Given the disparity in life outcomes between trans people and cis people, the idea that the desisters would have been better off transitioning is quite the bold speculation.
Again, these people are not prevented from transitioning. A minority, about 20%, do transition as adults. The rest no longer harbor desire to live as a different gender.
People have explained to you previously why this claim is false, yet you keep repeating it over and over. You are counting kids with GNC behavior who never talked about transitioning themselves stopping said GNC behavior. You are also counting kids who end up repressing (some of which end up transitioning with worse outcomes years down the line). You already know this.
> You are counting kids with GNC behavior who never talked about transitioning themselves stopping said GNC behavior.
These children met the criteria for GID in the contemporary iteration of the DSM. The author of the study I linked would go on to write the criteria for gender dysphoria in the DSM-V. The idea that we'd see a substantially different rate of desistence if the DSM-V was used is not likely: the author of the study has stated that most of the children would have met the criteria for gender dysphoria under the DSM-V.
> You are also counting kids who end up repressing (some of which end up transitioning with worse outcomes years down the line)
The study followed up with patients for an average of over 10 years. Do you have any actual evidence that a significant portion of desisters in this study transitioned later in life? Or are you just stating this without evidence?
People have not offered a good explanation why these rates of desistence are false. They either insist that the criteria used was wrong, or baselessly claim that desisters are repressing a desire to transition.
We have been saying that the DSM is a joke for years, and that you can't diagnose someone of being trans just by ticking boxes, the only way to go about it is self identification. So yeah sure, they used the DSM to diagnose and then perform conversion therapy on GNC children who never necessarily claimed to be trans, and from that they inferred that most trans kids end up "becoming cis".
> Do you have any actual evidence that a significant portion of desisters in this study transitioned later in life?
I don't have enough funds to perform such a research, maybe there exists such a paper but I have not looked for it. In general trans topics are woefully underfunded. But I know enough people that ended up desisting either due to conversion therapy or due to shame and lack of support from their family, and transitioned years afterwards (5-15+ years) after living shitty and depressing empty lives pretending to be cis.
For the third time, the children in the study met the same criteria that would be used to approve a child for puberty blockers. Why do you keep insisting that these children "never necessarily claimed to be trans"? Whatever "claiming to be trans" is supposed to mean, the important thing is that the study used the same criteria that would be used to approve a child for puberty blockers.
> But I know enough people that ended up desisting either due to conversion therapy or due to shame and lack of support from their family, and transitioned years afterwards (5-15+ years) after living shitty and depressing empty lives pretending to be cis.
This is called "anecdote". As I said, the claim that a sizeable chunk of desisters transition later in life is being made without evidence.
And again, with a mean followup time of over 10 years, most of the people who transitioned 5-15 years later would be counted as persisters, not desisters.
Puberty blockers are a huge step. Not one taken lightly. Kids who are unsure, by and large don’t take that step.
I injured my wrist a few years back. Doctors offered me pt or surgery + pt. They clearly advised me that given the low severity of my injury, surgery would likely improve some things while causing other impacts. I declined the surgery.
This is how most medical choices are made. Doctor advises, patient listens and choses best option. For patients who are also minors - their parents are also involved. Every day a parent and child choose between consequences of the intervention and consequences of non intervention. The only difference with trans kids is apparently you and the gov want a say in the choice. It’s not your body, nor your kid. It’s none of your business.
How would you have decided if the doctors offered preemptive surgery on your wrist when you were still an impressionable child, before you ever got to experience the "pain" of your injury. How could you possibly make an informed decision then?
That is the same user, me. The critical used the same arguments made here: insisting that the patients weren't "actually trans", which I find unlikely for the reasons I wrote above. Not only that, they cited the retracted CAMH report to try and discredit the study author. Not only was that report retracted, CAMH had to pay the author over half a million in damages for defamation.
The part of society that treats them badly are those that encourage the delusions, including but not limited to the doctors that directly profit from that.
Accusing the doctors of profiting directly off transitioning… well yes, in the states you have a for-profit medical system. But unless you think oncologists are giving kids cancer for their own profit, you’re being a hypocrite.
In the UK, Canada, most of the rest of the world? Single payer public health systems mean trans healthcare isn’t more profitable than any other type of health care. Doctors have no profit incentive, as there are easier less controversial specialities that have larger patient bases and higher patient thru-put.
How much can the disparity in life outcomes be attributed to a trans person needing to undergo a second puberty in a society where doing so is discriminated against?
I feel like as a society we put trans people in a situation where it is controversial for them to transition as children, but also controversial for them to transition as adults. (The notion of a man in a dress no longer exists if the man never had male puberty, but not only is it controversial for such a boy to never have male puberty, we villainize the now-man's attempts to become a woman!) But then we say that outcomes for trans people are bad so them staying in the closet is good. Which is weird, because the cause of the bad outcomes is that there is no stage of their life where trans people can transition noncontroversially.
