You understand that you're saying this about medical procedures performed on children, correct?
If you didn't notice, not only did you not dispute me, two other users came in and defended it.
Utah creates 5 person commission to regulate one trans girl playing sports
- Thread starter TheMysteriousGX
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So: a kid undergoing fully reversible hormonal blockers, when they choose to do so, isn't giving consent;
...but a kid undergoing irreversible puberty, against their own decision, is giving consent?
a) I wouldn't be so confident in calling them "fully reversible". This is not a long standing treatment with a wealth of longitudinal studies, we just don't actually know the long-term effects.
b) Children don't give consent.
Much more so than puberty.
They can withdraw it. If a kid says they don't want to go through with elective surgery, we don't put them through it. Here, they're saying they don't want to go through an elective biological process.
What's different, other than the fact that puberty is imposed on most of us?
Maybe. The potential for political interference in medicine is an unknown quantity and we have seen how unrelenting conservatives can be in their never ending quest to force medicine to comply with their religious beliefs. What I will tell you is that in the slightly less near future, as prevailing medical knowledge filters into the social consciousness and generations of children grow up seeing and living alongside visible trans people, your position will become untenable.
Puberty blockers aren't just used to treat trans children, of course. They are also used to treat even younger children showing signs of early puberty. Early puberty, from a physical standpoint, is not a huge complication. There are a range of fairly small medical risks associated with it (but opponents of puberty blockers frequently claim all kinds of risks resulting from their use which, if real, would dwarf the risks posed by early puberty).
The main reason for treating children with early puberty is that it often causes children psychological distress. Children may become alienated from their peer groups and develop negative feelings about their own bodies. Girls who experience early puberty are particularly vulnerable, and face higher rates of substance abuse and mental illness. They also tend to engage in sexual behaviour younger, which may have associated risks.
So, is giving puberty blockers to a 7 year old girl who is miserable and being teased by her classmates because she is growing breasts akin to a lobotomy? If not, then what exactly is the difference between that and giving the same medication to an 11 year old child who is experiencing their puberty as distressing and dysphoric and needs more time to figure out who they are before their body decides for them. What is it about wanting to prevent these children from suffering through an unwanted physical process that is so akin to intentionally damaging a part of someone's brain and leaving them permanently disabled?
At the root of this is a very fundamental disagreement over the role of medicine. On one hand, there is the position that views medicine as the enforcer of societal conformity. As you so eloquently put it, "we" (the sane rational people who understand the supreme, cosmic importance of our penises and vaginas as the core determinants of our very being) have the right to decide what "should" be done about people who don't conform to our totally reasonable expectations.
This was, again, the mentality that saw huge numbers of children put under the knife to "correct" insignificant anomalies in their genitals for fear that they might imagine themselves to be anything other than perfect little boys and girls. Under this logic, using puberty blockers to treat early puberty is acceptable not because it makes children less miserable, but because it serves the overall goal of ensuring that bodies conform to the standard of normality. Using the same procedure to treat trans people is unacceptable because it removes bodies from the state of normality. At its core, this belief is a fierce and violent anti-individualism, it views the body not as a person but as a part of the greater social body which must be kept healthy and hygienic, and it is that social body that medicine exists to tend to, not the individual.
On the other hand, there is a mentality that views medicine as a tool to facilitate the quality of life of the individual, and which understands that, just as individuals vary, the metrics on which their condition may be qualified may also vary. Social non-conformity is not, in and of itself, illness, but becomes illness when it causes harm or distress. This perspective understands that giving children puberty blockers might separate them from what many might consider a "normal" life, and that this may carry psychological risks, but it also understands that living a "normal" life is not, in and of itself, more valuable than the alternative, and that the risks must be weighed against the benefit to the individual.
So, I was (among many other things) at one point a child diagnosed with depression. I was given anti-depressants, which I didn't like but which definitely had an effect in stabilizing my mood and quite possibly saved my life, and psychodynamic therapy. Later, I disclosed this to another medical professional and was met with complete horror.
That was a huge turning point for me, because for the first time in my life I felt like someone saw what had happened for what it was. I remember self-harming every week because I didn't want to go, and I remember lying on that couch and saying things that I wasn't ready to hear myself say, I remember having thoughts and not being able to tell if they were my thoughts or my therapists', and yet at that point I was so fragile and so desperate to be well (and everyone around me was so desperate for me to be well) that I kept telling myself that it was all necessary, that I was getting better, until eventually I believed it. I have been afraid of going to therapy all my adult life, and I never understood why until that moment because somehow I had not considered that all my horrible memories weren't actually good and hadn't actually helped me.
