Having been an adolescent female once, all of this seems so obvious it shouldn't need to be said. But apparently it does need to be said. So kudos to those who are saying it.
The term 'iatrogenic harm' is one of those terms I'd never have thought I'd have needed to know, along with the sex life of clownfish. What a terrible mess we have landed ourselves in. The people who I'd have imagined to be the kindest and most moral - doctors, therapists and other caring medical professionals - are the ones who seem to have lost the plot more than most.
I agree with what's written in the article. I would just emphasise that both conditions seek to control what feels like an out-of-control body and mind. Also important is the control of the other. Gianna Williams described some Anorexics as operations as no entry defence that is a fear of being intruded upon emotionally as well as concretely. Sometimes connected to deep-seated fears of an intrusive maternal figure. In my experience, this is a core fear of some people with GD. And some patients have both.
"Iatrogenic" and "nosocomial" are two words that should both be much wider understood.
Even more important, how vaccines function, the anamnestic response; so many antivaxxers say they know of someone who got vaccinated against COVID but got sick anyway. The point is that the person recovered. These people are intolerably ignorant, thinking they've made a point.
But public service announcements about health and nutrition are as dead as the moon.
I suffered a late adolescent schizophrenic episode. Which I recovered from and have never experienced again. I believe it was partly caused by my lack of belief that I could cut it as an adult. But I eventually did. Becoming a wife and mother. I'm so glad no one tried to put a weird trans template on me and convince me this was the way forward. This ideology is so worrying because it is sold to young women when they are at their most vulnerable.
The subject has largely been advanced in the universities by feminist run 'Gender Studies' departments which are overtly hostile to men. Most men up until no didn't encounter this academically. It's also quite abstruse, bordering on the obscurantist. I'm a bit more than halfway through Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and it's a tough read if you are not up on feminist and gender/sex ideology. She relies on so many other thinkers, it's mind boggling.
Am very up on it all, for the last six years. I and many other women were and are talking and attempting to reach others, raising the alarm. We of course are concerned for our children and grand children. When Bill C-16 actually passed we were first shocked and in a kind of disbelief, and then Bill C-6 really just pushed the ideological agenda so much further, and now with Bill C-63 we may be silenced, all the women, unless we can stop it or influence massive clean up to the content. I understand that men were not as exposed academically, nor were they being replaced in language, as when a man can be a woman, but an actual female is one less, a 'cis' woman. That's a moving over go accomodate a male, which men have never had to do, so picked up much more slowly on the issues. Many men were peaked when they began to seem males in girls' change rooms.
This all makes so much sense, you have to wonder why people in the trans community and the gender affirming community don’t want to acknowledge this. I keep trying to figure out what the end game is here, every sane person in the industry with a modicum of intelligence and life experience must know that what they are doing is wrong. Is it just for the money and they don’t really care about the outcomes of the individuals they see or is it something deeper and more sinister being driven by the elites to achieve a society where everyone is unsure of who they really are and internal conflicts are never resolved, therefore they are easily led and controlled by outside influences.
Sigh...While I do get this is good stuff, when reading about adolescence and development from professionals these days, one gets the impression that it's all so difficult and horrible and a mess. Uh, 'No' maybe?
I have 5 sisters and a daughter, and I'm a human being on the earth. Teen girls seem to get massive attention and support and protection these days. They also seem to be overly therapeutic about their own psychology. The merest hint of anxiety or sadness will result in a school intervention if the parent doesn't jump on it first. Despite all the evidence we have that psychology is not terribly effective, it's the FIRST reaction. Kids aren't encouraged to be resilient and tough. Adults seem to have forgotten that they need to challenge kids at this age, that they need to take risks and fail and have arguments and screw up friendships as teen agers. We are learning to be social and how to interact with the opposite sex and many other aspects. None of this is going to be nice or feel good all the time. So what?
I think we have given girls in particular the idea that adolescence is sooo hard, so we shouldn't be surprised when the act as if it is. Sure, for some SMALL pct of girls with actual disorders that are severe, therapeutic interventions make sense. But the entire subject seems to be treated and discussed therapeutically now. Kids have been growing up and going through adolescence mostly harmlessly since the dawn of humanity. It hasn't changed that much - but our politics have.
The real issue for girls that's never discussed is the massive power that girls inherit as they sexually mature. The attention from boys, while we only hear how awful it is, is actually quite an asset for women. They start to realize that 'men choose and women compete for that choice' (the base reality of human mating, if you don't know this, don't argue, just go read a scientific text on human mate selection). For young girls this is real power and can be quite heady. They are also cheerleaded from the moment they arrive at school as girls and are told constantly they can do anything and be anything (boys are not taught this) and how awesome they are for just being girls.
