Sexual reassignment surgery and top surgery are types of treatment. Another type is puberty blockers, which I asked about and you responded with talking points instead of information.
Also, what is the end game of puberty blockers? I assumed if you were a trans boy and took them, you got surgery as an adult to remove for example, breast buds so they never develop into breasts. Are you saying people stay on puberty blockers their whole lives?
I’m not trying to push an agenda here. As a parent, I’m honestly trying to understand the ramifications of these treatments. Because as a leftists, asking these questions becomes verboten, as if you hate trans people to question any treatment.
But really (since this is a controversial thread) I just don’t want my child taking a knife to, and hindering the functionality of, any part of their body that was already working just fine. This is especially true for parts that enables an enormous amount of human bonding and the human experience, like sexuality. It feels akin to circumcision/ genital mutilation in my mind, and if that’s what they decide they want as an adult, I wouldn’t stop them. But as their guardian, who safeguards their person for their future self, I would have been willing to divorce my husband over circumcision (at the time we disagreed on it, but we only had daughters). There’s no way most parents without an ideology want to risk long term damage to their child for something uncertain or fluid.
This a really interesting response. Thank you!
If someone takes hormone blockers for several years before deciding to stop, does puberty proceed the same as in a younger person?
Since this is a controversial thread, I feel at liberty to say: while I was never trans, I was pretty ambivalent about my gender as a young person. It wasn’t until after I’d gone through puberty and had multiple years of estrogen (through the natural process of puberty) that I felt “feminine”. Gender kind of partly feels like a process you go through vs an identity.
Least controversial opinion in this thread.
What are puberty blockers if not hormones?
Hmm. I guess I don’t necessarily disagree with your premise… But maybe your value judgment.
Does the suffering humanity inflicts/ experiences outweigh the joy/ love/ happiness humanity causes/ experiences?
And, I guess personally, I don’t weight all life equally. I value more complex life as more valuable. I care about a dolphin more than a stink bug. I think humanity’s ability to evaluate itself and reason is precious and rare, certainly in the history of the planet, potentially in the universe. Even if humanity can never really improve its disposition to be more compassionate or less greedy, why put out the light of a complex mind experiencing and observing itself?
Ultimately, what has value to you?
While I agree that Reddit is awash in (multiple) state propaganda, and that posting violent rhetoric, or even sympathy for it, there is likely to put you on a list (or multiple), I don’t think Reddit users really trust it’s that safe. In the last year and a half, since Luigi, there has been huge amounts of bitterness over the censorship of content and strict banning policies. People have discussed, and followed through on, leaving in droves. Huge amounts of old content are no longer available because people scrubbed their post history on the way out.
If the current discourse doesn’t reflect that, I would suggest it’s because :
The whole reason China winning would be bad is because of their surveillance state ensuring no one gets around their curtailment of civil liberties…
Reminds me of this other terrible dystopian idea I saw the other day: https://nz.news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-announces-plan-control-182840080.html
Glad billionaires think they can steal the sun and sell it back to us now.
As a Trump-hating American working in defense, I always tried to tell people that our economic dominance was enforced with the barrel of a gun. Friends working in international relations would also reference books like “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” that also pointed to usage of the CIA and international lending terms to enrich ourselves at the expanse of the 3rd world, especially Latin America. I completely agree that a capricious, bi-polar US is an untenable world leader.
But in general, it’s very hard to get most Americans to care about our relationships and interactions with the rest of the world, much less acknowledge the ways we are dependent on it. There is some US-centric vanity involved, as well as some stubborn ignorance due to never interacting with the rest of the world at all. But I think in part it’s also due to the hyper competitive nature of simply trying to live in the US, such that there is no brainspace for anything not directly affecting you. Stressors include corporate expectations that everyone should live to work, so many people a few paychecks away from losing their homes and lifestyle with no social safety net, the struggle to afford to live in areas with good schools for your kids, etc etc. In some ways, I’m hopeful that losing global pre-eminence could make life easier for us, especially if it brings about government reform (I don’t mean the MAGA version of this, obviously).
China, the obvious successor to American influence, assuming a more commanding role on the world stage is a mixed bag. On one hand, they certainly prize stability above almost everything, and an authoritarian state run by technocrats indeed seems more effective at addressing climate change than a Corporatocracy that profits from destroying the planet. On the other, there’s not even acknowledgement of unethical practices (e.g.: labor conditions in Chinese companies in DRC, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) when there is no free press. As the US spread it’s influence and democracy after WWII, I kind of worry that the entire world may be forced to get in line with the CCP.
Look, as an American, all I’m asking for is a little extrajudicial redition of Musk and Thiel by South Africa. If we could just get rid of some of the malevolent billionaires that have made the pilgrimage to the land of greed, we might stand a chance of holding on to some of our civil liberties.
Don’t you worry. Civil War is still on the horizon. Gotta see how 2026 goes.
I guess you’ve never have neighbors with bamboo!
It has long since become a problem for every neighbor that borders their yard. I’ve been digging the runners our of my yard since we moved in 8 years ago, and I’m about ready to spend ~$10k on remediation (burying a wall that the roots can’t penetrate).
It is not native and grows out of control where I live. It takes over acres too densely for anything else to grow.
Can we harvest bamboo to extinction next?! Starting with my neighbor’s yard…
That’s fine. It’s an extreme example to illustrate the perspective: most parents will err on the side of “Do no harm.” You are misidentifying the perspective you’re fighting. I am more likely to live in a liberal bubble than a conservative one. It’s just where my mind (and the average parent’s mind?) automatically goes. One method of philosophical reasoning is to start with the extremes and then narrow down to the center/ more likely scenarios that are shades of the extreme… I think that’s common?
How do they prevent their bodies from producing sexual hormones they don’t want? Removal of the testes/ ovaries? Ablating the adrenal gland ? (pretty sure that’s not a thing … It would have other serious ramifications).