It's a long read, but an essential one, about WPATH's new draft Standards of Care (so, things like age limits on surgery, hormones etc among many other things) and the controversy around them. A few rushed thoughts:
"And just like that, after four years of painstaking work, Leibowitz, de Vries and the rest of their group were being called out as traitors by peers and the community they sought to care for. “We understood the enormity of the need for these standards from the beginning,” Leibowitz told me. “I’m not sure we recognized the enormity of the controversy. It’s a result of the fact that our world, the world of gender care, has exploded.”"
I can't decide whether it's sweet or alarming that they were so naive/sheltered from how the discourse has been in the past few years. Are they not on Twitter? (I'd hope they don't use it to inform their studies, obviously!) Of course setting any kind of age limits or even fuzzy requirements ("Identify as the gender for some time" - I paraphrase) will earn you 'fury from providers and activists within the transgender world.' The fact that you've been working in this field for years is irrelevant to the TRAs.
Based on this research, in some cases Zucker advised parents to box up the dolls or princess dresses, so a child who was being raised as a boy (a majority then) wouldn’t have those things to play with.
It's really hard to know what 'a child who was being raised as a boy' means. I assume male, but 'raising as' suggests gender not sex? I wish language wasn't so stupidly constrained. In fact the author hardly uses the words 'male' or 'female' unless describing e.g. 'male puberty'.
The Amsterdam clinic shifted, too. Some Dutch families socially transitioned kids on their own, which de Vries and her colleagues accepted; they began counseling other families about social transition too. Though the Amsterdam researchers’ previous results, like Zucker’s, showed that most kids who came to the clinic in elementary school later realigned with the genders of their birth, and often came out as gay, lesbian or bisexual, de Vries and her colleagues now see those findings as a product of their time, when the children whom parents brought to the clinic included many boys with an interest in wearing feminine clothing and playing with dolls that didn’t turn out to be gender dysphoria. Today many Dutch parents are more accepting of this behavior, and the Amsterdam clinicians think that as a result, most of the children who come to the clinic are asserting a strong and persistent gender preference. It’s more likely that such children will stay the course of being transgender, research shows
This is a good thing, I think? And look, it's a result of going against the notion that 'playing with dolls means you're a girl', that is so commonly brought up by parents of transgender kids (this was a big issue with the Mermaids' woman's kid). I.e. - being more critical of gendered roles. I hope this approach is encouraged.
“I know there are worries that effeminate males can be assumed to be female or masculine girls can be assumed to be male,” says Amy Tishelman, the lead author of the SOC8 chapter on children and a child psychologist who is the former director of clinical research at the gender clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital. “That’s not what we’re advocating. Support for trans people should not be a way of limiting what a girl or a boy or a woman or a man or a person can be.”
I hope they expand on this and make it extremely clear that femininity and masculinity have nothing to do with sex or gender. Currently, the NHS 'gender dysphoria' criteria rely heavily on stereotypes.
St. Amand thinks the purpose of an assessment is not to determine the basis of a kid’s gender identity. “That just reeks of some old kind of conversion-therapy-type things,” he told me over the phone in April. “I think what we’ve seen historically in trans care is an overfocus on assessing identity.” He continued: “People are who they say they are, and they may develop and change, and all are normal and OK. So I am less concerned with certainty around identity, and more concerned with hearing the person’s embodiment goals. Do you want to have a deep voice? Do you want to have breasts? You know, what do you want for your body?”
Interesting that this person wants to get away from 'identity' and reduce people to concentrate on body parts and physical characteristics. This would seem to be a logical progression from 'there's no such thing as a male or female body' that Stonewall etc assert.
Interesting descriptions of internalised misogyny driving trans boy identities.
Jack Turban is included in the article, whom I mainly know from this medium.com/@JLCederblom/the-lukewarm-perjury-of-jack-turban-a85903109051
Lots more to think on but it's a good summary.