Apology for the Priesthood Ban / "March of Dimes Syndrome" / "Mission Creep" / "Spencer's Law"

[The Nehor]

5 hours ago, GoCeltics said:

@Calm
 

“This doctrine did not originate with President Brigham Young but was taught by the Prophet Joseph Smith. At a meeting of the general authorities of the Church, held August 22, 1895, the question of the status of the negro in relation to the Priesthood was asked and the minutes of that meeting say: ‘President George Q. Cannon remarked that the Prophet taught this doctrine: That the seed of Cain could not receive the Priesthood nor act in any of the offices of the Priesthood until the seed of Abel should come forward and take precedence over Cain’s offspring” (Joseph Fielding Smith, The Way to Perfection, p. 110. See also Milton R. Hunter’s Pearl of Great Price Commentary, 1948, pp. 141-142.

 

“It is true that the negro race is barred from holding the Priesthood, and this has always been the case. The Prophet Joseph Smith taught this doctrine, and it was made known to him, although we know of no such statement in any revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants, Book of Mormon, or the Bible. However, in the Pearl of Great Price, we find the following statement written by Abraham: ‘Now this first government of Egypt was established by Pharaoh, the eldest son of Egyptus, the daughter of Ham, and it was after the manner of the government of Ham, which was patriarchal. Pharaoh, being a righteous man, established his kingdom and judged his people wisely and justly all his days, seeking earnestly to imitate that order established by the fathers in the first generations, in the days of the first patriarchal reign, even in the reign of Adam, and also of Noah, his father, who blessed him with the blessings of the earth, and with the blessings of wisdom, but cursed him as pertaining to the Priesthood.’ Pearl of Great Price, Abraham 1:25-26” (Joseph Fielding Smith, “The Negro and the Priesthood,” Improvement Era, April 1924, p. 565).

 

The attitude of the Church with reference to the Negroes remains as it has always stood. It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization, to the effect that Negroes may become members of the Church but that they are not entitled to the Priesthood at the present time. The prophets of the Lord have made several statements as to the operation of the principle. President Brigham Young said, ‘Why are so many of the inhabitants of the earth cursed with a skin of blackness? It comes in consequence of their father’s rejecting the power of the Holy Priesthood, and the law of God.’ They will go down to death. And when all the rest of the children have received their blessings in the Holy Priesthood, then that curse will be removed from the seed of Cain, and receive all the blessings we are entitled to’” (Official statement of the First Presidency to BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson, dated August 17, 1951, quoted in John Lewis Lund, The Church and the Negro, p. 89).

 

“The former decree of God concerning the Negro has been reaffirmed in modern times. According to George Q. Cannon, the Prophet Joseph Smith taught the following doctrine: ‘That the seed of Cain could not receive the Priesthood nor act in any of the offices of the Priesthood until the seed of Abel should come forward and take precedence over Cain’s off-spring.’ Other reports confirm the fact that Joseph Smith taught that the Negro cannot yet receive the priesthood” (Hyrum L. Andrus, Doctrinal Commentary on the Pearl of Great Price, 1967, p. 402).

Others taught it as folklore.

Joseph Fielding Smith was in no position to know and his father attributed it to Brigham Young at first and later shifted to attributing it to Joseph Smith.

[Duncan]

Here's a guy who thinks the Priesthood ban was inspired or a revelation at least

https://www.truthwillprevail.xyz/2024/07/scripturecentral-goofs-up.html

 

I don't espouse his viewpoint at all

[smac97]

3 hours ago, Duncan said:

Here's a guy who thinks the Priesthood ban was inspired or a revelation at least

https://www.truthwillprevail.xyz/2024/07/scripturecentral-goofs-up.html

I don't espouse his viewpoint at all

He hedges his bets, though:

Quote

In my research into President Kimball’s various statements regarding the priesthood restriction, I find that he called it a “possible error” once, but every other time he referred to it as the Lord’s doctrine or program or policy. And he didn’t seem to distinguish between the meanings of those labels; the Lord had implemented it and He would have to remove it.

To try to maintain the argument that the restriction was an error or mistake made by all the prophets until President Kimball (1978) is simply untenable and unsustainable. Too many prophets and apostles have formally stated that they and their predecessors have not erred in their ministries on matters of such importance; that they had no fear of future embarrassment from being or doing wrong in leading the Church.
...
The only situation that I can think of where a possible long-term mistake was made and then fixed, is with the office of the Seventy. When the church was initially being restored in the 1830s, there were just Seventies. But as the decades passed, there became General Authority Seventies and local Seventies, with the General Authorities (First Seven Presidents then First Council of Seventy) presiding over the locals. Then in 1987 the local stake/ward level Seventies Quorums were disbanded and only the General Authority Seventies remain and they have multiplied in quorums. (There is far more to this history than what I have just summarized, but this is not the place for such a recounting.) But no one’s eternal blessings were at stake; the change was more administrative than anything else, putting the priesthood quorums in their proper places and order. And more of that happened under President Nelson, with most high priests being moved to elder’s quorums.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Duncan]

23 minutes ago, smac97 said:

He hedges his bets, though:

Thanks,

-Smac

There is also this

https://latterdaysaintmag.com/are-church-leaders-infallible/

[smac97]

On 6/18/2024 at 11:24 AM, smac97 said:

Having referenced (and linked to) then-Bro. Corbitt's talk against activism, and also to then-Elder Oaks' talk about addressing disagreements in the Church, and in the spirit of "start{ing} a conversation" about activism in the Church, I submit the following article: The March of Dimes Syndrome

Some excerpts:

Quote

John Tierney
The March of Dimes Syndrome
The better things get, the more desperately activists struggle to stay in business.

This seems to be a common - perhaps inevitable - trend in "activism" (which trend may be part of why Bro. Corbitt's 2022 talk is so relevant and resonant).

Quote

In the spring of 1979, a few weeks after the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, more than 65,000 people marched on the United States Capitol chanting “No Nukes, No Nukes.” As a young reporter at the Washington Star assigned to cover this new movement, I interviewed march organizers and noticed that all of them had previously organized protests against the Vietnam War. This struck me as curious: How had they suddenly become so passionate and knowledgeable about nuclear power?

I later learned that a term exists for this phenomenon—the March of Dimes syndrome—and that the tendency affects many other movements, too.

Obviously "March of Dimes Syndrome" is a neologism.  Although I have frequently perceived its manifestations in much of today's "activist" stuff, I was not aware of the label.  The earliest instance of it I could find was in 2016:

Quote

In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt founded the March of Dimes to combat polio. You read that right. This piece of trivia is not as widely known anymore, because polio was effectively eradicated in 1955 with the widespread introduction of the Salk vaccine.

So why does the March of Dimes still exist, now as an organization researching, much more famously, birth defects? Put simply, when faced with the prospect of either closing up shop or changing missions, they chose the latter.

An organization changing its mission is hardly surprising. Plenty of foundations and nonprofits whose original purposes or missions have long since been forgotten are still operating. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as an organization that has successfully established itself is likely to be more effective at a new mission. But this phenomenon of organizational self-perpetuation is worth probing. Let’s call it the March of Dimes syndrome.

The March of Dimes Syndrome Writ Large

Now, the basic idea that people or interest groups seek self-perpetuation—we might also call it “continued relevance”—is also nothing new. We are used to thinking of business activity along these lines: in that field the impulse is called planned obsolescence. The idea is that no product should be so desirable or durable that it erases the need for a new product down the road. There is a built-in incentive against a company satisfying its customers too well.

