New piece on UnHerd: What happens when trans exceptionalism meets ordinary children?
I have a new piece up over at UnHerd on the US Democratic party’s embrace of ‘gender-affirming care’ and what medical providers have to believe to transition children:
Rather than bending the arc of history toward justice, the Biden administration has put the full force of the federal government behind a treatment model that amounts to little more than an unregulated medical experiment on vulnerable children and adolescents. Don’t let the language of civil rights fool you.
To understand gender affirmation and the people who push it, we need to take a closer look at their belief in the utterly exceptional “transgender” child. What do affirmative clinicians believe about such a patient, who arrives in their office with a label firmly affixed? Affirmative care starts not with a question or a clinical assessment but with a moral imperative: validate the patient’s transgender identity.
Presented with a “transgender” patient, what else matters? Does a patient’s age or developmental stage matter? What about his or her sex or sexual orientation? What parts of a patient’s life story — or medical history — stand out?
Gender clinicians such as Johanna Olson-Kennedy prefer to talk about gender-questioning three-year-olds as “people”. And they are people. But when we talk about three-year-olds as “people”, rather than toddlers, important information gets lost, with consequences. When we talk about “people”, we think adults. We think autonomy. When we talk about “toddlers,” we think: tiny humans who need constant care and guidance, who cannot be trusted to brush their teeth or cross an empty street, much less start down a medical pathway.
That’s the reason Olson-Kennedy talks about “people” when she’s referring to toddlers. The ideas that underpin gender-affirming care lose their moral force when translated from “people know who they are” to “toddlers know who they are”.
I also wanted to say thank you to Wesley Yang for his input and edits on this piece.
I couldn't post on Unheard, so I'm posting this comment here:
The "true self" -- I could puke when I hear that term. People are so changeable that a person's "true self" can change every few months. By "true self" they really mean "what I want for myself today". But what a child wants for itself at eight years old might be very different from what the adult-yet-to-come wants for itself. This is the bottom line: No minor child has the wisdom or insight to make life-changing decisions about itself and its future. Changing genders (to the extent possible) is for the adult to choose.
What Olson-Kennedy says about diabetics is the most fundamental misinformation and gaslighting imaginable. Diabetes is a physical disease, while gender dysphoria is a psychological state. There is absolutely no similarity between the two. The treatment for most psychological illnesses is THERAPY, NOT "AFFIRMATIVE CARE". Accepting a child's self-diagnosis is MEDICAL MALPRACTICE.
It is having a disastrous effect on_all_children:
Primary pupils are being bullied and called transphobic for using wrong pronouns
Mark Macaskill
Sunday July 03 2022, 12.00pm BST, The Sunday Times
Children as young as 11 — including those with learning disabilities — are being bullied in Scottish schools for questioning transgender ideology and failing to use appropriate pronouns, it has been claimed.
Safeguarding Our Schools Scotland (SOSS), a campaign body, said dozens of parents had raised concerns in recent months over pupils being ostracised by their peers and branded “transphobic”.
It said the cases it was aware of did not include malicious behaviour towards trans children but involved young people who struggled to understand and accept the decision of their peers to switch gender.
They include a primary six pupil in Inverclyde who was abused verbally and on social media for refusing to acknowledge that a girl she had known for five years had self-identified as a boy. The stress caused her to self-harm. In another case, a pupil with dyslexia was bullied for continuing to refer to a boy as “he” after the individual identified as a girl.
Lucie Phillips, from SOSS, said the reports highlighted a worrying trend that the national anti-bullying service, Respect Me, appeared unwilling to confront. [...]
- LINK to full article (archived/non-paywalled): https://archive.ph/XTsDW#selection-853.0-877.157