Needing time and considered thought
Reading a Spectator blog post about a Labour MP who equates analysis of trans ideology to “hate material” I pause over a passage about the advocacy group Mermaids:
Despite its influence, it is worth noting what Mermaids is not. It is not a research body. Its activities are support (for families) and advocacy: based on its contacts with those families, it argues for what it sees are better policies and practices by the NHS and others. It does not carry out or commission clinical or academic research. Its most recent annual report lists among its charitable activities “campaigning and advocacy” and says: “Mermaids has also become more active in lobbying”.
There is regular dialogue between Mermaids and the GIDS, but the two sides do not always agree. An example is on the time the GIDS team take to give referred children the hormone-blocking drugs that stop their bodies developing the physical characteristics associated with their birth sex.
In evidence to another Commons inquiry in 2015, Mermaids argued that GIDS should make such drugs available much more quickly. The GIDS team has generally resisted that call, more than once saying that “any decision around hormone treatment needs time and considered thought.”
And in evidence to that earlier committee, Dr Bernadette Wren of the GIDS said this:
“I know that Susie and Mermaids would like a fast track so that young people who are already well into puberty and feel that they know that they want to move forward into physical intervention would bypass our assessment process and move straight into physical intervention. We feel that is not an ethical way to practise.”
I’m just impressed all over again by how bonkers it is to think it’s clear and obvious and progressive to mandate a rush into physical intervention on the basis of…the feelings about gender of young people who are already well into puberty. Young people who are already well into puberty are probably the last people on earth anyone should consult on the subject of sex and gender, because they’re in the midst of the transition and they don’t know yet. They don’t know. They don’t know how they’re going to feel in a couple of years and five and ten. They know that less than they ever will again, because puberty is confusing and because their brains aren’t fully developed yet. Those two things together make a Niagara Falls of reasons not to take their current feelings as reliable about their future feelings. Making drastic permanent physical changes on that basis is, indeed, not an ethical way to practice.
How to tell if your one-year-old is transgender:
https://vimeo.com/185149379
Skeletor, that video is frightening. How the f*** can these people talk about TERFs enforcing the gender binary? If that isn’t enforcing the gender binary, I don’t know what is!
Gee, honey, if you don’t want to play with those boring dolls and tea sets, it must be that…OMG, you’re really a boy! Congratulations, honey, we figured out your message before you could even talk!
These people are seriously screwed up. Maybe the child described with the barrettes was really just a pre-verbal feminist? One who didn’t think toys and clothes should be assigned by genitals? One who wants all the wonderful things they see that boys are allowed to do, all the wonderful toys boys are allowed to play with, all the comfortable clothes boys are allowed to wear?
When I was in grade school, I was required to wear a dress to school. It was Maine. It got cold in the winter. I had to wear a dress. And every single day that I was in that school, the principal would show up in our classroom with a ruler to measure the distance from the floor of any skirt he felt was not sufficiently long enough. (I was never measured – my mother would not allow any skirts above the knee; she even modified my sister’s cheerleading costume). No boy in that school ever had his clothes measured (though I’m sure the ruler might have shown up if the principal thought a boy had hair that was too long – nah, he could determine that by sight, because my brother was sent home once for having hair too long It had just grown down past the top of his ear. My mother typically kept him in a military cut, but hadn’t given him his haircut yet that week).
There were a lot of times in my life, before we were finally allowed to wear matching pantsuits when I was in junior high, and jeans when I was in high school, that I might have wanted to say “I’m a boy” too, just so I could be comfortable, so I didn’t have to take Home Ec, so I didn’t have to be subjected to the nasty, repressive world in which I was raised. Fortunately, my mother did not buy toys for us, so we roamed outside and created our own worlds, which usually involved playing whatever my older brother wanted to play, which was NEVER dolls or tea parties.