Reflections on FRONTLINE'S Program GROWING UP TRANS

One of the great joys of life is going to a dinner party and finding out everyone there wants to discuss the same issue. So it was with this Blogger, when he attended a Dinner Party on July 1, 2015, and discovered everyone there wanted to discuss the June 30^th episode of PBS FRONTLINE’s program, GROWING UP TRANS.

It was a television program about Trans children and Trans teenagers, and is the best TV program of 2015.

PREFACE- the following is excerpted from the FRONTLINE notes on the program.

“….For earlier generations of transgender people, the only way to transition physically was through surgery or taking hormones as adults. However, new medical options are allowing transgender children to start the process of transitioning at younger ages…..

When someone makes the decision to transition, part of that process can be social — choosing a new name, changing pronouns, wearing different clothes — and part of it can be medical.

One of the more recent medical developments is the use of puberty blockers to treat children who are transgender or gender non-conforming. The medications, which suppress the body’s production of estrogen or testosterone, essentially pause the changes that would occur during puberty…...”

Doctors who use puberty blockers say they allow children who experience gender dysphoria — the feeling that they’re in the wrong body — the time and space to explore and settle on their gender identity. What makes treatment tricky is that there is no test that can tell whether a child experiencing distress about their gender will grow up to be transgender. The handful of studies that do exist suggest that gender dysphoria persists in a minority of children…..

…..Puberty blockers have been tested and used for children who start puberty very young — if their bodies start to change before the age of eight or nine. …

But their use in treating transgender children is a relatively new practice, first prescribed in the United States by the Gender Management Service at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2007, and recommended in the Endocrine Society’s guidelines for the treatment of transgender people in 2009.

Doctors say the benefit of using puberty blockers is that they block hormone-induced biological changes, such as vocal chord changes, the development of breast tissue or changes in facial structure, that are irreversible and can be especially distressing to children who are gender-non conforming or transgender.

…. the use of puberty blockers to treat transgender children is what’s considered an “off label” use of the medication — something that hasn’t been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. And doctors say their biggest concern is about how long children stay on the medication, because there isn’t enough research into the effects of stalling puberty at the age when children normally go through it.

The Endocrine Society’s guidelines suggest starting puberty blockers for transgender children when they hit a stage of development known as Tanner stage 2 — usually around 10 or 11 years old for a girl and 11 or 12 years old for a boy. The same guidelines suggest giving cross sex hormones — estrogen for transgender girls and testosterone for transgender boys — at age 16. However, doctors caution that estrogen and testosterone, the hormones that are blocked by these medications, also play a role in a child’s neurological development and bone growth….. there isn’t enough research on is whether someone who was on puberty blockers will regain all their bone strength, or if they might be at risk for osteoporosis in the future.

Another area where doctors say there isn’t enough research is the impact that suppressing puberty has on brain development…….

While the Endocrine Society’s guidelines suggest 16, more and more children are starting hormones at 13 or 14 once their doctors, therapists and families have agreed that they are mentally and emotionally prepared. The shift is because of the concerns over the impact that delaying puberty for too long can have on development, physically, emotionally and socially.

…..The physical changes that hormones bring about are irreversible, making the decision more weighty than taking puberty blockers….. Patients are also warned that they may be at higher risk for heart disease or diabetes later in life. The risk of blood clots increases for those who start estrogen. And the risk for cancer is an unknown, but it is included in the warnings doctors give their patients…..

While transgender adults have taken hormones sometimes for years, the generation growing up now is among the first to start taking hormones so young. Since most people who start hormones take them for life, doctors say there also isn’t enough research into the long-term impact of taking estrogen or testosterone for what could end up being 50 to 70 years…..

…. The cost of puberty blockers is approximately $1,200 per month for injections and can range from $4,500 to $18,000 for an implant. ….FRONTLINE.”

This Blogger grew up in the Brooklyn of Larry David, theatrical producer Ed G, Dr. Jeffrey Borer (who lived across the street), Shirley Chisholm(the first black woman to run for President), Bernie Sanders, Barbara Boxer, civil rights legend Len G, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, and Mafia madman, “Crazy Joe” Gallo, who lived down the street. Three thousand kids went to this Blogger’s high school in his Senior Year; and this Blogger would bet the farm none of them had ever heard of GENDER DYSPHORIA. 

The options are that the Brooklyn kids were too naive, what with their Chinese handball, stickball, going to Coney Island or the downtown Paramount , to recognize Gender Dysphoria in their midst, or, for our generation, Gender Dysphoria did not exist.

Millennial Social workers, therapists and doctors will say that the Brooklyn kids did not recognize it; the Brooklynites will say: it did not exist.

This Blogger believes that Gender Dysphoria always existed; but the recognition of it is not the new phenomenon; what is the new, Millennial phenomenon is the burgeoning number of transgender kids, America’s Millennial Society is in the midst of a tsunami of transgenders, a tidal wave of transgender kids.

The Millennial phenomenon is not that transgender kids exist; but that their Millennial numbers rival herds of Serengeti wildebeests.

It is an empirical fact that there is a new, vast crop of Millennial transgender kids; the question is why.

The FRONTLINE episode GROWING UP TRANS was filmed in Chicago; and one of the striking notable, noticeable facts is the plurality of trans kids  come from a mixed race parenthood, be it white/black, white/Hispanic, white/Indian.

