Reactionary Radical Eliminationists vs. Trans

Mods, please change Uncle Albert's name to Wrong PoopyHead?

Ok then. You sure sound like you're saying you don't see children having surgery as all that big a deal, when in reality it is. So that's what I'll take out of this

If you are worried about teenagers getting boob jobs, it is not a fucking problem. If you allow for hormone blockers and natural HRT when the body is going through puberty to keep it within the gender the child is supposed to be the breasts will either not develop in trans men, or will develop in trans women.

The SRS that is in the argument is bottom surgery if you do not force trans kids to go through puberty of the wrong gender because of you being triggered.

I am not a doctor, but I would say top surgery should wait until breast development has ended. It just seems premature to start removing or adding material before natural development stops. However, you are also not talking about radical removal of essential body cells. This is fatty tissue. Your body actually removes and adds it naturally. From what I have seen this sort of removal or addition is just below the surface and it is not major surgery at all.

HOW are you so BAD at this after all these years of practice?

I'm saying that anyone who is suddenly interested in the topic of minors getting elective cosmetic when they realize trans kids - a tiny few - are having top surgery for gender affirmation and never gave the topic any thought before....ought to have their motivations examined.

And if they go beyond that and want to ban those procedures ONLY for trans kids while cis kids continue, we can safely conclude that THEIR motivation is bigotry.

Trans people and allies: "They are not actually castrating any minors. Also, "castration" is an idiots word for GRS."

UA: "But they would if they could!" (oh fuck, my dick shriveled again!)

Us: "so you want us to defend behavior which you theorize might be happening in the future so that you can bitch about it now? Does the word goalposts mean anything to you?"

Pot supposedly stunts your development.
We know it makes you paranoid.
And then there's the lead paint theory.

Asbestos powder sprinkled in joints, enhanced with lead for flavor and weight, dipped in mercury?

I am going for an old school lobotomy done with a lead tool dipped in mercury.

Here is a problem where gaslighting gets trans supporters into trouble while the right does a good job in pretending they are worried for kids. I know from personal experience that many trans kids are not confused at all and know exactly what gender they are. But there has to be a middle area or children who might make mistakes. There is also a reality that kids do not understand that helping trans kids is often spalshing them with positivity and attention because of the negative influences, which may cause a child to go along with those ideas if accidentally and wrongly stumbled upon.

When I first came out at anime conventions there was a huge positive love thrown at me for what I was doing. I was old enough to understand what it was, but a younger person who was cis but open to crossplay might have confused the happiness of being positively recognized as a happiness for being trans. This is an area where certain professionals and allies can make a mistake and encourage a cisgender person down the wrong path.

In other places, in the past, I have expressed concern thast the positive view of being male in society could confuse cis women into thinking they were trans men because the environment makes an emotional imbalance where some cis women may think that the pains they feel from societal abuse are gender dysphoria. I had to back way off of it as I realized I have only a concern for a person experiencing the pain of being the wrong gender, and little idea of how gender dysphoria would feel from the direction of female to male.

I think there is a legitimate concern of how to not cause harm for a specific person who may not be as sure as I and many others were, or for people who have other troubles like sexual abuses which do effect their own perspective of their gender. The reality is that the psychological world is just coming out of the dark ages where they felt this was some sort of sexual perversion, and we do not have generations of good information on how to handle this.

That is not to say we hide from it and say we can never do anything to affirm it because that would mean we could never find the right balance because we would always have to deny it. Clearly there is overwhelming success in the positive with affirming care, but that does not mean everyone needs it. The other reality is that if the environment was more forgiving and accepting towards people who do not fit the majority gender constructs, then any mistakes will have far less impact on social acceptance.

This idea that the republican right cares about children who express differences with gender norms is a fucking lie. The republicans are happy to abuse those people and wish they could kill them or make them harm themselves. Trans therapy should be less about jumping through hoops, and more about discovery and self expression for the patient. However, since psychology is often the field for students of medicine who cannot hack medical doctor shit because they are too stupid, but they still want the big paycheck we have to rely on hoop jumping because most shrinks are too stupid to diagnose anything. On one hand I believe that psychology is a true and needed medical field, and on the other hand 99 percent of therapists and psychologists are hopelessly fucked simpletons who really should not be mucking in other people's heads. This just happens to occur because our educations system makes psychology the easy road.

