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The study defines it thus:
It doesn't state how many just got hormones and how many got surgery.
Not sure what you mean by this. Puberty blockers or actual HRT? Obviously puberty is difficult for many and putting it off can prevent temporary discomfort, if that's what you mean, but in fact many trans people are happier after going through puberty, provided that it's the right puberty.
You mean social transitioning? The study was about medical transition. If it were just clothes and personae, the controversy would be much less severe.
You've been fed cherry-picked information about sex reassignment surgery. Many people are, in fact, happy about their surgeries. See /r/Transgender_Surgeries. Some of the dissatisfaction with SRS may be attributed to ineptly performed operations. The linked subreddit has much discussion on the quality of different surgeons, which varies greatly. One is dubbed "the butcher of Montreal"; another is widely known to be substandard and people only go to them because they're the only one covered by insurance.
And in any case, many trans people, even after socially transitioning and getting on HRT, prefer not to get SRS.
What objective metric do you propose to measure whether or not someone is better off other than asking them if they feel better?
And all of the media coverage could have been avoided if people had just treated it as a curiosity and a medical condition, and not some kind of new woke perversion to be fought. Like in Iran.
"Some people prefer to be referred to as a gender different from the one they were born with."
"Oh. Okay."
That's the normal response. The kind of response a person not looking for another culture war battle to fight would give.
The normal response to defecting from gender roles is, uh, not a polite 'oh. okay.'. Go wear a dress in public(and not in the gay district) with a big bushy beard if you don't believe me.
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Firstly, I think it's profoundly condescending to tell someone they've been "fed" cherry-picked stories, dumb sheeple that they are. Secondly, @Shakes wasn't passing a value judgement on the efficacy of bottom surgery: the part of his comment that you quoted is literally just an (accurate) description of what a vaginoplasty entails. Thirdly, it's rather hypocritical of you to accuse someone of having fallen for cherry-picked stories that portray bottom surgery negatively, then link to a subreddit that selects for people who are happy with their surgeries while excluding detransitioners (or, more sadly, people who took their own lives after undergoing bottom surgery). Fight cherry-picking with studies and meta-analyses, not cherry-picking in the opposite direction.
This proves too much. Heroin addicts claim to feel better when they use heroin. (I don't even disbelieve them – I'm sure they do feel happier in the short-term.) The fact that gender reassignment surgeries open their recipients up to a host of health problems they would not otherwise have had seems as good an "objective" metric as any other. As you more or less concede in the top-level comment, the question of whether surgical transition actually improves trans people's mental flourishing certainly seems to be an open one, and the point of medical studies is to give us hard data which will inform our decisions on whether it's a good idea for individual patients. If 90% of people diagnosed with gender dysphoria saw a durable uplift to their subjective well-being after undergoing surgical transition, it would be a no-brainer. 70%? Sure. 50%? Hmm – you might need to have a bit of a think about that one. 30%? Probably not until you've already tried several years of talk therapy. 10%? Only as a matter of last resort for those in such severe psychic distress that it's this or suicide.
If a person is considering undergoing a major elective medical procedure which will render it impossible for them to have children and opens them up to a host of medical problems they would not otherwise have had, we need robust data on the efficacy of that procedure in improving its recipients' subjective sense of well-being. Shrugging your shoulders and saying "well, some people feel better afterwards" simply isn't good enough. (All of this goes double if you're expecting the taxpayer to foot the bill, as some trans activists demand.)
Personally, I support bodily autonomy for adults – but if one of my loved ones was considering surgically transitioning, I would do everything in my power to try to dissuade them. (In much the same way that I support the right of adults to practise polyamory or pursue careers in pornography or the entertainment industries, even though I know that the overwhelming majority of people who do so will see their subjective well-being take a hit as a result. If a close female friend of mine was considering starting an OnlyFans, I would support her right to do so, but I would also tell her that this is a decision she will almost certainly regret.)
When convicted male rapists with intact genitalia are demanding to serve their sentences in the female estate and these demands are being granted – then yes, this is a woke perversion to be fought. It's pure historical revisionism to claim that gender-critical people started this fight and that "trans people just want to live their lives in peace".
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The implementation of the liberal affirmative model accompanying a medical model put this to bed. You can't have a medical condition and a socially affirmative model assisted by wide celebration of concepts of identity placed in proximity to the general population, including children. You can't do so and claim you are adhering to rigorous medical research which has a default answer of "We don't know" to many basic questions about the condition, causes, and populations effected. Not when advocates and experts in medicine insist dysphoria is not a prerequisite for transgenderism.
If the Dutch Protocols led to 20 years more rigorous study with small experimental cohorts that invited critical dissent and testing, trans people not only would be better off but we might have a more advanced understanding of the condition. Of course if you tolerate slow, plodding research that demands dissent to progress in experimental areas -- to question and define the nature of gender, sex, identity and dysphoria -- you will have condemned some small number of trans people to suffering. They would have suffered for a purpose, namely a greater understanding and a lower profile that provided more tolerance via obscurity. Maybe we could do brain scans by now to screen or something.
The ideal outcome was for trans research to go on as a medical venture without ideological or social interest. An interesting article in The Atlantic would have popped up every few years. By now trans people would know know about the trans-Mecca neighborhood in Seattle in the event they were born in Utah.
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This is a little disingenuous. It was treated as a curiosity and a medical condition. It was specifically the activists who declared that it is an identity and absolutely not a medical condition, which was the genesis of the whole controversy.
Transvestites have been a curiosity since time immemorial. Dysphoria has been a medical condition in the books ever since we've had books. Don't pretend like it was the anti trans lobby that made this an issue.
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