Or the opposite, there are people who support children making significant life changes without any parental oversight or psychological analysis.
Who? What I do see is this:
- Trans community is concerned about being outed to unsupportive parents which could lead to abuse, against their own wishes. Laws being passed that require outing LGBT children to parents undermine the ability of a person to have some semblance of autonomy or shield themselves from reprisal from family members.
- Trans community is concerned about having to deal with paternalistic gatekeeping rather than exploratory therapy to help the individual figure it out for themselves.
Ultimately, if someone see trans identity as a pathology to be addressed, I suppose the above doesn’t really matter or can be dismissed. Which is one thing I was getting at about pathology in my last post. It doesn’t help that there is a rather vocal group out there mis-representing what the community actually wants.
Whether people like it or not, there needs to be acceptance that trans people exist and will live their best life having undergone gender transition. On the other hand, I think there is reasonable data to suggest a concern about transgenderism being a phase some children may go through and medical intervention may not be the best course of treatment in some children.
What medical intervention are we talking about here?
For children pre-puberty, some clothes a new hair style and trying out a different name isn’t a big thing. Social transition is relatively simple at that age. If it does desist, that’s fine. No harm, no foul. In terms of puberty, blockers to buy time to sort things out can lead to improved outcomes without jumping straight into HRT.
If anything, I think we tend to make folks wait too long to get access to therapy. Folks under the NHS in the UK have it particularly bad with wait times for the
first appointment being
years. This can lead to folks that have stronger dysphoria to take matters into their own hands, which I’d imagine is something you don’t want.
That said, I don’t think this tragedy should be considered a representation of trans-ideology broadly. As far as I know such an event has never occurred, at least at this scale. At the same time, I do not accept that ANY amount of mistreatment of the trans community justifies killing other people, especially 3 innocent 9 year old children. It troubles me that some in the media have tacitly justified this as understandable or not surprising. Meanwhile other mass shooters are given none of this and are often labeled as having some sort of unproven white supremacist motivation when in most cases the issue is more likely bullying/social rejection which is probably not so different to this case.
In what way has the media being justifying this as understandable? I see some acknowledgement of the political situation in places, but that’s about it. At least outside the Murdoch-sphere at the moment.
That said, I fall into the ”not surprised” camp here. But more because we’ve got a rather ugly mix of stuff here in the US that makes this sort of event too easy to accomplish. As for the details on this specific event, I am waiting for information on the manifesto before trying to make any sort of guess as to the motivations involved here.
That said, so much needs to be done to prevent these mass mass murders from occurring. I am not opposed to an assault rifle ban, but I just don’t think it’s politically feasible. What l do know is that in almost all of these cases there are many, many red flags that go ignored. And at the very least we need to ensure the systems in place work as they’re supposed to and to not allow people to fall through the cracks.
And we as society in general could probably do better to be compassionate and inclusive to everyone. And do make every effort to help those who are struggling- up to and including reporting those who may pose a danger to self or others.
I agree that red flags do get thrown on so many of these occasions. To the point that I think red flag laws can probably help. To a point…
The other aspect of trans identity as a pathology is that depending on how the red flag laws work, it isn’t hard to “Jim Crow” your way into leveraging those laws against minorities. If trans identity is considered a mental illness (by legislators), then it’s not a huge leap to say that is a flag that can be used to “defang” a group of people.
As a bit of an aside, we’re finally starting to see some places drop their compulsory sterilization rules related to gender markers on government documents. There are multiple US states where this is still the case though, and feeds into requiring specific medical interventions in order to avoid issues with incongruent outward appearance and documentation. So I think it’s understandable that many in the community would be acutely anxious about the idea of a trans mass shooter leading towards laws that could ultimately strip their right to self defense. But again, strip the pathology away and it becomes harder to use trans identity as a “red flag” in laws such as these, or to justify requiring specific medical procedures/sterilization.