Where does confidence come from?
I always wonder how Jolyon Maugham QC can be so confident about the wack things he says. I don’t wonder it so much about Adrian Harrop and Owen Jones, because they’re rather childish and undisciplined and silly, but I have this idea that QCs have to do better than that. (To be sure, Harrop is a medical doctor and you’d hope that would apply to him too, but he’s just so goony that it seems futile to wonder further.)
Like this thing for instance.
How does he manage to be so confident that there is such a thing as a “transgender child” and that it is easy to know which children are transgender and that there are never any mistakes about it? How can he be so confident that all that is known and established and well beyond question? How can he be so very confident of all that that he thinks the only right course of action is prescribing puberty blockers? How can he be so confident that puberty blockers are in no way risky or undesirable or damaging such that if there is a mistake and the transgender child in question later turns out not to be transgender, that child will wish the puberty blockers had not been prescribed?
How can he be so confident that there are only two choices, prescribe puberty blockers (yay! happy transgender child) or do nothing (boooo! sad transgender child)? How can he be so confident that therapy, watch and wait, caution are not also choices? How can he be so certain that all children who say they are transgender are entirely right about it and also not at all influenced by the public relations campaign to make being trans the hippest best wokest thing ever? How can he be so confident that fashion and political rhetoric and social media and roleplaying games (thanks Sastra) have not created a new way for kids to make themselves special? How can he be so confident that the stories people tell about themselves are transparently uncomplicatedly true? A lawyer of all people!
The revival of feminism started decades ago, in the late 60s, and still many men don’t get it, think women are shit, can’t be bothered, don’t care. The trans craze has been raging for a few years and here are smug domineering women-hating men like Jolyon Maugham QC embracing it without a hint of doubt or skepticism.
I wonder if Jo is fine with doctors giving accurate descriptions of puberty blockers, including the known risks, the relative dearth of research into their long term effects, and the research showing that people not administered blockers lose their suicidal ideation at about the same rate as those administered them, in addition to dropping their notions of trans-ness. And I’m baffled as to how Jo, a legal professional, thinks minors are supposed to be expected to know the gravity of such decisions given they aren’t legally considered to have that capacity.
If Maugham seriously believes that the only 2 choices for a child who believes they’re in the wrong body are 1.) puberty blockers and 2.) nothing, then he clearly hasn’t done any research on the topic. The “mental health” model allows for many different therapeutic approaches which help them understand themselves, explore how they view gender, develop resilience and coping mechanisms, and deal with any other additional psychological and social problems and issues (which virtually all trans identified children and adolescents have.)
It’s not about talking them out of being trans — so-called “Trans Conversion Therapy.” It’s about giving them the space and tools to deal with all their thoughts and feelings, cope with their dysphoria, and form a strong personal identity, so that whichever choice they later make is one they’re comfortable with. Kids obsessed with transition to the point where nothing else matters are in the grip of an obsession, not showing the world that they’re trans.
Puberty blockers don’t just stop the body from developing; they prevent the brain from maturing. They don’t necessarily catch up. In fact, it’s almost certain that they can’t.
Something has been nagging away at the back of my mind for a while, a feeling that there is something about the puberty blocking issue that is being overlooked, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what, but it has finally come to me.
Why do so many adults seemingly have an interest in keeping young people’s bodies and minds in a pre-pubescent state up to and past the legal age of sexual consent? Maybe I’m over-thinking this, or my thinking is coloured by the amount of abused children I encountered through fostering, but I find the level of determination and denial of facts that these people are engaged in when it comes to insisting that blockers be given to all who ask for them to be highly suspicious.
Acolyte, I might find your argument compelling if it weren’t for the actual effects of Lupron on kids. It doesn’t really make them stay young forever. In fact, it makes them age and die sooner. They get to twenty and they’re already fifty inside.
One can study the long-term effects of Lupron on kids – just not with the kids who adults have transed, which is a comparatively recent fad. For example, Lupron was discovered in the 80s, and has long been prescribed to make short kids with precocious puberty taller. The effects? Horrendous.
https://www.statnews.com/2017/02/02/lupron-puberty-children-health-problems/
The trans-cult is obsessed with a victimless fantasy. They want to separate people from their bodies, and make genitals as plug-and-play as computer peripherals.
Comparatively speaking, juvenile surgical castration would be gentler and have fewer side effects, if castrati are what the trans-cult demands be rendered unto them.
Papito, #4:
That’s true, but only if one is the sort who cares about things such as evidence, truth, and the victims of sexual abuse and/or exploitation.
Manufacturers and users of porn have no concerns about the long-term health effects of what are very often extremely small young women (the smaller they are, the larger the normal-sized mens’ dicks look by comparison) being repeatedly penetrated, often very violently, both vaginally and anally, and often by multiple men at once. Thinking about the potential for diseases, including cancer, and serious damage to the women’s reproductive systems and other internal organs isn’t something that the men who make and who use porn want to do very much of, because as long as the profits roll in and the images continue to fuel the sexual fantasies then, well, who cares once the women are too old and used-up to boost the flagging erections, eh? There’s always going to be desperate young women to take their place.
Similarly, child abusers give little-to-no thought about the damage inflicted on the bodies and minds of their victims, it’s all about the abusers’ sexual gratification and the power they hold. The only long-term concern for child abusers is the risk of discovery. Which brings us to my original comment. If there are people. – mainly men but some women too – who fantasize about sex with minors but don’t want to risk the legal consequences, as far as they’re concerned the possibility of pre-pubescents who are over the age of sexual consent is ideal, a legal way of fulfilling their fantasies. I seriously doubt that such people would even think of looking up the risks concerned with puberty blockers; their concerns are utterly for their own pleasure and for strictly short-term relations with the youngsters they wish to exploit, exactly the same as the porn industry. Their interest in the individual stops when the individual is too old or too spent to maintain the illusion.
I’m not suggesting that all proponents of blockers are in it for this reason, but just as a certain amount of transwomen are all about easier access to women – for whatever reason – then it would be foolish not to acknowledge that some who lobby for the giving of blockers on request must do so with ill intentions and without caring a toss about the future health of the exploited.
Acolyte, perhaps there is something right with me in that I couldn’t even conceive of wanting to have sex with someone who can’t actually enjoy sex. So castration pimps like Maugham just want their own little pillow angels? I can’t even.
Well, while I wouldn’t accuse any individual without some solid proof I am certainly suspicious of anyone who would ‘help’ already vulnerable children (and kids who seek this kind of treatment cannot by definition be happy, well-balanced and untroubled) by attempting to keep them in a vulnerable state. Many actual and would-be exploiters and abusers know that the easiest way to get close to the vulnerable is by pretending to help them get what they believe they need, or appearing to be the very person they need at difficult times.
Besides, nobody would be so stupid as to be so open and public about their support if their motives were bad. Would they?