This is footage from a hearing on a Transgender Bathroom bill in Ohio. All of it is fascinating but the most relevant portion 13:55 when Ranking Member Joe Miller (D) contrasts this bill with Racist Jim Crow laws, and the tendency to otherize people based on their own inherent traits.
Ohio GOP nutjob Beth Lear gets grilled by Ohio Democrats Joe Miller, Casey Weinstein, Munira Abdullahi and Richard Brown over her horrifying, transphobic bill. The GOP legislation would target trans kids regarding their access to single-sex bathrooms in schools and universities. The Ohio Democrats points out the discrimination in the GOP bill, the penalty of this potential new "law," the similarities of this bill with old racist policies and so much more.
In response to this Rep Bath Lear gives an impassioned and deeply deluded speech about “protecting the children.”
Rep. Casey Weinstein: The language used here implies that you don’t believe that transgender people exist. Recently at CPAC a speaker said that “transgender people should be eradicated from the Earth.” Do you believe that transgender people exist, and if so do you believe they should be wiped away or kept out of public life completely?
Rep. Beth Lear: Of course, you know that that is a ridiculous question. I absolutely don’t think anybody should be wiped out. [Wait for it.]
One of the main reasons that Rep. Byrd and i are doing this. Science is very clear, there are only two genders. And I am greatly aggrieved that so many in our culture are lying to children and telling them that they can change who they are. There’s nothing wrong with who they are.
They shouldn’t be told that you have to be somebody different and you have to carve up your body in order to be acceptable. That is horrible. [Yes, it is — it’s also a massive lie.]
But our job is to protect all people. [Apparently not *all*] And as legislators, I think it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that we’re not only providing safe spaces for kids and young adults who are very confused about who they are, but we are also providing safe spaces for those who are not.
Weinstein: You said these kids are “being told” you don't think it’s something inside the kids, you don’t think it’s something that they feel about their bodies? You maybe claim it’s parents or some other influence that’s telling them that. You know for me I care about parent’s rights, I trust children, do you not?
Lear: Children have an imagination and their brains are not fully formed until about 25. I think everybody on this committee knows that and agrees with that. [Always projecting universal knowledge]
So, If I had a child who was anorexic, am I gonna tell that child “Oh, you know what you’re right you’re so fat — I’ll get you diet pills, so you can eat less.” No.
If I had a child who thought he was a bird. Am I going to take him to a doctor who says the best thing to do is explore being a bird. And “Oh, by the way — there’s a five-story building next door why don’t you jump off and see if you can fly.” There are ridiculous things that we are allowing, and as adults we have to understand law, science and religion. We need to take responsibility for the things we say and do, and how we raise this next generation.
Are parents allowed to abuse their kids? No. So there are limits, and we need to set a limit and draw a line in the sand.
So, it’s “child abuse” — and they have a vivid “imagination.”
“What if they thought they were a bird?”
Straw man arguments, false equivalence, and a wrong reading of science.
This is what people like to use as excuses to further assault and stigmatize vulnerable children who are dealing with Gender Dysphoria. They were just “told” something.
The fact is that the psychological profession has over time changed their opinion on this. Being gay used to be considered a psychological disorder. That is no longer the case, and it is also no longer the case for those who are Transgendered.
This kind of bigotry has a history that goes back a while to Anita Bryant and other anti-gay activists and conspiracy theorists, leading to the forming of the Moral Majority and the rise of Ronald Reagan.
This trend has metastasized in recent years into a full-blown anti-trans movement which is of focused on “the poor children” but is really an effort to maintain gender norms and white supremacist hegemony. It is hate-mongering which has increased the rate of violence particularly against black trans females who have assaulted and murdered at an increasing rate.
This rhetoric has consequences. The Right uses this as a fear-mongering rally point to get their people out to vote — we need to rally and organize better than them.
I recently had a detailed discussion with a MAGA about this and his view was much like Rep. Lear’s.
Landon Waugh: Since the beginning of time that I’ve only been two genders, just because you have bought scientist saying otherwise doesn’t change the science,
And.
Science as always said that there’s a boy and a girl and that it nice try.
