'Do you want a 65 pound kid or a dead kid?'

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

Fantastic thread copied over from Twitter. @gigilarue4, a US woman, posted it yesterday.
***
Imagine, if you will, your thirteen year old daughter coming to you, out of the blue with some news. Imagine your happy, great looking, healthy, smart, successful, socially active child coming to you and saying tearfully “Mom, I’m too fat. I’m not supposed to be 105 pounds. I’m supposed to be 65 pounds. I hate to look in the mirror and I hate my body this way”.

Suddenly, they start wearing baggy jeans, heavy sweatshirts and oversized clothes to make themselves appear smaller. They spend hours on the internet looking at pictures of 65 pound people who have successfully achieved their goal with excessive dieting and liposuction. They become obsessed with every bite of food they take, after a lifetime of loving French fries, pizza, ice cream, pasta, cooking- suddenly that passion for food has evaporated. All they think about is how happy they will be when they get to be 65 pounds.

You talk to the counselor at their school. She says, “Awww…talk to this person, she’s an expert”, and she hands you a business card. The person is a doctor at Children’s Hospital, and she has an Eating Disorder clinic that is world famous. You call and explain your situation to her social worker.

The social worker says that you kid can come in and be put on a liquid diet of 500 calories a day and will reach her goal weight of 65 pounds in a few months. They can then do liposuction on the areas that didn’t thin out they way they should have.

You pause, certain you misheard her and say, “Excuse me? She’s supposed to be 105 pounds. That’s a healthy weight”, & the social worker says, ”Well, you need to accept that you now have a 65 pound child. The suicide rate for kids with this issue is 40%. Do you want a 65 pound kid or a dead kid?”

You obviously want your kid alive so you ask about therapy. The social worker says “We don’t find mental health evaluations useful. These kids just know who they are and once they realize this about
themselves, parents need to step out of the way and let them take this journey. If we have to involve the law to get parents on the right side of this, we will. That’s a last resort, but it happens.I do have a therapist who is also 65 pounds, and they can talk to your kid about
how the process works”.

You say thank you and hang up. Something doesn’t feel right. You call a few other therapists and they either don’t work with kids or they have a very limited knowledge of this particular Eating Disorder. A few say they specialize in this issue and have had several patients that have eventually all gotten to 65 pounds. “Nobody in my practice has ever not gone down the road”, they say, “They just know what’s right for them”.

In the following weeks, your kid stops eating and develops depression, anxiety and spends too much time looking at emaciated people on Instagram. Every conversation is about food or weight-loss, every meal is excruciating. Any attempts to use logic like, “65 pounds is not a healthy weight and impossible to maintain that long term without serious health effects” is met with anger and accusations of invalidating her authentic self.

You research more and find that the consensus of all of the major medical organizations- Pediatric Endocrine Society, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medial Association-is that once your kid decides they are supposed to be 65 pounds, there’s nothing anyone can do. They just know, and you need to support them. Simply having the thought is enough to proceed with the liquid diet and liposuction.

Any attempt to reason with them or convince them to nourish themselves is considered child abuse conversion therapy and laws are enacted to prevent therapists who might be concerned about their mental well being from addressing it.

You come across several websites created by kids who did this exact thing- who are now older and their bodies are permanently destroyed from adverse effects of long term starvation.Their brains, organs and metabolic system is out of whack and it will never be the same. No matter how much they try to regulate it, they will never be able to get back their once healthy body. They wish they’d been given an alternative immediate affirmation of their misconception that they were overweight. They wish the doctors had told them no.

Now replace “65 pounds” with “trans”. That’s what this feels like.
***

For anyone who missed @Waitrosescheapestvodka's blatant lies on the previous page, here's the quotes:

"Self-starvation can be lethal. Taking hormones and surgery isn't." (11:38)

"I did not say surgery cannot be lethal." (12:55)

Fuck off with your gaslighting.

