Hey, I was wondering if you could give me advice on how to "degender" my friend, it's a delicate situation because she is still a minor and I am an adult and don't wanna come across a creep/groomer towards her, I can give more details off anon if anything, just thanks in advance for your time and reading this
i won't make any sweeping assumptions about you, but tbh i'm deeply skeptical of "friendships" between minors and adults outside of the structure of a mentoring relationship that is open with and involves the parents or like, "friend of the family" type things where you're friends with the parents and have known the kid forever, and i am skeptical of your "friendship," too.
so with that on the table, it is not your responsibility to "degender" her. if you are genuinely worried for this girl's safety, reach out to a parent or guardian and let them in on your concern. that is the extent of what it's acceptable for you to do. if you cannot reach out to a parent or guardian on her behalf, it is hard to imagine you have an acceptable relationship with this girl at all.
there is no way for you as an adult to exert an influence campaign on a minor that is appropriate, especially in the context of not being able to confide in her parents.
whether you reach out to a parent or not, i urge you to reconsider what it means to have a friendship with a minor when you yourself are an adult. and outside of the cases i outlined above, consider leaving this girl alone.
I've been meeting more and more 21-24 year old trans people and so many of them are just so... childish?? They still act like teenagers. And at first I was judgemental of them. I do not respect that they are grown adults that continue acting this way.
But I've also learned that a lot of them started transitioning at 14, 15, 16, etc. So fucking young. Indoctrinated and put on this horrific medical malpractice train that they just can't get off of. There's a really disturbing lack of self-reflection that baffled me until I realized that transition has basically stunted them.
This applies more for the ~everyone is valid uwu~ crowd than the transmedicalists, who usually want to just move on with their lives. But these people are stuck in this ideological bubble where they cut out anyone who disagrees with them. They reject anything that makes them feel uncomfortable, that threatens their perception of their gender, which is so fragile that it can't be held under scrutiny. And they know it. It's why the act the way they do. Allowing their views about gender and the world at large to develop would also mean leaving behind their zealotry. They cannot do this because of how invested, physically and socially, they have become in this ideology. Leaving it behind would mean loss of friends, loss of ego, maybe even a full detransition. It would mean death.
this tracks with my experience of transition, which i started at 18-almost-19. i felt stuck there maturity-wise for so long, invested in this one narrow goal to the neglect of any other life goals i could have been pursuing. i did not engage in age-appropriate growth during this time (at least not willingly).
happy to say i have since caught up to myself, a process in which detransition was only the first step.
Hello, this ask is probably going to be rather heavy, so it's fine if you don't want to respond to it.
So my situation is that for several years (from 13 to 17) I considered myself to be a man trapped in a woman's body and wanted to transition to become "my true self". However, since then I became gender critical and stopped pursuing transition because it would not fix my internal issues and above all it would not actually ever make me male. So transitioning became pointless to me.
Now as an adult however, I've recently started feeling my desire to transition creeping back on me, although this time it was because of how apparent it became to me how misogyny all around the world is seen as a non-issue. Every day I hear of women dying, being sexually assaulted, forcefully impregnated and in general being disrespected by everyone. All of this became too much for me to handle so that's why my desire for transition came back. (Not to mention that I'm the only GNC woman in my social circles, so there is also the added alienation from other women.)
I think my question is: is it really that bad to transition in order to avoid or at least lessen the amount of misogyny i face every day? I know that by doing so I would be throwing other women under the bus, but I'm not mentally strong enough to challenge the oppression women face. I know that transitioning would make me miserable in many ways and probably physically sick as well (with all the hormonal side effects), but at least it would mean that men would harass me less. I'd rather be safe than happy.
you donât need anyoneâs permission to make that choice, but i will reflect back to you some of the truly limited insight i can glean from this message:
you already think transition will be bad for you, both for your physical body and your mental health.
you donât seem to believe the central tenet of gender ideology that generally allows trans people to persist in their identification.
you seem like you feel isolated and alone, mentioning being the only GNC woman in your group. perhaps trying to find other GNC women is a safer and more attractive goal for you than transitioning?
youâre right that misogyny is everywhere, but some of the examples you mention make me think youâre spending a lot of time online where your exposure to these things may be magnifying the role theyâre playing in your everyday life. maybe iâm wrong and all these things are truly happening TO you, but if theyâre not, thereâs no shame in limiting your exposure to them. same concept as doom-scrolling affecting how people view society. you donât need this, but i give you permission to look away from the carnage sometimes so that you may look upon your own life with love and appreciation, because there likely are things there to love and appreciate.
