Gender Affirmation Surgery is currently reserved for those who are 18 years or older. Rather, Tandy Aye argues for why it may be more beneficial for surgery...
"Any parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life" - EM
Serious question (I really have no idea): Is this a thing that actually happens? I would not assume that Musk (1) knows what he is talking about or (2) is making an argument in good faith.
I take "sterilize" to mean a procedure that prevents fertility, either irreversibly, or reversible by some additional invasive procedure.
For instance, if a 17-year old girl wants a prescription for the pill, and has the blessing of her parents and her doctor, I would not call that "sterilization," and I doubt Musk would advocate for the parents and doctor to serve life sentences (but...who knows).
I am aware that some kids who feel like they were assigned the wrong gender are on Lupron, which I think delays puberty as long as you keep taking it. So, not simply a contraceptive, but not sterilization either.
TLC STAR Jazz Jennings is one of the youngest publicly documented people to identify as transgender. She was born male but has lived the majority of her life as a woman, causing many people to ques…
A leading transgender health association has lowered its recommended minimum age for gender transition treatment in teens, including starting sex hormones at age 14 and some surgeries at 15. The guidance is from the World Pro...
Long-term cross-sex hormone treatment may cause temporary or even permanent infertility. However, as cross-sex hormones affect people differently, they should not be considered a reliable form of contraception. There is some uncertainty about the risks of long-term cross-sex hormone treatment.
"Any parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life" - EM
Serious question (I really have no idea): Is this a thing that actually happens? I would not assume that Musk (1) knows what he is talking about or (2) is making an argument in good faith.
I take "sterilize" to mean a procedure that prevents fertility, either irreversibly, or reversible by some additional invasive procedure.
For instance, if a 17-year old girl wants a prescription for the pill, and has the blessing of her parents and her doctor, I would not call that "sterilization," and I doubt Musk would advocate for the parents and doctor to serve life sentences (but...who knows).
I am aware that some kids who feel like they were assigned the wrong gender are on Lupron, which I think delays puberty as long as you keep taking it. So, not simply a contraceptive, but not sterilization either.
To sterilize a person or animal means to deprive them of the ability to reproduce, typically by removing or blocking the gonads (or other sex organs, such as the uterus) or inhibiting these organs from maturing.
Infertility means that reproducing is difficult, but not necessarily impossible.
All sterilized/sterile people are infertile, but not all infertile people, or people with fertility problems, are sterile.
Children with sex/gender distress are typically put on Lupron or another GnRHa analog drug to stop their natural development at Tanner Stage 2 of puberty, prior to their gonads maturing. Then they are customarily put on cross-sex hormones as well (estrogen for males, testosterone for females) some months or a year or so later.
For example, the American model for "early transition," Jazz Jennings, was put on "puberty blockers" when Jazz turned 11, and estrogen when Jazz was 11 years, 5 months.
Being on "puberty blockers" and cross-sex hormones during the crucial period of adolescence when their gonads are meant to start producing ova or sperm renders so-called trans kids sterile because this combination of drugs prevents their gonads from ever maturing enough to begin making sperm or ova in the first place.
In someone who has gone through puberty of adolescence already and thus obtained the capacity to make sperm or ovulate, cross-sex hormones will impair fertility, but they won't always make a person totally sterile. Time is a factor, though: the longer the cross-sex hormones are taken, the more they seem to diminish natural gonadal function.
But the youngsters put on both "puberty blockers" and cross-sex hormones at early ages, and kept on them for several years, like Jazz Jennings were never allowed to develop fertility (or libido, sexual function and orgasmic capacity) to begin with.
A 17 year-old girl who goes on the pill - whether for contraception or other reasons - has already undergone gonadal maturation and developed the capacity to ovulate. If she wasn't ovulating, she wouldn't need the pill.
The pill and other forms of hormonal birth control use forms of the sex hormone estrogen and/or progesterone to stop girls and women from ovulating. Estrogen and progesterone are the two main sex hormones that the female body makes in large amounts naturally anyways.
Interfering with a post-pubescent person's natural endocrine system and gonadal function by prescribing hormones meant to give them the sex hormone profile of, or similar to, the sex hormone profile of the opposite sex is very different to prescribing a girl or woman tthe pill, which contains synthetic forms of the hormones her body makes naturally. Same goes for prescribing a menopausal woman estrogen as HRT, or a man testosterone because he has low T.
