Are transgender people the gender they say they are?

[parochial boy]

That said, saying ''people who menstruate'' instead to not be noninclusive to the <1% of people who identify as transgender is demeaning to women.

Yeah, for example, I identify as a man, not a "person with a penis", "non-mensurating person" or any other classification social justice activists have invented in the past 15 minutes and are demanding everyone start using. Why is my self identification less important than that of transpeople? It seems like they're the only ones who get to call themselves what they want and everyone else has to use ever changing jargon that's being made up on the fly to stay out of social justice jail.

If we're really being postmodern about this, someone who says "I'm a man because I have a penis" isn't any more "wrong" than someone who claims to be a certain gender because of a "brain sex". The issue here is not to let people define themselves however they want, it's to impose the concept of the "brain sex" and trans jargon onto everyone else.

To be honest, you are actually the only person I have ever seen on here using the term "brain sex". My understanding is the term is controversial, even widely rejected, by transactivists because of what it implies and because of the lack any convincing science behind it.

It's the same with all the other woke terms like "people who menstruate", if I didn't come here I would probably not have ever even heard or registered these terms. People really overestimate the audience and platform that a small number of online activists have.

As for insisting that non or pre-op transpeople are actually their assigned at birth gender. Well Afleitch makes the most relevant point here, you don't know whether a female presenting transwoman is one or not unless you find out what their genitals are; so the most socially well-adjusted thing is quite simply to take them at their word. Seeing as we base our day to day judgement of someone's gender largely on their appearance and the way they present themselves, it seems a bit obsessive to suddenly change this and make an exception for transpeople.

All the more since the consequences of banning them from legal recognition of their gender has real and dangerous consequences for them. Whereas legally recognising them as their target gender has a comparitively minuscule impact, despite what various the moral panics of reecent times would want to make seem

[parochial boy]

No it’s just a cause of immense psychological pain, leads to them being forced in to physically dangerous spaces and is on the whole potentially deadly when trans people « aren’t seen as the gender they claim to be »

I mean, what in the actual Christ, this is why people claim that right wingers aren’t capable of empathy.

[parochial boy]

It's more of a concern that not just on forum but IRL too, despite all claims that trans people are some oppressed class, they (as well as cis supporters) have a stranglehold on modern society to dictate that one's life can be ruined simply for having justifiable reasons not to see them as they gender they demand to be seen as. And even if it doesn't go as far as ruining someone's livelihood, it's often still going as far as assigning some nasty label to someone or some lesser form of punishment for insanely dumb reasons like thinking there are only two genders, thinking that there's no difference between gender and sex and you are what you are born as, refusing to have sex with someone because the other person is trans/not having the genitals of their preference, having an issue with trans women in women's only spaces, etc. Contrary to how you are presenting it here, in our culture today, "correcting" often means forcing someone to hold your view despite their justifiable reasons not to see it the way you do.

Because trans people are an oppressed class. No matter what you like to think, any person coming out as trans today is going to face, in the very best case scenario, a intense degree of social rejection and hatred on top of the already rather unpleasant experience of dysphoria that would have lead to them coming out as trans in the first place. Trans people are far, far more vulnerable to physical and sexual violence, exclusion from the workplace, exclusion by family and friends, homelessness and suicide than almost any other group in society; on top of the fact that they are still an acceptable target in the way that very few other groups are. Look at the legislation that is directed at them, or even look at the attitudes directed towards them even on this allegedly liberal forum. You can, and are, nasty about trans people in a way that it is totally taboo to be about gay people or black people in this day and age.

Frankly, presenting yourself as the victim of trans people because of your brave opposition to the legitimacy of their gender identity speaks to a simply incredible level of narcissism and hypocrisy on your part.

[parochial boy]

To be honest, the reason that trans activists get so aggressive is quite clearly because it is completely honest to be constantly barraged with the same arguments semantic arguments about the illegitimacy of their identities or the dangers of puberty blockers. I mean, how is this thread still going? everything that needs to be said needs to be said and yet the same people come back with the same arguments, which get the same responses, the same infernal circle.

As far as the puberty blockers go, I mean how many times has this been said? Yes, there are side effects; no, the side effects are not a concealed secret. The reason they are used is because the medical profession has evaluated the risks and benefits associated with their use and concluded that the benefits far outweigh the risks. Medicines typically do not get approved if this isn't the case, and the decades of longitudinal clinical studies tend to support this.

