[paperwasp42]

One of the most horrifying social media pages I've seen was an influencer who billed herself as a "trans activist" and documented every moment of her trans daughter's life.

This poor kid was 8-years-old and attempted suicide on a regular basis. Every time she tried to kill herself, the mom would document the gritty details, post pictures and details about it online (and of course get massive likes/shares by well-intentioned folks wanting to "raise awareness"), and request donations for her "activism."

That girl will never be able to "pass" as female due to her face/identity being plastered on social media as a trans kid. She also will have to live with the horror of millions of strangers knowing the gory details of her trying to shove a knife into her wrist, chugging Tylenol, and having complete mental breakdowns at school that required emergency medical intervention.

My gut instinct also suspects the girl's poor mental health has a strong element of Munchausen by Proxy. It is bizarre for an 8-year-old to know that Tylenol and wrist-slitting are both preferred methods for suicide, and to act on this knowledge.

Despite all this, the mom was clearly raking in donations, and collecting thousands of comments about what a "hero" she was for "bringing light" to trans issues. The horrified comments by trans individuals were always buried at the bottom of posts.

The entire page felt like thinly-veiled child abuse, but there isn't anything in Facebook's code of conduct that could be used to stop it. And Facebook of course had no incentive to address the content--the page had millions of likes and was surely a great source of traffic/profit.

I would love to see policies in place to restrict this sort of child exploitation. I am all for freedom of speech on social medical platforms, but blatant exploitation of children in exchange for money is a special sort of cruelty that should be reined in.

[ht85]

> It is bizarre for an 8-year-old to know that Tylenol and wrist-slitting are both preferred methods for suicide, and to act on this knowledge

As a parent this really stands out. I have a kid around that age and almost his entire "serious" knowledge comes from home. He does pick a lot from other kids at school but in a very abstract way.

When I think about what is on his mind compared to what you painted there, the difference is mind-blowing. A good illustration of the dangers of social media for people —of all age— who lack guidance and perspective.

[Arrath]

> This poor kid was 8-years-old and attempted suicide on a regular basis. Every time she tried to kill herself, the mom would document the gritty details, post pictures and details about it online

What in the absolute fuck.

That's monstrous

[ouid]

Munchausen's by proxy is real, and the consequences of it are at least as damaging as denying children access to medical transition services.

I believe that you have taken the position that this child is really experiencing gender dysphoria, but it's at least an equally plausible scenario that the parents are responsible for that too.

This is a serious hole in the argument for providing gender affirming care to children in an attempt to reduce harm. The trans-activist community is becoming complicit in child abuse when it denies the existence of this problem.

[ComposedPattern]

Ignoring the fact that 8-year-olds do not receive medical treatment for gender dysphoria, is the existence of Munchausen's by proxy also "a serious hole in the argument" for providing children with medical care in general?

[ouid]

Not providing a 10 year old with puberty blockers when you suspect that it is because the child has been manipulated into believing that they have gender dysphoria is practicing medicine. So I am not proposing that we deny anyone access to medicine.

Parents with Munchausen's manipulating their prepubescent children into socially transitioning is a good explanation for the rise in prepubscent children socially transitioning. If we allow ourselves to believe that this scenario exists, then we must allow ourselves to consider the possibility that it happens a lot, since Munchausen's is at least as common as gender dysphoria.

[dragonwriter]

> Not providing a 10 year old with puberty blockers when you suspect that it is because the child has been manipulated into believing that they have gender dysphoria is practicing medicine.

Not if there is no reasonable basis for that suspicion; in that case, it is just practicing bigotry.

> Parents with Munchausen’s manipulating their prepubescent children into socially transitioning is a good explanation for the rise in prepubscent children socially transitioning.

Without a causal mechanism to explain the increase in both the incidence of the disorder and that particular manifestation, its a pretty crappy explanation, when “people become more likely to report symptoms that they actually have when the social stigma of reporting those symptoms is reduced and awareness exists of treatments that mitigate the symptoms” is a much better explanation with a clear causal mechanism for the upswing in reports of gender dysphoria.

