I understand that you think this. My point is that the institutional position of the Republican Party is that there should not be any ways to report safety concerns without exposing yourself to risk, because reporting of safety concerns might lead to employers being held liable for unsafe working conditions.
I understand that you think this. My point is that the institutional position of the Republican Party is that there should not be any ways to report safety concerns without exposing yourself to risk, because reporting of safety concerns might lead to employers being held liable for unsafe working conditions.
In this particular instance it seems to have bitten them in the ass, but I'm sure most of them regard the occasional difficulties faced by right-wing whistleblowers as acceptable collateral damage in the broader project of making sure workers are gagged.
When we weren’t affirming of our older son being a girl, his friends all tried to convince him that we were right wing conservative Christian bigots. Part of what helped him see reality was the ridiculousness of that scripted cookie cutter allegation when it was applied to his very progressive, gender non conforming themselves parents.
Of all the parents involved in our local parents of ROGD group maybe 2 or 3 families are conservative and they are all what I would say passes for conservative here, none are right wingers by any stretch. The rest of them are all politically left of center, sometimes far left of center. There are a growing number of non-conservative gender skeptics. But the left hasn’t updated its script to account for that quite yet.
May I ask where you live that there are enough "parents of ROGD" to have an actual group?
I was under the impression that all forms of "transgender" combined is no more than about 2% of the population.
Context: my kids are both normies and they graduated from their middle class/upper middle class exurban high school way back in the ancient days of 2017. Maybe I just missed a lot of this stuff in real life.
I’m in the PNW. There are many families living this all over the country but where we are is likely one of the places with the highest concentrations of trans identifying children. Seattle, home sweet home. The families involved in this come from all over this side of the state. And these families aren’t the only ones I know caught up in this as I also know plenty of families with abruptly trans identified kids who are affirming or at least not seeking out an ROGD parents group.
My older son started high school in 2017, my older niece in 2016. And yes, I think those graduating in 2017 got out at just the right time. The kids in my family attended 4 schools in 3 area districts. My nephew is a senior, my middle niece is a junior and my younger son and niece are entering high school this fall as freshmen. It’s definitely not a tiny percentage of the kids.
Thanks for the context. We are in the part of Pennsylvania in which the far Philly suburbs convert into Pennsyltucky.
I have long suspected that the demographics of ROGD has a significant social class element. Probably not very many cases in Southside Chicago or the Ohio Valley. Back in 2022 Abigail Shrier spoke at my alma mater so I have some rudimentary knowledge of the topic. I also read about the Lisa Littman controversy at Brown.)
Question: is ROGD a symptom of deep, destructive psychological disturbance like anorexia nervous? As a 1980s teenager I see some parallels.
OR
Is ROGD a relatively benign identity phase from which the girls grow out of it with no long-term effects? Kind of like being a goth or hippie?
Hadley Freeman's Good Girls, about anorexia and specifically her experience with it speculates about a possible connection/link between anorexia and cutting and ROGD among girls. I'm not sure if it holds up, but it makes some sense to me.
On your later suggestion that it is a phase in many cases, I agree, but the danger is the push to medicalize and threats to parents who don't go along with it/weird involvement of the schools/teachers in pushing it and hiding it from parents. If not for that, I wouldn't see it as much different than girls getting into being goth or other such things.
Unless I missed a major paradigm shift in the process, medicalization of gender identity requires parental consent. Invasive treatments and surgeries will stop when parents simply say "no". Kids always have temporal desires that are self-destructive - who says the adults in the room must indulge every whim.
I would consider hormones medicalization, and it seems to be easy to get those without parental consent or much in the way of counseling at a PP or other clinics. For more, in some blue states it seems like parents can be threatened for not affirming. there's a very different situation than with things that were acknowledged as a mental health issue (like cutting or anorexia) or which didn't involve any non reversible actions (like being goth).
Good point in making the distinction between anorexia/cutting on one hand (immediate recognition of mental health issues with attendant treatment, often in-patient)
AND
ROGD on the other hand (eh, let a 15 year old decide what's best for her long term health and well-being).
Absolutely surreal to anyone over the age of about 25.
Planned Parenthood doesn’t to my knowledge prescribe to children. That said, they are the place where most of the medicalized 18-20 years olds I know have gotten their prescriptions and no, I don’t think people can meaningfully consent to the lasting side effects when they are 18. It’s such an arbitrary, bs line.
“Unless I missed a major paradigm shift in the process, medicalization of gender identity requires parental consent.”
