Roe v Wade

[pineapple stu]

What indeed

Well - no.

This for me is the problem with using memes in place of discussion. You posted that in response to comments about the UK Supreme Court ruling. I would be fairly sure that had absolutely nothing to do with Trump's decision, so it doesn't prove the point you think it does.

The thing is - Trump is an idiot; we all know that (well, most of us anyway). There may be a good reason for cutting the service btw - there were good reasons for cutting the NHS' gender unit for example - but I don't think Trump has done anything in his time in office to have earned any benefit of the doubt.

But the problem is there's damaging activists on both sides. The discussion here I think started with me criticising people putting pronouns in their emails, on social, etc (while Real Ale, on the other side, said he could fathom a case where it should be compulsory). I recently read Time to Think by Hannah Barnes, the BBC investigative journalist who did a lot of work in the GIDS/Tavistock case. It was in my reading pile anyway; I didn't read it because of this thread - though that said, I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in this area, which presumably is everyone on this thread. The referrals to GIDS were skyrocketing before it was shut down - but there were people being referred who were using pronouns or identifying as something they weren't simply because it was the trendy thing to do at school for example. There's people who found pronouns were helpful for transitioning - but then very unhelpful for detransitioning, when they realised it was simply a phase they were going through. (In fact, pronouns became a sort of confirmation bias, shutting down discussion on other solutions for the patients)

There was a significant change in treatment outcome - originally there was something like 80% of people presenting were successfully treated with psychological advice in coming to terms not just with their body and changes during puberty, but also with the various comorbidities they had experienced (autism, depression, domestic abuse, sexual abuse - and excessive social media use was often in there too, though I'm not sure if that could count as a comorbidity), but that changed to a situation where staff are bullied for not giving diagnoses of gender dysphoria, and where almost 100% of people put on puberty blockers (which are proscribed to allow people time to think) went on to surgery, which is unheard of in medicine - it implies a clear bias towards pushing people down a pre-ordained path, and a path with pretty much no scientific basis either. (Indeed, there's a class action lawsuit in the brewing)

Interestingly, not only did the Tavistock have big issues with activist staff (effectively they bullied disagreement out of the place such that only activists were welcome), but there was also a strong air of homophobia there too - so no real consideration of the fact that many young people identifying as trans are actually struggling to come to terms with being gay, and indeed many identify as trans because they feel it's more socially acceptable to be trans than to be gay.

That all factors in to a situation where it can be very hard to challenge people who identify as something they're clearly not - and that leads to Crafty's very real-world example he gave earlier, which no-one has engaged with.

So when (reasonable) people criticise the trans movement, those are some of the reasons why. It's not to deny that there are trans people - but it is to say that those who push pronouns, who shut down criticism, who make false equivalences and so on are doing just as much harm as the Trump side of things. And this is a movement which needs to be criticised, for the benefit of those it purports to help.

(The US is much worse btw, as the US tends to be - they'll operate at the drop of a hat, which has obvious repercussions for the patient. In medicine, you pretty much never want to become like the US. Which, of course, is where the pronoun trend started.)