As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients. But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex.
A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby’s chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine—but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother’s womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male. “That’s kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis,” says James.
Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD.
When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person’s anatomical or physiological sex. What’s more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. “I think there’s much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can’t easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London’s Institute of Child Health.
These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms. Few legal systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person’s legal rights and social status can be heavily influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female.
“The main problem with a strong dichotomy is that there are intermediate cases that push the limits and ask us to figure out exactly where the dividing line is between males and females,” says Arthur Arnold at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies biological sex differences. “And that’s often a very difficult problem, because sex can be defined a number of ways.”
THE START OF SEX
That the two sexes are physically different is obvious, but at the start of life, it is not. Five weeks into development, a human embryo has the potential to form both male and female anatomy. Next to the developing kidneys, two bulges known as the gonadal ridges emerge alongside two pairs of ducts, one of which can form the uterus and Fallopian tubes, and the other the male internal genital plumbing: the epididymes, vas deferentia and seminal vesicles. At six weeks, the gonad switches on the developmental pathway to become an ovary or a testis. If a testis develops, it secretes testosterone, which supports the development of the male ducts. It also makes other hormones that force the presumptive uterus and Fallopian tubes to shrink away. If the gonad becomes an ovary, it makes oestrogen, and the lack of testosterone causes the male plumbing to wither. The sex hormones also dictate the development of the external genitalia, and they come into play once more at puberty, triggering the development of secondary sexual characteristics such as breasts or facial hair.
Changes to any of these processes can have dramatic effects on an individual’s sex. Gene mutations affecting gonad development can result in a person with XY chromosomes developing typically female characteristics, whereas alterations in hormone signalling can cause XX individuals to develop along male lines.
For many years, scientists believed that female development was the default programme, and that male development was actively switched on by the presence of a particular gene on the Y chromosome. In 1990, researchers made headlines when they uncovered the identity of this gene, which they called SRY. Just by itself, this gene can switch the gonad from ovarian to testicular development. For example, XX individuals who carry a fragment of the Y chromosome that contains SRY develop as males.
By the turn of the millennium, however, the idea of femaleness being a passive default option had been toppled by the discovery of genes that actively promote ovarian development and suppress the testicular programme—such as one called WNT4. XY individuals with extra copies of this gene can develop atypical genitals and gonads, and a rudimentary uterus and Fallopian tubes. In 2011, researchers showed that if another key ovarian gene, RSPO1, is not working normally, it causes XX people to develop an ovotestis—a gonad with areas of both ovarian and testicular development.
These discoveries have pointed to a complex process of sex determination, in which the identity of the gonad emerges from a contest between two opposing networks of gene activity. Changes in the activity or amounts of molecules (such as WNT4) in the networks can tip the balance towards or away from the sex seemingly spelled out by the chromosomes. “It has been, in a sense, a philosophical change in our way of looking at sex; that it’s a balance,” says Eric Vilain, a clinician and the director of the Center for Gender-Based Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s more of a systems-biology view of the world of sex.”
According to some scientists, that balance can shift long after development is over. Studies in mice suggest that the gonad teeters between being male and female throughout life, its identity requiring constant maintenance. In 2009, researchers reported deactivating an ovarian gene called Foxl2 in adult female mice; they found that the granulosa cells that support the development of eggs transformed into Sertoli cells, which support sperm development. Two years later, a separate team showed the opposite: that inactivating a gene called Dmrt1 could turn adult testicular cells into ovarian ones. “That was the big shock, the fact that it was going on post-natally,” says Vincent Harley, a geneticist who studies gonad development at the MIMR-PHI Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne.
The gonad is not the only source of diversity in sex. A number of DSDs are caused by changes in the machinery that responds to hormonal signals from the gonads and other glands. Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, or CAIS, for example, arises when a person’s cells are deaf to male sex hormones, usually because the receptors that respond to the hormones are not working. People with CAIS have Y chromosomes and internal testes, but their external genitalia are female, and they develop as females at puberty.
Conditions such as these meet the medical definition of DSDs, in which an individual’s anatomical sex seems to be at odds with their chromosomal or gonadal sex. But they are rare—affecting about 1 in 4,500 people. Some researchers now say that the definition should be widened to include subtle variations of anatomy such as mild hypospadias, in which a man’s urethral opening is on the underside of his penis rather than at the tip. The most inclusive definitions point to the figure of 1 in 100 people having some form of DSD, says Vilain.
But beyond this, there could be even more variation. Since the 1990s, researchers have identified more than 25 genes involved in DSDs, and next-generation DNA sequencing in the past few years has uncovered a wide range of variations in these genes that have mild effects on individuals, rather than causing DSDs. “Biologically, it’s a spectrum,” says Vilain.
A DSD called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), for example, causes the body to produce excessive amounts of male sex hormones; XX individuals with this condition are born with ambiguous genitalia (an enlarged clitoris and fused labia that resemble a scrotum). It is usually caused by a severe deficiency in an enzyme called 21-hydroxylase. But women carrying mutations that result in a milder deficiency develop a ‘non-classical’ form of CAH, which affects about 1 in 1,000 individuals; they may have male-like facial and body hair, irregular periods or fertility problems—or they might have no obvious symptoms at all. Another gene, NR5A1, is currently fascinating researchers because variations in it cause a wide range of effects, from underdeveloped gonads to mild hypospadias in men, and premature menopause in women.
Many people never discover their condition unless they seek help for infertility, or discover it through some other brush with medicine. Last year, for example, surgeons reported that they had been operating on a hernia in a man, when they discovered that he had a womb. The man was 70, and had fathered four children.
CELLULAR SEX
Studies of DSDs have shown that sex is no simple dichotomy. But things become even more complex when scientists zoom in to look at individual cells. The common assumption that every cell contains the same set of genes is untrue. Some people have mosaicism: they develop from a single fertilized egg but become a patchwork of cells with different genetic make-ups. This can happen when sex chromosomes are doled out unevenly between dividing cells during early embryonic development. For example, an embryo that starts off as XY can lose a Y chromosome from a subset of its cells. If most cells end up as XY, the result is a physically typical male, but if most cells are X, the result is a female with a condition called Turner’s syndrome, which tends to result in restricted height and underdeveloped ovaries. This kind of mosaicism is rare, affecting about 1 in 15,000 people.
The effects of sex-chromosome mosaicism range from the prosaic to the extraordinary. A few cases have been documented in which a mosaic XXY embryo became a mix of two cell types—some with two X chromosomes and some with two Xs and a Y—and then split early in development. This results in ‘identical’ twins of different sexes.
There is a second way in which a person can end up with cells of different chromosomal sexes. James’s patient was a chimaera: a person who develops from a mixture of two fertilized eggs, usually owing to a merger between embryonic twins in the womb. This kind of chimaerism resulting in a DSD is extremely rare, representing about 1% of all DSD cases.
Another form of chimaerism, however, is now known to be widespread. Termed microchimaerism, it happens when stem cells from a fetus cross the placenta into the mother’s body, and vice versa. It was first identified in the early 1970s—but the big surprise came more than two decades later, when researchers discovered how long these crossover cells survive, even though they are foreign tissue that the body should, in theory, reject. A study in 1996 recorded women with fetal cells in their blood as many as 27 years after giving birth; another found that maternal cells remain in children up to adulthood. This type of work has further blurred the sex divide, because it means that men often carry cells from their mothers, and women who have been pregnant with a male fetus can carry a smattering of its discarded cells.
Microchimaeric cells have been found in many tissues. In 2012, for example, immunologist Lee Nelson and her team at the University of Washington in Seattle found XY cells in post-mortem samples of women’s brains. The oldest woman carrying male DNA was 94 years old. Other studies have shown that these immigrant cells are not idle; they integrate into their new environment and acquire specialized functions, including (in mice at least) forming neurons in the brain. But what is not known is how a peppering of male cells in a female, or vice versa, affects the health or characteristics of a tissue—for example, whether it makes the tissue more susceptible to diseases more common in the opposite sex. “I think that’s a great question,” says Nelson, “and it is essentially entirely unaddressed.” In terms of human behaviour, the consensus is that a few male microchimaeric cells in the brain seem unlikely to have a major effect on a woman.
Scientists are now finding that XX and XY cells behave in different ways, and that this can be independent of the action of sex hormones. “To tell you the truth, it’s actually kind of surprising how big an effect of sex chromosomes we’ve been able to see,” says Arnold. He and his colleagues have shown that the dose of X chromosomes in a mouse’s body can affect its metabolism, and studies in a lab dish suggest that XX and XY cells behave differently on a molecular level, for example with different metabolic responses to stress. The next challenge, says Arnold, is to uncover the mechanisms. His team is studying the handful of X-chromosome genes now known to be more active in females than in males. “I actually think that there are more sex differences than we know of,” says Arnold.
BEYOND THE BINARY
Biologists may have been building a more nuanced view of sex, but society has yet to catch up. True, more than half a century of activism from members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community has softened social attitudes to sexual orientation and gender. Many societies are now comfortable with men and women crossing conventional societal boundaries in their choice of appearance, career and sexual partner. But when it comes to sex, there is still intense social pressure to conform to the binary model.
This pressure has meant that people born with clear DSDs often undergo surgery to ‘normalize’ their genitals. Such surgery is controversial because it is usually performed on babies, who are too young to consent, and risks assigning a sex at odds with the child’s ultimate gender identity—their sense of their own gender. Intersex advocacy groups have therefore argued that doctors and parents should at least wait until a child is old enough to communicate their gender identity, which typically manifests around the age of three, or old enough to decide whether they want surgery at all.
This issue was brought into focus by a lawsuit filed in South Carolina in May 2013 by the adoptive parents of a child known as MC, who was born with ovotesticular DSD, a condition that produces ambiguous genitalia and gonads with both ovarian and testicular tissue. When MC was 16 months old, doctors performed surgery to assign the child as female—but MC, who is now eight years old, went on to develop a male gender identity. Because he was in state care at the time of his treatment, the lawsuit alleged not only that the surgery constituted medical malpractice, but also that the state denied him his constitutional right to bodily integrity and his right to reproduce. Last month, a court decision prevented the federal case from going to trial, but a state case is ongoing.
“This is potentially a critically important decision for children born with intersex traits,” says Julie Greenberg, a specialist in legal issues relating to gender and sex at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, California. The suit will hopefully encourage doctors in the United States to refrain from performing operations on infants with DSDs when there are questions about their medical necessity, she says. It could raise awareness about “the emotional and physical struggles intersex people are forced to endure because doctors wanted to ‘help’ us fit in,” says Georgiann Davis, a sociologist who studies issues surrounding intersex traits and gender at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was born with CAIS.
Doctors and scientists are sympathetic to these concerns, but the MC case also makes some uneasy—because they know how much is still to be learned about the biology of sex. They think that changing medical practice by legal ruling is not ideal, and would like to see more data collected on outcomes such as quality of life and sexual function to help decide the best course of action for people with DSDs—something that researchers are starting to do.
Diagnoses of DSDs once relied on hormone tests, anatomical inspections and imaging, followed by painstaking tests of one gene at a time. Now, advances in genetic techniques mean that teams can analyse multiple genes at once, aiming straight for a genetic diagnosis and making the process less stressful for families. Vilain, for example, is using whole-exome sequencing—which sequences the protein-coding regions of a person’s entire genome—on XY people with DSDs. Last year, his team showed that exome sequencing could offer a probable diagnosis in 35% of the study participants whose genetic cause had been unknown.
Vilain, Harley and Achermann say that doctors are taking an increasingly circumspect attitude to genital surgery. Children with DSDs are treated by multidisciplinary teams that aim to tailor management and support to each individual and their family, but this usually involves raising a child as male or female even if no surgery is done. Scientists and advocacy groups mostly agree on this, says Vilain: “It might be difficult for children to be raised in a gender that just does not exist out there.” In most countries, it is legally impossible to be anything but male or female.
Yet if biologists continue to show that sex is a spectrum, then society and state will have to grapple with the consequences, and work out where and how to draw the line. Many transgender and intersex activists dream of a world where a person’s sex or gender is irrelevant. Although some governments are moving in this direction, Greenberg is pessimistic about the prospects of realizing this dream—in the United States, at least. “I think to get rid of gender markers altogether or to allow a third, indeterminate marker, is going to be difficult.”
So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,” says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.
I am an older gay guy in a long-term wonderful relationship. My spouse and I are in our 33rd year together. I love politics and news. I enjoy civil discussions and have no taboo subjects. My pronouns are he / him / his and my email is scottiesplaytime@gmail.com
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83 thoughts on “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic”
Scottie, if I may …
I REALLY wish you’d get off this topic. People are going to believe what they want to believe and while education IS important, I truly doubt your MANY posts on the subject is going to sway a person’s thinking. IMO, each person has to come to grips with controversial ideas on their own and beating them over the head is not generally referred to as education. 🙃
Hello Nan. I think what you are really tired of is the comments on the subject. Either way I cannot in good conscience let bigotry go unchallenged and must stand up for a marginalized community. Sorry. You are free to avoid reading any post that upsets you or you disagree with of course, but I do the blog to share the stuff I think is important. I think discrimination against the LGBTQ+ is an important subject to address and to push back against. Remember I am of that community, and I have felt that discrimination personally all my life. I do feel it is important to post on the subject. I really do. The object of the don’t say gay bills is to erase the subject from the schools and the kids so the right can push anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda on them before they can be taught tolerance. Think of the old saying about give me a child before the age 7 and …
Russia proved it works. There was a growing acceptance of gay people, gay rights, and even marriage equality there. Then the conservatives banded with the church to make even talking about being gay in a positive way wherever a minor (a person under 18) may see / hear it illegal. You cannot even display the rainbow flag in public. Nothing positive on the radio or TV. Nothing positive in movies. But the government and the anti-LGBTQ+ can still say all the negative crap they want. I think you can guess what happened. Acceptance of the LGBTQ+ people tanked. It stopped growing and regressed. Gays were arrested and lost all rights. The attacks against gays got much worse. Now in Russia you do not see a gay presence or display. It is gone, gays don’t exist is what the conservatives want to portray because you don’t see any display anymore. They are all in the closet to protect themselves.
The conservatives and religious figures in the US loved it. They are adopting the same ideas here hoping to have the same results. If I don’t keep the subject in the public eye as best I can then I will help them. They are starting with the trans, vilify them as perverts wanting to attack women in the bathroom and steal everything women have worked for. It is all about making the trans person the villain and bad guy and the women the poor victim. So conservatives must step and save the poor women. Like conservatives care about women normally.
You are correct, I should have cut the conversation off earlier and I will in the future. I feel that Tildeb has not been discussing in good faith. He is like the people I meet in the comments of the far right cartoons sections only not as quick with the constant insulting that makes them feel smart.
There is a balance I have to find. On your blog I have wanted to fire back on disinformation that he has left address to me and out of respect for your wishes did not respond. But here I have to decide how much disinformation to let stand. I would prefer to have people reading the comments to be enlightened and to go do their own research. At least google the subject. But they will not. They will read what is put in front of them and either feel it makes sense or it doesn’t. So I have to learn the balance. When to just end a conversation and when to respond. I want the comments to be an exchange of ideas, reason, and knowledge. Not a knock down fight. Time will see.
Best wishes.
Criticism of this article by Jerry Coyne is here. It’s eye opening for anyone actually concerned with what’s true and shows the scope of the ideological take-over of a once respected magazine.
Hello Tildeb. Coyne is a well known anti-trans person and I stopped following him years ago over his stances on some subjects. He has an old fashion stance on subjects that doesn’t reflect the change in understanding of issues. To be sure it is understandable as he is old. It was not that way when he was teaching so it must not be correct that it changed idea. Personally I never found him to be that bright or much of a speaker. His talks on evolution bored me to a stupor. But everyone can check him out for themselves. There are people on this blog who like him. Seems you are another one.
Harvard evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven in conversation with Bari Weiss. At both 1:11 and again at 1:14 in this podcast, Hooven tells us in no uncertain terms what defines sex and why it is biologically binary (surprising to you – again – will be that it’s all about gametes and that this is used across ALL biology). She also explains why so many people confuse variations in characteristics and chromosomes to create a supposed spectrum that simply is not true regarding the fact of binary sex in reality. This scientific definition has absolutely nothing to do with me or others but is simply a way the science of biology recognizes the reality of reproductive life.
If you are now thinking, “She must be an anti-trans bigot,” take a moment for crying out loud and understand that this impulse – this NEED you seem to demonstrate – is coming from you BECAUSE you are coming at this issue through prioritizing your own emotional thinking that agrees with your feelings rather than by finding out what is true and what is real FIRST.
Speaking of good faith, if you’re going to relegate what’s true in reality to be some form of bigotry because it doesn’t align with a preferred ideological framing, and you run the thought experiment outwards to encompass everyone believing as you do, then I cannot figure out how anyone could think this would end well. Surely the only starting position should be to agree to respect that what’s true matters, that reality’s arbitration of our beliefs about it is an excellent place to start. If we could even agree on this much, then we could have a legitimate and productive and fruitful discussion about anything. But when you vilify anyone regardless of expertise who disagrees with your framing on merit as if bigots, you’ve already closed that door. The mind will soon follow.
Hey Tildeb. This post you are responding to was written on the 2nd of April. Your comment is two days old so say some where around 16 to 17 days have gone by. I post a hell of a lot of stuff that you seem not to care a crap about and don’t bother to leave comment on. But you are driven to comment again and again on a post most of us had our say on and moved on from. Tells me you are serious anti-trans and really want to attack anything dealing with subject with as much venom as you can. Guess what? I do evaluate what I read. I disagree with you. I disagree with the people you quote. I find them bigoted and untrustworthy on the subject. I have checked your citations and found them on very anti-trans publications. Bari Weiss I disagree with on almost everything, but she is really popular with right leaning moderate former liberal Bill Maher.
You have an ax to grind on the subject. I have a pro-trans positive position. But you don’t agree with the people I quote, and I sure don’t agree with the people you quote.
The advantage I have is the majority of medical professionals are on my side. Medical science is on my side. You can keep chewing the bone on this, there are people still pushing conversion therapy for sexual orientation and claiming it is a choice. They are wrong, they are the minority, and they are sure they know more than the people educated in the subject.
Again for the last time. The majority of experts in the fields of this subject disagree with you. I agree with them. The biologists, the medical doctors, the gender specialists, the mental health experts, the medical scientists that work in the fields in the subject of gender / sex … The majority of all these groups disagree with you. That is enough for me. It should be enough for you. But some people yell at the moon thinking it hears them. You keep fighting the tide. Most of the people advance as our understanding does, some don’t and remain regressive as the world passes them by. I choose to advance with new developments. You do you boo.
You have dismissed any and all contrary data and waved away any and all experts who raise them. You do this over and over again. You use the same tactic with commentators and journalists who raise these legitimate issues and publicize them. There’s no ‘dialogue’ going on here on your site; there is simply your ideology being presented as if ‘information’ from many MSM links that agree with you. Any and all contrary evidence – no matter how strong – is summarily and contextually dismissed as ‘disinformation’ because it doesn’t align! (You’ve already done this right now reading this, haven’t you?)
In response to the consent issue (a central issue when it comes to what constitutes ‘ethical’ medical procedures), for example, you dismiss it as claiming no girl undergoes gender reassignment surgery in the US under the age of 18 (therefore and adult, therefore informed and able to give consent, therefore anyone who questions this is spreading ‘disinformation’). I’ve given you one study where a third of the respondents underwent surgery prior to that age (no comment from you) and the linked one here where a 15 year old under went a double mastectomy. Just because you BELIEVE it’s not happening doesn’t mean it ISN’T happening. So your belief is demonstrably false (because this is now classified as ‘disinformation’ in your view and so you don’t have to worry about it fitting your beliefs). So consent is an issue if we’re going to talk about the ethics of this practice of genderizing children. But contrary facts I raise (you’re not going to do it obviously) don’t alert you that you are simply shutting out evidence in order to maintain a false belief. Nor do you care to be shown this… repeatedly dismissive of any and all attempts. That’s exactly how creationists think and how evangelicals stay in their alt reality bubble. That’s what you’re doing and why there really is a question that perhaps you are not offering good information. Perhaps you are offering only ideologically approved information (and so search the internet using confirmation bias as your guide to ‘respond’ to dismissing legitimate evidence). Ideologically aligned and what’s true are not synonyms. But using this confirmation bias tactic is a GUARTANTEED way to avoiding what’s true.
You claim the majority of scientists and medical practitioners agree with you. They don’t. They follow their standards of practice, Scottie. Again, not synonymous. Not the same thing. And those practices ARE changing because of evidence that have swayed decisions from law suits that use it… evidence you have already dismissed. That should raise a red flag to you that maybe you’re missing something. But it doesn’t.
Consent and the lack of it was EXACTLY what the Kiera Bell case I raised was all about and it was THIS ruling – unanimous – that altered the standards of practice in Sweden and Denmark as well as England. Information and good evidence YOU have already dismissed as ‘disinformation’ (coming from the mouths of detransitioners, no less, but can’t be true in your mind because it doesn’t align with what you believe) is altering medical practices there… but practices here that are currently legislated by governing bodies to promote and appease and align with the feel good ideologues. That’s what these practitioners are up against and forced to adhere to ‘affirmation only’ directives (that for some reason you presume is non biased medicine) that removes the need for informed consent to be ethical! I raised this: you just wave it away. Dismiss it wholesale.
That you have waved all of this away should be a red flag to you that you’re not thinking straight about this issue, that you are being duped because you are missing something important. What that is is very clear me: you have stopped seeking and respecting what’s true first but have replaced this with what ‘feels’ good to you, what feels right to you based on a history of encountering bigotry in the past, as if the latter could have been prevented by the former! So who cares about thousands of young girls being harmed today? It’s all good, it’s all right, as long as it makes you feel like you are championing the underdog.
That’s why you’re neither on the right side of history nor following good science. You have a belief and you’re going stick with it. Just like any other good little creationist with a belief to defend.
I read the rather loooong article, and this above all stood out to me: When else do we trust children to self-diagnose and make lifelong medical decisions?
I also agreed with: … this is still a new phenomenon about which a great deal is not known.
There’s no doubt there are legitimate and medically supported cases of transitioning, but as I think I’ve commented before … it needs to be AGE-APPROPRIATE. It seems to me the “rush” to accept this issue is overlooking some very important things.
And probably most of all, it’s concerning that it’s becoming a political/religious issue. But then, what else is new? I suppose there will always be those who think everyone should abide by THEIR views and opinions because, well, they’re right!
Hello Nan. I agree with most of what you wrote, maybe all of it if I understand your points correctly. What I disagree with is the assumption that something non-age appropriate is happening. That is a right wing media drive talking point to justify these don’t say gay bills and anti-trans laws.
It is important to understand what is really happening is age appropriate. The right wing media wants to drive the idea that kids are lining up to transition like they are being offered ice cream. That parents are making little kids have sex change operations because they wanted a different gender child. Doesn’t it remind you of the abortion scares that women were aborting viable babies because they did not like the sex of the child or that women wanted the right to abortion so they could have wild sex parties all the time. It is a right wing distortion to make it seem a horrible liberal misuse.
There is just more coverage of young trans kids now and remember in the US the only sexual surgeries done on kids is corrective genital surgery to fix a medical problem such as no urethra or other issue. Not sexual reassignment unless the kid is either born with no function genitals or has mangled them in an accident. Or sickness like testicular cancer so they have a ball or both removed.
That is the kids having sex reassignment surgery that Tildeb and the right like to push as sexual reassignment. A girl in my high school had to have a mastectomy. I only knew because I was a friend of the family. She had cancer all her life. She died like at 21 or 22. But it was not a surgery because she was trans gender, she needed the surgery to get rid of the cancer. But that is the misdirection of the right wing that we are dealing with.
Tildeb has used the right wing misinformation technique of using bits of truth / reality to then create a fictional narrative. Teachers are not having gender swap parties with 6 year old’s. They are not having same sex orgies with 5 year old’s.
Right now the media focus on trans gender is new. The right wing media attempt to demonize trans gender issues is new. But not trans gender people. They have been around forever just as the rest of the LGBTQ+ have been. Think about it, did gays start to exist just when media attention happened about them? Did we exist only after traditionalists tried hard to demonize us and put us back in the closet?
The pushback against trans and gays is happening because of acceptance. The elected officials that have written the don’t say gay and the anti-trans bills have admitted it. They have seen how well it has worked in Russia. But even in Muslim countries where gay is punishable by death and in countries where there are long prison sentences if someone finds out, gay and trans people keep existing.
You say there is a rush to accept such things. Things are being overlooked. OK That is something we can explore as it is a legitimate complaint. Let’s address what you think is being ignored or overlooked. That is the way we spread acceptance. Because that is the way we dispel misinformation.
Because acceptance is the issue and the point. Nan studies have shown kids are killing themselves in large numbers due to not being accepted. I just posted the horrific story of a kid bullied so badly he wanted to kill himself, of a man beaten so badly he is now blind because a family did not accept their adult son being actively gay, and how a man who believes right wing media followed a little boy into a bathroom to tell him that the men (his fathers) raising him were raping him and had stolen him. Then he attacked the entire family in public. No one came to help the two men and their two children. That is why the push for acceptance is so very important. Why we must fight back against the right wing misinformation / distortion. That is why it is necessary to be taught in the lowest grades. Teaching that LGBTQ+ exist and are not bad but OK is age appropriate. It also is important that bigots don’t get to prevent teaching acceptance as that leads to the indoctrination of hate and creates more little bigots to attack other school kids.
That last point of the right framing this as protecting kids and letting the parents have a say in everything in the classroom is misinformation / misdirection. First there is not a rush of child pedophilia in the schools. But most importantly it is only one small minority of parents that the right wants to have a say. It is not all parents. The majority of parents are OK with the acceptance of LGBTQ+ kids, with gay straight alliance clubs, with rainbow stickers. But the right cult base / Republican leaders don’t want those parents to voice their view. They want maga parents only. Shall we turn science and history over to the evangelical preachers also?
This is the scary political part of this. Rule by the shrinking minority over the majority. The republican party is a minority party cementing majority rule with gerrymandering and voter suppression. For example Florida is a blue state but our state government is heavily red / Republican. And DeathSantis just drew new maps that have been approved to get rid of a couple of the remaining democratic districts. Out of the four Democratic seats, DeathSantis just got rid of two of them, even though the extra population growth in the state was due to minority voters. Black people mostly. They took out the black majority district. Gone. That to me is scary that the Republicans want a one party rule over the people like in China.
Scottie, yes. I read all of your response. But just as you think that I am over-reacting to this issue, I find I must say the same about you. There’s no doubt we are on different sides of the fence. At least to some degree. And while I do see and understand YOUR perspective, I am not anywhere near ready to totally agree.
One other thing … I read the article that tildeb linked to VERY closely and I do NOT think it was “right-wing” propaganda. I felt it was the story of this individual’s personal experience … and I doubt very much she is unique in her later misgivings. After all, she was only 15 at the time of her elective mastectomy! Essentially, she made her decision while she was still in puberty!
Your wrote that “studies have shown kids are killing themselves in large numbers.” IMO, this is a typical over-statement and one that I would be more likely to attribute to a “right-winger!!” In actuality, Nearly 20% of high school students report serious thoughts of suicide. (UCLA study) — and while the percentage is significant, I highly doubt they are all attributable to sex issues.
While you have offered incidents and arguments to support your own POV, surely you must realize this is what we ALL do when we disagree on highly contestable topics (e.g., abortion!). But in the end, I think you have to agree — we each have to make up our own minds.
This is long but I think I addressed all the points asked.
Hello Nan. I consider you a good faith actor in this unlike Tildeb who I have caught out misrepresenting information and using articles from a group started to be anti-trans. So I am going back to read Tildeb’s comment. As I said I just basically ignored it while catching a few words of it as I scrolled past.
I don’t recall every saying you were overreacting in our discussions on this subject. I may have suggested the foundations of your views might be routed in traditions simply because of the generation you are part of but I thought of your position more as questioning than rejecting. I have carried on the discussion with you under the idea of sharing information that you might not have considered or have known. Am I wrong?
OK lets talk about the 15 year old Tildeb linked to. First the author is a reporter for the New York Post. The New York Post (NY Post) is a conservative daily tabloid newspaper published in New York City. Then I noticed in the article she went right for the political, claiming that the girls gender reassignment surgery was part of the Biden pushed transgender affirming care plans. Total B.S. I looked it up. Yes the Biden administration is fighting for trans kids to get needed medical care including social transitioning. There was no mention of surgery. That is made up. See I told you, look at the source and what the bias is. By the way I used the link in the article. The link doesn’t show what the author claims. They do this because most people will just accept that the Biden administration is pushing sex reassignment surgery on kids, when that is not true. Plus the linked to article from the White House is long, most won’t bother with it.
I have addressed the stuff about Sweden and other misinformation. But here is the way to look at it. You can find any fringe doctor or group that claims anything you want that is different from the mainstream view. There are plenty of medical doctors willing to prescribe Ivermectin, a dewormer, to treat covid which is a virus claiming it works. All the peer reviewed studies said it did not work against Covid but the right still claimed there were studies that did show it worked. Not peer reviewed and not done by the doctors in that field but hey they showed it worked right? There is an entire doctors group started by right wing religious bigots that still claim conversion therapy works and should be used on kids. On kids, and some of that is real torture like electric shocks. Mainstream doctors say it doesn’t work and doing that is harmful. But there is that group pushing it.
So why do we have splinter groups that push alternatives to the accepted mainstream science? Is it because the majority of doctors are all wrong and this fringe group has had an enlightenment? If that was the case the majority of doctors would look over the data and change their stance and method of treatment. But that is not happening. Just as the majority of doctors did not switch to using Ivermectin for Covid, the majority of doctors still believe that treating transgender kids with social transitioning and puberty blockers is the right treatment.
Now to the crux of the story. A person’s story of being pushed into transitioning and regrets it. Oh why did not someone slow down this rush to make her a him. Only Nan let’s look at facts. I can show you far more stories of trans kids fighting for years to get medical help including mental health counseling and medications such as puberty blockers and were delayed or denied. Why do you think the WH had to release documents and use the power of the government to get kids these treatments? Because they are being denied on a large scale in red states for political / religious reasons not medical. Just the opposite of forcing kids into them. Now this girl and all the others kids she says were failed, if they were not treated by mental health professionals first before anything else then they did not go through the approved treatment regime. Which makes me skeptical. See there are years of procedures to go through before you get puberty blockers as a pre-puberty kid. During puberty they try to quicken the processes but it is still intense and time consuming. Kids don’t get to walk into and get puberty blockers like ordering French fries. Remember the US system, someone has to pay for that appointment and medication. And any surgeon that did sexual reassignment on a minor without that medical history work up is looking to get sued. So again I doubt a lot of this.
Nice switch in the middle of the article from young Choe to 23 year old Helena. Helena is a detransition advocate, understandable as she detransitioned, but notice her transition story doesn’t start until she is 18. Yes as a teen she wore boys clothes which I guess means pants and shirts, and she cut her hair short. But no medical intervention until she was 18 and initiated it herself. She doesn’t mention going to mental health professionals only a school guidance counselor. So as an adult she went to a clinic and got testosterone. Good for her. I had six months of work ups after a year of lowering testosterone lab numbers before I could get my prescription for the medication. Ron is still waiting as his doctor doesn’t like the idea and Ron doesn’t want to really push him. He gave Ron the pill that backfired on him badly. He has made Ron almost terrified to use the injections. So good for her to walk in and just get it on request. Makes me wonder?
OK I could keep tearing this article apart but I think you get the idea. It is a hit piece by a right wing author with an issue against transgenders.
But the real kernel of truth in this situation is the one missed. There are people who regret transitioning from one gender to the other. That is true. There are reasons some do it such as pressure from family, church, or others. But some do it really from regret at transitioning. I have posted this before and cited the study. The number is 2.4%. Really 2.4% detransition. That is not a lot of people. I forgot the study that is from but I just looked it up again and here is one study saying the rate is less than 1%.
Based on this review, there is an extremely low prevalence of regret in transgender patients after GAS. We believe this study corroborates the improvements made in regard to selection criteria for GAS. However, there is high subjectivity in the assessment of regret and lack of standardized questionnaires, which highlight the importance of developing validated questionnaires in this population.
Again a real small amount. But I was looking to see the rate of people who regret having other types of surgery. So I used knee surgery. Boy that is bad. Here is some I found.
So you can see the rate of regret for transitioning is really low compared to other surgeries. I wont bore you with a list of other ones as if you want you can google them.
The idea pushed that kids are being rushed, hustled, forced, pressured in to transitioning and then having mass detransition is not true. Is there some, sure just as there are gay people who hate that they are gay. It happens.
Let’s talk about kids killing themselves. First how many have died from Covid, lets use that as a baseline.
Since the beginning of the current year, 179 children have died from Covid-19 in the US, compared with 735 children in the preceding 20 months, according to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The figures mainly involve the age group 0-17 and were gathered from about May of 2020 to early March 2022.
Figures similar to the AAP’s appear in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) weekly provisional data on Covid deaths. From 2020 up to 9 March this year, a total is given of 894 deaths among those aged 0-17, of which 129 – almost 15% – have occurred since the start of 2022. both are from the link below. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/11/us-child-covid-deaths-omicron-surge
Oh great gravy the following statistics are upsetting so everyone reading please be in a safe place first. I know it upset me.
SUICIDE & CRISIS CENTER OF NORTH TEXAS > PROGRAMS AND SERVICES > FOR TEENS > TEEN SUICIDE FACTS
Teen Suicide Facts
In the United States
Suicide is the third leading cause of death of young people between the ages of 15 and 24.
5,000 young people complete suicide in the U.S. each year.
