Guest post: There is no alternative puberty
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany Room.
Here’s a story I came across from Canadian Press that has been carried on a number of news services:
Transgender people bear brunt of misinformation about gender identity, experts say
(They have no idea how true that is, but not in the way they’re thinking; trans identified people pay with their health and well-being for the misinformation they’re fed. I’d say that’s “bearing the brunt” alright. This story contains some of that very disinformation from these “experts.”)
Dupré Latour, a trans woman who grew up in West Africa and immigrated to Canada five years ago so she could affirm her gender identity, believes that religion, stereotypes and misconceptions help people justify their hate.
Well what about the lies, intimidation, and denial of reality? I can imagine that one could develop an antipathy towards transgenderism without needing to draw upon religion. There are plenty of “stereotypes” and “misconceptions” within genderism itself, and I wouldn’t trust this man’s definition of “hate.”
She is saddened that many believe that transgender identity is merely a trend.
I don’t care how sad he is, social contagion is a thing, and it preys upon confused youth, many of whom are suffering from other problems, none of which will be solved by transing them. Many, if not most, of these children and youth would, if not shunted into the “gender affirming” pathway, desist, and grow up to be gays and lesbians. How real can it be if it’s something you can grow out of? If it looks like a trend, and walks like a trend, and talks like a trend, it can’t very well be fundamental and innate, can it?
“But we’ve always been there,
Nope.
…it’s just that now, we are in an environment, in a favourable era, but it’s not a trend: these are people who make sacrifices, people who don’t love themselves, who look in the mirror and hate themselves and who have no choice to go through this to live their lives in the image of what society expects.”
The sacrifices are no proof that it’s not part of a trend. People will do any number of harmful, deluded things in persuit of something that is not real. And as for self hatred, and problems with self image, see above regarding comorbidities that transing won’t fix.
Advocates have for years said that misinformation clouds much of the debate over transgender rights in Canada, especially when it comes to youth.
Advocates think that puberty blockers are like a pause button; Advocates think that puberty blockers are safe when used off-label. They believe that it’s possible to go through the “wrong” puberty, whereas a human body is primed to go through just one, which will happen only once. There is no “choice” in the matter, no Door Number Two, no Plan B. Blockers prevent the natural growth and development programmed into the body. Disrupting that is not hitting “pause.” There is no alternative puberty that can be offered the person denied the one and only puberty they will ever have a chance of experiencing. To suggest otherwise is clouding misinformation.
Not allowing the use of preferred pronouns can heighten levels of anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts among non-binary and transgender youth, said Annie Pullen Sansfaçon, a professor at the Université de Montréal’s department of social work and a gender identity researcher for the past 15 years.
And how much of that is because they’ve been told that’s what they’re “supposed” to be feeling? No discussion of gender identity touching on children fails to claim this; kids doing their own “research” and self-diagnosing as trans are going to see this formula all the time. It’s become part of the script, it’s part of what kids have been told is key to getting their own way. It’s what’s expected of them. It’s a bunch of self-selected subjects and no control group.
GRIS-Montréal, a community organization, has been holding workshops and conferences in schools about sexual orientation for 30 years. Since 2017, the organization has also broached the realities of gender identity.
Great; forced teaming. Though I have to laugh at the oxymoronic idea of “the realities of gender identity.” As if.
Marie Houzeau, the organization’s general manager, said the same prejudices and myths that existed in relation to homosexuality in the past are now transposed to gender identity, ..
Bullshit.
…even though it’s established that one cannot influence the orientation or gender identity of someone else.
More bullshit. If people couldn’t be “influenced” in regards to their “genderidentity” there would be no detransitioners.
She said there is a huge disparity in the amount of reliable information circulating in schools.
“We know that young people receive a lot of information through social media, some follow influencers and that constitutes their main source of information,” Houzeau said.
“We also know the phenomenon of algorithms and echo chambers that ensure that young people only receive information that is in line with what they already think, it can lead to misinformation for some people if they follow people who themselves have opinions based on misinformation.”
Yes, and you’re not doing that at all, are you?
On the other hand, some youth have the right information and can share it with their peers to help debunk transition and treatment myths, she said.
What do you consider to be the “right” information? What myths are you passing off as truth? What’s your take on puberty blockers? Do you think that sex is “assigned” at birth? Is there more than one sex? Can humans change sex?
Pullen Sansfaçon said one common misconception is about puberty blockers — medication prescribed to adolescents who are beginning a gender transition. She stressed these drugs are not given to children before puberty hits.