[ouid]

> there is no reasonable basis for that suspicion

There is absolutely a reasonable basis for that suspicion. There are simply many times more prepubescent children with claims of gender dysphoria than at any other point.

How effective a test is for diagnosis depends heavily on what my priors are about the population it is applied to. If I were to administer an HIV test to every American adult, and then started everyone who got a positive result back with antiretrovirals, I would almost mostly be giving that treatment to people without HIV. This is true even though the test is very accurate. If the number of people walking into gender clinics goes up by a factor of 5, I cannot, a priori, expect that my test has the same predictive power that it used to.

> is a much better explanation with a clear causal mechanism

A priori, they are both good explanations. An explanation is good if it's simple, predictive, and you do not have the data to disprove it. The way we distinguish between competing good explanations is through testing. So far no one has proposed a test to tell the two hypotheses apart, except perhaps to look at the rate of detransitioning among the cohort of recent transitioners. This data has yet to become available, as it requires longitudinal study, but the leading signs are not necessarily in favor of your hypothesis. https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/107/10/e4261/6604653

[CRConrad]

> > Parents with Munchausen’s manipulating their prepubescent children into socially transitioning is a good explanation for the rise in prepubscent children socially transitioning.

> Without a causal mechanism to explain the increase in both the incidence of the disorder and that particular manifestation, its a pretty crappy explanation

Eh, what? It's right there in what you replied to: The manipulation is the causal mechanism.

[figlett5]

> in that case, it is just practicing bigotry

You people are like broken records, honestly. Any criticism automatically becomes bigotry or hate or genocide or whatever. It's absurd.

[dragonwriter]

You really need to learn to understand how conditional statements work.

[pseudalopex]

> Parents with Munchausen's manipulating their prepubescent children into socially transitioning is a good explanation for the rise in prepubscent children socially transitioning. If we allow ourselves to believe that this scenario exists, then we must allow ourselves to consider the possibility that it happens a lot, since Munchausen's is at least as common as gender dysphoria.

You seem to have confused what used to be called Munchausen's syndrome and Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. Or where you got your information did. Now they are called factitious disorder imposed on self and factitious disorder imposed on another. Factitious disorder imposed on self is estimated about as common as gender dysphoria. The ranges overlap. Estimates for factitious disorder imposed on another are much lower.[1] And most cases involve infants or very young children. Probably because older children can speak for themselves and are less pliable.

[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9834-factitio...

[ouid]

I do not have them confused, I just didn't want to say munchausen's by proxy 30 times when it is clear from context. Munchausens by proxy is less rare than Munchausen's. The 1% figure is more or less accurate.

[ComposedPattern]

> Not providing a 10 year old with puberty blockers when you suspect that it is because the child has been manipulated into believing that they have gender dysphoria is practicing medicine. So I am not proposing that we deny anyone access to medicine.

Of course if there were some specific reason to believe that the child was being manipulated, then it would be medically appropriate not to treat them with puberty blockers. But you said "this is a serious hole in the argument for providing gender affirming care to children" as if you think this should be the overriding concern even when there's no specific evidence that the child is being manipulated. That is what I take issue with.

Suppose that we were discussing an influencer parent who was exploiting their child's blindness for social media views. Would you be telling people that it's just as likely as not that the child is just pretending to be blind to satisfy the parent with Munchhausen's? If not, you're special pleading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading.

> Parents with Munchausen's manipulating their prepubescent children into socially transitioning is a good explanation for the rise in prepubscent children socially transitioning

It's a very poor explanation, because more people of all ages are transitioning more than in the past, not just prepubescent children. It also stands against an obvious and much simpler explanation, which is that children today are more likely to encounter the idea that someone can be trans and much less likely to be told to suppress non-normative gendered behavior.