That simply isn't true. There are more than just XX and XY chromosomal pairs and the presence of a Y chromosome is not determinative.
The gender identity of a person is the final result of genetic, hormonal and morphologic sex. Over a long period sex determination, and, specifically, male sex determination, has been correlated to the presence of the Y chromosome, which in turn has been the karyotype signal of the testes. However, research has provided data to convince that this theory is only part of the truth. In addition to the Y chromosome, a multitude of other genes influence sex determination and are able to cause male to female sex-reversal and vice versa. It is of great interest that these genes are located in more than one autosomal chromosomes or even in the X chromosome. It has become obvious that sex determination, according to the genetic sex, is a complicated matter that not only requires the presence of Y chromosome. This fact triggered extensive research of the Y chromosome and led to great insight into its structure, origin, evolution and eventual fate in humans.
The gender identity of a person is the final result of genetic, hormonal and morphologic sex. It also includes all behaviour, such as body gestures and mannerisms, way of speech, sexual preferences and content of dreams. Particularly, gender identity is the result of the genetic sex, the gonadal sex, the internal genitalia, the external genitalia, the secondary sexual characteristics that appear in puberty and the social gender that is attributed in accordance with the norms and the beliefs of the social body.
And the definition of Sex is not simply “binary.”
A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby's chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine—but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother's womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male. “That's kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis,” says James.
Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD.
When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person's anatomical or physiological sex. What's more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. “I think there's much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can't easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London's Institute of Child Health.
Again, this was not an isolated phenomenon.
She wasn’t especially tall. Her testosterone levels weren’t unusually high for a woman. She was externally entirely female. But in the mid-1980s, when her chromosome results came back as XY instead of the “normal” XX for a woman, the Spanish national team ousted hurdler María José Martínez-Patiño. She was ejected from the Olympic residence and deserted by her teammates, friends, and boyfriend. She lost her records and medals because of a genetic mutation that wasn’t proven to give her any competitive advantage.
People like Martínez-Patiño have been ill-served by rules that draw a hard line between the sexes. In the U.S., the Trump administration looks set to make things worse. According to a memo leaked to The New York Times in October, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is trying to set up a legal binary definition of sex, establishing each person “as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.” But our bodies are more complicated than that.
An increasing recognition of this complexity by researchers and the public has affirmed that gender sits on a spectrum: People are more and more willing to acknowledge the reality of nonbinary and transgender identities, and to support those who courageously fight for their rights in everything from all-gender bathrooms to anti-gender-discrimination laws. But underlying all of this is the perception that no matter the gender a person identifies as, they have an underlying sex they were born with. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of biological sex. Science keeps showing us that sex also doesn’t fit in a binary, whether it be determined by genitals, chromosomes, hormones, or bones (which are the subject of my research).
Even Jesus said in Mathew 19:12 that there are “Eunuchs who were born that way.”
For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”
What is someone who is “born a Eunuch”? Is that a gay man? Is that a transgender man? Is that a woman?
One of the arguments Landon kept asking me was “Show me a transgender skeleton!”
He seemed to be under the impression that being Trans was a separate gender than being Male or Female and that’s not really the case. He seemed to think that a transgender skeleton would show different markers than and man or woman — while at the same time he denied the existence of Intersex persons who actually would show a third (or forth or fifth) alternative such as XXY or XXX chromosomes. In the end though, the identification of gender through skeletal remains is not nearly an exact science.
In the early 1900s, the U.S.-based anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička helped to found the modern study of human bones. He served as the first curator of physical anthropology at the U.S. National Museum (now the Smithsonian Institution). The skeletons Hrdlička studied were categorized as either male or female, seemingly without exception. He was not the only one who thought sex fell into two distinct categories that did not overlap. Scientists Fred P. Thieme and William J. Schull of the University of Michigan wrote about sexing a skeleton in 1957: “Sex, unlike most phenotypic features in which man varies, is not continuously variable but is expressed in a clear bimodal distribution.” Identifying the sex of a skeleton relies most heavily on the pelvis (for example, females more often have a distinctive bony groove), but it also depends on the general assumption that larger or more marked traits are male, including larger skulls and sizable rough places where muscle attaches to bone. This idea of a distinct binary system for skeletal sex pervaded—and warped—the historical records for decades.