Each year, there are approximately 10 youth suicides for every 100,000 youth.
Each day, there are approximately 12 youth suicides.
Every 2 hours and 11 minutes, a person under the age of 25 completes suicide.
In the past 60 years, the suicide rate has quadrupled for males 15 to 24 years old, and has doubled for females of the same age.
For every completed suicide by youth, it is estimated that 100 to 200 attempts are made.
Firearms remain the most commonly used suicide method among youth, accounting for 49% of all completed suicides.
So let me dig into that 5,000 a year as that is a lot of kids. This is from the Trevor project, which is a pro-LGBTQ+ group. But suicide statistics are the same if you are pro or con LGBTQ+ I would think. I might be wrong.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people, with LGBTQ youth being four times more likely to seriously consider suicide, to make a plan for suicide, and to attempt suicide versus their peers.
MAR. 11, 2021
Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020), with LGBTQ youth being four times more likely to seriously consider suicide, to make a plan for suicide, and to attempt suicide than their peers (Johns et al., 2019; Johns et al., 2020). Understanding the number of LGBTQ youth who seriously consider and attempt suicide, as well as how often suicide risk occurs, improves our ability to serve and advocate for LGBTQ youth.
The Trevor Project estimates that at least one LGBTQ youth between the ages of 13–24 attempts suicide every 45 seconds in the U.S.
Because many LGBTQ youth report attempting suicide multiple times in a given year, this estimate likely underrepresents the extent of how often LGBTQ youth attempt suicide in the U.S. Additionally, The Trevor Project’s past-year attempted suicide rates are based on non-probability data that trend slightly slower than rates among national probability datasets
The process for deriving these numbers can be found in The Trevor Project’s National Estimate of LGBTQ Youth Seriously Considering Suicide. Based on our previous estimation process, there are approximately 2,647,755 LGBTQ youth living in the United States who are between the ages of 13–18 and approximately 2,529,117 who are between the ages of 19–24.
there are approximately 2,647,755 LGBTQ youth living in the United States who are between the ages of 13–18 and approximately 2,529,117 who are between the ages of 19–24.
2.6 million LGBTQ+ kids suicide a year. You wrote you thought I was doing a typical over statement. We on the left were upset with 894 kids that died of Covid. I think 2.6 million who committed suicide due to pressures of being LGBTQ+ is something that is a serious issue to be addressed. So yes Nan, LGBTQ+ kids are killing themselves in large numbers.
Your last paragraph is what I thought we / I was doing. The difference is as I said at the start, I don’t think Tildeb is discussing in good faith. For example you read what he linked to and did not realize that it was a hit piece pushed by an anti-trans author who has a sub-stack (blogs) full of anti-trans stuff. She has no degree in anything medical or dealing with gender, but she is pushing anti-trans stories. That is disingenuous. I learned long ago to look at the source and see if they are qualified to make the assertions they do. You say everyone must make up their own minds. That is true. What I am trying to do is present the facts as they are. The truth without the distortions and bias of anti-trans hate groups. The simple fact is the majority of medical doctors and medical associations such as the AMA support the transgender procedures established for kids which included mental health examinations along with medical exams, social transitioning, and the use of puberty blockers when appropriate. Those are facts. Just as it is a fact that the majority of medical professionals support the Covid vaccines as important treatment for Covid. I do think that as a lay person we need to trust the majority of the medical profession. And see the fringe groups for what they are.
As I said at the top I tried to answer the questions you asked. If you have more let me know.
Hello Nan. I wanted to add that I searched for more information on a 15 year old detransitioning after breast surgery. I searched for different ways of putting it. Know what I found. I found that same article on Fox and real clear politics, both are far right media. Nowhere else on any mainstream platform. But even more interesting I found Penny. Penny had the same story, she was rushed into it at the same age as Chloe, she had the same symptoms as Chloe, the same surgery as Chloe, and regretted it the same as Chloe. And amazingly Penny said she was just needing mental health help that no one offered instead of transitioning, just like Chloe. Not saying the story is made up but I strongly suspect it. Again Penny’s story was on a far-right media site. But not covered anywhere else. Makes me wonder.
Hello Tildeb, I think I laid out the points very well in both replies to Nan. If something is only on the radical right media and nearly identical to push the same points … Well it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what is going on. Oh and I did a little digging into Bari Weiss turns out she made a crusade to cross the country trying to get what she felt was liberal professors fired. It was her big passion. She was the big cancel culture that the right complains about. Guess who Suzy Weiss is the sister of? Yes that is right. Then I read that Suzy wrote an article attacking collage admission standards because she did not get into the Ivy League colleges she felt she deserved to be accepted to. To many of those other people getting preference it seems. Right wing much? Should I trust her reporting on trans issues?
Sorry, Scottie … Waaaay more than I care to read! Especially on this subject! Perhaps you feel the need to elaborate for others who read your blog, but the proliferation of words on the topic does not alter my reluctance to give a “thumbs up” on what’s happening.
Of course it’s your prerogative to assume my position “might be routed in traditions simply because of the generation you are part of,” but I feel somewhat insulted that you would even hint at that! I feel that my willingness to even discuss this subject is evidence that I do try to “stay up with” things that are happening in the world today. I have never been one to bury my head in the sand.
As for the article, I’m not going to argue the source or the “politics” behind it — for one main reason. I am still of the very strong opinion that there ARE kids in puberty who are being influenced by external sources and, as a result, are acting against their own well-being. While I won’t deny there are some who are genuinely affected, I think the entire issue is being blown WAY out of proportion.
Hello Nan. I doubt you can honestly say your feelings toward things are not colored by your life experiences. That is simply the way it works. Even people against slavery in the 1860s did not think that blacks were equal to whites. Lincoln wanted to send all blacks to a country they could feel comfortable living in as he was sure they were not equal to whites and that would cause them issues. I am the sum of my life, the people in our congress are the sum of their times, and you while you may have kept up and be open minded still have those same society teachings that we all must overcome. We all do. That doesn’t mean you buried your head in the sand, it means you had to overcome those perceptions to change it to your current one. For example, 75 year old Manchin was asked about legalizing cannabis and his response was “why”? ” I have not even thought of it, why would we do that, oh you don’t smoke do you”? he asked the interviewer. His mind set, like most of the others his age in congress is at odds with over 80% of the country that wants it legalized. There was no insult meant, we are the sum of our lives.
I worked hard on that reply. I spent hours looking up the information so I feel insulted you wouldn’t read it. But here is the thing I want you to really understand. That is the number of LGBTQ+ kids who commit suicide. Not the number that try, that is the number that succeeded. See you wrote:
Your wrote that “studies have shown kids are killing themselves in large numbers.” IMO, this is a typical over-statement and one that I would be more likely to attribute to a “right-winger!!” In actuality, Nearly 20% of high school students report serious thoughts of suicide. (UCLA study) — and while the percentage is significant, I highly doubt they are all attributable to sex issues.
I admit I got the math wrong. I thought my figuring showed that there were 2.6 million plus suicides. That is not the true number. That is the number of estimated LGBTQ+ kids and of them 1 in 4 tried to kill themselves. I admit I did not get the math right.
One in four teenagers who identified as LGBTQ+ said they attempted suicide during the first half of 2021, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC’s findings also revealed that almost half (46.8%) of teenagers who said they are lesbian, gay or bisexual seriously considered a suicide attempt during that same time frame. These results came to light from the CDC’s first national survey of high school students, a project funded by the federal CARES Act to assess the mental health of American youth during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now according to the Trevor Project.
Summary
Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020), with LGBTQ youth being four times more likely to seriously consider suicide, to make a plan for suicide, and to attempt suicide than their peers (Johns et al., 2019; Johns et al., 2020). Understanding the number of LGBTQ youth who seriously consider and attempt suicide, as well as how often suicide risk occurs, improves our ability to serve and advocate for LGBTQ youth.
Finding
The Trevor Project estimates that at least one LGBTQ youth between the ages of 13–24 attempts suicide every 45 seconds in the U.S.
Because many LGBTQ youth report attempting suicide multiple times in a given year, this estimate likely underrepresents the extent of how often LGBTQ youth attempt suicide in the U.S. Additionally, The Trevor Project’s past-year attempted suicide rates are based on non-probability data that trend slightly slower than rates among national probability datasets
Methodology
A. Estimating the Number of LGBTQ Youth Ages of 13–24 in the U.S.
This estimate is based on Trevor’s previous estimates of the total number of LGBTQ youth between ages 13–24 who live in the U.S. each year. The process for deriving these numbers can be found in The Trevor Project’s National Estimate of LGBTQ Youth Seriously Considering Suicide. Based on our previous estimation process, there are approximately 2,647,755 LGBTQ youth living in the United States who are between the ages of 13–18 and approximately 2,529,117 who are between the ages of 19–24.
B. Estimating the Number of LGBTQ Youth Who Attempted Suicide in the Past Year
The Trevor Project’s 2021 National Survey of LGBTQ Youth Mental Health found that 19.0% of LGBTQ youth ages 13–18 and 8.3% of LGBTQ youth ages 19–24 reported attempting suicide in the past year. Applying these rates to the estimates of LGBTQ youth living in the U.S. results in an estimated 503,073 LGBTQ youth between the ages of 13–18 and 209,917 between the ages of 19–24 who attempted suicide in the past year, for a total of 712,990 LGBTQ youth between the ages of 13–24.
C. Estimating How Often LGBTQ Youth Attempt Suicide in the U.S.
To approximate how often attempts occur, the estimated total number of LGBTQ youth ages 13–24 who attempted suicide (712,990) was divided by the total number of minutes in a year (525,600), resulting in an estimated 1.356525992 attempts each minute or .02260876654 per second. Dividing the number 1 by the estimate per second, provides an estimate of how often an attempt occurs in seconds, which was 44.23063055. As such, we estimate that at least one LGBTQ youth between the ages of 13–24 attempts suicide in the U.S. every 45 seconds.
So I don’t think that is an over statement. But in case you do please tell me the acceptable number of LGBTQ+ kids trying to kill themselves because of how they are treated or seen on our society. I think it is already too many.
Scottie, I totally understand the significance of this topic to you, but you and I don’t (and may never) see it in the same light. Call me old. Call me a stick-in-the-mud. Call me whatever seems to fit.
There’s little doubt that you could probably write an entire book on the subject (in fact, you almost have! 😄) — but that’s not going to move me any closer to seeing it the same as you. So let’s just call it a draw. OK?
Hello Nan. I understand that we don’t agree on trans issues. Fine. Remember this is a conversation not an argument is the way I feel. I worked hard searching for the information because I thought you wanted it.
Here is where I think we can agree. I did the math correctly this time. That means 662,000 LGBTQ+ try to kill themselves a year. Tried to kill themselves, not thought about it. I know you care about that.
You don’t want dead kids. I don’t want dead kids. It seems the radical right / Republicans don’t care about dead kids as long as they are LGBTQ+.
We don’t agree on every aspect of trans rights and issues, but I bet we agree on enough to fight the radical right’s / Republicans attempt to increase the number of dead LGBTQ+ kids. At least I think we do.
No, I don’t recall saying I wanted information on this issue. I simply made some observations of my own and you quickly countered them. It’s OK, Scottie. We’re just not in the same place on this topic.
As for the suicides? No one likes to hear/read about teenagers attempting (or committing) suicide. For whatever reason! That’s all I’m going to say.
Hello Nan. Sorry had an issue here to deal with. Your last that you think the issue is being blown way out proportion, in that we agree. That is part of what I have been trying to refute. All these state legislatures banning trans girls from sports when asked to name one in their state, they cannot. It is not a big issue. Trans people are not flooding bathrooms causing trouble, they are not flooding gyms causing trouble, the simple point is this is something being claimed as a political wedge issue. The object is to cause the same fear as gay teachers are recruiting your kids, mentioning same sex parents in grade school is instructing kids in sexual orientation. It is all about building fear and hate going into elections. These politicians cannot cite a single incident they are legislating against because that is not the point. It is about causing the fear. Those people will be in your bathroom when they may have or not been already and you never noticed. Instead, now girls who look boyish are getting challenged in the bathrooms. I often say notice how it is always trans girls in girl’s bathrooms / locker rooms, but these same people don’t care about trans boys in boy’s bathrooms / changing rooms. Why? because it doesn’t cause the same fear. A boy in a girl’s space is scary, a girl in a boy’s space is great and titillating to these people. Same with the idea of trans women in women sports. The right drives the fear of “real” women losing to fake women. But they cannot show it happening. One transwoman who spent her life before training, took the time off to transition then came back to compete and is not really doing as great as other women, but every time she wins the right blows it up. That is why I tell people to look at the source and look at the facts. But you are right Nan, it is far over blown. Just let trans people be who they are in our society. They are no threat to anyone and in more danger from the right wing than you are from them.
Your denialism that this is even an issue is the problem I’m trying to address. I’m trying (and failing) to point out that denying the very real issues of implementing this ideology throughout institutions like education is a significant factor at driving a small subset of moderate voters into the arms of voting Republican. Because I think the Republican party is an existential threat to the US remaining a liberal democracy, I raise the issue that not enough people on Left realize that their denialism of these very real concerns are helping the Republicans win at the polls. Blanket support for any and all trans and race and gender ideology implemented by Democrats is a very real problem in this regard, as is the automatic vilification of any real liberal who criticizes this identity ideology. The Left is eating its own.
You automatically damn the person raising criticism as some kind of right wing bigot because, in your mind, there is no issue on one side and nothing but bigotry and disinformation on the other. Hence, I call this denialism similar to a creationist religious belief and any refutation by facts blasphemy.
For example, the BC School Trustees Association voted almost unanimously (97.2%) to continue the implementation of unisex bathrooms in all schools. So enlightened. Parents of girls prior to the vote told these trustees that their daughters aren’t using the bathrooms, are too uncomfortable using the facilities when a period arrives, that they are skipping school, wanting to stay home, refusing to go into a bathroom where the boys are peeing in the sinks and who enjoy ‘teasing’ girls – sometimes much younger girls – and sometimes assaulting them.
Facts don’t matter.
Along comes a champion of social justice and insists this is all made up, that anyone who raises an issue like this is a bigot, that such parents are transphobic, that such occasions are so rare that there’s really no issue at all so it’s hate and fear driving the criticism.
Sound familiar? Guess how those parents are going to vote when they have an opportunity to express their very deep anger at this treatment in the secrecy of the ballot box?
Oh right… it’s all made up. And besides, think of the suicide rate of the the poor trans sexual children we’re ‘saving’. So virtuous. So many still to save. Let the door knocking begin: do you have a moment and have you heard the “Good News”?
Hello Tildeb. You are failing because it is a political driven issue that is not a real life problem in the world. The moderates that are being driven to the republicans is a talking point and something used to cause fear to prevent speak up on trans rights. Polly said something similar a long time ago, she said it is only the trans part driving the Republican party as gays were accepted a long time ago. Turned out we see that is false also.
The people making this an issue are going to vote conservative anyway. The people making trans issues a problem are watching conservative media, they are conservative in thought, they feel more comfortable on that side of the spectrum. I am talking about those who are making it an issue. Not those who are unsure or feel that some parts may go too far. The ones pushing this such as yourself are actively pushing an anti-trans agenda. That is why you do not care about any other topic I post accept spending less money on the military to give the people more benefits. Notice the two issues you objected to on my blog? What do they have in common? Oh yes they are right wing positions and the data you used is from right wing sources. Ah enlightenment.
Your dooms day scenarios are not happening. Trans people are not sweeping all the women’s sports trophies. They are not pushing women out of sports. It is a ginned-up fear mongering attempting to hurt trans women, just as if a trans women uses the women’s bathroom they will rape your little daughter and assault your wife bullshit. Again, all out of the right-wing playbook. Never a thought that trans women my just need to relieve themselves. They have to be there to rape and assault.
I admit the left is not good at handling the messaging coming out of the right, simply because the corporate Democrats are afraid of upsetting their wealthy donors, who are the same wealthy donors to the Republicans. The days of the Ted Kennedy type liberal Democrat was almost over. But they are coming back and the people like that. tRump showed the people like fighters who will claim to stick up for their interests against the wealthy and big business. Of course tRump lied, but that is what the right does. But the liberals are making a resurgence and that terrifies the right, because they know the public supports the liberal positions. Why do you think there is such an attempt on the right to silence any mention of the positives of the LGBTQ+? It is clear, the majority of the public support the LGBTQ+ and that support has been growing. So the right has to stop anything positive while keep hammering how evil, bad, horrible, woman raping, girl destroying the LGBTQ+ really is. I wish I could post all the stories I see that are just this fear mongering to get the idea into the public, and you help do that for them.
The latest I read is the idea that in 20 years or so, there won’t be lesbians because all the girls who like girls will be trans boys. That trope has been pushed by TERFs in the UK for a while. But it is really playing into the right wings idea that peoples gender and sexuality is a choice that can be changed at a whim. It is not like that.
I understand Tildeb you are male? Could you tomorrow really say you believe you are female and go through years of abuse and social / medical treatments to transition? No, because you are male gendered in your head. That part that tells you who you are. It is the same for transgender people, the part in their head that tells them who they are tells them they are in the wrong body. To remedy that is not a threat to anyone else, but there are people who see it as a threat to their ability to force others to live by their narrow view of what must be allowed. Transgender doesn’t mean criminal psycho that the right is trying to make it
Tildeb dear, I call those using these issues against trans as bigots because it doesn’t affect them, and these issues are made up to appeal to bigots. Really. Oh my god women who look manly may be using the same bathroom, flee for your life! I don’t use female bathrooms I don’t know about you, but when I go into a bathroom I don’t inspect everyone coming in or going out to see if I think they are manly enough. I have known all levels of men in my life, and I can tell you what is shown up top never tends to match what is below. Are women doing that, have an inspection before use. I have posted of women stopped and assaulted trying to use the bathroom because some right winger did not think they were feminine enough. My gods that should drive real feminist crazy and does I can tell you the TERFs are a small but very loud group like magas. Judge a female on her looks, how dare you.
I do not automatically damn any idea or person. I have investigated the issues deeply and found they are crap made up to scare people. Be afraid, be very afraid, the gays are coming the gays are coming … oh, not scared of the gays anymore … okay … the trans are coming the trans are coming, be afraid be afraid. This too shall pass if the right wing doesn’t have its way with these anti LGBTQ+ laws.
Good gods I hope people see through you. Unisex bathrooms mean boys are peeing in the sinks. Girls with periods are afraid to go into them … because girls first are always afraid of boys and boys seeing a girl will have to rape them right? Then the girls are afraid because of their period … are girls just disrobing at the door and waving bloody clothing around while dripping blood. Shit as a boy that would have terrified me. And assaulting the girls of course the boys are. No girls are assaulting the little boys as that is not allowed in that boys are never weak but always the strong aggressors because that causes fear. Girls are little defenseless unable to protect themselves, unable to remember which boy it was and tell the teacher or authorities, but yes it really is happening. Sure believe me it is, and big foot and ET are having a baby on the school playground next week.
Hey Tildeb I seen those same parents on TV storming US school board meetings claiming that asking kids to wear face masks was making it so they couldn’t breath and god created their faces to be seen so masks were the work of Satan. You know a cloth across a kids face on Halloween was ok but in school was an abomination of the worse kind.
Again all bullshit designed to cause fear. I bet if I tracked the article back it would be to a radical right wing outlet. Why do you not provide links to these big important news stories, is because they are always on a anti-trans site? How many parents told the school their girls would skip vs how many parents supported it. Was it two? Five? How many kids in the school? Just as an aside many countries use unisex bathrooms with no issues or trouble. I used them in Germany. No problems. Peed, popped, showered, brushed my teeth all the other stuff one did in a big unisex bathroom with no issues or problems. Good lord, google Chinese kindergarten bathrooms. No stalls, just toilets with small dividers and the boys and girls all doing it with no problem, the bigger girls help the little boys clean their bottoms. Maybe what we should do its not teach kids that thing between their legs makes the entirety of who they are and is the most important that must always be a hidden part of themselves. Kids don’t learn to fear that thing until adults teach them too.
Oh an on the girls period thing. I grew up with a couple hell spawn of that gender. They bragged about how if they wanted to get out of a class or skip school they would use that issue, that “evil menstruation thing” and get out of class or school. One sibling must have had a running period flow for all of high school to get out of PE. Every few days of the week they had PE. All month. For years. They were proud of them selves. They are also all maga right wing Republicans now.
It is driven by hate, these attacks on the trans gender. Trust me I know it is not made up, the information claimed is but the hate is real. Is racism made up? But this tells me all I will ever need to know about you Tildeb. You don’t care about the death of a child as long as the child is a child is acting as don’t support. You now sicken me.
And besides, think of the suicide rate of the the poor trans sexual children we’re ‘saving’. So virtuous. So many still to save. Let the door knocking begin: do you have a moment and have you heard the “Good News”?
See I care about all children and especially the children in right wing family’s being indoctrinated who might be LGBTQ+ being told they are the worst possible thing their parents can imagine and so hated. I care about the sexually abused children being denied sexual education that might inform them can tell on their parents who are doing it. Again due to the lack of good sexual education I went several years wondering if every time I was raped as a kid I would become pregnant like my hell spawn sisters. So you make light and jokes about saving kids, it seems what the right does. I will keep fighting for every kids I can against the bigotry of the right and the misinformation you push.
Oh dear, to disagree with you is denialism, yet your denial of the facts is not? I see. Oh yes Republicans are having a great time spreading misinformation and misdirecting people. It is far easier to lie than to correct the lie. But it is well proven the right has no trouble lying on issues they don’t like or support. They love to do it. It comes right from the top of the party. But I really wonder at the followers of those lies. Since it is not much of a political gain for them it must be one of either hate or misinformation. There is not much that can be done about the hate, but I can refute the misinformation here on my blog. The misinformation you repeat and put out. I cannot be scared that Republicans are messaging hate, I have faced that hate all my life Tildeb. I know that the right has to have a boogieman / scapegoat to create fear in their cult like followers. First, it was the gays who were coming for your kids, shouldn’t be in schools, and so on. That stopped being scary because gays are known by everyone. So since trans gender people are few and not well know the right will make them the new scary boogieman / scapegoat if they can. Before the gays it was the blacks. Fear, fear, fear it is what the right is about. Keep the base sired up, afraid and angry. Trans people are just the current target, and of course the right is trying hard to make that the entire LGBTQ+. That should give every one pause who thinks they are safe because they are not trans.
To disagree with me is not denialism; to dismiss reality is. That’s what you’re doing. You are dismissing the real life medical harm to real life girls as not a problem. You are dismissing the real life harm to real live women in sports, in prisons, as not a problem. You are dismissing the real life stories and the real life medical harm revealed by detransitioners and court cases as not a problem. In every case, you wave away the harm to wave away the problem. The centers of transition in Denmark, Sweden, and England share ‘my’ concern you insist is not a problem, you insist is based on ‘my’ fear, ‘my’ hate.
See from where I stand you are the one dismissing reality. You’re dismissing the majority of doctors organizations that say treating transgenders with social transitioning, medical treatments including puberty blockers, and eventually surgery is the proper treatment. You’re making up a boogieman of harm to “real live women” in sports that is not happening. Your fixed on the 2.4% of trans people that detransition but ignoring the 97.6% that are happy they transitioned living life as they really are. You found a few places that share your view. great. Covid deniers found US governors that agreed with them also. I know of states that have legalized over the counter sale of Ivermectin dewormer for the treatment of Covid, not that it helps, but they claim it does. They are wrong just as are the places you cite.
Yes… except for all the facts. And it is those that I think matters more than a dismissive wave and a denial they exist.
“But what are the benefits and adverse effects of starting young kids on these powerful [puberty blockers] and then hormones? We don’t know,” says Dr. Frederic Ettner, a physician who has worked with transgender patients for over two decades.
“… physicians want to be cautious in administering treatments like puberty blockers and hormones when they aren’t sure what the consequences might be, or even the best way of administering treatment, says Dr. Stephen Rosenthal, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospital.
From NIH: ““not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones.”
What about the facts of transitioning? What does that mean for a 13 year old girl thinking of starting the process unaware of the actual risks even for adults?
From Scott Newgent’s article here (get it? New Gent?): “I had seven surgeries. I also had a massive pulmonary embolism, a helicopter life-flight ride, an emergency ambulance ride, a stress-induced heart attack, sepsis, a 17-month recurring infection due to using the wrong skin during a (failed) phalloplasty, 16 rounds of antibiotics, three weeks of daily IV antibiotics, the loss of all my hair, (only partially successful) arm reconstructive surgery, permanent lung and heart damage, a cut bladder, insomnia-induced hallucinations—oh and frequent loss of consciousness due to pain from the hair on the inside of my urethra. All this led to a form of PTSD that made me a prisoner in my apartment for a year. Between me and my insurance company, medical expenses exceeded $900,000.”
(And he’s in favor of transitioning. Which is fine… because he as an adult can GIVE informed consent. But not kids because we don’t know the long term effects! There’s the real science, Scottie. Oh, and please read why you’ve been fooled about the suicide risk. You’ve never seen the correction, have you? You probably didn’t know anything about it because, hey, why should you? You already know The Truth.)
And so:
“As someone who has experienced medical transition first-hand, I am convinced that it’s better to err on the side on discretion, and leave life-altering decisions to adults who have the benefit of a fully developed brain.”
Your ‘boggieman of harm’ is very real. You’re just dismissing it.
Tildeb. You are welcome to your opinion, but not your own facts. Those are not facts any more than that trump won the 2020 election is a fact.
I have addressed your random doctor issue. You seem to ignore anything that you don’t agree with.
AMA reinforces opposition to restrictions on transgender medical care
JUN 15, 2021
CHICAGO — The American Medical Association (AMA) today strengthened its established position opposing the governmental intrusion into the practice of medicine that is detrimental to the health of transgender and gender-diverse children and adults.
Legislatures in 20 states this year proposed banning physicians and other health care professionals from providing medically necessary gender-affirming care to transgender and gender-diverse youth. In response to this legislative trend, physicians and medical students at the AMA’s House of Delegates meeting voted to meaningfully expand the organization’s strong opposition to undue restrictions on medical care to populations that have been politicized in state legislatures.
“The AMA opposes the dangerous intrusion of government into the practice of medicine and the criminalization of health care decision-making,” said AMA Board Member Michael Suk, MD, JD, MPH, MBA. “Gender-affirming care is medically-necessary, evidence-based care that improves the physical and mental health of transgender and gender-diverse people.”
Most recently in April 2021, the AMA delivered a letter (PDF) to the National Governors Association urging its members to oppose legislative dictates that inappropriately limit the range of options physicians and families may consider when making decisions for gender-diverse pediatric patients. The letter cited evidence demonstrating that forgoing gender-affirming care can have tragic consequences for transgender individuals who face increased risk of anxiety, stress, substance use disorder and suicide. The majority of transgender and diverse-gender patients report improved mental health and lower rates of suicide after receipt of gender-affirming care.
The AMA is a strong supporter of human rights and freedoms and will continue to strongly oppose discrimination based on an individual’s sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity. AMA will continue to work to ensure transgender and gender-diverse minors have the opportunity to explore their gender identity under the safe and supportive care of a physician.
Lastly did you even bother to read the last reply? You love the 2.4% that regret transitioning. Sorry they did not find the comfort in life they needed. But you want to ignore the 97.6% that love the choice they made.
Again you are focused on a small subset of an issue and claim it is the majority. You seem driven to prove something that is not true. I don’t know if it is driven by politics or bigotry for you. But it is deceptive. And that is a tactic used by both the right wing and bigots.
Facts are what I’m most concerned with. Not mine, not yours, just facts. Here’s a good list to start with.
You claim, for example, very high rates of satisfaction and very low rates of dissatisfaction with gender transitioning. Are these the facts? No. These are merely extensions of an imposed belief. The facts are not aligned, especially considering the explosion of cases for children by sex-based chemical intervention that is AUTOMATICALLY prescribed by command from EVERY MERDICAL ORGANIZATION to ANYONE of ANY age (yes, some do not take it and this accounts for about 5% of those who seek medical counselling about ‘gender’ -whatever the hell that is – and the supposed ‘identity’ that should be supported by physical ‘transitioning’). You may wonder why every medical college has gone along with this when the FACT is that NO ONE understands the long term effects of this chemical intervention on CHILDREN.
“National Health Service adult GIC (Gender Identity Clinics in Britain) between 1 September 2017 and 31 August 2018: The treatment pathway was completed by 56.1%. All interventions initially sought were accessed by 58%; 94% accessed hormones but only 47.7% accessed gender reassignment surgery; 21.7% disengaged; and 19.4% were re-referred. Multivariate analysis identified coexisting neurodevelopmental disorders (odds ratio [OR] = 5.7, 95% CI = 1.7–19), previous adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) per reported ACE (OR = 1.5, 95% CI = 1.1–1.9), substance misuse during treatment (OR = 4.3, 95% CI = 1.1–17.6) and mental health concerns during treatment (OR = 2.2, 95% CI 1.1–4.4) as independently associated with accessing care.”
The conclusion?
“Neurodevelopmental disorders or ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) suggest complexity requiring consideration during the assessment process. Managing mental ill health and substance misuse during treatment needs optimising. Detransitioning might be more frequent than previously reported. might be more frequent than previously reported.”
The recommendation here is NOT supportive of affirmation therapy. It is for greater considerations than this blanket approach imposed by professional colleges on ALL medical and counselling involvement. ALL, Scottie. No exceptions. Whether from a 12 years old confused child or a 92 years old murderer: affirmation only. This is the ‘medical’ aspect you keep referring to for support of your BELIEF in the no harm, no foul for medicalized intervention. These are not the facts.
Ah Tildeb, never one to not have the last word. I went over this several times. Again you disregard the medical studies done in the US and other places that say the detransition rate is lower than 1% to as high as 6% and in the latest peer reviewed study done it was 2.4%. I even provided citations.
The link goes to a page that has the logo “No child is born in the wrong body” The slogan used by the TERF, religious right, and the right wing media such as Fox, Breitbart, OANN, and Newsmax.
No child is born being attracted to the same gender. No child is born gay. They are recruited to it. They must be peer pressured and talked into it. Heck if they don’t see gay or hear of gay, they will never think of it. They will all be straight! Praise Jesus and pass the collection plate to elect more republicans.
Sorry Tildeb. Heard all that bullshit before. It was a lie then and it is a lie now.
Instead you go to TERF island of Brittin to cite data of people who never fully transitioned as evidence of people being unhappy about transitioning? Next you will go to Afghanistan to show how gays really don’t exist or prefer to be dead. Yes let’s take the small island of Britain’s findings about people who never finished the transition procedures to show that people who did are unhappy with transitioning. Yes people who never finished that plate the ordered at the restaurant are the best ones to rate it. You know we talked about the groups that don’t agree with the majority. Remember the ivermectin and anti-vaccine doctors? Come back to me when the majority of doctor groups worldwide changes their stance. Because I trust the majority more than the fringe.
Hey what are the guidelines in Canada where you live? Let me go look that up.
Wow that is so great. It must be nice to live in a progressive country. Canada also goes by the counseling and medical workups, social transitioning, puberty blockers when the right age is reached, and then when appropriate medical treatment to sexually transition. Only Canada is much more aggressive about it. And the government pays for it all with no government interference. Wow if only the US trans kids had access to the Canadian health system. I wonder why you did not use your own countries stats? From what I read the Yukon is the gold standard in trans care.
But I want to address the very large problem you have. You think you know more than any other person when you are driven by your feelings on an issue. 98 doctors out of 100 agree with trans youth care but Tildeb knows the majority are wrong and the 2% are right. Look at how you wrote your comment and what you capitalized. Every medical organization believes in doing this even though you know they are wrong. All the doctors and medical scientists say this is the right thing to do but you say they don’t know what it is doing to children.
Hey I heard that one about the Covid vaccines, no one knows what they will do long terms so don’t take them. Your fears / dislike for trans treatments for kids are so much more knowledgeable than the medical doctor’s science. You admit it. The majority is against you but you are sure you are still the one that is correct.
” … than this blanket approach imposed by professional colleges on ALL medical and counselling involvement. ALL, Scottie. No exceptions”
It is a worldwide conspiracy I tell you, fear, fear, be afraid they are rushing all the preteen kids who wake up on Tuesday’s straight into surgery to chop off or add on bits and then straight to the dressing chambers to get the new gender clothing before being rushed right to the sex orgy party.
Tildeb this is not what is happening and I think you know that but this is what you keep sounding like.
Oh man, the war to get the last word has begun. You cannot see yourself can you. By they way I did not read what you wrote. I won’t be reading anymore of your garbage when I have already responded to it. Everything that needs to be said has been said, your failed incorrect anti-trans driven hate crap has been refuted, answered, corrected, and yet you keep going and going and going. I can guarantee it will be more propaganda from some source created just to spread anti-trans hate. It will be more misinformation / misdirection of some story made up in part or whole to show how harmful transgender people are, how the doctors are mutilating kids, or that parents are forcing their kids to dress in dresses publicly so they are not embarrassed when little johnny shows moon eyes of love to little Billy. Some of what you wrote I traced back to show it was a partial true bit of information with most of it missing so it could be twisted to make the claim it was something it never was. All hog slop to misdirect or misinform and to appeal to people’s emotions. Such a trans women are stealing all the records from born women, when in the very swim meet the trans woman lost races to the non-trans women. I might as well be watching Fox news on the subject except you don’t have as good graphics.
Understand that when you tried to claim all biologist say sperm and egg is how we determine human sex you lost all credibility. You used the word gamete. Gamete, which in reality is a mature haploid male or female germ cell which is able to unite with another of the opposite sex in sexual reproduction to form a zygote. Sperm and egg! But you just couldn’t admit you had to use that to justify your argument.
