I have completed the quote for you, so there can be no misunderstanding. Deciding whether or not to have genital surgery is not the reason why puberty blockers are given. They are given to delay the decision about the most appropriate type of puberty; surgery comes later (if at all) and the decision about that is not deliberately delayed by puberty blockers (although it can be delayed as an unwelcome side effect of not taking them).Daryl wrote:You just confirmed my statement 100%. It was a lot more words but just the same result: puberty blockers are a means to make room (time) for people to decide whether or not to undergo surgery (medical procedures) to change sex (or "gender" if you prefer).pelmut wrote:No, they delay puberty long enough for the child to make an adult decision about what gender it is (and, incidentally, to comply with the law which assumes that all children become responsible adults overnight at exactly the same number of days after they were born). They stop the child potentially going through an inappropriate puberty until the decision can be taken about which puberty is most appropriate. When that decision has been made, puberty can proceed under the body's own hormones or under medically controlled and administered hormones; the final decision being taken by the well-informed adult patient themself. Some, but by no means all, can then go on to have genital surgery if they feel they cannot be accepted by society without it.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.If puberty blockers are refused [...] they will then [later] be in a position to consider whether or not to have genital surgery
Please read that again and tell me if you still think that I was recommending the use of illicit drugs as part of an ideology.Yes, let's not "parade" the victims of your ideology.pelmut wrote: Unfortunately there are a few people each year who are not actually transgender but are persuaded to go down this [illicit drugs] route; they are the 'regretters' who are paraded by the hate brigade as evidence for refusing to treat the needs of genuinely transgender children.
We appear to be agreed on this: "sex change" actually means "sexual morphology change", but I wonder how many people realise the subtle difference?The surgery changes what sex they appear to be, their sexual morphology, to allow others (society) to perceive them as the other sex. This is what "sex change" means.pelmut wrote:The surgery does not change their sex, it alters the appearance of their external sexual characteristics (genitals and breasts) so that they can be accepted by society as the person their gender tells them they are.That surgery is for changing sex. Sex, not "gender" (except as a synonym for "sex").
By the definition that the trans movement (which you endorse) uses, I am "trans" on "gender presentation" grounds at least,...
That's a tricky one because your reason for a particular presentation may not be the same as mine (or anybody elses). Do you wear a skirt because you feel it aligns with your gender, or do you wear it for one of the hundred-or-more other reasons that men in skirts do?
That sounds as though you don't believe you are the gender they assume you are. If that is the case, they are making the mistake of assuming that a particular presentation [wearing a skirt] signifies a particular gender -- something I think we can all agree isn't true....as I am quite often reminded by members of "society".
(As explained elsewhere, transgender isn't a movement, it is just a natural human characteristic which has become more noticeable recently because of the prurient interest of the media.)
I did not say it was misaligned, I said that it was not aligned the way society expected it to be. The transgender alignment is a perfectly valid one, but not the one Western society has historically endorsed.To speak of it [gender] as being misaligned with a physical characteristic (like sex) is as incoherent as saying that a person's soul is misaligned with their body.
It has been a very useful concept which explains a lot of things that would otherwise be very puzzling. Until recently, gender has been in a very similar position to the position light was in a couple of hundred years ago; people could see it existed, but didn't understand it. There were lots of theories about it: was it a fluid? Was it something shot out from the eyeballs that we sensed making contact with things? Was it real at all, because nobody had succeded in weighing it?There is no reason to reify the belief called "gender".
A concept like 'soul' has also been useful in the past, but greater knowledge has made it less and less believeable; in contrast, the reality of gender has become more and more believeable to the point where scans of brain activity (not structure) are showing differences which are independent of the sex of the volunteer and align with what they say is their gender.