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I don't know how different the UK is compared to the US, the guy in the article is from the UK where they have a different health system then we do. I'd like to think it would happen less here then there.
According to the article he started hormones in 2015, started living as a female. By the time he had the surgery he'd been living on hormones as a female for over 2 years. He also states he was in therapy before the surgery. Now a few years later he regrets what he did.
The article leads me to think that this guy has other health issues which it seems like he's trying to put blame on other people for his decision to go through with the surgery when he did, saying he really couldn't deal with the fact that he was born gay or something like that.
I believe that in the America of the Seventies, one could have assumed one would get competent counseling. However, considering the high number of utterly incompetent and corrupt people who now people our professions, and who occupy positions of public trust, that assumption can no longer be made.
The bungling of the care of the Turpin children, following their discovery, and their becoming wards of the state, is a horrible illustration of just what sort of creature is allowed to administer to, manage, and "guide" young people, these days.
Yes, there should be counseling. However, given the above realities, I don't believe that this is now POSSIBLE.
In a remote corner of my own family, there was a beautiful and brilliant girl. A natural leader, she was a favorite of classmates. She mentored her own teachers. She was that smart, and that much of a leader. She placed among the nation's top math students, which landed her a complete scholarship, despite her industrialist father's income, in an elite degree program, at an elite college. She was STACKED, too.
As a female, she was a complete success. Looking the way she did, and considering the high-earning profession she was on-track for entering, she could have had any woman she wanted, for the rest of her life.
However, that corner of our family have huge problems with joinerism, egalitarianism, conformity, and "manhood issues". They're "joiners" (the rest of my family regard athletes as disposable sex toys, and nothing more. But her corner of the family worship sports teams, along with the whole sports sickness which normally only affects lumpenproles). They joined all sorts of things, actually, and embraced all sorts of groupthink. They downwardly-assimilated all sorts of inferior modes of speech, dress, and interior design. The children's very names are Kardashian-level, to put it kindly.
Her grandfather, in the second generation of my uncles who fled Mississippi to attain prominence in better regions, grew up as a fatherless boy. He grew up to be a star athlete in high school, and a Michael Landon lookalike (including the fabled part) - all of this allowing him to become a hemingwayesque caricature of manliness(masking a secret life about like Michael Landon's). His gender hysteria and shame infected his son, who worshiped his powerful, charismatic, noble, narcissist father. The son observably struggles with his father's irrational obsessions, while dutifully struggling to perpetuate them.
So, here comes this girl, who's come up within her family's culture of conformity, group-think, nobility, and need to join(and need to unquestioningly excel at things which rational dissection would reveal as having no value to the person doing the excelling). They live in a part of the Lower Midwest: chosen by the grandfather, precisely because it was the least-diverse place imaginable. As with Portland, people in this girl's town, could afford to have noble ideals, because they lived in a microcosm sheltered from reality.
All those factors, including her family's "manhood" obsession, coalesced into the perfect storm. She bound her spectacular chest. She started taking hormones. The alternative community in their sheltered little university town, probably cheered-her-on. Her toxic mother probably egged-her-on, gloating secretly. Now, she's had surgery. She had the only Upper Class girl's name in her corner of the family. Now, HE has a Working Class man's name. While she was a stunning and successful young woman, he is an utter failure at manhood - the very manhood her father and grandfather found so ridiculously important.
Men, like it or not, are judged on their size, their muscularity, the depth of their voices, the amount of money they make, and upon parts I can't mention. He has none of that. He's small. He's not built. He's not hairy. His voice falls short of the baritone rumble he so wants to affect. We won't talk about the physical attributes which are just-plain-MISSING. And, instead of staying on-track for becoming an elite professional, he became so distracted by "social issues", he plotzed in school, and now he's doing menial labor.... low-paying menial labor.
I tried, when the chest-binding began, focusing on logistics, to explain that to be a successful "he", she would have to go on serious 'roids - and HGH, and lift weights like crazy. "Do you know how much pressure men are under, to be muscular and V-shaped?" I began explaining ketosis and fasting, for boosting HGH. While this was true, I should have SCREAMED: "As a woman, you're a perfect 10. You've got it ALL! Play the damn cards you were dealt, dammit! You've already drawn a winning hand. You won't draw a hand like that, again."
