Trans Women are not Women

[Rolfe]

How many daughters have you had? I ask, because that's so completely wrong it's at massive odds with your previous, informative posts.

Little girls defecate in their nappies, and when they get old enough to sit up, the faeces gets squashed into the vagina. Most sensible parents wipe it out with designated cloths.

I would have said it's impossible to change nappies and not see the vagina.

I don't have any children. I do have a female body all of my own though, and I know the correct names for the various bits. Glenn is quite right. The vagina is an internal organ which can only be seen using a gynaecological speculum. Its presence as a patent channel to the cervix can only be established by inserting a probe of some sort deep into the body. Doing that to an infant, or indeed to any female without her consent, is sexual abuse.

I think its very unlikely that Semenya has a patent vagina. We do know that her superficial genitalia - in effect the labia majora of the vulva, or what appeared to be the labia majora of the vulva as that is all you can see without "interfering" with a little girl - appeared to be female when she was an infant but this tells us nothing as the absence of a visible penis is well recognised in some DSDs of male infants. "Ambiguous genitalia" usually appear female to people who aren't medically trained. I think it's possible Semenya might have had ambiguous genitalia as an infant - we don't know if she was ever examined by a doctor at that stage.

 

[Rolfe]

I don't think we can have all of the cake, here. If we have everyone compete in the same category, women will essentially be taken out of top competitions, which affects the lower-tier ones as well. If we instead split those in two -- one for each sex -- that problem disappears, but it means that marginal cases such as trans people and intersex might not be able to compete at all.

Cold equation: exclude less than 1% of the abled population, or 50%?

Sort of this. But there's no reason at all why trans people and intersex people wouldn't be able to compete in a straight male/female split in sports, apart from the question of drug-taking (see below). All intersex people are in fact male or female, and that can be determined quite objectively. A problem may arise where a biologically female competitor has a DSD that confers an advantage, but that's for the authorities to sort out. It may be decided that this is no more unfair than someone with huge feet being a good swimmer or someone who is very tall (which is also sometimes due to a genetic disorder) being good at basketball.

Trans people again are not excluded. If they have male bodies they can compete in the male category. They may not do very well if they're doping themselves with anti-androgens, but that's their choice. If they have female bodies and are taking testosterone then they should be excluded from the women's events but again that's their choice. For this reason the "male" category might be better referred to as "open". They may not do very well, but again it's their choice.

The over-sersitive pandering to the trans lobby by allowing males to compete in women's events really has to stop. If someone with a male body chooses to put themselves at an athletic disadvantage against other males then they're free to do so, but it shouldn't confer them elegibility for the women's events. Some of this is about mediocre men who transition then seeing a great opportunity to dominate the women's events, like that guy who smashed about nine female world records a few days ago. Some of it is about transitioning men who crave the validation of their "femininity" by participating in women's sports, including changing and showering and gossiping with women.

Caving in to the demands of these people at the cost of making women's sport uncompetitive for actual women was a really really bad idea and hopefully sense will re-establish itself in the not too distant future.

However, all of this rather glosses over the fact that in general elite level sports very much frown on drug-taking. Athletes are constantly warned against taking anything that might queer their pitch in a drug test. People have been stripped of medals and even banned for taking a minor over-the-counter cold remedy. Hormones are generally an absolute no-no. And yet here we have a class of people, trans people, who are by definition on constant medication with hormones.

Should the hormone treatments taken by trans people in themselves disqualify them from competitive sport? I think it's a case that can be argued. It's a particular issue with spironolactone, which is a banned substance, but then suddenly it's a required substance if you're trans and competing as a woman, because it's necessary to bring your testosterone down. In what way is this even consistent, never mind fair?

I think society has to get over itself in respect of the trans issue. Just because someone is trans it doesn't follow that they should receive everything they want. So often this seems to start from the point of asking, how can we (at least partly) offset the advantage that the male body confers on a transwoman when "she" competes as a woman? This is begging the question. It's making the a priori assumption that transwomen must be allowed to compete in women's events. Why is that? The answer seems to be that avoiding hurt to a transwomen's feelings is more important than fairness in women's sports, indeed more important than the athletics careers of young women who are currently training hard hoping to win athletics scholarships and sponsorships and medals in elite events.

