There's no excuse for threats and acts of violence against ‘gender-affirming’ medical providers. And we should not confuse targeted harassment campaigns with scrutiny of what organizations like the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and their membership are doing, even if these organizations desperately want to shut us up.
The correct attitude about all this is really very simple:
1. People must accept that children do not have the maturity to choose to transition on behalf of the adult yet to come. Transitioning is for adults only.
2. That being the case, medical providers must DO NO HARM, and that includes not changing the bodies of children in ways that they may regret, or which might cause them suffering later.
3. Once a child is an adult, the adult is free to do what he pleases with his body.
This idea that a child can or should make choices for the adult yet to come is what is so wrong. Children are just not mature enough to know what they really want TODAY, much less in ten or twenty years. Anyone who deals with children knows how easily influenced they are, and how easily their minds change. Certainly, it is irresponsible to give kids the idea that they can change their gender -- just knowing that is enough to make a lot of kids want to "try" it.
LET THIS TRANS REVOLUTION HAPPEN TO ADULTS. LEAVE THE CHILDREN OUT OF IT. Children should be told that transitioning is like smoking and drinking: YOU CAN'T DO IT UNTIL YOU GROW UP.
I actually think that extreme caution must be taken even when a person is technically an adult , as in the case of Ritchie Herron (tulip) who was 24 when he started transition, 31 when he had surgery and now, 35, bitterly regrets it and realises that he had underlying mental health issues that the NHS gender clinic ignored, including plenty of red flags which indicated that they should never have performed surgery on him. Many other examples too of people who transitioned as adults and now regret it. Mental health problems are not limited to children. All of us are, to a greater or lesser extent under the thrall of social media, and, unlike other instances of social contagion, trans ideology has captured all of our institutions, schools, medicine, media. It’s hard for even adults to resist it when it has the veneer of respectability.
Oh sure, I didn't meant to imply that only children make mistakes. Adults make plenty of them, and are perfectly capable of ruining their lives. But children are a special group who must be protected because they are, by definition, immature. If I had my way, it would not be possible to transition without therapy for ANYONE. But trans activists have complained bitterly about the "gatekeepers" that they were having to deal with, and so the gatekeepers stopped gatekeeping. But because of the special nature of children (they are not developed enough to be responsible), there must ALWAYS be gatekeepers to keep them from harming themselves. Indeed, no trans treatments should be available to them at all. Of course, children should be free to act out their feelings (boys wearing dresses, etc.), but that's as close to transitioning as society should allow children to get.
I agree with you up to the point about adults being free to do what they want with their bodies. Society is entitled to set limits on what people can do to themselves, or have others do to them. To push it to the extreme, society can and does allow people to be prevented from killing themselves (unless, in some places, certain criteria are met) Society is even more restrictive on other people doing things that lead to the death of a person, no matter how much the person wants help to be dead. There are some things that adults cannot be allowed to do, or have done to themselves, without at least some outside oversight. My opinion is that having primary and secondary sex characteristics chopped off for cosmetic reasons falls somewhere within the range of "Not allowed at all" and "Only with extreme oversight".
I think your view is extreme. What about personal freedom? Should tattoos be illegal? They WERE illegal once. Yes, suicide is against the law, but it hardly matters after the fact, does it? And the law is more concerned with whatever responsibilities the person is trying to escape (if that is his or her motivation). Your argument certainly doesn't support a woman's right to have an abortion.
No, adults should have maximum personal freedom as long as that doesn't involve directly harming other people, society or the environment.
But doctors also have, at least in principle, a duty to do no harm. If I am a practitioner of some fringe religion and I believe that I will achieve enlightenment only if I literally blind myself to the world, no ophthalmologist is under any obligation to assist me in rendering myself sightless. If I am a rabid Harry Potter fan and I decide that I want to look exactly like Lord Voldemort, no cosmetic surgeon is under any obligation to reengineer my face so that I am noseless. More plausibly, if I am a drug addict and I decide that I want to spend as much of my life as possible chemically numbed to the world, no doctor is under any obligation to write me a prescription for Oxycontin.
