Number of children being referred to gender identity clinics has quadrupled in five years
- Thread starter LateX'Dog
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If a Man insisted that he was the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte and went around wearing a Napoleon Uniform and insisting that he should be referred to as “L’Emperor”. Then most people would regard him as deranged. Yes??
Moreover, The idea that the NHS should perform cosmetic surgery on him to make him look more like Napoleon or that he should have a legal right to be called Napoleon (And indeed, that people might even face some legal sanction for not doing so) would not even get far enough to be laughed out of court.
On the other hand, he puts on a dress, lippy and high-heels and insists on being called Jennifer then hey, that’s the new normal, apparently, and the NHS, and everybody else, is expected to pander to his delusions and even face legal action if they refuse to do so…??
Either both parties are deranged,
Or neither is.
Which is it??
Furthermore, And back to the original post. Medicine has always had its quacks who exploit the vulnerable to gain professional stature and line their pockitses, This is just the latest fad and I dare say it will blow over in time, just like Monkey glands, Phrenology and whathaveyou.
All in all, it wouldn't be so bad if the quackery was targeting its traditional victims and simply separating rich people from their money. But this has become a significant and growing mainstream NHS issue at a time where other, really more pressing health issues, Like cataracts, arthritic hips, and so on are being rationed due to cost.
To make things even worse, this is quackery that is now targeting children and is almost certainly going to leave a legacy of thousands of damaged and mutilated people in its wake.
Soldato
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I'd think he was pretty cool to be fair
However.....!
The question still applies....
Isn't that argument in your previous post a bit of a straw man.
Insofar as I have attempted to create an identity delusion that is clearly (IE I would I expect to be considered so by most people) deranged.
Yes, I can see that.
However, I still do not see why one sort of identity delusion is clearly evidence of insanity and the other is the new normal and is held beyond question...:/
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I'd go for the NHS insisting on 6 months intensive electric shock therapy first, then if little Donald still wants to be a Dorothy, or Dorothy still wants to be a Donald they could put forward a cogent case for further discussion 
I don't want to pay my taxes for all this juvenile sexual frippery and its treatment and counselling to be taken from them. But no wonder there's so much alleged insecurity in one's sexuality when the media features every bizarre nuance of sexual oddity at every possible opportunity, portrayed as totally normal, fun and commonplace in people from 9 to 90 
I don't want to pay my taxes for all this juvenile sexual frippery and its treatment and counselling to be taken from them. But no wonder there's so much alleged insecurity in one's sexuality when the media features every bizarre nuance of sexual oddity at every possible opportunity, portrayed as totally normal, fun and commonplace in people from 9 to 90 
I think there's a difference between thinking you are a specific historic figure and thinking you are a different gender. I'd hazard that you could show that physiologically in some way as well, maybe with brain scans.
You also seem to be assuming that all referrals will end in surgery.
Many of the issues and arguments would simply disappear if people stopped insisting that sex and gender are the same thing. They so obviously aren't that it's irrational to say they are. So irrational that you could say (remembering the last few posts in this thread) that it's deranged
That image in post 140, for example, is a perfect illustration of this artificially imposed problem. The first two "genders", labelled as "actual genders", are sexes. The rest, labelled as "mental disorders" are genders and in some cases genders explicitly wrongly labelled as sexes. The "mental disorder" is believing that gender and sex are the same thing.
I'll use myself as an example. I'm male. That's my sex. I am 5'11", bulky, quite muscular and very hairy. Plait my chest hair level of hairiness (and yes, I do mean that literally - I have tried it to test the idea). I wear a hairnet/hat when working with food, but I really should be wearing that sort of thing on my arms because I have more hair on my arms than on my head. That's part of my gender, i.e. those are masculine biological characteristics. I have a natural pitch high enough to put my speaking voice in the frequency range usually associated with women. Many people who hear only my voice assume I'm a woman. That's part of my gender, i.e. that is a feminine biological characteristic. So even in genuinely biological aspects of gender, I am clear proof that gender is not the same as sex. But of course the vast majority of gender has nothing at all to do with biology. It's purely social and frankly just made up. For example: a dress is gendered extremely feminine here and now. A dress was ungendered in ancient Rome, but the length of the dress was very gendered. Pink was gendered strongly masculine in this country 100 years ago and in just a matter of decades switched to being gendered extremely feminine. It's just made up stuff. It's not real and it doesn't mean anything. In those aspects of gender, my position on the spectrum of gender varies from thing to thing. In some things, I am very masculine. In other things, very feminine. In most things, somewhere around the middle. Overall, people who've stated an opinion lump me into the feminine side. Which is probably true, but I don't really know because I don't care and I don't pay much attention to gender. It's not real, so why would I care about it?
If I believed that sex and gender were the same thing I would probably be very bothered by myself and might well seek some sort of group identity label to paper over the mismatch created by that belief, labelling myself "genderfluid" or somesuch thing and believing that also made my sex spontaneously change from day to day or hour to hour (if someone believes that sex and gender are the same thing, they must believe that changes in gender and changes in sex are the same thing). I'd probably retain enough rationality to understand that wasn't actually real and that would probably bother me and I might compensate for that by being aggressive about demanding that everyone else pretend to believe it too.
But thankfully I don't have the delusion that sex and gender are the same thing, so I can be myself and let everyone else be themselves and not be bothered about it all because my position is consistent with itself and with reality.
That image in post 140, for example, is a perfect illustration of this artificially imposed problem. The first two "genders", labelled as "actual genders", are sexes. The rest, labelled as "mental disorders" are genders and in some cases genders explicitly wrongly labelled as sexes. The "mental disorder" is believing that gender and sex are the same thing.