you arenât single-handedly responsible for challenging the oppression women face, and an inability to fix it all doesnât mean whatever you can do (something as seemingly small as being a visibly masculine woman who gives a little girl hope for how she can be in the future) isnât meaningful.
best of luck to you, and i get it; it makes sense to want to hide, and camouflage is a widely used survival technique in prey animals. but our lives are not so purely animalistic, we must also create meaning to live fully. i want that for you as i want that for me.
with your "WHY do you want to look masculinized and have a deeper voice?" point, i keep hitting the road block of "because im a man" and im not really sure what to do with that. it seems almost innate to brain that im a guy, its just there like a building block to everything else- i feel like i cant get past it? why cant women be masculine?-> they can but im not a woman -> you where born a woman-> yeah but im a man , its literally just that again and again and im not sure what to do ?
i know dude, butâand i mean this gentlyâitâs not innate. that thought springs from conditioning, my best guess is from living in a society that hates and ridicules women, especially masculine women. and since YOU donât hate masculine women, itâs fine for other women to be masculine, but your little sponge of a brain has been absolutely steeped in the message that masculine women are [take your pick of negative descriptions], so thatâs why it defaults to âbut not me, tho; iâm actually a man.â the implication being that your secret man status absolves you from the societal embarrassment of being a masculine woman.
and maybe transition will insulate you from the overt hostility and abasement of being a masculine woman in this cultureâas long as you convincingly imitate being a man. and that âas long asâ is a very heavy burden to carry. i do not recommend it. but that insulation will also cut you off from real authenticity, connection to people who are actually like you, a self-congruous life. helluva bad trade imo.
so wanting a deeper voice and a masculinized body? of course you want that, thatâs the necessary camouflage upon which your entire self-deceiving identity construct is predicated.
there is no man-essence inside your female body waiting to get out. there is only accepting yourself as a woman or pretending youâre not; there is no third option where you either somehow ARE or BECOME a man. that wonât happen.
so do whatever you will, act however you act. i say none of this to stop you from transitioningâi am not invested in your individual life trajectoryâwhether you transition or not, all of the above is and will remain true, and thatâs up to you to reconcile however you choose.
oh by the way i bet youâre so scared of trans women that pass as cis. oh NO i thought that woman was hot but it turns out she has a PENIS!! nobody can blur the lines of gender because what if i get a crush on someone i shouldnât ): because attraction canât be fluid or blur the lines of gender at all D:
nobodyâs asking you to date people with dicks if you donât want to jfc just stop invalidating lesbians who do date trans women. stop invalidating lesbians who are trans women. keep trans people out of your fucking mouth for a second. reevaluate your beliefs for a second maybe.
is sex really that important? are peopleâs genitals at birth really that important? are intersex people irrelevant because theyâre only 1% of the population (79 million people)? you say you believe trans women are female but then you say lesbians donât date trans women. are they female lite to you? Can you define who lesbians can date in a way that excludes all trans people and includes all cis women?
i've seen feminine men and thought, "wow she's hot," only to realize i'm looking at a cute gay guy. attraction disappears. i thought that person was a woman, was attracted to who i thought was a woman, and upon finding out i was wrong, the attraction fades. i am not afraid of this. this is not a scary thing, it is simply a real thing.
no one is asking me personally to date people with dicks, they're just asking me to share lesbian-only spaces with them where they can walk up and hit on me when the point of lesbian spaces is that i'm free from that imposition, and if i want to decline i have to pretend it's for some other reason, not because they're men; they're asking me to pretend we're the same and we just aren't. no one is saying transwomen aren't people worthy of spaces of their own, people who love and are attracted to them, we're just saying they're not entitled to OUR spaces or OUR love and attraction and we shouldn't have to play pretend that they are.
you tell on yourself with the word "invalidate," because real things are not destroyed by invalidation. you know what happens when someone doesn't know, doesn't realize, or doesn't believe i'm a lesbian? absolutely nothing. i remain a woman attracted only to women. invalidation only affects imposters. if invalidation is affecting transwomen who are pretending to be lesbians it is because deep down they know they just aren't; they're atypical heterosexual (or bisexual) men, but there is no fathomable universe where any man, even one with a special attachment to his concept of womanhood, is a lesbian.
god, YES sex is important. it is one of the main organizing factors of the world and it is especially important to women. don't trot out intersex people when it's convenient for you to make a shitty point (and to do so poorly, btw). intersex people are male or female and their conditions cause actual health impacts in their lives, they are not your convenient puppets and the vast, vast majority of trans people are not intersex so knock it the fuck off.
i have NEVER said i believe transwomen are female. trans women are necessarily male, unless you think it's possible or okay for a "cis" woman to "identify" as a transwoman? lesbians are females who love and are attracted exclusively to other females. it's very easy.
