And yes, why does one have to show the exact number of detransitioners? They can't tell you what fraction of treated people who get medical intervention have good outcomes and how many have continued with intervention for 10 years, past the average regret times (and, relevantly, and what fraction would have had good outcomes anyhow, even without medical intervention). They don't know. No one knows.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence--claiming someone needs such a powerful intervention requires careful scientific scrutiny. that's why we have the scientific method, to avoid mistakes like lobotomies, the opioid epidemic, etc., best we can. The scientific method only works if you use it! It only works if people are collecting and examining evidence. Not hiding evidence, hiding the lack of it...
[I'd like to suggest adult doesn't mean an 18 year old--college age for many is not yet at maturity-- but someone who is actually developmentally mature, 25 or so (there's a reason for the drinking/smoking age, car rental age, and for women who want elective hysterectomies not getting them easily on demand at age 18--and many kids ending up with this distress are developing even more slowly because of ASD).]
I appreciate your nod to the religious character of some of these beliefs. I agree that these people are preaching the existence of a sort of "gender soul," and in my opinion, that violates the First Amendment.
Thank you for covering this with such skill. You are able to put into words what many parents like me can’t. I’m too emotional. Kudos to Newsweek. I keep thinking about all of human history- in what other time has this happened to teenagers?
I'm convinced the lack of evidence-based data is a feature, not a bug, of the transactivist agenda.
Who can say it's a bad thing to grow up without experiencing a puberty, or to be sterilized while still a virgin in the absence of any medical problem, if there's been no requirement to do any follow-up reporting on these patients, and therefore no data? It's an astonishingly malevolent framework that was proven effective when the NRA succeeded in getting Congress to pass a law (the Dickey Amendment) that stopped the CDC from collecting data on deaths by firearms resulting from crime, accident or suicide, beginning in 1996. Without data arguing for gun control, there would be no gun control. So elegant, and yet so deadly that even the lead sponsor, Rep. Jay Dickey (R, Arkansas) expressed regret about it in 2015, two years before his death and 14 years after his political career ended.
I wish the de facto gag rule against understanding what's being done to trans-identifying kids at least had a poster child like Dickey who could be held accountable one day; but the trans-ideology capture is so widespread and so diffuse that we can't even hope for this tiny crumb of future reckoning. Your taking the initiative to collect the data yourself is heartening: I'll gladly report my own daughter's ordeal, and I don't need anonymity, but I wonder if you might want to create a spreadsheet that parents can fill in and share with other parents we know who may not be Broadview subscribers (yet)?
"I’ve also talked to trans adults who changed their bodies and feel...much better walking around in the world—but most of those I’m talking to are very concerned for the kids cavalierly choosing this, or being groomed to choose it, because these are serious psychological and medical interventions..."
On the one hand, reckless and hurried medicalization is as legitimate a concern of parents and caregivers as of young people suffering from gender dysphoria;
on the other hand, ideally, the above long term health and safety concerns would be advanced by an organization of the concerned trans people mentioned - i.e., not just "for the (trans) people," but "by" and "of the (trans) people."
So...an organization of trans people who speak to a range of trans medicalization topics - e.g.:
continued gender dysphoria and/or body dysmorphia even after medicalization;
health risks - known and understudied - associated with long-term hormone therapy;
trans people who identify as trans w/o medicalizing, or who de-medicalize without changing their trans identity.
Upshot: the trans-narrative of medicalization as solution is presently "overdetermined," and one effective way to challenge it is by a responsible trans organization that breaks w/that idea not by directly challenging it, but by showing a range of possibilities and choices within trans culture.
Thank you! Again!
And yes, why does one have to show the exact number of detransitioners? They can't tell you what fraction of treated people who get medical intervention have good outcomes and how many have continued with intervention for 10 years, past the average regret times (and, relevantly, and what fraction would have had good outcomes anyhow, even without medical intervention). They don't know. No one knows.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence--claiming someone needs such a powerful intervention requires careful scientific scrutiny. that's why we have the scientific method, to avoid mistakes like lobotomies, the opioid epidemic, etc., best we can. The scientific method only works if you use it! It only works if people are collecting and examining evidence. Not hiding evidence, hiding the lack of it...
[I'd like to suggest adult doesn't mean an 18 year old--college age for many is not yet at maturity-- but someone who is actually developmentally mature, 25 or so (there's a reason for the drinking/smoking age, car rental age, and for women who want elective hysterectomies not getting them easily on demand at age 18--and many kids ending up with this distress are developing even more slowly because of ASD).]
I appreciate your nod to the religious character of some of these beliefs. I agree that these people are preaching the existence of a sort of "gender soul," and in my opinion, that violates the First Amendment.
Thank you for covering this with such skill. You are able to put into words what many parents like me can’t. I’m too emotional. Kudos to Newsweek. I keep thinking about all of human history- in what other time has this happened to teenagers?
I'm convinced the lack of evidence-based data is a feature, not a bug, of the transactivist agenda.
Who can say it's a bad thing to grow up without experiencing a puberty, or to be sterilized while still a virgin in the absence of any medical problem, if there's been no requirement to do any follow-up reporting on these patients, and therefore no data? It's an astonishingly malevolent framework that was proven effective when the NRA succeeded in getting Congress to pass a law (the Dickey Amendment) that stopped the CDC from collecting data on deaths by firearms resulting from crime, accident or suicide, beginning in 1996. Without data arguing for gun control, there would be no gun control. So elegant, and yet so deadly that even the lead sponsor, Rep. Jay Dickey (R, Arkansas) expressed regret about it in 2015, two years before his death and 14 years after his political career ended.
I wish the de facto gag rule against understanding what's being done to trans-identifying kids at least had a poster child like Dickey who could be held accountable one day; but the trans-ideology capture is so widespread and so diffuse that we can't even hope for this tiny crumb of future reckoning. Your taking the initiative to collect the data yourself is heartening: I'll gladly report my own daughter's ordeal, and I don't need anonymity, but I wonder if you might want to create a spreadsheet that parents can fill in and share with other parents we know who may not be Broadview subscribers (yet)?
"I’ve also talked to trans adults who changed their bodies and feel...much better walking around in the world—but most of those I’m talking to are very concerned for the kids cavalierly choosing this, or being groomed to choose it, because these are serious psychological and medical interventions..."
On the one hand, reckless and hurried medicalization is as legitimate a concern of parents and caregivers as of young people suffering from gender dysphoria;
on the other hand, ideally, the above long term health and safety concerns would be advanced by an organization of the concerned trans people mentioned - i.e., not just "for the (trans) people," but "by" and "of the (trans) people."
So...an organization of trans people who speak to a range of trans medicalization topics - e.g.:
continued gender dysphoria and/or body dysmorphia even after medicalization;
health risks - known and understudied - associated with long-term hormone therapy;
trans people who identify as trans w/o medicalizing, or who de-medicalize without changing their trans identity.
Upshot: the trans-narrative of medicalization as solution is presently "overdetermined," and one effective way to challenge it is by a responsible trans organization that breaks w/that idea not by directly challenging it, but by showing a range of possibilities and choices within trans culture.