As a trans person, I can say for a fact that the worst part of this "culture war" is that we can't talk freely about the complexities, and that the underlying compassion for individuals themselves is utterly lost. The gender critical campaigns have reduced things down so far that it's now not about how do we appropriately give support to people, but instead about basic rights to personal freedom and being able to participate within society. Faced with extreme threats to survival, it is normal for humans to drop nuance, and so those opposed to trans people get to say "look at those crazy trans people, ignoring science/safety/etc". And there's strong history of trans people strawmen being created by GCs and widely publicised as real, further stoking hatred. Trans people want to talk about things seriously and openly. We've always existed, and don't pose any kind of new danger to anyone - indeed, many of the gender critical arguments are misogynistic in basis ("protecting innocent girls"), and there's a documented rise in transphobia and of cis women getting harassed for "not looking feminine enough to be a real woman". Core to Sabine's argument is that this is an area of science & healthcare, and not something for petty fights, political wins, and media sensationalism. And frankly, most trans people absolutely agree - we just want to go about our lives with the same dignity as anyone else.
(and that's not to say that trans people and are supporters have always been perfectly ethical and above board. But when you're faced with threats of violence and literal, documented on video, desires to be eliminated from society.... Reacting with anger is normal)
And once again, despite your succinct, hypocritical addendum feigning to recognize some wrong doings (how lightly you adress the many lives ruined by "your side" ) you served us the story that trans people and their allies can do no wrong and that everybody critical of the trans community (allies, advocates and lobbyists) are the problem. Clearly, YOU are . You can not plead that for everything to be good and dandy, people who criticize many things happening in this matter should just SHUT UP . That is exactly what you do. You are not a voice of reason or neutrality : you are exactly the kind of people we fight Thank you .
Her argument is awful though. Basically seems like the only way she'd be in favour of PB would be if there's a double blind study demonstrating reduction in suicidality. But you shouldn't have to be suicidal to get to transition
Like so many things in the US, this is not a question for politicians or the general public. It's a question for scientists and medical professionals. I am happy that more and more people feel safe about talking to their doctors and/or families about their feelings on their own gender. This is real progress. But the only government entity that should be involved is the FDA who test drug safety and the entity that regulates therapies/surgeries and their practitioners.
I have real empathy for people who feel they got the wrong body parts. If I was born with a female body, retaining everything else I know about myself as a red blooded American man, I don’t know if I could deal with it. Especially when family and society just thinks your crazy, and when surgery is risky, and kids will bully you on top of your already difficult circumstances. I’m sure there are fakers, some people fake cancer. But nobody bullies you when you say you have stage four melanoma.
Actually, as a trans person, I view the saying "born in the wrong body" as more of a metaphoric descriptor that attempts to convey to cis people the experience of what it's like to be trans living in cis-normative society. Many trans people say that they do not consider themselves as being in a "wrong body," but rather assert that their body belongs to them and that they ought to have the right to make of their body what they wish. Besides, many cis people do just that already. I myself do not say that I was born in the wrong body, but say that I was born into a wrong society that does not have space for me.
"If I was born with a female body, retaining everything else I know about myself as a red blooded American man, I don’t know if I could deal with it." What do you mean with "if I could deal with it"? Deal with what? Personally, I find it hard to imagine me living my life any different, no matter if I had male or female bodyparts. Except of course for the fact that women are just generally treated worse/differently, but that's entirely an issue with society and not with me or my body and I would very much dislike the idea of modifying my body just to fit in with the part of society that I'm interested in (I mean I would refuse to be put into a category).
@@amyashlyn9293 as one of them cis people myself, I like your framing. And that is what got me fully 100% on board being a trans ally. Personal Bodily Autonomy. And that includes the mind, obviously. ANY argument against PBA strikes me as fundamentally authoritarian. It's why despite getting the Covid vax myself, I don't think anyone should be made to get it. And why I'm pro choice in every single respect. Prioritizing PBA may cause some few societal problems, but we should learn to accept and mitigate that, rather than chipping away at PBA.
In science it is not that controversial. Only primitives make it controversial, but a science show is not really for them. If this video makes you upset, then you need to reconsider your relation to science and facts.
@@juzoli I’m not sure calling people with any(!) opinion on the topic that thinks it’s not entirely unemotional or thinks it’s complicated a “primitive” is something I’ll ever agree with. Scientific facts are also just a way to (in a slightly more formal manner) convince each other of opinions. Philosophy Tube has some great videos about that. This isn’t to say that there is no consensus on these topics, but “scientific facts” are often not as clear, because they need to be convincing, and people can be convinced of the wrong thing. In other words, get off your high horse, I guess?
@@Fs3i It is primitive, because most people use these arguments explicitly to insult and hurt other people, often for political gains. Sure some has intelligent opinions about it, but they are rarely that loud. Most people on the internet who are screaming “there are only 2 genders, the rest is mental illness” are in fact primitive people, who just want to hurt others.
@@juzoli you shouldnt have been so mean now they will stick to their biases, attack you as a person because it's easier (like the 2 people above me) and keep being wrong ! Very counterproductive imho
I know a good number of trans femme physicists, so as part of social transition? Yeah, checks out. (And if you drop out of physics into computer science, as I did? There's even more trans femmes in computer science.)
@@peacefroglorax875 Well, I am a physics teacher working in China / Kazakhstan. In my experience, boys are assumed to be better at physics than girls (even by some local teachers) and yet the girls either equal or frequently out do the boys.
In my experience, transgender women tend to be less likely to come out due to societal pressures. They tend to pass less frequently and are more strongly argued against in the media's eye. Most trans arguments in the media seem to feature transwomen and women's spaces whereas the transmen side is less critiqued in the same way. This may offput transwomen from coming out in fear of social stigma
Excuse me how is it possible that a person born of a specific sex can change his or her sex simply because of "feelings". Sex and gender are binary. Don't buy into the lies being pushed by a humanistic agenda
@@Kj_002 If you're going out for a game of pickup basketball, nobody cares. But if you are a biological male, you have inherent physical attributes that are far less probabilistically likely in a biological female. So, it is categorically unfair that a biological male be allowed to compete and have an unfair advantage to biological females. To elaborate on this intuition of fairness, let me give you an example: We see it as fair to have a biological advantage, as long as you are competing within a group that we humans intuitively see as fair. Heights of kids of a given age, for instance, are normally distributed. There may be a kid who's much taller and stronger than their peer. Yet, in a competition like a race, they are matched up against each other. We would find that fair. | However, we would find it unfair if a kid that was 18 came to compete with kids that were 12 years old in a race. | Why? Because the distribution of traits of 18 year olds give them an unfair biological advantage over what is possible for 12 year olds. | In this same exact manner, there is a categorical difference between the normal distributions of men's traits and women's traits. A 99th percentile woman for instance, is 5'10. It's an extremely rare biological gift. That means only 1 in 100 women will be that tall or taller. | When you compare that to men, that only puts you in the 50th percentile. That means that super rare trait for a woman is grossly overshadowed by the heights men can have. It's an inherent biological difference that is fundamentally and irreconcilably unfair. So a man going into women's competitions is equivalent to the 18 year old competing with 12 year olds. Even if the 18 year old has been blocking their hormones and injecting 12 year old hormones. There are attributes that are going to be different between the competitors that give an unfair advantage to the 18 year old.
In the Netherlands the ratio of girls and boys waiting for gender affirming care seems to have balanced out again. In any case, the requirements in the Netherlands to receive this care are pretty strict, it is not a procedure you can just get on a whim. Also people are closely monitored both before and after transition to check their well-being and see if any mistakes have been made in the assessment. Ultimately it is about people actually transitioning not people that may entertain the thought for a while.
I'm a trans guy who transitioned as an adult (18): I've been out and living as a guy for 3 years now and have been on hrt for a few months. I read through many of the other comments, and I'd like to add on to them and address a topic I saw a bit underepresented: the medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. The modern sociological consensus is that you do NOT need to have dysphoria to be trans, and you may have dysphoria about a body part but that doesn't necessarily indicate you are trans. Dysphoria is a mental reaction to feeling a discrepancy between how your body is and how you expect it to be/feel like it should be. Since everyone processes certain traumas differently, not every trans person actually experiences dysphoria to the same level. At the same time, treating dysphoria doesn't actually treat depression, anxiety, or any other mental health problem an individual could've developed due to the trauma of being trans. Going to a therapist and getting treated for those is just as crucial as receiving medical transition care...unfortunately many trans people I know assumed all their problems would disappear upon starting hrt, and although they are happy with their changes, hormones obviously don't make depression go away. So even just from my experience and from extensive talks with my psychiatrist, I am not at all surprised that studies found that mental health of patients medically transitioning did not significantly improve, because medical transition is not a "cure to depression", it just helps to alleviate dysphoria and make someone feel more comfortable in society. I should note here that I don't study medicine, and I think we should leave it up to medical professionals and the patient to thoroughly evaluate the best course of care for each individual. I understand how someone not diagnosed with dysphoria wanting to medically transition can be a difficult situation, and I am not smart enough in this topic to resolve such issues. I advocate strongly for thorough medical evaluation before commiting to any sort of gender care, but I don't think it is as simple as "HRT is a perfect solution" or "HRT is bad for everyone". I really do think this should be evaluated on a person-to-person basis and best left up to the psychiatrist, GP, and the patient without government intervention (anymore than the government intervenes in other medical issues, that is)
Oh my god the mental gymnastics required to say that the depression and anxiety many of these people experience is a RESULT of being 'trans' is next level. You are truly full of koolaid.
Having seen other TH-camrs commenting on trans issues, I came away with the impression that many medical professionals, including GPs, have little or no relevant training and are only slightly more informed than the general public. As such, the argument "leave it to GPs" is flawed until their lack of training is addressed. I wouldn't be surprised if similar issues exist in other groups of medical professionals, such as psychiatrists.
@@ppike__ I can tell you if you want me to. You just do not feel that you should change your body to conform to the biological standard of a particular sex. If I have breasts and feel like a man, that does not make me a woman, my behaviour does. Gender is an experience, it is qualia. Disforia is a sintoma, anxiety for being perceived by other people in a way you are not that does not manifest in some people.
My scepticism of the "they're doing it because it's popular" doesn't come from any "agenda" but as a gay man in my fifties I've heard it all before about me. People haven't let go of the "it's a choice" libel still as if anyone would choose to have every Tom Dick and Harry know better than you what you are going through. I have known 2 trans people and both transitioned as adults.
Many people use it as a cover for other things, but just flat out denying it as an absolute nonsense, like some people online do, is also disingenuous.
Actually, the argument with transgender often goes that gender is a choice, and the gender 'assigned at birth' may not matter. It was always puzzling for me how it was markedly different with the case of gay rights, when society concluded that there is no choice whatsover, and even forbade in law attempts to convert gay people
I'm in my 30s and transitioning, but I still question if it's social contagion. 😂😂 I was cross dressing a long time before I learned about trans though, so it can't be 100% social contagion for me. I don't know if I would have started this journey had I not met trans people who identified me as trans. In any case, I'm happy with the results.
"It Takes All Kinds" is what my mother used to say when asked about people who spoke/acted/behaved differently. The beauty of this line is that it encourages, even insists on tolerance but doesn't require that you actually understand every divergent branch of humanity. Sure, its important to try but its OK not to as long as you are tolerant and respectful.
It takes all kinds to make the world go round. Seriously, what happened to this phrase? I mean the phrase seemed to always be used to refer to personalities, not states of being, and with ideologies running hot it's hard to anyone to accept the other side.
I think regarding the change in proportion of FTM vs MTF binary transgender people, it's important to note that the social pressures on trans people of these genders are not equal. Trans men who underwent female puberty, for example, have a lot easier time passing as male after hormone therapy than trans men in similar circumstances do passing as women. And much of the culture war in America specifically latches onto the idea that trans women are just men in dresses hoping to assault cis women and 'trick' heterosexual men. Trans men are far more invisible- there's less violence at risk for living as a trans man at the moment.
This is very true, trans men are seen as men with thin beards after HRT, and as victims of "woke gender ideology" before they fully pass, while trans women are seen as creepy failures of men or enthusiastic predators looking for an excuse to get into women's spaces. It's way safer to be the former.
Also she seems to just assume that the rates should be roughly equal, and the fact that they aren't somehow disqualifies certain people from really being trans even though this is backed up by literally nothing ever
@@sethdrake7551 Does she? She stated that the rates, up to a certain point, _had been_ roughly equal. In fact, the stats I vaguely remember from ~10 years ago is _more_ MtF than FtM people (by a noticeable amount, like 2:1 or something). I don't see her stating that this disqualifies anyone, but merely asking why this relatively sudden shift is happening. Asking a question is not pushing an agenda in either direction, and I'd say the video has generally been pro-trans.
And to compare the life satisfaction of those who had any treatment or had no treatment, and to ask whether or not someone is happy with transitioning or if they would have rather not transitioned. These, I think are the most important questions and they seem to be left out completely, but for any other treatment these are common questions that are researched and we know exactly how many people who have had heart surgery are happy with their choice. One would expect this far simpler research that doesn't need a control group was done on trans kids/adults as well. And it is, but for some reason it's left out of this video.
@@anonymoususer3561 evidence suggest that going through the wrong puberty is incredibly harming to a child's development. that includes those who don't get an early treatment. If you actually cared about the health and well-being of children you would look at the evidence and the science, instead of what just makes you personally uncomfortable.
I have a young relative who insisted on transitioning; I think their parents took the best route, they let them use whatever pronoun or name they wanted; but to start medical transition they had to attend therapy to manage their depression and anxiety. Within a year they decided to keep the new name and pronoun, but hold off on the medical transition for now. I think accepting and understanding had a huge impact on their mental health, and letting them know they don't have to confirm into traditional gender roles had a huge impact.
This! I think we forget there can be so much nuance in this discussion and what really matters is people knowing it’s case by case, ensuring people have access to accurate information and can make informed consent.
So to you being stuck in the body they were born in, and to have the secondary sexual characteristics forced on them is the "right choice?" You must surely see that this can only be because you believe it is a "fad." A choice about which body they develop IS being made. Irrevocavle choices that can't be mended. If you are wrong, and it isn't a fad, then they will now live in the wrong body forever.
@@GigiofGigi "accurate information" being the kind they get when it is too late, and they already have breasts or a deep voice. Convenient. None of you have the first clue what you are talking about.
I was born in 1958. I wouldn't have told anyone that I was the wrong sex when I was a teenager for anything in the universe. I just kept my mouth shut and drank and took drugs, tried to unalive myself multiple times and wished I had the courage to do it right. Abject misery was my life. At the age of 35, in 1993, I was living in San Diego,(rather than North Carolina), and finally got the courage to come out and transition. It was like coming alive. Soaring out of hell to take part in life....finally! I never regretted it for a second.-weezi-🙏💖🙏🌄
May I ask why you thought you were the wrong sex? Was it because you did not conform to certain societal expectations? In contrast to intersex people, I have a hard time imagining that a biological man or woman can be "born into the wrong body". If men can show emotions and women can play soccer, and they can be attracted to the same sex, why is there a need to change one's gender? I thought the whole point was to get rid of these societal norms, not taking hormones and getting surgery to be able to do these things in a pre-specified gender role.
@@Flovus hello. i'm not the guy in the comment but i think i can answer your question. men can be feminine, and women can be masculine, and that doesn't mean that they're trans or that they have issues with their gender neccesarily. as far as i know, trans people aren't trans because they have a problem with masculinity or femininity neccesarily. they're trans because something in their brains (that they have no control over) tells them that they are the opposite sex. and that's it. however, like sabine says in the video, sex is set in stone from birth. they can't change it. it's your biological sex. They also feel like it's very very wrong, they feel like it sticks out to the eye when someone calls them by their assigned gender at birth, like "she, girl, woman, queen, sister etc" or "he, boy, guy, man, brother, king, etc", but they don't really know why that is. It just feels wrong to them. I've heard this or variations of it from a few trans friends: "This is not my choice, i would not be trans if i had the choice to." or "This is not fun, life would be easier if i was cishet." it really isn't their choice. I'm cishet, probably like you, and i've been around a lot of trans people. It didn't really affect how I see myself. I did my research about it, but it didn't make me feel like i should be trans too or something. thank you for not being rude while asking those questions by the way.
@@Flovus you see, before transitioning I kinda did fit into society expectations, of an slightly anxious nerdy guy, but still. I didn't have a problem with fitting into social expectations of masculinity - didn't feel pushed, nor I was pushing myself to conform to some other standards. I've been interested exclusively in women, and women seemed to be interested in me. And yet, something felt wrong. So wrong, that repression of this feeling ended with depression. It turned out that transition helped me with my mental health more than any kind of therapy or pills prescribed by psychiatrists. And as a woman I'm more misaligned with stereotypical womanhood (like, I'm working in a predominantly male industry) than I was with stereotypical manhood. I'm not stating that it's universal for all trans people - it's just a „case study” of my own example.
@@SublimeWeasel if you've been "around a lot of trans people", you should see how it's social contagion and not anything real, because the chances of you even knowing 2 trans people is astronomically low unless you go to like trans parades or something.
In order to penetrate or be penetrated. They need to turn off the porn and go join the Peace Corp so they can see what real problems look like. You cannot "change ones gender" as there really is no such thing. You are male or female - tangibly and unchangeably - and you present how you do. If they want to call that presentation "gender", fine, but it's just more word salad. Just like that "unalive" thing used by someone else. If a word means the same thing as "kill" or "suicide" than what makes "unalive" any better than saying "kill" or "suicide"? It's just a way to force change in their mould onto the society at large.
... on the other hand, I thought the joke was a little undermining. "Normal human behavior" is a thing we can define, even if the sum total of all "normal human behavior" describes the behavior of no individual human. For instance, there's a long history of people killing each other. That kind of behavior could be included in "normal" or "not normal" depending on what is meant by the definition. I wouldn't joke about it, but really address the definition and take it seriously. Otherwise we complacently propagate confusion and increase the amount of miscommunication and misunderstanding.
@@jimbrookhyser it's also a little undermined by sabine's own usage right at the beginning of the video, in which she (jokingly? i don't know...) refers to "normal" people whom, apparently, think right-wing bigotry and accepting trans people as people whose lives are worth saving are comparably "crazy" points of view... i believe she is being glib rather than serious myself, but the centrist posturing is obnoxious
16:00 this may be a dumb question, but wouldn’t you expect to see little change with puberty blockers? the point of taking them is to delay a change that might otherwise cause distress. (not getting worse) does not equate to (getting better.) otherwise thank you for a relatively balanced and in depth look at this stuff, it’s important.
i think no significant effect means compared to a control group of children with the same issues, that get a placebo or no drugs. I haven't read the study though.
i was thinking the same think and it was touched on again later in 'the control group who weren't treated got worse' . also the fact that in the discussion of mental health over time there was no mention that increasing queer-phobia is likely to cause a general decline in queer people's mental health which is going to skew all of the results of the very limited recent scientific literature.
thats why you need a control group (people who experience gender dysphoria (or feel they are transgender), but did not take puberty blockers), and then compare the results to the control group. the problem is that noone has properly conducted this. (that one paper had SEVEN people in the control group, when is should have been like 60 if i remember correctly)
My father grew up unacceptably left-handed in decidedly non-progressive 1930/40's Belfast, and in his case the result of forced right-handed writing was a terrible stutter that took a decade of renewed left-handed writing (as an adult) to rectify - so not quite as easily fixed as swapping hands, though he definitely wished it had been so
My lefthanded husband was also scorned in class by the teacher for making a mess while writing (with an inkpen, no wonder). This was back in the '80 in western europe too.
@@InShadowsLinger he only said, "not as easy as swapping hands", which is correct, no? It was just a nuance. Go and review your claim of "willful misleading".
@@InShadowsLinger: My father had tremors for the entire remainder of his life, and never fully recovered his lefthandedness. I'm not sure what exact point you're trying to make, but my father's anecdotal experience does not seem to support it.
@@zbnmth It wasn't said that "swapping hands" in this case is objectively easy. It is as easy as re-learning all the motor skills associated with primary hand. But still, doable with proper rehab. Which isn't the case for permanent changes during puberty, be it artificial or natural
The gender ratio shift could be explained in many other ways - it's hard to compare the violence and hatred "failed men" face in society to anything. By that i mean people who were expected to be straight men (gay men, transgender women), who did not comply with societies expectations. The physical and emotional violence that comes with that from peers and family is unparalleled. I'm not saying people assigned female at birth who transition don't face difficulties, just that they are different, and currently less immediately severe. It's much easier to be "non binary" if you were born AFAB because feminism already fought for women's right to be gender non conforming. Any sign of gender deviancy from AMAB people is mostly met with ridicule and like i said violence.
*hugs* That's the reason why I do worry for my amab demi-male spouse when he (his preferred pronoun) goes about in one of his blouses. I think being blind probably insulates him a little bit, at least from physical violence. No one comments about me never wearing anything "girly" That said, I'm the one buying or making them for him, since I know what colors suit him better and how to minimize his (in his opinion) unfortunate amount of hair.
It could also be genetic 🧬. There is considerably less selective pressure to be very masculine or very feminine with society, so sexual dimorphism is likely decaying from lack of reason to be maintained. This wouldn't always cause transgenderism, but the gap is shorter to cross 🦘. Feminine traits are the most effected, as feminine traits are the most different from basal, as human women have the most complicated gender specific traits. Males are more close to normal animal behaviour, with human wide traits added on.
Thank you for ponting this out. AMAB (Assigned Male At Bith) gender non conforming individuals in westernized societies face incredible levels of violence in all fronts. It’s disappointing to see Sabine not making the effort to understand how societal factors like the amount of hatred openly directed at the trans community, particularly trans women, will skew results :/ We grow up scared to death to come out. We are discussed as subhuman, degenerates, and as if we’re out of our minds for “deciding to not be men”. This information is presented as “neutral” but the amount of time dedicated to “concerns” on treatment and the lack of mention regarding the long term satisfaction rates of gender affirming care *in accepting environments* is baffling. Our lives are not made worse because of treatment. It’s the unending hatred, family rejection, lack of job oportunities as visibly trans. We’re dehumanized sistematically, and that takes a toll on our emotional wellbeing. I respect Sabine’s expertise on particle physics any day, no doubt. She’s a fantastic science communicator when it comes to physical phenomena, and as a phycisist myself, I find her brilliant. However, I find her lacking an empathic view in these topics. It’s *impossible* to discuss “crude data” seriously whithout at least acknowledging the effect the amount of violence thrown our way has 😔 it’s disheartening. All of these “moderate” “level headed” discussions are scary. How can all of this hatred just be willingly ignored? 😨😰 (Edits for clarity)
Depends where you are in the country. Often standards for male competence get ridiculous and unrealistic if you're in an area with lots of gang violence or it's rurual, so the ridicule and violence are from insecure men that hate seeing someone letting others down by not being a warrior with their own compound, which isn't really something realistic that citizens in a developed country should worry about.