I should have jumped into the fray, and talked reality, to counter all the platitudes and relativism and group-think and tolerance spouted by others. But I didn't. I was just one of those greedy, cynical, globalist, eugenicist, misanthropic, amoral, ignoble monsters from the family outside their idyllic little mountain town full of academics.
So, I held-back. And I regret it.
Good luck, in finding a therapist/counselor who'll tell kids the things I should have told my young cousin.
(All of this said, I feel the need to state that there absolutely ARE people who are genuinely born between genders. They have to choose. They don't have much of a choice. We should be as supportive as we can be, of such people. We should say prayers of thanks, if we, ourselves, don't face such dilemmas.)
Last edited by Rachel NewYork; 06-29-2022 at 01:42 PM..
Reason: Removed red text. Red text is reserved for moderator actions.
I tried, when the chest-binding began, focusing on logistics, to explain that to be a successful "he", she would have to go on serious 'roids - and HGH, and lift weights like crazy. "Do you know how much pressure men are under, to be muscular and V-shaped?" I began explaining ketosis and fasting, for boosting HGH. While this was true, I should have SCREAMED: "As a woman, you're a perfect 10. You've got it ALL! Play the damn cards you were dealt, dammit! You've already drawn a winning hand. You won't draw a hand like that, again."
But if someone, like your cousin, has gender dysphoria and truly believes that they were born into the wrong body, telling them (or screaming at them) that they should be grateful to look how they look is actually cruel. Your cousin hated himself every time he looked in the mirror and didn't see a man reflected back at him.
Here is a link to The Cleveland Clinics protocol regarding Gender Reassignment Surgery. One stipulation is that before any surgical changes are made, the prospective patient must live for a year as their desired gender. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/about...guidelines-tab
As you will read, each procedure requires one, two, or three letters from psychiatrists, attesting to the candidate's suitability for gender resignment surgery. In a broad sense, they also must demonstrate that they are of sound mind.
This procedure is taken very seriously.
Along with the Cleveland Clinic, the other hospitals providing this procedure are all "A" list medical facilities. A few examples - Mount Siani Medical Center NYC, Johns Hopkins Medical Center, Baltimore, Boston Hospital, Massachusetts and others of this caliber.
You're posting things from conservative media that have a distinct anti-trans bias. This peer-reviewed study finds that regret after gender-affirmation surgery is around 1%: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8099405/
Look at the reply above your own. Is the Times of London “conservative media”? A quick search using the person’s name brought up several other sources.
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Last edited by Rachel NewYork; 06-30-2022 at 08:00 AM..
Look at the reply above your own. Is the Times of London “conservative media”? A quick search using the person’s name brought up several other sources.
But the larger point is that a 1% rate of regret over having gender-affirmation surgery is a non-issue. As I pointed out, exponentially more people regret having children, getting married, getting a tattoo, going/not going to college, etc.--but because those things are "normal" while being trans is "weird," no one is suggesting widespread counseling for every decision someone might make.
Look at the reply above your own. Is the Times of London “conservative media”? A quick search using the person’s name brought up several other sources.
The evidence of one person (in three articles) is not evidence of more generalized regret regarding this surgery. I am sure if you do a cursory search for people regretting cosmetic surgery generally, the evidence available will be more plentiful. It seems like there isn’t a week that goes by where we don’t hear about some celebrity or another regretting X or Y surgery. I don’t see plastic surgeons denying people surgeries unless it is clear that the request is the result of some mental illness- like someone requesting unreasonably huge breasts or other enhancements. On the other hand, I certainly SEE people irl who appear to have had cosmetic surgeries that are not realistic at all, so someone is performing them.
When I actually talk to people who have had plastic surgery or hear about them anecdotally from friends, the results are much more positive. Chances are, if someone doesn’t have a problem, we are not going to hear about it.
These are very reputable sources, quite unlike the OP's link to "The Daily Mail", a notorious British tabloid "scandal rag" with notoriously low journalistic standards.
The findings from the peer reviewed NIH study were shocking - even to me. I knew that with all of the psychological testing, and other precautions, there would be a relatively low percentage of patients who regret this procedure, but "abound 1%" was even lower than I expected.
This is startlingly low, when one considers the drastic and controversial nature of GRS. Apparently, there are many satisfied customers, and the medical centers, physicians and psychologists involved are doing a thorough job of selecting - and weeding out - candidates.
The other study published by "The Atlantic" was a little greater than I expected. Apparently, eight percent of parents regret having children.
I suspect that this number may increase, at least in certain states in the US,
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