Jordan Peterson interview on C4

CtevenSrowder

Brian? wrote: »

It’s lowers the debate to name calling.

Sure we passed that bar a long time ago.

Brian?

CtevenSrowder wrote: »

Sure we passed that bar a long time ago.

It's never too late to change

Brian?

Brian? wrote: »

I despise people throwing around terms like totalitarian, while having the neck to accuse people of extremism.

Well, consider who, and the manner of the posts, he was referring to.

It’s lowers the debate to name calling.

Seriously?

Gynoid

Brian? wrote: »

I despise people throwing around terms like totalitarian....

Better let ol' 20 cents know

Brian?

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Well, consider who, and the manner of the posts, he was referring to.



Seriously?

Yes, seriously.

It doesn't irk you that someone describes a poster on boards, with zero actual power as totalitarian? Talk about hyperbolic.

Even describing trans activists with a tiny amount of influence as totalitarian is laughable.

Brian?

Gynoid wrote: »

Better let ol' 20 cents know

There are enough people doing that.

Brian?

Brian? wrote: »

Yes, seriously.

It doesn't irk you that someone describes a poster on boards, with zero actual power as totalitarian? Talk about hyperbolic.

Even describing trans activists with a tiny amount of influence as totalitarian is laughable.

It's about the attitude. This way or no way. My way or you're a "phobe".

And I said "seriously?" because you've ignored (or maybe approve of) the host of insults/labels thrown at anyone who disagreed with the transgender advocates. You complain about the way posters have referred to 20Cent or others, but showed no concerns for how they treated others. So.. yeah. Seriously?

But I get it. You are serious. Fine. Double standards. I get it.

Brian?

Brian? wrote: »

There are enough people doing that.

True enough. Should be time to get back to the thread content, and not about the posters behavior/attitudes.

nkl12xtw5goz70

Deleted User wrote: »

And I said "seriously?" because you've ignored (or maybe approve of) the host of insults/labels thrown at anyone who disagreed with the transgender advocates. You complain about the way posters have referred to 20Cent or others, but showed no concerns for how they treated others.

Yes, I'd also noticed that Brian? is highly selective in condemning "name calling."

Gynoid

Brian? wrote: »

Even describing trans activists with a tiny amount of influence as totalitarian is laughable.

A "tiny amount of influence"....
From The Times today. Behind a subscription wall, but lucky enough I have a free sub, so I can copy and paste.
This state of affairs described below is directly because of people who you describe as having a tiny amount of influence.

WEEKEND ESSAY
Giving puberty blocker to ‘trans’ children is a leap into the unknown
A landmark legal review will examine claims that confused young people are being subjected to a giant medical experiment, says Janice Turner



An 11-year-old child is probably years from his or her first kiss. Yet the drug they are about to take will almost certainly lead to a medical pathway which will leave them sterile. Since their gametes will never be allowed to mature, doctors will not even be able to harvest their sperm or eggs. Can any 11-year-old understand the gravity of ruling out ever having children?

Moreover can this child, for whom sex is an unimaginable, probably rather revolting adult business, consent to a treatment which will depress their future libido to the extent they may never have an orgasm? (Imagine trying to explain the concept, let alone the desirability, of an orgasm to an 11-year-old.)

These are the ethical issues which make puberty blockers the most controversial of medications. On one side are “affirmative” clinicians and trans activists who believe that halting the onset of natal puberty is the only way to alleviate the distress of gender dysphoria, a sense of being “born in the wrong body”. On the other is a growing number of psychotherapists, doctors and endocrinologists concerned that blockers are administered too readily and, since they are prescribed “off-label” with no research into the long-term outcome for patients, amount to conducting a medical experiment on children.