I have read a bunch of biologists and even shared some peer reviewed articles with you that showed that is not the way they view human sex / gender and its markers but you refused to change because your stance is not information driven but by your bigotry.
You had your say and then some. Notice we are not going to your blog and acting like you are here. But here you are again and again on a single subject to grind an axe that already has been shown to my satisfaction to be broken and deceitful. No one else is commenting because we have had our say and realize no one is going to change their view. The readers and viewers might comment on a new post but not on one 21 days old. You just cannot accept that others do not agree with you right away and so keep writing the hate drive misinformation.
I think you cannot accept that people don’t agree with you and will repeat the same nonsense until you die so long as you can get the last word in. You once argued with me for three days very long days over who was a larger threat to my safety in my community, loud belligerent Christian rednecks that live all around me or the few Muslims who are friendly to me. Your islamophobia was so deep, you who didn’t even live anywhere near me in the deep south, were unable to accept I knew my own situation better than you. That is the person you are. Apparently you’re a bigot, and you will fight to the very end of reason to push your bigotry. But we don’t need it here. You have tried to dress it up but it comes down to punching down at a group of people that don’t harm you and don’t cause the harm you pretend they do. But I have addressed all this.
So as I wrote at the top, lets see if you can resist the need you have to have the last word, again and again and again …
Scottie, I’ve expressed my concerns about this matter to you before, but I think they bear repeating.
IMO, tildeb is not so much discounting this issue as a whole, but is more concerned that there are young people who are being “treated” before they are even old enough to make sound decisions about life, let alone themselves. And I totally agree with him on this. Counseling and a wait-and-see attitude should always be the standard.
For me, it isn’t so much a matter of whether transgender issues exist as it is that the sudden and extreme attention to the issue can be detrimental to some young people. And yes, suicides can and do result, but there are many factors that come into play during this stage of life. It’s not all about transgenderism.
As for the AMA issue — certainly there should not be “governmental intrusion” — not in this or ANY issue that involves a person’s body (e.g., abortion!). It MUST be a personal decision made between the doctor and the patient.
Hello Nan. The medical guidelines call for complete medical work ups including examinations from doctors in the gender fields to determine if the young person / child is truly trans or is doing it for another reason. Then social transitioning, and when nearing puberty the use of puberty blockers. I go over the reasons why later on. Then when it is the appropriate time and the person is sure of their gender and with parental permission if the person is 16 or 17, the use of hormones or other medical treatments can begin. If no permission for a parent or guardian is given the minor must wait until 18 to begin medical transitioning.
Let’s be clear Nan, the law states that before the age 16 it is illegal to perform any sexual reassignment surgery. Period. Cannot be done. Yes you can chop parts of the boys dick off for religious reasons, you can change the sex of intersex kids when they are not old enough to understand what is happening at any age from birth up. But for transgender kids before 16 sexual reassignment surgery is not happening.
In the US a person 16 and over after the appropriate medical steps have been taken with the permission of the parent or guardian can get sexual reassignment surgery. With the permission of a parent or guardian. Kids are not doing it themselves. We claim parents can make life or death decisions for their minor children, are you saying this is one that parents cannot make with / for their 16 and 17 year old.
Tildeb likes to claim girls are rushing into surgery and then regretting it. But peer reviewed studies have shown that only 2.4% of people who have transitioned regret it and detransition. That leaves 97.6% that are happy and comfortable with their choices to transition. That is 97.6%, the majority for who transitioning when they were young before puberty was the correct thing to do. Shouldn’t we see that as evidence that the proper way is just what the majority of the medical groups say it should be, counseling, social transitioning, puberty blockers and then when ready if they wish to medically transition treatment with hormones.
Nan you say why not do counseling and wait and see. But that is what puberty blockers are for. To give people the time to mature and be sure of the gender they feel they are. After a teenager goes through puberty the features of the gender they are not, become permanent and then more surgery is needed, along with the person having forever the features of the wrong gender. Imagine knowing all your life you are a girl, and about 13 you start to become a man. By 16 you have all the features of manliness all over your body that you hate. By 18 you think you are the ugliest woman on the planet and might as well die. Or the reverse. A kid growing up knowing they are a boy even though people insist you wear dresses and skirts and call you a girl’s name. As you enter your teens you are growing breasts. The very thing you know you shouldn’t have. You know as soon as you can you will have them cut off.
So Nan the answer to your question is counseling and puberty blockers are what is prescribed by the majority of medical professionals. That and social transitioning. Those steps are the wait and see. If a kid is still sure after a decade or more of living as the gender they are when they are ready they transition with the right hormones and surgery as needed.
There is a lot more attention to trans genderism than there needs to be. That is because of the anti-trans people fighting it every step of the way. I think there is far too much attention paid to a women’s private medical decision to have an abortion but that is being driven by people that want to deny that right to others. These are the same people that fought everything about gay rights and same sex marriage, the same ones who fought interracial marriage and racial equality. They replaced the bad guy from black, to gays, to trans. Polly has a post about a trans women who has drawn a series of cartoon books about trans acceptance based on her experiences. She is invited to schools to speak. Her books are vetted. Polly’s TERF group hounded her and tried to get her fired from talking to schools because in her private time she is a furry. Oh my gods she dresses up as an animal with human characteristics. How can we let someone like that near kids. She is not doing it in the classroom remember, but it is a way to attack a trans women teaching tolerance. I reminded Polly that there was a time when as a lesbian there were people who would demand she not be allowed in a classroom. The attention is driven by hate and a desire to stop others from doing something that these people don’t like. It is the same old story all over again with a different target.
“Nan you say why not do counseling and wait and see. But that is what puberty blockers are for. To give people the time to mature and be sure of the gender they feel they are.”
No, puberty blockers block puberty, Scottie (another one of those inconvenient facts)… often with the cost of permanent sterility and loss of orgasm. And that’s the just the first step! That’s what about 95% of every. single. child. gets. prescribed.
I keep encountering physicians and clinicians and researchers who say over and over again that ‘we’ simply do not know enough about the long term effects and life long consequences from this very first chemical intervention that almost every. single. child. is prescribed when questioning their ‘gender’ identity. You just wave this away. No concern at all. Not even a crinkle of the brow. But they do privately complain that they are obligated by their professional standards for licensing to affirm only. There is no ‘time to mature’ on puberty blockers! That’s the whole POINT!!!!!!!
But wait; sure, biological maturity is stopped by these blockers but let’s pull a nice linguistic trick here and pretend we are allowing these children to gain ‘gender’ maturity while on them! Now, let’s keep up the façade to fool people and pretend that means something like giving children who ‘question their gender identity’ (again, what does this really mean?) time to enjoy biological maturity and develop informed consent when we’ve intentionally stopped it… without any clue as to the life long consequences other than sterility and loss of orgasm. How is the brain development altered here? I don’t know. You don’t know. These medical folk admittedly don’t know. But, again, you’re GOOD with that. There cannot possibly be any harm at all because Scotties says so. So hey, what do you care if a 14 year old girl tells her docs that she knows she will never want to be a mother and breast feed or have enjoyable sex as a woman (’cause, hey, she already knows)? See? No harm reported… yet (except by detransitioners) who change their minds. Good thing, then, that every single detransitioner is a right wing bigot and not a girl/boy who HAS had the time to develop an alternate point of view to the rose-colored glasses the trans ideologues impose on everyone.
Hey Tildeb. Yes Puberty blockers block puberty. As I said that is what they do. They stop a lifelong body change from happening until a person is sure of their gender. What do you think doctors are trying to help the patient prevent? What is your point. Oh I see you equate mental maturity with the full physical development of the human body after puberty. That is stupid. Really.
A person has the same maturity a 16 / 17 without going through puberty that they will have gone through puberty. Puberty blockers stop the body changes not the brain development. So they give time for young people to understand the decision they are making.
Tildeb did you know that Senator Ron Jonhson said that the Covid vaccines had caused over 220,000 deaths so far and yet no government agency was investigating that and the CDC in the US was still pushing this death causing drug on the people!
Yup I watched the video of him saying that.
Every major medical group says that puberty blockers are not harmful and fully reversable. But hey they said the Covid vaccine was OK to take also so maybe we shouldn’t believe them.
You keep hearing disinformation because you go to places disinformation is pushed. You read disinformation, you listen to disinformation, then you regurgitate disinformation here on my posts to confuse people. You might as well say you get your information from Fox news or other right wing misinformation mills. Some of the stuff you sent me I tracked back to only radical right wing sites, not on any mainstream news outlet. That should tell you something.
In my last reply I talked about how you think you and the outlier sites you use know more than mainstream doctor’s organizations. Maybe try getting your information from better sources.
Seriously at this point you are sounding like a Qanon person. Doctors have to say trans treatments are OK and give the treatments to keep being doctors, but we hear them in private sneak messages to us that it really is bad and they think the government is putting something in the water making the frogs gay. ( that last was from Alex Jones of info wars who has the same ideas )
Really Tildeb get help. There is no global conspiracy to create a world of trans kids. Just like there is no conspiracy to make every kid gay. There are no teachers teaching gender swapping in 1st grade or whatever damn silly thing pushed by the fear mongers.
One last thing Tildeb. It is not because Scottie says so. I freely admit I am neither a medical practitioner nor a medical scientist. But I am smart enough to listen to the majority of people who are. But you refuse to accept the opinion of these people. You keep saying you know better than they do and point to outliers, fringe groups. I have already gone over this and hate to keep repeating myself.
I wonder what drives you on this subject? You wrote to me that you write in an argumentative way and like to argue. You said you were liberal but refer and quote only right wing conservative viewpoints. Is it personal, religious, or political for you? With the attention you have for just this one issue I wonder if it is your paid job to be anti-trans? Don’t tell me you only care about the kids, because if so you would be arguing for vaccines and other treatments or against them. If the welfare of the kids themselves were the point, there are a lot of things I post you would comment on such as homeless kids, hungry kids, school opportunities for kids.
But you focus here only on the medical and social help for trans gender kids.
By the way nice fear mongering about a 14 year old girl tells her docs that she knows she will never want to be a mother and breast feed or have enjoyable sex as a woman. Nicely written to be emotional and as uninformative as possible. Because Puberty blockers wouldn’t prevent those things and would have been started earlier in a girl, are you trying to imply a 14 year old girl is having her not fully formed breasts cut off? And Tildeb how do her breasts equal her ability to enjoy sex or be a mother? Different areas of the body really.
As for every detransition person being a right wing bigot, great sleight of hand job there. I never said that nor implied it. I said the author of the article was a bigot and the articles were on right wing sites. What I did say was I was sorry for the few that had that situation, but that they were a very small minority. 97.6% of people who transition are happy with doing so. That is the issue you cannot overcome and refuse to face.
You keep referring to a very small minority and demanding we stop the happiness of the very large majority to help the future very small minority.
Think of that and how it doesn’t make sense. I will help you if you want.
It is the same old story all over again with a different target. — I can totally agree with that statement!
OK, if counseling and medical exams are taking place with pre-puberty kids, then I’m OK with that. But if puberty blockers are being prescribed, I have strong reservations about this action. Let me ask this … IF a 10 or 11 year old child is put of these blockers, can their body return to “normal” if, within a year or so, they “change their mind” and discover they’re comfortable with their gender?
That’s what the Kiera Bell case was ALL about, Nan, and why I previously quoted the medical review of ‘no significant effects’ as very low confidence. That’s ideology talking, not facts, not best practices. That’s why the High Court ruled no child under 16 can possibly grant consent to even start on puberty blockers and why several other countries immediately changed their practices. One of the most revealing facts from this case was that the majority of children who take puberty blockers do not resume puberty! Ever. (And so everything from that retarded state is a laundry list of negative side effects… especially for girls and bone density.)
Why isn’t this well known? Well, I imagine it’s because who wants to say so and then be labelled by well meaning and compassionate people like Scottie as a right wing bigot and transphobe and hater? That’s how this works: one or the other. This side or that. Friend or enemy. Right or wrong.
We know about 30% of brain development occurs during and after puberty. If that isn’t reason enough to put the brakes on this deplorable practice for medicalizing ‘gender questioning’ children with life altering puberty-denying chemicals in the name of some identity ideology, I don’t know what is. To then advocate for MORE and EASIER access to these medications automatically granted I think is unconscionable and deeply irresponsible no matter how flowery the language used to defend and justify the promotion might seem.
Hello Tildeb. Wow one case and the entire medical profession realized how horribly wrong their idea of (let me count) 50 years had been. Also you realize that the high court in the UK is only a lower level court in the US way of looking at the courts. The decision was mostly overturned, and the few remaining parts are on appeal. One reason is the judge was well known to be anti-trans. Imagine a politically active judge in a case with ramifications country wide? Almost what happens in the US when a right wing judge rules a hospital must treat a Covid patient with ivermectin or when a right wing judge rules that Biden cannot stop a policy implemented by his predecessor because a president doesn’t have that authority?
Tildeb nothing says the brain doesn’t keep developing if the body doesn’t have puberty hormones. Please cite the study. The hormones involved work on the body’s sexual systems not the brain. You are conflating apples to oranges to confuse the issue.
All major doctors’ organizations say puberty blockers are safe and reversable and you stated that to me yourself in an earlier comment. You said they all use it. They wouldn’t all be using it if they thought it was harmful.
Yeah, they would use it claiming puberty blockers are safe because they are using it but do not know the long term effects other than sterility, bone density loss, retardation of neural development, and loss of sexual function including orgasm. These are well known but ‘acceptable’ side effects when not doing so is seen as producing more suicide.
And you’re quite right to say this will require court cases, which are just now starting. Bell’s case was the first case. And I use the documents and studies provided for that case because Tavistock (the main clinic for treating gender dysphoria in Britain) itself used them (as the US and Canada is doing now) as part of its defense. The effect of that ruling not only changed the medical approach in England but, as I’ve pointed out, instigated a change in several other European countries who are world leaders in treating gender dysphoria. Their approach is much more cautious. And the basis of that caution is the conclusion by the scientific community involved with biology that the long term effects are not known, that advocates who say they are ‘safe’ are actually running the experiment right now.
Again and again you try to paint me as someone transphobic. Scottie, that is a lie. I am concerned about children being misled by ideologues and those who support them into a medicalized life. I think there is plenty of time to make that difficult decision when they become adults (this opinion from the past president and transitioned male of WPATH, for crying out loud as well as hundreds and hundreds of detransitioned young people as well as the unanimous tribune High Court decision and not as you continuously claim from that right wing bigot and transphobe ‘Tildeb’) and it is deplorable that we are using children to diagnose themselves and start on puberty blockers when we know they are least capable of doing so responsibly. In spite of your contrary beliefs, these health and long term concerns being made by children are valid. The harm is real. It is well documented.
So now it’s time for you to go back to your denialism and wave these concerns away, comforted in the belief that such terrible bigoted people as Tildeb and every contrary fact to your misguided belief raised are just… wrong.
Hello Tildeb. As I pointed out before (gods I hate to keep repeating myself) the Swedish case was politically driven and so is the situation in Britain. I think we both know how political pressure is working all across the world to restrict the rights of different minorities including the LGBTQ+.
Oh yes doctors rush to use drugs on kids they don’t know what they do. Sure. Oh no there is not any data to show what it does, we just grab any drug and push it in because we love to upset the conservatives. Insert evil laugh here.
Drugs are tested as best as they can be. Can we know the long term effects of the Covid vaccine for sure, no. But we do know the long-term effects of Covid are worse than anything the vaccine can do based on what we know about the composition of the vaccine and the drug combo in it. The same is true for puberty blockers. Medical scientists know how everything in the puberty blockers affect the body and what those effects do. To assert the idea that we don’t the long term effects is incorrect, medical doctors have a good idea of what the long term effects could be. The main stream medical groups say use them, they are safe and reversable.
Again the majority of medical organizations including the AMA say they are the proper treatment and completely reversable. End of story!
Oh I am driven by my love of children, not the trans kids, but the straight cis kids and parents that think it is icky for boys to wear a dress. Give me a break.
I care about the kids, all the kids including the trans kids. Not all gender questioning kids will go all the way in their journey, and it is not required they do so. What is required is they are given the chance to make that journey safely and with the support of those around them. I care about the 662,000 LGBTQ+ kids that suicide a year. A year.
The people who wrote the don’t say gay bills all over the US in Republican controlled states say they are doing it because they love the children, and they want to protect those children they love from that horrible gay that will do something really bad to the kids if they see or hear it.
Tildeb you are making the mistake of the cis gender person happy in their gender Identity. Why not wait until their 20 or 25 or 50 to express their gender. Never mind they are living in the wrong body acting as the wrong gender and worse their body has become the very thing, they know they are not. It is harder to transition after your body has grown the adult attributes of the opposite gender than you are. That leads to the very mastectomies you hate.
That is what the very reversable puberty blockers are for. To give the person time to understand themselves and decide what they want to do. But you know all this. I have written it to you and to Nan. Imagine being a girl, knowing you are a girl deep down everything you are is girl, yet your body is becoming a masculine man. Your shoulders are widening, your voice is deepening, your face taking on maleness, and you are developing an adams apple, things you will have to work to hide all your life.
Or from the other view. You are a boy and know with every fiber of your body you are a boy. But now you are going through a female puberty. Your growing tits for gods sake, the horror. Your body is becoming even more of what you will have to work to undo to be who you are.
Tildeb try to imagine transitioning at your age. There are people who wait until late in life to do it and they never really succeed in looking how they feel. You want to force this on all the trans people and kids. Because you don’t accept mainstream science. The majority of doctors do not see a long term problem with puberty blockers, and I will take their assessment over yours. You should also.
Watchful waiting resolves over 90% of all gender dysphoria cases… with zero chemical interference. Why? What role does puberty play in reducing gender dysphoria? The other 10%? Well, why doesn’t it concern you that it went from 99% male pre 2012 to over 90% female by 2018? That doesn’t sound very… equitable…. to me. Why the complete reversal?
You tell me.
All I know is that if one asks these kinds of questions, one is vilified for spreading ‘disinformation’, for being a right wing bigot, a transphobe, a TERF, a cis-normative chest-feeding front hole hater who puts children at higher risk for suicide, which is deemed the correct ‘information’. That’s where we are in this thread.
Hello Nan. Nope. I addressed that. Notice I told you before that Tildeb is not a fair actor in this. Notice also the difference between what you write and what he does and my responses. I just replied to him that I call out the forced birth crowd who claim to be pro-life for using the same tactics he does. I told him I call out the anti-vaccine people and the people who claim Covid is a hoax using the same misleading fake data studies as Tildeb is doing with trans issues. The reason is Tildeb is not asking questions, all through these comments and replies Tildeb has push an anti-trans agenda straight from the radical right / religious right / TERF playbooks. So I call it out. I make sure people know it is not just asking a question. That is the same defense Tucker Carlson uses and did so very recently again. Hey I am not against anything or promoting this, I am just asking questions as he pushes aggressively for attacks on the right wing targets. Same tactics gets same response.
Sorry, Scottie, but yes … that is where you are. It is more than apparent that you and tildeb will never have a meeting of the minds … and neither of you can simply “let it go.” To me, and I would imagine anyone else that might be reading along, there is and never will be a win-win.
Hello Nan. I agree Tildeb and I won’t ever agree. That is not what Tildeb was claiming. I was responding to Tildeb’s claim of being unfairly attacked and called a bigot. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is most likely a duck.
But here is the choice I have. I can either close the comments to prevent misinformation or continue to address / correct the misinformation and lies. So far I have never closed comments, and that would deny other people the chance to voice their opinion. On the other hand those reading Tildeb’s comments would think that trans women are winning every female sports event and people assigned woman at birth don’t get to play. They would think men are dressing as women to charge into bathrooms to assault poor little girls. Or that kids are being rushed with little to no medical examinations right into transitioning and all of them regret it as soon as they wake up from surgery. In almost all countries the medical guidelines are clear, it takes years of exams and carefully followed procedures before you even get to puberty blockers which the majority of medical organizations including the AMA say are safe and reversable, far more is required to have sexual reassignment surgery. They are not picking kids at random out of public schools and forcing them to change genders. Parents are not changing their kids’ genders on whims.
My point is at what time do I let the misinformation stand so that someone reading along will be misinformed? I would love to have spent the last few hours posting about other things. I have 50 open news tabs. But I know how badly misinformation driven by bigotry hurt me personally in the past. I have to stand up for trans people now, both kids and adults. Discrimination against any of the LGBTQ+ is wrong, just as it is against POC or anyone else. So I keep doing my best. Best wishes.
Hello Tildeb. Found a veery interesting article that addresses your point. Spoiler, it doesn’t agree with you. I like it so much I may post the entire very informative article.
In 2013, Steensma co-authored an oft-cited study that examined 127 adolescents, all of whom had displayed various levels of gender dysphoria as children. The researchers found that 80 of the children had desisted by the ages of 15 and 16. That works out to 63 percent of kids who basically stopped being transgender — a lower rate than in previous studies, but still a majority.
Some clinicians criticize this study, however, on methodological grounds, because the researchers defined anyone who did not return to their clinic as desisting. Fifty-two of the children classified as desistors or their parents did send back questionnaires showing the subjects’ present lack of gender dysphoria. But 28 neither responded nor could be tracked down.
“You can’t do that in scientific studies,” Ehrensaft said. “You have to have your subjects in front of you and know who they are. You can’t just assume somebody is in a category because you don’t see them anymore.”
In addition, 38 of the 127 kids were originally designated “subthreshold” for gender identity disorder, meaning they did not fulfill all the criteria for meeting the official diagnosis.
This, according to Erica Anderson, a gender clinician at UCSF, makes the desistance findings even more suspect.” [It] begs the question of whether these kids were actually divergent [in their gender identity] before the study selected them,” she said.
Steensma stands by the study’s methodology. But interestingly, he added that citing these findings as a measure of desistance is wrongheaded, because the study was never designed with that goal in mind.
“Providing these [desistance] numbers will only lead to wrong conclusions,” he said.
This little gem probably escaped your notice. This article references 1/3 of people a large study reported ‘non-binary’! Let’s focus on that a bit because it highlights the problem here.
Non-binary in this study means self-reporting ‘gender’ fluidity! What are we talking about when the term gender fluid is raised?
We are talking about gender and no one knows what that means in biological terms. It’s not like ‘gender’ has an organ or characteristics or genes. It’s almost always referenced as a ‘feeling’ related to typical masculine and feminine traits but treated as if part and parcel of biological sex… which is in practical terms binary! (Male and female, small and large gametes, used to identify sex across all species throughout all of biology. This covers 99.99% of all creatures.)
We are also talking about fluidity, as in swaying this way and that, which in gender terms should mean feeling sometimes more feminine, sometimes more masculine. But that’s not how it’s used: non-binary refers specifically to sexually attracted sometimes to male, sometimes to female. (Oh, and we’re also referencing some people in this study prior to and during puberty… apparently experts in understanding sexual attraction!) Well, to account for this discrepancy between being born in the wrong body and fluid feelings of sexual attraction, we find proponents of gender identity and transitioning returning to the safe haven of relating gender not to sex traits and their physiological characteristics but to ‘feelings’ of feminine or masculine! How handy! Yup. Changeable feelings. Fluid feelings. So that, apparently, justifies drugs to alter the biology of children who report such feelings, you see. I mean, we’re talking about the fluidity of feelings and addressing that by use of physiological medicalized intervention to change the body.
One must be a bigot to raise concerns for a physiological treatment for an emotional condition.
Imagine if gays and lesbians had tried to convince law makers that a sizeable minority – say 1/3rd – weren’t born gay but ‘suffered’ from shifting attraction to same and opposite sex. Depending. On shifting feelings. Where would the argument go that claimed same sex attraction was from birth, that sexual attraction was NOT a choice? No one would believe it because choice would be highly relevant if this were the case!
And yet, it is the fact of being born gay or born lesbian that is the FOUNDATION upon which discrimination on an inherited trait is deemed to BE discriminatory. In other words, shift this foundation and make ‘no choice’ into a ‘choice’, make it ‘fluid’, and undercut why the law constitutes ‘discrimination’ for an immutable characteristic or trait! The ‘born this way and unable to change’ no longer fits, does it?
Why gays and lesbians don’t see this aspect of arguing and supporting gender identity based on an inherited ‘feeling’ is a HUGE problem when we are told to accept gender fluidity as fundamental to gender ideology. It’s not surprising to me that I’ve encountered dozens and dozens of self-reported gay and lesbian denialism by thinking, “Oh, I must have been born in then wrong body” rationalization by people who later identify as gay or lesbian. So gender ideology is self-refuting. You can’t on the one hand be born in the wrong body and yet try to argue one can forever and continuously alter the choice of which sex to be! That is irrational.
Hello Tildeb. Notice the article emphasized that many of the kids in the detransition studies wouldn’t qualify for treatment under the current rules. It was part of what I quoted. Which if you have trouble following these kids wouldn’t be counted as needing treatment nor be counted as not following through with transitioning or desistance.
In addition, 38 of the 127 kids were originally designated “subthreshold” for gender identity disorder, meaning they did not fulfill all the criteria for meeting the official diagnosis.
This, according to Erica Anderson, a gender clinician at UCSF, makes the desistance findings even more suspect.” [It] begs the question of whether these kids were actually divergent [in their gender identity] before the study selected them,” she said.
Why do you keep wanting to go over and over the same things? OK here we go. Gender and sex are two different things. Gender is a social construct. Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. The biological part is the mental ID of the person, who they are on a spectrum of femininity or masculinity. We all know who we are inside us, it is part of the brain make up. Just as you were born with your sexual orientation already formed, which also there is no gay or straight organ, you know your gender. Sometimes that knowledge of who you are doesn’t match the plumbing. I will add more on this at the end.
Biologist think that the idea of just a binary they are or are not on sex is incorrect for humans as it is for other animals. We have gone back and forth on this and I have cited the articles. The idea that if something dangles it is male and if not is a girl has long been discounted as incorrect. Especially if you consider the standard practice in some areas of sexual reassignment surgeries for babies / toddlers with micro penises. They say it doesn’t dangle enough so it comes off and a new girl is made. That was the standard and still is in some areas.
However biologist look at more than what dangles and the gamete of sperm and the gamete of egg, which again is not how human sex is determined it is the product of the male or female if one is sufficiently to the male side or the female side. Biologists look at chromosomes, genes, and hormone production and a lot of other things over my head. The idea is that it is a spectrum of ++male on one side sliding to not male or female to ++ female on the other side. That is human biological sex. And it works with gender identity as well. It is full male on one side sliding to queer / nonbinary to full female. It is an easy concept to understand if you want to.
One must be a bigot to ignore / deny the medical advice when the majority of doctors recommend a treatment based on complete medical workups from professionals in that field. That is what you are doing, what you are trying to stop. So if the shoe fits?
Tildeb no one is rushing kids into transgender transitioning of any kind, social or medical. That is the point you keep trying to push. A mass assembly line of kids being chosen at random and made to change genders. That is a made-up talking point of the far right and it is completely driven by bigotry. First of all the numbers of trans kids are small as it is. You and those pushing this idea want to overlook that the older the kid the more medical examination and time taken to prescribe treatments they have had. The younger the kids the more they are examined by mental health and genders specialists to see what treatment is proper such as letting the 7 year old wear dresses or change their name. Every step of the way has medical guidelines and procedures.
You don’t like the procedures and don’t like the guidelines, so you pretend they are not used. But they are. And this is why I call you dishonest. Also being gender different is a medical condition recognized by the majority of medical groups, it is not an emotional condition. Being gay is a phase right? Kids just going to grow out of it or can have it beaten out of them. I heard that one also.
Again as I said at the beginning gender identity is not a choice. It is who you are. When you talk of things being a choice can you change your gender identity? Could you tomorrow give up being a man and live the rest of your life as a woman and feel that you really are a woman. No you can’t because it is not a choice. You latched on to the words gender fluid without really understanding what they mean. Sad, but I can help you.
Remember that spectrum I explained earlier? Well if you are near the middle on both sides you have traits of both genders in your identity. You bi in the gender area is a way to think of it. You relate both ways. Again this is also because some people biologically are not all male or all female sex. It is a spectrum as discussed above. You could have a dangle but have weak male chromosomes and have strong female ones. Or any of those magic combinations’ biologists are finding. So that means that you can adapt inside yourself to either the male gender persona or the female gender persona but really don’t feel at home fully in either. You’re in that fluid middle ground.
Does that clear up your confusion?
Last thing. This keeping describing the knowledge of who you are as a feeling. That is an old playbook right out of the past as it was used against gays by traditionalists and the religious right. It is not a feeling it is an inborn knowledge of self. The reason gays / lesbians don’t agree with you on it is we know it is a trope used against us in the past that anti-trans people are resurrecting to use against trans people. Just as you used the emotional condition phrase to minimize trans people knowing they are in the wrong body and so need mental health treatment it, those same tricks were used against gays saying they were mentally ill.
Tildeb the LGBTQ+ community has seen these attacks before. On the LGB people at first. They were wrong then. They are wrong now. You are wrong.
Can you please explain how “an inborn knowledge of self” can be sexually non binary (not ‘gender’ for which there is no biological basis)? Short answer: physically impossible but in gender ideology a necessary ‘truth’. Not fact; truth.
Can you explain how a brain developed in utero (inborn) as one of either two sexes can later produce an inborn knowledge of self that is neither? (Again, not gender for which you tell us without any blushing of hypocrisy, “is a social construct (edit: not inborn, you see). Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them.” Ah, that explain the difference in French between pencil and pen. Now… Poof!… miraculously, we have a social construct that is now INBORN!
See how the belief system works?
We are expected to go along, keep our mouths shut, and pretend distributing developmentally retarding drugs to children is fully justified by a linguistic game inserting ideology into and over not just biology but medicine. Shhh… and any harm produced simply doesn’t exist because the True Believer tells us it doesn’t exists but, if it did, it would be worth it. Children’s suicides, donchaknow. (We must save the souls even if the bodies must perish!)
This gender ideology has all the hall marks of a extremist religious belief. Hallelujah: you have Awokened in virtue while those immoral blasphemers of disinformation like I am are just sinners who are motivate by hate of your god.
“The male and female brain have structural differences,” he says. Men and women tend to have different volumes in certain areas of the brain. “When we look at the transgender brain, we see that the brain resembles the gender that the person identifies as,” Dr. Altinay says.Mar 27, 2019 For example, a person who is born with a penis but ends up identifying as a female often actually has some of the structural characteristics of a “female” brain.
And the brain similarities aren’t only structural.
“We’re also finding some functional similarities between the transgender brain and its identified gender,” Dr. Altinay says.
In studies that use MRIs to take images of the brain as people perform tasks, the brain activity of transgender people tends to look like that of the gender they identify with.
The evidence suggests that the sexual dimorphic brain could be the anatomical substrate of psychosexual development, on which gonadal hormones may have a shaping role during prenatal and pubertal periods. Additionally, according to several heritability studies, genetic components may have a role, but a promising candidate gene has not been identified.
In fact, in the last few years research has focused mainly on neuroanatomy and sexual dimorphism of the brain, exploring the influence and shaping role of several genes and sex hormones [4]. In particular, the sexual dimorphic brain is considered the anatomical substrate of psychosexual development, on which genes and gonadal hormones may have a shaping effect [11]. Growing evidence shows that prenatal and pubertal sex hormones permanently affect human behaviour and heritability studies have demonstrated a role of genetic components.
Indeed, cismen and ciswomen present anatomical differences in the total brain volume, as well as in several sex-dimorphic structures. In particular, the total brain volume is bigger in cismen, and in transgender men similar volumes to the assigned gender at birth were found [12,13,14,15]. However, the total intracranial volume in transwomen resulted to be in between male and female controls [12]. Furthermore, sex differences have been observed in cortical thickness that is higher in ciswomen compared to cismen in several regions [16,17]. Studies conducted on transgender individuals reported signs of feminisation in cortical thickness of transwomen, while no sign of masculinisation was found in transmen.
The summary to every article on this is that there is a difference between male and female brains and trans people show parts of the gender they identify to more or less degree.
This was easy to find Tildeb. You claim to be in the education system yet you couldn’t google is gender in the brain. Good grief.
As for the screed of the last two paragraphs you mock because that is all you have left. The science is against your anti-trans belief, the medical data is against your anti-trans beliefs, the social data is against your anti-trans views, and there is no verified evidence of the anti-trans claims you made. But you continue to push anti-trans stuff.
Apparently, you were taken in by the ‘progressive’ language (cisgendered, cismale, cisfemale, ‘assigned gender’ at birth, yada, yada, yada) and presumed it MUST back up the ideology that trans-whatever IS biologically relevant!
Au contraire, mon ami.
The ‘big’ words actually have biological definitions and they back up the very questions I asked as HIGHLY relevant (dimorphic, for example MEANS binary and it DOES cross the entire spectrum of the animal kingdom: “the process of sexual differentiation refers to the development of DIFFERENCES between males and females, which are widely observed in nature”) and – as yet – completely unknown. That was my point. We’re dealing with ideology (square peg) and biology (round hole). I suggest you reread this summarizing study (it offers no new information but compiles previous studies) and realize that the biological differences between cis males and cis females have meaning ONLY if the cis language is dropped entirely because it adds exactly zero information.
What the compilation shows is that there is a very high degree of alignment between sex and ‘gender’ identity. No guff, eh? There is a significant biological difference between males and females. No guff, eh? “Growing evidence shows that prenatal and pubertal sex hormones permanently affect human behaviour and heritability studies have demonstrated a role of genetic components.” Well, clutch my progressive pearls: prenatal and pubertal sex hormones PERMANENTLY affect behaviours (because our behaviours have a hormonal component). So hey, come on kids! Let’s chemically alter you’re puberty and stop your body from developing the sex housed prenatally in the biology and call it ‘safe’!
