4 ms·

It can be difficult to feel normal if there isn't a word to describe how you feel. If all you see is depictions of a certain kind of person (straight and cisgen

by delecti 10y ago

It can be difficult to feel normal if there isn't a word to describe how you feel. If all you see is depictions of a certain kind of person (straight and cisgender [1]), but you don't feel that way, are you broken, wrong, crazy even? I've seen countless accounts of people that fit the formula of "I felt different all my life, and it wasn't until I heard the word <label> that I understood." So yes, maybe if you're straight and cisgender you never gave a thought to it, because the majority of people around you were as well, but to a little transgender or asexual teen, hearing the label is like finding a community and comfort blanket all in one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisgender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisgender - Cisgender (often abbreviated to simply cis) is a term for people who have a gender identity that matches the sex that they were assigned at birth. Cisgender may also be defined as those who have "a gender identity or perform a gender role society considers appropriate for one's sex."[1] It is the opposite of the term transgender. Edit: kid->teen, I'm not talking about pre-pubescent children

wyager 10y ago
> but to a little transgender or asexual kid Kids are weird. They often do a ton of weird shit at least until puberty. I think this trend with the internet-bound millennial left (at least, I haven't seen anyone else do it) of taking every possible aspect of someone's personality (like a child expressing that they wish they were boy/girl) and classifying/medicalizing it is just as harmful as overdiagnosing kids with ADHD and getting them strung up on amphetamines. Not everything needs to be turned into a medical issue or have a big deal made of it. Now, instead of just doping kids up on amphetamines, we're also giving them hormone blockers or even HRT. And no, that's not a bogeyman; it's not hard to find celebratory videos where the parents give their pre-pubescent kid their first round of hormone treatment. According to [1], 80-95% of kids diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria completely get over it by the time they hit puberty (and [2] says 88-98%). It is almost always, as we used to call it, "a phase". Any diagnosis made before puberty is extremely likely to be a misdiagnosis. So forgive me, but I don't really buy "Think of the (transgender/agender) children!" as a compelling argument, since the actual occurrence of permanent gender dysphoria in children is low bordering on negligible, with many persistent cases potentially attributable to parental treatment rather than any sort of neurophysiological disorder on the part of the child. See [3] as an example. I think encouraging children to see themselves and having dysphoria and to seek treatment is extremely harmful, given that in the vast majority of formal diagnoses, no medical intervention is necessary. The whole thing just reeks of projecting identity politics onto innocent bystanders in a way that is demonstrably bad for their mental and physical health. [1] Cohen-Kettenis PT, Delemarre-van de Waal HA, Gooren LJ. The treatment of adolescent transsexuals: changing insights. J Sexual Med 2008;5:1892–1897. [2] http://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements/gender-ideology-harms-children http://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/21/boy-living-life-as-girl-removed-from-mothers-care-high-court-judge https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/21/boy-living-l...
- delecti 10y ago
  Maybe the word "kid" wasn't the right one for conveying my intention. I wasn't thinking "children 10 and under" but rather adolescents, maybe 13-18. The period of a person's life when they're sorting out who they are. Speaking from experience, being a transgender kid sucks, but I agree that before 10 nothing a person says or does should be considered immutable gospel about their identity. That said, while it's not immutable, it's still something parents should listen to. Ignoring a gender nonconforming child expressing themselves is a bigger risk than encouraging a kid who eventually grows out of it. Also, no pre-pubescent kids are getting hormones, just blockers, which are fully reversible if it is just a phase. It's not standard procedure to start actual hormones until about 16. If the kid "snaps out of it" then they stop taking the blockers, and grow up no worse for wear. But if they maintain their transgender identity, those blockers will save them a world of distress.
  - wyager 10y ago
    > If the kid "snaps out of it" then they stop taking the blockers It seems astoundingly likely that a heavy dose of the correct set of sex hormones is precisely what causes these kids to "snap out of it" in the first place. > and grow up no worse for wear I'm very skeptical of this claim. There's no way that disrupting such a fundamental developmental stage in such an aggressive way can just be shrugged off. Does the collective neurological and physiological damage of disrupting all these kids' development outweigh the benefit to the 2%-20% who actually end up continuing to identify as trans? And how much does that percentage decrease in the absence of hormone blockers?
    - delecti 10y ago
      > It seems astoundingly likely that a heavy dose of the correct set of sex hormones is precisely what causes these kids to "snap out of it" in the first place. That sort of treatment used to be common. In general it results in the trans kids getting horribly depressed, often killing themselves. Doctors with more field experience and who have done more research than me have settled on blockers as a safe and effective treatment with no long-term side effects if they're discontinued. You'll have to provide something more than gut feeling that they can't just be shrugged off.
logfromblammo 10y ago
Whenever I see cis- and trans- applied to humans, I get the creeping suspicion that some subset of ortho-, meta-, para-, dextro-, levo-, gem-, vic-, hom-, syn-, anti-, exo-, and endo- will be next, and everyone will need to pass an organic chemistry course just to sign up for a dating service. (In queue at the local coffee shop.) Couple-A: (reading a Quandr-E profile out loud) Orthodisexual dextromasculine cismale seeks polyamorous dyad for exo- addition (or endo- if it feels right).... Couple-B: Awww... dang. Too bad drhe isn't *para*-disexual. Swipe left. Sasquatch: I know, right? But gotta respect drhis life choices. Couple-A: Hey, you wouldn't happen to be... Sasquatch: Nope. I only date unicorns. Senior Coffee-Service Engineer: (surreptitiously applies alicorn wax) Dude: (enters) Any hetero cisfemales in here? Chorus: No! Dude: (exits) Dodecagenarian: One half-liter fair-trade, please. No saccharoids. Double cannabis-butter shot. Senior Coffee-Service Engineer: That will be $6129, sir and/or ma'am. Rod Serling: (appearing from nowhere) Submitted for your approval: Birmingham, Alabama, in the year 2040, just 2 years after the Social Justice War....
- dTal 10y ago
  Beautifully dense satire. A+, would read again.
Glyptodon 10y ago
I can sort of see where you're coming from... if The Hardy Boys, then Nancy Drew, if Nancy Drew, then Gay Hardy Boys, if Gay Hardy Boys, then Lesbian Nancy Drew, etc., and so on, until every label has its own version so everyone can enjoy their detective story. But at the same time, it seems conceivable that somebody could just come up with an upbeat middle grade detective series where gender wasn't a central aspect of the construct and people could just enjoy mysteries and detectives fantasies without having to relate to the characters' choice of dates. In any case I was fortunate to grow up in a family which (essentially) stressed that being "normal" was basically like being an idiot lemming, and, more particularly, implied that being/feeling different was fine even if it wasn't always easy. So I guess with the right framing it's possible to feel like a relative space alien without coming to be convinced that you're the broken one, but it's sure not a path of convenience.