What are the differences among body dysphoria, sex dysphoria, gender dysphoria, and just the despair that comes with being treated differently because you're female?
if you're looking for discrete, categorical differences you probably won't find them, or won't find them to be sufficiently different to easily classify one over the other. these are just words we're using to refer to subjective feelings. the biggest differences are the meaning we (as individuals and we as a society) make of feelings that likely have large areas of overlap.
hi, your blog is incredibly interesting- i genuinely didn't realise there was a not conservative side of the gender critical sphere. i've been on testosterone for about 7 months now, so far this has been making me feel more like myself. personally I am not thinking about 'gender' but rather what i want to look and sound like- this has been working better than the whole 'gender is a feeling' thing..which is definitely a theory! If its okay to ask, what are your thoughts on medical transition?
i think medical transition is, broadly, very harmful.
it harms the individual: disrupts natural hormone cycles, negatively impacts cardiovascular health, negatively impacts reproductive functioning, creates an artifice which the individual comes to rely on to "feel like themself," thereby severing that person from true authenticity, necessitating the person remain a lifelong medical patient to keep all effects of hormones, subjecting the person to unnecessary risk of surgery, including death. it costs a lot of money and time that you don't actually have to spend. there is no evidence it correlates with mental health improvement, and it is my opinion that by focusing on transition, people do not attend to the areas of their lives that actually need and would benefit from attention and intervention.
it harms the group: gays and lesbians are disproportionately impacted by medical transition; gender non-conformity (which homosexuality is a form of) has become pathologized; now young lesbians and gays are not only growing up in a culture dominated by heterosexuality and rife with homophobia, they also have to navigate the pervasive message that they might benefit from transition. when i was a kid i was told by adults that i was "trying to be a man," that real women are not lesbians, and eventually i agreed with them. that gender non-conformity is seen as a precursor to "trans identification" only makes this worse--it's like, you get the "what, are you trying to be a man >:( ??!!" but also, "what, are you trying to be a man <=D ??!!" messaging. and what chance do we stand against attacks from all sides?
it is harmful to all women: look around at misogyny--devaluing women's opinions as vapid or lesser, assuming women are weak and fickle, dismissing women's perspectives and ideas, preying on women and girls sexually, seeing women as one-dimensional vessels for the transformation of the men around them--of COURSE girls don't "feel like a woman" these days, who would? instead of looking at the way society treats women and the disidentification it is producing among youth as the blazing alarm that it is, trans culture has wedged itself between women and liberation with the suggestion that "maybe you're not a woman if you don't feel like one?" never minding that "feeling like one" generally means liking being objectified, belittled, seen as weak, ignored, simultaneously not being taken seriously but being blamed for things. not only does this derail the actually important conversation about misogyny, but it leaves women and girls vulnerable to the predation of medical transition, which as i mentioned above, is harmful physically, emotionally, socially, and financially.
also, i would argue there are actually no conservative "gender critical" people. conservatives tend to reject gender non-conformity and embrace traditional gender roles; ain't no way to be critical of gender while holding central traditional gender roles. conservatives may be "trans critical," but they're not actually "gender critical." trans ideology has a lot in common with conservatives when it comes to gender, actually. both reinforce traditional gender stereotypes; how different is "i'm masculine and fit in more with boys than girls, so i must really be a man" from "i'm not a man, so i can't act masculinely, i must act femininely" really? they are threads of the same rope and that rope holds us prisoner, it doesn't free us. true gender non-conformity is being female but realizing that your masculine nature doesn't change anything about you (trans ideology), nor does it need to change itself (conservative ideology).
i know you didn't ask for this part, but you're here in my inbox, so here you go: doesn't it strike you as strange that it's taking synthetic medical intervention to make you "feel like yourself?" is the route to authenticity really via the path of cosmetic surgery and synthetic hormones?
it's either intellectually dishonest or intellectually lazy to stop at you're just "thinking about...how you want to look and sound." WHY do you want to look masculinized and have a deeper voice? there is a zero-percent chance the answer to that question is entirely separate from how those traits get you treated in society. and that's the impact of misogyny. and please don't misunderstand this as me suggesting you should not be masculine--i just don't think you have to subject yourself to the harms of medical transition in order to BE masculine.
