Sexual reassignment surgery and top surgery are types of treatment. Another type is puberty blockers, which I asked about and you responded with talking points instead of information.
Also, what is the end game of puberty blockers? I assumed if you were a trans boy and took them, you got surgery as an adult to remove for example, breast buds so they never develop into breasts. Are you saying people stay on puberty blockers their whole lives?
I’m not trying to push an agenda here. As a parent, I’m honestly trying to understand the ramifications of these treatments. Because as a leftists, asking these questions becomes verboten, as if you hate trans people to question any treatment.
But really (since this is a controversial thread) I just don’t want my child taking a knife to, and hindering the functionality of, any part of their body that was already working just fine. This is especially true for parts that enables an enormous amount of human bonding and the human experience, like sexuality. It feels akin to circumcision/ genital mutilation in my mind, and if that’s what they decide they want as an adult, I wouldn’t stop them. But as their guardian, who safeguards their person for their future self, I would have been willing to divorce my husband over circumcision (at the time we disagreed on it, but we only had daughters). There’s no way most parents without an ideology want to risk long term damage to their child for something uncertain or fluid.
This a really interesting response. Thank you!
If someone takes hormone blockers for several years before deciding to stop, does puberty proceed the same as in a younger person?
Since this is a controversial thread, I feel at liberty to say: while I was never trans, I was pretty ambivalent about my gender as a young person. It wasn’t until after I’d gone through puberty and had multiple years of estrogen (through the natural process of puberty) that I felt “feminine”. Gender kind of partly feels like a process you go through vs an identity.
Least controversial opinion in this thread.
What are puberty blockers if not hormones?
Hmm. I guess I don’t necessarily disagree with your premise… But maybe your value judgment.
Does the suffering humanity inflicts/ experiences outweigh the joy/ love/ happiness humanity causes/ experiences?
And, I guess personally, I don’t weight all life equally. I value more complex life as more valuable. I care about a dolphin more than a stink bug. I think humanity’s ability to evaluate itself and reason is precious and rare, certainly in the history of the planet, potentially in the universe. Even if humanity can never really improve its disposition to be more compassionate or less greedy, why put out the light of a complex mind experiencing and observing itself?
Ultimately, what has value to you?
What do you think the drones are for?
I don’t see why we have to contrast the US and China so that one is a good guy and one is a bad guy. Has the US exploited the rest of the world since WWII for our own financial interests? Yes. Do we have an increasingly authoritarian government seeking to eventually crush internal dissent? Yes.
None of that makes China good.
If you don’t want to talk about Tiananmen Square, talk about China forcefully relocated migrant workers ahead of the Olympics in 2008. Talk about China sending Uyghurs to reeducation camps and forcefully sterilizing some of them. Talk about how China forced women to abandon/ abort babies for 30 years throughout vast swaths of their country. Talk about how people residing in China can’t actually talk about any of these things, to the point where citizens of Hong Kong fought back with violent protests and many fled to resist their encroaching authoritarian hand.
Did China raise more than a billion people out of brutal poverty in a single generation, and was it one of the most impressive and important developments of the last century? Yes, absolutely. Is an authoritarian technocracy better able to deal with the issues facing humanity in the near future like climate change? Potentially.
That doesn’t mean China’s citizens enjoy civil liberties.
That’s fine. It’s an extreme example to illustrate the perspective: most parents will err on the side of “Do no harm.” You are misidentifying the perspective you’re fighting. I am more likely to live in a liberal bubble than a conservative one. It’s just where my mind (and the average parent’s mind?) automatically goes. One method of philosophical reasoning is to start with the extremes and then narrow down to the center/ more likely scenarios that are shades of the extreme… I think that’s common?
How do they prevent their bodies from producing sexual hormones they don’t want? Removal of the testes/ ovaries? Ablating the adrenal gland ? (pretty sure that’s not a thing … It would have other serious ramifications).