Rachel Bronwyn wrote:Cases of people regretting having undergone permanent sex reassignment procedures are very, very unusual.
That's not my impression.
For one thing, there appears to be very little systematic follow up of such things, here in the UK at least. Medical authorities tend to lose touch with people who have undergone treatment and noone (AFAIK) has managed to do a proper study of long-term effects. Then there is the problem that doing such a study meaningfully would involve treating a group of transexuals while denying treatment to a control group, and there are possibly insurmountable ethical issues with that. But there are plenty of stories from people who say they regret having had surgery, or who say that it didn't provide the relief from anxiety that they expected it to.
Generally in medical treatment the onus is on the practitioners to prove, via properly followed up surveys etc, that a treatment "works" - ie, in a case like this, that it improves the happiness and well-being of most patients, to a significantly greater extent than it reduces the happiness of others. I don't
think anyone has yet provided such proof about SRS. (But then it hasn't been widely carried out for very long.)
In my experience, cases of people transitioning "back" for the wrong reasons (pushy families or church groups, etc) and then wishing they hadn't done so are more common. Hell, I can think of a number of people who have transitioned back but not regretted a moment they spent as the opposite sex.
Surely there you're talking about people who have not had surgery? AFAIK there is no way to properly reverse the effects of SRS, certainly not to put things back "the way they were".
But yeah, in terms of everything short of that, I have no problem with people of any age living as any gender they want to, for as long as they want to or forever, and I can well imagine you're right about the effects of social pressure.
I don't know if Beatsong's kid is transgendered nor have I labelled them such. I responded to the chorus of "he's only ten", which seriously bothered me on a general basis because being ten doesn’t make your thoughts or feelings less legitimate than your mom’s and dad’s.
It doesn't make them less legitimate, no. But it does mean that when looking at them, we have to do so in the context of how 10 year olds typically think and make sense of their world. When a 10 year old makes an absolutist statement like "boys are crap", we shouldn't interpret that the same way as we do when an adult makes such a statement, because they haven't had the experience and education to know about the vast number of possible less-absolutist ways of expressing what they're feeling.
A typical example of this is when parents get divorced, and it's very common for children to completely demonize one parent (usually the father) and idolize the other, apportioning all the blame in a way that is completely unrealistic. Then as they grow up, learn and think and learn and think and learn and think, they come to realise that life is not as simple as that, and often being rapprochement with the estranged parent at a later age.
Considering the realities of transgenderism, is utterly ridiculous to assume, because the child is small, they don’t know what they’re talking about nor do they understand their own feelings. Rejection of one’s assigned gender from a very young age is the biggest symptom of transgenderism in kidlets.
Indeed! I don't know what you mean by "very", but a large part of my point here is that he DIDN'T show any such rejection, until he was at least 9 and a half. And "rejection" is prossibly too strong a word even there. He says "girls are better than boys" but then he also has no problem dressing as a boy most of the time and having people see him and treat him as one. If anything, I think he's more likely to be "pangender" (if that's a word?) with perfectly healthy elements of both.
By the time a transgendered kid hits fifteen without having been allowed to pursue the gender and body they best identify with, they have already unnecessarily suffered. Teenage girls have begun to grow beards. Teenage boys are growing tits. Can you imagine anything more traumatising than developing the wrong sex characteristics? Little girls, three and four years old, who are biologically male are known to suffer extreme anxiety over the prospect of potentially growing beards. It doesn’t have to happen either.
Again, there's absolutely nothing so far to suggest that his sense of gender is anywhere near as strong or polarised as what you describe here. He certainly hasn't yet voiced any kind of horror about what will happen to him during puberty, and we've talked about it a bit. I'm not saying it couldn't or won't happen, but there's no reason to think it will just because he likes wearing skirts.
Allowing eleven and twelve- year-olds to undergo hormone therapy to allow them to experience some of the symptoms of puberty pertaining to the sex they identify with while blocking those their body is naturally prepared to undergo is controversial. The people undergoing the therapy are still considered too young to consent to such elective procedures. At such a young age the idea “it’s just a phase” and “they’ll grow out of it” is very real. Lots of parents (and trans kids) aren’t comfortable pursuing that avenue prior to the kid being fourteen/sixteen/eighteen.
I'll admit I'm not.
That said, the kid does NOT need to undergo the puberty their body is prepared for either, which would only make them more uncomfortable in their own skin as transgendered kids and would make their potential physical transition MUCH more difficult.
That’s what puberty blockers are for. They don’t interfere with a kid’s growth but they do ensure girls who aren’t sure they want to be girls don’t get boobs and periods and boys who aren’t sure they want to be boys don’t grow beards and develop the muscle structure of a grown man. Kids can be taken off them at any time and the puberty their body is programmed to undergo will begin. Kids can also transition from being on puberty blockers at whatever age they and their parents deem appropriate and pursue hormone therapy to block their natural puberty and simulate some of what puberty for the sex they identify with would include.
But you're fucking around with the child's natural growth. And despite all my questions and invitations in this thread, and reading elsewhere, I'm yet to find anyone manage to define for me what this thing called "gender identity" actually IS, in a way that is as much a part of "nature" as growing tits or facial hair. The only people who appear to actually
have it as a subjective awareness (as opposed to just going along with it as a social expectation) are transexuals who "knew" they were from babyhood. For everybody else as far as I can tell, there is just biological sex, sexuality/desire, and interests.
As I mentioned earlier, I'm considering a hypothesis that gender awareness itself is an extreme abnormality (I don't mean that pejoratively, just statistically) occuring only in transexuals. Because what little girls trapped in boys' bodies say about "I've always known I'm a girl" is
not what little girls in girls bodies say. They just get on with life, pretty indistinguishably from boys until social conditioning takes over.
I think the link earlier about obseved brain difference between trans women and ordinary men is extremely interesting. I suspect this is, like a lot of things, to do with neurological factors that we're only at the very beginning of understanding.
All of which is to say that - IMO - something as radical as puberty blocking followed by SRS at an early age should only be considered in the most extreme circumstances, where someone has a gender identity that is totally opposite to their biological sex, and is in constant, extreme suffering because of it. That doesn't apply to my son, by a long way.
And, at the risk of nit-picking:
Beatsong, do you seriously think being emotionally obtuse, untidy and struggling to find things are exclusively or even predominantly male characteristics? Really?
No. I was being facetious and trying to inject some humour into this otherwise quite challenging thread.
I think pretty much all of what people call "male" or "female" characteristics are bunk, or social conditioning. The only things that can be proven to be male or female characteristics are bodily organs and features, and hormonal patterns (and to some extent the emotional factors that flow from them, like PMS).
That's why explicit and absolute statements of "gender identity" by transexuals don't make any sense to me.
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