Gender dysphoria is rising – and so is professional disagreement
bmj.com
bmj.com
If you ask most trans people why the numbers are going up you'll typically get the same response: awareness and exposure to other trans people that can help explain gender dysphoria.
Many trans people do not understand that they are suffering from gender dysphoria. It's not a crystal clear set of symptoms. They will rationalize or bury symptoms, which are more or less entirely mental, and it is frequently not at all apparent to an outside observer that they are experiencing it.
I distinctly remember the first time I read a forum with others describing gender dysphoria and how it manifested for them. I discovered that feelings I thought were something only I felt, that no one else seemed to understand, actually had a root cause which was shared by others. That there was a name for what was "wrong" with me, and that I could fix it. I was 26.
Awareness about gender dysphoria has risen and more people are finding out that there is a name and a solution for the wrongness that they experience. It's only natural that more trans people are coming out.
It's unfortunate that cis people cannot experience what gender dysphoria is like, even for a moment, because they have no frame of reference for why it is so confusing for trans people, especially prior to them realizing what it is that they are experiencing.
Eventually things will level off as the number of people with gender dysphoria that have recognized and treated it approaches 100%, though I doubt it will come to rest anywhere near there.
And the experience of trans people the nation over is not one any person would want to experience. If a person imagined they wanted the adoration and attention of others for being trans, they sure wouldn't want it for long. The mockery from their peers, their elders, their representatives and the literal State actively seeking to "eradicate" them is a *whole lot of harm* just for media clout.
It seem to me there's a normal function of the teenage psyche that leads a small percentage of them to try to fit in as little as possible: goth makeup comes to mind.
Not beating a child is always the right course of action, regardless of whether there is left-handedness that one is trying to "correct".
The kind of "treatment" that someone undergoes for gender dysphoria is incredibly invasive and doesn't seem compatible with the maxim "first, do no harm" unless gender dysphoria were something that had severely negative health outcomes if untreated. Since gender dysphoria is a health issue that's psychological in nature, this needs to be measured against a baseline of psychological health issues actually being quite prevalent even in the general population.
Left-handedness is grounded in physiology and neurology, which are "hard" medical sciences, while gender dysphoria is only grounded in clinical psychology, which just isn't.
When I say "hard" medical science, I roughly mean this: Physiology and clinical psychology both have a history of iatrogenic horror. But for physiology, you need to go much further back in time to find it. And while health intervention on both physiological and psychological grounds have been on the rise, health outcomes on physiological conditions have generally improved through history, while the population seems to be getting sicker and sicker where psychological conditions are concerned.
There are parents that transitions their 4-5 year olds. I doubt the kids would meet any clinical diagnosis or that it would be possible to diagnose at that age.
You can expect a higher percentage that will be diagnosed with dysphoria compared to the former baseline, but I don't think we only see that effect. Perhaps it is even the smaller component.
I also intentionally tried to use leftie stances in sports and I was mindfully doing it just to be different because I thought that was cool when I was like, 7 years old. This stuck a lot more, probably because I learned how to do things with a leftie stance from the get-go.
I think you underestimate how much stupid crap kids will try to imitate if they think it's vaguely cool and how much this can stick in a very real way. If I tried to do some sports as a "righty" I would fall on my ass. I was never actually much for social status either and kids actually gave me shit for not using a right handed stance.
[0] https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/dying-attention...
e.g. -- https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-developing-tics-...
Furthermore teenagers are the "IT'S NOT A PHASE MOM" group (it was definitely a phase).
People can diagnose themselves with whatever they want, psychiatric diagnosis is largely bullshit, my question is more why do people WANT to diagnose themselves with these conditions, and does having labels like this actually help you.
To me, I see this entire phenomenon as being rooted in psychiatry taking it for granted that the more diagnosis's the general population has, the more drugs they're, the more therapy they're in, the better off they are. When psychiatry seems to think that more is better, why shouldn't teenagers think that too? Psychiatry has been applying more and more labels to the general population for decades and decades, if trends continue, todays self-diagnosed teen is next decade's totally valid patient, so aren't teens just getting ahead of the curve by self-diagnosing now?
