Conversion Therapy and a Survey of 25,896 LGBTQ youth

[Shizuku]

Trigger Warning - this post discusses suicidal feelings.

As the banning of conversion therapy is currently being debated, it might be useful for members of this group to see a survey of 25,896 LGBTQ youth which found that 57% of transgender and non-binary youth who have undergone conversion therapy report a suicide attempt in the last year:

www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2019/?section=Conversion-Therapy-Change-Attempts

If anyone reading this is experiencing suicidal thoughts, please know that suicide is preventable, and that support is available. Here is a link to the Samaritans:

www.samaritans.org/

@Awiltu

You mistake is thinking that sex is purely about reproduction.

It is purely about reproduction. Humans come in two generic types, male and female, because that's how humans, as a mammalian species, have evolved to create the next generation of humans to perpetuate the species. If humans had evolved to reproduce by budding clones of ourselves from our fingertips, we wouldn't need sexual dimorphism.

Asks the person who is telling literally thousands of highly trained, highly educated doctors and scientists who specialise in this field that they have got it wrong.

No, what posters on this thread have been saying is that, irrespective of the quality of the science, your interpretation of it is wrong.

pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/09/02/peds.2013-2958

"METHODS: A total of 55 young transgender adults (22 transwomen and 33 transmen) who had received puberty suppression during adolescence were assessed 3 times: before the start of puberty suppression (mean age, 13.6 years), when cross-sex hormones were introduced (mean age, 16.7 years), and at least 1 year after gender reassignment surgery (mean age, 20.7 years). Psychological functioning (GD, body image, global functioning, depression, anxiety, emotional and behavioral problems) and objective (social and educational/professional functioning) and subjective (quality of life, satisfaction with life and happiness) well-being were investigated."

"RESULTS: After gender reassignment, in young adulthood, the GD was alleviated and psychological functioning had steadily improved. Well-being was similar to or better than same-age young adults from the general population. Improvements in psychological functioning were positively correlated with postsurgical subjective well-being."

No control group, no control treatment. For all we know, a comparable sample of trans young adults would have achieved the same outcome with psychotherapy alone.

If you are dismissing studies without control groups, you'll want to dismiss the Tavistock study then. You better let the people who are posting it know.

Any suicide is a tragedy. That still doesn't mean that there is any definitive evidence that the best way to prevent suicide in young trans people is to treat with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery.

It is almost as if you didn't realise that many of us have postgraduate science degrees or are working scientists and health professionals.

f you are dismissing studies without control groups, you'll want to dismiss the Tavistock study then. You better let the people who are posting it know.

Ah, but the Tavistock study failed to show any benefit. You don't need a control group to show that an effect that didn't happen might have been due to something else.

Just asking if the same link gets posted over and over, do we have repeat our posts about those links?

If you keep your stock answers in a document somewhere you can cut and paste the replies in?

I think sometimes I should get a database of standard answers to save us all a lot of effort

@YetAnotherSpartacus

The thing is though: we don't need citable sources to prove that sex is real. That's just a distraction

I'm imagining a physicist saying "Oh golly-gosh, I know! I'll write a paper explaining that the Earth is round!"

I'd say that there might be a mathematician out there saying the same about 1+1=2, but knowing mathematicians, there probably is.

DD1 started her Maths degree by having to prove that 1 actually exists, took a while to get to actually adding anything to it

Just asking if the same link gets posted over and over, do we have repeat our posts about those links?

Surely there must be a point when these links can get reported as spam.

@Awiltu

f you are dismissing studies without control groups, you'll want to dismiss the Tavistock study then. You better let the people who are posting it know.

Ah, but the Tavistock study failed to show any benefit. You don't need a control group to show that an effect that didn't happen might have been due to something else.

Exactly.

It is almost as if you didn't realise that many of us have postgraduate science degrees or are working scientists and health professionals.

Yes indeed.

Shizuku doesn't seem to understand that a scientific study is not a definitive statement of fact. You can't just do the equivalent of throwing a study on the table and say "There, all sorted". Scientific research is like trying to solve a giant jigsaw puzzle with no picture to guide you, and a box that contains some incorrect pieces. Each study is a piece of the puzzle, but researchers have to work out where it fits into the whole picture, and whether the piece belongs there at all or is an error.

The reason that research papers publish their methodology and statistical analyses, rather than just their conclusions, is so that others in the field can evaluate whether the authors' conclusions are valid, and so that other researchers can, if they wish, replicate the study to make sure the results weren't an anomaly.

