A rapid change in public opinion
For several days this week the veteran Swedish journalist Malou von Sivers will cover the same topic in every episode of her nightly TV chat show: the extraordinary rise in diagnoses of gender dysphoria among teenage girls.
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The immediate trigger for Von Sivers’s themed week is a report from Sweden’s Board of Health and Welfare which confirmed a 1,500% rise between 2008 and 2018 in gender dysphoria diagnoses among 13- to 17-year-olds born as girls.
But it also reflects a rapid change in public opinion. Just a year ago, there seemed few official obstacles left in the way of young people who wanted gender reassignment treatment.
Which is to say, puberty blockers, aka an uncontrolled medical experiment on children.
In the autumn of 2018, the Social Democrat-led government, under pressure from the gay, lesbian and transgender group RFSL, proposed a new law which would reduce the minimum age for sex reassignment medical care from 18 to 15, remove all need for parental consent, and allow children as young as 12 to change their legal gender.
Then in March last year, the backlash started. Christopher Gillberg, a psychiatrist at Gothenburg’s Sahlgrenska Academy, wrote an article in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper warning that hormone treatment and surgery on children was “a big experiment” which risked becoming one of the country’s worst medical scandals.
And the big experiment rests on the premise that children will reliably continue to want what they say they want right now, for the rest of their lives. That seems like a very shaky premise to base such a drastic experiment on. When I was 11 the closest I could get to having an idea of what I wanted to do with my life was a fantasy of driving around the western US having adventures. I’m glad nobody gave me a car and waved goodbye.
In April, Uppdrag Granskning, an investigative TV programme, followed up with a documentary profiling a former trans man, Sametti, who regretted her irreversible treatment.
In October, the programme turned its fire on the team at Stockholm’s Karolinska University hospital, which specialises in treating minors with gender dysphoria. The unit has been criticised for carrying out double mastectomies on children as young as 14, and accused of rushing through treatment and failing to consider adequately whether patients’ other psychiatric or developmental issues might better explain their unhappiness with their bodies. The Karolinska disputed the claim, saying it carefully assessed each case.
But who is assessing what “carefully” means?
On 20 December, the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment, which the government had asked to review the scientific research into the recent surge in teenagers reporting gender dysphoria, reported that there was very little research either into the reason for the increase or the risks or benefits of hormone treatment and surgery.
First, do no harm.
In the UK it’s illegal to tattoo a child under 18, even with parental consent. It’s unbelievable someone should be allowed to chop a child’s breasts off, before they’ve even reached the full size.
Will this become this generation’s Tuskegee experiment? I suspect so.
What? You listened to children telling you what they KNOW about themselves and yet you “assessed” them? What the hell happened to the right to self-identify, to say “I know better than a psychiatric assessment who I am?”
Fascist.
Years ago, during the Satanic Panic, when children were accusing everyone left and right of sexually molesting them while flying on broomsticks during the full moon, panicked supporters had a catch phrase they repeated regularly “Believe the children.” Believe them. They always tell the truth when it comes to being molested. Always — even when there’s clear evidence that they’re being led by investigators and given suggestions by psychologists, even when there are obvious signs of contagion, even when there are contradictions and logical impossibilities and things which if true would not just destroy lives but destroy the laws of physics and what we know of the natural world. Believe the children because they do not lie and cannot be influenced, bullied, or mistaken.
And here we go again. This is the inevitable result of the claim that Gender Identity is biologically based and forms in the womb. A newborn has a Gender Identity. A one-year-old has one, and will try to express it (maybe by pulling apart their onesies or refusing bonnets.) It’s internal and incorruptible and immutable. If a preschool boy says “I’m a girl” you ask “Honey, do you mean you think you’re a girl, or want to be a girl? Or, do you mean you ARE a girl? Is it that one?”
Believe the children.
It’s the same fanatical support they gave to the children telling implausible stories about the devil. It’s as if, the more unlikely it is, the more the innocent really, really need you on their side.
Exactly. I was fascinated by the eager acceptance of absurd slogans like “Believe the children” during the Satanic Panic, and especially in the aftermath when I read more about it. Also similar and equally astonishing was the credulity around the “encountering beings from another solar system” stories. Intensity of emotion was taken to be evidence of truth. This campaign is like those in so many ways.
I was just thinking about that Satanic Panic stuff and “Believe the Children.”
The choice was never between believing your child automatically and calling your child a damn liar. We can all be wrong. We can be misled. We can misunderstand. And of course, it’s often even easier for children to be misled or be mistaken.