Again, you utterly fail to recognize the double standard here: sure, prenatal sex-based development in the brain is permanent. But it’s also has to be fluid to fit the ideology. Sure, sex-based differences is part and parcel of everyone’s biology. It’s binary. It’s permanent. But it can’t be if the ideology of gender fluidity is to be justified. So, yeah, we know theese sex-based differences FURTHER develops during puberty, not least of which is in the brain. But identity by gender must be made malleable so we’ll pretend blocking it is safe. Sure, no study shows us the long term consequences of retarding this brain development by blocking puberty in the name of aligning ‘gender identity’ but, with enough advocacy we can get well meaning people to close down sex-based research and alter funding only to gender-based research. We’re doing it for the kids! What study coming out of gender-based research is going to state, “Yup, we were completely wrong: gender identity has no scientific link beyond sex-based biology.” But we can pretend that chemical treatment for ‘aligning gender identity with the feelings of children’ is safe even though avoiding developmental sex-based puberty might have later effects beyond all the negative physiological side effects we already know about. But hey kids, it’s safe, safe, safe… like having a puberty recess while you consider which gender game you want to play later.. (Safe in medical terminology refers to no known long term toxicity. It does not mean there is no negative and/or dysfunctional long term effect.)
In effect, you have demonstrated yourself and your opinion here in this thread if not physiologically wrong then certainly biologically naïve. You operate not by good information, not by sex-based knowledge, not in thee best long term interests of children, but by ideology alone… searching the internet and republishing whatever seems to support you ideological beliefs regarding gender identity. You’re not a bad person for doing so: you have been fooled into believing something by dismissing any and all contrary information. That’s why I say this ideology is like a religion and its advocates just like religious believers. Gender identity is an incoherent ideology because its terms supposedly describing reality do not align with reality. That’s the red flag and more people should pay attention to this discrepancy and question and criticize policies and practices based on it.
Hey Tildeb. What is wrong with you? You ask how gender is biological and I show you a bunch of quotes that show medical scientists consider that the brain is clearly different between sexes with what is considered the female gender differs from what is known as the male gender. Then instead of acknowledging you were wrong in your over the top oh how could this be comment, you double down. Possibly to get another last word or just confuse people.
Do you ever admit your wrong when you clearly are?
Or do you just always keep trying a different attack?
Well we all know the answer to the above.
I did what you and any other person can do, I googled the question. Sorry you don’t like the result. I even included the parts that said more study is needed because I am honest. You might try it.
Every quote and I could list a whole lot more, said there was a biological connection to gender. I even cited the links. But you dispute that and give a dissertation but never cite a link. Sorry it seems again the majority of medical scientists just don’t agree with you.
Oh yes, it is wrong because words currently understood by the public mean what the people who wrote the articles are trying to convey to the public in ways they can understand, are too normally understood to the public? WTF. The word cis is well known in current usage. I find it funny that you think you know so much more than the people who wrote the paper that you think they can only be correct if they change their wording to suit you. They are smart enough to work on this subject and I am sure they understood the words they used. How arrogant of you to think it makes sense only if they rewrite it to what you approve of.
The world according to Tildeb.
Again Tildeb knows more than trained skilled people with advanced education in the field they are talking about. God’s Tildeb it must be exhausting being smarter than the rest of the world and everyone in it.
Dear Tildeb, the quotes show that the idea that gender identity is at least partially formed in the womb as is sexual orientation. Do other factors as a person develop come into play, that debate is centuries old. But it does lay to rest the idea pushed by you that kids don’t know their gender or sexual orientation identities unless someone pushes it on them. It entirely refutes the idea that adults are recruiting kids to be trans or LGB.
Wow again a nice slide and shift. You slipped in the false and disagreed with idea by the majority of medical organizations that puberty blockers are unsafe. What you fail to acknowledge is that these kids transitioning, those that make it to this point, will go through puberty. The rest will also go through puberty. Puberty blockers are a delay, not a lifetime deal.
Trans kids go through puberty! You want people to believe that if they don’t go through the puberty of whatever birth sex they were assigned then they will have lifelong issues. That is not true, not proven, and disagreed with by the majority of medical institutions.
What is true is that if the young person nearly in adulthood or already of adult age wishes to keep going on the gender changing journey they will be given medical help going through the puberty of the gender they identify with.
Is it really that hard for you to understand what the goal is? It is not to stop puberty entirely. It is to give the person the right puberty to match their gender. You created a strawman argument that is not applicable.
Last let me address the idea you have tried to push in the entire comment. No matter what the qualifications of the researcher, if they don’t agree with you their results are wrong, and they need to change the words to meet with your approval. But you fail to mention your qualifications to make such an assessment.
You claim my information is not good information, but it is what the majority of medical organizations say is correct. Tell me what does that say about your information? Yours clearly doesn’t agree with the majority by a large margin. I have addressed fringe groups and the odd doctor out syndrome before. You are asserting that only your fringe information should be taken as real and the majority of medical advice is wrong. Where have we seen that before? Oh every time the right doesn’t like a medical advance or an extension of right based on greater understanding. And please don’t try to claim you are a liberal when you decry the word cis as a word only the progressives would use.
Let me demonstrate what’s going on here (note the bold face emphasis) in your reasoning. It’s illuminating because many ideologues do exactly the same thing:
You say, “You ask how gender is biological and I show you a bunch of quotes that show medical scientists consider that the brain is clearly different between sexes…”
Correct. The biology is based on sex. That’s exactly what the researchers are finding and saying and reporting in this review of studies. So far, so good.
You equate gender with sex. This is the correct order. You have said many times when asked to define the term that gender is a social construct – also correct. Biological sex is not a social construct. It is one of the two binary (dimorphic) BIOLOGICAL states. Male or female (those pesky gametes again determine which). Those are the terms used for biological sex throughout biology INCLUDING humans. (Yes, there are some others that are some variation on this dimorphic state, but variations are the exceptions FROM the BASE and not the base from which the binary emerges.)
So we – you and I – agree that gender and sex are NOT synonymous. You know this and I know this and biologists know this and medical practitioners know this. But not the ideologues. They want the two to be reversed. And you oblige. I do not. You oblige by swallowing the red pill. I stick with the Blue. And you demonstrate this by making the substitution and reversal effortlessly. And there’s a reason for doing that.
Yes, there is unquestionably a difference between the sexes, but here’s the linguistic trick. Because the social construct FOLLOWS human behaviour, gender FOLLOWS these sex based differences. Yes, there IS a correlation. About 99.99% of people present gender behavior – the constructed behavior – common to their natal sex! So male behaviour is termed ‘masculine’ and female behaviour termed ‘feminine’. They correlate. So far, so good. But here comes the reversal (gird thy loins)….
Again, noticing the amalgamation where gender begins to absorb sex to reverse the order:
“You ask how gender is biological and I show you a bunch of quotes that show medical scientists consider that the brain is clearly different between sexes with what is considered the female gender differs from what is known as the male gender.
Right there. The reversal has begun. Of course there are differences. That’s what biological sex shows! Duh. The correlation from sex to gender is presented first using these demonstrated sex-based differences (male, female) to the expressed differences in behaviour (masculine, feminine) called gender differences. Remember, gender differences in BEHAVIOUR are constructed out of sex differences in BIOLOGY. So here’s the fact: changing the gender behaviour DOES NOT CHANGE THE BIOLOGY. This is the fact you are denying by reversing the order.
Now, ideologues and their collaborators take the term ‘gender’ and reverse it. They pretend (as do the ‘gender researchers’ you love to quote) that we assign what we already agreed was this gender construct onto a male or a female infant. And this is where the ‘miracle occurs: the notion is that the infant could be either sex (because the biological sex is now and magically the social construct) but the construct of gender now becomes the biological! Voila!
Oh look we’re all born into genderized bodies of masculine and feminine traits that can be tweaked or altered and justified simply by how we feel! Why, there’s really no such thing as biological sex! There’s no such thing as permanent sex-based differences! No siree… there’s no problem at all stopping puberty because some children think those pesky biological sex-based changes are not welcome in this Brave New Gender Constructed World where gender is real and biological sex is the social construct that follows! And, sure enough, it’s the sex that is ‘assigned’ by the birth person and those attending him/her/they/it awaiting the glorious day when the genderized feelings of that infant coalesce into altering the biology that isn’t real.
The ideology is incoherent and irrational, Scottie, not because I think so but because it denies the reality of sex-based biology and imposes a belief-based ideology about gender that is not true. You were born male. End of story. No one assigned you that biology. If you – like most people – have both masculine and feminine traits, who cares? If you – like most people – are attracted to other people, who cares if they are male or female, masculine or feminine? Your gender did not develop or align or conflict with your biology. You are simply Scottie, a male as determined by your biology regardless of any other factors (or language) you want to import to it.
Tildeb. The interchanging of gender in common language usage is done all the time. People know what is meant by context. Word usage and spoken language is fluid and changes all the time. Words have the meaning people assign to them.
You started out arguing that trans women were hurting assigned at birth women in sports. You couldn’t show the evidence of that. You couldn’t prove your claims on adult trans in bathrooms assaulting others. So when your attacks on adult trans women did not work you switched to trans kids.
Your arguments became how harmful the trans movement was towards kids. You failed to prove your claims. Kids were not being rushed into switching genders, kids were not being taught sex acts and gender swapping in school, the medical science and data is clear that puberty blockers are safe and reversable, and the majority of medical associations approve the medical guidelines of social transitioning followed by medical intervention to prevent puberty followed by more medical intervention as called for.
So when those arguments fail for you, what do you do? You attack the words I use. Everyone understood the meaning of those sentences. But you want to twist what the mean to argue they don’t mean what we all understood them to mean by context.
What is the old saying in court?
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell”
This is the point you are at.
Here are the facts established by the majority of biologists and medical scientists in the appropriate fields.
The fact is sex in the meaning of male and female is a spectrum, not a fixed binary. The fact is that gender is a social concept that may have roots in the make up of the brain. The fact is that people assigned at birth as being on one side of the sex spectrum may have the both the biological and sociological gender of the other side of the spectrum or be somewhere else on the spectrum. This applies to kids.
The ideology you claim I am pushing is the current best understanding of the majority of the medical community. It has been researched by them. Your opposition to it could be for several reasons but mostly it seems to come down to “It has never been this way before so why change how we deal with it, instead just do what we have always done” and “We should keep making trans people wait until it is too late to help them and then make fun of their efforts to live as the gender they know they are”.
The world has moved on Tildeb. Most of us do not want to live in a regressive past that made a segment of the population most comfortable but was hard, uncomfortable, and dangerous for the rest of the people. It may make you and some minority of others happy to return to that past, but the rest of us can deal with helping others to live happy lives in the gender and sexual orientation they are. We accept the science and data.
Claiming I am a male by biology obscures the fact that the gender / sex is not binary but on a spectrum. Again your argument goes back to the idea that if it dangles you are male and if it doesn’t dangle enough you are a female. That again doesn’t take into account all the things we know now that goes into the biological make up of sex, such as chromosomes, genes, and body chemicals such as hormones. They have found it is not a simple XX or XY. That is simply a fact that cannot be argued against.
As for am I a male. Are we talking sex, gender, or sexual orientation and even sexual preference? I am cis, but where on the biological spectrum do I fall? Unless I get a full medical make up there is no way to tell how far into the male spectrum I fall. If we are talking gender, I am again male, but I am not fully into the male side of the spectrum of what our society used to claim / expects is a masculine male. And if we are talking about the last category, well we don’t know each other well enough for those conversations. If you really want to know you would have to date me first.
“The interchanging of gender in common language usage is done all the time,” referring to the switching of ‘gender’ and ‘sex’. The former is socially constructed based on the later which is biological. The point here is that sex (biology) precedes gender (social characteristics). These are NOT the same thing, which reminds me of the sleight of hand used all the time by religious apologists using the term term ‘faith’ to mean both trust/confidence with the religious notion of belief. The term ‘gender’ is substituted for sex all the time by ideologues to pretend gender precedes biology (assigned at birth!). This is exactly my point in reversing what is true (biology) with what is believed to be true (ideology).
What’s the harm?
Well, as we see, when we apply the ideology and impose it on reality, we find transwomen are now the only true women. Women are to be called ‘persons’. A birthing person. A chest feeding person. A bleeding person. And so on. Wherever women have places separate from men, now we have men as ‘real women’ demanding inclusion. This runs the gamut from sports to prisons to rape shelters. You pretend there is no evidence of this, but there is. You know it,. I know it. From swimmer Lia Thomas to serial rapist Karen White, the evidence is plain. And the effects are predictable: in every case where transitioned males/’real women’ demand inclusion, females lose. They lose the podium. They lose safety. They lose privacy. They lose safety from male violence. So I raised this issue that male and female are not on some gender sliding scale as you conflate to be them but are binary sexes with very real biological differences. In other words, gender is NOT biology and biology is NOT gender. Abusing language to make it appear differently is not good ‘information’ but clearly ideologically driven lies and deceit. The ideology fits the description of ‘disinformation’.
So what and who cares?
Well, when we impose the ideology on young people through indoctrination in education, we see the results: a massive increase in transitioning of children from natal female into a ‘genderized’ man. (Gee, I wonder why Republicans are using this to gain electoral victories if it’s all about Tildeb and transphobic bigotry?) Again (in case you missed the pattern) guess who is losing out? Yup: females. Every time, in every way.
Young females in their thousands (5500% increase in past 10 years in the US) are now undergoing chemical retardation and developmental interference with the active support by the entire medical profession more concerned with how they want to appear to be supporting young females by respecting these young females ‘feel about their gender’ (golly, I wonder why young females might wish they were males… what a deep mystery!) than the health and welfare of their mental and physical biology. This is the inversion/abuse of language that you wave away thinking it is simply an equivalent and perfectly reasonable substitution only I am taking issue with (not because it’s important to recognize the lie but because you believe it’s my way of avoiding truth-bearing points you raise)! But that’s neither true nor ethical.
I keep hammering the point and you keep ignoring the fact that gender is not biology. By doing so you avoid my argument that we should not be medicalizing this perversion of transitioning between biological states because of normal adolescent feelings and angst by pretending stopping development is normal and justified and safe while the confused adolescent takes a time out to consider options. That’s the real disinformation going on here. It is none of these things in truth. Retarding puberty has known consequences and these are real. Retarding puberty AND taking opposite sex hormones (over 95% on puberty blockers do exactly this) has long term consequences we know about (sterility, loss of sexual function, bone loss) and long term consequences we don’t know about (because the practice on this scale is relatively new. But detransitioners offer us a very real glimpse into what it means long after the ideologues abandon you). What we do know is that transitioning starting with puberty blockers is a lifetime of guaranteed medical need and constant intervention and high risk with real and negative consequences for one’s physiological health, justifiable I think only in the most extreme cases of significant, demonstrable, and life threatening dysfunction from dysphoria.
What you’re selling is ideology (and what other ideological conquered institutions self-justifiably promote) and not biological facts. The substituted language you rely on that reverses reality by pretending sex follows gender shows the dishonesty. That’s disinformation at work.
Tlideb. Enough. You are wrong. I have refuted every single argument you brought up until you were left arguing the meaning of words. The context of what I wrote and that the articles said is clear, even if you disagree with it.
What is clear is your drive by ideology on this issue and some need to always have the last word. Nan used to have to cut you off on her blog because you wouldn’t stop. Do I have to do the same here? I have said several times it is enough in this thread.
Everything that can be said has been said. I represent the future as humanity progresses, you represent the traditionalist past seeped in fear of any changes from the status quo. We have covered it all as I said. No one is reading us anymore. Accept you lost, and that this is my blog. Accept the world is moving on, even as your regressive side is winning a few battles now, they will lose the war. Trans rights are human rights. LGBTQ+ rights are human rights.
“I am the mother of a trans-identifying child — now 23 years old. (I can’t give my name for fear of alienating her.) You captured the rollercoaster of emotions many parents going through this feel — the fear that she has adopted this ideology as a coping mechanism to deal with underlying mental health issues and that she will do irreparable harm to her body. And that we are politically homeless. I can’t vote for anyone who would support Trump. But Biden and his team have it wrong when they quote the lie of “better a trans son than dead daughter.”
I agree with DeSantis on many aspects of the so-called “don’t say gay” bill. I don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss sexual orientation and gender ideology with young children. I also don’t think it’s appropriate to review the periodic table with them. That doesn’t mean I’m anti-chemistry.
What I wish for my daughter is that she not be beholden to gender stereotypes, that she be comfortable in her own body and that she avoid a lifetime of medical intervention with life-long negative consequences (including infertility) which cannot ultimately transform her into a man. If she were anorexic, we’d have support and options to return her to health. Because her coping mechanism is trans ideology, we get no support from medical or psychiatric professionals, from schools or from most liberals.”
Tildeb another unsourced anecdotal screed that is supporting the rabid right to erase the LGBTQ+. Not even sure what you are trying to push with this except trying to get the last word again. You have lost all credibility. Enough.
Hey Tildeb, let me address the other thing you wrote. You feel attacked unfairly as you claim to just be asking questions. That is not what you are doing. To suggest it is just another attempt to confuse the issue. You are deliberately pushing disinformation and misdirecting people. I already said I don’t know if it is political or personal with you, but your tactics are right out of the far right / TERF playbook. I refute and rebut what you push with cited facts that you ignore or change your attack, often repeating what I clearly showed to be wrong before. That is clearly dishonest and not asking questions.
Even the numbers you claim for kids not finishing transition are wrong. It does take me time to look up the true information to address your biased misinformation, but I do it because it is not a good idea to let a lie or myth stand as a fact. You are not being targeted for no reason, nor personally attacked. You are targeting a vulnerable population with the goal of denying them the needed medical assistance to achieve the gender state of who they really are.
Just as we call out antiabortionists who pretend to be pro-life but are really forced birth, I will call out you for doing the same things. Just as I called out anti-vaccine people and those who push that Covid was a hoax, I will call out those who use fake studies and fringe medical people to create misinformation that harms the LGBTQ+.
If you don’t like me doing that you really don’t need to subject yourself to such treatment? Just stop leaving comments full of misinformation, lies, and hateful attacks on the LGBTQ+, including trans gender kids and trans adults. Problem solved.
” You are targeting a vulnerable population with the goal of denying them the needed medical assistance to achieve the gender state of who they really are.”
No, that’s not what I’m doing. That’s what you BELIEVE I am doing. Not the same thing, Scottie.
I am criticizing the ‘affirmation only’ aspect to treating gender dysphoria BECAUSE this one-size-fits-all approach harms vast numbers of real children in real life. There are many approaches that should be used first, not least of which is watchful waiting under therapeutic oversight.
Maybe you’re never around girls but I know just how powerful is the social component and reputational harm of peer criticism and rejection. Far more than boys. And I know how powerful is the use of gender dysphoria to shield girls from the very real difficulties of puberty. This is real problem when dozens of girls in the same school suddenly become gender dysphoric. In your world this is reason to celebrate. In mine, it raises a red flag that we’re dealing with a social contagion.
You BELIEVE my concerns are caused by bigotry and/or that I reject some children who really do exhibit life long dysphoria. This is not true. That’s why I mentioned preparing the ground, so to speak, with parents and students to accept a transitioned youth because my concern then as it is now is all about the welfare of the child… in my case the social welfare inside a school community for all. I had then and maintain now no problem whatsoever with someone who has transitioned any more than I have a problem with someone gay. Or black. Or even Catholic! My problem is with an ideology that send children skipping and singing down this life path and feeling oh so virtuous without appreciating just how challenging and risky and fraught with life long medicalization that path is in reality. If necessary, sure. But let’s keep that bar high. If not, let’s err on the side of caution and be very dubious about widespread and sudden claims of gender dysphoria and the nearly automatic use of suppressive drugs to treat it as if these were no more harmful than candy and were actually GOOD for children at preventing suicide. Avoiding puberty has a cost far, far beyond the hard problems especially for girls going into and through puberty, and I sincerely doubt most kids have any clue what this avoidance means in the long run because the medical community has no clue what it means in the long run.
Tildeb. Your good, you shift well. Reading this at the start I could agree you sounded very much sympathetic to the trans kids.
Until you go to the part where you state an untrue medical opinion not held by the majority of doctor organizations and the AMA.
Until you again push the idea that kids are rushing to turn their entire lives upside down and face all the hassles at home, in school, in public to socially transition. There are still kids scared to come out as gay. Nobody is pushing kids to switch genders any more than they are pushing kids to be gay or lesbian. It is a fear tactic.
Until you claim kids must go through puberty and kids don’t understand their choices. Again they are guided by medical professionals and their parents. Kids don’t just saunter into a clinic and get puberty blockers behind the parent’s back.
Tildeb the bar is already high. More kids are denied the journey of expressing their true gender than the ones who get the support they need to do so. But as you yourself wrote many who feel they are in the wrong gender never complete any transition at all, social or medical. They decide that it is not the journey they want to make. So there is no harm letting them start that journey and even take puberty blockers for a short time, which if they stop taking they go through puberty. No problem.
Trans kids are a small number as are adult trans people, and you are making it harder for that small number to not only transition but to live their lives fully as the gender they are. And you do that by pushing false information and fear. That is why I know “You are targeting a vulnerable population with the goal of denying them the needed medical assistance to achieve the gender state of who they really are.”
Everything you wrote after that except your claim you just love the children, trans, gay, black, and Catholic (Not really sure why you singled out Catholics instead of just saying religious) is about stopping kids who know they are in the wrong sex body from starting and going through that journey of being the gender they know they are. Slow it down, most don’t need it, force kids to go through puberty, prevent and deny using the drug that most doctors say is safe that most governments say is safe and reversable simply by stopping. Do you see what you write or is it deliberate? Either way you are trying to prevent kids from social transition including using puberty blockers when appropriate.
One last thing. This comment was directed at kids. Before in our comments you directed a lot of anger and bigotry at adult trans women. You were not concerned about trans men. So I wonder if that is why you are against trans kids, you are stopping what you see as a problem before it starts?
Hello Nan. Yes. The large majority of medical providers, the medical organizations, and the medical science data these people understand, say yes. The AMA says they are safe. The largest doctor group for kids in the US says they are safe. All the majority of research on these drugs which have been used since the 1970’s say they are safe and reversable. Want to stop their effect, just stop taking them. Oh by the way they are used for more than trans gender issues, they were developed to help kids that went into early puberty. Along with a couple other things I forget right now.
Think about it this way, why would the majority of medical guidelines of these doctor organizations call for using them on minors if they were as harmful as Tildeb wants to make out they are. In places like the US they would be sued out of business.
This is just another point of attack for those that want to stop the transition of young people and who disagree that people can be born in the wrong body with the wrong assigned gender. The want to make it seem the medications are dangerous and not studied. Sound familiar? Think of the stuff we have heard for two years on the Covid vaccines. This attack on puberty blockers is the same.
I don’t agree with your last sentence. But that’s neither here nor there. As I think I’ve said before, there are undoubtedly individuals who are battling with this issue. However, IMO, it is being blown TOTALLY out of proportion. On BOTH sides. And that, I hope, is my last comment on the issue. 🤞
Hello Nan. I enjoy talking with you, but if you don’t want to comment you never have to. I was going to ask you a question but as you don’t want to be in this conversation I won’t do so. But I will keep posting on it, Tildeb will keep trying to spread misinformation, I will keep replying.
As for being overblown. I already told you I agreed with that. The reason is the anti-trans side keeps attacking and trying to make as big a deal as possible over minor issues. The LGBTQ+ are a minority of the population. The T part, trans people, are much smaller minority of our group. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stand up for them, but it is what attackers do, they go after the weakest smallest members of a group.
I find it funny that the talking point of just drop the T, stop supporting the trans people and the right will leave the rest of us alone was the big push right before DeathSantis went on the don’t say gay binge. The right was trying hard to pick us off one letter at a time and then their big name bosses stepped on that message.
Really Nan when did you hear about transgender people? When the Republican governor of North Carliana decided to make it a political issue by implementing a “bathroom bill to protect little girls” He and his party then went on a media blitz about how transgender women who they said were really men were trying to force their way into bathrooms to rape and molest your daughters and wives. The law got overturned when big businesses pulled support out of the state. But in the meantime a lot of people got assaulted trying to enter a women’s bathroom when right wing jerks decided they were not female looking enough. Most were not trans.
Is it over blown yes! Transgender people have existed for ever. The most famous ones were in old England and the US civil war. I bet you and I have been in public bathrooms with transgender people and never even knew it. It was not a big deal, just as it is not in sports. There is no run on women sports wins by trans women but the anti-trans people want to make it seem so.
But that is the point I have been trying to make Nan. This media attention is hate driven. No one cared where people peed until Republicans made it so. No one cared about guys dressed up in costume to read to kids until the religious right made it an issue. I can remember people dressing up to read to kids in my local library back in the 1970s.
It is political to make points and now has become a religious / bigoted hill to die on. I don’t like it. Trans people don’t like it. They just want to live their lives as the people they know they are. As for preteens, puberty blockers simply give them the opportunity to not have to go through life in a body they know is not their gender. And again, prescribed and used since the 1970s with no issues.
Anyway. If you want to ignore the posts, feel free to do so. I won’t be upset, I post a lot of stuff and it is stuff I believe in, not stuff all my viewers do. If you do comment, I will respond. I always do respond to comments, I love them and to me it is a conversation not a fight. Well for most people. People enter and leave conversations as they wish.
Really Nan when did you hear about transgender people? — On your blog. This is not a topic that would have caught my eye at all. And quite frankly, I sorta’ wish it never had. I understand your need to spotlight it, but I think for many of us, it’s not much different than the MANY other issues we’re facing today. An excellent example is the abortion issue. I tend to think there are far more women that are affected by this than there are kids having difficulty with gender identity. But then, I’m a woman.
Hello Nan. Yes trans people are a minority inside a minority. But they are being attack just as the rest of the LGBT were being attack in the years before. So they need help and support from the rest of us more now than ever.
Yes Nan there are more women than trans people. There are more women needing abortions than trans kids need puberty blockers, but if the right has their way neither will get what they need. See the common theme?
I have fought for women’s right to body autonomy all my life and I am not a woman. I won’t ever need an abortion. As I am gay I doubt my love interests will need an abortion. But I have still fought against the effort to deny the right of body control for women over their own body, which is what denying abortion really is.
On my blog I supported the right of abortion along with other equality rights for women. I have seen the right of a woman to control their body chipped away at by the right relentlessly. But I have seen the right do that to the LGBTQ+ also. Again it is what the right wing / religious groups do, try to restrict the rights of others by increasing their own right to control what others can do.
Fighting for one right doesn’t mean you cannot fight for all people’s rights. Fighting for women’s rights doesn’t mean it is OK to ignore the discrimination of others. We can do both. I can do both.
Hi Scottie;
I’ve known two people who were trans. The first, quite obvious. The second, I never would have known until told. What was the difference? The first was unable to transition until adulthood, all adult secondary sexual characteristics developed, and she was not the beautiful person on the outside she could have been. Surgeries and attempts at happiness took a horrible toll. The second, much later in my life, was beautiful, happy, funny!, and successful. Transition was accomplished with the secondaries understood and planned for a successful new life.
When children come into the world deaf, we find cochlear implants to help them. When children come into the world needing sight correction, we provide glasses, and even laser surgery like I received later in life. Heart defects, club foot, cancer, etc. There are statistical physical sexual defects that are documented and real, and we help them. But, when something can’t be so easily seen somehow we decide that nothing exists?
I will stand in complete support with a parent that is totally lost and unable to make a decision for their child, no matter how clearly the child declares what he knows to be true, because a parent is saddled with the unwinnable decision that only begs “what if I’m wrong?”. I have ZERO support for the neighbor that decides they have some sort of right to decide for the kid that isn’t even their child. People stand up and declare that something is untenable who have no cost to their “passion” and get to shrug their shoulders or simply walk away and expound loudly on the next topic that strikes their fancy, leaving lives in their wake and without a care for who gets hurt.
So, to all the wanna-be’s and so-called christians who feel they have the right to decide for others: Everything in this country and in Christ is about a person having the opportunity to live a wonderful, happy, fulfilled life. You don’t get to dictate what that is. If you are a great human being, you will love, comfort, and support a young person, an old person, EVERY person as they find THEIR wonderful life.
Tildeb; with ALL respect, I think you are attempting to be a sign post and a guide, but you are risking being a road block.
Hugs
Hello Randy. You are far more tolerant of Tildeb than I have become. He is a roadblock. He also pushes incorrect and misleading information. He is clearly trying his best to not only prevent trans kids from receiving the medical care / treatment they should have but is trying to force everyone to be the gender assigned at birth at least until the irreparable harm of puberty happens. You stated how hard it is for a transgender person to transition after developing the wrong gender attributes.
It is a traditionalist view. If they can force kids to go through puberty they can continue to mock transgender people who transition. As you said, the person who was able to use puberty blockers was able to transition much more successfully. Less people will feel comfortable with who they are. The more ridicule and negative things kids see and hear the less likely they will be open about who they are. Again it stops the growing public acceptance of the LGBTQ+ driving more to not be out and open but hiding who they are to protect themselves.
We have talked about people who simply cannot accept the changes in culture and in social understanding. They want the country / world to stay as it was. They want society to be what it was when they were in their prime and the world they grew up in. They fight against the changes as hard as they can with whatever they can. It is more than not accepting the changes; it is an attempt to prevent them, so they don’t have to change.
I don’t know what drives Tildeb. He has written that he deliberately writes in an argumentative style, he clearly feels the need to have the last word on other people’s blogs. He argues not from facts of the country he has claimed to be from but uses the information push by the anti-trans group in the UK known as TERFs. I don’t really know if his opposition is based in religion, tradition, simple bigotry, or politics. But it doesn’t matter as the results he wants to accomplish are the same. The stopping of progress and a return to the way things used to be. That will mean more dead LGBTQ+ kids, more bullying for LGBTQ+ people, more violence directed toward LGBTQ+ individuals, and the loss of rights for the LGBTQ+. Those are things I cannot accept and must fight as hard as possible against.
Hi Scottie;
The crazy thing is that these people seem to think that homosexuality and lgbtq issues are new. You and I are both in our 50’s –sorry to out you, Scottie. Not 29 anymore 😦 I have lived a horrible life of misery because I couldn’t come out and be me when I was young, too afraid of the consequences. I can’t count the number of times I wanted to end this life. How many more did so? How many more have lived a miserable existence for appearances sake?
So what the hell do they want? They want people like Rock Hudson, living a lie his entire life? They want to pretend that there are no people who are homosexual, trans, bi? Is being genuine such a frighteningly foreign concept that they would rather people be miserable and suicidal just to protect their fragile image of the world? How many more need to die? And why the F do they get a choice in it?
Damn. Sorry…..
Hello Randy. Never be sorry for anything you say here. This is your home also. I do regret we were not around each other to support each other in our troubled times. Boy I could have put a hurt on anyone giving you a hard time back in those days bro!
The very people that want to deny other people the right to live openly as they are, want the special right to force their religious myth doctrines on everyone else.
These people hide their personal failures at living up to their ideal church doctrines by attacking others as unworthy. The leaders of these groups don’t even practice what they preach and protecting the brand is more important than making sure the people have food, housing, or other daily needs.
As for the Republican elected office holders some are traditionalist that want the world to return to a time they enjoyed it more and since they had it well during that time because they felt more comfortable and more in charge.
What neither of these groups want is the culture and society to progress forward. They want to hold it back to when they were happy and comfortable. In fact Justice Alito referred to a lawyer from the 1600s that believed in martial rape and had at least two women put to death as witches to find that abortion is a crime not a right, which shows you how regressive these people want to be to enshrine their comfort into all our lives.
They don’t care about your comfort, your needs, your requirements, or your circumstances. All these groups and those people want is their comfort and their happiness taken care of, so that they can do any despicable action they want to the others without consequence.
Randy, what people do not seem to understand is the complete gaslighting Alito had to do to history to make his ruling. He ignored that the country not only was founded on personal liberty and privacy was part of that liberty, that the founding fathers declared that happiness was an important factor of life, to state that historically there was no idea of individual liberty in the US. That turns history upside down as much as declaring the US was founded as a Chrisitan nation … Oh wait Alito believes that myth also. No less than 5 amendments are built on the idea of privacy and individual right to live free from government intrusion into personal matters. Also the founders clearly meant the constitution to grow and change as the needs of the people / country grew and changed. Or they wouldn’t have made the ways to change the document clear in it.
But that goes against the very religious theocracy some of the justices want to create or think should be created to please their god. Religion is not a democracy it is a dictatorship with God at the top and his henchmen the religious leaders next down to tell the people what god said they must do to please him. Often that means money and sexual favors to the religious leaders but hey that pleases god right?
This became a rant, did not mean it to. I hope you are in a better place mentally / emotionally soon. If you need me I am here. Call / text / skype any time. I love you brother, you are grand. You are the best brother ever. Hugs
Scottie … people don’t always agree on issues. You know this! And you ALSO know that no matter how much “proof” you offer, they are going to counter it with their own “proofs.” If you doubt my words, consider … RELIGION. There are blogs FULL of discussions on whether Christianity is valid or not and each side has their reasons (and “proofs”) why they believe as they do. And look what’s going on RIGHT NOW throughout blogland …. arguments about abortion!
My point is … you and tildeb at never going to see eye-to-eye on this issue. I know you both want to have the “last word,” but it’s never going to happen. So, for the sake of the rest of us who like to visit your blog, PLEASE STOP!
Hello Nan. You clearly did not read my last two replies I made this morning to his comments left a day ago. I don’t like to repeat the same things over and over and over and over. At some point there comes a limit to what more can be said.