In this case - you treat these as a medical subject; there are plenty of treatments that are given to children that have potentially nasty and irreversible side effects, and yet we don't try to ban these because we know the benefits. What is not a reasonable argument is comparing them to things like tattoos or body piercings or other body modifcations that aren't being used in a medical setting

[parochial boy]

As far as the puberty blockers go, I mean how many times has this been said? Yes, there are side effects; no, the side effects are not a concealed secret. The reason they are used is because the medical profession has evaluated the risks and benefits associated with their use and concluded that the benefits far outweigh the risks. Medicines typically do not get approved if this isn't the case, and the decades of longitudinal clinical studies tend to support this.

And nobody in this thread has questioned this, at least not to my knowledge.

We should, though, regardless of our view of GnRH agonists and other "puberty blockers." It's a wildly inaccurate characterization of the history of medicine in the United States.

This is not just a matter of our health care system's strange vulnerability to becoming a means of profiting from pushing highly addictive psychoactive drugs under the guise of "treatment": the high-profile fuck-ups such as amphetamines, opioids, and benzos. There are even more boring examples: proton pump inhibitors, hip and knee replacements, orthodontics, tonsillectomies... the list goes on.

For those of you who can't stomach any assertion provided without a source and a list of credentials, see Jack Wennberg's work on geographic variation in utilization and supply-induced demand for health care.

I don't want to get drawn into a discussion about the reputability of American medical professionals, because the response will invariably be "They know better than you do." Nonetheless, overprescription and profit-oriented surgeons have demonstrated in recent years that the "trust the professionals" argument just isn't good enough.

The difference is, famously in the case of opiates but also very much with things like joint replacements, puberty blockers are used as a fairly standard form of treatment in the non-profit oriented healthcare systems you get outside the USA. And yes pharma companies pushing expensive treatments exists in those systems too, but it doesn’t go anywhere near as far as in it does in the US. In that respect, the biggest case that you could make is that they are prescribed too quickly to children presenting symptoms of gender dysphoria, that’s a legitimate argument, but it’s a very different one to the argument that has been made that they shouldn’t be prescribed at all and don’t on the whole have the best long term outcomes for children suffering from gender dysphoria.

[parochial boy]

As far as the puberty blockers go, I mean how many times has this been said? Yes, there are side effects; no, the side effects are not a concealed secret. The reason they are used is because the medical profession has evaluated the risks and benefits associated with their use and concluded that the benefits far outweigh the risks. Medicines typically do not get approved if this isn't the case, and the decades of longitudinal clinical studies tend to support this.

And nobody in this thread has questioned this, at least not to my knowledge.

We should, though, regardless of our view of GnRH agonists and other "puberty blockers." It's a wildly inaccurate characterization of the history of medicine in the United States.

This is not just a matter of our health care system's strange vulnerability to becoming a means of profiting from pushing highly addictive psychoactive drugs under the guise of "treatment": the high-profile fuck-ups such as amphetamines, opioids, and benzos. There are even more boring examples: proton pump inhibitors, hip and knee replacements, orthodontics, tonsillectomies... the list goes on.

For those of you who can't stomach any assertion provided without a source and a list of credentials, see Jack Wennberg's work on geographic variation in utilization and supply-induced demand for health care.

I don't want to get drawn into a discussion about the reputability of American medical professionals, because the response will invariably be "They know better than you do." Nonetheless, overprescription and profit-oriented surgeons have demonstrated in recent years that the "trust the professionals" argument just isn't good enough.

The difference is, famously in the case of opiates but also very much with things like joint replacements, puberty blockers are used as a fairly standard form of treatment in the non-profit oriented healthcare systems you get outside the USA. And yes pharma companies pushing expensive treatments exists in those systems too, but it doesn’t go anywhere near as far as in it does in the US. In that respect, the biggest case that you could make is that they are prescribed too quickly to children presenting symptoms of gender dysphoria, that’s a legitimate argument, but it’s a very different one to the argument that has been made that they shouldn’t be prescribed at all and don’t on the whole have the best long term outcomes for children suffering from gender dysphoria.

But I didn't say they shouldn't be prescribed at all. I've reiterated several times in this thread that I don't support a blanket ban on them.

Fair enough, I’m not accusing you of that, but certain other posters have very definitely made claims to that extent. Or that they should not be accessible until a time point that is too late.