Sounds like he’s done a lot of research and has kept an open mind. He’s also wise in suggesting to go into therapy and see if there may be other causes/co-causes.
Anecdotal, but a friend of mine has ADHD and once she started treatment for that she also lost like 95% of her feelings of dysphoria and decided to postpone transitioning until she could figure her shit out a bit more.
Years later she’s decided she’s fine as she is and saved herself shittons of money and physical suffering with no real drawback.
It’s important not to be emotionally attached to a diagnosis.
I’ve learned from trans friends that we share some experiences of gender, because I generally don’t fit the traditional masculine model despite being a cis male. I remember being interested in “girly” things as a kid and being frustrated that I wasn’t “supposed” to play with the toys that I wanted to I could see where in another life, with the right people saying the right things at the right times that could lead me to believe that I’m trans when I don’t actually seem to be
I suffered from severe depressions as a teenager, and my therapist at the time suggested it might be due to gender dysmorphia. I was raised by women, no father figure, which made me a lil feminine in some characteristics. As a confused teen, i ate that idea up…
Years later i realized that wasnt it, and felt like my therapist was way too quick go with that idea. Clinging to a diagnosis was my way of keeping hope alive that i could fix the issue. I did fix it eventually, but not through gender reassignment surgery…
Shouldn’t hormones and surgery be the last option as that’s the most extreme, expensive and difficult to reverse option? Like make sure its not something else that can be treated with less invasive options first. Would be awful to go through a sex change when actually you just needed antidepressants.
But mental illness is in a pretty shit state right now.
I’m afraid that the whole discussion is so polarized at the moment that it is hindering progress. On one hand, conservative people want to completely ban hormone therapy and puberty blockers. On the other hand, progressive people want to ban the pathologizarion of gender affirmation. There a huge lack of nuance in the discourse.
A while back, there was a study (IIRC) from the UK that recommended against gender transitioning for children. No surprise, it created quite an uproar before it was retracted.
At no point in any of the media coverage or comments on Lemmy, etc, did I see any discussion of the study itself. To this day, I have no idea if there was an issue with the methodology. It seems that no one, neither supporters nor opponents, bothered to read past the headline. Many of them were very fervent in their beliefs, but that wasn’t enough to get them to look at the details.
This is also very bad for science - there are countless headline-grabbing “studies” that fail basic requirements. I’m sure you’ve seen things like “Is coffee/chocolate/etc good for you? A new 10-day study of 23 people suggests that…”. Which of course should get picked apart.
If we aren’t following the science, then what are we even trying to do?
(As an aside, I suspect that study was flawed, but I can’t confirm. It goes against the conclusions widely agreed upon, and would require significant rigor and evidence to support the claim)
On priors, you’re talking about the Cass report, which was in fact massively flawed, and I saw a great deal of discussion on it. Among other issues, they tossed out a lot of studies, and wrote the report from the stance that the only studies worth looking at would have been double blind studies. I’m not sure if you’ve considered this specifically, but it’s pretty damn hard to blind starting to grow boobs or facial hair. Cass, the supposedly neutral party conducting the study, was handing out copies of “Irreversible Damage”, a scaremongering antitrans book about how the poor helpless young “women” were being seduced by big trans. It was garbage, and there’s plenty of writeups on it.
When human and social situations are interpreted in simplistic one-size-fits-all ways by people who have linked such interpretation to being a member of a “political side”, their takes are not really about what’s best for the people involved, even when they claim otherwise.
There really isn’t any “one size fits all” approach for most human subjects, specially something as socially significant as gender is in most societies.
Sounds like he’s done a lot of research and has kept an open mind. He’s also wise in suggesting to go into therapy and see if there may be other causes/co-causes.
Anecdotal, but a friend of mine has ADHD and once she started treatment for that she also lost like 95% of her feelings of dysphoria and decided to postpone transitioning until she could figure her shit out a bit more.
Years later she’s decided she’s fine as she is and saved herself shittons of money and physical suffering with no real drawback.
It’s important not to be emotionally attached to a diagnosis.
I’ve learned from trans friends that we share some experiences of gender, because I generally don’t fit the traditional masculine model despite being a cis male. I remember being interested in “girly” things as a kid and being frustrated that I wasn’t “supposed” to play with the toys that I wanted to I could see where in another life, with the right people saying the right things at the right times that could lead me to believe that I’m trans when I don’t actually seem to be
I suffered from severe depressions as a teenager, and my therapist at the time suggested it might be due to gender dysmorphia. I was raised by women, no father figure, which made me a lil feminine in some characteristics. As a confused teen, i ate that idea up…
Years later i realized that wasnt it, and felt like my therapist was way too quick go with that idea. Clinging to a diagnosis was my way of keeping hope alive that i could fix the issue. I did fix it eventually, but not through gender reassignment surgery…
Shouldn’t hormones and surgery be the last option as that’s the most extreme, expensive and difficult to reverse option? Like make sure its not something else that can be treated with less invasive options first. Would be awful to go through a sex change when actually you just needed antidepressants.
But mental illness is in a pretty shit state right now.
I’m afraid that the whole discussion is so polarized at the moment that it is hindering progress. On one hand, conservative people want to completely ban hormone therapy and puberty blockers. On the other hand, progressive people want to ban the pathologizarion of gender affirmation. There a huge lack of nuance in the discourse.
I agree with you, and would go further.
A while back, there was a study (IIRC) from the UK that recommended against gender transitioning for children. No surprise, it created quite an uproar before it was retracted.
At no point in any of the media coverage or comments on Lemmy, etc, did I see any discussion of the study itself. To this day, I have no idea if there was an issue with the methodology. It seems that no one, neither supporters nor opponents, bothered to read past the headline. Many of them were very fervent in their beliefs, but that wasn’t enough to get them to look at the details.
This is also very bad for science - there are countless headline-grabbing “studies” that fail basic requirements. I’m sure you’ve seen things like “Is coffee/chocolate/etc good for you? A new 10-day study of 23 people suggests that…”. Which of course should get picked apart.
If we aren’t following the science, then what are we even trying to do?
(As an aside, I suspect that study was flawed, but I can’t confirm. It goes against the conclusions widely agreed upon, and would require significant rigor and evidence to support the claim)
On priors, you’re talking about the Cass report, which was in fact massively flawed, and I saw a great deal of discussion on it. Among other issues, they tossed out a lot of studies, and wrote the report from the stance that the only studies worth looking at would have been double blind studies. I’m not sure if you’ve considered this specifically, but it’s pretty damn hard to blind starting to grow boobs or facial hair. Cass, the supposedly neutral party conducting the study, was handing out copies of “Irreversible Damage”, a scaremongering antitrans book about how the poor helpless young “women” were being seduced by big trans. It was garbage, and there’s plenty of writeups on it.
https://kinesismagazine.com/2025/02/16/methodological-and-ethical-failures-of-the-cass-review-why-it-falls-short-as-a-guideline-for-trans-healthcare/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-u-k-s-cass-review-badly-fails-trans-children/
Thank you- this is exactly the sort of critique I had been expecting/hoping to find
When human and social situations are interpreted in simplistic one-size-fits-all ways by people who have linked such interpretation to being a member of a “political side”, their takes are not really about what’s best for the people involved, even when they claim otherwise.
There really isn’t any “one size fits all” approach for most human subjects, specially something as socially significant as gender is in most societies.