Not in my state. And in more sane states where parental consent is required, even there, in situations where the parents don’t agree, the court tends to side with the affirming pro-trans parent. Or skeptical parents get browbeaten by the clinicians who tell them if they don’t consent, their child will kill themselves. So parents go ahead and “consent”.
Abigail Shrier has covered this topic extensively.
My son desisted, thank goodness, but in our state *had he pursued it*, he could have accessed blockers and hormones without our consent. Genital surgery on males is usually an 18+ thing but double mastectomies for girls are happening under 18.
We are currently working to challenge a new law in our state that has the impact of giving non-affirming parents less recourse in situations where a child has run away than parents who are credibly accused of abuse.
I think it can be both. For some, I think it looks and works a lot like previous eras mass hysterias- from witch trials on up to pregnancy pacts.
For some, I think it very much is just a way to be unique/different/cool. Not unlike being hippie or emo or punk. If not medicalized and thus limiting future choices, I don’t think this is necessarily a problem. I don’t care what my kids wear or if they have stupid nicknames with their friends. But I don’t think we need to rework language to validate someone’s belief that their pronouns are fire and fire self either. Allow exploration but don’t affirm delusional thinking.
I think it’s more prevalent in white middle class/affluent families but I’ve observed it outside of that class grouping as well- my family is mixed on SES lines. I think for kids who have a lot of struggles it can be a way of finding belonging.
One thing I would say is that it is a way for people to acquire an oppressed minority card. This is a theme that has come up with many families I know. If the worst thing you can be is a relatively rich white girl or a “toxic” white boy, giving people an opt out card for that is going to create an incentive. And being trans is more effective for that than claiming to be gay when you aren’t in fact same sex attracted.
ETA:
I see you are in PA. In part for a more mixed political landscape,
in part for better real estate prices and in part to get our kids away from this crap, we have very seriously considered moving. Pennsylvania and Ohio
were high on the list.
But in addition to job and other considerations, we also have my elderly father with moderate dementia to take care of and a cross country move would be very ill advised. He’d have no idea where he was and it would significantly harm his overall quality of life. So here we stay, trying to shield our kids the best we can and hoping against hope that people are peaking and this trend will blow over. At some point, I think it will become passé with the kids and they will have to find something else to move on to.
My hunch is that the vast majority are just a teenage phase. You're right that we have to balance the need for teens to explore their identity against affirmation of delusion.
Twenty three years ago, there was a Lifetime Channel movie "Truth About Jane". A natal female teen who looked and acted like a "girl" comes out to family and friends as a plain old lesbian. Mom goes ballistic while Dad brushes it off as a phase.
I think you can't escape the trans craze anywhere. My daughter attended HS in Southwestern PA and 2 out of the 35 girls in her class were trans identified.
There’s nowhere free from this but the prevalence here, which sounds like a joke or gross exaggeration to people outside of the super blue bubble areas, is astronomical. Of my 3 nieces friends, MOST identify as some flavor of trans or have at some point. 2 out out of 35 sounds very low to me. It’s more pronounced in some groups (theater kids, the skater/emo types) but it’s present everywhere (even the Catholic youth group trip, though they don’t placate the kids the way the schools do- girls who say they are boys still room with the girls).
I really wish I were exaggerating but I’m not.
To be fair, a lot of these kids are identified as NB and don’t seem to take any medical steps.
This seems to entirely miss the point. To the extent that she's not even right-wing, that would make it better, not worse (from the Republican point of view) that the law doesn't protect her.
Remember Wilhoit's law. All of conservatism is fundamentally about defining in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, and out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. To the extent that Reed falls into the latter category, too bad for her, I guess.
Doesn't OSHA mandate employers provide a mechanism for reporting health and safety issues faced by employees? I don't think the Jamie Reed whistleblower reports qualify as a health and safety issue faced by employees it's a complaint about healthcare policies. I believe you are confusing two different issues.
You are correct that Reed's complaint is not an OSHA complaint, which is why it's not protected by federal law and she has to rely on state law for any protections that might apply. (Of course, it should be noted that the institutional Republican position on OSHA is that it either should not exist, or should be so underfunded as to be indistinguishable from not existing.)
My point is that to the extent that red-state laws on protecting employees who report this sort of thing are severely unprotective of those employees, that is by design.
I understand that you think this. My point is that the institutional position of the Republican Party is that there should not be any ways to report safety concerns without exposing yourself to risk, because reporting of safety concerns might lead to employers being held liable for unsafe working conditions.