The medication is not permanent and simply slows down the puberty process, buying time for a young person to weigh their decision more carefully. If a person stops taking it, puberty resumes its course within a few months, Pullen Sansfaçon said.
Hey look, there’s a myth right there, the pause button. The vast majority of children put on blockers end up being given wrong sex hormones.
According to recent studies, gender-affirming care has psychosocial and mental health benefits for youth. During adolescence, hormone blockers reduce the risk of suicidal ideation.
But other studies have caused several countries to stop the use of blockers for children, and found that gender affirming care does not result in improvement in mental health issues or suicidality. And let’s not forget the damning revelations of the WPATH papers and what they mean for the entire concept of “best practices” in “gender affirming care.”
“These are medications that can save a person’s life,” Pullen Sansfaçon said.
These are experimental procedures that can permanently fuck up a person’s life.
It’s the same thing for gender-affirming surgeries.
Indeed, these can permanently fuck up a person’s life.
The Canadian Paediatric Society says age cutoffs for funding such surgeries vary by province and territory in Canada, but genital reconstructive surgery is restricted to individuals who are 18 or older.
But the genitals aren’t being “reconstructed,” they’re removed and replaced with a non-functioning resemblance of the other sex’s organs. Just as a glass eye is not actually a functional eye that restores sight when worn, a “neo-vagina” isn’t a vagina at all; a “neo-penis” is not a penis. Sexual function is not restored, it is lost.
Top surgery to remove or augment breast tissue is generally limited to those 16 and older.
Using the euphemism “top surgery” to replace the more accurate (and unavoidably more charged) double mastectomy is dishonest and minimalizing. You’re not changing a t-shirt, you’re removing healthy breasts.
A followup with a psychologist is also required. Sam Lajeunesse, a 43-year-old trans man, can attest to its benefits.
What about more psychological consultation beforehand? If gender clinicians were really concerned for their patients’ well-being, the best case scenario would be desistance through watchful waiting. That would be their first, best choice for resolving or dealing with their patients’ issues. A pathway that avoids pharmaceutical and surgical interventions should be considered a better course than one that requires more aggressive “treatment.” But watchful waiting is now off the table, thanks to “experts” like these.
Pullen Sansfaçon said that some effects of hormone therapy can be reversed, sometimes through corrective surgery.
So sometimes the diagnoses are incorrect? Sometimes mistakes are made? And the times when “corrective” surgery can’t “reverse” the effects of hormone therapy? Ooops.
Medical and surgical help for young transgender and non-binary people isn’t new; standards of care have been set by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health since 1998 and have been updated over the years.
Oh dear.
Lajeunesse and Latour describe discussions about their gender identity as a sort of eternal “coming out.”
That makes sense, in that they will never become the sex they are not, whatever the course of “treatment.”
“Often, people will say, ‘You’re a man,’ but no, I’m not a man, I’m a trans woman,” she said with pride. “And sometimes, it’s heavy to always have to explain that you can’t address me as a man.”
But you are a man, and nothing you do, nothing done to you, changes that. And I can address you as a man if I like, because that’s what you are. You might have found doctors willing to cater to your delusions, who in turn encouraged you to force others to do the same, but I will not let you dictate my reality. You are not a woman of any kind, and never will be.
And as for “misinformation,” apart from actual right wing bigots, I doubt you’ll find any amount of deception or dishonesty to match the amount and degree employed by genderists on a regular basis. “Gender affirming” clinicians sell promises of the impossible while trivializing, downplaying, and euphemizing the risks and consequences of the regime they are selling. They have joined in the effort to make talk therapy that might lead to desistance illegal, and made the procedures and treatments they are offering sound harmless and reversible, falsely suggesting they offer their patients some kind of “choice” in matters where they can have none, and the ability to make changes that cannot be made.
No, but they’re given well before puberty has completed, generally at the very start; when children are but ten years old or so.
I don’t know why that jumped out at me when the entire piece reeks of dishonesty. Maybe because it’s an answer to a question no one asked, it strikes me as a kind of misdirection. “No, children on puberty blockers don’t turn green and get eaten by wolves. Any more misconceptions I can clear up for you silly people?”
Yes indeed. There’s no point in blocking puberty after it’s finished. Too clever by half.
I’m so angry, I can’t bear it. This shit is breaking me, I swear.