As a result, teen girls compete for this power and hierarchy in the 'sexual marketplace', and tear each other to shreds, mostly via reputation damaging and social ostracism etc. None of this is ever explained to most adults, forget kids, so we talk about all of this in truly bizarre ways.
Girls have it much better than boys these days in our society. I have run out of sympathy for the girls, sorry...I know this is OT, but there it is.
> This statement is a straw man argument that misrepresents the goals and practices of gender-affirming healthcare. It uses emotionally charged language ("castrate") to paint a false and alarming picture of the care provided to transgender youth.
"Castrate" is an accurate description, I know that, nearly everyone on this substack knows this. Whether you also know this or believe your own propaganda isn't very relevant.
The neutral would be "it." I would not have an issue with referring to abhorrent people as neuter, I do it with Sarah Palin and Kari Lake all the time.
But the use of "they" for a single person has bothered the shit out of me since I started learning foreign languages; I haven't it used it since I was 13 and I don't need to tie my grammar into knots.
I'm subject to headaches. I had them every day of my first 15 years because of cigarette smoke; I get them from pop music; I get them from the singular "they." I may sound like a jerk about this but I really wish people would stop using this grotesque grammar, especially since the 'trans" have embraced it and there is also this unmotivated imperative to use "gender-neutral language."
You say that “more extensive, well-controlled studies are needed to better understand the potential links between these conditions and to inform evidence-based clinical practices“ and yet imply that whatever “valuable” information we get still shouldn’t change or “overshadow” the importance of affirmative health care.
Can you imagine any result of any potential study which would link anorexia and trans identities in a way which would change your mind? Could you give a hypothetical?
"the proven benefits that gender-affirming care already has for many people."
There are no such benefits. This is a fiction. Some women who go on testosterone experience a few months of elevated mood, but there is NO evidence from any study that shows hormones and surgery reduce depression, suicide, or any of the comorbidities that the "trans" tend to have.
On the contrary: seven to ten years after these experimental treatments, especially involving surgery, there is a 19-fold surge in suicide. Small wonder; they were already sick, now their health is shot, they are sexually dysfunctional, and nobody wants to date them.
And the extortion ("live son or dead daughter") is a lie; 40% of these kids are mentally ill, and the ones who don't go the "trans" route atop the other illnesses are exactly as suicidal as those who do.
I know you mean well, but you are unwittingly propagating lies. And given teh suppression of research by "trans" activists, it's not as though you can get the truth from American sources.
I believe that any treatment other than psychiatry to help the “dysphoric” live with their biological sex to be malpractice. And, in the case of hormones and surgery, criminal.
A strong cause-and-effect link between anorexia and gender dysphoria would seem to undermine the idea that people are innately transgender as a matter of identity, and place them instead into the category of psychological disorders. That wouldn’t necessarily mean that nobody should receive sex trait modification procedures, of course, but it would I think place a burden of proof on the claim that it has proven benefits. The default is now to help align the mind with the body.
If you can imagine a hypothetical study which would, to you, be sufficient to class gender dysphoria and anorexia as similar disorders then sure, I’d be interested. I’m genuinely curious. Thanks again.
BTW, careful when engaging with thrown away. Don't confuse his verbosity for knowledge, or his superficial politeness for sincerity. His schtick is really quite simple once you see it:
First a paragraph of insincere politeness thanking you for your input, which he will then proceed to ignore.
Followed by several paragraphs followed stating how complicated it all is and yet nevertheless it's best to continue castrating children, sorry, providing them with "gender affirming care".
At this point, with several entire nations rejecting what you claim is accepted for children now, one cannot take your position seriously. There is no case for 'affirmative care' based on valid, reliable studies (most of what WPATH produces doesn't even approach validity or reliability - these are technical, statistical terms if you are unaware). They almost all observational, correlational studies with very low sample sizes. No control groups, and all short term. The best long term study we have shows that trans people commit suicide more often after 'treatment' at this point.
How much longer can you keep denying the truth? At a certain point, you are just into harming kids for your politics and ideology, ya know? Careful, some people might find that a bit off...
I really appreciate your response here; it’s very thorough. I think the hypothetical is off, though, because we seem to be talking about different things when referring to a “cause-and-effect link” between anorexia and gender dysphoria (which is probably my fault for not being clearer.)
The claim isn’t that anorexia leads to gender dysphoria, but that both conditions are similar but separate disorders which share underlying causes. This might be a combination of biology — such as atypical body ownership and self-perception in the fronto-occipital part of the brain — and social contagion. Or it might be other factors.
