We Need to Change the Terms of the Debate on Trans Kids | The New Yorker

Transing a teenager is a "mistake" the way letting a teenager get a tattoo is a "mistake," except that tattoos can be undone. You can't get your reproductive system back.

As someone who was a mother to a teen daughter who said she was trans and demanded that I provide her with hormones and surgery (and, of course, a new name and pronouns), allow me to explain that if my kid had shown any REAL independence, I would have taken out a billboard in Times Square to celebrate. Aside from demanding that other people follow her precise and ever-changing rules, she was basically sunk into her own anxiety and wouldn't do anything which required her to expend any energy. Her life wound up being her, at home all the time, sitting on a couch or in bed, playing games on her phone most of the day (while her friends were in school) and then Facetiming and locking her sisters out of their shared bedroom in the evenings.

The problem in my daughter's life was that she was a mentally ill girl, not a boy in a girl's body. She needed therapy, not being told lies and having her health damaged.

The job of a parent is to make sure that your children don't make any stupid, life-altering mistakes before they are autonomous adults. For example, there is nothing wrong with pregnancy, a lot women find fulfillment in it, and most never regret it. But if my 16 year-old daughter walked up to me one day and said, "Mom, I want to have a baby," I would tell her to wait, to graduate high school, to find a job, to find a mate, to think things through before making a decision that will change the trajectory of her life. I would also probably take it as a cue that maybe she wasn't getting enough love from me or the people around her, and was looking for it in other ways. But what I wouldn't do is hop into the car and drive her down to the fertility clinic to get inseminated. That would be wildly irresponsible and potentially damaging and CYS would probably get involved.

So why is this the expected reaction for parents whose children say they might be trans?

“Women and children are always mentioned in the same breath,” the visionary feminist activist Shulamith Firestone observed in the book “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution,” from 1970. “I submit . . . that the nature of this bond is no more than shared oppression. And that moreover this oppression is intertwined and mutually reinforcing in such complex ways that we will be unable to speak of the liberation of women without also discussing the liberation of children, and vice versa.” Firestone noted that women and children were inextricably linked not only by the women’s duty of childbearing and child rearing but by the obligation, for both groups, to maintain innocence, fragility, immaturity, and dependence on others. She saw the path to liberation in divorcing the reproductive function from women’s biology, and in abolishing childhood. One might argue that young people who seek trans care are pursuing both of these projects, and that is why they inspire such panicked opposition.

What the what? There's so much I'd want to say about that but I'm too angry and too tired. Plus it's almost too ridiculous to bother.

I was quite annoyed by the whole article... ending with an argument that, sure, some children will make mistakes but we should let children make mistakes. Yes... mistakes like not studying for a test and getting a bad grade for it, eating too much candy and getting a stomach ache, etc. Not mistakes that will reverberate through their life, mistakes that they will be unable to comprehend the lesson of until their brains are more mature. I'm not a fan of slippery slopes, but it felt like this woman was sentences away from arguing child consent for sexual abuse, etc.

EDIT: I will say, the one positive is that this is at least being talked about now. I'm glad there was some sort of coverage of Keira Bell. Also, I notice the phrase: "we need to change the terms of the debate" - yeah, because you're starting to lose the debate! So now you're saying it's no longer about what's best for the kids, but that kids should be able to have the freedom to do what's not best for themselves. Ugh.

Archive link: https://archive.is/sTSNx

FFS. Some choice quotes:

• when children act with particular independence

• Rowling, Shirer[sic], and other opponents of pediatric trans care

• Bell later transitioned back to being female.

... ¬_¬ ...

• [Shulamith Firestone] saw the path to liberation in divorcing the reproductive function from women’s biology, and in abolishing childhood. One might argue that young people who seek trans care are pursuing both of these projects, and that is why they inspire such panicked opposition.

• People—including young people, acting legally, with their parents’ support—choose to[...]make what often amounts to commitments to lifelong medical intervention with S.S.R.I.s for depression or stimulants for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [...] None of these decisions is just like the decision to transition. But are they really so much lighter, so much less consequential

(?!! OF COURSE they are! And people don't make a lifelong commitment to SSRIs, what are you talking about?)

• In her 1970 book, Firestone discussed the arbitrary historical boundaries of childhood.

(big difference between 'culturally constructed' or 'imperfect but pragmatic' and 'arbitrary'...)

• I began my own transition at fifty, long after experiencing the misery of pregnancy and the incomparable joy of breastfeeding. I have no regrets.

Right so your lack of regrets is completely irrelevant to the matter at hand, then.

• Had I had the option of transitioning as a teen-ager, I would have chosen to do so—and I am almost certain that I would have had no regrets then, either, because I would have had a different life.

That's very easy to say when you haven't lived that different life.

• To be able to talk about a range of transition options, at different times in life, we would need to change the terms of the debate. We would need to view both age and gender on a continuum, not as binary states.

I don't fucking believe it I literally wrote a story taking the piss out of this line of argument this week so that people could see how dangerous it was.

• None of us has ever been as innocent and ignorant as the children of our imagination, and none of us will ever be as wise and competent as the adults we make ourselves out to be.

Speak for yourself, and stop trying to tell other people what they imagine.

• What if we accepted that some losses are desirable and some are regrettable, and that we can’t always know the difference?

Is the loss of one's reproductive organs due to being conned regrettable, or desirable? We just don't know!

• What if we knew that we are always changing not only as individuals but as societies, and the categories we use to sort ourselves mutate faster than we realize?

I think everyone's aware that societies change, and that nonetheless we have laws about what children can consent to for some very good reasons.

New bloody Yorker. They are pushing this shit so hard

So your dog’s gender is irrelevant, there are many more interesting things about a being yadda yadda.

And then you spend the rest of the article using woqueisms (“assigned at birth”) and telling us how important it is that kids be able to “trans” to the other gender.

Fuck off, author, and fuck off, New Yorker, for presenting ideology as fact, using language that attempts to normalize the abhorrent and insulting people’s intelligence.

As heartbreaking as that admission is, all available data indicate that such regrets are exceedingly rare.

You mean don't collect data and then claim it's rare? Tavistock's data suddenly appeared after the trial, but the available info didn't seem to be in its favor.

Bills that would ban trans care for young people have already been prefiled for this year’s legislative sessions in Alabama, Texas, and Missouri; last year, a similar bill was defeated in South Dakota, thanks to opposition from the pharmaceutical industry.

Little nugget tucked into the article without comment. The bill was defeated not because of the opposition of health care professionals, but because of the opposition of the pharmaceutical industry.

The reason people ask the dog's sex is because it often does matter. You know, like if your dogs have intact reproductive systems and you need to know if a litter of puppies is on the horizon. Or because different dogs respond differently to other differently sexed dogs. Or if dogs have different behavior by sex. Like:

Will your dog lift its leg to piss on my fence or will your dog squat in the dirt part of the sidewalk and leave a rivulet of pee that might end up on one of our shoes if we don't move.

I personally usually ask the sex question first only if I haven't already sexed the dog on my own, and then only so the name will make more sense when I ask it. Dog names are often weird enough as it is without sex clues for their origin.

"Had I had the option of transitioning as a teen-ager, I would have chosen to do so—and I am almost certain that I would have had no regrets then, either, because I would have had a different life."

I teach high school English. If one of my students wrote this in an essay, I would have them revisit it because it is totally illogical. Perhaps the author can't see this clearly because, I don't know, SHE HAS A PERSONAL STAKE IN THE OUTCOME?