The harm suffered
Sweden has made The Big Swerve.
The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare released new recommendations that effectively halt “gender-affirming” medical interventions in minors and prioritize psychotherapy for the treatment of gender-dysphoric youth. This is confirms the direction taken by the leading children’s hospital in Sweden last year, after a series of investigative reports exposed the harm suffered by children and young people who were medically “transitioned” using hormones and surgery.
The link is dated February 2022 (and is in Swedish). I suppose now the “activists” will be accusing Sweden of embracing “conversion therapy.” One person’s “refraining from extreme surgeries and/or drugs for dysphoric children” is another person’s “extreme cruelty via conversion therapy.”
I think that
should read
And please ignore #1. Wrong key.
Why do you think that?
Ruh roh. Sweden isn’t exactly a hive of far-right conservative thought; more stories like this are really going to put a dent in the transgender anti-reality shield.
@#2: The original says: “One person’s “refraining from extreme surgeries and/or drugs for dysphoric children” is another person’s “extreme cruelty via conversion therapy…”
The two are 180 degrees apart, IMHO.
That was my point. The proponents of chopping off teenagers’ bits consider refraining from doing that to be “conversion therapy.” They’re wrong. If you haven’t been following you may not realize that “conversion therapy” is a pejorative.
OK. No worries.
Google Translate converts the February 2022 Swedish article from Norwegian to English with this syntax:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&hl=en&u=https://lakartidningen.se/aktuellt/nyheter/2022/02/socialstyrelsen-unga-ska-bara-fa-hormonbehandling-i-undantagsfall/
Bonus 1 — Clicking my link above jumped me to a Google domain where I can browse all of the web site for the Swedish medical journal Läkartidningen translated from Norwegian to English:
https://lakartidningen-se.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=no&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en
Bonus 2 — For any of the other Swedish web sites cited in the article for Person & Identity, you could try my first Google syntax above and see if it leads to something like my second Google syntax above.
I think that we really need to concentrate on never saying LGBT(+infinity), but instead saying LGB. One of the reasons that there has been such success in England gathering protests against “LGBT Conversion” is that gay conversion therapy is brutal and lesbian therapy can take the form of coercive rape. There is no T Conversion therapy, but talk therapy to get at the root of the reason that one thinks that they are actually a disembodied female trapped in a male body (or F trapped in M.) Many people conflate the two, including an Aiche Wylie who was so proud of harassing a gay man merely because of an LGB Alliance shirt. Or button. I don’t want to watch that video again to verify.
There is talk therapy to try to convince gay people they aren’t gay, and there is talk therapy to help people who are confused and troubled by their thoughts regarding sexuality work through their feelings. Transactivists regard any talk therapy at all regarding trans issues as the first type, trying to convince people they aren’t trans, unless it is emphatically the opposite of that. They don’t acknowledge at all the possibility of helping people deal with gender confusion. People just “are trans”, they don’t have a mental condition, don’cha know.
There is also “therapy” other than talk therapy, such as shock therapy or surgery or drugs, that are aimed at forcing people to “give up” being gay, under the guise of “converting” them. Perhaps there are some similar therapies aimed at people with gender dysphoria. The most obvious examples, though, are in the other direction, therapies to cement a gender identity into an altered body, and it is the withholding of these treatments, not their provision, that is being dubbed “conversion therapy”. Topsy-turvy world.
Proponents of Affirmation Therapy often insist that “exploratory talk therapy” is at the very heart of Affirmation Therapy. What they mean by this is that children & teens who are uncertain, confused, or “exploring their gender” are not rushed into transition. They talk. Sometimes the patient decides they’re not trans after all. It happens.
But children & teens who are 150% pig certain they’re trans, asserting they’ve always been this way, insisting they need transition in order to be “who they really are?” Nope, those folks sure don’t need any “exploratory talk therapy.” Obviously.
It comes down to the is a fundamental difference in kind between LGB and T. A person who presents as the former expresses a metabelief (“I like [boys | girls].”) about a normative value (“Yay [boys | girls]!”). A patient who presents as T, however, expresses a descriptive judgement: “I am a [boy | girl].” This is a proposition, in the technical sense: a statement that admits of one truth value (for a given interpretation). Moreover, its correctness can be determined empirically. Investigating and challenging incorrect self-belief is supposed to be a legitimate therapeutic function.
This isn’t super-complicated stuff. One wonders why it’s so hard for people to see.
Did you mean to say “patient”? I’m guessing that’s a brain-fart for “person”?
It’s willful blindness in this one claim particularly. If it were just the blindness, that would be one thing. It’s the coercion to collude that takes it that much further. It’s not usually suggested as a matter of course, that society at large affirms and goes along with people’s mistaken beliefs about themselves. We don’t agree with dangerously underweight anorexics that they are in fact horribly obese. We do not humour people, suffering from very particular brain injuries, by going along with their sincerely held (but mistaken) belief that one of their own limbs is actually a robotic or alien replacements that have somehow been grafted onto their bodies. The vehemence and sincerity of these strongly held beliefs does not enter into the picture. The incorrectness of the self image overrides the firmness of the patient’s conviction. There is no demand made that we share, and reinforce, the delusions of these people, or a socially enforced, professionally sanctioned belief that doing so is actually good for the people trapped within these delusions.
We’ve noted on a number of occasions here on B&W that Donald Trump’s self image as a “stable genius” is a claim of the same sort. It is a laughably inaccurate self-image, but enough went along with him that he was elected to the highest office in the United States. Going along with delusions, or denying that they are delusions at all, can have serious ramifications. These are still being played out with the American body politic around the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. But there are delusions on both sides of the aisle.
People who would balk or laugh at “validating” Trump’s self assessment happily put pronouns in their bios, and will unquestioningly believe, repeat, and enforce the claim that TWAW. There are medical associations proclaiming that children can “know themselves” perfectly well, and that they should be allowed to make decisions about a future that they are, in reality, ill-equipped to imagine because they are still, you know, children. Puberty, a normal, healthy (if sometimes fraught) stage through which humans pass, is compared to “an approaching asteroid” to be paused, delayed or avoided. It is insisted that this can be done safely and reversibly. “Watchfull waiting” is branded as “conversion therapy,” while the euphemisticaly named “affirmation” approach is nothing but a fast-track to a path of mutilation, debilitation, and lifelong medical dependency that will likely fail to address issues that it leaves, by design, unacknowleged and unexplored. All for the child’s “mental health”.
And that’s all the more…pathetic, frustrating, wrong, because it’s so crucial to be aware and keep in mind that people can be mistaken about themselves, including precious Us, the ones trying to be aware and keep in mind. People can be wrong about themselves and that includes all the pronouns, including the first person ones. Trump’s utter delusion about himself, and his willingness to shout it to the world, is one of the most disgusting things about him.
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