RU, it's not clear to me who you were speaking to, but I agree with you that doctors must do no harm. I say that myself above. Doctors are violating that oath by giving transitioning treatments to kids, although they would probably say that the kids would commit suicide if they didn't -- but we all know that that argument is a red herring.
I don't agree. Personal freedom has limits, and the Millian harm principle has lacunae aplenty. I see no contradiction in what I have said and my support of a woman's choice to have an abortion (which I have always supported). Tattooists (at least where I live) have to be licensed - a form of oversight. Again, where I live, it is unlawful for anyone to remove healthy limbs or organs, no matter how much a person asks for it (but, oddly, not primary and/or secondary sexual characteristics). Sado-masochistic acts are not lawful. Branding is not lawful. Brain surgery for psychiatric conditions requires two doctors and a court order before it can be performed no matter how much the individual wants it. Surgery can only lawfully be carried out by those trained it. Assisted suicide is regarded as homicide. The examples are many and varied, but come down to society having set limits to protect (or not) some people.
Yes, personal freedom has limits -- where others are concerned. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. Beyond that, my opinion is that adults should have maximum freedom. We'll just have to disagree.
I'm in the UK. I do understand your points - I've had most of the same opinions for most of my life. For example, until the last two or three years, I was an advocate for assisted suicide, but the situations in Belgium and the Netherlands made me revise that support - maximising freedom has come to look like not giving a damn about caring for people. Allowing unfettered access to cosmetic procedures in the name of maximising freedom feels the same to me.
I believe in reincarnation. If a person messes up one life, he has many more chances to live a good one. You said that in England it is permissible to change physical sexual characteristics. That's obviously in response to trans people. What sado-masochistic acts are not lawful? Are you saying that people can't have the kind of sex they want to have? It sounds to me like you are just getting more conservative as you get older.
I think you'll find a dismembered pre-born baby is pretty much harmed. It seems you want mentally ill people to be allowed to mutilate their genitalia in case there's a knock on effect on the right to kill pre-born babies. No doubt if push came to shove, GCs like you would be willing to accept child mutilation by trans doctors to defend the 'right' to kill pre-born babies. The opposition of so many feminists and LGBs to trans child mutilation is so flimsy.
Whether or not abortion is murder depends on whether we have a soul and when the soul enters the fetus. My religion says that the soul usually enters the fetus around the time of birth; and even if it enters earlier, the soul will reincarnate.
Lord Ha Ha, your values are badly amiss, and I see you as a crackpot.
A child who has been groomed throughout childhood to a particular end doesn't suddenly become an independent adult who can make his own decisions on his 18th birthday.
Simon, in these discussions we have to keep our focus on what reasonable restrictions and laws should be. Generally, 18-year-olds are seen as being adults, and that gives them the right to fuck up their lives. Do we want to take legal adulthood away from 18-year-olds? Of course, in many U.S. states, you must be 21 to drink, so only a 21-year-old is a full adult.
I'm not a Republican, but I support laws that block any kind of medical transitioning treatments for people younger than 18, and I would support making that 21 if I thought other people would go for it. As I keep saying, I believe in reincarnation, and we all have the right to fuck up a few of our lives. The government can't protect us from everything, especially from ourselves.
I did see on TV (or perhaps I read it) a story about a teenager who had his testicles removed the moment he turned 18 (on his way to becoming a woman), and then immediately regretted it. It was a sad story, but it will become part of his learning and growth process, just like the teens who have their breasts removed and then miss them later. (I don't think that should be legal for teens.) Anyone can regret anything that they do at any time.
You are omitting from your analysis the party actually committing the action. It should not be legal to intentionally maim someone who is so mentally ill he consents to it. Even (especially) if you have a medical degree.
No, I haven't forgotten that. If you read my other comments here, you'll see that I consider it to be malpractice for doctors to harm their patients. "Do no harm" is the motto they go by, or should, and altering a person's body in unnecessary ways is "harm". I can't cover every point in every comment I make.
A very good point. Add to that evidence that the brain doesn't stop maturing until the mid-20s and we can set a lower limit of capacity to make these decisions not before 25 years of age.