Two pelvises with drastically exaggerated differences—a man’s shown on the left and a woman’s on the right (identified in Lithuanian)—illustrate how sex was estimated skeletally in the early 1900s.
In 1972, Kenneth Weiss, now a professor emeritus of anthropology and genetics at Pennsylvania State University, noticed that there were about 12 percent more male skeletons than females reported at archaeological sites. This seemed odd, since the proportion of men to women should have been about half and half. The reason for the bias, Weiss concluded, was an “irresistible temptation in many cases to call doubtful specimens male.” For example, a particularly tall, narrow-hipped woman might be mistakenly cataloged as a man. After Weiss published about this male bias, research practices began to change. In 1993, 21 years later, the aptly named Karen Bone, then a master’s student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, examined a more recent dataset and found that the bias had declined: The ratio of male to female skeletons had balanced out. In part that might be because of better, more accurate ways of sexing skeletons. But also, when I went back through the papers Bone cited, I noticed there were more individuals categorized as “indeterminate” after 1972 and basically none prior.
Allowing skeletons to remain unsexed, or “indeterminate,” reflects an acceptance of the variability and overlap between the sexes. It does not necessarily mean that the skeletons classified this way are, in fact, neither male nor female, but it does mean that there is no clear or easy way to tell the difference. As science and social change in the 1970s and 1980s revealed that sex is complicated, the category of “indeterminate sex” individuals in skeletal research became more common and improved scientific accuracy.
He, also, attributed the concept of additional — or blended — genders as being a “mental disorder.”
There’s a reason why mental illnesses have decreased in the United States dramatically
Coincides with identifying genders
It’s because we’ve accepted it now
And he denied the existence of any “Intersex.”
Intersex isn’t a gender is a deformity.
There are only two genders, male and female. There is no third gender.
Nobody is claiming there’s a third gender — we’re saying the gender isn't “binary.” It’s not just male and female, it’s also a spectrum of blends between the two. From being straight on either end, to being partially *both* as intersex, to being gay, being lesbian and then ultimately being transgender — or reversed.
Further, he had an elaborate theory that a particular psychologist named Kinsey and another named John Money who had participated in gender experiments was responsible for all this “propaganda” he called it. He argued that “someone was paying” doctors to adopt this ideology over the decades and that the entire psychological and medical professions had been warped by these payments to push this agenda. The apparent end goal of this agenda is a “depopulation” because that’s makes sense in the midst of a crazed scary conspiracy theory.
His Kinsey video: www.facebook.com/…
Of course, he actually got all this from Matt Walsh.
Kinsey and Money believed that gender was a “social construct” and a result of environment, rather than internal factors.
I would argue that thinking is wrong, and has been proven to be so. Modern gender theory does not present that the formation of gender roles and identity is entirely based on environment and social expectations. There is indeed an internal biological component to gender, as there is to sex and reproductive organs.
There is of course a very serious irony that Landon and people of his ilk push the conspiracy theory that “monied forces are pushing propaganda” while supporting Matt Walsh and the Daily Wire which is nothing but a pile of propaganda funded by the Fracking Billionaires of the Wilks Family.
Two billionaire Texas brothers whose fortunes derive from oil and gas fracking have pumped millions of dollars into rightwing media outfits that have promoted climate-crisis denialism and sent more big checks to back an array of evangelical projects and conservative Texas politicians.
The fracking billionaires Farris and Dan Wilks have each doled out millions of dollars through separate foundations over the last decade to a number of high-profile conservative and religious groups including the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council and Focus on the Family.
“Thanks to their incredible wealth and largesse, the country as well as the [Republican] party are now feeling the effects of their aggressive brand of religiously-charged political activism,” said Darren Dochuk, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of Anointed with Oil.
Follow the money, indeed.
There is an actual history to the diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria according to Psycholog.org, and that isn’t it.
Jack Drescher, M.D. (2010) provides a thorough overview of psychiatric diagnoses related to gender identity, including the history and evolution of such conceptualizations. The medicalization of transgender identities and gender identity-related distress has been a controversial topic for decades. This is due in part to concerns about further stigmatization of an already marginalized group. Early theories often conflated homosexuality with transgender identities and took a pathologizing stance toward gender non-conformity. Caveats about the diagnosis will be listed later in this section.
