Can anyone actually dispute that “identifying” as something is a product of the mind? An “identity” is a thought, a feeling, an idea, a conviction, a belief. So whether you believe “identifying as transgender” is legitimate and real, or a bunch of regressive hogwash, it seems we might all agree that the notion of “identity” originates in our heads. As such, gender identity is a psychological state. A breast, penis, vagina, or clitoris doesn’t think. It can’t have an identity. It just is.
It’s a giant leap to then assume that the body—which simply is—must be altered to “match” the thought or feeling generated by the mind.
So pervasive has become this assumption, that ordinary, pediatric medical institutions create whole websites to teach us all to think it is normal for kids and adolescents to saturate their bodies with off-label hormone regimens, and to prepare for future extreme surgeries.
One such pediatric healthcare provider is Jennie Brown, a registered nurse at Seattle Children’s Hospital, who authored the “Transgender Teens” section of the hospital’s “Teenology 101” website.
[In the old days, parents didn’t need websites and patronizing gender clinics to tell them all about teenagers. Because guess what? We were all teens ourselves at one time, with transient but firmly held ideas about almost everything, including but not limited to: who we really were, body ornamentation, substance use, who and what we were going to be as adults, and all the rest. Parents were assumed to have some wisdom when it came to raising their offspring. But today’s parents are such ignorant old fools, they need entire institutions to tell them how wrong they are if they question the mercurial yet powerfully held views of the adolescents they’ve known for 12 or 16 or 18 years.]
But I digress.
In the 14-part series, Ms. Brown teaches us all we need to know about the wonderful world of transgender teens. In part 8, we learn about testosterone “treatment” and the exciting changes the FTM will experience, among them:
Menstruation: For FTM patients, menstruation can be a frustrating ordeal and a monthly reminder that their body remains female despite their inner identity being male. Within the first six months of hormone treatment, they will stop getting their periods, which is often a huge relief.
Ah yes, a huge relief. (Of course, menstruation is also a “frustrating ordeal” for many girls who aren’t questioning their gender identity, but evidently that’s irrelevant here. These aren’t girls–they’re boys trapped in the wrong body.)
But why do those periods stop, and, most importantly, could there be even the slightest health risk when a formerly healthy female body no longer behaves in a normal, female way?
One YouTuber provides some insight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9go7OisFMDc
On the Teenology site, Nurse Brown goes on:
Emotions: Testosterone may cause patients to feel irritable, aggressive, or unbalanced. There are ways to help address this without going off testosterone; talk to your provider if this occurs.
Because you sure as hell wouldn’t want to go off “T” just because you felt aggressive or unbalanced, would you? Better to take some other drugs to counteract these effects. Say, a benzodiazepine? Or how about an SSRI?
To be fair, Nurse Brown does add a cautionary note (at the end of the long list of changes that most girls-wanting-to-be-boys have come to crave, after watching endless hours of magical transition videos on YouTube):
Many of these changes may be irreversible. It’s very important that a patient starting FTM therapy be sure this is the course they want to follow. In addition, taking testosterone long-term may cause an increase in the likelihood of developing certain cancers. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough research on transgender health to have good information on this.
[emphasis mine]
It is indeed “unfortunate” that we adults are willing to offer our children up as an uncontrolled, generational experiment before any decisive research has been done. (And as far as I can tell, no one is really bothering to systematically study these young women who are injecting themselves with testosterone on a weekly basis.) But of course, these “unfortunate” risks are well worth it, because we all know adolescents always have their own best interests at heart. And that they are never, ever influenced to do anything unwise just because their peers are doing it.
Nurse Brown updated the Transgender Teens site last summer. She apparently feels it’s vital to educate us about all the different gender identities that are possible to claim. Because it’s so very important that we accurately label ourselves, especially when we’re teenagers! Some highlights:
Agender: Someone who is agender does not identify as having a gender. They do not feel masculine or feminine, or that they have a different gender; they simply feel “gender-neutral.”
