[Nota bene, October 8, 2023: This is a crazy-busy week for me—so please wish me luck!—and so I’m opening up this paid-only post to everybody for today’s update…] I’m looking at the country I called home for most of my life—the United States—and wondering: who are the ‘persuadables’? Who needs to be poked and prodded to act on what they know? Who needs encouragement to inform themselves about the subjects they’ve been avoiding and
It takes courage to admit we've been wrong or that we've been avoiding something. I'd say this is more the exception than the rule. I think the vast majority of people live in a near constant state of avoidance, actively dodging inconvenient and uncomfortable truths. When you grow up in an abusive or neglectful home, harm is so constant and inescapable that you escape it in your mind through avoidance. Growing up in an oppressive society is not so different. Harm and suffering are so constant that avoidance can feel like survival or safety. We might even tell ourselves the harm isn't happening or if it is, the people being harmed don't matter. I think Judith Herman said it best in Trauma and Recovery,
"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering."
That quote makes me think of all the comments I've read which go something like "if all those girl/women athletes just refused to compete, they could end this", which is wrong in many ways, but it gives a pass to the adults in the room, professional or not, who know that's it's unfair but go along with it. The coaches, sponsors and governing bodies.
Megan McArdle’s idea of the Oedipus Trap is interesting: when good intentions lead to harm, people have a difficult time ever acknowledging they were wrong. We discuss lobotomies as a case in which a harmful medical treatment for mental illness was eventually ended when that harm was finally acknowledged. But the most active promoter and practitioner of lobotomies never did acknowledge its harm. When he died he was trying to gather evidence of of its efficacy, convinced he had done the right thing.
I remember reading that myself. He invested his entire career into a bad idea. At the end, he couldn't acknowledge that his life was wasted.
I have a childhood friend who has done something similar. When we were young teens and first became friends, he was already a born-again Christian. As you would expect, he grew up to be a minister. He carved out a name for himself as a literal interpreter of the seven-day Creation in Genesis. If you read the Bible, you find that God created the universe in an extremely odd order which was not in any way scientific. Some Christians have tried to make sense of that by saying that the Bible must be interpreted symbolically. But my friend will have none of it. He interprets every word in the Bible literally, and in so doing he has set himself up as the most rigid of rigid born-again Christians. Of course, nowhere in the Bible does it say it is the word of God. In addition, he is a biblical scholar, which means he is completely aware of the genesis of the Torah (Old Testament), and how and why it evolved as it did. And he is also aware that the books of the New Testament contradict each other in various ways. But he is completely invested in the lies he believes in, so much so that he will never backtrack and acknowledge that he is in any way wrong.
Some people become so comfortable with the wrong ideas in their heads that they come to identify with them, and then cling to them as if their lives depended on them. The Lesbian couple across the street is a good example. They are both completely convinced that they must warm up their cars before driving them in the winter, but that isn't true of modern cars. In fact, it hasn't been true for decades since cars were no longer made with carburetors. Yet every winter, they let their cars idle for ten to twenty minutes before they drive off, filling the street with pollution, some of which gets into my home.
This determination to hold onto bad ideas is what separates stupid people from intelligent people.
PJ: "Some people become so comfortable with the wrong ideas in their heads that they come to identify with them, and then cling to them as if their lives depended on them.'
Amen to that. Apropos of which, a quote from Jonathan Swift some 300 years ago:
JS: "Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired: For in the Course of Things, Men always grow vicious before they become Unbelievers."
But, as you suggest with your tale of "the lesbian couple across the street", pretty much all of us -- present company excepted of course ... -- have those "opinions" that we'll defend to the death -- getting rather "vicious" in the process -- when anyone tries to reason us out of them.
Something of a case in point and of some bearing on the OP is the "conventional wisdom" that sex is "immutable" and that everyone is either male of female. Little more that folk biology at best which is not at all consistent with standard biological definitions like those published in the Glossary of this article in the journal of Molecular Human Reproduction:
"Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of the two sexes"
If your childhood friend became a born-again Christian, he probably became a "pastor" rather than a minister. I mention this not to quibble with your insightful comment but instead to riff on the obvious symbolism of the "pastor" in a Fundiegelical congregation. It creates a power dynamic in which the faithful are sheep, herd animals that exist to be exploited by others.
I know very affluent gays who have given very, very significant amounts to Human Rights Campaign over many years.
