@Exapno_Mapcase Actually, yes I am surprised I remember it so differently. I am still not denying all I claimed. Also, you do have to remember that my memories are from when I was just a child. 
That alone made me afraid to transition for a long time, the hatred and violence against us. Growing up during this period, things like the deaths of Brandon Teena and Gwen Araujo and many others really impacted me. I already had a difficult life and didn’t want to make it harder for myself.
Unfortunately it hasn’t stopped, the murders have been getting even worse as the inevitable backlash to us asserting our rights happens. The rise of TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism) ideology has become particularly dangerous to us and has already caused a backlash in the UK thanks to celebrities like JK Rowling getting on board. So you can probably say things have gotten worse in that regard. Hatred of us has gotten stronger, but so has acceptance of us.
You’re not a teenager still forming your own identity and trying to find your place in the world, while simultaneously coping with the changes of puberty and men’s reactions to your new body.
No trans people were murdered in the UK this year. I hope none are living in fear because of statistics from other, far more conservative countries that are being brought up here for political reasons.
I should have structured that paragraph better. You are right that no transgender people were murdered in the UK this year, over 30 have here in the US though. I heard the life stories of all of them during this year’s Transgender Day of Remembrance. And hate crimes against us have been rising everywhere it seems, but it has quadrupled in the UK over the past 5 years. And I was specifically talking about the rising transphobia over there in the overall society, like with the failure to finally protect our rights in the Gender Recognition Act changes, which are sorely needed. As difficult as it can be to transition here, it’s a nightmare for transpeople over there.
Some of the strongest transphobic views seem to come from Brits and I’m not sure why.
Not making it as simple to get a GRC as the campaigners hoped for is not necessarily a sign of rising transphobia, any more than the UK government originally creating civil unions instead of the desired gay marriage was a sign of rising homophobia. Transgender people are already protected from discrimination by the Equality Act 2010.
My theory is that the culture war in America prevents diversity of views. You pick a side and you accept everything that comes with it. There’s plenty of transphobia in the US but it’s all on the right. In the UK there is somewhat less stigma to thinking differently, for both good and ill. Transphobia is bad, but cis women should also have the right to advocate for our rights.
Emphasis added.
WHO is doing SURGERY on minors?
This boogeyman is always brought up, always, despite the fact that standard of care in the Western world says no surgery until the person is ADULT, that is, the age of consent. No reputable doctor or health system is performing anything irreversible on children.
Current standard is counseling and maybe puberty blockers if appropriate. NOT surgery. NOT hormones.
Why? For precisely the reasons brought up - for a non-zero number of kids there is some other issue than being trans gender and it should be dealt with in a different manner.
The one instances where under-age surgery seems arise in reality are the intersex - and advocates for that group are trying to get that stopped because for far too long the emphasis has been doing surgery on infants to get an approved cosmetic appearance with no regard for sexual function or the individual’s choice.
I suspect that in some cases therapy is more needed for the adults than the kids, what with past societal baggage, misunderstanding of trans vs. gay vs. gender behavior roles/what is deemed appropriate.
Yeah, I think a lot of adults, when confronted with this issue in their own family, go immediately into deep, deep denial.
It’s a pale, pale shadow of what trans people go through, but growing up a tomboy with decidedly “male” interests I was subjected to a LOT of crap growing up to “teach you to be a lady” - in other words, I was not acting in my proper gender role so some adults felt it was their duty to force me to behave that way. Including one teacher who attempted to pressure my parents to put me on medication to change my behavior to something daintier and more feminine. It didn’t work.
But odd, isn’t it, how often it’s considered acceptable surgically alter a baby because their genitals don’t fit a particular norm, but OMIGOD DON’T TOUCH THAT TEENAGER’S CROTCH, and it’s considered acceptable to use chemicals to alter the behavior of a child that doesn’t fit society’s notion of “masculine” or “feminine” or “normal” but OMIGOD DON’T USE PUBERTY BLOCKERS ON SOMEONE IN COUNSELING AND UNDER MEDICAL SUPERVISION!