But Nan, you are clearly still reading them as is Randy. So people are reading the comments and replies. People are always free to not read anything they prefer not to. I have already explained why I answer, it is to make sure misinformation, myth, and misdirection is not left unchallenged. The alternative is to remove a comment such as Polly has done to me when she cannot refute what I comment. I don’t like that done to me and I won’t do it to others. Polly need not comment here again.
This not and never has been about convincing Tildeb. I don’t consider him to be acting in good faith as I said. I view him the same as I view the maga. I view him the same as the Covid vaccine deniers, the ones pushing for Ivermectin as a viable treatment for Covid despite all evidence to the contrary. I view Tildeb the same as I view those who call for Dr. Fauci to be arrested, tried, and hanged for giving his best medical advice based on the medical data he has the skill to interpret, which they do not have so they equate their falsehoods as equal to the medical guidelines recommended by the CDC.
No, Scottie. #1 — I am NOT reading yours OR tildeb’s comments. I see them and move on. In fact, I’ve learned to recognize the post title and don’t even bother to open it. I only read this time because I saw that Randy had made a comment. #2 — You just wrote: I don’t like to repeat the same things over and over and over and over. So my question is … why do you? Because that’s what has been taking place on this particular post.
I FULLY realize it’s your blog, Scottie and certainly, you can do whatever you want with it. But why spend time writing essentially the same thing “over and over and over” when you COULD be spending time with Ron, or playing TV games, or catching up on your political reading? You say it’s not about convincing tildeb, but what else would it be called since you’ve explained your POV numerous times in your comments to him? Plus, you have made your position clear in a number of your other posts.
But again … It’s YOUR blog and by all rights, it’s not for me to say anything. So I’ll shut up.
Hello Nan. I don’t mind your comments voicing your opinion, so there is no need to shut up. I just wanted to emphasize that people only read what interests them and pass by the rest.
The point of saying you did not read the last two replies is I addressed both what you said in the last comment and this one.
I had to wait until everything had been thrown at the wall by Tildeb. Most of what I addressed was not a rehash of citing new sources saying the same things. I would summarize things already addressed but not open that issue up again for more debate.
Tildeb’s next to last comment was a criticism of word usage and that was a dodge, I addressed it and said enough. It ends on this thread. We have covered it all.
His last comment was a short anecdotal story with no citation. I refused to rehash the subjects mentioned in the story. I explained that he had gotten to the point of repeating himself and if I answered so would I. Not exact quotes as I don’t feel like going back and looking up and copying the exact words.
I explained that if need be I would close the comments on the post if he did not accept it was enough already.
He is welcome to comment on other posts and I expect he will. I have no plans to stop championing the causes I believe in. I assume he does the same on his blog. I have never gone and looked at his blog, have you?
I remember what Ark said so often when asked why he argued with religious people. He said it was for the people reading along who never comment but absorb the information. It is about planting seeds.
Nan here is why it is not about convincing Tildeb and why I do it. Sometime in the future, a day, a month, a year someone will stumble over that post and may read the comments. They will see Tildeb’s comments and assertions. They may take them as facts when they are not but instead are lies, myths, misinformation, and misdirection. If those people reading don’t see a rebuttal to those things, then they will believe them. But if they read my rebuttal and replies, even if they don’t agree they may look it up. That really is what I want, people to look up the information themselves if they can. Not everyone can research stuff well, not everyone has the time. If I see two different opinions, I tend to google it. Massive information tool the internet, the trick is to understand your limitations. Just because people can find a peer reviewed scientific paper they have to have the ability to understand it. That is why the paper’s author’s own words are important. A lot of people look at a headline and think that is what the data showed or what the scientist said, it often is just what the reporter or news organization wanted to grab views. And a conclusion is only as good as the study itself. It is important to make sure it is a valid study.
The quotation was from a comment sent to Andrew Sullivan’s substack (paid subscription) on this gender issue. And he has A LOT to criticize.
I know you like to paint everything I write here with a broad brush you label as, “lies, myths, misinformation, and misdirection”. And you attribute it all to me, a terrible person to be sure. But everything I offer here is from multiple sources that I would think any reasonable person would find acceptable and not belonging to Tildeb The Terrible Blasphemer.
For example, Andrew Sullivan is a gay writer – as is Freddie deBoer, as is Bari Weiss, as are many other thinkers and writers on this topic that I have offered. The fact you can be married to another man is one of Andrew’s crowning contributions as he was certainly a champion of gay marriage when even the gay community was telling him to leave it alone. He calls it as he sees it and offers pretty good reasoning and evidence independent of little ‘ol me to make his case. In fact, every source I’ve offered has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with me.
None of that matters: you have your belief and you’re going to stick with it. Reality plays no part in adjudicating it.
I have offered a board member of WPATH, a transitioned leader supporting the need for far more caution than is currently in place. I have offered the opinion of parents whose families are torn apart by this official response. I have offered a world renowned reassignment surgeon, heads of research from many countries involved with actual treatments of real people in real life with puberty blockers and hormones and transitioning youths. I have offered court cases, documentation, first person accounts by detransitioners, investigative journalists and authors, all urging more caution, urging a move away from ‘affirmation only.’ Not because Tildeb the Bigot says so, but because of compelling evidence.
No matter who I offer in my bigoted stead, you wave ALL of them away as right wing bigots and some kind of anti-gay ivermectin peddling MAGA ‘phobes’ not because they are in fact but because YOU BELIEVE ANY CONTRARY POSITION FROM YOUR OWN must be so. You have your belief and THAT trumps EVERYTHING including reality. So of course you will continue claiming it’s all about Tildeb and the bigotry you have ‘defeated’ with ‘good’ information.
That’s why you’re demonstrably an ideologue and committed to a belief-as-if-fact just like a creationist is committed to creation-as-if-fact and just as immune to honest and open and respectful discussion of compelling evidence if it threatens your deeply held beliefs in any way. I will stop wasting both our time.
Good lords Tildeb. Famous self-hating gay Andrew Sullivan who goes on Bill Maher’s show to run down everything liberal or left he ever heard. He is more right leaning than a lot of Republicans. Bari Weiss I have already addressed as a shill for anything Israel does and again hates anything liberal, and I showed how her writing is very anti-trans anything. Not really non-bias medical sources, are they? Every source you quote is a right wing hack or activist. You offered a disgruntled board member who quit after deciding the group was wrong but again you forget all the ones that stayed supporting the goals of WPATH. Think about it, one person says 19 others are wrong and you discount the 19 to believe only the 1. This is why you are the ideolog on this subject, and why you’re wrong. I don’t wave away your false arguments, I investigate them. It comes down to the same thing every time. The majority of medical organizations / practitioners all think the current guidelines of treatment for trans kids is correct and it includes social transitioning with medical assistance such as puberty blockers as needed, which are safe and fully reversable, followed by medical transitioning treatment as decided by the patient with the medical providers. Your fringe doctors that don’t agree who are a small minority who don’t overrule the correct medical advice of the majority. That is why you are wrong.
Congratulations Tildeb. You have made me do something I have never done. I will close the comments on this thread. I hate to have the same things said and answered and said again. It is a waste of my time. Since you seem driven to keep going long past the time you had anything relevant to say, anything new or even interesting to say on it, but keep repeating yourself and your discredited viewpoint ad nauseam, I have no choice but close the thread. Bye
Hi Nan,
I really really shouldn’t be typing right now. But, I know you will relate to what I’m about to say. Some populations of peoples have learned to “live” with abuse. We turn a blind eye, get pissed maybe but shrug as “reality” steps on us once again. I’m hurt, I’m pissed, and sometimes we don’t even realize how much until we face the fact that we keep getting hit, keep getting hurt.
I guess what I’m trying to say, and not doing it very well… my damn eyes and nose are running… is sometimes it takes a minute for the hurt to break through the defences and be noticed for the damage it keeps doing.
I understand what you are saying, and I love you for it. I just want you to know that sometimes the hurt needs a voice, someone who will stand up and declare that it isn’t right, that there are real people in these issues and debates. That’s what Scottie is doing.
Hello Randy. I am sorry your pain is hurting you today, I know too well how that is.
What you need to remember is you are one hell of a great person and you are the very best brother I could ever have. Many tried to tear us down. But none of them have succeeded.
You have accomplished more in your life than those who were against you ever thought you could, because of the great person you are and the power within you.
You are one hell of a great person. The world is better with you in it!
I am proud to call you brother. Give my best to your folks when they get in. Hugs
Scottie's Playtime 
Scottie, if I may …
I REALLY wish you’d get off this topic. People are going to believe what they want to believe and while education IS important, I truly doubt your MANY posts on the subject is going to sway a person’s thinking. IMO, each person has to come to grips with controversial ideas on their own and beating them over the head is not generally referred to as education. 🙃
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Hello Nan. I think what you are really tired of is the comments on the subject. Either way I cannot in good conscience let bigotry go unchallenged and must stand up for a marginalized community. Sorry. You are free to avoid reading any post that upsets you or you disagree with of course, but I do the blog to share the stuff I think is important. I think discrimination against the LGBTQ+ is an important subject to address and to push back against. Remember I am of that community, and I have felt that discrimination personally all my life. I do feel it is important to post on the subject. I really do. The object of the don’t say gay bills is to erase the subject from the schools and the kids so the right can push anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda on them before they can be taught tolerance. Think of the old saying about give me a child before the age 7 and …
Russia proved it works. There was a growing acceptance of gay people, gay rights, and even marriage equality there. Then the conservatives banded with the church to make even talking about being gay in a positive way wherever a minor (a person under 18) may see / hear it illegal. You cannot even display the rainbow flag in public. Nothing positive on the radio or TV. Nothing positive in movies. But the government and the anti-LGBTQ+ can still say all the negative crap they want. I think you can guess what happened. Acceptance of the LGBTQ+ people tanked. It stopped growing and regressed. Gays were arrested and lost all rights. The attacks against gays got much worse. Now in Russia you do not see a gay presence or display. It is gone, gays don’t exist is what the conservatives want to portray because you don’t see any display anymore. They are all in the closet to protect themselves.
The conservatives and religious figures in the US loved it. They are adopting the same ideas here hoping to have the same results. If I don’t keep the subject in the public eye as best I can then I will help them. They are starting with the trans, vilify them as perverts wanting to attack women in the bathroom and steal everything women have worked for. It is all about making the trans person the villain and bad guy and the women the poor victim. So conservatives must step and save the poor women. Like conservatives care about women normally.
You are correct, I should have cut the conversation off earlier and I will in the future. I feel that Tildeb has not been discussing in good faith. He is like the people I meet in the comments of the far right cartoons sections only not as quick with the constant insulting that makes them feel smart.
There is a balance I have to find. On your blog I have wanted to fire back on disinformation that he has left address to me and out of respect for your wishes did not respond. But here I have to decide how much disinformation to let stand. I would prefer to have people reading the comments to be enlightened and to go do their own research. At least google the subject. But they will not. They will read what is put in front of them and either feel it makes sense or it doesn’t. So I have to learn the balance. When to just end a conversation and when to respond. I want the comments to be an exchange of ideas, reason, and knowledge. Not a knock down fight. Time will see.
Best wishes.
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Criticism of this article by Jerry Coyne is here. It’s eye opening for anyone actually concerned with what’s true and shows the scope of the ideological take-over of a once respected magazine.
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Hello Tildeb. Coyne is a well known anti-trans person and I stopped following him years ago over his stances on some subjects. He has an old fashion stance on subjects that doesn’t reflect the change in understanding of issues. To be sure it is understandable as he is old. It was not that way when he was teaching so it must not be correct that it changed idea. Personally I never found him to be that bright or much of a speaker. His talks on evolution bored me to a stupor. But everyone can check him out for themselves. There are people on this blog who like him. Seems you are another one.
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Harvard evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven in conversation with Bari Weiss. At both 1:11 and again at 1:14 in this podcast, Hooven tells us in no uncertain terms what defines sex and why it is biologically binary (surprising to you – again – will be that it’s all about gametes and that this is used across ALL biology). She also explains why so many people confuse variations in characteristics and chromosomes to create a supposed spectrum that simply is not true regarding the fact of binary sex in reality. This scientific definition has absolutely nothing to do with me or others but is simply a way the science of biology recognizes the reality of reproductive life.
If you are now thinking, “She must be an anti-trans bigot,” take a moment for crying out loud and understand that this impulse – this NEED you seem to demonstrate – is coming from you BECAUSE you are coming at this issue through prioritizing your own emotional thinking that agrees with your feelings rather than by finding out what is true and what is real FIRST.
Speaking of good faith, if you’re going to relegate what’s true in reality to be some form of bigotry because it doesn’t align with a preferred ideological framing, and you run the thought experiment outwards to encompass everyone believing as you do, then I cannot figure out how anyone could think this would end well. Surely the only starting position should be to agree to respect that what’s true matters, that reality’s arbitration of our beliefs about it is an excellent place to start. If we could even agree on this much, then we could have a legitimate and productive and fruitful discussion about anything. But when you vilify anyone regardless of expertise who disagrees with your framing on merit as if bigots, you’ve already closed that door. The mind will soon follow.
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Hey Tildeb. This post you are responding to was written on the 2nd of April. Your comment is two days old so say some where around 16 to 17 days have gone by. I post a hell of a lot of stuff that you seem not to care a crap about and don’t bother to leave comment on. But you are driven to comment again and again on a post most of us had our say on and moved on from. Tells me you are serious anti-trans and really want to attack anything dealing with subject with as much venom as you can. Guess what? I do evaluate what I read. I disagree with you. I disagree with the people you quote. I find them bigoted and untrustworthy on the subject. I have checked your citations and found them on very anti-trans publications. Bari Weiss I disagree with on almost everything, but she is really popular with right leaning moderate former liberal Bill Maher.
You have an ax to grind on the subject. I have a pro-trans positive position. But you don’t agree with the people I quote, and I sure don’t agree with the people you quote.
The advantage I have is the majority of medical professionals are on my side. Medical science is on my side. You can keep chewing the bone on this, there are people still pushing conversion therapy for sexual orientation and claiming it is a choice. They are wrong, they are the minority, and they are sure they know more than the people educated in the subject.
Again for the last time. The majority of experts in the fields of this subject disagree with you. I agree with them. The biologists, the medical doctors, the gender specialists, the mental health experts, the medical scientists that work in the fields in the subject of gender / sex … The majority of all these groups disagree with you. That is enough for me. It should be enough for you. But some people yell at the moon thinking it hears them. You keep fighting the tide. Most of the people advance as our understanding does, some don’t and remain regressive as the world passes them by. I choose to advance with new developments. You do you boo.
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I’m glad you can rest easy and feel virtuous in the certainty of your own faith.
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I do, I am on the right side of both history and science. You should join me.
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I would… except you’re not.
You have dismissed any and all contrary data and waved away any and all experts who raise them. You do this over and over again. You use the same tactic with commentators and journalists who raise these legitimate issues and publicize them. There’s no ‘dialogue’ going on here on your site; there is simply your ideology being presented as if ‘information’ from many MSM links that agree with you. Any and all contrary evidence – no matter how strong – is summarily and contextually dismissed as ‘disinformation’ because it doesn’t align! (You’ve already done this right now reading this, haven’t you?)
In response to the consent issue (a central issue when it comes to what constitutes ‘ethical’ medical procedures), for example, you dismiss it as claiming no girl undergoes gender reassignment surgery in the US under the age of 18 (therefore and adult, therefore informed and able to give consent, therefore anyone who questions this is spreading ‘disinformation’). I’ve given you one study where a third of the respondents underwent surgery prior to that age (no comment from you) and the linked one here where a 15 year old under went a double mastectomy. Just because you BELIEVE it’s not happening doesn’t mean it ISN’T happening. So your belief is demonstrably false (because this is now classified as ‘disinformation’ in your view and so you don’t have to worry about it fitting your beliefs). So consent is an issue if we’re going to talk about the ethics of this practice of genderizing children. But contrary facts I raise (you’re not going to do it obviously) don’t alert you that you are simply shutting out evidence in order to maintain a false belief. Nor do you care to be shown this… repeatedly dismissive of any and all attempts. That’s exactly how creationists think and how evangelicals stay in their alt reality bubble. That’s what you’re doing and why there really is a question that perhaps you are not offering good information. Perhaps you are offering only ideologically approved information (and so search the internet using confirmation bias as your guide to ‘respond’ to dismissing legitimate evidence). Ideologically aligned and what’s true are not synonyms. But using this confirmation bias tactic is a GUARTANTEED way to avoiding what’s true.
You claim the majority of scientists and medical practitioners agree with you. They don’t. They follow their standards of practice, Scottie. Again, not synonymous. Not the same thing. And those practices ARE changing because of evidence that have swayed decisions from law suits that use it… evidence you have already dismissed. That should raise a red flag to you that maybe you’re missing something. But it doesn’t.
Consent and the lack of it was EXACTLY what the Kiera Bell case I raised was all about and it was THIS ruling – unanimous – that altered the standards of practice in Sweden and Denmark as well as England. Information and good evidence YOU have already dismissed as ‘disinformation’ (coming from the mouths of detransitioners, no less, but can’t be true in your mind because it doesn’t align with what you believe) is altering medical practices there… but practices here that are currently legislated by governing bodies to promote and appease and align with the feel good ideologues. That’s what these practitioners are up against and forced to adhere to ‘affirmation only’ directives (that for some reason you presume is non biased medicine) that removes the need for informed consent to be ethical! I raised this: you just wave it away. Dismiss it wholesale.
That you have waved all of this away should be a red flag to you that you’re not thinking straight about this issue, that you are being duped because you are missing something important. What that is is very clear me: you have stopped seeking and respecting what’s true first but have replaced this with what ‘feels’ good to you, what feels right to you based on a history of encountering bigotry in the past, as if the latter could have been prevented by the former! So who cares about thousands of young girls being harmed today? It’s all good, it’s all right, as long as it makes you feel like you are championing the underdog.
That’s why you’re neither on the right side of history nor following good science. You have a belief and you’re going stick with it. Just like any other good little creationist with a belief to defend.
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I read the rather loooong article, and this above all stood out to me: When else do we trust children to self-diagnose and make lifelong medical decisions?
I also agreed with: … this is still a new phenomenon about which a great deal is not known.
There’s no doubt there are legitimate and medically supported cases of transitioning, but as I think I’ve commented before … it needs to be AGE-APPROPRIATE. It seems to me the “rush” to accept this issue is overlooking some very important things.
And probably most of all, it’s concerning that it’s becoming a political/religious issue. But then, what else is new? I suppose there will always be those who think everyone should abide by THEIR views and opinions because, well, they’re right!
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This is long, I hope you will read it all.
Hello Nan. I agree with most of what you wrote, maybe all of it if I understand your points correctly. What I disagree with is the assumption that something non-age appropriate is happening. That is a right wing media drive talking point to justify these don’t say gay bills and anti-trans laws.
It is important to understand what is really happening is age appropriate. The right wing media wants to drive the idea that kids are lining up to transition like they are being offered ice cream. That parents are making little kids have sex change operations because they wanted a different gender child. Doesn’t it remind you of the abortion scares that women were aborting viable babies because they did not like the sex of the child or that women wanted the right to abortion so they could have wild sex parties all the time. It is a right wing distortion to make it seem a horrible liberal misuse.
There is just more coverage of young trans kids now and remember in the US the only sexual surgeries done on kids is corrective genital surgery to fix a medical problem such as no urethra or other issue. Not sexual reassignment unless the kid is either born with no function genitals or has mangled them in an accident. Or sickness like testicular cancer so they have a ball or both removed.
That is the kids having sex reassignment surgery that Tildeb and the right like to push as sexual reassignment. A girl in my high school had to have a mastectomy. I only knew because I was a friend of the family. She had cancer all her life. She died like at 21 or 22. But it was not a surgery because she was trans gender, she needed the surgery to get rid of the cancer. But that is the misdirection of the right wing that we are dealing with.
Tildeb has used the right wing misinformation technique of using bits of truth / reality to then create a fictional narrative. Teachers are not having gender swap parties with 6 year old’s. They are not having same sex orgies with 5 year old’s.
Right now the media focus on trans gender is new. The right wing media attempt to demonize trans gender issues is new. But not trans gender people. They have been around forever just as the rest of the LGBTQ+ have been. Think about it, did gays start to exist just when media attention happened about them? Did we exist only after traditionalists tried hard to demonize us and put us back in the closet?
The pushback against trans and gays is happening because of acceptance. The elected officials that have written the don’t say gay and the anti-trans bills have admitted it. They have seen how well it has worked in Russia. But even in Muslim countries where gay is punishable by death and in countries where there are long prison sentences if someone finds out, gay and trans people keep existing.
You say there is a rush to accept such things. Things are being overlooked. OK That is something we can explore as it is a legitimate complaint. Let’s address what you think is being ignored or overlooked. That is the way we spread acceptance. Because that is the way we dispel misinformation.
Because acceptance is the issue and the point. Nan studies have shown kids are killing themselves in large numbers due to not being accepted. I just posted the horrific story of a kid bullied so badly he wanted to kill himself, of a man beaten so badly he is now blind because a family did not accept their adult son being actively gay, and how a man who believes right wing media followed a little boy into a bathroom to tell him that the men (his fathers) raising him were raping him and had stolen him. Then he attacked the entire family in public. No one came to help the two men and their two children. That is why the push for acceptance is so very important. Why we must fight back against the right wing misinformation / distortion. That is why it is necessary to be taught in the lowest grades. Teaching that LGBTQ+ exist and are not bad but OK is age appropriate. It also is important that bigots don’t get to prevent teaching acceptance as that leads to the indoctrination of hate and creates more little bigots to attack other school kids.
That last point of the right framing this as protecting kids and letting the parents have a say in everything in the classroom is misinformation / misdirection. First there is not a rush of child pedophilia in the schools. But most importantly it is only one small minority of parents that the right wants to have a say. It is not all parents. The majority of parents are OK with the acceptance of LGBTQ+ kids, with gay straight alliance clubs, with rainbow stickers. But the right cult base / Republican leaders don’t want those parents to voice their view. They want maga parents only. Shall we turn science and history over to the evangelical preachers also?
This is the scary political part of this. Rule by the shrinking minority over the majority. The republican party is a minority party cementing majority rule with gerrymandering and voter suppression. For example Florida is a blue state but our state government is heavily red / Republican. And DeathSantis just drew new maps that have been approved to get rid of a couple of the remaining democratic districts. Out of the four Democratic seats, DeathSantis just got rid of two of them, even though the extra population growth in the state was due to minority voters. Black people mostly. They took out the black majority district. Gone. That to me is scary that the Republicans want a one party rule over the people like in China.
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Scottie, yes. I read all of your response. But just as you think that I am over-reacting to this issue, I find I must say the same about you. There’s no doubt we are on different sides of the fence. At least to some degree. And while I do see and understand YOUR perspective, I am not anywhere near ready to totally agree.
One other thing … I read the article that tildeb linked to VERY closely and I do NOT think it was “right-wing” propaganda. I felt it was the story of this individual’s personal experience … and I doubt very much she is unique in her later misgivings. After all, she was only 15 at the time of her elective mastectomy! Essentially, she made her decision while she was still in puberty!
Your wrote that “studies have shown kids are killing themselves in large numbers.” IMO, this is a typical over-statement and one that I would be more likely to attribute to a “right-winger!!” In actuality, Nearly 20% of high school students report serious thoughts of suicide. (UCLA study) — and while the percentage is significant, I highly doubt they are all attributable to sex issues.
While you have offered incidents and arguments to support your own POV, surely you must realize this is what we ALL do when we disagree on highly contestable topics (e.g., abortion!). But in the end, I think you have to agree — we each have to make up our own minds.
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This is long but I think I addressed all the points asked.
Hello Nan. I consider you a good faith actor in this unlike Tildeb who I have caught out misrepresenting information and using articles from a group started to be anti-trans. So I am going back to read Tildeb’s comment. As I said I just basically ignored it while catching a few words of it as I scrolled past.
I don’t recall every saying you were overreacting in our discussions on this subject. I may have suggested the foundations of your views might be routed in traditions simply because of the generation you are part of but I thought of your position more as questioning than rejecting. I have carried on the discussion with you under the idea of sharing information that you might not have considered or have known. Am I wrong?
OK lets talk about the 15 year old Tildeb linked to. First the author is a reporter for the New York Post. The New York Post (NY Post) is a conservative daily tabloid newspaper published in New York City. Then I noticed in the article she went right for the political, claiming that the girls gender reassignment surgery was part of the Biden pushed transgender affirming care plans. Total B.S. I looked it up. Yes the Biden administration is fighting for trans kids to get needed medical care including social transitioning. There was no mention of surgery. That is made up. See I told you, look at the source and what the bias is. By the way I used the link in the article. The link doesn’t show what the author claims. They do this because most people will just accept that the Biden administration is pushing sex reassignment surgery on kids, when that is not true. Plus the linked to article from the White House is long, most won’t bother with it.
I have addressed the stuff about Sweden and other misinformation. But here is the way to look at it. You can find any fringe doctor or group that claims anything you want that is different from the mainstream view. There are plenty of medical doctors willing to prescribe Ivermectin, a dewormer, to treat covid which is a virus claiming it works. All the peer reviewed studies said it did not work against Covid but the right still claimed there were studies that did show it worked. Not peer reviewed and not done by the doctors in that field but hey they showed it worked right? There is an entire doctors group started by right wing religious bigots that still claim conversion therapy works and should be used on kids. On kids, and some of that is real torture like electric shocks. Mainstream doctors say it doesn’t work and doing that is harmful. But there is that group pushing it.
So why do we have splinter groups that push alternatives to the accepted mainstream science? Is it because the majority of doctors are all wrong and this fringe group has had an enlightenment? If that was the case the majority of doctors would look over the data and change their stance and method of treatment. But that is not happening. Just as the majority of doctors did not switch to using Ivermectin for Covid, the majority of doctors still believe that treating transgender kids with social transitioning and puberty blockers is the right treatment.
Now to the crux of the story. A person’s story of being pushed into transitioning and regrets it. Oh why did not someone slow down this rush to make her a him. Only Nan let’s look at facts. I can show you far more stories of trans kids fighting for years to get medical help including mental health counseling and medications such as puberty blockers and were delayed or denied. Why do you think the WH had to release documents and use the power of the government to get kids these treatments? Because they are being denied on a large scale in red states for political / religious reasons not medical. Just the opposite of forcing kids into them. Now this girl and all the others kids she says were failed, if they were not treated by mental health professionals first before anything else then they did not go through the approved treatment regime. Which makes me skeptical. See there are years of procedures to go through before you get puberty blockers as a pre-puberty kid. During puberty they try to quicken the processes but it is still intense and time consuming. Kids don’t get to walk into and get puberty blockers like ordering French fries. Remember the US system, someone has to pay for that appointment and medication. And any surgeon that did sexual reassignment on a minor without that medical history work up is looking to get sued. So again I doubt a lot of this.
Nice switch in the middle of the article from young Choe to 23 year old Helena. Helena is a detransition advocate, understandable as she detransitioned, but notice her transition story doesn’t start until she is 18. Yes as a teen she wore boys clothes which I guess means pants and shirts, and she cut her hair short. But no medical intervention until she was 18 and initiated it herself. She doesn’t mention going to mental health professionals only a school guidance counselor. So as an adult she went to a clinic and got testosterone. Good for her. I had six months of work ups after a year of lowering testosterone lab numbers before I could get my prescription for the medication. Ron is still waiting as his doctor doesn’t like the idea and Ron doesn’t want to really push him. He gave Ron the pill that backfired on him badly. He has made Ron almost terrified to use the injections. So good for her to walk in and just get it on request. Makes me wonder?
OK I could keep tearing this article apart but I think you get the idea. It is a hit piece by a right wing author with an issue against transgenders.
But the real kernel of truth in this situation is the one missed. There are people who regret transitioning from one gender to the other. That is true. There are reasons some do it such as pressure from family, church, or others. But some do it really from regret at transitioning. I have posted this before and cited the study. The number is 2.4%. Really 2.4% detransition. That is not a lot of people. I forgot the study that is from but I just looked it up again and here is one study saying the rate is less than 1%.
https://journals.lww.com/prsgo/fulltext/2021/03000/regret_after_gender_affirmation_surgery__a.22.aspx This is a group of doctors from a Plastic and Reconstructive surgery association.
Again a real small amount. But I was looking to see the rate of people who regret having other types of surgery. So I used knee surgery. Boy that is bad. Here is some I found.
Previous studies have shown 6–30% of patients are dissatisfied after the surgery, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6961288/#:~:text=Total%20knee%20arthroplasty%20(TKA)%20is,complications%20%5B3%E2%80%9312%5D.
A recent study found that 20% of people are unhappy with their knee replacements. https://www.considerable.com/health/pain-management/knee-replacement-regrets/
So you can see the rate of regret for transitioning is really low compared to other surgeries. I wont bore you with a list of other ones as if you want you can google them.
The idea pushed that kids are being rushed, hustled, forced, pressured in to transitioning and then having mass detransition is not true. Is there some, sure just as there are gay people who hate that they are gay. It happens.
Let’s talk about kids killing themselves. First how many have died from Covid, lets use that as a baseline.
Since the beginning of the current year, 179 children have died from Covid-19 in the US, compared with 735 children in the preceding 20 months, according to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The figures mainly involve the age group 0-17 and were gathered from about May of 2020 to early March 2022.
Figures similar to the AAP’s appear in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) weekly provisional data on Covid deaths. From 2020 up to 9 March this year, a total is given of 894 deaths among those aged 0-17, of which 129 – almost 15% – have occurred since the start of 2022. both are from the link below.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/11/us-child-covid-deaths-omicron-surge
Oh great gravy the following statistics are upsetting so everyone reading please be in a safe place first. I know it upset me.
https://www.sccenter.org/programs-and-services/for-teens/teen-suicide-facts/
So let me dig into that 5,000 a year as that is a lot of kids. This is from the Trevor project, which is a pro-LGBTQ+ group. But suicide statistics are the same if you are pro or con LGBTQ+ I would think. I might be wrong.
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/research-briefs/estimate-of-how-often-lgbtq-youth-attempt-suicide-in-the-u-s/
Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people, with LGBTQ youth being four times more likely to seriously consider suicide, to make a plan for suicide, and to attempt suicide versus their peers.
MAR. 11, 2021
Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020), with LGBTQ youth being four times more likely to seriously consider suicide, to make a plan for suicide, and to attempt suicide than their peers (Johns et al., 2019; Johns et al., 2020). Understanding the number of LGBTQ youth who seriously consider and attempt suicide, as well as how often suicide risk occurs, improves our ability to serve and advocate for LGBTQ youth.
The Trevor Project estimates that at least one LGBTQ youth between the ages of 13–24 attempts suicide every 45 seconds in the U.S.
Because many LGBTQ youth report attempting suicide multiple times in a given year, this estimate likely underrepresents the extent of how often LGBTQ youth attempt suicide in the U.S. Additionally, The Trevor Project’s past-year attempted suicide rates are based on non-probability data that trend slightly slower than rates among national probability datasets
The process for deriving these numbers can be found in The Trevor Project’s National Estimate of LGBTQ Youth Seriously Considering Suicide. Based on our previous estimation process, there are approximately 2,647,755 LGBTQ youth living in the United States who are between the ages of 13–18 and approximately 2,529,117 who are between the ages of 19–24.
2.6 million LGBTQ+ kids suicide a year. You wrote you thought I was doing a typical over statement. We on the left were upset with 894 kids that died of Covid. I think 2.6 million who committed suicide due to pressures of being LGBTQ+ is something that is a serious issue to be addressed. So yes Nan, LGBTQ+ kids are killing themselves in large numbers.
Your last paragraph is what I thought we / I was doing. The difference is as I said at the start, I don’t think Tildeb is discussing in good faith. For example you read what he linked to and did not realize that it was a hit piece pushed by an anti-trans author who has a sub-stack (blogs) full of anti-trans stuff. She has no degree in anything medical or dealing with gender, but she is pushing anti-trans stories. That is disingenuous. I learned long ago to look at the source and see if they are qualified to make the assertions they do. You say everyone must make up their own minds. That is true. What I am trying to do is present the facts as they are. The truth without the distortions and bias of anti-trans hate groups. The simple fact is the majority of medical doctors and medical associations such as the AMA support the transgender procedures established for kids which included mental health examinations along with medical exams, social transitioning, and the use of puberty blockers when appropriate. Those are facts. Just as it is a fact that the majority of medical professionals support the Covid vaccines as important treatment for Covid. I do think that as a lay person we need to trust the majority of the medical profession. And see the fringe groups for what they are.
As I said at the top I tried to answer the questions you asked. If you have more let me know.
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Hello Nan. I wanted to add that I searched for more information on a 15 year old detransitioning after breast surgery. I searched for different ways of putting it. Know what I found. I found that same article on Fox and real clear politics, both are far right media. Nowhere else on any mainstream platform. But even more interesting I found Penny. Penny had the same story, she was rushed into it at the same age as Chloe, she had the same symptoms as Chloe, the same surgery as Chloe, and regretted it the same as Chloe. And amazingly Penny said she was just needing mental health help that no one offered instead of transitioning, just like Chloe. Not saying the story is made up but I strongly suspect it. Again Penny’s story was on a far-right media site. But not covered anywhere else. Makes me wonder.
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Motivated reasoning versus confirmation bias. You might want to check them out to explain why you dance between context and content.
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Hello Tildeb, I think I laid out the points very well in both replies to Nan. If something is only on the radical right media and nearly identical to push the same points … Well it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what is going on. Oh and I did a little digging into Bari Weiss turns out she made a crusade to cross the country trying to get what she felt was liberal professors fired. It was her big passion. She was the big cancel culture that the right complains about. Guess who Suzy Weiss is the sister of? Yes that is right. Then I read that Suzy wrote an article attacking collage admission standards because she did not get into the Ivy League colleges she felt she deserved to be accepted to. To many of those other people getting preference it seems. Right wing much? Should I trust her reporting on trans issues?