I've mentioned the gender/trans issues to them...and they come back with the most jejune talking points about how all the medical associations are in agreement, 40 or 50% suicide rate, and so on. You talk to them and it's like talking to a wall.
Q. If you had a magic wand and you could fix anything in the world to make it better, what would you do?
A. I will answer with a Jewish joke. There’s a reporter looking out a hotel window down at the wailing wall in Jerusalem. Every morning he sees an old man who comes to pray. One morning he asks the man, “So, what are you praying for?” The old man said, “Well I’m praying that my children and grandchildren will be happy and healthy, and that there will be peace between Jews and Arabs.” “And how long have you been doing this?,” asked the reporter. “For fifty years,” says the old man. “For fifty years you’ve been coming to this wall and you pray?”‐ the reporter expresses his amazement. “Yeah,” the old Jew answers. “How does it feel?” asks the reporter.
Yes, and I'm sure the intentions of those doctors who were destroying the brains of children and mentally disturbed people with knitting needles in the mid-20th century were also good. I'm referring, of course, to lobotomies. The lessons that were learned back then have been forgotten: The brain works best when it is whole. Similarly, the body works best when it is whole. Harming the body doesn't help with any psychological problem.
I just read about the beauty pageant in the Netherlands which selected the "woman" to be sent to the Miss Universe pageant. "She" was a trans woman. Now, the Miss Universe pageant was never anything that I liked or admired. It focusses on the superficial aspects of women. But adding trans women to it just makes it unfair. It means that women are losing opportunities, just as all those girls who competed against Lia Thomas lost opportunities. In other words, I see two layers of misogyny at the Miss Universe pageant -- the misogyny of reducing women to their appearance, and the misogyny of allowing men to take women's places.
That trans woman, by the way, doesn't even look like a really attractive woman. He is too tall, and too skinny. He doesn't have the soft layer of fat that women usually have on their bodies that make them look curvaceous. I mean, you can see his ribs above his small breasts, and his face is too angular.
It's not only lost opportunities (and frankly the ridiculousness of the whole idea of men entering a beauty pageant). Historically, like them or not (I don't) beauty pageants have celebrated an ideal of female beauty. Given that no trans identified male is likely to conform to that ideal, are we now going to have to redefine the word beauty as well as the word woman?
One thing I didn't say in my comment is that the trans woman probably won that beauty contest, not because the judges found him the most beautiful (he certainly isn't), but as a way to show their liberal bona fides. So the other contestants were sacrificed for social political reasons and not actually judged on their beauty. I am an old liberal, but modern liberals have become more stupid than there are words to describe.
I do believe that many trans women are convinced they are, or should be, real women -- at least inside they feel that way. So I have a little sympathy for them. Why so many of them want to express their femininity as excessive glamor, I also have an idea: Just as masculinity (muscles, hair, etc.) is the preferred image for the ideal man, so is glamour the image for the perfect, "most feminine" woman. But why these trans women don't have the respect for women to stay out of their private spaces, that really bothers me. I have said this many times before: Trans women know they are not women, so they resent real women for having the thing they want the most but can never have. That resentment then expresses itself in the domination of women -- i.e., in beating them at their sports, winning beauty pageants, etc. -- in being a "better woman" than most real women are.
But you seem to be suggesting that the judges of beauty pageants are in collusion with trans women. If so, I guess that is what happens to do-gooder liberals who don't find real women interesting enough to care about. I call such behavior the "Sympathy Sickness" -- do-gooders who find reasons to sympathize with people who do harmful things, in the same way that many liberals will be sympathetic with criminals. (I'm a liberal, by the way, but not a stupid liberal.)
That tall, bony trans woman couldn't possibly have been the prettiest woman in that Dutch pageant.
People (especially women), need to realize that this is where "be kind" gets you. You start off just going along with the pretense that some dude in a dress is a woman, and before you know it you have men masturbating under their towels while watching girls getting undressed at the local pool 'women's' changing rooms. And if you complain, you are the one told to leave.
And all you health professionals out there, whatever happened to "do no harm"? You wouldn't prescribe a gym membership for a skeletal girl who "knew" she was "really" fat, so what gives? Did you miss the bit of basic high school biology that taught that mammals can't change sex? https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/first-do-no-harm
"The thing is, in service of the decision to Sit This One Out, it’s clear that many Professional Grown-Ups have actively avoided knowledge."
