The right in the US - especially conservative Christians - are whipped up into a frenzy now over the thinking literally any acceptance or encouragement of trans kids is "grooming". And I think they've been able to accomplish this by taking the word "children" and completely warping it in order to create a narrative that is so incredibly divorced from reality.
So what's the reality regarding trans youth? I'm not an expert so comrades please correct me if I'm wrong but in the US it generally follows this shape:
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Social transitioning for pre-pubescent youth (clothes, pronouns, etc). No medical interventions are done at this stage.
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Puberty blockers at the onset of puberty (maybe right before? I'm not clear on this one).
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Hormones can be taken after puberty blockers if the person eventually chooses. Puberty is different for everyone but I guess this would be around age 14 or 15? Specific ages I'm not sure about but we're not talking little kids here.
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Then actual surgical interventions are pretty limited for under 18s. I think I've only really heard about top surgeries for trans men who are like 16 or 17. Of course cis teen women have long been able to get breast reduction surgeries and no one complains about that. But AFAIK that's about the extent of surgeries for under 18 folks - extremely limited, for good or ill.
So what has the right done? They've completely twisted this narrative into that doctors are performing bottom surgeries on like 5 year olds across the country. I once saw a meme that compared Boston Children's Hospital to the Island of Dr. Moreau. They are utterly convinced that every year there are thousands of little grade school age kids getting gender affirming surgeries. What they're actually doing is taking that very small number of surgeries done on older teens and putting it under the blanket of "children". The people who are leading this charge and might know better (like Matt Walsh) are purposefully pulling this little trick to try and get people enraged.
Not that hypocrisy ever mattered to the right, but I bet you these same people who talk about "children are being mutilated" will think it's super important to clarify "those aren't migrant children crossing the border! They're like 16, they're basically adults! The media calls them 'children' to gain sympathy!" Or encourage their 14 year olds to join ROTC and basically be the little Hitler Youth in order to pave the way to join the imperialist crusading US military at 18. Whatever.
And even when it's not about surgeries, the evangelicals especially talk about children being "tricked" into being trans. This is because theologically they have to believe that being trans isn't real. That being trans is not something inherent but is instead a trick of the devil.
And where are the libs to push back on all this? Of course they're silent. The left can push back as best we can but we simply don't have the numbers to try and show a significant push back (so far at least). The libs do have the numbers. They could be pointing out this little trick the transphobes are trying to pull with the word "children". They could point out the completely unscientific assumptions made by people who by and large think the universe is less than 10,000 years old and evolution is a lie. But no, they'd rather sit on their hands and pretend nothing's happening. Or that voting is the solution.
Goddamn liberals. We're on our own on this.
Anybody who ever utters the words "Think of the children!" is incredibly sus. This paper thin veneer of concern has been the calling card of the world's most reactionary politics for quite some time now.
If you actually wanted to "save the children," you would make it so their guardians don't need to work two and a half jobs just to pay rent. So their guardians can actually have time read them bedtime stories, have time to cook them healthy meals, take them to the playground, take them to the library. We built a society where children spend more time getting parented by YouTube and the video game console than they do from their loving family, and nobody seems too concerned about changing that. Just changing the flavor of propaganda which comes out of the screen.
From what I recall from an episode of CIA Evans' podcast, it goes as far back as Roman times where Romans would spread tales of Christians doing unspeakable things to children
Then after they became Christian they began doing the same thing to non-Christians
Romans would spread tales of Christians doing unspeakable things to children
Sounds like they accurately predicted the Vatican, tbh
tbf the Vatican only did it because the Roman ruling class did it first.
This grooming discourse is essentially just blood libel for 2022
If you actually wanted to “save the children,” you would make it so their guardians don’t need to work two and a half jobs just to pay rent. So their guardians can actually have time read them bedtime stories, have time to cook them healthy meals, take them to the playground, take them to the library.
umm actually sweaty how about you self optimize instead of wasting all your time? I work 18 jobs as a CEO and still have time to read to my children.
I kid, of course, but it seems to me like an easily defutable argument on the basis of ideology. Which is why I propose you bring hard numbers into it and asks whether someone spouting this agrees that we need to do something about cars (just generally), because they're the biggest killers of kids around
umm actually sweaty how about you self optimize instead of wasting all your time? I work 18 jobs as a CEO and still have time to read to my children
They'll just go "See? This is why need women out of the workforce"
The best society for children that the world has ever seen was the former GDR (East Germany) because they focused on the material needs of children and their caregivers.
Pedofiles benefit a lot from the right flooding social media and law enforcement with false reports.
Isn't that why the Catholic church was against LGBT people in the first place?
:astronaut-2: :astronaut-1:
Not only are they being intentionally disingenuous with the word "children" but also of course the word "groomer", when in their demented, syphilitic minds a trans person or drag queen being in close proximity to a child is somehow going to "infect" them. The whole moral panic of it is entirely fabricated.
