BBC at it again

[Chersfrozenface]

www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/20d41ea8-42df-4bcd-92e6-692e204d3894

"Why one woman filmed her transition: ‘I want to show young trans kids it gets better’
Lily grew up in a small village, where she faced misunderstanding and prejudice – but wants to show young trans people like her that things can change"

Time to insist BBC Three does a sympathetic documentary on Keira Bell. For balance, since the BBC claims to be so much in favour of that.

A female child will never go through male puberty no matter how much testosterone you give them.

Is that what they're being told will happen?

Trans and suicide do go together. This is a well established fact. You can look at surveys of trans people from across the world covering thousands of individuals and suicidal feelings are always a major component.

First you say "suicide", then you say "suicidal feelings". These are not remotely the same thing. But attempts to blur the distinction are very common.

Puberty blockers are justified as "preventing suicide", when the number of child suicides attributable to dysphoria is not statistically distinguishable from zero. IIRC, the Tavistock had no reported cases.

All the stuff about "life-saving treatment" is just emotional nonsense. It's a physical treatment for a mental health condition, with unknown efficacy. The mental health condition normally resolves without treatment during puberty, and it's not clear whether puberty blockers do better in that regard.

the sex you were assigned at birth.

No such thing happens. Come on. The sex of a baby can be observed waaay before they're born. Assigned a name, yes, assigned a sex, absolutely not.

most trans people wouldn't want a psychological solution because they would feel that it's attempting to turn them into someone else. That's conversion therapy.

That to me says gender identity is tethered to the body and the look of that body. So only the bodily changes you wish for will make it possible to realise your true gender identity. Is that what you're saying, @Positrans?

positrans

The systematic review that you reference was limited to adults only. Therefore I do not believe that informs the discussion about potential impact of PBs in children.

From the methodology page:
Participants: Adults who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, who have transitioned gender, or who self-identify as transgender

Thanks for posting those studies. I will definitely read them later.

However they are about adults and we are talking about children and teens. And the papers from the clinicians are about children and teens.

From the methodology

Our research protocol was developed in accordance with the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) Guidelines. We used the PICOS (Participants, Interventions, Comparisons, Outcomes, and Study Design) criteria to organize our approach to this research question:

Participants: Adults who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, who have transitioned gender, or who self-identify as transgender

That's quite an adult viewpoint. Children need to grow away from their parents and they need an identity and a place where they feel they fit in

But on the flip side " if Katy jumped off a cliff would you?" Was a common phrase in most of our childhoods . Yes we tried to carve out some space but ultimately we weren't allowed these things to take over our lives and we also were kept quite grounded with it. We were told no rather than indulged with everything to extremes. And those bkundries were important. We had to learn that although we were obviously special to our friends and family, that was as far as it went. We knew we were no more special than anyone else in the outside world

Totally agree with that. Children are children. They are growing still, developing brains and bodies. They need the right kind of support and help. I was more just trying to explain that what is not important as an adult can be very important to the child

@Positrans

There are no pychological solutions to gender dysphoria. There are some that help you cope, but none that cure it. Also, gender identity is about who you are, so most trans people wouldn't want a psychological solution because they would feel that it's attempting to turn them into someone else. That's conversion therapy.

This is not unusual - there are many medical conditions that have negative effects on your mental health, and psychiatry can help you cope with that, but what you need is for the underlying condition to be cured. The most effective way to do that with gender dysphoria is transition.

How exactly is having needless surgery, hormones and other subsequent drugs and surgery to cope with the surgery 'solving the problem'. There is no evidence to suggest transition actually helps psychologically either, especially long term.

So what the point?

Genuinely curious about what this achieves apart from a focus and goal oriented life for a few years, (which may provide a distraction and temporary relief) but doesn't solve the overiding problem that no one can change sex.

The response at this point seems to be to lash out at everyone else (including those who are supportive), blaming them of 'not understanding enough', not bending over backwards to put them first foresaking all else, rampant paranoia about prejudices and just blaming everyone for not becoming an amazing super highflyer simply because everyone else has to uphold and participate in a fantasy about life in general (which goes far beyond gender identity) which is unachievable.

You can not destroy material reality. It always still exists. Thats the problem at the heart of this that the ideology (and it is an ideology rather than an identity crisis - because its based on belief not anything more).

I note the article was recent enough to mention Elliot Page but Keira gerts no mention. The BBC seems to think that Hollywood stars are more newsworthy than English law.

As I said - I told no one I was trans, and no one knew, so I wasn't being told anything about how I should feel. A lot of us kept extremely quiet about it in our childhoods.

I will just make a point about this. My sibling's retrospective memory about incidents in their childhood are rather different to mine. I'm three years older.

They insist that the idea came purely from them. I remember how fucked up it made me (and had massive consequences to me as a teenager and my own mental well-being) that my mother constantly told us from about age 8 (and 5) that we were 'born the wrong way around' and i should have been a boy and he should have been a girl. My sibling of course denies this (despite them having no memory of their childhood before about age 7 whereas mine goes back to age 2 which always astonishes my Mum).

Not only this but my parents invested hours and hours into trying to get them into sport, any sport because they were so worried about them being small, effeminate and 'a bit of a wimp'. They would think up ways to try and 'toughen them up'. This wasn't helped by me being a tomboy. Then they suffered really bad bullying at school along the same lines including being called 'a girl' or other such sexist namecalling.

There's other stuff too. That i was a first hand witness to.