Desisters are not "still in the closet". They have become comfortable in their cis gender and no longer want to transition. Many (~60% of the sample) live happily as same-sex attracted cis people.
And so how does all of this prove that it should be illegal to speak about transitioning anywhere kids might read? Because that is what is at stake with these rulings
No, I don't think it should be illegal to speak about transitioning. Where in this comment chain does it even remotely look like I argued in favor of the bans discussed in the OP?
You are arguing about the harms of transitioning in a thread about how talking about it online is being suppressed. It seems pretty clear your priorities are controlling other people, not access to information.
What didn't I address? The fact that trans people have worse life outcomes than cis people? That's such a well documented health disparity I didn't feel the need to links sources, but if you insist:
Even if these disparities are due to discrimination, those disparities still exist. We don't measure health outcomes based on what hypothetically would happen in an ideal world where people genuinely do not recognize or distinguish between the sexes. We measure health outcomes based on what happens in real world.
For the third time, desisters are non-dysphoric cis people. They are not repressing a trans identity. If they still feel gender dysphoria living as their cis gender they have, by definition, not desisted.
The logic here is so strange. You acknowledge discrimination against trans people exist and yet also use the discrimination against trans people as a justification to discriminate against children exploring gender, i.e. trans children.
I wonder how many left handed people were beaten into becoming right handed, and remained right handed. In a society where left handed people continue to be beaten, would these people be considered happily right handed since they continue to use their right hand? How would we be able to tell?
I wonder if we existed in a world where soft boys were beaten into becoming less emotional, who grow up to be unemotional men. In a society where adult men are beaten if they express softness, are these men considered happily unemotional? How would we be able to tell?
How do we tell if someone is cis when it is stigmatized to be trans or express gender dysphoria? Genuinely not sure, honestly.
Sex is so deeply ingrained in humanity - heck, not just humanity but mammals and animals writ large - that it is almost certainly impossible to create a world where people genuinely treat trans people the same as cis people. Sure, outlawing discrimination in housing and employment against trans people is not only feasible it's been implemented in most liberal democracies. But that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the difference between living life as a trans person versus a cis person. Gender is a social construct. Sex is biology. For many people, the latter is more salient than the former.
This is why talking about what the outcomes would be in some hypothetical world is pointless. Doctors are striving to deliver the best outcomes in the real world, not the outcomes in some hypothetical world that doesn't actually exist and probably never will.
> yet also use the discrimination against trans people as a justification to discriminate against children exploring gender, i.e. trans children.
Children are free to explore their gender. Just not with powerful drugs that have lifelong effects. Refusing to prescribe puberty blockers to a child experiencing gender dysphoria isn't discrimination any more than it is to refuse to prescribe artificial testosterone to a boy that has normal levels of testosterone for his age. We "discriminate" against this boy that wants to explore hypermasculinity, too.
> I wonder if we existed in a world where soft boys were beaten into becoming less emotional, who grow up to be unemotional men. In a society where adult men are beaten if they express softness, are these men considered happily unemotional? How would we be able to tell?
You would measure their health outcomes: do the latter experience depression or other negative mental health conditions at different rates? Do they die by suicide at different rates? I haven't dug deeply into the effects of corporal punishment, but presumably it's discouraged because we've observed negative outcomes.
> How do we tell if someone is cis when it is stigmatized to be trans or express gender dysphoria? Genuinely not sure, honestly.
I'm not sure what you mean by "how do we tell if someone is cis". I think you mean something along the lines of "how do we tell which gender dysphoric children will or won't continue to experience dysphoria in their cis gender past natal puberty?" If that's the case then the answer is "we can't". Psychologists tried, for decades, and failed to predict the minority of patients that would persist in cross sex gender identity. We know that ~80% become comfortable in their cis gender after natural puberty. This is why it's hard to justify prescribing puberty blockers. Suppressing natal puberty will help someone pass better in a cross-sex gender, but the benefits of passing better need to be weighted against the probability that the child would live comfortably in their cis gender without dysphoria absent blockers.
Which is the better health outcome? 5 trans people who medically transitioned before puberty, or 4 cis people who live comfortably without dysphoria in their cis gender and 1 trans person who transitioned after natal puberty? Ideally we'd be able to predict the 1 patient that would persist, and transition them medically before puberty. But again, we don't have that ability. Thus, it's insufficient to justify prescription of puberty blockers by pointing to the one trans person who medically transitioned as an adult and say that they would have had a better live if they were able to transition medically before puberty. This is the big reason why advocates for puberty blockers tend to dislike discussion of persistent rates with versus without puberty blockers. It's fairly easy to justify them in the simplistic world where all gender dysphoric youth are guaranteed to persist. But factor in the persistence rates without blockers and it becomes vastly harder to make the case for them.
Coulda said the same about homosexuality ~30 years ago. It’s a bad reason then, it’s a bad reason now.