Treatment
Some people regret the whole thing.
By age 14, Eva became convinced she was a transgender boy. By 16, she had come out to her teachers and classmates.
Her family wasn’t pleased but trans activists and a Toronto therapist had a solution.
She could move into the Covenant House youth shelter, and then freely go on hormones to push ahead with medical transition.
Hell yes. Mess with your body at age 16; what could go wrong?
“They thought it was so important for me to be on testosterone that it was OK if I left home and probably didn’t graduate high school,” recalled Eva, who asked that her last name not be published to preserve her privacy around sensitive issues. “Even at that point in life, when I was 16 and totally believed this was the only thing that was going to save me, I was more rational about it.”
So she didn’t mess with her body. Wise move, but others are not so wise.
A few years later she changed her mind about the whole thing.
Eva, now 24, is part of a controversial cohort known as detransitioners and desisters, transgender people who come to rethink their decision, often having already undergone drug and surgical treatments.
In October she founded an organization – Detrans Canada – she hopes will support individuals she said can feel ostracized by the LGBTQ community.
She believes transition is essential for some gender dysphoric youth, but questions a treatment approach she said pushes young people too forcefully in that direction.
If it’s really essential for some, why has it taken so long for humanity to figure that out? I know medical thinking changes over time, and is cumulative, and there’s a lot that humans didn’t know in the past, and so on, but still…why has it taken so long? Since it has taken so long, why are we so very confident that it’s a real thing and in some cases requires body-altering treatment?
I may be abnormally averse to needless body-alterations. I never even wanted pierced ears, when all my cohort was getting them. I’m horrified by what fashionable shoes do to women’s feet, and don’t get me started on FGM. But even if it’s an abnormally intense aversion, it’s still not irrational. You only get the one body, so why damage it for stupid frivolous reasons? Why not take care to preserve it instead?
“I feel a little bit angry, more than a little bit, because other people who’ve been in this position went much further than me,” said Eva. “I have lesbian friends who have no uterus, no ovaries, no breasts and are 21-years old. I’m angry that every single doctor and therapist we saw told us this was the one and only option.”
It’s mass lobotomies all over again.
Greta Bauer, the CIHR chair in gender and sex science at Western University, said she’s aware of no research indicating destransitioners’ ranks are expanding. She said many don’t regret their choice, they have simply stopped taking hormones for various other reasons.
“What concerns me is that some people seem to think that the existence of any regret justifies denying or delaying care for everyone who needs a treatment,” said Bauer. “This is not the standard by which we evaluate any other medical treatment.”
But is it care? Is it treatment? Is it medical treatment? What if it’s none of those things, but just a batshit fad for an invented condition with invented drastic “treatments”? What if it’s a deeply muddled conviction that a psychological state is in fact a bodily medical condition when it isn’t? What then?
The ‘advisers’ appear to have an emotional stake of their own in the outcome. In its own way, it’s putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank.
Yes, and why do they? Just everyday commonplace credulity and crowd contagion and all that? It’s like the Freud craze all over again, but these people have the Freud craze to learn from.
My wife is of the same opinion, and I don’t think it makes her or you “abnormally averse”. She doesn’t have pierced ears, and when our daughter said at the age of 13 or so that she wanted her ears pierced my wife said not yet. When you’re old enough to make your own decision (which I think she defined as 16) then I won’t stop you.
As for Eva’s story, I’m appalled.
That’s what I think too, of course, but I put it that way to sort of give the other side its due – to frame myself the way an opponent might. Anyway, comradely greetings to your wife!
Well, I do have pierced ears, but my mother was also “wait”, and I did. It made me not a little bit angry when she allowed my younger sister to pierce hers at 14, when I was just getting old enough, by her estimation, to decide. So I did get them pierced, and enjoy wearing earrings, but I certainly would never ever insist others had to pierce…which is more like what is happening here. Oh, you want to wear earrings? Oh, you must pierce your ears! It’s the only way! Any rational person would see that as ridiculous.
