[NOTE: Part I can be found here.]
In May, Florida joined over a dozen other states in banning transgender surgery for minors. But it wasn’t all that long ago that minors didn’t have access to such surgery. What was behind the push for extending it to minors in the first place?
Part of it is that the left became far more focused on trans causes because it was the next step after other causes, such as gay marriage, had been won. Social media is another big factor, because the trans movement spreads through the susceptible younger population in that way, particularly among adolescent girls dealing with the conflicts inherent in going through puberty and becoming a woman in an era in which they feel pressured to be sexually active, and are aware – many through internet porn – of some of the more violent and extreme aspects of sexuality. A great many of these young people are gay, and are in retreat from that. There’s also an element of some unknown number of older people with various sexual fetishes encouraging and “grooming” the younger ones, particularly online. And of course, there’s money for pharmaceutical companies, therapists, and doctors.
But there’s a physiological reason, too, and that has to do with the way puberty affects the body, especially the bodies of biological males. Back when most people who identified as trans were adult biological males who described themselves as having felt from early childhood that they were females, it was well known that adult transition could be especially difficult for those men because they often had trouble “passing.” Adult women on testosterone often had a somewhat easier time looking like men even if they had started taking male hormones and had their surgeries in adulthood after puberty, because the growth of facial hair, the prominent Adam’s apple, the deepening of the voice, and the gaining of muscle mass as a result of testosterone in a female is significantly easier than the taking away of those things in a male once they have already occurred post-puberty. Testosterone has a more potent masculinizing effect than estrogen has as a feminizer, especially for post-pubescent adults. And both are dangerous drugs for the opposite sex to take, although that is glossed over by most trans activists and trans activist doctors.
That latter goal – making the adult male-to-female trans person’s voice higher, getting rid of male facial hair, doing away with the heavy musculature of a man – wasn’t really convincingly accomplished by most biological males taking estrogen in adulthood. Once vocal cords have thickened, they don’t thin to female proportions. Once the jaw has grown and male facial features are set, it ordinarily takes heavy-duty plastic surgery to change things and even then it usually doesn’t quite make it (that’s why, for example, Caitlyn Jenner nee Bruce Jenner continues to have a masculine facial “look,” despite extensive facial surgery). And at the time, the vast majority of people identifying as trans were adult men who wanted to transition to female.
There also was a growing idea – although not supported by research (see this, for example) – that suicide in young people with body dysmorphia could be prevented through early medical intervention. And so the idea of having childhood medical treatment with puberty blockers and then hormones, followed in many cases by early “top” surgeries (for girls; otherwise known as double mastectomies) and sometimes (but less often) by early bottom surgeries, became more and more common, more demanded, and more accepted. They were adopted back when they applied mostly to boys wanting to be girls, but since then the vast majority of self-identified young trans people are girls wanting to be boys, a population in which delaying puberty for cosmetic reasons in order to “pass” is not as important as it would be for male-to-female transitioners. But now the social contagion, plus the fact that many websites advise teens what to say to authorities in order to be greenlit for medical transition (threatening suicide works, even if a person isn’t really suicidal), have made it very easy for both sexes to take puberty blockers and sex hormones, and undergo irreversible surgeries.
It is therefore sadly ironic that, for girls, taking testosterone is usually so very good at causing irreversible physical changes that will enable them to more easily pass as males (ordinarily better than taking estrogen works for males wanting to pass as females), because girls who change their minds and de-transition when they are a bit older can often find that, even after stopping the testosterone, they don’t go back to their previous selves and that they now sometimes have trouble “passing” as females, their actual biological sex.
It is a tragic situation, enabled by the left and the supposed health professions, and that is often true even for girls who have not had surgery. To watch de-transitioner videos and hear their deep voices and listen to them talk about permanent changes in their genitalia, their prominent Adam’s apples, their hair loss, and their wider jaws, is to see something both sad and infuriating. And the people to be infuriated with are the members of the medical and therapy professions who allowed this to happen.
The potential dangers are obvious and not always told to these young people, and certainly often not well-understood by them even if they hear them. Informed consent is not possible at those young ages. And many adolescents, especially the girls with late onset gender dysphoria, actually are suffering from other mental disorders such as what used to be known as Asperger’s syndrome and is now known as being “on the autism spectrum.”
The surgeries themselves – difficult and problematic at best – have special problems when done early, after puberty blockers have been given. Apparently, it turns out that going through normal puberty is usually vital for psychosexual development. To be blunt, with the taking of puberty blockers, many of these young people never develop normally to the point of having orgasms and later cannot do so even when taken off the blockers. Even with “just” hormones, there can be fertility problems and bone density problems, and even cardiovascular problems. To be blunt again, biological boys who have been medically blocked from going through puberty tend to not have enough penile material to accomplish bottom surgery (the creation of a fake vagina) in the usual way it’s done for adults. I could go on, but I think you get the idea without my getting even more graphic.
At least adults can be assumed to have informed consent, but that simply isn’t true for teenagers. And their parents are often counseled by health professionals who say that, if they don’t consent, their children are likely to kill themselves. Even the most reluctant sometimes consent when they are told that.
Now we have the backlash of states banning the surgical procedures for minors. Some also ban hormone therapy for minors, as well. These laws have predictably met with fierce resistance from the left and trans activists, for obvious reasons. Leftist “progress” is not supposed to be rolled back in this way.
One interesting wrinkle in all of this is that I have yet to meet a therapist who approves of the medicalization of the treatment of children who say they are transgender, and that includes all the therapists I know who are liberal Democrats or on the left, and I know plenty of them. The ones I know tend to be older or even retired, and they were trained under a very different system long before medical treatment and “gender affirmation” for minors were ever contemplated. But despite their current disapproval of these methods, they still vote reliably Democrat, and for the most part – actually, in every case so far – they were unaware of the devastation these treatments can wreak until I told them. And these developments are not nearly enough to change their minds and convince them to vote for anyone on the dread right. I plan to work on that a bit by talking to them more; should be interesting.
NOTE: I plan to write a Part III.
