Alex von Kitchen<p>A quick intro into care for transgender kids, and some of the more common regressive talking points. Feel free to share if you think this is useful (and suggest improvements)</p><p>Care for trans children is about giving them agency to decide who they want to be. For young kids this is social transition; clothes, hair, names, sparkly tiaras. There is usually some degree of counselling and socialisation through all this, as appropriate for the child</p><p>Once they reach puberty, puberty blockers are used to delay changes and give the person time. Puberty blockers buy time by preventing permanent changes from puberty. Internal puberty will resume if they stop blockers (they were developed to treat early puberty in cisgender kids)</p><p>Eventually they will probably start Hormone Replacement Therapy, but the point is to give them a choice on what puberty to go through. HRT is broadly safe</p><p>Surgery is only done if the person wants it, and generally after 16 or 18 depending on the type. There are a lot of different options here</p><p>All of these processes were developed to treat various medical issues in cisgender and/or intersex kids. What's happening here is that it just centers the child's choices, rather than impose society's values on them</p><p>The whole process is driven by what the person wants. It's about children's agency and bodily autonomy</p><p>You can't force transgender kids to be cisgender. That just results in traumatised or dead trans people. This is all about supporting children to be happy</p><p>Some common BS talking points:<br>Desistance / detransition - generally children who come out as trans continue to be trans. The claims otherwise are based on a terrible study had too low a threshold for inclusion and falsely classified people as cis<br>The point is to give children agency, so if they do decide they're cis then that's fine. The treatment has worked</p><p>Rapid onset gender dysphoria - this is just bullshit. What's happening is that parents are assuming dysphoria started around when the person came out to them, when what actually happened is the person doesn't trust their parents enough to be open about this. The trans person doesn't trust their parents because their parents are bigots</p><p>Social contagion - people are just more aware that you can be trans, and that includes being non-binary. People have more knowledge and control over their lives, seems good to me</p><p>"There are only two sex/genders" - this is just a bullshit assertion, equivalent to "the earth is flat" or "we didn't come from monkeys". Biology and psychology are far more complex than that</p><p><a href="https://aus.social/tags/Trans" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Trans</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/TransRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TransRights</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Auspol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Auspol</span></a></p>