Is This Just Me?

[Catiette]

So, for context, I've a range of concerns about mandated pronoun use (eg. children's health & well-being in the light of the Cass Review's findings; the impact on individuals with learning difficulties or who are neuro-divergent; the ethics of compelled speech especially in eg. a courtroom or DV context; women's rights...)

However, I also recognise this is a complex issue & am sympathetic to aspects of it. For example, I support using opposite sex pronouns in a legitimately diagnosed case of gender dysphoria, & am beginning to think that, where a child perceives themselves as, let's say, "gender-confused" for whatever reason (& a key issue with pronouns is, of course, how many reasons there may be for this in the current climate), using "they/them" may be a way of alleviating their distress as they work it through while also mitigating the Cass-identified risks of using opposite sex pronouns in this context.

Anyway, in advance of the start of the new school year, a place near me has shared the leaflet linked below with its staff, and I've been asked my thoughts about it as someone who reads fairly widely on all this.

I found pages 1 through 5 pretty much as expected - some parts concerning, many frustrating in the simplistic & didactic treatment of a hugely complex issue, but overall, "so far, so familiar". Then I read the penultimate page: "10 Things You’re Actually Saying When You Deliberately Misgender or Ignore Someone’s Pronouns". Before sharing my own views on this in more detail, I wondered what others think. Link below, content of relevant page pasted below that.

https://www.kogarahcommunity.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/All-about-Pronouns.pdf

"10 Things You’re Actually Saying When You Deliberately Misgender or Ignore Someone’s Pronouns

1. I know you better than you know yourself
2. I would rather hurt you repeatedly than change the way I speak about you
3. Your sense of safety is not important to me
4. Your identity isn’t real and shouldn’t be acknowledged
5. I want to teach everyone around me to disrespect you
6. Offending you is fine if it makes me feel more comfortable
7. I can hear you talking, but I’m not really listening
8. Being who you truly are is an inconvenience to me
9. I would prefer it if you stopped being honest with me
10. I am not an ally, a friend, or someone you can trust"

I think what we're watching is the playing out of the underfunding of psychological support services - it's been a massive problem for decades (closing the psych hospitals with the resultant loss of staff expertise, treating anything possible with meds rather than with one-to-one therapies). It means that clear cases of mental illeness, call it psychological distress if you prefer, don't get recognised (in a non-judgmental way, it's illness, not error) and treated early and appropriately. Not just in the context of gender - all over the place.

The older male adults with sexual fetishes are a whole other thing.

I watched a disturbing BBC documentary recently on the forced sterilisation of women in Greenland over many decades. The usual mix of tearful victims, a lost generation of children and distraught families, the all too familiar mix of egotistical politicians and doctors, the destroying of whistleblowers.

And as I watched it, my mind developed a split screen...playing the documentary from a decade hence where our lost generation will be featured alongside the egos and looking the other way and crippling of critical voices.

My Q is...will that documentary stay a figment of my imagination? Because for it to happen, the BBC will have to implicate itself, as will so many all across medicine, ethics, public policy and journalists.

Can this be the scandal that never gets addressed as such, the damage limitation from culpable individuals and elites and organisations, is so stringent that the gas lighting we're experiencing now will be as nothing compared to the gaslighting in a decade when guilty parties will claim they were also fooled, or they never supported it all?

@Immoralplant, that's really interesting. My understanding was that there WAS limited evidence out there - but that it was potentially problematic (eg. predominantly short-term studies only) & needing further examination, with long-term studies suggesting a trend towards, as you suggest, less positive outcomes. Then there's "anecdotal" evidence in the form of individuals for whom transition appears to have been positive.

So I'd say, for some individuals, yes, my understanding is that it can be positive, but that overall trends are at best inconclusive &, more, potentially worrying? And, of course, these trends are what matter, if treatment protocols are founded on efficacy & effectiveness, & both are hard to measure - & being made harder by the politicisation of the issue...

So, I guess I just don't begin to know enough about it (& not having a science background makes assessing the evidence myself challenging - not least when some seems to be ideologically biased).

Your explanation of the perceived distress as being the defining characteristic, regardless of context, possible causes, duration etc., makes a LOT of sense, tbh. Maybe my distinction is, as you say, far too simplistic.

I'll ask my various medical contacts their thoughts on not just diagnosis, but treatment sometime...

100% projection

Yup.

Either the courtesy moves equally in both directions or I'm not remotely interested.

Side-by-side with a reduction in parenting - no criticism, working parents generally have no choice, but it leaves children having to more vulnerable to unhealthy influences. Such as social media, of course.