and i say this as someone who took these steps, who masculinized with a mastectomy and many years of testosterone. i get that there are certain advantages to appearing as a man in society despite being a woman, but largely these are individual advantages for ME that come at the expense of WOMEN. thinking i'm a man, men take me more seriously; this impacts women by reinforcing the idea that men deserve consideration when women's voices don't, and it means that i don't have to advocate for women to be taken seriously because I don't personally need it; it runs the risk of making me complacent to this phenomenon, convincing me that surely women are exaggerating when they share their experiences because i don't have such a hard time of things, all the men are nice to me. see how pernicious it is?
because i'm 5'10", skinny, and with a flat chest, many people think i'm a man when i'm running. this means i can run at night, with headphones in, in new places--all basically without fear. the stories other women tell me make it clear this isn't the case for them. some women i know don't run outside anymore at all because of how men treat them, sexualize them, harass them, prey on them. so i get that it is a clear advantage to appear as a man sometimes; this is one thing i'm actually really grateful for. but it is not worth the damage i did to my body, it isn't worth the sense of alienation i sometimes feel from women, a sense i also felt with men, even when i was pretending to be "one of them," it isn't worth the money and time and effort i spent trying to convincingly imitate men that i could have spent on things that would actually nurture me and my life.
"gender is a feeling" certainly is a theory, but so is "transition makes me more myself," and one is about as good as the other.
we are not alive to simply take our thoughts and feelings at face value! interrogate your feelings and your ideas! we live in a culture and none of us are immune to that. something something unexamined life.
Sisters, some of you may lack experience evaluating scientific evidence, yet are confronted with TRAs saying âscience proves trans people exist!â and providing links to scientific studies claiming to have found a biological basis for trans identity, or proof that transition is beneficial to trans people.
Iâd like to outline a few concepts that may help you understand the problems with the science that has been conducted on the subject of trans people. I am not a scientist, so Iâd much appreciate any feedback or corrections.
1. Begging the question
Here are some of the studies being held up as proof that trans people are âvalidâ:
A study of the brains of trans women, trans men, cis women and cis men, and the potential for gender-based differences: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150107082133.htm
Our sense of belonging to the male or female gender is an inherent component of the human identity perception. As a general rule, gender ide
A study on the brains of some trans men, and some cis men and cis women, claiming to show that the brains of the trans men had more similarities to the cis male brains, relative the cis female brains: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022395610001585
Some gray and white matter regions of the brain are sexually dimorphic. The best MRI technique for identifying subtle differences in white m
Youâve heard it before, Iâm sure. Are you ready to learn why these studies were giant wastes of time? And no, itâs not even because of the obvious problem right off the bat (How did they know there were no closted trans people in the âcisâ groups? How could they be sure there were no future detransitioners in the trans groups?).
Itâs because, if you want to do science, you cannot start by assuming what you are trying to prove. This is known as the fallacy of âbegging the question.â They relied on the self-reports of trans people to sort them in a group apart from cis people. In attempting to prove the biological basis for the category âtransâ, they assumed the category âtransâ had a biological basis. This is what pseudoscientists do.
This fallacy comes up a lot in arguments with the devoutly religious: âThe human eye is too complex to have evolved, it must have been designed. Therefore, God exists.â Sir, noâŠ. you cannot assume that the eye is too complex to have evolved that way. You must prove that to me.
What they should have done, right from the start, is study the brains of self-identified trans people, and from there predict the future detransitioners. Or they could have studied the brains of self-identified non-trans people, and predicted which ones were closted trans people. That would have been real science.
âI am not convinced. After all, they found something that looks âfemaleâ in the brains of the trans women! Maybe their methods are flawed but they must have found something!â
Not necessarily. I think what may be going on is known as:
2. P-hacking
When I was a young child, I saw a History Channel Special that claimed to prove that the Bible predicted the JFK assassination. I think the letters of a certain translation were arranged in grid form, and certain words related to the JFK assassination were grouped in close proximity. Stupid, right?
But I was just a kid, so I told my dad âDad! Did you know the bible predicted the JFK assassination?â And my father recognized that as an excellent opportunity to teach me about p-hacking.
âNo,â he said, âthose are just coincidences.â
âDad, are you blind? What are the odds that those exact words would be found together like that?â
âNot very high. But donât forget⊠they werenât looking for evidence that the bible predicted the JFK assassination. They were looking for evidence that the Bible predicted anything, in the history of ever. Itâs actually quite unlikely, using their methods, that youâd find NO uncanny predictions of anything thatâs ever happened in human history. And youâd probably find a few uncanny predictions in the Harry Potter books, using this method.â
These researchers in the second study cited did not set out to find whether trans men had similar fractional anistropy levels in posterior part of the right superior longitudinal fasciculus to cis men. They were looking at whether the white matter patterns of trans men had any similarity to cis men (of course, in doing so they flagrantly beg the question, but I digress).
