Thursday, July 6, 2017

Transgender Rights and Child Abuse

At some point, hopefully in the not-so-distant future, people will look back at the transgender rights movement and ask themselves: What were we thinking?

In the name of settled science pediatricians and other medical professionals are embracing the notion that a child is whatever he believes that he is. Pediatrician Michelle Cretella is not the first to challenge the current orthodoxy, but she does an excellent job of addressing this mass delusion.

Here, for your edification, a few salient excerpts. Since there is no biological basis for transgender beliefs, physicians have had to invent a psychological basis.

Cretella remarks:

The transition-affirming view holds that children who “consistently and persistently insist” that they are not the gender associated with their biological sex are innately transgender.

(The fact that in normal life and in psychiatry, anyone who “consistently and persistently insists” on anything else contrary to physical reality is considered either confused or delusional is conveniently ignored.)

The point is almost too obvious to repeat, but we seem clearly to be in the realm of delusional beliefs here.

Once a child persuades everyone that he is not a he or that she is not a she, the medical profession begins a series of interventions:

The transition-affirming protocol tells parents to treat their children as the gender they desire, and to place them on puberty blockers around age 11 or 12 if they are gender dysphoric.

If by age 16, the children still insist that they are trapped in the wrong body, they are placed on cross-sex hormones, and biological girls may obtain a double mastectomy.

So-called “bottom surgeries,” or genital reassignment surgeries, are not recommended before age 18, though some surgeons have recently argued against this restriction.

Of course, you are dealing with children. And you are ignoring the fact, Cretella adds, that the vast majority of children who believe that they are not who they are will eventually change their minds:

Even the American Psychological Association’s Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology admits that prior to the widespread promotion of transition affirmation, 75 to 95 percent of pre-pubertal children who were distressed by their biological sex eventually outgrew that distress. The vast majority came to accept their biological sex by late adolescence after passing naturally through puberty.

And, of course, as I have mentioned here, the new age of transgender rights has caused a spike in the number of confused children who want to belong:

But with transition affirmation now increasing in Western society, the number of children claiming distress over their gender—and their persistence over time—has dramatically increased. For example, the Gender Identity Development Service in the United Kingdom alone has seen a 2,000 percent increase in referrals since 2009.

But, transgender rights advocates insist that if children are not mutilated with hormone treatments and surgery, they will commit suicide. The claim does not withstand scrutiny:

Adults who undergo sex reassignment—even in Sweden, which is among the most LGBT-affirming countries—have a suicide rate nearly 20 times greater than that of the general population. Clearly, sex reassignment is not the solution to gender dysphoria.

Of course, it amounts to little more than systematic child abuse, and child torture:

These professionals are using the myth that people are born transgender to justify engaging in massive, uncontrolled, and unconsented experimentation on children who have a psychological condition that would otherwise resolve after puberty in the vast majority of cases.

Today’s institutions that promote transition affirmation are pushing children to impersonate the opposite sex, sending many of them down the path of puberty blockers, sterilization, the removal of healthy body parts, and untold psychological damage.

These harms constitute nothing less than institutionalized child abuse. Sound ethics demand an immediate end to the use of pubertal suppression, cross-sex hormones, and sex reassignment surgeries in children and adolescents, as well as an end to promoting gender ideology via school curricula and legislative policies.


8 comments:

trigger warning said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
trigger warning said...

"Once a child persuades everyone that he is not a he or that she is not a she, the medical profession begins a series of interventions..."

The very notion that children should be "persuading" adult parents and medical professionals about health matters with potentially pernicious and irreversible consequences, in the face of a trivally obvious biological counterargument, would be hilarious if it weren't so bizarre. They're clearly dogpaddling in the pissing section of the gene pool if the neo-darwinists are right.

trigger warning said...

By the way, SS, I was not critiquing the substance your statement. I merely marvel that such adults are running around loose in a society that prescribes institutionalization for persons likely to harm themselves or others.

Ares Olympus said...

The peculiar thing about gender dysphoria is that it is a state that no human being would want to be in. So at least in a world of social disapproval, you can be sure that a large fraction of such youth will keep this "feeling" firmly hidden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria

For me the real problems don't occur until you suggest gender dysphoria is correctable by hormones and irreversible surgeries. So celebrities like Bruce Jenner can be part of the problem if it encourages this. Or maybe Jenner is an example that waiting until you're in your 60s is okay, so first win the Olympics before deciding you're actually the "weaker sex".

But the bigger issue, and why suicides are so high, and remain high even after a transition of course is because it doesn't guarantee approval or acceptance by others. You can blame or shame society for disapproval, but of course its not wider society but our own family and friends whose opinions really matter.

If it wasn't for plastic surgery for all the enumerable ways people are dissatisfies by their bodies, it would be easy to denounce it all. But if we denounce hormone treatments on children, there are also many other ways that biology goes wrong, and hormones are prescribed.

It would be much easier if you could detect gender dysphoria as a chemical problem, or a genetic source, while when we can't, it means apparently, we have to listen to the insistence of children to their identity.

My cautionary advice would be religious "This is the body God gave you" and hope that is true rather than a cruel joke.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Maybe we will someday realize we were out of our minds. Don't count on it.

Our society has lost all familiarity with the word "No."

Transgender "acceptance" and "celebration" and "outreach" and "civil rights protection" efforts are a form of totalitarian thought control. We are at the whims of someone else's subjective, emotional beliefs or sensitivities. These laws and regulations impose a duty on others based on no other objective standard other than how someone "feels." These are not reasonable requests or demands.

Again, the answer to all this is "No.". People who tell you that a slippery slope is a logical fallacy have never considered the predictable ramifications of transgenderism and the wild offsprimg it will produce.

Transgender claims are preposterous. Society must have limits... we cannot accommodate everyone's unique emotional needs, much less give them legal sanction. The entire transgender enterprise is ridiculous.

The media's Caitlyn Jenner "awareness" campaign is a Benny Hill farce without the humor. I don't care how someone wants to dress or call themselves, but a he is not a she, or vice-versa. I don't care how he "identifies." Gender-assigned facilities reflect normal social functionality. They needn't be changed en masse to to validate bizarre feelings or preposterous choices.

I know of no population we have that receives this level of accommodation for its every need/whim. I'm sorry if you have a penis and feel as though you're a woman. You're not. Call yourself whatever you wish, but it's otherwise not my problem. I'm sorry this is happening to you... there's nothing I can do.

Enough.

I'm afraid that we will not wake from all this. Our society is hopelessly sentimental about the most marginal elements of bizarreness. We do not love, we tolerate. When toleration is not enough, we're told we must accept. When acceptance is not enough, we must celebrate. When celebration isn't enough, we're told we're the problem. It's very, very disturbing.

Ralph said...

Anonymous is right. Men can replace women in sports and win. Women can't replace men, hence title ix.

trigger warning said...

"The media's Caitlyn Jenner 'awareness' campaign is a Benny Hill farce without the humor."

Or the music. ♫

Anonymous said...

Case in point:

http://thefederalist.com/2017/07/05/new-army-training-tells-female-soldiers-put-naked-men-showers/

What are we doing?