1. Medical transition genuinely helps trans people
2. x% of adolescents who identify as trans will desist in adulthood
> First, do no harm
The fact of the matter is that without a reliably way to differentiate 1 from 2, medical transition will be doing genuine harm to x percent of people. This is a core violation of bioethics. To borrow from Blackstone, I would rather nine trans people go through their biological puberty than perform a mastectomy on or render infertile one adolescent who will later come to deeply regret it.
> The Endocrine Society acknowledges .. it is placing “.. a higher value on psychological well-being, and a lower value on avoiding potential harm.
This acknowledgement is shocking to me, and I imagine it's why there is so much vitriol in this debate. What kind of parent would want to see their child harmed this way by a system which has explicitly de-prioritized harm reduction?
And this is all aside from the fact that one of the main themes of the investigation is the lack of high quality evidence that medical transition uniformly helps trans people.
https://www.hcplive.com/view/suicide-risk-reduces-73-transge...
(among *many* others)
My biggest point of caution is that the past is not the present, and the amount of patients has exploded to such an extreme that said evidence is very arguably irrelevant because we're not treating the same body of patients as we were when most long-term evidence was gathered. We're seeing a tripling in the amount of people identifying as transgender. I question if we truly know how these drugs affect the MAJORITY of people seeking them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/10/science/transgender-teena...
My suspicion is that they'll help in the short term, but I do worry about the long term. As long as we're careful about keeping research active and objective at least it won't take very long to start getting answers.
Since it seems we've already committed to the experiment, our focus should be on collecting data on the outcomes and making sure that no matter what those outcomes are these children are given our support and are treated with compassion as they grow.
This really makes me wonder if there isn't something else going on, such as young people simply being unhappy with their lives or the gender roles expected of them, and jumping on the "transgender" bandwagon as a way to escape that. The idea that 20% of the population is transgender really makes no sense. Maybe a large part of the population simply doesn't want to conform to what conservative society expects of "masculinity" or "femininity", so instead of simply ignoring that crap like they did in the past, now they believe they're "transgender" and try acting like the opposite sex.
And yes at that age we all fit that description, only he decided to take hormone pills and surgery rather than deal with the real issues he had from childhood and school.
I wanted to be a girl too to a while, I wanted a sister so I made one up and lied about it. I can't tell you why at my age now, my solutions to my feelings weren't really all that logical. I'm fine now. I'm a happy to be male, I got used to shouldering some of the responsibilities of being a man, still learning though.
And I'm a green account because I don't stick with an account for more than a few threads. I don't see the point anymore.
But I am being genine in my experiences shared, for what it's worth to you, which seems very little at this point.
I don’t much see the point of rotating accounts if you lurk more than post (I lurk more than post too, usually), but whatever. But comments that come off as not thoughtful from new accounts tend to get less grace because there’s a non-negligible amount of bad faith posters, especially on politically charged topics
Honestly I still think this is an alt account, because the account age almost exactly matches the age of the thread (12h now) but your first post is only like an hour old. Plus the initial tone, I don’t know. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, but it’s lot of doubt. please post more thoughtfully in the future, your followup was good discussion at least but the initial post was borderline noise IMO
I think there's some truth to the idea that people who might have previously "just" been gender non-conforming now identify as transgender.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/mathematics/calhoun-roden...
Faced with population pressures, a lot of rats just gave up or altered their behavior.
> Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, increase in homosexual behavior, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and females, aggressive behavior of females, passivity of non-dominant males with increased attacks on each other which were not defended against
> After day 600, the social breakdown continued and the population declined toward extinction. During this period females ceased to reproduce. Their male counterparts withdrew completely, never engaging in courtship or fighting and only engaging in tasks that were essential to their health. They ate, drank, slept, and groomed themselves – all solitary pursuits. Sleek, healthy coats and an absence of scars characterized these males. They were dubbed "the beautiful ones". Breeding never resumed and behavior patterns were permanently changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun
This was also just a social structure; those rats might not have been exposed to high levels endocrine disrupting plastics, lead, obesity, etc., that modern humans are. But that mouse behavior looks an awful lot like what we're seeing these days in online incel, or trans, communities, et al.