The brain is highly complex. When you conduct an MRI scan, you generate mountains of data. And if you set out to prove that a similarity exists somewhere in this mile-deep well of data you have generated for these individuals, you are going to find something that appears statistically significant. Itâs actually unlikely that you will find no similarities between any two groups of people who have their brains scanned. And, if you are engaged in anti-scientific motivated reasoning, you will take this and claim to have found evidence for a biological basis for trans identification.
âPerhaps there is faulty science going on but you canât argue with the results! Transition saves lives! Studies have shown that it makes people feel so much better!â
Well, thereâs a problem with that, too.
3. The placebo effect
The neurological basis of the placebo effect has been extensively studied. We know, for example, that it can be augmented or dampened by certain drugs. We know that it exists even when you know you are being given a placebo. And we know that the more elaborate a placebo is, the more effective it is: so a surgery will be more effective than an injection, which will be better than a pill.
Do you see where Iâm going with this? Have you ever heard of a more elaborate treatment than gender transition: surgery, hormones, clothing, hair, name, pronouns, every aspect of your life can change.
But transition has not been proven to be any more effective at treating gender dysphoria than some kind of equally elaborate placebo. Thatâs the piece thatâs missing, that would usually be accounted for when studying any sort of medical treatment.
âBut there are a lot of health benefits to placebos. If they help people, then they help people.â
This is true. Thereâs a problem, though. Transition is not tumeric pills or reiki or like⊠journaling frequently. In fact, it comes with risks of absolutely nightmarish consequences. Trans women are walking around, right now, with colostomy bags because of botched vaginoplasties. Trans men are stuck with chronic kidney infections from phalloplasties, as well as the risk of gangrene and lifelong weakness in their donor sites, as well as phantom pain and progressive tightening and sclerosing from their mastectomies. Puberty blockers disrupt brain development and put a child at risk of osteoporosis, sterility, and sexual dysfunction. Hormones cause powerful and systemic changes that have not been fully studied, but consider this: what happens when the cartilagenous valves on a male-sized heart become thinner and more flexbile under the influence of estrogen? What happens when the cartilage structures in a female sized brain become larger and tougher in response to testosterone? Do you know?
You donât, because nobody knows. We arenât studying these treatments. We are experimenting on human beings, just like they did in the Nazi camps, and for what: treatments that have not been proven to be better than a placebo, that are based on faulty science, and that donât even hold up to common sense. Why would you amputate a healthy young womanâs breasts? Because she begged you to? Is that how medicine works?
âBut why does the trans rights movement need to lean on junk science? Why donât they do real science instead?â
Because it is a religion. Thatâs it, thatâs the only explanation left. They believe that they have gender identities, that are at odds with their physical bodies. Theses gender identities have not been demonstrated to exist. These gender identities seem to want things of trans people, and they seem to be placated with certain rites (going to the beach after top surgery, standing to pee after phalloplasty) and certain prayers (compelled pronoun usage). Gender identities act similarly to the members of any polytheistic pantheon.
I have no problem with anyoneâs religion. But it is time the scientific establishment, and the government, understand that in âaffirmingâ trans people, while defacing the scientific method, logic and common sense, they are in fact respecting an establishment of religion. They do this to the ultimate detriment of trans people, who have come to them for help, for answers, and are made a mockery.
âWhy do you care so much about trans people?â
Because theyâre human beings and they deserve better than this horseshit. Because I used to be one. Because if not me, then who?
tbh I donât think Iâll ever really forgive the trans movement for indoctrinating so many people into the belief that women speaking about our sex-based oppression is âterfyâ and shouldnât be allowed and any woman who does it wants to genocide trans people. even if they back off of this stance, the damage is done.
me saying âwomen are oppressed on basis of sex, not gender identity, and we cannot identify out of that oppressionâ does not mean I think itâs okay to kill or hurt trans people. it does not mean that I agree with right-wingers when they say gender non-conformity is destroying civilization. It does not mean that I am going to vote for politicians who think all gay people/gender non-conforming people are groomers.
it literally just means you cannot change your biological sex (which was never a controversial statement, even among trans people, up until like 5 years ago) and females should have special protections and spaces since we are constantly being preyed upon by males who see us as subhuman sex objects. that doesnât mean I think all trans people are predators, it means that enough males are predatory toward women that we deserve to have spaces away from them (especially spaces where weâll be not fully clothed).
we deserve to be able to talk about female-specific oppression without being told weâre evil genocidal nazis. and the fact that they constantly have to misrepresent what our actual beliefs are tells me they know weâre right and it scares them.
