Another ACLU ad on Facebook.
An anonymous donor has pledged to match all donations up to $200,000. Every dollar you donate right now will be doubled and immediately put towards our legal, advocacy, and organizing work that supports trans kids and their families.
“Supports” how though? What do they mean by support?
They’re “supporting” what they call “trans kids” by working to make sure they can get drastic, irreversible surgery or drugs or both. It’s not as clear-cut as they think that that equals “support.” It could be that the reality is that some or all such “kids” are caught up in a trend, and will regret this medical tampering with their path to physical adulthood. In addition to everything else wrong with this campaign, the ACLU is being shockingly reckless with the futures of a whole lot of teenagers.
Comments
18 responses to “Lifesaving healthcare?”
From what I’ve heard of the Texas law it sounds bad. Probably really bad. It’s also been proposed by bad politicians for discriminatory and self serving ends, designed to punish and demonise people they don’t like and their families.
Based on what I know, the law should scrapped. I still don’t support the ACLU on this issue though, for the reasons you outline.
Or, like, they’ll die of multiple organ failure due to the medical tampering, before they even get a chance to regret it. Terrible.
Meanwhile, slowly but surely, European countries are waking up.
A second review of the UK’s only NHS gender clinic, GIDS, echoes many of the concerns of the first. Especially interesting, to me, is the concern about “diagnostic overshadowing”:
“It notes that the clinical approach used by GIDS ‘has not been subjected to some of the usual control measures’ typically applied with new treatments.
“The report says there are often tensions between the expectations of the young person – who often wants rapid access to physical interventions after a long, challenging wait to be seen – and the responsibilities of the clinician.
“Another significant issue raised with the review team was that of ‘diagnostic overshadowing’, whereby once a young person is identified as having gender-related distress, other complex needs – such as neurodiversity or a mental health problem that would normally be managed by local services – can be overlooked.
“While noting that ‘many of the challenges and knowledge gaps that we face in the UK are echoed internationally’, the review group raises serious concerns about the lack of data collection by GIDS and more broadly, especially on outcomes for the recent increase in girls questioning their gender identity.
“In a letter directly to children and young people at the beginning of the report, Cass assures readers that her belief is that ‘more services are needed for you, closer to where you live’. But she also cautions them that there was ‘still a lot we don’t know about the long-term effects’ of hormone treatments.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/mar/10/nhs-gender-identity-service-for-children-cant-cope-with-demand-review-finds
(Cross-posted from my Facebook wall)
This is what makes me angry about some medical practitioners on the periphery of these discussions. They publicly pronounce that these drugs are safe and reversible and we should give these young kids the ‘space’ to figure themselves out.
I’m not sure if they don’t realise that in some cases the drugs are taken through normal puberty past the point of any sensible return, or that the blockers are replaced with cross sex hormones that irretrievably affect the person.
It’s either dishonest or so lacking in care and precision that it would be actionable if done in actual medical practice. The head of Family Planning in NZ, an otherwise very respected doctor working for a great organisation has made just such pronouncements and it made me chew tacks.
I feel like we *should* know… Not the specifics but a simple thought experiment would presumably yield the result that *fucking with natural development* is a very serious proposition.
How is that not obvious?
All aboard the Bullshit Express.!
I’m in the same boat as Rob@#1, especially since the law was written by the same folks that created Texas’ abortion bans. The unfortunate truth may be that women just have no good options here, and we’re deep into ‘lesser of two evils’ territory.
One of the at this point probably thousands of victims of this ‘lifesaving healthcare’. Only 15.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220310024624/https://www.reddit.com/r/detrans/comments/taesv4/i_finally_realized_im_not_a_boy_and_i_dont_know/
Jeezus wept that’s heartbreaking.
@guest, #8
That poor child. Luckily, she never took T.
She’s so incredibly articulate and self-aware in this post…no 15 year old should have to be this emotionally mature.
Oh god. That’s so horrible.
And yesterday, PZ Myers was declaring as fact that puberty blockers are temporary and harmless.
My doctor wants to put me on statins. When we were discussing it yesterday, she made a lot of interesting points about how there are a lot of unknowns in terms of dosage, the role of genetics, whether and at what point they can be discontinued, and so on. She pointed out a couple of times that medicine is still an uncertain science.
My point being that statins truly are life-saving drugs that have been around for about half a century, and have been widely used and studied, and yet there’s still a lot we don’t know about them. So why are people so cocksure about the effects of puberty blockers?
I participate in paid surveys from a polling organization. Sometimes they are political rather than consumer. I answered one today about the Texas transgender bill. At the end, there was an opportunity to find out who was behind the survey. Given the wording of the questions, I figured it was a group in favor of gender identity. It was, the ACLU. So I got a few cents from them for my multiple choice answers.
JtD @ 13 – that’s really awful.
#13 – to think that I once admired him and sought his approval on my blog posts and radio show intros.
#14 – My brother claims that statins are so dangerous they should never have been approved, and even shared some conspiratorial stories about how the idea that cholesterol has been trumped up as a contributor to atherosclerosis, and that statins were touted as the cure. He thinks that we should sue the doctors that prescribed them to our mother since she died of a heart attack.
I take them as a heart attack survivor, an artery was blocked and I don’t want that to happen again.
Mike,
Glad to know that you survived. I plan to start taking them when the prescription goes through because I don’t intend to have a heart attack anytime soon.