You know when you tell a devout Catholic that you don't believe people are being cured of cancer by the Virgin at Lourdes and they send you a letter to the Catholic Herald as evidence followed up by sections of the bible as evidence. That.

this!

Ereshkigalangcleg 😂

There is something decadent and fundamentally wrong with a society that turns out distressed children, and then decides the cure must be the children are broken and need drugs and surgery to fit in.

@Thelnebriati

There is something decadent and fundamentally wrong with a society that turns out distressed children, and then decides the cure must be the children are broken and need drugs and surgery to fit in.

Indeed. And trying to pretend that middle aged transitioning males are the same as young, distraught teens. And demanding they are treated the same.

And trying to pretend that middle aged transitioning males are the same as young, distraught teens. And demanding they are treated the same

The lack of acknowledgement of who the current cohort of transitioners in the U.K. consists of has been noted repeatedly on this thread.

YetAnotherSpartacus:
I'd say that there might be a mathematician out there saying the same about 1+1=2, but knowing mathematicians, there probably is .

Following the derail a bit (no-one is taking OP seriously any more, anyway -- with good reason), here is an example of the proof:
Proof that 1 + 1 = 2 (There is a bit of English just over half-way down the page.)

[I had a quick look at that, and somewhat shamefacedly I admit I can still understand it. Easy enough in a way once you remember the notation. But for the life of me I cannot get to grips with what Shizuku thinks she means by 'gender identity'.]

It is so striking that OP is not interested in the wellbeing of children and young people. If they were, they'd be interested in proper discussion, getting as much evidence and data as possible, listening to detransitioners and other view points. It seems to me that instead they're just wanting a "gotcha". It's the only medical field I can think of that people are against collecting data about all outcomes.

Strangely, I think that if the OP was less hostile and absolute in posting style they probably would have realized by now that there is probably some commonality in what they believe is ‘good treatment’. Yet, we never get there because the continuous distraction and deflection and posturing.

[I had a quick look at that, and somewhat shamefacedly I admit I can still understand it. Easy enough in a way once you remember the notation. But for the life of me I cannot get to grips with what Shizuku thinks she means by 'gender identity'

I ran out of fingers and I don't think I'll ever have enough fingers to understand whatever it is that Shiz is on about. Or toes.

The Observer's leader the weekend that the Keira Bell judgement was issued is relevant to this discussion:

"Any questioning of the gender-affirming model – and the role that trauma, internalised hostility to same-sex attraction or misleading online material may play in gender dysphoria in teenagers – is dismissed as transphobic. This is a chilling state of affairs that is detrimental to child safety. There are children who will find last week’s judgment distressing and it is imperative they receive the professional support they need. Children are not pawns to be deployed in adult debates about identity. Bell’s bravery has paved the way for a child-centred judgment that gives them the protection they deserve"

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/06/the-observer-view-on-the-high-courts-ruling-on-puberty-blocking-drugs-for-children

The Times letter is appropriate here I think.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4190792-Conversion-therapy-letter-to-The-Times-today

trying to pretend that middle aged transitioning males are the same as young, distraught teens. And demanding they are treated the same.

I agree with the first part that there are people pretending that middle aged males have the same condition as teenage girls, but in some respects they are treated very differently.

There are middle aged males who simply label themselves transwomen, but have no intention of making any physical modifications to their bodies (for clarity NATWALT). We are supposed to accept that their bodies have miraculously been transformed into female bodies and their penises are now 'female penises'. Anyone who disagrees is labelled a bigot, and yet just a few years ago such people were referred to a crossdressers or transvestites, and nobody said they thought they were actually women.

OTOH teenage girls who identify as boys are being told that they need puberty blockers, testosterone and mastectomies asap. Why isn't there a demand to accept that those teenagers have 'male breasts' and 'male vaginas' and leave their bodies alone?

Asks the person who is telling literally thousands of highly trained, highly educated doctors and scientists who specialise in this field that they have got it wrong.

Science isn't a democracy. When every single expert in a field bar one lone voice agree, it still doesn't mean that all those experts are right and that one brave soul is wrong.

It's true that scientific consensus is arrived at by a collective of scientists in any given field largely agreeing on general points of a theory, but there is rarely agreement on all of the details. And as science evolves so does consensus. What was consensus ten years ago is today recognised as wrong, what is consensus today may be recognised as wrong in another ten.

