I'll start by making my stance on transgenders completely clear. I hold to the notion that it is a mental disorder, similar to anorexia, bulimia, or body integrity identity disorder. Broadly, they relate by an incongruity between one's body and their mental image. It may be a tired comparison, but I have not seen a solid argument against.
As such, I would prefer to live in a culture that does not pretend it is normal, much less a culture that applies pressure to force society to accept it as normal. Of course, this means that all of this DIE DEI, SEL, or any other three letter WEF initiative, I find abhorrent.
And my opinion on "gender-affirming care" is that it is another swindle by the medical-industrial complex to profit off of our misery.
Now, with that in mind, let's masticate.
Imagine a teenager with gender dysphoria, who actually does get to choose freely:
- puberty blockers, including their side effects, in order to make the rest of the transition later on (with or without surgery) easier
or - no puberty blockers, avoiding the side effects and making a potential retransition later in life easier, but at the cost of making them miserable throughout puberty and making future stages of the transition more difficult
And sure, the second option is 'doing nothing', but doing nothing is also a choice, which has upsides and downsides too.
First, excepting the minutely rare cases of genetic anomalies, puberty is a choice that has been refined in the crucible of evolution, backed by millions billions upon billions of choices made over the course of countless millennia. Puberty blockers are a novel development that is more or less untested for long-term side effects and has a laundry list of known issues, many irreversible, and includes, in many cases, inability to orgasm and sterility.
Chesterton's Fence would argue that doing nothing is going to be the better choice more often than not.
Your position is that if this teenager chooses the second option, of their own volition, then great; if they choose the first option, well, that shouldn't be allowed because of the downsides involved. So let's just take their choice away and only leave the second option. But that second option has downsides too, in fact worse ones at least in the short term and possibly also in the longer term, while its upsides are quite uncertain since they only apply in the event of the teenager wanting to revert to their birth gender later on.
I would ask you to clarify your point. Are you saying the upsides of waiting for puberty are uncertain since they only apply in the event of the teenager wanting to revert to their birth gender later on?
If so, I have to say that is fallacious. As an example, from my understanding, if one wants to pursue gender reassignment surgery, waiting for puberty will allow for more tissue available for a successful procedure. So there's that.
But let's look at your point about our hypothetical teenager changing shis mind. The fact is, teenagers by and large make more mistakes, make more poor choices, and change their minds more often than adults. There's a reason why insurance companies charge higher premiums for car insurance amongst the youth, and it isn't discrimination. It's because teens are a higher liability.
Teenagers are ignorant know-it-alls. They love and hate passionately. They've been fed a thimbleful of knowledge, and think they've got the world all sussed out. "You're still young, that's your fault. There's so much you have to go through." etc etc
I can't really see how option 1 (puberty blockers) is considered a legitimate option in any rational sense, frankly.
Out of curiosity, do you think teenagers should get to make their own decisions on other difficult medical questions, like for instance in a case of advanced cancer with a choice between a final attempt at chemo which has a low chance of success but is guaranteed to make the patient's life a lot more unpleasant in the meantime, or giving up and letting the patient spend the final days/weeks of their life saying goodbye in comparative calm and comfort? That's not intended as a full analogy or anything, the choice is quite different, but it's also a case of a difficult medical choice, between 'doing something' and 'doing nothing', where you definitely want to be making an actual conscious choice and not just walking into something by default because you're too afraid, or just not allowed, to make the choice.
I think dependents need to defer to their parents, yes. Otherwise, what the hell is the point of parenting. You live under my roof, you live by my rules.
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- 03/09/2023 11:22:53 PM
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