It’s hard to know where to begin with all the bullshit. But a major weak spot in their arguments is this one:
The activists always deploy this line, because it’s right at the foundation of their belief system. But notice that just as quickly as they declare that trans people “have always been there,” they change the subject without going into detail. Because there’s no evidence that they’ve always been there. Actually, it’s far worse than that: there’s a vast body of damning evidence that they were never here before.
All the “special gender” identity labels you find throughout history in various cultures, the things trans activists analogize to Western transgenderism, ALL of them… they’re all just gay people — almost always gay men, specifically. Every “ladyboy” and “hijra” and “fa’afafine” and “muxe” and all the rest… they are all homosexual males living in collectivist cultures that ascribe strict gender roles to people from an early age, which set a strict and limited menu of life choices for people based on their sex, but which also assign a separate kind of ceremonial role for the girly boys (and occasionally but far less often the butch girls), whom they’ve come to predict are probably not gonna grow up to be the marrying kind.
And NO ONE in any of these other cultures ever pretends that “special gender” people are literally the opposite sex. As Helen Joyce has said, never in history have people pretended they can’t see what sex other people are. Yes, there have always been cultural ideas about sex stereotypes and sex roles, but there has never been a culture that pretended it couldn’t see what sex everyone was. Never. There have even been ideas about lingering “gender” effects from reincarnated souls that inhabited opposite sex bodies in past lives — many Buddhists believe this. But built right into that belief is the fact that everyone is one sex or the other: you were one sex before in a past life, and you are the other sex now in this life. Your sex is always, always, always apparent and indisputable.
The cog in the mental gears, the complicating factor that makes it hard for people to readily see how obvious it is that feminine “third gender” people in other cultures are analagous to gay men in the West, is the neuroplasticity component.
Human brains aren’t fully formed at birth; they’re born with rudimentary instructions, and they “complete their wiring” through childhood and adolescence. This “wiring up” happens to different parts of the brain in different periods in our development. For example, our sense of “nationality” or cultural ethnicity becomes especially plastic around age 9 and then hardens at age 15. It doesn’t matter what culture or country you’re immersed in before or after that time frame. It’s where you are in that window that will set your sense of national and cultural identity for life. Immigrant and binational families know this all too well: some kids in these families “Americanize” more than others. The crucial variable is which country they went to middle school in.
Humans’ sense of “gender identity” and our overall level of behavioural gender conformity develops in childhood. That part of our brain is very neuroplastic throughout childhood: from the age of two or three we become hypersensitive to social cues about how boys and girls are supposed to behave, and we unconsciously wire ourselves up to fit in with the gender stereotypes around us. Gay people’s brains are wired from birth a bit differently, though: not only are we wired to exhibit sexual attraction patterns more typical of the opposite sex when we reach puberty (boys finding males attractive; girls finding females attractive), we’re also wired to express cross-sex gender-behavioural tendencies right from infancy. We start out life waaaay more in line, behavourally, with the opposite sex. As we move into toddlerhood and begin the journey of “wiring up” our “gendered behaviour” profile to match the social norms we’re picking up from our environment, we’ve got a much further way to go than typical straight toddlers, to get to the point of “fitting in” with our peers, sex stereotype-wise. And that means it’s more likely that we might not fully complete the journey, which is why by adulthood some gay people seem pretty typical, gender expression-wise, others are super flaming or super butch, and still others are somewhere in between.
So the journey for a typical “pre-gay kid” involves being born with abnormally cross-sex behavioural tendencies, unconsciously learning from social cues that these are not desirable traits, and unconsciously molding ourselves to “fit in” with more “typical” boys or girls. All of this happens before our sexuality even activates.
Like I said, some of us adapt more than others. The adaptation journey depends on several things, and it can trip up or change because of any of them:
1. Your childhood social environment has to provide the social cues which signal to you which behaviours are expected of you based on your sex.
2. Your childhood brain has to have the capacity to detect the social cues that your social environment is feeding you.
3. Your childhood brain has to have the neuroplastic ability to rewire itself to adapt in response to these social cues.
4. You have to have a personality profile that prefers fitting in to standing out, and doesn’t consciously reject social norms.
So if you grow up in a social environment which sets up a separate social role for feminine boys, you won’t be provided with social cues to change your behaviour based on your sex. You’ll just be taught that you’re in your own separate social category from both the other boys and the other girls. This is the case with cultures like Thailand and Samoa and indigenous tribes that have “third gender” roles. Highly gender nonconforming kids are singled out early and accepted as “third gender” kids, so they never even start the “self-wiring” journey to rewire their behaviours, or if they do start it they don’t finish it, and they grow up into adults with atypical “gender identities”, unlike here in the West, which just categorizes kids as boys and girls and doesn’t offer a “third option” for kids to model their behaviour against.