by delecti 10y ago

wyager 10y ago

> but to a little transgender or asexual kid Kids are weird. They often do a ton of weird shit at least until puberty. I think this trend with the internet-bound millennial left (at least, I haven't seen anyone else do it) of taking every possible aspect of someone's personality (like a child expressing that they wish they were boy/girl) and classifying/medicalizing it is just as harmful as overdiagnosing kids with ADHD and getting them strung up on amphetamines. Not everything needs to be turned into a medical issue or have a big deal made of it. Now, instead of just doping kids up on amphetamines, we're also giving them hormone blockers or even HRT. And no, that's not a bogeyman; it's not hard to find celebratory videos where the parents give their pre-pubescent kid their first round of hormone treatment. According to [1], 80-95% of kids diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria completely get over it by the time they hit puberty (and [2] says 88-98%). It is almost always, as we used to call it, "a phase". Any diagnosis made before puberty is extremely likely to be a misdiagnosis. So forgive me, but I don't really buy "Think of the (transgender/agender) children!" as a compelling argument, since the actual occurrence of permanent gender dysphoria in children is low bordering on negligible, with many persistent cases potentially attributable to parental treatment rather than any sort of neurophysiological disorder on the part of the child. See [3] as an example. I think encouraging children to see themselves and having dysphoria and to seek treatment is extremely harmful, given that in the vast majority of formal diagnoses, no medical intervention is necessary. The whole thing just reeks of projecting identity politics onto innocent bystanders in a way that is demonstrably bad for their mental and physical health. [1] Cohen-Kettenis PT, Delemarre-van de Waal HA, Gooren LJ. The treatment of adolescent transsexuals: changing insights. J Sexual Med 2008;5:1892–1897. [2] http://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements/gender-ideology-harms-children http://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/21/boy-living-life-as-girl-removed-from-mothers-care-high-court-judge https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/21/boy-living-l...