But are the Professional Grown-Ups actually avoiding knowledge? And did they really decide to sit out the culture war over gender identity ideology?
I submit that far from adopting a position of neutrality, Professional Grown-Ups willingly consented early on to their capture and indoctrination by trans rights activists. Editors-in-chief, deans and college presidents, heads of public agencies, executive directors, CEOs and others were predisposed to this by their legitimate guilt at having been slow to support gay civil rights. Any resistance they might have had vanished with the onset of the Black Lives Matter era that cast Professional Grown-Ups - the white ones, anyway - as humankind's chief oppressors. The PGU's had no choice but to lean in on all things trans, and lean in they did. Not only did most Professional Grown-Ups not sit out trans invasion, they were instrumental in bringing about the introduction and implementation of the tenets of gender identity ideology within their organizations.
The True Believers among the Professional Grown-Ups likely don't consider the gender-critical case against trans ideology to be knowledge-based. No, to them it's all an undifferentiated stew of lies and hatred. Who is going to tell them otherwise? As far as they are concerned, knowledge resides in trans activists' talking points we know so well. To heed Abigail Shrier or the hosts of the "Gender: A Wider Lens" podcast is to replace knowledge with transphobia. If the grown ups appear to be backsliding, their in-house zealots will keep them on course. Coleman Hughes learned this recently when the TED Talk organization suppressed his talk praising color blindness in response to a backlash by the woke Black@TED “Employee Resource Group that exists to provide a safe space for TED staff who identify as Black." https://colemanhughes.substack.com/p/why-is-ted-scared-of-color-blindness
PGUs' exposure to information that contradicts the beliefs trans rights activists have fostered will probably produce a state of cognitive dissonance that could reinforce rather than shake their confidence. It may be necessary to look to the cult deprogrammer's playbook for ways to reintroduce Professional Grown-Ups to reality.
The people who appear to be sitting this one out are doing nothing of the kind, of course. They are taking advantage by participating in one way or another — playing the pronoun game, remaining quiet about their discomforts, supporting the causes it's been easy to support for decades despite the turn — to remain in the good graces of their friends, to maintain their professional reputation and their paycheck, to appear adequately virtuous. This isn't just about not knowing. Because you have to play along on some level. The other side demands it.
I think there's an element of waiting for someone else to act, ideally the bigger organization above one's own. So when the Int'l Olympic Committee kicked it back to the individual sports associations they had to be adults, anyway.
Wow. You really drank the Kool-Aid on this one. No one is sterilizing gender confused kids. Stop parroting bullshit you read on the internet. You write this opinion piece and address it to the well educated professionals and then you just repeat the same lies and rhetoric as the ignorant unwashed masses.
Gender Affirmation Care...which is what you are probably referring to consists mostly of therapy. Necessary therapy. In a world where everyone from social media to parents are going on and on about how trans people are defective or freaks...teenagers who are not comfortable with themselves hide in fear that their secret will get out. They need a Professional Grown Up to tell them that their feelings are valid and that they are normal. This therapy is the first step in their journey of self discovery. It will help the realize if they are trans or not. It will help them find out who they really are. It will also keep many of them from killing themselves.
The idea that there are hospitals that are sterilizing children is false. It has been proven false over and over and over again...but urban legends love to continue despite facts. The idea that gender surgery is being performed on minors is also false. While it is true that in some cases medication is being used...it is very rare and only considered in extreme circumstances. What you are truly advocating against is therapy.
Therapy that saves lives.
Therapy that makes scared teenagers feel normal.
Therapy that combats systemic prejudice.
Therapy that stops kids from killing themselves.
You say you care about kids? Then stop this nonsense. You know it's your own bigotry talking...it was never about the children.
It takes courage to admit we've been wrong or that we've been avoiding something. I'd say this is more the exception than the rule. I think the vast majority of people live in a near constant state of avoidance, actively dodging inconvenient and uncomfortable truths. When you grow up in an abusive or neglectful home, harm is so constant and inescapable that you escape it in your mind through avoidance. Growing up in an oppressive society is not so different. Harm and suffering are so constant that avoidance can feel like survival or safety. We might even tell ourselves the harm isn't happening or if it is, the people being harmed don't matter. I think Judith Herman said it best in Trauma and Recovery,
"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering."