@@moth5799 yes but I want those peope who call themselves scientists and all they do is spread missinformation to be challenged by other scientists and call them out
Huh, yeah I didn’t notice that but I don’t think that’s a good look. Granted, there are mentions and images of papers, but you’re right I’d expect open references (script is kinda meh). Still think she’s a good educator though, unlike some other commenters that just want to leap to an attack and forgot the whole “nuance” thing Edit: not OP
She completely misrepresented the studies, made false equivalence and strawman logical fallacies. My was a big fan up until this appalling video. It's one thing to have an opinion I disagree with, it's another to completely misrepresent the science and argument to prop up that opinion.
I randomly discovered this video after seeing one of your quantum mechanics videos. I must say, it's rather nice to hear someone who, after looking through the scientific papers on the topic, has come to the EXACT same conclusions as myself after I did my own research. There has been so much anger and people talking past each other online, I really think society needs to take a step back, return to objectivity, and look for good, caring solutions for anyone who is struggling, instead of adamantly standing behind their 'side' on the issue. That's the only way we will ever move forward.
I am a transwoman and I think this video has a lot of nuanced discussion about the topic. As a lover a science I would also like to see better studies done on the subject but I think the prospect of creating a control group for these studies is difficult. You'd have to have someone with gender dysphoria and then have them not transition. Antidotally, I can say that this has gone poorly for some of my peers. When there was a control group in that study that fact that it shrank so much should be indicative. My lived experience has been that my mental health has declined while not seeking treatment. It shouldn't be surprising that the control groups mental health gets worse while the other group either stays the same or makes modest gains. I think there is another topic being left out of the conversation all together. I think we all need to agree on a few foundational things to have a good faith investigation about transgender people. Firstly, I think we need to agree that we are real (was pointed out in the video) and have the right to exist as citizens with the same rights as everyone else. The political problem we have in the US right now is that we can't agree on that. This makes it hard to have good faith research on trans people. It also makes these studies difficult to carry out. How do account for these existential problems that many trans people face? I can say that can take a toll on your mental health. Unless we can reduce that as an external factor or we can account for it I feel like studies will be difficult to carry out. Just my thoughts :)
It also fair to say that the Trans and LGBTQIA+ community has had lots of poor research done on us in the past. I'd love to see more of the research be designed by people who are apart of the community they are studying. Or at the very least be part of the design process. It's so hard to explain how dysphoria feels to people who haven't experienced it. I feel like it would be a hard thing to study unless you understand what it feels like. About the control groups I mentioned earlier, I think understanding you are trans and then not transitioning would be paramount to taking a CIS person who knows they are CIS and putting them on the wrong hormones to find out what happens. So how do we ethically design studies with a control in mind when not getting the care could be so needlessly detrimental?
@@ashley5514 I get where you are coming from, but I have to disagree. If a study is properly conducted, then it is irrelevant who the researchers are. While I have nothing against trans people being involved in the studies, introducing them _because_ they're trans is the wrong way to go about it. That feels like a conflict of interest if anything. The only people that should be studying this stuff are those that are serious about the research, regardless of whether they are trans or not.
I speak as a trans woman who transitioned at my late 20’s in Brazil. And I did it despite the statistics pointing Brazil as the most violent country towards trans women, we call it trans-feminicide, often with regards of cruelty and excess violence. I had always been like this, but the fear was part of my social structure. Gender dysphoria is real, and it can go on for a lifetime, I didn’t know what it was but the angst was always there lurking from the shadows, I studied psychology, I traveled, moved around, did therapy for years getting to know myself and building the courage to take the first steps towards transition, it’s been 4 years, I feel way much better about myself, despite the cultural and societal consequences. I believe it would have been much better if I could have transitioned in my late teens, I hope more studies can be taken and we have it scientifically right, so young trans people can have a better life.
you are very brave, and honnest with yourself. i respect that and wish you all the best out there in your life, i hope you may be safe, in good health and find happines.
As an adult trans person who has grown up away from social media or even the trans conversation (my family is conservative and religious) transitioning in my late 20s has been a boon on my mental health and general quality of life. But I assume that is because the people I live with accept me and respect my identity. I think studying trans people's mental health is complicated because we are a small minority and our well-being is very dependent on how those around us (family, colleagues, government) treat us. That is why I suspect proving HRT does any good is complicated, it is only a small part of what being a healthy and happy trans person is. On top of that, many trans people forgo hormones and operations completely and focus on the social part of their transition. So, I do not think focusing on hormonal therapy is a good way of studying whether transitioning is a good thing. I guess we will have to wait and see for more studies to come in.
I suspect HRT and other medical procedures help with not experiencing quite as much hate. That is, if you "pass", transphobic people just don't notice you which in my opinion is quite obviously good for anyone's mental health. If we lived in a perfect world, maybe medical transition would be unnecessary for most trans people, but that doesn't seem to be the case right now.
@@nio804Being honest, no not really. Treatments help me with my own distress over my secondary sex characteristics. Other people have very little to do with it. If there are other trans people who feel the way you describe than it would explain a lot of the bad data in the video. We’d need to separate those two groups since they have different needs.
@@qarsiseer Ah, I didn't mean a trans person would choose to go on HRT just to "pass", but that it has the incidental effect of making it easier to present as their gender without being noticed by transphobes. Obviously any decision to medically modify one's body should be founded on personal needs first, regardless of whether it's related to gender or not.
@@nio804 Before I accepted that I was trans, I was trying to figure out if there was a way for doctors to remove my breasts "but in a way where I don't have to come out as transgender." I badly wanted to change my sex characteristics even if I couldn't socially transition, so there are trans people that are affected by the experience of their body in way not directly related to how they're treated in society. At the time I was willing to forego social transition because I feared what negative things I would face as a trans person, so social stigma still plays a part in how people feel about gender expression. (Luckily for me, social transition was a breeze so I didn't even need to worry about it lol)
I'm a little late to the game here as i just saw this video. One important factor that was completely ignored when discussing the psychological satisfaction of recipients of treatment is the fact that systemic hatred of trans people is a common thread before, during, and after treatment. Of course someone is going to be depressed if they are constantly inundated by an endless barrage of hate! As a trans woman who transitioned 20 years ago i can definitively say that transitioning made me happier and more satisfied with my life but the world's hatred continues to drag me down.
they only reason lots of people hate you is because you think i should stop referring to women as woman and men as men you lot invented cis male and cis female ; did you know the word cis isnt actually a real word its only recentl been added to dictionaries ; the world does not need to altert its language to suit your gender if you are happy to be trans good on you
Thank you, I was hoping someone would point this out. Also trans feminine people are more stigmatized and more likely to be victims of violence than trans masculine people, so that’s going to affect the number of people who feel safe coming out of the closet and can even keep people fully repressed to themselves. To be clear, I’m certainly not saying trans masc people have it easy! This is a dangerous world for all trans people right now.
You're correct that hatred is unfortunately a common thread before and after treatment...but that's also not entirely relevant to what's being measured, in a very technical sense. See, if you measure the effect of a treatment, and there's another phenomenon going on in the background throughout, then you should still be able to measure the effect of that treatment. For instance, if it's very warm out and I turn on the AC, it should still have an effect that can be measured (unless the AC is not working).
@@CamustangYour reasoning is flawed - you’re assuming the external factor remains constant before and after. Taking your analogy, suppose that after turning on the AC, global temperatures also rose by 40 degrees. Then, one might erroneously deduce that the AC doesn’t cool anything down.
Nobody said otherwise. The argument is that there’s a big difference between letting someone write with their left hand and proceeding with irreversible surgeries and committing them to a life of chronic medication.
@@theondono The data suggests that those who regret transition are incredibly low. That you think you should have a say in these decisions is just not plausible.
@@joeandorian7719 You mean the barely existent data suggest there isn’t many who regret the transition? There are LOTS of people who do. I’ve been on dates with some. I personally know some. And now that it’s so much easier to get access to hormones and puberty blockers, I am guessing the number of people who regret it is going to massively increase. Just as an aside, what is wrong with just being who you are regardless of your inners? Seriously. Maybe the problem is misogyny ia still alive and well. What’s wrong with being a fem boy or a butch girl? Seriously. Trans ideology is currently erasing lesbian and gay kids or even just kids who don’t fit into a binary, all the while say the heteronormativity is the problem. It is a trash argument to say that a little kid is going to actually understand what they are doing to there body. It’s akin to child a use to allow this as liberally as it is. More strict standards need to be in place before a kid that can’t even vote can start electing to have their biological development disrupted.
@@joeandorian7719 even if only one person regrets it it is enough to criticize it. Now there is Reddit with more than 40000 people regretting it and there are multiple Detransitioners speaking out. They are on TH-cam and they have their own organizations. They are growing and growing. Your beloved data is obviously inaccurate
Yeah. Because her opinion is a fact? A normal person who thinks they are born into the wrong body.. wow, how ironic considering that is condoning gnostic mysticism.
It is a medical condition and mental disorder. It isn't a metaphysical phenomenon. The "experts" don't even know the cause, but less grey matter in their orbitofrontal cortex is a factor. Evidence suggests that endocrine disruptors in the environment are a leading cause for gender dysphoria. Giving puberty blockers to pre pubescent children and surgeries is not common sense. Instead of chopping off someone's penis maybe we should look into reducing environmental pollution. The ignorance of humanity is maddening. You're a bunch of imbeciles. It has to do with hormone disruption during gestation, and this is exactly why gender dysphoria affects men more than women. Yeah, you all really understand "science." There is nothing wrong with their body, and no one is born in the wrong body. Talk about believing in gnostic mysticism.
@@ADUAquascaping Sabine was asking a rhetorical question, whether you can even define normality in the strictest sense. It's not merely her opinion, it is a fact of life you learn along the way. No one, nothing, that actually exists is "normal". Normality is however you define it, an abstract, arbitrary, subjective, a certain number of standard deviations from the statistical mean. Since you have a problem with gnostic mysticism, i'm assuming (possibly wrongly) that you deem yourself 'Christian'. Do you truly think you your faith is "normal" compared to the rest of humanity? To the rest of Christiandom? You could argue whether something is "morally right or wrong" according to your faith, whether God likes this and that, but anyone who has done some introspection and mingled with actual people would know that normality is undefinable. And that we each struggle with our personal sins. That is what she is saying here.
That's because 'normal' is highly culturally defined. Example: Lived in many countries overseas. One time (mid-80s), in Kenya, a few of us Americans were sitting in chairs, listening to Judy Collins and the like (on cassette tapes), drinking some wine watching an absolutely glorious African sunset. The Kenyans thought it somewhat strange, waste of time. We, 'Magnificent, beautiful!' (and it was!) they ... 'Don't get it'. Best example of what is 'normal'behavior that I have ever heard.
"The control group members who did not receive care had worse mental health outcomes and by the end there were only 7 people left in this group" - this is the problem with control group studies in this group. Who would put themselves into the control group? It would mean denying yourself and sticking withthat despite knowing an alternative exists
The ethics of control groups is incredibly complex, and can't be shrugged off. In many of these studies it's just not possible to have an untreated group.
You don't understand study design. In a double-blind randomised controlled trial (RCT), you don't know if you're taking the control or not. It's not a decision you make.
@@mikolmisol6258 True, but you know you could be, which could make people more reluctant to participate in the study in the first place. That seems like it would make it more likely that people less critically in need of treatment would participate.
This was falsely intepreted. There were only 7 people at the 12 Months mark in the control group, but you can see that on earlier timestamps control group was significantly bigger. This was actually inacurately presented by SH
Just because you think it's unethical doesn't make the existing data any stronger. If you want things to change without stronger data, you're going to need to admit the argument is a cultural one and not a scientific one.
As the parent of a chromosomaly intersex child, I really wish we could just teach our children to accept their whole selves without worrying so much about who is a boy or girl and whether their body matches a definition of either. While your anatomy may define your biological sex and increase the odds of certain personality traits, it doesn't have to define who you are. My child is who they are and their anatomy isn't at odds with the reality of what they will grow to view as their identity. There is nothing wrong with either their feelings on the subject, or with their body.
I agree, my hope is that people can love the skin they’re in. We don’t really get a choice, so it’s healthier to accept our biology. Hard when kids are taught they can be whatever they want.
@@eeeatenit's not possible many times to just accept where you are, neither is it necessarily healthy, you should fight against your circumstances, not take it like a bitch.
@@eeeatenSpoken by someone who has never once felt gender dysphagia. I would love it if instead you could just accept people get to choose to what they do with their bodies.
@@skyisreallyhigh3333 gender dysphagia you say? i find that hard to swallow. i assume you mean dysphoria. no i have not felt gender dysphoria, because i understand that gender doesn't really mean that much and no matter how i feeeeel my sex is based on my biology. i do know a few women who felt gender dysphoria strongly as teens, mostly because they felt strong and brave, and they felt society's expectations of young women didn't really match how they felt - they weren't girly girls so at the time identified as tom-boys. now they are confident strong adult women they are VERY glad they didn't change their bodies, and that they weren't offered treatment because they may well have taken it. i also know a few trans women. they transitioned as adults, and are happier as women than they were as men - great, right? power to them. the point is this is not a decision for kids to make when they are growing, changing and confused. it's too easy to throw medical treatment at a problem that is usually psychological. we used to teach kids to love who they are, now we tell them they can be whatever they choose. sounds great, rarely works.
As a response to why there are more AFAB people identifying as trans in proportion to AMABs in adolescence, I would make the argument that since AFAB people start puberty earlier than AMABs, they have more time to figure out what characteristics about their body are bothering them and why. I also believe that it is still somewhat more stigmatized for AMAB people to be trans, or identify as LGBTQ+ (see current political discourse of AMAB trans and queer people being groomers, and media villanization dating back to the 80's). For these reasons, I believe that the amount of AMAB trans adolescents will eventually come closer to, or meet the number of AFAB adolescents.
@@cristianproust or trans women are being killed more often than trans men. The real reason there's a "sudden surge" in transgender youth is that they arent being murdered as often, and the only reason there arent many trans adults is that AIDS killed most of them. Read a book.
@@cristianproust There is more empirical evidence of the relative unacceptability of trans women (painted as predators) than trans men (painted as victims) than there is that any social contagion is a widespread cause of dysphoria, and the hypothesis of acceptance explains both the increase and the gender disparity in that increase. If you ask trans people, all of them will say that acceptance is a conscious factor in why they are or are not out, in the timing of them coming out, and in who they come out to. This factor is as obvious and uncontroversial as anything can be here. The hypothesis of social contagion explains nothing new, and there is no evidence for it that is not already explained by more obvious factors, why should anybody accept that hypothesis as any kind of substitute? If you want to use social contagion as a contributing factor that operates alongside acceptance in explaining the increase, and assign some kind of weight to it based on evidence, you will find an incredibly tiny number, one that you will struggle to distinguish from zero, especially given current evidence. The only evident use the social contagion hypothesis has is to induce outrage in those who are disgusted by trans people, it has no explanatory power.
plus trans women face significantly more backlash in this culture war, that is often (extremly misogynistically) framed as poor confused naive lesbians versus creepy male sex predators. it's no wonder that this is a recent trend and once the winds shift and being transphobic becomes more and more socially unacceptable, like homophobia and racism are today, we would likely see this ratio settle at 1 again
As a university professor, I have had more than one student over the years suddenly changing the first name to something suggesting the opposite gender. They usually are in their lower twenties and I'm rather confident they have made up their mind by now. They are just starting their transition, so their appearance and behavior sometimes sends mixed signals as to their gender, which can lead to awkward interactions. It is therefore a special challenge to treat these students in such a way as not to make their transition even more difficult then it already is. It seems to me that being aware of their struggle is the first step to improve their situation, and correct information and honest discussion helps with that. In this sense: thanks, Sabine, for this valuable contribution.
When talking about teens in middle and high school, which is what this video focused on, we need to keep in mind that children of that age are desperate to fit in, especially girls. This is why there is a higher percentage of depression among girls of that age than boys. Since you give your own personal experience on the matter let me give you mine. My teenage goddaughter and her friend last year announced that they were non-binary and wanted to be called they/them. The friend even changed her name to Moss. A year later and they both are back to using female pronouns and the young lady to using her given name. While my goddaughter's parents, other family members and I supported her wishes and used the terms she wanted for us to use I had a suspicion that she and her friend, who are not popular girls, made the decision not based on actual feelings of gender dysphoria but because they saw it as a way to increase their popularity among their peers. When their expectations of increased popularity didn't pan out they dropped the new pronouns. This is why I believe the studies are noting a rapid increase of the phenomena among young girls not previously seen before. As Sabine noted girls are more likely to be influenced by popular culture and will do whatever they feel necessary to fit in. This is why it is very important for young people to get counseling and why I support the idea that no permanent physical changes be made until after they have reached adulthood when they are better able to make a decision that will affect them for the rest of their lives.
If I could put my input on the matter, I would like to emphasise on that acceptance of their current identity is a very important thing to do, if their current identity or not- you can't decide for them who they are. Also true with sexual orientation- even if your kid or friend who came out as gay might actually be straight or bi or whatever, it's not for you to decide, it's for them. Just understand and be accepting of who they are, and if they come up to the realisation that the trans label does not fit them- try and be accepting aswell. The fact that there is always doubt on wether their identity is the most matching for them never means that the most common option is the correct one for themselves, just that it's ok if they regret or change their minds.
"I can see you're making many changes in how you present yourself, lately. Is there anything I should update about how I refer to you? If I do end up needing to make changes, I would be happy to. I want to make sure my classroom is a safe place for everyone to be more authentically themselves."
A complaint about statistics: If you _know_ you don't know the true rate of trans folks in the population, there's no reason to believe you know anything about the true distribution at all (in fact all we know for sure is this is not the true distribution!) Many marginalized groups are suppressed diferentially, so we should not expect that the suppressed distribution resembles the true distribution in any way. Young boys and young girls are subject to wildly different social forces, there's no reason to believe there should be any kind of invariance of proportions as those social forces shift.
It's perfectly possible that the social construct "female" produces more diagnosable gender dysphoria, or that the social construct "man" has properties that cause fewer such diagnoses, or that the disparity is rooted in the general anatomy of the mainstream gender ideology of the studied societies.
@@christianknuchel How can you socially construct something built off of biology and the actual recordable differences between male and female brain structure? You refuse to debate on a non emotional basis.
To demonstrate one difference in social forces... compare the word for a girl who acts like a boy (tomboy) and a boy who acts like a girl (sissy, nancy boy). Girls (I think) typically view “tomboy" as more or less neutral (it could be positive, negative, or neutral depending on intent) but “sissy” is one of the worst insults a 12-year-old boy can think of.
One thing that I've heard about the case of Sweden "rolling back" is that the country has been at the forefront of gender-affirming care with much easier access to treatments, including surgery for younger people, than most other places in the world. That was from a documentary on the "rollback" on French TV a year or two ago, a state owned channel if I remember correctly (seen as left-leaning if anyone wonders why it would matter). What I gathered is that after some highly mediatized cases of people regretting their decisions to switch genders with medical assistance at a younger age there has been a backlash against somewhat zealous use of these therapies, but it's still rather more accessible and common than in many other western countries. I wanted to say this because in the video it seems like the countries who go back on these treatments may have completely changed their course but in my understanding and memory of it it's more of a case of three steps forward and one step back.
@@ng.tr.s.p.1254 Why does the G word trigger you so badly, son? Depriving a whole generation of healthy children of the possibility ever to procreate is genocide indeed. Especially when a very certain racial/cultural group is targeted. If you're one of those who promote it, you're a criminal. If you're indifferent, you clearly need to start thinking. It may be difficult initially, without a habit.
@@ng.tr.s.p.1254 A persistent government policy aimed at depriving children of any possibility to reproduce is genocide. To genocide A people, you don't need to gas it You may simply prevent its next generation from being born. simple as.
it's also worth noting that a couple of years ago sweden got an extremely conservative, right wing government for the first time in a while, which seems bent on undoing so many of the things that have been built over decades.
Hello. I am transgender and left handed. And I want to share my story. But first I want to say that English is not my native language, so I apologize for my style. Now I am 31 years old. I started hormonal therapy at 24, then I changed documents at 27. I have felt a problem with my gender all my life and wanted to change sex since childhood. I learned about the possibility of hormone therapy only at the age of 17. I only learned the term "gender dysphoria" at the age of 23. I didn't start the transition until adulthood, not because I didn't feel dysphoric. I just didn't know about the possibilities and was afraid to talk about this topic. I didn't need to know the term "dysphoria" to experience it. Thus, I was a closeted transgender without even knowing about the existence of the “Lgbt agenda”. I also want to say about the comparison of transgender and left-handedness. They did not try to retrain me to the right hand. But I tried to learn to write with my right hand myself. And I didn't succeed. It's difficult and uncomfortable for me. I would not be happy if they tried to retrain me by force. I can indeed take a pen from my left hand to my right, but that won't make me right-handed and will only cause discomfort. I also want to express my opinion about the "pseudo transgenders" who allegedly fell victim to LGBT propaganda. In our society, it is believed that a man should be masculine and a woman feminine. Many people who have problems with gender expression think they are transgender. But you don't have to be transgender to be a gentle guy with long hair or a strong-willed strong woman. In my opinion, the problem of "pseudo transgenders" is in public stereotypes and not in society's awareness of transgenders. I believe that if people are freer and more aware, the number of transgender people will not increase. There will be an increase in the number of people who, being cisgender, will show less stereotypical traits. And finally, I will add that the lack of improvement in the psycho-emotional state of children receiving therapy may be associated with social problems and social rejection. I will not speak for all situations, but in some of them, the refusal to change your body and documents can cause more suffering than the difficulties that arise during the transition. In such situations, therapy may not make life substantially better, but not therapy may make life substantially worse.
Can you educate me a little bit about how you felt like you were in the wrong body? Even if I was better at writing with my left hand, I would have no idea. I've only ever tried writing with my right hand. | In the same manner, I have never entertained the thought that I could be "in the wrong body." I don't even know how I might come to that conclusion. Maybe it would be an indication if i found other men attractive. But aren't there also gay trans? Also, I think people have a deep reverence for the traditional concept for masculinity and femininity. It is not apparent that it is a a good idea to erase these sacred archetypes for the sake of utilitarianism or hedonism.
That is a beautifully expressed message, Touko. I appreciate your sharing the journey you've been on. It actually helps people understand the parameters of our varied lives and our conversations.
@@21area21 Hey are21-- I can't reply for Touko but I wanted to say that as a gay man, no-one I know is challenging the "rightness" of people who feel or are drawn to well-defined masculinity or femininity. I happen to like those incarnations of sexual identification, and frankly, some or most trans-folk seem to as well. Feeling that your physical corpus is inconsistent with your felt gender is simply a different issue. I know many heterosexual men and women who put very little stock or energy into traditional gender roles, but many gay people like myself, and many trans people, who do. So whether our feelings are so different from yours is quite debatable. The important principle is respecting every individual's right to define themselves, and to determine the course of their own desires, and not put any person's life or life choices on some public platform for the pleasure of our dissection and derogation.
Ultimately, the big, huge, monstrous problem lies with the language we use. Sex (male/female/intersex) and gender (masculine/feminine/neutral) are not the same. Trans sex and Trans gender are not the same. "man" and "woman" are neither sexes nor genders, they are terms combining different meanings of sex and gender. It's all a huge mess caused by academia using words in completely incoherent and contradictory ways.