Putting kids on "puberty blockers" and cross-sex hormones so that they never develop reproductive capacity at all, ever - and so they never will develop a libido or the abiity to experience sexual pleasure including orgasm - is another thing altogether. But that's exactly what's being done in the name of "gender affirming care" nowadays. Moreover, this supposed "care" is being billed as "life saving."
This post was edited 2 minutes after it was posted.
Remember, genocide doesn't start with death camps, it starts with dehumanization.
Demonizing all trans people and everyone who supports them as "degenerates" and "groomers" is exactly that.
Genocide against trans people isn't occurring yet, and may it never. But too many people are showing they want it.
Seriously, what single human has advocated for the death of even a single trans person?
Most people who dislike the trans movement are upset because it hurts the people who identify as trans. Transgender is sold as a solution to people's mental health issues. If only you were the opposite gender, you'd be happy. It's a lie. Now, there are exceptions - people who thrive after medical/surgical transition - but they are exceptions and not the rule.
I have lived with 4 transgender people in my life. Invariably, they had serious mental illness. None could hold jobs, and all blamed their joblessness on transphobia. Three of them pursued medical/surgical transition. One of the three is thriving as a "non-binary". Her dad part-owns a major league baseball team - so she had access to the top doctors and surgeons. The other two can't hold a job. Both blame their life failures on transphobia, but they live in a liberal community where EVERYONE cheers them on for their trans bravery. In reality, the reason they don't have jobs is they can't get to work on time, and if they do, they cause a scene.
You are not so ignorant as this.
Have you even read any threads here, including some of the current ones, where people claim trans people are a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Western civilization, or say flat out that they should all be thrown in mental institutions or killed? They are not just trolls, and even if some specific ones were, it's not just here that people characterize trans people as "groomers" and child molesters and say they should be executed brutally. For what crime? For acknowledging that they would have been better off had they been able to transition at a young age, and wanting that for the children of today who are like them, who need what they needed. That's not anything like what they are accused of.
Transgender surgeries, for properly vetted patients, are some of the least-regretted surgeries on record. Some trans people go from suicidal before transition to thriving afterward. More go from managing but miserable to thriving. That's less visible, and you might wish to disregard it, but it's no less real.
Some don't thrive afterward, though usually they don't regret transitioning either. I've seen people like that just as you have -- though I've seen more who do thrive. I think the culture of much of the transgender community, where victim status is a trump card in every argument and the answer to everything wrong in one's life, has much to answer for here.
This needs more emphasis, I believe, in transgender mental health care, although it's by no means ignored: transition does not solve every problem in a trans person's life. It does solve one big problem and make the others feel worth solving.
People can debate the merits all day long but anyone who claims that surgery on minors (including genital surgery) is not happening in the US, or that hormone treatment may not cause infertility in minors is lying.
Investigation by Reuters of trans youth health and insurance claims:
Hormone treatment may leave an adolescent infertile, especially if the child also took puberty blockers at an early age. That and other potential side effects are not well-studied, experts say.
... U.S. patients ages6-17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis initiating hormone treatment 2017 1,905 2018 2,391 2019 3,036 2020 3,163 2021 4,231
The article specifically says the numbers may even be undercounted because you don't need a specific diagnosis to get treatment, especially if you do not make an insurance claim.
Gender surgeries:
The Komodo analysis of insurance claims found 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021. Among teens, “top surgery” to remove breasts is more common. In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims
About 42,000 U.S. children ages 6 to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021, nearly triple the number in 2017, a unique data analysis for Reuters found.
People can debate the merits all day long but anyone who claims that surgery on minors (including genital surgery) is not happening in the US, or that hormone treatment may not cause infertility in minors is lying.
Investigation by Reuters of trans youth health and insurance claims:
Hormone treatment may leave an adolescent infertile, especially if the child also took puberty blockers at an early age. That and other potential side effects are not well-studied, experts say.
... U.S. patients ages6-17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis initiating hormone treatment 2017 1,905 2018 2,391 2019 3,036 2020 3,163 2021 4,231
The article specifically says the numbers may even be undercounted because you don't need a specific diagnosis to get treatment, especially if you do not make an insurance claim.
