> Another one is the question, whether gender dysphoria results from mental illness, or the other way around.
[We have the data](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1909367116), being trans is identifiable as early as 2-3yo, from the moment gender differences in behavior become apparent, long before any capacity to comprehend and adhere to complex expectations of boogeyman "transtrender parents".
You want to be treated as arguing in good faith, but fail to research the subject, propose questions that assume the conclusion, bring up vague anecdotes contrary to the statistics you're unwilling to consider, and disregard the fact that transgender children suffer from lack of treatment just as hard as wrongly treated cisgender children.
However laudable, is that not an ethic rather than an objective assessment? I don't see why that should make us doubt the voices of trans individuals as they describe their situation, even if we might wish for them to achieve self-acceptance.
> I suspect that what you call gender dysphoria isn't the prime cause.
That's not my terminology; it belongs to the medical establishment.
> Suzie Green of Mermaids has said that some of their motivation in transing their son as a toddler was his father's discomfort with some of the toys he was playing with and the homosexual connotations.
Excuse me, a toddler? A toddler and any kind of sexual connotations? I have no idea what you're talking about, but you're packing a lot of red flags in that sentence.
> > and transitioning has been a very real solution for many people
> Again, hard to say
No, this part isn't hard to say. Whether in some cases strict gender expectations might cause gender dysphoria might be hard to say, but I know too many people for whom transitioning has been a very real solution to think it might be "hard to say" if it really did.
We should definitely reduce restrictive gender expectations, but I don't think that's going to completely eliminate gender dysphoria.
> I've had no success changing the minds of people who think that being trans is a mental illness despite citing numerous peer reviewed articles.
It was considered so until 2013, when Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders dropped it as a mental illness:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-transgender... Not that I think this has any relevance: many things once considered mental disorders are now considered personal traits. The point is that it's not an outlandish thing to believe, just an outdated one.
> I’d be more convinced of an analysis of child rearing in a “gender neutral environment” created by those who do not have the gender they were assigned at birth
I agree with you about some stuff, but you're wrong about this. Transgender people aren't magically free of gendered societal influences. Some are shitty sexists who prefer strict gender roles. Speaking as a transgender person.
Look I completely agree with you. But people in this thread keep making pointless biological arguments with the motivated goal of invalidating trans people. And my hope that pointing out that the world is weirder than people assume at the biological level (like you can have a uterus where the cells are all XY) would make people realize that being trans is actually one of the less weird phenomenon that occurs in humans. Trans women aren’t women because maybe one day with a transplant they will be able to give birth, they’re women because they experience distress and wrongness when treated as a man but it’s alleviated when treated as a woman.
It wound be easier to argue that this is just some kind of delusion if cis people didn’t also experience it when treated as the opposite gender and it happens about 1 in 100 people.
> For example, a man can wake up one day saying to himself, "Damn, I feel like a woman". If I don't accept that he is, if only for a fleeting moment, a woman, than I'm labeled a bigot.
This comes across as a caricature of a serious issue.
For what it is worth, whether I agree or disagree with you (or anyone), I strive not to mischaracterize your concerns.
I would like to ask a favor. Please read [1] and come back here afterward. Try rephrasing your comment. I hope you are capable of making a good faith attempt at understanding sex (at birth), gender identity, expression, and so on.
> In one study I read, >97% of children who identified as trans changed their mind as they reached adulthood, and the majority were just homosexual.
A citation could be useful. I suspect that good data on this is difficult to generate, .
> There is literally no such thing as a ‘trans’ person.
This is a pretty difficult statement to contend with, because we need to unpack what you mean by `trans`. I've met transgender people, they certainly do exist, but if you're claiming that those people are not really transgender but just gay men dressing up as women and being performative, we'd have to dig deep into Judith Butler literature to find some common language.
> ... had mind-bogglingly idiotic parents who raised him the wrong gender ...
Though uncommon, XX children can have ambiguous genitalia at birth. Today (1) we have some idea on what it is and we can deal with it at various stages of growth in-utero, at birth, during infant development, at adolescence or even later? Faced with a similar situation the past, parents gambled (aided with biases and superstitions). Is that sufficient to call it idiocy, I do not think so.
> It’s insane to think that kids can be trans because a huge part of what makes us men or women happens during puberty.
As far as I can tell, nearly all kids are fairly certain about their gender identity by the time they start school. What makes you so certain that those of them who are transgender will have no idea?
> A trans person's identity isn't up for debate. You are insinuating that trans people are not human, which is abhorrent.
How? There is a biological reality which we can't erase even with the medical miracles we can nowadays do to ease gender dysphoria, and there is self-identification. Neither even remotely relates to whether transpeople are human. At most they relate to mental health.
There is absolutely a reasonable basis for that suspicion. There are simply many times more prepubescent children with claims of gender dysphoria than at any other point.
