Way too offspring-focused
Pregnant transmen shouldn’t be pressured to stop taking testosterone despite the risks it poses to babies, researchers have controversially claimed in a Government-funded study.
Current maternity care guidance for transmen — biological women who identify as the opposite gender — recommends they stop hormone treatment in pregnancy. The NHS warns it could ‘affect the baby’s development’, with some studies linking exposure to the male sex hormone in the womb to genital abnormalities.
Testosterone is listed as a ‘category X’ substance in pregnancy in the US because of the dangers it poses to a foetus. But a panel of experts, including three from Britain, said the current advice centres too heavily on preventing babies from developing birth defects.
“Too” heavily. Yes really: what’s all this fuss about birth defects, anyway? It’s time to start queering birth and being inclusive of birth defects instead of trying not to have any.
Instead, the team — given a £500,000 grant by a subsidiary of Britain’s UK Research and Innovation to conduct research on trans male experiences — suggested NHS guidelines should be shifted to better support trans men to live out their gender identity.
The three British experts were sociologists hailing from the universities of Sheffield, Westminster and Glasgow.
Oh that kind of “experts.” Not experts on medicine or cross-sex hormones or birth defects, but sociologists.
Writing in the journal SSM – Qualitative Research in Health, the researchers, which consisted of experts from the US, Australia and Italy, argued such concerns should take a backseat compared to the harms trans men might experience from not taking their hormones.
‘Both patients and providers tend to pursue precautionary, offspring-focused treatment approaches,’ they wrote. ‘These approaches reinscribe binarized notions of sex, resulting in social control in their attempts to safeguard against non-normative potential future outcomes for offspring. These offspring-focused risk-avoidance strategies and approaches are, we argue, part of the gendered precautionary labour of pregnancy and pregnancy care itself, and not without potentially-harmful consequences for trans people.’
Jeeezus. “These offspring-focused risk-avoidance strategies” – that wins some kind of prize for smarty-pants callous trolling. I bet they high-fived each other for being so transgressive.
Teratophobia is oppressive of trans rights. Pregnancy is settler colonialism.
Oh, I remember that one—featuring everyone’s favourite drunken sociology professor, Sally Hines. At that point, you may as well argue that it’s ableist and eugenicist to administer polio vaccines, because it implies that being paralysed is bad.
I have been told that any attempt to avoid birth defects is ‘ableist’. We are supposed to embrace birth defects as something special.
Telling pregnant people not to drink is oppressive, because FAS is a special difference to be respected and honored.
I’ve said before that these people are worshippers of The Crippled God… but with all this, why should we research the five or six TIFs that have sufficiently compartmentalized their dysphoria that they can put up with vaginal sex and got pregnant with their mixed up hormonal stew instead of doing what works, which is to say *not* injecting testosterone into pregnant mothers? Hardly seems important or useful.
I saw a video (obviously staged) in which a young woman said she was a man (“I identify as a man, so I am a man”), and she was in a doctor’s office. The doctor said the tests indicate the woman is pregnant. The woman protested that she couldn’t possibly be pregnant, men don’t get pregnant, it must be something else. The doctor insisted otherwise, regardless of claims.
This was not a real story, but I am reasonably sure I’ve read at least one account of a woman thinking she could avoid pregnancy by identifying as a man. I know I’ve read about what what a downer it is, getting pregnant, because it destroys that precious validation.
Self identification is just so much more important than anyone or anything else. I’m guessing these sociologists would be among those who would insist that yes, men can give birth. Of course it’s somebody else that’s going to pay the price for their insane insistence on reifying delusional word games.
Imagine the conversations, as the child grows up, on discovering that the reason behind any birth defects he or she might have was that their health and well-being took a distant second place to mom being able to keep growing her beard.
Ooof, that’s a thought. Grim.
If someone else had written this, it would be considered satire. It’s certainly ludicrous when you translate it into other scenarios:
” These safe-landing focused risk-avoidance strategies are…not without potentially-harmful consequences for people who believe they are pilots.”
” These not-sinking focused risk-avoidance strategies are…not without potentially-harmful consequences for people who believe they are pilots.”
” These no-meltdown focused risk-avoidance strategies are…not without potentially-harmful consequences for people who believe they are nuclear power-plant engineers.”
Let’s look at this load of shite a little more closely.
Well, sex isn’t “binarized”, it is binary. It’s binary nature isn’t a “notion.” It isn’t being “reinscribed” it’s just there as a brute fact. The “experts'” inability to see, or unwillingness to admit this should have precluded them from having any say at all on this issues. Nobody is filling in the blanks, or “overwriting” some other reality out of politically motivated spite and malice. Their jumping up and down, holding their breath until they turn blue won’t change that. Words don’t work that way, not even those coming from sociologists. Funny how they try to make it look like the position that conforms to the facts of material reality is the blinkered, unreasonable, ideological one. If someone is pregnant, that someone is female, however they “identify.” They’re speaking from how they would like biology to be, rather than from how it actually is. Stonewall biology anyone?