Magnus Hirschfield is credited as among the first physicians to distinguish between same-sex attraction and “transsexualism.” This was followed in 1949 by David Cauldwell who proposed one of the earliest diagnostic conceptualizations related to gender identity with the term “psychopathia transsexulialis.” In 1966, Harry Benjamin, M.D. published his foundational text The Transsexual Phenomenon and is credited with popularizing the term transsexual as it is used today, educating medical professionals about transgender people, and pioneering hormonal treatments to facilitate gender transition.
Despite increased attention to transgender people, the first two editions of DSM contained no mention of gender identity. It was not until 1980 with the publication of DSM–III that the diagnosis “transsexualism” first appeared. In 1990, the World Health Organization followed suit and included this diagnosis in ICD-10. With the release of DSM–IV in 1994, “transsexualism” was replaced with “gender identity disorder in adults and adolescence” in an effort to reduce stigma. However, controversy continued with advocates and some psychiatrists pointing to ways in which this diagnostic category pathologized identity rather than a true disorder.With the publication of DSM–5 in 2013, “gender identity disorder” was eliminated and replaced with “gender dysphoria.” This change further focused the diagnosis on the gender identity-related distress that some transgender people experience (and for which they
The DSM–5 articulates explicitly that “gender non-conformity is not in itself a mental disorder.” The 5th edition also includes a separate “gender dysphoria in children” diagnosis and for the first time allows the diagnosis to be given to individuals with disorders of sex development (DSD). DSM–5 also includes the optional “post-transition” specifier to indicate when a particular individual’s gender transition is complete. In this “post-transition” case, the diagnosis of gender dysphoria would no longer apply but the individual may still need ongoing medical care (e.g., hormonal treatment). Nevertheless, discussions continue among advocates and medical professionals about how best to preserve access to gender transition-related health care while also minimizing the degree to which such diagnostic categories stigmatize the very people that physicians are attempting to help.
This doesn’t match his Kinsey story. Kinsey died in 1956, the DSM-5 wasn't updated to include Gender Dysphoria until 2013. How is this connected?
What Landon wasn’t able to do — other than spout Matt Walsh’s conspiracy theory — was to show the receipts. He didn’t have any documentation or evidence that showed how the payments from — whoever — to various psychiatric and physician organizations proving that they have been “bought off” in order to implement the gender diagnosis that they have.
Is George Soros paying for this?
I mean, if he was talking about the proliferation of Opioids and how the pharmaceutical industry plied doctors with money in order to present drugs like Oxycontin as a “safe and non-addictive” pain remedy, I would be right there with him because — there’s a money trail.
The payments that came from BigPharma like Purdue and the Sackler family make this relationship very clear.
Today, the Department of Justice announced a global resolution of its criminal and civil investigations into the opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma LP (Purdue), and a civil resolution of its civil investigation into individual shareholders from the Sackler family. The resolutions with Purdue are subject to the approval of the bankruptcy court.
“The abuse and diversion of prescription opioids has contributed to a national tragedy of addiction and deaths, in addition to those caused by illicit street opioids,” said Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen. “With criminal guilty pleas, a federal settlement of more than $8 billion, and the dissolution of a company and repurposing its assets entirely for the public’s benefit, the resolution in today’s announcement re-affirms that the Department of Justice will not relent in its multi-pronged efforts to combat the opioids crisis.”
Where is the proof that this is the case with Gender Dysphoria? Who is paying for this? It’s simply nonsense. However, because this is all now a “Deep State” conspiracy theory — Landon wouldn’t pay any attention to any of my posts from the Psychiatric or Medical community. All of it was “propaganda” to him. All of it was “biased.”
Naturally, he proclaimed his own “victory” over the issue since I couldn’t produce evidence of a Trans skeleton which had a third gender.
You fail, sir good day.
Yeah, ok, poor me. I failed to prove a straw man I wasn’t even asserting.
