There is a movement to stop any kind of discussion about therapy on gender dysphoria other than transition. Trans activists seek to cast all therapeutic interventions other than transitioning in the same light as conversion therapy.
I think we will deal with the fallout of this activism for decades to come: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/calls-to-end-transgender-...
In this case there's a group of transsexuals, who feel, perhaps rightly so, that society haven't been sufficiently helpful or protective. They just fail to understand that not all who identify as transsexual at an yearly age grow up to be transsexual. Some end up being comfortable with the gender they where born with, why other turn out to just be homosexual. Exposing these groups to a non-critical treatment and not discussing other options will hurt a group of people much larger than those you are currently denied help with transition.
It's just hard to argue with a well meaning minority, without being cast as being against them.
Trans people that transition do not do that to assume the opposite gender (at least as Gender is used today especially in the same circles), they are attempting to assume the primary secondary sexual characteristics of the opposite sex.
I never got a good explanation why transsexual was changed to transgender other than the fact that you can’t change your biological sex.
The whole sex vs gender debate is a literal mess. On one hand gender is a social construct if so transgenderism would never be an issue, if gender is so fluid and a “choice” then why convention therapy can’t work (I don’t think it can, and I also don’t think that gender / sexual orientation is particularly fluid or a choice).
Personally I started to look at sex or well sexuality as the social construct these days, it’s clearly a tool to form societal structures as seen in places like prisons for example.
Gender on the other hand for me is the heuristics that arise from biological constraints due to the (biological) sexual dimorphism of humans.
As far as “black” vs “African American” that seems to be an utterly American thing.
In the U.K. Black British for example is literally an acceptable way to call a black person, if they are black British that is since there are plenty of other black minorities in the U.K. like black Caribbean etc. I’ve never seen anyone saying African British.
1) Trans people hate tavi, and want the contract taken off them.
2) Tavi's child services don't provide access to surgery or cross sex hormones
3) Most of tavi's child patients don't get puberty blockers.
This is an area with considerable disinfo. Most people on HN are woefully unprepared to deal with that, which is why this thread is full of inaccurate info.
Can you please unpack this sentence a little more? I'm just trying to understand things better.
My understanding of therapy is that it is used for healing and / or to cure a disorder.
And so I can see why using the word "therapy" in this context is problematic, because it implies that there exists something which needs to be healed, or a disorder which needs to be cured.
I'd value your thoughts on this. Thanks.
That really helped frame things in a more constructive light for me.
Thank you.
- Gender dysphoria is classified in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)
- When it manifests in young people, there can be various reasons, for example, coming to terms with being gay.
- Therapy can explore the reasons for this and help understand how to best help the patients
- For some patients, the right course of action is to have gender affirming surgery and transition
- For other patients, this is a temporary discomfort with their identity that passes or can be resolved otherwise (e..g by accepting sexual identity etc). <--- This is the controversial part. Trans right activists see this position as an erasure of trans identity/denying their right to exist, etc pp. They seek to suppress any kind of research investigating e.g. the rapid rise in gender dysmorphia in teenagers as a medical phenomenon (e.g. in https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an-interview-with-lisa-litt...), and seek to ban any books/research/open debate in this area.
I have no idea on the biological or psychological reasons, but I object to any suppression of research on medical phenomena.
> This is the controversial part. Trans right activists see this position as an erasure of trans identity/denying their right to exist, etc pp. They seek to suppress any kind of research investigating
Does this mean _all_ Trans rights activists?
I'm wondering if there is discourse from Trans rights activists who are activists for reasons other than those associated with medical research - and who possibly object to this attempt by a subset of Trans rights activists to suppress said research.
I only have one Trans friend that I actively engage with on this topic, and I get the impression that even within the Trans community there is a lot of disagreement in terms of what's best for society (and how to best raise our children).
Which is perfectly normal - especially given the deeply nuanced nature of this discussion.
I'm just trying to wrap my mind around why Amazon took this step.
So, will Amazon now de-list diagnostic manuals?
Here, OTOH, is a young woman talking about how she was temporarily convinced she was a trans man: https://youtu.be/r57wGbiK3U8
While I'm sure you could find someone on tumblr posting about how all 3 year old boys who play with dolls should immediately be given HRT, all mainstream thought (by trans people and medical professionals) I've seen is that children who exhibit gender dysphoria should be given puberty blockers while thorough psychological analyses etc are carried out.
No, this is untrue. Trans people all accept that questioning is a valid part of treatment. The controversial bit is that transphobes say that the only allowable treatment is questioning and denial, and that any attempt to support someone to transition is abusive.