delecti 10y ago
Maybe the word "kid" wasn't the right one for conveying my intention. I wasn't thinking "children 10 and under" but rather adolescents, maybe 13-18. The period of a person's life when they're sorting out who they are. Speaking from experience, being a transgender kid sucks, but I agree that before 10 nothing a person says or does should be considered immutable gospel about their identity. That said, while it's not immutable, it's still something parents should listen to. Ignoring a gender nonconforming child expressing themselves is a bigger risk than encouraging a kid who eventually grows out of it. Also, no pre-pubescent kids are getting hormones, just blockers, which are fully reversible if it is just a phase. It's not standard procedure to start actual hormones until about 16. If the kid "snaps out of it" then they stop taking the blockers, and grow up no worse for wear. But if they maintain their transgender identity, those blockers will save them a world of distress.
- wyager 10y ago
  > If the kid "snaps out of it" then they stop taking the blockers It seems astoundingly likely that a heavy dose of the correct set of sex hormones is precisely what causes these kids to "snap out of it" in the first place. > and grow up no worse for wear I'm very skeptical of this claim. There's no way that disrupting such a fundamental developmental stage in such an aggressive way can just be shrugged off. Does the collective neurological and physiological damage of disrupting all these kids' development outweigh the benefit to the 2%-20% who actually end up continuing to identify as trans? And how much does that percentage decrease in the absence of hormone blockers?
  - delecti 10y ago
    > It seems astoundingly likely that a heavy dose of the correct set of sex hormones is precisely what causes these kids to "snap out of it" in the first place. That sort of treatment used to be common. In general it results in the trans kids getting horribly depressed, often killing themselves. Doctors with more field experience and who have done more research than me have settled on blockers as a safe and effective treatment with no long-term side effects if they're discontinued. You'll have to provide something more than gut feeling that they can't just be shrugged off.

logfromblammo 10y ago

Whenever I see cis- and trans- applied to humans, I get the creeping suspicion that some subset of ortho-, meta-, para-, dextro-, levo-, gem-, vic-, hom-, syn-, anti-, exo-, and endo- will be next, and everyone will need to pass an organic chemistry course just to sign up for a dating service. (In queue at the local coffee shop.) Couple-A: (reading a Quandr-E profile out loud) Orthodisexual dextromasculine cismale seeks polyamorous dyad for exo- addition (or endo- if it feels right).... Couple-B: Awww... dang. Too bad drhe isn't *para*-disexual. Swipe left. Sasquatch: I know, right? But gotta respect drhis life choices. Couple-A: Hey, you wouldn't happen to be... Sasquatch: Nope. I only date unicorns. Senior Coffee-Service Engineer: (surreptitiously applies alicorn wax) Dude: (enters) Any hetero cisfemales in here? Chorus: No! Dude: (exits) Dodecagenarian: One half-liter fair-trade, please. No saccharoids. Double cannabis-butter shot. Senior Coffee-Service Engineer: That will be $6129, sir and/or ma'am. Rod Serling: (appearing from nowhere) Submitted for your approval: Birmingham, Alabama, in the year 2040, just 2 years after the Social Justice War....

dTal 10y ago
Beautifully dense satire. A+, would read again.

Glyptodon 10y ago

I can sort of see where you're coming from... if The Hardy Boys, then Nancy Drew, if Nancy Drew, then Gay Hardy Boys, if Gay Hardy Boys, then Lesbian Nancy Drew, etc., and so on, until every label has its own version so everyone can enjoy their detective story. But at the same time, it seems conceivable that somebody could just come up with an upbeat middle grade detective series where gender wasn't a central aspect of the construct and people could just enjoy mysteries and detectives fantasies without having to relate to the characters' choice of dates. In any case I was fortunate to grow up in a family which (essentially) stressed that being "normal" was basically like being an idiot lemming, and, more particularly, implied that being/feeling different was fine even if it wasn't always easy. So I guess with the right framing it's possible to feel like a relative space alien without coming to be convinced that you're the broken one, but it's sure not a path of convenience.