I think all people of good will (except the ACLU) are on the same page with respect to transgender rights. That is, everyone, regardless of gender status, sex, or transitioning status, should be afforded moral or legal equality and treated with respect and civility. There are a few exceptions when that right conflicts with others (most notably in sports), but having such an attitude is not transphobic.
Further, any child contemplating transsexuality should be treated with respect by everyone, but not pushed to undergo transitioning. The proper course involves supportive (but not pushy) parents and friends, unbiased but empathic psychological counseling, and unbiased medical advice, which gives a full descriptions of the likely and possible outcomes of hormone therapy and surgery. Then, if the young person still wants to transition (preferably after puberty), then have at it.
This holds for teachers in schools, of course. They can be supportive, but they have no right to push children into altering their gender. One of the problems here, which the ACLU loves but which worries me, is this one from the AP article below (click on screenshot):
Under state and federal law, however, students have privacy rights that extend to sexual orientation and gender identity, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Only in limited circumstances can a school notify a parent of their child’s sexual identity against their wishes.
“Outside of school, these students may similarly face potential hostility at home because of who they are,” said attorney Peter Renn of Lambda Legal. “For example, involuntarily outing a student as LGBTQ to their parents can very well lead to them getting kicked out of the home in some circumstances.”
This seems to me pretty reasonable, but I haven’t thought through it completely as it does conflict with parental “rights”. But this is all irrelevant in the case below, as the two teachers at issue actually set up a meeting to let the parents know that their daughter wanted to transition to the male gender. Read the AP report below (click on screenshot) for a case study about how schools should not deal with children undergoing gender dysphoria.
Jessica Konen is suing a California school district for pushing her daughter to become a transmale after already telling the daughter that she was “bisexual”. (Remember, there are tomboys who are often considered “bisexual” but don’t become lesbians or transmen.) The teachers apparently not only conspired to push Konen’s daughter towards transitioning, but then informed the mom about her daughter, blindsiding the mother in a set-up meeting.
The details:
A mother who claims teachers secretly manipulated her 11-year-old daughter into changing her gender identity and name has filed a legal case against a tiny California school district.
Spreckels Union School District was responsible for “extreme and outrageous conduct” that led the student on a path toward transitioning as a boy and drove a wedge between mother and child, according to the claim filed Wednesday by a conservative legal group.
Jessica Konen said two middle school teachers who ran the school’s Equality Club — later known as UBU (You Be You) — planted the seed that her daughter was bisexual in 6th grade and then introduced the idea she was transgender.
The legal claim — a precursor to a lawsuit — follows a dustup in the district last fall after the author of a book widely criticized as “anti-transgender” quoted the two teachers speaking at a conference about how to run an LGBTQ+ club in a conservative community.
. . . While Konen said her daughter had revealed she was bisexual [JAC: this bisexual identity was apparently instilled in the daughter by the teachers as well], the mother was unaware she was identifying as a boy until she was called to a meeting at the Buena Vista Middle School principal’s office in December 2019 when her daughter was in 7th grade.
She wasn’t told the purpose of the meeting until her daughter entered the room and sat across a table from her and teacher Lori Caldeira broke the news.
“I literally was caught off guard. I was blindsided,” Konen said. “I didn’t even know what to feel like because I didn’t even know where it came from.”
Konen said she began to cry.
She said her daughter was also caught by surprise. She had told teachers she wanted to notify her mom, but didn’t know they set the meeting up that day.
So the teachers not only pushed the girl to transition (see below), but also violated privacy rights by setting up this meeting. But it gets worse!
. . .When schools went to remote learning during the pandemic in March 2020, Konen said her daughter began returning to her “old self” and now uses her given name.
But it wasn’t until this fall that Konen began to question how her daughter got on the path to a different identity after the article by Abigail Shrier circulated around town.
In a leaked recording from a California Teachers Association conference, Caldeira and Kelly Baraki were quoted discussing how they kept meetings private and “stalked” students online for recruits.