I'll use myself as an example. I'm male. That's my sex. I am 5'11", bulky, quite muscular and very hairy. Plait my chest hair level of hairiness (and yes, I do mean that literally - I have tried it to test the idea). I wear a hairnet/hat when working with food, but I really should be wearing that sort of thing on my arms because I have more hair on my arms than on my head. That's part of my gender, i.e. those are masculine biological characteristics. I have a natural pitch high enough to put my speaking voice in the frequency range usually associated with women. Many people who hear only my voice assume I'm a woman. That's part of my gender, i.e. that is a feminine biological characteristic. So even in genuinely biological aspects of gender, I am clear proof that gender is not the same as sex. But of course the vast majority of gender has nothing at all to do with biology. It's purely social and frankly just made up. For example: a dress is gendered extremely feminine here and now. A dress was ungendered in ancient Rome, but the length of the dress was very gendered. Pink was gendered strongly masculine in this country 100 years ago and in just a matter of decades switched to being gendered extremely feminine. It's just made up stuff. It's not real and it doesn't mean anything. In those aspects of gender, my position on the spectrum of gender varies from thing to thing. In some things, I am very masculine. In other things, very feminine. In most things, somewhere around the middle. Overall, people who've stated an opinion lump me into the feminine side. Which is probably true, but I don't really know because I don't care and I don't pay much attention to gender. It's not real, so why would I care about it?
If I believed that sex and gender were the same thing I would probably be very bothered by myself and might well seek some sort of group identity label to paper over the mismatch created by that belief, labelling myself "genderfluid" or somesuch thing and believing that also made my sex spontaneously change from day to day or hour to hour (if someone believes that sex and gender are the same thing, they must believe that changes in gender and changes in sex are the same thing). I'd probably retain enough rationality to understand that wasn't actually real and that would probably bother me and I might compensate for that by being aggressive about demanding that everyone else pretend to believe it too.
But thankfully I don't have the delusion that sex and gender are the same thing, so I can be myself and let everyone else be themselves and not be bothered about it all because my position is consistent with itself and with reality.
Are you trying to say that gender, is a social construct?
Soldato
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Today I learned my pee pee is a social construct.
Well it is... ignoring the real issue between being either male or female and thus being something in between, everything else is superfluous *****.
No. If I was trying to say that, I would have said that. I didn't. Because I wasn't.
You should have possessed enough rationality to know that whatever puddle of nonsense you learned that from was a puddle of nonsense. You'd have to be genuinely delusional to believe what you've just written.
I'm talking about the 51+ gender "identity" silliness on the likes of Facebook.
1) Trends are not absolutes and should not be applied to every individual.
2) One small study is not comprehensive.
3) Gendered treatment starts from birth and in some cases even before birth, so the initial predicate of that study is false and thus its conclusion is unreliable.
4) Other studies have shown no distinction.
The study you refer to was not double-blind. Not by a long chalk. It was directly administered by one of the authors of the study who had decided beforehand what the results were going to be and who had constant knowledge of the factors involved. Even if she was trying not to bias the results, she would have been biasing the results. That's exactly why studies are usually constructed to make everyone involved on both sides ignorant of the factors involved.
Then there's the mobile used. It was made from an image of a face with bits moved around. Same individual parts of the face, arranged in different positions and with different lighting in some areas. Were the babies who spent more time looking at it doing so because it was not a face or because they were shuffling the image around in their minds to try to reconstruct the face? The authors of the study assume the former because it helps their preconceived ideas about innate female superiority, but that doesn't mean it was really the case.
Then there's what was actually being measured - chunks of time as short as 3 seconds in which some people judged where the baby was looking. A tendency to look at the face more than the mobile was assumed to be a preference for looking at faces, which was assumed to be superior socialisation skills. Was that the reason or was it taking them a bit longer to recognise a face?
The authors of the study assume the former because it helps their preconceived ideas about innate female superiority, but that doesn't mean it was really the case.
So people who assumed things about gender made a study to create evidence for their assumptions and made assumptions about the interpretation of the evidence to support their assumptions.
Our society is so fixated on sex and genderisation is so deeply engrained that it is normal to not even be able to think about a person without knowing their sex because even thinking about someone is gendered. The most common first question about a neonate is their sex - "what did she have?". That question contains the assumption that a person's sex is their identity, that their sex is literally what they are. Then genderisation can be imposed on them as if it was sex, which is why it's normal to require knowing a person's sex as the first thing about them. That's why it's normal for people to treat people differently depending on what they think the other person's sex is, right from birth. This has been shown repeatedly by giving adults false information about a child's sex and observing their interactions with the child. In some cases, the same child dressed differently. Put an infant in blue clothing, tell the adult the infant is a boy. Later on, put the same infant in pink clothing and tell the same adult that the infant is a girl. That's all it takes.
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Soldato
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U WOT M8?!
So I'm going to make the assumption that you don't, but you know you'll be pulled up on it... you're just deflecting the question.
I think you're far too over the top in your simplification of this. This challenges everyone's perceptions and upbringing and its understandable that people are confused by it.
For myself, I'm torn by this sort of discussion.
On the one hand, throughout history people have suffered from medical conditions that have only become accepted as genuine conditions once medicine has progressed to a point that we scientifically understand it. Given that our understand of the brain is still so much in its infancy, and our grasp of actual mental illness is so poor currently, these sorts of things could genuinely be medical conditions that in 100 years time are entirely accepted and treatable.
I do feel that as a society we're far to focused on what sex someone is, but then I also feel personally that it's a dangerous thing to be teaching young children to question their gender though.
Kids aren't just allowed to be kids anymore.