Tag Archive | science

Michael Bailey Is A Danger to Trans Kids – Those Kids Know Who They Are

May29

Recently, on another forum, some individuals were defending Michael Bailey’s utter BS that Bailey was using to defend reparative therapy being used on trans kids. There are a lot of problems with Michael Bailey’s nonsense, not the least of which is that he may be nearly as bad as Zucker up in Canada.

Bailey claims that 80% of all trans identified kids never transition and settle into their lives as their birth sex. But the 80% figure is, as Bailey admits, decades old. It is also highly flawed. The core flaw in that study? Children were being actively discouraged from their gender identity (reparative therapy) and Bailey and his henchmen failed to followup after age 18 to see if these people stayed in their birth gender their entire lives or if they subsequently transitioned as adults. I personally know two older transwomen who Bailey claimed to have “cured”. They said they simply felt oppressed, faked it, waited til they were older, and transitioned when they were out of their parent’s (and Bailey’s) control.

Subsequent advances in diagnostic techniques now allow much clearer distinction between what the profession refers to as “gender curious” children and children who are actually transgender.

Two separate recent studies followed two groups of children who were identified as trans using modern diagnostic criteria. One was in San Diego through Rady Children’s Hospital. The second was in The Netherlands. Both groups were followed for over 10 years, and in both groups, 100% of children identified as trans early on chose to transition and live in their identified gender.

Here is info about the Dutch study. There were 55 participants. All transitioned and are happy.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/transgender-teens-become-happy-healthy-young-adults/

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/09/16/3567886/transgender-puberty-suppression-study/

Here is the California study involving Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. There were 42 participants. All transitioned and are happy.

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/03/10/3631788/letting-transgender-kids-transition-is-for-their-own-good/

In short, Bailey is a quack. He’s full of nonsense. He deliberately quotes outdated statistics. He ignores the last 20+ years of neurobiological research that says this is a medical condition that cannot be reversed or “cured”. And he remains an advocate for conversion therapy, which every major medical and psychological organization in the United States says is immoral and unethical because it consistently leads to increases in suicidality.

Bailey is simply pushing his reparative therapy agenda, just like Zucker.

Siding with Bailey is dangerous, because anyone who does is lending credence to his “reparative therapy for trans kids” argument. And if anyone believes that works, they can tell it to Leelah Alcorn.

Trans Kids Know Who They Are

Feb4

Transgender children know who they are, and they know this at a deep and fundamental level, just like cisgender kids do too. This is further proof that our sense of gender identity is very deep and below the rational thought level within the human brain. It also raises serious questions about how detrimental parents trying to “condition” their child to accept their desired gender for the child can be versus allowing the child to express their natural gender identity.

Transgender kids show consistent gender identity across measures

“A study with 32 transgender children, ages 5 to 12, indicates that the gender identity of these children is deeply held and is not the result of confusion about gender identity or pretense. The study is one of the first to explore gender identity in transgender children using implicit measures that operate outside conscious awareness and are, therefore, less susceptible to modification than self-report measures.”

That’s significant. It’s important too because it further removes the wind from the radical right wing religious extremists who insist that “God doesn’t make mistakes” in trying to argue that male is male and female is female. Well guess what? God doesn’t make mistakes and God made those kids trans! So deal with it, religious zealots!

This further indicts the horrible sexual fixation of modern western Judeo-Christian culture and the detrimental mental health impacts that distorted view of reality has caused to so many people, not just trans people, but many, many more. Our ingrained cultural notions of gender, sexuality, and how these things intertwine are fundamentally broken and not aligned with reality at all. It’s time we cast superstitious nonsense aside and embrace reality as it is, not as some radical extremist preacher wishes it were.

Leelah Alcorn – Her Death and Facing Human Monsters Among Us

Jan2

People are trying to whitewash what Doug and Carla Alcorn did to their child. I’m having none of it. They chose to be religious bigots. They chose to ignore medical and scientific fact in favor of 6000 year old superstitious nonsense. As surely as Leelah was their child, they also killed their own child with their words and by sending their child to therapists who practice a form of therapy that is considered “unethical” by both the AMA and the APA. They helped kill their child by authorizing three times the dose of Prozac recommended for children, when Prozac itself is proven to increase suicidality in children.

