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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33039 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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I'm not sure I read you right, but I take it your post means that you do want hormone treatments for children and teenagers?

That’s the current medical consensus (for teenagers - actual pre-pubertal children don’t need hormones).

I can only speak to my personal experience, but I’ve been through childhood gender dysphoria and I wish I had know transition was an option then. I grew up outside of America and before it became engrained in the popular consciousness, so when I was a child the only thing I could come up with was pretend I’d gotten in an accident that cut off my genitals, so doctors would be forced to reassign me. I didn’t go through with it due to low pain tolerance, but that would have been actual (self-)mutilation, and I had no awareness that being trans was a thing so you cannot blame social contagion.

I think it was a mistake for current trans activists to focus on a nebulous concept of gender identity instead of gender dysphoria, which is a serious psychiatric condition that has widespread medical consensus about how to treat it. For people with it, puberty is an unwanted, traumatic experience that ends up giving you a body you despise and that you end up spending tragic sums of money fixing. Perhaps if that was the primary discourse, you’d also get fewer people that only do it because it’s trendy or whatnot.

I can only speak to my personal experience, but I’ve been through childhood gender dysphoria and I wish I had know transition was an option then.

Do you think you would have been better off with medical transitioning pre-puberty, even if that meant you would never orgasm or have functional male or female sexuality (like what seems to have happened with Jazz Jennings)?

I don't think there's enough studies on the sexual development of trans women who completely blocked male puberty, as it's fairly rare. I probably would have preferred that at the time, since my sexuality made me feel very distressed in general, but "completely block puberty" and "transition as an adult" aren't the only two options. I don't see why I couldn't have transitioned shortly after the onset of male puberty, enough to gain the ability to orgasm and some sexual functioning, but before my voice dropped and height increased. And there's also the potential use of topical testosterone for normal genital development, that's very promising but under-studied.

FWIW, it isn't even true that starting medical transition early on results in an inability to orgasm or a lack of sexual function. Even trans women who start puberty blockers so early that they don't have enough skin to use for a penile inversion vaginoplasty are still as likely as cis women to report being able to orgasm, after vaginoplasty using an alternative technique.

That’s the current medical consensus

Where? Certainly not across Europe.

Yeah, I guess there's a line in the sand somewhere around here. It'd take a lot of convincing for me to consider your misfortune more pressing to prevent than the harm likely done to impressionable teenagers who needlessly undergo such treatment. I'd wager many conservatives have similar preferences in this issue.

But there's probably an underlying debate about the rights of parents to override the wishes of their children that we'd need have first. Or differently phrased, in how far the state should be able to override parental authority.

Thats been tricky for a while, if a Jehovahs Witness raised child and their parents all agree that they don't want a life saving blood transfusion should the state override them considering the childs best interests?

If the child wanted the transfusion and the parents did not, does that change the calculus?

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