@@KangMinseok I completely agree. Language is an obstacle to a lot of clarity. But with the right calculation and good judgement, we can change language, which changes on its own constantly.
Having worked at a general hospital that's had a trans reference center for decades, it was easy to see that, up until 2015 when I left, in adult patients detransition rates were low and reported quality of life improvement was high. Local data was overwhelming. And it was a lenghty process, too. Screening to greenlight surgical procedures took 2 years. You had to be openly living as the target gender for that period, and you had to control for conditions that could complicate your diagnostics. Psychiatric and psychological care was provided, and every single professional had to agree and sign it in order for you to get the medical approval for permanent procedures. I can't see this being any different for children (in fact Pediatrics is usually way way stricter than this). TDLR: If your protocol is strict, there's no excuse not to provide care.
Learn to be comfortable in the body you’re born with. Transgender dysphoria simply means you are a guy who thinks that he is a girl and vice versa. All surgery does is require lifelong hormone replacement and sterility. And it’s not up to fetusphobes to demand for everyone else on having a pubescent ‘romper room’ dystopia that casually discards old people and fetuses is good for anybody!🤔
The protocols aren’t nearly as strict now as they were when you left. I know it was very strict & “adults only” in the 1980’s & 90’s. And I wouldn’t rely on Pediatricians to push back against giving puberty blockers or doing “top” & “bottom” surgeries if they’re told those are the “Standard of Care” & they could lose their Admission Privileges, Malpractice Insurance or Licenses if they refuse to provide “gender affirming care”.
I’m a detransitioner, former “trans kid” and I was put on puberty blockers to treat being “born in the wrong body”. This isn’t medicine, and you can’t change sex, I was lied to. I could rant for hours but I’ll leave my comment there. Shame on everyone who does this to kids…
"I can't see this being any different for children " Children are TOO YOUNG too make life altering decision. You frighten me. Everything else you said becomes suspect.
I expect that trans men used to be under counted. I'm 62 and a trans man who was assigned female at birth (AFAB). My male identity was clear to me before kindergarten. I thought I was alone. I knew trans women but never met a trans man. In my 30s, I started meeting many women, my age and older, who also had "gender identity issues." These women never referred to themselves as trans men. Instead, they talked about the horror, physical discomfort, and trauma of being in the wrong body. These women would never have been counted in a survey or come out publicly. This is how I discovered I wasn't alone in the world. I attended a large women's spiritual retreat where I confided that I struggle with gender identity issues. The facilitator confessed that they too had these struggles. Then the room was filled with choruses of "me too." It was a transformative moment. The community became a safe place to talk about identity and even the very elderly would discuss their male identities. I don't remember any of these individuals coming out publicly, but given that there is more acceptance today, I hope that they will.
You are *actually* trans. Kids today can just be what used to be called tomboys, but now take their mild, common gender non-conformity and immediately leap to "im trans!"
I was lucky when I tried to explain to my parents that I was in the wrong body, I was told that tough, this was the body I was given so I would just have to live with it. I never once doubted I was in the wrong body. I remember even before fully understanding the difference between boys and girls, having the desperate need to crawl out of my body because it felt so wrong. I did learn early on that it was not a safe topic to talk about so I kept it secret. My parents used to explain to everyone that I was just a tomboy. When I got older my parents sent me to modeling and finishing school twice in an attempt to teach me to behave and present more like a woman.
@@MarigoldBright maybe I didn't make myself clear, sorry. Anything related to any other topic? Did your views on dinosaurs or astronauts change? Maybe firemen and power rangers? Santa clause? What else did you *know* in kindergarten and how do you feel about that knowledge now?
Great video Sabine. Small observation. When I was a child, there was no common term to be used. So if I had known I was transgender when I was 5, I sure wouldn't know the word was transgender. That was the 60s. Today, we have a lot of kids able to better understand themselves, there isn't more of us, there is just more of us that understand what makes us uncomfortable.
No, there is more transgender people. At least more people claiming to be. And I am sure all of this gender confusion stuff is going to mess up a lot of vulnerable children. I have mental issues of my own though, and do not judge.
@@TheLobotomist-t1 Well what I meant was our numbers didn't suddenly increase, we were always there, but many of us had no means to understand who we are. Most vulnerable children likely wouldn't be vulnerable if they had parents who were more understanding. Nothing says never should have become parents, like ditching a child, because they discover their son is their daughter.
Sabine - I can't emphasize enough how important to me, and how much I appreciate, your ability to analyze and present a fair, balanced, and non-biased summation of the different topics you delve into. I was watching a you-tube video just yesterday where someone else was trying to do just that, and not succeeding very well - bias tends to shine through even the best efforts. I remember remarking to my wife that "Sabine would have presented a more balanced view of this". Of all the people I trust to present the truth, (and that's a damn tiny list) you are at the top - and to me you're a national treasure. Thanks for your efforts, and please keep up the good work. I feel really, really bad about people who don't feel right about the body they are born into, I can't imagine what a nightmare that would be, And I am also disheartened and angry about people who dismiss their feelings, or are cruel and non-inclusive in their dealings with these unfortunate folks. I hope we can put more resources into studying the problem as soon as possible, and do what we can to help them, and to create an environment where they are accepted and loved, the way we all deserve to be.
I too absolutely hope for us all to be able to provide support for anyone needing it. I also hope we can find a way to discern what exactly it is that ails a person, so we don't go and make grave mistakes and give only proper and right treatment for everyone when needed. While it's not enough for everyone, sometimes all that teenager needs is time to let the body and brain sort things out.
It seems odd to consider people who voluntarily stop puberty blockers as the control group for those who don't. If they stopped voluntarily, they likely decided that they don't need them, and thus are a poor proxy for those who want the blockers but can't get them. The difference is obviously gonna be smaller.
I think it'd be worthwhile to have two controls, those that are cis and those that want blockers but can't get them; this way you have more points of reference
I disagree that the enforced right handed writing was a trivial change, I think that if you look deeper that you will find a significant increase in learning issues and school problems in those people forced to use their non dominant hand, often by corporal punishment.
I think you misunderstand what she meant by trivial change. It is a trivial change in that if you were to make someone write with their opposite hand for one day and then realize oops this was a bad idea they can go back to their other hand. Fundamental you're not doing anything to the other hand that causes damage. With gender-affirming care you can't undo many of the aspects of this care. As an example, A successful transition involves sterility.
as a trans woman, for me and many other trans people i know, hormone therapy is an attempt to survive and not commit suicide more than anything else. It makes sense that mental health would not become much better, as many people socially transition at the same time as hrt, which is incredibly difficult. when i was more visibly transgender, i would frequently be called slurs, be stared at, and was ostracized because of it. hormone replacement therapy has helped me not be as noticeable, and makes life a little easier. but i still struggle with the way people see me because of my transition and life is by no means easy.
The s**cide frequency of your demographic would be higher with or without hormones, 25% of people with GD also have ASD, and people with ASD already have a 10x higher s**cide rate than the general population. It also includes disproportionate sufferers of eating disorders, anxiety and depression. These are all preexisting conditions that are simply lumped in with GD to create the illusion that GD is causing all this distress, when it actually just co-exists with a boatloading of preexisting conditions.
@@awkymomo6954 i've been diagnosed with bulimia but it only started with the onset of gender dysphoria, i can't speak to the entire trans population but i used to want to kill myself and I don't want to as much anymore after receiving hormone therapy
Trans scientist here (not a scientist on transgender issues, rather I fall into both categories; though I do have a significant background in psychology as well as engineering). I think this is a well-balanced review of the issues (thank you, Sabine!), but I'd like to add a few small caveats. First, I disagree with Sabine where she appears to suggest that an increase in suicidality in an untreated group is somehow less relevant than a decrease in suicidality of the treated group. This is a salient observation if it is not expected that suicidality would grow in general in adolescents, but that is not the case here, so I feel the difference between the two is what matters most. In particular, it isn't surprising that as children questioning their gender enter adolescence, suicidality will increase across the board. What Sabine fails to detail (unless I missed it) is the preponderance of unambiguous data illustrating how being the targets of bullying and violence is much more significant for queer youth than for sexuality/gender-normative youth. The effect size here is very significant. I also take slight exception to the suggestion that the "social contagion" theory should be considered a reasonable conjecture simply because there is no good evidence for or against it. At best, this is a hypothesis with no significant support, and the onus scientifically should be to provide evidence to reject the null hypothesis, not to somehow "prove" the null hypothesis-especially when the null hypothesis is "this phenomenon is as real as it was in previous generations". Even with good data it is often impossible to demonstrate that an effect does not exist, so it is generally incumbent upon the researcher to soundly reject the null in order to make a claim reasonable. The idea certainly has some face validity, but the suggestion that it is pervasive or predictive is still an unproven assumption lacking decent support. I agree there is probably an effect of social media on inaccurate self-diagnosis (autism and ADHD may also have this issue to some extent), but it is impossible for me to determine whether the effect size could be significant enough such that stating this hypothesis in a way that suggests it is reasonable in the absence of data to support that claim would do more good than harm. This is also a very old canard familiar to queer people, as "grooming makes children gay" has been used to demonize queer people for centuries and there is still no good evidence (to my knowledge, I don't know if this has changed in the past two decades) to suggest that, for one, "being gay" is frequently due to "social contagion" despite the increase in numbers in later generations. I haven't heard people making the claim social media is "turning people gay" because it is an inflammatory supposition without strong empirical evidence to back it up. It seems equally questionable when applied to transgender people, though the issue may be more salient due to the nature of medical treatment. Ironically, most transgender people report knowing they are transgender at a very young age (I mention this on gender constancy in a couple of paragraphs), perhaps even earlier than self-reports of being gay, which often happen in adolescence as any sexual attraction in youth is usually of a different quality. (I personally knew when I was eight, but I suppressed it for years and dealt with suicidality because of it. Had I been born twenty or thirty years later, I would have had the opportunity to come out much earlier in life rather than waiting until my mid-twenties to realize what was missing.) What a lot of this comes down to has to do with social attitudes toward people who present as unusual in defiance of social expectations, whether or not gender is the specific issue (though gender is particularly salient as I'll mention in a moment). In most societies violence is sadly tolerated toward queer individuals, usually due to authority acceptance by people in positions of moral authority making use of power structures to marginalize others for personal gain, or (I would hope more commonly) merely out of ignorance or fear. But gender is particularly thorny in part because sexism is more openly accepted than racism: you might hear somepony say, "most women...", more frequently than you would hear them say, "most Blacks...", because the latter is considered less socially acceptable. Socially, most people recognize differences between men and women and readily attribute them to biology even when the aspects of gender-typing being considered, like the wearing of a tie or the color pink, have almost certainly nothing significant to do with biology (as evidenced by these roles being different from culture to culture). Moreover, children know about gender almost immediately: not only do they understand their assigned gender prior to being able to speak in full sentences, gender constancy (the idea that it is taboo to deviate from assigned gender roles) is usually very well-understood by a child prior to age 4. Racial constancy, by comparison (such as the idea wearing dreadlocks doesn't make you Black, or wearing a headdress does not make you Indigenous American) happens closer to age 8, though this data is old and may have changed in some families over the past decade as social awareness of racial issues has arisen. For the record, my suspicion is that a significant amount of stress leading to mental illness in gender questioning youth comes from how they are treated by others socially in person, and transitioning in an manner that changes one's appearance reduces this stress in part not only by validating their feelings which improves self-esteem, but also by reducing bullying behavior; in particular, if the child is able to "pass" easily among people who don't know them well. If a boy's identified gender is male, the less he "looks female", the less bullying and bigotry he is likely to encounter. This is very well-documented. Additionally, religious people are often more accepting of children in transition than they may be toward adults who transition later in life where they are more likely to view it as a "choice", as unrealistic as that point of view may be. These aren't intended as large criticisms of Sabine's take, so I feel I should mention why I think these minor issues are so important. People are definitely crazy on both sides of most arguments, especially arguments with a subjective social component that butt heads with traditional values. I really appreciate Sabine's adherence to this fact. And while there is danger in not considering the possibility of the effect of social media on self-diagnosis, I am more concerned with the use of unsupported arguments as a means for attacking a marginalized group. People who are transgender adults are being dehumanized and physically assaulted at the same time as these arguments against gender-affirming care for children swell, and I don't think this is a coincidence. One thing Sabine fails to mention at all in this video is the stance of all major medical organizations in support of age-appropriate gender-affirming care, and those organizations are led by experts with decades of medical experience who are better equipped to interpret the data than, say, politicians and reactionaries. Even in societies with liberal values, violence against transgender people and suicides of transgender adults and youth are very real, very significant problems today. It is important to proceed with caution medically, but equally important to proceed with caution socially when potentially spreading unsupported hypotheses that can be used to cause and further genuine harm by bad actors. Finally, I should point out that perhaps the biggest problem here (which I think Sabine does touch upon) is the fact that people on both sides of controversial social issues tend to have unscientific agendas. For example, detransitioning is still very rare, but it is a notable risk that doctors are hesitant to lend weight to or even discuss with young patients, because they know it will be used as a rallying cry to deny care to those who genuinely need it by overstatement of risk and oversimplification of the issue. This is due to how adversarial people averse to science are on social issues (on both sides), unfortunately by necessity. For example, I personally feel that abortion should be accessible in most circumstances, but I'd also like to see frequent inspections of abortion clinics done in a way that does not create an impediment to offering prompt and safe services; I also think fetuses in later stages of development should be anesthetized prior to the procedure. You will find neither of those arguments to have public support, because those who support abortion services are forced to argue that the fetus should not be a consideration whatsoever while those against it are forced to argue that there is no circumstance where abortion isn't unethical. This is because giving even the slightest ground on these extremist views will lead to those on the other side of the argument immediately capitalizing upon it and using it to their advantage. I don't know any solution for this. Thanks for the video, as always.
"One thing Sabine fails to mention at all in this video is the stance of all major medical organizations in support of age-appropriate gender-affirming care, and those organizations are led by experts with decades of medical experience who are better equipped to interpret the data than, say, politicians and reactionaries." So society is anti-trans and trans people need protection to the point where we literally can't even acknowledge blatant and drastic problems with the trans community over the fear of them being "marginalized" yet apparently the entire scientific community supports trans people? Does that sound like it makes sense to you? It used to be widely accepted by the medical community that smoking was good for the lungs. If a normal person with no medical experience noticed every friend he has that has smoked long term has had the same health problems and made the connection that smoking was bad, would he be wrong purely because the doctors say otherwise? Have you ever done any research into why this sudden upsurge of "transphobia" came about at the same time it became the priority of the trans community to interact with other people's children with the stated purpose of turning them trans, and fight for the continued right to expose children to sexual performances both publicly and privately?
I think your last chapter about abortion tells how people seems to think thery are medical experts while making decisions about someone else's healt treatment, it's not a field of politics and the discussion among low understanding about medical field can't be the ones who are saying how the fine work of medical procedures should go. It's the discussion inside the departments who are evaluating the medical field. It's like US has death penalty and ppl are speaking about the ways the ppl should be killed, not the subject itself. What comes to trans-debate, I hope the main point would go in public conversations, that trans-ppl could live save and in caring enviroment and are supported to make their own decisions, not making a lot work to try to change their head around if they are thinking what's their gender-ideology. Also a gender-sensitivy as upbringing gives peace for all of us, who have to live inside narrow minded norms that are obsessed about babies gender or if pink and light blue are rightfully wore. In US maybe they just let kids grow up dressed as they like and prioritize on life-threatening things like mass shootings.
This comment should be higher up. As a nonbinary biochemistry master’s student I felt there were some limitations to the arguments presented in this video, and you managed to explain many of my thoughts more coherently and succinctly than I could have.
As a trans woman who only came out in her 30s i 100% agree with the lack of good quality research into trans people. Just on a personal level It’s soo frustrating that there is soo little hard evidence on the best dosage of hormones and blockers or the best form in which to take them. What are the differences in outcome between oestrogen gel, patches, tablets or injections? No one knows. The form of medication you get is based largely on the collective anecdotal experiences and preconceived ideas of the gender clinic you are being treated by. And their level of funding. We still have no idea if progesterone is good, useless or dangerous for trans women. Plenty of us have our own personal experiences of perceived benefits to mental health and feminising outcomes, but we can’t quantify the risks that might only manifest 10-15 years down the line. And many clinics don’t prescribe it because of that lack of research into it. Yet trans women have been taking it for 40+ years. There’s been more than enough time to find all this stuff out. But we’ve just been ignored by most researchers for all those years. And even now when research is done it’s as good as useless half the time because it’s of such terrible quality. Why is money being wasted on studies that would never be able to prove anything because of their lack of controls or too low numbers when that money could be pooled into a few high quality studies that could actually answer the questions. And especially for trans kids. I know myself that all the most intense causes of dysphoria I have experienced would simply not have existed for me if I’d started treatment in my teens. Most of those will never be fully reversed by adult hormone treatments and I can’t afford the surgeries that might ale alleviate some of them. And yet children are now being denied that opportunity to live without extreme dysphoria because no one’s bothered to do the research that can actually prove its benefits. It’s soo very frustrating.
Just curious, did you try bioidentical hormone replacement? I just feel like tons of people who transition don't even get their hormone or cholesterol panels done. I wouldn't feel like a biological man either of all my testosterone was bound up by SHBG and you have the effective testosterone level of a birth African woman. It's just weird to me that the solution is "I'm a different gender" instead of "my environment is ruining my hormone levels". Teenagers eat horrible food, get horrible sleep, stay up on their phones all night, don't study for anything anymore, and then turn around and are claiming 1/4 are trans now. I just don't buy it, that's simply too high to make mathematical sense. Why aren't we considering that all the plastic in our bodies is crushing our free hormones? I just feel like before people transition they should try bioidentical hormone replacement to see if that's really what their problem is. The trans suicide rate shows, clearly something isn't right with the approach, and I'm hearing of so many people wishing they didn't transition.
Also, your hormone dosage is based on the hormone levels in your blood. If you don't know that you shouldn't be messing with your hormone levels. Pay to get a blood panel done, you can just pay for it. It's about $500. I don't understand what you mean by not having the knowledge required, it's basic hormone science? What's your current testosterone/estrogen levels, both free and total in your blood? Start there
@Un Listed I am very glad that that treatment worked for you, but I think if you told most people diagnosed with gender dysphoria that they should take hormones that are aligned with their assigned gender, they would immediately stop listening to you and walk away. Almost every trans person I know thought about it VERY hard before they made the decision to start their transition. It is more than a little arrogant to assume that someone hasn’t considered the alternatives to any treatment they seek.
@@Flourish38 you should TRY IT to make sure you aren't being delusional. If you live your entire life with hormone levels that are compromised by environmental factors, I really think you would MAKE SURE you're right instead of assuming you're right. You don't have the ability to see what your life is like on bioidentical hormone replacement, so you have to treat yourself like a science experiment. That's why I said 3 months. 3 months is enough time to see if it's what you need without permanently affecting your body long term. You need to MAKE SURE YOURE RIGHT before you potentially compromise your body for life. It's a BIG DECISION. I spent a lot to my life "not feeling like a man" until I decided to get my blood work done and found out my testosterone level was so low i was barely a functioning male. If I had decided to transition I can guarantee i would have ended myself. You have blood on your hands if you keep pushing the idea that every trans person is truly actually 100% trans and not potentially experiencing compromised hormone levels. Look at the trans suicide rate and tell me your approach is perfect.
Having controls in studies poses ethical problems because if it is believed that treatment is helpful, then having patients you don't treat might be seen as refusing treatment. But it's even more of a problem when people are so strongly polarized and politicized, and yet another kind of problem when there is no strong .scientific reason to take one side over another.
The medical treatment should of course not be instantly accessible to children. However, the abuse trans people go through on a regular basis beforehand can not be understated. Many see hormone therapy as an out, an "if i do this, people will see the real me right away". And yes, that does work sometimes. However, the much more important thing is to get society to stop taking gender roles that seriously to the point of systematized abuse based on gender assigned at birth, and not just for trans people. It is not the unequivocal duty of someone with a uterus to bear children and care for them, and any other lifestyle is a waste or something. Neither is it the duty of someone with a penis to bottle up all emotion, show no weakness ever and be a breadwinner for a member of the former group. You might say our society doesn't do that anymore, but you couldn't be less blind or ignorant if you say that. It has just become much more subtle, but no less harsh.
But you have to admit that human society wouldn’t have advanced had people before us NOT conformed to certain roles. Imagine if hunter/gatherer tribes just said “naw we gonna do some other shit” and ended up starving/not reproducing. Imagine if your parents didn’t fuck.
That's what's always confused me. I'm from a place where even before the trans thing, if one bathroom broke you could just use the other one. No one was really abused or teased for being a woman or trans, and usually it's the opposite where people are confronted for being rude towards different people. I think the trans thing is a reaction to places with oppressive gender norms, like if you're a man you must own a truck or guns or else you won't get attention from women, bullshit like that. It's a harsh country, America. Regardless if you're man or woman you'll get punished for it. It makes sense to try to step out of that, though that's a symptom I think internet profiles being a main social touchstone have enabled, but the internet is a poor socializing medium.
@@krunkle5136 Oh no, being trans is a thing beyond just gender norms. But the gender norms are what cause like 95% of the problems for trans people, and a whole lot for cis people as well.
@@krunkle5136 Who do you think enforces the gender roles? Yeah of course media hungry for ratings perpetrates all sorts of harmful and rigid views without nuance. Also other factors, authority figures who don't care, your own friend groups who don't know better, but media is a big part of it.
Gender dysphoria is a horrific experience, I'm finally at the end and living how I want to now and I'm so freaking happy, it's like a weight off my shoulders, it's how I felt back when I was 10 before it all started
so what exactly makes you happy/horrified? just that your body parts changed? That you got chemicals injected in your body? Or is it just social expectations of how to act?
@@ysf-d9i I can dress how I want to, I can act how I want to, my body is the right shape. I don't feel out of place in social situations, I don't get called bro and excluded from the other girls, also the chemicals just make me feel nicer. hormone wise it feels like before I hit puberty and it just all feels right
@@GageEakins don’t bother, one of the sources is a Reuters editorial piece. Another source is one where they got the parents of the trans kids from anti trans social media groups, so basically preselected data, Sabine then presents this study on equal footing with the counter study and then does the equivalent of “Who’s to say”. The most charitable interpretation of this video is incompetence, then next most charitable is chasing views, then finally malice.
@@TG-to5nf Oh I know I was just pointing out how bs it is to hide your sources behind a paywall. I am completely sidelined by this video of hers because her Trans Sports video was so reasonable.
@@GageEakins did she talk about bone density in that one? If she did, did she mention the fact that black women can and often do have higher bone density than white men. Did she touch on how that scientific fact was used to keep sports segregated by race in the US? I haven't seen it, and probably won't, so this is genuine curiosity. Imo, it's probably the most salient and relevant point within that whole convo, so if she left that detail out, even if she didn't go into the history bits, I would be kinda sus
@@Mzzkc She did mention it but basically said it was a non-issue. She pointed out that the Olympics already has rules for hormone therapy and that handles any college sports arguments and then said that for teenagers, they haven't been on hormones long enough to make an appreciable difference and even if they did, sports has never been fair and never will be fair so any argument about fairness is sort of moot. It was actually a novel pro-trans athletes argument that I have never seen used before but I actually can get behind it.