This logic has also often been applied to government, with commentators noting the ease with which lawmakers and bureaucrats start new programs but the difficulty in getting them to end any programs. Milton Friedman’s famous quip that “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program” neatly encapsulates the idea.

It’s somewhat less familiar to claim this same logic and set of incentives—an organizational impulse to “stay in business” and to never quite solve the problem—applies to the philanthropic (or academic) worlds. But the logic applies here too, and here are a few examples other than the March of Dimes itself.

A similar label I have previously encountered is "Mission Creep," described here:

Quote

Mission creep is the gradual or incremental expansion of an intervention, project or mission, beyond its original scope, focus or goals, a ratchet effect spawned by initial success.  Mission creep is usually considered undesirable due to how each success breeds more ambitious interventions until a final failure happens, stopping the intervention entirely.

I think "activism" these days is often quite susceptible to the March of Dimes Syndrome / Mission Creep phenomenon.  This includes activism in the Church.

Back to the Tierney article:

Quote

Why, last year, did the Human Rights Campaign declare a “national state of emergency” for LGBT people? Why was the election of the first black American president followed by the Black Lives Matter movement? Why have reports of “hate groups” risen during the same decades that racial prejudice has been plummeting? Why, during a long and steep decline in the incidence of sexual violence in America, did academics, federal officials, and the #MeToo movement discover a new “epidemic of sexual assault”?

These supposed crises are all examples of the March of Dimes syndrome, named after the organization founded in the 1930s to combat polio. The March helped fund the vaccines that eventually ended the polio epidemics—but not the organization, which, after polio’s eradication, changed its mission to preventing birth defects. Its leaders kept their group going by finding a new cause, just as antiwar activists did after achieving their goal of ending the Vietnam War. The Three Mile Island accident offered new fund-raising opportunities and a new platform for veterans of the antiwar movement such as Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, who both addressed the crowd at that first antinuke rally.

For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished.

I wonder if activist calls for an apology from the Church are borne of this "March of Dimes Syndrome" mindset.  Any progress/success the Church has made/had relative to condemning racism, fostering goodwill, etc. is a threat.  In the minds of some activists, they can never declare "mission accomplished."  Mission Creep happens.

Quote

Consider the current cultural conflicts over gender and sex. As the gay rights movement achieved its initial goals from the 1970s, overturning antisodomy laws and destigmatizing homosexuality, the movement expanded to include so many new causes that it required an acronym, LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, and more). Its leaders declared a new cause, same-sex marriage, which vanished after the Supreme Court legalized it nationally in 2015. Five years later, the Court extended civil rights protections to people’s sexual preferences.

What were activists to do? Gays could marry in every state, and the whole LGBTQIA+ alphabet was a protected class—what more could groups like the Human Rights Campaign or the National LGBTQ Task Force possibly demand from the government? What would get the attention of crusading journalists? An antigay hate crime would generate a brief publicity and fund-raising burst, but even progressive journalists struggled to sustain the groups’ narrative that America was a homophobic society.

The laws against homosexuality had been toppled. The culture that produced those laws has been overthrown, too. Most Americans now support same-sex marriage. The Pride flag flies at corporate headquarters, churches, schools, city halls, and the White House. Uttering once-common antigay slurs is now career suicide. Gay characters, long taboo in television scripts, are now practically obligatory. Gays once felt overwhelming social pressure to stay in the closet, but now many young adults are reluctant to admit to being heterosexuals, as reflected in the surge of young women classifying themselves as bisexual despite never having had sex with a woman.

So activists have moved the goalposts once again. It is no longer enough for conservative Christians to tolerate same-sex marriage—now they must be legally required to bake cakes and design web pages for the weddings. It is no longer enough to protect gay students from harassment—now these students must have access in elementary school libraries to how-to manuals for **** sex. Public schools must encourage prepubescent students to explore the many possible gender identities without their parents’ knowledge. Biological males self-identifying as females must be allowed to compete against females in sports. These new causes have been wildly unpopular, arousing opposition from homosexuals as well as heterosexuals, and have led to a decline in public support for the gay rights movement. But however much the backlash has hurt the original cause, the controversies keep activists in business.

"So activists have moved the goalposts once again."  Yep.

If the Church were to issue a formal institutional apology, would self-appointed "activists" accept it and move on?  Or would they deem it insufficient, move the goalposts, and demand more?

...

I can't help but wonder if some of the activists calling for the Church to issue an apology see Mission Creep not as a bug, but as a feature.  That is, these folks want the Church to issue an apology so that they can, in true "Mission Creep" style and form, deem the apology insufficient, move the goalposts, and demand more.  And the "more" would, in my view, almost certainly - and perhaps almost immediately - take us to demands that the Church "apologize" for the Law of Chastity, for its prohibitions against same-sex behavior, for its past opposition to same-sex marriage, for its current non-recognition (in an ecclesiastical sense) of same-sex marriages, and so on.  And I think the calls would not stop at just an apology, but for alteration of the Church's doctrines, so as to ratify same-sex marriages, to allow temple sealings between persons of the same sex, to allow same-sex behavior, etc.

Additionally or alternatively, I wonder if this is a pretext for calling for women to be ordained to the priesthood.  And perhaps disavowals of claims to prophetic/priesthood authority, the Book of Mormon, and so on.

The Tierney article goes on to explain a third label for this phenomenon (in addition to "March of Dimes Syndrome," mentioned in the article, and "Mission Creep," commented on by me) :

Quote

The March of Dimes syndrome is an ancient social affliction that is especially virulent today and destined to get even worse. Kings, generals, and high priests have always tried to maintain power by declaring new crusades—new enemies to conquer, new sins to extirpate. But it has gotten steadily easier for leaders to rally the public because of another phenomenon, known as Spencer’s Law, named after the Victorian sociologist Herbert Spencer, who observed a paradox in the reform movements of his day to combat poverty, hunger, child labor, illiteracy, and alcoholism.

These problems were widespread in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century. Then, as the Industrial Revolution lifted incomes during the nineteenth century, the working classes saw a dramatic improvement in their diets and living conditions. By mid-century, most Britons were literate because children were going to school instead of being put to work. Alcohol consumption fell dramatically. But it was only late in the nineteenth century, after so much progress had already occurred, that reformers captured the public’s attention with campaigns to help the needy, mandate universal education, and pass temperance laws. “The more things improve,” Spencer wrote in 1891, “the louder become the exclamations about their badness.”

Spencer’s Law has been reformulated by Stephen Davies of the Institute of Economic Affairs: “The degree of public concern and anxiety about a social problem or phenomenon varies inversely as to its real or actual incidence.” Thus, we obsess about racism today more than we did during the Jim Crow era. From 1990 to Obama’s election in 2008, the African American homicide rate fell by 50 percent—and then the Black Lives Matter signs sprouted on lawns across the country. From 1995 to 2010, the rate of sexual violence against women dropped by nearly 60 percent in America—and then began the panic chronicled in The Campus Rape Frenzy, the book by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr., debunking the mythical epidemic of sexual assaults occurring on university campuses. By 2017, corporate America had instituted strict punishments and mandatory training to prevent sexual harassment—and then came #MeToo. Public acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage reached an all-time high in 2023—and then the media breathlessly reported that gay activists had declared a “national state of emergency.”