That quote makes me think of all the comments I've read which go something like "if all those girl/women athletes just refused to compete, they could end this", which is wrong in many ways, but it gives a pass to the adults in the room, professional or not, who know that's it's unfair but go along with it. The coaches, sponsors and governing bodies.
IW: "I think the vast majority of people live in a near constant state of avoidance, actively dodging inconvenient and uncomfortable truths."
Indeed. ICYMI, an old cartoon on the relative popularity of "comforting lies" and "unpleasant truths":
https://henrykotula.com/2020/05/27/cartoon-unpleasant-truths-vs-comforting-lies-3/
All the perpetrator asks is for the bystander to do nothing. Oof.
IW, are the other therapists at your job still practicing affirmative care, or have you moved on to another job?
Megan McArdle’s idea of the Oedipus Trap is interesting: when good intentions lead to harm, people have a difficult time ever acknowledging they were wrong. We discuss lobotomies as a case in which a harmful medical treatment for mental illness was eventually ended when that harm was finally acknowledged. But the most active promoter and practitioner of lobotomies never did acknowledge its harm. When he died he was trying to gather evidence of of its efficacy, convinced he had done the right thing.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4k2nzooJVkSer0sbNqtir6
I remember reading that myself. He invested his entire career into a bad idea. At the end, he couldn't acknowledge that his life was wasted.
I have a childhood friend who has done something similar. When we were young teens and first became friends, he was already a born-again Christian. As you would expect, he grew up to be a minister. He carved out a name for himself as a literal interpreter of the seven-day Creation in Genesis. If you read the Bible, you find that God created the universe in an extremely odd order which was not in any way scientific. Some Christians have tried to make sense of that by saying that the Bible must be interpreted symbolically. But my friend will have none of it. He interprets every word in the Bible literally, and in so doing he has set himself up as the most rigid of rigid born-again Christians. Of course, nowhere in the Bible does it say it is the word of God. In addition, he is a biblical scholar, which means he is completely aware of the genesis of the Torah (Old Testament), and how and why it evolved as it did. And he is also aware that the books of the New Testament contradict each other in various ways. But he is completely invested in the lies he believes in, so much so that he will never backtrack and acknowledge that he is in any way wrong.
Some people become so comfortable with the wrong ideas in their heads that they come to identify with them, and then cling to them as if their lives depended on them. The Lesbian couple across the street is a good example. They are both completely convinced that they must warm up their cars before driving them in the winter, but that isn't true of modern cars. In fact, it hasn't been true for decades since cars were no longer made with carburetors. Yet every winter, they let their cars idle for ten to twenty minutes before they drive off, filling the street with pollution, some of which gets into my home.
This determination to hold onto bad ideas is what separates stupid people from intelligent people.
PJ: "Some people become so comfortable with the wrong ideas in their heads that they come to identify with them, and then cling to them as if their lives depended on them.'
Amen to that. Apropos of which, a quote from Jonathan Swift some 300 years ago:
JS: "Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired: For in the Course of Things, Men always grow vicious before they become Unbelievers."
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/07/10/reason-out/
But, as you suggest with your tale of "the lesbian couple across the street", pretty much all of us -- present company excepted of course ... -- have those "opinions" that we'll defend to the death -- getting rather "vicious" in the process -- when anyone tries to reason us out of them.
Something of a case in point and of some bearing on the OP is the "conventional wisdom" that sex is "immutable" and that everyone is either male of female. Little more that folk biology at best which is not at all consistent with standard biological definitions like those published in the Glossary of this article in the journal of Molecular Human Reproduction:
"Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of the two sexes"
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
If your childhood friend became a born-again Christian, he probably became a "pastor" rather than a minister. I mention this not to quibble with your insightful comment but instead to riff on the obvious symbolism of the "pastor" in a Fundiegelical congregation. It creates a power dynamic in which the faithful are sheep, herd animals that exist to be exploited by others.
And most lobotomies were done on women, but he never acknowledged that discrepancy.
I can't imagine how coaches, athletic directors, and sponsors of teams can live with the decision to dismantle women's sports.
I know very affluent gays who have given very, very significant amounts to Human Rights Campaign over many years.
I've mentioned the gender/trans issues to them...and they come back with the most jejune talking points about how all the medical associations are in agreement, 40 or 50% suicide rate, and so on. You talk to them and it's like talking to a wall.