"This letter paints exposés on child medical transition as "disinformation," even when those exposés archive and share medical systems' own promotional materials, even when they quote medical providers at length in their own words."
yes. that is where we are. thank you for stating it so clearly.
and didn't the Vanderbilt University Medical Clinic just announce it is "suspending all permanent gender affirmation surgery for minors," despite the fact that trans activists have managed to get the media to report that it did not do and has never done such surgeries and anyone who says it does is part of a disinformation campaign by the far right? https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/09/us/vanderbilt-suspends-gender-affirming-surgery-minors/index.html
Thank you again for being one of the clearest and most eloquent voices speaking out against this insanity. And thank you for stating a fact that many in the gender-critical camp find hard to hear: gender, while complex, is not therefore meaningless or nonsense. Much of the damage caused by gender ideology can be traced to the belief that gender is *only* a culturally constructed mythology, nothing other than sexist stereotypes. In fact, we can learn much about how the "transgender" delusion is unattainable from a solidly empirical account of gender, which we will only arrive at when we accept that such an account is both plausible and worthwhile.
"What medical providers [...] actually do and to whom and on what basis, who's on board—sounds like slander. The truth here is so obscene that to speak it is automatically discrediting."
Perfectly stated. Any time someone writes in the comments under a NYT or Washington Post article on trans stuff that gender reassignment surgeries ARE being performed on minors, the torch-carrying mobs come out to scream that it's a nasty lie. I wish they could make up their minds about whether they're okay with surgeries being performed on minors or if it's a horrible thing to claim such a thing is happening, in which case I guess they would be against it???
The new WPATH recommendation for testicle removal is 17. I believe genital surgeries have been being performed on minors but I don’t know how one can get hard data on that. Would love to find out how.
There’s a word for sterilizing humans without their consent because they have been deemed afflicted with fill-in-the-blank mental health issue - it starts with “eu” & ends with “genics”.
Matt Walsh gave the riposte of ripostes to the efforts of captured paedatric institutions to get Biden's vote fraud regime to lock him up for exposing the sick child mutilating freaks they are.
If Biden's Vote Fraud Party manages to rig the mid-terms as well as it did the Presidential, expect them to go after Matt Walsh. He's hitting them way too hard.
And on a related theme, if Breslow why not this guy?
The correct attitude about all this is really very simple:
1. People must accept that children do not have the maturity to choose to transition on behalf of the adult yet to come. Transitioning is for adults only.
2. That being the case, medical providers must DO NO HARM, and that includes not changing the bodies of children in ways that they may regret, or which might cause them suffering later.
3. Once a child is an adult, the adult is free to do what he pleases with his body.
This idea that a child can or should make choices for the adult yet to come is what is so wrong. Children are just not mature enough to know what they really want TODAY, much less in ten or twenty years. Anyone who deals with children knows how easily influenced they are, and how easily their minds change. Certainly, it is irresponsible to give kids the idea that they can change their gender -- just knowing that is enough to make a lot of kids want to "try" it.
LET THIS TRANS REVOLUTION HAPPEN TO ADULTS. LEAVE THE CHILDREN OUT OF IT. Children should be told that transitioning is like smoking and drinking: YOU CAN'T DO IT UNTIL YOU GROW UP.
I actually think that extreme caution must be taken even when a person is technically an adult , as in the case of Ritchie Herron (tulip) who was 24 when he started transition, 31 when he had surgery and now, 35, bitterly regrets it and realises that he had underlying mental health issues that the NHS gender clinic ignored, including plenty of red flags which indicated that they should never have performed surgery on him. Many other examples too of people who transitioned as adults and now regret it. Mental health problems are not limited to children. All of us are, to a greater or lesser extent under the thrall of social media, and, unlike other instances of social contagion, trans ideology has captured all of our institutions, schools, medicine, media. It’s hard for even adults to resist it when it has the veneer of respectability.
Oh sure, I didn't meant to imply that only children make mistakes. Adults make plenty of them, and are perfectly capable of ruining their lives. But children are a special group who must be protected because they are, by definition, immature. If I had my way, it would not be possible to transition without therapy for ANYONE. But trans activists have complained bitterly about the "gatekeepers" that they were having to deal with, and so the gatekeepers stopped gatekeeping. But because of the special nature of children (they are not developed enough to be responsible), there must ALWAYS be gatekeepers to keep them from harming themselves. Indeed, no trans treatments should be available to them at all. Of course, children should be free to act out their feelings (boys wearing dresses, etc.), but that's as close to transitioning as society should allow children to get.