Other than that, I am also averse to bodily modifications. Piercing ears seems sort of mild, but cutting off breasts (or protruding bits of any kind, whether they actually protrude or only sort of dangle), removing healthy uterus and ovaries, etc? Not okay. These are irreversible. If I didn’t want my ears pierced anymore, I could leave the earrings out long enough and they will close up (I know, it’s happened to me, even after they’d been pierced long enough I didn’t think it could) or just not stick earrings in them anymore and ignore them.I also don’t like tatooing, though if an adult chooses to do that, it’s sort of their body. If a younger person chooses, without parental permission, to tatoo, I would say, no, you need to wait until you’re old enough to understand. My father had tatoos when he was in the Navy because all the other guys were. Years later he had them surgically removed, because they weren’t so “cool” in professional work. And my mother didn’t like the half-naked dancing ladies.
A while back I was musing with the idea of opening a tattoo parlour. Make $$$$ putting them on, and after they go out of fashion, make more $$$$ taking them off again. Oh, and learn a bit about the art trade on the way through; half-naked dancing ladies and stuff like that. (h/t iknklast.)
But I may have missed the boat.
Or hysterectomies.
I wasn’t attacking pierced ears, or people who have pierced ears, or the custom of having pierced ears. On the contrary, I was using my own aversion to the idea of pierced ears as an indication of my general dislike of cosmetic (i.e. non-medical, not necessary) body changes. It was just to underline the fact that it’s something I shy away from even when it’s basically harmless. That’s all.
Yeah, I didn’t think you were. If it came across as defensive, I didn’t mean it to, I was just sort of adding a point about disliking that stuff myself, but not completely.
Something I didn’t mention is that she comes from a culture (Latin America) where female babies often have their ears pierced when very young. Once in Colombia (not where she came from) I was walking our then baby daughter in her pram and heard a couple of women speculating about whether she was a boy baby or a girl baby, and one said that he looks like a girl but must be a boy baby as he doesn’t have pierced ears. In Colombia wearing a pink dress and having a girlish face isn’t enough to identify you as female: without pierced ears you are male. So, Ophelia, if you go to Colombia you may be taken as a man.
It didn’t come across to me as defensive. I took it the way I think you meant it.
I’m so used to pierced ears that I regard them as normal, but I’m not keen (to put it mildly) on pierced lips, noses, cheeks etc., or multiple piercings in the same ear. As for nipples and labia I don’t usually see them, but I gather that they’re popular in some circles.
Too bad the Freud craze, and its offspring the Repressed Memory craze and the sexualization of children, are still with us. The trans-Stasi have grown up in a culture that has erased those memories.
Part of the problem is that everybody feels their hands are tied when they talk about trans The media and people who need to speak publicly about it always feel they have to be extra-considerate of the sensitive feelings of people who think they’re transgender. I know in Eva’s case she has to be extremely diplomatic because as the head of a detransition organization her job is to reach out and earn the trust of teens who are still trapped inside the trans bubble.
I’m glad the Canadian media is finally starting to really look at this. But I’m annoyed by the soft-shoe balancing act. I’m sick of on-the-other-hands and but-some-people-might-benefits. Kids are being harmed. Women’s rights are being ripped apart. Lesbians are being put through hell. I want to hear people speak the naked truth. “Who are we fucking kidding? Of course we shouldn’t be giving kids sex changes! These are distressed kids who’ve been misled by creeps on the internet! Of course Jerry in Accounting isn’t really Tiffany trapped inside Jerry’s body; Jerry’s got a paraphilia and if he wants to act it out in the office he sure as hell shouldn’t be doing so in the women’s bathroom. And a pink leather miniskirt and fishnets are not appropriate office attire for a man or a woman. Of course Ellen Page is still a lesbian, and of course JK Rowling doesn’t want to see her dead.” No ums or buts or cautious caveats. Just say it, people. This is crazy bullshit and we all know it.
But Jerry only wants t feel pretty!