So
@Bomb#20, it would be really useful at this point, for establishing good faith, to just acknowledge,
whether or not you knew already, "Sigma, it is indeed obvious that people are born transgender, and affirmation is clearly necessary for transgender people's health, especially that of transgender youth." Again, I do not care a button whether you already knew or not. I just need us to clear that communication hurdle, so I can know if it is okay to stop reposting those links.
It's not clear why you posted them in the first place; but I guess I need to congratulate you on having the sense not to post them a third time and become a living example of "What I tell you three times is true." But as far as I can see they have no bearing on any dispute I'm having with you; you seem to have invented out of whole cloth some position for me that you keep arguing against even though I've given you no reason to think whatever position you're fighting against is mine.
Do feel free to clarify your position.
I already stated my positions upthread and if you'd read for content instead of reading for tirade triggers you wouldn't have found them unclear.
But on one point my position is pretty much the same as yours: that evidence is required to back up truth claims. You are not conscientious about not making truth claims without evidence. Over and over, you make claims you have no evidence for about what's going on in other people's minds. My position is that you ought to stop doing that.
Not everything that I say is specifically a response to your particular views. I have a lot to say on the subject, in general.
*snaps her tail with a loud crack*
Now, pay attention. There are others in this thread besides you and myself. There is at least one douche-flute here that claims that the fact that I am transgender is "just a thought in my head," regardless of the fact that I have offered evidence to the contrary. There is at least one raving lunatic here that claims that I am trying to bring an end to civilization only by asking people around me to call me she/her,
s'il vous plait, merci beaucoup.
Also, the general anti-woke movement, throughout the country, has become particularly toxic surrounding conservative politicians like DeSantis. He has signed a bill that literally makes it a crime for a teacher to have a copy of
Heather Has Two Mommies on the bookshelf or to talk about the families of children that actually do have same-sex parents. They are calling people "groomers" if they object to that lunacy. Furthermore, transphobia, in the United States, has been surging for the past three years, at least, and as someone that has already experienced the violence of the 1980's and the 1990's, I know, from experience, that that kind of hate can get seriously out-of-hand.
There are several issues that I talk about in these posts, not just views specifically stated by you.
I increasingly find anti-wokeists to be the most abysmally useless pieces of <expletive deleted> that I have ever met on the Internet, though, and the more I interact with them, the more I want to punch them in the eye.
Well isn't that special?
I have been attempting to explain what my own positions are.
I'm pretty sure you just did.
Further, it's not clear why you imagine I would need to agree with your above assertion in order to "establish good faith". As far as I can see you haven't offered any evidence for it. There were no babies in the studies you posted. How the heck do you figure anisotropy in diffusion in the brains observed in teenagers and adults says anything one way or the other about whether the anisotropy arose before they were born or during childhood?
In other words, you ask us to speculate that the brain has a degree of plasticity that it does not, as far as anyone knows, have.
Why do you do that? Why do you over and over ignore the plain meaning of the words people say to you and impute some completely different meaning to it? I didn't say a bloody thing about brain plasticity. Read it again, and this time read for content. I'm
obviously talking about the
timing of brain changes. You made a truth claim about
when something happens, and you say empirical evidence is required for truth claims, but nothing you presented was evidence for
when brain diffusion becomes anisotropic. What time a change happens has jack squat to do with how plastic anything is.
I find such naivette, regarding how the central nervous system develops, to be shocking. It is doubtful to me that such large differences in connectivity are amenable to changing readily during development. I assumed that most people possessed of any interest in science at all understood that the brain you have is, to a large extent, the brain you are stuck with. Besides subtle things you can do to guard yourself against cognitive degeneration later in life and weak evidence regarding the efficacy of nootropics like
bacopa monnierri and
hericium erinaceus, your ability to change how your brain is connected, throughout most of your lifetime, is actually a little bit limited. While you can slightly improve your general cognitive performance over long periods of time if you do a lot to exercise your brain every day, it is actually unusual and extraordinary if you can fundamentally change how your brain is put together. I tend to take this to be general knowledge.
Therefore, I was really shocked when you asked me when a person's brain becomes this way. As far as I know, the way that y our brain is fundamentally put together when you are a small child is a fairly good predictor of how it will be fundamentally put together when you are an adult.
I assumed that the statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics would give you enough information to satisfy you, in regard to the position that a person's gender identity is pretty much set from early childhood. If you find their sources to be inadequate, I would like to know which ones you contend are inadequate.
If you want me to, I can cite a single study that specifically finds sex-atypical brain connectivity in transgender children. This article by a team including Nota, Kruekels, and several other highly educated doctors concludes that transgender children have sex-atypical brains. If you want to pull up the entire article on Sci-Hub, then be my guest. Here is the abstract.
