Kids are weird. They often do a ton of weird shit at least until puberty. I think this trend with the internet-bound millennial left (at least, I haven't seen anyone else do it) of taking every possible aspect of someone's personality (like a child expressing that they wish they were boy/girl) and classifying/medicalizing it is just as harmful as overdiagnosing kids with ADHD and getting them strung up on amphetamines. Not everything needs to be turned into a medical issue or have a big deal made of it. Now, instead of just doping kids up on amphetamines, we're also giving them hormone blockers or even HRT. And no, that's not a bogeyman; it's not hard to find celebratory videos where the parents give their pre-pubescent kid their first round of hormone treatment.
According to [1], 80-95% of kids diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria completely get over it by the time they hit puberty (and [2] says 88-98%). It is almost always, as we used to call it, "a phase". Any diagnosis made before puberty is extremely likely to be a misdiagnosis.
So forgive me, but I don't really buy "Think of the (transgender/agender) children!" as a compelling argument, since the actual occurrence of permanent gender dysphoria in children is low bordering on negligible, with many persistent cases potentially attributable to parental treatment rather than any sort of neurophysiological disorder on the part of the child. See [3] as an example. I think encouraging children to see themselves and having dysphoria and to seek treatment is extremely harmful, given that in the vast majority of formal diagnoses, no medical intervention is necessary. The whole thing just reeks of projecting identity politics onto innocent bystanders in a way that is demonstrably bad for their mental and physical health.
[1] Cohen-Kettenis PT, Delemarre-van de Waal HA, Gooren LJ. The treatment of adolescent transsexuals: changing insights. J Sexual Med 2008;5:1892–1897.
Maybe the word "kid" wasn't the right one for conveying my intention. I wasn't thinking "children 10 and under" but rather adolescents, maybe 13-18. The period of a person's life when they're sorting out who they are.
Speaking from experience, being a transgender kid sucks, but I agree that before 10 nothing a person says or does should be considered immutable gospel about their identity. That said, while it's not immutable, it's still something parents should listen to. Ignoring a gender nonconforming child expressing themselves is a bigger risk than encouraging a kid who eventually grows out of it.
Also, no pre-pubescent kids are getting hormones, just blockers, which are fully reversible if it is just a phase. It's not standard procedure to start actual hormones until about 16. If the kid "snaps out of it" then they stop taking the blockers, and grow up no worse for wear. But if they maintain their transgender identity, those blockers will save them a world of distress.
> If the kid "snaps out of it" then they stop taking the blockers
It seems astoundingly likely that a heavy dose of the correct set of sex hormones is precisely what causes these kids to "snap out of it" in the first place.
> and grow up no worse for wear
I'm very skeptical of this claim. There's no way that disrupting such a fundamental developmental stage in such an aggressive way can just be shrugged off.
Does the collective neurological and physiological damage of disrupting all these kids' development outweigh the benefit to the 2%-20% who actually end up continuing to identify as trans? And how much does that percentage decrease in the absence of hormone blockers?
> Does the collective neurological and physiological damage of disrupting all these kids' development outweigh the benefit to the 2%-20% who actually end up continuing to identify as trans?
Blockers aren't given to seven year olds who show up as gender nonconforming in Rorsach tests and play tasks in the GID studies that form the basis of that figure. The paper you quoted earlier states:
"GID persisting into early puberty appears to be highly persistent: at the Amsterdam gender identity
clinic for adolescents, none of the patients who
were diagnosed with a GID and considered eligible
for SR dropped out of the diagnostic or treatment
procedures or regretted SR. Even
some of those who were not eligible to start
treatment before the age of 18 years because of
serious psychiatric comorbidity, extremely adverse
living circumstances, or a combination of both,
persisted in their wish for SR. Because their other
problems had to be addressed before they were
regarded eligible to start SR successfully, their
treatment was usually delayed until after 18 years
of age."
> It seems astoundingly likely that a heavy dose of the correct set of sex hormones is precisely what causes these kids to "snap out of it" in the first place.
That sort of treatment used to be common. In general it results in the trans kids getting horribly depressed, often killing themselves.
Doctors with more field experience and who have done more research than me have settled on blockers as a safe and effective treatment with no long-term side effects if they're discontinued. You'll have to provide something more than gut feeling that they can't just be shrugged off.
I think the implication wasn't that one should "treat" people with hormones so much as let nature take its course (speaking from experience, the natural hormone surge at the start of puberty definitely counts as a "heavy dose").
Kids are weird. They often do a ton of weird shit at least until puberty. I think this trend with the internet-bound millennial left (at least, I haven't seen anyone else do it) of taking every possible aspect of someone's personality (like a child expressing that they wish they were boy/girl) and classifying/medicalizing it is just as harmful as overdiagnosing kids with ADHD and getting them strung up on amphetamines. Not everything needs to be turned into a medical issue or have a big deal made of it. Now, instead of just doping kids up on amphetamines, we're also giving them hormone blockers or even HRT. And no, that's not a bogeyman; it's not hard to find celebratory videos where the parents give their pre-pubescent kid their first round of hormone treatment.
According to [1], 80-95% of kids diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria completely get over it by the time they hit puberty (and [2] says 88-98%). It is almost always, as we used to call it, "a phase". Any diagnosis made before puberty is extremely likely to be a misdiagnosis.
So forgive me, but I don't really buy "Think of the (transgender/agender) children!" as a compelling argument, since the actual occurrence of permanent gender dysphoria in children is low bordering on negligible, with many persistent cases potentially attributable to parental treatment rather than any sort of neurophysiological disorder on the part of the child. See [3] as an example. I think encouraging children to see themselves and having dysphoria and to seek treatment is extremely harmful, given that in the vast majority of formal diagnoses, no medical intervention is necessary. The whole thing just reeks of projecting identity politics onto innocent bystanders in a way that is demonstrably bad for their mental and physical health.
[1] Cohen-Kettenis PT, Delemarre-van de Waal HA, Gooren LJ. The treatment of adolescent transsexuals: changing insights. J Sexual Med 2008;5:1892–1897.
[2] http://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/21/boy-living-l...