How effective a test is for diagnosis depends heavily on what my priors are about the population it is applied to. If I were to administer an HIV test to every American adult, and then started everyone who got a positive result back with antiretrovirals, I would almost mostly be giving that treatment to people without HIV. This is true even though the test is very accurate. If the number of people walking into gender clinics goes up by a factor of 5, I cannot, a priori, expect that my test has the same predictive power that it used to.
> is a much better explanation with a clear causal mechanism
A priori, they are both good explanations. An explanation is good if it's simple, predictive, and you do not have the data to disprove it. The way we distinguish between competing good explanations is through testing. So far no one has proposed a test to tell the two hypotheses apart, except perhaps to look at the rate of detransitioning among the cohort of recent transitioners. This data has yet to become available, as it requires longitudinal study, but the leading signs are not necessarily in favor of your hypothesis. https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/107/10/e4261/6604653
>If you wait this long the trans and gay kids are already being picked on
I think the better thing to do would be to work on fixing bullying overall. Even if kids understood different sexual orientations better they would still make fun of people who are different. If somebody talks different or looks different they will be made fun of.
>everyone else has learned how sex works from internet porn.
I don't think sex ed will fix this. It quite possibly peak kids interest and cause them to view porn even earlier when they look up information about sex.
>I think this is an interesting point, and I'd agree that if the problem was just puberty then moving things back a year would solve the issue.
You are the one who brought up puberty.
>Obviously real data would be needed for this beyond just a hypothesis,
Fully agree. I think the problem is testing this. Introducing porn and other sexual content to a 5 year old doesn't seem like the greatest thing to do.
>Gender identity isn't a sexual issue at this age (obviously it's inherently sexual but not in the way this point is addressing it). There seems to be some consensus that gender dysphoria is first experienced at age 3 to 7 and personally I witnessed kids I went to school with displaying signs of this prior to 3rd grade.
How many actually are showing signs of this? There is a growing number of people who think if a boy plays with a Barbie or likes pink that means he is showing signs of gender dysphoria.
>There isn't any harm in explaining to children that gender dysphoria exists and that while some of them may question their gender, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them and that they shouldn't pick on people who don't fit cleanly into gender categories.
There is a harm. 80% of kids who display gender dysphoria at this age grow out of it. Those 80% may become more certain in their incorrect gender identity and start treatments over conversations you are proposing. The longer kids are on medications (and if they get surgery) the harder it is to detransition, which as I mentioned already is at 80%.
> I wonder if some of the gender and queer issues in kids these days are actually because of this issue, same with other pathologies that sometimes require medication like ADHD/Autism.
Uh, transgender people were scientifically known since at least the late 19th century [1]. The problem is that the Nazis eradicated all the knowledge during their reign [2], and that the Catholic Church was actively fighting against LGBT people for a very long time, even before that era (and modern-day Evangelicals in the US have taken on their mission).
What has changed in "gender and queer issues" is that this negative influence has disappeared as the public importance of the Catholic Church has waned over the last decades and that protections for LGBT people got affirmed by courts, constitutions and laws.
As for ADHD/autism: these were also known to science at least in the mid 19th century [3]. However, for a very long time the issues were not as apparent or problematic in society as they are today, mostly because most of society was working in the agricultural sector with lot less work load than modern-day turbo-capitalism requires [4].
> A child who insists that he is no longer a male (or never was) is definitely confused.
Circular, self-reinforcing, argument. Invalid.
> If that same child insists that he's black, even though both of his biological parents are white, would you take him at his word or save him from getting Dolezal'ed by an unforgiving woke mob?
Non-sequitur. Dismissed. Child still in need of psychological treatment.
> Children don't make good decisions. Their brains are literally missing the hardware until about age 25. [1] We don't allow them to make permanent changes that they might regret.
Sure we do. All the time. We allow them to grow up - that's rather permanent. You're not upset about that. Of course, it just so happens to be something you don't personally disagree with, unlike the topic of discussion.
> How does this even work as more and more peoples' gender identities deviate from the classical male and female?
Well. Colour me plain, but I don’t think allowing people to select a gender disparate from their biology is useful, nor is going to help in this regard.
Kids these are getting more confused than ever before, because we as adults are afraid to draw clear lines and put up simple, reliable structures they can relate to.
Being handwavey about something as fundamental as gender is doing our kids a gross disservice.
What evidence do you have that identity doesn't originate in biology?
I'm well-aware of the existence of transpeople, but I'm not ready to conclude that gender dysphoria doesn't originate in biology. There's more to a person's biology than their genitalia.
[We have the data](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1909367116), being trans is identifiable as early as 2-3yo, from the moment gender differences in behavior become apparent, long before any capacity to comprehend and adhere to complex expectations of boogeyman "transtrender parents".
You want to be treated as arguing in good faith, but fail to research the subject, propose questions that assume the conclusion, bring up vague anecdotes contrary to the statistics you're unwilling to consider, and disregard the fact that transgender children suffer from lack of treatment just as hard as wrongly treated cisgender children.
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