Brain functional connectivity patterns in children and adolescents with gender dysphoria: Sex-atypical or not?
Author links open overlay panel
Nienke M.NotaaBaudewijntje P.C.Kreukelsb
Martinden HeijeraDick J.VeltmancPeggy T.Cohen-KettenisbSarah M.Burked1JulieBakkerbe1
Various previous studies have reported that brains of people diagnosed with gender dysphoria (GD) show sex-atypical features. In addition, recent functional magnetic resonance imaging studies found that several brain resting-state networks (RSNs) in adults with GD show functional connectivity (FC) patterns that are not sex-atypical, but specific for GD. In the current study we examined whether FC patterns are also altered in prepubertal children and adolescents with GD in comparison with non-gender dysphoric peers. We investigated FC patterns within RSNs that were previously examined in adults: visual networks (VNs), sensorimotor networks (SMNs), default mode network (DMN) and salience network. Thirty-one children (18 birth assigned males; 13 birth assigned females) and 40 adolescents with GD (19 birth assigned males or transgirls; 21 birth assigned females or transboys), and 39 cisgender children (21 boys; 18 girls) and 41 cisgender adolescents (20 boys; 21 girls) participated. We used independent component analysis to obtain the network maps of interest and compared these across groups. Within one of the three VNs (VN-I), adolescent transgirls showed stronger FC in the right cerebellum compared with all other adolescent groups. Sex differences in FC between the cisgender adolescent groups were observed in the right supplementary motor area within one of the two SMNs (SMN-II; girls > boys) and the right posterior cingulate gyrus within the posterior DMN (boys > girls). Within these networks adolescent transgirls showed FC patterns similar to their experienced gender (female). Also adolescent transboys showed a FC pattern similar to their experienced gender (male), but within the SMN-II only. The prepubertal children did not show any group differences in FC, suggesting that these emerge with aging and during puberty. Our findings provide evidence for the existence of both GD-specific and sex-atypical FC patterns in adolescents with GD.
And I can assure you that it is not possible to raise a transgender child to be anything besides transgender. My father's attempts to teach me how to hunt and fish only made me a transgender girl that knew how to hunt and fish. I could still dress a deer if I wanted to. I had a hermaphroditic rolepaying character (a highly feminine one) by the time I was 14, and I only took that long because I was a late-bloomer.
*spreads out her wings and poses in her shiny black glory* Of course, since that secret roleplaying character was once my only outlet for my real gender identity, I actually did develop a deep emotional attachment to dragons that has, as you can see, stuck like crazy glue.
I think that the chances that transgender children are not set on that course from birth are trivial. The science is still young, but I think that it will eventually be proved that transgender people literally are born as such, assuming it has not been already and I have merely failed to find the publication that proves it.
*looks at you levelly with her absinthe-green eyes, and her white teeth flash against her scaly, jet muzzle as she speaks*
I do not know if you have heard of dissociative identity disorder. The boy my biological sire raised was a perfect, little rural Christian boy. He was everything that his father had wanted. He was tough, and he was not afraid to go for a tumble. He was a crackshot with a rifle and quick with a shotgun, and he would fearlessly swim in the same water as 8 foot long alligators. He could hold his own in a fight with a larger boy than himself, and he had a deadly choke-hold. I wonder what happened to that boy.
*flicks out her pale pink tongue* I ate him, of course.
He was a contrived persona. He was a character in a play. I kept on playing that role, so I could continue having the affection of my father a little bit longer. However, the longer I kept playing in that role, the more flat and insincere the lines sounded to my own ears. The problem was that I had never meant any of it. I finally made up my own ending where a dragon came down and ate him in the end. That part of the play was closer to being true than any other part. All of it was a lie.
Sure, maybe you say that believe me. I need to keep saying it because it needs to be said. If your child is transgender, then you can have a living and healthy transgender child, or you can have a corpse. There is a third scenario, though. The third scenario is where a dragon comes down from the sky and eats your child, and then the dragon will never like you very much.
The reason why I do not have any truck with "woke" philosophy is that I have already gone through the phase of my life where I was constantly angry all of the time and never stopped being angry. I was savage, and I was cruel. I was a monster that had forgotten how to feel any emotion besides vengeance.
No, it did not make my life better, but it made me incredibly lonely. People that sympathized with me at first would begin to distance themselves from me. One day, there would be some relatively weirder than usual detail about my life that would come out, or I would share one of my more controversial views. As soon as the grounds for a scandal were there, I would be anathema because I had not made a single real friend.
But that was not the dragon. The dragon is just a playful flirt and a nerd. The part of me that raged was a different sort of animal, and it was one that I really never particularly liked.
It is true that many of the people that follow "woke" philosophy are obsessed with outrage, and it is true that that outrage is really unhealthy. However, I know why they do it. Being angry feels slightly more comfortable, in the moment, than feeling helpless.