What strikes me about the document in the OP is how contrary it runs to all principles of safeguarding, parenting, good mental health and generally accepted education. Instead of being solution-focused, it is problem-focused, encouraging rumination by the distressed person. Instead of critical thinking about the issue, it encourages black-and-white catastrophising. Instead of encouraging the individual to look within to solve their personal issues, it requires that they give up any true autonomy and dump all their issues upon others.

It is unhelpful, unhealthy and endangers the well-being of the children it is aimed at.

I agree, I think it's really harmful to a child to indulge them in this way, and to tell them that the whole world will bend to their self image, and anyone who doesn't is their enemy.

It also speaks to the wider issue of why this single issue is treated so differently than anything else. I really can't think of any other social/ medical issue that would be pandered to unquestioningly in this way by medical institutions and the media.

@JellySaurus, your penultimate para. explains the issues I see in it so well.

Pps have done plenty thorough take-downs of that list - much better than I could.

Just to add some response, though, as a teacher, parent and grandparent: yes of course I know you (pupil, child, grandchild) better than you know yourself, in so many ways. ("1. I know you better than you know yourself.") Of course I do: that's what being your teacher/parent/grandparent entails.

As well as that, yes I do also know - again, in so many cases - what's better for you.

Tough to swallow? Maybe. But any 'hurt' you may feel ("2. I would rather hurt you ...") is small. And sometimes necessary for your well-being.

I wouldn't be doing my job as a teacher/parent/grandparent if I gave in to you (pupil/child/grandchild) on any of this trans nonsense (that I see for what it is when you perhaps don't).

One of my children used to have the most tremendous tantrums when she didn't get her own way. She could gather quite a crowd as she stamped her little feet and yelled, "I won't! I know better than you! I won't! You're unfair! I won't!. I won't!"

OP's leaflet reminded me of that child. She grew up. When will these trans people grew up and learn to act sensibly?

I don't think it's a 'complex issue' at all, OP. The people who wrote that leaflet are just silly. Childish and silly. They need to grow up.

What strikes me about the document in the OP is how contrary it runs to all principles of safeguarding, parenting, good mental health and generally accepted education. Instead of being solution-focused, it is problem-focused, encouraging rumination by the distressed person. Instead of critical thinking about the issue, it encourages black-and-white catastrophising. Instead of encouraging the individual to look within to solve their personal issues, it requires that they give up any true autonomy and dump all their issues upon others.

Excellent summary. Justifying and encouraging abandonment of personal responsibility is front and centre in so many aspects of this entire political movement.

Who exactly is supposed to be raising the humans without needs, thoughts, feelings, issues, expectations, beliefs or identities of their own who will live for nothing more than providing the nurturing for the endless needs and vulnerabilities of this group?

I suspect everything is being driven by the needs of the older men with sexual fetishes.

They do get ‘benefits‘ from medical transition.
They do get benefits from pretending the best way to treat gender dysphoria is to force society to pander to a delusion, rather than psychotherapy to help patients accept reality.
They do get a benefit from the depiction of trans individuals as ‘the most vulnerable minority in society’.
They get a benefit from compelling use of their preferred pronouns.
They don’t care about any damage done to children or women.

Was just about to make the same comment re Barracker. Still the best thing I have read about pronouns and I wish it had a wider audience.

It always pays to ask the question ‘who benefits?’ and to keep digging deeper to find all who benefit.

It usually pays dividends in highlighting either the original intended beneficiaries or the unintended beneficiaries. And it rarely is young trans people, and even more rarely is it female people.

Sadly also teen transitioners also get very short term benefits, (and can't see the long term harm, cos they're kids.)

Teen transitioners get an increased social importance, extra attention from their teachers, the gratification imposing newspeak on others, including berating classmates who make mistakes or aren't sufficiently progressive. Additionally, there are genuinely some mtf older teens who, perhaps even subconsciously, enjoy being in the girls' "in crowd" including their single sex spaces.

I've seen all this play out among teens I've come across.

Nb I don't "hate" or even blame them. They're kids. They shouldn't be put in such a position. It's like when they've done social experiments where a group of kids are given authority over their peers and end up imposing sadistic punishments on them. The kids themselves aren't evil or bad or anything. They're just put in a terrible position that gives them a kind of social superiority over their peers.

This post will probably get censored. I've read over it and I know I'm coming across really harsh. I do care deeply about all my students and always operate on the basis that negative behaviour has a cause, that isn't innate, but due to the way adults have treated them.

This is an Australian leaflet. If you are going to speak to Australian doctors perhaps you need to ask them if they have seen the British Cass review, if they know that Sweden, which was a pioneer in medicalising teenagers, has now retreated from that because of concerns about long term side effects.

Interesting that the organisation responsible for this leaflet has 7 directors but only 3 profiles of them. Jordan Ross is the Childrens Services Manager and Jonathan Karanikas chair of the Board of Directors. Seem to be a lot of men involved with this organisation, not a very inclusive organisation.