hi!! i'm trying to get into running so i can try out for my school's track team next year, any tips? i'm not a very athletic person, don't play any sports, but i still want to try.
hooray for running and track! way to go anon, i wish i had run track in high school but i was way too afraid, so kudos to you. i have previously written some general running advice, which iâll link to below. never having run track, i donât know anything specific about training, but recently saw who i think to be local high school track teams practicing on a river trail. maybe asking your coach if you can practice with the team this summer and/or emailing the coach asking her for some workouts you can do to prepare for the season. if sheâs worth her salt, sheâll give you something. if you already know which event you want to do, practice skills related to that. you also canât go wrong with tacking on some strength training and core work to whatever you do this summer. also, good luck! youâre gonna do great!
previous questions about running:
hello I was hoping to get advice on running! i was never particularly athletic but started doing couch to 5k and have just hit the 3mi mark
What tips do you have for those who want to start running? I enjoy running, but I have some difficulty keeping a training routine. How do yo
Thinking about how most discussion around âeducate boysâ is sub-textually presented from a position where sexual violence is a default, expected behaviour that must be trained out, rather than treating it as a learned behaviour that could be prevented if the teaching was identified and stamped out
Michael Laidlaw, MD: I'm a board-certified endocrinologist, practicing in private practice for the last 16 years. I've been studying and publishing in this area for the last 5 years, including peer reviewed journals such as Journal of of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, and others. I also have a patient who is a detransitioner.
I think it's important to note that studies are shown that desistance, or growing out of this condition, of children by adulthood is very high. It's some 50-98%.
I want to be sure before I give someone a very powerful hormone like Insulin that they in fact have diabetes.
What about cancer? Before we give any powerful agents such as chemotherapeutics or surgeries, we certainly want to have physical evidence of this problem, such as biopsies or imaging.
Now, the gender affirmative therapy treatment proposed by WPATH gives very powerful hormones and surgeries on what basis? Where can we find the gender identity to be certain that these children will not desist by adulthood? Can we use imaging of the brain or blood tests, genetic testing, are there other biomarkers to ensure that we are correct? There is no such thing.
Julia Mason, MD: The Endocrine Society put out guidelines in 2017, and they were very careful in the guidelines. One, to point out that the evidence was of low and very low quality. And they also said in the guidelines that they have no idea how you identify which kids are trans and require this treatment.
And the the American Academy of Pediatrics the next year just leapt into that void and said, oh, oh, we'll tell you how you know which kids. You ask them.
Prior to 2018 I had maybe one trans patient. But then there was another one. And another one. And another one.
It wasn't until later that I started asking questions like, wait, every single kid I send to the gender clinic gets put on puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. Just, it was happening immediately.
Patrick Hunter, MD: This affirmative model of care has spread wildly in the last 8 years. Now we have objective, unbiased systematic reviews. These systematic reviews tell us the evidence for youth transition is poor quality, and with very low certainty for benefit.
In JAMA Pediatrics, there was a study reported from Northwestern University in Chicago. Patients ranged in age from 13 to 24 years. The authors concluded that mastectomy was beneficial and should not be delayed in youth. What lead them to that conclusion? The finding that 3 months after surgery, the 36 patients were happy with their flat chests. They lost 9% of their surgical cases to follow-up. Nine percent. In 3 months.
It is absurd, meaningless to draw any conclusions after 3 months.
This paper is indicative of the quality of research we have in this field, published in our most prestigious journals.
IIRC, youâre dating a trans-identified person, right? I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how to tell if a relationship with someone with that much political distance is worth the shot. Iâm not really a radfem, just a sort of gender skeptic, but Iâm in a similar boat and I feel weird about it. Iâm not sure what the best way to proceed is.
itâs hard to advise on how to tell whether itâs worth it to take a shot with someone or not. i suppose my question would be, what kind of political distance is there between you and the other person?
my partner considers themself non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, but doesnât consider themself trans. their NB situation has more to do with discomfort with the social role of women and personal experiences with misogyny than belief in gender souls or changing sex. this makes it a lot easier for us to be in a relationship because we mostly agree on things. because misogyny is a motivator for them, they understand the importance of sex and female class consciousness.
it was also crucial that i never held my beliefs back from them, both in the sense that they didnât feel duped and i never felt like i was censoring myself.
so, how to tell if itâs worth it to tryâŠdonât hide your thoughts or self, itâs okay to not see entirely eye to eye on things as long as your non-negotiable values are shared, and you really like each other. without knowing you or the other person, thatâs all i got. good luck with whatever you choose.
I no longer have the energy to read these kinds scribes in full because itâs always more of the same: pretending to not know what feminism, pretending women are saying something we arenât. Itâs just so energy sucking.
