They don’t even get the initial euphoria
Oof, this is a painful read. It’s about the horrifying side effects of “wrong sex hormones on men” as the author puts it, and how systematically it’s been and continues to be concealed. I say it’s painful but I also recommend reading it: it’s very clarifying.
It starts with the effects on feelings as opposed to the body, and finds that they’re a wash for males.
I started to find out what can be expected from the medical interventions for young AMAB (assigned-male-at-birth) trans women like my son. And there, the researchers of the NEJM study are unequivocal about their findings: even among the variables that were finally reported, “depression and anxiety scores decreased…but not among those designated male at birth.”
That’s right. For young men like our son, even those researchers who believe in “full steam ahead with hormones” have nothing optimistic to report. Zip. Nada.
So what about the body?
But so much for patient surveys on their mental outlook and how they feel. How does the body react physiologically to estrogen? To go back to the cocaine analogy I introduced earlier, we do not willy-nilly administer cocaine to patients just because they feel some initial euphoria (which, in the case of estrogen, is ironically conspicuous by its absence). What do the clinical studies on the effect of estrogen on the brain and the body say?
…
In 2018, researchers from Germany showed that increased estrogen levels are associated with depression in males. No wonder all the patient survey studies, including the latest in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed no improvement in the psychological outlook among males.
Oops.
It occurs to me that this could be part of the explanation for why the political (or pseudo-political) ideology that underpins this dangerous experiment is so deranged. It’s for and about and largely created by men with severe mental problems. Not that this hasn’t been discussed all along, of course, but still, learning that estrogen likely makes them more depressed than they already were…well, it can’t help the discourse much.
At this point, it is so surreal to see that it is parents like us, coming from fields far removed from biology and medicine, who are taking all their time from their day jobs to go through this research. For many, it has affected our professional and personal lives, not to mention our physical health and well-being.
As for the people who should have been doing this job and acting as gatekeepers – the psychologists, the endocrinologists, the doctors and the nurses, and the entire medical profession – why, they all have resorted to magical thinking and activism and even claiming that “although gender-affirming hormones can cause some irreversible changes,…these effects are primarily cosmetic.”
Shrinking brains, cognitive decline, depression, Alzheimer’s, suicide, cardiovascular diseases, asthma, arthritis, systemic sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, lupus, and other autoimmune diseases – yes, according to the gender “experts,” all these changes from estrogen are “primarily cosmetic!”
So what explains that? I will never understand it.
And so they get locked into chasing the dragon with ever increasing medical interventions.
That’s gotta cause some major dissonance. When I finally started getting real help for my social anxiety, the hope that my life would improve by itself gave me a sense of hope and elevated my view of myself, the world, and my place in it. I’m trying to imagine what kind of state I’d be in if the thing I believed was helping was actually making me worse. My tendency has always been to look inward for fault, hence the social anxiety, but if I were the sort to have an external locus of control? I’d be looking for someone, anyone to blame for my suffering. Which neatly explains the vehement hatred of anyone not on board 100% with the Genderist project, and it explains the obsession with making every nook and cranny of life conform to the ideology. “If transition isn’t making us happy,” they think, “then there must be something out there that’s preventing it from working, even if we can’t see it. We must find it and destroy it.”
I would argue with anyone who says asthma is just cosmetic; and being an asthmatic, I guess I’m entitled to talk about it, right? :-( I also suffer from arthritis and depression; neither of those is cosmetic. In fact, most of those have not made any physical change to my body, though during the worst of my depression I had anorexia, which some would call cosmetic, I suppose, and also I tended to dress without any care for what I was wearing and often looked like I was just…I don’t know, not just out of bed or anything, but not like I was going to wherever I was going.
The magical thinking behind this is so breathtakingly astonishing, especially in how many of the medical profession accept it without question.
[…] a comment by Nullius in Verba on They don’t even get the initial […]
It is a painful read.
A few thoughts: So there IS a male and a female brain? At least for the purposes of the impact of cross-sex hormones?
I read Gina Ripon’s “Gender and our brains : how new neuroscience explodes the myths of the male and female minds” (Here’s a quick review: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-5247-4702-2 ) As I recall she said there weren’t many significant differences in the functioning of male and female brains. There were some differences but also a lot of overlap. The most consistent finding appeared to be that women recognize faces better and men are better at rotating 3-d images in their heads.
Reading that link also reminded me why I cringed everytime COVID-deniers were denigrated for not listening to the experts and the science. Telling people to listen to authority should not be one of your default responses to contrarians. The COVID-denial argument was/is stupid in itself. (“Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci and the Chinese Communist Party invented a virus in a germ-warfare lab that was no more dangerous than the seasonal flu in order to make Donald Trump look bad.”) There was no need for an appeal to authority.
As we see in that link, “authority” can be delusional ignoramuses, mercenary charlatans, or well-meaning incompetents.
Finally, I recently had the pleasure of reading this blog-post. ( https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2020/12/when-is-person-terf.html ) (It’s about a right-wing, female Canadian politician and why she’s a “TERF.”)
There’s a part where the politician mentions the Litman study on “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” and all the helpful gender cultists point out how “fundamentally flawed” it was.
We see from the link numerous instances of how “fundamentally flawed” gender “science” is.
Going back I see they disparage Jesse Singal as “a favourite among the TERF crowd, largely because his articles are often so lengthy that refuting them is a significant effort on its own.”
There’s quite obviously male and female brains; we are our bodies and each brain is steeped in the chemicals those bodies produce, trucked around by said bodies, etc… Which means that a “brain in the wrong body” emphatically can’t exist short of unethical surgery.
What sexed brains shouldn’t mean is falling into the naturalistic fallacy.
Of course brains are sexed; they’re also highly plastic, and grow or prune connections according to experiences throughout life. Some studies have shown a slight preponderance, on average, of particular features in one sex or the other, but so slight that they can’t be used to predict the sex of a particular brain (although that hasn’t stopped some people talking about those features as being sexed).
However, the claim that the brains of ‘trans’ people more closely resemble the opposite sex has been shown to be false once sexual orientation is taken into account.
As far as I’m aware, no-one has done fMRI scans on mixed sex twin fœtuses (to eliminate, in so far as it is possible, differences due to environmental cues), so we don’t know what, if anything, is the base state of a brain before culture starts changing it.
tigger, I have seen a couple of studies that have tried looking at the brains of infants before they have become socialized. So far, I’m not impressed with methodology, and the findings always seem to be interpreted through the biases of a patriarchal society, and I suspect even the methodology is. I know some of it is, going in with particular assumptions of what is ‘male’ behavior and what is ‘female’ behavior. I think there are also some doing MRIs on infants, but it is limited and so far, rather inconclusive (which seems to mean they haven’t found the differences they expect to see, therefore, isn’t telling us anything yet).