And this is a bad thing if it impinges on the woman’s fantasy that she is male. It’s not “social control” that is transphobically insisting that wrong sex hormones are bad for the developing fetus; it’s just the way things are. It’s a real consequence of the choice TiFs make in pursuit of an impossible “identity.” (just as no longer being able to make the cut on men’s sports teams is a natural consequence of the TiM pursuit of a “female” identity.).If they really were men, they wouldn’t have this problem at all. The fact that they do have this complication, that they must make a decision around the “treatment” they’re insisting on, is simply emphasizing the fact that they are not male. More thorough treatment might have rendered them sterile, but that is a different thing. And as a passing thought, might it not be in society’s interests to reduce the number of birth defects in children? Might it not be in the child’s?
The “labour of pregnancy” is determined by sex, and while there is likely always some degree of “precautionary” care involved that perforce falls to women alone, my understanding is that most women who choose to go through with their pregnancies are aware of this, and are prepared to do this for the health of their children. It is not a bad thing for women to behave in this fashion. A good part of pregnancy care is working towards the birth of a healthy baby. Certainly the health of the mother is vital too, not just as a mother-to-be, but as a person in her own right. Sometimes conflicts between the two will arise, and balances will be need to be struck, depending on the circumstances and consequences. But to disregard the needs of the fetus altogether in service of upholding a mistaken self-image is incredibly selfish. If you don’t want a child, get an abortion. If you do want a child, then take responsibility for it. That this will entail some degree of inconvenience, discomfort, sacrifice, and yes, danger, is a part of that choice. You can’t “Yes, but” your way out of it. It comes with the territory. Putting your unborn child in danger needlessly, for selfish and misguided reasons, is not a good idea, and not the best start at parenting one can imagine. Encouraging women to do this for ideological reasons of deluded “gender identity” isn’t really something to be proud of either.
I wouldn’t trust the sociologists’ determination of the “potentially harmful consequences” for trans people, given that they likely claim “misgendering” is “actual violence.” So on one side we have unwarranted threat inflation of unspecified “potential harm” being promoted by people who think calling a man a man, or a woman a woman, is to be ranked with GBH. What of the actual harmful consequences to the unborn child whose heath and well-being they are so cavalierly discounting?
Why was this “panel of experts” consulted at all on this matter? What have they contributed, apart from counselling selfish irresponsibility that aligns with their ideology? Do they also consult on matters of plumbing, or subatomic physics? They’d be equally qualified to do so, meaning not qualified at all. Going in the other direction, I’m sure plumbers would have done a better job,
Not yet out of January and there’s my Bullshit Bingo card filled for the year.
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Re fetal alcohol, shaming, and so on:
It is certainly reasonable for doctors to advise pregnant women not to drink alcohol. It is reasonable for certain other people to reinforce this advice. What often happens, though, is that nearly everyone who sees a pregnant woman holding what looks like an alcoholic drink thinks it is not only appropriate but their civic duty to tell this woman she shouldn’t be drinking alcohol, or perhaps to take her drink from her, or otherwise butt in and accost the woman for something that is not their business. So the pushback against this kind of busybody intrusion becomes extreme, saying that nobody, including doctors, has any right to tell pregnant women they shouldn’t drink, all of it is shaming, all of it is a violation of bodily autonomy, no matter who says it, no matter why or when they say it.
The same is true for, another example, doctors advising patients to lose weight. A doctor, who knows details of your medical situation and history, can advise things that a stranger on the street or at a restaurant or in a gym has absolutely no business saying. But people generalize, and claim it’s “fat shaming” in all cases.
People need to be more clear about these kinds of distinctions.
Sackbut, that’s so true. And it isn’t just alcohol; people (strangers on the street, even) feel emboldened to make any sort of instruction to pregnant women. And mothers, after pregnancy is completed, because no woman has ever mothered a child correctly (which is probably true at varying degrees of difference, because babies don’t come with instruction manuals so we all make mistakes).
But yeah, doctors not only have the right to tell women that, they have the obligation. The baby’s father might have some say, too, but there are good ways and bad ways to do it.
And as for deciding it’s cool or okay to have a child with disabilities, what makes anyone think they have the right to make that decision for someone else? I hear people say how cool it is to have a Down’s baby, because they are so sweet and loving. Yeah, but who asked the kid if they wanted to have Down’s? If it’s avoidable, the default should be avoid it. If not, deal with it as well as possible.
T is avoidable. No pregnant woman needs to take a drug that could cause her child birth defects just for her own desire not to be a woman. Some drugs are necessary; T is not.
I am reminded of this news item:
Woman Sues Mom’s Doctor For Allowing Her To Be Born, Wins Millions
The title is a little misleading as it was not quite about allowing her to be born, but rather that the doctor’s advice, had it been more thorough, would likely have resulted in a later and healthier pregnancy, and hence a healthier child. I’m not very satisfied that it was a good decision, at least not based on the brief description given there, but it should still be a sobering thought for anyone considering this vanity-first approach to pregnancy.