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I said two months ago I would reply to a comment about this study on the mental health effects of gender transition. I have only now managed to find the time, so I'm going to post my reply as a top-level comment lest it get buried. You can find the previous discussion here.
To be honest, some of the statistical manipulation seems dubious, but that's above my pay grade, so I'm going to assume the study was conducted in good faith with no shenanigans.
In short, the study finds that, contrary to assumptions that transitioning should improve mental health, the share of people needing mental health treatment rises drastically after transition. Anti-trans people conclude that this means transition actually worsens mental health, and, hence, people should not be allowed to transition.
There's some nitpicking to be done here, for example, maybe the patients already needed mental health treatment and just found out they needed it at the same time as they found out they're transgender, or that just seeing a mental health professional regularly doesn't necessarily mean that your mental health is worse than it used to be.
But my fundamental objection is to the conclusion that no one should be allowed to transition. Suppose the anti-trans side is completely correct on the facts, that transitioning did, in fact, directly worsen the mental health of many or even most patients. There are still some patients who are better off. There are countless anecdotal reports online of people who are happier after transitioning. The most you can conclude is that the criteria for who should transition need to be changed. (If I'm interpreting the data right, the likelihood of needing mental health treatment after transitioning was higher in those born later, consistent with the rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)/social contagion hypothesis.) But if you care about people's happiness, some people should still be supported in transitioning.
Obviously if you believe all trans people are delusional and object to transition and treating people as their stated gender regardless of the effect on their mental health, this does not apply to you. But in that case the study isn't an argument you can use.
Speaking of ROGD, its rhetorical use by anti-trans people is a peculiar example of a self-contradictory motte-and-bailey: usually the bailey is a stronger version of the motte, and thus necessarily consistent with it, but here the bailey ("all trans people are delusional and none of them are their stated gender") contradicts the motte ("some trans people with a specific presentation – primarily adolescent girls – are not actually their stated gender") because the latter presupposes that some trans people are, in fact, their stated gender. If you believe all trans people are delusional, why do you care about the specific etiology of the transness of a specific subgroup of trans people? The treatment, whichever you prefer, should be the same.
I consider myself pro-trans, but I believe ROGD/social contagion may well be a real thing. If you agree about the possibility of social contagion, you should try to minimize the attention trans people receive, yet anti-trans activists have been the main publicists of transness for about a decade now – trans people really entered the mainstream with the North Carolina "bathroom bill". It used to be that you would only find information about transness if you went looking for it because you were questioning your gender, but now that trans people are everywhere (thanks to anti-trans activists), you get impressionable young people who were not predisposed to questioning their gender hearing about it and joining in for the standard reasons impressionable young people join trends. (Cf. media coverage of school shootings encouraging more school shootings – a common argument among anti-gun-control people.)
Speaking from the anti-trans (as it would be represented) side, I think we really don't have enough established about existing mental health conditions and co-morbidities. I don't believe a two year old has a firm and unyielding grasp of their innate gender, such that parents and school should start socially transitioning their toddlers. I think puberty is a very stressful time of upheaval and change, in even a body horror type of fashion: suddenly all these changes, with no consent, knowledge or will of your own, and you don't know from day to day what the next alteration will be, and now these changes thrust upon you make the people around you behave differently and put a whole set of new expectations and limits on you. Add in any alienation from feeling you don't fit in and don't fit the pattern of what a girl or boy "should" be, and that's without even "are you indeed on the autism spectrum or have other problems?" and the rainbow pixie dust hugboxes online telling you that you are a Real Girl or Real Boy and that will solve everything!
I found puberty very tough. I felt boys had it easier. Thank God this was long before the days of the genderbread person or unicorn in every primary school classroom and people eager to urge on "of course you are a boy, why you don't have traditional girl interests and you like boy stuff, you need to become Chauncey and then everything will be marvellous and of course we'll work on your parents about do they want a dead child or a live one? leave it to us!"
All that being said: are there real trans people? Yeah, I'll accept that. Are the most egregious cases we see demanding publicity and special treatment really trans? I kind of doubt it, and I wish we could honestly and coolly look at cases such as "elderly murderer who already killed two women is now trans and declaring 'she' should be in women's prison" without the hysteria on both sides. But we're far, far from that.
I've found this to be generally true, to the point where someone describing puberty as a scary experience is generally a strong tell for me that the commenter is female. For me (and I assume most boys) the "worst" issues with puberty were (in no particular order):
Otherwise, for most boys puberty means getting taller, stronger, and faster. It means being able to grow facial hair (though it can look pretty pathetic initially, I wasn't able to grow a proper beard until my late teens/early 20's). It means finally being allowed to do more "grown-up" things (kids are retarded and don't realize that being a grown-up sucks).
For women I can absolutely see things like 3 to 5 days of pain and bleeding every month as being a horrible experience. But my brain can't relate to the horror I've heard some women express at developing breasts and similar features though, I just don't understand that one.
Apart from the physical changes, what I found difficult were the new set of constraints. Things I had been able to do before, now I couldn't do because "only boys do that/you're a young lady now" and no adequate, so far as I could see, reason for that. So I did grump about "can't do this, can't do that, I could if I were a boy".
As I say, being born too early for social experimentation saved me.
Anecdotes are not data, but first - if you're not sexually attracted to women, then "oooh lady bits!" is not an arousing experience for you 😁 Second, just going by my own experience, suddenly I had these growing lumps on my chest, and now I had to get a whole new set of garments (bras) to manage them, and now it was important that I manage them, because modesty and all the rest of it, as well as attracting male attention. And I was eleven, which was way earlier than my mother expected me to start puberty, so she had told me nothing (in the opinion that she had time yet to sit me down and give me The Talk and do all the explaining; this was in the days when sources of information were "the dictionary" and "the encyclopaedia" if you had a set in the house so not much luck for me trying to make sense of all this on my own).
Boys have always had penis and testicles, imagine if you didn't but now suddenly things were growing out of areas that previously had nothing there!
Horseshoe theory is real. Both the extreme left and the extreme right believe in rigid gender roles. These activities, interests, and traits are MALE, these activities, interests and traits are FEMALE. If you do the first you are MALE. If you do the second you are FEMALE. If you like both then you are BOTH/NEITHER/WEIRD.
The main difference is that the the extreme right demands your activities, interests, and traits change to fit your gender, while the extreme left demands your gender change to fit your personality. The reason so many people go from radically right households to become radical leftists is because you don't have to change your structure of how gender roles ought to work, just whether it's possible/good to change sides. There's less inferential distance to get from one extreme to the other than there is to become a moderate who believes in letting people be themselves without getting all obsessed about Identities.
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