Guardian long read by Shon Faye about trans children

[Booboobadoo]

I couldn't find a thread about this already, thought would add:
www.theguardian.com/society/2021/aug/24/shaky-acceptance-transgender-kids-families-fight-for-inclusion?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Inclusion or 'do what tell you bigots and centre Shon in everything bigots!' ?

It is very one-sided. I was a tomboy the entire time at primary school. I didn’t get the other girls, had no interest in dolls, only wore jeans and asked for meccano sets for Christmas.

I wasn’t ‘trans’, I was just a child. Like 80-90% of gender non-conforming children, my issues were resolved at puberty.

www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.632784/full

Some children persist, and for them an early transition may be beneficial, but if there is medication involved things become dangerous.

Early medical transition and your body never goes through a normal puberty. We know that makes the children infertile, and may well also impact on their brain development. There needs to be research on this, but transactivists seem to block research.

Shon is not even worth a short read

Can someone précis it please, so I don't have to read it?

Same here, @RoastChicory. My mother 'despaired' of my tom boy ways.

Interesting, especially that of the parents. I think that a lot of history is being rewritten. I know a family with a trans child who 'came out' at three or four whose parent is also quite vocal on social media.
At that age, the parent was using toys and clothes primarily as proof that the child was trans e.g. (X always refused to have a haircut and went straight to the dress up box for dresses).
There was also nothing but affirming and cheerleading from the offset as well as a great deal of defensiveness at the idea that the child might just be gender non conforming rather than 'born in the wrong body'. (Their words)
The child is now 11 and the narrative is now that in Faye's article: it wasn't about clothes and they spent time trying to work it out first before reluctantly agreeing to transition. They've also denied saying 'wrong body' which appears to have fallen out of fashion.
Anyone who has been in proximity to this family will know that's not true. There's been a great deal of shifting and changing of the story from the beginning as its become clearer and clearer that its all rooted in stereotypes even as they completely deny that it is.

I would read it but I doubt it would offer anything insightful. I suspect it will contain a heart wrenching anecdote about a family with a precocious articulate child, won’t mention all the girls presenting currently, won’t mention all the kids with ASD or intellectual impairment or trauma, won’t talk about the lack of evidence of medical transition nor the harm, and will probably have something about Section 28 and how we are all bigots or something.

not I have only very quickly skimmed but that pretty much sums it up. You forgot the evils of Transgender Trend though.

I'll have a look later maybe. I've got women's work cleaning to do.

@NotBadConsidering

I would read it but I doubt it would offer anything insightful. I suspect it will contain a heart wrenching anecdote about a family with a precocious articulate child, won’t mention all the girls presenting currently, won’t mention all the kids with ASD or intellectual impairment or trauma, won’t talk about the lack of evidence of medical transition nor the harm, and will probably have something about Section 28 and how we are all bigots or something.

That's amazing. Pretty much spot on with every point.

And lots of confident assertions about ‘gender identity’. It is total bollocks, and dangerous in the consequences for the children.

I have different degrees of sympathy for those under the trans umbrella. But not for those pushing for medical interventions to "fix" children turning them into medical cases for life. Especially since when the scandal breaks properly into the public consciousness most of the will simply walk away.

It’s pushing hard on the nothing at all to do with stereotypes isn’t it?

For some trans people it’s all about the stereotypes and very little to do with wanting to be the opposite sex (e.g non-binary identities). Which is fine but it’s just not the same thing at all.

I really feel that those with body (I.e. sex) dysphoria who used to be known as transsexual are very much being let down by everyone else being shoved under the ‘trans’ umbrella and used when convenient (as in this article) to prove the point that ‘it’s not about stereotypes’.

I assume it's an excerpt from Faye's new book, is it?

How extraordinary that a liberal paper like the Guardian is now promoting the sterilisation of children.

I assume it's an excerpt from Faye's new book, is it?

Yep.

Knowing who the author is I'll give the article a miss, thanks.

