Trans kids

[Macareaux]

This is an interesting article in a US publication about trans kids and rapid onset gender dysphoria.

After considering many aspects of the issue and anecdotal reports and data, the writer comes to the the conclusion that the distilled problem is that there is no way of determining which children are truly trans and which are not.

If we are to progress then sooner or later these mainstream writers are going to have to have the courage to say that there is no such thing as a transgender child.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/andrew-sullivan-hard-questions-gender-transitions-for-young.html

Tammy flowers.

The thing is we live in a very gendered world.

Yes, and if by gender you mean socially and culturally imposed roles deemed appropriate to one sex or the other, then this is really crap for all of us. I want a world where no-one bats an eyelid if a boy wants a doll for Christmas or pulls the pink princess dress out the dressing up box, or his father wants to take extended paternity leave, or if a girl wants to climb trees, take car engines to bits and a woman wants to be a front line infantry soldier.

Some people are still trying to keep people sex segregated.

But this is the point at which you conflate sex and gender. People just are (barring a tiny percentage of people who are intersex) one sex or the other. That's not sex segregation, that's fact. As to why we as a society choose to segregate the sexes into separate space, sometimes this is done for good reasons (women's safety, privacy and dignity for both sexes) and sometimes this is done for bad reasons (women being barred from, for instance, men's clubs where business deals and political alliances are built).

I'm referring to how I'm generally read by others.

Not sure what you mean by this? Are you trans and regularly "misgendered" because people read you as a member of the biological sex recorded on your birth certificate? I can see this would be painful for you, and if done maliciously then those are very unpleasant people.

Or do you mean you don't fit socially imposed gender norms in the sense of expected behaviours and roles, and people give you grief over this? If so, welcome to the club. I would guess most of us on this board have had this experience from early childhood onwards. (My first recognition of how shit gender, in the sense of sexist stereotypes, was came at primary school when I was told I couldn't play cricket or do woodwork because only the boys got to do that. Still rankles over four decades later.)

Tammy

I think it might be a sort of technical language associated with pharmacology - a drug has effects - what it's supposed to do, as well as side-effects - unwanted things that go along with the desired effects of the drug.

A drug such as lupron can have reversible effects but irreversible side effects, whereas a drug such as testosterone can have irreversible effects but reversible side effects. (T probably has both of both, but for simplicity ...)

It's all marketing semantics though - drugs do things to your body, some of those things are wanted but others are bad, some things will stop when you stop taking the drug, others will continue.

What gets described as an effect and what's a side effect depends on what you're flogging it for - look at the history of viagra.

Tammy I read your link. I had no idea this was happening to so many people. I am so sorry.

I do understand that, but unfortunately the fact that the blocking of puberty “is reversible” (which sadly is not always the case, but mostly) has led to them being discussed as this thing you can take, and if you change your mind you can stop as if nothing ever happened.

Thank you Pencils for your posts! Very helpful.

Re suicidality, this is why I don't understand the objections to trialling DBT in a ROGD population. It's non-invasive, it allows for the option of transitioning later if in a person's best interest, it can easily co-exist with exploration of gender...DBT teaches distress tolerance, and is surely a therapy that would serve kids with GD well, whether or not they choose to later engage with medical and surgical transition.

My best bet is that blockers and hormones are cheap, and a years worth of group and individual therapy is expensive, and it's better for the bottom line to treat kids as cheaply as possible.

I mean, can all decent people not agree that it is not an optimal outcome for our children to grow up to be life-long medical patients?

(Sometimes it happens anyway - our children have diabetes, or are diagnosed with cystic fibrosis or childhood cancers, or asthma - and these parents and children roll with the punches, often admirably and heroically - but the evidence for ROGD being life-threatening to the entire cohort in the absence of medical treatment is nowhere near comparable to these situations.)

That most loving parents would prefer for their children to grow up whole and healthy, with their fertility and sexual function intact ?

That most loving parents understand and accept that their children can be gender non-conforming in a variety of ways, from presentation to behaviour to sexual orientation, and that's OK, but is entirely separate from the question of launching children into adulthood already dealing with the medicalization of their bodies ?

That most loving parents don't want their gay sons or their lesbian daughters to feel pushed out of maleness or femaleness by their sexual orientation ?

That parents are alert to the ableism that sees some autistic children sent down a medical pathway to infertility and shudder at the historical memory of eugenics on the left ?