This is an area our society is really not mature enough to deal with properly, but since there is not even an "adult" society to guide our toddler society, and there is no actual guidebook we are stuck with learning as we go which means that mistakes will be made. The idea that is proposed by idiots like Jordan Peterson that we do not advance at all because we do not know where to advance is much more damaging and worse. By not advancing and understanding the psychology of gender and sexual relationships beyond the male and female we just keep destroying the other sexualities and people who do not conform to our present gender conceptions rather than failing to understand a tiny fraction of confused or middling individuals that we can do our best with and enable in our communities despite failings to find the right solution.

The regret rate doesn't support the concern trolling though. At any age cohort the regret rate for transitioning is astonishingly low, lower than basically for any other sort of treatment that has been assessed. If there was a huge risk of "mistakes" that wouldn't be the case.

Part of that is because contrary to the claims of the moral panic crowd, the gatekeeping for any sort of medically supported transition for minors is rather extreme. Particularly for the younger professions. The entire purpose of having a blocker stage is to give everyone MORE TIME to be really REALLY sure before anything potentially irreversible happens.

It's not untrue that if the right wing myth were a real thing - where someone could slide right from that convention over to Planned Parenthood next week and get your script for E or T that there's a somewhat elevated risk that you'll look back in a couple of months and think "I believe I fucked up" - and for a small handful of adults, maybe you can slip past the gates by getting black market drugs or whatever...but again, WHERE are all these mistaken transitions? The reason that the right wingers have like 3-5 people that they fly from state to state to testify for the bigot bills is because THAT'S ALL THEY CAN FIND.

Reality is much different and particularly for minors. YEARS of evaluation, sometimes a decade or more before your first HRT. Phases, feelings, and mistaken impressions don't hold up to such scrutiny. They don't endure. We also know that it's impossible to change someone's gender identity cis-to-trans or trans-to-cis. Whatever is going on with gender identity and the human brain, people instinctively and innately rebel against any such force.

Something else they claim is that trans people try to bury detransition stories because it supposedly undermines us. I've never seen any proof of that hogwash. Absolutely frank talk incoming:

What REALLY undermines us in the eyes of ill-informed cis people? Any and all sorts of non-binary identities. Particularly gender-fluid professions. While trans people have spent decades building up the conception that we're just kind of like a switch flipped the wrong way - a premise that reinforces the "normality" of the binary that people grok - and made some progress. Then in the last 10-15 years we see more and more and more visibility of non-binary professions and gender non-conforming mixed presentations like that glamourous model who wears a beard to deliberately challenge those expectations.

So what did trans people of the more "traditional" sort do with this situation? At least on the high profile "activist" stage (can't speak for every individual)? OPEN ARMS. Complete affirmation of the legitimacy of their assertions.

I'll be honest, I DON'T "grok" it AT ALL. But I choose to know my role and respect it in the same way that I ask cis people to respect me even when they can't understand. But the point is, if we wanted to suppress a narrative that complicates ours, THAT is where the pushback would have been...and it didn't happen.

Hey, Conservatives! If trans kids get these surgeries done, it'll stop them from masturbating.

The Corn Flake guy said the same thing about circumcision at least a hundred years ago, and we've been chopping baby dicks without consent ever sense. I figure it's worth a shot.

And it's not like we don't have data. Grifters like Jesse Singal out here like "I'm not against trans people but there's just so much we don't know because there's no data!"

Bullshit. There's an ever increasing sizeable pile of data that continues to inevitably fail to turn up a hidden cohort of youth transition regret (or any other age cohort regret for that matter)



I'll come back to this in a moment since this is misleading - no child has a trans related medical intervention before clear onset of puberty ...so including "6-17" misleads. Both in the size of the cohort and the impression of early medicalization. It would be much better to narrow it to 12-17. But still...







What there's no chart for, of course, is bottom surgery which despite UA's anticipatory rage isn't a thing.

Narrow population cohorts are difficult to find numbers for because they are typically broader. This link for instance...
United States - Age distribution 2021 | Statista
...states the following:

In 2021, about 18.24 percent of the U.S. population fell into the 0-14 year category, 65.08 percent into the 15-64 age group and 16.68 percent of the population were over 65 years of age.

