Best practice?
This is horrifying.
Alabama lawmakers, she says, have been put on notice “that laws and policies preventing care that healthcare professionals recommend for transgender minors may violate the constitution and federal law. To be clear, every major medical association agrees that gender-affirming healthcare for transgender kids is a best practice and potentially lifesaving.”
Just like that. So every kid who says “I’m trans” or maybe even “I think I’m trans” should be put on the path to trying to change sex? There’s no potential for harm, no risk at all?
Horrifying.
And the protest signs should read:
Gender Affirming Care is Conversion Therapy
That should discombobulate them. :P
Does Psaki know she’s approaching Spicer/Huckabee-Saunders/McWhatsername territory? This will not age well. What is it about trans “rights” that causes such a widespread, fierce determination to remain aggressively ignorant and impervious to argument, nuance or basic due diligence among people who should know better? Will they continue to hold fast to the party line even after it’s become too hot to handle? How long before the breaking wave of scandal that is becoming more evident in the UK crosses the Atlantic?
This is HORRIFYING. ASKING QUESTIONS IS VIOLENCE! JUST SHUT UP AND BE KIND!! YOU WANT TRANS KIDS TO DIE!!!
The US Department of Justice has a page for their LGBTQI+ Working Group where I will complain.
I find these laws appalling in the same way I find the laws restricting abortion appalling. These are not easy decisions for individuals to make in any circumstances. I can agree with you regarding the dangers of the current medical fad of transitioning. I have had similar concerns about a number of medical fads over my lifetime and you can find interesting histories of dangerous medical fads in earlier times. I don’t know if this particular fad will die down, or if medicine and our culture will end up making gender far more flexible than it was in the past. Either way, making laws against it is incredibly destructive and repressive.
Yadda yadda blah blah, repeating a sad fact: I can predict with depressing certainty your political affiliation by the strains of pseudoscience to which you subscribe.
Having the intellectual fortitude to exercise one’s own mind on any of these points of dogma will earn no friends. To be a heretic is to oppose the group will, and all opponents are equally detestable. I’ve seen it happen between family members whose knowledge of each other’s moral commitments should trump partisan doctrine.
Background: I am pro-vaccine in general and pro-COVID-19-vaccine in particular. I think that transgender trend is at least mostly a social contagion and extreme caution should be taken before giving hormones and surgery to children.
But…If you “follow the science” and “listen to the experts” then Psaki and the Biden administration are 100% correct to take this stance. Search for “AAP transgender” and you’ll find the American Academy of Pediatrics, by far the most respected name in science when it comes to raising children, has consistently supported “gender-affirming care” and trans girls in girls’ sports. Here’s an article plucked at random from their site (but you can find many more):
https://publications.aap.org/aapnews/news/12780
The AAP practically defines what “best practices” are when it comes to child care, so when Psaki says this stuff is best practices, she’s (in theory) standing on the firmest of foundations.
And it’s not just the AAP. Virtually all the “science” in the US takes the same stance.
I find this all very unfortunate, but here we are.
Yes, just like the Tavistock. See also: lobotomies.
Even wikipedia slightly rowed back from the rhetoric of reliability not truth when the practice of reliable sourcery made all too obvious the weakness of defining reliability as attributable to a reliable source with the category of reliable sources being socially constructed.
Hats off to whoever conjured up the term ‘reliable sourcery.’ Terry Pratchett? lol :D
And, Skeletor, it’s not really what the science says, it’s what the scientfic organizations say. Organizations are as much political as they are scientific, so they may be selective in what science they use to adopt their recommendations.
If the power structure in their organizations isn’t asking how a kid can believe they are transgender but skipping ahead to treatments based on the assumption that the kids “know who they are,” important science is not done to determine the best courses of treatments. Sweden is just now starting to look at it, and is not recommending what Psaki is seeing.
There’s no “settled science” on how to treat trans kids, because there isn’t any science that shows that their transness is an established fact. I think that many people who claim science as their ally don’t understand science as well as they think they do, and I make that claim about even some scientists. They know their part, but if they are not interested in the philosophy of science and how to frame the questions that will give them a much more solid base of understanding, then they are going to come up with bad answers.
Any logical process, including science, is going to be way off if you don’t have good assumptions as to the root causes of an issue.
Why do kids think they are trans? That’s where the therapy needs to start, not “how can we change their bodies to match?”
I think Skeletor’s point is that government officials are not spending time reading up on these issues to the level we might hope, and are taking their cues from leading medical organizations in the US, who are largely caught in the ideological snare. So the government officials are on solid ground by most common meanings of “following the science”. How many well-meaning science-advocating people in the US would think to question the AAP? How many questioned the CDC or the WHO about COVID precautions or vaccines? The Biden administration is indeed listening to the experts; these particular experts are wrong. As Ophelia noted, think “Tavistock”, think “lobotomies”.
Pandemic. War. Recession. Inflation. Climate change. Insurrection. Corporatism. Mass incarceration. Consumer debt. Student debt.
Could lose both House and Senate in the mid-terms.
And this is the hill that the Biden administration has decided to die on?
It belongs in the same bin as contains the postmodernism craze that took hold in humanities departments in universities, and whose acolytes attempted to cross the divide and plonk it into scientific ones. But in this case, people who should know better don’t just make fools of themselves. Irreversible harm to others will likely result as well.
But not to the said acolytes.