A YouTube reply that might help some folks understand some stuff better about trans kids. The OP said something about how "no one should be telling a 12-year-old they have the wrong body".
My response below:
That's wonderful dialogue you've written there, but it's from the 70s. Maybe we can use more modern language, like, "nobody is telling 12-year-olds that they are transgender."
Because that's true. No one is doing that. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of how this works. But I have some time today, so here's a summary.
There are three kinds of transition. Social, legal, and medical.
Kids generally access social first, and if before puberty, ALWAYS. Social comes first. They change their name and pronouns, cut their hair differently, wear different clothes. That's pretty much it.
If they find that they like the social transition so much they feel they want to make it permanent, they may ask their parents if they can make the change legal - which is to say, legally change their name.
The third kind is medical transition. Under medical guidance, this is ONLY ever started by request OF THE CHILD, and it only happens when puberty has already started, technically, "Tanner Stage 1".
Currently, best practice is to prescribe puberty blockers temporarily, until the child is old enough to assert medical autonomy, which is a threshold decided by the doctor - is the child mature enough to understand the topic, and its consequences, and so on? This can vary, from 14 at the earliest, to 18 at the oldest. Until then, the puberty blockers - completely safe, and used by cisgender children for precocious puberty for nearly 80 years, and still are - keep the hormones out of the receptors, so puberty is not advanced.
Nothing about puberty blockers is permanent. It is a pause button, chemically; it temporarily blocks receptors for hormones.
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Ostensibly, this is because kids should be older to make this choice. This isn't for the kids' benefit: it's for the benefit of cisgender people, who find the entire idea of taking the "wrong" hormones to be deeply nauseating.
The problem is, these aren't the "wrong" hormones for these kids. They're the right ones. Taking the right ones means no need for expensive surgery, and ineradicable signs of that wrong puberty (like breast growth, or facial hair) will not be a long-term problem. It leads in every single study to much higher happiness.
So puberty blockers are given, to make cis people feel more comfortable. Not for the trans kids. They, often, have transitioned at 5 or 7, and have therefore, at 12 when puberty hits (for example), have lived the latter half of their entire life in their new gender.
That's not a phase. That's a commitment. This is not, "rawr, I'm a dinosaur".
If you ask those kids if they want to have puberty at the same time as their peers, they're all going to say yes. Do they want to be the smallest kid in class when they're 16, still looking like a 12-year-old?
So all you're doing by refusing them medication is making their lives more difficult as trans people, not making them better in any way. You are, in fact, pushing them into a category even YOU might think is too far, Madame Bigot.
You see, when a child is supported by their family, and helped to achieve their goals, that child as a teenager will have the same serious-self-harm rate as any modern teenager: about 4% will attempt the worst case.
If the child is opposed by their family, that risk rises to FIFTY-SIX per cent.
So. Are you still comfortable saying those kids should not have any access to those medications, when the lack of them is literally meaning their chance of surviving to adulthood drops below 50%?
That's a good trade for you? Then, I'm afraid, you are a sociopath, and a deeply immoral person, if your answer to "children: dead or trans" is "dead, please."
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Good day to you. The education was free. But my time in future will not be. You have now been muted. Blather all you like. I can provide sources for everything I've said. Anyone can look them up and see for themselves. None of you bigots have that. So...yeah. Good day to you, madame.
And if you think me calling you madame is an insult or hurtful...then consider how it feels to a trans kid who hears the same language all the time? Now do you see where that higher incidence of mental health bad outcomes is from? It isn't being trans that makes us mentally ill.
It's reactions of people like you, who see us and decide that in your infinite wisdom, you have the right to tell other people how to live their lives and what they can do with their bodies, and you don't mind if they die doing that.
The word for those beliefs is "Nazism".
And that's what makes us mentally ill.
Byeeeeee!
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-fin-
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