One way to approach this is to set aside the elderly and assume relatively even distribution at younger ages. This isn't perfect because there are still causes of early death that make the higher ages, say 50+, likely to be a lower share than younger ages but we're roughing it here.

If there are approx.. 330 million Americans and 18.24% of them are under 15, then that's a bit over 60 million or roughly 4 million kids at each age. If we apply that in the 15-65group it holds up, somewhat over 4 million at each year of age, but I'll round down on these to an even 4 million even though it's a lowball number.

So, in the actual cohort relevant to this discussion, 12-17, you're looking at a minimum of 24 million kids.

Going back to the study in the images, that means that over the last five years the % of all kids in our cohort who began puberty blockers increased from .0026% to .0058%
HRT? From .008% to .018%
Top surgery? .0009917% to .001175%

THIS is a crisis? Remember, a very miniscule proportion of these groups can be found to express regret and detransition. Something considerably less than 2%. Can't really do the math here since there's certainly considerable overlap among these patients. But taking the highest reported figure from these charts - 4,231 began HRT in 2021, that amounts to something less than 42 discontinue and not all of those - a minority actually - will be "oh shit, I'm not really trans" and most would have found the rebuke of the world around them too intense to bear.

These are not assumptions, they are based on research:







Again, there's basically no other known major medical intervention that gets remotely close to this low level of regret.

Too late, he's now called"Auntie Sue".

@Nova, you have so much patience, and such a willingness to try to break through to blockheads that I am in awe.

Yup.

It would be an entirely normal and understandable human reaction for you to say "Uh, enby people? Since you can live just fine as either male or female, how about we delay talking about how special you are for transcending gender until we've taken care of the problems facing those of us who don't have that luxury?"

Actually, it wouldn't be that unlike the problems that bisexual people faced being accepted as part of the gay community.

Yet it's entirely cis-het people who see "they" as a singular pronoun and lose their shit.

Perfect bang on and incredibly necessary column, particularly as it appears in NYT which has been regularly running low-key bigotry columns wearing the mask of "just asking questions"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/opinion/trump-desantis-transgender-rights.html

Watch this. Do it now.
The only quibble I have is when she says "America is better than this" - I'm honestly pretty sure that we're not.

https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1624147323373686801?s=20

We never have been. I know people disagree with that, but remember, our first step into this country was dependent upon an indigenous population we started wiping out immediately once we had a secure footing, and then we brought over slaves, and built the foundations of this country with slaves. We hired night patrols to capture runaway slaves, they became our police force. Banks and corporations began to immediately center themselves, and many of our founding fathers went along with it, one of them even got a Broadway production about him. In some ways, things in this country have improved for the marginalized, but for the most part we're exactly where we started, and we started out being awful.

Stokely Carmichael once said that for Dr. King's plan of non-violent action to work, America had to have a conscience, and went on to say America has no conscience. Has none. He was right, and he's still right. If anyone is expecting the US just to start becoming better for all of us, and not just the few who possess the money and the means, they will wait forever, because it will never come to pass. These legislative bodies do not work in our interest, they have other vested interests that take precedence. I haven't given up on having a better country, a better world, but it does require acknowledging that the US system is working as intended, this is the way we are, this is the system we've used since our inception, and we will go on using it as long as the same type of people are in charge, dictating our value back to us as if we're not the ones who truly hold the power to change things.

It has/had people like King and Carmichael.
A country with truly no conscience wouldn't have people that ached for its apparent absence.
It would be a Borg cube, or the pod people village from "Body Snatchers".
Or medieval Spain.
They wouldn't notice the difference.

I think Carmichael was referring to America as a whole, that the system itself, the governing bodies that keep on turning, they do not possess a conscience, and it's clear on that level they don't, because our government will drop $800 billion on a military budget while a million homeless people live in the street, and tens of millions of children never have enough to eat. The US makes all the grand appearances of having a conscience, but at the end of the day, if they truly have a conscience, then they're just grossly inept and incompetent, and if the end result is the same, they don't deserve any credit for trying to care.