> etc pp. They seek to suppress any kind of research investigating e.g. the rapid rise in gender dysmorphia in teenagers as a medical phenomenon
Linking to Quilette lowers your credibility. Littman did not interview any trans children. She went to an online forum for "gender critical parents" and asked if their children's transition was a sudden. Unsurprisingly, many of those parents said yes. Turns out if you go to conspiracy theory forums you find people who believe conspiracy theories. That doesn't make them true. It's a bit weird to see people on HN suckered into this so easily, but here we are. Her "study" has been widely debunked by experts.
> and seek to ban any books/research/open debate in this area.
No they don't.
Transition of minors does not seem to be a morally clear cut topic to me, given that they aren't allowed to do a lot of other life changing things. You can argue for the opposite, but too many trans activists are painting their opponents as stupid, disingenious or even hateful and want to silence them by force.
This will blow back on them.
(If you can't answer this question without googling it shows that maybe you need to slow down before posting, to avoid spreading misinformation.)
If we are going to let them do that we should at least let them put their genitals where they feel like before then.
The hypocrisy is the problem. You can't both have children be too immature to decide to have sex, yet be mature enough to make decisions about their sex which will impact them for the rest of their lives.
It is currently against any kind of recommended practice to perform genital surgery on children. It is not approved nor is it practiced. This kind of intentionally hyperbolic language is the sort of thing that is the stuff of tabloid headlines, not reasoned discussion.
This is disingenuous moral panic and a good example of the motte-and-bailey approach the UK press uses to discredit proper medical treatment of trans youth.
Some adults do regret the long-term effects of their hormone treatments. Many more adults regret not getting access to hormone treatments sooner. Others regret going off hormones for personal or professional reasons and then not being able to start again because their doctor says they must not really be trans.
The solution for all these problems is easier and more flexible access to the treatments and a society more open to all modes of gender. Not a "but the children" moral panic.
Or do they hope to buy themselves lenience from progressive politicians in coming cartel investigations? Will AOC (who famously helped to kill a NY Amazon project) start to love Amazon now that books that 'frame sexual identity as mental illness' are banished from its pages?
One of those changes would have cost them real money.
With Amazon they probably want to score some cheap progressive points to paper over those awkward and possibly illegal union busting tactics that threaten their bottom line.
But they put a rainbow logo on and now all is cool.
Regarding worker rights I think that central banks destroying money by printing ,,infinite amount of dollars'' are the ones to blame, companies are generally in a hard position, that's why they can get away with inhuman tactics :(
Folding to their demands won't do anything useful, the nebulous 'woke' will make progressively more demands. If they can choose what Amazon does and doesn't sell, why stop at books nobody cares about? Keep going until actual resistance is met!
The thing is, classical mob that collects "pizzo" money is vertically structured and can actually promise the payer real safety in exchange for money paid. That is not the case of the Twitter mob, anyone can start a shitstorm against anyone else.
This kind of topics tends to be discussed by tiny, though passionate minorities. I would expect Amazon to have some TERFs, too.
The high-value workers and executives for Amazon are located exclusively in progressive areas. They probably raised a fuss and Amazon didn't want another Tim Bray situation. Given that the corporation loses nothing and gains a degree of loyalty from its employees, it wins.
Do you believe that? I would say such decisions are far from riskless, they can even jumpstart potential competitors and drag Amazon et al into future antitrust litigations. This kind of power being exercised wantonly tends to attract hostile attention.
"Corporations are made of employees... They have opinions and preferences of all sorts!"
They are, but we do not really know how many employees would prefer X or Y. There wasn't any internal ballot on this topic, AFAIK. It may well be the case of a tail wagging the dog.
Book selling is highly symbolic for Amazon, because they grew out of this niche. Also, banning books has a specific bad taste associated, because that is what authoritarians over the ages have done and liberal people resented such bans.
I guarantee you that Amazon is still going to be here in ten years. At most for antitrust, it would have AWS and the core shopping business split up. But that would happen anyway. It's not really wantonly to take an ethical stand, even if the ethical stand is mostly for show, or even if it's outright wrong. Especially not in a field like bookselling, that Amazon has nowhere close to a monopoly in.
> They are, but we do not really know how many employees would prefer X or Y. There wasn't any internal ballot on this topic, AFAIK. It may well be the case of a tail wagging the dog.
We pretty much know for Amazon, though. Its valuable employees are rich people on the coasts. Overwhelmingly, this demographic is pro-LGBT and against getting put in a higher tax bracket. They aren't going to vote against liberalism.