"'The more things improve, the louder become the exclamations about their badness.'"

Might this be said about the Church since 1978?

Quote

Several factors are responsible for this paradox. First is the negativity effect, or the brain’s innate bias to pay more attention to the negative than the positive. The better that things get, the harder we look to find something bad, a tendency termed “prevalence-induced concept change” by the social psychologists who demonstrated it in 2018, in a study published in Science. In one of the experiments, the psychologists showed people photos of faces and asked them to identify the ones with threatening expressions. As the series of photos progressed, fewer and fewer hostile faces appeared, but the people were so determined to see the negative that they started misclassifying the neutral faces as hostile. “When the world gets better,” explained one of the psychologists, Daniel Gilbert, “we become harsher critics of it, and this can cause us to mistakenly conclude that it hasn’t actually gotten better at all.”

As the world gets better—as people become richer, better educated, and longer-lived—we find new things to worry about and have more disposable income and free time to spend curing humanity’s woes, real or imagined. Our instinct to save others is noble, but it risks being corrupted. “As society grows wealthier,” the economist Donald Boudreaux observes, “the need to be saved by others from earthly misfortunes grows steadily less frequent and less dire while the itch to save others from earthly misfortunes grows steadily more frequent and more intense.” This itch explains why journalists and the public keep falling for hoaxers like the actor Jussie Smollett: the demand for racism vastly exceeds the supply. It’s not easy to meet the growing demand from saviors, given a shrinking supply of victims, but the potential rewards have inspired remarkable creativity—and there’s every reason to expect more in the future.

"First is the negativity effect, or the brain’s innate bias to pay more attention to the negative than the positive."

Might this be in play relative to how some folks treat the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?  

"As the world gets better—as people become richer, better educated, and longer-lived—we find new things to worry about and have more disposable income and free time to spend curing humanity’s woes, real or imagined."  Again, are black people in the Church better off now than they were in 1978?  If so, why is it that folks of an "activist" bent seem fixated on characterizing the Church in the worst possible ways?

I just came across an article earlier today which seems to touch on the above concepts ("March of Dimes Syndrome" / "Mission Creep" / "Spencer's Law" etc.).  The context, though, is not about the Church's Priesthood Ban, but about generalized notions of how trans ideology operates in society.  And since we are part of society, this issue affects us as well.

The article: The grisly truth about kids transitioning

Some excerpts:

Quote

Trans activists claim that access to ‘gender-affirming care’ is a basic human right. Even children, they say, must be free to medically ‘transition’. What this really means is providing children with powerful, sterilising drugs, followed by a lifetime of hormone treatment and irreversible surgery. And as we now know, following the landmark Cass Review into gender medicine, these children tend to be deeply vulnerable – often struggling with their sexuality, sometimes autistic or suffering from trauma – and most would grow out of their ‘gender distress’, if we allowed them to. Why have so many young, vulnerable children been lured – sometimes pushed – down this path? And why have so many supposed progressives become cheerleaders for such damaging and unnecessary medical interventions?

Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, recently sat down with spiked’s Fraser Myers to discuss the regressive truth about trans ideology. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the full video of the interview here.

It's a worthwhile video. 

Quote

Fraser Myers: What consequences might children face if they medically transition?

Helen Joyce: There are some very real dangers for young children who are dissociating from their bodies. Going through puberty is distressing enough as it is, but it’s doubly distressing for children who dissociate from their bodies in this way. This might mean they’re not able to understand what their bodies are telling them or whether they’re attracted to certain people. If they receive hormone therapy as well, the consequences are catastrophic.

This is true for both sexes, but more so for girls. Quite simply, testosterone is a hell of a drug. It does a whole load of things to the body that are irreversible. I could grow a beard if I took testosterone. However, if a man took oestrogen, it wouldn’t make his beard stop growing. For something like hair follicles, once they have been switched on, that’s it. You can’t switch them off.

The same goes for your voice dropping. If I took testosterone, my voice would drop and I would never be able to get it higher again. These girls who are taking testosterone at 16 – which is the youngest you can get it on the NHS in England – will have facial hair within a year. They’ll have body hair, their voices will have broken. If they have the gene for male-pattern baldness, that will possibly have started, too. These are irreversible hormonal changes.

Testosterone is also terrible for female sex organs. It causes the vaginal lining and uterus to atrophy. Women who are on testosterone for more than a few years are eventually going to have to get their sex organs removed – which means they will be sterilised. However, oestrogen doesn’t really undo the things that testosterone does. Cross-sex hormones do far more damage to girls’ bodies than they do to boys.

There is a push to try to start male transition earlier or to block their puberty so they never go through testosterone-driven changes. But people are now realising that all of these interventions are very bad for a developing person. Taking what are euphemistically called ‘puberty blockers’ affects a child’s bones, brain and sexual organs irreversibly. It also affects future fertility and sex drive. If you stop all the natural processes that are supposed to mature a person during puberty, it will be disastrous.

The key bit (at least as pertaining to the "March of Dimes Syndrome" / "Mission Creep" / "Spencer's Law" concept:

Quote

Myers: Given all the risks that this ideology seems to pose, why is it that so many supposedly sensible people have fallen for it and have allowed it to run amok in our institutions?

Joyce: I call this the ‘ideology of bad analogies’. It has a lot to do with this idea of the arc of progress. People think that because we’ve ended slavery, we gave women the vote and we stopped tormenting gay people, that the trans issue must be the next civil-rights battle.

I think there is something to this.  

Quote

If you look at it out of the corner of your eye, that’s what it looks like. You might hear about trans rights and think about the hard road that somebody who identifies as trans has to walk. If you don’t stop and really think about whether we should count men as women, or women as men, most people won’t see why this might be an issue.

Yep.  Moreover, if you don’t stop and really think about these things, you might even be tempted to accuse others (who have considered the ramifications of things like medical intervention on children re: gender dysphoria) of being bigoted.

Quote

If you’re gender critical, people just pigeonhole you or write you off before they think everything through. They’re not listening to you.

"{P}eople just pigeonhole you or write you off."

Yeah.

Quote

The other week, I was talking to somebody at the Liberal Democrat party conference. She said that she was absolutely not gender critical and, as far as she was concerned, transwomen are women. ‘But I worry about the children’, she said. I didn’t say anything at the time, because there was no point in getting into an argument with a random bystander. But that does make you gender critical, actually. That makes you a TERF.

All I care about is people not being hurt. I care about people’s rights and I care about the children. If you say you care about the children, you are gender critical – the ridiculous phrase that has become attached to people who notice there are two sexes. But if you then say that somewhere, you will get attacked. My colleague Maya Forstater, who founded Sex Matters, lost her job for saying this. People know that if they say something, they will get into trouble. So they stay quiet instead.

So much of this is just utterly ridiculous. We are in a situation where you can have ‘genderfluid’ dachshunds and enormous men pretending to be women in sports. In many ways, of course, I don’t know how somebody could not laugh. You just wouldn’t think it could be happening. But that’s part of how it has happened. People think it just all sounds so ridiculous that you must be exaggerating. That’s their mistake. It is happening and we have to take it seriously.

Lots of suppression of viewpoints going on here.

Thanks,

-Smac

[california boy]

6 hours ago, smac97 said:

I just came across an article earlier today which seems to touch on the above concepts ("March of Dimes Syndrome" / "Mission Creep" / "Spencer's Law" etc.).  The context, though, is not about the Church's Priesthood Ban, but about generalized notions of how trans ideology operates in society.  And since we are part of society, this issue affects us as well.