There are lots of people who have consciences, who care, who want there to be a better world, but the system in which we live ensures that those individuals remain individualized, that they don't group together too often, or in dangerous ways. Our system can handle protests just fine, it can handle thousands of people rioting in the streets, because the media work for the system, and they will spin it as violence against the good people of America, while the politicians promise to get to the bottom of the problem, all the while stoking their end of the fire for more support from their base. To do this, everyone involved has to ignore their conscience, and if they're ignoring their conscience, it's just as bad as not having one, because the people they oppress will still be oppressed.

What's worse is the new tactic of using diversity, idpol, as a cudgel between people who would do better to work together and recognize where they are on the power scale. The workers sit at the bottom, even though they have all of the power. The owners sit at the top, even though their power comes from our labor. To distract from this, the ownership class will employ people who look like oppressed groups, sound like oppressed groups, and cover the systemic corruption with the face of that oppressed group. The cops who murdered Tyre Nichols were all black. What good did it do him to see his face staring back at him as they murdered him? When you see people talking about LGBTQ+ members in the military, what are we getting but bombs dropping on kids by trans folks instead of cisgender white folks? If the end result is still the upheld white supremacist and capitalist system, which is the heart of imperialism, what good is it doing? What is the point of having a conscience if it's just going to be put aside so the works of the heartless can still be done uninterrupted?

At the end of the day, the US is a corporation, and corporations do not possess a conscience, and so America itself, the country which lends its name and military might to other nations with interest and whether they like it or not, has no conscience for as long as that system exists. So Carmichael is still correct.

I know every scrap of that already, and still I don't think the victory of evil is inevitable.
I think we will get to a Star Trek world, even if it takes 10,000 years.
Capitalism as we practice it can't endure any more than chattel slavery did.
3-D printing alone will shake things up.
Oil companies sabotaging battery research bought them, what, 50 years, tops?
We'll get there.
Evil will arm-wrestle against it, sure. It always does.
But so what?
The climb has never been easy.
Going back to the first lungfish flopping out of the ocean.

Well certainly I believe we can succeed. If I didn't, I wouldn't bother being a communist, I'd go be a die-hard capitalist and fleece gullible people out of their money (no, I wouldn't, I'd feel guilty for even trying). It is said that the universe bends towards justice, and I agree with the caveat that the bend only happens if we're the ones bending it. If we're not fighting to bend the universe toward justice, then it will just proceed toward entropy, as it has done, and will continue doing once we're no longer around to have any effect on it.

So yes, it can happen, but it shouldn't take 10,000 years. Even 1,000 years, or 100 years is unacceptable. The human species doesn't even have 100 years to dick around with, and I'd rather end as much suffering now than create a long term goal that will get waylaid by the next party in power, and that's the key: it requires constant vigilance, constant effort, and for the moment people don't have the mental, emotional, or physical energy to be that vigilant.

DeSantis is trying to hide the effects of his policies on LGBTQ youth by getting schools to stop collecting data on students mental health in Duval County. They know what they're policies are doing and are trying to hide it.

Missouri Anti-trans "Whistleblower" Story Is A Manufactured Controversy - Point By Point (substack.com)

Watch this.
The only quibble I have is when she says "America is better than this" - I'm honestly pretty sure that we're not.

https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1624147323373686801?s=20

Absolutely sickening. Arkansas State senator Matt McKee asked a trans person at a legislative hearing "do you have a penis?" Does this State Senator have any basic human decency?
(video)

https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1625242440419405842?s=20

As good as her answer was I do think that I'd have been inclined to say something like "Your perverted obsession with my genitals says a lot more about your ability to legislate than it does my ability to testify."

Astroturf, backed by reactionary billionaires that you can never outspend

Erin's trans risk map is a very close approximation of the "sides" on pretty much every political divide that's widening in this country. An abortion ban map would look very much like this, among others.
I have said and maintain that if there was another civil war it would not follow strict political lines like the first one (nor would it be mainly army v. army) because, for example, Atlanta isn't as right wing as Georgia by a LONG shot, ditto Nashville, St. Louis etc.
But if you want to approximate the divide using state lines - it looks like this.

A few of these are harder calls - Virginia has a Dem controlled state Senate and if they get the governor's office back the risk decreases. Both the Senate and House are very closely divided. Kansas has a Dem gov but that won't hold forever. Same with LA






First Period Anti-Trans Legislative Risk Assessment Map (substack.com)