That radical acceptance of the body you are is not 'conversion therapy', but in fact, a loving approach to the body, one which rejects the idea of the body as yet another consumer item ? One which challenges the narrative of self-harm as heroic ? One which does not split the self from the body, but acknowledges we are our bodies ? An integrative approach to the body ?

Surely, Frack, these are things reasonable people can agree on ?

I do understand that, but unfortunately the fact that the blocking of puberty “is reversible” (which sadly is not always the case, but mostly) has led to them being discussed as this thing you can take, and if you change your mind you can stop as if nothing ever happened.

Yes

On her other thread, Frack posted a study that interviewed 35 children about their experiences at 'gender affirming' clinics. It didn't say how many were on these drugs but not all were. And in this tiny group of less than 35 children, one kept getting fractures, one made a serious suicide attempt, one started vomiting randomly and there were other side effects noted.

And they were all so keen to continue regardless and the conclusion said:

The results suggest that trans youth and gender diverse children are benefiting from medical gender-affirming care they receive at specialty clinics, providing valuable insight into their decision-making processes in seeking care and specific interventions. Providers might consider adjusting aspects of treatment protocols (such as age restrictions, puberty stage, or mental health assessments) or applying them on a more flexible, case-by-case basis to reduce barriers to access.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15532739.2019.1652129

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3738164-Fracks-reference-post?msgid=91419023

Of course they were keen to continue - the entire culture around them is telling them they'll probably end up killing themselves if they don't do this.

I can't get these children out of my head. This has to stop.

I can't get these children out of my head.

That's because you are not desenitised to it, you are having a normal reaction.

You know, given the disparity between what Zucker actually said about the Littman study and what Frack wants us to think he said it's hard to not suspect that the intention may have been the following - say you have proof that GC women are wrong, post links to said proof that you are fully aware most won't be able to access because, when the inability to access the "proof" is pointed out provide selective and misleading quotes, and voila, point "proved".

It really is impolite of those of you who were able to access the papers anyway to undermine this most excellent strategy by telling us all what the papers actually say.

And there should have been italics in there.

And even the claim that the wanted effects of these drugs are reversible is dodgy af because once children are on them they almost invariably progress to cross-sex hormones.

Everyone - WPATH, Tavistock, all the trans orgs, the media, politicians ... has been plugging them as a 'pause button', a way of giving a child 'breathing space' to explore their 'gender' and decide what to do next. A way to take the pressure off.

This whole video is fucking shocking but skip to 20:27 for the stuff on puberty blockers. This video was shown on CBBC which aims its programmes at children aged 6 - 12. It was first broadcast in 2014: 3-4 years into the Tavistock experiment.

The Health Research Authority recently investigated the Tavistock's shoddy 'research' project and made this recommendation:

‘Researchers and clinical staff should consider carefully the terms that they use in describing treatments e.g. avoid referring to puberty suppression as providing a “breathing space”, to avoid risk of misunderstanding.’

The narrative has changed (yes, I blinked and missed it as well):

5 minutes ago: 'Puberty blockers provide a safe, reversible breathing space for a child to explore their gender identity. They reduce gender dysphoria and prevent suicide.'

Now: 'Puberty blockers are not intended to prevent gender dysphoria, they allow subsequent cross-sex hormone treatment without the need to surgically reverse or otherwise mask the unwanted physical effects of puberty in the birth gender. Worsening behavioural and emotional symptoms of dysphoria are to be expected because these are Proper Trans Kids and have you not seen the suicide stats?'

www.transgendertrend.com/health-research-authority-puberty-blockers-commit-children-permanent-physical-transition/

www.hra.nhs.uk/about-us/governance/feedback-raising-concerns/investigation-study-early-pubertal-suppression-carefully-selected-group-adolescents-gender-identity-disorders/

Always pay attention when the narrative changes.

Also cross sex hormones do not provide the puberty of the opposite sex. There is no puberty. These children never have one.

This post doesn't add any value to this thread, apart from applauding the incredible people who have taken the time to properly analyse the links and bodies of work that were referenced.

Proper rigour being applied.

You are awesome, all of you.

JanesKettle they don't want DBT or any other psychological therapy in case it works.

If GD is a mental illness from which you can recover then nobody gets validated and nobody makes much of a profit.

In the UK we are used to people advocating for the most cost-effective options because we have the NHS. However the trans industry is mostly based in the US where healthcare operates very differently. It's better for the bottom line to treat kids as profitably as possible.

