Love to be cis and regurgitate transphobic misinformation about how Transitioning Is Too Easy And Accessible Without Really Thinking It Through These Days and Big Trans Is Allowing Children To Do Irreversible Things With Their Bodies They Grow Up To Regret
Imagine how disconnected from trans people you need to be to think that trans people are being traumatized by being allowed to transition too early and too easily, and that we’re not “presented with other options or lives to lead” by pretty much fucking everyone around us.
And this is one of the more widely-followed (cis) lesbians on this site.
I’ve posted all this before, but if anyone is seriously wondering about “Children And Teens Doing Permanent Thins To Their Bodies!!!’, her fearmongering flies in the face of established scientific knowledge and actual medical practice (if you think there’s actually anything true to “transitioning too early is so easy and so many people end up with regret”, please read)
Puberty blockers deliberately provide a lengthy period of time for the careful consideration of an individual’s gender identity and developmental course. These are long-acting injections or implants which temporarily prevent the development of the permanent physical changes that accompany puberty. This treatment does not have permanent effects – it is described as “completely reversible” in medical literature (de Vries & Cohen-Kettenis, 2012) [emphasis mine]. Instead, this protocol delays puberty for a number of years while the child and medical professionals can consider whether more permanent transition treatments like hormone therapy or surgery are appropriate. A child or teenager has the option of discontinuing puberty blockers if they decide they don’t want to transition; their own puberty can then proceed as normal. Such cases have been described by pediatric endocrinologists (Shumer, Nokoff, & Spack, 2016):
“A 12-year-old biologic male presented to the gender clinic after referral by a mental health professional. The child had been having dysphoric feelings about his male pubertal development, and was found to be at SMR rating 3. Treatment with a GnRH agonist was initiated. The child continued in therapy and by age 14 had developed a better understanding of their gender identity. The child accepts that they do not identify completely with a male or female gender identity, and begins to refer to themself as genderqueer. They prefer to be referred to using the them/they/their pronouns. After discussion with the family and mental health professional, the decision is made to withdraw the GnRH agonist medication and allow male puberty to progress with continued supportive counseling in place.”
If this protocol really did inexorably guide every child into a more permanent medical transition, this period of extended consideration would not be standard clinical practice. This time specifically serves to identify those youth who will stop experiencing dysphoria and will not want to transition. While Julie Bindel and others may speculate at length about how they “might” have pursued a medical transition, there is every indication that even if they had ever received puberty blockers, they would have had ample opportunity to recognize that transitioning wasn’t what they wanted.
Contrary to these media depictions, puberty blockers and transition treatments are not delivered in a scattershot or reckless manner. While Ditum asserts that 80% of children with gender dysphoria will lose this dysphoria in adolescence, this isn’t simply a spin of the roulette wheel. During the extra time provided by puberty blockers, extended evaluations are conducted to observe the course of an adolescent’s gender identity development, reliably distinguishing those who will continue to experience dysphoria from those who will not (de Vries & Cohen-Kettenis, 2012):
“During the diagnostic trajectory, information is obtained from both the adolescents and their parents to assess whether the adolescents meet the eligibility criteria. Therefore, first it is ascertained whether adolescents are suffering from a very early onset gender dysphoria that has increased around puberty, or whether something else brought them to the clinic (e.g., confusion about homosexuality or transvestic fetishism). About one quarter of the referrals in Amsterdam do not fulfill diagnostic criteria for GID and most of them drop out early in the diagnostic procedure for this reason or because other problems are prominent”
There are various specific factors that are recognized as potentially related to an individual’s likelihood to persist in experiencing dysphoria (Steensma, Biemond, de Bohr, & Cohen-Kettenis, 2011). These factors can be of diagnostic value during treatment:
“Starting around the age of 10, and for the subsequent years, the persisters indicated that their cross-gender preferences and behaviour and their gender identity remained stable, but that their dysphoric feelings intensified. The intensification of gender dysphoria was attributed to three factors; (1) Certain changes in their social environment, (2) The anticipation of and/or actual physical changes during puberty, (3) The first experiences of falling in love and discovering their sexual orientation.
… In desisters, the gender discomfort gradually decreased over the course of grades 7 and 8 (age 10 to 13). Both boys and girls indicated that their changing interests and friendships, and the physical changes during puberty made the gender discomfort diminish and eventually disappear. The desisters also reported that their first experience of falling in love and awareness of sexual attraction were factors that resulted in the disappearance of their gender dysphoria.”
