sophie
Break My Heart
It does inasmuch as both concern bodily autonomy.
Pressed. The crux of the “issue” is whether we are to be treated as women, or whether it’s alright to treat us as quasi-women (read: men) in certain circumstances. To concede that there are some circumstances where cis people should be allowed to treat us as quasi-women reframes the question around when society is required to treat us fully as women, entitled to the same rights as every other woman, and when society is allowed to treat us as lesser. Speaking for myself, it is deeply insulting that cis people feel perfectly entitled to have these sorts of "debates," and that so many of even the "well-meaning" ones treat it as some periphery issue; an indignity that they can conceded our behalf so they can appear reasonable and well-balanced to their transphobic friends.
Gonna combine these two together. Yes you are right. Much of the objections to our participation in sport start from explicitly malicious in nature, by people who don't actually care for women's sports at all, and see in a particular news item an opportunity to introduce a wedge to chip away at our rights and our fair treatment.
I will point out as well though that this "debate" and its terms are not just transphobic, but also sexist. To accept the framework of the position that trans women are men and so should be excluded from women's sports also necessitates conceding a lot of the undergirding positions the argument is built on, namely that: a) men and women are ontologically different creatures whose divergence is at all times and in all respects objectively determinable, b) this objectively determinable divergence always trends in the direction that men are superior to women in all respects; c) that the men's division will always be favored because of this superior performance, and that it is natural and just that men's divisions will always be afforded more attention, more prestige, and more resources than non-men's divisions; d) that women's sports represent a consolation division, one to which none would rightly aspire, but for the fact that its lesser status renders it easier to win; that its sole reason for existence is because men are intrinsically superior, that it represents a hedge to keep men out, rather than a room to bring women together; and that for someone to positively aspire to a woman's division, but must have been done for some ulterior motive (typically having to do either with the aforementioned assumed inherent male dominance or to do with sexualization of women and their spaces).
As with so many of these things, trans women become the canary in the coal mine on women's issues because of the unique intersection we stand upon within patriarchy, but make no mistake, those roads are manifestations of patriarchal oppression of women, and so any attack on us as women necessarily entails a reinforcement of patriarchal norms which oppress all women.
They appear to be. As Syn noted, puberty blockers first began to be used in the 80s, and in the time they've been used, we haven't found significant side effects that weren't manageable through some combination of diet, exercise, and supplements. As I mentioned in the earlier post, the safest course would be to get trans kids on cross-sex hormones at puberty onset. That way they will be able to experience their adolescent development with their peers while minimizing many of the more irreversible effects of a puberty that may be enormously aggravating to the trans kid. The hormones that we take - estradiol and testosterone are bioidentical, meaning that rather than replicating the effects of the hormone through a different structure, these are literally the same hormones that are produced in the body during the course of typical puberty.
By asking the child if they want to experiment with a new name and pronouns. By using that name and those pronouns when they decide them. By asking their peers, their teachers, their babysitters, their neighbors, etc. to also use that name and those pronouns when speaking to about the child. By engaging the child in play and socialization that are typical of the gender identity that they claim. By taking the child to buy (and subsequently encouraging them to wear) clothing that they choose, and which is affirming to their claimed gender. And so on.
There's no way to be 100% sure, in the same way that there is no way for you to be 100% sure that you are the gender you say you are. But this also works in reverse: I believed quite strongly that I was a man for the first 24 or 25 years of my life...until I realized that I wasn't. Really all you can do (for anybody!) is go by what they say until they say otherwise. And for parents and pediatricians, observe the child as they say otherwise and see if they tend to say the same things consistently, persistently, and insistently. And for what it's worth, we have some 30+ years of research on youth transition at this point, and what we have tended to find is that kids (and adults!) who say they are trans tend to be very serious when they say that. The incidence of desistence (a child saying they are trans and later saying they are cis) is very rare. Less than 2%.
The easiest way to think about this is to ask the same question in reverse: how do you know a child is truly cis? How do you know they won't at some point come out and say that they are actually trans, that being cis was just going through a phase or acting up? How would you approach raising or treating a (presumed) cis child in this respect? Would you treat their cis-ness as a phase? Would you refrain from letting them go through their cis puberty out of a fear that at some point they may regret having gone through it? Or do you rather assume that the child knows their gender? That when a cis boy tells you he's a boy, that represents a fundamental truth about his being that he truly *knows*? Why should the trans boy be treated any differently in this respect than the cis boy?
What would have described is simply the inverse of what trans people already experience. When a child presents as trans, and the cis parents refuse to allow that child to take puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones that child will undergo the physical, emotional, and social changes of a cis puberty. For trans people, experiencing these changes is extremely harmful. And many of them, like changes to ribcage and hip structure, height, or facial structure are irreversible, or else reversible at great expense and risk in the case of facial structure or breast tissue.
Should parents be held accountable for this harmful and irreversible harm that they have allowed to happen by knowing their child said they were trans and either not believing them or refusing to accept that?