I agree with you up to the point about adults being free to do what they want with their bodies. Society is entitled to set limits on what people can do to themselves, or have others do to them. To push it to the extreme, society can and does allow people to be prevented from killing themselves (unless, in some places, certain criteria are met) Society is even more restrictive on other people doing things that lead to the death of a person, no matter how much the person wants help to be dead. There are some things that adults cannot be allowed to do, or have done to themselves, without at least some outside oversight. My opinion is that having primary and secondary sex characteristics chopped off for cosmetic reasons falls somewhere within the range of "Not allowed at all" and "Only with extreme oversight".
I think your view is extreme. What about personal freedom? Should tattoos be illegal? They WERE illegal once. Yes, suicide is against the law, but it hardly matters after the fact, does it? And the law is more concerned with whatever responsibilities the person is trying to escape (if that is his or her motivation). Your argument certainly doesn't support a woman's right to have an abortion.
No, adults should have maximum personal freedom as long as that doesn't involve directly harming other people, society or the environment.
But doctors also have, at least in principle, a duty to do no harm. If I am a practitioner of some fringe religion and I believe that I will achieve enlightenment only if I literally blind myself to the world, no ophthalmologist is under any obligation to assist me in rendering myself sightless. If I am a rabid Harry Potter fan and I decide that I want to look exactly like Lord Voldemort, no cosmetic surgeon is under any obligation to reengineer my face so that I am noseless. More plausibly, if I am a drug addict and I decide that I want to spend as much of my life as possible chemically numbed to the world, no doctor is under any obligation to write me a prescription for Oxycontin.
RU, it's not clear to me who you were speaking to, but I agree with you that doctors must do no harm. I say that myself above. Doctors are violating that oath by giving transitioning treatments to kids, although they would probably say that the kids would commit suicide if they didn't -- but we all know that that argument is a red herring.
I don't agree. Personal freedom has limits, and the Millian harm principle has lacunae aplenty. I see no contradiction in what I have said and my support of a woman's choice to have an abortion (which I have always supported). Tattooists (at least where I live) have to be licensed - a form of oversight. Again, where I live, it is unlawful for anyone to remove healthy limbs or organs, no matter how much a person asks for it (but, oddly, not primary and/or secondary sexual characteristics). Sado-masochistic acts are not lawful. Branding is not lawful. Brain surgery for psychiatric conditions requires two doctors and a court order before it can be performed no matter how much the individual wants it. Surgery can only lawfully be carried out by those trained it. Assisted suicide is regarded as homicide. The examples are many and varied, but come down to society having set limits to protect (or not) some people.
Yes, personal freedom has limits -- where others are concerned. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. Beyond that, my opinion is that adults should have maximum freedom. We'll just have to disagree.
What country do you live in?
I'm in the UK. I do understand your points - I've had most of the same opinions for most of my life. For example, until the last two or three years, I was an advocate for assisted suicide, but the situations in Belgium and the Netherlands made me revise that support - maximising freedom has come to look like not giving a damn about caring for people. Allowing unfettered access to cosmetic procedures in the name of maximising freedom feels the same to me.
I believe in reincarnation. If a person messes up one life, he has many more chances to live a good one. You said that in England it is permissible to change physical sexual characteristics. That's obviously in response to trans people. What sado-masochistic acts are not lawful? Are you saying that people can't have the kind of sex they want to have? It sounds to me like you are just getting more conservative as you get older.
I think you'll find a dismembered pre-born baby is pretty much harmed. It seems you want mentally ill people to be allowed to mutilate their genitalia in case there's a knock on effect on the right to kill pre-born babies. No doubt if push came to shove, GCs like you would be willing to accept child mutilation by trans doctors to defend the 'right' to kill pre-born babies. The opposition of so many feminists and LGBs to trans child mutilation is so flimsy.
Whether or not abortion is murder depends on whether we have a soul and when the soul enters the fetus. My religion says that the soul usually enters the fetus around the time of birth; and even if it enters earlier, the soul will reincarnate.
Lord Ha Ha, your values are badly amiss, and I see you as a crackpot.
