Gender and threats to "Normality" (spilit from "The challenges ahead")

[elengil]

IMO, fully comprehending that tribalism is an evolutionary trait of our species is essential to overcoming the reflex to 'other' those who are 'not my people'.

There's a lot packed into that little word 'normal'.

While we have the tribal instinct, it seems to mostly be a problem of who defines 'my' and 'not my' more than anything.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Impenitent]

Oh, absolutely! Power imbalances are a huge factor in a number of ways: majority vs minority, hierarchical factors; wealth & influence - these are self-evident.

There's also the less recognised fact that being a perpetrator - the willingness to break the accepted civil norm of refraining from doing harm to others - in itself lends the perpetrator power through fear.

While we have the tribal instinct, it seems to mostly be a problem of who defines 'my' and 'not my' more than anything.

And yet we all do it to some degree; and we certainly all 'inherit' our tribe from our first and primary carers and carry that with us unless we have sufficient exposure to positive experiences with the 'other', a willingness to self-question and a sufficiently open mind to accept information that does not support our existing biases. I don't know that any of us are completely successful in overcoming it.

[Inanna]

I know that I myself struggle with my biases. And recognizing them as bias is the first step. I’m pretty sure I’m missing some, though.

[Eldy]

Alabama is using the case that ended Roe to argue it can ban gender-affirming care - NPR

Posting this here rather than in the Roe thread since it's not about abortion, but the state of Alabama is taking up Clarence Thomas' example by trying to use the Dobbs decision as the basis to restrict other rights.

Critics have expressed fear that the legal reasoning behind the high court ruling could lead to a rollback of decisions involving such matters as gay marriage, birth control and parental rights.

The state is asking a federal appeals court to lift an injunction and let it enforce an Alabama law that would make it a felony to give puberty blockers or hormones to transgender minors to help affirm their gender identity.

Meanwhile, Alabama parents continue to enjoy legal protection from being considered negligent for refusing their children medical care, so long as they're "legitimately practicing his or her religious beliefs" when they do so.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I would say that is nuts, except for the very real suffering that it is causing to real people.

[RoseMorninStar]

There are a lot of things that

"...not mentioned in the Constitution and is not "deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition."

and I fear it's going to cause a lot of suffering in the coming years. Guns however, are protected.

[Cerin]

It is by no means universally accepted among medical professionals that a fast-track to hormones and puberty-blockers is the best way to serve trans-identified minors. The article below is a Canadian article referencing Sweden's decision to no longer allow this kind of 'gender-affirming care' for people under 18.

It notes that gender dysphoria is frequently combined with other psychological issues, which makes counseling for such patients an absolute necessity, and any attempt to label such counseling as 'conversion therapy' would be an utter disaster.

Conclusions

The fast-tracking of medical transition appears to be the protocol in place at many of Canada’s gender clinics, with parents and some detransitioners expressing surprise and shock that medical transition is being offered as the 1st line of treatment. The sharp drop-off in referrals in Sweden corresponded to the realization by parents and General Practitioners that sending children to a gender clinic would not necessarily provide them with additional assessment or services, but rather put them on a fast-track to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

The experience in Sweden, and corresponding similarities in Canada, points to a significant gap in assessment and services for trans-identified youth to ensure that their long term physical and mental well-being is prioritized over and above a quick fix of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Research indicates youth become trapped in a one-way medical path as almost 98% who are prescribed puberty blockers proceed with medical transition even when there is no evidence of long-term benefits.

Further, suicide risk is often used as the rationale for easy access to medical transition for trans-identified children and adults. Pro-transition advocates consider the need for assessments and screening to be dehumanizing and unnecessary. Clearly, the data from the Swedish NBHW does not support this position. People who commit suicide have an underlying mental illness that requires expert treatment and care. It would be medically negligent to avoid psychiatric assessment and/or deny corresponding psychological services to provide treatment for this population where the risk of suicide is elevated due to these comorbidities.

It will be very interesting to see how the official clinical guidelines in Sweden take shape and evolve over the next 2 years.

When will Canada start asking questions like Sweden?

https://genderreport.ca/the-swedish-u-t ... sitioning/

[Frelga]

Is a dedicated transphobic publication really the go-to source for information on, well, anything?