Who made that decision? Why were the tender feelings of transwomen deemed to be more important than women's athletics, women's feelings, women's careers and fairness to women? Well, because at every turn women's rights, modesty, comfort and safety have been brushed aside as the trans lobby has convinced politicians and organisations that the interests of the trans always take precedence.

This has to stop, and a lot of people are waking up to the fact.

 

[Rolfe]

I've been thinking more about Caster Semenya's career and what was known. I've followed the controversy at a superficial level since she first emerged with people saying "that's a male", because I was interested in what the cause might be, but I didn't give it much deep thought.

She was born in 1991. I can't lay my hands on the exact date when males were first permitted to compete in women's events if they declared themselves to be trans, but from memory I think it was as long ago as 2007. That would have made Semenya 16 at the time, and would have been before she emerged into the elite category. It seems to have been in 2009, when she would have been 18, that the controversy arose and she was subjected to sex testing. She was withdrawn from competition for several months but then returned to women's athletics. The results of the tests remained confidential.

At the time I remember much being made of "Caster is a woman" (without defining "woman") and people assumed that her continuing eligibility for women's events meant that the tests had shown she was female. However if I'm right about 2007 being the start of trans-identifying male participation in women's events, that doesn't follow at all. If I'm reading this right, the sex tests in 2009 showed that she was male, but it was realised that she couldn't be prevented from competing because males were now allowed to compete anyway if they "identified as female", and Caster certainly identifies as female. If I'm right, it's the rule-change to allow "transwomen" to compete as women that prevented her from being disqualified in 2009.

I assumed that her eligibility for the women's events meant that she was biologically female (I had no idea until late 2017 that males were allowed to compete in women's events at all) and took her obvious virilisation to mean that she was a woman with adrenal hyperplasia and hyperandrogenism. I vociferiously defended her right to compete, by that assumption.

It was an assumption shared by a lot of people, but it wasn't actually logical if one considered the whole story. As far as I remember it's been known for quite some years that Semenya does not have ovaries she has undescended testicles. Now that fact on its own doesn't make her a man, because CAIS XY women also have undescended testicles. If you don't put the two halves together (I didn't) you don't get it.

CAIS women are not virilised. They can never be virilised because of their condition. Visible virilisation excludes CAIS. Semenya's appearance demonstrates that she has a significant androgen response. And the presence of testicles pretty much points to an SRY gene somewhere. SRY gene plus androgen responsiveness = male. No wonder so many people were like "colour me unsurprised" at this week's news.

 

[Meadmaker]

This has to stop, and a lot of people are waking up to the fact.

That's a bit optimistic, but I hope you're right.

 

[Rolfe]

That's a bit optimistic, but I hope you're right.

Oh, it will stop, of that there is no doubt. This is in the same category as the satanic sex abuse recovered memories scandal, or even the glass delusion of the 15th to 17th centuries. Eventually society comes to its senses. The only question is when this will happen.

Men cannot transform into women or vice versa. This isn't Don't Bite The Sun. Male bodies do not become female in some essential mystical way just because their owner harbours the delusion that he's a woman. There's no such thing as being born in the wrong body. By definition, everyone is born in their own body! And a brain that is part of a male body is a male brain. No man can "feel like a woman" because no man knows what it is to feel like a woman. No woman knows what it is to feel like a woman, she only knows how it feels to be her, which includes living in a female body - which is something men do not experience. The whole concept is riddled with regressive sexist stereotypes.

This is about very feminised homosexual men and boys, and very masculinised homosexual girls and women. While choosing to live as the opposite sex is a perfectly valid choice - after all, this whole idea of gendered clothes and lifestyles is a really sexist concept - actually taking drugs and having surgery to alter the body to resemble that of the opposite sex is a very drastic step and really should be reserved for people who absolutely can't come to terms with their bodies as they are. It's something that should be embarked on very cautiously with a lot of disclaimers and warnings, not celebrated as "brave and stunning" and treated as the preferred option for every little boy who likes princess dresses or every little girl who likes short hair, dungarees and playing with trains.

