UK High Court finally acts to block unsupervised use puberty blockers on children

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I wonder if you also think parents should be able to deny their child say, cancer treatment, or if you're just being a raging transphobe.

See previous comment. Cancer treatment is different.
 
I wonder if you also think parents should be able to deny their child say, cancer treatment, or if you're just being a raging transphobe.
I don't think this is a sound analogy.

Cancer can be diagnosed in a pretty objective way, and the treatments are well-established. We can talk about "denying cancer treatment" because we can confidently state that the patient has cancer, and how that cancer can be treated.

This isn't true of gender dysphoria. Diagnosing it is difficult and unreliable, and we do not have well-established process for treating it. This is all new and contested ground; you could ask five psychiatrists and get six opinions. We can't readily talk about "denying gender dysphoria treatment" because every word of that sentence implies a host of further questions, so it's unhelpful to draw analogies to what would be a straightforward example of parental negligence.
 
I don't think this is a sound analogy.

Cancer can be diagnosed in a pretty objective way, and the treatments are well-established. We can talk about "denying cancer treatment" because we can confidently state that the patient has cancer, and how that cancer can be treated.

This isn't true of gender dysphoria. Diagnosing it is difficult and unreliable, and we do not have well-established process for treating it. This is all new and contested ground; you could ask five psychiatrists and get six opinions. This means that we can't readily talk about "denying gender dysphoria treatment" because every word of that sentence implies a host of further questions, so it's unhelpful to draw analogies to what would be a straightforward example of parental negligence.

It's all well and good you saying this but what is your solution for transpeople?

To just wait and hope the dysphoria, which often comes in waves and increasing over time, subsides?
 
@Traitorfish To use a crass analogy, this is like saying that we need to be sure that immunisations don’t cause autism before we inject them into children. While completely divorced of all context this statement is innocuous, when thrust into the context of the anti-vaxxer movement it is just terrible. It is the same here. There is no epidemic of children being fast-tracked to puberty blockers then HRT and surgery. From what I’ve read around 1,000-2,000 children get referred to the Travistock clinic for gender related issues and only 10% of them end up on puberty blockers. The fact that this court case (to my understanding) was not a massive class action lawsuit, that the lawyers funded by the anti-trans lobby could only find one detransitioner and one disgruntled parent argue their case for them speaks volumes. This was a non-issue exaggerated by the anti-trans lobby and the judges fell for it because they aren’t doctors, aren’t trans, don’t understand the issue and as Arwon put it - TERF island gonna TERF.
 
Are you for real? Suicide can mean death!

True but here if you're not going to get far arguing that.

As I said there's waits for all types of medicine threatening suicide doesn't speed that up otherwise everyone would do it.

Not sure how the case went down sounds stupid but to me it's fundamentally about consent and parents have the right to refuse. The state can intervene in some cases but then you would have to make the arguement that any parent saying no to puberty blockers should have their kid removed from them.
 
I love when the 'we need numbers' crew ignores the only person bringing numbers to the table.

I am also intrigued when El_Mac says we don't have data on puberty blocker long-term effects on people who don't go on to HRT. What happened to the precocious puberty cis kids?

Why is nobody advocating court approval for them but they are for trans kids?

If this is not blatant hypocrisy, tell me what is.
 
I don't recall your asking for numbers, just pretending that there isn't already a bureaucratic procedure to get through for this, and that parents should be able to invalidate it at any step.

As Evie pointed out with recourse to law, parents do not have rights over their children, they have duties. They should not and cannot choose against their children's well-being, wishes, and interest.

My analogy with cancer is not meant to be medical, it's meant to represent what your twisted premises entail.
 
True but here if you're not going to get fair arguing that.

As I said there's waits for all types of medicine threatening suicide doesn't speed that up otherwise everyone would do it.

There is so much wrong with this post I am unsure how to phrase it in a way you could understand. Zardnaar, I strongly suggest you educate yourself on the most basic issues surrounding LGBT people and healthcare before you participate in a thread like this. If I’m being generous your posts reflect an extreme lack of knowledge in these subjects.
 
