopped discussions citing no hatred here thanks.

Arty mum type page had a similar play out, utterly nonsensical long post from someone who was extremely hand maidenly (I actually copied it into my notes the cognitive dissonance was so batshit crazy so I could try to understand it) lots of hearting and rainbow emojis. I noticed a few who'd attempted to query the twaw mantra (mainly via safeguarding concerns; instantly plagued with suicide stats) had the suffragette colours in their profile pic. (I'm not sure many get what that means and I've never done anything that before but have done now.)

Mind you in the sling group I once saw a thread about gang bang porn and how the women absolutely love it, in response to someone who queried finding it funny.

To add, mostly mothers in these groups.

serficafleur;

There is a lot of that, I am quite sure. Really, a lot. But there is also some other stuff, which comes from somewhere we don't understand, and which has always been there at a much rarer and more scattered level.

So unless the nature of the human animal is suddenly changing, which I kind of doubt, there is contagion, the internet, unhappy girls responding to things in our society that are deeply unhealthy.And so on. I don't blame the parents as much as some, because I have met a few, and they have been doing their best in a nightmare situation. I have not often thought that the issue was being created by their own actions and misconceptions.

Although god knows what chemicals we are ingesting. I truly don't know what is going on, and when I was young, and struggling with palpable GD in isolation, I would not have dreamed that we would be where we are today.

Someone once said to me, and it was good advice. "Don't do it,. Just, DON'T do it. But if you HAVE to do it, it can be done." At 53 I gave the struggle up, having been a VERY peculiar little boy of 7 ( everyone said) and trying transition in 1966.

By the " don't do it" mantra/ sentiment, you'd fight tooth and nail not to have your child on puberty blockers or hormones. But you would love them the more , and the more conspicuously, because of what they are going through.

Kay

One thing that is crystal clear to me is that trans people are not one homogeneous group. Some are born male and others female, some are teenagers whilst others are middle aged, some are autistic others neurotypical, some have other mental health problems but others don't, some seem to have a fear of growing up and others appear to have a sexual motivation for change, etc etc

Recent BMJ letter by medical clinicians:

Published 29 October 2018
'Redesigning gender identity services: an opportunity to generate evidence'
authors: Richard Byng, general practitioner and professor in primary care research, Susan Bewley, emeritus professor of obstetrics and women’s health, Damian Clifford, consultant liaison psychiatrist, Margaret McCartney, general practitioner and freelance writer
(extracts)
"A recent feature in The BMJ implied that new services are all that’s needed to improve transgender healthcare. Providing timely, sensitive services for all, including those who decide to not pursue treatment or detransition, is important. But the article did not question the steep rise in referrals of mainly young women or the potential harms of medical overdiagnosis and overtreatment" (continues)

"Regulated medical practitioners should follow a framework of evidence, not simply respond to client expectations. Creating that evidence to inform quality standards is an ethical imperative. We need research to explore the interplays between gender identity, mental health and neurodevelopmental problems, sexual orientation, autogynephilia, and unpalatable gender roles" (continues)

open access link here:
www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4490.full?ijkey=6lX93kQA0lz5YoB&keytype=ref

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3410257-BMJ-article-We-need-research-to-explore-the-interplays-between-gender-identity-mental-health-and-neurodevelopmental-problems-sexual-orientation-autogynephilia-and-unpalatable-gender-roles

If blockers had been around in the early 60s I would have wanted them desperately. They would have made a huge difference in my life.

But looking back now I am glad that they were not because the rare occasions when they might be justified cannot compensate for the lives that might be destabilised taking them when they should not.

Having to go through puberty and emerge intact teaches you to fight for what is necessary but not without exhausting other options first.

Today's emerging society is soft round the edges and sees rights as a given and demanded like a child at Christmas wanting everything in the store.

If you get handed something too easily you may end up grabbing it whether you want it or not, just because it is there or others round you got it first and so you want it too.

If you have to fight to prove need and work like mad to earn it this builds character and helps appreciate what you have won. You end up understanding the value. Of your rights and other peoples rights.

This is what is going wrong with this society and the handling of this transgender issue. Belief is life is too hard so make it easy and I will be good I promise.

Life should be hard. So should fundamentally changing who you are legally. Easy is not necessarily better. It can be the highway to mistakes and taking things for granted and treating others as if their support should be implicit.

Being trans is no cakewalk. You have to work at it for a lifetime. It has to be really necessary and if it can be avoided then you should thank your lucky stars and do it. It is not a Marvel adventure story.

We should not be teaching our children anything different. Yet tragically we are and some of them will suffer for our 'kindness'.

It's the parents transing their very young eg 3-4 year olds I can't feel sympathy for because they should know better.

There are people who have 3-4 year olds who grew up being brainwashed on the internet themselves.

I’m horrified by some of the younger posters on the main boards (and I’m really not THAT old myself) what they think is acceptable/normal after growing up in the age of online porn.