God bless you.
A child who has been groomed throughout childhood to a particular end doesn't suddenly become an independent adult who can make his own decisions on his 18th birthday.
Simon, in these discussions we have to keep our focus on what reasonable restrictions and laws should be. Generally, 18-year-olds are seen as being adults, and that gives them the right to fuck up their lives. Do we want to take legal adulthood away from 18-year-olds? Of course, in many U.S. states, you must be 21 to drink, so only a 21-year-old is a full adult.
I'm not a Republican, but I support laws that block any kind of medical transitioning treatments for people younger than 18, and I would support making that 21 if I thought other people would go for it. As I keep saying, I believe in reincarnation, and we all have the right to fuck up a few of our lives. The government can't protect us from everything, especially from ourselves.
I did see on TV (or perhaps I read it) a story about a teenager who had his testicles removed the moment he turned 18 (on his way to becoming a woman), and then immediately regretted it. It was a sad story, but it will become part of his learning and growth process, just like the teens who have their breasts removed and then miss them later. (I don't think that should be legal for teens.) Anyone can regret anything that they do at any time.
You are omitting from your analysis the party actually committing the action. It should not be legal to intentionally maim someone who is so mentally ill he consents to it. Even (especially) if you have a medical degree.
No, I haven't forgotten that. If you read my other comments here, you'll see that I consider it to be malpractice for doctors to harm their patients. "Do no harm" is the motto they go by, or should, and altering a person's body in unnecessary ways is "harm". I can't cover every point in every comment I make.
A very good point. Add to that evidence that the brain doesn't stop maturing until the mid-20s and we can set a lower limit of capacity to make these decisions not before 25 years of age.
"This letter paints exposés on child medical transition as "disinformation," even when those exposés archive and share medical systems' own promotional materials, even when they quote medical providers at length in their own words."
yes. that is where we are. thank you for stating it so clearly.
and didn't the Vanderbilt University Medical Clinic just announce it is "suspending all permanent gender affirmation surgery for minors," despite the fact that trans activists have managed to get the media to report that it did not do and has never done such surgeries and anyone who says it does is part of a disinformation campaign by the far right? https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/09/us/vanderbilt-suspends-gender-affirming-surgery-minors/index.html
Thank you again for being one of the clearest and most eloquent voices speaking out against this insanity. And thank you for stating a fact that many in the gender-critical camp find hard to hear: gender, while complex, is not therefore meaningless or nonsense. Much of the damage caused by gender ideology can be traced to the belief that gender is *only* a culturally constructed mythology, nothing other than sexist stereotypes. In fact, we can learn much about how the "transgender" delusion is unattainable from a solidly empirical account of gender, which we will only arrive at when we accept that such an account is both plausible and worthwhile.
Another really insightful article, thank you!
"What medical providers [...] actually do and to whom and on what basis, who's on board—sounds like slander. The truth here is so obscene that to speak it is automatically discrediting."
Perfectly stated. Any time someone writes in the comments under a NYT or Washington Post article on trans stuff that gender reassignment surgeries ARE being performed on minors, the torch-carrying mobs come out to scream that it's a nasty lie. I wish they could make up their minds about whether they're okay with surgeries being performed on minors or if it's a horrible thing to claim such a thing is happening, in which case I guess they would be against it???
The new WPATH recommendation for testicle removal is 17. I believe genital surgeries have been being performed on minors but I don’t know how one can get hard data on that. Would love to find out how.
There’s a word for sterilizing humans without their consent because they have been deemed afflicted with fill-in-the-blank mental health issue - it starts with “eu” & ends with “genics”.
If you want to send this as
a letter to the Dept of Justice I would be honoured to sign it. Excellent writing.
If you want to do that, please do!
Sexual Cleansing is so lucrative!
Matt Walsh gave the riposte of ripostes to the efforts of captured paedatric institutions to get Biden's vote fraud regime to lock him up for exposing the sick child mutilating freaks they are.
If Biden's Vote Fraud Party manages to rig the mid-terms as well as it did the Presidential, expect them to go after Matt Walsh. He's hitting them way too hard.
And on a related theme, if Breslow why not this guy?
https://youtu.be/5YTv7OzZYWU