In recent months these brewing worries have crossed into the public sphere. A landmark judicial review is being brought by Susan Evans, a former psychiatric nurse at the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Services (GIDS), a woman known as Mrs A who is the mother of an autistic 16-year-old girl referred to the clinic, and Keira Bell, a 23-year-old woman who as a child was enabled by GIDS to transition into a male and now regrets it. The plaintiffs argue that prescribing hormone blockers to under-18s is illegal because, unable to understand their far-reaching consequences, children cannot consent to take them. They say the Tavistock is “materially misleading” child patients and their parents, omitting to say that “nearly 100 per cent of children who commence hormone blockers go on to take the irreversible cross-sex hormones”.

Meanwhile, in the light of a 3,000 per cent increase in referrals to GIDS in the past decade, the government has announced a long-awaited independent review, chaired by Dr Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, to assess children’s gender services and make “evidence-based recommendations about the future use of these drugs”.


So what are puberty blockers and how did they come to be used on children worldwide? The group of drugs, GnRH agonists, release a form of the human hormone gonadotropin to stop the testicles and ovaries from producing sex hormones. Triptorelin, the most widely used, is licensed to treat advanced prostate cancer in men and endometriosis in women, to “chemically castrate” male sex offenders and in children to halt rare cases of early puberty, but not to treat child gender dysphoria.

Yet in 1994 a 16-year-old girl told the Amsterdam Gender Clinic she wanted to be a boy. Uniquely, three years earlier she had persuaded an endocrinologist to halt her puberty. Inspired, clinicians began administering hormonal blockers before secondary sex characteristics had occurred, then moving on to cross-sex hormones. The “Dutch protocol” was seen as a remarkable breakthrough for trans people whose most heartfelt desire is to “pass” as the opposite sex. Puberty blockers could end the agony of repeated cosmetic surgeries. If you never developed a beard you would never need painful electrolysis to remove it. If you never grew breasts you wouldn’t need a double mastectomy. Besides, for gender dysphoric children puberty is a dread moment when your hated body emerges categorically as the “wrong” sex.

Triptorelin is presented by gender clinics as a “pause button” which need not stop puberty for ever but can give a “breathing space” while a young person decides whether they wished to proceed to transition. If not, you just stop taking them and your natal puberty will kick in. What parent, faced with a deeply distressed child, would not press that button?

The problem is that almost everyone who takes puberty blockers goes on to transition. Frozen Peter Pan-like, they see classmates develop into adults. Many have already “socially transitioned”, assuming opposite sex names and clothing. Going back is scary, so inevitably they press forward into cross-sex hormones.


But would they have transitioned anyway? Most likely not. A statistic, undisputed by GIDS and North American gender clinics, is that without medical intervention around 85 per cent of gender dysphoric children come to terms with their biological sex after puberty. As GIDS notes: “‘Persistence [in identifying as trans] was strongly correlated with the commencement of physical interventions such as the hypothalamic blocker.” Moreover the vast majority of these non-conforming kids seen by clinics — girls who prefer short hair and skateboarding, boys who love Barbies — will grow up into lesbians or gay men. In the maelstrom of adolescence, are they confusing same-sex attraction with being trans?

Clinicians believe the natural cascade of sex hormones at puberty can resolve bodily self-hatred. Yet if puberty is thwarted this cannot happen. Moreover, the claim that blockers are fully reversible, that natal puberty will just spark up even years later if you stop taking them, is largely untested — because almost no one does that.

The Dutch protocol was quickly taken up by gender clinics worldwide but British clinicians, who upheld a “watchful waiting” approach, initially remained cautious, refusing to prescribe blockers to under-15s. But quickly these drugs became a political as much as a medical demand: campaigners argued that to deny them to children was transphobic.

Some British parents started taking their children to America where easy access to drugs and even paediatric surgeries — including mastectomies for 14-year old girls — are commonplace. Notably in 2007 Susie Green, an IT manager from Leeds, took her 12-year-old son Jack to a Boston clinic to be prescribed hormones, then at 16 to Thailand for genital surgery, illegal in Britain and now in Thailand. Later Green became chief executive of Mermaids, a charity for trans children, which under her leadership has fiercely advocated for blockers, hormones and early surgical interventions. The Mermaids website recommended Dr Helen Webberley, a private GP suspended by the GMC for running an unlicensed gender clinic, who prescribed triptorelin online.