Most of the time scientific consensus changes incrementally, imperceptibly until those changes add up to take consensus into a new direction. Sudden breakthroughs in science can also progress the state of knowledge, and sometimes those breakthroughs are made by one individual standing against all of their colleagues. One scientist who disagrees with the scientific consensus reached by her colleagues. There is huge resistance from the vast majority who all agree with the orthodoxy, then the evidence for the dissenting opinion mounts up and then the discipline slowly coalesces around a new consensus.

Take the origin of birds. You may not be old enough to remember, but when I was at primary school in the 70s, the idea that birds are the only living dinosaurs was ridiculed as abject nonsense. Birds and dinosaurs were closely related, but no more than that.

A British paleontologist called TH Huxley had proposed the theory in 1868, but it was rejected. There was no evidence in the available fossil record that birds could have evolved from dinosaurs.

Enter John Ostrom, arguably the most important paleontologist of the 20th century. His theories revolutionised the discipline, his work led to dinomania as well as Jurassic Park. He gave us the warmblooded agile dinosaurs we see in the movies, especially the fearsome velociraptors, modelled after deinonychus, discovered by Ostrom in 1964.

The same year he discovered a dinosaur skeleton that struck him as birdlike. Further discoveries and research led him to conclude that dinosaurs were indeed the direct ancestors of birds. He published his theory in 1973, revisiting Huxley's ideas from a hundred years earlier. And then he went through hell. He was called crazy. Deluded. For nearly 30 years, scientific consensus said he wasn't just wrong, but ridiculous for reviving a long discarded theory.

And then, in 2000 an excavation in China yielded the fossil evidence proving him right. He was vindicated. Today, scientific consensus regards those who dismiss Ostrom's theory on the origin of birds as the ridiculous ones.

Sadly, Ostrom himself could not enjoy his triumph. By then he was severely disabled and suffered from Alzheimer's. But his theory, once the opinion of one dissenter is now orthodoxy.

So while scientific consensus can be right, it can also be wrong. And appeals to believe one view because the mass of scientists agree on it are typically made to laypersons who don't understand how science works. That won't fly here.

Because scientific consensus does not in and of itself constitute proof for the veracity of a claim. You need to show your workings for that. And that means looking at these papers and analysing their methodology, their data and then examining whether their conclusions follow from their research and whether the conclusions are correctly represented in any claim made about them.

And we're doing just that and these papers fall short of your claims, Shizuku.

Can someone tell me whether expressing dismay that their child wants to have a double mastectomy, and having lots of discussion with that child to ascertain whether this is the answer, or whether anything else is going on (which might also account for their ED and self-harm which started precisely at the onset of puberty and after their father announced that he was leaving the family home to set up life with another woman) That’s a hypothetical scenario by the way but do you get what I’m getting? Does it mean any thoughtful, gentle exploration of their over all mental health before prescribing hormone blockers or T?

Because if that’s what they mean by ‘conversion therapy’ when it comes to Transgender aspects of the Bill then that’s outrageous and dangerous. And how does one convert an ‘asexual’ person? They appear to be prominent in this Lobbying to get the ban.In the case of my children I think any parent would let their child work that one out for themselves. If they don’t want to have sex or feel no sexual attraction that’s their business - if this involves them wanting hormones and surgery I’d certainly want to be able to discuss and explore this.

It’s very confusing. I might write to Liz Truss and ask her what the definition of ‘conversion therapy’ is. It’s down to definition and language again isn’t it. We need to be singing from the same song sheet.

I’m not mocking transgender youth or people. I’m saying to you @Shizuku that trans ideology cannot have it both ways.

Maybe my Blah Blah Blah was a bit clown like to say there has been lots of talk going in circles here.

Any suicide is a tragedy and that’s why transgender people deserve the best of unbiased, ethical and robust research, to avoid harm both to transitioners and detransitioners.

Keira’s Bell case made it clear; children are too young to know the repercussions of drastic decisions in their future lives and selves. But as it has been pointed here, treatment for distressed children should not advocate to damage their healthy body to fit with a ‘gender identity narrative’ no one can define outside restrictive and damaging stereotypes.

You don’t know me but feel confident to point to me as the cause of other people’s suffering. Shame on you.

I am in very good terms with the trans people I know and a few desisters. Most of them identified as lesbians before transitioning. In fact, some have very little if any sexual relationship before transitioning. Not all trans people think like you, many acknowledge their sex and the few adult ones I know are really upset at how younger trans are cared for.

Conversion therapy to me is what happens in Iran and what has happened to lesbians to be like Keira. Talking therapies should be available to explore MH before irreversible treatment.