TW who supports the SC ruling - AMA

[VanishingVision]

Hello! I was thinking of doing this post for a little while now as the previous posts doing this by the rather wonderful trans men here were really interesting but I didnt want to take up too much space here or take any attention away from much more important things here than what I have to say.

But I figured to just go for it before I have a big old break from the Internet for a while.

So like the title says, I'm a transwoman who accepts the SC ruling: ask me anything if you'd like to and I'll do my best to answer.

Most people seem to agree that, historically, any experiences a young child may have around 'GD' likely/often disappears around puberty.

Also, people say that their GD developed around puberty.

Given this, isnt the most obvious scenario that GD in young children is not related to GD in teens and adults? That childhood dysphoria is based on a childs view of the world, and isnt a body dysphoria at all?

If, true. Surely it follows that, historically, the dysphoria in adults is triggered by sexual factors, and not innate?

I agree that there are probably different types of dysphoria, some sexuality-based, others not.

I'm a bit confused by this, though:

" That childhood dysphoria is based on a childs view of the world, and isnt a body dysphoria at all?"

My own childhood dysphoria was a body dysphoria. It wasn't about how I viewed the world, rather the opposite: how I viewed myself.

It is for the faint hearted - it is for the people who haven't got the emotional strength to realize that facing your own mental health issues face on is hard but worthwhile, and instead choose the "easy" option - get hormone prescribers and surgeons to put in the graft, not themselves and their mental health. It is for the people who want a short-cut to being special.

Using wrong-sex promouns is a type of activism

The difficulty is finding therapy without agenda. And then the person has to engage with that therapy. Therapy which doesn't affirm the patient's feelings is going to be uncomfortable and challenging. To an extent doesn't the patient have to start from the premise that their feelings are in some way wrong or incongruent?

I listened to Richie Herron talking about his experience of therapy which seemed to be directing him towards surgery. Add to that he was also deep down a rabbit hole of social media which also constantly affirmed the idea of surgery.

His story is an object lesson in what can go wrong when therapy has an agenda.

How many people go to the doctor pretty sure of what is wrong with them? What they want is a prescription or a referral.

What they don't want is to be told they are wrong and that their problem is all in the mind. Especially when there is so little help available when the problem is all in the mind.

Richie Herron stayed on the transition pathway because it gave him access to therapy and treatment. A hope of a 'cure'. It was the wrong therapy and the wrong treatment but people were listening to him.

This is the danger when something becomes the fashionable 'cure all'. It gets attention and attention means resources. This means resources get pulled from 'old fashioned' treatments.

That's very interesting about your development @VanishingVision

A lot to think about. There's a podcast (yes I listen to a lot of podcasts!) interview with a young man who had a serious development delay so he had to take male hormones to progress through puberty, and he did it later and faster than would have happened naturally. He talks about how the delay affected him and how things changed once he started the hormones, and how not going through a natural puberty at the usual time can affect people.

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(This is from the recent "Beyond Gender" series which I mostly don't find as interesting as the older "Gender a Wider Lens" series, but this episode is very powerful.)

I have another question if you don't mind: what's your relationship to physical acitivity? Do you do any sports, or exercise, or dance? And do you take part in any of these activities with other people?

The only visible difference between a five year olds boys body and a 5 year old girls body are their genitals.

If a five year old hates their body want to be the opposite sex. It can only be genitals, can't it?

For adults, the genitals suddenly arent that important because vanishing few have that surgery and their dysphoria is sorted by 'top' surgery and hormones.

If genitals dont matter for adults, why did it bother them so much as 5 year olds?

I do understand your feelings, I really do. Is your autistic son young or a fair bit younger than mine at least? If so I can fully understand why you feel as you do. I absolutely don't agree with young people being transitioned or encouraged that way before they are fully adult enough to understand themselves and life. In my case my son ( daughter if you prefer) was a lot older and not autistic. Its not been made a big thing of and he doesn't mind if people call him his old name ( which I do sometimes!) but it seems petty not to use his pronouns etc at this point. I accept we are possibly coming at this from two different perspectives, mine as a parent of a fully grown adult, yours possibly as a parent of a younger person ( correct me if I'm wrong) If so I do understand your position on this. I can only speak of my own experiences which won't be the same as others.

I didn't hate my body as a child. Thinking there's something wrong with it doesn't necessarily mean hating it.

"For adults, the genitals suddenly arent that important because vanishing few have that surgery and their dysphoria is sorted by 'top' surgery and hormones."

I think there's a misunderstanding here? It's not that the genitals don't matter anymore, because they do. It's that, at least in the case of female trans-identifying people, the bottom surgery is a butchery, and the risks far outweigh the potential benefits.

I mean, I used to think that I had mostly overcome my bottom dysphoria, but since I've heard about how researchers have found a way to grow entire organs from stem cells, it's come back in full force. I hadn't overcome anything; I had just resigned myself to the unchangeable.

All therapy is uncomfortable in my experience. I don't necessarily agree that anyone undertaking it in these circumstances just wants to be affirmed in their beliefs. It would be a pointless exercise in that case.

This is what the Finnish adolescent gender expert Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala says on this (my bold). Interestingly, what she says points out that affirmation in itself is agreeing something is wrong with the original child.

