There is no pause button
Jacob has just turned 16 and for the past four years the teenager’s body has been put on pause. He has been on hormone blockers to stop puberty while he decides how far he is willing to go to become a transgender man.
He claims that taking blockers was “the worst decision I’ve ever made”.
Jacob was born a girl but felt unhappy with his gender. “I always felt so weak and pathetic and inferior to the men.” He started using the male pronoun and imagined himself growing up and “dating a woman”.
It’s not as if that feeling is entirely unknown to girls in general. There are different degrees of it, but few girls get to escape it entirely. Girls learn early that boys hit harder.
So Jacob went to the Tavistock clinic and was referred for blockers.
“It was sold to me as a miracle cure for being trans,” he claimed. He told another trans school friend about them, who started requesting blockers too.
Hormone blockers are only licensed in Britain to delay the onset of puberty for children suffering “precocious puberty” — that is, those who start developing abnormally early before the age of eight or nine.
However, their use is promoted by the transgender campaign group Mermaids as a way of giving young people “a pause button” while deciding whether to graduate to the irreversible, cross-sex hormones that will trigger the life-changing, fertility-reducing jump from one gender to another, once they reach 16.
But there is no “pause button” in life.
“They promise you that your breasts will disappear, that your voice will be deeper, that I would look and sound more like a boy. For me, that was the best thing that could have happened,” he said.
Only, Jacob found that wasn’t what happened at all. Far from becoming one of the lads, as he’d hoped, he felt even more alienated from them as their physiques changed and Jacob’s remained the same.
“At school, other people were maturing into adults. The guys I grew up with were growing hair and growing up. For someone who’s trying to fit in as a boy, that’s not what you want.”
That’s the missing pause button, see. You can’t make everyone else “pause” along with you, and the result is they leave you behind. He had been a tall kid but he became a very short teenager. His younger brother passed him and Jacob could no longer stand to be in the same room with him.
“My little brother is 18 months younger and now he has completely outgrown me. I go to school and I feel like other people are developing and I still feel like a child,” he said.
Jacob also claims he was not warned about the side-effects of the drugs.
These have included insomnia, exhaustion, fatigue, low moods, rapid weight gain which caused his skin to become covered with angry, itchy stretch marks, and a reduction in bone density. “I’d never broken a bone before [taking puberty blockers],” he says. “I’ve since broken four bones.
“I stubbed my toe, it broke. I fell over, my wrist broke. Same with my elbow.”
As he took the blockers, Jacob’s mother watched her child become even more introverted and body-conscious. “The blockers contributed more to the self-image problems that were already there,” she said.
Jacob is now staggered by the lack of discussion before he was merrily given blockers.
Mermaids, the transgender lobby group, claims that puberty blockers are safe and “completely reversible” and that not giving them to youngsters who request the can be more damaging than prescribing them.
Gendered Intelligence, another trans campaign group, claims on its website that hormone blockers give children “breathing space to ensure that they are sure about the permanent effects of cross-sex hormones, without the adverse effects of an incorrect puberty.”
Jacob is scathing about such claims. “Breathing space! It really isn’t. I’ve not had any space to breathe the last four years.
“They sell it to you as a break from feeling like a girl, and that’s fine for the first few months but as soon as everyone else around you starts developing it becomes ‘spot the transgender kid’, which is so easy because you’re stuck as a child.”
Aging out of childhood is hard. There are at least parts of it that everyone misses. It doesn’t follow that the solution is to get stuck in it by taking insufficiently tested drugs.
A spokesman for Tavistock said: “All young people considering the puberty blocker or cross-sex hormones are repeatedly made aware of the known potential impacts of these medical interventions. . .as well as the areas of impact that remain to some extent unknown.
“The information that we give patients about the blockers makes it clear that they may get tired and experience low mood.
We explain to young people that hormones give us energy and drive, not just our sex drive but our overall ‘get up and go’.
“We also emphasised to them routinely that while on the blocker they would stay early puberty whilst their peers developed. This is a routine part of the discussion.
“In the end the decision to go on blockers is a balancing act weighing up these factors against the perceived distress of undergoing puberty in the ‘wrong’ gender and developing unwanted and potential hard to change secondary sexual characteristics.”
But what if there is no such thing as “the ‘wrong’ gender”? What if that is a social fad invented by “activists” and promoted by more and more and more activists? What if there is only the body, and whichever sex that body is, and how that body decides to live in the world? What if the Tavistock is promoting and amplifying that “perceived distress of undergoing puberty in the ‘wrong’ gender” and doing massive harm in the process?
My irony meter just shattered. The pieces are lying in little fragments all over the floor.
If you are a transmale, shouldn’t you feel like a boy? So why, if you don’t feel like a girl, do you need blockers as a break from feeling like a girl? I know, I know, someone will explain that this is just a shorthand for being miserable about everyone else seeing you as a girl. No.
The symptoms this individual is describing, as OB indicated, are exactly part of growing up female. It is obvious from his statement that he actually felt like a girl, but didn’t want to feel inferior anymore. Well, duh. That is exactly what it feels like to feel like a girl/woman. To be treated as inferior, to be told you are inferior, to feel inferior.
So don’t fix the bodies of young people; the bodies are not the problem. Fix the problem. STOP TREATING GIRLS LIKE THEY ARE LESS WORTHY. Allow boys and girls both to explore whatever hobbies, fashions, body decorations, etc that suit them rather than channeling every activity toward a particular sex. The trans lobby is focused on the wrong thing.
