Helen Lewis on Puberty Blockers article

[ILoveToSquanderPromise]

From her Substack:

Yesterday, the Atlantic published something I’ve been working on for a while—an article on the US child gender medicine debate. I wanted to make the case to the right that the bans (12 states so far and counting) are unduly punitive, counter-productive and might have unforeseen consequences—such as children with severe mental health needs not seeking treatment, or doctors afraid to give it to them.

But I also wanted to make the case to the left that the U.S. is becoming more of an outlier in terms of the approach it favours (“affirmation”), the frequency with which it turns to medical solutions, and the ages at which doctors are allowed to perform surgeries.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/texas-puberty-blockers-gender-care-transgender-rights/673941/

The middle ground approach is how we got here in the first place. First it was, okay we'll only mutilate and sterilise children who have the most severe diagnosis of gender dysphoria, but then over the years this has gradually crept into targeting more and more gender non-conforming children who have been groomed into believing they can become the opposite sex.

There can be no middle ground to this. This abuse of children must be halted immediately. Ideally there would also be imprisonment on the cards for all the Mengele types who enabled this horror.

Agree with zibzibara. I could be wrong but doesn't Helen Lewis also say trans women are women?

I liked Leor Sapir's Twitter thread on this piece. It's long, so I'm linking to the ThreadReader thingy, but here is a sample:

As I and Corinna say in the piece, bans are an unfortunate concession to reality. That reality is that, at the moment at least, the choice is between unregulated "gender-affirming care" and limiting these interventions to age 18+.

Why? Because those who practice affirmative care have proven time and again that they simply cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. They are committed to the "affirming" ideology that takes kids at their word and eschews exploratory therapy.

Democrats might have shown interest in treating trans medicine as an open scientific debate rather than a "civil rights" issue pitting good against evil. had they done so, we might have had laws that are more nuanced and moderate.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1654119280177299457.html

Taking a middle ground approach always sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? But in medicine there are plenty of areas where a middle ground is simply wrong.

Here we have a situation where you can choose to give mentally distressed children harmful medication and surgery that will have permanent, life-changing consequences, at an age where they're not even old enough to have a tattoo. Or you can choose to give them counselling and talk through their feelings of distress.

What really is the middle ground between those two positions? Just give the harmful medication and surgery to some children - the ones who are really distressed? Or just give it to them when they're 16, because although 16 is young, it's older than 13? Or give them counselling first and, if that doesn't work, then put them on the medication that will destroy their bone density, damage their fertility, give them vaginal atrophy, followed by surgery that has a 60% complication rate?

It's ludicrous.

Hard agree