Asked by Helsingin Sanomat what she thought of gender self-identification for minors—a proposed element of the new Finnish law that did not ultimately pass—Kaltiala emphasized that it is “important to accept [children] as they are,” but this means neither pressuring a child to conform to behaviors traditionally associated with the child’s sex nor “negating the body” by confirming that the child’s gender self-identification is real. “In either case,” said the psychiatrist, “the child gets a message that there is something wrong with him or her.”

This is from an excellent very detailed article in The Tablet Magazine*.
Finland Takes Another Look at Youth Gender Medicine
A recent interview with the country’s top gender expert shows how out of step the American medical establishment is with its European counterparts
By Leo Sapir
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/finland-youth-gender-medicine

That paragraph also ends by saying,
Evidence from a combined 12 studies to date demonstrates that when children with cross-gender or gender variant behavior are left to develop naturally, the vast majority—“four out of five,” according to Kaltiala—come to terms with their bodies and learn to accept their sex. When they are socially transitioned, virtually none do.

*Please do not be put off by this being in The Tablet Magazine. The article is quoting what she actually said and she is an expert with years of experience in this field. It is not an article about religion.

Sorry I forgot to quote. That was responding to @RapidOnsetGenderCritic and @LoudlyMeowingCat

My son was left to just be and enjoy the things he wanted to though, yes it mainly typically boyish things but I didn't comment or steer him either way. Gender identity just wasn't a thing when he was young, it wasn't in TV, in schools or a social thing. I certainly didn't know anything about the subject. I was quite happy to let him do and enjoy the things that interested him. There were a few times when that set him apart from other girls but it didn't bother him and he just continued as he was.

I think a lot of the points being raised are about children being transitioned, which is obviously wrong. My original post was a response to a poster saying there wasn't GD 20 or 30 years ago and I said there was, my experience being as a parent of a 39 year old.

Sorry, @LoudlyMeowingCat I didn’t mean to suggest you had influenced your child by affirming them, but just thought you’d be interested in Dr Kaltiala’s view about affirming very young people who feel they are the wrong sex.

Yes very interesting and I didn't take it that way! There is obviously something very different going on now with children and very young adults being encouraged to identify as trans and I absolutely don't agree with it.

I have to say, vanishing, I don't think many people would read your posts, and not immediately understand why you don't identify as being a man.

From being 'treated as a girl' because of the long hair as a child (which presumably felt more much more pleasant than being 'treated as a boy') to being a somewhat feminine same sex attracted teenager who couldn't identify with the lad culture at school and being picked on because of it.

Not to mention the violent and chaotic childhood with no boundaries.

And then going on the Internet and soaking up everything that could account for it.

On the basis of that, it sounds fairly logical.

For many feminists, me included, it's not so much that identifying as the opposite that isn't frequently understandable, it's that it's not just papering over the cracks, it's actively shoring up the issues that they are opposed to in the first place.

Things like treating girls and boys entirely differently, and the sexism behind it, rampant homophobia, for both sexes, again due to sexism, etc.

it's no coincidence at the term TERF contains the words radical feminist. Feminists were the first people to notice what was going on, because they can sniff out sexism from space.

And, of course, the final nail in the coffin is that not only is the entire concept due to sexism, the solution is to leverage sexism to provide the answer!

Using the very concept of womanhood and their spaces as the therapy required for 'authenticity'.

You can see why it grates...

However, this sort of thread is very useful. Your agenda does not appear to be, first and foremost, to get women to do what you want. And the fact you don't use women spaces will definitely win you some support.

But you can see, I'm sure, why the entire concept of transgenderism is something that a lot of women disagree with, irrespective of how pleasant the person is who demonstrates it.

For what it's worth, I agree with the previous poster who said ongoing therapy is probably a very good idea.

And one other thing, for people who think they've raised their children in a non-gendered way, I urge you to watch the BBC programme no more boys and girls.

Sexism is bombarding children from every possible angle, even before they're born.

When a woman who knows the sex of her unborn child being told when if kicks it will be a footballer (if it's a boy), or ooh she's going to be trouble (if it's a girl).

Unless you're raising your children in a vacuum, they will be subjected to sexism at every turn.

The programme was a massive eye-opener. Teachers who prided themselves on being 'gender neutral', gobsmacked when they saw film of themselves treating boys and girls very, very differently.

Teachers, the headteacher, parents, each other. It was inescapable.

Oh, and a third PS, of course it's way, way worse now, perhaps not in a civil rights way, but in an aspirational and social way.

Look at the role models that our children are now aspiring to.

Little wonder that so many youngsters of either sex feel they don't fit the bill.

Sometimes the child themselves fights against being treated in a sexist way.

I agree that sexism is strong but it doesn't always follow that children go along with it

I agree with that almost 100%.

My only disagreement would be your last sentence. I think that for some people ignorance is bliss - there is no advantage in OP learning how he could have accepted his birth sex and not transitioned

Precisely, by deciding that they better fit wrong-sex, sex-based stereotypes, not their own sex, sex-based stereotypes.

No, but taken to its logical conclusion , sometimes to escape it they identify as the opposite sex, or as non-binary.

edited to add, thereby just cementing in the gender stereotypes.

For instance, a girl identifying as a boy, because she doesn't like wearing dresses, because only girls wear dresses.

We had a transwoman on here, a very long time ago, one of the first, if I remember correctly, who said he loved identify women because he could be more 'vibrant'.