Of course, the whole thing is, as per usual, just projection because by and large the people that are actually grooming underage people are conservatives, including Matt Walsh himself .
Social transitioning for pre-pubescent youth (clothes, pronouns, etc). No medical interventions are done at this stage.
This is completely correct. Medically transitioning at this point is out of the question. The majority of physical characteristics that could cause "dysphoria" (i prefer gender incongruence nowadays, but will use the term dysphoria in this post for ease of argument) haven't even developed yet - bodily dysphoria is only present when the child has pronounced problems with their genitals, which happens regularly in kids that know this early they are trans, but isn't always and necessarily the case. Even if it is there, and even if it is strong to the point that the child threatens or even attempts castration, the gender dysphoria at this point can usually be alleviated almost completely by socially transitioning. We just do not notice our genitals that much when we have clothes on. The real pain of living in a mismatched body starts when we develop the wrong secondary sexual characteristics.
Puberty blockers at the onset of puberty (maybe right before? I’m not clear on this one).
In many cases also after the start of puperty. You can use them to interrupt a puperty that has already begun - in fact that is what they were developed for, to stop a premature puberty in cis children. There are kids who only realize they're trans once the wrong puberty hits, there are unfortunately also kids who, due to gatekeeping, only get on puberty blockers after puberty has set in in spite of wanting them earlier. You can still safe a lot at that point, in fact HRT right after puberty is over still can have pretty profound effects, but ideally you prevent the wrong puberty entirely, which means that dysphoria later in life is practically nonexistent. Denying a kid to avoid the wrong puberty is torture, you force them to consciously witness how their body is warped in ways that will haunt them for years, if not for life. The entire right wing trans discourse is unbelievably cynical, but speaking of "irreperable damage" caused by transitioning is among the more egregious lies they tell.
Hormones can be taken after puberty blockers if the person eventually chooses. Puberty is different for everyone but I guess this would be around age 14 or 15? Specific ages I’m not sure about but we’re not talking little kids here.
You could start with hormones at any point once puberty has set in. 14 is a common legal limit, in some places it is also 16. Puberty blockers are ultimately a way to buy time until making the decision for or against HRT that will lead to semi-permanent outcomes either way- either the child goes through a testosterone-fueled puberty and permanently has a larger height, broader shoulders, larger hands and feet, a deeper vocal range that would have to be altered through time-consuming speech therapy and a beard and body hair that would have to be removed with lasers, or they would go through an estrogen-fueled puberty and permanently have wider hips, a smaller height, smaller hands and feet, and breasts that would have to be removed surgically.
The problem with keeping kids on puberty blockers too long is that all their peers already go through puberty while they remain physically and hormonally children. I think waiting until 16 with HRT is way too long. There are a few kids who identify as trans as children, but as cis as adults, but that number is very low - not as incredibly miniscule as detransitioning adults, but still only about 2,5% of all patients. So if we assume the 2,5% actually all are cis (i would love to see follow-up numbers on that 10, 15, 20 years later) and withhold treatment based on that risk, for every confused cis kid that does not get the wrong treatment, we have 39 (thirty-nine) suffering trans kids who are denied the right treatment. The consequences are very comparable for both groups. So saying that kids should not get gender-affirming care because they may be confused about their identity means that for every cis kid, you sacrifice 39 trans kids. Clearly this is only an option when one is incredibly, genocidally transphobic.
Then actual surgical interventions are pretty limited for under 18s. I think I’ve only really heard about top surgeries for trans men who are like 16 or 17. Of course cis teen women have long been able to get breast reduction surgeries and no one complains about that. But AFAIK that’s about the extent of surgeries for under 18 folks - extremely limited, for good or ill.
Yes, this is extremely limited, if it is even available at all in a given jurisdiction. In most places, nobody does any gender reassignment surgery on minors. In fact, the most common surgery in this regard is done to intersex children without their consent, often right after birth, and usually with disastrous results. The LGBTI community obviously is one of the strongest opponents to that. "Surgeries on kids" in the context of trans kids transitioning is by and large a propaganda lie, like almost everything wall candidates like Matt Walsh pull out of their ass.
If someone has some deeper reading on the fascist fixation on "children" (or rather the bundle of ideology that they use children as a proxy for, because obviously they don't give a shit about actual children) I'd love to see it. It's bewildering to see fascists (of all eras frankly) clamor over protecting the youth and "securing a future" for them, while being the biggest proponents of child abuse, both on the individual and systemic level. Like how can you rant about protecting children while taking school lunches away? While forcing them into homelessness because their parents can't make ends meet? While taking their healthcare away?
It's clear that they don't actually care about real, living human children, but idk what exactly they use "protect the children" as a stand-in for. Lately I tend to read it as "secure a future for the cishet. white people" given the people most likely to use it.
