Posted February 15, 2016
It's popular to put gender-roles and gender, as well as physical appearance into a "scientific" unified block. And that's.. curious, to say the least. You have examples of girls who are born with testosterone levels and the glands and physical make-up to be, in effect, men. And you have boys who produce estrogen to a level where it affects their physicality very obviously. But these situations are rare, and we just don't know if fixing them one way or the other halfway to puberty is going to either help or harm them. It's also not technically impossible for a girl with over usual testosterone levels to give birth.. you know, whether it makes you queazy or not, it's not a given that if you show signs of "leaning" towards the other end in any stage of these "sciences", that you're actually going to be talking about anything else than psychological well-being for either the parents, or for the child later when they're castigated by society.
You essentially don't get actual doctors who say that they'd recommend chemical treatment one way or the other for the sake of the patient seen from an isolated medical perspective.
Meanwhile, remember that gender is not decided in a fetus until very late, surprisingly late, in the stages of fetal development. On the other end, we also know that being exposed to chemicals of various.. even government approved kinds of amounts.. is going to hasten or slow puberty compared to a "normal"/average time-horizon. It's just not a solid science that determines what "natural" is, and specially not what is going to be the most pleasant for the child. On top of that, we generally live much longer now than just 50 years ago - meaning that your "ideal" make up is perhaps not actually becoming a work-horse with baloons for muscles at the age of 16.
Take my own example. I got into puberty late, like my father, and like my grandfather, turns out. But when I was 12-13, my parents and some doctors convinced themselves of that I should be put on steroid treatment to "get things started". And this was completely safe, apparently, and although I was skeptical, you don't have much to say when you're 12 and your parents just "want what's good for you". So I got put on smaller doses of steroids until I started growing a bit faster, etc. Still remember that the biggest argument was that I should get hair on my crotch like my classmates. That was the biggest argument and the greatest concern here.
When the cure started, I basically thought I was going to become a rapist. It may be just because of the way I analyze everything effortlessly, and require that to stay calm and "normal", but my body just got fucked up. Thinking back on it now, I think people expected me to start becoming "normal", and run after girls. But I thought I was dangerous, and I probably was too. If you've trained in a gym, you've likely seen grown people like that at some point, in short periods (rather than years). And imagine a kid going through something like that.
Eventually the pills were spent, and in time the ears grew to become slightly smaller than my shoulders again, my dick didn't slap my knees any more, and things like that. And then I actually did go into puberty, like everyone else, and it wasn't another "cure", let me assure you of that. Worked out well enough in the end. But apparently my body just didn't go into puberty at 12.7 years old for another 3.6 years, before being "fully developed". And although I looked the part, I didn't feel well about myself until much later. Of course, I still have that laid-back neither-or attitude that I've always had. That, over the years, have been seen as extremely chauvinistic, as well as flirting with the feminine, and all the way back to not being masculine enough, and then certainly gay, to not gay in any way at all, etc. In just 20 years or so after I turned 12, and that I can remember well, society around me has judged me both ways backwards several times, in other words. If I cared, I most certainly would have been mentally ill by now, if I wasn't before.
But the kind of stuff you put kids through with chemicals in a period like that isn't going to seem "unnatural" to the kid, right? They have no idea. Kids are dumb, and they're pliable, and they have no established identity yet. So they're not going to complain. In fact, they might want to be accepted and treated as normal, no matter what the cost.
So think about that. That the actual situations where you really do have a decision to make - when the fetus doesn't develop one gender, or neither gender, for example. Or when you can measure that the hormone levels are way off. These are actually incredibly rare. Rather what you typically get into is a situation where you might want to "perhaps" "help" the child "a little bit" on the way to become normal to society, as god intended. With chemicals.
Obviously I have very strong opinions on this, but at least try to understand that the context where this debate seems to be a controversial subject, actually is only addressing a very rare situation. The larger context is the way we tend to mix "science" with "social science". In an effort to make our preferences and notions of "normal" seem proven without any room for doubt.
And in that sense, starting to "treat" children in multiple stages, from psychological to physical therapy to orient them into a particular "normal" outcome, in line with what the advertisement boards insist we should look like -- that hardly seems more advanced and sophisticated, or scientific, than Chinese girls having their toes and feet crushed to become pretty, does it.
