No, fuck that. That approach leads to dead kids.
The number one, most effective way to reduce suicide among trans kids? Let them identify however they want.
What you’re advocating right now will lead directly to more dead children.
More dead Trans children. That means less live Trans adults. That’s a win in the ‘pubbies’ mind. (Yes, I used the singular for mind. It shouldn’t be hard to determine the correct reason I did.)
What may happen rather is that as the sociocultural newness passes (really, “fad”? you have a talent for picking the word that will rub people wrong), there will develop a manner of speaking about and referring to these cases, so that the people in those cases may wind up not referring to themselves or be referred to as “trans” but it will be because some other terminology will get traction – but they will still be who and what they are all the same, and will need to be supported. They’re not going away. Heck, one can imagine a scenario where there would appear people wanting to claim exclusivity of the “trans” identity (because, humans are schmucks…) leading to just such a situation, but that is not something we can decree prescriptively.
As the notion of “nonconforming”, “fluid” or “genderqueer” grows into greater acceptance and normalization, that would also have the positive outcome Babale pointed out, of putting less stress on the youth and on their elders. But so will just accepting trans identities.
The whole “you have to choose a box and a label and stick with it” thing should be avoided as much as “it’s a phase”(*). Let people live as who they are.
(* rarely, it turns out it is, but we can’t assume that by default)
Samantha is my business. She’s a hypothetical character I created, you dolt. You don’t have to like it, chum. And if you don’t, well, that’s too bad for you.
We need a way to support them without giving them treatments that might have negative consequences for them down the road. Some who had hormones and/or surgery feel they are living a nightmare. That the road to transitioning was made too easy. Shouldn’t we listen to them, too? So, let’s find a way to support them without treatments that might ruin their lives when they’re a few years older. If there are medications/treatments that do not have potentially negative long-term consequences, great, use them. But none that do.
How is it that we don’t allow middle school and younger high school children to drive a car, drink alcohol, get a tattoo, see R-rated movies, etc.—all of which have far less dire potential negative consequences—but we allow them to make a decision with such huge long-term stakes. To be blunt, it seems absolutely nuts. I get that many of these kids are at risk for suicide. So, let’s support them emotionally and with professional psychological therapy, keeping in mind that many/most of them will no longer experience gender dysphoria after they go through puberty.
We have that already. It’s precisely the thing you’re fighting against.
Because those aren’t medical treatments for a very serious condition?
The professional psychologists and therapists recommend puberty blockers and social transition.
So let’s get that up, running and successful before changing anything else.
Yup.
I have a friend who was a lesbian, until she wasn’t, too. These things happen.
Like fewer people identify as gay than did in the 80s, when there was a similar phenomenon of it becoming acceptable to talk about being gay?
I doubt it.
Yeah, it’s called puberty blockers. Kids with social support and professional counseling can get through this, and work out what’s right for them. I refer you to my long post above.
I will grant that if there were more widespread social acceptance of gender non-conforming people, there would be less negative long-term consequences to trans kids who went through the wrong puberty. But right now, forcing a trans kid to go through their biological puberty can be enormously damaging, and the impact is largely irreversible.
And despite the cherry-picked study you cite, most studies seem to find that gender identity is usually persistent. So giving kids a couple extra years to be sure is playing the odds.
…that process exists and is called gender-affirming care.
Agreed, but I think magellan01 may have meant that “when the newness wears off, fewer people will continue to identify as trans than the number who at some point identified as trans”.
I.e., the point would be that as time goes on, some of the people currently on the trans train will decide that they were just doing an exploratory day-trip and get off the train. Not that there won’t continue to be significant numbers of new passengers boarding the trans train.
And yes, I totally concur with you that the overall ridership of the trans train is now, and will continue to be, higher than it was back in the day when the train was covered in glaring official signs reading “WARNING! THIS TRAIN IS EXCLUSIVELY RESERVED FOR SICKOS AND PERVERTS! IF YOU FEEL ANY INCLINATION TO BOARD THIS TRAIN THEN THERE IS SOMETHING SERIOUSLY WRONG WITH YOU, GET HELP!”