> we must allow ourselves to consider the possibility that it happens a lot, since Munchausen's is at least as common as gender dysphoria.

You say that as if it means that a given child presenting with gender dysphoria is just as likely to have Munchausen's by proxy as actual gender dysphoria. But there are tens of thousands of possible conditions someone with Munchausen's might imitate instead. We should expect that the fraction of them that imitate gender dysphoria is dwarfed by the number of people who actually have gender dysphoria.

It's telling that your argument is entirely theoretical. If there were a significant number of children manipulated into socially transitioning because of Munchausen's by proxy, there would be actual confirmed examples to refer to. If it were a large-scale social problem, there would be data on its prevalence. But there isn't, because this is a scenario fabricated to apply unjustified scrutiny to children with gender dysphoria.

[dumpsterdiver]

> when there's no specific evidence that the child is being manipulated.

I disagree with your apparent assumption that "manipulation" by a parent must not only be a negative thing, but that it must also be a conscious effort made by the parent to affect their child's behavior one way or the other. I put the word "manipulation" in quotes because I believe that for many people the word carries a negative connotation, and I'm attempting to point out that in the context of parenting it absolutely does not have to be negative.

I think it's important to note that when children do things that upset a parent, the parent will naturally react in a way that potentially "manipulates" the child into not acting that way anymore.

For instance, if a child acts out at school and gets suspended for a few days, some parents might frown but then say, "That's okay. We know that this incident doesn't reflect who you are." But then let's imagine that the parent is more distant than usual that night, and doesn't interact with their child as much as they normally do (for instance, they might not ask about the child's day during dinner). Even though the parent may not be intentionally doing this (maybe they're just caught up thinking about their child, and what they can do to help), they are in fact sending signals to their child displaying their displeasure.

Similarly, when a child does something that pleases a parent, the child might discover that the parent is more talkative than usual at the dinner table that night, and more interested in what's going on in the child's life. This rewarding behavior could be explained by a parent simply being excited about their offspring succeeding.

In this way you can see that it doesn't take much to "manipulate" a child's behavior. Some people might refer to "attempting to manipulate the behavior of their children to produce a desired outcome" as "parenting". If a child throws a rock and breaks a neighbors window then a parent might scold the child, and this absolutely counts as "manipulating" the child's behavior.

Getting back to the discussion at hand, when a parent rewards their child for a specific behavior in a manner that suggests that the child is courageous and unique, the child might feel pressured to continue engaging in that behavior. If a child is considered by their parent to be courageous and unique when they engage in a specific type of behavior, what might the parent think if the child suddenly stops this behavior (from the child's perspective)? Instead of courageous and unique, will the child now suspect that their parent views them as a cowardly sheep, or a quitter? Is it so far fetched to imagine a scenario in which a child takes a certain stance as a rebellious gesture, but then finds that it backfires when their parents are thrilled about it and shares it with the world? Can you imagine the potential embarrassment of the child? Adults aren't the only humans who can get embarrassed, afterall.

In summary, even such small things as a frown or a smile (or even talking a little less or more than usual) can serve to manipulate a child's behavior, let alone ecstatically sharing every detail of a kid's behavior to the online world. Creating the equivalent of a reality TV show of a child's life will absolutely impose the unspoken expectations and unconscious biases of the parent, and will in effect manipulate the child's behavior and course of action.

Edit explanation: Clarified a point earlier in my response, and fixed/embellished a few sentences.

[Kye]

There's no denial of the problem, only of the attempt to elevate it into something more common than it is in an obvious ploy to make gender affirming care harder to access with a time-honored "won't someone think of the children!" moral panic that's already having negative effects on adult trans people's access to care.

[ouid]

There is extremely active denial of the problem. The parent comment didn't even consider this as a possibility.

Moreover, your comment is also an example. You can't simultaneously describe yourself as not denying the problem while completely dismissing that problem as "moral panic designed to deprive adults of access to care".

