pelmut wrote:Daryl wrote:We are in fact tackling that real culprit, and very rapidly too, considering it is a society-wide change. The whole "gender" idea seems rather more a distraction from and even harmful to that project. I say we put "gender" in the circular bin,
I agree entirely that society is the biggest culprit in making transgender people miserable, enforcing certain dress rules on men and indoctinating boys into a macho culture. There are other lesser culprits, but gender isn't one of them, it is a poorly-understood and poorly defined property of people. To abolish it is like saying the cause of obesity is due to the distinction between weight and mass, but most people find the concept of mass difficult to understand, so let's abolish mass and it will make dealing with obesity easier.
Daryl wrote:...along with the puberty blocker drugs Santa gave some of our kids for Xmas
Puberty blockers are saving lives (and, incidentally, steering a few children away from undergoing treatment they may later regret); if they were to be abolished, there would many more child suicides. If there were a better way of preventing suicide in underage transgender children and reducing the years of agonising puberty-reversal treatment required by transgender adolescents, it would be in use by now.
"Gender" is poorly defined (and subsequently poorly understood) precisely because it is
not real. Your weight vs. mass analogy fails completely because both of those are observable and directly measurable. They are as real as a cement block or sunshine.
A better analogy involving obesity would be saying that obesity is a consequence of having a lack of
pride. "He's so fat, doesn't he have any pride?" certainly sounds familiar. So far, the cure for obesity has been to stop weight-shaming people, but this hasn't actually changed the real, measurable weight of anyone.
Convince me that puberty blockers are doing what you say and I will concede the point. I have seen strong arguments against the statements that you have already made, so just making the assertion doesn't work.
This article echos my concerns and those of many others. In particular I see an immense methodological challenge in proving the negative "suicides didn't happen" because it would be nigh impossible to control everything enough to preclude other reasons for any apparent reduction in the number of
expected suicides in the studied group.
I will also point out that puberty blockers as a means to make room for people to decide is making room for people to decide whether or not to undergo
surgery. That surgery is for changing sex. Sex, not "gender" (except as a synonym for "sex"). I still see no reason to keep reifying the concept of "gender", since "sex" works just fine.