“When we were doing our virtual learning — we totally stalked what they were doing on Google, when they weren’t doing school work,” Baraki said. “One of them was googling ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ And we’re like, ‘Check.’ We’re going to invite that kid when we get back on campus.”
“Check”? How insensitive can you be? (The teachers’ names are Lori Caldiera and Kelly Baraki.) Caldiera now clams the stalking comment was a joke, but I don’t believer her. These are woke teachers with agendas that are all “push, push, push kids to transition”.
Why they do this mystifies me. Teachers are not peers on social media seeking to validate their own decisions by urging others to follow them; teachers are supposed to care for the children. At any rate, both teachers have been placed on administrative leave, and the girl is reported as having voluntarily resumed her female name and is “returning to her old self.” The mother is quoted:
Konen said her daughter is now doing well in high school.
“She still deals with confusion,” Konen said. “She feels like she can breathe, you know, like she doesn’t have pressure on her.”
The problem with the epidemic of transitioning, nearly all from the female to the male gender, is that those with some gender dysphoria, or even typical adolescent confusion, are pushed to transition rather than urged to go slowly and get proper medical and psychological counseling. As Bari Weiss reported on her Substack column, two specialists in transgender medicine, both transgender women, are jumping off the express train to transsexuality and urging more caution. (The bolding is mine):
Their allies in the media and Hollywood reported stories and created content that reaffirmed this orthodoxy. Anyone who dared disagree or depart from any of its core tenets, including young women who publicly detransitioned, were inevitably smeared as hateful and accused of harming children.
But that new orthodoxy has gone too far, according to two of the most prominent providers in the field of transgender medicine: Dr. Marci Bowers, a world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist who operated on reality-television star Jazz Jennings; and Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic.
In the course of their careers, both have seen thousands of patients. Both are board members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the organization that sets the standards worldwide for transgender medical care. And both are transgender women.
Earlier this month, Anderson told me she submitted a co-authored op-ed to The New York Times warning that many transgender healthcare providers were treating kids recklessly. The Times passed, explaining it was “outside our coverage priorities right now.”
. . . in the last decade, watchful waiting has been supplanted by “affirmative care,” which assumes children do know what’s best. Affirmative care proponents urge doctors to corroborate their patients’ belief that they are trapped in the wrong body. The family is pressured to help the child transition to a new gender identity — sometimes having been told by doctors or activists that, if they don’t, their child may eventually commit suicide. From there, pressures build on parents to begin concrete medical steps to help children on their path to transitioning to the “right” body. That includes puberty blockers as a preliminary step. Typically, cross-sex hormones follow and then, if desired, gender surgery.
The NYT is reprehensible. Transsexuality is a big issue, and when two transsexual doctors who are experts in transexual medicine have something to say, the Times should publish it. But of course what these doctors say goes against The Narrative.
It’s worse than that, for the teachers weren’t even practicing “affirmative care” but deliberately pushing the girl towards transitioning. Who do they think they are? Are they experts in dealing with gender dysphoria?
Given their dereliction of duty towards their charges, both teachers should be fired.
Is “transitioning” reversible?
Medical transitioning (cross-sex hormones and surgery) is not reversible.
How so?
It seems to me if “male” needs to go to “female” – and that is true, genuine female – what keeps female going male?
If an anatomical male has hormonal and surgical procedures to become female, it is not a perfect process. The genitalia are removed. Testes – gone. A vagina is put together from various parts (I won’t go into details), but I doubt its as good as the real thing. Now suppose that person wants to become a man again. It will be an imperfect process too, but now doubly so because there is less to work with.
Then the precise terms for this would not be “male” or “female”, but there would be a term to note that process, as it is results in a near-male or near-female configuration. Nurses or doctors would need such information, for instance.
“Male” and “female” normally have to do with gonadal tissue, where testicular tissue is for males, and so on. But if someones balls are cut out, I’m not against calling them a man if that is what they want.
Why am I clenching? Stop that!
Re “A vagina is put together from various parts (I won’t go into details), but I doubt its as good as the real thing.”
Almost certainly. And y’know, I think I can go to my grave without finding out.