There is a comment somewhere below about how FWR seems to have an exceptional number lot of women who have had body /gender hatred problems

I wonder if this is because women who have had this experience in childhood or adolescence tend to twi very quickly to the problems with the way experts are dealing with kids and adolescent girls.

I would say that it is probably true that deep loathing of the body may be relatively rare, but I think that it's just very very common for adolescent girls to feel uncomfortable, embarrassed, and scared about the changes of adolescence. That's exaggerated by the ramped up emotions found in kids of that age, about all kinds of issues.

ArnoldWhatshisknickers I read that the Thai government changed their laws as a reaction to Jackie Green bring taken there for that surgery.

It's a good analogy and shows the contrast in how eating disorders and body dysmorphia are tackled versus the completely uncritical approach in transgenderism and in dealing with children who are distressed and obsessed with the gendered expectations around their bodies.

This. I've also posted before about people with body dysmorphia and unrealistic expectations being referred for psychological support instead of plastic surgery, even (actually especially) when they have said they will end their lives without said surgery.

So why are people with dysmorphia around their sexual organs not given the same support?

@Themyscira

Admittedly a slight contradiction there! Not sure on the need to be abusive, though.

Saying that surgery isn't lethal isn't quite the same as saying "no person ever dies from surgery complications, ever". I'd say eating food is not lethal, but death from anaphylactic shock happens. I was speaking generally.

Not eating though is most definitely lethal, and not eating for a sustained period is lethal for everyone. At it's more severe end treatment for eating disorders is directly life saving.

My point is that although I can see where the analogy is coming from, it minimises the risks of anorexia. A 25% death rate is terrifying and this is why extremely restrictive and aggressive interventions like forced nasogastric feeding are viewed as justifiable. I don't think the comparison holds.

I think it's a useful comparison, obviously it's a different illness and so there are differences.

But it does make us ask the question, why with the one do we realise that self-perception and attitude to our own body can be inaccurate and related to some sort of unhealthy or even disordered thought process that needs to be addressed, while denying that possibility with sex dysphoria.

It's also worthwhile because I think both are related in some instances to the same people, teen girls (mainly) who are so uncomfortable with the changes of puberty that they are willing to go far to shut them down, be that through starving themselves or surgery and hormones.

My point is that although I can see where the analogy is coming from, it minimises the risks of anorexia. A 25% death rate is terrifying and this is why extremely restrictive and aggressive interventions like forced nasogastric feeding are viewed as justifiable. I don't think the comparison holds.

I think though that what concerns many is that while the interventions for kids identified as trans may not have that kind of short term numbers associated with them, what about down the line? There are very serious outcomes that may affect just as many people if we look 20 years down the line, including an earlier death, maybe a lot earlier. In every case you are probably going to have significant negative health outcomes in the longer term.

It's easy to not give those weight because we don't see them right away, that's how our minds assess risk. But what if 25% of kids that have these interventions die 20 years early? How do we count that in terms of seriousness?

I did not say surgery cannot be lethal. Any surgery comes with risks, just as (to a lesser extent) any medicine does. But we aren't talking 1 in 4 are we?

Firstly, 1 in 4 is the lifetime risk of mortality and second, morbidity and mortality rates don’t have to match absolutely perfectly to make the analogy worthwhile. The point of the analogy is everyone would be rightly horrified if children with anorexia nervosa were allowed to dictate the terms of their treatment but for children with gender identity issues it’s deemed completely fine.

Sometimes it helps to be really clear about what is involved with these vulnerable young people.

The surgery here includes castrating young males and removing young women’s breasts.

The hormones taken by distressed, dysmorphic young people will make them infertile and may shorten their lives.

Baldly, the consequences can be catastrophic. And vulnerable young men and women deserve better. We have to safeguard them, when their distress means they are not able to make informed, objective and calm decisions about their future.

We have to safeguard them, when their distress means they are not able to make informed, objective and calm decisions about their future.

Why aren't the medical professionals safeguarding them? - all I can see is cheerleading