Whose game of political football?
It doesn’t though.
It isn’t “gloating” to be glad children won’t be given puberty blockers for frivolous reasons. Blocking puberty isn’t “healthcare” except in the case of premature puberty. Gender skeptics are relieved that the harm of blocking puberty will be stopped. Hines doesn’t agree that it is a harm, but she ought to be able to grasp that many other people do.
I suppose for people like her trans ideology is like being in a club or a sorority or a cult, rather than a coherent set of ideas. It’s a badge, a secret handshake, a wink, a clubhouse, a mechanism for excluding the uncool.
The issue is the healthcare of a vulnerable group of young people, but not in the way Hines means it. It’s about keeping that healthcare out of the hands of gender fanatics before they ruin any more lives.
It’s not at all clear what she means when she says that this is about philosophical and political beliefs rather than medical care. The second tweet almost seems to suggest that whatever beliefs are being fought over are actually unrelated to trans “treatments”. GCs and others are simply, somehow, just using the issue as a wedge or lever to get something else done.
Seriously?
Speaking of loading the language…
Really Ms. Hines? I think you’ve got the ghoulishness on the wrong foot. What could be more ghoulish than promoting the stunting of normal, human devolpment and then topping it off with mutilation, sterilization, and extreme, experimental plastic surgery that can never achieve the result of changing that child’s sex?
If these “treatments” were as medically effective as she’s claiming, she would have the numbers to prove it. She would have a clear, consistent definition of “gender” and “gender identity” which could be used for accurate disgnoses in order to maximize the effectiveness and appropriateness for the extreme intervention she’s so keen to champion. This definition and diagnosis would reliably catch and exclude the children who would desist, or detransition, preventing needless suffering. Clinicians truly interested in the health and wellbeing of their prospective patients would welcome studies like the Cass report because it would allow them to refine and improve their standard of care. But there are no such numbers. There is no such definition, no such diagnosis. That’s because “gender medecine” is little more than legalized mayhem, dangerous quackery identifying as medical care.
If “gender medecine” were actually medical, you wouldn’t have the likes of Olsen-Kennedy supressing the results showing the lack of effectiveness of her “treatments.” She’d want to know how to improve her results, and that doesn’t come by wishful thining, or by shooting the messenger. That just results in more needlessly maimed patients. But that’s not the dangerous part, is it? The dangerous part is that knowledge of the failure of these “treatments” to improve patient outcomes will be used to bring them to an end. There goes the whole gender industrial complex. Quick: circle the wagons! Just like the Catholic Church’s response to the continuous scandal of child sexual abuse, the important thing is not to prevent further harm, but to protect the institution. Who’s doing the weaponizing now?
Actual, useful medicine would be able show a track record of success and efficacy that has statistical significance above that of the placebo effect. Its supporters and practitioners would not have to resort to ad hominem attacks on critics, or fill their patients’ heads with thoughts of suicidal ideation.
These children aren’t political footballs*, they are hostages. They’ve been caught up in larger machinations of which useful idiots like you, Ms. Hines, are also part. You’re providing “intellectual cover” (such as it is) for something that is not a “sport” at all, but a sociopathic political movement with a very real, very high price, particularly for women. But if you insist on a gaming analogy, I would suggest chess over football. It’s a longer, more subltle and complicated game, with many pieces on the board, all moving in various ways, employing feint and decption, but an overarching strategy in service to a final end. And the children’s role in all of this? Perhaps you are familiar with the term “pawn sacrifice?”
If they were footballs, the only side that’s been kicking them is yours.
Because trans activism has always insisted that there’s “NO CONFLICT!” between women’s rights and trans “rights” (and then insisted on “NO DEBATE” to prevent any discussion of the very real conflicts between them), they’ve always claimed that feminists have had some other reason to oppose trans “rights”. That reason has usually been presented as pure hatred and spitefulness. They’re just so keen on hurting trans people that they’ll use any excuse to do it. Forget the actual harm done to women by self-ID, any talk of women’s dignity, health, and safety is a smokescreen for doing harm to trans “women”. Women aren’t allowed to have their own awards, facilities or spaces unless they allow men pretending to be women. That’s why trans activism has never acknowledged the fact that self-ID is an open invitation to opportunistic sexual predators even if “transwomen” are all perfectly harmless. That’s why trans activists will not allow women to have single-sex spaces, and why sex, in any case, must be erased in favour of “gender.” TiM “affirmation” and “validation” through access to female spaces are more important than women’s wellbeing. The real, ongoing, inevitable collateral damage to women is the price that TiMs are more than willing to accept for self-ID. Self ID is all of a piece. Deny one bit, call “trans women” men, and it all comes apart. That language use, access, and validation, once taken or given, however illegitimately or undemocratically, must be defended at all costs. And it is. That’s what’s put men into women’s prisons, hospital wards, rape shelters, sports teams, and more. Women saying “No” is not acceptable and must be fought. Thus, any talk of “women’s sex-based rights” is painted as nothing but a dogwhistle for trans genocide. “We are innocent and blameless; we’ve done nothing wrong*. They oppose us because they HATE us. They want us all DEAD.”