So while the study you came up with is indeed a legitimate example of something which would change your mind about how to approach the diagnosis and treatment of gender dysphoria, finding out that some people who identify as trans also have an eating disorder which appears to be linked allows a distinction between gender dysphoria as a gender-identity based fundamental aspect of self, and gender dysphoria as a symptom of an underlying mental health condition. There may be no such distinction. We should also be cautious about assuming that a mental health condition can’t be considered a “fundamental aspect of self” by the person who has it. That’s one of the problems associated with anorexia.
Could you then imagine a study or series of studies which would link anorexia and gender dysphoria in the second interpretation of “link,” similar cause? Thank you.
> If a hypothetical, large, longitudinal study with rigorous methodology and appropriate controls followed a representative sample of individuals over time, the findings demonstrated that a significant proportion of teens presenting with gender dysphoria had a previously undiagnosed eating disorder, and that treating the eating disorder resolved the gender dysphoria in many cases, it could suggest a need for more comprehensive screening and a more cautious approach to gender-affirming interventions - especially in adolescents. (WOW, that has to be one of the longest sentenced I have ever written, whew)
Wow, that's a lot of caveats, and you present even more in the following paragraphs. So in practice, you'll always find some excuse not to change your mind.
Having been an adolescent female once, all of this seems so obvious it shouldn't need to be said. But apparently it does need to be said. So kudos to those who are saying it.
And so horrible that if you state the obvious you’re labeled a hater and a ‘phobe.
If you state plain, simple, uncontroversial scientific truth then you're an advocate of nothing less than "genocide."
And nothing less if you restrict a women's sport to women.
This movement needs to be repressed. Especially now that it veers into sanctioning pedophilia.
The term 'iatrogenic harm' is one of those terms I'd never have thought I'd have needed to know, along with the sex life of clownfish. What a terrible mess we have landed ourselves in. The people who I'd have imagined to be the kindest and most moral - doctors, therapists and other caring medical professionals - are the ones who seem to have lost the plot more than most.
I agree with what's written in the article. I would just emphasise that both conditions seek to control what feels like an out-of-control body and mind. Also important is the control of the other. Gianna Williams described some Anorexics as operations as no entry defence that is a fear of being intruded upon emotionally as well as concretely. Sometimes connected to deep-seated fears of an intrusive maternal figure. In my experience, this is a core fear of some people with GD. And some patients have both.
"Iatrogenic" and "nosocomial" are two words that should both be much wider understood.
Even more important, how vaccines function, the anamnestic response; so many antivaxxers say they know of someone who got vaccinated against COVID but got sick anyway. The point is that the person recovered. These people are intolerably ignorant, thinking they've made a point.
But public service announcements about health and nutrition are as dead as the moon.
I suffered a late adolescent schizophrenic episode. Which I recovered from and have never experienced again. I believe it was partly caused by my lack of belief that I could cut it as an adult. But I eventually did. Becoming a wife and mother. I'm so glad no one tried to put a weird trans template on me and convince me this was the way forward. This ideology is so worrying because it is sold to young women when they are at their most vulnerable.
It's nice that men over the last year or two are tuning in to gender ideology and consequent issues.
The subject has largely been advanced in the universities by feminist run 'Gender Studies' departments which are overtly hostile to men. Most men up until no didn't encounter this academically. It's also quite abstruse, bordering on the obscurantist. I'm a bit more than halfway through Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and it's a tough read if you are not up on feminist and gender/sex ideology. She relies on so many other thinkers, it's mind boggling.
Am very up on it all, for the last six years. I and many other women were and are talking and attempting to reach others, raising the alarm. We of course are concerned for our children and grand children. When Bill C-16 actually passed we were first shocked and in a kind of disbelief, and then Bill C-6 really just pushed the ideological agenda so much further, and now with Bill C-63 we may be silenced, all the women, unless we can stop it or influence massive clean up to the content. I understand that men were not as exposed academically, nor were they being replaced in language, as when a man can be a woman, but an actual female is one less, a 'cis' woman. That's a moving over go accomodate a male, which men have never had to do, so picked up much more slowly on the issues. Many men were peaked when they began to seem males in girls' change rooms.
It’s all crap.
This all makes so much sense, you have to wonder why people in the trans community and the gender affirming community don’t want to acknowledge this. I keep trying to figure out what the end game is here, every sane person in the industry with a modicum of intelligence and life experience must know that what they are doing is wrong. Is it just for the money and they don’t really care about the outcomes of the individuals they see or is it something deeper and more sinister being driven by the elites to achieve a society where everyone is unsure of who they really are and internal conflicts are never resolved, therefore they are easily led and controlled by outside influences.