The article: The grisly truth about kids transitioning

Some excerpts:

It's a worthwhile video. 

The key bit (at least as pertaining to the "March of Dimes Syndrome" / "Mission Creep" / "Spencer's Law" concept:

I think there is something to this.  

Yep.  Moreover, if you don’t stop and really think about these things, you might even be tempted to accuse others (who have considered the ramifications of things like medical intervention on children re: gender dysphoria) of being bigoted.

"{P}eople just pigeonhole you or write you off."

Yeah.

Lots of suppression of viewpoints going on here.

Thanks,

-Smac

The only people who should be involved in this decision is the parents of the child, the child and the doctor.  Otherwise it is no one else business deciding what any medical procedure is done or what is best for the child.

 

[smac97]

1 hour ago, california boy said:

The only people who should be involved in this decision is the parents of the child, the child and the doctor.  

And the law.  And the canons of medic ethics.

1 hour ago, california boy said:

Otherwise it is no one else business deciding what any medical procedure is done or what is best for the child.

Nobody is, or ought to be, above the law.  Do you agree with this statement?

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited October 8, 2024 by smac97

[longview]

33 minutes ago, california boy said:

The only people who should be involved in this decision is the parents of the child, the child and the doctor.  Otherwise it is no one else business deciding what any medical procedure is done or what is best for the child.

 

Surgical mutilation and chemical castration are NOT what's best for the child. Let the child at least grow out of that phase until the mid-twenties. Don't fall for the suicide concerns for confused people. I would say suicide is a GREATER risk for transitioned people.

[california boy]

On 10/7/2024 at 6:51 PM, longview said:

Surgical mutilation and chemical castration are NOT what's best for the child.

Let me be clear where I stand.  I personally am in favor of not allowing surgeries and chemical castration until after the child is of legal age.  BUT, I am not the parent nor am I the doctor.  I do believe that there may be rare instances where that MIGHT be the best decision for the child.  I just don't know and neither do you.  The far bigger issue is people who have no idea about a child that is not there deciding all the other procedures leading up to surgery should also be something they get to decide on.  Yes, I strongly believe that a stranger who has absolutely no knowledge or understanding of a child should not have ANY input into how their medical decisions are made.

 

On 10/7/2024 at 6:51 PM, longview said:

Let the child at least grow out of that phase until the mid-twenties.

And just how do you know that is in the best interest of the child?  Have you raised that child since birth?  Do you know what is going through the child's mind?  Do you think the parents are incapable of prayerfully considering the best path for their OWN child? Just what makes you an authority on what is best for other people's children?

And where does this end?  Should other people decide what is best for your children?  Should they be allowed to decide if say, a religion is harmful and brainwashing children into something that is harmful to them?  How about allowing a child to marry someone at age 14 because he says he is a prophet?  Should you be able to decide whether someone else's male child should be surgically muttilated by a parent having their child circumcised?  

Quote

Don't fall for the suicide concerns for confused people. I would say suicide is a GREATER risk for transitioned people.

Data indicate that 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth.   Are you willing to bet on the life of a child that you don't know AT ALL that they will not die of suicide and you know better than the parents of that child and their doctor?  

I hope you will consider these points carefully before making a knee jerk reaction in assuming what is best for other people's children.

Edited October 9, 2024 by california boy

[california boy]

13 hours ago, smac97 said:

And the law.  And the canons of medic ethics.

What specific law are you talking about?  What canons of medic ethics are you referring to?

13 hours ago, smac97 said:

Nobody is, or ought to be, above the law.  Do you agree with this statement?

Thanks,

-Smac

I do believe that just because a law is enforce, doesn't mean it is right.  I could list a whole lot of laws that have been bad laws starting with the right to own slaves.

[The Nehor]

13 hours ago, longview said:

I would say suicide is a GREATER risk for transitioned people.

Why? Intuition? A need to believe that to maintain your worldview?

Or because the data supports this? Which it doesn’t.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10027312/

[longview]

23 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

Why? Intuition? A need to believe that to maintain your worldview?

Or because the data supports this? Which it doesn’t.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10027312/

National Institute of Health? Yeah. Go ahead and put your utter trust in the system. If those various agencies and world bodies have been shown to let down the people during covid, our only choice is to look over our options three times over.

[The Nehor]

21 hours ago, smac97 said:

I just came across an article earlier today which seems to touch on the above concepts ("March of Dimes Syndrome" / "Mission Creep" / "Spencer's Law" etc.).  The context, though, is not about the Church's Priesthood Ban, but about generalized notions of how trans ideology operates in society.  And since we are part of society, this issue affects us as well.

The article: The grisly truth about kids transitioning

Some excerpts:

It's a worthwhile video. 

The key bit (at least as pertaining to the "March of Dimes Syndrome" / "Mission Creep" / "Spencer's Law" concept:

I think there is something to this.  

Yep.  Moreover, if you don’t stop and really think about these things, you might even be tempted to accuse others (who have considered the ramifications of things like medical intervention on children re: gender dysphoria) of being bigoted.

"{P}eople just pigeonhole you or write you off."

Yeah.

Lots of suppression of viewpoints going on here.

Thanks,

-Smac

Nope, not a lot of suppression of viewpoints. The activism creep thing is just stupid. It is such a ridiculous idea that there are somehow a shortage of good causes to advocate for that people have to make them up in order to be relevant. How does that make any sense at all? Thinking it through for three minutes should make anyone laugh at the idea but if it is good propaganda for the cause the brain must be shut off for the good of the cause.

A lot of hysteria targeting a vulnerable population opposing the broad medical consensus and the reality that gender-affirming care for transgender minors is rare.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/gender-affirming-surgeries-rarely-performed-on-transgender-youth/

Medical intervention for transgender minors was and continues to be rare except for social transitioning. I have quite a few transgender friends. I don’t know of anyone who pursued medical transitioning until they were an adult.

There is also the stink of hypocrisy over the whole thing. For some time now intersex activists have sought to have gender-affirming care that is not medically necessary for literal newborns and infants banned. This has pretty much gone nowhere. The parent’s right to choose a gender for children born with ambiguous sexual characteristics is somehow a parent’s right. However with a transgender minor even now that the minor is capable of expressing their desires gender affirming care should not be allowed even if the parents agree. Why?

Because anything that supports and obscures any threat to a gender binary is allowed. Allowing an intersex child to choose once they are old enough may leave them ambiguous until then and that makes other people uncomfortable and threatens their worldview. Having gender affirming medical treatment is fine when it supports the binary. If it threatens the binary it MUST BE BANNED!!!! If a cis male teen has enlarged breasts gender affirming cosmetic care is okay. Nothing about him having to wait to be an adult to “decide”.

So people should stop pretending it is about protecting children. It is not. If it were they would be consistent about this protection. They rely on the children strategy despite how rare transgender minors getting surgery and medical interventions are. Of course this will go like the new abortion laws. Since the people creating these bans are bigots and idiots and ignorant they are going to do things like ban minors having a masectomy. Then a minor cis male with an atypical genetic problem can’t get a breast reduction (gender affirming care). A minor cis female with breast cancer can’t get the breast removed in order to live and has to leave the state to get surgery in order to survive. Giving a child with a hormonal disorder hormone supplements to assist with or trigger puberty to match their assigned gender at birth is also gender-affirming care and some laws would put this on the chopping block. 

