Define “treatment”
Bazelon on the new WPATH guidelines part 2:
When WPATH released the draft of the SOC8 for public comment, Leibowitz and his co-authors braced for the inevitable conservative attack. For teenagers who have parental consent, the draft adolescent chapter lowered to 14 (from 16 in the previous guidelines) the recommended minimum age for hormone treatments, which can permanently alter, in a matter of months, voice depth and facial and body hair growth and, later, other features like breast development. It set a minimum recommended age of 15, for breast removal or augmentation, also called top surgery. (The previous standards didn’t set a minimum age.)
It’s interesting that she admits the alterations from hormone “treatments” are permanent (while still calling them “treatments”).
Opponents of gender-related care did, indeed, denounce all of this. But Leibowitz and his co-authors also faced fury from providers and activists within the transgender world.
…
Assessments for children and adolescents have long been integral to the Standards of Care. But this time, the guard rails were anathema to some members of a community that has often been failed by health care providers….In a publicly streamed discussion on YouTube on Dec. 5, activists and experts criticized the adolescent chapter, with the emotion born of decades of discrimination and barriers to care.
Notice the inserted excuses for “the emotion,” which others might describe more specifically. Maybe the “emotion” (i.e. rage and abuse) is born not of decades of discrimination but of the nature of the movement/activism/ideology itself. Maybe narcissistic rage is characteristic of trans activism, and encouraged by it, and flattered and embraced and imitated.
The small group of clinicians who wrote the first Standards of Care were all cisgender. After WPATH was created in 1979, transgender advocates increasingly gained influence in the organization, but many transgender people viewed subsequent versions of the standards as imposing paternalistic and demeaning barriers to treatment.
But that assumes the “treatment” really is treatment. That assumes it cures something. Does it? What does it cure? What does it treat?
To answer those questions requires defining terms, though, and we know how people taken by the cult feel about definitions.
I saw an attempt the other day to defend the self-referential definition of “woman” (woman := someone who identifies as a woman) by arguing that it’s like any mathematical proposition that has infinite formulations; e.g., 2×2=4, 2×2=4×1, 2×2=4x1x1, … Therefore, saying the one is problematic implies the others are problematic.
My face ended up with a clear imprint of my palm.
Well, saying breast augmentation and reduction is slightly better than “top surgery”, but it still sounds a lot better than removal of healthy breast tissue, or better yet, cutting off healthy breasts.
Paternalistic and demeaning barriers to treatment – tried to get an abortion lately? How about birth control? How about any sort of female care? Paternalism has been the dominant attitude of doctors to women since…well, since the time doctors and women began to coexist. Demeaning? Absolutely. Ever buy tampons from a male clerk? How about have a pap smear? What about having a baby at the time my mother was having hers, when doctors assumed women were too stupid to understand the process? What about most of the doctors I’ve ever gone to, not just for female health issues but just ordinary check ups or illnesses, who talked to me like I was a child, and a not particularly bright one? They have a bad habit of talking to my husband as though he understands, and he doesn’t, and doesn’t know what questions to ask. But he has that penile attachment where I only have a “front hole”, to use what is perhaps the most demeaning and patronizing term they’ve come up with so far to avoid saying woman.
Welcome to the world of being a woman…only that part of the world you don’t want, do you? You want to keep your male privilege even while intruding on the few spaces women have carved out for themselves.
Not fair! You keep asking these difficult questions!!
In its full scope “gender affirming” care is not so much a treatment as a lifetime subscription.
Current trans ideology is the worst of several possible worlds. It demands and promotes the needless medicalization of people who might otherwise desist and be homosexual women and men, while trying to suppress truthful information about the ramifications of this approach that would normally be available to people looking into their options. But “informed consent” is transphobic. So current dogma fails dysphoric people, both those who would desist, as well as those who are “actually” trans (whatever that might mean).
To make things worse, genderists fail to acknowledge the camouflage for predators that self-ID and demands for trans identified male “inclusion” into women’s single-sex-spaces provides. Even if EVERY SINGLE TiM was completely harmless (which is not self-evidently true), the trans activist position is an open door for opportunistic predators, “trans” or not. (This of course is They claim there is “no conflict” with women’s rights, yet scream blue murder and “TRANSPHOBIA!” whenever women talk about their rights, spaces and boundaries, which sounds like they see a conflict after all. Or, there’s “no conflict” when they are given everything they want. Without discussion, because “NO DEBATE!” It’s a clusterfuck all the way down, with injustice and damage for all.
To make things worse, in places where an affirmative therapy mandate has been smuggled in under the cover of conversion therapy bans, most therapists won’t touch gender dysphoric kids with a ten foot pole.
So these kids – most of whom also suffer from anxiety and/or depression and/or PTSD and/or undiagnosed autism – can’t get help for any of those things.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/15/biden-plan-transgender-youth-health-care-00039844
It’s not going to get any better, at least in the US. Europe seems to be changing course in a positive way. Biden is pushing on regardless.
Amazing, isn’t it – Biden remained a sexist asshole for DECADES after everyone with any sense had caught on, but now he’s Mister Fake Progressive with the trans bullshit. Heads women lose, tails men win. Anita Hill was a lying slut but Lia Thomas is a poor persecuted woman.
Couldn’t agree more Ophelia. I prefer Biden to Trump, but this is a massive achilles heel. For him, and most of the left honestly. I feel so alienated from my normal political constituency. I only hope the left will catch on to people like me, and at least let us have a voice.
I prefer Biden to Trump but I prefer SO many Dems to Biden it would take me all day to list them. I wish he’d stayed out so that we could have voted for someone better.
There are some Dems I like. I feel like Biden was the best bet to beat trump, but I could be wrong. jamie Raskin seems great. Trying to think of other candidates I would prefer. Midwest governors seem like a solid bet. Gretchen Whitmer maybe?
Who would you have preferred? I am from the UK, so not as familiar with the options as you are.
What Biden signed is an Executive Order, which has the force of law as it is an interpration on how to enact existing law. The positive thing about the EO is that it can be nullified without having to go back through Congress. If Kara Dansky finally gets through to the White House admin, she may be able to get it reversed by this old man or the next president.
(Not a Biden fan, either. I was disheartened when he entered the race but glad he beat Trump, and that’s all I have to say about that.)