This is also about teenage girls who hate their developing bodies and men's interest in them and want to get rid of them. (About 40% of such girls are on the autism spectrum or have mental health co-morbidities.) There has been a huge increase in girls declaring that they're "trans boys" and wanting mastectomies and testosterone, and even hysterectomies and phalloplasty. Where is that coming from? It absolutely maps to the earlier manifestation of anorexia nervosa as a cry for help or a cry of despair from a young woman who simply can't cope with being a young woman in today's society. And just as nobody thinks that prescribing an anorectic girl a low-calorie diet sheet and scheduling her for bariatric surgery is a good idea, nobody should think that celebrating such a girl as "stunning and brave" when she declares she's a boy and offering her testosterone and a mastectomy and calling her Calum is a good idea either.

This is also (perhaps mainly, these days) about men with various degrees of autogynaephilia, some of whom are also narcissistic bullies, whose desire to transition to female is driven by an erotic fascination with their own bodies as feminine bodies. It is mainly these men who are demanding access as of right to women's sports, changing rooms, dormitories, swimming sessions, domestic violence shelters, gender-balanced panels, all-women shortlists, business and artistic awards and even prisons. They crave the validation they get from being included in the category "woman" and being in a position where they imagine they're being included in "girl talk". They have appropriated the identity of "the most marginalised people in society" and run with it, using this to force politicians and organisations to accede to their demands and ignore (as bigoted transphobic hate speech) any protestations from women who realise their rights have been given away by stealth.

And possibly worst of all, the autogynaephilic men are the driving force behind the push to affirm young people in the first two groups as members of the opposite sex and fast-track them into damaging alterations to their bodies. Oh, I have a lady brain, says the middle-aged autogynaephilic man, I have always been a woman (ignoring his normal boyish childhood), and look at me now with my deep voice and my beard and my male pattern baldness. If only I'd been allowed to transition when I was a child, how much better things would have been for me! Children must be allowed, indeed encouraged, to transition, and have drugs and surgery as young as possible! (But at the same time he's keeping his penis and testicles and asserting his right to be regarded as a woman without shaving his beard or even adopting feminine stereotypes.)

So we have the obscenity of pre-pubescent children who are non-gender-conforming, the vast majority of whom would grow up to be comfortable in their own bodies if simply left alone, being prescribed puberty blockers to delay the puberty that would actually help get their heads together, then cross-sex hormones which cause permanent sterility and permanent loss of sexual desire if given in this way (also with serious side-effects in relation to bone density and future cancer risk), and then having their healthy bodies surgically altered to resemble the opposite sex, sometimes (in America) as young as 13 for girls. Boys are being castrated and having their penises removed as young as 16, and having a "neovagina" cavity fashioned from part of the large intestine because their infantile penises don't have enough skin to do the job. They then have to push a dildo into this cavity every day for the rest of their lives in order to prevent it from healing up. Girls are being horribly mutliated by having parts of their forearms stripped away to make penis-like structures with no erectile tissue and with serious risks of devascularisation and necrosis. It has to stop.

And now most of this forum is going to (again) turn and denounce me as a terf, a transphobe, a bigot and a peddler of hate speech. Well I don't care. I'm past trying to placate the trans allies by adding in all the modifiers about being kind and cherishing the feelings of these oh-so-marginalised flowers and so on. Women have been gaslighted into the assumption that it's their duty to give up their rights to men who claim to be more oppressed than they are for too long. I'm so far past that it's not even a blip on the horizon any more.

And I'm just one of the less vociferious ones. More and more women are rising up against this by the day. Martina Navratilova's "peak trans" conversion was a joy to behold. That woman rocks! Men too, who understand what's going on, thank you Graham Linehan and Iain MacWhirter and Stuart Campbell and Chris McEleny and many more of you.

So this is going to stop. I just hope it stops soon, before too many more young people are robbed of their healthy bodies and their sexuality and their long-term health, and too many more promising young female athletes have their careers destroyed, and too many more vunerable women are sexually assaulted by predatory men who have been housed in women's prisons and rape shelters.

 

[Belz...]

By definition, everyone is born in their own body! And a brain that is part of a male body is a male brain. No man can "feel like a woman" because no man knows what it is to feel like a woman. No woman knows what it is to feel like a woman, she only knows how it feels to be her, which includes living in a female body - which is something men do not experience. The whole concept is riddled with regressive sexist stereotypes.