Sigh...While I do get this is good stuff, when reading about adolescence and development from professionals these days, one gets the impression that it's all so difficult and horrible and a mess. Uh, 'No' maybe?
I have 5 sisters and a daughter, and I'm a human being on the earth. Teen girls seem to get massive attention and support and protection these days. They also seem to be overly therapeutic about their own psychology. The merest hint of anxiety or sadness will result in a school intervention if the parent doesn't jump on it first. Despite all the evidence we have that psychology is not terribly effective, it's the FIRST reaction. Kids aren't encouraged to be resilient and tough. Adults seem to have forgotten that they need to challenge kids at this age, that they need to take risks and fail and have arguments and screw up friendships as teen agers. We are learning to be social and how to interact with the opposite sex and many other aspects. None of this is going to be nice or feel good all the time. So what?
I think we have given girls in particular the idea that adolescence is sooo hard, so we shouldn't be surprised when the act as if it is. Sure, for some SMALL pct of girls with actual disorders that are severe, therapeutic interventions make sense. But the entire subject seems to be treated and discussed therapeutically now. Kids have been growing up and going through adolescence mostly harmlessly since the dawn of humanity. It hasn't changed that much - but our politics have.
The real issue for girls that's never discussed is the massive power that girls inherit as they sexually mature. The attention from boys, while we only hear how awful it is, is actually quite an asset for women. They start to realize that 'men choose and women compete for that choice' (the base reality of human mating, if you don't know this, don't argue, just go read a scientific text on human mate selection). For young girls this is real power and can be quite heady. They are also cheerleaded from the moment they arrive at school as girls and are told constantly they can do anything and be anything (boys are not taught this) and how awesome they are for just being girls.
As a result, teen girls compete for this power and hierarchy in the 'sexual marketplace', and tear each other to shreds, mostly via reputation damaging and social ostracism etc. None of this is ever explained to most adults, forget kids, so we talk about all of this in truly bizarre ways.
Girls have it much better than boys these days in our society. I have run out of sympathy for the girls, sorry...I know this is OT, but there it is.
> SEGM - A known group that, upon a closer look, seems more interested in pushing an agenda
Unlike the people pushing kids to castrate themselves.
> rather than contributing to a nuanced understanding of best practices in transgender healthcare.
Sorry, but we're not going to let you hide your atrocities and BS behind "nuance".
> This statement is a straw man argument that misrepresents the goals and practices of gender-affirming healthcare. It uses emotionally charged language ("castrate") to paint a false and alarming picture of the care provided to transgender youth.
"Castrate" is an accurate description, I know that, nearly everyone on this substack knows this. Whether you also know this or believe your own propaganda isn't very relevant.
You sure have Chutzpah. Engaging in massive trolling and then attempting to blame the person calling you out.
Wow, six paragraphs without saying anything of substance, just bad appeals to authority and apologism for castration of children, impressive.
As if you have ever said "anything of substance." All you ever do on Substack is bother people.
Specifically by calling out their BS.
Well, I must complement you on your chutzpah at least.
Why are you such a compulsive jerk?
I merely call out BS when I see it.
Go to hell
Sounds like a single male person to me. Which makes your use of the third person plural completely confusing.
What objection do you have to “he” and its declensions?
The neutral would be "it." I would not have an issue with referring to abhorrent people as neuter, I do it with Sarah Palin and Kari Lake all the time.
But the use of "they" for a single person has bothered the shit out of me since I started learning foreign languages; I haven't it used it since I was 13 and I don't need to tie my grammar into knots.
I'm subject to headaches. I had them every day of my first 15 years because of cigarette smoke; I get them from pop music; I get them from the singular "they." I may sound like a jerk about this but I really wish people would stop using this grotesque grammar, especially since the 'trans" have embraced it and there is also this unmotivated imperative to use "gender-neutral language."
> I would not have an issue with referring to abhorrent people as neuter, I do it with Sarah Palin and Kari Lake all the time.
Had you actually listened to those "abhorrent people" you might have actually seen the mess we were getting into before it happened.
You say that “more extensive, well-controlled studies are needed to better understand the potential links between these conditions and to inform evidence-based clinical practices“ and yet imply that whatever “valuable” information we get still shouldn’t change or “overshadow” the importance of affirmative health care.
Can you imagine any result of any potential study which would link anorexia and trans identities in a way which would change your mind? Could you give a hypothetical?
"the proven benefits that gender-affirming care already has for many people."
