The dice are loaded and ready
“Grace” Lavery gets a pile of crap published at Foreign Policy. Why FP is that gullible is beyond me. It’s about the Tavistock ruling (so that makes it suitable for FP because it’s in Another Country?).
In effect, the courts intervened in the transition-related care of children experiencing gender dysphoria, putting those children and their families in the position of having to seek care abroad.
But calling it “care” assumes the very thing that is at issue – that puberty blockers are a legitimate treatment for a genuine medical condition that needs treatment. That’s a very shaky assumption, and for Keira Bell, for instance, it turned out to be entirely wrong. Lavery is cheating by treating it as obvious and universally agreed that puberty blockers are a “treatment.”
The decision is an unprecedented juridical attack on the LGBT community in the U.K., in which the British state has asserted a right to enforce unwanted puberty—and to arrest transitions that are already in progress—on the slimmest of pretexts.
Another cheat. It’s not an “attack” at all, but whatever it is, it is not on “the LGBT community.” L G and B people don’t want puberty blockers, and it’s stacking the deck to try to portray the ruling as a form of homopobia.
We’re used to this kind of deceptive garbage in blog posts and tweets, but Foreign Policy ought to be able to see it and reject it.
It also reflects a disturbing escalation of anti-transgender policy across the United Kingdom.
But it isn’t “anti-transgender,” it’s anti-harmful medical interventions on children.
A formerly highly marginal ideology, the so-called gender critical position, has captured British institutions.
Which twin has the ideology here? The gender critical position is not an ideology so much as it’s a rejection of an ideology – the trans ideology that inculcates such dogmatic truths as “puberty blockers are essential treatment” and “protecting adolescents from dangerous medical interference is transphobic.” The foundational claim that people can have the body of one sex and the mind of another is an ideological claim of a fantastical nature.
The court’s decision was lauded not just by the British right-wing press like the Spectator but, more strikingly, by center-left media like the Observer, which applauded the decision, suggesting that it will “ensure that children will now receive the protection to which they are legally entitled.”
Yes, and what does that tell us? Perhaps that there may be some truth to the notion that children need protection from people who would permanently mess up their bodies (including their brains).
“a right to enforce unwanted puberty”
Other rights the UK government has asserted for itself:
— a right to enforce unwanted chastity on young children
— a right to enforce unwanted celibacy on young children
— a right to enforce unwanted sobriety on young children
— a right to enforce unwanted education on children
— a right to disenfranchise citizens under 18
Dr. Jane Clare Jones’ elegant commentary on the article:
https://buzzchronicles.com/Alex1Powell/b/law/3474/
Ah thank you.
Unwanted puberty is ‘enforced’ in the exact same manner that unwanted toenail growth is. It’s an ineluctable part of being alive. In normal circumstances (barring problems such as precocious puberty) you should be as willing to interfere with it as you would chopping your foot off to deal with the nail problem.
News flash. Unwanted puberty is something all of us endure. Noone loves puberty. It’s unpleasant to endure. It’s messy (at least for women; I don’t know about men). It’s embarrassing. So all they’re saying is that people are being forced to grow up. Duh. We all have to do it…not like a mayfly, which spends most of its life as a juvenile, and only a few hours as an adult.
I don’t remember anything notable about it, which is one reason Netflix’s Big Mouth (other than being gross) has been hard to watch… This season they added in trans shit so I’m sure it’ll go straight to woke hell…
I didn’t see this article until infidel753 linked to it, and I must say that this post is not very good.
(1) The ruling is an attack on Gillick competence, which says that children under 16 (in the United Kingdom) can consent to medical treatment without parental permission if they can comprehend what that treatment does. This ruling states that people under 16 cannot understand permanent, life-changing decisions.
The religious right says abortion is a permanent, life-changing decision. Technically, they’re right. This is a backdoor way to prohibit under-16s from getting abortions and birth control. The dice are, indeed, loaded and ready.
(2) I don’t know about the United Kingdom, but here in the states, the
* American Academy of Pediatrics ,
* the American Medical Association ,
* the American Psychological Association ,
* the Endocrine Society , and
* the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
all say that puberty blockers are ” legitimate treatment for a genuine medical condition that needs treatment.”
If the all the mainstream medical societies say one thing, and a bunch of cranks says something else, mainstream medicine. The “gender critical” ideology says that mainstream medicine is deluded and wrong. The “gender critical” folks are the cranks.
(3) “L G and B people don’t want puberty blockers, and it’s stacking the deck to try to portray the ruling as a form of homopobia.”
Some do – there are transgender lesbians, transgender gays, and transgender bisexuals!
(4) “The foundational claim that people can have the body of one sex and the mind of another is an ideological claim of a fantastical nature.”
There are non-binary people, and there are societies, such as the Bugis and Navajo, which traditionally had five-gender systems. Some people have ovotestes.
There is a condition known as chimerism, where two embryos fuse into one. There has been at least one case where a person had both one ovary and one testicle! This makes it possible that a person could have XX genitals and an XY brain, or vice versa.
(5) Where do intersex people fit in? Do “gender critical” people even admit to their existence?
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advice is interesting. It includes a lot of hints and warnings that the advice is provisional, and that it’s a product of changing fashions.
Their italics. It could turn out that the “emerging” advances aren’t scientific at all. They don’t spell that out, but “subject to change” is a broad hint.
And why is that? Why are there more and more youth in this underserved population? Could it be because treating gender nonconformity as a medical problem is a growing fashion? I think it could, yes.
Why? Why are there these large gaps? Could it be because the fashion is outrunning the ability of medical experts to keep up?
Even though all this is so new and they’re running so hard to catch up. It’s terrifying. “We’re still struggling to understand this, but in the meantime put kids on puberty blockers that will mess up their bones and brains, and cut off their breasts or dicks and get rid of the pesky uterus and ovaries.” It’s bonkers.