This is about very feminised homosexual men and boys, and very masculinised homosexual girls and women.

Wait, are you saying that trans people don't actually exist, or that gender dysphoria doesn't work the way we usually think it does?

 

[d4m10n]

Just listened to an interesting podcast episode on the topic of gender and the metaphysics of womanhood:

https://twitter.com/aytchellesse/status/1122074106860462080?s=19

 

[JoeMorgue]

Wait, are you saying that trans people don't actually exist, or that gender dysphoria doesn't work the way we usually think it does?

I don't think it's that simple.

I can't speak for Rolfe. But I don't think a direct question of "Do trans people exist" really gets us anywhere because the bulk of this discussion isn't using terminology, it IS the terminology.

Strip away the "How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg" questions and we're left... nothing at best, something which is functionally a soul but for gender at worst.

 

[Rolfe]

Wait, are you saying that trans people don't actually exist, or that gender dysphoria doesn't work the way we usually think it does?

Obviously trans people exist. And obvously there are people who are extremely uncomfortable with the bodies they have. This is not because they have a female brain in a male body (or vice versa) though. Your brain is part of your body. If your body is male, your brain is male too. It has male chromosomes and is supplied by blood which carries male hormones. It can't be female.

Body dysmorphia or body dysphoria is a psychological/psychiatric condition. The first resort should not be to try to change the body to make it conform to the patient's thinking. The first resort should be to try to reconcile the patient to the body he or she has. Not least because the medicalisation and surgical procedures involved carry significant risks and involve potentially serious side effects, but also because one of the first principles of psychotherapy is not to accede to or affirm the patient's delusion.

Experts generally agree that physical transition including surgery may indeed be the best solution for some patients. One problem however is that it's difficult to tell which patients, and long-term happiness seems not to increase overall when you look at fully transitioned patients. Suicide risks don't go down after transition. So I'm not saying that transition is something that should never happen, I'm pointing out that the current practice of immediately affirming someone who says they're trans (or even says they think they might be trans) without any psychological evaluation or psychiatric treatment to establish exactly what's going on with their mental health and if there's a way to avoid a future of permanent medicalisation and disfiguring surgery is a bad idea.

Even more so for children, when older studies show that at least 80% of children who say they want to be or even are the opposite sex will grow out of it as they go through puberty and become happy in their own bodies. But it is currently forbidden (following pressure from the trans lobby) as malpractice and "conversion therapy" for any clinician to question a child's assertion that they're the opposite sex and seek to reconcile them with the body they have. This in my opnion is a medical scandal.

 

[8enotto]

Being born clearly defined physically is an advantage. There is no doubt to those surrounding you as to gender. They will know how to act. If the individual decides nature was wrong then the problems begin.

Later developing in an odd manner as Caster is or coming into the world with an odd situation isn't going to be an easy life.

There is an otherwise pretty young lady near where I work that has a deep voice and a lump in the throat, other than that dresses and acts the part of every young lady in her late teens. She won't be in this town long when it's possible to get to the big city and hide in a crowd of similar folk.


Adapting to a society that won't adapt to her cannot be easy. And she isn't trying to be in pro level sports.

 

[Belz...]

Obviously trans people exist. And obvously there are people who are extremely uncomfortable with the bodies they have. This is not because they have a female brain in a male body (or vice versa) though. Your brain is part of your body. If your body is male, your brain is male too. It has male chromosomes and is supplied by blood which carries male hormones. It can't be female.

Body dysmorphia or body dysphoria is a psychological/psychiatric condition. The first resort should not be to try to change the body to make it conform to the patient's thinking. The first resort should be to try to reconcile the patient to the body he or she has. Not least because the medicalisation and surgical procedures involved carry significant risks and involve potentially serious side effects, but also because one of the first principles of psychotherapy is not to accede to or affirm the patient's delusion.

Experts generally agree that physical transition including surgery may indeed be the best solution for some patients. One problem however is that it's difficult to tell which patients, and long-term happiness seems not to increase overall when you look at fully transitioned patients. Suicide risks don't go down after transition. So I'm not saying that transition is something that should never happen, I'm pointing out that the current practice of immediately affirming someone who says they're trans (or even says they think they might be trans) without any psychological evaluation or psychiatric treatment to establish exactly what's going on with their mental health and if there's a way to avoid a future of permanent medicalisation and disfiguring surgery is a bad idea.

