The state of proper gender therapy
(media.communities.win)
Comments (29)
sorted by:
I keep coming back to puberty.
There is no fucking way anyone has any clue about their sexuality until they pass through puberty.
I’m an atheist. I don’t have strong commitments to sexual orientation, etc., because of religious beliefs.
But give me a fucking break.
ANY attempts to alter CHILDREN before puberty is one of the worst forms of abuse.
Wait... so you don't consult 4 year olds for decisions on long-term investment?
But medical experts say it's now possible for kids to know their gender in the womb.
Doctor, "You're 7 months pregnant. I'm going to assign your child-thing as a girl, but from the masculine position in the womb I believe it is really a boy trapped in a girl's body. You should hold off on buying baby clothes until the baby has decided its preferred gender."
These people are sick.
You're better off consulting a 4-year-old than a "professional financial advisor."
Altering them during puberty is just as bad. The hormonal changes make teenagers (and face it, we've ALL been through it) completely confused to the point where we don't recognize our own bodies at times. We go to school and we're awkward. We do stupid things. We get made fun of by our classmates, sometimes even our friends and family. And then, God help us if we ever get attracted to someone and then make even more of a fool of ourselves trying to figure out how to talk to them and spend time with them without ending up as a completely inarticulate, wobbly mess. We've all had that experience. It goes on like that for years.
And this is the mental state in which these predators assert that a teenager is mature enough to make life-altering, irreversible decisions like those to render oneself sterile and cut off any of those awkward parts we don't like and replace them with totally non-functional awkward parts of the other sex.
You don't need God to know this is wrong. Even if you're totally atheist, you can understand that these teenagers are not capable of making this kind of decision. Hell, watch one of those classic 80s high school movies if you need a refresher. Kids need powerful, wise, firm, but loving adults in their life to guide them into adulthood while giving them enough confidence to life their lives. They do not need weak, beta adults trying to boost their own egos, satisfy their own insecurities, or trying to live vicariously through the children.
SANE mental health care for confused teens is banned in 20 states? I did not know that. Kinda wish I didn't know that.
This is why control of the language is so important. Orwell was right again. Conversion therapy should be the polite way of mutilating your body to look like the other gender, and gender affirmation should be non-destructively helping people accept how they were born.
Excellent point!
I’m a former lib. I’m a Christian, a Trump lover, and happen to be gay. I tried conversion therapy and it was extremely harmful to me in my teens. I know young men who killed themselves because of it. It’s terrible.
My lib friends don’t even know how to respond when I tell them I’m against transitioning children for the same reason I’m against gay conversion therapy. Both concepts are encouraging and affirming a young person’s self-hatred.
Trangenderism is the polar opposite of self-acceptance.
I also tell my drag-queen-loving friends that the transgender movement will soon be calling drag “trans appropriation” and equating it to blackface. It’s the only logical next step if you subscribe to that nonsense.
I'm a married hetero, Christian (in the way Jesus defined it, not as any organized religion does), and pretty much a life-long libertarian or abolitionist -- if any of that matters to you.
I'm also a science nerd, and one thing I know is that brain development and body development have distinctly different paths -- see Affective Neuroscience by Jaak Panksepp, 1998, p. 232 in particular.
It's quite possible for a male body to house a brain that is organized more like a typical female brain, and vice versa. That's not the only path to same-sex attraction, of course, but it certainly is one -- and "sin" has nothing to do with it.
Another point that has always seemed obvious to me: Jesus whole ministry involved bringing more compassion to the world. Just because the Old Testament says something, or someone other than Jesus says it in the NT, doesn't mean Jesus would have approved of it.
"Let he without sin cast the first stone" is a clear example of this.
> Does that mean you support the idea of "trans" people / kids? Or, that male/ female traits are overlapping..?
No, there IS no converting a male body into a female body, and the hormonal and especially the surgical attempts to do so are horrors; those who do such things to young people who have been conned into having them done are criminals. They know damn well you can't turn a young man into a woman, nor can you turn a young woman into a man. The detrans movement is full of people who are living with the mostly unfixable consequences and more than a few are unABLE to live with those consequences.
What Dr. Panksepp is saying is that there are differences in male and female brains, and because our brains and the rest of our bodies are on somewhat different developmental tracks, it is possible for a person to have a clearly male body with a largely female brain, or for a clearly female person to grow up with a brain closer to the male norm. I believe that is one common reason for people to grow up feeling "they're in the wrong body" and, in some cases, to have same-sex attraction. Again, that's certainly not the ONLY way people feel uncomfortable in their bodies or find themselves attracted to the same sex, but it's one that I don't see being discussed or taken into consideration, well, anywhere. I believe a person's sexual preference is neither a moral decision nor anyone else's business, and the available science supports that, IMO.
On religion: I grew up attending Methodist churches and Sunday School but always felt the Old Man with a Beard in the Sky idea was bizarre and on the same level as Santa or the Easter bunny. Also, I knew too many people who attended church and/or identified as Christian who were mean-spirited in their daily lives, which told me that at the very least "being Christian" by itself didn't make one a good person.
So from an early age I was an atheist; science made sense to me, religion did not.
