“Gender-affirming care”
The ACLU might be right about this.
It might be, but it might not.
It’s not a slam-dunk that it’s right though. It’s not just obvious that it’s right to allow and even encourage teenagers to do irreversible things to their bodies because they believe there’s a mismatch between their bodies and what sex they are. It’s not just obvious that it’s better to let a teenager take puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones years before her or his prefrontal cortex has matured. It’s not just obvious that this should be called “gender-affirming” as opposed to “reckless endangerment.”
The ACLU doesn’t know that this belief in a gendered soul is going to become universal knowledge. The ACLU doesn’t know it’s not a fashion as opposed to a new true belief that no one knew until ten or twenty years ago. The ACLU is not a set of psychologists or endocrinologists, it’s a civil liberties campaign group that’s going all-in on a novel and bizarre belief about inner selves at odds with the bodies they live in. The ACLU is setting fire to its own work.
Did you hear about Sweden?!!!!!! This seems to have happened just this week.
https://archive.ph/H660X
Sweden’s new guidelines emphasize that gender-dysphoric youth will continue to receive care. However, health care for gender dysphoria is no longer reduced to “hormones and surgeries.” The recommendations now call out a key role for psychiatric and psychosocial services. /3
The guidelines assert that based on current evidence, the risks of hormonal interventions outweigh the possible benefits. Thus, these interventions (often referred to as “gender-affirming care”) will not be available outside of research settings, except as “last-resort.” /4
Sweden is realigning with the classic “Dutch Protocol” model, where only early childhood-onset gender dysphoria cases will be considered for hormones and surgeries. Those with post-puberty onset of trans identity will not be candidates for hormones/surgeries as minors. /5
Dammit. So tots with a parent who has Munchausen by proxy will still be chemically sterilised and their natural development stunted, then surgically mutilated and tortured for life?? How is that fair?
I posted this in Miscellany Room 7 before I had seen the post here to which it obviously applies. Reposting here, apologies for the duplication.
A father refuses to accept his effeminate and possibly gay son, and only accepts the boy after medical and surgical treatments render the boy gender-conforming; treatments will likely sterilize the boy and continue for his lifetime. A state government wishes to ban such treatments. A huge backlash against the ban arises.
If the boy is forced to be a masculine boy, the state in this scenario might be nominally liberal and the backlash nominally conservative. But if the boy is turned into a simulacrum of a girl, it seems that only conservative states are interested in banning this intervention, and the backlash is nominally liberal, of the “woke” variety. As is currently happening in Texas and Alabama and probably other places.
Alabama is also in the process of passing a bill that would require students to use dressing facilities (bathrooms, lockers, anywhere someone might be in a state of undress) in accordance with their sex as listed on their birth certificate.
I’m sure most of these bills are copycat bills, probably written by a conservative think tank and introduced in sympathetic legislatures around the country. I’m sure most of them are not intended as humanitarian or supportive of the rights of women, but rather as ways to fire up the conservative electorate and to distract the liberals.
On that last point, it’s working. The “bathroom bill” is what everybody seems to be talking about in liberal circles in Alabama. Meanwhile, the state House also passed a bill allowing people to carry concealed firearms without a permit. Is anybody talking about that? Nooooo.
Meanwhile, it’s distressing to watch well-meaning people shout angrily about how abuse of children is being called “child abuse”, disingenuously or not.
Re the OP, I’d be less charitable and say that the ACLU is wrong about this. But the aspect that bothers me in particular is that the ACLU has chosen this hill, and is not fighting other battles that are much more clearly in their scope. Why aren’t they fighting for the rights of women to single-sex spaces? Why aren’t they fighting free speech battles for people who speak out against gender ideology? Why aren’t they fighting, I dunno, something having to do with permitless concealed carry?
Also re the OP, the kids receiving puberty blockers are probably best described as “adolescents” rather than “teenagers”, since it seems children as young as 10 are given these drugs.
