Using this link solely for the gift link:
A provacative piece by Andrew Sullivan … this part certainly expressed something that has been bothering me, especially watching my son and his friends navigate puberty and beyond:
“… To begin with, gays and lesbians, including me, empathized with kids with gender dysphoria, and trusted the medical profession with the rest. If this helped kids or even saved their lives, as was often emphasized, what business was it of mine? If transitioning this young in life helped some pass better as adults, good for them.
Still, questions lingered, drawn from my own life. As a child, uninterested in playing team sports but very interested in the boys who played team sports, I was once asked by a girl when I was just 10 years old, “Are you sure you’re not really a girl?” Of course not, I replied.
But I wonder how I might have responded if someone in authority — a parent or a teacher or a doctor — had suggested that my difference and occasional anxiety was because I was, in fact, a girl. That my body was irrelevant, and that I could choose to be the opposite sex before puberty and all my confusions would disappear. I just don’t know what I would have said or done, to be honest.
And how do today’s parents, teachers and doctors know
for sure that a 10-year-old child isn’t, well, like me, and really is trans? How can they know for sure that the gender dysphoria isn’t instead a manifestation of being gay or lesbian and wanting to change it? How do they know for sure there isn’t another complicating personal or psychological factor? I was told not to worry. A child had to demonstrate a “persistent, consistent and insistent” trans identity for years even to be considered for medical intervention.
But this, I found out, was no longer true. The whole point of the new regime of gender-affirming care was that it rejected broad mental health assessments of children that could ensure that mistakes really didn’t happen. The old “persistent, consistent and insistent” model was deemed transphobic and loosened to become an affirmation policy. As soon as a kid said he or she was the opposite sex, further counseling and mental health exploration was deemed problematic, because it amounted to transphobic conversion therapy, we were told. When I said that seemed crazy, and that surely we needed more safeguards, I was sternly told, “Children know who they are.”
… In the Netherlands, the famous Dutch protocol for gender-affirming care was pioneered in the 1990s with far stricter safeguards in place than exist in the United States today. There, of a cohort of 70 adolescents referred to an Amsterdam clinic from 2000 to 2008, 62 were same-sex attracted. And it’s easy to see that one way to “cure” yourself of attraction to the same sex is to become the opposite one. At Britain’s now-shuttered Tavistock clinic, according to the investigative journalist Hannah Barnes, staff members had a dark joke that at the rate they were going, there would be “no gay people left.” This
is why sex-change surgeries are permitted and even subsidized in Iran: It’s a way to rid the country of gay people.
And a fix for gender dysphoria for gay and lesbian kids can be puberty itself, as it was for me and many of my gay male friends. Once my own hormones kicked in, my anxieties evaporated. I
loved being a boy, I realized. Puberty blockers literally block gay and lesbian kids from the chance at that possible resolution of their gender dysphoria. There is a real conflict here, and it’s obscured by the L.G.B.T.Q.+ identity.…”