Agreed - it has been said by some people that the creation of 'trans children' which was really never a thing until a few short years ago**, is all in the service of these men and their determination to get what they want at all costs.

Which sounds far fetched until you realise that it's a convenient answer to the natural question that would occur when a grown man tells everyone that being a woman is becoming his 'authentic self' and has always been how he felt inside but couldn't express it until now because of bigotry etc. The natural follow on from this would be - if this is a real thing, then where are all the children who feel this way?

It also goes a long way to explain the paradox of why teenagers and young people are clamouring for hormones and surgery immediately (or they will kill themselves), but fully grown men - usually in middle age - don't need or want any surgical intervention, they just put on some lipstick or something and are automatically women.

Also, the pharmaceutical companies benefit from having a whole generation of new customers who will likely be on medication for life. Win win for them.

**Yes there were a tiny number of children who had discomfort with their bodies and expressed a preference to be the opposite sex, but most of them grew out of it at puberty, and in fact studies showed that most of these were little boys who grew up to be gay.

I've seen it constantly throughout my teaching career, whenever there's a political progression in the zeitgeist.

For example, early in my career, there was a drive to stop kids from using the word "gay" as an insult. (I do applaud this, and it has largely worked, I rarely hear it used in that way.)

At the time I saw kids get a genuine gratification in berating their peers if they slipped up "aha! You said the word gay as an insult, that's cos you're Homophobic. Everyone, Bobby is Homophobic!" In most cases, Bobby wasn't genuinely homophobic but was using the word in a dissociated way from it meaning homosexual. (Nb I do agree one shouldn't use the word as an insult. I'm just pointing out the psychology behind the pleasure kids get in correcting each other.)

I then saw the same play out regarding "correct/incorrect" terms describing race.

I now see the same among today's teens. A few self appointed newspeak-police just love correcting perceived transgressions in gendered language. Pregnant people, post-person, whatever. The trans kid himself is held up as the ultimate arbiter in any dispute.

When the children who were uncomfortable in their bodies starved themselves, or took religious vows, they got a short-term dopamine hit, and some societal approval 'thin is pretty' 'being in the church is good and holy'.

It went disastrously wrong for many of them, with knock-on effects for their fertility and (in the case of people- male and female - who should not have gone into the church) on the people taught and cared for by them.

The unquestioning approval of the daft actions of the victims of genderism has such a 'here we go again' vibe. It's as though there is a subset of society with deep programming to prevent adult fertility.

Though I agree that the older men with fetishes are doing a lot of the shouting.

It is never healthy to teach children that their mental well-being is entirely in the hands of other people.

@Mummy08m I really appreciate your insight as a lot of it tracks with my own kids' experiences in school.

What strikes me about the document in the OP is how contrary it runs to all principles of safeguarding, parenting, good mental health and generally accepted education. Instead of being solution-focused, it is problem-focused, encouraging rumination by the distressed person. Instead of critical thinking about the issue, it encourages black-and-white catastrophising. Instead of encouraging the individual to look within to solve their personal issues, it requires that they give up any true autonomy and dump all their issues upon others. It is unhelpful, unhealthy and endangers the well-being of the children it is aimed at.

Agree 100% with all of this. 'Catastrophising' is a word that came to mind when I read it too.

It doesn't actually read as if it's written by an adult professional, it reads as if it's written by a child - it's very much in the 'if you don't let me eat ice-cream for every meal you HATE me and are a TERRIBLE parent' toddler tantrum style.

Most adults have brains that have matured enough to understand both short and long term risk and benefit, this is a skill most children have not yet fully developed and it's why they're not allowed to do things like drive, get married, get a tattoo, drink until later on.

The adults in their lives in positions of responsibility do have a responsibility to talk honestly to them about issues that might make them happy in the short term but could have horrendous long-term consequences. We see this as absolutely critical in every other aspect of life and yet somehow it gets thrown out of the window here.

I am also really glad a PP raised the issue of the other children. I've said many times, I think teachers using gender-based pronouns for ONLY some children in a school and forcing compliance (overtly or through their behaviour) of other children falls very clearly under the definition of 'emotional abuse' in KCSIE. It is abuse of the other children and not it's not a question of 'be kind': some other children will be seriously damaged by adults modelling to them that they have to lie about sex and are only important as a validation tool and not in their own right - that their own speech is not allowed and not important. They will also be damaged by the gaslighting: being told they cannot trust their own senses nor the adults around them to tell the truth - it undermines safeguarding. It's 'being unkind' and harming other children, it's abusive and would be seen as such in any other situation.

IMHO - the children who are struggling with gender-related issues should be receiving dedicated help and support to love themselves and their bodies as they are. The rest of the children should not be being brainwashed with this insanity.