But I'm supposed to swallow the bullshit that it 'all came from them' and there wasn't anything else going on to influence them. Cos to express my reality and recall my own life and memory of events is 'transphobic' somehow. My Mum in particular is annoying as fuck on this as obviously this affirms what she thought all along. (Spot the cognitive dissance on this from my mum who both acknowledges my recollection as accurate but also then says it came all from my sibling and was in no way an influence on her child)

Strangely enough my sibling has followed the strangely familiar pattern of getting into Japanese Anime and associated social media communities and suddenly finding their true authentic self which seems to be rather a strange coincidence if it were a naturally occuring phenomenon rather than a socially produced one. Obviously Japanese Anime is the obvious vehicle for people with gender identity 'finding each other' rather randomly because they just happened to like Japanese cartoons than these existing online communities promoting certain social values & ideas and propogating them and having certain common physical representations of idealised bodies and heavily stereotyped (and sexist) gender roles. Its definitely not got any parallels at all with pro-ana communities...

Trans and suicide do go together. This is a well established fact.

Not according to this recent paper:
www.researchgate.net/profile/Kenneth_Zucker3/publication/345626543_Suicidality_in_clinic-referred_transgender_adolescents/links/5fa943dba6fdcc06242032de/Suicidality-in-clinic-referred-transgender-adolescents.pdf

Although our data suggest that elevated rates of suicidality are a clinical issue requiring attention in some transgender adolescents, it should, of course, be noted that the majority of the adolescents, either by parent-report or self-report, did not report such thoughts or behaviors

The problem is positrans, is that this is your opinion, your experience. I'm sorry you experienced it. You say yourself you have come through and made the decisions that are right for you. That's ok, you are an adult.

However, I know many trans people who disagree with affirmation during the teen years. One even thinks it should be 21. Their experiences are entirely different. They suffered but they waited.

I appreciate your discussion though as it's very good to have civilised debate.

There are red flags for me in this programme in terms of how much YouTube influenced the individual. There needs to be a careful balance. Sweden has shown rates of trans teens being directly impacted by media sources.

Trans is quite simple to define really - it's the state of having a gender identity that is different to the sex

But what is a gender identity? I don't have one and nobody has ever been able to explain it to me without resorting to stereotypes. The nearest I can understand is that it is some internal sense of self which exists separate to the body. I can grasp that, as I was raised Catholic and still believe I have a soul - it is separate to my body and encompasses who I am. However, having a soul (gendered or otherwise) is a belief rather than a verifiable fact, and I would never condone physical alterations to a child based on a belief. That would be wholly unethical.

No one is "promoting" suicidal ideation in children, they are "reporting" it, and they need to do that because it's real

Suicide is known to have an element of social contagion about it, particularly among young people. And there is almost never a single cause. I will believe it is being "reported" rather than "promoted" when the groups involved stop relying on already debunked stats and start following the Samaritans guidance wrt reporting suicide.

I also need to point out that a number of sites and images on Instagram linked to self harm and anorexia are banned simply because teens with poor mental health are known to be influenced by such images and sites.

The process is similar to what media and charities like mermaids are doing, "this will help you."

Will it?

It's all about control and finding a community where people have commonalities.

Michele Moore describes at length a teen with anorexia who developed GD after a spell in an anorexia clinic, as two other girls had it too. Thereafter the anorexia was blamed on GD by clinicians.

A teen who definitely shouldn't have PBs as both the anorexia and the pbs would have ruined her bone density for life.

Red

Teens cannot imagine long term physical pain and disability unless they're actually experiencing it. Therefore they cannot consent to that.

Trans and suicide do go together. This is a well established fact

Correlation is not causation.

This is a well established fact. Unlike trans and suicide going together. I get very pissed off at the crap i see passed off as 'evidence' on this opinion which as soon as you put this 'evidence' under any level of scrutiny in terms of methodology it falls apart like a chocolate teapot.

The Stonewall examination of this was particularly alarming in how half the participants who were self reporting mood also identified as disabled. Which is completely unrepresentative of the population as a whole and deserved further investigation as potentiallly an alternative explanation rather than making the automatic lazy assumption that it was all about trans. Especially given what we know about autism...

@SisterWendyBuckett

Red

Thanks but im fine.

I wont be lectured by people about how 'they've always know' when my own experience is that is a pile of crock.

Why is my experience less important or relevant than someone who is trans?

Good to see so many women with knowledge to challenge some of what positrans is claiming.

The suicide starts debunked, the issue with social contagion, etc.

Positrans, you may not realise it, but there are at least 4000 posts on this site from women who have been married to transwomen. There are very, very many adult transwomen who would absolutely not have appreciated puberty blockers, because their adult bodies and sex life are very important to them.

Also, very many of these transwomen had typically masculine interests, careers, etc - what you have erroneously called being a 'tomboy'. For a lot of late transitioning male individuals, it's very common. As is the rewriting of history.

Also, mermaids are not very popular here. Many parents took rather a dim view of the blue jelly baby/pink jelly baby teacher training, to be honest.

I have to say @Positrans I don't agree with most of what you say but thankyou for remaining civil and telling us about your experience. Nice to read a thread that doesn't descend into slurs and posts being deleted.

Part of that is that I'm lucky - I'm small, have a naturally fairly high voice and I pass easily. Most trans women aren't so lucky. Also, that doesn't mean I have no problems, or that I didn't spend my life's savings on transition surgeries that could have been avoided.

I know the thread has moved on, but @Positrans, do you really believe that your male genitalia would have transformed themselves into female genitalia if you had been given cross-sex hormones and had never been through puberty?

And would you have been happier to have had a significant loss of sexual function and no fertility to be able to better replicate the looks cosmetically of a female?

How can gender identity be just about stereotypes if some trans girls are tomboys? I was one myself.

How can a boy be a 'tomboy'? A 'tomboy' is a label applied to a girl who does things which are stereotypically associated with boys. If a boy does them he is just an ordinary, unremarkable boy.

So if a gender identity is nothing to do with stereotypes, what is it? How would I know if I have one or what it is?