Bowing to activist pressure, in 2010 GIDS reduced its lower age prescription limit from 15 to ten. Even though the known side-effects of the drugs include lowered bone density and height, plus depression. GIDS admits it has no idea how freezing puberty affects the fast-developing teenage brain. The question of adult sexual function is swerved as too tasteless, but real-life examples are emerging. Jazz Jennings, 19, a trans reality TV star in the US, who never experienced natal puberty and looks indistinguishable from a natal girl, has admitted having almost no libido and asked her parents if an orgasm was like a sneeze. Susie Green revealed that her trans daughter Jackie was left with a child’s penis, so the Thai surgeons inverting it into a vagina had little to work with.

Remembering that triptorelin is used off-label, shouldn’t every gender clinic conduct exhaustive long-term research, monitoring every patient to ensure that their radical drug regime works? In 2011 GIDS embarked on a study of 44 young people and Dr Michael Biggs, associate professor at Oxford’s Department of Sociology, has analysed the results that GIDS has only published in dribs and drabs. This includes findings that children — although happier and more confident after six months — noted “internalised problems and body dissatisfaction, especially in natal girls” after a year. Most alarming was a significant increase in patients agreeing with the statement: “I deliberately try to hurt or kill myself.” Given that parents are repeatedly told (wholly erroneously) their children will kill themselves if they don’t take blockers, this surely requires more scrutiny.

Dr Biggs is concerned by GIDS’s methodology, the clinic losing touch with patients in the trial and, above all, its failure to publish a conclusive report. Why is this? Would clinicians have to concede that they had sterilised children, consigned them to life-long patienthood, including needless surgeries to remove healthy body parts for no good reason?

Meanwhile the problem has increased exponentially: in 2009, only 77 children were referred to GIDS but a decade later it was 2,590. Whereas male referrals were once the majority, three quarters are now natal girls. In any other health sector researchers would leap to investigate such a trend. Yet GIDS remains incurious. Last year its senior consultant psychiatrist Dr Elizabeth van Horn said on Newsnight: “We do not know why the numbers have gone up so dramatically recently. Or why more of them are girls.”

Perhaps this isn’t surprising when anyone who interrogates this phenomenon is hounded by an activist lobby. Dr Lisa Littman, of Brown University, explored what is termed “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”: clusters of teenage girls, often friends, often same-sex attracted, who after long exposure to online transition forums in early puberty abruptly declare themselves trans. Her paper was denounced as bigotry and removed from her university’s website.

Yet her views are echoed by GIDS clinicians, 35 of whom have resigned in the past three years, many alarmed by the rush to medicalisation and the way Mermaids, Instagram trans influencers and the CBBC programme I Am Leo present transition as uncomplicated. They say they are seeing girls with a panoply of other issues — anxiety, depression, self-harm, undiagnosed autism, victims of homophobic bullying and sexual abuse — for whom transition to a male body was presented online as the universal panacea. Often a normal, tom-boyish disgust at their new breasts, eliciting sudden and unwanted sexual attention from men, is interpreted as a certainty that they are in the “wrong body”. Yet instead of interrogating these underlying issues, clinicians are told to “affirm” a young person’s “trans identity” and prescribe the puberty blockers that trans campaigners fiercely insist are their right.

The former psychiatric nurse Susan Evans, in her statement to the judicial review, says she saw triptorelin prescribed after just three or four sessions. One ex-GIDS psychotherapist tells me that getting a blockers prescription is seen as an end in itself, a sign you are truly on your trans journey. Even if a young person has already gone through puberty — so the side-effects for girls are akin to sudden menopause — they must take triptorelin for around a year before being allowed cross-sex hormones. Although this period is supposed to be a pause for reflection, young people then receive less therapy not more: “They are told, ‘Go away we’ll see you in three months’.”