In this particular instance it seems to have bitten them in the ass, but I'm sure most of them regard the occasional difficulties faced by right-wing whistleblowers as acceptable collateral damage in the broader project of making sure workers are gagged.
Even the “right wing’ whistleblower who is left of Bernie, lesbian, and married to a trans man. What a set
When we weren’t affirming of our older son being a girl, his friends all tried to convince him that we were right wing conservative Christian bigots. Part of what helped him see reality was the ridiculousness of that scripted cookie cutter allegation when it was applied to his very progressive, gender non conforming themselves parents.
Of all the parents involved in our local parents of ROGD group maybe 2 or 3 families are conservative and they are all what I would say passes for conservative here, none are right wingers by any stretch. The rest of them are all politically left of center, sometimes far left of center. There are a growing number of non-conservative gender skeptics. But the left hasn’t updated its script to account for that quite yet.
May I ask where you live that there are enough "parents of ROGD" to have an actual group?
I was under the impression that all forms of "transgender" combined is no more than about 2% of the population.
Context: my kids are both normies and they graduated from their middle class/upper middle class exurban high school way back in the ancient days of 2017. Maybe I just missed a lot of this stuff in real life.
I’m in the PNW. There are many families living this all over the country but where we are is likely one of the places with the highest concentrations of trans identifying children. Seattle, home sweet home. The families involved in this come from all over this side of the state. And these families aren’t the only ones I know caught up in this as I also know plenty of families with abruptly trans identified kids who are affirming or at least not seeking out an ROGD parents group.
My older son started high school in 2017, my older niece in 2016. And yes, I think those graduating in 2017 got out at just the right time. The kids in my family attended 4 schools in 3 area districts. My nephew is a senior, my middle niece is a junior and my younger son and niece are entering high school this fall as freshmen. It’s definitely not a tiny percentage of the kids.
Thanks for the context. We are in the part of Pennsylvania in which the far Philly suburbs convert into Pennsyltucky.
I have long suspected that the demographics of ROGD has a significant social class element. Probably not very many cases in Southside Chicago or the Ohio Valley. Back in 2022 Abigail Shrier spoke at my alma mater so I have some rudimentary knowledge of the topic. I also read about the Lisa Littman controversy at Brown.)
Question: is ROGD a symptom of deep, destructive psychological disturbance like anorexia nervous? As a 1980s teenager I see some parallels.
OR
Is ROGD a relatively benign identity phase from which the girls grow out of it with no long-term effects? Kind of like being a goth or hippie?
Hadley Freeman's Good Girls, about anorexia and specifically her experience with it speculates about a possible connection/link between anorexia and cutting and ROGD among girls. I'm not sure if it holds up, but it makes some sense to me.
On your later suggestion that it is a phase in many cases, I agree, but the danger is the push to medicalize and threats to parents who don't go along with it/weird involvement of the schools/teachers in pushing it and hiding it from parents. If not for that, I wouldn't see it as much different than girls getting into being goth or other such things.
Unless I missed a major paradigm shift in the process, medicalization of gender identity requires parental consent. Invasive treatments and surgeries will stop when parents simply say "no". Kids always have temporal desires that are self-destructive - who says the adults in the room must indulge every whim.
I would consider hormones medicalization, and it seems to be easy to get those without parental consent or much in the way of counseling at a PP or other clinics. For more, in some blue states it seems like parents can be threatened for not affirming. there's a very different situation than with things that were acknowledged as a mental health issue (like cutting or anorexia) or which didn't involve any non reversible actions (like being goth).
Good point in making the distinction between anorexia/cutting on one hand (immediate recognition of mental health issues with attendant treatment, often in-patient)
AND
ROGD on the other hand (eh, let a 15 year old decide what's best for her long term health and well-being).
Absolutely surreal to anyone over the age of about 25.
Planned Parenthood doesn’t to my knowledge prescribe to children. That said, they are the place where most of the medicalized 18-20 years olds I know have gotten their prescriptions and no, I don’t think people can meaningfully consent to the lasting side effects when they are 18. It’s such an arbitrary, bs line.
I know our local PP prescribes hormones to 16+. I assumed without parental permission since I know you can get BC underage without parental permission, but it looks like state law (for now) still requires parental permission for hormones. https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-illinois/patient-resources/gender-affirming-hormone-therapy#:~:text=Proud%20to%20Care,folks%20ages%2016%20and%20up.
Also: https://howardbrown.org/transhealth/youth-hormone-program/
“Unless I missed a major paradigm shift in the process, medicalization of gender identity requires parental consent.”
