Guest post: Puberty blockers prevent their minds from being made
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Send us your best.
In reality, the problem has never been disagreement about how to care for trans children and young people.
Bullshit. If you can’t define it, how do you treat it? In reality, the problem has been in immediately deciding children with any degree of dysphoria are “trans,” desistance and detransitioners be damned. How do you decide who qualifies as “trans”? What’s the test? What are the criteria? Desistance and detransition are huge red flags showing that somebody has got it wrong. They should be a valuable source of refinement and calibration of “trans” diagnoses, not shameful failures to be swept aside and demonized. If someone “wasn’t really trans to start with,” how do you decide who is?
Quite apart from the determination of the correct target group of patients, the “treatment” itself is flawed and problematic. Puberty blockers are not a “pause button” that allows children or youth to “make up their minds.” Given the evidence of stunted cognitive development, puberty blockers literally prevent their minds from being made. There is no “wrong” puberty, just the one and only one your body has been aiming for since conception. If you miss the train, or fail to hit the mark, there is no other puberty available to you. These children can never have a “choice” of which puberty they will have; it’s one per customer, take it or remain unfinished and malformed. Treating puberty as a preventable disease, or like a flavour of ice cream, is not a very good idea. The body’s gonna do what the body’s gonna do. Interfering with that (without an actual disease or disorder being present) is not going to end well. Selling someone an impossible fantasy is not “care.” Better a difficult truth than an easy lie. So yes, there’s always been disagreement, because your idea of “care” is a ticket to life-long body horror.
Don’t even bother treating GD as a disease anymore, says Abigail Thorn.
#Cass starts by asking “Does transition relieve mental distress in a clinical setting?” which is fundamentally pathologising (and condemned by international medical authorities when NHSE tried this in 2023.) The real Q is, “Do you want to transition?” If yes, that’s your right!
https://twitter.com/PhilosophyTube/status/1778438557813670368#m
So no more “trans kids will commit suicide from mental distress” lines anymore. It’s full mask off time.
(Also, AT’s outfit is ridiculous. If you want to be taken seriously as a philosophy, stop wearing fetish outfits in your profile).
Most children, when coerced into doing something because the adults around them think that it’s a good idea (learning to play a musical instrument, for example) only comply until adolescence. My father, for example, had piano lessons with his aunt (who lived on the same street). He asked to be allowed to stop when he was ten, but was compelled to carry on until he rebelled when he was twelve. He didn’t touch a keyboard for thirty years. When my eldest son asked if he could stop when he was ten, having played since he was a toddler, I agreed. He was fed up with his teacher objecting to his other great passion: playing rugby. My father was shocked, and thought that I should have insisted he carry on. However, I pointed out how his own history showed what a bad idea that would be, and was vindicated when, after a few months of getting cross with me for not playing his favourite pieces accurately enough, my son started pushing me along the piano stool and teaching me how to play! He was soon back to playing all the time, because it was fun again, and what he wanted to do. And I didn’t tell him to stop playing rugby.
If your child is determined to become a concert pianist, or a doctor, or a bus driver, all they need is support as they follow their own path. They don’t need their development to be medically or surgically arrested; I doubt that a single castrato knew the whole consequences of what was being done to him, even though the castrati were just as fashionable and fêted in their day as so-called ‘trans kids’ are today. I expect that many would have gone on to sing beautifully as adulta, but with adult male voices instead and the chance to have their own families.
I have to wonder in what sense it’s a “right” to “transition.”
I also have to wonder if Thorn means “If you want to do X, that’s your right!”
There is no such thing as a “right” to do whatever you want.
It’s also not true that desire=a right.