[Eldy]

I'm also uncomfortable with that site, but I'll do my best to offer a serious response, because I think it's bad for everybody that certain trans-related topics are hard to bring up due to concern trolls poisoning the well. By which I mean, most people who bring up this crap do so as a pretext to roll back trans rights, which they already wanted to do for other reasons (this is not a comment on Cerin, who I don't know). But as I've said before, I think there is room for debate about how young is too young to medically transition, even if it's a difficult discussion to have for a number of reasons.

A lot of trans people have a knee-jerk opposition to any kind of gatekeeping or imposition of barriers to medical transition, because it's something so many of us have struggled to get past (I've been fortunate enough not to encounter that from doctors so far). I consider it a matter of medical autonomy, and I reject out of hand the idea of mandatory counseling before HRT for adults, for the same reason I reject the idea of mandatory counseling before sterilization procedures. But I think one can validly question the applicability of this model for minors, who by definition have less developed decision-making processes, and who on average probably have not spent as much time thinking about the possibility of transitioning as trans adults. The fact that it's become much easier, in some countries, to meet with a doctor who prescribes hormones—which I think is a very good thing—also contributes to trans people of all ages potentially making the decision whether or not to medically transition earlier than used to be normal. Someone who only walks into a doctor's office after a long process of self-questioning, finding community support and information, building up courage, and so on is not in the same place as someone who got referred to that doctor very quickly after they started talking about their gender identity—and potentially with minimal or no contact with anyone who has personal experience of transitioning.

I don't know how common this is, and to be clear, I am not talking about the concept of "rapid-onset gender dysphoria," which I don't believe exists. But transitioning is a huge life decision, especially medical transition, which not all transgender people make. I don't think many people decide to do it without thinking about it a ton, but I am willing to at least not dismiss out of hand the possibility that well-meaning, overeager, mostly cisgender adult authority figures might inadvertently push trans kids towards picking a certain path. That's not something I'm particularly comfortable with, especially because there's limited public awareness of the huge amount of variation in transgender and nonbinary experiences. The (for lack of a better term) classic model of being trans—transitioning to the opposite binary gender, adopting a stereotypical gender presentation, going on hormones, and getting (as applicable) both top and bottom surgery—still has way more visibility than other possible approaches, even though it has never been the only option. With love and respect for all the non-trans folks in my life, I don't really trust cisgender people to be the ones in charge of educating trans kids about this. (Not to say the transgender community is totally without flaw here: I was very fortunate after coming out to have a lot of people assure me there's no one right way to be trans, but it's not hard to find those who think there is.)

I don't know that there's an easy answer here. In some ways, it's a good problem to have, because it's a testament to transgender identities being so much more accepted by mainstream society than they were even in the recent past. I certainly do not want to go backwards. But I think there are questions worth considering, and I'd rather it not solely be the anti-trans crowd asking them. My personal inclination is to err on the side of making it easy to transition, because that can be literally life-saving in some cases, but I don't claim to have an objectively correct solution to the minimum age question.

[Sunsilver]

moved post to another forum: http://thehalloffire.net/forum/viewtopi ... 96#p401896

[Sunsilver]

I have a dear friend who is very athletic. Her daughter followed in her footsteps, and all through High School was the goalie for a women's hockey team. She also played football and was the only female on a co-ed team. As a result, she was picked on by the other females at her school, and found herself wondering if she should be a male. She actually began hanging out with a group of transgender females, and was considering changing her sex. Eventually, she became so unhappy that she attempted suicide. Through counselling, she has now come to accept that she is female, and like her mom, just not one of those females that gets her identity through being hyper-feminine and making herself as attractive as possible to the opposite sex.

Just wanted to report that my friend's daughter has graduated from university with a 90% average, and is planning to get her master's in psychology. She has a boyfriend, and she sings with him in a music group.

To celebrate her graduation, she and her mom have gone on a trip to the Maritimes together. Very happy that she seems to have figured out who she is!

Wanted to post a video of her singing, but FB won't allow it.

