Is there ANY concern among Trans Rights Activists for the health wellbeing of adolescents receiving gender affirming drugs that the findings of the Finnish study might be true

[mardirousse]

You would expect Trans Rights Activists to be concerned about the physical mental health of gender questioning children, yet I haven't seen a single TRA express the slightest concern that gender affirming care might be causing harm to young kids, who they see as transgender. Not here, not on r/transgenderuk, not on x.
They are attacking the credibility of the study, but given its size and the very shocking findings, why aren't at least some of them expressing a little concern that there might be something in it? I mean, these are vulnerable kids, and they're taking really powerful drugs with major long-term consequences, and now it looks like there's evidence that it may be doing the opposite of what it's supposed to...
How could you not be concerned, whatever your agenda? They're kids!
Aren't trans rights activists interested in the right of trans kids to be safe and healthy?
Am I missing something?

Banking eggs is known to be not only horribly invasive, dufficult, and painful, and would be administered to a pre pubertal girl in this context, but also to have such a vanishingly small success rate I'd actually query whether one could use the word 'success' in any meaningful way. I think its around 1% iirc.

Males banking sperm is of course a very minor issue comparatively speaking.

This is sad reading. Aimed at girls with cancer who are offered egg banking. Gives an idea of the procedures involved and the risks:

www.guysandstthomas.nhs.uk/health-information/fertility-preservation-for-women/freezing-eggs-or-embryos

This is where I had the 1% figure from:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51463488

Just another instance where the harms to girls are far greater.

Before 'trans' became a hot trend, the teeny tiny numbers treated were almost all male.

So I am surmising that any long term evidence would show more info on consequences for males, and that there will be very little for females.

Thank you for this.
I've read about this in other contexts.
No surprise at all that a male-led movement glosses over the risks for women.
Just tell them they can always bank their eggs and it'll all be fine.

Yes. 'Bank sperm' is a casual shrug of a matter for a male. It's a completely and utterly different scenario for a girl.

Your life experience is that of a man who pretends to be a woman.
Not of a woman.

Matilda read more than three books.

@onepostwonder Most of us know that there is a massive amount of junk "research" published and available online. Until comparatively recently "no debate" was pretty effective at blocking any good studies. They didnt get funded and the smaller studies didnt get published.

I'm willing to believe there may be some children who experience such mental distress about their body that what is laughingly referred to as "gender affirming care" may be appropriate for them. Sadly "no debate" and junk research have prevented serious study of how you can separate them from the ones who will be harmed. All we know is that many people who are gender confused will find it resolved by puberty. So if you hand out puberty blockers to children more children will be harmed than helped.

Adults are a different matter but there doesnt seem to be much good quality research there either on whether the known physical risks are worth possible mental benefits, benefits that the finnish study suggests may not be there.

Instead of trying to find weak arguments for why these studies should be ignored those who truly believe some people benefit should be asking for an analysis of who didnt have worse medical health and how they differed from those who did.

Males who are puberty blocked at the earlier stages of puberty can’t masturbate and ejaculate to produce sperm because the sperm haven’t developed yet, and they don’t have the physical or emotional capacity to do it.

This post, as others have pointed out, is yet another demonstration of just how little male people know and / or understand about female people.

Any adult who feels it is appropriate for a female child to under go egg harvesting procedures if it is not for a life threatening treatment is very poorly informed or simply doesn’t care about female people’s experiences.

We know from the female adults who have reported strokes and other life limiting and shortening side effects of egg harvesting that this is not a process to be breezily dismissed with a ‘oh.. they can just bank their eggs’. And for a start, that child would have to not had their puberty blocked in the first place.

The thing is harvesting sperm and harvesting ova is in no way symmetrical. Yet incredibly dismissive sentences such as “But I also believe trans youth should be provided the opportunity to bank sperm or eggs” miminise the issue.

Oh… you might want children in the future?… here you go female child patient … just bank your eggs here - that issue is now resolved.

It is just like the dismissal of the asymmetrical detriments of female people taking testosterone because to acknowledge those would acknowledge the validity of people’s concerns about the health of female people and this disrupts that over arching narrative that there are absolutely no valid concerns when people receive this affirming care.

Slogans and breezy statements may appear superficially acceptable.

As ever, its when we start to look at the nitty gritty detail and practical, real life applications that we have to consider what those.slogans mean and the implications of them.

Self harm may be a useful lens from which to consider 'gender incongruence'.

-I had in mind the comment about children castrating themselves.

.......about a 1-hour misogyny-laden phone call the very first time I’d had the misfortune to interact with that committee

Oh, the irony of OnePost complaining about a "misogyny-laden phone call".

At the time, it had never had a female member

And ten years later, with you as its Chair, the committee still didn't have a female member.
Well, unless you co-opted some actual women on to it yourself, @onepostwonder

The way onepostwonder talks about women harvesting their ova suggests that he thinks women only have to pop in to a convenient clinic in their lunch break to have this done.

There was a TIM poster (anime name) a few years ago who talked earnestly about advising a young gender confused girl about egg freezing. It was grim.

Yes.

Like causing menopause in child or young female adult to facilitate an extreme body modification for someone’s identity is always treated dismissively by those who fully support any hormones and surgeries for that identity. And the lack of acknowledgement of the negative impacts on the female body of going through early menopause, having ovaries removed etc.

The disproportionate negative impacts on female people’s health with puberty blocking and testosterone compared to male people’s treatments has long been dismissed by those male activists.

But to think that harvesting ova from a child and a young female adult is something to be so breezily dismissed shows many things. Just one is a lack of knowledge and understanding about female lives.

I remember.

I put it up there also with a male adult breezily declaring that those children who will never achieve orgasm in the future are fine because asexuality is recognised now.

But also it is interesting that some male people also cannot acknowledge that they also experienced male puberty
and then claiming their puberty was estrogen driven as if that early male puberty never occurred.

Plus it is a form of sexual abuse to explain to a child how to do this, and a psychological abuse to suggest it to a child who has been taught to hate his penis.

Most people who read the trial papers for the new PB trial would have been shocked at the suggestion of adults asking some of the questions stipulated.

Not just those on the 'gc' side, either - there is a blog from the parent of a child who identifies as trans who had the same response.

Entirely unsurprising.

TRAs don't really do truth, do they?

'There is a visible community of trans people happy to share information and support with trans people who need information and support.'

There are visible communities of all sorts of people on the internet, many happy to share with children. This fact doesnt mean that the NHS should offer the same things as these people, just because they exist.

Hormones are almost as accessible to anyone as any street drug in countries that don't already sell them over the counter.

The street drug comparison is spot on. The NHS doesn't generally offer programmes providing drugs for children taking street versions.

Another analogy might be providing clean razors for those wishing to self harm - in fact given your comment about children self castrating perhaps this isnt intended as an analogy?

Many if not most people have areas of cognitive cloudiness and even contradictory beliefs.

The issue is that NHS and other bodies are supposed to try and apply logical thinking, use scientific principles, look for evidence and test hypotheses.

Onepost complains about pedantry, but when it comes to an institution like the NHS pedantry is kind of baked in, one could say the foundation of modern medecine relies on it.

'There is a visible community of trans people happy to share information and support with trans people who need information and support.'

Yes.

And rarely do these people have any safeguarding training (or follow it).

We even have had a male poster, who similarly considered themselves an ‘elder’ in the community who transitioned decades ago as a teen, who even advised teens and young adults to not disclose their sex to prospective sex partners. And was proud of doing so.

Maybe they do, but it's striking how often TRAs will confidently state assertions like, "Scientists agree that sex is a social construct."

Not to mention the old chestnut, "Trans women are women."