I am completely on board with giving adults access to care. I am significantly more hesitant to give parents access to medical interventions for their children. Please do not warp my words.

PS: You might describe Munchausen's by proxy as a rare condition, but its prevalence is on the order of 1% of the population, which happens to be at parity with the rate of gender dysphoria in the population. It is not a rounding error.

[pseudalopex]

Munchausen's syndrome by proxy is called factitious disorder imposed on another now. The highest estimate I found from a reputable source was 0.04%.[1] Claims on the order of 1% turned out misreported estimates for factitious disorder imposed on self. And most cases of factitious disorder imposed on another involve infants or younger children.

The 1st comment stayed close to the article subject. It presented reason for concern even without speculating about the child's gender dysphoria. Adding that speculation predictably moved the discussion far from the original subject. Not bringing up something at every chance is not denial. Never mind extremely active denial.

[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9834-factitio...

[CRConrad]

> Munchausen's syndrome by proxy is called factitious disorder imposed on another now.

Honestly, who gives a fuck?

Yeah sorry, that may sound a bit harsh... But really, what's this constant renaming of things supposed to be actually good for? The main effects seem to be:

1) Some people get to feel all good and righteous and “with it”, because they know the PC terminology; and

2) The rest of us are A) either annoyed at i) having to learn new shit again, ii) not getting to be in that hip and in crowd, or above all, iii) how smug and pompous those masters of the PC vocabulary come off, intentionally or unintentionally giving the impression that they look down on us peasants...

Or B) Just confused as to what the fuck they're talking about.

So thank you, I guess, for having taught us – me – this, so I won't look like an ignorant bumpkin next time someone says it... But I would very much have preferred not having to.

[Kye]

>> "Please do not warp my words."

You too?

I've been down this road. I'm not going to say anything that can convince you.

edit: You might want to consider not using the same rhetoric as folks who call people groomers for not wanting kids to kill themselves because they can't get treatment for their dysphoria. Reconsider your sources of information if you sincerely feel hurt by being seen in the same light. You are parroting propaganda.

[ouid]

In response to your edit, which I believe deserves its own response:

I'm basically going to ignore the part where you accuse me of using the "same rhetoric as X". I don't know what that means, or how it's relevant to what we're talking about. I'm certainly not hurt by it, as it doesn't mean anything.

If Adolf Hitler himself arose from the grave to agree with me, and that caused me to change my mind, then I would consider that evidence that I didn't have a good reason to believe it in the first place. This is not the case here.

I am actually pretty skeptical of the claim that the "people calling trans-activists groomers" are making this point. That just sounds like a name that you've given to the entire set of people who disagree with you, regardless of their reason.

Concretely, it seems that we are both of the opinion, based on the content of this comment chain, that it is important for the system to protect children. Either from killing themselves as a result of not being able to receive gender affirming care, or from their parents, who use them as a means of acquiring attention.

My claim is that it is well established that the latter problem exists, and that it exists commonly enough that it is not clear that, even under the most generous assumptions of the causal link between gender affirming care and suicide attempt reduction, that this offsets the damage that is caused by giving Abusive parents this tool.

Moreover, this is clearly not black and white. This is a matter of policy. I am not claiming that it is impossible to protect children from both threats. I am merely claiming that gender affirming care doesn't.

[ouid]

You might want to consider that having trouble convincing other people is explained at least as well by having a bad argument as the other people being bigots.

[jimbokun]

Because you have already decided that anyone who disagrees with you is just participating in a "moral panic".

[Kye]

Not anyone, no.

[Spivak]

Yeah this is one of those stories that if you really feel like it's worth telling so that people can understand the experience of trans kids and what it's like as a parent you need to contact a journalist who knows how to do this right so they can tell the story in a way that can't be traced back to you or your child. The very last thing someone who's trans needs is to have a spotlight shoved in their face involuntarily.