I wonder if there's a citations needed episode on this, it kind of reminds me of the way "taxpayer" is used by right wing media types.
It reminds me of this quote:
The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.
--Methodist Pastor David Barnhart
Same idea, really. They don't really have a voice, and when they do it's easy to write off.
not protecting the children as in keeping them safe, but protecting the children as in protecting the purity of childhood as a concept
obviously all the actually alive children have been poisoned and corrupted by the heathen gayfolk around them /s
if you view children as they do, as blank slates that society then marrs, then protecting the children becomes about protecting the blank slate from errant marks, and the children themselves become entirely representative of society as a whole. Working backwards, if we can protect the slate so that only what we want written down is kept, then clearly society itself will be fixed in reflection.
at least that's my take on their reasoning
I don't know which episode, but there's a CTH where Matt talks specifically about this. let me try to dig it out of the caves of my head
My roommate completely bought into that drivel, and in typical lib fashion, believes it to be correct and hard to argue out of
For being tragender writ large, it doesn’t make sense to call it inherent for the same reason being cisgender isn’t inherent,
Except the preponderance of evidence is that it is inherent and probabilistically related to prenatal hormone levels during certain stages of neurological development. There was a meta study* a few years back that compiled a bunch of research on things like congenital adrenal hyperplasia (massively more likely to result in a male identity than the baseline rate of trans masc identities in the general population, although still a minority of all individuals with CAH), other hormone-related congenital conditions (some caused massive increases in the incidence of trans identities, although still a minority of the individuals in the studies), XY individuals with cloacal exstrophy who were AFAB due to missing genitals who were raised female (extremely high incidence of male identities, nearly half the subjects in the study), and prenatal exposure to diethylstilbestrol (which showed nearly a 30% rate of female identities in AMAB individuals with confirmed or suspected prenatal exposure to DES) which found the existing literature is enough to conclude that there is something that's inherent and fixed in the brain.
And if it wasn't, then a lot of the medical side of transitioning wouldn't work. HRT would cause dysphoria instead of alleviating it, GRS would result in a mismatch with the brain's map of the body instead of aligning the body with that map as it does. If there were not a fixed and inherent quality in the individual then coercion and cishet indoctrination would work instead of being the deadly torture that they are. The simple fact that transitioning works both socially and medically is extremely strong evidence for the existence of some form of innate gender identity.
Now, obviously, I think whatever that construct in the brain is has to be very plastic and adaptable because of how it slots people into boxes that can be very wildly different across cultures and it is my personal theory that it's a wide range of constructs intermingled with other things and serves to influence how socialization is taken in, how self-image is developed based on cultural aesthetics and norms, etc along with more directly medical things like the hormones that the brain expects or how the brain builds a map of the body. I would further say that I believe these constructs can be independent of one another so individuals can end up with a variable mix that doesn't neatly fit into the larger boxes, and that perhaps some aren't even fully fixed at all so that there can be a degree of ongoing variance that moves someone's identity around.
And the dumbest thing is that despite all this, I also believe in gender abolition from a liberationist standpoint, that as far as it is possible to do so there should be a comprehensive decoupling of gender from aesthetics and roles, with the understanding that people are still going to filter socialization in a gendered way to some extent, still form their self-image in line with their gender, still require specific hormone balances to feel ok, etc.
* Evidence Supporting the Biologic Nature of Gender Identity; Aruna Saraswat, MD; Jamie D. Weinand, BA, BS; Joshua D. Safer, MD; Endocr Pract. 2015;21(2):199-204.
My point was to establish that gender is something that is real and innate, even beyond the strictest medical aspects of treating gender dysphoria. I believe that overall your stance is ideologically correct, but factually incomplete: gender is real in some fashion, even if we can say that people should be liberated from all the baggage that has gone along with it historically.
Correct the body or correct the brain. Correcting the body in this case is much safer on countless levels, therefore that is virtually always the best solution.
I'd caution against using this particular rhetorical framing because it comes with unfortunate implications. Like imagine talking like that about a broken arm, how the brain is saying "ow that hurts" and "that really shouldn't be bending that way" so you can correct the flesh or correct the brain, but it's better to set the bone because of course it is. It becomes comical, like there cannot be a question that the brain might be wrong about whether the arm should be bending that way or not so it's weird to think of it in terms of choosing what to "correct." It's the same with gender, like you can't "correct" the brain here because that's the person, that's the bit that matters.
Even as a rhetorical device to emphasize that making the body align with the brain is possible and safe in a way that literally rewriting someone's identity cannot be, it comes across as conceding that the brain is other than correct. I'm not going down to jump down your throat about it and I am taking pains to explain this as softly and neutrally as I can, but it is something that will strike a nerve for some people.
