It’s in the framing
Maya makes an important point about all this.
I’ll just quote the rest (with Twitter shortcuts and formatting removed).
You could argue that the court got it wrong; that it is in the interests of these children to be put on PBs because of psychological benefits (suicide risk argument) or because their future self will have a better life if transition is more visually convincing (outcomes argument).
You could argue this, and show compelling medical evidence (but the Tavistock failed to do this). Then you would weigh those benefits with the risks & negative impacts on those children (to their adult sexual function, and ability to have children bone density & chance of regret etc).
But what you shouldn’t do. What it is absolutely immoral to do is weigh the risks and negative impacts on those children against the interests of “trans people everywhere” or “the LGBT community.”
Oh yes. So you shouldn’t; so it is. It’s that poison word “community” again, that poison word that excuses and encourages and makes virtuous so much filthy oppressive life-narrowing shit.
As a society we must not sacrifice children’s welfare – sterilising them, medicalising them for life and taking away adult sexual function – to satisfy the interests of a community of adults. That would be child abuse.
Choices like these have been made before: people put the perceived interests and cohesion of the Catholic community, the gay community, the Scouting community, the Muslim community or whoever ahead of protecting children from harm (or they said the children ‘consented’)
Yes. Yes times a thousand. People also put the perceived interests and cohesion of the Catholic community and the Muslim community and the Mormon community and the fundamentalist community etc etc etc ahead of protecting women from abuse, oppression, coercion, disappearance, death. It’s a pattern. I hadn’t quite noticed that it’s the same pattern with “the trans community”…although I definitely had noticed the way trans activism uses its annexation to “the LGB community” to browbeat everyone out of all proportion to their numbers. Membership in the LGB commewniteee equals an enormous megaphone.
I’ve noticed how advocates for self ID have been using transed children as cannon fodder, as the AGP men who would be able to take advantage of self ID have already gone through puberty and would be able to claim “womanhood” without the need for any medical intervention at all. It’s like the appropriation of “intersex” to claim that sex is a spectrum, even though the vast majority of AGP men are not intersex, and are clearly aiming at the specifically “female” part of the alleged “spectrum” of sex as their preferred destination, and broadcasting that selection through hyper-stereotypical gender tropes. For them, the tools of self ID are voice lessons, long hair, frilly blouses, bright lippy, gold lame purses and the fucking head tilt, not hormones and surgery.
Riding the LGB bus and claiming “oppression” helps them hide the fact that trans advocacy is largely a movement of and for straight, white men demanding access to women’s spaces.
Even if we grant the TRA claim true – that trans people are placed at risk by this decision – the question still remains as to the issue of consent to medical procedures, and TRAs are asking us to ignore that for the sake of themselves. I wish I had spotted that point.
Well said, Bruce. And Holms, it’s a matter of odds, isn’t it?
If trans people are put at risk by this decision, and children whose belief they are trans is just a phase are put at risk without this decision, which side of the scale weighs more?
Who disappears faster from the scale? I don’t believe that trans people are put at risk at all. Trans radicals appear to believe that children whose transgenderism is just a phase don’t exist, or don’t count.
Never mind the overwhelming evidence that puberty and time resolve the conviction of transgenderism for the majority of children. To the trans radicals, the kids in the other pan just weigh more.
I think the trans radical judgment relies also upon denial of the harm done. They want to believe that surgery and drugs are not a big deal. If surgery and drugs are okay for adults, why not for children, they ask.
Genital surgery on children with disorders of sexual development, now that’s a bigger problem. If doctors get that wrong, it’s a scandal. Hasty and mistaken transing of adolescents, who cares, because they asked for it, and you mustn’t question a trans person’s assertions.
I’ve run into people who are raising their babies as “non-gendered,” or “theybies.” How long is it until trans radicals start surgically inducing disorders of sexual development on babies so they can grow up with indeterminate sex?