What’s really going on here is there’s a contingent who wants 1950’s TV “normal” and don’t want to accept that there have always been people outside that norm. They want to deny the existence of those people, and insist they hide who they really are. Doesn’t matter how much it hurts the people in hiding, the “norm” must be preserved at all costs! Which is easy for those folks to say, as they’re not the ones being asked to pay the costs.
Funny…
Every woman ever has gone through that adolescence. I heard that same argument about the “dangers” of being exposed to homosexuals when I was that age. Now I’m hearing it about trans people.
Being around lesbians in no way altered that I am heterosexual (and by “heterosexual” I mean on the far end of the Kinsey scale - no desire to “experiment”, not the least bi-curious. Sexually I am only interested in men and men alone.) Being around trans people does not make me question whether or not I’m a woman.
What greater acceptance means is that we have discovered there are a LOT of people who were not quite so extremely conforming to expected roles. When being homosexual can result in death those capable of repressing those desires do so, meaning homosexuality appears a lot less common than it actually is. If being trans means a short, miserable life and/or almost certain violent death anyone who can suppress those feelings of their body not really fitting them will do so, so it appears a lot less common than it actually is.
Now that it’s not so much an instant death sentence (either literally or socially) it turns out there are a more gender-questioning people than we supposed. It’s not because it’s “new” or somehow contagious or people are being “given ideas”, it’s because people who had those feelings all along no longer have to completely suppress them for their own survival.
This California clinic, and they are by no means the only one:
This is what I mean about the culture war tying disparate views together. I am opposed to this sort of cosmetic surgery on minors whether intersex or not. Does this make me transphobic?
I call bullshit on that - while there is a lot of transphobia on the America right it most certainly exists on the left, too. And a rather prominent trans woman in the US, Kaitlyn Jenner, has been a Republican/on the right most of her life.
There may be general trends, but in reality you don’t actually know everything there is to know about a person from their political leanings.
Exactly. So often I would read a story about a transgender child and the comments IMMEDIATELY go to hormones and surgery. When at the age of like 7, it would just be a social transition, like dressing in clothes of that gender and going by a different name and pronouns. Hormone replacement therapy won’t become an issue until puberty (I don’t support puberty blockers), and surgery usually not until they become of legal age (although that can also be earlier with parental support).
It’s like whenever someone finds out I’m trans the inevitable question is “Have you had the surgery?” when A. That’s none of your business and B. You don’t have to have surgeries to be transgender. We are all on our own path, you don’t need to transition to be transgender, or even have dysphoria.
I don’t think hormone blockers should be handed out like candy, or automatically, but I think they have a role for some individuals. I was menstruating at 10, which means puberty at that age - some of us go through it very early. Puberty blockers have long had a role in “precocious puberty” for the reason that there are some serious potential problems with undergoing puberty at a very young age so the effects are well known at this point. If it would help the person involved I don’t have an issue with delaying puberty to 15 or 16 rather than having them go through it at, say, 12. Or 10.
But that’s a decision to be weighed carefully on an individual basis, not as an automatic dispensing of drugs.
Do you support surgery on 13 and 14 year olds, now you know it’s happening?
Have you actually looked into it? I have and there are some very concerning signs.
I agree they have a use, but assuming puberty goes according to schedule, delaying a vital biological process for years past when it should take place seems like it would have negative consequences. That’s why I think trans kids/teens should be able to basically choose which puberty they want to go through when the time comes.
Assuming their parents agreed to it, I have no problem with mastectomies at that age.
…I’m confused as to how this relates to the question posed by the OP? How does either supporting or not supporting surgery on a statistically insignificant amount of people (where the surgery was deemed medically necessary) show that we either did or didn’t treat transgenderism better in the past?
Given that studies show ~98% of kids given puberty blockers proceed to cross sex hormones, there’s no good reason to delay the latter until 16 if we are going to allow the former. However, there are big questions about the effects of these treatments on fertility and sexual function, something 10 year olds are not equipped to understand, and there’s also the issue, as Broomstick mentioned, of the non-zero number of kids where there is some other issue than being trans gender and it should be dealt with in a different manner.