Is miscegenation causing the spike in Gender Dysphoria? From the sample in the program, that is a reasonable conclusion.

This Blogger’s companions at the Dinner Party were hesitant to attribute Gender Dysphoria to miscegenation, but all agreed that something had changed in the Gestalt to trigger this burgeoning number of transgender kids. The Dinner Party fielded the following suggestions: Food Supply, specifically Food Additives; Climate Change, Job Stress on Women, Job Stress on Men, Sperm Deterioration, Media, a By-Product of the Drug Culture (pot, heroin and cocaine), Diet Drugs, Diet Sodas, Diets, Exercise, Jogging, Hip-Hop, Beyonce, or Lady Gaga (as Readers of the MAXEY CHRONICLES know, this Blogger BLAMES EVERYTHING BAD on Lady Gaga, and rightfully so).

One of the key aspects on the program was how many Doctors stated that society was entering a BRAVE NEW WORLD; this Blogger believes that. This Blogger believes that the rising number of transgender children is, in reality, the birth of a new species; X- MEN and its sequels had it right.

This Blogger believes that Gender Dysphoria may well be Nature’s instinctive reaction to Over-population, thus the need for a non-reproducing species to either replace Mankind, or slow down the growth of Mankind’s numbers.

This Blogger believes that there is  empirical evidence that Transgender kids are a new species; that evidence is their ungodly MATURITY. The maturity of their vocabulary is stunning; their grasp of the clinical aspects of sex is mind boggling. Their mastery of mature sexuality at such a tender age makes them real life embodiments of THE CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED. Every transgender kid seemingly knows more about sex, at 10 years old, than Richard Pryor ever did, and Pryor grew up in a brothel.

However, if Trotskyite instincts kick in, the rise of Transgender kids is caused by the crass, mercantile, capitalist fact that Medicine, and Doctors, individually and collectively, are making A LOT OF MONEY off of transgender kids, much more so than if the kids were DENNIS THE MENACE or CHARLIE BROWN or LUCY or Shirley Temple.

Could this rise in transgender children be a medical conspiracy to give pregnant women the drugs necessary to create Gender Dysphoria children to increase medicine’s bottom line?

From a Jungian standpoint, one of the fascinating aspects of the program was the divergence in attitudes between the fathers and mothers of transgender children. Mothers were unanimously supportive; fathers were, either covertly or overtly, unanimously aghast; regardless of how Liberal and Modern they were in their veneers, the fathers viewed their children as ROSEMARY’S BABY, the spawn of the Devil.  In every father’s visage there was a flash of infanticide (most visible in the Black Christian father), followed by utter bewilderment, WHY ME, how did my sperm create a transgender child?  Followed by total and abject resignation to bad karma (check out the Indian father after he gives his child a hormone shot).

Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of transgender kids is that they, between the ages of10 and 16, are making decisions about going to war against their own bodies.

One of the mothers of a transgender kid lamented that she could not comprehend how a 13 year old child got into the driver’s seat in making these PROFOUND decisions about her/his  body, and future.

Welcome to the Age of the Millennials, where ignorance is empowered; in all of recorded history , up to this Age of Millennials,  wisdom came from experience or Ockham's Razor common sense; now in this New World of mad Millennials, wisdom is attributed to the juvenile insistence of  persistent whining.

One of those most poignant, sad, perhaps tragic moments of the program was when a 20 something male, who had transitioned from a girl, reflected on his choice. He stated that when he was a young person he had no concept of what irreversible meant; now, in his twenties, when every day he has to take dosages of hormones, he understands that he will live a life of measured doses until death. He was hesitant to use the word regret over his decision, that word is politically incorrect for transgenders;but  he was disappointed by the lack of happiness in his life, which he presumed would be his by way of hormone injection.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

If indeed Mankind is living in Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD, where new species of Humanity is being created in plain view, then Mankind must adjust to this development by using the tools that the BRAVE NEW WORLD avails to it.

Gene Manipulation.

Empirical evidence is conclusive that Mankind cannot develop a hormonal treatment which will transition transgender to happiness, whether it is from male to female, or female to male. The only thing hormonal treatments can do is condemn transgenders to a lifetime of calculating dosages.

However, Mankind can eliminate transgenders by applying its scientific efforts to isolating the transgender gene, identifying it through pre-natal testing, and eliminating it through gene manipulation.

The upside of eliminating the transgender gene is enormous and uplifting; there will be no more Caitlyn Jenners. Who among us does not think that is a worthy goal?

SIDEBAR

During the Dinner Party discussion, one of the facts brought up about environment on the development of Trans children came from the Los Angeles Times' obit of Patrick Macnee.

"Macnee’s unpredictable mother, a niece of the Earl of Huntingdon, became pregnant by another man and then moved into a stately Tudor mansion with her lesbian lover Evelyn, an heiress who dressed like a man and had a pet monkey that would perch on her shoulder.

As recounted in Macnee’s 1988 book “Blind in One Ear: The Avenger Returns,” the man-hating Evelyn forbade the 7-year-old Patrick to wear trousers in her home and suggested he would look better in a dress.

He ultimately was allowed to wear a kilt. But Macnee overheard “Uncle” Evelyn, as he was required to call her, tell his mother, “Given time, we’ll make a good woman of him.”

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/growing-up-trans/