Stop me if you've heard this joke before ... 😉🙂
Quote:
Q. If you had a magic wand and you could fix anything in the world to make it better, what would you do?
A. I will answer with a Jewish joke. There’s a reporter looking out a hotel window down at the wailing wall in Jerusalem. Every morning he sees an old man who comes to pray. One morning he asks the man, “So, what are you praying for?” The old man said, “Well I’m praying that my children and grandchildren will be happy and healthy, and that there will be peace between Jews and Arabs.” “And how long have you been doing this?,” asked the reporter. “For fifty years,” says the old man. “For fifty years you’ve been coming to this wall and you pray?”‐ the reporter expresses his amazement. “Yeah,” the old Jew answers. “How does it feel?” asks the reporter.
“Like talking to a wall!”
Unquote
https://www.legacyletter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Dr_Simon_Gelmans_Legacy_Letter.pdf
It reminds me of that line in Bob Dylan's 'Blowin in the Wind':
"How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn't see?"
Ironic that many of the Professional Grown-ups probably revere Bob Dylan, and yet they're the ones doing precisely what he says in the song.
Yes, and I'm sure the intentions of those doctors who were destroying the brains of children and mentally disturbed people with knitting needles in the mid-20th century were also good. I'm referring, of course, to lobotomies. The lessons that were learned back then have been forgotten: The brain works best when it is whole. Similarly, the body works best when it is whole. Harming the body doesn't help with any psychological problem.
I just read about the beauty pageant in the Netherlands which selected the "woman" to be sent to the Miss Universe pageant. "She" was a trans woman. Now, the Miss Universe pageant was never anything that I liked or admired. It focusses on the superficial aspects of women. But adding trans women to it just makes it unfair. It means that women are losing opportunities, just as all those girls who competed against Lia Thomas lost opportunities. In other words, I see two layers of misogyny at the Miss Universe pageant -- the misogyny of reducing women to their appearance, and the misogyny of allowing men to take women's places.
That trans woman, by the way, doesn't even look like a really attractive woman. He is too tall, and too skinny. He doesn't have the soft layer of fat that women usually have on their bodies that make them look curvaceous. I mean, you can see his ribs above his small breasts, and his face is too angular.
He also got teeth like a horse, women can't get away with that and be considered pageant material.
It's not only lost opportunities (and frankly the ridiculousness of the whole idea of men entering a beauty pageant). Historically, like them or not (I don't) beauty pageants have celebrated an ideal of female beauty. Given that no trans identified male is likely to conform to that ideal, are we now going to have to redefine the word beauty as well as the word woman?
One thing I didn't say in my comment is that the trans woman probably won that beauty contest, not because the judges found him the most beautiful (he certainly isn't), but as a way to show their liberal bona fides. So the other contestants were sacrificed for social political reasons and not actually judged on their beauty. I am an old liberal, but modern liberals have become more stupid than there are words to describe.
I do believe that many trans women are convinced they are, or should be, real women -- at least inside they feel that way. So I have a little sympathy for them. Why so many of them want to express their femininity as excessive glamor, I also have an idea: Just as masculinity (muscles, hair, etc.) is the preferred image for the ideal man, so is glamour the image for the perfect, "most feminine" woman. But why these trans women don't have the respect for women to stay out of their private spaces, that really bothers me. I have said this many times before: Trans women know they are not women, so they resent real women for having the thing they want the most but can never have. That resentment then expresses itself in the domination of women -- i.e., in beating them at their sports, winning beauty pageants, etc. -- in being a "better woman" than most real women are.
But you seem to be suggesting that the judges of beauty pageants are in collusion with trans women. If so, I guess that is what happens to do-gooder liberals who don't find real women interesting enough to care about. I call such behavior the "Sympathy Sickness" -- do-gooders who find reasons to sympathize with people who do harmful things, in the same way that many liberals will be sympathetic with criminals. (I'm a liberal, by the way, but not a stupid liberal.)
That tall, bony trans woman couldn't possibly have been the prettiest woman in that Dutch pageant.
People (especially women), need to realize that this is where "be kind" gets you. You start off just going along with the pretense that some dude in a dress is a woman, and before you know it you have men masturbating under their towels while watching girls getting undressed at the local pool 'women's' changing rooms. And if you complain, you are the one told to leave.
