Medicalization of trans children, even those who are entering puberty or beyond, is a bad idea. There needs to be more research on the safety of puberty blockers and cross sex endogenous hormones for long term medical outcomes including cancer and heart disease risks. Once you are an adult, sure, do whatever you want to your body; but there is a different ethical consideration for minors.

You’re not a doctor. There have been studies and there will be more.

What about the ethical consideration of teens suffering and killing themselves because of gender dysphoria? Does that not matter?

This isn’t some “nice to have” this is important medical treatment to save lives, improve quality of life, improve outcomes.

Politicians have no fucking business denying healthcare to trans people.

The “they will die if they don’t get gender affirming care” narrative is so harmful. Women who should qualify for gender affirming care (eg, hair removal from PCOS-induced hirsutism) aren’t considered the same way. Do their feelings matter less? Are they really commiting suicide in large numbers because they do not have this treatment (perhaps it’s unaffordable because health insurance doesn’t cover it)?

Do you know a lot of girls with PCOS who are being bullied to the point of violence? Because that’s exactly what happened to the trans girl I grew up with 30 years ago. Long before she ever said she was a girl or presented as a girl in public. When she just “looked like” an effeminate little boy, another child wrapped her scarf around her neck and around a piece of playground equipment and started pulling her off the ground by her throat.

You know why? Because she was wearing a glittery purple scarf. And you know what the school administration did about it? Not one fucking thing. Her mother and my mother had to go on a crusade to even get the incident acknowledged.

Yeah, I wonder why trans kids have such high suicide rates. It’s not magic, you ignorant FART. You’re part of the problem driving these kids to experience high suicide rates.

(Feminism Appropriating Radical Transphobe, for anyone who isn’t familiar with this much more appropriate acronym for a TERF.)

bro that’s fucking horrible and nobody should have to go through that but making people go through irreversible chemical, hormonal, and physical “treatments” instead of even trying to help their mental anguish is even worse. That’s literally saying that cutting body parts off and gaslighting yourself into being okay with it is a reasonable fix toward feeling uncomfortable in your body, they should have the root issue addressed rather than having the entire medical field shit on them by making them think mutilating themselves is the right and empowering choice. they’ve fooled everyone including you, and it’s all for money, because these “treatments” rake in ridiculous amounts of money and would bring in more money than just fixing their real issues so they can live a happy life phisically and chemically intact.

Umm… You have fallen for some massive misinformation friend. The first stages of a transition are a trial period where one figures out what their individual needs are. Medical providers are actually pretty cagey about regret so if you are a trans youth this involves a therapist and a social worker who talks woith thw kids and their guardians.

As an adult this means basically doing dry runs of everything. Name change, social transition, binding, packing and talking to other trans people to see what worked for them. Inside the community itself there’s a lot of people don’t medically transition ever. For a solid chunk the social aspects alone give them the tools they need to get by okay…which is why if someone is pointing to someone and screaming about how their pronouns are going to destroy society it’s really not great! Adding pressure by removing all the mental tools they need to get through their day in the body they have and telling them they are fake and just wanting attention doesn’t achieve the aim of dissuading people from desiring medical transition. Quite the opposite.

Look a little bit further into non-binary identies and you will find a lot of trans people who have embraced halfway transition. Sometimes it’s just a single sex characteristic you can’t get over, sometimes your sense of identity isn’t stable over the long term so a medical transition doesn’t work for you. The point being is there’s a lot of different trans people out there who have all approached being trans very differently. What works for one doesn’t work for all so you share your experiences to find differences and similarity, experiment, really drill down into how you react to everything and I mean EVERYTHING… You lay out your values, fears, life goals, relationships, body image issues, spirituality - all of it and you itemize it. You figure out what you really want out of life, what you stand to lose and what you hope to gain by either staying as you are or pursing something else.

Trying to figure out your gender identity happens as a period of self experimentation over the course of years before you go to a doc about a physical transformation and pushing someone towards a medical transition as the only option is a subsect of “trans medicalism” which inside the community itself is generally policed as an asshole thing to levy at someone.

So when you come out the gate with “The first thing they do is chop off their bits!”… No. That is not how any of this works.

I understand your point of view, it’s good that there’s a lot of care taken to make sure the mental impact of transitioning is minimal, but the point is this is a huge amount of work to help someone try and cope with “being” something that doesn’t align with what what they were born and biologically formed as. It’s a noble sentiment, but we should be approaching the whole issue in a way that helps people realize that they don’t have to change to be themselves.

we should be approaching the whole issue in a way that helps people realize that they don’t have to change to be themselves.

That is literally the first thing the majority of transgender people try. Usually for years if not decades, before the finally accept who they are and transition.

I guess my question is why doesn’t the medical field try harder to actually properly fix the suffering they’re experiencing instead of just helping them with the part of the process that keeps them buying hormones for the rest of their lives to fight their own body’s hormone production and sometimes involves painfully mutilating themselves?

Because they have tried everything else, it didn't work. We've done all the things you are asking. We have tried every therapy you can imagine. It's not effective.

You are working on the assumption that there is some other treatment that works that we are just ignoring. What exactly do you think it is?

The truth is that transition works, it alleviates distress, and it's a very simple and safe treatment option.

I’m sorry if it came off that way,

I’m well aware that there’s not much else available because the medical field clearly doesn’t care enough to give you a more effective treatment option. I remember hearing about a drug that eliminated the feeling of gender dysphoria, but now I can’t even find anything about it on the internet, and to be completely honest, it feels suspicious, because even the idea of innovating toward simply treating the core emotion of gender dysphoria is shunned, even though it’s the most rational and straightforward treatment anyone could have.

The point is that a medication that could eliminate the root cause of dysphoria should and possibly did exist, but clearly something is strange with the world if even the idea of directly fixing someone’s mental anguish is seen as hateful and bigoted. You should not stand for those keeping you away from genuine relief and contentness, instead of this half baked excuse for a treatment that is destructive to your body, emotions, and fights your hormones.