When i was in school, words like queer were insults. Now there are children at my children's school who feel safe to be publicly different. That's why i think we're seeing more trans identification in younger age groups. They feel safer with their peers than when i was their age.
yeah, well, that's going away fast, since conservatives are legalizing the dehumanization and oppression of trans people in broad daylight and normalizing anti trans violence.
Feeling safe with your peers is obviously a good thing. Nobody is going to argue against that. But isn't it a stretch from "being queer and feeling safe with your peers" to "cutting off fully working body parts, using life changing hormones and sterilizing yourself"? By simply focusing on words like safety or queer, you are evading the hard questions that need to be asked.
@@EaglePicking I was offering a suggestion as to why, as stated in the video, a greater proportion of young people self identify as trans. I offered no opinion as to how young people doing so should be treated.
"Just exactly what is going on? No one really knows, but the most reasonable expectation is that the current increase in reports of gender dysphoria is caused by a mixture of two causes. Young people are more comfortable being openly trans AND some of them erroneously believe they are trans because they've heard so much about it. I'd say that anyone who insists that one of those possibilities doesn't exist is pushing an agenda and shouldn't be taken seriously." Well said.
well i just think we should be careful ESPECIALLY with the young. a 5 year old transgender is in my opinion like a vegan dog. in 100% of the cases a parents decision. cause i remember when i was 5-6 years old and i didn't think about those things. i had the sexuality of a potatoe. there was man and woman yes and different body parts but no idea or thought about anything else or what to do with them. and even teens haven't really fully developed. they haven't fully discovered themselves. like when i was 13-16 about every other girl at one point was convinced to be lesbian. well fast forward 20 years later except for one all are married and with children. however transitioning is nothing you can do on a whim and go back later like exploring your sexuality with your bestie. that's why in many countries the entire process is VERY long and VERY difficult with multiple psychologists and only done to adults. and that's how it should be. for christs sake, we don't let children vote, drive cars, drink, have sex but let them make their own decision when it comes to life altering irreversible medical procedures that make them infertile when they are 12? what's this insanity? i was at that age myself and i was a complete and utter morron and certainly not fit to make such a decision. i would have hated myself and everyone involved in this process forever and most likely wouldn't be here anymore.
@@Dunkelelf3 I already didn't liked what was between my legs when I was 4, and knew I was meant to be a girl aged 6. I'm 56 now, those feelings never went away despite all my efforts (including being married etc), and I'm only starting my transition because of the amount of stigma attached to transgender people when I was younger. Just because _you_ didn't experiment this doesn't mean it doesn't exist and isn't real and doesn't ruin your life. Also you're making it looks like 5 or 12 yo kids can get HRT and SRS on a whim, which is the exact opposite of truth. Letting kid freely explore their own gender doesn't require any treatment, isn't a "life altering irreversible procedure", and can only help them finding out who they really are. Puberty "blockers" aren't "life altering irreversible procedure" either and are used for other means as well without anyone making any fuss about it - and to get them as a transgender kid usually requires already having a regular followup from a psychiatrist for a few years. I know of very few countries where you can start HRT before you're at least 15 or 16, and there again not without prior a regular psychiatric followup. As far as I know you can not have SRS before legal majority, and even then you have to have been on HRT for at least a couple years already. Oh and yes: if you're genuinely worried about kids getting "life altering irreversible procedure" from a very young age, you may want to look at what is _still_ being done (even in countries where it's officially illegal) to 10 of 1000s of intersex kids every year "for their own good". Strange as is it might seems, absolutely nobody gives a fuck about it (except of course intersex people themselves and a small handful of allies). If you "kid protectors" were really concerned about protecting kids you would know about this and would act on it instead of spewing disinformation.
@@bettybee605 I already didn't liked what was between my legs when I was 4, and knew I was meant to be a girl aged 6. see that's where the problems begin. what you "feel" like doesn't matter. that's the cold harsh truth. yes i didn't experience gender dysphoria and it sounds pretty sucky. but the reality is just that no hrt and srs will ever change what you are born with. xx or xy. you can't change sex. i was talking about srs when i talked about life altering medical procedures. and there are a lot of those transitioned at a young age now in their 20s who regret. and that's why i think what i think. it's nothing that should be treated lightly. ofc trans people should be treated with dignity like everybody else. but sorry if i have hard times to accept people for what they are when they can't accept themselves for what they are. i don't care what's between your legs and what you do in your bedroom and with whom and how. just keep all of those things away from my children. and schools doing drag shows without parental consent well.. same.. keep that away from my children and we can all be friends.
@@Dunkelelf3 Thanks, you just made it very clear you are deliberately spewing transphobic hate here - "you will never be a woman", "can't accept people who can't accept themselves", "xx female xy male basic biology", "ofc trans people should be treated with dignity like everybody else. but (...) keep it away from my children", congratulations, you've learned your lesson well.
@@beestingza They are under compulsion to find excuses for their abuse, they don't hold allegiance to the truth, only their abusive behavior. Imagine a gambler, he will make all kinds of crazy excuses as well, like that 99% of gamblers quit before hitting it big.
In this case doesn't "a control group" imply that we would have to deny potentially life-saving care to an enormous number of people for a very long time? There seems to be a good reason why that kind of research is less common in medicine.
You are correct, but how do you think other research into long term issues was conducted? If the test is to determine whether treatment X helps or harms then technically both groups are at risk since you do not know which group is safe. There are cancer studies where people literally got cancer and died just to help prove a treatment was beneficial.
We are not particle physicists, we can't simply run the experiment one more time or get a test group out of wimp, and retroactive studies always have their selection and adjustments issues. Thats why our significance values are so low vs other Sciences
Wouldn't the control group just be people who don't identify trans/get no treatments? So, for example, if there some widespread factor, like another pandemic, mental health decline might be record in all groups, including the control group? There is no ethical issue with a control group that just lives their lives normally.
@@mikecurtis11 the point of a control is to remove variables. The primary problem with using a cis control when studying trans treatment options is that cis individuals aren't trans, which creates a variable which cannot be easily reconciled. Even if you tracked a representative cis population to see any mental well-being changes over time, the best you could do, from a conclusion standpoint, is point at the numbers. It would be impossible to say with high certainty what caused any differences between the cis and trans samples. Cis people, as an example, don't have their existence in public life or their access to healthcare as a constant daily subject of international debate. You'd have to account for that reality in the data, along with other differences in lived experiences between cis and trans people. From a study design standpoint, that's a huge ask. Better instead to use trans controls when studying trans treatment outcomes.
I thought this was only the case when a placebo was used instead of the current best standard of care. For example, when a new cancer drug is compared against placebo, which causes enormous harm, rather than to the current best cancer drugs. (Yes, there are such cases.)
I've gotten to know a few transgender people over the years and have watched as they came out and then transitioned and went on to live thier lives. It's a hard world out there and their treatment pre transition and during transition can be and often is traumatic. And trauma often leads to mental health issues. I see this as being even more complex and nuanced than it is usually given in media (this video is a wonderful exception). I hope you do a follow up in a year or two - and I hope there is higher quality studies out there to help guide kinder treatment of all involved.
They have a differently structured brain from endocrine disruptors and environmental pollution. Stop treating it as if it's some metaphysical phenomenon. It's not. Most people just can't handle reality. I am not condoning hate. I am just telling you the truth of the situation.
My mental health improved vastly when I started began taking hormones and again when I socially transitioned. My traumas stem from abuse by those who claimed to love me when I came out to them.
@@Livi_Noelle If you're talking about a partner, that is kind of messed up to hide that and then later come out. That's as good as lying to them (by omission) and that is not how you build a lasting relationship. That kind of thing should be discussed very early into a relationship if you want it to be a serious one. But if you're talking about relatives... well. Unfortunately you can't choose relatives, but you can choose friends and who you're going to spend your life with. There is no way to change what they did to you, but it's possible to change how people that are going to go through it are treated.
As per Sabine's presentation, one thing is clear. There is clearly an dearth of reliable and significant scientific and psychological studies that can offer definitive insight, conclusions or recommendations. This should especially be heeded with considered caution in the case of young children and their parents assenting to transitions. Adults, though also lacking the benefit credible, in-depth studies, obviously have free rein to make such will decisions for themselves. It is a very sensitive, difficult and challenging subject of our society's epoch and will require more time to land on terra firma. We must, in the interim, be respectful, patient and tolerant.
We can't prove that there is no God or other sky daddy who created the universe. Neither can i.e. Christians prove that there is one. Should Christians be allowed to force atheists to affirm their god? Is it disrespectful for an atheist not to do so? Why should a T gender person have the right to demand affirmation of their unproven self-belief? Where is the evidence for humans having an "internal sense of being female, male or something else." rather than just a self-belief akin to a religious belief. Humans have been demonstrably shown to have incorrect feelings as well as beliefs about their physical existence - why should we treat this differently? Where is the evidence that an "internal sense of being something else" can exist. How is that different from a person claiming to see a color that no other can see. How would we prove that? Why assume that they are right about something no one can confirm, even if that something is their own nature? Why do we shift the burden of proof for such a positive claim? This all seems highly unscientific to me.
The problem with no control group is understandable since essentially a control group would demand a group of teens getting placebo instead of blockers or gender affirming care, we do control groups with many illnesses and symptoms but those are larger than 0.5% of the population. There's no getting around the need for controlled study but its going to be difficult to achieve, its gonna take time.
The thing is that, in the meantime, young people suffer irreversible health damage even before a single proper study has been done, and the term "transkids" is officially used in primary schools.
Omg, the way you dissect scientific papers instead of just citing them is unparalleled. You presented it with facts, addressed all the points and critiques all the conclusions. That's how I like a scientific approach to be. I saw many experts discussing on the topic here on youtube on both sides of the spectrum and nothing got even near the quality you outputted in this one. Thank you for the clarification.
Sabine is a Quantum Physicist, formerly an Astrophysicist, and being able to get at the actual data through all the noise is kind of important to her fields of study. Removing the skew put on the data by bias is like looking for the galaxy behind a black hole through all the gravitational lensing. I would expect Sabine to be able to handle that without batting an eyelash.
@@drakkondarkspell It's more impressive than you're making it out to be. Many scientists, including quantum physicists and astrophysicists, don't put in a lot of thought when they talk about fields they aren't part of.
@@drakkondarkspell Believe me, I heard many doctors and scientists speaking on this topic. Some were for and some were against. Both cited papers. But ultimately they just took papers that defended their position. Here, we just see the facts. She does not voice her opinions but just drew the line that more research needs to be addressed and pointed out the flaws on the current results. It's not about taking sides but following where science leads and this is the peak of scientific approach IMHO
@@drakkondarkspell A thing I would caution people to remember. Having a degree in and being a great scientist in one area does not make one an expert in another area.
As far as I can tell, the vast majority of trans people are very sensitive and intelligent which unfortunately leaves a lot of room for neurotic tendencies and self criticism which is what leads to the feelings they have.
@Terre Schill Thank you. I really don't get why it's such a stretch for people to understand that the hate is real and hate makes you hide. It can also just take a really long time to realise that "trans" is the name for a feeling of disconnect you've had your whole life.
Dear lord, this really needs some sort warning like those explosive science videos - "Never attempt broaching this topic at your workplace, in school, in public or anywhere else"
@@preppen78 Quite the opposite. There is no reason people shouldn't be able to talk about this, and we shouldn't allow extremists to scare us off just talking about this with stupid tricks like shooting cases of beer with machine guns. If you make trouble over this, you need to go to jail, that's all. The 1st amendment doesn't include a right to terrorize those you disagree with. Let's start with Kid Rock, the most shameful American we have right now.
If you asked any of the teens I grew up with in the 70s, (about 10 of us), who was gay, no one would have raised their hand. Today about 20% of them easily admit they are gay b/c times have changed and they feel much more free to be who they were all along. I suspect this is highly true for the increase of young people identifying as Trans today. But yes, I'm sure there is also some amount of teens thinking it "trendy" to claim to be Trans. Either way it should not be reduced to simply following a trend, and any kid who does, either real or imagined, needs proper attention and treatment. And politicians need to stay the hell out of it. This is between a doctor, the patient, and their family.
Back then, they lived under strict social forced conformity. Today, society is more open. A lot of people are more understanding, thus, more people are able to express themselves freely. This is good thing.
the number of people who are willing to imagine that generally lifelong identification is something people might flippantly buy into on the basis of being "trendy" reflects poorly on our society's empathy and capacity to really consider the positions of those who are "othered." -- to say not a word of the average person's general intelligence. for all my fellow gays out there please don't pretend to have forgotten what it's like to be on the receiving end of these obnoxious nonsense-arguments. and moreover do not fail to recognize that the heteronormative supremacists are applying it here in precisely the same way because they've never had respect for anyone but themselves - let's not kid ourselves into pretending the social acceptance that cis gays/lesbians have now from some of the anti-trans contingent is anything more than a forced toleration.
I feel it’s less trend and just teenagers doing what teenagers do and exploring themselves and who they want to be as they approach young adulthood. It’s simply more acceptable and much safer to explore gender than back then (tho that’s becoming marginal.) But it’s also why actual hormone replacement is very rare in minors and actual procedures are almost unheard of for minors. Most gender based procedures are done by their parents because they may be intersex (XXY or whatev wacky stuff genetics occasionally does) and the parents were thrust into the responsibility of making that decision. Even if not forced they chose because of how they were raised and wanted “best” for their child as misguided as it is. That or circumscision is technically genital mutilation so it’s pretty common for Abrahamic religions to do genital surgeries on literal babies lol
I doubt that 20% would be homosexual. The meaning of the word "gay" used by young people is sometimes more like "queer", but I doubt that 20% exclusively have sex with the same sex. I think surveys show that the proportion who are gay has stayed around 2% for decades.
I heard somewhere that Sabine was transphobic and came here to watch the video and I can't understand that accusation at all. This is incredibly level-headed.
This is simply false, especially if you consider the fact that in this video she is purposefully cherrypicking her scientific information and misrepresenting studies in favour of hormone therapy and or puberty blockers. For example, she is saying that the longitudinal studies in favor of hrt are bad simply because they don’t have a control group which is a bad argument, because it would be unethical to artificially withhold treatment and gender affirming care for trans people just to have a control group. Also in longitudinal studies the baseline later becomes the control group. :)
@@b3n048 nonsense, you can always do "cherrypicking" with social and even medical studies, so it´s easy to accuse someone, whose statement doesn´t fit your world view.
@@Thomas-gk42 well even if she wasn’t cherrypicking info there would still be the issue that she conveys false info in this video, because she says that there is no conclusive evidence on the topic when there is tons of research in favour of puberty blockers and gender affirming care which she is for whatever reason deliberately leaving out of the video.
@@b3n048I´m sure there are also tons of research to support the opposite claim. I never saw a social/medical study without an anti study. So I have some understranding for parents who don´t want to feed their kids with medication. This has nothing to do with the rights of minorities, to live a free and respectful life. Sabine´s video does absolutely not contradict that.
As a psychologist I can confirm that researching mental health is extremely difficult. Psychological data are notoriously difficult to obtain, analyse and interprete. Research subjects of a certain demographic are usually 'few and far between' . Finding a group that is homogenous is virtually impossible [in most cases] Keeping a group[ of subjects together over a period of time can be like herding cats. Where does that leave us? IMHO research is about ' asking questions, being curious' regarding a certain aspect of human life. To try and capture human life in statistics can be very useful, however more often than not it is by the nature of the subject researched like chasing a phantom. That begs the question if research methods used in say physics are the correct instruments to research ' the human condition'. What psychological research has taught me is that every human is unique. Life is ever changeing. Humans need room to develop and 'grow into themselves'. Social / cultural pressures can both be stimulating and stifling. Those people that find a path for themselves to negotiate these pressures will thrive, the others will struggle. Parents, communities and mental health workers can create and environment that is condusive to a stable and positive development of young people into adulthood. Love, opportunity, acceptance, open-mindedness, exploration, education and support are key elements, for us all. Go where you find these and you'll 'grow into the best version of yourself'
Great points. How can you measure the degree of 'feeling better' or 'worse' between people? It's all subjective. Further, on'e feeling at the time the answer was given may change the next day. How one feels right now depends upon so many other threads in one's life. It's remarkably fuzzy at best.
As a STEM guy it took me a lot to understand that methodologies differ in different sciences and are not as applicable. Lots of people disregard the social sciences because of the difficulty and impossibility of actually applying the scientific method. You can never have replicable experiments in social sciences. That doesn't mean you should disregard the research that doesn't conform to the standard of experimentation in physics.
Professionals getting shouted down, complaints made, being reprimanded &/or fired for saying a trans person may have an underlying mental health issue resulting in the gender dysphoria in the UK, leaves most psychologists too afraid to challenge it. Much of the research is being funded by gay rights organisations & pressure to provide positive evidence in the way of continued financial backing.
@Jonathan Rose BS. Britain is flooded by TERFs getting loads of access to an anti-trans mainstream media stoking the fears of the public. What evidence do you have that studies are funded by pro gay groups? What evidence does anyone have for an underlying condition? This bleating about getting shouted down seems mostly complaining because others point out flaws in their position.
That's a bit of a cop-out. The biggest problem I see with some psychology & sociology studies is sample sizes being too small, selection bias, survivorship bias, and the survey or other assessment tool being poorly designed. Let me give an example outside of the trans area to avoid the pitchforks and torches. There have been attempts to determine how many times are guns used defensively In the US Harvard has their firearms research center which has a strong gun control or anti-gun bias. Their survey starts with h"ave you been the victim of a crime in the past year? yes or no?" If a person says no, the survey is over. If they say yes they then go into gun ownership and then ask them if they happened to have defend themselves during that crime. And that's the problem. .. Many people who've used a gun defensively where the criminal decided oh crap I'm outta here don't remember or consider that to be a crime. And so the survey filters out anyone who might have used their gun defensively and then considered no crime to have occurred. Which is why they report something between 60k to 80k defensive gun uses per year. On the pro-gun side they have equally odd surveys where they do improper extrapolations from the sample size ended up with something like four million defensive gun usage per year. So snotty 80,000 it's not four million it's somewhere in between. So yeah poor surveys, post-hoc analysis and some ridiculous selection and survivorship with nearly every trans research paper I've seen.
But no one can force themselves to be right handed or left handed or both. That’s where you’ve missed John Oliver’s point. It was easier to say you were left handed cause it was more acceptable to be left handed. Thats the whole point, people who were left handed were punished. Once it was ok to be left handed more people came out as left handed.
This was useful, balanced and nuanced as I would have expected. Two takeaways that I think are worth thinking about : 1. The numbers are small but the vehemence of the culture war rhetoric is not proportionate (in my opinion) especially that from the Right of the political spectrum. 2. It was almost an aside but the point about "normality" is actually crucial (again in my opinion). Is it possible some of the irrational responses to this topic are an unconscious reaction to having this "normality" challenged? This is the tip of a very large argument but this video shows it is possible to approach the topic with critical thinking and (as Sabine clearly demonstrates) still maintain compassion for others.
I actually do think that the negative reaction has to do with what we consider “normal” being challenged. People gravitate to beliefs that make sense to them because it gives them a sense of control in their life, and given how we live on a rock in empty space and we have limited lifespan, that anything that challanges our notions can be seen as threat, and thus we feel like we have lost control. Despite the fact what we consider “normal” is constantly changing
@@Psychedlia98 I don't. We humans also seek novelty. We would hate being bored. Are transgender people a threat? I don't think so. I don't think I've ever met a trans person but if I have.. I didn't notice. Humans are humans. Good humans are good humans. Bad defective humans are conservatives. Life is about change and growing. We are not what we were on day 1 and I hope we will be different even next week. It's the conservatives who can't handle this life. they need everything to be plastic and unliving so they can feel safe. But that means that they stifle all of us because of their excessive psychological fear of change. These are the people who would go to a place like France and eat Mcdonalds rather than eating the food that the French are known for. You can tell I'm not because McDonalds will never be on that list unless it's adapted for that culture and then.. sure. I'll eat that paneer burger whatever. I can't get that back home. Think of how normal is constantly challenged. You get a new boss. Do you have a tantrum because you have to learn a new name? A new routine? No. That's silly. What about if there is a strike and you need to find alternate transportation? Sure. You'll be upset but it's about the inconvenience. It's not some event that leads you to collapse on your bed and say "the world is going to end". If you were told that you were going to have hamburgers and instead, you get pizza, do you get super upset rather than say .. "Huh. I thought we were having burgers. This is good too." Conservatives squander this time, this brief snippet of life, because they can't handle living. That's why they fantasize about a heaven. They want a vapid insipid version of life because they can't handle reality. I mean.. have you looked at say the Muslims. They don't drink alcohol here but in their heaven, they do. Why? Why is it magically good in "heaven" but not here? Same for those Christians who think that they will enjoy their 24/7 hymn singing to their egotistical god. That sounds like listening to elevator music (bad music) 24/7 and having to smile.. They're pathetic.
The negative reaction from the right is due to our view that institutions (including medical ones) are perpetrating physical harm against children with mental illness, often against the wishes of their parents, and declaring that the mental illness in question cannot be challenged as a matter of human rights.
@@Psychedlia98 Most reasonable people were fine with someone else not being "normal". The reaction toward gay and trans people has been steadily getting better and better. Only now, relatively recently, is it getting worse. Why? Because now theyre bringing peoples children into this. Its a natural and unsurprising reaction.
I recall seeing a story about how the US airforce tried to build cockpits configured for the average pilot and found that pretty well every pilot found them uncomfortable.
@@KonradZielinski yep. they took something like 80 different measurments and averaged them, but found that exactly nobody was actually average on more than about seven of the measurements. Humans vary a LOT.
Why are the sources locked behind a paywall? I mean, I can guess why, but if they're not provided to back up the claims presented in the video, the scientific method says they should be disregarded entirely.
Well if you want to apply "the scientific method" and use her efforts as a scientific source for your scientific advancement you can very well pay her for her scientific work. Or you can just watch a TH-cam video as a free lunch. Edit: You know that Sabine works at a German University? And in Germany all the lectures are public and for free. But you have to be enrolled to get the transcripts. Got it?
@@j.m.w.5064 Hey buddy, I actually have evidence that you're completely off base on this one! I'll let you look at it so you can see for yourself, if you paypal me 5 bucks.
@@randyohm3445 See, if it was important for me and if I thought you were a credible or at least interesting source and put some work in, then I would pay a fee. Like I did many many times, when I went to book stores, lessons or libraries. But you're not, so I don't. Schade Schokolade.
@@j.m.w.5064 So, I sarcastically tried to scam you and your response was "only people I like can scam me." That's.... interesting. I guess I'm just crazy for thinking that scientific claims made based on sources should provide those sources rather than demanding money first. :/
I wonder if the (apparent) increased ability for trans men to pass means that natal female to male transitions are "overrepresented" because they are less targeted by society
It’s much more likely to be a combination of genetic factors and hormone balances during pregnancy. Certain estrogens contribute to brain development during pregnancy, and it now looks like autism could be (at least) partly caused by this. This would explain why there is a correlation between trans men. Basically autism is a disorder that exhibits more masculine traits people female at birth with autism are more likely to be more masculine. So autism and ftm gender dysphoria are comorbid.
