As more have sought gender transition
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons has issued a broad recommendation against gender transition surgeries for youths, becoming the first major medical association in the United States to narrow its guidance on pediatric gender care amid a crackdown by the Trump administration.
Yessssss!
Never mind the Trump admin. It’s the only thing they’re right about.
A statement sent Tuesday to the group’s 11,000 members and obtained by The Washington Post recommends surgeons delay gender-related chest, genital and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old. Fewer than 1,000 minors in the United States receive such surgeries every year, according to research published in JAMA, the American Medical Association’s journal, and the vast majority of the procedures are mastectomies, not genital surgeries.
But there’s an intense debate over when young people should be able to get medical interventions as more have sought gender transition and some systematic reviews have suggested the evidence for the benefits and risks of pediatric transition is insufficient. Supporters of transition care for youths have pointed to the widespread endorsement by U.S. medical organizations.
Ahhhhh no. That item is tainted. It’s tainted by years of frantic, enraged, threatening rhetoric about suicide and anguish and the divine wisdom of the trans communinny. People are pushed to endorse, they’re bullied and threatened and ostracized and shouted at and accused of monstrous cruelty and evil. I know what a fraction of that is like because I’ve had it done to me. I’m just a writer/arguer/nitpicker; imagine being a doctor and getting all that. In one way perhaps it helps being a doctor because you know a lot about bodies, but in another way, when all your colleagues tell you you’re wrong and evil, it wouldn’t help at all because why don’t your colleagues see what you see?
“This is a vulnerable, adolescent population,” said Scot Bradley Glasberg, past president of ASPS who did not vote on the new guidance but has been involved in discussions about the group’s stance. “We are mindful that some of these surgeries are irreversible.”
And another thing about them is that they don’t change the sex of the surgeried.
The group, which represents plastic surgeons primarily in the U.S., has evolved its stance on the issue. In 2019, the group opposed attempts by states to restrict transition care and said “plastic surgery services can help gender dysphoria patients align their bodies with whom they know themselves to be and improve their overall mental health and well-being.”
Except that they’re wrong about knowing themselves to be. If they know themselves to be a rabbit they’re wrong about that. People can know themselves to be anything, and lots of them do. Trump knows himself to be an enormously long list of things he isn’t. We see him enacting that confident knowledge and the gap between it and the reality every day. What people know themselves to be is not an accurate guide to anything, including what they will know themselves to be next year, or tomorrow. What’s in the mind is in the mind; it can’t cause us to grow wings or jump over houses or live on the ocean floor.
The surgeries were never more than just rites of passage. Terrible, harmful, irreversible rituals to bond these kids to the tribe of trans. So-called “sex change” surgeries don’t actually change anyone’s sex — this is true in exactly the same way that baptism doesn’t literally make anyone “born” again.
Stripped of all the symbolism and superstition, holy water is literally just regular water that’s been sloshed around by a priest or something. Molecule for molecule, it’s still H2O. So it is with surgically and chemically modified males and females. Cell for cell, they’re still regular males and regular females. Only the sloshing they’ve endured is horrific.
The only benefit of these rituals comes from the social environment, that they prescribe a change in how others are supposed to treat the people who’ve undergone the ritual. Take the holy water out of the church — imagine bringing a bottle of the stuff to an isolated tribe in Papua New Guinea — and it’s blindingly obvious that splashing people with it doesn’t instigate any “rebirth”. Take the “sex change” surgeries out of the 21st century Western liberal context and it’s blindingly obvious that their sexes don’t really change. It’s the culture, not the scalpel, that does all the work.
Which is why they’re so rabid about forcing the culture to play along. If we don’t all keep clapping for Tinker Bell, the magic evaporates and we awake in the midst of a horrific crime scene.
Yes, and since baptism doesn’t leave a lasting, permanent physical effect, no one says ‘don’t do that to kids’, even though many of us atheists might feel it’s manipulative and wrongheaded. If they ‘detransition’ from religion, they can move away from it without having to face a mutilated body.
Not the same with trans; once you have your genitals removed, they don’t grow back just because you change your mind. If the hormones make you infertile, you remain infertile even if you change your mind.
Very well said, OB. Very well said indeed.
Though the ancient Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi on the slopes of Mt. Parnassus has been completely destroyed by earthquakes, landslides, and religious purges in late antiquity, we know a lot from writers like Plato and Pausanias. “Know Thyself” was one famous maxim carved there in stone. I have spent going on 86 years on that track so far, and am still finding surprises. So it is a study I heartily recommend to all, particularly those in the trans camps whose mission appears to be the seeking of their own happiness via the misery of others.
The trans-rabbits of the world though, have my deepest sympathy. It nust be a nasty place to be, where most other creatures want to eat you alive.