Guest post: The one irreversible, life altering decision
Originally a comment by Djolaman on All on the rainbow.
It’s remarkable, isn’t it? If you’re under 16 then there are hardly any consequential decisions which you can make you yourself in the uk. You can’t sign a contract of any kind, get a loan, own property, leave school, consent to sexual activity, work more than 12 hours a week, get a tattoo, get a piercing, drink alcohol, get married, be tried as an adult in a criminal case, be sent to an adult prison, live alone, drive any kind of vehicle except a pushbike, receive any inheritance that isn’t managed by a trustee, view or appear in sexually explicit material, open a bank account, act as legal guardian for a child or undergo elective cosmetic surgery.
Some of these things, (bank accounts, piercings,) you can do with parental consent, others (driving, inheritance, pornography) have higher age limits of 17 or 18, which parental consent can’t overrule. The common thread linking all of them is that they’re decisions which can go badly wrong. Taking out a loan you can’t repay is a huge problem, and it’s rightly felt that children need to be protected from the consequences of making those kinds of decisions.
Yet looking at that list there are only one or two items where the potential downside is as stark and unavoidable as the decision to remove or mutilate your genitals or breasts, making yourself infertile and developing a lifelong dependence on continuous medical interventions. But as we all know that is the one enormously significant, irreversible, life altering decision that there is a strong push to have handed over to children, ideally without parental oversight or indeed knowledge. This is at an age where the most important long term decision most people have made is whether to continue with history or geography for GCSE. Utterly incredible.
The popular TRA counter-narrative is that a “transgender child” who goes through the “wrong” puberty has been forced against their will into an irreversible, life-altering course of action, one which causes immediate pain and suffering (one of the worst kinds of suffering there is, the children report and their advocates emphasize) and which also makes it so much harder to “pass” in the future. So it’s a wash. Both letting children decide their future and not letting children decide their future involves long-term consequences which can’t ever be undone.
Of course, that only makes sense if you buy into the idea that Gender Identity is present at birth, unmistakeable, and those who aren’t persistent and insistent from toddlerhood are suppressing their True Self due to transphobia. That turns the adult belief that children aren’t capable of making drastic decisions into a drastic decision to commit child abuse.
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/45389/when-parents-look-for-advice-on-their-trans-identified-kids-on-reddit
Someone on the internet suggested the following to a concerned parent looking for advice:
“Would honestly suggest going for the blockers… the risks are more minimal than many headlines would have you believe… Regardless of the risk of and adverse effects, nothing could be more damaging to your daughter than going through the wrong puperty… it is a multiplier for depression and dysphoria… it is a mental hell nobody should have to endure… Even if it was a 100% chance to cut their life expectancy in half, I would still say, with confidence, get the blockers…”
:-(
I do kind of get the claim that allowing puberty to proceed is itself a big thing – it’s not as it were “neutral” while stopping it is the opposite of neutral. It is in a sense (no blocker v blockers; do nothing v do something), but puberty itself is…strange. But that’s life as a body in time – that body changes. Using hormones and surgeries to pretend it doesn’t is more drastic than just adapting to the changes.
The thing is, trans-ness is a delusion. To be clear, I am very sympathetic to people who have delusions. It must truly be hell. But all this medicating, cutting, re-configuration of genitalia, voice-coaching, cosmetics-advising — none of that addresses the root of the problem. I can’t think of any other delusion that we “treat” by pretending it’s real, and even normal, and going to such lengths to try to bend reality to fit it.
Exactly. I’ve said that what feels like about a million times by now. It’s a delusion or a fantasy, and it makes zero sense to make it mandatory to endorse either one. Enjoy your fantasy but don’t try to force us to play along with it. Get help for your delusion if it’s disrupting your life, but don’t try to force us to play along with it.
Sastra:
Of course, this is incompatible with the idea that an adult can discover his or her transness later in life, like the Philosophy Tube creep. He referred to himself as cisgender up until recently, so he was either lying or mistaken about his gender identity prior to announcing he was a laydee. If he was mistaken, then people can be mistaken about their gender identity–and he could be now. If he was lying, then people can and do lie about their gender identity–and he could be now. Neither case is compatible with the sort of certainty claimed by our relied upon by activists in demanding, well, anything really.
And that’s just taking their ideology as a given without bothering to call on any outside facts like resistance rates. The thing can’t even get off the ground in its own universe.
The “persistent and insistent” argument is the best I’ve seen for innate gender identity, but even if it’s true it’s not a very good argument. Just because you’ve been something for as long as you can remember, that doesn’t mean it’s innate. Just about every human older than two has been a speaker (or signer) of at least one language for as long as they can remember, but it should be obvious that specific languages are not innate*. Children learn the languages that they have access to, and begin learning them at a very early age, and for the most part can’t remember learning them, but they’re learned. Much of cultural knowledge is learned that way, and it feels natural–it’s the way we’ve always done things–but it’s not innate. The foods we eat, the games we play, the holidays we celebrate, the deference to others we show or don’t show, even the colors we see: none of those are innate (though they may draw on innate characteristics or abilities). As far as I can tell there’s no good reason to hypothesize that gender identity is innate, and even if there were there is no good way to test that hypothesis.
*Though there’s debate among linguists about the extent to which language in the abstract is innate.
“… Even if it was a 100% chance to cut their life expectancy in half, I would still say, with confidence, get the blockers…”
I’m SORRY, but this is just NUTS. NUTS, I tell you.
Thanks Ophelia, this is an unexpected honour.
Thank you.
There’s no such thing as the “wrong” puberty. There’s puberty that comes with your sex. That’s the only one on offer. It’s not like you can choose some other kind of puberty, as the “right” puberty. It’s either the puberty for your sex, or it’s no puberty at all. No puberty at all is purposely depriving a living organism of its natural fulfillment of its biological maturation. It’s not like puberty blockers are reversible in reality. If you miss the window for your pubertal growth and development, you’ve missed it. It doesn’t stay open forever. Who really wants to be an immature child for their entire life? [Don’t answer that; the answer seems to be, “lots of people.”]
I don’t get it. If gender isn’t about sex organs, if lesbians can have dicks, if you are the gender you feel you are, if there are no sexes but persons with uteri and persons with phalli, then what goddamn difference does it make which puberty you go through?
I don’t get it.
Nice piece, Djolaman
We do treat sixteen year olds as almost-children, which is to their advantage as that means oldies will cut them a bit of slack for irresponsible/bad behaviour. Eg people will speak of being lenient towards Shamima Begum who ran off and joined ISIS when she was fifteen. Those who joined Hitler Youth are given a pass. The two years between 16 and 18 seem huge – an 18 year old soldier doesn’t seem half as bad as a sixteen year old, who appears as a child soldier.
The Scottish National Party gave 16 and 17 year olds the vote in Scotland before the independence referendum, whereas the voting age is 18 in the UK. They calculated that the young would be more excitable, more idealistic while we grumpy old Unionist gits said that they were less likely to count the cost, and were of course less mature in judgement.