Previously hormone treatments were always combined with extensive psychotherapy. Now the psychotherapy is optional.
I suggest reading “Time to Think” - it’s a journalism book about the Traviston clinic. It started out as a rigorous, comprehensive treatment center, but became a pill mill.
It’s a sad book, because it’s about people not getting the treatment they need.
You don't think trans people want the therapy lol? We're literally dying to get it.
Greetings from year 3 on a waitlist for a therapist
And that's just to resume care, I already have a diagnosis
There is an ocean of difference between medical transition and stimulants/SSRIs. The main one being that the latter category do not cause irreversible change to the body. You can just stop taking them and be more or less as you were before. This isn't true for a medical transition that begins in adolescence. Infertility, mastectomy, and significant increases in lifetime cancer risk all represent irreversible harm.
None of these drugs are free of risk, but refusal to undertake effective treatment can also cause negative permanent changes to the body indirectly, so simply doing nothing isn't free of risk either.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-SSRI_sexual_dysfunction
I'm having trouble parsing this, is this saying the overall total in that time period was nearly 18,000 and the yearly amount was increasing, or that the yearly total was 18,000?
This article seems very vague about what treatments are being given to whom. My understanding is that in the US, minors with gender dysphoria who haven't started puberty don't get medical treatment, which is in line with the NHS guidelines. The article seems to be implying otherwise, but doesn't outright say so.
It's the wild west in the US. If you have the money you can usually find a doctor who will do whatever you want. We can (and probably should) ask how often it's happening, but children are getting medical and even surgical treatment. I haven't seen any evidence of children under 6 getting hormones or puberty blockers though.
For example:
> Dr. Gallagher said she performed top surgeries on about 40 patients a month, and roughly one or two of them are under 18. Younger patients are usually at least 15, though she has operated on one 13-year-old and one 14-year-old, she said, both of whom had extreme distress about their chests. (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/health/top-surgery-transg...)
> Over the 3-year study period, a total of 204 gender affirmation surgical cases were identified: 177 chest/top and 27 genital/bottom surgeries (Table 1). Most cases were masculinizing chest reconstructions 177/204 (86.8%) with 65/177 (36.7%) of those patients being less than 18 years of age (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9000168/pdf/jcm...)
> The Komodo analysis of insurance claims found 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021... In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims...A total of 17,683 patients, ages 6 through 17, with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis initiated either puberty blockers or hormones or both during the five-year period. (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-tran...)
So medical practitioners provided a 'solution', cutting a chunk of bone out of both legs to reduce height. (Usually reserved for people with asymmetric limbs.)
She desperately wanted to get this major surgery because she had tall poppy syndrome and didn't like life as the tall girl in high school. Her parents said no, it wasn't a real solution to her anxiety. She tells that story today and still rolls her eyes at herself for wanting to go through with it.
My heart breaks for these kids who've been enabled by their parents into getting irreversible body modifications. The worst part is that they feel rushed to make a decision because of the puberty window. This is a horrible time to be a child and a parent, truly.
But the easiest one I can explain is that this trend was clearly temporary as you and your mother acknowledge. Whereas the history of transgender people in humanity goes back to ancient history and carries through societal trends and gender role evolutions.
The more biting thing I can say is just because "<Something> is a trend", doesn't mean that "<Something else> is a trend too."
It always confuses me how on a site for techies, where people constantly reason about with virtual concepts and abstractions, the idea that physical biology genes and hormones might be typically but not EXCLUSIVELY coupled with mental sentience is so difficult to imagine.
I personally struggle to understand why a site full of techies can't see the human body for what it is, a genuine masterpiece of engineering with the clear and unmistakable hallmarks of purpose and higher order systems design.
Which, in our experience as engineers, is only ever the product of deliberate intelligence and any claim of exception should really raise eyebrows. Anyone who builds anything should have no trouble with this.