There is plenty of money to make and we all know this is the only thing that matter for corporations.
But the thousands of middle managers with non-technical degrees need to justify their existence. They always need to check some bullet points in their performance evaluations.
This is why you see HR moving to a "new" online HR platform every year and inventing nonsense like 360 degree reviews.
They can claim that they have "done" something!
Same here: This ban will have been discussed for at least a week, so another week is secure for their performance evaluations.
Another benefit of the culture wars is that they can be used to suppress the productive parts of the population. Especially technical people are intimidated easily (not in online comments but in real life), so if the parasites establish a sufficient number of taboos and enforce them, they control the actual workers.
Taboos have been a ruling class tool since the dawn of time.
15-20 years ago, working in tech was a good job in the sense that being a mechanical engineer, doctor, or lawyer was a good job.
Today, these are the most powerful, richest, and most influential companies in the world, and people who like power are involving themselves more than they used to.
15-20 years ago, these companies were more meritocratic in a domain knowledge sense: the "nerds" were powerful because they had knowledge and could build stuff.
Nowadays "politicians" (in the corporate sense, people good at office politics) have realized they cannot compete with the nerds who've been building stuff since they were kids, so to get a piece of the pie there's a political fight to redefine what's important.
Now "values" are important instead. Those who have the values have the power and influence.
I'm personally looking to move to a different industry than the tech companies. Some industry with less power and less prestige. Those will attract more interesting people who care about what's important.
I get the historic roots of it being linked with anti-gay/LGBT activities and it being problematic about 'fixing' what essentially are healthy sexual functioning (e.g. it's fine to be gay).
But it's not black and white and surely 'some' gay/bi men and women suffer distress and would prefer to be straight.
And likewise for 'trans' children and adults - perhaps there are effective ways to reduce/eliminate gender dysphoria. Do such methods really always have to seem bad.
Note: I am neutral on this / have many gay friends. It's purely from a theoretical perspective.
That's what the American Psychiatric Association says: "https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/news-releases/apa-reiter..."
To add to it, my only thoughts were for people who wanted to be straight /cis gendered but were having very distressing thoughts/feelings that they might be gay/trans. But I realise what I may be describing might better be described as an anxiety disorder and so a seperate point. I'm sure doctors would pick up on this too. Hmmmm ok I'll do some thinking.
All of these things seem to counsel against conversion therapy being an accepted practice.
This is an interesting point, will they "burn" e-books already sold, like they did with "1984" (due to licensing issues)?
The vast majority of decisions at amazon don't attract media attention. They're just decisions. Sell this. Promote that. Reorder. Don't reorder. If you control 75% of the book market... you are censor-ish. even if these decisions are neutral, they still shape the book business in a censor-like way.
Amazon are sitting in a censorial seat. So are the other, content-centric monopolies like google & facebook. Youtube videos, websites, blogs, books, etc. When you go to produce one of these, you consider: what will google/fb/amzn think? Will it appear in feeds? Will it rank? Will it get an 18+ rating?. What makes or doesn't make that censorship is market share. A "true" censor, censors all the papers. An editor only edits one. If there is only one magazine, magazine censorship is default.
In any case, I find a lot of current anti-censorship discussions off-mark. There appears to be some cultural/moral/normative shifts in boardrooms. Are you unhappy with the power in those boardrooms, or with whatever specific decision got made last tuesday. I get the feeling that the latter is the main one.
https://m.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-harry-became-sally-ryan-...
"they certainly have the right"
Expressing disagreement (or even dismay) with a company's decision isn't inconsistent with support for a free market, either.
- A number of folks invoke what they've heard people who call themselves activists say only to get a response from someone saying that's not a real activist. On one hand this is akin to no true Scotsman and on the other I can see the situation that invokes, "that doesn't represent me" as difficult to process. It might be helpful if HN users who are knowledgeable can educate the non-educated on who actual trans activists are so that when the non-educated are hearing a reactionary voice they are able to identify that to themselves and others.
- Russia has a very wide law that patently shuts down any conversation about trans-people and adjacently gay folks as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_gay_propaganda_law
- Some non-zero amount of trans folk do not approve of the Tavistock Center in the NHS (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/calls-to-end-transgender-...). Earlier/easier access to hormone blockers seems to be one complaint, but ill-preparing patients for "immediate and long term consequences" seems to be another which a high court recently ruled on. (https://www.itv.com/news/london/2021-01-20/tavistock-centre-...)
