"Trans people have always been here!"

[GoldenBracelet]

God I'm tired of reading "Trans people have always been here!", like it's some kind of unarguable gotcha 🙄

Yes, there have always been men who think they are women.
No, they have never been women.

See also women who think they're men.

And I am pointing out your logic is not consistently applied.

Lots of treatments that have no evidence base are refused to everyone. Puberty blockers for sex dysphoria is a treatment that lacks evidence, with very serious side effects. So it's not available to anyone.

Puberty blockers for precocious puberty has some good evidence for being an effective treatment, and because the timeline is very restricted negative side effects are less serious. Although there are in fact strict protocols because of the potential harms and recently some have thought they might actually outweigh the benefits.

This is basic stuff, if you are struggling with how doctors decide what kinds of treatments are medically appropriate you might need to consider you don't have any basis to make comparisons.

Its a global consensus amongst expert medical practitioners/organisations in the field.

How so?

This view is contrary to a global consensus of experts & organisations in the field.

Yeah…. no, I don’t think so. Not in the UK, anyway.

It’s astroturfing. There is one global agenda driven organisation for “trans healthcare” and everyone else just repeats their pronouncements.

And this gets to the heart of the debate about whether puberty blockers can ever be ethical - using puberty blockers to treat precocious puberty is a medical intervention protocol designed to bring bring the puberty of someone with a developmental defect as much into alignment with normal puberty as possible. This contrasts with trans usage where they are used to delay (and really we must be honest here - intentionally disrupt) natural puberty. i.e. using them for the opposite purpose.

You will often hear trans people make the claim that cis children are being allowed puberty blockers to treat puberty but trans children (because of hateful discrimination) are disallowed them for treating puberty. This is as silly claiming that Ozempic is provided to overweight people to treat eating disorders but denied anorexic people, because of prejudice, for treating eating disorders.

But as the recent Peggie verdict shows, transgender misuse of language has a powerful effect on people's ability to reason about trans topics even in the formal situation of law.

Adding the parenthetical observation - for all its trans fanaticism, AI very easily detects these logical fallacies. It's quite disturbing that highly intelligent humans with years of rigorous, discourse laden education so easily make and fall for this type of disjointed reasoning, it doesn't bode well for the human race.

Yes & lots wrong in terms of evidence that supported the outcomes of the Cass report.
law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/integrity-project_cass-response.pdf

Globally? Seriously? A conspiracy of that magnitude as was also alleged for the COVID vaccines & Climate change is highly unlikely.

If anything, the political pressure applied to Hillary Cass to dump on gender affirming care wreaks of political interference.

Yup. All sorts of people have been around forever, that's what makes humanity so interesting. Sinners and saints; the abnormally gifted and the Irredeemably stupid; the ugly and the beautiful; the tall, the short; the weak, the strong; people with every kind of madness, an infinity of deformities. We all just muddle through as best we can, hoping for fair treatment. It can never be fair to elevate one kind of abnormality above everybody else.

Serial murderers have been around forever. No-one suggests this as a good reason to let them do their thing and a special month every year to celebrate them. We don't even do this for the intellectually gifted, the talented or the hyper-beautiful: we expect them to respect others and we hold them to account if they don't.

Yanbu

I never understand the accusation that gender realists are trying to erase trans people either. If gender realists didn’t accept the existence of trans people then we wouldn’t talk about people being trans or use the word at all 🤷‍♀️

Regardless, the government commissioned and received a report and no court or tribunal in this country is going to gainsay it.

I don't think an argument that trans identifying children are being unfairly denied healthcare is going to get any traction.

Sure.

How about you give one example on the thread rather than vaguely gesturing with links so people know exactly what you’re referring to? I believe that Yale report has been debunked in its turn, but I’d like to know what you personally find compelling.

In a nut shell? Methodological flaws, misinterprets data, misrepresents studies, and applies a higher standard to gender-affirming care evidence, overlooking existing research and pathologises gender diversity.

Here's a summary:

Key Critiques (Including Yale/Associated Papers)
Methodological Flaws: Critics point to poor statistical rigor, unreliable datasets, and selective use of evidence in the Review's systematic reviews.
Misrepresentation: Claims that the Review misrepresents primary research, quotes, and the existing literature on transgender care.
Double Standard: An accusation that the Review holds gender-affirming care evidence to an unfairly high standard compared to the evidence for its own recommendations.
Pathologizing Gender: Critics argue the Review fails to acknowledge healthy gender diversity, speculates baselessly on causes (trauma/pornography), and omits crucial biological/cultural research.
Ignores Existing Consensus: Accusations that the Review downplays international clinical guidelines and established evidence, leading to unsupported assertions.