The trouble for clinicians is that there is no diagnostic tool which can predict who will “desist” and who will go on to transition. For adult trans people, who have felt from childhood that to live authentically and free from mental distress they must live in the opposite gender, whose painful lives are marked by bullying, discrimination and search for treatment, it is wholly understandable that they wish to save younger people their pain. “I would without doubt have accepted the opportunity of early female hormone therapy and early sex-change surgery,” a trans woman wrote to me. “I would be ecstatic and have grabbed the opportunity as a young teenager to become the woman that I am.” Many, however, regard the haste with which children are put on a medical pathway with grave unease.

That such controversial drugs will come under the scrutiny of a judicial review and a public inquiry should be welcomed. Dr Hilary Cass proved herself a fearless whistleblower in 2013 when working at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, exposing how poor management was endangering patients. She will need to be robust to deal with the inevitable vicious accusations of transphobia which greet anyone probing gender ideology and medicine.

Above all, any examination needs to be cool, objective and above the frenzied politicisation of the culture wars. In the US, eight state legislatures have introduced bills to ban doctors prescribing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to minors, a move easily dismissed as more bigotry from anti-choice Republicans. But in the US few liberal voices or newspapers dare to interrogate the explosion of highly lucrative paediatric gender clinics willing to diagnose kindergarten kids as trans or how pharmaceutical companies will profit from having millions of life-long customers. Dr Cass might ponder why Ferring Pharmaceuticals, which produces triptorelin, not only financially supported a trial into the Dutch protocol but since 2013 has donated £1.4 million to the Lib Dems, the most vocal supporters of gender self-ID.

Doubts about puberty blockers have come from senior clinicians, from LGBT campaigners worried that gender clinics are performing “gay conversion therapy” on future homosexual kids, and from feminists appalled that girls who do not conform to sexist gender stereotypes feel they cannot be girls. Already a growing number of “de-transitioners”, mainly young women, are coming forward, angry that doctors rushed them into irreversible treatment.

How will this play out in the next decade, as the first cohort on puberty blockers come to terms with their probable infertility? Such experimental paediatric medicine has been politicised and shrouded in secrecy for too long. It is time to ask serious questions.

creditcarder

mcmoustache wrote: »

I don't get understand his use of "white male" as a derogatory term. First of all, he was in Ireland where, let's face it, the vast majority of us are very much white. Second of all, it comes across as cringey yank stuff.

I agree. Ireland has a completly different gender dynamic than America (due to a different climate, history, occupation, and the different nature of the foreign chruch).



I know you mentioned white, but we really need to stop importing american feminism in the same way we need to stop importing swine flue :P

nkl12xtw5goz70

Gynoid wrote: »

But in the US few liberal voices or newspapers dare to interrogate the explosion of highly lucrative paediatric gender clinics willing to diagnose kindergarten kids as trans or how pharmaceutical companies will profit from having millions of life-long customers.

This is a huge problem. Clear-thinking people on the left urgently need to stand up to the trans activists and make their voices heard on this issue — rather than being cowed into silence and making it seem like the only people who have an issue with it are the evil right-wingers.

Prescribing puberty-blockers to 10-year-olds or performing double mastectomies on 14-year-old girls is insane. My heart goes out to these kids who will never have the chance to grow up normally.

Just because a girl has short hair and likes skateboarding doesn't mean she's "in the wrong body." Keep her away from drugs and surgeries, let her grow up into a woman, and let her decide for herself how she wants to live her life.

creditcarder

Gynoid wrote: »

A "tiny amount of influence"....
From The Times today. Behind a subscription wall, but lucky enough I have a free sub, so I can copy and paste.
This state of affairs described below is directly because of people who you describe as having a tiny amount of influence.

I don't care about politcal correctess anymore. All of the people involved, and especially the trained psychologists, should be put into to prison and not put against a wall and not shot for legal reasons.



I am sorry, but this is disgusting.

creditcarder

Kassidy Savory Tick wrote: »

This is a huge problem. Clear-thinking people on the left urgently need to stand up to the trans activists and make their voices heard on this issue — rather than being cowed into silence and making it seem like the only people who have an issue with it are the evil right-wingers.