There's a reason anti-depressants and therapy are typically prescribed together. Therapy is hard. I have learned that some forms of therapy are less hard and less invasive than others, but it's hard. It may sound very easy, if you have no serious problems, to go and talk to someone about whatever silly thoughts you've been having that week. I know people who do that because they have a lot of money. It is, however, extremely hard to reflexively take apart your own thoughts and memories and to try and figure out why it is that you want to die. It is extremely hard if you are a child.
Therapy is not the "gentle" alternative to medication. Therapy, if you are doing it properly and engaging it, is what you need medication to get through.
Anyway, that's my little dose of ADHD oversharing for today.
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Yes. Do you?
Like, shit dude: It's standard operating procedure to cut off bits of half the infants of the United States with routine cosmetic surgery with zero input from the child. But the kid asking for a medical procedure while being evaluated by a doc is a bridge too far?
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Medical consent is different than sexual consent, and conservatives tend to fight for the latter to be as low as possible
... That is not a Catholic thing. That is a dumb american thing. The catholics over here do not do that.
Yeah, I looked that up after and edited my post. I'd just assumed it was religious because why else would so many Americans be?
Though, like many weird things, it might have roots in American protestantism: it was apparently promoted early on not just for cleanliness, but as a way to prevent masturbation.
So important stuff shouldn't be on IDs because it might make people feel bad? So no weight or height on IDs either because people could be fatter or shorter than they look in the car?
How is saving a life cancelled out by cops knowing what biological sex someone is?
Chances are pretty high that if you go through puberty and X amount of years afterward, you'll be taller than if you were a biological woman. So, yes, height advantage.
Don't get the point about why trans woman are the cause of woman getting boot from competition because of drug testing. You'd have to test women regardless for testosterone.
What does it matter if a guy purposefully transitions to win or transitions because they want to and they end up winning?
There's differences between the sexes that you can't reverse
It's a completely disingenuous argument. Gay marriage is allowed for fairness (if the government didn't recognize marriage, the whole debate would've been a thing in the 1st place) and the sexes are separated in sports for fairness.
Love how we went from "you aren't forcing people to put themselves to cops" to "it's not bad to forcibly out people"
Besides, how fucking useful is it for a bearded dude to be described as female for 99.99% of interactions with that ID? Is that useful for buying alcohol? For when you get pulled over? For when the State is doing a manhunt? No, the fuck, of course not! It would just look fake! Useful if your transphobic bouncer wants an excuse to kick somebody's ass though.
Police harassment kills more people than would be saved on the off chance you're unconscious after a gender-relevant injury where the only way for the doc to know what's up is to rummage through your personal effects.
How much money you want to bet that Mugsy Bogues, celebrated NBA star, immortalized in the cult classic Space Jam, does not have a height advantage on any woman of the WNBA, despite being a cis man his entire life?
New rules for finding the *acceptable* level of naturally occurring testosterone for women to have to count as women. I mean, I personally believe that any amount of naturally occurring testosterone is acceptable for women to have, but people trying to protect women playing women's sport seem to disagree
Motive matters. The former, a common entirely made up argument, has and will never happen
Maybe. Yet. Haven't seen one though, least one we wouldn't fix deficiencies of with steroids and hormones
First, look up the phrase "semantic argument", then realize that the "why" is irrelevant: states are not banning trans girls from playing sports in the same way they did not ban gay men from getting married.
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The birth sex is outdated information. It is something that is no longer particularly useful for actually identifying the person.
The correct analogy would be including somebody's weight and height at birth on their ID. Since they've changed.
I haven't seen this argument since before the Obergefel decision came down and it's aged like milk.
There is a concerted effort by left wing activists to make trans people as visible as possible to specifically children, because they believe the same as you. The majority of the population resents this effort. It is backfiring, dramatically. Culture is not a linear system, it is a sine wave. The wild years of the early 1900s led to the conservative 40s and 50s, which created the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, which led to the conservative 80s and 90s, followed by the more liberal 2000s. We flip basically every 20 years which is the dominant cultural sentiment, and we are sliding right into a decade of conservative dominance as the predictable reaction to social liberalism getting a little out of hand.
Yes. Obviously not in level of extremeness, but in the sense of "oh crap, we took medical science a little to far there". Again, how do you not see that this is just drugging children to make them conform to social expectations?
...because that medication is a coping mechanism. And again, I'll say this as many times as needed, there are with certainty people with internal psychological conditions that can't be solved externally, and coping is what you can do, and I support that treatment. But for people with social and environmental issues, coping with drugs is not an appropriate response, as it does not address the problem. "Aspects of myself do not match up with the social expectations of my sex" is not a medical or psychological issue, it is a social issue, giving kids drugs is not a solution to that problem.
Super weird how trans people got super visible immediately after conservatives lost the fight to keep gay marriage illegal. But sure, it was left wing activism
Of course, to some people, "actually criminalizing the murder of gay people" is "social liberalism getting a little out of hand".