Even more so for children, when older studies show that at least 80% of children who say they want to be or even are the opposite sex will grow out of it as they go through puberty and become happy in their own bodies. But it is currently forbidden (following pressure from the trans lobby) as malpractice and "conversion therapy" for any clinician to question a child's assertion that they're the opposite sex and seek to reconcile them with the body they have. This in my opnion is a medical scandal.

I understand your position here but I was trying to clarify whether your comment about "This is about very feminised homosexual men and boys, and very masculinised homosexual girls and women." was about trans people or some other group. I wasn't and still am not clear on that.

 

[Rolfe]

Being born clearly defined physically is an advantage. There is no doubt to those surrounding you as to gender. They will know how to act. If the individual decides nature was wrong then the problems begin.

Later developing in an odd manner as Caster is or coming into the world with an odd situation isn't going to be an easy life.

There is an otherwise pretty young lady near where I work that has a deep voice and a lump in the throat, other than that dresses and acts the part of every young lady in her late teens. She won't be in this town long when it's possible to get to the big city and hide in a crowd of similar folk.

Adapting to a society that won't adapt to her cannot be easy. And she isn't trying to be in pro level sports.

I don't think that people with DSDs and people with no physical abnormalities but who have a psychiatric/psychological problem that makes them uncomfortable with the sex of their normal bodies should be compared at all.

Caster Semenya's situation is horrific. It may be that she would have been correctly diagnosed at birth if her parents had had better access to healthcare, and they might have been advised to bring her up as a boy, but there's no knowing if she would have been happy as a boy. Now, she looks so masculine (and indeed I see she's also married to a woman) that one wonders if she'd have been better off if she had been raised as male, but it's so difficult to know. She obviously can't erase the upbringing as a girl, and for her there's the extra complication that being an elite female athlete is part of her identity.

However, hers is a situation with no clear good outcome possible. She was born with a physical abnormality that has affected her life profoundly and the best that can be managed in a situation like that is often "least bad". One has to bear in mind that it's a physical abnormality, not a mental one.

In the case of your "otherwise pretty young lady", whom I assume is a normal male who identifies as female, this is a completely different situation. Without knowing the history I can't possibly have an opinion on what would have been the best way to deal with the feeling of wanting to be female. But given the high level of continuing unhappiness among people who transition, is presenting transitioning as the only option for everyone the best approach? Currently alternatives like counselling and psychotherapy to try to reconcile the patient to his (or her) own body isn't even being tried and clinicians who advocate it are being hounded from their jobs with allegations of malpractice, so there is no control group.

 

[Rolfe]

I understand your position here but I was trying to clarify whether your comment about "This is about very feminised homosexual men and boys, and very masculinised homosexual girls and women." was about trans people or some other group. I wasn't and still am not clear on that.

I was referring to the category of trans people known as HSTS or homosexual transsexual. This is the only category that has a childhood onset, before puberty begins. Obviously not all pre-gay boys or pre-lesbian girls are in this group, but some of them are.

 

[caveman1917]

I'll just leave this here.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BwxgbyQgtI_/?utm_source=ig_embed

(9 new "world records" in 1 day!)

That's gotta be a world record. Or perhaps a world meta-record (how many world records you set in a single day).

 

[DragonLady]

Oh, it will stop, of that there is no doubt. This is in the same category as the satanic sex abuse recovered memories scandal, or even the glass delusion of the 15th to 17th centuries. Eventually society comes to its senses. The only question is when this will happen.

Men cannot transform into women or vice versa. This isn't Don't Bite The Sun. Male bodies do not become female in some essential mystical way just because their owner harbours the delusion that he's a woman. There's no such thing as being born in the wrong body. By definition, everyone is born in their own body! And a brain that is part of a male body is a male brain. No man can "feel like a woman" because no man knows what it is to feel like a woman. No woman knows what it is to feel like a woman, she only knows how it feels to be her, which includes living in a female body - which is something men do not experience. The whole concept is riddled with regressive sexist stereotypes.

