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I really doubt you can find anything from a major politician that supports that claim. This isn't even "making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike", it's just plain making things up.
Some schools secretly socially transition children. Some locales will take children out of parents' custody if they fail to support transition. This is not all right wing paranoia.
Can you provide a source for the claim that schools are forcing uninterested, non-consenting children into transition? Or are you just searching for the maximally inflammatory way to say "some kids don't trust their parents not to disown them"?
Really? "Fail to support" transition, or "try to block their kid from accessing the relevant medical treatments"?
Neither of those is an example of "mutilation"
Do you think parents who love their children and will not disown them, but refuse to go along with either social or medical transitioning, should lose their parental rights? Do you think they should not be allowed to veto the school facilitating transition, without their knowledge or approval?
If a kid is in horrible pain, and their parent refuses to do anything about it, and the kid is actively looking to escape? Yeah, I think it's pretty reasonable to remove the kid. Would you tolerate a parent neglecting a broken leg because they think all surgical intervention is blasphemous butchery? Are you okay just watching a kid die from cancer, a totally preventable cancer, just because surgeries carry a bit of risk?
Heck, let's go mental illness specifically. A kid is starting to develop schizophrenia. We just invented a magic pill that can prevent it from getting any worse. The parents refuse to medicate them. You're cool with this? You don't think, at some point, somebody should step in and help the poor kid?
If a kid is terrified their parents will find out about them getting a tooth fixed, wouldn't you be a bit concerned about how the parents are treating that kid? Would you really feel guilty for sneaking your son's best friend to the dentist to help him deal with a cavity that's been getting worse for years?
I'm not saying every kid is right, but you don't get that sort of fear of your parents from nowhere. I was a horrible gremlin of a kid and I never went anywhere near that far to cover something up.
If you can point me to an epidemic of kids getting abducted against their will, I'd probably change my tune. But I get the sense that most of the kids in question are quite happy with the decision. I haven't seen anything that suggests they're particularly prone to regretting it later, either.
Here's the problem - it's very much debatable whether this "horrible pain" is actually something requiring medical treatment. I know you think it does. We are all familiar with the rhetoric that gender dysphoria is so real and urgent and painful that not allowing the child to transition is likely to lead to suicide, and akin to refusing to let a child receive treatment for schizophrenia. So you frame it as, essentially, parents letting their children die because of their bigoted religious beliefs. But this is almost never the case. Parents almost always treat a child being "trans" as a psychological issue, a child in distress who needs help - but you will not accept that "help" could be anything other than affirming their entity and even allowing them to begin medically transitioning, when there is good reason to think help should actually be helping them work through their gender dysphoria (if it is really gender dysphoria), becoming comfortable in their bodies, and perhaps choose to transition when they are an adult if they still feel that's what they need. Can you at least acknowledge that this is a reasonable, loving, and non-abusive response, even if you think it's not the correct one?
Again with the "terrified." I'm sure there are children in abusive households who still face abuse, or being thrown out on the streets, if they are revealed to be gay or trans. This happens and those are extreme cases that may require state intervention, as with any other abuse. But almost all the cases I have seen are not of trans kids with parents who will reject and abandon them for being trans, but parents who simply don't agree with putting their kids on hormones, wearing binders, planning to get surgery, etc. Refusing to change the pronouns they use for their son or daughter might upset the child, but it's not abuse!
I don't agree with @WhiningCoil's framing of hordes of children being abducted by the state, but I would ask you in return, do you have any numbers regarding parents who are actually abusive and neglectful of their trans children, such that state intervention is required? Do you think schools should socially transition children secretly if the child says their parents won't go along?
You "get the sense" that most of the kids are quite happy with the decision, but this seems to be vibes and personal bias. I think the actual level of regret is very hard to evaluate. I'm sure you hate Jesse Singhal, but I have yet to see a trans activist who can actually dispute his numbers and his deep dives into studies on the subject.
That's... basically exactly what the actual standards of care say to do? You start with therapy and just discussing the issue to get a feel for where the kid really is. You don't just drop them on HRT instantly. There's puberty blockers, so that they can make an informed choice as an adult in either direction, rather than make any permanent changes. For the kids who have a really clear sense of who they are, AND whose parents support it, you might see HRT before 18, but again, the parent IS actually involved in that decision. Basically no one is getting surgery before 18. Getting surgery usually takes YEARS of waiting, even as an adult who knows exactly what they want.
What part of that process are you objecting to?
Would you be okay if I consistently misgendered people on this forum? You're an adult who can walk away from the conversation, so presumably this is a thousand times less bad than having it come from your own parents. I think most people here would get pretty reasonably upset with me if I leaned into trolling like that.
And if you won't tolerate it here, why in the world should we expect kids to tolerate it?
I mean, c'mon, you're objecting to an article of clothing? Teach the kid how to do it safely rather than forcing them to risk it with ace bandages and overly tight compressions.
What happened to "perhaps choose to transition when they are an adult if they still feel that's what they need"?
I read scientific studies, hang out in trans communities, keep my ear out for about news, and so forth. I mean, if nothing else, I'm involved in numerous trans communities, have numerous trans friends, and presumably have a much better vantage point into the community than you do. I'm the sort of person that shows up here, looking for people who disagree with me, so I'm clearly not cherry-picking my sources. Short of being a credentialed expert, I'm not sure how you get a better perspective than mine?
If people really regret it so much, it should not be nearly this difficult for me to find those people.
Is there some specific source here, or am I just supposed to spend a week deep-diving him? I'm happy to take a peek, but I will absolutely admit that I don't think he's a source worth investing a lot of time in, right now.
Depends what you mean by that. There've been about 5,700 gender affirming surgeries performed on minors between
20172019 and 2023. Some might call ~1K per year it "basically no one", but I've heard claims from pro-trans people claiming it's single digits annually, so I want to make it clear that if this is what you meant to imply, you're off by 3 orders of magnitude.Also, @Amadan - in case you wanted a source.
Yeah, that's some suss methodology
i.e. there's absolutely no reason to think these codes aren't also used for other things, they just happen to show up commonly in gender-affirming care.
The article itself notes that this contradicts basically every other study out there.
"We just assumed this stuff was accurate" should not inspire any confidence in these results
The explicit disclaimer...
The other explicit disclaimer...
Oh, okay, are we including intersex people in this? I thought this was a conversation about transition.
This is listed under surgical codes...
Electrolysis.
I'm sorry to say this report is hot bullshit.
Looks like naraburns link is a lot more reliable: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9555285/ gives us 209 patients over a 7.5 year period, so 30 instead of 5,7000
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