I will not stand by and submit to the nonsense being spewed by Carla Alcorn about “unconditional love”. If that’s what love looks like, then that kind of love kills.

I will not excuse James Dobson and his hypocritical motto “Families: where life begins and love never ends” because his transphobic rantings fueled the Alcorns extremist positions. For Leelah Alcorn, Dobson’s advice as “Families: where life ends and love never begins.”

I will not stand by and excuse them for their role in this because the culture around them “brainwashed” them. They had a choice and they deliberately chose scientific ignorance over medical fact.

It’s time to end this religious superstitious nonsense. It’s time to make reparative therapy a felony crime, including when practiced by “religious” therapists!

As a nation, we no longer tolerate lots of fundamentalist nonsense. We no longer allow women to be sold to the man that raped her to be forced to be his “wife”. We no longer tolerate “curse of Ham” religious reasoning for racial bigotry. There are lots of fundamentalist extremist ideas to which this nation has already said “NO!”

Now it’s time to say no to Reparative Therapy – a form of psychological abuse and torture intended to force someone to conform to gender and sexual stereotypes. It’s time to ban reparative therapy and make it a nationwide federal felony. And it’s time to prosecute and imprison every barbaric monster who insists on practicing this superstitious nonsense.

And to close, I’ll go one step further. We need to prosecute the therapists who helped kill Leelah Alcorn.. Punish them. Because they still think what they did was right and that, in itself, is a horror and a wrong that a respectable society should not tolerate.

Please sign the petition for Leelah’s Law, to ban reparative therapy throughout the entire United States. It’s time to strike back at the human monsters among us and remove them from civilized society. Let’s pass Leelah’s Law so no more children face Leelah’s fate. And let’s prosecute the Alcorns and the therapists who took part in this religious killing. It’s time.

The Myth of Post-Op Regret And Suicidality

Jan2

There is a popular myth going around that attempts to quote from this 2003 Swedish study:

Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden

People using this study do so selectively. Let me explain the statistical manipulation going on with gender surgery detractors and the myth they try to construct.

First they note that general population rates for suicidality are around 1.6% in the United States. Then they note that suicidality rates for post-op transsexual people are about 4.1%. They then claim that since this is “hundreds of percent higher” that surgery does not work.

But let’s talk about the reality. What is that reality? It is that the pre-op suicidality rate for transsexuals is 41%!!!

Yep, that’s right. Pre-op rates of suicidality for transsexuals are 1000% higher than post-op rates. How do we know this? From the UCLA Williams Institute study Suicide Attempts among Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Adults. (Warning! PDF!)

And the Swedish study actually supports gender surgery. Their conclusion?

This study found substantially higher rates of overall mortality, death from cardiovascular disease and suicide, suicide attempts, and psychiatric hospitalisations in sex-reassigned transsexual individuals compared to a healthy control population. This highlights that post surgical transsexuals are a risk group that need long-term psychiatric and somatic follow-up. Even though surgery and hormonal therapy alleviates gender dysphoria, it is apparently not sufficient to remedy the high rates of morbidity and mortality found among transsexual persons. Improved care for the transsexual group after the sex reassignment should therefore be considered.

Note what is said very, very gently and in careful scientific language: “This highlights that post surgical transsexuals are a risk group that need long-term psychiatric and somatic follow-up.”

So what detractors are doing is selective statistical selection to “prove” their biased point. When we take the entire picture, we see that gender surgery actually reduces suicide rates to 1/10th of what they were pre-op. And, as the Swedish study concludes, what trans people need is more support, not because they are trans, but because too many people in society today are just ignorant assholes.

Send Your Name To Mars!

Oct22

Up until now, I’ve been semi-anonymous here on my blog, but today you’ll see my name. And the reason for that is that NASA is allowing our names to fly on the various missions preparing to go to Mars.

cara-mars-boarding-pass

 

You can send your name on missions to Mars by visiting this NASA link!

I think this is pretty cool! I’ll never get to set foot in space, despite that being one of my biggest wishes since I was a child, but my name can go with the astronauts who will be leaving earth. And that small thing, just knowing my name will go out there, makes me smile.

Submit your name too!