@@icecoldnut5152 misinformation. The idea that autism is "hypermasculine brain" is outdated and since debunked and simply misinformation. There is a larger percentage of trans people in the asd community, but this is also true for trans woman, not just man...
My little brother think he is trans but is a blatant trend chaser, so yes they do exist. Many many young people are doing it cos its trendy, which is dangerous and acting like this isnt so, is also very very dangerous. also 2:55 "have you ever seen a normal human" Normal in psychiatry is called euthymic.
I think the desire to belong becomes amplified in adolescence and that desire can show up in many many different ways depending on their environment. If one way they attempt to influence their belonging is through gender expression, that could also go either way. For example, I am a fully transitioned trans man (female to male) but when I was in middle and high school, before I transitioned, I put extra effort into appearing much more feminine than was natural to me because that’s what “belonging” dictated in my environment. So, while there are certainly kids who are “performing” the opposite gender, there are also many who are “performing” their assigned gender. The stresses of modern youth don’t cause someone to be transgender, but they can certainly cause kids to act ways inauthentic to themselves. I think that’s why it’s important to understand one thing she mentions briefly, but is the linchpin of her argument, which is that she’s concerned about rapid onset of gender dysphoria - meaning the adolescent had no previous symptoms. I think that’s a strong indicator that extreme caution should be taken before any medical transition.
As a mostly-transitioned MTF I think you make a very good point! I would definitely fall into the category of 'sudden onset' dysphoria for most of the people around me, having no apparent signs of trying to be more like girls/women, not even in private. However, the process of picturing myself as female and desiring (what I could only describe as) this female body appearance in the mirror, had been taking place for a long time. Once I decided to go trough with transitioning, I opened up to everyone around me as well as multiple psychs, explaining this longwinded route of intense disappointment surrounding my physical attributes and how transitioning might alleviate this for me, and the response I got was overwhelming acceptance, support and even recognition to the extent that was possible - my story just 'clicked' for them, resonated enough to see that this could be the right step for me. For the people closest to me, it also explained this long period of depression that no one could previously understand, as well as little quirks like being so uncomfortable with being talked about in 3rd person (because of pronouns, I then explained) I won't ever advocate for people 'becoming' transgender - being at a significant incongruence with your body is a painful experience, if it had been at all a choice, I would have never made it. However, I fully recognise the potential benefit of transitioning, as I've experienced myself (I consider myself blessed to be fully passing in both appearance and voice, took a few years though) Therefore, I arrive at the same conclusion: at a young age, it's imperative that 'we' explore the thought process behind this desire to transition, and try to uncover any alternate explanation or issue that might indicate that transitioning is NOT the right solution! To accomodate some of the people in the comments section: no, I do not consider myself as female, I fully recognise that's not how I was born, I simply wanted to appear like that, and I have succeeded - society is now actually the one that treats me as female! (I've never asked for pronouns in public, people use the female ones automatically)
on the other hand if one is able to 'perform' and not suffer as an adult for it, that begs the question are any of the treatments actually worthwhile. do they improve anything. but i agree it might be a twist of biology or culture that women tend to 'perform' more. though ill caveat that just because someone has to perform as female doesn't mean they'd want to perform as male if there was not any friction.
Such a good point that deserves so many more likes! Can't believe it hadn't clicked for me until I read this but it is so true. There is indeed a strong pressure to perform in heterosexuals so why are people surprised if anyone in the rest of the spectrum 'feels' like they are overdoing/performing their gender! It just makes sense everyone does, especially in an age of constant ads and social pressure from all sides to 'look your best' (according to what the ad, magazine or celebrity tells you). I always was very dress-oriented myself but without the typical girl cuteness or need to use makeup. Yet pressure was high and you got bullied for not looking girly enough and just being who you wanted (or could afford in my case).
@@originalsinquirls1205 totally agreed, I hope people can uncover or separate this friction component from their desires before they commit to irreversible changes
Great video as always. My takeaway points are.1 more quality research required. 2 first step of gender affirming care, such as name change, pronoun change, alternative dressing styles and activities (such as physics club 😂) are easy and cheap to undertake and fully reversible so no reason not to go with it.
Put another way, it costs little to nothing to be supportive, and can cost *everything* to be unsupportive. Indeed, being unsupportive all but guarantees negative outcomes, while being just as irreversible as surgery.
@@alyssahallisteri would like to add that the reason why the trans suicide rates are so high is because of unsupportive families, friends, and current systems in place (ex. the justice system not taking trans people’s assaults seriously, the government actively working to make it harder to transition, discrimination happening in places of employment, etc.). it is VITAL that cis people support their trans peers, especially right now.
Sabine A few aspects of this video stand out to me. Re: ROGD, the Littman paper that initially advanced the idea was not just 'heavily criticized', but retracted. Therefore, it would be more accurate summarize the state of the data as 'there is no evidence of this' rather than the more generous 'there is evidence, but it's pretty bad' that you opted for. Additionally, the study recruited survey respondents from websites like Mumsnet, which is notoriously anti-trans, and ROGD was a common belief among mumsnet posters before it was given name by Littman. The study could very well just be describing people colluding to create a narrative or transphobic parents from whom their children hid everything until the last possible moment. Re: Jesse Singal, while what Jesse points out in this specific instance may or may not be true (idk), Singal has been criticized for himself being misrepresentative of evidence in a way that is persistently biased against transgender people. It's, to say the least, a red flag to see his name included in a video like this. I'm not accusing you or anybody on your staff of being anti-trans or misrepresenting anything, but it does seem like a few careless slip ups found their way into this video.
The ROGD paper was not retracted, it was corrected. These are two extremely different things, don't spread misinformation if you care at all about your argument.
@@filiecs3 My bad, Brown retracted a press release about the paper on ROGD, not the paper itself. I haven't thought about it since 2019 so I forgot the specifics.
It was "retracted" because it undermined trans ideology, not because it was false. Both anorexia and trans ideology are social contagion, which girls are more prone to, which is ironic since it causes them to think that they are men, their female trait causes them to think that they are male.
i am someone who came out as trans to my family when i was 13, and was able start feminizing hormones with the support of my family and doctors just before i turned 15. i'm not exactly happy or content with my life as it is now, and as the past 4 years of HRT have progressed, i've actually started to identify less and less with the gender i came out as. however, i don't say this to say i regret transitioning. i'm actually extremely grateful my unhappiness has nothing to do with my gender identity now, because even after all the ways i've changed (and i've been through a LOT of personal changes), my conviction that i am not the gender i was assigned at birth has never faltered, nor has my belief that feminizing hormones are the right choice for me. maybe now i don't identify as fully female, but i've always seen myself as a "fem" person, and HRT absolutely does its part in sparing me from the gender dysphoria i would be feeling if i still wasn't aligned with that. from my perspective, gender is too sensationalized. sex serves a simple biological purpose, but humans are the only species that have had the intellectual agency to establish genders, and for some reason we think they're this law of nature that is dangerous to interact or play with. in the end, the goal is to live in alignment with the person you see your best self as, which is more realistically about gender expression than gender itself. of course, as someone who has remained happy with their transition since starting as a minor, i don't think minors should be restricted from transitioning. however, in order to mitigate the potential harm of young people being dissatisfied with their choice to make permanent changes to their bodies, i think a degree of medical "gatekeeping" is important, which i certainly faced. though, i also think a less gender-enforced society would alleviate the some of the pressure impressionable teenagers experience to chain themselves to certain identities. it's just hard to get good data for this stuff.
As a "normal" male person, I want to thank you for sharing this. Shows, That there are a lot of people, who look on their life problems without hating-glasses.
Of course it never faltered because you’re succumbing to sunk cost fallacy. You’ve gone too far to go back and admitting you were wrong would be quite painful, so you don’t, and comment here to try and continue gaslighting yourself into believing a 13 year old has any goddamn idea what they’re talking about.
@@SB-mr2nk A little bit more respect would be useful to support a good one together. This person is open and shared her life story for a better understanding. That's exactly the goal of this video by Sabine.
She literally shows the papers in the video. You're either too lazy to do even a 5 minutes research or you're just trying to find reasons to critisize her.
"On one hand, there are the crazies who don't want to kill any followers of Moses. On the other, people who really want to kill them all. And then there are normal people like you and me, who only want to kill half of them"
There is actually a lot of room for in between positions and the true crazies are a minority on both sides. However, the fact that you make that comparison suggest that you might be one of the crazies on one side.
@@starry_lis You are missing the point. The statement that there are crazies on both sides is true. Anything about oppression or who has power or whatever does not change that.
@@neandrewthal she's presenting herself as an objective sceptic and a scientist, yet just by framing it this way she fails. She wouldn't compare homeopathy to antibiotics the same way.
@@starry_lis Because antibiotics have overwhelmingly proven benefits and homeopathic cures have none beyond placebo. You cannot try to claim that giving puberty blockers to all gender non-conforming pre-teens is equivalent to antibiotics and that carefully considering whether there are other factors at play in each case is equivalent to homeopathy.
The very idea that transness could be a "fad among teens" assumes trans teens have a good time. And here's another thought: it may not be "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" when a gay kid has to come out to their parents for the fifth time because they were in denial the first four times. It may just as well point to a "glacial onset of parents finally listening to their kids".
A fad from a few years ago was for kids to eat Tide Pods(laundry detergent). Another fad: flash mob with potential for violence and vandalism. Another: hazing. A current one in the fitness wordld is Dry Scooping protein powder which has choked people to death. i would look for another comparision.
the really sad thing is that this fad is there BECAUSE the teens are not having a good time. It's the same reason people join cults; they are suffering in life and lonely and feel different from everyone else or have problems they can't solve. Then the cult reaches out to them telling them how they belong to this group and how the cult will solve all of their problems magically. instead of actually treating the problems and mental illnesses, western leftists just push a horrible solution that does far more harm than good and then pat themselves on the back for being so compassionate and open-minded and tolerant.
I am a trans woman and agree with everything you said Sabine. My own personal experience is that I knew something wasn't right from a very young age but only recently did I have the vocabulary to express what I was feeling. I spent several years in therapy starting at age 40 before I began any kind of transition; I wanted to be sure. If I knew as a teenager what I know now, I absolutely would have transitioned. However at that age I just thought what I was feeling was wrong, so I suppressed it. I suppressed it for as long as I could until I was on the verge of ending my life. And yes, it is harder to be a trans woman than it is a trans man. The vitriol that is out their is primarily directed at trans woman. I love to talk about my experience and what it means to be trans. What we see in the media is an oversimplification of something very complex. In turn that has been weaponized. When I do talk to someone who is willing to have an open mind and be respectful, they are absolutely amazed at the complexities involved. Trans people have been demonized in recent years and people have formed their opinions on a strawman. Believe me if it was as easy as taking a pill to align my gender and sex, I would have done it in a heart beat; but its not. I just wanted to be comfortable in my own skin, I didn't care how that was achieved. I have been on HRT and have had surgeries, dealt with hatred, dealt with being fetishized, discriminated against, sexually assaulted, and had my father reject me when he supported me at first. But despite all of that I wouldn't change my decision to transition; I have no regrets. Given the strawman that most people base their beliefs on, I have found that most people just lack an understanding and and discover that I am a human with feelings and emotions just like them. For myself, and I suspect most other tans people, I don't wanted to be treated any differently or put into a group. I just want to be treated like every other woman. Yes, the irony, i get it. How do people treat me like any other woman, given the complexities? Unfortunately I don't have the answer, but I think it starts with people not listening to the media and having a conversation.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I was not very familiar with this topic, but this video gave me a lot to think about. Happy to find people like you, sharing their thoughts and experiences without hate.
_The study problem is that physicists can build huge colliders and smash an unlimited number of particles together to get large sample sizes. If doctors did the same with children, that would be horrifying._ It's not the best analogy, but it really illustrates the problem of harming children to complete a study or not preventing harm to children to complete a study.
Honestly I'm really disappointed in this video from Sabine. I hope she makes a followup or just takes it down. There will never be a double-blind study on gender-affirming care, because denying gender-affirming care to ANYONE who identifies as transgender is monstrously unethical and no ethics board would ever approve giving transgender patients a placebo instead of actual treatment. The risks of untreated gender dysphoria are well-documented and seriously deadly, as Sabine said in the video. If the gender-critical insist on waiting for "more data!!!" before allowing trans people to receive healthcare, then a lot of those trans people are going to live horrible lives, and many will die by their own hand. We cannot deny care while we wait for studies on the long-term complications, that's unethical. We can't give trans kids a placebo to gather data for those studies, that's unethical. Besides, it will be obvious to any patient if they're receiving a placebo and they WILL go elsewhere to get actual treatment - at which point the study will no longer have the oh-so-important control group. These standards are impossible to meet and honestly are just a poor excuse to deny gender-affirming care, which should not be done in any case when a patient identifies as transgender and seeks gender-affirming care. I'm so disappointed that Sabine missed the obvious problem with asking for control groups with this type of illness. Such a study would put many lives at risk, and it will never happen. The key point is that it's unethical to purity test transgender people in a skeptical way when they seek out gender-affirming care. Saying that we can't tell apart the "true" trans and the "mistaken" trans people apart is a complete misdirect from transphobes. There will never be a way to tell these two groups of people apart in a general healthcare setting, and ANY attempt at doing so will do immeasurable harm to countless trans people. Why on earth would Sabine suggest that such a distinction among transgender patients is relevant to the standard of care, or even a possible distinction to make? It's just an excuse for every transphobic doctor and parent to insist that their patient/child is mistaken, when there is absolutely no way to determine this one way or the other, which will lead to immense suffering.
There are some key things missing from this analysis: • There could be a lack of control group data in studies because of the very small number of studies so far conducted and the inherent ethical dilemma with withholding gender affirming care for a control group. • The risks associated with gender affirming care could be considered alongside the risks and costs of not getting it. Puberty blockers, for example, could mean later top surgery is unnecessary. And there is no remedy for the skeletal changes that puberty causes trans-femme people. • The measure of success of gender affirming care seems to have been presented here as how much it improved conditions such as depression and anxiety. Gender affirming care is targeted to reduce gender dysphoria. It might reduce depression and anxiety to the extent those are directly caused by dysphoria. But what if the depression and anxiety are not caused by dysphoria but rather rooted in how hard it is to live as a trans person in a world which is structurally transphobic? Gender affirming care can’t fix structural problems. Or what if depression and anxiety are present and have nothing to do with the dysphoria? I’ve lived with gender dysphoria, depression and anxiety, which in my case have complex interactions, given I’m also ADHD and living below the poverty line. I’m not engaging in frivolous what-ifs here. • The video talks about the distress caused by not experiencing puberty alongside your peers, but not the distress of experiencing the wrong puberty. For a person who identifies as a boy to start menstruating and growing breasts is very challenging for them. • The analogy with left-handedness is not weakened because gender affirming care can involve irreversible treatment. The analogy helps explain the uptick in people transitioning, but doesn’t remotely claim that transitioning is as trivial as left-handedness. • It’s a shame there is a missing exploration of possible causes of the demographic shift, because there’s plenty to explore there. For example, socio-politically, there is a much greater pushback and stigma against trans-femme people than trans-masc people which could still be suppressing the numbers of trans-femme people coming out and transitioning. • The statement that many trans-masc youth also present with other “psychological problems” is a tricky one. There is a noticeable pattern with autism and being trans-masc, for sure. But many autistic folk would take issue with autism being labelled a “psychological problem,” rather than a neurodivergence. Given apparent correlations with autism, we could look into what about autism may increase the likelihood of gender incongruence? Could it be that being autistic helps some be less susceptible to being pressured into the boxes that allistic people are? • I’m not sure what was happening with the statement that top/bottom surgery are euphemisms for “BiTs BeInG cUt OfF! 😱“. In the trans community, we use those words not as euphemisms but just shorthand that avoids us needing to give private details in a world which seems obsessed with portraying our life-saving healthcare as body horror 🤷🏻♀️ • I think that the statement, “some erroneously believe they are trans because they’ve heard so much about it,” requires evidence which is not provided here. If you think people resistant to this statement have an agenda, then you ought to at least suggest what that agenda might be and what those pushing it hope to gain. To leave this hanging arguably opens you to charges of dog whistling. Some of the missing analysis in this video could as well point to an agenda 🤷🏻♀️
Full disclosure: I am a 48 year old trans woman and transitioned I’m my late thirties. I am a volunteer youth worker at a charity supporting LGBTQIA youth, and I have many friends and acquaintances with children who identify as trans or non-binary/genderqueer. It’s fair to say the anecdotal evidence I’m party to is from a self-selecting group. I try to be self aware and open minded, and I’m open to the suggestion that I have an agenda, although I think my agenda is just to respect and advocate for the views and wishes of young people that relate to their identity and choices.
@@minaondrums The video is not without bias. You may want to review Rebecca Watson's response entitled: "Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder Screws up on Trans Kids' Care" Some other comments are recommending Therapist Reacts: "Being Trans is Not a Fad". That channel looks like it was created just to post that response.
I'm a middle school teacher. I always need to bite my tongue during these conversations. I will say, my personal observations in the classroom line up with your conclusions 100%. I especially loved the line "anyone suggesting either of these possibilities is completely false is pushing an agenda."
everyone who has anything to say is pushing an agenda. the only question is what they want. the undeserved conceit of centrism that it can use 'having an agenda' as a proxy for rejecting a point of view is ridiculously nonsensical. i for one have an agenda which embraces the fact that gender is arbitrary and performative and agrees that people freely choosing to reflect that as they please (including expressing a transgender identity) are people who have just as much place in society as a white heterosexual childrearing couple. the fact that you claim to feel a need to 'bite your tongue' implies quite strictly that you, too, have an agenda. what is it? answer that for yourself.
Sabine, thank you so much for covering this important and sensitive topic with such professional care. You've focused on the science without managing to disparage the anecdotal experiences of so many people who are living this reality themselves, parents and medical professionals. It's very difficult to report on this topic while remaining neutral and you've done it beautifully. I hope others in this sphere can follow your lead so we can have rational discussions that focus on the most important aspect that links us together- the desire to ensure human beings get the right care and can lead healthy and productive lives.
Non-binary myself. Certainly tp the outright terf in my family, and my elderly parents; coming out as such to them, in my late 30's, was seemingly confusing and sudden. Even though up until then I was thought of by them as a very "feminine man". To me, it's a matter of settling at what point is it okay to accept that a person has rights to their own body, and even the right to decide their own identity. The family terf still tried for months after my coming out, to argue that I don't know who I am. That social media had brainwashed me. That I also mistake my lack of masculine traits for being transgender. So with this level of push back, lack of support, and failed attempts at gaslighting. As an adult who had plenty of time to draw the conclusions I have. It sadly doesn't shock me that trans youth, aren't suddenly happy people in the year or two right after their transition starts. As the social pressure to conform to a majority cis culture is much worse for them.
Learn to be comfortable in the body you’re born with. Transgender dysphoria simply means you are a guy who thinks that he is a girl and vice versa. All surgery does is require lifelong hormone replacement and sterility. And it’s not up to fetusphobes to demand for everyone else on having a pubescent ‘romper room’ dystopia that casually discards old people and fetuses is good for anybody!🤔
"right to decide their own identity" Isn't quite right. Big part of it is own action, the way you carry yourself ect. Usually it's the same thing, but sometimes there are clear discrepancies between identity a person believes to be entitled to, and the way they act. Such as making 0 effort into looking like a woman while identifying as such, and also expecting complete strangers to know to use female pronouns without telling them (a clip where customer starts yelling at an employee for calling him a man when he identifies as a woman comes to my mind). Never been all that manly myself, did consider just for a moment if transition would be the way to go but no. I do not believe it's going to do me any good when I do not even view it as legitimate way to 'change gender'. And that is the polite way I would describe it. Since I cannot get what I want anyway, my own solution is very different: Indifference. I am me and my gender doesn't define who I am. As for gender identity, I do not see any reason to change it since it would only cause pointless confusion, changing it doesn't change what's between my legs and by the end of the day it is the only thing that matters from reproductive point of view. Trying to change that through surgery... as I said I do not view is at viable for myself, because I only view it as same as putting on a permanent mask on top of my face after burning it to make it unrecognizable. It is not my face, but it is the only face I have left. But that is only the way I view it, everyone can decide for themselves how they view it and choose if it's the correct choice for themselves.
@Spugleo It's okay for you to do what you want for yourself, based on your own evaluation of your needs and what you feel you can have. Where I take issue with your comment is the use of phrases like "permanent mask" and the violent imagery here and there. In addition, your reference to the clip of that one person having an overreaction in a store is suggestive. Really while customer service workers take a lot of shit, I take exception to the spectacle of filming and posting a person's public meltdown, much more making news of it, inventing stories about it, and using the dissemination of those stories to make broad statements about a minority group. You saw one person having a really bad moment; I question why this lingers in your head as characteristic of trans people, that you seem to not be considering whether there may be further context that would change your perspective, especially when, as I'm sure you're aware, people very early in transition are typically at the peak of their distress related to dysphoria (as it is only as it gets worse that people seek treatment, and tends to improve with treatment). Similarly with the references to violent imagery; I am not sure I can judge where that comes from, but these are very harsh and emotive descriptions of what you think transition is, and may be rooted in either disgust or the condemnations of others, rather than a sober appraisal of what medical transition entails. This negativity is not uncommon with people who, as you confess, have some desire not to have the gender you started out with, but don't see it as possible for them. I'm just an internet rando so I'm not interested in telling you what you should do with your own body. That's yours, it's up to you to make whatever decisions you make for whatever reasons you think are important. I will, however, voice some criticism of projecting these sorts of harsh thoughts onto other people and their bodies. Many people do not feel they've put on a permanent mask or burnt themselves, and while you say this is only something you're talking about in terms of your own feelings and experience, the way in which you're articulating it clearly suggests generalization. I don't think that's a really healthy way to think about other people, and I don't think it's great to say things like that in a public forum as a response to someone else voicing their experience.
Well, individuals do not get to choose their gender in society. We almost always assume the gender of people we see, rather than asking for their input. So yea, the very idea that you are choosing a gender different from what society judges you as will cause problems.
To give perspective, not excuses, if they are like me they have never met a trans person. Back in late 70's nobody at my high school was gay. That changed when I hit college and they became my social circle. That slipped away has life happens. I've always wondered how many of my friends did not survive AIDS. That is all it took was to have gay friends. Fast forward 40 years and I don't know and have never met a "trans". (I did move to Idaho. I don't even know any democrats.) I do know we have gay kids at high school here in Idaho. It may seem slow to you, but that amount of social acceptance is astonishingly fast. Just know your kids will be raised (hopefully) in a more loving world.