Just as the rushed abortion laws are getting women who don’t even want an elective abortion hurt or killed these laws are going to hurt cis-gendered children as well. It was never about the children. They are lying. They want to make the “bad people” suffer or keep them out of public view.

[The Nehor]

3 minutes ago, longview said:

National Institute of Health? Yeah. Go ahead and put your utter trust in the system. If those various agencies and world bodies have been shown to let down the people during covid, our only choice is to look over our options three times over.

Thank you for this case in point of people deliberately choosing ignorance.

This was a study done by a university and (like many such studies) published on a government website to allow ease of access.

Conspiratorial nonsense about how all the experts and professionals are lying to us will be the death of us all. 

[longview]

3 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

Conspiratorial nonsense about how all the experts and professionals are lying to us will be the death of us all. 

Maybe you can use Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum as your last resort for truth verification. "The day will come the people will eat BUGS and be happy about it."

[smac97]

26 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

Nope, not a lot of suppression of viewpoints.

Ah, well.  Reasonable minds can disagree about such things.

26 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

The activism creep thing is just stupid. It is such a ridiculous idea that there are somehow a shortage of good causes to advocate for that people have to make them up in order to be relevant.  How does that make any sense at all? Thinking it through for three minutes should make anyone laugh at the idea but if it is good propaganda for the cause the brain must be shut off for the good of the cause.

I think the examples Tierney notes are pretty apt.  An appeal to ridicule won't work here.

26 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

A lot of hysteria targeting a vulnerable population opposing the broad medical consensus and the reality that gender-affirming care for transgender minors is rare.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/gender-affirming-surgeries-rarely-performed-on-transgender-youth/

Medical intervention for transgender minors was and continues to be rare except for social transitioning. I have quite a few transgender friends. I don’t know of anyone who pursued medical transitioning until they were an adult.

Reuters in October 2022: Putting numbers on the rise in children seeking gender care

Quote

Thousands of children in the United States now openly identify as a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth, their numbers surging amid growing recognition of transgender identity and rights even as they face persistent prejudice and discrimination.

As the number of transgender children has grown, so has their access to gender-affirming care, much of it provided at scores of clinics at major hospitals.

Reliable counts of adolescents receiving gender-affirming treatment have long been guesswork – until now. Reuters worked with health technology company Komodo Health Inc to identify how many youths have sought and received care. 
...
In 2021, about 42,000 children and teens across the United States received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, nearly triple the number in 2017, according to data Komodo compiled for Reuters. Gender dysphoria is defined as the distress caused by a discrepancy between a person’s gender identity and the one assigned to them at birth.

Overall, the analysis found that at least 121,882 children ages 6 to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria from 2017 through 2021. Reuters found similar trends when it requested state-level data on diagnoses among children covered by Medicaid, the public insurance program for lower-income families.

Gender-affirming care for youths takes several forms, from social recognition of a preferred name and pronouns to medical interventions such as hormone therapy and, sometimes, surgery. A small but increasing number of U.S. children diagnosed with gender dysphoria are choosing medical interventions to express their identity and help alleviate their distress.

These medical treatments don’t begin until the onset of puberty, typically around age 10 or 11.

Reuters in October 2022: As more transgender children seek medical care, families confront many unknowns

Quote

Across the United States, thousands of youths are lining up for gender-affirming care. But when families decide to take the medical route, they must make decisions about life-altering treatments that have little scientific evidence of their long-term safety and efficacy.
...

The United States has seen an explosion in recent years in the number of children who identify as a gender different from what they were designated at birth. Thousands of families like the Boyers are weighing profound choices in an emerging field of medicine as they pursue what is called gender-affirming care for their children.

Gender-affirming care covers a spectrum of interventions. It can entail adopting a child’s preferred name and pronouns and letting them dress in alignment with their gender identity – called social transitioning. It can incorporate therapy or other forms of psychological treatment. And, from around the start of adolescence, it can include medical interventions such as puberty blockers, hormones and, in some cases, surgery. In all of it, the aim is to support and affirm the child’s gender identity.

But families that go the medical route venture onto uncertain ground, where science has yet to catch up with practice. While the number of gender clinics treating children in the United States has grown from zero to more than 100 in the past 15 years – and waiting lists are long – strong evidence of the efficacy and possible long-term consequences of that treatment remains scant.
...
{T}he number of children receiving medical treatments like those the Akron clinic outlined for the Boyers is also growing fast. The number of children who started on puberty-blockers or hormones totaled 17,683 over the five-year period, rising from 2,394 in 2017 to 5,063 in 2021, according to the analysis. These numbers are probably a significant undercount since they don’t include children whose records did not specify a gender dysphoria diagnosis or whose treatment wasn’t covered by insurance.

National Review in August 2023: Thousands of Minors Have Received ‘Gender-Affirming Surgeries’

Quote

A new study has been published by the Journal of the American Medical Association about the number of people who have had “gender-affirming” surgeries — including minors — between 2016-2019. The numbers are startling:

A total of 48 019 patients who underwent GAS were identified, including 25 099 (52.3%) who were aged 19 to 30 years. The most common procedures were breast and chest procedures, which occurred in 27 187 patients (56.6%), followed by genital reconstruction (16 872 [35.1%]) and other facial and cosmetic procedures (6669 [13.9%]).

The absolute number of GAS procedures rose from 4552 in 2016 to a peak of 13 011 in 2019 and then declined slightly to 12 818 in 2020. Overall, 25 099 patients (52.3%) were aged 19 to 30 years, 10 476 (21.8%) were aged 31 to 40, and 3678 (7.7%) were aged 12 to 18 years. When stratified by the type of procedure performed, breast and chest procedures made up a greater percentage of the surgical interventions in younger patients, while genital surgical procedures were greater in older patients. [Emphasis added.]

It is worth noting that for some strange reason, the analysis included the younger category at ages 12–18, when it would have been much more elucidating to segregate minors 12–17 so we could know for sure how many children are having mastectomies, facial reconstructions, and genital redesigns. But it is clear that children’s bodies are being surgically altered. Indeed, another study out of Vanderbilt University found that 489 minors — ages 12–17, median age 16 — had mastectomies in 2019.

How many of the 3,678 surgeries between ages 12–18 were of the genitals? According to the report, “405 patients (11.0%) aged 12 to 18 years underwent genital surgery.” I suspect — hope — that most of these were age 18, but surely not all. If I am right, that means at least some minors have had their genitals destroyed, rendering them infertile and almost surely incapable of orgasm for the rest of their lives.

And remember, these statistics end at 2019. If anything, the transgender hysteria is far more intense in 2023, meaning that potentially more minors are being put under the knife.

To me, this study should indicate the importance of hitting the brakes for transgender surgeries and puberty blocking in minors — as much of Western Europe is now doing. But the authors have a different take:

The rapid rise in the performance of GAS suggests that there will be a greater need for clinicians knowledgeable in the care of transgender individuals and with the requisite expertise to perform GAS procedures. However, numerous reports have described the political considerations and challenges in the delivery of transgender care. Despite many medical societies recognizing the necessity of gender-affirming care, several states have enacted legislation or policies that restrict gender-affirming care and services, particularly in adolescence. These regulations are barriers for patients who seek gender-affirming care and provide legal and ethical challenges for clinicians. [Emphasis added.]