On the other hand, I believed that religions had important things to say about life, and learned more about them.
Physics, of all things, really started getting me interested in religion a few decades ago. The science of consciousness, of quantum mechanics, and of several other areas fascinates me (there's a LOT of interesting material in those areas) and eventually I ran into something that really flipped a switch for me:
The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality by Bernardo Kastrup.
It's not even that I fully embrace or believe his views, but rather that it shocked me into seeing how a shift in paradigm (the framework we use to organize facts and details into a coherent mental picture) was enough to help understand the common thread among nearly all religions and to see their utility for humans in our many cultures. I am less concerned now about the specific framework that people or cultures have and more focused on what actually happens and the fundamentals being depicted (as opposed to the way those fundamentals are named or dressed up).
It also made clear that the various ways religions describe heaven, an afterlife, and other spiritual matters might be (in part) attempts to conceptualize a universe in which consciousness is foundational rather than a side-effect of the squishy matter between our ears.
Kastrup's Idealism solves the "hard problem of consciousness" (how can atoms and flesh create SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE?) and a few other problems in physics, but the shift from "matter is primary, and creates consciousness" to "consciousness is primary, and creates the matter and physical laws we see in the universe" is quite a jolt. There are many other versions of (roughly) that idea; Kastrup discusses them and highlights the problems of each.
To oversimplify, Idealism sees the physical brain as capturing a tiny, dissociated bit of the universal consciousness -- That Which Experiences, as he puts it -- and it is THIS which constitutes our soul, this which keeps us from being zombies, acting on information from our senses (as even a thermostat on the wall does) without ever experiencing anything.
All life on Earth is family, because we share the language of DNA (and for one example, every living thing on Earth uses the same energy-transfer molecule, ATP, without which life slams to a halt; even melatonin is so ancient that even many plants make it).
If Kastrup is right, all conscious life -- LOTS of argument about where consciousness starts, both in other species and in a growing human fetus -- is family for another reason: our very consciousness is temporarily dissociated piece of the universal consciousness itself.
As for Jesus: These four short quotations from Him are, for me, all the Bible needs to contain. If anything, much of the other material has caused confusion and problems, imo. Any true religion supports love, compassion, and therefore particularly supports the proper and compassionate treatment of children.
Matthew: 18:1 -- 18:6 about children, and protecting them.
Mark: 10:13 -- 10:15 about children
Luke: 17:21 Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
John: 13:34 A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. 13:35 By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.
I just read through this and am appalled at how long it is. I've just run on and on, really. It would take me a week or more to edit this properly. I hope you find something useful or interesting in some of it, useruser123, and in any case, I wish you well on your own journeys.
Some of those self-professed "Christians" can some of the most hateful and judgmental people around.
You're right. It took me a long time to understand it wasn't so much Christianity itself failing as it was toxic parenting. Even a religion that specifically tells us to love one another can't reliably overcome THAT.
I know what you mean! The more you learn about the natural world the more stunning it is. Even the smallest biological thing is so complex it's hard to believe it can function. I've never been able to believe in Biblical miracles, but I certainly understand people of any age being gobsmacked by the miracle of life or mesmerized by the miracles of physics or the other sciences. We are very lucky to live in a time when not only is science so advanced but so much high-quality science writing is available.
Thanks for that. Something to think about.
I'm a former inpatient psych nurse. Once i had a pt who was born an A, but was transitioning to become a B. Their partner was on the other unit, born a B but trying to become an A. I thought, THIS IS WHY YOU ARE IN THE PSYCH HOSPITAL! There's no medication to fix that kind of mental illness!
Truly. And we’ve allowed the mental patients to run the show……..
oh yes, they were there for weeks, eating up Benzos for "Myyyyyy annnxxxxiiieeeettttyyyyy" Well, no wonder they were anxious! ahh had no patience for that kind of stuff.
Being a mental health nurse is so hard. At the core of it, they’re just people that don’t want to follow societies rules. Whether they have “control” over that can be debated.
It was super hard and I don't do it any more.
Its honestly not even that uncommon anymore, and that's the scary part. Last 2 jobs I worked had co-workers doing the exact same thing (and a 3rd coworker who always bragged about his "Girlfriend's penis").
it is scary, weird, gross, it's such a weird way to try to fit in
Wait, how do you ban therapy of willing participants, so long as it’s the conversational kind?
Right is up, left is down, up is left, down is right, right is left and left is right with these people.
They did to the language what they're doing to the kids. "Affirming who they really are" is to make them comfortable in their intact body. "Conversion therapy" is to give them a new name, give them hormones, and mutilate their body.
Sorry, while the first paragraph is correct and I agree with his point, the second paragraph is incorrect, conversion therapy is about convincing gay people to be straight. The process is abusive and is justly banned where it is BECAUSE it is not about addressing the CAUSE(S) of homosexuality+, as much as a type of brainwashing.
I'm not going to pretend I have correct answers to this, but if there was a protocol to address homosexuality+ (and I've seen the parasite argument, and do find it compelling) then THAT should be in use and permitted.
I get clown world and all, but as much as I agree with this guys point, I have to disagree with the argument.