I was born in 1995. I have considered myself Trans since I can remember but I didn’t even know what I was really proclaiming. I always liked the female lifestyle so that’s how I drifted, the clothes, the hair. As for the current situation in the United States I don’t know but for me I just wanted to fill the niche of what was a girl growing up and doing that fun stuff. I’m still not sure about the surgery I’m scared to death of anybody touching anything on my body and hormones I’m not on them I don’t know if I want to take them i am fine with my appearance between male but presenting female. As for your question I don’t know if it’s a fad but I believe kids should be open to being themselves but I don’t want them to be put into a situation where they feel like they need surgery or hormones blockers or hormone therapy to feel complete maybe you just want to dress a certain way and wear your hair a certain way and that’s fine,
I get it. There are so many gender clichés in our everyday life, how can you completely identify with just one? Though beeing non-binary is different than trans.
I wouldn't want any kid to feel pressured into changing themselves, but I don't think any really do. The medical guidance is to start with plenty of counseling, and the point of that is to figure out what the patient actually WANTS. They might be offered the _option_ to take certain steps, and be talked through everything that would involve, but no good doctor would say "well, you _must_ get surgery done, and try to convince the patient of that. I know that doctors are not perfect, and that there might be some shoddy doctors out there who would be overly aggressive about such things, but I think that for the most part such doctors only live as boogeymen on right wing social media, meant to scare parents and politicians. I do think that we need to take reasonable good faith steps to ensure that doctors treating potentially trans children are well educated on the dos and don'ts, that before any massive changes are made that the child has received effective medical guidance, but I also think that it's important that these tools remain available for those individuals that WANT to have them, and that proper medical guidance indicates would be helpful to them.
My thing is about the kids thing is still kids are still young and developing. I truly don’t know if that’s a good time to push something like this because maybe they are just bewildered by the world. I just don’t want kids to think they are trans unless they really are Trans. I guess we have to ride the line to make certain that they are. It shouldn’t be a decision made lightly or overnight and it definitely needs to be consulted with the parents and there should just be a long process in my opinion to make sure you know they know what they are doing because I don’t want anybody’s kid to feel pressured to change their life especially in that big of a way. Kids are young. Their minds are developing. It’s truly a hard thing to say. Adults or teenagers are best equipped to make big decisions like this. That’s just my honest opinion.
Indeed have been living in everyday life a female presenting for years. It's just been a difficult process, really knowing what to change about yourself if you'd get to. I mean its normal to not like things about yourself or your body. So am I doing any medical interventions because I want to conform? Or is it just to correct for going through the "wrong" puberty? Getting the choice to explore this at an earlier age without judgement would go a long way to finding out who you really are.
To me there is an elephant in the room. It is the society that we are embedded in, and the assumptions and expectations of what gender means. What could happen if we changed as a society in terms of acceptance and care for individuals, what if children grew up where there gender played more of a minor role in their social structures. If we had a society that celebrated individual expression and reduced labelling and recognised also that we are changing dynamic beings, who go through all sorts of transitions and oscillations. How much gender dysphoria is caused by discomfort with context rather than the individual? This extends far wider than gender, but into all forms of labelling and prejudice, and our deep need for care, acceptance and connection with our shared humanity.
For those studies without a control group, its important to note that a lack of any large improvement is also a lack of deterioration. A control group with no treatment may have produced worse results, if only one had existed
It's also important to understand that the gold standard of a properly controlled, double-blind experiment isn't always a luxury that's practical in all sciences. It's easy for a physicist to scoff at such practices when you can conjure up a billion collisions in a particle collider and get six-sigma results, but that's not the reality in psychology or medicine or sociology. I once met a man who was convinced there was no evidence that masks prevent the spread of COVID, when I presented the man with three studies that all concluded that masks prevent the spread of COVID, he said, "none of those have control groups". I suggested he sign up to be part of a study where he's purposefully exposed to COVID infected people coughing without masks on. He could be in the control group! Analyzing the effectiveness of masks to limit the distance traveled by water drops that cary the virus just wasn't enough evidence. Similarly, you have to find children with gender dysphoria (and their parents) who will agree to forego treatment and the associated 3-fold increase in suicide rates for years. No wonder the control group numbers dwindled to 7 in the one study Hossenfeld presented with a control group...
It should also be noted that the kind of sociological / psychological studies this video is about tend to have smaller sample sizes and often cannot be the gold standard double blind that you might see in medicine.
I understand the impulse to say pump the breaks on this one from a physicist's view, but I am very hopeful you do a follow-up on this one. While I don’t doubt that there may be factors pushing people who aren't transgender to perceive themselves as such, there is little evidence of widespread regret of gender affirming care in which the main reason given isn't societal lack of acceptance. Acceptance is basically the largest factor in all issues of trans-well being.
There is also little evidence there is not widespread regret in this new cohort of young people assigned female at birth transitioning, because the sudden spike in examples is atypical. Trying to use self-reported statistics from decades ago to argue that the experience of young people today will be the same, is tenuous and disingenuous.
There is evidence of widespread regret. Don't just write words and pretend you're right. The suicide attempt rate goes up after transition. Meaning, once people take the plunge and transition they realise changing genders didn't fix their mental illness. That's what the data shows, those are the facts. Sorry.
It isnt quite soon enough yet as those generations effected hadnt reached the age to consider detransitioning, not to mention the even greater levels of shame transgenders display towards those who do detransition, and the massive backlash that happened to some. I suspect we’ll see it happen though, and itll probably cause a massive uproar. Even some of the transgender community who are reasonable already fear its to late to stop it to.
The answer is: it depends on the procedure. Generally speaking, tissue is preserved and reused whenever possible. There is a vocal feminization procedure, as an example, which merely sutures the thicker vocal folds. It's completely reversible and has excellent outcomes compared to similar procedures. But yeah, there's like, dozens of different surgical methods for all sorts of things that are constantly improving over time. One, which was first used in cis women, involves using fish skin to help create a neovagina. It's pretty neat.
if you mean the muscle gets repurposed sure... it just won't grow back in your arm. And if you do it as a kid, for other procedures your penis/labia is not big enough to successfully make something else "properly" to the extent that this prosthetic can be considered fit for purpose. Also if the abstract of a study cites "Latin-x" you can assume the study researchers are biased AF
The most important studies on trans people are 10 - 20 years after transitioning. To see how many regretted their decisions. No control group required.
You would be surprised at the amount of things - positive, negative, harmful, beneficial, etc. - that people will SAY the do not regret. There is ample scientific proof that identifying as trans is persistent and that is basically it. Obesity, in fact, is more persistent than identifying as trans. We cannot identify trans people reliably unless THEY self-report it. We are at the tip of the iceberg with regards to understanding the phenomena and more studies are necessary because "gender affirming care and calling it a day" is obviously not good enough and even if it helps 4 times more people than it harms, that is still very far away from good enough and we should try to do better.
i am not trans/nonbinary, but have several close personal friends who are. very appreciative for content that is so detailed and based in objective fact. objective information is hard to find but so important to have when demonstrating support for loved ones. the first video i saw from this channel was a discussion of trans athletes and really set the tone for the academic detachment that i admire in your videos. thank you for the work you do!
@@robdel_actual comment was directed at sabine, not you. absolutely no interest in debating the merits of a third party with some rando on the internet. show some tact.
@@robdel_actual right, men can't become women. Women are women, whether they are cis or trans, they are born that way. Same with men. Men are men, whether they are cis or trans, they are born that way.
Hi Sabine. I would like to correct your statement that, although generally Indonesia is socially much more conservative when it comes to the transgender community in Indonesia, a person living as a transgender in Indonesia is not "illegal".
I think that is why counseling is so important. With such a rare and not well studied issue, you need to get individual care and be treated like an individual and not just a statistic. All a person can do is make the best choice they can at the time. What we should all be able to agree on though, is that no one should be made fun of or mocked for their choices.
I can honestly say that the bullying I received throughout school made me a stronger person. I wasn't brought up to expect society to tiptoe around my feelings. I'm a normal woman ( I find the term cis offensive) and I was made fun of because I grew up poor. Very poor. While it's certainly not nice of children to mock other children, it does build character, as well as reveal, in stark relief, the lack of character of the bully.
Unfortunately even counsellors and therapists are starting to become affected by the insidious lack of nuance that plagues both sides, such that many of them seem to be there just to “validate” what the client wants to hear.
@@flappyfeet1147 Or they fall back on their "standard of care" scape goat. Everyone seems to ignore the amount of money a person will spend on a lifetime of "care" if they decide to take the plunge. Even just pills can cause all sorts of future health problems, especially with the heart and bones. Very sad.
@@JanicePhillipsCis is a descriptive term, it’s odd to find it offensive. It’s like saying you don’t like being called a homo sapien. But if it bothers you, perhaps it’s further building your character, as you mention
@@gnocchidokie Cis is a made up term so people won't have to use the word NORMAL. It is in no way comparable to being called homo sapiens, as it is made up slang...for normal. That is the reason I find it offensive. If abnormal people can demand what they are called, how does informing someone what I do not like being called show a lack of character on my part?
I personally dont care about it that much, its a form of body modification and everyone should have that right once reaching a certain age. If it helps your self image and/or is something that a person wants for themselves they should be allowed. I myself dont understand gender identity or its importance, perhaps thats because I myself just don't care what labels I am stuck with because I just am what I am. Ones identity and physicality are both part of them and you don't have much agency in either, even one's identity is influenced by things that they cant control whether external or internal. I myself went through puberty really late and I am well below the average in height, I am somewhat androgenous though my biological sex is still obvious. None of that mattered to me though because why should I care what my body is like? I just do what I do and am what I am, it doesn't really need a label and no one else needs to understand me but out of pure laziness the answer I put when asked my gender is male but id rather just not have to be asked a question that is pointless to me.
@@I-call-it-the-poop-loop Yeah I know but considering this doesnt seem to be the norm I dont know lol. People are always crying about what gender they are perceived as whether trans or cis. If I walk up to the average man where I live and in any way insinuate he isnt manly I could get punched.
Did you just imply that me, as a man, would get angry about gender stuff like I'm a girl or something? You're lucky you're on the internet buddy, otherwise I'd hit you right now!@@Exquailibur
@@Exquailibur when you're in the "default" group it can be really hard to see how someone else's experience could be so different. Trans people are at high risk of murder, rape, and other violence precisely because of their identity. For some groups "Identity Politics" is a life and deaths struggle for existence.
@@orpal Yeah I am in the default group, I am a male that is smaller then most women and I am neurodivergent. I am totally not at risk of any form of violence when most other men are twice my weight and I struggle to identify people's facial expressions. The point I was trying to make is that I believe in people's rights even if I dont understand those rights. I dont understand why it matters for a person to be a man regardless of whether they are cis or trans but I think people have the right to do so. I dont think I need to understand a person to advocate for them, if I did need to then I wouldnt be able to advocate for many people at all.
If you want to be transgender, you join the socialist club. I remember socialist activists in the 1990s dressing as females and trying to popularize this ''movement.' I remember an International Socialist Organization open meeting where an overly excited sodomy advocate was taken aside by the leadership, who explained that this was ''in the pipeline' but that they were not ready for it yet. Its not hard to figure out what's going on.
Short answer, no. The number of people who fit a category inevitably increases as understanding of that category increases. It really is that simple. There is, however, a concentrated moral panic surrounding trans people and in some circles on the right, a push to straight up eradicate trans people from public life.
I think it's crazy paywalls exist. Maybe it's there to control who is able to make studies with more funding from people with resources wanting to see research that supports what they want to see. There are new platforms with people posting research without paywalls... Where you might be able to look up papers. I think it will not be a thing for much longer and those companies will just be forced to adjust. kind of like how downloading music couldn't be stopped.
It isn't controversial. She had a bad take and promoted lies and pseudoscience to push an agenda. She should honestly just take this video down. It's just bad takes from beginning to end.
@@inejunta6569 It’s there to restrict access to knowledge to the middle and upper classes. Knowledge is power, and in a capitalist society, it is in the interests of the ruling class (wealthy industrialists and mega-corporations) to disempower workers and the poor. A poorly educated, ill-informed populace is easier to control and exploit.
@@nobody.of.importanceit’s pseudoscience because you don’t agree with the studies? she never said trans people aren’t valid. it’s facts that there are a lot of things we don’t know, otherwise there wouldn’t be this huge wave of detrans too. instead of saying she lied, maybe look up all the studies yourself and learn a little bit more about this topic.
I really respect how true scientists can have the ability to look at polarizing and sensitive issues with nuance and care. It's so normal for people to pick a side, defend it, and never question anything they believe. I feel like this has helped me take a more compassionate and nuanced perspective on the matter. Thank you.
@@coniferous4637"Socially contagious fad among the brainwashed woke who want to mutilate your kids". That's a dismissive exaggeration of the gender critical position and then she flatters herself as 'normal' for saying so.
I applaud you having a honest and clear conversation as much as possible in this format. I hope everyone would be allowed to live and pursue happiness in whatever gender they prefer. If they are harming noone then noone should harm or hinder their right to live as they wish.
@@MegaLokopo then that is a bad thing that has no bearing on their right to persue happiness in whatever gender they prefer. I don't suddenly get to take away a dudes right to life just because he is defending drug dealers. I don't get to start yelling racial slurs at a wife who is defending her abusive husband.
I do appreciate the summary of results that was presented in this video. However, I deeply object to how this presentation frames the decision-making process as lying entirely in the hands of scientists, physicians, and parents. I failed to notice Sabine even once mentioning the agency of the adolescents and youths that might receive gender affirming care. Their informed consent should be the ultimate factor in deciding whether a medical intervention's benefits outweigh its costs. I do agree that parents, physicians, and scientists have a vital and essential role in informing and advising a young person on the potential costs and benefits, but the patient's agency must be the central focus at all times.
Same way you can't get your body altered at 13 because you don't think you'll ever want kids... is the same rationale that applies to other treatments that are effecting the body. No matter what they are the feelings of an adolescent kid are just that. It should ultimately be irrelevant in terms of treatments that will literally change them until they're legally old enough. That is after all the reason parents are the ones given all legal authority over their consent until that age. If treatment is causing provable harm especially, that means they literally caved in and allowed kids to medically harm themselves just to possibly make them happier or maybe less depressed. These decisions are for 18 year olds to tackle at bear minimum.
@@daddybarber1214 That’s a pretty gross generalisation. Sure teens don’t have the experience or understanding of implications that adults might, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have personal freedoms. Isn’t what you are suggesting fairly similar to, for example, not allowing those who don’t complete a secondary education to vote; due to their potential lack of understanding as to what may be at stake?
I’m going to unsubscribe if they don’t make a response to the issues many brought up. I hope that a scientist won’t hide from the comments that are constructive criticism.
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As a trans person, I can say for a fact that the worst part of this "culture war" is that we can't talk freely about the complexities, and that the underlying compassion for individuals themselves is utterly lost. The gender critical campaigns have reduced things down so far that it's now not about how do we appropriately give support to people, but instead about basic rights to personal freedom and being able to participate within society. Faced with extreme threats to survival, it is normal for humans to drop nuance, and so those opposed to trans people get to say "look at those crazy trans people, ignoring science/safety/etc". And there's strong history of trans people strawmen being created by GCs and widely publicised as real, further stoking hatred.
Trans people want to talk about things seriously and openly. We've always existed, and don't pose any kind of new danger to anyone - indeed, many of the gender critical arguments are misogynistic in basis ("protecting innocent girls"), and there's a documented rise in transphobia and of cis women getting harassed for "not looking feminine enough to be a real woman".
Core to Sabine's argument is that this is an area of science & healthcare, and not something for petty fights, political wins, and media sensationalism. And frankly, most trans people absolutely agree - we just want to go about our lives with the same dignity as anyone else.
(and that's not to say that trans people and are supporters have always been perfectly ethical and above board. But when you're faced with threats of violence and literal, documented on video, desires to be eliminated from society.... Reacting with anger is normal)
And once again, despite your succinct, hypocritical addendum feigning to recognize some wrong doings (how lightly you adress the many lives ruined by "your side" ) you served us the story that trans people and their allies can do no wrong and that everybody critical of the trans community (allies, advocates and lobbyists) are the problem.
Clearly, YOU are .
You can not plead that for everything to be good and dandy, people who criticize many things happening in this matter should just SHUT UP . That is exactly what you do. You are not a voice of reason or neutrality : you are exactly the kind of people we fight
Thank you .
Her argument is awful though. Basically seems like the only way she'd be in favour of PB would be if there's a double blind study demonstrating reduction in suicidality. But you shouldn't have to be suicidal to get to transition
reactionaries don't have any capacity to think anyway
Like so many things in the US, this is not a question for politicians or the general public. It's a question for scientists and medical professionals. I am happy that more and more people feel safe about talking to their doctors and/or families about their feelings on their own gender. This is real progress. But the only government entity that should be involved is the FDA who test drug safety and the entity that regulates therapies/surgeries and their practitioners.
I have real empathy for people who feel they got the wrong body parts. If I was born with a female body, retaining everything else I know about myself as a red blooded American man, I don’t know if I could deal with it. Especially when family and society just thinks your crazy, and when surgery is risky, and kids will bully you on top of your already difficult circumstances. I’m sure there are fakers, some people fake cancer. But nobody bullies you when you say you have stage four melanoma.
With toxic society, people with stage four melanoma are likely to encounter someone who'll delight in making them unhappier
Actually, as a trans person, I view the saying "born in the wrong body" as more of a metaphoric descriptor that attempts to convey to cis people the experience of what it's like to be trans living in cis-normative society. Many trans people say that they do not consider themselves as being in a "wrong body," but rather assert that their body belongs to them and that they ought to have the right to make of their body what they wish. Besides, many cis people do just that already. I myself do not say that I was born in the wrong body, but say that I was born into a wrong society that does not have space for me.
"If I was born with a female body, retaining everything else I know about myself as a red blooded American man, I don’t know if I could deal with it."
What do you mean with "if I could deal with it"? Deal with what?
Personally, I find it hard to imagine me living my life any different, no matter if I had male or female bodyparts. Except of course for the fact that women are just generally treated worse/differently, but that's entirely an issue with society and not with me or my body and I would very much dislike the idea of modifying my body just to fit in with the part of society that I'm interested in (I mean I would refuse to be put into a category).
@@amyashlyn9293 as one of them cis people myself, I like your framing. And that is what got me fully 100% on board being a trans ally. Personal Bodily Autonomy. And that includes the mind, obviously. ANY argument against PBA strikes me as fundamentally authoritarian. It's why despite getting the Covid vax myself, I don't think anyone should be made to get it. And why I'm pro choice in every single respect. Prioritizing PBA may cause some few societal problems, but we should learn to accept and mitigate that, rather than chipping away at PBA.
@@avedic Thank you 💗
I’m sure this topic won’t be controversial at all. Good luck, anyone venturing into the comments!
In science it is not that controversial. Only primitives make it controversial, but a science show is not really for them.
If this video makes you upset, then you need to reconsider your relation to science and facts.
@@juzoli I’m not sure calling people with any(!) opinion on the topic that thinks it’s not entirely unemotional or thinks it’s complicated a “primitive” is something I’ll ever agree with.
Scientific facts are also just a way to (in a slightly more formal manner) convince each other of opinions. Philosophy Tube has some great videos about that.
This isn’t to say that there is no consensus on these topics, but “scientific facts” are often not as clear, because they need to be convincing, and people can be convinced of the wrong thing.
In other words, get off your high horse, I guess?
@@Fs3i It is primitive, because most people use these arguments explicitly to insult and hurt other people, often for political gains.
Sure some has intelligent opinions about it, but they are rarely that loud. Most people on the internet who are screaming “there are only 2 genders, the rest is mental illness” are in fact primitive people, who just want to hurt others.
@@juzoli There's no need to be smug. It only impugns any point you're *trying* to make.
@@juzoli you shouldnt have been so mean now they will stick to their biases, attack you as a person because it's easier (like the 2 people above me) and keep being wrong ! Very counterproductive imho
"if you want to be a girl you join the physics club" GODDAMN she is dropping bombs just because she can
Yes, well done.
Can anyone explain this joke? I don't get it - are there more girls in the physics club than boys?
I know a good number of trans femme physicists, so as part of social transition? Yeah, checks out.
(And if you drop out of physics into computer science, as I did? There's even more trans femmes in computer science.)
@@peacefroglorax875 Well, I am a physics teacher working in China / Kazakhstan. In my experience, boys are assumed to be better at physics than girls (even by some local teachers) and yet the girls either equal or frequently out do the boys.
@@peacefroglorax875 she is a girl and joined the physics club. It's a not so subtle suggestion for more girls in physics, a male dominated field.
In my experience, transgender women tend to be less likely to come out due to societal pressures. They tend to pass less frequently and are more strongly argued against in the media's eye. Most trans arguments in the media seem to feature transwomen and women's spaces whereas the transmen side is less critiqued in the same way. This may offput transwomen from coming out in fear of social stigma
Excuse me how is it possible that a person born of a specific sex can change his or her sex simply because of "feelings". Sex and gender are binary. Don't buy into the lies being pushed by a humanistic agenda
thats probably cause of transwomen in sports
@@KostasG-nt9pe but what’s ur take on that
@@Kj_002 on what I said or on what you said?
@@Kj_002 If you're going out for a game of pickup basketball, nobody cares.
But if you are a biological male, you have inherent physical attributes that are far less probabilistically likely in a biological female. So, it is categorically unfair that a biological male be allowed to compete and have an unfair advantage to biological females.
To elaborate on this intuition of fairness, let me give you an example:
We see it as fair to have a biological advantage, as long as you are competing within a group that we humans intuitively see as fair.
Heights of kids of a given age, for instance, are normally distributed. There may be a kid who's much taller and stronger than their peer. Yet, in a competition like a race, they are matched up against each other. We would find that fair.
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However, we would find it unfair if a kid that was 18 came to compete with kids that were 12 years old in a race.
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Why? Because the distribution of traits of 18 year olds give them an unfair biological advantage over what is possible for 12 year olds.
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In this same exact manner, there is a categorical difference between the normal distributions of men's traits and women's traits. A 99th percentile woman for instance, is 5'10. It's an extremely rare biological gift. That means only 1 in 100 women will be that tall or taller.
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When you compare that to men, that only puts you in the 50th percentile. That means that super rare trait for a woman is grossly overshadowed by the heights men can have. It's an inherent biological difference that is fundamentally and irreconcilably unfair. So a man going into women's competitions is equivalent to the 18 year old competing with 12 year olds. Even if the 18 year old has been blocking their hormones and injecting 12 year old hormones. There are attributes that are going to be different between the competitors that give an unfair advantage to the 18 year old.
In the Netherlands the ratio of girls and boys waiting for gender affirming care seems to have balanced out again. In any case, the requirements in the Netherlands to receive this care are pretty strict, it is not a procedure you can just get on a whim. Also people are closely monitored both before and after transition to check their well-being and see if any mistakes have been made in the assessment. Ultimately it is about people actually transitioning not people that may entertain the thought for a while.
That is combining compassion and common sense. Something you will never see in much of thewhere Jebus holds sway.
Google 'New "20-year" Study from Amsterdam's VUmc Youth Gender Clinic: A Critical Analysis'. Follow-ups have been lacking.
@Anaximander yes, it's far more sane to believe men and women can turn into each other...
@Anaximander your first comment is giving tacit support to trans surgery...