However, there is a better way.
Unless current conclusions regarding the likely bounds of neural plasticity were to have changed, I suspect that you would engage in outright magical thinking rather than the simpler acknowledgement that a person's gender identity is set at least by childhood.
Of course you would. You don't have a reason to suspect such a thing of me. Right there in the text I wrote that you quoted back to me, I offered childhood as the obvious alternative to in-utero. But you wouldn't let that stop you from making up garbage about me. You're a dragon, and you don't care.
It constitutes a politically meaningless difference, except perhaps to a father that thinks he can stop his son from being transgender by teaching him to fish, skin a deer, and play football. You don't strike me as that stupid.
I say that transgender people may as well be assumed to be born that way, and my reason why is that it strikes me as unlikely that the neurological connections that determine gender identity are formed during childhood rather than during gestation. I believe that gestation is a simpler and therefore more likely explanation. There is significantly more developmental plasticity, then. It requires less imagination than it takes to suggest that gender identity somehow forms during childhood.
Furthermore, speculation otherwise flies in the face of the current advice of the American Academy of Pediatrics. If you want to argue against some of the most highly educated doctors in the world, then be my guest. They do not take commands from me.
If you are attempting to deny that gender identity is fixed by the time it is recognizable, then you might as well be asserting that being transgender is just a "thought in my head" contrary to the evidence that I have offered.
Where the heck do you see me "attempting to deny that gender identity is fixed by the time it is recognizable"? Why do you make up garbage like that? What I denied is that you'd backed up your claim that people are born transgender. Birth happens years before transgenderism is recognizable. And I denied that agreeing with you about your ill-judged timing claim is necessary to "establish good faith". Accusing people of bad faith for not agreeing with you is called "poisoning the well".
I assume, then, that you acknowledge that gender identity is fixed at least by childhood. That's good to know. I am far too lazy and busy to go through the entire thread to figure out where you might have mentioned that viewpoint before, so it is useful if you just tell me.
I have furnished empirical evidence that my gender is something that I am stuck with. I have furnished you with the highly authoritative position statement of some of the most educated pediatric experts in the entire country.
Well, (a) if that's what you really meant to be so insistently and repeatedly arguing for, then why the devil didn't you say
that, instead of posting a red-herring about it happening before birth? And (b), why the devil do you think it's something you need to convince me of? Where the heck did I say anything to suggest you aren't stuck with it?
Of course you're stuck with it.
Thank you. *clicks her claws against her perch appreciatively* I can assure you that it is even more awkward for me than it is for others. It is better if others around me are at least aware of that fact.
For me to be clear on what your position is, I need you to simply acknowledge that, based on the scientific knowledge that is currently available to us, my gender identity is most likely fixed, and as a consequence, it is sensible, practical, and reasonable for me to pursue the social affirmation of my gender identity, which is supported by a broad scientific consensus.
Of course it is. No duh! Where the hell did I suggest otherwise?
It is good to have that cleared-up, then!
That doesn't mean I think the way you've been pursuing it here -- by misrepresenting other posters, by libeling them, by fantasizing about punching them in the eye -- is a practical, or reasonable, or ethical, or medically indicated strategy for getting what their consensus tells you you need.
Then anti-wokeists should abstain from being annoying douche-flutes.
For that matter, why do you care so much?
Because there is no realistic alternative to seeking gender-affirming care and asking for the support of our communities in seeking affirmation in our gender identity.
Bloody hell! Read for content! Why do you care so much ==>
whether the anisotropy arose before they were born or during childhood? <== You have no realistic alternative to seeking gender-affirming care and asking for the support of your community in seeking affirmation in your gender identity, and that's the case whether your gender identity happened to you when you were two, or when you were four, or when you were zero, or when you were minus three months.
*raises up one wing and waves it around for attention* From birth seems to be more likely because neural plasticity is significantly higher during gestation. While it is not necessarily impossible, as far as I know, that there could a period during early post-natal development where a child's prospective gender identity, by early puberty, could change, I am not aware of any evidence of such a phenomenon. I believe that it is simpler to extrapolate that prenatal conditions most likely influence a person's likely gender identity.
For us to do otherwise is untenable, and to demand otherwise of us is deranged.
Please point out the post in which somebody here demanded otherwise of you.
Someone demanding that I should be called by male pronouns only because of my assigned sex at birth is deranged, and I think it's kind of crazy. Some of the more extreme anti-wokeists demand this. Maybe you haven't, but you would be surprised at how often I run into anti-wokeists that insist on that lunacy. That is without even going on Twitter. I'm not even sure what happens on there.
No, please, don't accuse me of projecting that onto you. I am complaining about it to you, and I am hoping that you will give a shit.