*And if you so much as suggest otherwise we’ll ostracize you, get you fired, deplatform you, and use the power of the state to persecute and prosecute you. But we’re a small, powerless, marginalized, victimized minority SO DON’T YOU FORGET IT!!!
Artymorty care to comment on this? I expect there is literal floating because GC is just as vulnerable to self-ID…
Sally Hines seems to be projecting. Nobody is ‘gloating’ that a great victory has been won for common sense! Gloating is what happens on her side when those in favour of child mutilation manage to get a women’s event closed. Gloating is an expression of schadenfreude, not an expression of relief that no more children will be abused with unnecessary chemicals.
One of the terms that bothers me here is “medical care.”
Medical care is something a person receives to treat a disease or an injury or a defect. Kids who feel unhappy about gender don’t need medical care, because they have none of these. Puberty is not s disease, their sex is not a defect, and unhappiness is not an injury. Medical care can’t fix the problem.
Nobody is gloating because opportunistic ghouls can’t push damaging medical interventions on sad kids. We’re just relieved, for the kids’ sake. The one thing most likely to resolve their suffering – completion of puberty – is the very thing the ghouls want to take from them.
It’s been sickening to watch the shameless gloating of the people rubbing their hands in glee at the misery of those who will no longer have access to the lobotomies they so desperately need.
And don’t get me started about the Schadenfreude of the people now celebrating the misfortune of everyone who will henceforth be denied the access to life-saving blood-letting.
How lacking in humanity does a person have be to deny women suffering from hysteria their sorely needed hysterectomies?
The blood of the people who will be deprived of necessary treatment for their body integrity dysphoria is on the hands of the anti-amputation crowd!
@BKSA #5
My brain isn’t able to parse what you are saying here. Can you elaborate? Even if I read “floating” as “gloating,” I’m not understanding what you are getting at.
Hines’ views on what constitutes “medical care” are revealed by the way she expresses doubt that “any of these people have spoken about these issues with young people.” She presumably means that a scientific process here entails the need to consult trans-identified young people, who can be reliably expected to insist that they really, really NEED this treatment or they will never pass and so might as well be dead.
But asking patients what they want isn’t how medicine works. It’s how “caring” works, within the context of dependent relationships and reasonable demands. Even if we leave aside examining the whole shaky foundation of truth and alternatives, there’s still the live possibility that “passing” (successfully fooling people about your sex) isn’t worth the dangers of puberty blockers. Determining what these risks are involves medical research. Determining whether the risks are worth it can’t be assessed by asking unstable teenagers in the grips of an obsession what they think.
Quite so. She has everything twisted around.
So, if it were about medical care, “these people” would have discussed the issues with “young people” i.e. children approaching puberty instead of relying on medical knowledge.
So that’s how it works? A doctor finds that a child has an inflamed appendix and needs it removed lest it explode and lead to peritonitis, but that’s not a good enough reason to proceed, the doctor needs to consult the child instead of relying on silly old technical knowledge?
Or a child with a perfectly healthy appendix tells the doctor that he/she identifies as having appendicitis because there’s no way his/her tummy ache was caused by eating too many candies, and that’s all the information that the doctor needs to go ahead with an appendectomy.
@tigger
I don’t think we need to even look for psychological explanations here. Hines and co are fighting a desperate battle not to have to address GC arguments. All they can do is ramp up the old techniques, the ones that used to work. Call your opponents evil, hint at dark motives you can’t even bring yourself to speak of and generally claim to be engaged in some great moral battle, where facts and even reason itself are irrelevant. It has always been ridiculous. The difference is now that it looks ridiculous. (But when you’re lying for Jesus nothing is ridiculous.)