Which, I know, makes me phobic or hateful or otherwise awful in the eyes of those who (sincerely) believe that their “identity” imposes an obligation on others to wish to have sex with them.
The operation is much more difficult if the person having the operation has not gone through puberty – another reason why puberty blockers are bad even for those who do eventually decide to go ahead with gender reassignment surgery.
Cross-sex hormones started before or early in puberty can alter it enough that it will not resume full cis-development when the hormones are stopped. Even drugs that “merely” delay puberty during watchful waiting can impair full bone development in girls which can lead to osteoporosis later in life. So if you could be sure that a child needed for its own proper development to be trans, go right to having her start shaving (beard) at 11 and to hell with fertility. (This is what the character in the Waterloo book for Grade 6 students was so keen to start doing.)
But of course you can’t.
That’s why the Waterloo School Board controversy mentioned in Sunday’s Hili Dialogue was so contentious (or was contentious until the Board Chair silenced the teacher and sicced the professional discipline goons on her.) The activists want to start affirmative therapy as soon as the child wants it and pressure the child and parents not to listen to anyone who questions the self-diagnosis. (Or in this case, the bizarre ideologically motivated diagnosis from the teachers.)
I am not an expert in this field. Given how the activists have captured the research agenda, it is safe to assume that no research that found hazards outweighed benefits would ever get published. No medical or psychological journal wants to see its offices destroyed by arson or, worse, whacked with an expensive complaint to the Human Rights Commission. Scientific wounding would be way worse for the movement than a JK Rowling novel.
This story from California is enormously important. The received dogma is that Rapid Onset (and implied reversible) Gender Dysphoria does not exist and to raise it merely belittles and pathologizes the child’s quest for his/her true gender identity. Of course I can’t comment knowledgeably but I’m hearing echoes of being told something you don’t want to hear in the earnest efforts to debunk the concept. (“Is it dead yet? … Is it dead yet?”) The original claim by Littman was that it spread by social contagion. The later discovery that this doesn’t seem to be the case was one of those “Whew!” moments but I think it’s still not clear if all kids who seem confused about their gender need to be hoovered into the treatment industry.
So even one case where a child, once removed from motivated influencers, seemed to revert back to her cis-identity is certainly a call for caution, and to consider each child an individual, not as a cypher for the culture-war tribe you belong to.
One problem with giving pre-adolescent children so-called “puberty blockers” is that actually going through puberty is often what is required to resolve the emotional feelings about their bodies that is behind the young person’s desire to transition in the first place. So instead of giving a time for reflection, the outcome is that the very vast majority of children given puberty blockers go on to have cross-sex hormone treatment – once they are on the medical rollercoaster it is hard to get off. For some, like Keira Bell here in the UK, the results can be tragic.
+1
If I was dictator, I would just compel everyone to go through cis-puberty and report back after they’d matured. I don’t buy the idea that a boy who thinks he’s a girl will freak out every time he gets an erection or a girl will melt down when she gets her period. Some of us did that anyway. The interaction between body and mind is how we come to terms with the world.
If you’re old enough to remember wringer washing machines — I think they were called mangles in the U.K.– your mother was always watchful to never ever let you get close enough to the rollers to get drawn in. One little finger was all it took.
The unspoken reason, IMO, behind the push for unquestioned youth transition by trans “activists” (mostly male-to-female, as I understand it, and possibly many/most being autogynephilic):
It is true that, once a child passes through puberty and acquires secondary sex characteristics, it will be more difficult to “pass” as the other gender (I still think of it as “sex”) even if they fully transition as an adult, with every imaginable intervention.
In other words, I suspect this is a case of massive projection on the part of people who are sad that, y’know, they don’t really appear to most people to be the gender they want people to see them as.
Not saying it’s so, but if it is, what an execrable, immoral thing it is to impose such discomfort on the wellbeing and health of children.
I believe that it is openly acknowledged that the use of puberty blockers is, to a significant extent, because it makes it much easier for the person taking them to “pass” as a member of the opposite sex in adulthood. The difficulty is that delaying or preventing puberty brings problems of its own that the person is too young to give informed consent to at the point of taking the medication.
