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When discussing pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in the treatment of gender dysphoria, the gender-critical among us often draw parallels with bodily integrity identity disorder. This is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person experiences profound distress because of the presence of one or more of their limbs, and requests to have these limbs amputated to alleviate said distress (or tries to amputate them themselves). Colloquially, one might say that people with this condition are able-bodied but identify as disabled.
Given that no one thinks that surgical amputation is the correct treatment for this psychiatric disorder, we gender-criticals argued, it follows that surgical intervention is the wrong approach for people with gender dysphoria. If it's wrong to amputate a mentally ill's person's arm just because they say it's causing them distress, how can it be right to do the same for a penis or breast?
Sadly, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, the medical establishment has noted the parallels, and it is coming to a rather different conclusion:
Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured. It doesn't matter if the Tavistock is shuttered and there's a rash of lawsuits directed at youth gender clinics in the US: if you're a medic who's internalised (or been made to internalise) the gender ideology worldview, the implications of that worldview and the role of the medical establishment it affirms have far-reaching implications in medical domains unrelated to gender medicine itself. At this point I honestly can't rule out psychiatrists prescribing anorexics appetite suppressants to aid them in achieving their "bodily attainment goals".
*Other than why the fuck are Canadian doctors so keen to help their fellow citizens maim or destroy their bodies??!!
I’m personally of the school of thought that interventions should be minimal until at least the mid teens. Don’t make a fuss about their clothes, their hair, their activities. Give them a nickname if you must, but keep it somewhat gender neutral. At 16 or 18 if the child is still thinking they’re the wrong gender, then and only then is there a subject worth talking about. There are real trans people. They do exist, though I suspect they are much rarer than supposed. But I don’t think we need to go much beyond “don’t be mean to people who look weird or act weird” in a grade school classroom.
I grew up in a relatively conservative community. There was one boy who, at age 4-ish, liked to dress in girl's outfits when we played dress-up games. He also liked some "girl's" toys, e.g. Polly Pocket. He was also fearful of competitive sports and tended to make friends better with girls rather than boys (I was an exception).
As often happens, he's just gay. He often finds it easier to identify with women and empathise with them, perhaps because he has more of a lady-brain (who knows?). People in this relatively conservative community generally ignored it, reasoning "He'll grow out of it," and they were right, since he is (99%) a typical adult guy these days.
The same thing happened with a girl in my neighbourhood, who just turned out to have a very active imagination as a child. She's now married to a man, with kids etc. She had a very religious family, who treated it as a game (like a child who decides that they are a dinosaur) and within a year she had forgotten even that she used to insist that she was a boy.
Kids are weird. Sometimes, it's because there is something deeply different about them. It's hard to know why, so it's best to enjoy the ride (within sensible boundaries e.g. keeping them from sexual experimentation) and offer them love throughout the process.
Maybe, but that's also incompatible with safety culture, on its face in fact (safety from hellfire for the traditionalists, safety from 'rather have a dead son' for the progressives, and for both of them safety from having a kid you can't stand).
By contrast, what you've described are parents/people aligned with dignity culture instead, where the right approach for reasonable actors is to just give them time/space/real opportunity to figure out the right answer themselves; restating "sensible boundaries" as "safety is only useful insofar as it furthers the cause of dignity, and we're already secure in our knowledge of what the truth and goodness are that any reasonable person would come to the same conclusion provided we give them initial conditions suitable for discovering it".
Agreed. The similarities between affirmation/esteem culture and guilt culture have probably been underinvestigated. I have a meta theory that many problems of human activity involve too much focus on what people ARE rather than what they DO. "Hate the sin, not the sinner" is once instance of moving in the right direction, but I think there are others, e.g. "Provide children - and people in general - approval for good things they accomplish, not for what they are."
(That's not to say that affirmation/esteem/guilt have no place in parenting, education etc.)
That's because it's the easy way out. You need to do intellectual or emotional labor to deal with people who DO [are aligned with your goals] but ARE NOT [aligned with the rules], and one way to deal with that is to turn your back and say you're not going to do it (doing this also gives you short-term power and sometimes people just get tired and want the easy way out).
Societies start to stop being able to do when the populace gets lazy like this. And while there is a place for identity, it must ultimately be subservient to activity, and when certain kinds of Christians/the Bible start talking about "women/the identity gender should not be in charge/operate unrestrained by men/the activity gender" I think this is what those parts are getting at.
Which leads to some interesting implications when you're talking about sexuality [and topically for this week, homosexuality], since "but what if my girl/boy grows up to be a woman/man incorrectly?" seems to me to be the driving impulse for the stereotypical swift parental overreactions to a woman who's more activity biased or a man who's more identity focused (regardless of how self-aware said child eventually becomes). And then, when that happens, is the implication more that two activity-genders or two identity-genders getting together is sinful (or is it just limited to "penis in the butt is bad", which... if the above is your understanding of gender/men/women that's going to seem immature at best and pointlessly angry at worst)?
But that, again, requires an unwillingness to be intellectually/emotionally lazy (which applies to both parties in that interaction; the sinner? has to also not be taking the lazy "they hate us 'cause they ain't us, so fuck you, I think I'll be as obnoxious as possible because I like being transgressive more than I like accommodating others" [which... right or wrong, it's that last part that condemns you more than anything else]).
Esteem/affirmation culture, in my view, lends itself far more to mere masturbation-by-proxy than a guilt or shame culture does.
Plausible and interesting. I shall look more into this issue.
Though I am not a Christian or against homosexual behaviour as such, I shall say this: their separation of (a) homosexual preferences from (b) homosexual behaviour ("It's ok to be born gay, as long as you don't do gay things" etc.) is already more sophisticated than many of the takes I hear from my students when debating this issues. Again, what people are vs. what they do.
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