This is about very feminised homosexual men and boys, and very masculinised homosexual girls and women. While choosing to live as the opposite sex is a perfectly valid choice - after all, this whole idea of gendered clothes and lifestyles is a really sexist concept - actually taking drugs and having surgery to alter the body to resemble that of the opposite sex is a very drastic step and really should be reserved for people who absolutely can't come to terms with their bodies as they are. It's something that should be embarked on very cautiously with a lot of disclaimers and warnings, not celebrated as "brave and stunning" and treated as the preferred option for every little boy who likes princess dresses or every little girl who likes short hair, dungarees and playing with trains.

This is also about teenage girls who hate their developing bodies and men's interest in them and want to get rid of them. (About 40% of such girls are on the autism spectrum or have mental health co-morbidities.) There has been a huge increase in girls declaring that they're "trans boys" and wanting mastectomies and testosterone, and even hysterectomies and phalloplasty. Where is that coming from? It absolutely maps to the earlier manifestation of anorexia nervosa as a cry for help or a cry of despair from a young woman who simply can't cope with being a young woman in today's society. And just as nobody thinks that prescribing an anorectic girl a low-calorie diet sheet and scheduling her for bariatric surgery is a good idea, nobody should think that celebrating such a girl as "stunning and brave" when she declares she's a boy and offering her testosterone and a mastectomy and calling her Calum is a good idea either.

This is also (perhaps mainly, these days) about men with various degrees of autogynaephilia, some of whom are also narcissistic bullies, whose desire to transition to female is driven by an erotic fascination with their own bodies as feminine bodies. It is mainly these men who are demanding access as of right to women's sports, changing rooms, dormitories, swimming sessions, domestic violence shelters, gender-balanced panels, all-women shortlists, business and artistic awards and even prisons. They crave the validation they get from being included in the category "woman" and being in a position where they imagine they're being included in "girl talk". They have appropriated the identity of "the most marginalised people in society" and run with it, using this to force politicians and organisations to accede to their demands and ignore (as bigoted transphobic hate speech) any protestations from women who realise their rights have been given away by stealth.

And possibly worst of all, the autogynaephilic men are the driving force behind the push to affirm young people in the first two groups as members of the opposite sex and fast-track them into damaging alterations to their bodies. Oh, I have a lady brain, says the middle-aged autogynaephilic man, I have always been a woman (ignoring his normal boyish childhood), and look at me now with my deep voice and my beard and my male pattern baldness. If only I'd been allowed to transition when I was a child, how much better things would have been for me! Children must be allowed, indeed encouraged, to transition, and have drugs and surgery as young as possible! (But at the same time he's keeping his penis and testicles and asserting his right to be regarded as a woman without shaving his beard or even adopting feminine stereotypes.)

So we have the obscenity of pre-pubescent children who are non-gender-conforming, the vast majority of whom would grow up to be comfortable in their own bodies if simply left alone, being prescribed puberty blockers to delay the puberty that would actually help get their heads together, then cross-sex hormones which cause permanent sterility and permanent loss of sexual desire if given in this way (also with serious side-effects in relation to bone density and future cancer risk), and then having their healthy bodies surgically altered to resemble the opposite sex, sometimes (in America) as young as 13 for girls. Boys are being castrated and having their penises removed as young as 16, and having a "neovagina" cavity fashioned from part of the large intestine because their infantile penises don't have enough skin to do the job. They then have to push a dildo into this cavity every day for the rest of their lives in order to prevent it from healing up. Girls are being horribly mutliated by having parts of their forearms stripped away to make penis-like structures with no erectile tissue and with serious risks of devascularisation and necrosis. It has to stop.

And now most of this forum is going to (again) turn and denounce me as a terf, a transphobe, a bigot and a peddler of hate speech. Well I don't care. I'm past trying to placate the trans allies by adding in all the modifiers about being kind and cherishing the feelings of these oh-so-marginalised flowers and so on. Women have been gaslighted into the assumption that it's their duty to give up their rights to men who claim to be more oppressed than they are for too long. I'm so far past that it's not even a blip on the horizon any more.