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Sorry, Scottie … Waaaay more than I care to read! Especially on this subject! Perhaps you feel the need to elaborate for others who read your blog, but the proliferation of words on the topic does not alter my reluctance to give a “thumbs up” on what’s happening.
Of course it’s your prerogative to assume my position “might be routed in traditions simply because of the generation you are part of,” but I feel somewhat insulted that you would even hint at that! I feel that my willingness to even discuss this subject is evidence that I do try to “stay up with” things that are happening in the world today. I have never been one to bury my head in the sand.
As for the article, I’m not going to argue the source or the “politics” behind it — for one main reason. I am still of the very strong opinion that there ARE kids in puberty who are being influenced by external sources and, as a result, are acting against their own well-being. While I won’t deny there are some who are genuinely affected, I think the entire issue is being blown WAY out of proportion.
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Hello Nan. I doubt you can honestly say your feelings toward things are not colored by your life experiences. That is simply the way it works. Even people against slavery in the 1860s did not think that blacks were equal to whites. Lincoln wanted to send all blacks to a country they could feel comfortable living in as he was sure they were not equal to whites and that would cause them issues. I am the sum of my life, the people in our congress are the sum of their times, and you while you may have kept up and be open minded still have those same society teachings that we all must overcome. We all do. That doesn’t mean you buried your head in the sand, it means you had to overcome those perceptions to change it to your current one. For example, 75 year old Manchin was asked about legalizing cannabis and his response was “why”? ” I have not even thought of it, why would we do that, oh you don’t smoke do you”? he asked the interviewer. His mind set, like most of the others his age in congress is at odds with over 80% of the country that wants it legalized. There was no insult meant, we are the sum of our lives.
I worked hard on that reply. I spent hours looking up the information so I feel insulted you wouldn’t read it. But here is the thing I want you to really understand. That is the number of LGBTQ+ kids who commit suicide. Not the number that try, that is the number that succeeded. See you wrote:
I admit I got the math wrong. I thought my figuring showed that there were 2.6 million plus suicides. That is not the true number. That is the number of estimated LGBTQ+ kids and of them 1 in 4 tried to kill themselves. I admit I did not get the math right.
One in four teenagers who identified as LGBTQ+ said they attempted suicide during the first half of 2021, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC’s findings also revealed that almost half (46.8%) of teenagers who said they are lesbian, gay or bisexual seriously considered a suicide attempt during that same time frame. These results came to light from the CDC’s first national survey of high school students, a project funded by the federal CARES Act to assess the mental health of American youth during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now according to the Trevor Project.
Summary
Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020), with LGBTQ youth being four times more likely to seriously consider suicide, to make a plan for suicide, and to attempt suicide than their peers (Johns et al., 2019; Johns et al., 2020). Understanding the number of LGBTQ youth who seriously consider and attempt suicide, as well as how often suicide risk occurs, improves our ability to serve and advocate for LGBTQ youth.
Finding
The Trevor Project estimates that at least one LGBTQ youth between the ages of 13–24 attempts suicide every 45 seconds in the U.S.
Because many LGBTQ youth report attempting suicide multiple times in a given year, this estimate likely underrepresents the extent of how often LGBTQ youth attempt suicide in the U.S. Additionally, The Trevor Project’s past-year attempted suicide rates are based on non-probability data that trend slightly slower than rates among national probability datasets
Methodology
A. Estimating the Number of LGBTQ Youth Ages of 13–24 in the U.S.
This estimate is based on Trevor’s previous estimates of the total number of LGBTQ youth between ages 13–24 who live in the U.S. each year. The process for deriving these numbers can be found in The Trevor Project’s National Estimate of LGBTQ Youth Seriously Considering Suicide. Based on our previous estimation process, there are approximately 2,647,755 LGBTQ youth living in the United States who are between the ages of 13–18 and approximately 2,529,117 who are between the ages of 19–24.
B. Estimating the Number of LGBTQ Youth Who Attempted Suicide in the Past Year
The Trevor Project’s 2021 National Survey of LGBTQ Youth Mental Health found that 19.0% of LGBTQ youth ages 13–18 and 8.3% of LGBTQ youth ages 19–24 reported attempting suicide in the past year. Applying these rates to the estimates of LGBTQ youth living in the U.S. results in an estimated 503,073 LGBTQ youth between the ages of 13–18 and 209,917 between the ages of 19–24 who attempted suicide in the past year, for a total of 712,990 LGBTQ youth between the ages of 13–24.
C. Estimating How Often LGBTQ Youth Attempt Suicide in the U.S.
To approximate how often attempts occur, the estimated total number of LGBTQ youth ages 13–24 who attempted suicide (712,990) was divided by the total number of minutes in a year (525,600), resulting in an estimated 1.356525992 attempts each minute or .02260876654 per second. Dividing the number 1 by the estimate per second, provides an estimate of how often an attempt occurs in seconds, which was 44.23063055. As such, we estimate that at least one LGBTQ youth between the ages of 13–24 attempts suicide in the U.S. every 45 seconds.
So I don’t think that is an over statement. But in case you do please tell me the acceptable number of LGBTQ+ kids trying to kill themselves because of how they are treated or seen on our society. I think it is already too many.
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Scottie, I totally understand the significance of this topic to you, but you and I don’t (and may never) see it in the same light. Call me old. Call me a stick-in-the-mud. Call me whatever seems to fit.
There’s little doubt that you could probably write an entire book on the subject (in fact, you almost have! 😄) — but that’s not going to move me any closer to seeing it the same as you. So let’s just call it a draw. OK?
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Hello Nan. I understand that we don’t agree on trans issues. Fine. Remember this is a conversation not an argument is the way I feel. I worked hard searching for the information because I thought you wanted it.
Here is where I think we can agree. I did the math correctly this time. That means 662,000 LGBTQ+ try to kill themselves a year. Tried to kill themselves, not thought about it. I know you care about that.
You don’t want dead kids. I don’t want dead kids. It seems the radical right / Republicans don’t care about dead kids as long as they are LGBTQ+.
We don’t agree on every aspect of trans rights and issues, but I bet we agree on enough to fight the radical right’s / Republicans attempt to increase the number of dead LGBTQ+ kids. At least I think we do.
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No, I don’t recall saying I wanted information on this issue. I simply made some observations of my own and you quickly countered them. It’s OK, Scottie. We’re just not in the same place on this topic.
As for the suicides? No one likes to hear/read about teenagers attempting (or committing) suicide. For whatever reason! That’s all I’m going to say.
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Hello Nan. Sorry had an issue here to deal with. Your last that you think the issue is being blown way out proportion, in that we agree. That is part of what I have been trying to refute. All these state legislatures banning trans girls from sports when asked to name one in their state, they cannot. It is not a big issue. Trans people are not flooding bathrooms causing trouble, they are not flooding gyms causing trouble, the simple point is this is something being claimed as a political wedge issue. The object is to cause the same fear as gay teachers are recruiting your kids, mentioning same sex parents in grade school is instructing kids in sexual orientation. It is all about building fear and hate going into elections. These politicians cannot cite a single incident they are legislating against because that is not the point. It is about causing the fear. Those people will be in your bathroom when they may have or not been already and you never noticed. Instead, now girls who look boyish are getting challenged in the bathrooms. I often say notice how it is always trans girls in girl’s bathrooms / locker rooms, but these same people don’t care about trans boys in boy’s bathrooms / changing rooms. Why? because it doesn’t cause the same fear. A boy in a girl’s space is scary, a girl in a boy’s space is great and titillating to these people. Same with the idea of trans women in women sports. The right drives the fear of “real” women losing to fake women. But they cannot show it happening. One transwoman who spent her life before training, took the time off to transition then came back to compete and is not really doing as great as other women, but every time she wins the right blows it up. That is why I tell people to look at the source and look at the facts. But you are right Nan, it is far over blown. Just let trans people be who they are in our society. They are no threat to anyone and in more danger from the right wing than you are from them.
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Your denialism that this is even an issue is the problem I’m trying to address. I’m trying (and failing) to point out that denying the very real issues of implementing this ideology throughout institutions like education is a significant factor at driving a small subset of moderate voters into the arms of voting Republican. Because I think the Republican party is an existential threat to the US remaining a liberal democracy, I raise the issue that not enough people on Left realize that their denialism of these very real concerns are helping the Republicans win at the polls. Blanket support for any and all trans and race and gender ideology implemented by Democrats is a very real problem in this regard, as is the automatic vilification of any real liberal who criticizes this identity ideology. The Left is eating its own.
You automatically damn the person raising criticism as some kind of right wing bigot because, in your mind, there is no issue on one side and nothing but bigotry and disinformation on the other. Hence, I call this denialism similar to a creationist religious belief and any refutation by facts blasphemy.
For example, the BC School Trustees Association voted almost unanimously (97.2%) to continue the implementation of unisex bathrooms in all schools. So enlightened. Parents of girls prior to the vote told these trustees that their daughters aren’t using the bathrooms, are too uncomfortable using the facilities when a period arrives, that they are skipping school, wanting to stay home, refusing to go into a bathroom where the boys are peeing in the sinks and who enjoy ‘teasing’ girls – sometimes much younger girls – and sometimes assaulting them.
Facts don’t matter.
Along comes a champion of social justice and insists this is all made up, that anyone who raises an issue like this is a bigot, that such parents are transphobic, that such occasions are so rare that there’s really no issue at all so it’s hate and fear driving the criticism.
Sound familiar? Guess how those parents are going to vote when they have an opportunity to express their very deep anger at this treatment in the secrecy of the ballot box?
Oh right… it’s all made up. And besides, think of the suicide rate of the the poor trans sexual children we’re ‘saving’. So virtuous. So many still to save. Let the door knocking begin: do you have a moment and have you heard the “Good News”?
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Hello Tildeb. You are failing because it is a political driven issue that is not a real life problem in the world. The moderates that are being driven to the republicans is a talking point and something used to cause fear to prevent speak up on trans rights. Polly said something similar a long time ago, she said it is only the trans part driving the Republican party as gays were accepted a long time ago. Turned out we see that is false also.
The people making this an issue are going to vote conservative anyway. The people making trans issues a problem are watching conservative media, they are conservative in thought, they feel more comfortable on that side of the spectrum. I am talking about those who are making it an issue. Not those who are unsure or feel that some parts may go too far. The ones pushing this such as yourself are actively pushing an anti-trans agenda. That is why you do not care about any other topic I post accept spending less money on the military to give the people more benefits. Notice the two issues you objected to on my blog? What do they have in common? Oh yes they are right wing positions and the data you used is from right wing sources. Ah enlightenment.
Your dooms day scenarios are not happening. Trans people are not sweeping all the women’s sports trophies. They are not pushing women out of sports. It is a ginned-up fear mongering attempting to hurt trans women, just as if a trans women uses the women’s bathroom they will rape your little daughter and assault your wife bullshit. Again, all out of the right-wing playbook. Never a thought that trans women my just need to relieve themselves. They have to be there to rape and assault.
I admit the left is not good at handling the messaging coming out of the right, simply because the corporate Democrats are afraid of upsetting their wealthy donors, who are the same wealthy donors to the Republicans. The days of the Ted Kennedy type liberal Democrat was almost over. But they are coming back and the people like that. tRump showed the people like fighters who will claim to stick up for their interests against the wealthy and big business. Of course tRump lied, but that is what the right does. But the liberals are making a resurgence and that terrifies the right, because they know the public supports the liberal positions. Why do you think there is such an attempt on the right to silence any mention of the positives of the LGBTQ+? It is clear, the majority of the public support the LGBTQ+ and that support has been growing. So the right has to stop anything positive while keep hammering how evil, bad, horrible, woman raping, girl destroying the LGBTQ+ really is. I wish I could post all the stories I see that are just this fear mongering to get the idea into the public, and you help do that for them.
The latest I read is the idea that in 20 years or so, there won’t be lesbians because all the girls who like girls will be trans boys. That trope has been pushed by TERFs in the UK for a while. But it is really playing into the right wings idea that peoples gender and sexuality is a choice that can be changed at a whim. It is not like that.
I understand Tildeb you are male? Could you tomorrow really say you believe you are female and go through years of abuse and social / medical treatments to transition? No, because you are male gendered in your head. That part that tells you who you are. It is the same for transgender people, the part in their head that tells them who they are tells them they are in the wrong body. To remedy that is not a threat to anyone else, but there are people who see it as a threat to their ability to force others to live by their narrow view of what must be allowed. Transgender doesn’t mean criminal psycho that the right is trying to make it
Tildeb dear, I call those using these issues against trans as bigots because it doesn’t affect them, and these issues are made up to appeal to bigots. Really. Oh my god women who look manly may be using the same bathroom, flee for your life! I don’t use female bathrooms I don’t know about you, but when I go into a bathroom I don’t inspect everyone coming in or going out to see if I think they are manly enough. I have known all levels of men in my life, and I can tell you what is shown up top never tends to match what is below. Are women doing that, have an inspection before use. I have posted of women stopped and assaulted trying to use the bathroom because some right winger did not think they were feminine enough. My gods that should drive real feminist crazy and does I can tell you the TERFs are a small but very loud group like magas. Judge a female on her looks, how dare you.
I do not automatically damn any idea or person. I have investigated the issues deeply and found they are crap made up to scare people. Be afraid, be very afraid, the gays are coming the gays are coming … oh, not scared of the gays anymore … okay … the trans are coming the trans are coming, be afraid be afraid. This too shall pass if the right wing doesn’t have its way with these anti LGBTQ+ laws.
Good gods I hope people see through you. Unisex bathrooms mean boys are peeing in the sinks. Girls with periods are afraid to go into them … because girls first are always afraid of boys and boys seeing a girl will have to rape them right? Then the girls are afraid because of their period … are girls just disrobing at the door and waving bloody clothing around while dripping blood. Shit as a boy that would have terrified me. And assaulting the girls of course the boys are. No girls are assaulting the little boys as that is not allowed in that boys are never weak but always the strong aggressors because that causes fear. Girls are little defenseless unable to protect themselves, unable to remember which boy it was and tell the teacher or authorities, but yes it really is happening. Sure believe me it is, and big foot and ET are having a baby on the school playground next week.
Hey Tildeb I seen those same parents on TV storming US school board meetings claiming that asking kids to wear face masks was making it so they couldn’t breath and god created their faces to be seen so masks were the work of Satan. You know a cloth across a kids face on Halloween was ok but in school was an abomination of the worse kind.
Again all bullshit designed to cause fear. I bet if I tracked the article back it would be to a radical right wing outlet. Why do you not provide links to these big important news stories, is because they are always on a anti-trans site? How many parents told the school their girls would skip vs how many parents supported it. Was it two? Five? How many kids in the school? Just as an aside many countries use unisex bathrooms with no issues or trouble. I used them in Germany. No problems. Peed, popped, showered, brushed my teeth all the other stuff one did in a big unisex bathroom with no issues or problems. Good lord, google Chinese kindergarten bathrooms. No stalls, just toilets with small dividers and the boys and girls all doing it with no problem, the bigger girls help the little boys clean their bottoms. Maybe what we should do its not teach kids that thing between their legs makes the entirety of who they are and is the most important that must always be a hidden part of themselves. Kids don’t learn to fear that thing until adults teach them too.
Oh an on the girls period thing. I grew up with a couple hell spawn of that gender. They bragged about how if they wanted to get out of a class or skip school they would use that issue, that “evil menstruation thing” and get out of class or school. One sibling must have had a running period flow for all of high school to get out of PE. Every few days of the week they had PE. All month. For years. They were proud of them selves. They are also all maga right wing Republicans now.
It is driven by hate, these attacks on the trans gender. Trust me I know it is not made up, the information claimed is but the hate is real. Is racism made up? But this tells me all I will ever need to know about you Tildeb. You don’t care about the death of a child as long as the child is a child is acting as don’t support. You now sicken me.
See I care about all children and especially the children in right wing family’s being indoctrinated who might be LGBTQ+ being told they are the worst possible thing their parents can imagine and so hated. I care about the sexually abused children being denied sexual education that might inform them can tell on their parents who are doing it. Again due to the lack of good sexual education I went several years wondering if every time I was raped as a kid I would become pregnant like my hell spawn sisters. So you make light and jokes about saving kids, it seems what the right does. I will keep fighting for every kids I can against the bigotry of the right and the misinformation you push.
Oh and bless your heart.
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“it is a political driven issue that is not a real life problem in the world.”
See? Denialism. And the Republicans are making hay with it.
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Oh dear, to disagree with you is denialism, yet your denial of the facts is not? I see. Oh yes Republicans are having a great time spreading misinformation and misdirecting people. It is far easier to lie than to correct the lie. But it is well proven the right has no trouble lying on issues they don’t like or support. They love to do it. It comes right from the top of the party. But I really wonder at the followers of those lies. Since it is not much of a political gain for them it must be one of either hate or misinformation. There is not much that can be done about the hate, but I can refute the misinformation here on my blog. The misinformation you repeat and put out. I cannot be scared that Republicans are messaging hate, I have faced that hate all my life Tildeb. I know that the right has to have a boogieman / scapegoat to create fear in their cult like followers. First, it was the gays who were coming for your kids, shouldn’t be in schools, and so on. That stopped being scary because gays are known by everyone. So since trans gender people are few and not well know the right will make them the new scary boogieman / scapegoat if they can. Before the gays it was the blacks. Fear, fear, fear it is what the right is about. Keep the base sired up, afraid and angry. Trans people are just the current target, and of course the right is trying hard to make that the entire LGBTQ+. That should give every one pause who thinks they are safe because they are not trans.
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To disagree with me is not denialism; to dismiss reality is. That’s what you’re doing. You are dismissing the real life medical harm to real life girls as not a problem. You are dismissing the real life harm to real live women in sports, in prisons, as not a problem. You are dismissing the real life stories and the real life medical harm revealed by detransitioners and court cases as not a problem. In every case, you wave away the harm to wave away the problem. The centers of transition in Denmark, Sweden, and England share ‘my’ concern you insist is not a problem, you insist is based on ‘my’ fear, ‘my’ hate.
You’re not thinking straight, Scottie.
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Hello Tildeb. Same right back to you.
See from where I stand you are the one dismissing reality. You’re dismissing the majority of doctors organizations that say treating transgenders with social transitioning, medical treatments including puberty blockers, and eventually surgery is the proper treatment. You’re making up a boogieman of harm to “real live women” in sports that is not happening. Your fixed on the 2.4% of trans people that detransition but ignoring the 97.6% that are happy they transitioned living life as they really are. You found a few places that share your view. great. Covid deniers found US governors that agreed with them also. I know of states that have legalized over the counter sale of Ivermectin dewormer for the treatment of Covid, not that it helps, but they claim it does. They are wrong just as are the places you cite.
You’re not thinking straight Tildeb.
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“You’re making up a boogieman of harm…”
Yes… except for all the facts. And it is those that I think matters more than a dismissive wave and a denial they exist.
“But what are the benefits and adverse effects of starting young kids on these powerful [puberty blockers] and then hormones? We don’t know,” says Dr. Frederic Ettner, a physician who has worked with transgender patients for over two decades.
“… physicians want to be cautious in administering treatments like puberty blockers and hormones when they aren’t sure what the consequences might be, or even the best way of administering treatment, says Dr. Stephen Rosenthal, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospital.
From NIH: ““not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones.”
What about the facts of transitioning? What does that mean for a 13 year old girl thinking of starting the process unaware of the actual risks even for adults?
From Scott Newgent’s article here (get it? New Gent?): “I had seven surgeries. I also had a massive pulmonary embolism, a helicopter life-flight ride, an emergency ambulance ride, a stress-induced heart attack, sepsis, a 17-month recurring infection due to using the wrong skin during a (failed) phalloplasty, 16 rounds of antibiotics, three weeks of daily IV antibiotics, the loss of all my hair, (only partially successful) arm reconstructive surgery, permanent lung and heart damage, a cut bladder, insomnia-induced hallucinations—oh and frequent loss of consciousness due to pain from the hair on the inside of my urethra. All this led to a form of PTSD that made me a prisoner in my apartment for a year. Between me and my insurance company, medical expenses exceeded $900,000.”
(And he’s in favor of transitioning. Which is fine… because he as an adult can GIVE informed consent. But not kids because we don’t know the long term effects! There’s the real science, Scottie. Oh, and please read why you’ve been fooled about the suicide risk. You’ve never seen the correction, have you? You probably didn’t know anything about it because, hey, why should you? You already know The Truth.)
And so:
“As someone who has experienced medical transition first-hand, I am convinced that it’s better to err on the side on discretion, and leave life-altering decisions to adults who have the benefit of a fully developed brain.”
Your ‘boggieman of harm’ is very real. You’re just dismissing it.
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Tildeb. You are welcome to your opinion, but not your own facts. Those are not facts any more than that trump won the 2020 election is a fact.
I have addressed your random doctor issue. You seem to ignore anything that you don’t agree with.
AMA reinforces opposition to restrictions on transgender medical care
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-reinforces-opposition-restrictions-transgender-medical-care
Lastly did you even bother to read the last reply? You love the 2.4% that regret transitioning. Sorry they did not find the comfort in life they needed. But you want to ignore the 97.6% that love the choice they made.
Again you are focused on a small subset of an issue and claim it is the majority. You seem driven to prove something that is not true. I don’t know if it is driven by politics or bigotry for you. But it is deceptive. And that is a tactic used by both the right wing and bigots.
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Facts are what I’m most concerned with. Not mine, not yours, just facts. Here’s a good list to start with.
You claim, for example, very high rates of satisfaction and very low rates of dissatisfaction with gender transitioning. Are these the facts? No. These are merely extensions of an imposed belief. The facts are not aligned, especially considering the explosion of cases for children by sex-based chemical intervention that is AUTOMATICALLY prescribed by command from EVERY MERDICAL ORGANIZATION to ANYONE of ANY age (yes, some do not take it and this accounts for about 5% of those who seek medical counselling about ‘gender’ -whatever the hell that is – and the supposed ‘identity’ that should be supported by physical ‘transitioning’). You may wonder why every medical college has gone along with this when the FACT is that NO ONE understands the long term effects of this chemical intervention on CHILDREN.
“National Health Service adult GIC (Gender Identity Clinics in Britain) between 1 September 2017 and 31 August 2018: The treatment pathway was completed by 56.1%. All interventions initially sought were accessed by 58%; 94% accessed hormones but only 47.7% accessed gender reassignment surgery; 21.7% disengaged; and 19.4% were re-referred. Multivariate analysis identified coexisting neurodevelopmental disorders (odds ratio [OR] = 5.7, 95% CI = 1.7–19), previous adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) per reported ACE (OR = 1.5, 95% CI = 1.1–1.9), substance misuse during treatment (OR = 4.3, 95% CI = 1.1–17.6) and mental health concerns during treatment (OR = 2.2, 95% CI 1.1–4.4) as independently associated with accessing care.”
The conclusion?
“Neurodevelopmental disorders or ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) suggest complexity requiring consideration during the assessment process. Managing mental ill health and substance misuse during treatment needs optimising. Detransitioning might be more frequent than previously reported. might be more frequent than previously reported.”
The recommendation here is NOT supportive of affirmation therapy. It is for greater considerations than this blanket approach imposed by professional colleges on ALL medical and counselling involvement. ALL, Scottie. No exceptions. Whether from a 12 years old confused child or a 92 years old murderer: affirmation only. This is the ‘medical’ aspect you keep referring to for support of your BELIEF in the no harm, no foul for medicalized intervention. These are not the facts.
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Ah Tildeb, never one to not have the last word. I went over this several times. Again you disregard the medical studies done in the US and other places that say the detransition rate is lower than 1% to as high as 6% and in the latest peer reviewed study done it was 2.4%. I even provided citations.
The link goes to a page that has the logo “No child is born in the wrong body” The slogan used by the TERF, religious right, and the right wing media such as Fox, Breitbart, OANN, and Newsmax.
No child is born being attracted to the same gender. No child is born gay. They are recruited to it. They must be peer pressured and talked into it. Heck if they don’t see gay or hear of gay, they will never think of it. They will all be straight! Praise Jesus and pass the collection plate to elect more republicans.
Sorry Tildeb. Heard all that bullshit before. It was a lie then and it is a lie now.
Instead you go to TERF island of Brittin to cite data of people who never fully transitioned as evidence of people being unhappy about transitioning? Next you will go to Afghanistan to show how gays really don’t exist or prefer to be dead. Yes let’s take the small island of Britain’s findings about people who never finished the transition procedures to show that people who did are unhappy with transitioning. Yes people who never finished that plate the ordered at the restaurant are the best ones to rate it. You know we talked about the groups that don’t agree with the majority. Remember the ivermectin and anti-vaccine doctors? Come back to me when the majority of doctor groups worldwide changes their stance. Because I trust the majority more than the fringe.
Hey what are the guidelines in Canada where you live? Let me go look that up.
Wow that is so great. It must be nice to live in a progressive country. Canada also goes by the counseling and medical workups, social transitioning, puberty blockers when the right age is reached, and then when appropriate medical treatment to sexually transition. Only Canada is much more aggressive about it. And the government pays for it all with no government interference. Wow if only the US trans kids had access to the Canadian health system. I wonder why you did not use your own countries stats? From what I read the Yukon is the gold standard in trans care.
But I want to address the very large problem you have. You think you know more than any other person when you are driven by your feelings on an issue. 98 doctors out of 100 agree with trans youth care but Tildeb knows the majority are wrong and the 2% are right. Look at how you wrote your comment and what you capitalized. Every medical organization believes in doing this even though you know they are wrong. All the doctors and medical scientists say this is the right thing to do but you say they don’t know what it is doing to children.
Hey I heard that one about the Covid vaccines, no one knows what they will do long terms so don’t take them. Your fears / dislike for trans treatments for kids are so much more knowledgeable than the medical doctor’s science. You admit it. The majority is against you but you are sure you are still the one that is correct.
” … than this blanket approach imposed by professional colleges on ALL medical and counselling involvement. ALL, Scottie. No exceptions”
It is a worldwide conspiracy I tell you, fear, fear, be afraid they are rushing all the preteen kids who wake up on Tuesday’s straight into surgery to chop off or add on bits and then straight to the dressing chambers to get the new gender clothing before being rushed right to the sex orgy party.
Tildeb this is not what is happening and I think you know that but this is what you keep sounding like.
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Oh man, the war to get the last word has begun. You cannot see yourself can you. By they way I did not read what you wrote. I won’t be reading anymore of your garbage when I have already responded to it. Everything that needs to be said has been said, your failed incorrect anti-trans driven hate crap has been refuted, answered, corrected, and yet you keep going and going and going. I can guarantee it will be more propaganda from some source created just to spread anti-trans hate. It will be more misinformation / misdirection of some story made up in part or whole to show how harmful transgender people are, how the doctors are mutilating kids, or that parents are forcing their kids to dress in dresses publicly so they are not embarrassed when little johnny shows moon eyes of love to little Billy. Some of what you wrote I traced back to show it was a partial true bit of information with most of it missing so it could be twisted to make the claim it was something it never was. All hog slop to misdirect or misinform and to appeal to people’s emotions. Such a trans women are stealing all the records from born women, when in the very swim meet the trans woman lost races to the non-trans women. I might as well be watching Fox news on the subject except you don’t have as good graphics.
Understand that when you tried to claim all biologist say sperm and egg is how we determine human sex you lost all credibility. You used the word gamete. Gamete, which in reality is a mature haploid male or female germ cell which is able to unite with another of the opposite sex in sexual reproduction to form a zygote. Sperm and egg! But you just couldn’t admit you had to use that to justify your argument.
I have read a bunch of biologists and even shared some peer reviewed articles with you that showed that is not the way they view human sex / gender and its markers but you refused to change because your stance is not information driven but by your bigotry.
You had your say and then some. Notice we are not going to your blog and acting like you are here. But here you are again and again on a single subject to grind an axe that already has been shown to my satisfaction to be broken and deceitful. No one else is commenting because we have had our say and realize no one is going to change their view. The readers and viewers might comment on a new post but not on one 21 days old. You just cannot accept that others do not agree with you right away and so keep writing the hate drive misinformation.
I think you cannot accept that people don’t agree with you and will repeat the same nonsense until you die so long as you can get the last word in. You once argued with me for three days very long days over who was a larger threat to my safety in my community, loud belligerent Christian rednecks that live all around me or the few Muslims who are friendly to me. Your islamophobia was so deep, you who didn’t even live anywhere near me in the deep south, were unable to accept I knew my own situation better than you. That is the person you are. Apparently you’re a bigot, and you will fight to the very end of reason to push your bigotry. But we don’t need it here. You have tried to dress it up but it comes down to punching down at a group of people that don’t harm you and don’t cause the harm you pretend they do. But I have addressed all this.
So as I wrote at the top, lets see if you can resist the need you have to have the last word, again and again and again …
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Scottie, I’ve expressed my concerns about this matter to you before, but I think they bear repeating.
IMO, tildeb is not so much discounting this issue as a whole, but is more concerned that there are young people who are being “treated” before they are even old enough to make sound decisions about life, let alone themselves. And I totally agree with him on this. Counseling and a wait-and-see attitude should always be the standard.
For me, it isn’t so much a matter of whether transgender issues exist as it is that the sudden and extreme attention to the issue can be detrimental to some young people. And yes, suicides can and do result, but there are many factors that come into play during this stage of life. It’s not all about transgenderism.
As for the AMA issue — certainly there should not be “governmental intrusion” — not in this or ANY issue that involves a person’s body (e.g., abortion!). It MUST be a personal decision made between the doctor and the patient.
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Hello Nan. The medical guidelines call for complete medical work ups including examinations from doctors in the gender fields to determine if the young person / child is truly trans or is doing it for another reason. Then social transitioning, and when nearing puberty the use of puberty blockers. I go over the reasons why later on. Then when it is the appropriate time and the person is sure of their gender and with parental permission if the person is 16 or 17, the use of hormones or other medical treatments can begin. If no permission for a parent or guardian is given the minor must wait until 18 to begin medical transitioning.
Let’s be clear Nan, the law states that before the age 16 it is illegal to perform any sexual reassignment surgery. Period. Cannot be done. Yes you can chop parts of the boys dick off for religious reasons, you can change the sex of intersex kids when they are not old enough to understand what is happening at any age from birth up. But for transgender kids before 16 sexual reassignment surgery is not happening.
In the US a person 16 and over after the appropriate medical steps have been taken with the permission of the parent or guardian can get sexual reassignment surgery. With the permission of a parent or guardian. Kids are not doing it themselves. We claim parents can make life or death decisions for their minor children, are you saying this is one that parents cannot make with / for their 16 and 17 year old.
Tildeb likes to claim girls are rushing into surgery and then regretting it. But peer reviewed studies have shown that only 2.4% of people who have transitioned regret it and detransition. That leaves 97.6% that are happy and comfortable with their choices to transition. That is 97.6%, the majority for who transitioning when they were young before puberty was the correct thing to do. Shouldn’t we see that as evidence that the proper way is just what the majority of the medical groups say it should be, counseling, social transitioning, puberty blockers and then when ready if they wish to medically transition treatment with hormones.
Nan you say why not do counseling and wait and see. But that is what puberty blockers are for. To give people the time to mature and be sure of the gender they feel they are. After a teenager goes through puberty the features of the gender they are not, become permanent and then more surgery is needed, along with the person having forever the features of the wrong gender. Imagine knowing all your life you are a girl, and about 13 you start to become a man. By 16 you have all the features of manliness all over your body that you hate. By 18 you think you are the ugliest woman on the planet and might as well die. Or the reverse. A kid growing up knowing they are a boy even though people insist you wear dresses and skirts and call you a girl’s name. As you enter your teens you are growing breasts. The very thing you know you shouldn’t have. You know as soon as you can you will have them cut off.
So Nan the answer to your question is counseling and puberty blockers are what is prescribed by the majority of medical professionals. That and social transitioning. Those steps are the wait and see. If a kid is still sure after a decade or more of living as the gender they are when they are ready they transition with the right hormones and surgery as needed.
There is a lot more attention to trans genderism than there needs to be. That is because of the anti-trans people fighting it every step of the way. I think there is far too much attention paid to a women’s private medical decision to have an abortion but that is being driven by people that want to deny that right to others. These are the same people that fought everything about gay rights and same sex marriage, the same ones who fought interracial marriage and racial equality. They replaced the bad guy from black, to gays, to trans. Polly has a post about a trans women who has drawn a series of cartoon books about trans acceptance based on her experiences. She is invited to schools to speak. Her books are vetted. Polly’s TERF group hounded her and tried to get her fired from talking to schools because in her private time she is a furry. Oh my gods she dresses up as an animal with human characteristics. How can we let someone like that near kids. She is not doing it in the classroom remember, but it is a way to attack a trans women teaching tolerance. I reminded Polly that there was a time when as a lesbian there were people who would demand she not be allowed in a classroom. The attention is driven by hate and a desire to stop others from doing something that these people don’t like. It is the same old story all over again with a different target.
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“Nan you say why not do counseling and wait and see. But that is what puberty blockers are for. To give people the time to mature and be sure of the gender they feel they are.”
No, puberty blockers block puberty, Scottie (another one of those inconvenient facts)… often with the cost of permanent sterility and loss of orgasm. And that’s the just the first step! That’s what about 95% of every. single. child. gets. prescribed.
I keep encountering physicians and clinicians and researchers who say over and over again that ‘we’ simply do not know enough about the long term effects and life long consequences from this very first chemical intervention that almost every. single. child. is prescribed when questioning their ‘gender’ identity. You just wave this away. No concern at all. Not even a crinkle of the brow. But they do privately complain that they are obligated by their professional standards for licensing to affirm only. There is no ‘time to mature’ on puberty blockers! That’s the whole POINT!!!!!!!