I don’t think it’s projection.
My alternative hypothesis is that we seem to be in an era of know-nothingism and distrust of authority. While this is easy to see on the right, it’s showing up on the left too, in more subtle forms…like this. This is the an example of the leftist side of “don’t trust doctors or experts. The people know their own situation better than they do.”
Of course, the two explanations are not mutually exclusive…
Connection between paragraphs seems tenuous. COMPELLING any solution or procedure for the treatment of sexual confusion or gender dysphoria in humans is bigotry. Involving the PT (#1!), the parents, psychologists and experienced medical clinicians in a SLOW investigation and process is probably as close as we can come to rationality in this issue of sexual and gender roles. In the USA, we’re barely beginning to recognize that the problems are many, complex, and have life-long consequences, whether they’re resolved “successfully” or “unsuccessfully”.
UK equipment might have been greatly different, but in the USA a mangle was a machine for ironing. I became quite proficient in its use during early adolescence. Mom and sisters didn’t like to use it, so I did most of the ironing. Dangerous for hands and one childhood pal needed plastic surgery after he’d finished growing to correct the damage from a mangle burn. OTOH, one sister ran her hand into a wringer on a washer and the worst consequence was that I had to fix myself a cold lunch at age 5. Mom hit the release, the rollers sprang apart, and a quick trip to the family physician got kudos to Mom for correct procedure; damaged arms/hands happened if someone hit Reverse and ran the limb BACK through the wringer. Sister is now a retired teacher and choreographer, and is as able with both hands as any other human at age 74.
Yet, if you look at what the people driving the Transgender Rights movement seem to believe, then transitioning is simply matter of saying so since biological sex is nothing more than a social construct.
I’m not sure that any minor should be allowed hormone therapy and surgery, however much they want to and however properly they have been advised. They are too young to make such a life-altering decision and there’s too much likelihood that they will regret it.
This sounds like a more invidious embrace of dogma. In the early 70s there were big psychology teachings that said children who were only children had a myriad of psychological problems like not being able to relate to other children, etc. It was bogus of course (especially given all the normal only children of today) and something seized upon by a new phenomenon – the start of the family that limited children (probably a result of reliable birth control and women having actual rights to go to work). As an only child, I had a teacher that insisted I had all these psychological problems while another was so surprised I was an only child because I didn’t exhibit any of them. Clearly there was strong bias at play.
If I had grown up in today’s world, I’m sure I would have been told I’m trans simply because I liked playing with toy cars, had a dinosaur collection, hated wearing dresses, preferred hanging out with boys, and played sports with the boys. Really I was just a kid that wasn’t constrained by her gender. I also played with dolls, skipped rope, played with the girls, and stuffed toys. I find the term “tom boy” sexist. It supposes that girls do girl things that prepare them for motherhood and boys do boy things that prepare them for business and war. Nothing is that simple and a lot of these things we do to kids is full of bias and we should leave them the hell alone and let them do what they want to do.
“Then, if the young person still wants to transition (preferably after puberty), then have at it.”
Activists will not settle for this. They will rage against it. I went to the mattresses once with an adamant trans warrior. This was near the bottom of the exchange:
Me: It is wrong to delay puberty with blockers, let alone begin hormone replacement and surgery on a child or adolescent. Not only because the child is below the age of legal consent (and often less than mentally independent/rational) but because these irreversible physical alterations destroy the child if it grows out of gender dysphoria, as many do.
Activist: Wrong. The myth of “growing out of” or “desisting from” is a fascist construction. If a medical authority ignores insistence and persistence, they are violating their code — they must affirm. Holding back on full transition destroys the child, because it now has developed physical maturity of the wrong sex. This is now tremendously, difficult and agonizing and need not have been imposed.
I’m a bit less hardball than you; I think if you’ve got a bunch of appropriate mature adults who have looked into the situation and are fairly confident it’s the right course of action (parents, doctors, etc.), well that’s probably the best ‘reasoned information’ you can ask for.