Not in my state. And in more sane states where parental consent is required, even there, in situations where the parents don’t agree, the court tends to side with the affirming pro-trans parent. Or skeptical parents get browbeaten by the clinicians who tell them if they don’t consent, their child will kill themselves. So parents go ahead and “consent”.
Abigail Shrier has covered this topic extensively.
My son desisted, thank goodness, but in our state *had he pursued it*, he could have accessed blockers and hormones without our consent. Genital surgery on males is usually an 18+ thing but double mastectomies for girls are happening under 18.
We are currently working to challenge a new law in our state that has the impact of giving non-affirming parents less recourse in situations where a child has run away than parents who are credibly accused of abuse.
I think it can be both. For some, I think it looks and works a lot like previous eras mass hysterias- from witch trials on up to pregnancy pacts.
For some, I think it very much is just a way to be unique/different/cool. Not unlike being hippie or emo or punk. If not medicalized and thus limiting future choices, I don’t think this is necessarily a problem. I don’t care what my kids wear or if they have stupid nicknames with their friends. But I don’t think we need to rework language to validate someone’s belief that their pronouns are fire and fire self either. Allow exploration but don’t affirm delusional thinking.
I think it’s more prevalent in white middle class/affluent families but I’ve observed it outside of that class grouping as well- my family is mixed on SES lines. I think for kids who have a lot of struggles it can be a way of finding belonging.
One thing I would say is that it is a way for people to acquire an oppressed minority card. This is a theme that has come up with many families I know. If the worst thing you can be is a relatively rich white girl or a “toxic” white boy, giving people an opt out card for that is going to create an incentive. And being trans is more effective for that than claiming to be gay when you aren’t in fact same sex attracted.
ETA:
I see you are in PA. In part for a more mixed political landscape,
in part for better real estate prices and in part to get our kids away from this crap, we have very seriously considered moving. Pennsylvania and Ohio
were high on the list.
But in addition to job and other considerations, we also have my elderly father with moderate dementia to take care of and a cross country move would be very ill advised. He’d have no idea where he was and it would significantly harm his overall quality of life. So here we stay, trying to shield our kids the best we can and hoping against hope that people are peaking and this trend will blow over. At some point, I think it will become passé with the kids and they will have to find something else to move on to.
My hunch is that the vast majority are just a teenage phase. You're right that we have to balance the need for teens to explore their identity against affirmation of delusion.
Twenty three years ago, there was a Lifetime Channel movie "Truth About Jane". A natal female teen who looked and acted like a "girl" comes out to family and friends as a plain old lesbian. Mom goes ballistic while Dad brushes it off as a phase.
It seems so quaint now.
I think you can't escape the trans craze anywhere. My daughter attended HS in Southwestern PA and 2 out of the 35 girls in her class were trans identified.
Yep.
There’s nowhere free from this but the prevalence here, which sounds like a joke or gross exaggeration to people outside of the super blue bubble areas, is astronomical. Of my 3 nieces friends, MOST identify as some flavor of trans or have at some point. 2 out out of 35 sounds very low to me. It’s more pronounced in some groups (theater kids, the skater/emo types) but it’s present everywhere (even the Catholic youth group trip, though they don’t placate the kids the way the schools do- girls who say they are boys still room with the girls).
I really wish I were exaggerating but I’m not.
To be fair, a lot of these kids are identified as NB and don’t seem to take any medical steps.
Don't you know that 100% of republicans are gay socialists married to trans people? It's called demographics!
This seems to entirely miss the point. To the extent that she's not even right-wing, that would make it better, not worse (from the Republican point of view) that the law doesn't protect her.
Remember Wilhoit's law. All of conservatism is fundamentally about defining in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, and out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. To the extent that Reed falls into the latter category, too bad for her, I guess.
Doesn't OSHA mandate employers provide a mechanism for reporting health and safety issues faced by employees? I don't think the Jamie Reed whistleblower reports qualify as a health and safety issue faced by employees it's a complaint about healthcare policies. I believe you are confusing two different issues.
You are correct that Reed's complaint is not an OSHA complaint, which is why it's not protected by federal law and she has to rely on state law for any protections that might apply. (Of course, it should be noted that the institutional Republican position on OSHA is that it either should not exist, or should be so underfunded as to be indistinguishable from not existing.)
My point is that to the extent that red-state laws on protecting employees who report this sort of thing are severely unprotective of those employees, that is by design.