[Frelga]

I'm sure there is room for discussion of treatment options, and there are probably scholarly articles in reputable scientific publications that can be used to guide conversations with medical professionals. What there isn't a room for is a state passing laws that criminalize entire swaths of healthcare options for whole groups of population.

And while I am not qualified to discuss those options (and neither is the state legislature of Alabama), I do know about authoritarian groups seizing power by attacking and demonizing vulnerable minorities. Are we gonna let them?

[elengil]

While we have the tribal instinct, it seems to mostly be a problem of who defines 'my' and 'not my' more than anything.

And yet we all do it to some degree; and we certainly all 'inherit' our tribe from our first and primary carers and carry that with us unless we have sufficient exposure to positive experiences with the 'other', a willingness to self-question and a sufficiently open mind to accept information that does not support our existing biases. I don't know that any of us are completely successful in overcoming it.

Yes! I didn't mean to say that individuals don't all have very real biases. I just meant that when an individual has an individual bias that's one thing, but when the Powers That Be (tm) decide for everyone that everyone should have the same bias *or else* - on threat of exile, persecution, or death - that's another thing entirely.

Get enough individual biases in the same room and that definitely starts to magnify the problem - biases are still biases - but it seems that a lot of times the problem isn't that individual people ever had a problem with XYZ, but some established power did, and that's when it becomes everyone's problem. That's when you get people who were otherwise loving and friendly suddenly looking sideways at their neighbors and saying things like "think about the children!"

[Cerin]

Is a dedicated transphobic publication really the go-to source for information on, well, anything?

Did you have a specific issue with the article's factuality?

[Frelga]

Is a dedicated transphobic publication really the go-to source for information on, well, anything?

Did you have a specific issue with the article's factuality?

Aside from the explicit bias and inherent lack of credibility?

Yes, knowingly (or, to be extremely generous, unwittingly) providing the fig leaf of pseudoscience to state's intrusion into personal health care decision and criminalization of things that are not anyone's business except people who are trying to make those decisions. It's this authoritarian encroachment that is the issue here.

Also very scary is the demand that legal rights be rooted in the history of the country that did not consider black people fully human and did not allow women to get a credit card without a man cosigning until 1974.

[River]

So I did a PubMed search on gender dysphoria in children in case anyone wants to see what actual experts are saying without further filtering by any type of media personality or journalist. The freebies are flagged in easy-to-spot burnt umber text. Review articles are more likely to be in English as we know, or something resembling English as we know it, so I'd start there.

PubMed's gotten really easy to use over the past few years, BTW. And with the push to make publicly funded research publicly accessible more and more of the goods can be accessed without fees or begging favors off people who can still get behind an academic IP address.

[Cerin]

Is a dedicated transphobic publication really the go-to source for information on, well, anything?

Did you have a specific issue with the article's factuality?

Aside from the explicit bias and inherent lack of credibility?

Yes, aside from your subjective characterization of the publication, do you have a specific charge against the factuality of the article?

[Frelga]

The factuality of the article is orthogonal to the discussion, which is about human rights abuse in states like Texas, Florida, and Alabama. I am not interested in nitpicking paint colors when the whole building is on fire.

If you are interested specifically in the best options for trans individuals, exploring the articles that River provided could be a good start.

Speaking of human rights, this isn't sinister at all. (It's actually terrifyingly familiar.)

DeSantis signs bill requiring Florida students, professors to register political views with state

Public universities in Florida will be required to survey both faculty and students on their political beliefs and viewpoints, with the institutions at risk of losing their funding if the responses are not satisfactory to the state's Republican-led legislature.

[River]

Hopefully, this will self-correct when they are unable to recruit or retain the kind of faculty that bring in the big federal grants or maintain enrollment to satisfactory levels.

Or, even more hopefully, there will be at least one university president in Florida that shows the same backbone Norlin did at CU back in the 1920's. At the time, Colorado came under control of the KKK and the University of Colorado was ordered to name and fire all not-Protestant faculty. The president of the university refused to comply. The university lost state funding for a year. That's where the deans end the story at CU commencement ceremonies. I looked up the ending, fearing the worst. It turns out the university never caved. Instead, over the course of that year, the KKK's power over Colorado broke and the legislature restored the university's funding without any faculty being fired over their personal beliefs.