this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Ah yes the great source of the New York post. I don’t think you are being harmful on purpose but I do believe that by spreading shit like this you are harming trans people. There is no trans epidemic or social fad. That opinion is absolutely ridiculous. I have a close family member who is trans and the difficulty of even getting hormones is extreme. Multiple meetings with psychologists and endocrinologist, many exams and paperwork, not even mentioning the bureaucracy you have to deal with afterwards. And this is as an adult, transitioning as a minor is way way harder. No one just gets transitioned in an accident, and 99% don’t regret it. Now on the flip side 30-50% of trans kids want to commit suicide due to societal pressure and bullying. The only „cure“ for gender dysphoria is, shocking I know, transitioning. So when people say to protect trans kids, it’s literally protecting them from self harm or from getting attacked. Also, do you really think that more people identify as trans because it’s a „fad“ or maybe it’s because your can finally openly talk about it! It’s like saying that the rise of left handed people after them not being retrained in school anymore is a social fad. It’s a stupid opinion. Whenever you have more societal acceptance of something more people will feel safe coming out. I understand that some people are scared of their kids being transed by the woke liberal teachers but the same people also think that Obama turned the frogs gay.
Are you questioning that Chloe exists? She's been speaking at length about her de-transition because the whole experience has destroyed her body permanently. You can read about her on her Wikipedia page. It's cool to question sources, but you didn't even take a sec on Google to check if your ad hominem attack was valid.
Here is another example. Sweden went all-in on "temporary" puberty blockers for gender affirming care until children started experiencing life-long injuries. They are now effectively banned for gender affirming care for children.
Chloe's case is a tragedy, for sure. The issue I have is that people are calling for bans rather than enhanced oversight.
Healthcare, at its core, is a numbers game. No effective treatment we've ever discovered is completely without risk. Every surgery or treatment, no matter how innocuous, could lead to complications or death. To use a recent example, the Covid vaccinations. They're considered extremely safe, and over 13 billion vaccination doses have been given to date with over 5 billion people having been vaccinated. Given that Covid kills or permanently disables 2 in every 100 unvaccinated people, and vaccines lower that rate by at least 90%, that's nearly 100 million lives that have been safeguarded by the vaccine. However, the vaccine has certainly harmed some people with extremely rare side effects. We accept that tradeoff, because saving 100 million lives is worth the risk of harming a few thousand people.
Gender affirming care for children is the same thing. We know that trans children are at extremely elevated risks of self harm and suicide, and gender affirming care is proven to be effective in preventing those outcomes. We know that some will regret their decision to transition because those cases are inevitable in any population that transitions. The focus should be on reducing the cases of regret with better screening and more oversight.
So, to debate this seriously, you need to answer the following question:
How many regretful de-transitioners are you willing to risk in order to save the lives of successful transitioners?
If the answer is zero, then you're not willing to seriously debate the use of a medical treatment and your opinion is dogmatic and carries no semantic value.
If the answer is very few, then congratulations, you're on the same side as many allies who want more funding for care and screening for trans issues.
Chloe would have likely been helped by more psychiatric care and screening, as from her story it's clear that her sexual assault as a minor precipitated a complex regarding her sexuality that was misdiagnosed as a desire to transition.
i think it's both. i don't know at what ratio, but kids really do follow fads. one kid kills themselves at a school and it raises the chances for all of them to do so. ideas are contagious. a kid that may just be going through the regular teenage angst period searching for an identity might latch onto the trans label to explain their feelings when really it's just a normal teenage thing to go through identity issues
again, i'm not trying to say kids shouldn't transition. i view transitioning as healthcare so to block kids off from it is absurd. but i think we also need to be careful and talk about the elephant in the room - that the rate of trans kids increasing so dramatically points to some issues with the ways we are doing it. when something jumps up so dramatically we should be asking questions
It's like the prevalence of left-handedness shot up dramatically once it was socially acceptable. You can't look at changes alone and say that things changing is a concern because it's changing.
This is false equivalence if I've ever seen it. The treatment for left-handedness was to sit on your hand, not do a fucking life-altering permanent surgery.