Live data from Hacker News

‘Gay furries’ group hacks agencies in US states attacking gender-affirming care

theguardian.com

51–60 of 97 posts

Re: ‘Gay furries’ group hacks agencies in US states attacking gender-affirming care

#51
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone, personally, who has suffered from these treatments and now regrets having ever taken them.

n=1 is not a representative sample. many people suffer from medical treatments and regret having them. if you can show me that the percentage of people who regret trans treatments are dramatically higher than people who regret _any_ medical treatment, maybe then you'll have an argument.

Yeah, I was watching a gender doctor on youtube who was saying something like 'suicide rate in trans people who don't go on HRT as a teenager is 40%, so we put teenagers on Lupron and send them to therapy until they're sure if they want to transition or not. Increased chance of osteoporosis in old age isn't much of a risk compared to 40% suicide rate' (my words from memory, not a direct quote)

Re: ‘Gay furries’ group hacks agencies in US states attacking gender-affirming care

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> which mirrors the rhetoric today where people falsely claim that transgender people are "turning" children trans... The number of trans kids doubled from 2017-2020[0] Do you think that’s organic change? [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/10/science/transgender-teena...

s/trans/left-handed/

Re: ‘Gay furries’ group hacks agencies in US states attacking gender-affirming care

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Puberty blockers have been administered as a valid treatment for precocious puberty for many decades. All of the bans on them specifically still allow them to be used for this purpose, because they are indeed safe enough. It's just that people don't like the idea of children being transgender, probably because it reminds them that they could potentially have a gay or transgender child. The Alan Turing lie is laughabl…

> It's just that people don't like the idea of children being transgender, probably because it reminds them that they could potentially have a gay or transgender child.

A shallow dismissal, a perfectly reasonable argument against irreversible action for changing children’s genders is that many of them aren’t so sure as it seems and later want to transition back.

Re: ‘Gay furries’ group hacks agencies in US states attacking gender-affirming care

#55
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Puberty blockers have been administered as a valid treatment for precocious puberty for many decades. That's a different treatment though, because puberty eventually resumes. Halting it entirely is more akin to the castrati children [1] who had their puberty physically blocked through removal of testicles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castrato

Puberty blockers are not permanent [1] they're taken until people start hormone therapy at which point they go through normal puberty [1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/gender-dyspho...

[flagged]

Re: ‘Gay furries’ group hacks agencies in US states attacking gender-affirming care

#56

The key distinction here is these laws limit gender affirming care for minors.

[flagged]

Literally every major respected pediatric care organization in the US disagrees with you. Please bring better evidence to HN when making such claims.

Re: ‘Gay furries’ group hacks agencies in US states attacking gender-affirming care

#57
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever had a conversation with a trans person? Quality of life for trans people that get the privilege of blockers is enormously higher than their counterparts. They've been in use for decades; it's not new. I cannot imagine a greater horror then having gender dysphoria, knowing exactly what is wrong, and still being forced to go through the wrong puberty (which does inflict irreparable harm, for us) because s…

I know someone who as a teenager was in an abusive relationship, insecure about themselves, pushed into taking these experimental treatments for a few months. The doctors and therapists just handed over the prescription, not questions asked. They now sorely regret ever having taken blockers, and are hoping it hasn't damaged their fertility too much.

A few months of blockers won't do much of anything in the long run. The risk of osteoporosis in the absence of sex hormones is well-known to endocrinologists, and they account for it. Even a few months of cross-sex hormones will do very little. It takes at least six months before anything irreversible happens.

And "someone who did this under duress regretted it hence no one should do this" isn't a sound argument.

Re: ‘Gay furries’ group hacks agencies in US states attacking gender-affirming care

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about children. Look at the charts here. [1] Why is the number of children experiencing this "gender dysphoria" skyrocketing? It should be linear, not exponential. There is a mental craze driving this, which is extremely profitable for the medical industry. This industry is preying on children to make a profit, justifying all the research on the small percentage of trans adults that actually need this tre…

Why would it be linear? The reasons it's increasing is because people no longer feel as much pressure to hide their true identity. It's the same reason that the number of left handed people doubled from 1920 to 1960 [1], it's not a conspiracy it's just the way social norms work [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/07/americas-...

[deleted]

Re: ‘Gay furries’ group hacks agencies in US states attacking gender-affirming care

#59
post #49
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gay people don't require any medical interventions to be gay, so it's not really the same thing. If the transgender identity is innate, why are there so many detransitioners coming out recently? Something has clearly gone very wrong.

This is a base rate error. There are so many more trans people recently because it became socially acceptable to be openly trans somewhere around 2014. The watershed moment was probably Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Time. Even among those of us who detrans (on the order of magnitude of 1%), at least 95% do so not because they were wrong, but because coming out invited reprisals which made their life too difficult to…

[flagged]

Re: ‘Gay furries’ group hacks agencies in US states attacking gender-affirming care

#60

Puberty is an incredibly complicated process, involving innumerable intertwined signaling pathways, gene expression changes, physical and mental changes, etc. We are only beginning to understand it all; to think we can just "pause" it like an MP3 player is the height of hubris. These experimental treatments have many potential negative side effects, including osteoporosis and infertility. Teenagers who feel insecure…

Everything in the body is complicated. The history of medicine is rife with unintended consequences. Many body altering surgeries are entirely useless and dangerous. Over 40% of antibiotic prescriptions are off-label and fully 75% of all prescriptions in pediatric populations are off-label, all of those prescriptions being administered by definition at a time of great growth and change in the body. And yet it's only…

Indeed. We value evidence-based medicine, especially when it comes to rejecting interventions that have been demonstrated not to work. As has been said, the name for "alternative medicine that actually works" is "medicine".

But a surprising amount of "medicine" is less well evidenced than we'd like it to be. That's not the same as demonstrably-false, but nowhere near the rock-solid gold-standard of testing. But we don't stop using it, because suffering patients can't wait while we straighten out the epistemological mess.

The best one to make a decision is a doctor, who has both the education required to understand the state of the art, and the details of the patient in front of them. They can combine that with their experience to make the best decision possible. It won't always be perfect, but it's got more likelihood than people guessing about what they think medicine is about.

Post reply on HN