Permanently Deleted
seems to be related to this ludicrous shite
Is there something I’m not getting here? My understanding is that puberty blockers just delay puberty–you stop taking them, and everything proceeds as it would have without them, so taking them isn’t some kind of permanent, drastic step. It just gives you some breathing room to grow up and understand your own identity, then make choices about your body and hormones, etc. But they seem to be arguing that puberty blockers cause irreparable damage–but the only concrete example of “irreparable damage” is that most people who take puberty blockers end up deciding to transition. Is that some kind of gateway drug argument? Like, the takaway isn’t “We’re mostly seeing kids who take puberty blockers grow up and decide to transition, so it looks like we’re pretty good at determining who needs puberty blockers,” but instead “The puberty blockers are forcing cis kids to transition against their will”??? What is going on here?
Yeah, you’ve understood the idiocy of the argument. It’s a weird sleight-of-hand aimed at tricking well-meaning but ill-informed people into thinking that trans kids don’t have any agency or sense of self.
You know what gets me about this whole situation? People who are against the use of puberty blockers nearly always cite the fact that the vast majority children who get them for gender-related reasons later go on to take cross-sex hormones. And like, yeah, if puberty blockers are hard to get (and they are) then only the most obviously trans teens are going to have them prescribed. And guess what? A teen who is super, obviously trans is almost certainly going to want/need hormones.
It’s just an infuriating twisting of statistics to try and paint puberty blockers as an irreversible decision that teens are unable to make when that’s just not true if you think about it for half a second.
All in all, the whole “let’s force trans kids to experience the wrong puberty because there’s a microscopic chance that maybe a cis kid might experience the wrong puberty if we let trans kids be happy” pisses me off to no end.
People who are against the use of puberty blockers nearly always cite the fact that the vast majority children who get them for gender-related reasons
I really don’t feel like going and reading that garbage again, but iirc that was actually a big part of the ruling. The judge said that because most people who get puberty blockers eventually go on to get HRT, the decision to get puberty blockers is actually a massive life-changing decision and not something that can be reversed later on with relatively little consequence. She also kept complaining that they haven’t collected data on every random thing she could think of (e.g. what percentage of people on puberty blockers are autistic) and inferred from that that it’s actually a highly experimental treatment.
Everything about this is just so outrageous. The fact that they got to cherrypick two highly atypical people to bring the case - a detransitioner and a parent trying to stop their kid from transitioning - while no trans people or organizations were allowed to intervene. The fact that the sole defendant (the part of the NHS that provides gender services to kids) is not exactly fully on board with trans people and failed to vigorously defend themselves, e.g. they declined to argue that parents could consent on behalf of their kids even if the kids themselves can’t. The fact that the judge who wrote the ruling is the daughter of a fucking baron and went to an exclusive private school.
And supposedly some of the people involved in bringing the case were mainly motivated by trying to weaken the principle that kids can get medical treatment without their parents’ approval or knowledge, provided that they’re capable of understanding it. Now they’ve successfully argued that puberty blockers are just too fucking complicated for 15-year-olds to understand (and even 17-year-olds, unless they have a judge helping them), they’re probably going to try and make the same arguments about abortion, contraception, STI tests and who knows what else.
Hmm seems pretty low for TERF Island tbh, progress!