So a boy who “knows” he’s a girl doesn’t have to be a liar. Or crazy. Or perverse. The child can simply be… mistaken. I don’t believe boys can actually be girls. So I don’t think I could believe any boy who said he was a girl. I could believe he was in distress. I could believe he thought of himself as a girl, or wanted other people to think of him as a girl, or was deeply unhappy with the life he thought was laid out before him as a boy and then a man. Or found comfort in the idea of being a girl.
But it’s bizarre that we should not just sympathize, empathize, respect, and try to help, but we should actually believe that a child knows something that can’t be true.
Yes, yes it is.
Exactly, Ben. Kids who have imaginary friends – you know, kids of the age of those currently being railroaded into transgenderism for declaring themselves to be girls or boys despite their sex – aren’t lying, or schizophrenic, or manipulating us. They’re just imaginative. We don’t argue with them, or make fun of them.
We certainly don’t react to them by saying “Yes, Mijo, you’ve discovered an alternate universe of other beings parallel to ours, and only you can see them! Now you must have life-changing surgery to enhance your vision! Furthermore, your unique status as an imaginary-friend-seer means you can use the carpool lane, and anybody who says your imaginary friend doesn’t exist is an amigophobe and must be cancelled because that’s like actual MURDER!”
A fourteen year old is young enough that they legally may not give informed consent to sex; they are not considered mature enough to consider the ramifications of pregnancy and STDs. How then are they considered mature enough to decide to permanently sterilise themselves? A fourteen year old is also young enough that they legally may not give informed consent to cosmetic surgery; they are not considered mature enough to consider the ramifications of surgery. How then are the considered mature enough to permanently remove genitals and breasts??
The other major reason children lack the legal right to give consent to things is that they are relatively easily swayed or coerced by adults; that is, even if they give consent and say the words that appear to show that they know what they are talking about, we cannot know whether they really understand the topic, or if they are simply mouthing a script given to them under peer pressure, intimidation, or that they were simply had their heads filled with nonsense. When an acquaintance’s son, aged eight or so, proudly announced to everyone present at a dinner party that he answered a school test with young Earth creationism bullshit, I did not join in with the proud congratulations of the family, I groaned inwardly at this young man being anti-educated. Because even a bright child can be filled with the opposite of information, if it comes from a trusted adult.
It’s a goddamn madness. The usual response to either of the above is ‘children know themselves better than anyone else’ which completely avoids the points raised. Children are not considered capable of giving informed because they do not have enough information to meaningfully weigh risks and because they can be misled, pressured, coerced etc. no matter how bright they are. Either one of these points ought to be fatal to the notion of minors giving consent to life changing medical procedures at fourteen, but an exception is being carved out for trans dogma.
Incidentally, I think 16 is approximately where these sorts of responsibilities should be phased in gradually.
#4 OB
And yet the same sceptics that are accepting of this ‘logic’ as it applies to trans dogma (PZ, most FTB-ers, Rebecca Watson, etc.), will readily point out the logical flaw of such when a religious person makes the same argument but in support of their religion.
Holy shit, another similarity to religion.
And again, how is it that trans ideology, so soon after its founding/birth/creation/whatever, gets a free pass from institutions and authorities who should know better? How does this one thing manage to get itself to the front of the line and get fast-tracked for recognition and implementation? I don’t see these bodies and institutions being that concerned about being on the “wrong side of history” in regards to those systemic sexual and racial inequalities and injustices that they have not yet fully admitted to, let alone rectified.
I will never understand how that happened.
Yeah, I’m a little mystified that anyone who’s ever actually spoken with a child believes that they’re incapable of uttering falsities or delusions or just things they don’t really understand the meaning of.
How many pre-adolescent girls in America today will swear to you, in all sincerity, that they are a “princess”? (My experience suggests at least 50%) Does this mean that they think their parents are kings and queens? Or that they live in a monarchy and have the right to rule? No, they’ve just grown up in a world of “Disney princesses,” where daddy calls them “my little princess,” and mom puts a “princess on board” bumper sticker on their minivan. Most of them probably couldn’t articulate to you what exactly makes someone a princess, or how one differs from a regular non-princess girl. But the label still means something to them.
I may be passing on a myth here, as I’ve only heard anecdotal reports, but apparently many urologists will refuse to perform a vasectomy on an adult male unless he’s already had children, or is some particular age, and/or his wife consents.
Screechy, I am unfamiliar with this situation, as many men of my acquaintance had vasectomies at a young age without any children, but I am sure there are probably some.
However, for a young(ish) woman with children, it is often close to impossible to find someone who will sterilize you. My mother wanted to be sterilized at 31 with 5 children; she was denied, and nearly died from her 6th pregnancy. My sister wanted to be sterilized at 33 with 4 children; she was told she was too young to know, and she might want to have more children some day.
If only they had known all they had to do was declare themselves to be men…