Prescribing puberty-blockers to 10-year-olds or performing double mastectomies on 14-year-old girls is insane. My heart goes out to these kids who will never have the chance to grow up normally.

Just because a girl has short hair and likes skateboarding doesn't mean she's "in the wrong body." Keep her away from drugs and surgeries, let her grow up into a woman, and let her decide for herself how she wants to live her life.

Too right. I mean, wtf is going on in the world? We're being told gender is fluid and then as soon as people start doing things that aren't their gender, they are forced for life to be that gender in quite a barbaric way?

Edit: As a teacher of young children/and teenagers, the thought of what you described is ill inducing.

20Cent

If being asked to refer to someone by their preferred pronoun or share a space with them is a lot for you imagine how they feel being discriminated against.

Brian?

Kassidy Savory Tick wrote: »

Yes, I'd also noticed that Brian? is highly selective in condemning "name calling."

I am indeed highly selective. I don't feel the need to pile in on 20cent, but when on of the posters who's objected to the name calling calls 20cent totalitarian I feel obliged to point out the hypocrisy and hyperbole. I select the time and place.

Brian?

[Deleted User] wrote: »

True enough. Should be time to get back to the thread content, and not about the posters behavior/attitudes.

It's no longer about Jordan Peterson either it would appear.

Brian?

Kassidy Savory Tick wrote: »

This is a huge problem. Clear-thinking people on the left urgently need to stand up to the trans activists and make their voices heard on this issue — rather than being cowed into silence and making it seem like the only people who have an issue with it are the evil right-wingers.

Prescribing puberty-blockers to 10-year-olds or performing double mastectomies on 14-year-old girls is insane. My heart goes out to these kids who will never have the chance to grow up normally.

Just because a girl has short hair and likes skateboarding doesn't mean she's "in the wrong body." Keep her away from drugs and surgeries, let her grow up into a woman, and let her decide for herself how she wants to live her life.

I agree. But these procedures and drugs are prescribed by actual doctors, surely this needs to be looked at with an evidence based approach. Applying emotionally responses won't help.

Studies need to be conducted and trans activists need to be told to feck off and allow them to happen.

Gynoid

Brian? wrote: »

It's no longer about Jordan Peterson either it would appear.

In the sense that Peterson came to attention re Bill C16, compelled speech as he called it and trans pronouns, it has evolved at least in an arguably closely related fashion. For people trying to shut down threads however, it is an argument that might be attempted.

Gynoid

Brian? wrote: »

I agree. But these procedures and drugs are prescribed by actual doctors, surely this needs to be looked at with an evidence based approach. Applying emotionally responses .

So are opiods. So were symphysiotemies. So are electro shock therapies. So were the huge numbers of hysterectomies that may have been unnecessary and caused a lot of harm. So is over prescription of anti depressants and anti biotics. Etc etc. Isn't appeal to authority one of the fallacies in argumentation?
One doctor you should look at is Johanna Olson Kennedy - a leading figure in gender treatment in children, she has lectured in the UK - if you are interested in being informed. When asked what if she makes a mistake by removing breasts from a 13 year old girl she replied they can always get new ones later if they want.

20Cent

Gynoid wrote: »

In the sense that Peterson came to attention re Bill C16, compelled speech as he called it and trans pronouns, it has evolved at least in an arguably closely related fashion. For people trying to shut down threads however, it is an argument that might be attempted.

Turns out Peterson was totally wrong about Bill C16.

So what do people maintain is the cause of it?..do you actually think people are born in the wrong body, or is it something to do with more estrogen in the water supply due to female contraception, or is it down to the BPA stuff in plastics?

Brian?

Brian? wrote: »

It's no longer about Jordan Peterson either it would appear.

Was it ever? Oh, sure, there will be the character assassinations that people love to do, and sometimes, the very credible taking apart of his material... but he represents the move to resist many social changes taking place in society. Transgenderism, radical feminism, inequality, alienation, etc.