In other words, they want more doctors doing these procedures — and this at a time when there are physician shortages around the country generally.

Bottom line: Children are being surgically transitioned in appalling numbers, including at least some genital mutilations that often require life-long continuing medical support — when studies show that gender confusion in children and teenagers is often “transitory,” as the “de-transition” phenomenon is growing.

We can and should have discussions about these matters.  

26 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

There is also the stink of hypocrisy over the whole thing. For some time now intersex activists have sought to have gender-affirming care that is not medically necessary for literal newborns and infants banned. This has pretty much gone nowhere. The parent’s right to choose a gender for children born with ambiguous sexual characteristics is somehow a parent’s right. However with a transgender minor even now that the minor is capable of expressing their desires gender affirming care should not be allowed even if the parents agree. Why?

Any number of reasons.  

There are some substantial risks involved in these procedures.

Most kids grow out of their desire to change their sex.  

Comorbidities should be addressed: Gender dysphoria and psychiatric comorbidities in childhood: a systematic review

Quote

The core symptoms of gender dysphoria in childhood rarely exist in isolation; more commonly the symptoms are exacerbated by psychosocial stressors and psychiatric disorders (Vrouenraets et al., Citation2015). There are several psychiatric comorbidities in populations of children with gender dysphoria, such as autism spectrum conditions (VanderLaan et al., Citation2015), anxiety and depressive disorders (Holt et al., Citation2014), eating disorders (Russell & Keel, Citation2002), self-harm and suicidality (Reisner et al., Citation2015), psychosis and posttraumatic stress disorder (Coleman et al., Citation2012). Most of the studies on comorbidities are conducted in gender clinics, where there may be a stronger clinical emphasis on gender dysphoria as the core source of the child’s suffering (De Vries et al., Citation2011). While treating gender dysphoria as the primary condition is important, psychiatric comorbidities often have a greater likelihood of persisting into the child’s future and complicating mental health outcomes throughout the medical transition (Steensma et al., Citation2011). This suggests it is vitally important to consider psychiatric comorbidities when prioritising and sequencing treatments for children with gender dysphoria (De Vries et al., Citation2011).
...

Clinical implications

Children with gender dysphoria often report a reduction in symptoms of depression and anxiety after receiving gender-affirming medical treatments, but they do not always show improvements in symptoms of gender dysphoria (Chew et al., Citation2018). The lack of follow-up and referrals for treatment of psychiatric comorbidities in the reviewed studies was concerning, given there may be psychological symptoms related to having gender dypshoria which are assumed to be treated once medical interventions are pursued.
...
 

The results of the study found that children with gender dysphoria often experience a range of psychiatric comorbidities, with a high prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders, trauma, eating disorders and autism spectrum conditions, suicidality and self-harm. Most importantly, this systematic review found that there was no standardised approach to the assessment, diagnosis, treatment and clinical management of children with gender dysphoria and psychiatric comorbidities, including a paucity of randomised control trials, which has implications clinical decision-making.

Noting children do not have capacity to consent to their own medical treatment, it was concerning to find that there were a range of different treatment models used around the world for children presenting with gender dypshoria, from early intervention medical treatments involving parental consent for treatment, to denial of medical treatment for children and adolescents. This may have implications for the level of psychological support that a child may receive depending on how the respective treatments for gender dysphoria are perceived. There was also an absence of studies from developing countries on gender dypshoria in childhood, suggesting implications may arise for the assessment and treatment of psychiatric comorbidities in non-gender clinics.

There are some substantial risks involved in these procedures: I Wish I Had Been Told About These Risks Before I Had Gender Surgery

Quote

Childhood Gender Dysphoria

One area where medical professionals should tread lightly is in the diagnosis and treatment of children who have gender identity issues.

A 2015 study aimed to gather input from pediatric endocrinologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and ethicists—both those in favor and those opposed to early treatment—to further the ethical debate.

The results showed no consensus on many basic topics of childhood gender dysphoria and insufficient research to support any recommendations for childhood treatments, including the currently published guidelines that recommend suppressing puberty with drugs until age 16, after which cross-sex hormones may be given.

An analysis of the 38 youth referrals for gender dysphoria to the Pediatric Endocrinology Clinic at the University School of Medicine in Indianapolis showed that more than half had psychiatric and/or developmental comorbidities.

Four-Year Study on Gender Affirming Care in the UK Warns of the Dangers of 'Gender Transition' for Kids

Quote

Four years ago, the doctors at the National Health Service (NHS) in Great Britain became alarmed about the treatment for children with gender dysphoria at the Gender Identity Development Services (GIDS) at the Tavistock in London. The NHS ordered a thorough study of Tavistock patients which was carried out by Dr. Hillary Cass, former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health at NHS.

The review of 9,000 patient records revealed what many professionals have suspected for years.

"This is an area of remarkably weak evidence, and yet results of studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint. The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress," Cass writes in the forward of the review.

It's a devastating indictment of gender care for kids. The study debunks almost every common myth advanced by the transgender fanatics, including the idea that if kids don't get care, they'll kill themselves.

"Michael Biggs’ work in this field showed that over a period of ten years (between 2010 and 2020), there were four known or suspected suicides among fifteen thousand children and adolescents on the GIDS waiting list. Two of these suicides were in people who were receiving treatment, two were on the waiting list. Every suicide is a tragedy, however, these numbers align with the risks associated with other mental health challenges," writes Stella O'Malley of Genspect, an organization that promotes "high-quality, evidence-based care for gender-nonconforming individuals all around the world."

The report recommends that no one under the age of 18 receive any kind of gender-affirming care, including hormone shots, and that “great caution” should be shown for patients under 25. 

The Dispatch:

The report included a variety of recommendations to improve care but concluded that “for most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” Consequently, the NHS reversed its decade-long practice of prescribing puberty-suppressing hormones (PSH) to children with gender dysphoria—“a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender of at least six months duration, as manifested” in delineated criteria, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. “We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of PSH to make the treatment routinely available at this time,” the NHS said last month. PSH treatment will still be available for participants in clinical trials and at private clinics, although some British lawmakers are now pushing for a ban across the board.

The most important finding of the Cass Report may be that it confirms that gender dysphoria in children has been consistently — perhaps deliberately — misdiagnosed when the feelings of gender confusion could very well be related to some other comorbidity.

The Atlantic:

When it comes to alleviating gender-related distress, “for the majority of young people, a medical pathway may not be the best way to achieve this.” That conclusion will now inform the creation of new state-provided services in England. These will attempt to consider patients more holistically, acknowledging that their gender distress might be part of a picture that also includes anxiety, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, or past trauma.

The New York Post points out that "Cass slams the World Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare guidelines for transitioning children as lacking 'developmental rigor and transparency.'" The Post also criticizes "health-care practitioners who 'abandoned normal clinical approaches' in order to start the process of 'transition.'" The Post points out that "the kids should first get screened for neurological conditions, autism and mental illness."

Trans activists will probably come back by quoting results from a 2011 Dutch study that showed positive outcomes for children given puberty blockers. The Cass report debunked much of that study.

The Dispatch:

But the Cass Review highlighted some significant issues with the 2011 study. For example, some of the study participants didn’t complete questionnaires after their treatments designed to assess their improvement, potentially biasing the results towards individuals who decided to come forward with positive outcomes. Plus, all the patients saw psychiatrists or psychologists during the PSH treatment, making it difficult to isolate the positive outcomes to the effects of the drugs.  