Honestly, seeing âwomenâ as a turf to be defended, as opposed to a set of imperatives and limitations to be criticized, challenged, changed.
Catherine Mckinnon I am not a set of imperatives. I am not a turf to be challenged or defended. I am a human being.Iâm not territorial over the word woman, they can use any sound with their mouth to refer to me they want. But what sound will I use with my mouth to say that I am a alive, experiencing consciousness in a human body which is persecuted on the basis of being of the female sex.
Victoria Smith wrote this article about how heartbreaking this is (she compares trying to define radical feminism without saying women are a sex class, to those creative writing exercises where you try not to use the letter âeâ in a whole story):
Catherine MacKinnon can'
That bit about âI am not a turf to be defendedâ is SO IMPORTANT and central to this whole thing. The way the right wing is starting to own this question, they absolutely DO talk about âwomanâ as an identity or turf to be defended. The Posie Parker rhetoric is full of this. So Catharine MacKinnon assuming the "terf" position is about defending the "woman identity", when a lot of us don't really care at all about the woman identity, we care about the material needs of women, is a huge problem.
Iâm so happy Victoria Smith called her out on this.
Weâre fucking tired of being fed shit and being told itâs gold and if we canât recognize itâs gold itâs because we donât understand some super duper sophisticated analysis. Academia is filled with this and itâs worse than stupid now, itâs EVIL.
Fuck, I'm not even sure if i can bring myself to read this piece. So many of my intellectual and feminist/lesbian icons (including margaret atwood, judy blume, billie jean king, bell hooks, and now catherine mackinnon) have absolutely abandoned the courage of their convictions and all of their principles in recent years in order to spare themselves from the mob.Â
Within the last five years or so, each one of the women I just mentioned has either a) flipped on her feminist principles after succeeding in a field that feminism helped them break into (cough cough billie jean king going all in on supporting and calling for MtF tennis players to compete in female tournaments after her own retirement, despite never having had to play against males herself) or b) gone out and made public statements that, at first, appeared to acknowledge the existence of womenâs sex-based oppression or female people as a class, only to immediately do a 180 and walk back their commentary after receiving the tiniest amount of pushback.Â
I think seeing whatâs happened to JKR in the public square has really escalated a culture of fear among even very high-profile feminists and female writers, which of course is unfortunately the point. Especially how itâs not going away even years later, like this is proof positive that even when women express their opinions as kindly and diplomatically-stated as JKR did, itâs still a huge endless fucking deal and sheâs still facing insane abuse and the seeming widespread societal conclusion that sheâs an evil unmentionable bigot. While I can understand not wanting that to happen to you, I donât see how that fear could ever justify betraying the entire body of feminist work youâve crafted over nearly a lifetime in the field.Â
i began reading mackinnonâs piece, but itâs so full of bad faith arguments and mischaracterization of feminismâŠitâs honestly embarrassing. i am embarrassed for her.
she does not explain WHY one might think males who claim to be women would be welcomed. just states it like itâs common knowledge. iâm open to hearing her argument here but there is none.
it does not strike me as self evident that there is a certain subset of men that women would be happy to consider also women. it strikes me as thinly veiled homophobic rhetoric and actual biological essentialismââleaving masculinity behindâ as of being a woman/âembracing womanhoodâ requires leaving masculinity behind. embarrassing argument for mackinnon to be making here.
she again needs to explain herself here. no radfem who knows anything about feminism conflates âfemale sexâ with âfeminine gender.â the accepted position of radical feminism is actually the exact oppositeâwomen are female, not not necessarily feminine. there is no wrong way to âbeâ a woman; the word is not a carefully delineated category into or out of which movement is even possible, it is merely the linguistic extension of female that is specific to adult humans in the same way âkittenâ describes a baby cat. my cat plays fetch and i sometimes jokingly call him âpuppy catâ but itâs universally understood that he doesnât belong at the dog park, right?
âreverting,â as though this definition of woman is somehow regressive. this is a linguistic feint meant to make an emotional appeal and itâs again embarrassing for a smart academic to be making this and all her other arguments in this piece.
âdefining women by biologyâ is NOT biological essential!! and i have to believe mackinnon knows this becauseâŠcmon this is undergrad level shit. which makes this a bad faith argument she should again be embarrassed by.
biological essentialism is ascribing a biological basis to behaviors/roles/preferences, like âwomen are naturally submissiveâ or âitâs nature for women to enjoy looking pretty;â mackinnon is not just wrong here, sheâs lying.
again with the âreductionâ language. no radical feminist is saying women are nothing more than female bodies, just that a female body is the one and only requirement for being a woman, and then that woman can live whatever type of life she wants!