Not sure how the case went down sounds stupid but to me it's fundamentally about consent and parents have the right to refuse. The state can intervene in some cases but then you would have to make the arguement that any parent saying no to puberty blockers should have their kid removed from them.

Missed this edited-in section. Nobody is making these arguments. This is a strawman. The court case was about if the kids can consent to the treatment in the first place (even with parental and doctor’s consent) and I believe that the court is applying a unfair double standard due to bigotry.
 
True but here if you're not going to get far arguing that.

As I said there's waits for all types of medicine threatening suicide doesn't speed that up otherwise everyone would do it.

And as I already pointed out, that's a twisted fabrication you keep invoking withyour hands solidy planted in your ears. People do NOT kill themselves as a threat to get medication. They die from suicide as a result of an untreated condition (as people with depression often do). But then between shifting goalposts ("no court anywhere" -> "I meant only in the OP country" -> "I don't care about the OP case, just parental rights"), extreme stawmaning such as this, and so forth, you don't really fool anyone anymore about what you're doing.

Not sure how the case went down sounds stupid but to me it's fundamentally about consent and parents have the right to refuse. The state can intervene in some cases but then you would have to make the arguement that any parent saying no to puberty blockers should have their kid removed from them.

Fortunately for those of us who don't deal in nonsense, and for children everywhere, even lawmakers are generally capable of imagining at least some nuances, not just a nonsensical binary where either parental authority must be absolute or abolished.

it is strange someone with the imagination for the strawman you keep making up above would not be able to imagine more than two possible state for parental authoriy.
 
I am also intrigued when El_Mac says we don't have data on puberty blocker long-term effects on people who don't go on to HRT.

I didn't say we don't have the data, I'm saying the people who are in this discussion need to have a matrix of what end conditions they would find acceptable or unacceptable. And not just the people in this thread, literally anybody involved in the discussion. Everybody has a bias, and in discussions like this, being able to voice your intuitions is vital

And then they can compare those intuitions to real data. Until you know what do you think you want to see, you won't know whether the real numbers horrify or placate your concerns
 
@Traitorfish To use a crass analogy, this is like saying that we need to be sure that immunisations don’t cause autism before we inject them into children.
No, it isn't.

What I'm highlighting is a genuine epistemic issue, whether or not children "know" that they are transgender. This has been asserted on the basis that the majority of transgender adults report that they "knew" they were trans in childhood. But this not a straightforwardly accurate claim, because what we are actually describing is that adult trans people have retroactively interpreted their childhood or adolescent experience as knowledge of being trans. Very trans people can honestly claim an explicit awareness of being trans as children, of having through "I am a trans person"; what they are describing is a sense of longing or of identification with another sex or gender, experiences which they have later identified with being trans; the "knowledge" is presented as intuitive rather than as intellectual. This isn't invalid on an emotional level, but it's unreliable as a factual account: adults are notoriously quite bad at providing accurate accounts of their childhood, because the way we habitually organise childhood memories is to make sense of our current identity. We construct narratives that lead to where we are now, and we can reasonably expect that people who have struggled to achieve a secure sense of identity would be more likely to organise their memories into such a narrative.

Further, we are working from a biased sample: people who transitioned as adolescent or adults, and so for whom childhood "knowledge" of being trans was later validated. Even if we disregard everything I've written above, we are still failing to account for people who exhibit dysphoria and/or gender non-conforming behaviour in childhood or adolescence, but do not transition as adults. The experiences or behaviours which are cited as demonstrating childhood knowledge of being trans do not universally correspond to later transition as an adult. It stretches credibility that children who later transition would almost universally possesses knowledge that they are trans as children, but that other children with very similar experiences who do not transition would not possess this knowledge; this would either require us to attribute to children and adolescents some uncanny predictive power which is inaccessible to adults, or it would require us to discover some additional facet or layer of a trans identity which is obvious to children and adolescents but has so far escaped the view of adult researches, both cis and trans.