However, two junior high teachers who learn what they know about the student by stalking them on-line and having conversations with them in a weekly club is clearly not that. What’s next, they talked to one kid about her migraines so now they’re qualified to write a drug prescription for her?
Its complicated, because gender dysphoria describes a range of orientations, including ones where a person can change their gender identity back and forth, like a slow swinging pendulum. I knew someone like that, long ago, and it was very eye opening.
Or after some swings one way or another, a person might settle into a kind of in-between orientation where they really want to be a bit of this and also a bit of that. This self knowledge takes time and careful consideration about how one really feels versus how you want to feel because of external pressure. It takes growing up. First.
I agree, Mark, and wouldn’t it be best if that person waited until emancipation and maturity to make a choice for cross-hormone and surgery — even at the risk of growing into the sex-body of the final gender choice? I have been reading that some trans adults would rather have stayed in the bio body but lived as the other gender, as well. I see the tag “changing the body did not relieve the dysphoria.”
“even at the risk of growing into the sex-body of the final gender choice? ”
should have said:
even at the risk of growing into the opposite sex-body of the final gender choice?
The infectious hysteria surrounding gender identity issues reminds me very much of the supposed satanic- abuse madness of the ’80s and ’90s. Children were encouraged by teachers, social workers, and psychologists to report fictitious events that in retrospect (and to many then) seem preposterous.
Thank you for this post. The case is outrageous, and unfortunately seems to be just the tip of the iceberg. I find it insane that youths are considered too immature to drink a beer yet quite competent to have their bodies mutilated.
“The problem with the epidemic of transitioning, nearly all from the female to the male gender…”
I’m not sure if you’re saying the “epidemic” is “nearly all from the female to the male,” or transitioning in general. If it’s the latter, I’m sorry, but this is not true.
JAC: I TRUNCATED THIS COMMENT BECAUSE IT WAS A. TOO LONG AND B. SUPERFLUOUS BECAUSE I MEANT THE FORMER, AS THE READER SHOULD KNOW.
In addition, you are using different names and so you’re gone.
Read the Roolz. Your comment is too long and all if it past the first paragraph is superfluous because you made the wrong assumption. I’ll truncate it and answer it here:
I meant what I said: the general direction of transitioning among the young: they are mostly from females young people to those of the male gender. And that happens to be true.
The rest of your comment is irrelevant. If you read my website you’d already know that. Plus you didn’t read the Roolz about comment length.
The more disturbing woke trend is that they reject calls to research whether this is true, how big the effect is, and correlates we might find associated with it. Very religious-like: don’t challenge the doctrine – don’t even look into it.
The mother seems to be doing the best she can, but is it possible she is also trying to push her daughter to be something she is not?
Of course that is always possible, but the very limited information given in this article doesn’t make me suspicious that she likely is.
As a parent I can say that parents are very likely to be the last people that a young teen would be entirely forthcoming or truthful with about something like this. Or about anything really. A parent is very likely to know that something is afoot but trying to get their young teen – teen to tell them about it can be a very difficult challenge.
Very true.
Well, you have two choices: put the kid in a foster home or let the teacher do their thing. Which do you favor?
In the UK, the government is planning to make conversion therapy illegal, but there are concerns that the law is loosely worded and would prevent parents and/or therapists etc. from trying to get children who think they want to transition to take things slowly and consider alternative explanations for their feelings. It was discussed on this afternoon’s Radio 4 PM programme. (The brief discussion starts about 24:15 minutes in.) https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0013r1j
6th grade? 7th grade?? I didn’t now which way was up, except I had a vague feeling that I wanted to kiss Wendy Martel. The idea that anyone outside the family should be advising on matters of sexuality, outside of basic sex ed for all, is ridiculous.
Some people think they know more about a topic than experts in a field. Having some knowledge but lacking ALL that is so far known, they come to a conclusion that experts do not. They then conclude that the reason experts are not doing this or that must be because the experts are under the influence of money and/or politics to not do it. A person then decides that they will be brave enough to not fear political repercussions or monetary and instead just “do what is right”.
