A fate worse than…
Andy Lewis, Le canard noir, tweeted an interesting letter:
Actually untested, unknown issues,
But hey? Who cares? pic.twitter.com/JFisZfc5r6
— Andy (@lecanardnoir) January 20, 2019
Can you read it? Don’t forget to zoom in if it’s difficult.
The first point is that puberty blockers leave the young person in developmental limbo, without the pubertal hormones or secondary sexual characteristic that would tend to consolidate gender identity. One particular puberty blocker “promotes a continued desire to identify with the non-birth sex” while 73 to 88% of GD patients who don’t get blockers “eventually lose their desire to identify with the non-birth sex.”
What caught my attention there is the fact that that loss of desire to identify with the non-birth sex is seen by trans activists as a surrender, a loss, a cop-out, a capitulation to…some equivalent of The Bosses, The Man, The Power. But…why? Why is it seen as more woke to cling to GD than to wait a few years to see if it wouldn’t be easier and simpler just to go with it and fight the sexist stereotypes without surgery and lifelong meds?
It seems like dysphoria at existing at all, or at maturing. There are difficulties in all that, obviously, but Resistance is Futile. We can’t stay 15 or 20 forever, so what about accepting that and moving on and doing something useful? Just a thought.
The letter in the tweet is commenting on a paper, Assessment and support of children and adolescents with gender dysphoria, by Butler, De Graaf, Wren, and Carmichael (Archives of Disease in Childhood, April 2018). The paper is free, and I just printed a 6-page PDF of it from that link. The paper looks very useful to see what these people are thinking.
The letter is in the same journal, but it’s $37 for an individual copy, so I don’t have a PDF to help read it more easily.
It’s a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. We shouldn’t be altogether surprised when a Grue turns up.
I have tremendous sympathy for people who feel alone, unloved and unrepresented. We have systematically failed those people for as long as we’ve been people and we don’t appear to have learned much along the way. People are feeling desperate about gender identity? I sympathise. Heaven fucking forbid that we try to fix societal expectations, though. It’s obviously far better to reinforce that gender bullshit by mutilating children and.. well… what then?
Seriously. Many of the things I do for a living require that I keep really quite complex and usually inconsistent models in my mind and then reason about them. I’m quite good at it. I’ve written papers about it in fancy journals and everything. But I cannot keep track of this shit. I can not follow any path of reasoning through this mess, regardless of any conceits, fudge-factors or straight up dimwitted logic blindness. There is just no way to render this position in a tractable number of dimensions.
I know we know this and my frustration is kind of abstract. But there are children who are being THE OPPOSITE OF HELPED. I don’t know what to do about it because every attempt is scooted into the TERF bin before anyone has bothered thinking about it.
We didn’t have this problem when we were complaining about religion or homeopathy, did we? There was always a bloc of people who couldn’t be turned, a bunch of (as we leaned, mostly obnoxious) people on our side, a few fence-sitters who could occasionally be turned and a lot of places to feel smug about our skepticism.
We knew where we were in those days. We skeptics turned out to be proper arseholes for the most part but we could probably do with a bit more old-skool randi-ish skepticism about the place. Only without the misogyny. And the bullying.
Ah fuck it, I have no idea what to do. But I hate it that children are becoming weapons in a battleground absolutely nobody understands.
I would imagine that the people doing this are doing it for the benefit of trans people who don’t lose their desire to identify as their gender assigned at birth.
There are going to be a lot of trans people – most of them, in fact – who did develop their secondary sexual characteristics at puberty, who presumably experienced a fair amount of heightened dysphoria at the time and for a number of years afterwards, before they were able to undergo whatever transition steps they decided to take. That’s a measurable harm, which it seems noble to want to minimise.
The amount of harm caused by continuing to feel the same way you’ve always felt, even if that makes you part of a marginalised group, and even if it may require other medical intervention, is probably harder to quantify. And the results found in the referenced April 2018 paper (thanks for the link @Dave Ricks) may be unfamiliar to those involved, or seen as preliminary. (Not yet replicated, or maybe other concerns, e.g. sample size?)
That said, I’m generally against “right to try” laws to protect desperate people who aren’t necessarily in a position to dispassionately review scientific results from the snake-oil scam artists who really exist and do great harm by conning sick people out of their money while in many cases making them even sicker.
However, I understand that the trans community has a sticky relationship with the traditional medical establishment, who have historically declared their condition as a disorder, and something that should be “cured”, and even for those that bullied their way through a hostile system often had to wait years or even decades before getting the kind of help they actually wanted.
So, um, yeah, but no, but yeah, but no, but what was the question again?
[…] a comment by latsot on A fate worse […]
@Karellen,
With respect to the trans community’s relationship with the traditional medical establishment, the shoe is certainly on the other foot now: the trans community has convinced the medical establishment to treat virtually any gender “atypical” behaviour as a disorder, and one that needs severe, urgent medical attention at that. For a group supposedly wary of having their identity be medicalized, trans activists sure are eager to conscript kids into a medically dependent condition for life.
Isn’t it just (or also) tribalism?
I’m vegan. When I hear of someone going vegan, I think “Hurray! My team is winning.” When I hear of something giving up their veganism, I think “Boo! Someone thinks I’m wrong.”
I think other things, too. I have actual beliefs and motivations beyond this silly Us vs. Them scheme.
But I think most of us are highly susceptible to this way of thinking. And for things that are more emotionally or politically charged (gender identity stuff certainly fits here), most of us are even more susceptible. The stakes are higher. It’s easier for our identities to be wrapped up in it.
I’m not defending this, but I think it’s there. (And yes, it can lead to some nasty, thoughtless stuff.)
@ArtyMorty #5 – Institutional distrust does not go away that easily. It can take a generation, or longer, after the problems are actually fixed for some people to be convinced that that kind of change isn’t just a surface level PR move. During that time, any stories which can be interpreted as providing evidence that the institution is going back to its old ways (or never left) will be taken that way by some and used as a “See, I told you we could never really trust them!” cautionary tale.
But, yeah, just because the paranoia might be justified, doesn’t mean that the reaction to it is free from problems.