Gender surgeries:
The Komodo analysis of insurance claims found 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021. Among teens, “top surgery” to remove breasts is more common. In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims
There are about 50 million children between age 6 and 17 in the US. If 0.5% of them are transgender, that's about 250,000 children. Even if you limit them to 12-17, over 100,000 of them potentially have gender dysphoria. Should we be concerned that 4% of them are on hormone therapy?
I agree no one under 18 should be getting surgery. What benefit is there to have the surgery at 16 or 17 instead of 18?
People can debate the merits all day long but anyone who claims that surgery on minors (including genital surgery) is not happening in the US, or that hormone treatment may not cause infertility in minors is lying.
Investigation by Reuters of trans youth health and insurance claims:
Hormone treatment may leave an adolescent infertile, especially if the child also took puberty blockers at an early age. That and other potential side effects are not well-studied, experts say.
... U.S. patients ages6-17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis initiating hormone treatment 2017 1,905 2018 2,391 2019 3,036 2020 3,163 2021 4,231
The article specifically says the numbers may even be undercounted because you don't need a specific diagnosis to get treatment, especially if you do not make an insurance claim.
Gender surgeries:
The Komodo analysis of insurance claims found 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021. Among teens, “top surgery” to remove breasts is more common. In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims
There are about 50 million children between age 6 and 17 in the US. If 0.5% of them are transgender, that's about 250,000 children. Even if you limit them to 12-17, over 100,000 of them potentially have gender dysphoria. Should we be concerned that 4% of them are on hormone therapy?
I agree no one under 18 should be getting surgery. What benefit is there to have the surgery at 16 or 17 instead of 18?
I agree that we should be less concerned about this than about other things. And one of those things is that they are being in this country, they are being gunned down in their classrooms.
Lets stop dwelling on the relatively unimportant things.
Having gender incongruence to the point where you want to surgically remove parts of your body, and possibly replace them with non-functioning parts associated with the opposite sex, should be considered a mental disorder.
Why? People have all kinds of surgeries and take all kinds of drugs to counteract the ‘natural order of things” in many ways. How about penile implants or breast augmentation surgery? There are all kinds of purely cosmetic surgeries people have done for no reason other than they want to. And you can bet your a$$ that the second someone comes up with a surgery that will make a person taller, for example, folks will line up in droves for that.
Where do you draw the line on mental disorder when it comes to people wanting to change some aspect of how they appear, physically, to themselves and to others? Tattoos?
There are many sound reasons why ED seems to affect men as we get older. Is it a mental disorder for a man to buy Viagra so he can get hard enough to have sex with someone when he’s beyond the age that ‘nature’ ordained he should be having sex? how about artificial insemination? Or surrogate mothers, etc, etc?
There are so many examples of how people live lives that aren’t (in the eyes of others) aligned with how nature destined for them.
There are about 50 million children between age 6 and 17 in the US. If 0.5% of them are transgender, that's about 250,000 children. Even if you limit them to 12-17, over 100,000 of them potentially have gender dysphoria. Should we be concerned that 4% of them are on hormone therapy?
I agree no one under 18 should be getting surgery. What benefit is there to have the surgery at 16 or 17 instead of 18?
There's no way to know exactly how many kids with sex/gender issues in the US have been put on exogenous cross-sex hormones (testosterone for females, estrogen for males) and/or powerful GnRHa analog drugs aka "puberty blockers" to halt their natural development. It could be many thousands, tens of thousands, or more than a hundred thousand.
A report released in 2022 by the Williams Institute, a think tank that does research promoting transgenderism and gender identity ideology at UCLA, said that based on national survey data from the CDC for 2019 and more limited survey data from some of the country from 2020, "300,000 youth ages 13-17 identify as transgender in the US"- or did in 2019-20.
Unfortunately, neither the Williams Institute nor any other outfit seems to be keeping tabs on the number of children under 13 in the USA who have been deemed transgender by the adults in their lives.
Not keeping tabs on the numbers of kids under 13 is a problem in my view because most kids who are put on "puberty blockers" and cross-sex hormones for sex/gender distress and confusion are started on them before they hit their teens. Jazz Jennings, for example, started "puberty blockers" at 11, and exogenous estrogen a few months later, at 11 years and 5 months.
In a medical journal paper about NIH-funded research published in 2018, leading clinicians in "pediatric gender medicine" at a major US children's hospital who are highly influential in the field internationally said they would prescribe both "puberty blockers" and cross-sex hormones to children as young as 8.