What’s more, subsequent research found that young people who experienced gender dysphoria as well as separate psychiatric issues reported no improvement in their well-being after taking PSH. Cass argued in The British Medical Journal that the early research showed success in a “small number of birth-registered males” but that the current population of people seeking gender treatment in the U.K. are largely “birth-registered”—or biological—females, and there is not sufficient evidence showing that that cohort benefits from PSH treatment. “It is unusual for us to give a potentially life-changing treatment to young people and not know what happens to them in adulthood,” Cass told BBC last week.

 

We can and should have discussions about these matters.  Some (many?) forms of activism, however, treat the propriety and advisability of these interventions as a foregone conclusion.  I find it worthwhile to examine the origins of these forms of activism, both in society and in the Church.

Thanks,

-Smac

[smac97]

1 hour ago, california boy said:

What specific law are you talking about?  What canons of medic ethics are you referring to?

There are a number of states that have legislated regulations regarding what is euphemistically referred to as "gender-affirming care" for minors.

1 hour ago, california boy said:

Quote

Nobody is, or ought to be, above the law.  Do you agree with this statement?

I do believe that just because a law is enforce, doesn't mean it is right.  

Well, sure.  This is the same reasoning utilized by people who disagree with same-sex marriage.  And it's a legitimate point.  But in the end, we are still a nation of laws.  So "{t}he only people who should be involved in this decision is the parents of the child, the child and the doctor" doesn't really work.

1 hour ago, california boy said:

I could list a whole lot of laws that have been bad laws starting with the right to own slaves.

So could I.  Some of them are even in force today.  Laws authorizing elective abortions, for example, are "bad laws."  But they are still the laws of the land.

Thanks,

-Smac

[The Nehor]

4 minutes ago, longview said:

Maybe you can use Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum as your last resort for truth verification. "The day will come the people will eat BUGS and be happy about it."

Are you under the impression that the World Economic Forum is some kind of governmental agency? Or that it is staffed by and led by experts?

It is a bunch of corporate and political elites with delusions of grandeur. It developed from an initiative to bring American management practices to Europe. In the early days it was more accurately a holiday trip for top executives to go skiing while attending a few self-gratifying meetings on the side so they could write off a trip to Switzerland as a business expense. Then they started thinking they were a 'big boy organization for big brained thinkers' and moved to New York. There they helped with such great initiatives as helping Colin Powell promote the idea of invading Iraq which as we all know was a resounding success.

Now it is a bunch of plutocrats (government and corporate) that use the organization as a forum to throw out ideas that they don't want to be accountable for (either to the shareholders or to the electorate). They mouth environmental platitudes and dabble in transhumanism but it is a bunch of detached elites pushing ideology that keeps them firmly in power. The bug comments come from the same elevated indifference as the apocryphal "let them eat cake" statement did in the French Revolution.

Then a bunch of reactionaries missed the point and threw in a dose of racism and classism screaming about how they will never eat bugs. What do they think we are????? A bunch of filthy poors from impoverished Africa? They did this thinking they are 'owning the libs' somehow (because they are fools). Oh, and yeah, the people who run the World Economic Forum do think that we are all a bunch of contemptuous filthy poors who exist to serve their interests. We should probably focus more on that contempt instead of the bug thing. Sounds more dangerous to me.

I am wondering if you wrote this thinking the World Economic Forum is somehow leftist and I would feel some weird need to defend them? Thanks, I needed that laugh. The laughter holds back the tears.

[JVW]

For what it's worth, even though I don't view the topic as political, my knee jerk reaction to this topic coming up in this thread is that if people talk about it the thread will be closed. I don't know if that's true or not, but this subject gets shut down pretty quickly in public discourse. I know when Abigail Shrier first published her book (it's really good), Irreversible Damage, it was banned on Amazon and several other bookstores for several months. So, for me, I feel like there is suppression around the topic, there's is a lot of dismissal, a lack of critical thinking and willingness to seriously consider opposing viewpoints.

It is a topic worth talking about, if we narrow the scope down to just minors it doesn't just impact the minor in question. Over 2% of High School girls currently identify as trans. So in a high school with 300 girls there'll be around 6 identifying that way. A decade or two ago there wasn't a single diagnosis of female gender dysphoria since it's first conception in the 1950's or whenever it was. There is an incredibly large social aspect to the trans ideology, and I view it as the new anorexia. So if my sweet little angel daughter grows up and hangs out with a bunch of trans girls at school, there is definitely a non-zero chance that she could start to identify that way. I want grandkids, I want my future teenage daughter to not make permanent, biologically life-altering decisions. I want her to be happy.

Trans does not make people suicidal. Bullying doesn't make people suicidal. I view trans as the ideology people adopt as a last resort before they die. The community is not made up of happy, peaceful, content individuals. People who are identifying that way hate their bodies so much that they want to look like a different gender. Someone feeling like that is already not happy. And for context, I have a relative who died by suicide as a trans teen. I also have a sister who currently identifies that way in her late twenties. I'm not some bigoted idiot commenting out of a lack of empathy, I'm just expressing my views.

[CV75]

I know a very skinny person who identifies as trans fat.

[smac97]

21 minutes ago, JVW said:

For what it's worth, even though I don't view the topic as political, my knee jerk reaction to this topic coming up in this thread is that if people talk about it the thread will be closed. I don't know if that's true or not, but this subject gets shut down pretty quickly in public discourse. I know when Abigail Shrier first published her book (it's really good), Irreversible Damage, it was banned on Amazon and several other bookstores for several months. So, for me, I feel like there is suppression around the topic, there's is a lot of dismissal, a lack of critical thinking and willingness to seriously consider opposing viewpoints.

It is a topic worth talking about, if we narrow the scope down to just minors it doesn't just impact the minor in question. Over 2% of High School girls currently identify as trans. So in a high school with 300 girls there'll be around 6 identifying that way. A decade or two ago there wasn't a single diagnosis of female gender dysphoria since it's first conception in the 1950's or whenever it was. There is an incredibly large social aspect to the trans ideology, and I view it as the new anorexia. So if my sweet little angel daughter grows up and hangs out with a bunch of trans girls at school, there is definitely a non-zero chance that she could start to identify that way. I want grandkids, I want my future teenage daughter to not make permanent, biologically life-altering decisions. I want her to be happy.

Trans does not make people suicidal. Bullying doesn't make people suicidal. I view trans as the ideology people adopt as a last resort before they die. The community is not made up of happy, peaceful, content individuals. People who are identifying that way hate their bodies so much that they want to look like a different gender. Someone feeling like that is already not happy. And for context, I have a relative who died by suicide as a trans teen. I also have a sister who currently identifies that way in her late twenties. I'm not some bigoted idiot commenting out of a lack of empathy, I'm just expressing my views.

That you felt it necessary to conclude your statements with "I'm not some bigoted idiot" rather strongly suggest that you are anticipating that accusation.  As I said: "Lots of suppression of viewpoints going on here."  Accusations of bigotry are big on the Hit Parade of those who want to silence others on this topic.  This sort of suppressive rhetoric is activism gone wrong, gone too far.  It is yet another reason, in addition to "March of Dimes Syndrome," to be circumspect about long-term and mission-creeping activists.  As Tierney aptly noted: "For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished."