Bigender, Trigender, Pangender, and/ or Gender Fluid: Someone who is bigender, trigender, or gender fluid is a combination of genders. Someone who is bigender feels they have both a masculine and a feminine gender, and they often move more towards one or the other depending on the situation. Trigender is the same, except there is a third gender involved (like genderqueer or agender). Someone who is pangender identifies, at times or all at once, with all genders. Gender fluid is similar to bigender, in that a person’s gender shifts back and forth over time.
This tangled semantic web could be quite amusing if it weren’t taken so deadly seriously by young people, who agonize online about which identity to choose, as in this Tumblr post:
Okay so I’m still using demiboy, because I’m definitely fluctuating between male and nonbinary.
But is it weird to only switch once a week, or every couple of weeks? It seems like a lot of fluid people change every day or two :\
Do any of these confused kids (and equally befuddled RNs) ever stop and ask themselves a simple question: What is a woman? What is a man? And how does my “gender identity” relate to my answer to this fundamental question?
I have never seen a transgender activist answer this question, other than to say: “It’s just how I feel.” That’s if they’re feeling charitable. More often, they’ll just call you a “TERF” or a transphobe (as if that is an answer to your very reasonable question).
Please delete the previous duplicate post. Not sure what happened there.
Did you notice the quote from the Seattle Children’s Hospital website?
‘Gender, according to the World Health Organization, is “the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.”’
It really baffles me how medical professionals will put children on cross-sex hormones and perform mastectomies all due to a child’s belief that they are the wrong “socially constructed role….” This is so very, very wrong.
What has happened to their rational mind? Or has social conformity become a religion to be upheld by our new priests: endocrinologists and psychologists?
How on earth are medial professionals getting away with this. Look at all the damage done to this young body that started out healthy. FIRST DO NO HARM! Now imagine this scenario repeated with several other patients. Doctors have been accused of war crimes for less than this. And not one attempting to address the ‘disconnect’ this young person feels to her own body. Using words like ‘bits’ and ‘down there’. That should have been seen as the real symptom from the beginning.
This engine has now taken a life of its own. Just a few years ago it was unheard of for any woman under the age of thirty or even forty to transition and it has gotten younger every year. Our current conservative culture together with trans activism have effectively constructed a version of “woman” that is at once hyper-feminine and hyper-sexualized (many companies including the uber trendy Zulily now sell high heels for toddlers. It’s a virtual pedophiles dream come true) No young woman can live up to this image or see herself reflected in it and this is worse for young lesbians who have no culture of their own to turn to for examples of how to just be a lesbian. Combine this with the fact that it is much more acceptable at the moment to be trans than to be lesbian, and you have the perfect storm.
It’s nothing but a eugenics and money-making movement, disguised as “queer” and progressive with the added bonus of destroying lesbian’s and other women’s communities and sex-based legal protections like separate bathrooms. The Nazis got a lot of eugenics ideas from people in the United States.
High-heels for toddles is very horrifying! It’s bad enough that nowadays criticizing so-called beauty practices and shoes like those can result in accusations of misogyny and there’s a ton of propaganda about how it’s totally safe to run around in those shoes. (Look at the first Jurassic Park movie where the female characters wear proper shoes when going into the jungle and running from raptors, then look at the new one where the main female character runs around in high heels.) Do we really need to be crippling a little girl’s feet when she is barely learning to walk?
Oh yeah, it is more acceptable to be trans, although FtTs are obviously lower on the hierarchy than MtTs. All lesbians are those awful terfy bigots who invalidate MtTs by saying no to them and their creepy fetish. You can only be a lesbian around these people by being a coward sell-out who plays lipservice to the notion that lesbianism means you like “six-inch clitoris” (what these men call their dicks).
This is so frustrating! Kids are unhappy so their solution is to chop up their bodies and shoot themselves full of stuff their body wasn’t meant to have. That video just killed me. No one told that poor unhappy young woman that her body shouldn’t be flooded with testosterone? She herself didn’t stop to think about how it would change her sex organs functioning? And I can’t believe that the hospital’s legal counsel would allow it to have that webpage considering the poor level of research on the long-term impact of taking this crap..
I want the kid in that video to be the one getting the hero awards.