Many people don’t agree with how they materially are legally categoried. That doesn’t make society responsible for giving them additional rights when they already have the equitable outcome that others in society have.

And that is the same as the ‘health care’ you describe. There are different groups who believe they should have access to treatment that their democratic government has halted for safety reasons or not permitted. It is up to those ‘experts’ to provide the evidence to support deeming the treatment effective. That has not happened and WPATH and their country specific organisations have had plenty of support to produce this evidence and they have not.

Meanwhile, the government is protecting children which is its job.

It’s a silly slogan because most people now that ‘trans’ in its current form has not been around forever. We know that there weren’t multiple cases of trans identifying girls in many schools in the past. There were none, but there were ‘tomboys’ and no one thought anything of it, no one was expected to pretend that they were actually boys. (Except George in the Famous Five - but no one believed or was expected to believe she actually was a boy, they just went along with it to keep the peace). And we know that there hasn’t been a matching very rapid increase in the numbers of older women id’ing as trans who have - we know its partly (or even largely) a social contagion amongst troubled/vulnerable teenage girls. We also know that it is starting to go out of fashion. We do know that there have always been men who enjoy cross dressing but no one has ever tried to say that they are actually women before. We know that there are women who reject stereotypically female clothes / fashions but until recently we understood that that was just a personal preference rather than that they were actually a man. We know that there have always been a tiny number of people with a more deep seated mental distress caused by gender dysphoria, but that was understood to be a phsychological condition that needed treating kindly rather than everyone else pretending to believe that they actually were the opposite sex. Of course further back in time this group were treated badly if they openly cross-dressed.

The point is trans minors are restricted from health care but other minors are not.

No. Trans minors are entitled to exactly the same care as other minors. Puberty blockers have only been approved in cases of precocious puberty, and both trans minors and non-trans minors can access them if they suffer from precocious puberty. That by definition means that there's exactly zero discrimination between them.

What you actually mean is that trans minors have additional needs for puberty blockers, which are supposedly dire enough that the horrific side-effects of using those meds on the long term can be overlooked. Well, that is something which needs to be proven, not just asserted, and so far, it hasn't been demonstrated.

The evidence is well documented from prisons

Very telling that you had to switch from the topic we were discussing - toilets - to an entirely unrelated one - prisons. That is, of course, because there's indeed zero evidence that trans women are at particular risk in men's toilets.

it does not necessarily follow that evidence existing persuades law makers particularly if they are incentivised not to

The law makers' potential reaction is irrelevant when the evidence is not presented in the first case. I repeat: as far as I know, no evidence that trans women are at particular risk in men's toilets has ever been presented to law makers. I'm open to being proven wrong.

In any case, trans women being accepted in female prison estates has long been done so for their safety

And that shouldn't happen because women's prisons are just that: women's prisons - not some kind of alternate men's prisons for men who feel or may be particularly at risk in men's prisons. For example, you don't see gay men being transferred to women's prisons for their safety. You don't see gay men using women's toilets because "I don't feel safe in the men's". So why should an exception be made for trans women? Male-on-male violence is by definition a male problem, to be solved by males among themselves.

Anyone who would imagine trans women aren't at an increased risk of sexual assault in prisons particularly if they have physically transitioned is deluding themselves.

I never denied that, since we never discussed it. But again: that's a problem for males to solve among themselves. Moreover, anyone who would imagine that women aren't at an increased risk of sexual assault in toilets and prisons in the presence of trans women is also deluding themselves. It has already happened, both in toilets and prisons.

In short: subcategories of men feeling or being unsafe among other men is in no way a problem for women to solve by accepting to increase their own insecurity through accepting those subcategories of men in their spaces.

That’s an AI summary you just googled, not an analysis of a key specific piece of evidence and why you think it’s such a compelling argument. Which is what I asked for.

Also, see my other point about that “existing consensus”.

TRAs will resort to any shameless sophistry in defense of their indefensible position.

These intelligent people know perfectly well that what they are advocating is a fallacy. They have chosen to protect their careers, rather than to protect vulnerable people.

My response to that is usually 'Yes, so have women. There are a lot more of us, and we'd like to be consulted before people give away our right to privacy and given the right to veto it without having to explain why or be accused of bigotry or phobia. Then I quote the figures about assaults in mixed sex changing areas and point out that I'm not saying any one group of males is more dangerous than any other and say I'd be happier about sharing those spaces with neutered men. That tends to be the point when people realise that their assumption that this small, vocal group do not have functioning sexual apparatus was not correct.

Can you provide me with links to the research that led you to believe this came from? A cursory look at transreddit suggests that people have trouble getting treatment.