Doing something is also not a neutral act
A few days ago Jolyon Maugham gave the world his views on the Cass report on gender identity services, in great detail and at much length, because he is…an expert on the subject? No, but he plays one on Twitter. The final point he makes is that doing nothing is not doing nothing.
And so on and so on. This will mean “a lifetime of people discriminating against you and sneering at you.” By not giving blockers “you scar someone with that life.” The purpose of blockers is “to stop those changes from happening whilst the teenager reflects, before further medical interventions which are irreversible.”
That’s all true enough. Not giving blockers has consequences just as giving them has. Sure. You could say that about anything. Not setting fire to people has consequences just as setting fire to them has. But his take on it leaves a lot out. He himself is making blockers sound more neutral than they are – he claims that blockers just “stop those changes,” but it’s not like pausing a podcast or stopping in the middle of a walk. Stopping the changes itself has consequences, major ones. It’s not the case that one can just resume them a few years later and all will be as if there had been no pause.
There’s been a lot of discussion of this lately, especially since the Keira Bell case, so he can’t be unaware of it. So he’s framing himself as sounding a note of caution about this dangerous refusal to give puberty blockers, but what about the possibility that it’s at least as reckless to give them? What about kids who think they’re “gender incongruent” for a year or two and then adjust to puberty and realize they’re not? Are they better off if they get blockers or if they don’t?
Given the overall importance of puberty for development of more than just the voice or shape of our throats, I can’t see how any pediatrician would argue that even puberty blockers without the side effects of Lupron would have on a young adult’s body.
We all hate puberty, with the way it misshapes our bodies, and forces our voices to squeak, brings out pimples, and leads embarrassing situations in school (humiliating, for many.) But, really, we have to go through it.
Given the failure of so many of our current adults to actually grow up, I think giving puberty blockers will only enhance that. I realize we’re talking about a small percentage of children, but seriously? It’s time for our population to enter the adult world.
Mike, a couple of words missing from that first sentence? “…without the side effects of Lupron would have [no effect?] on a young adult’s body”?
As we told all our residents over the years – all medicines are poisons, and all surgeries are forever. You’ll spend 6 years learning how to do surgery and a lifetime on when.
The moral was to avoid anything unnecessary in the treatment of a patient. I fail to see how altering children before their brains have matured, adheres to ‘primum non nocere’
Thank you.
Needless to add, some decisions we make as children have lasting and irreversible consequences. A friend of mine as a child decided to do a bit of solo rock climbing, and had a fall which smashed the top of his right femur and much of the pelvic socket, and he had to have his whole leg amputated at the hip, making prostheses difficult to manage for the rest of his life.
As the old saying put it: ‘marry in haste; repent at leisure.’ It probably arose in times and circumstances where divorce was difficult, if not impossible. Though I am not privy to his inner thoughts, I would guess that my friend has often had regrets over his childhood decision to go rock-climbing, sans expertise or proper modern equipment.
Likewise, swallowing puberty-blockers in one’s teen years is about as brainless as decisions get, and is in the same category as castrating oneself to win a drunken bet; which has no doubt happened on occasion.
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https://www.bookbrowse.com/expressions/detail/index.cfm/expression_number/180/marry-in-haste-repent-at-leisure#:~:text=But%20the%20first%20known%20expression,we%20may%20repent%20at%20leisure.
Pliny:
I think this is true of many professions, if not most. When I was a young software engineer with fire in my belly I’d massively over-engineer solutions as a matter of routine. Those solutions seemed to me the most elegant because they could be modified over time to cope with changing needs. No matter what change was required, my abstractions of the objects and patterns involved could accommodate them.
Experience taught me that over-engineered solutions like those are brittle, nobody can understand them and they cost far too much to build in the first place. These days, when it comes to software development, I’m pretty much of a low-tech, soul-surfer vibe: let’s work out what it is you actually want and then I’ll build that in the way I think makes most sense to you. I charge a lot more, in fact, for my barely-there engineering because I’m fairly confident that I’m building the punter the thing they actually need.
It’s those two things: working out what punters actually want (regardless of what they say you want or what I’d like to build) and the applying hard-learned expertise to decide the best way to do it, that distinguish people who know how to build software from those who know how to write code.
Or, in other words, maturity and expertise are vital in our professions, why are they so easily discounted when it comes to making irreversible changes to our bodies and future social lives?
It’s a bugger’s muddle.
@Ophelia – It was an inelegant sentence, to be sure. I will try to re-word it:
Heh. Not inelegant, I don’t ask questions about that, but there really is a word (or more) missing.
“I can’t see how any pediatrician would argue that even puberty blockers without the side effects of Lupron would have [no impact?] on a young adult’s body.”