Levine made the comments ahead of a Saturday speech at Texas Christian University during which Levine blamed the high rate of suicidal ideation among transgender-identifying youth in part on “harassment, scapegoating and intentional abuse,”
Perhaps such youth simply need to be told no, they can’t ‘identify’ as anything until they are older.
It’s systemic anti trans hate don’t you know, that’s why they kill themselves, definitely not because they were crazy to begin with and sought a radical drug and surgical procedure as a last ditch effort to resolve their own mental problems. Just like every black American’s problems are the fault of slavery or racism from 100 years ago, and you can’t prove otherwise.
So unfortunately for this type of unfalsifiable agenda-driven leftist thinking, in the trans case there was a big study in Sweden started over 30 years ago. They’re quite socially accepting of trans people and even so…
Ten to 15 years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers. McHugh points to the reality that because sex change is physically impossible, it frequently does not provide the long-term wholeness and happiness that people seek.
So yeah, a good fraction of these people are mentally disturbed, especially so for the guys who want to be women, and their mental health problems and suicide rates reflect this.
I wouldn’t even go that far, especially for kids - kids don’t have the capacity to understand what they think or feel (and what they think they feel can change multiple times each day).
When middle schoolers want to drink, we tell them no. When middle schoolers want to have sex, we tell them no. When middle schoolers want to smoke, we tell them no. When middle schoolers want to drive cars, we tell them no. When middle schoolers want to drop out of school, we tell them no. How the hell did deciding to [pretend to] change gender become the tent pole that no one is allowed to say no to and everyone is supposed to just accept? It has far more life-altering consequences than all those other things combined, yet somehow it’s the one thing that is acceptable to actively encourage.
I’d say the mentally disturbed ones are those who refuse to tell them no.
because trying to get a kid going through puberty to understand that everyone is awkward at that age, telling them they weren’t born in the wrong body, and that if they just wait, they’ll turn out fine, is conversion therapy, don’t cha know?
I can’t imagine how life is for a person who changed his/her gender at an early age, only to find out later on they don’t really want to have their new gender. Ending misery might be their only way out then.
Why are the ones that get help far less likely to kill themselves than the ones who don’t?
Do they? If you’ve got a study from say, 2015 or earlier (before when anyone who tried to publish a transphobic conclusion like that they were no better or maybe worse with surgery would have been fired), I’d be happy to take a look.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Transphobia
I mean, I’m open to the possibility that their suicide rate, cited above, was 20x a normal person after surgery and would have been 50x without it or something. But either way, I think it’s important to realize many of these people are not mentally well in addition to whatever other issues they have.
There isn’t good data anywhere that has arrived at this conclusion. Almost all the studies are garbage, and the ones that aren’t haven’t been able to draw statistically significant conclusions. And the garbage ones are all over the map. The authors of the most recent study published on how kids do with childhood treatment had to lie about their study in order to report what they wanted to.
And that ignores that it’s still comparing untreated trans kids with treated trans kids. The opposing argument is all about not giving kids the option of chosing to be trans in the first place.
In their world, any alternative to affirming treatment is akin to conversion therapy, so of course affirmation is the only option. Convenient how that works, huh?
It’s not like you can’t “not allow” them to be trans–untreated is the scenario you’re after. Pretending the problem doesn’t exist doesn’t make it go away no matter how much the right thinks problems can be solved that way.
Let’s back up a tad and get the lay of the land.
At what age of a child do you believe that, a child, that child’s parent(s), and that child’s doctor should be able to remove/restructure healthy breasts? At what age do you believe they should be able to remove/restructure healthy genitals?
First off - thank you for giving a straight answer. A lot of people interested in this debate won’t do that.
Do you realize your view is way closer to conservatives than trans activists on how we should treat kids with gender dysphoria?
I haven’t been convinced that puberty blockers as a long term treatment are safe enough not to cause irreversible damage (leading a person not to fully develop or be permanently sterilized if they later come off them), so I don’t currently hold the same view as yours, but I am happy to hear you aren’t fully on the trans train that wants to give kids cross sex hormones and affirming/mutilation surgery before they reach the age of maturity.
I think you have a very wrong view of what the trans activists want.
And where is the evidence that they cause sterility? Besides, transition pretty much causes sterility in the first place, that’s not a reason against them. And they always later come off them, the point isn’t to permanently block puberty but to delay it until they decide which way to go–if you go to hormones before puberty sets in it goes better.
Obviously not all activists want the exact same thing, but I would say most want no restrictions and are 100% on board with the affirming model of care with kids. I’m sure each individual person has a different year of age in their mind, but almost none are at 18 years of age. The proof of that is in the fact that when arguing with conservatives who are trying to pass laws making it illegal to surgically trans kids, I have never seen one single trans activist argue that they agreed only adults should have surgeries.
So if you think I have a “very wrong view,” what specifically about my view of their position is “very wrong?”
Puberty blockers were developed to delay precousis puberty in kids that were starting it too early and they were designed to come off it when they hit puberty age. They weren’t developed to stop kids from going through puberty that are actually at puberty age and stay on it until they hit eighteen. Plus, almost every kid that goes on puberty blockers goes on to take cross-sex hormones (which we know does cause infertility), so we actually have very little data on what happens to kids that were on puberty blockers long term and came off.
It’s a reason against giving them to kids who aren’t mature enough at a pre-pubescent age to make the decision to sterilize themselves for life.
We don’t have the data to support this conclusion. This is brand new “medicine” that is essentially experiments on kids. In a few decades, this will be considered 10x as horrific as when we as a society legitimized lobotomies on the mentally ill.
That’s the rub - gender is not a choice, it’s biological. You can work hard to break down gender-based stereotypes all you want, but a male following traditional female roles/behaviors/whatevers is still a male. So a child can wear whatever they want, etc - but a boy is still a boy, a girl is still a girl. Actually changing that requires much, much more than simply preferring a different gender - and that’s where the objections are regarding children. Any ‘treatment’ (besides non-pharmacutical psychological counseling) is akin to letting a 10 year old get liposuction because she feels that she should be thinner than she is.
A true “trans” activist would be working to eliminate gender-based restrooms and gender-discriminated sports, not demanding a man be able to use the women’s restroom simply because he’s decided he would rather be a woman.
You have no fertility when you are hormonally the other gender, puberty blockers do not cause sterility. They don’t do anything irreversible!
We know being forced to live as the wrong gender does harm.
You might want to tell the mayo clinic so they can take that possible side effect of their page for puberty blockers. Or alternatively, you might actually not know what you’re talking about and no one should trust you with medical advice.
Not physical harm. Transing kids however, that does do physical harm that many go on to regret.
Our society believes in innocent until proven guilty and our system of justice believes that we are better off letting some guilty people go free if the alternative is accidentally sending innocent people to jail. I wish trans activists would take the same tact with gender confused kids. It is better to force some actually gender dysphoric kids to wait until they reach the age of maturity before they can choose to medicalize themselves for life than it is to cause irreversible damage on someone by transing them as a child when they would have grown out of their confusion and wouldn’t have transitioned had they been more mature.