That they might not know enough to realize what the right or best thing to do is does not occur to them – it feels so good to believe that they are doing good when few else are “brave” enough to do so. It is the situation with these two and also that of many other people on many other topics – they think they are fully informed saviors.
True, though “experts in the field” of gender studies and gender clinics are almost all likely to be fully invested in the belief that gender is a fundamental aspect of personhood, knowable only to the individual, correctly discerned by children, and usually requires physical transitioning in order to bring a child’s outer self in congruence with their inner self. In other words, the teachers here weren’t going rogue. They were following mainstream practice, available in books and articles. They may even have attended educational seminars on the topic.
One thing to keep in mind is that they never see themselves as “coaching” or guiding what comes “unprompted” from the child. It was the same for the Satanic Panic or other socially-constructed mental conditions. They ask questions after hearing something. They never lead — the child was either spontaneously forthcoming, or clearly nervous about admitting something big. That’s how they remember it.
And, if the child has been introduced to “age-appropriate” literature on how “some kids are trans and that’s great,” the teachers may remember correctly. The more a susceptible person thinks “could I be trans?” the more certain the feeling becomes. Once you know you’re trans, your problems have both an explanation, and a seemingly-easy solution.
The other thing to keep in mind is how regressively sexist this all is.
“…but also violated privacy rights by setting up this meeting.”
Now, I agree that it sounds like the teachers may have coerced the child into considering transition. But that is a separate determination from extending the privacy involved to include the parent.
II am not a lawyer, but I do deal with US Privacy Act, HIPAA, and GDPR related to digital information.
The child had made an affirmative statement to notify the parent. The evidence: “She had told teachers she wanted to notify her mom, but didn’t know they set the meeting up that day.”
In my profession, I force everyone I work with to keep artifacts of any customer agreeing to extend privacy protections to another person. Just in case I don’t have access to exculpatory statements like ‘she wanted to notify her mom’. But here, the plaintiffs volunteered that exculpatory evidence.
Setting it up earlier than the child understood is simply a misunderstanding. Bad as such a timing mistake may be, it doesn’t mean privacy rights were legally violated. Barring additional evidence of course: such as statements like “I want to tell my mom myself”, “let’s tell her on Jan 31”.
The child owns the privacy rights and can choose to allow the teachers to include another specific person in the knowledge. There is no possibility in this case that the parent must choose rather than the child. The privacy rights were extended by the one person who could do so.
Note that a legal finding that the teachers coerced the child to consider transition is legally separate from a legal finding the child was coerced into that specific affirmative statement.
Thus it likely is not a violation. But I will defer to any Legal opinion on the subject.
I’m extremely skeptical of the claim by the ACLU, that the AP cites in its article, that students have privacy rights *that the school can enforce against the parents*, especially as to matters of sexuality and gender identity; for example, it doesn’t violate HIPAA for a school to tell a child’s parents if their kid falls and breaks their arm at school. And it wouldn’t violate any federal law, for example, if the school told a parent that they caught the kid having sex in the bathroom, whether that was with an opposite-sex partner or a same-sex partner. The article references “federal and state law”, but then fails to state what those laws are. This sounds like a novel, untested interpretation of currently existing student privacy rights (think FERPA; do you ever recall consenting to let the school tell your parents how you were doing on parent-teach conference day?) that the ACLU, working in tandem with teacher’s unions, is pushing forward, but that no court has yet accepted. Kids probably do have some privacy rights as to conversations with guidance counselors, though that’s very different than kids talking with their teachers about being gay or transgender.
Maybe there are in fact some state or local laws allowing schools to shield a child’s recognition that he or she is gay from the parents if the child tells a teacher, counselor, or guidance counselor that their parents finding out would put them at risk of violence, but that would have been a highly controversial law that we surely would have heard of and would not have passed quietly. Generally, since children can’t legally consent, they don’t hold privacy rights in the same way that adults do, and unless there’s an extremely compelling reason with solid evidence (like suspicion of child abuse when a parent takes a child to a doctor), a third party can’t withhold info about the child from a parent under the child’s privacy rights.