- Hormone blocking seems to be the main course of treatment in children while in therapy (that last part also seems very key). The intent behind this is that a child and their parents can make the choice to transition without having to undo the affects of puberty in the future which are costly and painful. The Mayo Clinic says that the only long term affects with puberty blockers has to do with bone density and fertility. (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/gender-dyspho...)
- Some non-zero amount of kids struggle with gender identity because they're struggling with sexuality in societies that openly struggle with accepting more diverse sexuality (being gay). This points to a need for continued societal growth in order to impact the medical system less.
- The article centers around a book called When Harry Became Sally written by Ryan Anderson who is clearly a religious and conservative voice (https://www.amazon.com/Ryan-T-Anderson/e/B00A0P0MR6?ref=sr_n...)
Tavistock and Portman is hated by transphobes simply because it provides healthcare to trans children.
It's hated by trans people for a number of reasons. The wait list is over two years. The care is not very good. (the latest CQC inspection is concerning. It's likely Tavi will lose the contract at some point, we're just waiting to find out when that will be). There is excessive and intrusive psychological screening - that's supposed to be supportive but children often describe it as aggressively denying their transness.. They delay access to puberty blockers.
Here's the CQC report: https://api.cqc.org.uk/public/v1/reports/7ecf93b7-2b14-45ea-...
> Hormone blocking seems to be the main course of treatment in children while in therapy (that last part also seems very key)
No, absolutely not. The vast majority of children with gender incongruence get counselling and psycho-social support. Sometimes the child's gender incongruence subsides. Sometimes it doesn't, and the child is supported to go through a social transition. This doesn't involve any meds, it just means the child "lives as their acquired gender". For a very small number of children this isn't enough, and that tiny number of children go onto puberty blockers. 60 million people in the UK, 13 million age 16 or under. Fewer than 200 children prescribed PBs.
The court case you linked to is being appealed. It's an unusual decision. In England if someone is over 18 they can make their own medical decisions unless they lack capacity to do so. If they're 16 or 17 they can consent to treatment, but cannot decline life-saving medical treatment. If they're under 16 they're checked to see if they're competent to make decisions, and then they can consent to treatment but can't refuse life saving treatment. All of this can happen without the involvement of their parents. If the child can't consent their parents can consent on their behalf.
Tavistock's process was more complex. The child had to have capacity to consent, and had to consent. But also the parent had to consent. And the Tavistock psychiatrists and psychologist had to agree. And, finally, the endocrinologists had to agree. If any one of these parties didn't agree the treatment was blocked.
The court said that this rigorous consent process was not enough. This is more a reflection of how widespread transphobic attitudes are in the UK than it is of medical science.
For all the talk about white supremacy, no one is really concerned about a resurgence of the Nazi movement in America, otherwise they would not let seminal works of the most prominent Nazi freely circulate.
Germany, which has a real (though fringe) neo-Nazi movement, spends a lot of effort on suppressing Nazi symbolism and rooting out neo-Nazis from police and Bundeswehr - which is indicative of the fact that they consider the risk serious.
It's hilarious that liberals from SF and NYC will manage to make fascism cool.
So, internationally agreed science and medicine says that being trans is not a mental health condition.
This matters because people calling it mental illness are often trying to deny access to healthcare. They'll say that transition is complex, and that other things should be tried first. What they mean is transition is bad and that as many people as possible should be prevented from transition and that conversion therapy should be imposed on these people.
> In 1973, after intense lobbying by gay and lesbian groups and new scientific information from researchers like Evelyn Hooker and Kinsey, the APA declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder[33] with a vote of 58% of the membership supporting the measure. [0]
I'm not saying that every lobbying effort was wrong - but you have to admit a couple things here:
1. Topics that are surrounded by controversy are way more susceptible the effects of political agendas. [1]
2. Psychology is a soft science. [2] So, it's even more susceptible.
[0] https://lgbt.wikia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_and_psychology
EDIT: Have you heard of Tildes? It's considerably more friendly for trans people. Send me an email at dan dot bealecocks at gmail dot com and I'll send you an invite. Or email the invite link here: https://docs.tildes.net/contact
Come out and say it - “I would prefer you dead than have to work alongside you”.
Although I think that may be changing. Since we're slowly (maybe too slowly) transitioning into from a culture that has accepted that fact that reproduction does not have the primacy it once had, we can relax our collective fear of extincting for lack of children and focus our fear and panic where it actually belongs.
Heck, ugly and fat people have the same sorts of problems. Nobody wants to date them, they regularly get passed over for promotions if a beautiful person is competing and many get depressed to the point of contemplating suicide. [0]