Based on that, I don't believe that the human body was designed for gender fluidity, in fact it is clearly deliberately set up to be binary. Any deviation from that default, in human beings, is unintended error. Perhaps due to deleterious genetic mutation or other entropic effects normally seen in complex systems.
Regardless of what you believe though, the safest thing to say is that we don't fully understand the systems in the body yet, and so Chesterton's Fence should apply. And ESPECIALLY so, when it's deciding whether to perform irreversible surgical work on a vulnerable population.
How many contractors arrive on site and incredulously say "what was the last guy thinking?" and actually mean it?
Just because we don't understand the reasoning yet isn't strong evidence of incompentant designs, it's more evidence of our own incompentance.
We used to think that the appendix was vestigial and useless, we used to think that 'Junk dna' was a thing. With more time and research we now know how wrong we were. I'll take the downvotes and predict that we'll keep finding out how wrong we are long into the future on this subject.
(I have to assume you must not know what the laryngeal nerve point is even about. Google "laryngeal nerve giraffe". Also try "blind spot why do octopus eyes not have it".)
Apply this type of thinking to anything else, and you'll never arrive at accurate or useful outcomes.
You're just deluding yourself.
In 2021, there were about 26.2 million children between the ages of 12 and 17 years old living in the United States. [0]
Even taking the high version of the estimate that it is per year, that is 0.3% of this population. And 0.12% if you include the under 12 population also
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/457786/number-of-childre...
What does Sweden do differently in their scientific community that they so frequently arrive at a different cost/benefit result than the rest of the West?
This has happened so much that it's clearly not by chance. We saw them reach a different conclusion about lockdowns - the cost would not make up for the benefit. When the mRNA vaccines emerged, they too had a different determination of cost/benefit and they were one of the first countries to determine that the benefit does not make up for the risk in certain populations. Then puberty blockers for minors, which in the US are effectively considered a perfect treatment with no side effects and to express even a hint of hesitation is met with professional and personal ruin.
It's unthinkable in the US today, yet it would not surprise me if this is Sweden again lapping the other countries in what will be scientific consensus in 5 years time.
Obviously, they're doing something very differently, though with the pandemic it seems, the results weren't very good.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-...
Perhaps they analyse and leverage more data of the outcomes and wellbeing of these people.
Sweden's position is based on lots of cases of teenagers regretting the procedure and some even suing the government for allowing them to have done it... it's not a position Sweden arrived at out of prejudice, if you know the social situation in Sweden today you would definitely understand that.
Give me a source.
In summary, there's been a recent explosing in the number of people performing transition in the last 10 years or so (from around 20 people per year in 2003 to 2007, to over 400 people in 2018)... so the number of cases where we have information about this is very few, and those who used to do it in the past, despite the stigma, were likely much more "certain" that this is what they want.
But of that older generation, only 2.2% are known to have actually gone though a de-transition (the figure does not include those who did seek help but did not go through with the process)... however, it's possible that many more regret it but never tried to revert it, as de-transitioning is even more difficult, and perhaps even more "embarrassing" (sorry for the term, I don't know if it's the best word here as I don't think anyone should be embarrassed for that, but I suspect they do) for the person to "come out" than for transitioning. One doctor interviewed claims "a handful" of patients (5 to 10) they treated have regreted and are currently detransitioning. So I think my argument that "lots of teenagers" are regreting is accurate, given there's a lot of other doctors doing this in Sweden, but up to you to make up your mind if a handful of people doesn't matter.
What shocked most people was the fact that teens as young as 14 were allowed to go through with the transition despite them having other serious mental health issues (half of the girls had autism or self-harm issues or anorexia) and without a serious, properly investigated diagnosis. Some who regret have to keep their identity secret because apparently they get told that they are hurting the trans community by talking about it, so it's not unresonable to believe at least some people decide to keep quiet about their regrets.
Finally, researchers in this area seem to agree that there's almost no data regarding the long term impact of transitioning and hence the process should be much more scrutinized than it currently is (some of the trans in the linked articles say they were basically treated as "lab rabbits")...