And I'm just one of the less vociferious ones. More and more women are rising up against this by the day. Martina Navratilova's "peak trans" conversion was a joy to behold. That woman rocks! Men too, who understand what's going on, thank you Graham Linehan and Iain MacWhirter and Stuart Campbell and Chris McEleny and many more of you.

So this is going to stop. I just hope it stops soon, before too many more young people are robbed of their healthy bodies and their sexuality and their long-term health, and too many more promising young female athletes have their careers destroyed, and too many more vunerable women are sexually assaulted by predatory men who have been housed in women's prisons and rape shelters.

Thank-you for such an extremely well reasoned and well worded post.

I do tend to believe that a very, very few people are probably helped by having transgender surgery, but the number is miniscule and should be the absolute last resort.

I share your hope that many more people will start to understand that almost everyone is uncomfortable in their own skin at some point, and it should be viewed as a call to learn to adjust lifestyles, not bodies.


I remember when I was about ten or so, desperately wishing I was a boy. I'd joined the girl scouts, expecting it to be similar to the boy scouts, but was extremely disappointed with the program of learning to clean house, raise babies and do craft projects with no practical purpose. I wanted the "fun stuff" -fishing, camping, and poking fires with sticks. Thankfully, my father understood that, and was happy to provide me with tents, coils of rope and pocket knives. I was able to reconcile my outdoorsy, active self with more traditionally feminine stuff -learning to bake a cake in a Dutch oven over the coals under the moon deep in the forest will do that to a girl like me.

I can only recoil in horror thinking of being encouraged to learn to wear a fake penis, showering with the boys, and trying to haul a boy's share of firewood or gear after striking camp.

There has to be a line drawn, and while there will probably always be a few that land on the "wrong" side somewhere, I think it will be a better state of affairs then trying to push children and teens onto the current highway to drugs and surgeries.

 

[Ziggurat]

Body dysmorphia or body dysphoria is a psychological/psychiatric condition. The first resort should not be to try to change the body to make it conform to the patient's thinking. The first resort should be to try to reconcile the patient to the body he or she has. Not least because the medicalisation and surgical procedures involved carry significant risks and involve potentially serious side effects, but also because one of the first principles of psychotherapy is not to accede to or affirm the patient's delusion.

I agree, a psychological or psychiatric condition should first be treated with psychology or psychiatry, not with surgery or hormones.

One aspect you didn't talk about is sexual abuse. A lot of transgender people are survivors of sexual assault, and transition is an attempt to deal with that by changing their sexual characteristics from what their abusers were attracted to. But it's a maladaptive response.

 

[Ziggurat]

I remember when I was about ten or so, desperately wishing I was a boy. I'd joined the girl scouts, expecting it to be similar to the boy scouts, but was extremely disappointed with the program of learning to clean house, raise babies and do craft projects with no practical purpose. I wanted the "fun stuff" -fishing, camping, and poking fires with sticks. Thankfully, my father understood that, and was happy to provide me with tents, coils of rope and pocket knives. I was able to reconcile my outdoorsy, active self with more traditionally feminine stuff -learning to bake a cake in a Dutch oven over the coals under the moon deep in the forest will do that to a girl like me.

I can only recoil in horror thinking of being encouraged to learn to wear a fake penis, showering with the boys, and trying to haul a boy's share of firewood or gear after striking camp.

It's almost like people have forgotten what a tomboy is. A tomboy is still a girl, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with them.

 

[Belz...]

One aspect you didn't talk about is sexual abuse. A lot of transgender people are survivors of sexual assault, and transition is an attempt to deal with that by changing their sexual characteristics from what their abusers were attracted to.

Really? I didn't know that. Do you have a link for that?

 

[Ziggurat]

Really? I didn't know that. Do you have a link for that?

I don't have numbers for what the fraction is, but this was informative:

 

[d4m10n]

I just hope it stops soon, before too many more young people are robbed of their healthy bodies and their sexuality and their long-term health, and too many more promising young female athletes have their careers destroyed, and too many more vunerable women are sexually assaulted by predatory men who have been housed in women's prisons and rape shelters.

Once we get past our current trans-inclusivist social phase (assuming your prediction comes true) what sort of tests will be used to determine the set of people who are eligible to compete in top level women's sport? SRY protein testing? Hormone levels? Other (perhaps sonographic) tests for specific internal organs?