This strongly suggests that the experiences that adult trans people report as "knowledge" of being trans are rendered as such in retrospective knowledge that they would eventually transition; had they not transitioned, the same experiences would be interpreted differently. I am wholly sympathetic to the idea that later transition helps make sense of childhood or adolescent experiences, but I'm sceptical that this is something which is straightforwardly discovered about those experiences, let alone something which was known at the time. In some cases, it may be true, but self-reporting years or decades after the fact isn't reliable proof of that.

The takeaway from all this is that children probably do not know that they are trans, and that we do not know which children who exhibit emotions or behaviours which are consistent with the reported childhood experiences of adults who will transition will turn out to be trans and which will not. If we cannot, then, reliably predict which children or adolescents exhibiting these behaviours will permanently transition as adults, we cannot reliably identify which of them it may appropriate to facilitate or encourage to pursue transition as children or adolescents. Caution is merited, and caution should increase with the risks of medical intervention; "risks", here, not describing some mysterious second ailment, but the straightforward implications of interrupting somebody's hormonal development, and which increase if the use of puberty blockers is assumed to represent the first step in a more comprehensive set of medical interventions, as some posters here, and certainly a lot of commentators elsewhere, seem to strongly assume.

I hope the above shows I've given this enough consideration that comparisons to anti-vax conspiracy theorists is, at least, uncharitable.
 
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What a long winded post to say that you know better about people's bodies than they do.
 
What a long winded post to say that you know better about people's bodies than they do.

What a disingenuous statement...
Traitorfish said no such thing at all. In fact, he made it abundantly clear that the current state of scientific research on the matter has not been able to come to any sort of understanding on how everything plays out. And that's a fact. There is no clear cut understanding on the matter. Mostly because it is a matter that was not actively researched for a long time due to the stigma associated with trans-people, and also because decrypting human psychology and/or it's connection to the body is far more complex than looking at how some cells in the body are mutating.

Basically, traitorfish has given a rational and logical argument, and you are just attacking him based on emotions instead of facts. This topic is way too important to try and make decisions based on emotions. You need a concise knowledge of the personal development of a human being to understand what is going on and how you can best help a person. Then, and only then, can you give people the help they need.

People really should know better than posting black & white nonsense like that. Being in favour of making sure that medical stuff dealing with such an issue know exactly what they are doing is in no way, shape or form "anti-trans". Nor is it telling other people that you know better about their bodies than they do.

These sort of attacks are doing a disservice to the whole debate.
 
Being in favour of making sure that medical stuff dealing with such an issue know exactly what they are doing is in no way, shape or form "anti-trans".
It can be, easily so, because 'making sure' is a dial that's affected by both actual underlying concern AND transphobia. Medicine is always a best-efforts real-time process. Someone can have a concern, and want more study before a treatment is recommended. But someone can actually resent the intervention and disguise it as 'wanting more study'.

We don't have basically any diseases that we 'best know how to help'. All we have are data so far. Sometimes a treatment even gets locked into Best Practice, and it turns out to be a horribly sub-optimal treatment that then causes harm longer than it needs to. The best we can do is have an idea of an acceptable spread of outcomes given the different decisions. And, transphobia will express itself in that spread of 'acceptableness' that they describe. This is balanced with the fact that the only way to improve the treatments is to experiment, and sometimes in medicine "experimenting" is done with retroactive analysis of different ideas.

Failing to intervene is the same as choosing an outcome, even if we don't morally weight them the same.

These sort of attacks are doing a disservice to the whole debate.
I agree with this. I think TraitorFish worked very hard to express a coherent position, and pointing out where some of the failures in measuring could occur. The main contention I would have with it is a reminder that failing to intervene is the same as choosing an outcome. We don't psychologically weight the concept of 'intervention' equally, you can see this with the divide people express when it comes to something as simple as the Trolley Problem.
 
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