And a whole lot of “16 year old John Smith died last night when his car drifted into oncoming traffic. The cause of the accident has been ascribed to ‘driver error.’ Services are at our Lady of the Sacred Heart, Sunday at noon.”
Right, we would expect in the old days the suicide itself would have been, when possible, papered over.
It’s damning in the sense that it contradicts the claim that the changes are fully reversible.
The arguments about reversibility are made to assuage questions about “what if my child changes their mind?” The Mayo Clinic cite says almost exactly that: “Instead, they pause puberty. That offers a chance to explore gender identity.”
If the blockers are not fully reversible–if they can cause infertility and incomplete genital development at non-trivial rates–then that argument is not convincing. It’s no longer something you can try and then stop, no harm, no foul.
We don’t prescribe serious medications just so patients can “explore” something. They’re given only when there is a true need, and the patients (or their guardians) should be given a full list of pros and cons.
My complaint here is not that puberty blockers are used at all for GAC. I’m sure there are situations where they are appropriate. My complaint is with the language around them. It’s irresponsible to downplay serious side effects by saying the changes are not permanent. Especially when the patient is at an age where they are so easily manipulated.
Your complaint should be that we’re nitpicking the language around 1 specific treatment for gender dysphoria in the first place. Yes, maybe it’s better if we say that puberty blockers are generally reversible, or mostly reversible, or largely reversible. Whatever. At the end of the day, the entire bucket of GAC is medically appropriate, backed by science, endorsed by accepted medical authorities, and not at all the business of Republican politicians. Republican legislatures need to stay out of decisions made between parents/patients and doctors as long as all of the above is true. Nitpicking layman’s summaries of various treatments is not helpful.
Because you know what? Doctors don’t tell patients that puberty blockers are 100% reversible. That’s not happening. The conversations are a lot longer and take many, many factors into consideration. Any doctor that prescribes puberty blockers long-term without informing the patient of potential side effects can be dealt with by current malpractice methods and/or board certification processes. Done.
Exactly. It’s not like a preteen/tweener walks into the doctor’s office and says “I want a puberty blocker” and the physician says “Righto, here ya go, take this prescription down to the pharmacy, see ya later.”
If only there was a, seemingly obvious, connection between being told there was gender affirming care that could be available to you, but you were going to be legally denied it, that might lead to folks to not see the point in continuing their struggles with their lives.
I can decide what to nitpick on my own, thanks.
I think self-correction is extremely important; often even more do than external fights. Without self-feedback, belief systems drift, often to extreme points.
Layman summaries should be accurate, especially in medicine (or in any area where health is at risk). My view of accuracy in communication is that of how Feynman described the scientific process:
That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school—we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
Feynman was talking about the scientific process, but I think the same points hold true for any process where the outcomes are important, such as medicine. It’s not good enough to say yes, calling puberty blockers reversible is inaccurate, but it’s ok because doctors will fill in the details. The information should be accurate to start with.
I concede that you’re right, we should all strive to be as accurate as possible in all environments. What does Feynman say about coming off like an asshole?
When you say
You are not describing the sort of casual layman’s interaction we’re having here on the SDMB. You’re implying that doctors are misleading easily manipulated youth. Piss off with all of that.
I could have worded that better, but my intent was not to imply that the doctors themselves are being misleading.
Any medical intervention progresses in stages, and doctors are usually not the first stage. The whole point to the Mayo Clinic’s information pages and so on is because patients are likely to do their own research early on. They may not have any idea of the appropriate treatments or even if their condition is a medical one (I’m speaking very generally here, not just about trans issues).
Even if the doctors themselves are almost always strictly accurate, it doesn’t imply that early influence on the patients has no effect. If a patient is convinced of something, they can behave differently, or even shop around for the subset of unscrupulous doctors.
There are strict standards on medical advertising for just this reason (and frankly, it probably shouldn’t be allowed at all). Yes, the doctors have the final say and in general they have high standards. That doesn’t mean that a patient filled with misinformation will have the same outcomes as ones that start with a more realistic view.
Other posters have pointed out some of the logical holes in your reasoning here. Other possible “ways to square” these apparently contradictory claims that you seem not to have thought of include the following:
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Some hypotheses suggest that the rise of social media use within the past 15 years or so is a primary or significant factor in higher teen mental illness and suicide rates. At the same time, the ubiquity of the internet has made it possible for more teens to learn about transgender identity and its social acceptance. So “online life” could be helping to cause both increased transgender visibility and increased mental illness and suicide among teens, rather than the increase in transgender identification itself causing more mental illness and suicide.
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Suicide has long been known to be more “contagious” among teens than among adults. That is, teens are much more likely than adults to engage in “copycat suicide” when someone they know has killed themselves. Again, social media in recent years has made young people much more constant spectators of the personal and social lives of a wide range of acquaintances, irrespective of in-person proximity, than they used to be. That is, the transmission vectors of “contagious suicide” have been strengthened.
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Firearm access is also well known to correlate with suicide rates. The widespread resistance to gun control legislation and increased firearm accumulation within the US gun-rights movement has meant that more US teens have easier access to guns. As a consequence, more of them who feel a passing temptation to commit suicide are going to succeed in actually killing themselves before the temptation has passed.
TL;DR: We need to think a lot harder about this phenomenon and evaluate actual data relating to many possible causes, rather than just making snap judgments about which one of a very incomplete cherry-picked set of explanatory hypotheses intuitively seems “more likely”.
Hi, Miller. Interesting Obviously there were dramatically fewer kids identifying as trans decades ago, so we can’t look back and compare apples and apples. So, it’s probably safe to say that, generally, kids from 50 years ago who would have identified as trans today were effeminate gay men and masculine lesbian women. The question your post sparked for me is: where is the line between an effeminate gay man and a man that seeks to transition to a woman? To put a finer point on it, what separates an effeminate gay man who chooses to prevent as a woman (either consistently or from time-to-time) but still identifies as a gay man, and someone who is “trans” and identifies as a woman? What makes the person trans? What makes the gay man a woman?
Umm, clearly you are not aware that being trans says nothing about which gender you are attracted to!
I’m not sure this is right. While there are more guns today, I’d say that a greater percentage of kids in the past had easier access to firearms. Guns weren’t taboo, and were present in many homes. Many schools had marksmanship clubs and kids would bring their guns from home to shoot.
Actually, I am aware of that, but so what? I was crafting a hypothetical, and thought simplicity would make it clearer. If you have anything that would be illuminating, that would be great.
Your question shows a massive misunderstanding of gender identity. There is no such line. Gender identity and sexual orientation are separate - there are straight, bi, and gay trans men and trans women. To put it simply (and there are sometimes more complex variations, in my understanding), trans women are people assigned male at birth who identify their gender as female. They may or may not be gay, and they may or may not be considered “effeminate”.
Very simple: a gay man is a man who likes having sex with men, while a Trans woman is a woman (gay? Straight? Not enough info to know) who was born with male parts.
That’s like you asking, “where’s the line between a person with brown hair, and someone who just has brown eyes?”
Are you? Because you implied that a trans woman is the same as an effeminate gay man, which is definitely not the case.
Something about holes and digging . . . but I can’t remember the details.
Yeah, never discount how we’ve all become hostages to the algorithm.
Still there were fewer total guns and the kids were likely being supervised and trained. As opposed to the age of many more guns and “adults” just having guns lying around and the nets propagating celebrations of armed yahooism.
Yes, I am. I was crafting a hypothetical and chose to make it as simple as I could in order to pose a question. How is that not obvious?