If you grow up autistic, you will lack the ability to pick up on social cues in general, so you will fail to pick up the cues you need to compare your own “gendered behaviour” against. This is why so many autistic youth in the Western world end up with gender dysphoria now: they fail to process the cues and adapt to the gender-based social norms of their environment. Now they’re being told that something’s “off” with their gender and they’re all being sterilized with transgender identities.
If you grow up in an abusive or tumultuous environment, your brain’s resources will be significantly taken up by simply coping with the stress of your environment, and it won’t have the necessary resources to allocate to the brain-energy-intensive work of rewiring itself. This is one of the many effects of growing up with abuse, and why abuse and poverty and lack of education are so often cyclical: the brain lacks the resources to wire itself up to function highly. This is also why such a massive number of foster kids and abuse survivors in the West can’t shake their gender dysphoria by the end of childhood, and end up with transgender identities as adults. Even straight kids in abusive homes develop gender dysphoria for this reason.
If you’ve just naturally got a spunky, self-confident personality and bristle at the imposition of rules and stereotypes (or if these traits are encouraged in you) you’re less likely to grow up to fit into gender stereotypes. But you’re also not likely to experience dysphoria about it in the long term. You won’t fit in, but you won’t be distressed about it, either. These kids make out happy and healthy. This is the way of so many tomboy girls and gentle, sensitive boys, gay and straight alike, who develop into adulthood just fine without gender dysphoria.
This last one is widely considered the ideal liberal Western way to raise a child. This is the ideal of individualistic culture: be yourself; you’re just fine the way you are, and there are no “gender roles” you need to fit yourself into. This is in contrast to the Collectivist way, which says, sure you’re free to be yourself, but you’re “naturally” destined for a limited, ceremonial role in society and culture because of your gender-atypical personality.
The transgender movement is like a hybrid between the older Collectivist way and the newer Individualist way: they believe gender nonconforming kids are just fine the way they are, personality-wise, but they also believe that this puts them in a separate category from other people of their sex. But it’s not a “third category” “gender role” like in Collectivist cultures, they believe these kids are literally the opposite sex.
This completely makes no sense. It doesn’t work. Nobody can change sex or determine their own sex based on their personality. The impetus behind this idea is a reaction against the next part of gay kids’ journeys: when their sexdrives activate, and they discover that they’re homosexual, and they (or more likely the people raising them) realize that they don’t want this.
The beating heart of transgenderism is the delusion that these proto-gay kids’ adolescence journeys can and should end with them “fitting in” as “normal” heterosexual adults. This is the very opposite of teaching them to be themselves. The very opposite of accepting their gender nonconformity and what is likely to accompany it in adulthood. It’s destroying their lives.
So you can see why transgenderism disproportionately affects gay people, as well as people with autism and histories of childhood abuse. And you can see why it superficially looks like transgender ideology is accommodating gender diversity even though on closer look it’s doing the opposite. You can also see how even many gay adults fail to recognize the link between gender nonconformity and gender dysphoria in childhood and adolescence, and later homosexuality. And you can see how the transgender movement relies on the indigenous “third gender” concept to try and bolster its pseudoscience claims and conceal the fact that these are mostly just pre-gay people being diverted and medically experimented on.
I hate it so much! Arrgh!
A different phrase jumped out at me:
And this is another blatant, dangerous lie. The window of opportunity for normal pubertal development has time limits. It’s not like the tolling of a statute of limitations, where the time counter is stopped for a time, but the entire remaining limitations period resumes, and the full amount of statutory time runs its course. You wait long enough on puberty blockers, and the developmental window is closed. The young person will never get a chance to complete their development into functional adulthood. They will permanently miss out on growth spurts, sexual maturation, and cognitive development. It’s inhuman. It’s insane. It’s criminally depraved.
@maddog
And of course even if it were possible to “pause” puberty, there’s no point in buying extra time for kids if it’s just more time spent in an undeveloped childhood state. They need time to grow up and figure out what they want with life. What they need is time to process the fact that they are gay, and to learn to accept it. The idea that they can “choose” to not be gay after having thought about it for any amount of time before they’ve ever gone through puberty is ridiculous. It’s just further proof that the “trans kids” thing is straight people pitying gay people and trying to “cure” us of our supposedly pitiful disease. I’m raging mad at the straight people who think they’re being progressive by humouring this bullshit. Just raging fucking mad, all the time.