I’m also Gen-X. I didn’t grow up with the assumption that everything was rosy for transgendered people, but I can see where someone around my age might get that idea.
We were the first generation to learn about the existence of trans people in our childhoods. The Renee Richards debate was all over the news, and a lot of good people were on one side or the other, so it wasn’t clear cut-- we couldn’t say “Look who’s on which side; it’s obvious what to think.” My own (very progressive) parents were even divided on the issue. They were progressive enough that in 1975, when my brother and I were 8 & 4, we had a babysitter who was a very much out college student.
Anyway, the fact that the debate had moved from “Is this an illness?” to “Should she be allowed to play women’s professional tennis?” signaled a move away from the medical model, and this was a lot of our intro to the issue. When I was still in high school, there was a TV movie about Renee Richards starring Vanessa Redgrave, so Hollywood had progressed since the days of Glen or Glenda? when the distinction between trans people and cross-dressers wasn’t even clear for most people.
During the Renee Richards debate, the Christine Jorgensen case was revisited, with lots of historic newsreel footage-- she was a media darling for a while. But she was an exception, because she had the right type of personality for this. She was really outgoing, and gave great interviews-- she had quite a magnetic personality.
I’m sure at this time, there were lots of hate crimes committed against trans people, but they weren’t identified as such, and therefore not reported as such. A lot of adults could probably read between the lines, but kids couldn’t. The fact that hate crimes came more and more to be identified as such, and therefore reported in the news as such, I’m sure created the false illusion that they were on the rise.
But, of course, they weren’t.
It’s kind of like how marital rape skyrocketed in the 1980s, but not because it actually increased-- rather because many jurisdictions passed laws against it, and so there were arrests for it for the first time ever, and therefore, for the first time, a way to collect statistics.
In the 1980s, for the first time, people who would otherwise have gone their whole lives without thinking about trans people, first entertained thoughts like “What if that were me, or my child? How would I feel? What would I do?”
Yes; I’m glad Broomstick brought this up. It’s also the case that, until very recently, people automatically assumed the a child or teenager who insisted on being the “opposite gender” was “going through a phase.” Even the trans child or teen him (or her) self often believed this. And all it takes is one case history in 100,000 of a kid who turned out not to be trans after declaring himself a girl at ages 4-6, to convince everyone that there was a very likely possibility every single other trans child was mistaken as well. Even when the case history turned up something like horrific sexual abuse, or batsh!t insane parents telling their son every day that he was meant to be a girl, because that’s what they’d really wanted, people still would refuse to take the other 99,999 kids seriously.
If NOTHING ELSE, the fact that people take kids seriously, and allow youth to transition ought to be evidence that things are better now.
This is an extremely misleading paragraph. Here’s a real study into the factors affecting persistence and desistence by relevant medical professionals:
Notice that they are not studying whether this phenomenon exists; it is well known and accepted by medical professionals, and as expected they found substantial numbers of desisters.
It’s a good thing that kids are now taken seriously and not forced to pretend to be something they are not. It is not good for the general public to be misinformed in either direction.
I don’t think you understood what I meant. There’s a non-zero, but pretty small number of kids who persist for a while in insisting that they are the other gender, but it does in fact turn out to be a phase, or a symptom of something other than being transgendered.
All it takes is that tiny number for laypeople (not doctors) to choose to believe that any child who persists is “going through a phase,” no matter how much research demonstrates demonstrates that the number is small.
It’s kind of like the non-zero number of toddlers/preschoolers who go through some kind of phase, or have some kind of extraordinarily unusual, but resolvable problem, like a cerebral allergy, and exhibit symptoms that look like autism, but that go away, to make every parent of an autistic child hold out hope that their child will “get better.” Problem is, many parents don’t get critical early intervention because of the hope that it’s “just a phase.”