@Anaximander just to make sure, you don't believe men can _turn into_ women because trans women are already women (and vice versa) right?
I'm a trans guy who transitioned as an adult (18): I've been out and living as a guy for 3 years now and have been on hrt for a few months. I read through many of the other comments, and I'd like to add on to them and address a topic I saw a bit underepresented: the medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. The modern sociological consensus is that you do NOT need to have dysphoria to be trans, and you may have dysphoria about a body part but that doesn't necessarily indicate you are trans. Dysphoria is a mental reaction to feeling a discrepancy between how your body is and how you expect it to be/feel like it should be. Since everyone processes certain traumas differently, not every trans person actually experiences dysphoria to the same level.
At the same time, treating dysphoria doesn't actually treat depression, anxiety, or any other mental health problem an individual could've developed due to the trauma of being trans. Going to a therapist and getting treated for those is just as crucial as receiving medical transition care...unfortunately many trans people I know assumed all their problems would disappear upon starting hrt, and although they are happy with their changes, hormones obviously don't make depression go away. So even just from my experience and from extensive talks with my psychiatrist, I am not at all surprised that studies found that mental health of patients medically transitioning did not significantly improve, because medical transition is not a "cure to depression", it just helps to alleviate dysphoria and make someone feel more comfortable in society.
I should note here that I don't study medicine, and I think we should leave it up to medical professionals and the patient to thoroughly evaluate the best course of care for each individual. I understand how someone not diagnosed with dysphoria wanting to medically transition can be a difficult situation, and I am not smart enough in this topic to resolve such issues. I advocate strongly for thorough medical evaluation before commiting to any sort of gender care, but I don't think it is as simple as "HRT is a perfect solution" or "HRT is bad for everyone". I really do think this should be evaluated on a person-to-person basis and best left up to the psychiatrist, GP, and the patient without government intervention (anymore than the government intervenes in other medical issues, that is)
May I ask, do you know what it means to be trans without the disphoria?
Oh my god the mental gymnastics required to say that the depression and anxiety many of these people experience is a RESULT of being 'trans' is next level. You are truly full of koolaid.
Having seen other TH-camrs commenting on trans issues, I came away with the impression that many medical professionals, including GPs, have little or no relevant training and are only slightly more informed than the general public. As such, the argument "leave it to GPs" is flawed until their lack of training is addressed. I wouldn't be surprised if similar issues exist in other groups of medical professionals, such as psychiatrists.
@@ppike__ I can tell you if you want me to.
You just do not feel that you should change your body to conform to the biological standard of a particular sex. If I have breasts and feel like a man, that does not make me a woman, my behaviour does.
Gender is an experience, it is qualia. Disforia is a sintoma, anxiety for being perceived by other people in a way you are not that does not manifest in some people.
@@EvanWells1 and how many trans people have you heard of? Those who have not detransitioned.
My scepticism of the "they're doing it because it's popular" doesn't come from any "agenda" but as a gay man in my fifties I've heard it all before about me. People haven't let go of the "it's a choice" libel still as if anyone would choose to have every Tom Dick and Harry know better than you what you are going through.
I have known 2 trans people and both transitioned as adults.
She's saying that a person has an agenda if they claim that 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘯𝘦 of two is taking place.
Many people use it as a cover for other things, but just flat out denying it as an absolute nonsense, like some people online do, is also disingenuous.
Actually, the argument with transgender often goes that gender is a choice, and the gender 'assigned at birth' may not matter. It was always puzzling for me how it was markedly different with the case of gay rights, when society concluded that there is no choice whatsover, and even forbade in law attempts to convert gay people
I'm in my 30s and transitioning, but I still question if it's social contagion. 😂😂 I was cross dressing a long time before I learned about trans though, so it can't be 100% social contagion for me. I don't know if I would have started this journey had I not met trans people who identified me as trans. In any case, I'm happy with the results.
The difference between then and now though is social media.
"It Takes All Kinds" is what my mother used to say when asked about people who spoke/acted/behaved differently. The beauty of this line is that it encourages, even insists on tolerance but doesn't require that you actually understand every divergent branch of humanity. Sure, its important to try but its OK not to as long as you are tolerant and respectful.
My nana used to say this too
@@tracy9610 Bless your sweet Nana too! Her wisdom is worth touting..
It takes all kinds to make the world go round. Seriously, what happened to this phrase?
I mean the phrase seemed to always be used to refer to personalities, not states of being, and with ideologies running hot it's hard to anyone to accept the other side.
Beautifully said ❤️
The problem is we used to have snowstorms and high winds to knock off the weak and defective branches. Not so much anymore.
I think regarding the change in proportion of FTM vs MTF binary transgender people, it's important to note that the social pressures on trans people of these genders are not equal. Trans men who underwent female puberty, for example, have a lot easier time passing as male after hormone therapy than trans men in similar circumstances do passing as women. And much of the culture war in America specifically latches onto the idea that trans women are just men in dresses hoping to assault cis women and 'trick' heterosexual men. Trans men are far more invisible- there's less violence at risk for living as a trans man at the moment.
This is very true, trans men are seen as men with thin beards after HRT, and as victims of "woke gender ideology" before they fully pass, while trans women are seen as creepy failures of men or enthusiastic predators looking for an excuse to get into women's spaces. It's way safer to be the former.
Also she seems to just assume that the rates should be roughly equal, and the fact that they aren't somehow disqualifies certain people from really being trans even though this is backed up by literally nothing ever
@@sethdrake7551 Does she? She stated that the rates, up to a certain point, _had been_ roughly equal. In fact, the stats I vaguely remember from ~10 years ago is _more_ MtF than FtM people (by a noticeable amount, like 2:1 or something). I don't see her stating that this disqualifies anyone, but merely asking why this relatively sudden shift is happening. Asking a question is not pushing an agenda in either direction, and I'd say the video has generally been pro-trans.
As long as you can stay stealth, anyway. What happened to Brandon Teena to this day makes me fuckin sick.
+
Would be nice to compare the life satisfaction (over the lifetime) of those who received an early treatment and those who did it only later in life.
Early "treatment" aka ruining the development of a child?
You would have to care if people were happy with thier lives for that research to make a difference.
And to compare the life satisfaction of those who had any treatment or had no treatment, and to ask whether or not someone is happy with transitioning or if they would have rather not transitioned. These, I think are the most important questions and they seem to be left out completely, but for any other treatment these are common questions that are researched and we know exactly how many people who have had heart surgery are happy with their choice. One would expect this far simpler research that doesn't need a control group was done on trans kids/adults as well. And it is, but for some reason it's left out of this video.
There is a massive suicide rates corresponding with it.
@@anonymoususer3561 evidence suggest that going through the wrong puberty is incredibly harming to a child's development. that includes those who don't get an early treatment. If you actually cared about the health and well-being of children you would look at the evidence and the science, instead of what just makes you personally uncomfortable.
I have a young relative who insisted on transitioning; I think their parents took the best route, they let them use whatever pronoun or name they wanted; but to start medical transition they had to attend therapy to manage their depression and anxiety.
Within a year they decided to keep the new name and pronoun, but hold off on the medical transition for now.
I think accepting and understanding had a huge impact on their mental health, and letting them know they don't have to confirm into traditional gender roles had a huge impact.
This! I think we forget there can be so much nuance in this discussion and what really matters is people knowing it’s case by case, ensuring people have access to accurate information and can make informed consent.
This would work as general advice if many therapists weren’t captured by the anti-science ideology that is pushing for everyone to transition.
So to you being stuck in the body they were born in, and to have the secondary sexual characteristics forced on them is the "right choice?" You must surely see that this can only be because you believe it is a "fad."
A choice about which body they develop IS being made. Irrevocavle choices that can't be mended. If you are wrong, and it isn't a fad, then they will now live in the wrong body forever.
Yes, this is generally what happens. People aren't out there making snap decisions and getting transed instantly.
@@GigiofGigi "accurate information" being the kind they get when it is too late, and they already have breasts or a deep voice. Convenient. None of you have the first clue what you are talking about.
I was born in 1958. I wouldn't have told anyone that I was the wrong sex when I was a teenager for anything in the universe. I just kept my mouth shut and drank and took drugs, tried to unalive myself multiple times and wished I had the courage to do it right.
Abject misery was my life.
At the age of 35, in 1993, I was living in San Diego,(rather than North Carolina), and finally got the courage to come out and transition.
It was like coming alive. Soaring out of hell to take part in life....finally!
I never regretted it for a second.-weezi-🙏💖🙏🌄
May I ask why you thought you were the wrong sex? Was it because you did not conform to certain societal expectations? In contrast to intersex people, I have a hard time imagining that a biological man or woman can be "born into the wrong body". If men can show emotions and women can play soccer, and they can be attracted to the same sex, why is there a need to change one's gender? I thought the whole point was to get rid of these societal norms, not taking hormones and getting surgery to be able to do these things in a pre-specified gender role.
@@Flovus hello. i'm not the guy in the comment but i think i can answer your question.
men can be feminine, and women can be masculine, and that doesn't mean that they're trans or that they have issues with their gender neccesarily.
as far as i know, trans people aren't trans because they have a problem with masculinity or femininity neccesarily. they're trans because something in their brains (that they have no control over) tells them that they are the opposite sex. and that's it.
however, like sabine says in the video, sex is set in stone from birth. they can't change it. it's your biological sex.
They also feel like it's very very wrong, they feel like it sticks out to the eye when someone calls them by their assigned gender at birth, like "she, girl, woman, queen, sister etc" or "he, boy, guy, man, brother, king, etc", but they don't really know why that is. It just feels wrong to them.
I've heard this or variations of it from a few trans friends: "This is not my choice, i would not be trans if i had the choice to." or "This is not fun, life would be easier if i was cishet." it really isn't their choice.
I'm cishet, probably like you, and i've been around a lot of trans people. It didn't really affect how I see myself. I did my research about it, but it didn't make me feel like i should be trans too or something.
thank you for not being rude while asking those questions by the way.
@@Flovus you see, before transitioning I kinda did fit into society expectations, of an slightly anxious nerdy guy, but still. I didn't have a problem with fitting into social expectations of masculinity - didn't feel pushed, nor I was pushing myself to conform to some other standards. I've been interested exclusively in women, and women seemed to be interested in me.
And yet, something felt wrong. So wrong, that repression of this feeling ended with depression. It turned out that transition helped me with my mental health more than any kind of therapy or pills prescribed by psychiatrists. And as a woman I'm more misaligned with stereotypical womanhood (like, I'm working in a predominantly male industry) than I was with stereotypical manhood.
I'm not stating that it's universal for all trans people - it's just a „case study” of my own example.
@@SublimeWeasel if you've been "around a lot of trans people", you should see how it's social contagion and not anything real, because the chances of you even knowing 2 trans people is astronomically low unless you go to like trans parades or something.
In order to penetrate or be penetrated. They need to turn off the porn and go join the Peace Corp so they can see what real problems look like. You cannot "change ones gender" as there really is no such thing. You are male or female - tangibly and unchangeably - and you present how you do. If they want to call that presentation "gender", fine, but it's just more word salad. Just like that "unalive" thing used by someone else. If a word means the same thing as "kill" or "suicide" than what makes "unalive" any better than saying "kill" or "suicide"? It's just a way to force change in their mould onto the society at large.
"Have you ever seen a normal human? I haven't." Thank goodness for you. ❤
Join the military
... on the other hand, I thought the joke was a little undermining. "Normal human behavior" is a thing we can define, even if the sum total of all "normal human behavior" describes the behavior of no individual human.
For instance, there's a long history of people killing each other. That kind of behavior could be included in "normal" or "not normal" depending on what is meant by the definition. I wouldn't joke about it, but really address the definition and take it seriously. Otherwise we complacently propagate confusion and increase the amount of miscommunication and misunderstanding.
@@bepitan Having two arms and two legs is above the average amount of legs and arms that average humans have.
@@jimbrookhyser "normal" is a statistical parameter extracted from a given sample of individuals.
@@jimbrookhyser it's also a little undermined by sabine's own usage right at the beginning of the video, in which she (jokingly? i don't know...) refers to "normal" people whom, apparently, think right-wing bigotry and accepting trans people as people whose lives are worth saving are comparably "crazy" points of view... i believe she is being glib rather than serious myself, but the centrist posturing is obnoxious
16:00 this may be a dumb question, but wouldn’t you expect to see little change with puberty blockers? the point of taking them is to delay a change that might otherwise cause distress. (not getting worse) does not equate to (getting better.) otherwise thank you for a relatively balanced and in depth look at this stuff, it’s important.
Yes, that was a bit of a non sequitur.
i think no significant effect means compared to a control group of children with the same issues, that get a placebo or no drugs. I haven't read the study though.
Good eye!
i was thinking the same think and it was touched on again later in 'the control group who weren't treated got worse' . also the fact that in the discussion of mental health over time there was no mention that increasing queer-phobia is likely to cause a general decline in queer people's mental health which is going to skew all of the results of the very limited recent scientific literature.
thats why you need a control group (people who experience gender dysphoria (or feel they are transgender), but did not take puberty blockers), and then compare the results to the control group. the problem is that noone has properly conducted this. (that one paper had SEVEN people in the control group, when is should have been like 60 if i remember correctly)
My father grew up unacceptably left-handed in decidedly non-progressive 1930/40's Belfast, and in his case the result of forced right-handed writing was a terrible stutter that took a decade of renewed left-handed writing (as an adult) to rectify - so not quite as easily fixed as swapping hands, though he definitely wished it had been so
My lefthanded husband was also scorned in class by the teacher for making a mess while writing (with an inkpen, no wonder). This was back in the '80 in western europe too.
@@InShadowsLinger he only said, "not as easy as swapping hands", which is correct, no? It was just a nuance. Go and review your claim of "willful misleading".
@@InShadowsLinger: My father had tremors for the entire remainder of his life, and never fully recovered his lefthandedness. I'm not sure what exact point you're trying to make, but my father's anecdotal experience does not seem to support it.
@@InShadowsLinger this is so bad, it's not even wrong
@@zbnmth It wasn't said that "swapping hands" in this case is objectively easy. It is as easy as re-learning all the motor skills associated with primary hand. But still, doable with proper rehab. Which isn't the case for permanent changes during puberty, be it artificial or natural
“If you want to be a girl, you join the physics club!” 😂 I love this
Yes, me too! I was one of those girls who loved physics and math and would have joined the club if there was a club to join 😊📡
For me it's the drama club, of all the performers at our school's last play, I was the only performer assigned male at birth from the school.
The gender ratio shift could be explained in many other ways - it's hard to compare the violence and hatred "failed men" face in society to anything. By that i mean people who were expected to be straight men (gay men, transgender women), who did not comply with societies expectations. The physical and emotional violence that comes with that from peers and family is unparalleled. I'm not saying people assigned female at birth who transition don't face difficulties, just that they are different, and currently less immediately severe. It's much easier to be "non binary" if you were born AFAB because feminism already fought for women's right to be gender non conforming. Any sign of gender deviancy from AMAB people is mostly met with ridicule and like i said violence.
*hugs*
That's the reason why I do worry for my amab demi-male spouse when he (his preferred pronoun) goes about in one of his blouses. I think being blind probably insulates him a little bit, at least from physical violence. No one comments about me never wearing anything "girly"
That said, I'm the one buying or making them for him, since I know what colors suit him better and how to minimize his (in his opinion) unfortunate amount of hair.
Twitter incarnate
It could also be genetic 🧬. There is considerably less selective pressure to be very masculine or very feminine with society, so sexual dimorphism is likely decaying from lack of reason to be maintained. This wouldn't always cause transgenderism, but the gap is shorter to cross 🦘.
Feminine traits are the most effected, as feminine traits are the most different from basal, as human women have the most complicated gender specific traits. Males are more close to normal animal behaviour, with human wide traits added on.
Thank you for ponting this out. AMAB (Assigned Male At Bith) gender non conforming individuals in westernized societies face incredible levels of violence in all fronts.
It’s disappointing to see Sabine not making the effort to understand how societal factors like the amount of hatred openly directed at the trans community, particularly trans women, will skew results :/
We grow up scared to death to come out. We are discussed as subhuman, degenerates, and as if we’re out of our minds for “deciding to not be men”.
This information is presented as “neutral” but the amount of time dedicated to “concerns” on treatment and the lack of mention regarding the long term satisfaction rates of gender affirming care *in accepting environments* is baffling.
Our lives are not made worse because of treatment. It’s the unending hatred, family rejection, lack of job oportunities as visibly trans.
We’re dehumanized sistematically, and that takes a toll on our emotional wellbeing.
I respect Sabine’s expertise on particle physics any day, no doubt. She’s a fantastic science communicator when it comes to physical phenomena, and as a phycisist myself, I find her brilliant.
However, I find her lacking an empathic view in these topics. It’s *impossible* to discuss “crude data” seriously whithout at least acknowledging the effect the amount of violence thrown our way has 😔 it’s disheartening. All of these “moderate” “level headed” discussions are scary. How can all of this hatred just be willingly ignored? 😨😰
(Edits for clarity)
Depends where you are in the country. Often standards for male competence get ridiculous and unrealistic if you're in an area with lots of gang violence or it's rurual, so the ridicule and violence are from insecure men that hate seeing someone letting others down by not being a warrior with their own compound, which isn't really something realistic that citizens in a developed country should worry about.
This is a hell of a lot better than watching a bunch of stupid debates on this issue. Great work.
Still I would like a debate between a biologist, neuroscientist, psychiatrist and psychologist from both sides.
@@geha9450 Would be better to just have a board of scientists to discuss it rather than a "debate".
the idea that we can debate away this issue is mind boggling in the first place. The sheer amount of debates about this is insult to injury.
@@moth5799 yes but I want those peope who call themselves scientists and all they do is spread missinformation to be challenged by other scientists and call them out
@@ADUAquascaping Source? Do you have a paper on this?
Wait.... Why are references exclusive to patreon ??? Shouldn't it be under the description and not under paywall or am i the crazy one here ?????
Kinda grifty. Is she an educator or a clout chaser?
@@wcookiv an uneducator and a grifter
Huh, yeah I didn’t notice that but I don’t think that’s a good look. Granted, there are mentions and images of papers, but you’re right I’d expect open references (script is kinda meh). Still think she’s a good educator though, unlike some other commenters that just want to leap to an attack and forgot the whole “nuance” thing
Edit: not OP
Yeah
I doubt she said anything truthful
She completely misrepresented the studies, made false equivalence and strawman logical fallacies. My was a big fan up until this appalling video. It's one thing to have an opinion I disagree with, it's another to completely misrepresent the science and argument to prop up that opinion.
I randomly discovered this video after seeing one of your quantum mechanics videos. I must say, it's rather nice to hear someone who, after looking through the scientific papers on the topic, has come to the EXACT same conclusions as myself after I did my own research.
There has been so much anger and people talking past each other online, I really think society needs to take a step back, return to objectivity, and look for good, caring solutions for anyone who is struggling, instead of adamantly standing behind their 'side' on the issue. That's the only way we will ever move forward.
I am a transwoman and I think this video has a lot of nuanced discussion about the topic. As a lover a science I would also like to see better studies done on the subject but I think the prospect of creating a control group for these studies is difficult. You'd have to have someone with gender dysphoria and then have them not transition. Antidotally, I can say that this has gone poorly for some of my peers. When there was a control group in that study that fact that it shrank so much should be indicative. My lived experience has been that my mental health has declined while not seeking treatment. It shouldn't be surprising that the control groups mental health gets worse while the other group either stays the same or makes modest gains.
I think there is another topic being left out of the conversation all together. I think we all need to agree on a few foundational things to have a good faith investigation about transgender people. Firstly, I think we need to agree that we are real (was pointed out in the video) and have the right to exist as citizens with the same rights as everyone else. The political problem we have in the US right now is that we can't agree on that. This makes it hard to have good faith research on trans people. It also makes these studies difficult to carry out. How do account for these existential problems that many trans people face? I can say that can take a toll on your mental health. Unless we can reduce that as an external factor or we can account for it I feel like studies will be difficult to carry out.
Just my thoughts :)
It also fair to say that the Trans and LGBTQIA+ community has had lots of poor research done on us in the past. I'd love to see more of the research be designed by people who are apart of the community they are studying. Or at the very least be part of the design process. It's so hard to explain how dysphoria feels to people who haven't experienced it. I feel like it would be a hard thing to study unless you understand what it feels like.
About the control groups I mentioned earlier, I think understanding you are trans and then not transitioning would be paramount to taking a CIS person who knows they are CIS and putting them on the wrong hormones to find out what happens. So how do we ethically design studies with a control in mind when not getting the care could be so needlessly detrimental?
Yes, if pretty much all of the control group leave the study, then that tells you something.
So you want to be a woman and you hate women, or dislike them??
@@ashley5514 I get where you are coming from, but I have to disagree. If a study is properly conducted, then it is irrelevant who the researchers are. While I have nothing against trans people being involved in the studies, introducing them _because_ they're trans is the wrong way to go about it. That feels like a conflict of interest if anything. The only people that should be studying this stuff are those that are serious about the research, regardless of whether they are trans or not.
Anecdotally*
I speak as a trans woman who transitioned at my late 20’s in Brazil. And I did it despite the statistics pointing Brazil as the most violent country towards trans women, we call it trans-feminicide, often with regards of cruelty and excess violence. I had always been like this, but the fear was part of my social structure. Gender dysphoria is real, and it can go on for a lifetime, I didn’t know what it was but the angst was always there lurking from the shadows, I studied psychology, I traveled, moved around, did therapy for years getting to know myself and building the courage to take the first steps towards transition, it’s been 4 years, I feel way much better about myself, despite the cultural and societal consequences. I believe it would have been much better if I could have transitioned in my late teens, I hope more studies can be taken and we have it scientifically right, so young trans people can have a better life.
you are very brave, and honnest with yourself. i respect that and wish you all the best out there in your life, i hope you may be safe, in good health and find happines.
@@GDuff123 This is a stupid, hateful comment.
I admire for choosing to do what's right for you despite the hostile environment. Please stay safe.
@@GDuff123 We have a real incellectual genius here.
@@GDuff123 why?
As an adult trans person who has grown up away from social media or even the trans conversation (my family is conservative and religious) transitioning in my late 20s has been a boon on my mental health and general quality of life. But I assume that is because the people I live with accept me and respect my identity.
I think studying trans people's mental health is complicated because we are a small minority and our well-being is very dependent on how those around us (family, colleagues, government) treat us. That is why I suspect proving HRT does any good is complicated, it is only a small part of what being a healthy and happy trans person is.
On top of that, many trans people forgo hormones and operations completely and focus on the social part of their transition. So, I do not think focusing on hormonal therapy is a good way of studying whether transitioning is a good thing. I guess we will have to wait and see for more studies to come in.
Well said!
I suspect HRT and other medical procedures help with not experiencing quite as much hate. That is, if you "pass", transphobic people just don't notice you which in my opinion is quite obviously good for anyone's mental health.
If we lived in a perfect world, maybe medical transition would be unnecessary for most trans people, but that doesn't seem to be the case right now.
@@nio804Being honest, no not really. Treatments help me with my own distress over my secondary sex characteristics. Other people have very little to do with it.