I actually do work in the space of telling the stories of trans folks (although not involving kids because obviously) and even with adults we still take crazy precautions. I push hard even when we get someone who doesn't want to be anonymous because you can't put that cat back in the bag and being a google search from being outed will haunt you if you ever want to "go stealth."

[paperwasp42]

> The very last thing someone who's trans needs is to have a spotlight shoved in their face involuntarily.

Exactly! This seems so incredibly obvious, and I was stunned by the thousands of followers on the page who seemed to nonchalantly view this kid's privacy and wellbeing as a worthy sacrifice for supposed "trans activism." Especially since there were quite a few negative comments from trans individuals pointing out why this was wrong and a major violation of the girl's rights.

Stories about trans kids are very important to tell, and they can be wonderful tools to encourage empathy and understanding. But they deserve the utmost caution and respect when handling them, especially when there is the complication of people being able to profit off the children.

The other startling thing about the page was the mom's complete lack of interest in shielding details such as what school or hospital the girl went to. It seemed wildly dangerous to publicly proclaim your child to be a member of an endangered minority who often faces hate crimes, and then tell the world exactly which elementary school they attend. Talk about a great way to bait nut-jobs.

I realize I sound very twisted talking about those sorts of possibilities, but as someone who works in cybersecurity, I have just seen too many creeps commit too many crimes.

I would absolutely love to see a policy that forbids the sharing of photos of children, and any identifying details of children, to a public audience. If people want to share those things with their direct network, then sure. But it seems a wild violation of personal rights to be able to share those personal details about another human being to the entire internet, when the child is far too young to consent.

[CRConrad]

> I would absolutely love to see a policy that forbids the sharing of photos of children, and any identifying details of children, to a public audience. If people want to share those things with their direct network, then sure.

And even that is difficult. I mean, let's say Facebook could be required to forbid people from sharing intimate stuff about children with the world at large, but only let them be visible to family and friends. “Wow, easy, problem solved!”, right? But then there are lots of people who have many hundreds, even thousands, of “friends”. How “direct” a network is that?!? So no, not easy at all.

[za3faran]

Absolutely gut wrenching. This is child abuse plain and simple. These people are confusing their children and raking in the $$$ and making themselves feel good for virtue signalling. What's society heading for? Wake up.

[jl6]

I’m not sure social media deserves all the blame here. This kind of exploitation has its roots in reality shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and I Am Jazz - there’s no bright line between those shows and what you describe.

[figlett5]

Those shows are just as awful.

Jazz in particular has been treated terribly. He's been physically and mentally destroyed by his family and his clinicians, brainwashed from age 2 or 3 into believing he was supposed to be a girl. This nightmare is all he's ever known. There will be no happy ending either, just misery and the shock of realizing his life is a travesty.

His show should be watched as a dire warning against the medical abuse of children.

[StrangeATractor]

FFS nobody's called CPS?

[paperwasp42]

I saw a post from the mom mentioning CPS had been called on her, which was the only reason I didn't call myself. I am skeptical of CPS in general, but an 8-year-old with multiple, sophisticated suicide attempts, and a mother making money off these attempts, just seemed way too sketchy to ignore.

Unfortunately, it seemed CPS had cleared her. At the time (this was back in ~2017), I shared the page with a friend who works alongside CPS, and she grudgingly agreed there wasn't really anything CPS could do. The kid seemed to have legitimate medical diagnoses, and the mom could easily argue in court that she was just "documenting her daughter's medical journey."

I can't seem to find the page now, which I'm hoping means it got shut down. Fingers crossed that little girl has found health, happiness, and the privacy she deserves.

[StrangeATractor]

Sort of figures. Kids in America don't really have any rights.

[CRConrad]

Does anyone?

Oh yeah, I forgot: Rich people do.

[colpabar]

Imagine how the media would cover the story of CPS going to a prominent trans activist parent of a suicidal trans child and you have your answer.

[meghan_rain]

Is this I am Jazz?

[svilen_dobrev]

somehow this reminds me of kids' quiz in Magnolia'1999 movie..