Uninformed consent
A solidarity too many.
Of course it’s vital that every child receive good health care, but good health care isn’t cutting off the breasts of teenage girls who say they feel like boys. Good health care is not putting such girls on puberty blockers. Good health care is not understanding the child’s needs exactly the way the child does, but rather understanding those needs the way an adult with medical training and experience does.
And what does it actually have to do with Amnesty anyway?
We are Amnesty International UK. We work to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.
As a global movement of over seven million people, Amnesty International is the world’s largest grassroots human rights organisation.
We investigate and expose abuses, educate and mobilise the public, and help transform societies to create a safer, more just world. We received the Nobel Peace Prize for our life-saving work.
It’s a human rights organization.
Ok so is there a human right to get invasive surgery that includes amputation of healthy body parts? Is there a human right to lifelong cross-sex hormones? Is that the only relevant right? If you think those are rights, and unquestionable absolute rights at that, is there perhaps also a competing right to medical information and advice that’s not shaped by campaign groups like Stonewall and/or furious advocates on Twitter? Is it really a right to get medical interventions that are based on a new and eccentric and hotly disputed dogma about people who are in “the wrong body”? Really really? Are they sure they’ve thought about it carefully enough? Are they sure there can be no harm done? (They can’t be, really, when there are people like Keira Bell.)
There were a lot of regrets when the Recovered Memory craze fizzled out. My guess is that there will be a lot of regrets about this craze eventually. It’s sad about all the people who will be messed up before that happens.
Yes, it’s not fair that kids who don’t claim to be trans get puberty blockers but they don’t let trans kids get them. That’s discrimination.
Did they even glance at the medical testimony? Or do they think every single risk and side-effect is better than not looking ‘passable?’
Is it vital to provide the highest attainable standard of healthcare even to children who have been sucked into a quasi-religious cult that tells them that their discomfort, their unhappiness, depression, and confusion are all explained not because of unresolved trauma, difficult puberty, and rigidly sexist society, but because they have a secret gender soul that’s at odds with the reality of their bodies? Can’t those children get the mental healthcare they need to come to terms with the bodies they were born in and learn to appreciate the lives they can lives as complete, intact adults? Do we really need to say that those kids, alone among kids, cannot be counseled for their self-image issues, their dysphoria, and their grief? Do we really need to single out those children for dangerous experimental medication and major, invasive surgeries including sexual mutilation and castration? Why can’t we treat those kids like all other kids, which is to say treat those kids, instead of transing them?
I think that the claim of being in ‘the wrong body’ has largely fallen out of favour, being so easily refuted. The ‘in’ description now seems to be ‘an internal sense and / or knowledge of who I am’. That sounds to me like either a misunderstanding of I think, therefore I am, or just another dishonest conflation in support of a warped hypothesis.
This is, as you would say, fluff, but notice that these fuckers write “vital that every child receives“, in the indicative, whereas Ophelia nostra writes “vital that every child receive“, in the subjunctive.
The recovered memory/hypnotic regression thing is precisely what this all reminds me of. Pseudoscience treated as legitimate, children influenced and coached to affirm nonsense, parental Munchhausen syndrome by proxy, etc. It’s all there.
AoS: No, I think they mean “in” to mean occupying a point within a boundary. Hence all the language about “inhabiting bodies”. They really do conceive of a divide between mind and body. This, perhaps, is part of what enraged them so about the children’s book My Body is Me. The titular premise is per se incompatible with their philosophy of mind, which might as well be homunculi operating cognitive machinery.
Yup, I know. Same here.
Nullius, maybe they saw Inside Out and assumed it was a documentary (cartoon documentaries are rare, but they are not totally unheard of).
iknklast, I had to google that. Haha!
iknklast, well, we are talking about children. And adults with serious developmental issues.
Nullius, re.
In my sentence ‘The ‘in’ description now’ I was using ‘in’ in the sense of ‘current’ or ‘fashionable’. That said, the ‘in the wrong body’ trope has fallen out of fashion, particularly in the sceptic section of the wokeverse, because it dawned on them that it was too close to mind-body dualism and the concept of a soul as per religious belief for comfort, hence the switch to an ‘internal understanding’ of one’s sex as being a better guide to the truth than physical reality.
Oh, have they started to use the term “sex” as well now? e.g. “I identify as being of female sex (not just gender), even though I have a penis”?
As I’m sure most of us here will remember, the word “sex” (in the sense of male or female) was anyway going out of fashion, being replaced by “gender” (supposedly a more “family” “child-friendly” “non-yucky” word) long before TRAs became prevalent. I think that this has made it easier for TRAs to latch onto it.
And this reminds me of a story…
There was (I believe still is) a certain blogger, utterly boring, utterly self-righteous, who wrote a serious of blogposts around 2005 called “Vomiting in Halakha” (halakha = Jewish religious law). A while later, he wanted to write a post called “Sex in Halakha”, about questions regarding sex-selection in embryos for implantation. Before he uploaded the post, his wife walked past his computer, and said: “OMG, you can’t write that bad, bad word [i.e. sex] online! What if a child saw it?!” So he changed the title of the post to: “S** in Halakha”.
The first (?) commenter on the post wrote: “When I saw the title of this post, I thought: Oh, shitting in halakha! Even grosser than vomiting in halakha!”
Re recovered memory: there was a really bad article about recovered memory in New York Magazine. Several people (including Elizabeth Loftus and Carrie Poppy) wrote letters of criticism, which the magazine declined to publish, so Poppy collected them and put them on her Medium site, along with copious description of who did what when. I love a good rebuttal. (It’s five letters; she added one after the URL was created.)
https://carriepoppyyes.medium.com/four-letters-new-york-magazine-hasnt-printed-88e08e94db5f
GW, yes, TW are now claiming to be both TW and female, just an incorrectly observed kind of female (ie even doctors look at them and call them male, because apparently doctors have reductionist colonial ideas about sex). I’ve had two recently tell me they are both female and trans women, and Chase Strangio promotes similar nonsense.
Recovered memory hasn’t gone away. The furious witch hunt of the 80s has dissipated, but I don’t think there’s been any great reckoning for the quacks who drove it.
Will Amnesty campaign for the ‘right’ to Gay Conversion therapy next?
That’s a bit harsh. Remember: be kind. It’s so much nicer to say “Come join your glitter rainbow family!”
Besides, these kids are special. They are, after all, getting special treatment.
Re: past lives (an off-topic musing)
I am getting ready to adopt a 9-year-old cat. I wondered, how many of his 9 lives he had used up? and then it occurred to me that doing “past life regression” with cats would probably get you what the cat did last week.