Hope that informs you enough to understand the debate that has been going on in Sweden, which unlike in the US, almost completely lacks the transphobic arguments and focuses on the actual data (or lack thereof) regarding trans people's wellbeing and whether there's enough evidence that people who are allowed to transition could not have been just suffering from other mental issues at the time their extremely serious decision was made.
How would a test like that even be constructed? There's no morphological, biochemical, or electrophysiological proxy for measuring gender dysphoria.
Just taking people at their word, seems perfectly ok.
Also, maybe just trusting folks’ lived experiences instead of telling them what to feel or what they are is a fundamentally decent and humane idea?
But what do I know…
^ sarcasm intended, for those too dense to have any kind of awareness of basic humanity
> During his speech on Saturday, Knowles told the crowd, “For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”
Knowles subsequently claimed that “eradicating” “transgenderism” is not a call for eradicating transgender people and demanded retractions from numerous publications, including Rolling Stone.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/cpac-spe...
* this directed at Knowles, not dahdum
Disagreeing with the existence of a class of people is the intellectual foundation for genocide. Wanting to reduce the number of trans people in the world is genocide, whether it's by bullet or conversion therapy.
Trans people are not a problem that need to be solved.
Suppose there's a person who doesn't believe in feminism, and wants to go back to the "good old days" of the 1800s and before when women were second-class citizens, and didn't have many rights: they couldn't own land, they couldn't choose their profession (if they were educated, they were stuck with nursing or teaching until they got married, at which point they weren't allowed to work usually), etc. Such a regressive person might say he wants to "eradicate feminism", but that doesn't want to mean he wants to eradicate women! He just wants to remove their rights and make them subservient again.
This person saying he wants to "eradicate transgenderism" I believe means the same thing basically. He doesn't want to murder all trans people, he just wants to eliminate society recognizing transgenderism as a valid condition, eliminate any rights or protections extended to people with that status, etc. Basically, he wants to go back to how it was in the 1950s or before, when society simply didn't recognize it.
You don't need conversion therapy to eliminate transgenderism; you just have to stop recognizing it at all, and treat people based on their biological sex. I'm not actually agreeing with this, but I do believe this is his position.
That does sound very compelling, when the alternative is what we are witnessing today, with males gaining access to what were previously female-only spaces, disregarding the boundaries of women and girls where they are most vulnerable.
It's becoming increasingly clear that transgenderism is a form of male dominance over women, and should be opposed like other forms of sexism. Women are being made second-class citizens again, but this time it's being touted as progressive.
If that was limited to personal decisions made by individuals, fine, whatever. But what we're actually seeing in legislatures across the country is threats of prison for being/helping transgender people. Prison for doctors, prison for teachers, prison for parents, prison for bathroom-users, prison for 'performing' a non-sex-aligned gender in public. This is how the holocaust started: prisons. Right-wing pundits are appealing to plausible deniability when they're using words like ERADICATE. The German public fell for this once. Don't be a damned fool. It's not the 50s he's longing for, it's the 30s.
Transgenderism isn't like this; it's not something you can determine from ancestry, nor is it an ethnicity of any type. The right-wingers see it as a personal choice, just like homosexuality. Of course, trans and homosexual people don't feel it's a personal choice, but it IS a personal choice for them to act on their feelings. What the right-wingers want is to force all these people back "into the closet". They want them to conform to their cis-hetero worldview, just like they did back in the "good old days" when homosexuals found either other homosexuals of the opposite sex, or unwitting heteros, to legally marry so they could appear to polite society as regular hetero people, and then did their homosexual stuff in secret, if at all.
This is why they want all these punitive measures: not so they can eradicate trans people or imprison them all, but to make society intolerant of an open expression of non-conforming sexuality. Basically, make an example out of a few people, and everyone else will fall in line: this is their thinking.
Again, to be clear, I'm not endorsing their position; I'm merely trying to explain what I believe their true thinking is. The conservatives are famous for idolizing some rose-colored halcyon (and somewhat mythical) idea of 1950s Americana, and my idea above falls exactly into this pattern, unlike your much more extreme idea of death camps.
https://twitter.com/BrynnTannehill/status/163311396718587085...