Athough there's no way to find out the numbers of kids on these drugs, we do know that since Norman Spack MD founded the very first pediatric gender clinic offering "puberty blockers" and cross-sex hormones to pre-teen boys in the US at Boston Children's Hospital in 2007, there has been a huge proliferation in the number of "gender clinics," therapists and medical practices that provide "gender medicine" to children in the US.
In 2022, Reuters reported that "the number of gender clinics treating children in the United States has grown from zero to more than 100 in the past 15 years."
Another source, the Gender Mapping Project, says there are now "more than 400 and counting" clinics in in North America that provide "gender affirming medical care" to children. The GMP is admittedly partisan, though. It advocates "for an end to the experimental intervention being performed on children across the world" experiencing distress and confusion about sex, sex sterotypes and gender identity.
But no matther how many confused, vulnerable kids are on these drugs, in my view it's too many. Because the fact is, these drugs have powerful, irreversible, worrying short- and longeterm effects on the health and wellbeing of the children taking them - such as sterility, reduced bone density, worsening depression, increased urges to self-harm, and sexual dysfunction.
Particularly alarming is the sexual dysfunction - or rather lack of any kind of sexual funtion - experienced by males put on the standard regimen of "youth gender medicine" in early adolescence the way America's "trans poster child" Jazz Jennings was.
The lead surgeon who operated on Jazz Jennings's genitals, Marci Bowers, MD, has publicly stated that males who were deprived of the chance to sexually mature because they were put on "puberty blockers" followed by estrogen as pre-teens and young teens and then go on to get "gender affirming" genital surgeries will never have the ability to experience genital arousal and orgasm.
If what's happened to poor Jazz Jennings is any indication, males put and kept on these drugs since they were pre-teens also don't develop much or any libido, either.
In case anyone wants to call Bowers' authority into question: Bowers is considered one of the best, most experienced surgeons in the world for "male to female" so-called "bottom surgery" - and Bowers is current president of WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the controversial organization of activists and health professionals that plays the leading role in establishing the "standards of care" for people who identify as transgender.
What's more, Bowers is trans too.
Bowers morphed from Mark to Marci in the late 1990s when Bowers was a husband and father of three children pushing 40. At that time, Bowers had was an ob-gyn whose practice focused on female patients and delivering babies. In the early 2000s, Bowers switched focus to become a specialist in genital surgeries on "male to female" or "trans feminine" patients, learning from renowned "MtF sex change specialist" Stanley Biber, MD. Bowers eventually took over Biber's world-famous practice serving trans-identified males seeking "gender affirmation" gential surgeries in Trinidad, CO when Biber retired.
Bowers currently is on the board of directors of the Trevor Project, which promotes "child transgenderism," and previously was on the boards of the Transgender Law Center and GLAAD.
This post was edited 4 minutes after it was posted.
Musk is a mentally unstable manchild. He has a lot of money and now has bought twitter. Without the money he inherited, he would probably be homess and babbling to people on a street corner or in a mental institution. Money is the only reason anyone thinks what he says is important. The same is true of Trump and a lot of other mentally unstable rich people. There are plenty of non conservatives in the same category, these were just two obvious names that fit this description.
Why? People have all kinds of surgeries and take all kinds of drugs to counteract the ‘natural order of things” in many ways. How about penile implants or breast augmentation surgery? There are all kinds of purely cosmetic surgeries people have done for no reason other than they want to. And you can bet your a$ that the second someone comes up with a surgery that will make a person taller, for example, folks will line up in droves for that.
Where do you draw the line on mental disorder when it comes to people wanting to change some aspect of how they appear, physically, to themselves and to others? Tattoos?
There are many sound reasons why ED seems to affect men as we get older. Is it a mental disorder for a man to buy Viagra so he can get hard enough to have sex with someone when he’s beyond the age that ‘nature’ ordained he should be having sex? how about artificial insemination? Or surrogate mothers, etc, etc?
There are so many examples of how people live lives that aren’t (in the eyes of others) aligned with how nature destined for them.
I'm not sure how you don't see the distinction between enhancing one's body and permanently destroying vital organs, whether through cross sex hormones which render them useless, or through barbaric surgeries which leave the patient with crudely formed genitalia that doesn't look or function like the "real thing". This is particularly egregious if the patient in question is a child -- and that's what we are discussing here.