But wait; sure, biological maturity is stopped by these blockers but let’s pull a nice linguistic trick here and pretend we are allowing these children to gain ‘gender’ maturity while on them! Now, let’s keep up the façade to fool people and pretend that means something like giving children who ‘question their gender identity’ (again, what does this really mean?) time to enjoy biological maturity and develop informed consent when we’ve intentionally stopped it… without any clue as to the life long consequences other than sterility and loss of orgasm. How is the brain development altered here? I don’t know. You don’t know. These medical folk admittedly don’t know. But, again, you’re GOOD with that. There cannot possibly be any harm at all because Scotties says so. So hey, what do you care if a 14 year old girl tells her docs that she knows she will never want to be a mother and breast feed or have enjoyable sex as a woman (’cause, hey, she already knows)? See? No harm reported… yet (except by detransitioners) who change their minds. Good thing, then, that every single detransitioner is a right wing bigot and not a girl/boy who HAS had the time to develop an alternate point of view to the rose-colored glasses the trans ideologues impose on everyone.
See how this works?
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Hey Tildeb. Yes Puberty blockers block puberty. As I said that is what they do. They stop a lifelong body change from happening until a person is sure of their gender. What do you think doctors are trying to help the patient prevent? What is your point. Oh I see you equate mental maturity with the full physical development of the human body after puberty. That is stupid. Really.
A person has the same maturity a 16 / 17 without going through puberty that they will have gone through puberty. Puberty blockers stop the body changes not the brain development. So they give time for young people to understand the decision they are making.
Tildeb did you know that Senator Ron Jonhson said that the Covid vaccines had caused over 220,000 deaths so far and yet no government agency was investigating that and the CDC in the US was still pushing this death causing drug on the people!
Yup I watched the video of him saying that.
Every major medical group says that puberty blockers are not harmful and fully reversable. But hey they said the Covid vaccine was OK to take also so maybe we shouldn’t believe them.
You keep hearing disinformation because you go to places disinformation is pushed. You read disinformation, you listen to disinformation, then you regurgitate disinformation here on my posts to confuse people. You might as well say you get your information from Fox news or other right wing misinformation mills. Some of the stuff you sent me I tracked back to only radical right wing sites, not on any mainstream news outlet. That should tell you something.
In my last reply I talked about how you think you and the outlier sites you use know more than mainstream doctor’s organizations. Maybe try getting your information from better sources.
Seriously at this point you are sounding like a Qanon person. Doctors have to say trans treatments are OK and give the treatments to keep being doctors, but we hear them in private sneak messages to us that it really is bad and they think the government is putting something in the water making the frogs gay. ( that last was from Alex Jones of info wars who has the same ideas )
Really Tildeb get help. There is no global conspiracy to create a world of trans kids. Just like there is no conspiracy to make every kid gay. There are no teachers teaching gender swapping in 1st grade or whatever damn silly thing pushed by the fear mongers.
One last thing Tildeb. It is not because Scottie says so. I freely admit I am neither a medical practitioner nor a medical scientist. But I am smart enough to listen to the majority of people who are. But you refuse to accept the opinion of these people. You keep saying you know better than they do and point to outliers, fringe groups. I have already gone over this and hate to keep repeating myself.
I wonder what drives you on this subject? You wrote to me that you write in an argumentative way and like to argue. You said you were liberal but refer and quote only right wing conservative viewpoints. Is it personal, religious, or political for you? With the attention you have for just this one issue I wonder if it is your paid job to be anti-trans? Don’t tell me you only care about the kids, because if so you would be arguing for vaccines and other treatments or against them. If the welfare of the kids themselves were the point, there are a lot of things I post you would comment on such as homeless kids, hungry kids, school opportunities for kids.
But you focus here only on the medical and social help for trans gender kids.
By the way nice fear mongering about a 14 year old girl tells her docs that she knows she will never want to be a mother and breast feed or have enjoyable sex as a woman. Nicely written to be emotional and as uninformative as possible. Because Puberty blockers wouldn’t prevent those things and would have been started earlier in a girl, are you trying to imply a 14 year old girl is having her not fully formed breasts cut off? And Tildeb how do her breasts equal her ability to enjoy sex or be a mother? Different areas of the body really.
As for every detransition person being a right wing bigot, great sleight of hand job there. I never said that nor implied it. I said the author of the article was a bigot and the articles were on right wing sites. What I did say was I was sorry for the few that had that situation, but that they were a very small minority. 97.6% of people who transition are happy with doing so. That is the issue you cannot overcome and refuse to face.
You keep referring to a very small minority and demanding we stop the happiness of the very large majority to help the future very small minority.
Think of that and how it doesn’t make sense. I will help you if you want.
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It is the same old story all over again with a different target. — I can totally agree with that statement!
OK, if counseling and medical exams are taking place with pre-puberty kids, then I’m OK with that. But if puberty blockers are being prescribed, I have strong reservations about this action. Let me ask this … IF a 10 or 11 year old child is put of these blockers, can their body return to “normal” if, within a year or so, they “change their mind” and discover they’re comfortable with their gender?
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That’s what the Kiera Bell case was ALL about, Nan, and why I previously quoted the medical review of ‘no significant effects’ as very low confidence. That’s ideology talking, not facts, not best practices. That’s why the High Court ruled no child under 16 can possibly grant consent to even start on puberty blockers and why several other countries immediately changed their practices. One of the most revealing facts from this case was that the majority of children who take puberty blockers do not resume puberty! Ever. (And so everything from that retarded state is a laundry list of negative side effects… especially for girls and bone density.)
Why isn’t this well known? Well, I imagine it’s because who wants to say so and then be labelled by well meaning and compassionate people like Scottie as a right wing bigot and transphobe and hater? That’s how this works: one or the other. This side or that. Friend or enemy. Right or wrong.
We know about 30% of brain development occurs during and after puberty. If that isn’t reason enough to put the brakes on this deplorable practice for medicalizing ‘gender questioning’ children with life altering puberty-denying chemicals in the name of some identity ideology, I don’t know what is. To then advocate for MORE and EASIER access to these medications automatically granted I think is unconscionable and deeply irresponsible no matter how flowery the language used to defend and justify the promotion might seem.
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Hello Tildeb. Wow one case and the entire medical profession realized how horribly wrong their idea of (let me count) 50 years had been. Also you realize that the high court in the UK is only a lower level court in the US way of looking at the courts. The decision was mostly overturned, and the few remaining parts are on appeal. One reason is the judge was well known to be anti-trans. Imagine a politically active judge in a case with ramifications country wide? Almost what happens in the US when a right wing judge rules a hospital must treat a Covid patient with ivermectin or when a right wing judge rules that Biden cannot stop a policy implemented by his predecessor because a president doesn’t have that authority?
Tildeb nothing says the brain doesn’t keep developing if the body doesn’t have puberty hormones. Please cite the study. The hormones involved work on the body’s sexual systems not the brain. You are conflating apples to oranges to confuse the issue.
All major doctors’ organizations say puberty blockers are safe and reversable and you stated that to me yourself in an earlier comment. You said they all use it. They wouldn’t all be using it if they thought it was harmful.
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Yeah, they would use it claiming puberty blockers are safe because they are using it but do not know the long term effects other than sterility, bone density loss, retardation of neural development, and loss of sexual function including orgasm. These are well known but ‘acceptable’ side effects when not doing so is seen as producing more suicide.
And you’re quite right to say this will require court cases, which are just now starting. Bell’s case was the first case. And I use the documents and studies provided for that case because Tavistock (the main clinic for treating gender dysphoria in Britain) itself used them (as the US and Canada is doing now) as part of its defense. The effect of that ruling not only changed the medical approach in England but, as I’ve pointed out, instigated a change in several other European countries who are world leaders in treating gender dysphoria. Their approach is much more cautious. And the basis of that caution is the conclusion by the scientific community involved with biology that the long term effects are not known, that advocates who say they are ‘safe’ are actually running the experiment right now.
Again and again you try to paint me as someone transphobic. Scottie, that is a lie. I am concerned about children being misled by ideologues and those who support them into a medicalized life. I think there is plenty of time to make that difficult decision when they become adults (this opinion from the past president and transitioned male of WPATH, for crying out loud as well as hundreds and hundreds of detransitioned young people as well as the unanimous tribune High Court decision and not as you continuously claim from that right wing bigot and transphobe ‘Tildeb’) and it is deplorable that we are using children to diagnose themselves and start on puberty blockers when we know they are least capable of doing so responsibly. In spite of your contrary beliefs, these health and long term concerns being made by children are valid. The harm is real. It is well documented.
So now it’s time for you to go back to your denialism and wave these concerns away, comforted in the belief that such terrible bigoted people as Tildeb and every contrary fact to your misguided belief raised are just… wrong.
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Hello Tildeb. As I pointed out before (gods I hate to keep repeating myself) the Swedish case was politically driven and so is the situation in Britain. I think we both know how political pressure is working all across the world to restrict the rights of different minorities including the LGBTQ+.
Oh yes doctors rush to use drugs on kids they don’t know what they do. Sure. Oh no there is not any data to show what it does, we just grab any drug and push it in because we love to upset the conservatives. Insert evil laugh here.
Drugs are tested as best as they can be. Can we know the long term effects of the Covid vaccine for sure, no. But we do know the long-term effects of Covid are worse than anything the vaccine can do based on what we know about the composition of the vaccine and the drug combo in it. The same is true for puberty blockers. Medical scientists know how everything in the puberty blockers affect the body and what those effects do. To assert the idea that we don’t the long term effects is incorrect, medical doctors have a good idea of what the long term effects could be. The main stream medical groups say use them, they are safe and reversable.
Again the majority of medical organizations including the AMA say they are the proper treatment and completely reversable. End of story!
Oh I am driven by my love of children, not the trans kids, but the straight cis kids and parents that think it is icky for boys to wear a dress. Give me a break.
I care about the kids, all the kids including the trans kids. Not all gender questioning kids will go all the way in their journey, and it is not required they do so. What is required is they are given the chance to make that journey safely and with the support of those around them. I care about the 662,000 LGBTQ+ kids that suicide a year. A year.
The people who wrote the don’t say gay bills all over the US in Republican controlled states say they are doing it because they love the children, and they want to protect those children they love from that horrible gay that will do something really bad to the kids if they see or hear it.
Tildeb you are making the mistake of the cis gender person happy in their gender Identity. Why not wait until their 20 or 25 or 50 to express their gender. Never mind they are living in the wrong body acting as the wrong gender and worse their body has become the very thing, they know they are not. It is harder to transition after your body has grown the adult attributes of the opposite gender than you are. That leads to the very mastectomies you hate.
That is what the very reversable puberty blockers are for. To give the person time to understand themselves and decide what they want to do. But you know all this. I have written it to you and to Nan. Imagine being a girl, knowing you are a girl deep down everything you are is girl, yet your body is becoming a masculine man. Your shoulders are widening, your voice is deepening, your face taking on maleness, and you are developing an adams apple, things you will have to work to hide all your life.
Or from the other view. You are a boy and know with every fiber of your body you are a boy. But now you are going through a female puberty. Your growing tits for gods sake, the horror. Your body is becoming even more of what you will have to work to undo to be who you are.
Tildeb try to imagine transitioning at your age. There are people who wait until late in life to do it and they never really succeed in looking how they feel. You want to force this on all the trans people and kids. Because you don’t accept mainstream science. The majority of doctors do not see a long term problem with puberty blockers, and I will take their assessment over yours. You should also.
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Watchful waiting resolves over 90% of all gender dysphoria cases… with zero chemical interference. Why? What role does puberty play in reducing gender dysphoria? The other 10%? Well, why doesn’t it concern you that it went from 99% male pre 2012 to over 90% female by 2018? That doesn’t sound very… equitable…. to me. Why the complete reversal?
You tell me.
All I know is that if one asks these kinds of questions, one is vilified for spreading ‘disinformation’, for being a right wing bigot, a transphobe, a TERF, a cis-normative chest-feeding front hole hater who puts children at higher risk for suicide, which is deemed the correct ‘information’. That’s where we are in this thread.
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That’s where we are in this thread. Yup.
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Hello Nan. Nope. I addressed that. Notice I told you before that Tildeb is not a fair actor in this. Notice also the difference between what you write and what he does and my responses. I just replied to him that I call out the forced birth crowd who claim to be pro-life for using the same tactics he does. I told him I call out the anti-vaccine people and the people who claim Covid is a hoax using the same misleading fake data studies as Tildeb is doing with trans issues. The reason is Tildeb is not asking questions, all through these comments and replies Tildeb has push an anti-trans agenda straight from the radical right / religious right / TERF playbooks. So I call it out. I make sure people know it is not just asking a question. That is the same defense Tucker Carlson uses and did so very recently again. Hey I am not against anything or promoting this, I am just asking questions as he pushes aggressively for attacks on the right wing targets. Same tactics gets same response.
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Sorry, Scottie, but yes … that is where you are. It is more than apparent that you and tildeb will never have a meeting of the minds … and neither of you can simply “let it go.” To me, and I would imagine anyone else that might be reading along, there is and never will be a win-win.
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Hello Nan. I agree Tildeb and I won’t ever agree. That is not what Tildeb was claiming. I was responding to Tildeb’s claim of being unfairly attacked and called a bigot. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is most likely a duck.
But here is the choice I have. I can either close the comments to prevent misinformation or continue to address / correct the misinformation and lies. So far I have never closed comments, and that would deny other people the chance to voice their opinion. On the other hand those reading Tildeb’s comments would think that trans women are winning every female sports event and people assigned woman at birth don’t get to play. They would think men are dressing as women to charge into bathrooms to assault poor little girls. Or that kids are being rushed with little to no medical examinations right into transitioning and all of them regret it as soon as they wake up from surgery. In almost all countries the medical guidelines are clear, it takes years of exams and carefully followed procedures before you even get to puberty blockers which the majority of medical organizations including the AMA say are safe and reversable, far more is required to have sexual reassignment surgery. They are not picking kids at random out of public schools and forcing them to change genders. Parents are not changing their kids’ genders on whims.
My point is at what time do I let the misinformation stand so that someone reading along will be misinformed? I would love to have spent the last few hours posting about other things. I have 50 open news tabs. But I know how badly misinformation driven by bigotry hurt me personally in the past. I have to stand up for trans people now, both kids and adults. Discrimination against any of the LGBTQ+ is wrong, just as it is against POC or anyone else. So I keep doing my best. Best wishes.
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Hello Tildeb. Found a veery interesting article that addresses your point. Spoiler, it doesn’t agree with you. I like it so much I may post the entire very informative article.
https://www.kqed.org/futureofyou/441784/the-controversial-research-on-desistance-in-transgender-youth
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This little gem probably escaped your notice. This article references 1/3 of people a large study reported ‘non-binary’! Let’s focus on that a bit because it highlights the problem here.
Non-binary in this study means self-reporting ‘gender’ fluidity! What are we talking about when the term gender fluid is raised?
We are talking about gender and no one knows what that means in biological terms. It’s not like ‘gender’ has an organ or characteristics or genes. It’s almost always referenced as a ‘feeling’ related to typical masculine and feminine traits but treated as if part and parcel of biological sex… which is in practical terms binary! (Male and female, small and large gametes, used to identify sex across all species throughout all of biology. This covers 99.99% of all creatures.)
We are also talking about fluidity, as in swaying this way and that, which in gender terms should mean feeling sometimes more feminine, sometimes more masculine. But that’s not how it’s used: non-binary refers specifically to sexually attracted sometimes to male, sometimes to female. (Oh, and we’re also referencing some people in this study prior to and during puberty… apparently experts in understanding sexual attraction!) Well, to account for this discrepancy between being born in the wrong body and fluid feelings of sexual attraction, we find proponents of gender identity and transitioning returning to the safe haven of relating gender not to sex traits and their physiological characteristics but to ‘feelings’ of feminine or masculine! How handy! Yup. Changeable feelings. Fluid feelings. So that, apparently, justifies drugs to alter the biology of children who report such feelings, you see. I mean, we’re talking about the fluidity of feelings and addressing that by use of physiological medicalized intervention to change the body.
One must be a bigot to raise concerns for a physiological treatment for an emotional condition.
Imagine if gays and lesbians had tried to convince law makers that a sizeable minority – say 1/3rd – weren’t born gay but ‘suffered’ from shifting attraction to same and opposite sex. Depending. On shifting feelings. Where would the argument go that claimed same sex attraction was from birth, that sexual attraction was NOT a choice? No one would believe it because choice would be highly relevant if this were the case!
And yet, it is the fact of being born gay or born lesbian that is the FOUNDATION upon which discrimination on an inherited trait is deemed to BE discriminatory. In other words, shift this foundation and make ‘no choice’ into a ‘choice’, make it ‘fluid’, and undercut why the law constitutes ‘discrimination’ for an immutable characteristic or trait! The ‘born this way and unable to change’ no longer fits, does it?
Why gays and lesbians don’t see this aspect of arguing and supporting gender identity based on an inherited ‘feeling’ is a HUGE problem when we are told to accept gender fluidity as fundamental to gender ideology. It’s not surprising to me that I’ve encountered dozens and dozens of self-reported gay and lesbian denialism by thinking, “Oh, I must have been born in then wrong body” rationalization by people who later identify as gay or lesbian. So gender ideology is self-refuting. You can’t on the one hand be born in the wrong body and yet try to argue one can forever and continuously alter the choice of which sex to be! That is irrational.
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Hello Tildeb. Notice the article emphasized that many of the kids in the detransition studies wouldn’t qualify for treatment under the current rules. It was part of what I quoted. Which if you have trouble following these kids wouldn’t be counted as needing treatment nor be counted as not following through with transitioning or desistance.
Why do you keep wanting to go over and over the same things? OK here we go. Gender and sex are two different things. Gender is a social construct. Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. The biological part is the mental ID of the person, who they are on a spectrum of femininity or masculinity. We all know who we are inside us, it is part of the brain make up. Just as you were born with your sexual orientation already formed, which also there is no gay or straight organ, you know your gender. Sometimes that knowledge of who you are doesn’t match the plumbing. I will add more on this at the end.
Biologist think that the idea of just a binary they are or are not on sex is incorrect for humans as it is for other animals. We have gone back and forth on this and I have cited the articles. The idea that if something dangles it is male and if not is a girl has long been discounted as incorrect. Especially if you consider the standard practice in some areas of sexual reassignment surgeries for babies / toddlers with micro penises. They say it doesn’t dangle enough so it comes off and a new girl is made. That was the standard and still is in some areas.
However biologist look at more than what dangles and the gamete of sperm and the gamete of egg, which again is not how human sex is determined it is the product of the male or female if one is sufficiently to the male side or the female side. Biologists look at chromosomes, genes, and hormone production and a lot of other things over my head. The idea is that it is a spectrum of ++male on one side sliding to not male or female to ++ female on the other side. That is human biological sex. And it works with gender identity as well. It is full male on one side sliding to queer / nonbinary to full female. It is an easy concept to understand if you want to.
https://postimg.cc/gallery/gcq9dzp
[url=https://postimg.cc/KR0nNvJs][img]https://i.postimg.cc/KR0nNvJs/gender-exspression.jpg[/img][/url]
[url=https://postimg.cc/rDz5YXHy][img]https://i.postimg.cc/rDz5YXHy/gender-spectrum.jpg[/img][/url]
I found this great article that explains it for everyone with easy to read language and pictures.
https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/understanding-lgbtq-exhaustive-explainer-gender-and-sexual-identities-44439
One must be a bigot to ignore / deny the medical advice when the majority of doctors recommend a treatment based on complete medical workups from professionals in that field. That is what you are doing, what you are trying to stop. So if the shoe fits?
Tildeb no one is rushing kids into transgender transitioning of any kind, social or medical. That is the point you keep trying to push. A mass assembly line of kids being chosen at random and made to change genders. That is a made-up talking point of the far right and it is completely driven by bigotry. First of all the numbers of trans kids are small as it is. You and those pushing this idea want to overlook that the older the kid the more medical examination and time taken to prescribe treatments they have had. The younger the kids the more they are examined by mental health and genders specialists to see what treatment is proper such as letting the 7 year old wear dresses or change their name. Every step of the way has medical guidelines and procedures.
You don’t like the procedures and don’t like the guidelines, so you pretend they are not used. But they are. And this is why I call you dishonest. Also being gender different is a medical condition recognized by the majority of medical groups, it is not an emotional condition. Being gay is a phase right? Kids just going to grow out of it or can have it beaten out of them. I heard that one also.
Again as I said at the beginning gender identity is not a choice. It is who you are. When you talk of things being a choice can you change your gender identity? Could you tomorrow give up being a man and live the rest of your life as a woman and feel that you really are a woman. No you can’t because it is not a choice. You latched on to the words gender fluid without really understanding what they mean. Sad, but I can help you.
Remember that spectrum I explained earlier? Well if you are near the middle on both sides you have traits of both genders in your identity. You bi in the gender area is a way to think of it. You relate both ways. Again this is also because some people biologically are not all male or all female sex. It is a spectrum as discussed above. You could have a dangle but have weak male chromosomes and have strong female ones. Or any of those magic combinations’ biologists are finding. So that means that you can adapt inside yourself to either the male gender persona or the female gender persona but really don’t feel at home fully in either. You’re in that fluid middle ground.
Does that clear up your confusion?
Last thing. This keeping describing the knowledge of who you are as a feeling. That is an old playbook right out of the past as it was used against gays by traditionalists and the religious right. It is not a feeling it is an inborn knowledge of self. The reason gays / lesbians don’t agree with you on it is we know it is a trope used against us in the past that anti-trans people are resurrecting to use against trans people. Just as you used the emotional condition phrase to minimize trans people knowing they are in the wrong body and so need mental health treatment it, those same tricks were used against gays saying they were mentally ill.
Tildeb the LGBTQ+ community has seen these attacks before. On the LGB people at first. They were wrong then. They are wrong now. You are wrong.
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Can you please explain how “an inborn knowledge of self” can be sexually non binary (not ‘gender’ for which there is no biological basis)? Short answer: physically impossible but in gender ideology a necessary ‘truth’. Not fact; truth.
Can you explain how a brain developed in utero (inborn) as one of either two sexes can later produce an inborn knowledge of self that is neither? (Again, not gender for which you tell us without any blushing of hypocrisy, “is a social construct (edit: not inborn, you see). Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them.” Ah, that explain the difference in French between pencil and pen. Now… Poof!… miraculously, we have a social construct that is now INBORN!
See how the belief system works?
We are expected to go along, keep our mouths shut, and pretend distributing developmentally retarding drugs to children is fully justified by a linguistic game inserting ideology into and over not just biology but medicine. Shhh… and any harm produced simply doesn’t exist because the True Believer tells us it doesn’t exists but, if it did, it would be worth it. Children’s suicides, donchaknow. (We must save the souls even if the bodies must perish!)
This gender ideology has all the hall marks of a extremist religious belief. Hallelujah: you have Awokened in virtue while those immoral blasphemers of disinformation like I am are just sinners who are motivate by hate of your god.
Good grief.
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Tildeb. Not sure what you are asking in the first question but I will answer as if you asked how gender is part of the brain.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lgbt-biology/born-this-way-researchers-explore-the-science-of-gender-identity-idUSKBN1AJ0F0
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgender-brain-what-you-should-know/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20male%20and%20female%20brain,Altinay%20says.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7139786/ Lots of big science words in this one for people who like this stuff.
The summary to every article on this is that there is a difference between male and female brains and trans people show parts of the gender they identify to more or less degree.
This was easy to find Tildeb. You claim to be in the education system yet you couldn’t google is gender in the brain. Good grief.
As for the screed of the last two paragraphs you mock because that is all you have left. The science is against your anti-trans belief, the medical data is against your anti-trans beliefs, the social data is against your anti-trans views, and there is no verified evidence of the anti-trans claims you made. But you continue to push anti-trans stuff.
Good grief!
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Too funny!!
Apparently, you were taken in by the ‘progressive’ language (cisgendered, cismale, cisfemale, ‘assigned gender’ at birth, yada, yada, yada) and presumed it MUST back up the ideology that trans-whatever IS biologically relevant!
Au contraire, mon ami.
The ‘big’ words actually have biological definitions and they back up the very questions I asked as HIGHLY relevant (dimorphic, for example MEANS binary and it DOES cross the entire spectrum of the animal kingdom: “the process of sexual differentiation refers to the development of DIFFERENCES between males and females, which are widely observed in nature”) and – as yet – completely unknown. That was my point. We’re dealing with ideology (square peg) and biology (round hole). I suggest you reread this summarizing study (it offers no new information but compiles previous studies) and realize that the biological differences between cis males and cis females have meaning ONLY if the cis language is dropped entirely because it adds exactly zero information.
What the compilation shows is that there is a very high degree of alignment between sex and ‘gender’ identity. No guff, eh? There is a significant biological difference between males and females. No guff, eh? “Growing evidence shows that prenatal and pubertal sex hormones permanently affect human behaviour and heritability studies have demonstrated a role of genetic components.” Well, clutch my progressive pearls: prenatal and pubertal sex hormones PERMANENTLY affect behaviours (because our behaviours have a hormonal component). So hey, come on kids! Let’s chemically alter you’re puberty and stop your body from developing the sex housed prenatally in the biology and call it ‘safe’!
Again, you utterly fail to recognize the double standard here: sure, prenatal sex-based development in the brain is permanent. But it’s also has to be fluid to fit the ideology. Sure, sex-based differences is part and parcel of everyone’s biology. It’s binary. It’s permanent. But it can’t be if the ideology of gender fluidity is to be justified. So, yeah, we know theese sex-based differences FURTHER develops during puberty, not least of which is in the brain. But identity by gender must be made malleable so we’ll pretend blocking it is safe. Sure, no study shows us the long term consequences of retarding this brain development by blocking puberty in the name of aligning ‘gender identity’ but, with enough advocacy we can get well meaning people to close down sex-based research and alter funding only to gender-based research. We’re doing it for the kids! What study coming out of gender-based research is going to state, “Yup, we were completely wrong: gender identity has no scientific link beyond sex-based biology.” But we can pretend that chemical treatment for ‘aligning gender identity with the feelings of children’ is safe even though avoiding developmental sex-based puberty might have later effects beyond all the negative physiological side effects we already know about. But hey kids, it’s safe, safe, safe… like having a puberty recess while you consider which gender game you want to play later.. (Safe in medical terminology refers to no known long term toxicity. It does not mean there is no negative and/or dysfunctional long term effect.)
In effect, you have demonstrated yourself and your opinion here in this thread if not physiologically wrong then certainly biologically naïve. You operate not by good information, not by sex-based knowledge, not in thee best long term interests of children, but by ideology alone… searching the internet and republishing whatever seems to support you ideological beliefs regarding gender identity. You’re not a bad person for doing so: you have been fooled into believing something by dismissing any and all contrary information. That’s why I say this ideology is like a religion and its advocates just like religious believers. Gender identity is an incoherent ideology because its terms supposedly describing reality do not align with reality. That’s the red flag and more people should pay attention to this discrepancy and question and criticize policies and practices based on it.
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Hey Tildeb. What is wrong with you? You ask how gender is biological and I show you a bunch of quotes that show medical scientists consider that the brain is clearly different between sexes with what is considered the female gender differs from what is known as the male gender. Then instead of acknowledging you were wrong in your over the top oh how could this be comment, you double down. Possibly to get another last word or just confuse people.
Do you ever admit your wrong when you clearly are?
Or do you just always keep trying a different attack?
Well we all know the answer to the above.
I did what you and any other person can do, I googled the question. Sorry you don’t like the result. I even included the parts that said more study is needed because I am honest. You might try it.
Every quote and I could list a whole lot more, said there was a biological connection to gender. I even cited the links. But you dispute that and give a dissertation but never cite a link. Sorry it seems again the majority of medical scientists just don’t agree with you.
Oh yes, it is wrong because words currently understood by the public mean what the people who wrote the articles are trying to convey to the public in ways they can understand, are too normally understood to the public? WTF. The word cis is well known in current usage. I find it funny that you think you know so much more than the people who wrote the paper that you think they can only be correct if they change their wording to suit you. They are smart enough to work on this subject and I am sure they understood the words they used. How arrogant of you to think it makes sense only if they rewrite it to what you approve of.
The world according to Tildeb.
Again Tildeb knows more than trained skilled people with advanced education in the field they are talking about. God’s Tildeb it must be exhausting being smarter than the rest of the world and everyone in it.
Dear Tildeb, the quotes show that the idea that gender identity is at least partially formed in the womb as is sexual orientation. Do other factors as a person develop come into play, that debate is centuries old. But it does lay to rest the idea pushed by you that kids don’t know their gender or sexual orientation identities unless someone pushes it on them. It entirely refutes the idea that adults are recruiting kids to be trans or LGB.
Wow again a nice slide and shift. You slipped in the false and disagreed with idea by the majority of medical organizations that puberty blockers are unsafe. What you fail to acknowledge is that these kids transitioning, those that make it to this point, will go through puberty. The rest will also go through puberty. Puberty blockers are a delay, not a lifetime deal.
Trans kids go through puberty! You want people to believe that if they don’t go through the puberty of whatever birth sex they were assigned then they will have lifelong issues. That is not true, not proven, and disagreed with by the majority of medical institutions.
What is true is that if the young person nearly in adulthood or already of adult age wishes to keep going on the gender changing journey they will be given medical help going through the puberty of the gender they identify with.
Is it really that hard for you to understand what the goal is? It is not to stop puberty entirely. It is to give the person the right puberty to match their gender. You created a strawman argument that is not applicable.
Last let me address the idea you have tried to push in the entire comment. No matter what the qualifications of the researcher, if they don’t agree with you their results are wrong, and they need to change the words to meet with your approval. But you fail to mention your qualifications to make such an assessment.
You claim my information is not good information, but it is what the majority of medical organizations say is correct. Tell me what does that say about your information? Yours clearly doesn’t agree with the majority by a large margin. I have addressed fringe groups and the odd doctor out syndrome before. You are asserting that only your fringe information should be taken as real and the majority of medical advice is wrong. Where have we seen that before? Oh every time the right doesn’t like a medical advance or an extension of right based on greater understanding. And please don’t try to claim you are a liberal when you decry the word cis as a word only the progressives would use.
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Let me demonstrate what’s going on here (note the bold face emphasis) in your reasoning. It’s illuminating because many ideologues do exactly the same thing:
You say, “You ask how gender is biological and I show you a bunch of quotes that show medical scientists consider that the brain is clearly different between sexes…”
Correct. The biology is based on sex. That’s exactly what the researchers are finding and saying and reporting in this review of studies. So far, so good.
You equate gender with sex. This is the correct order. You have said many times when asked to define the term that gender is a social construct – also correct. Biological sex is not a social construct. It is one of the two binary (dimorphic) BIOLOGICAL states. Male or female (those pesky gametes again determine which). Those are the terms used for biological sex throughout biology INCLUDING humans. (Yes, there are some others that are some variation on this dimorphic state, but variations are the exceptions FROM the BASE and not the base from which the binary emerges.)
So we – you and I – agree that gender and sex are NOT synonymous. You know this and I know this and biologists know this and medical practitioners know this. But not the ideologues. They want the two to be reversed. And you oblige. I do not. You oblige by swallowing the red pill. I stick with the Blue. And you demonstrate this by making the substitution and reversal effortlessly. And there’s a reason for doing that.
Yes, there is unquestionably a difference between the sexes, but here’s the linguistic trick. Because the social construct FOLLOWS human behaviour, gender FOLLOWS these sex based differences. Yes, there IS a correlation. About 99.99% of people present gender behavior – the constructed behavior – common to their natal sex! So male behaviour is termed ‘masculine’ and female behaviour termed ‘feminine’. They correlate. So far, so good. But here comes the reversal (gird thy loins)….
Again, noticing the amalgamation where gender begins to absorb sex to reverse the order:
“You ask how gender is biological and I show you a bunch of quotes that show medical scientists consider that the brain is clearly different between sexes with what is considered the female gender differs from what is known as the male gender.
Right there. The reversal has begun. Of course there are differences. That’s what biological sex shows! Duh. The correlation from sex to gender is presented first using these demonstrated sex-based differences (male, female) to the expressed differences in behaviour (masculine, feminine) called gender differences. Remember, gender differences in BEHAVIOUR are constructed out of sex differences in BIOLOGY. So here’s the fact: changing the gender behaviour DOES NOT CHANGE THE BIOLOGY. This is the fact you are denying by reversing the order.
Now, ideologues and their collaborators take the term ‘gender’ and reverse it. They pretend (as do the ‘gender researchers’ you love to quote) that we assign what we already agreed was this gender construct onto a male or a female infant. And this is where the ‘miracle occurs: the notion is that the infant could be either sex (because the biological sex is now and magically the social construct) but the construct of gender now becomes the biological! Voila!
Oh look we’re all born into genderized bodies of masculine and feminine traits that can be tweaked or altered and justified simply by how we feel! Why, there’s really no such thing as biological sex! There’s no such thing as permanent sex-based differences! No siree… there’s no problem at all stopping puberty because some children think those pesky biological sex-based changes are not welcome in this Brave New Gender Constructed World where gender is real and biological sex is the social construct that follows! And, sure enough, it’s the sex that is ‘assigned’ by the birth person and those attending him/her/they/it awaiting the glorious day when the genderized feelings of that infant coalesce into altering the biology that isn’t real.
