Transitioning? Not So Fast!
Transitioning? Not So Fast!
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| Maciek Jasik |
"Alarms
are being sounded all over the world [against the trend to proceed in
undue haste to effect transgender changes in young people]. And Canada
seems completely deaf to it", stated Aaron Kimberley a
transgender man living in British Columbia. He is also a registered
nurse and is experiencing qualms over the current approach in Canada
among medical professionals and parents to proceed with alacrity and
insufficient caution to usher children into the process of gender
transition; gender dysphoria is declared, minors are treated with
hormones, and surgery follows soon afterward.
A
government move is underway in the House of Commons, supported by all
political parties, to make it illegal to subject children or adults to
any form of conversion therapy. A practise that has been said to be
discredited, with its goal of focusing on changing someone's sexual
orientation or gender identity. The bill has passed in the House and is
prepared to move to the Senate for assent before it becomes law. The
bill is a reflection of the current zeitgeist, the sacred belief that
children expressing discomfort in their birth gender assignment must be
encouraged to transition to a more 'comfortable-fitting' gender.
Mary's
daughter insisted she had to alter her sexual identity, suddenly
announcing at age 16 that she was a transgender boy. The young girl had
long suffered depression and uncertainty along with a deep sense of
anxiety. A doctor wrote a prescription for testosterone following a few
15-minute appointments and within months the teen had a double
mastectomy, to become a trans male. Her mother recalls that as her
daughter was being wheeled into the operating room for the mastectomy
she expressed self-doubts about her decision.
She
is now 21 and in the process of "detransitioning", a reversion to her
original female identity. Her mother, Mary, has become a partner in a
movement asking that the health care system now geared to affirmation of
a young person's transgender feelings with drugs and surgery slow down,
and seriously consider assessments of other psychological issues before
declaring the young to be fully capable of making such a life-altering
decision.
Outside
of Canada which has embraced full transitioning for young people with
scarcely enough medical and psychological examinations of their
expressed feelings and emotions over the issue -- which has seen a tidal
wave of children demanding they be assisted in their determination to
leave the gender they were assigned at birth based on their physical
characteristics, when they claim their minds and emotions are lodged in
the other gender -- a reversal of social attitude is taking place.
Countries
as diverse as Finland and Australia have taken steps to back up from
the affirmative approach. At the same time, some leading figures in the
transgender medical world have themselves begun to urge caution. A
provincial bill in Ontario's legislature is set to speed up access to
medical transition and to reduce the need for medical practitioners to
make referrals for treatment. At both the provincial and federal level,
the way is being paved for children to confuse their identities and face
an uncertain future.
While
there may well be a good number of legitimate instances of a
psychological need to transition, the entire process has taken on a
popular social-activist stance, with young children wanting to be part
of the new trend. Parents and detransitioners indicate their support for
improving access to medical transitions for those who really require it
to be done, and feel transphobic bigotry has no place in society. While
not opposing gender neutral bathrooms or public funding for transition
treatment, they argue the pendulum has swung uncontrollably, and not to
society's or the most vulnerables' advantage.
In
some instances, gender treatment occurs outside hospitals. The
questioning newly arisen of the status quo has arrived in parallel with a
boom in demand driven by patient demographics; both looking
suspiciously like red flags that something is badly amiss. People
presenting with gender dysphoria were predominately young boys or
middle-aged men, traditionally. Now, gender-identity clinics are coming
face-to-face with mostly teenagers born girls.
Pediatric
patients numbers at ten hospital clinics across Canada leaped from
close to none in 2004 to over 1,000 by 2016. Some 80 percent represented
natal girls, most under age 16, when first arriving at the clinics. In
the U.S., a major college health study found the percentage of students
identifying as transgender or gender non-conforming rose from .05
percent between 2008 and 2014 to three to four percent more recently.
An
American study of parents skeptical about gender treatment in 2018
hypothesized that there was a new "rapid-onset gender dysphoria"
phenomenon among young girls sometimes convinced by online influencers
and through social contagion. According to gender-medical professionals
the explosion is a reflection of a growing acceptance of transgenderism
following years of stigma and isolation, and the true number of youth in
need may in fact be much higher.
The
complaint from critics is that health care practitioners are too ready
to place children on "puberty-blockers"; drugs to "pause" the
development of puberty, and then cross-sex hormones, followed frequently
by reassignment surgery. The emphasis, they feel, should lie in an
exploration of the complex mental health issues of young people
presenting as trans. "We feel the health-care system has been completely taken over by a political agenda at the expense of the actual evidence", said a representative of the group Gender Dysphoria Alliance.
Dr.Marci
Bowers, a trans woman, a widely respected gender-reassignment surgeon
herself, preparing to become president of the World Professional
Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), is among top figures in the
field who have expressed concerns. Concerns which led to change in
recent months in some countries. Where Finland last year encouraged
psychotherapy before transition treatment, and the Australia-New Zealand
psychiatry regulator claimed it to be essential. In Sweden, clinics
stopped prescribing puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones to
patients under 18 this year.
Dr.Bowers,
the gender reassignment surgeon, suggested that children are sometimes
placed on puberty blockers too soon, with complications arising in
reassignment surgery which can deprive them potentially of sexual
satisfaction for their lifetimes. Transgender women Erica Anderson and
Laura Edwards-Leeper, senior officers with WPATH as psychologists, spoke
of sloppy and dangerous assessment of young people presenting as
transgender, the results of overly hasty prescribing of medical
interventions.
Labels: Gender Dysphoria, Process, Teens, Transgenderism, Uncertainty
posted by Pieface @ Monday, December 06, 2021
