Critics say that Pink News is out to lunch
Ah, Pink News.
Critics say that Newsnight presented being transgender as something that children should be encouraged out of. https://t.co/4ElI96Wi2o
— PinkNews (@PinkNews) July 23, 2019
Shock horror!
Wait. Is it? Is it bad to present being transgender as something that children should be encouraged out of? At least when the issue is “being transgender” in the sense of getting medical interventions, hormone blockers or surgery or both? Should children be encouraged to make irreversible changes to their bodies on the grounds that they “feel” like the other sex? Should children be encouraged to do that in this climate in which “being transgender” has become a craze like sitting on flag poles or accusing daycare workers of Satanic ritual abuse?
What about children who are not encouraged out of it, and get those irreversible changes, and then in five or ten years realize that they’re not transgender after all? What if their sex lives and love lives are permanently limited because of irreversible physical changes they made when they were 8 or 12 or 15? What if it turns out that that cohort has a much higher suicide rate than trans people have ever had?
It’s as if there were a huge evil corporation, The Acme Trans Your Kid corporation, busy PRing everyone into jumping on the bandwagon…except that then the left wouldn’t be cheering it on.
Not only should they be “encouraged out of it,” but it should be illegal and prosecutable to put children on puberty blockers, hormones, or to operate on them.
God damn, this is moral insanity.
On this topic — the Acme Trans Your Kid corporation — Jazz Jennings will never have an orgasm, because the puberty blockers stunted the development of their penis, and surgery to invert their stunted penis could only make things worse. Reportedly, in the UK, the Tavistock clinic has been telling parents and their children that puberty blockers are reversible, but that is untrue, and everyone who says the are reversible should know it is untrue.
I highly recommend watching this video of an endocrinologist William Malone talking in professional terms about the treatment of gender dysphoria (in psychiatry) by medicalization (chemically).
Also on this topic, I highly recommend reading Transgender Children and Young People (2018), and I look forward to reading Inventing Transgender Children and Young People (Sept. 2019).
I’ll paraphrase one thought from the first book of essays. The transgender movement invented “transgender children” for political purposes, to reify “gender identity” in the public mind, and generate sympathy for it. But the mutilated children are just cannon fodder for adult males asserting power.
My paraphrasing here was blunt because I’m angry. Each essay is more careful and methodical than I have patience to be.
Meanwhile, there have been some posts here that have discussed some of the therapists who actually seem to be encouraging children into trans. Children who like to be different than the classic stereotypes, are treated like weirdos by their classmates (and all too often teachers), so they get depressed, go to counseling, and are told they want to be the opposite sex.
I’d thought that was the case, as the push for self ID would do away with the need for any surgery, but the children would have become invested in the ideology with there flesh and blood, fertility and their mental health like some sort of pyramid scheme, where the self-ID autogynephiles get the big payoff, while disphoric kids are left holding the bag.
This feels like a logical extension to the trend of “de-disorderizing” everything. Blindness and deafness are not disabilities. It’s an accessible parking space, not a handicapped one. People don’t “suffer from” depression and anxiety disorder, they are consumers of mental health services. And it’s not a disorder, because they aren’t abnormal; it’s cognitive diversity. People aren’t “stricken with” cancer; they just “live with” it.
The PinkNews tweet is directly analogous to the cochlear implant “controversy”:
Deafness is not something to be fixed. It’s just part of who a “person with deafness” is. It’s a cultural identity, not a medical condition. Trans-ness is not something to be fixed. It’s just part of who a “person with gender dysphoria” is. It’s a gender identity, not a psychiatric condition.
It’s insane. It’s what happens when Teddy Brewster devises an entire metaphysics grounded in the assumption that his presidential identity is intrinsically veridical. It’s not, Teddy. You are not Theodore Roosevelt, and your aunts’ basement is not the Panama Canal.
The way trans-ideologues can pull together and simultaneously endorse contradictory ideas seems almost magical. When you begin with a contradiction, you can build literally anything you want into your philosophical framework. In logic, we call this the principle of explosion or ex falso quodlibet—from the false, anything follows. It’s not magic.
It’s insanity.
Nullius, your post reminds me of trends I have been seeing for a long time to paint mental disorders as positive. Down’s babies? Oh, so happy. Schizophrenics? Oh, they’re fun (I read a play that actually made the argument that we shouldn’t treat schizophrenia because someone had a real fun uncle who was schizophrenic. Oh, he killed himself? But he was fun! And happy!). I’ve even read people who envy those with mental disabilities, for various reasons, but often because they “seem to have something” other people don’t. Case in point: Equus (the play) where the doctor envies the young man his worship. A worship that caused him so much pain he blinded a whole stable full of horses! Oh, but he had worship. He had something the doctor felt he didn’t have. Why force him to conform to society’s idea of sane?
There is some reality to that last bit – people who simply were different, women who didn’t want to be wives and mothers, people with lively imaginations – often being sent for mental treatment when all they needed was the opportunity to be themselves in a restrictive society.
But as someone with a genuine mental disorder (yes, disorder, and yes, that is how I perceive it and feel it), I resent this. You want to feel the pain I feel? Fine. But don’t suggest that it is great to be me. Don’t suggest that having anorexia is great because I can lose weight. Don’t suggest that OCD is just something we all have. Don’t, don’t, don’t. And don’t pretend I am just a “mental health consumer”. If there is anything that trivializes the pain, that will do it.
And now we’re doing it to children who don’t want to conform to society’s gender roles, or who have some sort of mental disorder of their own (from what I’m seeing, people who have never thought about gender at all, or who have moved through life without thought of gender dysphoria are now being convinced that their pain and suffering of a different mental issue – depression and anxiety seem to be the most common – is actually the need to be the opposite gender. And they believe it so deeply they begin to hate anyone who thinks differently about gender than the TRAs. Since the trans lobby has commandeered almost all the symptoms in the DSM, it’s possible to identify as gender dysphoric regardless of what sort of problem you have.
What if this had been the norm years ago when my therapist asked me if I wanted to be male? When I said no, I just want to be female in my own way, would he have accepted that and helped me work toward that end? Or would he have worked to convince me to change my gender identity, which would have done literally nothing to help my problems? I live on a precarious enough ledge as it is; I certainly would not have been helped by pushing me onto another ledge and then pushing me over.
iknklast, I genuinely thank you for saying exactly what you just said, because I feel the same way. My mental disorders are disorders. Rebranding them as anything else not only doesn’t help, it trivializes things that have warped my entire life in ways I will probably never fully grasp. As Thomas Jefferson says in 1776, “The King is a tyrant—whether we say so or not. We might as well say so.” I haven’t lived with a tyrant. I’ve suffered under it.
I was beginning to think I was alone in my resentment.
And there is Pink News cheering it on.
God what a nightmare.
My Type 1 diabetes is freedom from society’s arbitrary ideas about what a pancreas should be.
And my asthma is freedom from restrictive notions about the need to breathe oxygen.
As a matter of fact, I’m the true insulin haver. Because I deliberately inject it 5 or 6 times a day. But you people…