@ Lady Mondegreen; the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne Australia has clinicians that have published on a subject who is now an adult, and at time of writing, remained on puberty blockers, apparently unwilling to make other choices. They were discussing whether or not such a course was ethical, and decided it was.
Bravo, Arty. This is an excellent explanation. It fits very well with what I experienced growing up, and with what I’ve seen in my children. When you write your book, I will preorder it.
This one is me, and my daughter:
Once upon a time I was a feisty little punk who did everything people told me I couldn’t. Now I’m a happy, healthy man who likes to cook and take care of the kids.
This one is my son:
Save the last part, thankfully. We were able to help him find desistance. He’s still on the long journey of an autistic adolescence, though – they sound like professors when they’re eight, but are still working on middle-school stuff when they’re twenty.
One little point I think may be worth mentioning, in this paragraph:
This is also perhaps why a certain percentage of gay people don’t understand that they’re gay until later in life, like in their twenties or even later, sometimes after they’ve married women and had kids. I have met men who had that story, but I’ve never even heard of a man who discovered he was straight in his twenties.
@Papito
Thank you!
And yes, you’re right about gay people — gay men, specifically, not understanding. Many gay men who manage to “masculinize” their behaviour before they reach puberty genuinely don’t remember how gender nonconforming they were in early childhood. The masculinization process is unconscious, and the kinds of boys who accomplish it the fastest and with the least amount of difficulty are the ones who are the most comfortable inhabiting gender stereotypes. They come to think that they just “naturally” masculine and they don’t even notice that they underwent a very large gender-behavioural transformation between, say, age two and age ten. (Their parents remember, though! Studies confirm this.)
When these masculine gay guys’ sexualities kick in at puberty, they’re the most likely ones to fail to detect that their physical sexual stimuli responses are gender atypical. Maybe it doesn’t even occur to them that they might be interested in fellow men, or maybe they’re just so unconsciously predisposed to fitting in, but for whatever reason, these men take longer to figure out what their sexual instincts are telling them. And even after coming out of the closet, these men have a hard time comprehending the link between same-sex attraction and gender-atypical behaviour. Some are quite hostile to it, even. And so they contribute to the transgender belief system in their own way by being very open to suggestions that gender-atypical gay men are fundamentally different to themselves and “better off” as transwomen.
Arty:
“Time to think” is actually inconsistent with the ideology. If trans-ness is innate and immutable, and if self-perception of gender is infallible, then there’s nothing to think about. The child’s mind isn’t going to change, so you’re only buying time for a forgone conclusion. The ideology actually entails that every child presenting with gender dysphoria should immediately transition.
If there IS something to think about, then trans-ness isn’t innate and immutable or the gender sense is fallible. The whole edifice crumbles. If there is something to think about, halting cognitive development inhibits the child’s ability to think about the subject. If there’s something to think about, then blockers and social transition wouldn’t nearly guarantee future medicalization. Unless the doctors have developed some nearly infallible means of discerning the “true trans child”, but that would negate the need for a time to think.
It’s all utterly incoherent.
Too right, Nullius. The acceleration of cognition caused by puberty is remarkable. Kids start to think, and learn, twice as fast. Blocking that process is not adding to thinking, it’s taking away. Puberty-blocking kids is to stop them from having second thoughts.
Indeed. They’re thought blockers as much as anything else, a way to lock prospective members into the cult. “You’re considering joining our group? Here, take this powerful drug that clouds your mind.”
Outta the park Arty!
Also excellent.
Of course, transing away the gay.
And they have another tactic: any woman who operated in a “man’s” role, or took a man’s name, or wore man’s clothes for the purpose of being what they wanted to be (George Sand, George Eliot, many others), they are now declared “trans”. Since women have been doing this for a long time (probably forever), that means they have always been here. Take away gay history and women’s history, and turn it into trans history. Malignant ideology.
iknklast, another option is to pretend that words had secret meanings which are apparently only understood when read through trans-tinted spectacles. For example, in the comments to a recent post of PZ’s (in which he states as fact that JK Rowling wants to bring back the Holocaust) a commenter claims that:
Yet a quick look at a German-English dictionary shows that the word means exactly what it looks like it means – ‘transvestite’, and in the official trans ideology transvestite is not the same as transgender.
It’s all smoke and mirrors and sleight of hand.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/03/15/ignorance-and-hate-go-well-together/#comment-2215338