One key component of this diagnostic process is that these youth are allowed to experience the earliest stages of their original puberty, which can be critical to their developing understanding of their gender (de Vries & Cohen-Kettenis, 2012):
“If the eligibility criteria are met, gonadotropin releasing hormone analogues (GnRHa) to suppress puberty are prescribed when the youth has reached Tanner stage 2–3 of puberty (Delemarre-van de Waal & Cohen-Kettenis, 2006); this means that puberty has just begun. The reason for this is that we assume that experiencing one’s own puberty is diagnostically useful because right at the onset of puberty it becomes clear whether the gender dysphoria will desist or persist.”
In effect, Bindel, Ditum, and others are baselessly criticizing these medical providers for supposedly failing to do something they have in fact been doing all along. Again, even if these individuals had undergone treatment with puberty blockers, this protocol would likely correctly determine that transitioning would not be appropriate for them.
Modern diagnostic criteria also make a clear distinction between clinically significant experiences of dysphoria, and a simple discomfort with cultural gender roles or desire for the social privileges afforded to another gender. The American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 (2013) states:
“Gender dysphoria should be distinguished from simple nonconformity to stereotypical gender role behavior by the strong desire to be of another gender than the assigned one and by the extent and pervasiveness of gender-variant activities and interests. The diagnosis is not meant to merely describe nonconformity to stereotypical gender role behavior (e.g., “tomboyism” in girls, “girly-boy” behavior in boys, occasional cross-dressing in adult men). Given the increased openness of atypical gender expressions by individuals across the entire range of the transgender spectrum, it is important that the clinical diagnosis be limited to those individuals whose distress and impairment meet the specified criteria.”
The APA’s DSM-IV-TR (2000) similarly specified as part of diagnostic criteria for gender identity disorder that individuals experience “A strong and persistent cross-gender identification (not merely a desire for any perceived cultural advantages of being the other sex)”, and further explained:
“Behavior in children that merely does not fit the cultural stereotype of masculinity or femininity should not be given the diagnosis unless the full syndrome is present, including marked distress or impairment.”
Professional clinical guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of gender dysphoria explicitly warn against misinterpreting gender nonconformity alone as an indication that dysphoria is present. The speculation that these treatments serve to target gender-nonconforming cisgender gays and lesbians is completely unfounded and contrary to modern medical practice.
Bindel and others imagine that they would have been guided toward transition if they were children today, and while this is vanishingly unlikely under current practices, suppose that all of these individuals ultimately did transition during puberty. What would the outcome be for them? Multiple studies have found no cases of persistent regret among youth who were treated with puberty blockers and later went on to transition (Cohen-Kettenis & van Goozen, 1997; de Vries et al., 2014). It’s also been found that after treatment, this group experiences psychiatric symptoms such as depression and anxiety at a rate no higher than that of their cisgender peers. These commentators must invent hypothetical cases of regret because of the lack of any actual cases of regret that would support their argument. But what is supposed to be regrettable about this outcome – that a happy and well-adjusted transgender person exists?
Cis people would rather that a million trans people go without medical access than one cis person go on puberty blockers, reidentify with their AGAB, and finish puberty with no real lasting side-effects from those puberty blockers.
The OP of this particular post is widely followed on the cis lesbian side of tumblr. The notes on this post have a lot of TERFs, but also a lot of other cis lesbians who just happen to agree with this misinformed, transphobic tripe.
Incidentally: one of the TERFs in the notes also reblogged this post repeating the Gender Dysphoria Desistance Myth:
The ~study~ they link heavily cites data from Kenneth Zucker’s clinic, I.E. LITERAL CONVERSION THERAPY PERFORMED ON TRANS YOUTH, which is largely responsible for where all of this kind of “Genuine Concern” about “Not presenting dysphoric youth with other options” comes from in the first place.
If cis lesbians could stop repeating misinformed and transphobic talking points about ~How Such Easy Access To Transition Is So Harmful To Dysphoric Cis Afabs And Is Basically Anti-Lesbian Conversion Therapy UwU~, or thinking that being dysphoric themselves makes them ~basically have as much a stake in these issues as trans people do~, that would be great!! :)
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