I meant to thank you for the direct link to the movie. For whatever reason I couldn’t get one on my phone.
It’s trans adults, too: GOP candidates now back trans medical restrictions for all ages
Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article277322158.html#storylink=cpy
Takeaway for observers: The mere fact of someone’s appearance in anti-trans propaganda does not mean they should be condemned for supporting the anti-trans agenda. Carefully consider what they actually say, and bear in mind that this kind of reprehensible distortion and deception is common on the Right.
I was listening to Fresh Air (just how liberal are you, anyway, RitterSport??) and Terry Gross was interviewing an intersex person and a director of a documentary on intersex people.
They laid out how those Republican anti-trans bills are even worse than I thought. It turns out that there are exceptions for medical treatments for kids if the child is born intersex – that means that the parents and doctor can go ahead and perform life changing, disfiguring surgery on an infant (obviously without its consent), but cannot provide consensual medical care to teens (and in some cases, adults).
So, non-consensual gender therapy – just fine. Consensual gender therapy? Nope.
Well, yeah, the point is to force children into a rigid binary form of anatomical sexual determinism right from birth.
If Mother Nature has carelessly failed to apply the binary-anatomical-sex rule with sufficient rigidity in the case of a particular newborn—which happens at least once in every several thousand births, and perhaps even oftener depending on how one defines “intersex”—then parents and doctors are allowed to perform a hasty correction according to their own arbitrary and perhaps ill-informed decision about “which sex” the baby should be. Duh.
I think the interviewee said 3%, but that seems high to me. Maybe she said 0.3%.
These Republican policies are just relentlessly cruel.
If you include all sex chromosome abnormalities, the rate of intersex births might be as high as ~2%. However, almost all of these (such as those with Klinefelter syndrome [XXY chromosomes]) have unambiguous genitalia and fit fairly clearly into male and female categories. Truly ambiguous cases are more like 0.02%.
Interesting. The first woman she interviewed had complete androgen insensitivity, or something like that, so XY, but developed as a girl/woman. So, as you say, you’d never know. Maybe it is 3%.
Leaving the intersexed aside, if you’re talking about puberty blockers or operations, people are against them for children because they are largely irreversible. And children lack the ability to give informed consent. We don’t allow children to decide to smoke, drink, get a tattoo, or drive (until 16), yet some want to have them decide on a decision that has much larger and ramifications for their lives. I came across this Canadian activist, who has what I think is the right take on this: https://www.billboardchris.com
Puberty blockers are not irreversible. The whole point of them is that you can just stop taking them, and puberty continues as usual.
Also, why are we “leaving the intersexed” aside? If a trans kid can’t consent to treatment, neither can an intersex kid. Why does your logic for withholding care from trans kids not apply to intersex kids?
Yeah, surgery on intersex infants is irreversible and often “wrong” based on how they feel when they are old enough to understand. I would favor a ban of surgery on intersex kids unless it corrects a dangerous condition.
So many medical procedures we perform on children are irreversible. Should we not fix cleft palates until adulthood?
And don’t get me started on routine circumcision.
That conservatives single out valid medical treatments on children for only this one issue should tell you that it’s not about valid medical treatments on children.
It is my understanding that if you block puberty when you’re 13, you can’t just stop taking the blockers when you’re 20 and expect things to develop as they would have.
I was leaving the intersexed out of the discussion because I’m unsure of the definition and didn’t want to make a statement about the group. I agree that the same logic should apply.
I don’t think there is much of a downside to surgeries like those to fix a cleft palate. I doubt anyone who had the operation ever complained when they became an adult that they wish the surgery never occurred. Circumcision really is a different discussion.
That you consider cleft palate surgery and HRT to be fundamentally different shows your prejudice.
Cleft palate surgery and most others don’t require any insight into the mental state of the patient to determine whether they’re warranted. They’re corrections for purely physical defects. The same is not true of HRT, etc.
Utter nonsense.
Well said.
Your understanding is incorrect.
GnRH analogues don’t cause permanent physical changes. Instead, they pause puberty. That offers a chance to explore gender identity. It also gives youth and their families time to plan for the psychological, medical, developmental, social and legal issues that may lie ahead…
When a person stops taking GnRH analogues, puberty starts again.
Some of the sites talk about hormonal therapy to kick-start continuing puberty if they change their mind.
I see a big loophole, here, given that transgenderism is, itself, an intersex condition.
Puberty blockers are the exact opposite of irreversible. The reason to prescribe them is precisely to avoid doing anything irreversible.