Honestly I do not understand how a minor knows what they want or do not want. But I do believe in saving lives but not at all costs. There has been a case where a male child pressured his mother into changing his sex to a female ( because he did believe he was a female); but once he/ she went through puberty he realised that he really was a boy!
Problem was, it was too late for all his abilities of fathering in the future were already removed, and the mother lost the chance to have grand children too. The mother had fort tooth and nail for her son/ daughter to be what the child thought they were.
In the end they are all unhappy and realised they should have waited.
There are other studies that show that there are just as many suicides with trangender people who don't get the operation for themselves as to those who do do the operation. So it is not the operation that is the issue but the persons thinking or mindset of themselves that needs to be addressed.
Allan
These are the usual misconceptions and simplifications found in the general hearsay and unprecise media contributions about the subject, so I‘m not surprised you are influenced by them, too.
The study you mention - I assume you are thinking of a Swedish study that found that the suicide rate of post-surgery adult transsexuals is still much higher than that of the general population. That study is often used to claim that surgery is useless. It‘s a false conclusion: Of course the suicide rate is still much higher because 1) the surgery cannot wipe out the visible effects testosterone had on the body especially during puberty (exactly what hormone blockers would avoid!) 2) hostility of society towards transsexuals causes severe depression. So the surgery an alleviate the problem, but transsexuals still have more depressions than the general population.
In fact, if the vast majority of patients didn‘t have alleviated depression after the genital surgery, psychiatrists wouldn‘t recommend them in their reports, and health insurances wouldn‘t pay them - but they do based on decades of medical experiences.
Secondly, as I said, the issue about minors is NOT yet genital surgery, but hormone blockers. Here, the main risk is that these blockers are partly reversible but not necessarily completely in a case of wrongly diagnosed transsexualism, the maximum disaster would be infertility. BUT: IF the psychiatrist has thorougly dealt with the kid, a wrong diagnosis is highly unlikely - the few cases mentioned don‘t prove anything - and the MUCH HIGHER RISK of not prescribing hormone blockers is that the brain-female youngster will go through hell experiencing her own totally irreversible voice break and skeleton growth - a horror that easily leads to suicide.
Prof. Milton Diamond of the University of Hawai‘i has dealt with studies on sexual topics since the 1970s. His study on transsexual twins revealed that 30% of identical twins of who one was transsexual were both transsexual, whereas 0% of fraternal twins of who one was transsexual were both transsexual - a very clear indication that there is a strong genetic component to transsexualism (identical twins share the same DNA).
Neurobiologists say that transsexualism is likely to be biologically rooted in the hypothalamus, probably due to specific hormonal influences of the fetus during pregnancy.
When you say the mindset of transsexual people has to be addressed, this comes down to conversion therapy. This is about to be legally banned in Germany, as it has been declared unethical and without scientific basis by specialists worldwide. Psychiatrist tried to eliminate transsexualism by psychotherapy for decades - to no avail, as it is fixed in the brain.
The WHO had just issued ICD11, the newest version of the catalogue of diseases, in which transsexualism is no longer found in the section of mental disorders, but in the section of sexual health.
What you can‘t do is pick isolated cases of wrong diagnosis and regrettal and take it as a justifcation to ban a treatment vital to the vast majority of cases, that way you will avoid 1% (if at all) of regrettals and ruin the lives of 99% for the sake of ideology.
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