Regardless of his cynicism, gender is both biological and psychological, it is how you relate to yourself and to the world. It’s not simply a matter of your “imagination” or a “delusion.”
From the NIH.
Use the terms above rather than the terms transgendering, sex change, the surgery, or pre-operative/post-operative. Transition refers to the process—social, legal, and/or medical—one goes through to affirm one’s gender identity. Transition may include changing hair styles, clothing, and other forms of gender expression. It may mean changing names, pronouns, and identification documents. It also encompasses gender-affirming medical care such as taking puberty blockers, taking hormones, and/or having gender-affirming surgeries. There is no one way to transition and the term means something unique to each individual who goes through the process.Pre-/post-operative may still be used in medical literature but should not be applied to a specific person without the appropriate context as specified by the individual.
It is simply not true that children are born male or female only, some babies are born Intersex.
Intersex is a term used when someone is born with sex characteristics that don't fit the usual definition of girl or boy. An intersex child might have internal sex organs, external genitalia, chromosomes, or other biological markers that differ from typical males or females.
These conditions are sometimes called differences of sex development (DSD). ("Hermaphrodite" was the term used to refer to people with these conditions, but that's now considered outdated.)
What does intersex look like?
An intersex baby may:
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Appear female on the outside but have mostly male anatomy on the inside, or vice versa.
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Have genitals that seem to be in between male and female.
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Have some cells with female chromosomes (XX) and some with male (XY). (Typically, all girls' cells have XX chromosomes, and all boys' cells have XY ones.)
This happens more often than you might think: About 1 out of every 2,000 children has a DSD, including those with variations that won't show up until later in life.
Being intersex is not the same as being transgender. It's often difficult to assign a gender to an intersex baby. If an intersex person feels that the gender they were assigned at birth does not match their gender identity, they may transition to the gender more aligned with their gender identity.
And actually, all embryos are initially female.
All human individuals—whether they have an XX, an XY, or an atypical sex chromosome combination—begin development from the same starting point. During early development the gonads of the fetus remain undifferentiated; that is, all fetal genitalia are the same and are phenotypically female. After approximately 6 to 7 weeks of gestation, however, the expression of a gene on the Y chromosome induces changes that result in the development of the testes. Thus, this gene is singularly important in inducing testis development. The production of testosterone at about 9 weeks of gestation results in the development of the reproductive tract and the masculinization (the normal development of male sex characteristics) of the brain and genitalia.
Normally the Y chromosome produces testosterone which allows for the formation of male organs. But as has been stated above you can have testosterone with the presence of a Y chromosome, and you can have a Y chromosome which *doesn’t* produce sufficient amounts of testosterone to create male organs. (Or a mix which can create both male and female organs in an Intersex child.)
This does put Adam and Eve in reverse perspective doesn't it? Men are created from a base template of women.
Logically, what would you call a person with XX chromosomes, who is internally female, but they have developed male sex organs?
And the reverse, who is a person with an XY chromosome who never-the-less hasn’t developed male organs and retains their default female organs?
Science hasn’t fully answered that question yet, chromosome testing — which is quite rare — would be required to confirm this, but I propose that this just may be the center of the phenomenon we see as “Gender Dysphoria.” The chromosomes, and the heart and the mind, say one thing — the organs say another because of a hormone imbalance during gestation.
This is arguably, the same reason that some people are gay and lesbian.
Both sexual orientation and sex-typical childhood behaviors, such as toy, playmate and activity preferences, show substantial sex differences, as well as substantial variability within each sex. In other species, behaviors that show sex differences are typically influenced by exposure to gonadal steroids, particularly testosterone and its metabolites, during early development (prenatally or neonatally). This article reviews the evidence regarding prenatal influences of gonadal steroids on human sexual orientation, as well as sex-typed childhood behaviors that predict subsequent sexual orientation. The evidence supports a role for prenatal testosterone exposure in the development of sex-typed interests in childhood, as well as in sexual orientation in later life, at least for some individuals. It appears, however, that other factors, in addition to hormones, play an important role in determining sexual orientation. These factors have not been well-characterized, but possibilities include direct genetic effects, and effects of maternal factors during pregnancy. Although a role for hormones during early development has been established, it also appears that there may be multiple pathways to a given sexual orientation outcome and some of these pathways may not involve hormones.