The potential profit for private healthcare providers from a year or two of therapy is absolute peanuts compared with the profit that can be made by making people dependent on medication for the rest of their lives, and the profit from the surgery, and the profit from surgical corrections to the surgery, and the profit from surgical corrections to the previous corrections ... and then at the end they can still add on the peanuts profit from therapy because there are plenty of people who need much more than a year or two by the time the trans industry has finished with them.

Pencils that's horrifying...and sadly, believable.

Why is no therapy offered in the NHS for GD? In any other field of medicine, the most conservative (small c) treatment is always pursued first. So if you have a tumour, and surgery alone can successfully treat it, you don't go on to chemotherapy unless clinically indicated.

With GD, in NHS adult clinics, there is no one advocating a "let's see if you can lead a good life in an unaltered body, and here are the tools we can help you develop to do that. And here is the robust legislation that ensures you are not discriminated against because you don't match stereotypes. If that proves unsuccessful we can move on to see what the minimum physical intervention can do to help."

Instead it's " what physical interventions would you like?"

Sorry, have not read the whole thread so this reply is for @frackoff re ROGD having "no evidence". There are a very small number of studies on the characteristics of children and young people referred to gender clinics. One old one (based on data from referrals between 2002 and 2010 - before the growth in referral rates) from Holland, one from GIDS and one from Scandinavia.

The growth in referrals of girls is striking throughout. What was 2:1 boys to girls in the noughties and before is now nearly 3:1 girls to boys. The biggest growth is in adolescent girls.

Kaltiala Heino in the Scandinavian study showed very high rates of comorbidities conditions, psychological difficulties and a big group who had this alongside the onset of gender dysphoria in adolescence. Whatever you choose to call it, it is worrying. I've attached the relevant table in the paper below, along with a graph of the changes in ages referred.

Just to clarify, that study is of 47 referrals to adolescent gender dysphoria clinics in Scandinavia.

Tagging on, really just to put this on the record. Out last night at a social evening and met a woman who is very high up at Barnardo's. Very clever, super-driven and competitive – and terrifyingly woke. She talked at some length about being pro-trans and wanting to develop more pro-trans groups and activities etc for trans young people. Totally unquestioning.

I don't know her and am unlikely to encounter her again (and I'd had two glasses of wine) so I asked about trans staff. Did they have any? When she indicated they did, I asked her how they coped with the change of identity and names and the balance of honouring the transperon's desire for discretion with the need to safeguard children and young people.

She walked away. I came home and googled and found that Barnardo's is one of Stonewall's champions. I've woken up wondering about it and spotted this thread. Seriously, how do you safeguard in these circumstances?

Whoops, having read back a couple of pages I can see this isn't the right place for my post. Thank you to Pencils for your commentary, really interesting.

No, it's important thatdamnwoman, it reminds me of when NSPCC ran away from the webchat when asked similar questions.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/mumsnet_facebook_live/3343961-Facebook-Live-about-talking-to-kids-about-staying-safe-from-abuse-with-NSPCC

We're in a very bad place when the orgs and people with such a hefty responsibility for safeguarding cannot even bring themselves to think about these issues.

The biggest concern here for me when it comes to GnrHAs is that it prioritises “passing” above all else.

A group of adults who’ve never had these drugs think that if only they’d never gone though puberty and they were better able to pass, their lives would be better. So the message to children is “take this drug or you’ll have a terrible life of stigma and depression and abuse”.

It’s prioritising that over all the other effects of these drugs: infertility, lack of sexual function, lack of libido, chronic fatigue, osteoporosis, thyroid problems, other longterm endocrine dysfunction fibromyalgia, neurological damage, chronic pain, loss of teeth, loss of hair, depression, impact on your ability to study, work, have relationships, etc etc.

In grown women with endometriosis these drugs are licensed for a maximum of six months use. Yet someone thinks that using it for longer in young children is a good idea?

Even if we were to agree that giving that class of drugs to children was OK (and I most definitely do not) why is it OK to exceed the recommended maximum lifetime dosage? Some kids will be on those drugs for years, and adults aren't allowed to be because the drugs are too dangerous. So, again, why is it OK for kids to be put on them for potentially much longer?

A group of adults who’ve never had these drugs think that if only they’d never gone though puberty and they were better able to pass, their lives would be better.

Do they really believe this? Many of these adults are late-transitioning males who have fathered children. Do they really think their lives would have been better if they had been sterilised as children and left with no sexual function?

And isn't this also sending out the message that they wish their children had never been born? And that their marriage has been a sham? Have they considered the damage they are doing to their families by pushing this narrative?