Guest post: Easier to sidestep the minefield altogether
Originally a comment by As The Smoke Rises Upward on Very precise indeed.
I take all the sanctimonious defenses of the (uncontested) personhood of trans people as a kind of tacit admission. Atwood can’t engage with actual gender-critical arguments because then she would have to respond with the party-sanctioned genderist dogma, and she can’t do that without making some readers wonder if maybe the terves do have a point after all.
“Lesbians are morally deficient if they don’t want to sexually engage with male genitals.” Well, that’ll go over just fine with cultural conservatives, but it might raise an a few eyebrows among the liberals who still believe that “trans” simply means “super mega gay” and imagine the LGBT as one big happy family.
“Anything uniquely pertaining to the health or reproductive rights of vagina people/ cervix people/ uterus people/ ovary people/ breast people must never be spoken of as a women’s issue. After all, not all women have vaginas/ cervixes/ uteruses/ ovaries/ breasts, and not all people with vaginas/ cervixes/ uteruses/ ovaries/ breasts are women. In fact, we’d prefer not to fully acknowledge that the people with vaginas are also the people with cervixes, uteruses, et cetera. If we zoom out and look at the bigger biological picture instead of playing ad-libs with an anatomy textbook, we might be forced to use the f-word. No, not that f-word—the other one, the one that rhymes with email.” Another tough sell. Hard not to trigger at least a few red flags.
“It is good and right and just to sterilize children and teens who aren’t even old enough to consent to sex in the nane of affirming their gender identity. It is wicked and evil and hateful to ask why the number of children and teens supposedly requiring this treatment has increased by several thousand percent over the past decade. It’s also rank bigotry to raise any concerns about the long-term health effects of what is basically a medical experiment.” Oof, good luck spinning that so everyone will swallow it—it’s going to stick in a craw or two.
And so on and so forth. Atwood’s a gifted writer and her name alone carries a great deal of leftist cachet, so she could make the case for all of these points as effectively as anyone. But inevitably, no matter how painstakingly she rhetoricized, she would still be stuck arguing positions that not all of her fellow liberals would continue to accept once they understood what it was they were really supposed to be accepting. Easier to sidestep the minefield altogether: you never have to say anything you don’t want to when you’re debating a strawwoman.
“It is good and right and just to sterilize children and teens who aren’t even old enough to consent to sex”
I’m pretty certain Atwood did not say that or mean that, neither does anyone advocating for trans rights. Puberty blockers are safe and fully reversable and also proscribed to cis children with precocious puberty as early as 9 or 11, and are given to trans kids and teens at Tanner stage 2 precisely to give them time to properly consider anything with more significant impact.
So nobody is advocating “sterilising children”. That’s just flat out false.
And for teens, the earliest HRT is prescribed is essentially 16, the same time teens begin to be sexually active with their peers and are usually provided access to the pill and other reproductive healthcare for this very reason. And that’s also the age where many places allow them to give informed consent to various other medical procedures such as abortion.
These are just facts.
But even taking that all into account, none of this is something “done to” trans children, teens or adults. It’s healthcare they explicitly request and need and which has been proven to significantly improve their lives in multiple ways.
Just as not allowing trans kids to socially transition is conversion therapy and torture, so is denying access to puberty blockers (while permitting them for cis children and teens), and denying medically necessary trans healthcare to adults equivalent to torture.
Presumably you don’t advocate for the torture of anyone, so please don’t make absurd claims like this about necessary healthcare for trans and nonbinary people.
=8/-DX
@ =8/-DX:
The NHS for one does not agree that puberty blockers are reversible:
https://www.transgendertrend.com/nhs-no-longer-puberty-blockers-reversible/
Part of what’s at issue is the ability of those children to consent to such measures when they aren’t capable of fully understanding the long-term consequences. Also at issue is the question of whether it’s being offered too freely and without due care and attention as we know has happened at the Tavistock clinic, for example. This treatment shows all the signs of being led by ideology rather than by good medicine. That practitioners persist despite the woeful lack of research in key areas and the deliberate misuse of statistics in others ought to trip your spider sense here.
What’s absurd is to say such treatments are necessary when you know no such thing. I’m sure nobody here is against hormone treatments and/or surgery when that has carefully been determined to be the best option for an adult who is fully aware of the long-term consequences. But many of us are against hormonal and surgical transition – or being put on a pathway toward it – when the patient is not equipped to understand the consequences and alternatives have not been carefully considered.
And nobody is suggesting that this is what Atwood is saying, only what is implied by the absolute support of trans ideology – an absolute support she refuses to give to feminism, which you can do without swallowing all the garbage that might be said by some aspects of feminism. The basic idea of feminism can be given full support without accepting the nonsense parts. It is impossible to give such full support to trans without accepting all the worst parts, because that is the least they will accept.
So if Atwood wants to accept what the trans lobby is saying, she needs to own it. Does she even know what they are saying, or has she heard “oh, transphobes” and jumped on the woke wagon? It’s impossible to know. It is suspicious that she uses a video someone else made about J.K. Rowling without using Rowling’s actual words, though.
@latsot #2 even the link you provide says they are physically reversible:
It actually is known that the psychological effects of being able to adequately socially transition, use puberty blockers, later HRT and other healthcare as appropriate are highly beneficial to trans people. An accepting family and affirmative approach to transitioning, as well as an affirming and supportive peer environment show significant psychological health benefits in both the short and long term. Blockers are a part of that and recommended care. Possible (known) side-effects are the same as when blockers are given to cis children, and taken into account when that is recommended care (i.e. reaching Tanner stage 2, too early in development.)
There are studies on this. The statements of “transgendertrend” trying to score some points by squeezing meaning from the general NHS website, notwithstanding.
=8/-DX
=8)-DX
Leaving aside your unnecessary use of the ‘cis’ qualifier, the ‘also’ in that sentence suggests that you have the primary use of puberty blockers arse-about-face. They are not ‘also’ prescribed (not ‘proscribed’, which means ‘forbidden by law’) to deal with precocious puberty in children, they were developed and licensed specifically to treat that condition and only that condition. The blockers are ‘also’ used to prevent puberty in children of a normal pubescent age who believe they are or may be the opposite sex from their actual biological sex, and that use is an off-license use, and it’s a use for which no genuine, controlled and methodologically sound long-term studies exist – despite the bogus claims – so in reality long term physiological or psychological effects of such treatment are unkown, although as with other drugs used before the full effects were known (see Thalidomide, for example) there are many indications that the blockers can pose serious long-term risks, including such charming effects as halting the development of the brain at a pre-pubescent stage, and the signs are that those affected brains may not begin to develop normally once treatment ends, particularly if blocker use was long-term. As our brains do not normally fully develop until we are in our mid-twenties, I would argue that the potential arresting of that development in a child’s early-teens is at best undesirable and at worse bloody dangerous and irresponsible.
=8)-DX
Trans activists often recite “facts” which are anything but.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20502877.2020.1796257
=8)-DX
Much like the supposed safety and full reversibility of puberty blockers, this is frequently claimed but not, actually, known.
The only study I have read that made a claim close to this studied the mental health of children who had transitioned AND who had supportive familes. The study authors admitted the many uncontrolled variables involved. And I have never seen a long-term follow up on these patients. I don’t believe one exists (if I’m wrong, I invite =8)-DX to share it here.
I HAVE seen studies that claimed positive psychological effects of medical transition for adults. The most recent one that I know of had to admit their conclusion was too strong:
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.1778correction
We do not have solid, robust evidence that transition helps gender dysphoric people in the long run. There’s a round-up of evidence here:
https://mobile.twitter.com/pauldirks