Personally, I find this thread more interesting now that posters are talking about the issues, rather than attacking the man's character.

nkl12xtw5goz70

Brian? wrote: »

Applying emotionally responses won't help.

I'm glad you are able to be so calm and unemotional about doctors causing irreversible damage to children with untested drugs and unnecessary surgeries.

I can guarantee that in ten years' time, many of these kids will be suing the crap out of these "clinics" and the governments that allowed vulnerable children to be treated like lab rats. And it will be richly deserved.

20Cent

20Cent wrote: »

Turns out Peterson was totally wrong about Bill C16.

Or the impact of the bill was negated/diminished because of what he did. His opposition raised the publicity of the bill, and made people question what they were getting themselves into. In any case, it's a bit early to be saying that he was right or wrong. It's rarely the initial change that's the problem, it's all the addendums that are added that cause issues.

Gynoid

""Paris Lees, a prominent UK journalist and transsexual activist, says: "This isn't going to be the answer to the transgender problem. The answer is making sure we identify people as soon as possible so we can help them as soon as possible so they can have the body they want." She adds that identifying and assisting young trans people before they reach puberty should mean that such drastic surgery remains unnecessary.""


I am just quoting that because it is illustrative of the embedded TRA position re children. Get them young. Before puberty. That is around 8 or 9, I suppose, maybe younger.

It is a quote from a crazy article about a Italian surgeon suggesting head transplant surgery might help people with gender dysphoria (!!! I know it is laughable, but the point is Paris Lees response is educational )

People who are disturbed about the childhood medical aspect but sanguine about other aspects are not recognising the long roots of the activist ideology. Many of the extreme and vocal adult trans activists - who are entitled to do what they want to themselves so long as it harms no one else - need the born in the wrong body stuff. The assigned male at birth etc. They need the media praise for the early socialisation of children in the opposite sex. They need the pubertal blockers, the cross sex hormones for children, because it validates their position. They need biology to be grossly misrepresented in school programs. They need senior politicians to claim babies are born without a sex. They need a male bodied person imprisoned with women.
They have to have the whole enchilada, anything less invalidates them. You are not allowed to say stop re sports, re prisons, re child treatment. Nothing . All the way or you are persecuting them.

Many transgender people are speaking out against all this.

Brian?

Gynoid wrote: »

So are opiods. So were symphysiotemies. So are electro shock therapies. So were the huge numbers of hysterectomies that may have been unnecessary and caused a lot of harm. So is over prescription of anti depressants and anti biotics. Etc etc. Isn't appeal to authority one of the fallacies in argumentation?
One doctor you should look at is Johanna Olson Kennedy - a leading figure in gender treatment in children, she has lectured in the UK - if you are interested in being informed. When asked what if she makes a mistake by removing breasts from a 13 year old girl she replied they can always get new ones later if they want.

You've replied to half my post, why? I said research is needed to verify if these treatments are correct.

Brian?

Kassidy Savory Tick wrote: »

I'm glad you are able to be so calm and unemotional about doctors causing irreversible damage to children with untested drugs and unnecessary surgeries.

I can guarantee that in ten years' time, many of these kids will be suing the crap out of these "clinics" and the governments that allowed vulnerable children to be treated like lab rats. And it will be richly deserved.

Why not reply to my whole post? I think it's a pretty reasonable position to take and You haven't actually replied to what I said. This type of debating is pretty disengenous.

Gynoid

Brian? wrote: »

You've replied to half my post, why? I said research is needed to verify if these treatments are correct.

What do you instinctively think about these treatments? Honestly.

20Cent

Deleted User wrote: »

Or the impact of the bill was negated/diminished because of what he did. His opposition raised the publicity of the bill, and made people question what they were getting themselves into. In any case, it's a bit early to be saying that he was right or wrong. It's rarely the initial change that's the problem, it's all the addendums that are added that cause issues.

It's been four years now.
Are professors being dragged off to jail for using pronouns now?