The ideology is incoherent and irrational, Scottie, not because I think so but because it denies the reality of sex-based biology and imposes a belief-based ideology about gender that is not true. You were born male. End of story. No one assigned you that biology. If you – like most people – have both masculine and feminine traits, who cares? If you – like most people – are attracted to other people, who cares if they are male or female, masculine or feminine? Your gender did not develop or align or conflict with your biology. You are simply Scottie, a male as determined by your biology regardless of any other factors (or language) you want to import to it.
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Tildeb. The interchanging of gender in common language usage is done all the time. People know what is meant by context. Word usage and spoken language is fluid and changes all the time. Words have the meaning people assign to them.
You started out arguing that trans women were hurting assigned at birth women in sports. You couldn’t show the evidence of that. You couldn’t prove your claims on adult trans in bathrooms assaulting others. So when your attacks on adult trans women did not work you switched to trans kids.
Your arguments became how harmful the trans movement was towards kids. You failed to prove your claims. Kids were not being rushed into switching genders, kids were not being taught sex acts and gender swapping in school, the medical science and data is clear that puberty blockers are safe and reversable, and the majority of medical associations approve the medical guidelines of social transitioning followed by medical intervention to prevent puberty followed by more medical intervention as called for.
So when those arguments fail for you, what do you do? You attack the words I use. Everyone understood the meaning of those sentences. But you want to twist what the mean to argue they don’t mean what we all understood them to mean by context.
What is the old saying in court?
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell”
This is the point you are at.
Here are the facts established by the majority of biologists and medical scientists in the appropriate fields.
The fact is sex in the meaning of male and female is a spectrum, not a fixed binary. The fact is that gender is a social concept that may have roots in the make up of the brain. The fact is that people assigned at birth as being on one side of the sex spectrum may have the both the biological and sociological gender of the other side of the spectrum or be somewhere else on the spectrum. This applies to kids.
The ideology you claim I am pushing is the current best understanding of the majority of the medical community. It has been researched by them. Your opposition to it could be for several reasons but mostly it seems to come down to “It has never been this way before so why change how we deal with it, instead just do what we have always done” and “We should keep making trans people wait until it is too late to help them and then make fun of their efforts to live as the gender they know they are”.
The world has moved on Tildeb. Most of us do not want to live in a regressive past that made a segment of the population most comfortable but was hard, uncomfortable, and dangerous for the rest of the people. It may make you and some minority of others happy to return to that past, but the rest of us can deal with helping others to live happy lives in the gender and sexual orientation they are. We accept the science and data.
Claiming I am a male by biology obscures the fact that the gender / sex is not binary but on a spectrum. Again your argument goes back to the idea that if it dangles you are male and if it doesn’t dangle enough you are a female. That again doesn’t take into account all the things we know now that goes into the biological make up of sex, such as chromosomes, genes, and body chemicals such as hormones. They have found it is not a simple XX or XY. That is simply a fact that cannot be argued against.
As for am I a male. Are we talking sex, gender, or sexual orientation and even sexual preference? I am cis, but where on the biological spectrum do I fall? Unless I get a full medical make up there is no way to tell how far into the male spectrum I fall. If we are talking gender, I am again male, but I am not fully into the male side of the spectrum of what our society used to claim / expects is a masculine male. And if we are talking about the last category, well we don’t know each other well enough for those conversations. If you really want to know you would have to date me first.
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“The interchanging of gender in common language usage is done all the time,” referring to the switching of ‘gender’ and ‘sex’. The former is socially constructed based on the later which is biological. The point here is that sex (biology) precedes gender (social characteristics). These are NOT the same thing, which reminds me of the sleight of hand used all the time by religious apologists using the term term ‘faith’ to mean both trust/confidence with the religious notion of belief. The term ‘gender’ is substituted for sex all the time by ideologues to pretend gender precedes biology (assigned at birth!). This is exactly my point in reversing what is true (biology) with what is believed to be true (ideology).
What’s the harm?
Well, as we see, when we apply the ideology and impose it on reality, we find transwomen are now the only true women. Women are to be called ‘persons’. A birthing person. A chest feeding person. A bleeding person. And so on. Wherever women have places separate from men, now we have men as ‘real women’ demanding inclusion. This runs the gamut from sports to prisons to rape shelters. You pretend there is no evidence of this, but there is. You know it,. I know it. From swimmer Lia Thomas to serial rapist Karen White, the evidence is plain. And the effects are predictable: in every case where transitioned males/’real women’ demand inclusion, females lose. They lose the podium. They lose safety. They lose privacy. They lose safety from male violence. So I raised this issue that male and female are not on some gender sliding scale as you conflate to be them but are binary sexes with very real biological differences. In other words, gender is NOT biology and biology is NOT gender. Abusing language to make it appear differently is not good ‘information’ but clearly ideologically driven lies and deceit. The ideology fits the description of ‘disinformation’.
So what and who cares?
Well, when we impose the ideology on young people through indoctrination in education, we see the results: a massive increase in transitioning of children from natal female into a ‘genderized’ man. (Gee, I wonder why Republicans are using this to gain electoral victories if it’s all about Tildeb and transphobic bigotry?) Again (in case you missed the pattern) guess who is losing out? Yup: females. Every time, in every way.
Young females in their thousands (5500% increase in past 10 years in the US) are now undergoing chemical retardation and developmental interference with the active support by the entire medical profession more concerned with how they want to appear to be supporting young females by respecting these young females ‘feel about their gender’ (golly, I wonder why young females might wish they were males… what a deep mystery!) than the health and welfare of their mental and physical biology. This is the inversion/abuse of language that you wave away thinking it is simply an equivalent and perfectly reasonable substitution only I am taking issue with (not because it’s important to recognize the lie but because you believe it’s my way of avoiding truth-bearing points you raise)! But that’s neither true nor ethical.
I keep hammering the point and you keep ignoring the fact that gender is not biology. By doing so you avoid my argument that we should not be medicalizing this perversion of transitioning between biological states because of normal adolescent feelings and angst by pretending stopping development is normal and justified and safe while the confused adolescent takes a time out to consider options. That’s the real disinformation going on here. It is none of these things in truth. Retarding puberty has known consequences and these are real. Retarding puberty AND taking opposite sex hormones (over 95% on puberty blockers do exactly this) has long term consequences we know about (sterility, loss of sexual function, bone loss) and long term consequences we don’t know about (because the practice on this scale is relatively new. But detransitioners offer us a very real glimpse into what it means long after the ideologues abandon you). What we do know is that transitioning starting with puberty blockers is a lifetime of guaranteed medical need and constant intervention and high risk with real and negative consequences for one’s physiological health, justifiable I think only in the most extreme cases of significant, demonstrable, and life threatening dysfunction from dysphoria.
What you’re selling is ideology (and what other ideological conquered institutions self-justifiably promote) and not biological facts. The substituted language you rely on that reverses reality by pretending sex follows gender shows the dishonesty. That’s disinformation at work.
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Tlideb. Enough. You are wrong. I have refuted every single argument you brought up until you were left arguing the meaning of words. The context of what I wrote and that the articles said is clear, even if you disagree with it.
What is clear is your drive by ideology on this issue and some need to always have the last word. Nan used to have to cut you off on her blog because you wouldn’t stop. Do I have to do the same here? I have said several times it is enough in this thread.
Everything that can be said has been said. I represent the future as humanity progresses, you represent the traditionalist past seeped in fear of any changes from the status quo. We have covered it all as I said. No one is reading us anymore. Accept you lost, and that this is my blog. Accept the world is moving on, even as your regressive side is winning a few battles now, they will lose the war. Trans rights are human rights. LGBTQ+ rights are human rights.
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“I am the mother of a trans-identifying child — now 23 years old. (I can’t give my name for fear of alienating her.) You captured the rollercoaster of emotions many parents going through this feel — the fear that she has adopted this ideology as a coping mechanism to deal with underlying mental health issues and that she will do irreparable harm to her body. And that we are politically homeless. I can’t vote for anyone who would support Trump. But Biden and his team have it wrong when they quote the lie of “better a trans son than dead daughter.”
I agree with DeSantis on many aspects of the so-called “don’t say gay” bill. I don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss sexual orientation and gender ideology with young children. I also don’t think it’s appropriate to review the periodic table with them. That doesn’t mean I’m anti-chemistry.
What I wish for my daughter is that she not be beholden to gender stereotypes, that she be comfortable in her own body and that she avoid a lifetime of medical intervention with life-long negative consequences (including infertility) which cannot ultimately transform her into a man. If she were anorexic, we’d have support and options to return her to health. Because her coping mechanism is trans ideology, we get no support from medical or psychiatric professionals, from schools or from most liberals.”
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Tildeb another unsourced anecdotal screed that is supporting the rabid right to erase the LGBTQ+. Not even sure what you are trying to push with this except trying to get the last word again. You have lost all credibility. Enough.
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Hey Tildeb, let me address the other thing you wrote. You feel attacked unfairly as you claim to just be asking questions. That is not what you are doing. To suggest it is just another attempt to confuse the issue. You are deliberately pushing disinformation and misdirecting people. I already said I don’t know if it is political or personal with you, but your tactics are right out of the far right / TERF playbook. I refute and rebut what you push with cited facts that you ignore or change your attack, often repeating what I clearly showed to be wrong before. That is clearly dishonest and not asking questions.
Even the numbers you claim for kids not finishing transition are wrong. It does take me time to look up the true information to address your biased misinformation, but I do it because it is not a good idea to let a lie or myth stand as a fact. You are not being targeted for no reason, nor personally attacked. You are targeting a vulnerable population with the goal of denying them the needed medical assistance to achieve the gender state of who they really are.
Just as we call out antiabortionists who pretend to be pro-life but are really forced birth, I will call out you for doing the same things. Just as I called out anti-vaccine people and those who push that Covid was a hoax, I will call out those who use fake studies and fringe medical people to create misinformation that harms the LGBTQ+.
If you don’t like me doing that you really don’t need to subject yourself to such treatment? Just stop leaving comments full of misinformation, lies, and hateful attacks on the LGBTQ+, including trans gender kids and trans adults. Problem solved.
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” You are targeting a vulnerable population with the goal of denying them the needed medical assistance to achieve the gender state of who they really are.”
No, that’s not what I’m doing. That’s what you BELIEVE I am doing. Not the same thing, Scottie.
I am criticizing the ‘affirmation only’ aspect to treating gender dysphoria BECAUSE this one-size-fits-all approach harms vast numbers of real children in real life. There are many approaches that should be used first, not least of which is watchful waiting under therapeutic oversight.
Maybe you’re never around girls but I know just how powerful is the social component and reputational harm of peer criticism and rejection. Far more than boys. And I know how powerful is the use of gender dysphoria to shield girls from the very real difficulties of puberty. This is real problem when dozens of girls in the same school suddenly become gender dysphoric. In your world this is reason to celebrate. In mine, it raises a red flag that we’re dealing with a social contagion.
You BELIEVE my concerns are caused by bigotry and/or that I reject some children who really do exhibit life long dysphoria. This is not true. That’s why I mentioned preparing the ground, so to speak, with parents and students to accept a transitioned youth because my concern then as it is now is all about the welfare of the child… in my case the social welfare inside a school community for all. I had then and maintain now no problem whatsoever with someone who has transitioned any more than I have a problem with someone gay. Or black. Or even Catholic! My problem is with an ideology that send children skipping and singing down this life path and feeling oh so virtuous without appreciating just how challenging and risky and fraught with life long medicalization that path is in reality. If necessary, sure. But let’s keep that bar high. If not, let’s err on the side of caution and be very dubious about widespread and sudden claims of gender dysphoria and the nearly automatic use of suppressive drugs to treat it as if these were no more harmful than candy and were actually GOOD for children at preventing suicide. Avoiding puberty has a cost far, far beyond the hard problems especially for girls going into and through puberty, and I sincerely doubt most kids have any clue what this avoidance means in the long run because the medical community has no clue what it means in the long run.
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Tildeb. Your good, you shift well. Reading this at the start I could agree you sounded very much sympathetic to the trans kids.
Until you go to the part where you state an untrue medical opinion not held by the majority of doctor organizations and the AMA.
Until you again push the idea that kids are rushing to turn their entire lives upside down and face all the hassles at home, in school, in public to socially transition. There are still kids scared to come out as gay. Nobody is pushing kids to switch genders any more than they are pushing kids to be gay or lesbian. It is a fear tactic.
Until you claim kids must go through puberty and kids don’t understand their choices. Again they are guided by medical professionals and their parents. Kids don’t just saunter into a clinic and get puberty blockers behind the parent’s back.
Tildeb the bar is already high. More kids are denied the journey of expressing their true gender than the ones who get the support they need to do so. But as you yourself wrote many who feel they are in the wrong gender never complete any transition at all, social or medical. They decide that it is not the journey they want to make. So there is no harm letting them start that journey and even take puberty blockers for a short time, which if they stop taking they go through puberty. No problem.
Trans kids are a small number as are adult trans people, and you are making it harder for that small number to not only transition but to live their lives fully as the gender they are. And you do that by pushing false information and fear. That is why I know “You are targeting a vulnerable population with the goal of denying them the needed medical assistance to achieve the gender state of who they really are.”
Everything you wrote after that except your claim you just love the children, trans, gay, black, and Catholic (Not really sure why you singled out Catholics instead of just saying religious) is about stopping kids who know they are in the wrong sex body from starting and going through that journey of being the gender they know they are. Slow it down, most don’t need it, force kids to go through puberty, prevent and deny using the drug that most doctors say is safe that most governments say is safe and reversable simply by stopping. Do you see what you write or is it deliberate? Either way you are trying to prevent kids from social transition including using puberty blockers when appropriate.
One last thing. This comment was directed at kids. Before in our comments you directed a lot of anger and bigotry at adult trans women. You were not concerned about trans men. So I wonder if that is why you are against trans kids, you are stopping what you see as a problem before it starts?
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Hello Nan. Yes. The large majority of medical providers, the medical organizations, and the medical science data these people understand, say yes. The AMA says they are safe. The largest doctor group for kids in the US says they are safe. All the majority of research on these drugs which have been used since the 1970’s say they are safe and reversable. Want to stop their effect, just stop taking them. Oh by the way they are used for more than trans gender issues, they were developed to help kids that went into early puberty. Along with a couple other things I forget right now.
Think about it this way, why would the majority of medical guidelines of these doctor organizations call for using them on minors if they were as harmful as Tildeb wants to make out they are. In places like the US they would be sued out of business.
This is just another point of attack for those that want to stop the transition of young people and who disagree that people can be born in the wrong body with the wrong assigned gender. The want to make it seem the medications are dangerous and not studied. Sound familiar? Think of the stuff we have heard for two years on the Covid vaccines. This attack on puberty blockers is the same.
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I don’t agree with your last sentence. But that’s neither here nor there. As I think I’ve said before, there are undoubtedly individuals who are battling with this issue. However, IMO, it is being blown TOTALLY out of proportion. On BOTH sides. And that, I hope, is my last comment on the issue. 🤞
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Hello Nan. I enjoy talking with you, but if you don’t want to comment you never have to. I was going to ask you a question but as you don’t want to be in this conversation I won’t do so. But I will keep posting on it, Tildeb will keep trying to spread misinformation, I will keep replying.
As for being overblown. I already told you I agreed with that. The reason is the anti-trans side keeps attacking and trying to make as big a deal as possible over minor issues. The LGBTQ+ are a minority of the population. The T part, trans people, are much smaller minority of our group. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stand up for them, but it is what attackers do, they go after the weakest smallest members of a group.
I find it funny that the talking point of just drop the T, stop supporting the trans people and the right will leave the rest of us alone was the big push right before DeathSantis went on the don’t say gay binge. The right was trying hard to pick us off one letter at a time and then their big name bosses stepped on that message.
Really Nan when did you hear about transgender people? When the Republican governor of North Carliana decided to make it a political issue by implementing a “bathroom bill to protect little girls” He and his party then went on a media blitz about how transgender women who they said were really men were trying to force their way into bathrooms to rape and molest your daughters and wives. The law got overturned when big businesses pulled support out of the state. But in the meantime a lot of people got assaulted trying to enter a women’s bathroom when right wing jerks decided they were not female looking enough. Most were not trans.
Is it over blown yes! Transgender people have existed for ever. The most famous ones were in old England and the US civil war. I bet you and I have been in public bathrooms with transgender people and never even knew it. It was not a big deal, just as it is not in sports. There is no run on women sports wins by trans women but the anti-trans people want to make it seem so.
But that is the point I have been trying to make Nan. This media attention is hate driven. No one cared where people peed until Republicans made it so. No one cared about guys dressed up in costume to read to kids until the religious right made it an issue. I can remember people dressing up to read to kids in my local library back in the 1970s.
It is political to make points and now has become a religious / bigoted hill to die on. I don’t like it. Trans people don’t like it. They just want to live their lives as the people they know they are. As for preteens, puberty blockers simply give them the opportunity to not have to go through life in a body they know is not their gender. And again, prescribed and used since the 1970s with no issues.
Anyway. If you want to ignore the posts, feel free to do so. I won’t be upset, I post a lot of stuff and it is stuff I believe in, not stuff all my viewers do. If you do comment, I will respond. I always do respond to comments, I love them and to me it is a conversation not a fight. Well for most people. People enter and leave conversations as they wish.
Be well, best wishes.
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Really Nan when did you hear about transgender people? — On your blog. This is not a topic that would have caught my eye at all. And quite frankly, I sorta’ wish it never had. I understand your need to spotlight it, but I think for many of us, it’s not much different than the MANY other issues we’re facing today. An excellent example is the abortion issue. I tend to think there are far more women that are affected by this than there are kids having difficulty with gender identity. But then, I’m a woman.
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Hello Nan. Yes trans people are a minority inside a minority. But they are being attack just as the rest of the LGBT were being attack in the years before. So they need help and support from the rest of us more now than ever.
Yes Nan there are more women than trans people. There are more women needing abortions than trans kids need puberty blockers, but if the right has their way neither will get what they need. See the common theme?
I have fought for women’s right to body autonomy all my life and I am not a woman. I won’t ever need an abortion. As I am gay I doubt my love interests will need an abortion. But I have still fought against the effort to deny the right of body control for women over their own body, which is what denying abortion really is.
On my blog I supported the right of abortion along with other equality rights for women. I have seen the right of a woman to control their body chipped away at by the right relentlessly. But I have seen the right do that to the LGBTQ+ also. Again it is what the right wing / religious groups do, try to restrict the rights of others by increasing their own right to control what others can do.
Fighting for one right doesn’t mean you cannot fight for all people’s rights. Fighting for women’s rights doesn’t mean it is OK to ignore the discrimination of others. We can do both. I can do both.
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Hi Scottie;
I’ve known two people who were trans. The first, quite obvious. The second, I never would have known until told. What was the difference? The first was unable to transition until adulthood, all adult secondary sexual characteristics developed, and she was not the beautiful person on the outside she could have been. Surgeries and attempts at happiness took a horrible toll. The second, much later in my life, was beautiful, happy, funny!, and successful. Transition was accomplished with the secondaries understood and planned for a successful new life.
When children come into the world deaf, we find cochlear implants to help them. When children come into the world needing sight correction, we provide glasses, and even laser surgery like I received later in life. Heart defects, club foot, cancer, etc. There are statistical physical sexual defects that are documented and real, and we help them. But, when something can’t be so easily seen somehow we decide that nothing exists?
I will stand in complete support with a parent that is totally lost and unable to make a decision for their child, no matter how clearly the child declares what he knows to be true, because a parent is saddled with the unwinnable decision that only begs “what if I’m wrong?”. I have ZERO support for the neighbor that decides they have some sort of right to decide for the kid that isn’t even their child. People stand up and declare that something is untenable who have no cost to their “passion” and get to shrug their shoulders or simply walk away and expound loudly on the next topic that strikes their fancy, leaving lives in their wake and without a care for who gets hurt.
So, to all the wanna-be’s and so-called christians who feel they have the right to decide for others: Everything in this country and in Christ is about a person having the opportunity to live a wonderful, happy, fulfilled life. You don’t get to dictate what that is. If you are a great human being, you will love, comfort, and support a young person, an old person, EVERY person as they find THEIR wonderful life.
Tildeb; with ALL respect, I think you are attempting to be a sign post and a guide, but you are risking being a road block.
Hugs
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Hello Randy. You are far more tolerant of Tildeb than I have become. He is a roadblock. He also pushes incorrect and misleading information. He is clearly trying his best to not only prevent trans kids from receiving the medical care / treatment they should have but is trying to force everyone to be the gender assigned at birth at least until the irreparable harm of puberty happens. You stated how hard it is for a transgender person to transition after developing the wrong gender attributes.
It is a traditionalist view. If they can force kids to go through puberty they can continue to mock transgender people who transition. As you said, the person who was able to use puberty blockers was able to transition much more successfully. Less people will feel comfortable with who they are. The more ridicule and negative things kids see and hear the less likely they will be open about who they are. Again it stops the growing public acceptance of the LGBTQ+ driving more to not be out and open but hiding who they are to protect themselves.
We have talked about people who simply cannot accept the changes in culture and in social understanding. They want the country / world to stay as it was. They want society to be what it was when they were in their prime and the world they grew up in. They fight against the changes as hard as they can with whatever they can. It is more than not accepting the changes; it is an attempt to prevent them, so they don’t have to change.
I don’t know what drives Tildeb. He has written that he deliberately writes in an argumentative style, he clearly feels the need to have the last word on other people’s blogs. He argues not from facts of the country he has claimed to be from but uses the information push by the anti-trans group in the UK known as TERFs. I don’t really know if his opposition is based in religion, tradition, simple bigotry, or politics. But it doesn’t matter as the results he wants to accomplish are the same. The stopping of progress and a return to the way things used to be. That will mean more dead LGBTQ+ kids, more bullying for LGBTQ+ people, more violence directed toward LGBTQ+ individuals, and the loss of rights for the LGBTQ+. Those are things I cannot accept and must fight as hard as possible against.
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Hi Scottie;
The crazy thing is that these people seem to think that homosexuality and lgbtq issues are new. You and I are both in our 50’s –sorry to out you, Scottie. Not 29 anymore 😦 I have lived a horrible life of misery because I couldn’t come out and be me when I was young, too afraid of the consequences. I can’t count the number of times I wanted to end this life. How many more did so? How many more have lived a miserable existence for appearances sake?
So what the hell do they want? They want people like Rock Hudson, living a lie his entire life? They want to pretend that there are no people who are homosexual, trans, bi? Is being genuine such a frighteningly foreign concept that they would rather people be miserable and suicidal just to protect their fragile image of the world? How many more need to die? And why the F do they get a choice in it?
Damn. Sorry…..
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Hello Randy. Never be sorry for anything you say here. This is your home also. I do regret we were not around each other to support each other in our troubled times. Boy I could have put a hurt on anyone giving you a hard time back in those days bro!
The very people that want to deny other people the right to live openly as they are, want the special right to force their religious myth doctrines on everyone else.
These people hide their personal failures at living up to their ideal church doctrines by attacking others as unworthy. The leaders of these groups don’t even practice what they preach and protecting the brand is more important than making sure the people have food, housing, or other daily needs.
As for the Republican elected office holders some are traditionalist that want the world to return to a time they enjoyed it more and since they had it well during that time because they felt more comfortable and more in charge.
What neither of these groups want is the culture and society to progress forward. They want to hold it back to when they were happy and comfortable. In fact Justice Alito referred to a lawyer from the 1600s that believed in martial rape and had at least two women put to death as witches to find that abortion is a crime not a right, which shows you how regressive these people want to be to enshrine their comfort into all our lives.
They don’t care about your comfort, your needs, your requirements, or your circumstances. All these groups and those people want is their comfort and their happiness taken care of, so that they can do any despicable action they want to the others without consequence.
Randy, what people do not seem to understand is the complete gaslighting Alito had to do to history to make his ruling. He ignored that the country not only was founded on personal liberty and privacy was part of that liberty, that the founding fathers declared that happiness was an important factor of life, to state that historically there was no idea of individual liberty in the US. That turns history upside down as much as declaring the US was founded as a Chrisitan nation … Oh wait Alito believes that myth also. No less than 5 amendments are built on the idea of privacy and individual right to live free from government intrusion into personal matters. Also the founders clearly meant the constitution to grow and change as the needs of the people / country grew and changed. Or they wouldn’t have made the ways to change the document clear in it.
But that goes against the very religious theocracy some of the justices want to create or think should be created to please their god. Religion is not a democracy it is a dictatorship with God at the top and his henchmen the religious leaders next down to tell the people what god said they must do to please him. Often that means money and sexual favors to the religious leaders but hey that pleases god right?
This became a rant, did not mean it to. I hope you are in a better place mentally / emotionally soon. If you need me I am here. Call / text / skype any time. I love you brother, you are grand. You are the best brother ever. Hugs
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Scottie … people don’t always agree on issues. You know this! And you ALSO know that no matter how much “proof” you offer, they are going to counter it with their own “proofs.” If you doubt my words, consider … RELIGION. There are blogs FULL of discussions on whether Christianity is valid or not and each side has their reasons (and “proofs”) why they believe as they do. And look what’s going on RIGHT NOW throughout blogland …. arguments about abortion!
My point is … you and tildeb at never going to see eye-to-eye on this issue. I know you both want to have the “last word,” but it’s never going to happen. So, for the sake of the rest of us who like to visit your blog, PLEASE STOP!
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Hello Nan. You clearly did not read my last two replies I made this morning to his comments left a day ago. I don’t like to repeat the same things over and over and over and over. At some point there comes a limit to what more can be said.
But Nan, you are clearly still reading them as is Randy. So people are reading the comments and replies. People are always free to not read anything they prefer not to. I have already explained why I answer, it is to make sure misinformation, myth, and misdirection is not left unchallenged. The alternative is to remove a comment such as Polly has done to me when she cannot refute what I comment. I don’t like that done to me and I won’t do it to others. Polly need not comment here again.
This not and never has been about convincing Tildeb. I don’t consider him to be acting in good faith as I said. I view him the same as I view the maga. I view him the same as the Covid vaccine deniers, the ones pushing for Ivermectin as a viable treatment for Covid despite all evidence to the contrary. I view Tildeb the same as I view those who call for Dr. Fauci to be arrested, tried, and hanged for giving his best medical advice based on the medical data he has the skill to interpret, which they do not have so they equate their falsehoods as equal to the medical guidelines recommended by the CDC.
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No, Scottie. #1 — I am NOT reading yours OR tildeb’s comments. I see them and move on. In fact, I’ve learned to recognize the post title and don’t even bother to open it. I only read this time because I saw that Randy had made a comment. #2 — You just wrote: I don’t like to repeat the same things over and over and over and over. So my question is … why do you? Because that’s what has been taking place on this particular post.
I FULLY realize it’s your blog, Scottie and certainly, you can do whatever you want with it. But why spend time writing essentially the same thing “over and over and over” when you COULD be spending time with Ron, or playing TV games, or catching up on your political reading? You say it’s not about convincing tildeb, but what else would it be called since you’ve explained your POV numerous times in your comments to him? Plus, you have made your position clear in a number of your other posts.
But again … It’s YOUR blog and by all rights, it’s not for me to say anything. So I’ll shut up.
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Hello Nan. I don’t mind your comments voicing your opinion, so there is no need to shut up. I just wanted to emphasize that people only read what interests them and pass by the rest.
The point of saying you did not read the last two replies is I addressed both what you said in the last comment and this one.
I had to wait until everything had been thrown at the wall by Tildeb. Most of what I addressed was not a rehash of citing new sources saying the same things. I would summarize things already addressed but not open that issue up again for more debate.
Tildeb’s next to last comment was a criticism of word usage and that was a dodge, I addressed it and said enough. It ends on this thread. We have covered it all.
His last comment was a short anecdotal story with no citation. I refused to rehash the subjects mentioned in the story. I explained that he had gotten to the point of repeating himself and if I answered so would I. Not exact quotes as I don’t feel like going back and looking up and copying the exact words.
I explained that if need be I would close the comments on the post if he did not accept it was enough already.
He is welcome to comment on other posts and I expect he will. I have no plans to stop championing the causes I believe in. I assume he does the same on his blog. I have never gone and looked at his blog, have you?
I remember what Ark said so often when asked why he argued with religious people. He said it was for the people reading along who never comment but absorb the information. It is about planting seeds.
Nan here is why it is not about convincing Tildeb and why I do it. Sometime in the future, a day, a month, a year someone will stumble over that post and may read the comments. They will see Tildeb’s comments and assertions. They may take them as facts when they are not but instead are lies, myths, misinformation, and misdirection. If those people reading don’t see a rebuttal to those things, then they will believe them. But if they read my rebuttal and replies, even if they don’t agree they may look it up. That really is what I want, people to look up the information themselves if they can. Not everyone can research stuff well, not everyone has the time. If I see two different opinions, I tend to google it. Massive information tool the internet, the trick is to understand your limitations. Just because people can find a peer reviewed scientific paper they have to have the ability to understand it. That is why the paper’s author’s own words are important. A lot of people look at a headline and think that is what the data showed or what the scientist said, it often is just what the reporter or news organization wanted to grab views. And a conclusion is only as good as the study itself. It is important to make sure it is a valid study.
But you know all that. Anyway best wishes.
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The quotation was from a comment sent to Andrew Sullivan’s substack (paid subscription) on this gender issue. And he has A LOT to criticize.
I know you like to paint everything I write here with a broad brush you label as, “lies, myths, misinformation, and misdirection”. And you attribute it all to me, a terrible person to be sure. But everything I offer here is from multiple sources that I would think any reasonable person would find acceptable and not belonging to Tildeb The Terrible Blasphemer.
For example, Andrew Sullivan is a gay writer – as is Freddie deBoer, as is Bari Weiss, as are many other thinkers and writers on this topic that I have offered. The fact you can be married to another man is one of Andrew’s crowning contributions as he was certainly a champion of gay marriage when even the gay community was telling him to leave it alone. He calls it as he sees it and offers pretty good reasoning and evidence independent of little ‘ol me to make his case. In fact, every source I’ve offered has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with me.
None of that matters: you have your belief and you’re going to stick with it. Reality plays no part in adjudicating it.
I have offered a board member of WPATH, a transitioned leader supporting the need for far more caution than is currently in place. I have offered the opinion of parents whose families are torn apart by this official response. I have offered a world renowned reassignment surgeon, heads of research from many countries involved with actual treatments of real people in real life with puberty blockers and hormones and transitioning youths. I have offered court cases, documentation, first person accounts by detransitioners, investigative journalists and authors, all urging more caution, urging a move away from ‘affirmation only.’ Not because Tildeb the Bigot says so, but because of compelling evidence.
No matter who I offer in my bigoted stead, you wave ALL of them away as right wing bigots and some kind of anti-gay ivermectin peddling MAGA ‘phobes’ not because they are in fact but because YOU BELIEVE ANY CONTRARY POSITION FROM YOUR OWN must be so. You have your belief and THAT trumps EVERYTHING including reality. So of course you will continue claiming it’s all about Tildeb and the bigotry you have ‘defeated’ with ‘good’ information.
That’s why you’re demonstrably an ideologue and committed to a belief-as-if-fact just like a creationist is committed to creation-as-if-fact and just as immune to honest and open and respectful discussion of compelling evidence if it threatens your deeply held beliefs in any way. I will stop wasting both our time.
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Good lords Tildeb. Famous self-hating gay Andrew Sullivan who goes on Bill Maher’s show to run down everything liberal or left he ever heard. He is more right leaning than a lot of Republicans. Bari Weiss I have already addressed as a shill for anything Israel does and again hates anything liberal, and I showed how her writing is very anti-trans anything. Not really non-bias medical sources, are they? Every source you quote is a right wing hack or activist. You offered a disgruntled board member who quit after deciding the group was wrong but again you forget all the ones that stayed supporting the goals of WPATH. Think about it, one person says 19 others are wrong and you discount the 19 to believe only the 1. This is why you are the ideolog on this subject, and why you’re wrong. I don’t wave away your false arguments, I investigate them. It comes down to the same thing every time. The majority of medical organizations / practitioners all think the current guidelines of treatment for trans kids is correct and it includes social transitioning with medical assistance such as puberty blockers as needed, which are safe and fully reversable, followed by medical transitioning treatment as decided by the patient with the medical providers. Your fringe doctors that don’t agree who are a small minority who don’t overrule the correct medical advice of the majority. That is why you are wrong.
Congratulations Tildeb. You have made me do something I have never done. I will close the comments on this thread. I hate to have the same things said and answered and said again. It is a waste of my time. Since you seem driven to keep going long past the time you had anything relevant to say, anything new or even interesting to say on it, but keep repeating yourself and your discredited viewpoint ad nauseam, I have no choice but close the thread. Bye
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Such is the cost when one blasphemes.
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Hi Nan,
I really really shouldn’t be typing right now. But, I know you will relate to what I’m about to say. Some populations of peoples have learned to “live” with abuse. We turn a blind eye, get pissed maybe but shrug as “reality” steps on us once again. I’m hurt, I’m pissed, and sometimes we don’t even realize how much until we face the fact that we keep getting hit, keep getting hurt.
I guess what I’m trying to say, and not doing it very well… my damn eyes and nose are running… is sometimes it takes a minute for the hurt to break through the defences and be noticed for the damage it keeps doing.
I understand what you are saying, and I love you for it. I just want you to know that sometimes the hurt needs a voice, someone who will stand up and declare that it isn’t right, that there are real people in these issues and debates. That’s what Scottie is doing.
hugs
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Hello Randy. I am sorry your pain is hurting you today, I know too well how that is.
What you need to remember is you are one hell of a great person and you are the very best brother I could ever have. Many tried to tear us down. But none of them have succeeded.
You have accomplished more in your life than those who were against you ever thought you could, because of the great person you are and the power within you.
You are one hell of a great person. The world is better with you in it!
I am proud to call you brother. Give my best to your folks when they get in. Hugs
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