There are no such benefits. This is a fiction. Some women who go on testosterone experience a few months of elevated mood, but there is NO evidence from any study that shows hormones and surgery reduce depression, suicide, or any of the comorbidities that the "trans" tend to have.
On the contrary: seven to ten years after these experimental treatments, especially involving surgery, there is a 19-fold surge in suicide. Small wonder; they were already sick, now their health is shot, they are sexually dysfunctional, and nobody wants to date them.
And the extortion ("live son or dead daughter") is a lie; 40% of these kids are mentally ill, and the ones who don't go the "trans" route atop the other illnesses are exactly as suicidal as those who do.
I know you mean well, but you are unwittingly propagating lies. And given teh suppression of research by "trans" activists, it's not as though you can get the truth from American sources.
I believe that any treatment other than psychiatry to help the “dysphoric” live with their biological sex to be malpractice. And, in the case of hormones and surgery, criminal.
Thanks for answering.
A strong cause-and-effect link between anorexia and gender dysphoria would seem to undermine the idea that people are innately transgender as a matter of identity, and place them instead into the category of psychological disorders. That wouldn’t necessarily mean that nobody should receive sex trait modification procedures, of course, but it would I think place a burden of proof on the claim that it has proven benefits. The default is now to help align the mind with the body.
If you can imagine a hypothetical study which would, to you, be sufficient to class gender dysphoria and anorexia as similar disorders then sure, I’d be interested. I’m genuinely curious. Thanks again.
BTW, careful when engaging with thrown away. Don't confuse his verbosity for knowledge, or his superficial politeness for sincerity. His schtick is really quite simple once you see it:
First a paragraph of insincere politeness thanking you for your input, which he will then proceed to ignore.
Followed by several paragraphs followed stating how complicated it all is and yet nevertheless it's best to continue castrating children, sorry, providing them with "gender affirming care".
At this point, with several entire nations rejecting what you claim is accepted for children now, one cannot take your position seriously. There is no case for 'affirmative care' based on valid, reliable studies (most of what WPATH produces doesn't even approach validity or reliability - these are technical, statistical terms if you are unaware). They almost all observational, correlational studies with very low sample sizes. No control groups, and all short term. The best long term study we have shows that trans people commit suicide more often after 'treatment' at this point.
How much longer can you keep denying the truth? At a certain point, you are just into harming kids for your politics and ideology, ya know? Careful, some people might find that a bit off...
Nobody here pays any attention to Eugene, why do you? The entire exchange is skipped.
Please don’t respond to him. We all know he’s just a jerk.
You really do sound upset that I explained how you play your game.
I really appreciate your response here; it’s very thorough. I think the hypothetical is off, though, because we seem to be talking about different things when referring to a “cause-and-effect link” between anorexia and gender dysphoria (which is probably my fault for not being clearer.)
The claim isn’t that anorexia leads to gender dysphoria, but that both conditions are similar but separate disorders which share underlying causes. This might be a combination of biology — such as atypical body ownership and self-perception in the fronto-occipital part of the brain — and social contagion. Or it might be other factors.
So while the study you came up with is indeed a legitimate example of something which would change your mind about how to approach the diagnosis and treatment of gender dysphoria, finding out that some people who identify as trans also have an eating disorder which appears to be linked allows a distinction between gender dysphoria as a gender-identity based fundamental aspect of self, and gender dysphoria as a symptom of an underlying mental health condition. There may be no such distinction. We should also be cautious about assuming that a mental health condition can’t be considered a “fundamental aspect of self” by the person who has it. That’s one of the problems associated with anorexia.
Could you then imagine a study or series of studies which would link anorexia and gender dysphoria in the second interpretation of “link,” similar cause? Thank you.
> If a hypothetical, large, longitudinal study with rigorous methodology and appropriate controls followed a representative sample of individuals over time, the findings demonstrated that a significant proportion of teens presenting with gender dysphoria had a previously undiagnosed eating disorder, and that treating the eating disorder resolved the gender dysphoria in many cases, it could suggest a need for more comprehensive screening and a more cautious approach to gender-affirming interventions - especially in adolescents. (WOW, that has to be one of the longest sentenced I have ever written, whew)
Wow, that's a lot of caveats, and you present even more in the following paragraphs. So in practice, you'll always find some excuse not to change your mind.
Where does it mention the small sample size (a sample size of 2)?
What is the source of the Colonel's quotation in your last line?
> That said, the authors' arguments and conclusions are based on their synthesis of existing research and theories,
Which are likely just as well supported as the n=2 study itself.
Seriously, who do you think you're fooling with this act?