Indeed, my area of expertise does not include detailed knowledge of child privacy laws. I did mention my privacy experience which is privacy laws that primarily apply to adults. Child privacy laws vary from state to state.
Since you brought up sex in the bathroom, I did find a document about the requirements from Wisconsin. “State statutes regarding the mandatory reporting of sexually active adolescents are complex with different directives that depend on the nature of the sexual contact, age of the adolescent, and access to health care services.”
Two quick points,1) If there is reason to believe it was involuntary, you must report to CPS or LEO. 2) If it was voluntary, then it gets into ages. Both 16-17 years old, no reporting required. One of them under 16, you must report to CPS or LEO. There is a section for Parental Notification which states: “When making a mandatory report for suspected child abuse, school officials routinely do not notify the parents or caregivers of the referral. Parental notification as part of the investigation
becomes the responsibility of the investigating CPS agency. Clearly, when the parents or
caregivers are possibly the perpetrators, this is necessary in order to avoid interfering with the
investigation. However, in situations involving peer-involved, sexually active students, the
parents or caregivers are not suspect. Schools and county CPS and law enforcement agencies may meet and proactively discuss guidelines for determining how, when, and if parents or caregivers are to be notified in a timely manner about their children being sexually active”
I won’t add links, but search for Reporting Requirements for Sexually Active Adolescents.
But I thought in the US that parents often deny their offspring medical procedures due to misguided religious beliefs?
‘The Times passed, explaining it was “outside our coverage priorities right now.”’
“Outside” as of one second after the issue was raised with the Times.
The Times seems to have no problem with consistently publishing Jennifer Finney Boylan.
Perhaps the Times’s Thursday and Sunday “Styles” section is one good place to go to ascertain its weighty, thoughtful “coverage priorities.”
Of course I am going to chime in on this one, but will try not to repeat my previous posts too much.
It is stalking and grooming behavior, and it is not limited to places like California. Much coverage of this is written to imply that kids with gender identity issues are receiving nonjudgmental advice from caring teachers and counselors, who just want the best for the kids, and that they only keep the info from parents to prevent abuse.
That is not at all a realistic appraisal of the situation. M. Levin above rightly compares it to the satanic panic. In our case, kids who have normal teenage issues unrelated to gender identity are convinced that the root of the problem is gender confusion, just like the satanic panic people tended to push kids towards “recovered memories” and similar BS. At the most basic level, kids are selected for grooming not because they have gender issues, but because they are judged to be susceptible to indoctrination. Of course, these kids are at the age where they are at their most vulnerable to such techniques.
Every stage of the indoctrination parallels methods used by cults, or the recruitment of child soldiers. Foremost is the need to isolate the kids from their parents or anyone else who might intervene. They cannot isolate them physically from their families, do they do it psychologically. An example is the idea of “deadnaming” or “misgendering”. The kids are taught that a parent or anyone else who does not fully accept the new identity is literally engaging in a hate crime, in erasing the child’s chosen identity. This puts the parent, and everyone else, in the position of either joining in the affirmation or risking being shunned by the kid.
If we give the school staff a huge benefit of the doubt, we can accept the claim that they are doing this because they believe it is in the child’s best interest. You could probably say the same when a child is injured in a botched exorcism.
But the kids are harmed. Every one I have encountered is depressed. Most have contemplated suicide. If the statistics are correct, about half will actually attempt suicide at some point. Statistics are not readily available to determine how many succeed in ending their lives.
Most will take hormones, which have emotional effects as well as physical. Often, the kids are groomed during puberty, and convinced that their normal puberty-related body issues are a sign of gender confusion. Without the hormones, puberty is a stage that one passes through fairly quickly. The hormones either cause the kid to suffer through similar effects again, or perpetually. The result is kids taking a bunch of meds, many of which are taken to deal with the side effects of drugs already being taken. They are taught that the depression is rooted in their parents not accepting their transition.
