Comments by "Tiago" (@lapun47) on "Young and trans: How does access to gender-affirming care for minors differ across the EU?" video.

  1. Aren't physicians supposed to 'do no harm'? If stopping a normal puberty and removing healthy breasts or testicals isn't harm, what is it?
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  2.  @tilttoolate3463  If HRT treatment gives male hormones to kids born with xx chromasomes or female hormones to kids born with xy chromosomes it's not leading to a normal puberty. It is replacing the hormones kid's own body produces with something foreign to them. HRT was developed to help women having trouble while going through menopause when their own body stopped producing the sex hormone, not to attempt to change children's sex.
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  3.  @tilttoolate3463  If you want to adhere to the fantasy that people are free to choose whether they are men or women in contradiction to the body they were born with you're free to do so. What you and they do not have the right to do is to force everyone else to accept that fantasy.
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  4.  @tilttoolate3463 There is a confusion of sex (male/men and female/women) and gender (masculine and feminine) in your thinking. Males/men can be either masculine or feminine in their interests and behaviour, but they are still men/males. One thing men/males cannot do is have babies, so trans men who do have babies cannot be men/males.
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  5.  @j377yb33n  wrote *You'll struggle to find anyone advocating top/bottom surgery for teenagers, stop with the fearmongering and lies." If surgery isn't planned at some point down the line then what is the point of puberty blockers and hormone shots?
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  6.  @babs_babs  Talk therapy also improves the quality of people's lives when they are suffering mentally and is a much less invacive form of health care than hormone injections and puberty blockers. I'm not saying that people suffering from gender disphoria are 'mentally ill', only that their suffering is not physical in the sence that, say, being born with a cleft palat that requires physical medical intervention is.
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  7.  @tilttoolate3463  Parental guidance isn't quite the same thing as giving in to the badgering of your teenager. (And by the way, who--gender disphoric or not--doesn't have 'a miserable teenagehood'? Shouldn't the question really be about the ramifications of teenage gender transition when one reaches adulthood?) What are really needed before we can talk about happiness or regret are long-term studies of those who transition and those who do not. But the widespread trans phenomenon among teenagers has not been around long enough to allow for that. I've been following this issue since an adult acquaintance transitioned some years ago, and the issues of societal acceptance and personal happiness/regret are far from settled for them or for the wider gender disphoric community.
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  8.  @tilttoolate3463  You note that 'The real problem is having to deal with general transphobia in society'. I don't think any of us can expect society to change quickly in this area. Think, for example, about the continued opposition to same-sex marriage or abortion even in countries where these have been legal for decades or longer. Perhaps what is needed is the establishment of two new categories, one to include female-to-male trans people and another to include male-to-female trans people. My guess, based on similar categories in some non-western societies, is that this would be easier for European societies at large to accept than the insistance that 'trans-men are men', 'trans-women are women'.
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  9.  @tilttoolate3463  I don't think there is a leap or contradiction from my first post (against medical intervention) to the previous one (about societal acceptance). My fundamental starting point is that individuals should be treated as individuals and judged as individuals, not as some sort of representative of a group. So I can understand that some like my acquaintance can feel gender disphoria and find that painful. Such people deserve a place in society, and, to the extent that their behaviour warrents it, respect. But I think the road of hormone therapy and surgery is a mistaken one. This is for two reasons: 1) Like you, I have been following this issue, for over a decade in my case, but (I am assuming) unlike you am alarmed by the amount of medical and psychological problems among those who have physicially transitioned I have found in the literature and on social media. Along with this, as more and more parents are supporting their child's transition, I have been impressed by--perhaps alarmed by--the number of studies which show a large majority (something like 80%) who are gender-nonconforming as children 'grow out of it' in adolescence to become gay/lesbian. 2) If we are really to believe that gender is fluid as the currently preached gender theory holds, then there should be no need for anyone to change their body in order to live as they wish and four distinct categories (man, woman, trans-man, trans-woman) ought to be able to co-exist in social space. I should add immediately, though, that one of the aspects of contemporary society I find most dangerous is that an instance on the individual's right to do what s/he pleases has been divorced from an insistance that the same individual accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This, I think, is well illustrated by some trans women's demands that everyone treat them as (what should we call them?) biologically-born woman in women's-only spaces like sports, locker rooms or prisons or by the demand that gay men must be willing to date trans-men. This is trying 'to have your cake and eat it too' or more concretely, to try to squeeze four truthful categories (man, woman, trnas-man, trans-woman) into two.
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