I mean, the slightly smaller signs now reading “WARNING: THIS TRAIN IS FREQUENTLY ATTACKED AND SOMETIMES VIOLENTLY MOBBED BY BIGOTS WHO REGARD THE PASSENGERS AS SICKOS AND PERVERTS” are still understandably somewhat off-putting to many, but at least it’s not as bad as it was.
Hmmm. Is he single? 
Depends how you count. Are you poly?
You don’t have to look further than the publisher’s reputation. As a general rule, if a paper is published in a Frontiers Media journal or an MDPI journal, caveat empor
From List of all Frontiers Media predatory journals by predatoryreports.org
To get an estimate of how many people might choose to stay on that train, it’s probably useful to look at other cultures. The European hegemony has wiped out many traditional cultures that recognized more gender roles than Christianity, but a few remain. For instance, in Samoa, there are Fa’afafine. The Wikipedia article says they are estimated to be 1%-5% of Samoans. Every culture defines what gender roles are possible, and the Samoan fa’afafine doesn’t exactly map to any gender roles in the US, but it has a lot of similarities to trans women.
Thanks for this. I was trying to track down reputation for the frontiers journal. That they were open access, I’d never heard of them, and they include sub journals on a bunch of different unrelated topics rather than sticking to a specialty, were all red flags that made me somewhat skeptical as to their quality. On the other hand they did claim to have a peer reviewed process, and based on their titles most of the other published articles seemed like they could be legit (they weren’t chock full of climate denial and scientific racis) so I was withholding my opinion until I had more substantial evidence like you just provided. Although I think the sub link is what really tells the story.
The National Publication Committee of Norway has assigned Frontiers Media an institutional-level rating of “level 0” in the Norwegian Scientific Index since 2018, indicating that the publisher is “not academic” (Norwegian Scientific Index, 2023).
In June 2015, Retraction Watch referred to the publisher as one with “a history of badly handled and controversial retractions and publishing decisions” (Retraction Watch, 2014a; 2015).
According to researchers referenced in a 2015 blog post quoted by Allison and James Kaufman in the 2018 book Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science, “Frontiers has used an in-house journals management software that does not give reviewers the option to recommend the rejection of manuscripts” and the “system is setup to make it almost impossible to reject papers” (Kaufman & Kaufman, 2018).
So in terms of reliability, a paper published in this journal might as well be a blog entry.
@magellan01 , do you think that children with cancer should be allowed to receive chemotherapy? Assuming your answer is yes, why? In what way is chemotherapy different from puberty blockers that makes it acceptable?
Of course. There is no risk of the kid lamenting that the cancer went away and he wants it back years later.
One of the things I’ve been trying to get to in this thread is if there is a way to identify those kids for which the dysphoria will persist, with a 99.9999% certainty. If such a test would exist, I would be fine with puberty blockers. But until we have that, I think we should err on the side of caution and see where the kid is at at least 18, after puberty, which seems to eliminate gender dysphoria for a large percent of kids on it’s own.
And if the consensus among the experts changes, as it appears to be happening in England and Australia, will you be championing their advice then?
At that level of certainty, we should definitely ban chemotherapy, then. Even by the most generous estimate, the overdiagnosis rate is many orders of magnitude higher than 0.001%.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/health/breast-cancer-unnecessary-treatment-study-partner/index.html
Why not just give kids puberty blockers if their doctor thinks its warranted, and let them stop taking them if they decide they aren’t trans after all? What’s the downside to this approach?
Because, as I understand it, puberty blockers can/do have long-term negative consequences. One question I have, and maybe you know the answer, is how long can puberty be postponed where the result is the same as if the puberty blockers hadn’t been given?
I just came across this excellent article by a woman who was on the front lines of trans affirming care. Very interesting. Would love to hear you, and others’ take on it:
https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-saving-trans-kids
Excerpts:
For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt.
All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, which had been established a year earlier.
I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.
To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist—usually one we recommended—who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.
That’s all it took.
Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.