Additionally, they are oversexualized in ways not appropriate for their age. This leads to high incidence of STDs, and of course compounds the depression.
The real and most serious issue is that they are never going to be satisfied with their transition. I mentioned in a previous post that many of them hold unrealistic beliefs about what medical intervention can achieve. Even if perfect and permanent medical transitions were possible, it would not be enough. The do not want to live as a member of the opposite sex, they want to live how they imagine life is like for an idealized version of the opposite sex. That is just not anyone’s reality.
The risks of long term hormone use are high enough that, as an example, a woman post hysterectomy in her 60s might be cautioned about the significant risks of cancer or cardiac side effects from common estrogen replacement therapies, but prescribing them to 15 year olds is not seen as a problem. Affirmation trumps all else.
Yes, some tiny minority of trans kids actually suffer some kind of sexual disorder, or experienced some form of abuse at home or elsewhere. Those are not the kids I am talking about.
I suspect the people responsible for this whole situation must not understand the risk they take when they choose to do serious and permanent harm to people’s kids.
I’m always grateful that you share your perspective on this. Not repetitive at all.
Thank you.
Thank you. I worry about length, of course, and I don’t want to repeat the exact same points on every trans topic.
Also, it is nice to discuss this topic with rational people who are not driven by ideology.
I can elaborate a bit on what this is like as a parent. Foremost, by the time we started to pick up on the idea that something was amiss, it was probably too late to change the child’s mind through rational discussion. Part of the grooming is to try to keep the parents uninformed for as long as possible.
My strategy has been to continue to offer my kid unconditional love and support, but to absolutely not participate in “affirmation”. That means, for me, I am not going to pretend to believe things that I know are not true. but I am also pretty unlikely to bring up this particular subject. We get along pretty well, as we have always had a lot of shared interests.
But it really seems morally wrong to use new preferred pronouns and such. I told my family that I would not do that, because I did not want to be complicit in what I believe is a delusion, and likely a destructive one.
In a more reasonable world, there would be objective and caring mental health professionals working on the best ways to sort these issues out, to the advantage of everyone involved. This is not that world. The people grooming the kids only know them for a short time, and don’t see the family or personal destruction they initiated. They are organized well enough that when we or the child expresses doubts or concerns, they refer us to professionals and groups that offer only affirmation. The parents might be relieved, thinking that the therapist or support group is going to help, but they just affirm, and serve to further isolate the kid from the people who care about them. Every such parent I know is just doing the best they can, mostly on their own.
You might think that nobody is going to supply your underage kids with hormone therapy, but you would be mistaken. One might also presume that you would be consulted before they are given antidepressants. That would also be wrong.
It might be that the first you hear about all the meds is when go horribly out of balance, and you learn that your kid is at the hospital on a psych hold, to protect them from self harm.
A last observation- I never cared about any of this until I was compelled to be involved. I will generally address people in whatever way they choose, and consider other people’s lives as none of my business. If I thought there was even a slight chance that my kid could find peace and happiness in the trans lifestyle, I would be all for it.
This is starting to sound more and more like ‘Repressed Memory Therapy’ where kids were helped to ‘remember’ all the times they had been ‘raped’. None of which actually happened of course, but the therapists cleaned up on the insurance.
I don’t think it would be going out on too much of a limb to say that this whole subject is imperfectly understood, and anyone, particularly a medical professional, who is in favour of giving irreversible treatment to someone who has yet to go through puberty is in favour of medical experimentation on children.
Tricky – brain not fully developed, there is a broad transition of feelings in how we regard our own sexualities & proclivities, so how to distinguish between the uncertainties of youth & the realities of some genuine cases? I say if they – the children – decide to transition gender, having had all the appropriate advice, then let them, provided it is not paid for by any state health care. To my mind it is a luxury to be able to change gender. But I suppose most will not agree.
You will get ferocious push back on the ‘paid for’ element; activists want it completely covered by governments, or by insurance companies forced by government.
They want that for ‘standing’ reasons; an official imprimatur from the orthodoxy that this is their right.