I was watching an interview with Blaire White the other day. She would describe herself as a classic transexual, i.e. knew from a very young age, persisted and is happier now having had some surgical interventions, but interestingly she said she is glad she never had any treatment pre-puberty as it would have completely messed her up and it was better for her to discover things in good time and deal with it as an adult.

The thing I don’t get about all of this is wtf qualifies shon or any of the arseholes who are telling us what we should do.

Experiencing something does not quality you as an expert???

Remember the good old days when people had to be taught and educated on a subject before they could claim to share knowledge and make recommendations?

Experiencing something does not quality you as an expert???

How many of those actively pushing for medical interventions to "fix" children turning them into medical cases for life have gone through this process themselves?

We are sleepwalking into a safeguarding nightmare…

@nauticant

Experiencing something does not quality you as an expert???

How many of those actively pushing for medical interventions to "fix" children turning them into medical cases for life have gone through this process themselves?

Well that's the thing isn't it? 'Get tits early' Faye certainly didn't. In fact I can't think of a single person who is banging the drum for childhood puberty blockers apart from people who went through puberty themselves.

Those who were pushed down that route by their parents are noticeably quiet on the matter.

It not difficult to predict these sorts of articles, particularly by people like Faye, and particularly in publications like the Guardian. There’s no way they’d want to instil doubt in the reader by giving the example of:

“Alex*, born female, is under the guardianship of social services but in the care of ‘his’ grandparents. Alex has been the victim of abuse, suspected sexual abuse but unable to be proven. There is also the suspicion of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Alex spends all of ‘his’ time on Discord. Alex told people ‘he’ was trans and a boy last week, having never expressed such sentiments before.”

(*based on an amalgamation of real cases).

It befits the narrative more if they convince people that all of these kids are clear of thought and have always expressed the view they’re of the opposite sex, when the reality is the exact opposite. Every single pro “trans kids” article I’ve seen has a story like that so I’m not surprised I was right in predicting this one would too. It’s pure propaganda.

It's in the Graun.

Can 100% predict the line it will take. Not wasting my time and not giving them clicks.

There have always been deluded parents and outright abusive parents. We should be able to rely on professionals to see through the verbiage and advocate for the child's best interests. Sadly, many professionals are also on the bandwagon.

This sort of casual sloppiness is enraging: "For those unacquainted with trans people, it might seem that in the past decade there has been a huge rise in children expressing issues with their birth-assigned gender. This is a perilous misunderstanding of the reality; in fact, there aren’t greater numbers of children asserting a trans identity than there were in the past. There are simply more children who feel able to talk about it openly and seek support and advocacy from their parents."

1. How do you know? If you don't want to go into it, can we at least have a footnote or something that at least in very broad terms explains why you are so sure that there are no more trans children than "in the past" (which part of "the past"? where?)

1. "for those unacquainted with trans people -" this is a very telling mistake. If this sentence makes any sense at all, she means "for those unacquainted with trans issues." But she isn't saying that - she's saying "trans people" or in other words blatantly coming out and saying "unless you hang around as friends with lots of trans people and are very tight with trans activists, you won't have been correctly brain washed about this yet." If what she is asserting, or sloppily trying to assert, in this sentence, was actually true, you would not have to know any trans people at all to be able to read statistical trends (where from? What trends? See point 1) and understand whether there are more trans children now than at any other given time.

I can't believe she gets away with this as journalism, let alone in a book. (to be fair, the book might be tighter and better edited - this might have been sloppily shortened for the paper. But it still shows how she thinks - "if you're a friend of trans people, which you should be, you will think like this, and believe that, and I don't have to give you facts or statistics to show why.")

It is however useful to remember the vilely homophobic atmosphere of schools in the 80s. If you were there and if you were gender non-conforming then you were traumatised. Even if you personally were not gender non-conforming, you could be traumatised to witness it. I think it's important to see what is happening in the name of trans rights in the context of that trauma.