Thank you for writing this. You really put into words how I feel a lot when I interact with well meaning allies who tell me stuff like "well gender doesn't matter to me".
Personally, I think my transness has nothing to do with social gender, because it's a result of some inherent aspect of my brain in conflict with the sex of my body. But, even if it's just a social construct, that doesn't mean it's baseless or not real.
it’s not like anyone, cis or trans, is ontologically a man or woman.
I completely, 100% have to disagree. I am very definitely ontologically a woman. It is just that Woman is neither a category of biology (that would be "female") nor a social role (that would be "feminine"), it is rather an internal, psychological category relating to our sense of self. It is the frame of reference through which we perceive the entire rest of our gender experience, the relationship to our bodies, the gendered relationships to other human beings, our gender performance, the relation between our behavior and gendered expectations ("do i like this because i'm a man or do i like it in spite of being a girl?"), the framing of our sexual orientation ("am i a straight man or a lesbian woman?") and so on.
Reducing gender to a two-fold model that just knows biological sex and gender as a social construct does not explain my experience at all, nor does it explain the experience of a majority of other trans people. It is beyond discussion to me that it is empirically non-viable. Focussing too much on a fleeting, socially constructed, idealist concept like gender performance is indeed a red herring when exploring one's gender, just as it is a mistake to get hung up on someting that can be changed just by hitting the right hormonal switches at the right moments like biology. To make sense of our lifes, especially that it is to us undeniably self-evident that we have never been our assigned gender at birth even when we supressed it and performed in a different gender role, in a body mismatched with our self, only makes sense when you treat woman or man or enbie as a seperate, internal category, everybody's "true self" so to speak. Otherwise, if i had a male body for most of my life and performed as a boy for most of my life, which i had and which i did, how could i always have been trans? I would have started being trans when my egg cracked, but not before, because under a two-dimensional biological + social model, 100% of the dimensions of my gender experience would have been manly. But they weren't. Neither my body nor my role as a boy ever fit me. Nothing in my life ever made sense, it was all a disparate jumble of struggling to fit a mold not made for me - and once i realised "oh, i'm just trans", all of that stopped. It just turned to dust. It could not offer the slightest resistance. Everything made sense by simply fitting in that missing puzzle piece that was my gender identity. This is a quite common experience for trans people who do not fall in the "i've always known, i refused to wear pants when i was just three years old and then i told mom it's a mistake by god that i have a weenie" category - lots of trans people do see their true self as early as that, lots of others don't and instead only come out later in life, but evidence clearly shows we're all equally valid.
Not feeling that you even have a gender identity is ofc still possible - it is a logical conclusion for agender people where gender identity may just be a blank, it may also be a privilege of cis people who never had to think about this issue too hard because their gender identity, social gender role and biological sex are all more or less completely aligned from the start, or it may be a fairly typical train of thought for eggs who through their denial and repression lack a connection with their gender identity (the latter was me for a large part of my life).
But if you want to explain everybody's gender experience - and a viable gender theory should do exactly that - you need more than the two dimensions of biology and social role. What i've outlined here is based on Leslie Feinberg's model, i've also seen five-fold models. But regardless of what you use, two-fold is always too simplistic, it is only an intermediary step up from bio-reductionist explanations like "gender is just your chromosomes".
Neither my body nor my role as a boy ever fit me. Nothing in my life ever made sense, it was all a disparate jumble of struggling to fit a mold not made for me - and once i realised “oh, i’m just trans”, all of that stopped. It just turned to dust. It could not offer the slightest resistance. Everything made sense by simply fitting in that missing puzzle piece that was my gender identity.
I hear stuff like this a lot from trans people I know as well.
There was an early 20th century geneticist named Dobzhansky who was pivotal in building the "modern synthesis" of post-Mendelian genetics and Darwin's work on evolution. He claimed that "nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution," for it was evolution that transformed biology from a "pile of sundry facts" into a coherent, integrated theory that all fit together into a sensible whole.
I tend to think about gender as something like that as well--a unifying hub that doesn't seem like much in isolation, but which binds together so many different aspects of our psychological and social identities that it's a thing that turns those identities from a "pile of sundry facts" to something that makes sense.
That makes it real if anything is, it seems to me.
Of course liberals would never defend the trans population. They're centrists. Centrists are conservative. "Liberal" is not the opposite of "conservative", no matter how much the man on the TV wants us to think so.
I really think it's two things:
Conservatives view teaching their children about reality as a way to undermine their authority over their possessions (read: children).
The other part is that they hear about children being raped and are upset that it's not them taking part.
Hormones can be taken after puberty blockers if the person eventually chooses. Puberty is different for everyone but I guess this would be around age 14 or 15? Specific ages I’m not sure about but we’re not talking little kids here.
I think it's 18 in the liberal democracy I live in
you have cishets comrades whether you want to believe it or not
