Chloe’s case is a tragedy, for sure. The issue I have is that people are calling for bans rather than enhanced oversight.
Healthcare, at its core, is a numbers game. No effective treatment we’ve ever discovered is completely without risk. Every surgery or treatment, no matter how innocuous, could lead to complications or death. To use a recent example, the Covid vaccinations. They’re considered extremely safe, and over 13 billion vaccination doses have been given to date with over 5 billion people having been vaccinated. Given that Covid kills or permanently disables 2 in every 100 unvaccinated people, and vaccines lower that rate by at least 90%, that’s nearly 100 million lives that have been safeguarded by the vaccine. However, the vaccine has certainly harmed some people with extremely rare side effects. We accept that tradeoff, because saving 100 million lives is worth the risk of harming a few thousand people.
Gender affirming care for children is the same thing. We know that trans children are at extremely elevated risks of self harm and suicide, and gender affirming care is proven to be effective in preventing those outcomes. We know that some will regret their decision to transition because those cases are inevitable in any population that transitions. The focus should be on reducing the cases of regret with better screening and more oversight.
So, to debate this seriously, you need to answer the following question:
How many regretful de-transitioners are you willing to risk in order to save the lives of successful transitioners?
If the answer is zero, then you’re not willing to seriously debate the use of a medical treatment and your opinion is dogmatic and carries no semantic value.
If the answer is very few, then congratulations, you’re on the same side as many allies who want more funding for care and screening for trans issues.
Chloe would have likely been helped by more psychiatric care and screening, as from her story it’s clear that her sexual assault as a minor precipitated a complex regarding her sexuality that was misdiagnosed as a desire to transition.
I’m a progressive, and nothing pisses me off more than other progressives being useful idiots for the right wing agenda.
What’s the point of whining like this if you’re not willing to understand the political realities of the US government and the current Democratic and Republican parties? Biden didn’t WANT to give up most of his social agenda, but he was forced to give it up in order to get ANYTHING done at all. Manchin and Sinema (may she step on legos barefoot every day for the rest of her life) blocked any attempts to get the social programs through the reconciliation process, and that doomed them because they certainly couldn’t pass the filibuster. Do people think Biden WANTED his social programs to be blocked?
The fact is, because of fifth columnists like Manchin and Sinema, the social programs will be blocked by united GOP obstruction until the Democrats have enough votes to overcome them. If a greater number of dissatisfied progressives actually came out to vote for progress instead of staying home wishing for perfection, we might have had a 52-48 senate majority and the BBB plan might have been passed nearly in its entirety. Instead we had a coal baron and a future Fox News correspondent block all the environmental and social programs that came up for vote and Biden was forced to compromise his vision.
I’m halfway convinced that people like the author of this article don’t really want progress, they want revolution. They don’t actually care about people getting hurt, they just want to see the utopian future they dream of being directly implemented. Newsflash, revolutions are usually a bad thing for the poor. The people who have the most capability to generate and apply force usually come out on top in a revolution. Those people aren’t the poor, they’re usually elites who currently aren’t in power. If the US had a general revolution right now, the new power structure would likely consist of the “good” billionaires and their military leaders, who would eventually coopt the power structure to make certain they stayed on top as usual. Society would be disrupted, millions would suffer, and fundamentally very little would change except the titles of the people exploiting labor.
If you don’t attempt to understand history and the structure of the systems that govern you, you will be continuously taken advantage of by those that do.