If only there was some philosophy, some social movement, that tried to promote the equality of women, so that “feeling like a girl” didn’t have to be a bad thing.
Also, is it just me, or is it weird for a transgender group to name itself after a mythological creature?
It is remarkable how thoroughly the “perfectly reversible with no side-effects” mantra has infected the progressive community. Adults who should fucking well know better will think that these drugs, designed specifically to alter hormone development and administered to children at a critical stage of development, are somehow the single drugs in the history of pharmacology to lack any negative or unintended consequences. It’s just plain breathtaking, is what it is.
Thank goodness—that you highlighted that “pause” nonsense. Was driving me batty.
Yes, Seth, it is. I think because it exposes what our progressive friends and neighbors and compatriots were really like all along. Absolutely drunk-besotted with regressive “gender” ideas. They were never, actually, accepting of homosexuality. Or even of the act of wearing “the wrong sex’s clothes.”
This never could have taken hold near-instantly if we weren’t ready for it.
Seth, I think that may be the antithesis of homeopathy. Believing that water has some extreme healing powers not contained in other medicines is sort of the antithesis of believing that a medicine specifically designed to change something in your body would not change any other part.
I suspected permanent or near permanent neoteny might be a thing… No, you don’t get a break from being a girl… You just stay a little girl longer.
“But what if there is no such thing as “the ‘wrong’ gender”? ”
I’m convinced that there is. Much like sexual orientation there are clearly individuals who are programmed from birth to perceive that they don’t conform to the phenotype they were born into (I have known two such individuals – one since they were 6 years old.). This isn’t surprising from a developmental standpoint considering the complexity of creating humans from a pretty small set of genes that aren’t all that different from a chimp’s. Gender is likely to developmentally be a strong binary with variation. Not believing in classical free will tends to make it easier for me to accept that these things are variations in complex programming. Add to that the power of peer pressure in childhood and adolescence and it seems unlikely that many people would deliberately choose something so isolating.
The problem of course is that it’s often hard to separate those in pain from simple pains in the ass. Which aligns with your second statement: “What if that is a social fad invented by “activists” and promoted by more and more and more activists?”
I think a fair number of gender nonconformists are just that – nonconformists. No worries, when I was younger we grew mustaches, beards, long hair and wore tie dye to stick it to the previous generation,
Course the difference was that our nonconformity didn’t detract from anyone’s true pain except for the hirsute I suppose.
‘Perfectly safe….no side effects’. Every time I hear this one word springs to mind; thalidomide.
Now, is it just me or does this sentence contain an obvious, glaring internal inconsistency? (bolding mine)
That more damaging is an overt admission that the drugs can be damaging.
This, however, is the sentence that leapt out at me.
A cure for being trans! I thought that being trans was supposed to be perfectly natural, perfectly normal, in no way a thing that needs curing as if it were an illness of some kind. Maybe young Jacob mis-spoke there, or maybe, just maybe, Mermaids really is pushing the blockers as a cure, promising to make the kids ‘normal’ by making adolescent uncertainties as something abnormal.
Why are you convinced?
iknklast
Fix the problem. STOP TREATING GIRLS LIKE THEY ARE LESS WORTHY. Allow boys and girls both to explore whatever hobbies, fashions, body decorations, etc that suit them rather than channeling every activity toward a particular sex. The trans lobby is focused on the wrong thing.
TEN THUMBS UP!
This is a troubling statement, because how do you know? How do you know what it means to be in the body of the opposite gender? The only way I can see is by either biological characteristics (i.e., feeling one should have a penis or that one should have breasts) or by gender expectations. Being male and female are biological states, and being born into the wrong body is just incoherent.
We determine all of this by societal expectations. More and more, I see friends having “gender reveal” parties, putting their kids in special outfits deemed appropriate for their sex/gender, and insisting on knowing the sex before birth. Why? “Oh, I don’t care either way, of course, I just want to be prepared.” For what? For implanting the proper sense of gender into their child by having the ‘right’ clothes, the ‘right’ color room, the ‘right’ toys. These are my college educated, often feminist friends!
So, what does it mean to be born in the wrong body? You are born into your body. You are raised in a society washed in gender expectations, even when we claim that’s all in the past – in fact, even though women are in positions now that they couldn’t have dreamed of when I was a kid, the gender divide seems to be widening in so many ways! We are pushing gender, pushing it, pushing it, with every single Bic for girls or Legos for girls or Male brain/Female brain fad that erupts on us, covering us with so much gender lava that nothing can grow except what is adapted to that lava.
Feeling strongly that you should be the opposite sex is not the same as being born in the wrong body. It could be, and probably is, being born in the wrong society for what you want to do with your body.
I’d like to know (a) how you distinguished the causal pathway involved, and (b) how you determined that the resulting perception is or should be treated as veridical.
Any number of causal factors could be involved in the development of a view of one’s sex that is incongruous with material reality. For example, a failure to learn at an appropriate age that the appearance of a thing does not determine its nature. A boy in a dress is still a boy.
Beyond that, however, I still have to wonder how you determine that the perception of an incorrect gender entails a reality of incorrect gender. We all acknowledge that people can be mistaken about reality. We even acknowledge that people can be deluded, that they can be motivated by such delusions that they do truly horrific things to themselves and others. (Just do a google news search for “body integrity identity disorder” for examples of how far people are willing to go.) So how do you justify the leap from (arguendo) “these people are programmed to perceive their sex as wrong” to “their sex is wrong”?