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited October 8, 2024 by smac97

[The Nehor]

11 minutes ago, JVW said:

For what it's worth, even though I don't view the topic as political, my knee jerk reaction to this topic coming up in this thread is that if people talk about it the thread will be closed. I don't know if that's true or not, but this subject gets shut down pretty quickly in public discourse. I know when Abigail Shrier first published her book (it's really good), Irreversible Damage, it was banned on Amazon and several other bookstores for several months. So, for me, I feel like there is suppression around the topic, there's is a lot of dismissal, a lack of critical thinking and willingness to seriously consider opposing viewpoints.

Amazon never banned the book. They did cancel a marketing campaign on the site for it.

The book is not “good”. It pushes the notion of ROGD (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria) which is the idea that if you fall in with a transgender crowd you will get dysphoria suddenly and completely and want to transition immediately. There is no credible evidence that this happens and no major healthcare institution believes it exists.

It is quack science.

Also on a practical level if you just want to be queer because it is the route to acceptance (LOL) in a peer group there are much easier ways to do that. You just identify as a demiboy and wear masculine jeans and a hoodie or something or identify as heteroflexible and kiss a few girls. Why run to be transgender when it is currently the biggest target of bigots? Teenagers can be very stupid but they aren’t that stupid.

11 minutes ago, JVW said:

It is a topic worth talking about, if we narrow the scope down to just minors it doesn't just impact the minor in question. Over 2% of High School girls currently identify as trans. So in a high school with 300 girls there'll be around 6 identifying that way. A decade or two ago there wasn't a single diagnosis of female gender dysphoria since it's first conception in the 1950's or whenever it was. There is an incredibly large social aspect to the trans ideology, and I view it as the new anorexia. So if my sweet little angel daughter grows up and hangs out with a bunch of trans girls at school, there is definitely a non-zero chance that she could start to identify that way. I want grandkids, I want my future teenage daughter to not make permanent, biologically life-altering decisions. I want her to be happy.

It is actually around 2%. Also notable that 35% of that 2% attempted suicide in the last year. Oh, and those suicides go up in states that pass anti-transgender legislation.

There wasn’t a single case of dysphoria a decade or two ago since it was first conceived of in the 1950s? Are you a time traveller? Also dysphoria has been around since….well….forever. You can find its expressions taking different forms in different cultures.

Again, there is no evidence supporting the idea that there is a large social aspect. There was an attempt to make it the new anorexia but nothing backing it has surfaced.

Your daughter is not an extension of you that exists to fulfill all your desires. What if she identifies as lesbian or bisexual and starts to date women? What if she decides she doesn’t want children? Is she trash to be thrown aside for failing you? You want her to be happy and have decided in advance what that will require for her. Go back up to that 35% of those 2% having tried to commit suicide in the last year. Suicide rates are also higher in closeted youth. Creating an atmosphere where she has to hide her feelings will not help her be happy. You want to spare your child pain but all those desires won’t change their desires.

11 minutes ago, JVW said:

Trans does not make people suicidal.

No, but believing that being trans means they have no future does.

11 minutes ago, JVW said:

Bullying doesn't make people suicidal.

WRONG.

11 minutes ago, JVW said:

I view trans as the ideology people adopt as a last resort before they die. The community is not made up of happy, peaceful, content individuals. People who are identifying that way hate their bodies so much that they want to look like a different gender. Someone feeling like that is already not happy. And for context, I have a relative who died by suicide as a trans teen. I also have a sister who currently identifies that way in her late twenties. I'm not some bigoted idiot commenting out of a lack of empathy, I'm just expressing my views.

Of course it is not full of happy, peaceful, content individuals. Do you know what being closeted does to a person? Do you know about what it is like to have to hide part of yourself lest your family think you a monster? It is not fun being an object of ridicule. It is not fun knowing that many of your closest emotional relationships have a big conditional on them. You don’t know how they would react if they knew who you really are. It poisons those relationships. It is awful.

https://allosaurusfragilis.tumblr.com/post/176976406631

I spent a lot of time weeping wishing I was straight because it would be easier. I wasn’t though and I am still not. My opinion was not asked for. I am in my 40s and have accepted what I am for about 20 years now. I am still working through the damage that hiding and self-hatred did to me.

Transgender people have it much much worse off than I do. Stop spreading ideas and intolerance that make it worse for them. They suffer enough.

[The Nehor]

31 minutes ago, smac97 said:

That you felt it necessary to conclude your statements with "I'm not some bigoted idiot" rather strongly suggest that you are anticipating that accusation.  As I said: "Lots of suppression of viewpoints going on here."  Accusations of bigotry are big on the Hit Parade of those who want to silence others on this topic.  This sort of suppressive rhetoric is activism gone wrong, gone too far.  It is yet another reason, in addition to "March of Dimes Syndrome," to be circumspect about long-term and mission-creeping activists.  As Tierney aptly noted: "For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished."

Thanks,

-Smac

Calling racists racist is an attempt to silence them!!!!!!!

We know, try to keep up with the rest of the class here.

Also the silencing thing isn’t working so whining about it is really just pathetic. It leads to weirdos thinking they are being horribly oppressed and that trans people are protected and lauded and lead privileged lives. It is broke-brained thinking.

[Calm]

1 hour ago, JVW said:

A decade or two ago there wasn't a single diagnosis of female gender dysphoria since its first conception in the 1950's or whenever it was. There is an incredibly large social aspect to the trans ideology, and I view it as the new anorexia

Five decades ago there is a good chance there wasn’t a single diagnosis of restless legs syndrome since previous work on the disorder by a doctor here and there was ignored by all the rest until the 1980s.  Wasn’t until the 90s it became well known.  And yet the percentage of the population that has it at some time in their life is probably around 10%.

There is nothing social about the diagnosis.   The disorder has existed for a very long time (we have the first record of it being described in the 1600s).  I don’t think one should assume something has a social aspect or worse doesn’t actually exist just because it was previously unknown.  Pretty much all diseases fall into that category if you go back far enough.  You need to show actual social contagion behaviour rather than just claiming it.  

Edited October 8, 2024 by Calm

[The Nehor]

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

Ah, well.  Reasonable minds can disagree about such things.

This again. 🤪

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

I think the examples Tierney notes are pretty apt.  An appeal to ridicule won't work here.

Reuters in October 2022: Putting numbers on the rise in children seeking gender care

Reuters in October 2022: As more transgender children seek medical care, families confront many unknowns

National Review in August 2023: Thousands of Minors Have Received ‘Gender-Affirming Surgeries’

We can and should have discussions about these matters.  

Any number of reasons.  

There are some substantial risks involved in these procedures.

Most kids grow out of their desire to change their sex.  

Comorbidities should be addressed: Gender dysphoria and psychiatric comorbidities in childhood: a systematic review

There are some substantial risks involved in these procedures: I Wish I Had Been Told About These Risks Before I Had Gender Surgery

Four-Year Study on Gender Affirming Care in the UK Warns of the Dangers of 'Gender Transition' for Kids

We can and should have discussions about these matters.  Some (many?) forms of activism, however, treat the propriety and advisability of these interventions as a foregone conclusion.  I find it worthwhile to examine the origins of these forms of activism, both in society and in the Church.

Do you have anything to actually say or are you just throwing out an article list from luminaries such as the National Review and the (LOL) Daily Mail? This is like a monkey throwing feces and thinking they are now winning a debate.

Edited October 8, 2024 by The Nehor