And it's not just the Professional Grown-Ups, it's the parents, pleased to be single out as "supportive" and special. It seems to escape their notice that have abrogated the safeguarding role of parenting; https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-parents
And all you health professionals out there, whatever happened to "do no harm"? You wouldn't prescribe a gym membership for a skeletal girl who "knew" she was "really" fat, so what gives? Did you miss the bit of basic high school biology that taught that mammals can't change sex? https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/first-do-no-harm
"The thing is, in service of the decision to Sit This One Out, it’s clear that many Professional Grown-Ups have actively avoided knowledge."
But are the Professional Grown-Ups actually avoiding knowledge? And did they really decide to sit out the culture war over gender identity ideology?
I submit that far from adopting a position of neutrality, Professional Grown-Ups willingly consented early on to their capture and indoctrination by trans rights activists. Editors-in-chief, deans and college presidents, heads of public agencies, executive directors, CEOs and others were predisposed to this by their legitimate guilt at having been slow to support gay civil rights. Any resistance they might have had vanished with the onset of the Black Lives Matter era that cast Professional Grown-Ups - the white ones, anyway - as humankind's chief oppressors. The PGU's had no choice but to lean in on all things trans, and lean in they did. Not only did most Professional Grown-Ups not sit out trans invasion, they were instrumental in bringing about the introduction and implementation of the tenets of gender identity ideology within their organizations.
The True Believers among the Professional Grown-Ups likely don't consider the gender-critical case against trans ideology to be knowledge-based. No, to them it's all an undifferentiated stew of lies and hatred. Who is going to tell them otherwise? As far as they are concerned, knowledge resides in trans activists' talking points we know so well. To heed Abigail Shrier or the hosts of the "Gender: A Wider Lens" podcast is to replace knowledge with transphobia. If the grown ups appear to be backsliding, their in-house zealots will keep them on course. Coleman Hughes learned this recently when the TED Talk organization suppressed his talk praising color blindness in response to a backlash by the woke Black@TED “Employee Resource Group that exists to provide a safe space for TED staff who identify as Black." https://colemanhughes.substack.com/p/why-is-ted-scared-of-color-blindness
PGUs' exposure to information that contradicts the beliefs trans rights activists have fostered will probably produce a state of cognitive dissonance that could reinforce rather than shake their confidence. It may be necessary to look to the cult deprogrammer's playbook for ways to reintroduce Professional Grown-Ups to reality.
Bravo. Well said. Good intentions, coupled with opportunistic actors can lead to extraordinarily bad outcomes.
The people who appear to be sitting this one out are doing nothing of the kind, of course. They are taking advantage by participating in one way or another — playing the pronoun game, remaining quiet about their discomforts, supporting the causes it's been easy to support for decades despite the turn — to remain in the good graces of their friends, to maintain their professional reputation and their paycheck, to appear adequately virtuous. This isn't just about not knowing. Because you have to play along on some level. The other side demands it.
I think there's an element of waiting for someone else to act, ideally the bigger organization above one's own. So when the Int'l Olympic Committee kicked it back to the individual sports associations they had to be adults, anyway.
Excellent comment by Inconvenient Woman! It explains so much!
Wow. You really drank the Kool-Aid on this one. No one is sterilizing gender confused kids. Stop parroting bullshit you read on the internet. You write this opinion piece and address it to the well educated professionals and then you just repeat the same lies and rhetoric as the ignorant unwashed masses.
Gender Affirmation Care...which is what you are probably referring to consists mostly of therapy. Necessary therapy. In a world where everyone from social media to parents are going on and on about how trans people are defective or freaks...teenagers who are not comfortable with themselves hide in fear that their secret will get out. They need a Professional Grown Up to tell them that their feelings are valid and that they are normal. This therapy is the first step in their journey of self discovery. It will help the realize if they are trans or not. It will help them find out who they really are. It will also keep many of them from killing themselves.
The idea that there are hospitals that are sterilizing children is false. It has been proven false over and over and over again...but urban legends love to continue despite facts. The idea that gender surgery is being performed on minors is also false. While it is true that in some cases medication is being used...it is very rare and only considered in extreme circumstances. What you are truly advocating against is therapy.
Therapy that saves lives.
Therapy that makes scared teenagers feel normal.
Therapy that combats systemic prejudice.
Therapy that stops kids from killing themselves.
You say you care about kids? Then stop this nonsense. You know it's your own bigotry talking...it was never about the children.