Sexual orientation is — at least partially — the result of hormone exposure during development. Why can’t that be true for gender identity as well?
Transitioning then isn't changing someone into something they are not — it's very likely correcting a mistake that happened during development.
And even if this isn't always the case. Don’t people have the right of self-determination? Do we have personal freedom to be who it is we want to be?
No, you can’t literally be a bird.
Someone who has male organs can't *literally* make themselves into a female entirely, or vice versa. There are practical limits to what is possible with current science, but they can approximate quite of bit of things. They can get remarkably close.
But all rights ultimately belong to the people under the 9th Amendment. And if someone truly believes — even with counseling — that they have been wrongly gendered, then they have a right to pursue correcting that.
Are we a nation based on freedom and self-determination or are we one that implements birth determination — like say — Iran or Saudi Arabia where someone’s religion is determined by their birth?
And even If it’s a matter of “confusion” — then with the help of their parents and medical professionals — they should be allowed to work through that confusion without anyone else telling them who they should be, or who they can be.
It’s a question of freedom, do we have it or do we not?
And here’s another fact, children who need it who are denied gender affirmation care have a high rate of suicide.
The suicide attempt rate among transgender persons ranges from 32% to 50% across the countries. Gender-based victimization, discrimination, bullying, violence, being rejected by the family, friends, and community; harassment by intimate partner, family members, police and public; discrimination and ill treatment at health-care system are the major risk factors that influence the suicidal behavior among transgender persons.
However, after transition, the rate of those we wish to detransition and reverse the procedure is remarkably low.
Some people stop taking hormones, stop identifying as transgender, and/or regret their medical interventions. Several aspects are discussed in Jorgensen (2023). While discontinuing hormones is a clearly defined action, the terms “regret” (Kuiper & Cohen-Kettenis, 1998; Narayan et al., 2021; Pfäfflin, 1992) and “detransition” (Expósito-Campos, 2021) can refer to a variety of situations. For example, there are those who both regret and detransition, those who regret medical intervention but feel detransition is impractical given their physical changes, those who do not report regret but would have preferred, in retrospect, to not have medicalized, and those who think that their medical intervention was inappropriate; all of these outcomes provide important information.
[...]
Although this fact is known to some (Irwig, 2022; Levine et al., 2022), low regret or detransition percentages are frequently quoted. Examples from the medical research literature include: “rare case of detransition,” “only 0.6% of transgender women and 0.3% of transgender men who underwent gonadectomy experienced regret” (Rosenthal, 2021, p. 586), “Post-GAC regret is rare, occurring in approximately 0.3% of individuals” (McNamara et al., 2022, p. 252), and in medical publications: “Gallagher said she follows the WPATH standards, which require mental health evaluations, and as a result, ‘the risk of regret is incredibly low’” (Ault, 2022). These claims also make their way into the press: “the rate of regret is very low,” “the very small group of people who detransition” (Bazelon, 2022), “regret rates between 0.3 and 0.6 percent” (Turban, 2022), “very rare” (Connell-Bryan et al., 2022), and official statements (USPATH Board & WPATH Executive Committee, 2022): “Transition reversal […] is rare.”
By comparison, the percentage of people who regret other forms of cosmetic surgery can climb as high as 65%.
Many people regret having had cosmetic surgery, either because the outcome does not match the hoped-for image or because of complications. Research by Medical Accident Group found that 65% of people they polled regretted their surgery, though 28% were very happy with its results.
No one reasonable or responsible is telling children they need to “change themselves” to be acceptable. In my experience, no LGBTQ person wants to trick anyone into being anything other than who they already are. They already know what it’s like to be told to be something that they aren’t — why exactly would they want to inflict that kind of hell on anyone else?
So we have what Landon and Rep. Lear would prefer which would be to deny the condition and refuse gender-affirming care for youth (or adults) and again treat this as a “mental disorder”, which could lead to suicide rates as high as 35-50% — or we have what the medical community is currently recommending which — apparently — is a success rate of about 99.4-99.7%.
Which seems like the better path to take? Which path truly protects the innocent and which does not?
