Guardian article

[Brainstorm21]

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/15/what-i-should-have-done-when-my-12-year-old-told-me-he-was-transgender?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Top surgery at 17?

It was their awful reporting of the Cologne NYE attacks in 2015 which turned me away from the Guardian. It hasn't got any better.
Me too - it was awful. I’d been reading for 20 years.

Articles like this have such power to some people. I think it's awful to publish them without some balance - you should care if they change your mind. You should challenge the idea that a gender identity and a body can and should match. We should hear from a detransitioner. We should hear from others who found other ways through this distress. We should hear about the health issues associated with the superficial body changes the person has achieved. Articles like this harm people especially vulnerable young people who don't ask these questions themselves .

*Once that oestrogen tide goes out, that's when a short and sharp menopause can hit. Apart from that, the only side effect is potential bone brittleness from a loss of calcium, so we're being vigilant about ensuring he's keeping up his vitamins.

*Vitamins are all that's needed to treat post-menopausal osteoporosis? Wow! How come the medical establishment doesn't know this!

Poor, poor kid.

The article doesn't have BTL comments allowed. Notably, every other article in that series does.

On the pseudo-mature children, I wonder whether this is a kind of "precocious" behaviour. If a child gets lots of attention and praise from adults for behaving in a superficially more adult way when they are young, they are likely to go on doing that as they get older. But it stops looking cute and then starts becoming age-appropriate. That's confusing for the child because something that previously earned praise is no longer effective. I think it also hinders development of more mature behaviour, as the child finds it hard to distinguish between the cutsey version and the actual adult equivalent.

(Off topic, but I think Laurie Penny's essays are an example of this. What was fantastic writing for a 6th form student and indicative of huge writing talent is much less impressive now that she's in her 30s and being compared to mature essayists. But because she was showered in praise when younger, she hasn't been able to evolve her style - perhaps because she mistook being told that her writing was great for someone her age for hearing that she is a great writer.)

@JellySaurus

*Once that oestrogen tide goes out, that's when a short and sharp menopause can hit. Apart from that, the only side effect is potential bone brittleness from a loss of calcium, so we're being vigilant about ensuring he's keeping up his vitamins. *Vitamins are all that's needed to treat post-menopausal osteoporosis? Wow! How come the medical establishment doesn't know this!

Poor, poor kid.

Vitamins?! Brittle bones casually mentioned as a side effect as if they were a mere brief headache.

I’m wondering if this article may be a parody.

Apart from that, the only side effect is potential bone brittleness from a loss of calcium, so we're being vigilant about ensuring he's keeping up his vitamins.

Apart from anything else, calcium isn't a vitamin.

I am a post-menopausal woman. Like many post-menopausal women I have osteoporosis - a disease that kills 12,000 women a year. That's more than the most common female cancers. Almost all of those women are old: in their 70s and 80s. Now imagine a young person experiencing that kind of bone loss in their 20s.

I wrote a long post on a previous thread about this regarding Freddy McConnell’s ability to provide informed consent. McConnell still doesn’t understand the implications of removing breasts, thinking if the nipples had been left alone Freddy would have been able to breastfeed. And this is someone who has had surgery and had 7 years to think about it.

That is both tragic and terrifying.

Articles like this harm people especially vulnerable young people who don't ask these questions themselves

And harms other parents unsure and lacking information about the process and reality. All that much worse because it’s coming from a parent who says they were initially unsure but apparently wholly convinced this was the right path for their child.

If a child gets lots of attention and praise from adults for behaving in a superficially more adult way when they are young, they are likely to go on doing that as they get older

The attention and praise also comes from being “trans”. So massive shock when child becomes an adult and is then expected to do adult things, but with a destroyed endcrime system, as a life long patient and with reduced fertility

Is the writer American, given she calls secondary school ’’high school” and injections “ shots” and speaks of “top surgery” which is euphemistic?
“Five years later, Connor is in his final year of high school, and is the happiest I’ve seen him since he was a child. We were lucky enough to access a gender clinic in our city, where both he and I were both nurtured through the process of his transition. He has been getting testosterone shots for more than a year now, and recently had top surgery, which removes the breasts, leaving a masculine chest.”

I’ve seen she is Australian. Either way the article seems like an artificial import

nolongersurprised
The attention and praise also comes from being “trans”.

I agree. I think there can also be an element of coaching with younger children - e.g. parents repeatedly asking a small child whether they feel like a boy or a girl today, asking them to state pronouns etc. Not sure if that's the case with the family in this article (the child was nearly a teenager when they started to identify as trans), but I would think that starts to create the association between gender identity conversations and praise/attention. Which then feeds into the parents recalling how their child 'identified' as trans from an impossibility young age.

It appears from Carolyn’s go fund me page set up for Connor’s double mastectomy that the surgery was very recent - as in January this year. Although the update may be a few weeks out of date now Connor was still recovering.

This is one of my soapbox topics but projecting adult intentions and motivations into children never ends well. You see it with child prodigies whose asynchronous development is encouraged - Uni at 12, hours or hours of music practice/day. Primary school children who are feted as the next Olympian. People are fascinated until they reach adulthood and then interest fades and the young adult is no longer “special”.

For this poor girl, her trans ness is her connection to her mum, the cause of her mum’s epiphany about acceptance or whatever and the subject of a few articles her mother has written. She’s fucked now if she ever wants to question her fertility, life long medical needs, difficulties with intimate relationships and the loss of her breasts.

The writer uses her child regularly in order to generate income via freelance articles as you can clearly see here:

muckrack.com/carolyn-tate-2/articles

The writer also has a history of an abusive relationship. startsat60.com/author/carolyn-tate where he threatened suicide - something replicated by her child.

Trans children appear rather lucrative.

Does the Guardian dare to give column inches to the parent of a detransitioner, or would that be a cancellable act?

@nolongersurprised

"a very limited number of people with whom they can be in a relationship,.."

This fact is one of the most grievous injustices parents do to these kids. Its utterly negligent. I sometimes will lurk on LGBDropTheT over at saidit.net and post after post are stories of young women who have transitioned, hanging out at clubs and bathhouses wanting sex with gay men. The different scenarios sound like MontyPython skits but its tragic for them. Its absurd for them expect anything other than disinterest, hostility and rejection. Do none of these parents consider the future dearth of partners?

I have to wonder whether the mother encouraged the transition because she didn't think her child wasn't an attractive enough female.

Do none of these parents consider the future dearth of partners?

It’s worse for boys, in a way. A boy who has had puberty blockers then oestrogen willhave the penis and testicles of a 9-10 year old with no ejaculatory function. That will be - or should be - off putting to adults considering them as sexual partners. I wonder if the push for genital surgery in some of these boys is to obscure the inherent horror that is an adult with a small boy’s genitals.

It may be that the vulva/vagina of girls is similarly underdeveloped if puberty blockers are used - but who knows? Certainly the people prescribing this don’t seem to know.

@MondayYogurt

The writer uses her child regularly in order to generate income via freelance articles as you can clearly see here:

muckrack.com/carolyn-tate-2/articles

The writer also has a history of an abusive relationship. startsat60.com/author/carolyn-tate where he threatened suicide - something replicated by her child.

Trans children appear rather lucrative.

Does the Guardian dare to give column inches to the parent of a detransitioner, or would that be a cancellable act?

Very interesting points. Devastating, too.

Definitely think the Guardian needs such articles for balance.