I agree that there are reasons to scrutinize, and possibly restrict, the use of surgery and hormones for minors.
I have serious doubts that criminal and child protective services investigations are a good way to accomplish this, as opposed to regulation of the medical profession.
I am 100% sure that I do not trust the state of Texas and the reactionary thugs in charge of it to implement this new policy.
I of course also think the ACLU is wrong about this, but I wanted to underline the point that the ACLU can’t really know it’s right [even if it is], because of all the complexities involved and the novelty of the belief system. It’s grotesquely overconfident and overbearing about this new peculiar ideology that pretends to be fact-based.
@2: Tigger, that part is certainly not good, but overall the fact that they’re limited who can get these horrible hormones is good. I don’t like that the little groomed kids can get these hormones, but I am glad that ROGD teenagers no longer can.
One thing I wonder is how many of those childhood onset gender dysphoria cases are actually the little one not fitting the appropriate stereotypes applied to their sex, and the parents are “OMG, you’re acting like a girl!”. So the kid decides he must be a girl, if doing these things is “acting like a girl”.
@7: Probably nearly 100% of the time, no?
SM@4
I share your distrust of the Texas and other governments to implement such things. I mostly agree with their charge of “child abuse”. I’d rather see doctors not do these things because they are harmful, rather than governments force doctors to stop.
iknklast@7
Good question. There are many anecdotes, so we know it happens.
GW #1
But only in research settings or as a “last resort,” after psychological/psychiatric treatment.
This is excellent news. This is what we need here in the US, not Abbott’s ham-fisted approach.
@iknklast
As I child, I was often told that I was “not a real boy”, “behaving like a girl” etc., mainly because I cried easily and was afraid of “boyish” activities like climbing, brawling (yes, in the 70s, it was considered o.k. for boys to fight each other) and so on and prefered reading, talking etc. Until age 12 or so I liked playing with girls better than playing with boys, my favorite characters were the girls from Lindgren’s Bullerbü novels. (I also liked, dinosaurs and monsters, though).
Today I know that part of my “girlishness” was simply character, part was me being a rather sensitive (perhaps even hypersensitive) kid and part was simply being extremely short-sighted, which was only discovered when I was 7 in my second school year. (The ophtalmologist was astonished how short-sighted I was for someone who got his first glasses and that no one had ever noticed it before.)
If someone had told me back then that I might be a girl in a boys body, I’d have loved that explanation. (So would my mother, who always wanted a girl…)
So if I were a child today, chances are high that people would tell me that I actually am “trans” and a girl, I myself would probably instantly believe it because it would explain why I was so different and i expect I would afterwards vehemently argue against anyone who says that I am just a different boy. I would possibly have transitioned and would believe the lie my whole life because it fits so well.
I am afraid that similar things happen to many kids today (especially if the parents are invested in wanting a girl/boy or wanting a trans kid because it is so cool and awesome…).
I think iknklast’s question was specifically about parents making this assessment. There are many cases where children make the assessment in opposition to the parents, and there are a number of support groups in existence for parents who disagree with the situation and don’t know what to do on the face of a culture that will brand them bigots and maybe take the children away if the parents don’t cooperate. There are also parents who go along willingly, but who didn’t initiate the idea. So no, I don’t think the number is close to 100% (of gender nonconforming kids who are told by their parents that they must be the opposite sex).
@Sackbut
I can imagine that for teenagers, but not for children aged 9 or below (unless they are groomed by someone else). At that age, kids do not really understand what sex and gender is and means. And I agree that even there the number is probably not 100%, but it will be much higher than for teenagers who are also at a development stage where testing/protesting against parents’ believe is an important part of growing up.
Sonderval,
There are many instances where small kids are groomed at school by the teachers. They are taught about gender woo and they can be given new identities that are used in school but not divulged to parents. Abigail Shrier talks about this at some length in Irreversible Damage; it’s absolutely terrible.