âqualities chosen so whatever is considered definitive if sex is not only physical but cannot be physically changed into.â i am so so so embarrassed for this grown woman who is an academic to really be making this argumentâfirst that the definition of sex has been âchosen,â as though it was concocted rather than observed, then that the physical, corporeal locus of sex is somehow arbitrarily arrived at, that there is some other locus of sex into which one CAN change but the mean women have picked the rigid physical categories not because it best reflects the shared reality of women, but because it excludes men. embarrassing to make the argument that women have defined our entire existence as a reaction to men.
i couldnât keep reading. so embarrassed for her and incredibly let down.
hello I was hoping to get advice on running! i was never particularly athletic but started doing couch to 5k and have just hit the 3mi mark but itâs TOUGH and I donât really feel like I can easily do it. How do I get better at running, and faster and be able to hit longer distances? is it just practice? it seems so far out of reach đ my hip also hurts when I run but is that just because Iâm bad at running?
hey, congrats on hitting your 3 mile mark, thatâs incredible! i remember the first time i ran 3 miles and it was also tough. one thing i know now was i was going way too fast!
the answer to most of your questions is to just run more, but i would specifically advise slowing down as you run more.
slow down so much it seems easy and you could have a chat while running those three miles. it might feel âtoo slow,â and might seem silly to go that slow, but this is how you a) make three miles not feel tough, b) go longer distances, and c) get faster. this is also how you preserve your own mental fortitude by not making running miserable all of the time.
running is miserable some of the time, and i would even venture that it should be miserable a very slim sliver of the time, like when youâre doing hill repeats or sprinting or you just hit mile 24 of a marathon. but i digress.
also, the slower you run the farther you can go. if you want to go farther and eventually get faster, you need more time on your feet; more time running causes physical adaptations in your body that make running easier/more efficient. and importantly, you cannot force these adaptations by going faster or farther than youâre ready to, you can only injure yourself this way.
if you wanna go farther and faster, you canât increase both at the same time. your body isnât adapted to both, and asking it to adapt to both is a recipe for injury. pick either distance or speed to increase and do so very cautiously. finishing a workout and feeling like youâve still got gas in the tank is a good thing.
and at the beginning of your running journey, just running more is likely going to improve your ability at both speed and distance.
idk how many miles youâre running per week, but the common idea is, donât increase your mileage more than 10% per week. so if you ran 10 miles this week, no more than 11 next week.
about the hip painâright out the gate, this isnât medical advice and i recommend a physical therapist, which is how i cured my own hip pain when i first began running. she identified muscle imbalances in my bodyânamely that my thigh muscles were a lot stronger than my glutes, which were not activating during running and my thigh muscles and my hip flexors were overcompensating, hence the pain. so your issue could be strength based, and strength training is incredibly helpful to running even if thatâs not the source of your pain. it could also be to do with your gait when running, which is something a PT can help you sort out. i had to change my gait significantly in addition to strengthening my glutes to sort my pain. another possible culprit is your shoes. your running shoes might be old, after about 500-700 miles, you should retire your shoes; after about 300 miles shoes will start to be affected by the use. so if your shoes are old or arenât exclusive or specifically running shoes, time for new ones.
it could also be that your shoes are not the right specs for your body/gait. i run in shoes with a high drop (10mm), which is the distance between the heel and the toe of the shoe. i once tried to change brands of shoes and switched to an 8mm drop thinking iâd be fine, but i was not fine. i had tendinitis in my achilles for two months following ~60 miles in the new shoes. i went back to a new pair of my old shoes and the tendinitis went away.
SO thatâs a lot way to say idk see a PT.
and while soreness is to be expected and a little ache or two, running shouldnât cause real pain, and if it is, thatâs a sign somethings up. it doesnât mean youâre a bad runner either, it just means you need to pay attention and make some adjustments.
donât seek a destination (like getting faster) when running, just run. itâs not going to be a steady incline of progress where each run improves on the last. your ability to enjoy the act of running itself will help you stick with what can be a lifelong hobby. and that brings me back toâslow down.
and as for running in the heat, it will always be harder than running in cool/cold. my paces drop significantly in the heat no matter how much i run in it. it also makes you sweat more, which means youâre losing (and thus need to replace) more water and more electrolytes when running in the heat vs running in the cool.
be kind to yourself. if running feels hard one day, whether itâs because of heat or because of life stress or bad sleep or whatever, just go easier so you can enjoy it and stick with the habitâthis will almost always lead to improvement, but it certainly wonât make you worse at running.