If there are other trans people who feel the way you describe than it would explain a lot of the bad data in the video. We’d need to separate those two groups since they have different needs.
@@qarsiseer Ah, I didn't mean a trans person would choose to go on HRT just to "pass", but that it has the incidental effect of making it easier to present as their gender without being noticed by transphobes.
Obviously any decision to medically modify one's body should be founded on personal needs first, regardless of whether it's related to gender or not.
@@nio804 Before I accepted that I was trans, I was trying to figure out if there was a way for doctors to remove my breasts "but in a way where I don't have to come out as transgender." I badly wanted to change my sex characteristics even if I couldn't socially transition, so there are trans people that are affected by the experience of their body in way not directly related to how they're treated in society.
At the time I was willing to forego social transition because I feared what negative things I would face as a trans person, so social stigma still plays a part in how people feel about gender expression. (Luckily for me, social transition was a breeze so I didn't even need to worry about it lol)
I'm a little late to the game here as i just saw this video. One important factor that was completely ignored when discussing the psychological satisfaction of recipients of treatment is the fact that systemic hatred of trans people is a common thread before, during, and after treatment. Of course someone is going to be depressed if they are constantly inundated by an endless barrage of hate! As a trans woman who transitioned 20 years ago i can definitively say that transitioning made me happier and more satisfied with my life but the world's hatred continues to drag me down.
they only reason lots of people hate you is because you think i should stop referring to women as woman and men as men you lot invented cis male and cis female ; did you know the word cis isnt actually a real word its only recentl been added to dictionaries ; the world does not need to altert its language to suit your gender if you are happy to be trans good on you
Thank you, I was hoping someone would point this out. Also trans feminine people are more stigmatized and more likely to be victims of violence than trans masculine people, so that’s going to affect the number of people who feel safe coming out of the closet and can even keep people fully repressed to themselves. To be clear, I’m certainly not saying trans masc people have it easy! This is a dangerous world for all trans people right now.
You're correct that hatred is unfortunately a common thread before and after treatment...but that's also not entirely relevant to what's being measured, in a very technical sense. See, if you measure the effect of a treatment, and there's another phenomenon going on in the background throughout, then you should still be able to measure the effect of that treatment.
For instance, if it's very warm out and I turn on the AC, it should still have an effect that can be measured (unless the AC is not working).
@@CamustangYour reasoning is flawed - you’re assuming the external factor remains constant before and after. Taking your analogy, suppose that after turning on the AC, global temperatures also rose by 40 degrees. Then, one might erroneously deduce that the AC doesn’t cool anything down.
Bullshit
Actually, forcing left handed people to write with their right hands is not harmless. It has been associated with stuttering and other complications.
Yeah, it's quite alienating and stifles learning
Nobody said otherwise.
The argument is that there’s a big difference between letting someone write with their left hand and proceeding with irreversible surgeries and committing them to a life of chronic medication.
@@theondono The data suggests that those who regret transition are incredibly low. That you think you should have a say in these decisions is just not plausible.
@@joeandorian7719 You mean the barely existent data suggest there isn’t many who regret the transition? There are LOTS of people who do. I’ve been on dates with some. I personally know some. And now that it’s so much easier to get access to hormones and puberty blockers, I am guessing the number of people who regret it is going to massively increase.
Just as an aside, what is wrong with just being who you are regardless of your inners? Seriously. Maybe the problem is misogyny ia still alive and well. What’s wrong with being a fem boy or a butch girl? Seriously. Trans ideology is currently erasing lesbian and gay kids or even just kids who don’t fit into a binary, all the while say the heteronormativity is the problem.
It is a trash argument to say that a little kid is going to actually understand what they are doing to there body. It’s akin to child a use to allow this as liberally as it is. More strict standards need to be in place before a kid that can’t even vote can start electing to have their biological development disrupted.
@@joeandorian7719 even if only one person regrets it it is enough to criticize it. Now there is Reddit with more than 40000 people regretting it and there are multiple Detransitioners speaking out. They are on TH-cam and they have their own organizations. They are growing and growing.
Your beloved data is obviously inaccurate
".....have you ever seen a normal person? I haven't." Well said Sabine.
Yeah. Because her opinion is a fact? A normal person who thinks they are born into the wrong body.. wow, how ironic considering that is condoning gnostic mysticism.
It is a medical condition and mental disorder. It isn't a metaphysical phenomenon. The "experts" don't even know the cause, but less grey matter in their orbitofrontal cortex is a factor. Evidence suggests that endocrine disruptors in the environment are a leading cause for gender dysphoria. Giving puberty blockers to pre pubescent children and surgeries is not common sense. Instead of chopping off someone's penis maybe we should look into reducing environmental pollution. The ignorance of humanity is maddening. You're a bunch of imbeciles. It has to do with hormone disruption during gestation, and this is exactly why gender dysphoria affects men more than women. Yeah, you all really understand "science." There is nothing wrong with their body, and no one is born in the wrong body. Talk about believing in gnostic mysticism.
A 'normal' person is a diluted crackpot.
@@ADUAquascaping Sabine was asking a rhetorical question, whether you can even define normality in the strictest sense. It's not merely her opinion, it is a fact of life you learn along the way. No one, nothing, that actually exists is "normal". Normality is however you define it, an abstract, arbitrary, subjective, a certain number of standard deviations from the statistical mean. Since you have a problem with gnostic mysticism, i'm assuming (possibly wrongly) that you deem yourself 'Christian'. Do you truly think you your faith is "normal" compared to the rest of humanity? To the rest of Christiandom? You could argue whether something is "morally right or wrong" according to your faith, whether God likes this and that, but anyone who has done some introspection and mingled with actual people would know that normality is undefinable. And that we each struggle with our personal sins. That is what she is saying here.
That's because 'normal' is highly culturally defined. Example: Lived in many countries overseas. One time (mid-80s), in Kenya, a few of us Americans were sitting in chairs, listening to Judy Collins and the like (on cassette tapes), drinking some wine watching an absolutely glorious African sunset. The Kenyans thought it somewhat strange, waste of time. We, 'Magnificent, beautiful!' (and it was!) they ... 'Don't get it'. Best example of what is 'normal'behavior that I have ever heard.
"The control group members who did not receive care had worse mental health outcomes and by the end there were only 7 people left in this group" - this is the problem with control group studies in this group. Who would put themselves into the control group? It would mean denying yourself and sticking withthat despite knowing an alternative exists
The ethics of control groups is incredibly complex, and can't be shrugged off. In many of these studies it's just not possible to have an untreated group.
You don't understand study design. In a double-blind randomised controlled trial (RCT), you don't know if you're taking the control or not. It's not a decision you make.
@@mikolmisol6258 True, but you know you could be, which could make people more reluctant to participate in the study in the first place. That seems like it would make it more likely that people less critically in need of treatment would participate.
This was falsely intepreted. There were only 7 people at the 12 Months mark in the control group, but you can see that on earlier timestamps control group was significantly bigger. This was actually inacurately presented by SH
Just because you think it's unethical doesn't make the existing data any stronger.
If you want things to change without stronger data, you're going to need to admit the argument is a cultural one and not a scientific one.
As the parent of a chromosomaly intersex child, I really wish we could just teach our children to accept their whole selves without worrying so much about who is a boy or girl and whether their body matches a definition of either. While your anatomy may define your biological sex and increase the odds of certain personality traits, it doesn't have to define who you are. My child is who they are and their anatomy isn't at odds with the reality of what they will grow to view as their identity. There is nothing wrong with either their feelings on the subject, or with their body.
I agree, my hope is that people can love the skin they’re in. We don’t really get a choice, so it’s healthier to accept our biology. Hard when kids are taught they can be whatever they want.
@@eeeatenit's not possible many times to just accept where you are, neither is it necessarily healthy, you should fight against your circumstances, not take it like a bitch.
@@AwfulnewsFM no idea what you're trying to say
@@eeeatenSpoken by someone who has never once felt gender dysphagia.
I would love it if instead you could just accept people get to choose to what they do with their bodies.
@@skyisreallyhigh3333 gender dysphagia you say? i find that hard to swallow. i assume you mean dysphoria. no i have not felt gender dysphoria, because i understand that gender doesn't really mean that much and no matter how i feeeeel my sex is based on my biology. i do know a few women who felt gender dysphoria strongly as teens, mostly because they felt strong and brave, and they felt society's expectations of young women didn't really match how they felt - they weren't girly girls so at the time identified as tom-boys. now they are confident strong adult women they are VERY glad they didn't change their bodies, and that they weren't offered treatment because they may well have taken it. i also know a few trans women. they transitioned as adults, and are happier as women than they were as men - great, right? power to them. the point is this is not a decision for kids to make when they are growing, changing and confused. it's too easy to throw medical treatment at a problem that is usually psychological. we used to teach kids to love who they are, now we tell them they can be whatever they choose. sounds great, rarely works.
As a response to why there are more AFAB people identifying as trans in proportion to AMABs in adolescence, I would make the argument that since AFAB people start puberty earlier than AMABs, they have more time to figure out what characteristics about their body are bothering them and why. I also believe that it is still somewhat more stigmatized for AMAB people to be trans, or identify as LGBTQ+ (see current political discourse of AMAB trans and queer people being groomers, and media villanization dating back to the 80's). For these reasons, I believe that the amount of AMAB trans adolescents will eventually come closer to, or meet the number of AFAB adolescents.
Great points.
@@cristianproust or trans women are being killed more often than trans men. The real reason there's a "sudden surge" in transgender youth is that they arent being murdered as often, and the only reason there arent many trans adults is that AIDS killed most of them. Read a book.
@@cristianproust There is more empirical evidence of the relative unacceptability of trans women (painted as predators) than trans men (painted as victims) than there is that any social contagion is a widespread cause of dysphoria, and the hypothesis of acceptance explains both the increase and the gender disparity in that increase. If you ask trans people, all of them will say that acceptance is a conscious factor in why they are or are not out, in the timing of them coming out, and in who they come out to. This factor is as obvious and uncontroversial as anything can be here.
The hypothesis of social contagion explains nothing new, and there is no evidence for it that is not already explained by more obvious factors, why should anybody accept that hypothesis as any kind of substitute?
If you want to use social contagion as a contributing factor that operates alongside acceptance in explaining the increase, and assign some kind of weight to it based on evidence, you will find an incredibly tiny number, one that you will struggle to distinguish from zero, especially given current evidence.
The only evident use the social contagion hypothesis has is to induce outrage in those who are disgusted by trans people, it has no explanatory power.
this
plus trans women face significantly more backlash in this culture war, that is often (extremly misogynistically) framed as poor confused naive lesbians versus creepy male sex predators.
it's no wonder that this is a recent trend and once the winds shift and being transphobic becomes more and more socially unacceptable, like homophobia and racism are today, we would likely see this ratio settle at 1 again
As a university professor, I have had more than one student over the years suddenly changing the first name to something suggesting the opposite gender. They usually are in their lower twenties and I'm rather confident they have made up their mind by now. They are just starting their transition, so their appearance and behavior sometimes sends mixed signals as to their gender, which can lead to awkward interactions. It is therefore a special challenge to treat these students in such a way as not to make their transition even more difficult then it already is. It seems to me that being aware of their struggle is the first step to improve their situation, and correct information and honest discussion helps with that. In this sense: thanks, Sabine, for this valuable contribution.
Awkward interactions? Just treat everyone as human, no awkwardness there.
Why not assign numbers to students instead?
When talking about teens in middle and high school, which is what this video focused on, we need to keep in mind that children of that age are desperate to fit in, especially girls. This is why there is a higher percentage of depression among girls of that age than boys. Since you give your own personal experience on the matter let me give you mine. My teenage goddaughter and her friend last year announced that they were non-binary and wanted to be called they/them. The friend even changed her name to Moss. A year later and they both are back to using female pronouns and the young lady to using her given name. While my goddaughter's parents, other family members and I supported her wishes and used the terms she wanted for us to use I had a suspicion that she and her friend, who are not popular girls, made the decision not based on actual feelings of gender dysphoria but because they saw it as a way to increase their popularity among their peers. When their expectations of increased popularity didn't pan out they dropped the new pronouns.
This is why I believe the studies are noting a rapid increase of the phenomena among young girls not previously seen before. As Sabine noted girls are more likely to be influenced by popular culture and will do whatever they feel necessary to fit in. This is why it is very important for young people to get counseling and why I support the idea that no permanent physical changes be made until after they have reached adulthood when they are better able to make a decision that will affect them for the rest of their lives.
If I could put my input on the matter, I would like to emphasise on that acceptance of their current identity is a very important thing to do, if their current identity or not- you can't decide for them who they are. Also true with sexual orientation- even if your kid or friend who came out as gay might actually be straight or bi or whatever, it's not for you to decide, it's for them. Just understand and be accepting of who they are, and if they come up to the realisation that the trans label does not fit them- try and be accepting aswell. The fact that there is always doubt on wether their identity is the most matching for them never means that the most common option is the correct one for themselves, just that it's ok if they regret or change their minds.
"I can see you're making many changes in how you present yourself, lately. Is there anything I should update about how I refer to you? If I do end up needing to make changes, I would be happy to. I want to make sure my classroom is a safe place for everyone to be more authentically themselves."
A complaint about statistics: If you _know_ you don't know the true rate of trans folks in the population, there's no reason to believe you know anything about the true distribution at all (in fact all we know for sure is this is not the true distribution!) Many marginalized groups are suppressed diferentially, so we should not expect that the suppressed distribution resembles the true distribution in any way. Young boys and young girls are subject to wildly different social forces, there's no reason to believe there should be any kind of invariance of proportions as those social forces shift.
It's perfectly possible that the social construct "female" produces more diagnosable gender dysphoria, or that the social construct "man" has properties that cause fewer such diagnoses, or that the disparity is rooted in the general anatomy of the mainstream gender ideology of the studied societies.
@@christianknuchel How can you socially construct something built off of biology and the actual recordable differences between male and female brain structure? You refuse to debate on a non emotional basis.
To demonstrate one difference in social forces... compare the word for a girl who acts like a boy (tomboy) and a boy who acts like a girl (sissy, nancy boy). Girls (I think) typically view “tomboy" as more or less neutral (it could be positive, negative, or neutral depending on intent) but “sissy” is one of the worst insults a 12-year-old boy can think of.
This
One thing that I've heard about the case of Sweden "rolling back" is that the country has been at the forefront of gender-affirming care with much easier access to treatments, including surgery for younger people, than most other places in the world.
That was from a documentary on the "rollback" on French TV a year or two ago, a state owned channel if I remember correctly (seen as left-leaning if anyone wonders why it would matter).
What I gathered is that after some highly mediatized cases of people regretting their decisions to switch genders with medical assistance at a younger age there has been a backlash against somewhat zealous use of these therapies, but it's still rather more accessible and common than in many other western countries.
I wanted to say this because in the video it seems like the countries who go back on these treatments may have completely changed their course but in my understanding and memory of it it's more of a case of three steps forward and one step back.
Yes, that rollback doesn't seem sincere or logical. I'm sure they're determined to proceed with the genocide.
@@williammkydde Sure grandpa, keep using the genocide word nonchalantly. That's how you get people to take you seriously. 🤡
@@ng.tr.s.p.1254 Why does the G word trigger you so badly, son? Depriving a whole generation of healthy children of the possibility ever to procreate is genocide indeed. Especially when a very certain racial/cultural group is targeted. If you're one of those who promote it, you're a criminal. If you're indifferent, you clearly need to start thinking. It may be difficult initially, without a habit.
@@ng.tr.s.p.1254 A persistent government policy aimed at depriving children of any possibility to reproduce is genocide. To genocide A people, you don't need to gas it You may simply prevent its next generation from being born. simple as.
it's also worth noting that a couple of years ago sweden got an extremely conservative, right wing government for the first time in a while, which seems bent on undoing so many of the things that have been built over decades.
Hello. I am transgender and left handed. And I want to share my story. But first I want to say that English is not my native language, so I apologize for my style. Now I am 31 years old. I started hormonal therapy at 24, then I changed documents at 27. I have felt a problem with my gender all my life and wanted to change sex since childhood. I learned about the possibility of hormone therapy only at the age of 17. I only learned the term "gender dysphoria" at the age of 23. I didn't start the transition until adulthood, not because I didn't feel dysphoric. I just didn't know about the possibilities and was afraid to talk about this topic. I didn't need to know the term "dysphoria" to experience it. Thus, I was a closeted transgender without even knowing about the existence of the “Lgbt agenda”.
I also want to say about the comparison of transgender and left-handedness. They did not try to retrain me to the right hand. But I tried to learn to write with my right hand myself. And I didn't succeed. It's difficult and uncomfortable for me. I would not be happy if they tried to retrain me by force. I can indeed take a pen from my left hand to my right, but that won't make me right-handed and will only cause discomfort.
I also want to express my opinion about the "pseudo transgenders" who allegedly fell victim to LGBT propaganda. In our society, it is believed that a man should be masculine and a woman feminine. Many people who have problems with gender expression think they are transgender. But you don't have to be transgender to be a gentle guy with long hair or a strong-willed strong woman. In my opinion, the problem of "pseudo transgenders" is in public stereotypes and not in society's awareness of transgenders. I believe that if people are freer and more aware, the number of transgender people will not increase. There will be an increase in the number of people who, being cisgender, will show less stereotypical traits.
And finally, I will add that the lack of improvement in the psycho-emotional state of children receiving therapy may be associated with social problems and social rejection. I will not speak for all situations, but in some of them, the refusal to change your body and documents can cause more suffering than the difficulties that arise during the transition. In such situations, therapy may not make life substantially better, but not therapy may make life substantially worse.
Can you educate me a little bit about how you felt like you were in the wrong body?
Even if I was better at writing with my left hand, I would have no idea. I've only ever tried writing with my right hand.
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In the same manner, I have never entertained the thought that I could be "in the wrong body." I don't even know how I might come to that conclusion. Maybe it would be an indication if i found other men attractive. But aren't there also gay trans?
Also, I think people have a deep reverence for the traditional concept for masculinity and femininity. It is not apparent that it is a a good idea to erase these sacred archetypes for the sake of utilitarianism or hedonism.
That is a beautifully expressed message, Touko. I appreciate your sharing the journey you've been on. It actually helps people understand the parameters of our varied lives and our conversations.
@@21area21 Hey are21--
I can't reply for Touko but I wanted to say that as a gay man, no-one I know is challenging the "rightness" of people who feel or are drawn to well-defined masculinity or femininity. I happen to like those incarnations of sexual identification, and frankly, some or most trans-folk seem to as well. Feeling that your physical corpus is inconsistent with your felt gender is simply a different issue.
I know many heterosexual men and women who put very little stock or energy into traditional gender roles, but many gay people like myself, and many trans people, who do. So whether our feelings are so different from yours is quite debatable. The important principle is respecting every individual's right to define themselves, and to determine the course of their own desires, and not put any person's life or life choices on some public platform for the pleasure of our dissection and derogation.
Ultimately, the big, huge, monstrous problem lies with the language we use. Sex (male/female/intersex) and gender (masculine/feminine/neutral) are not the same. Trans sex and Trans gender are not the same. "man" and "woman" are neither sexes nor genders, they are terms combining different meanings of sex and gender.
It's all a huge mess caused by academia using words in completely incoherent and contradictory ways.
@@KangMinseok I completely agree. Language is an obstacle to a lot of clarity. But with the right calculation and good judgement, we can change language, which changes on its own constantly.
Having worked at a general hospital that's had a trans reference center for decades, it was easy to see that, up until 2015 when I left, in adult patients detransition rates were low and reported quality of life improvement was high. Local data was overwhelming. And it was a lenghty process, too. Screening to greenlight surgical procedures took 2 years. You had to be openly living as the target gender for that period, and you had to control for conditions that could complicate your diagnostics. Psychiatric and psychological care was provided, and every single professional had to agree and sign it in order for you to get the medical approval for permanent procedures. I can't see this being any different for children (in fact Pediatrics is usually way way stricter than this).
TDLR: If your protocol is strict, there's no excuse not to provide care.
Learn to be comfortable in the body you’re born with. Transgender dysphoria simply means you are a guy who thinks that he is a girl and vice versa. All surgery does is require lifelong hormone replacement and sterility. And it’s not up to fetusphobes to demand for everyone else on having a pubescent ‘romper room’ dystopia that casually discards old people and fetuses is good for anybody!🤔
The protocols aren’t nearly as strict now as they were when you left. I know it was very strict & “adults only” in the 1980’s & 90’s. And I wouldn’t rely on Pediatricians to push back against giving puberty blockers or doing “top” & “bottom” surgeries if they’re told those are the “Standard of Care” & they could lose their Admission Privileges, Malpractice Insurance or Licenses if they refuse to provide “gender affirming care”.
I’m a detransitioner, former “trans kid” and I was put on puberty blockers to treat being “born in the wrong body”. This isn’t medicine, and you can’t change sex, I was lied to. I could rant for hours but I’ll leave my comment there. Shame on everyone who does this to kids…
So do you also think a mastectomy to save a person from death by cancer is not health care... or maybe a foot because of diabetes? Hmmm
"I can't see this being any different for children "
Children are TOO YOUNG too make life altering decision. You frighten me. Everything else you said becomes suspect.
I expect that trans men used to be under counted.
I'm 62 and a trans man who was assigned female at birth (AFAB). My male identity was clear to me before kindergarten. I thought I was alone. I knew trans women but never met a trans man.
In my 30s, I started meeting many women, my age and older, who also had "gender identity issues." These women never referred to themselves as trans men. Instead, they talked about the horror, physical discomfort, and trauma of being in the wrong body. These women would never have been counted in a survey or come out publicly.
This is how I discovered I wasn't alone in the world. I attended a large women's spiritual retreat where I confided that I struggle with gender identity issues. The facilitator confessed that they too had these struggles. Then the room was filled with choruses of "me too." It was a transformative moment. The community became a safe place to talk about identity and even the very elderly would discuss their male identities. I don't remember any of these individuals coming out publicly, but given that there is more acceptance today, I hope that they will.
You are *actually* trans. Kids today can just be what used to be called tomboys, but now take their mild, common gender non-conformity and immediately leap to "im trans!"
What else was clear for you at kindergarten? Did anything at all clear at kindergarten later evolved? What else didn't change throughout your life?
I was lucky when I tried to explain to my parents that I was in the wrong body, I was told that tough, this was the body I was given so I would just have to live with it. I never once doubted I was in the wrong body. I remember even before fully understanding the difference between boys and girls, having the desperate need to crawl out of my body because it felt so wrong. I did learn early on that it was not a safe topic to talk about so I kept it secret. My parents used to explain to everyone that I was just a tomboy. When I got older my parents sent me to modeling and finishing school twice in an attempt to teach me to behave and present more like a woman.
@@MarigoldBright maybe I didn't make myself clear, sorry. Anything related to any other topic? Did your views on dinosaurs or astronauts change? Maybe firemen and power rangers? Santa clause? What else did you *know* in kindergarten and how do you feel about that knowledge now?
@@MarigoldBright you're actually trans. Kids today call themselves trans just for being tomboys.
Great video Sabine. Small observation. When I was a child, there was no common term to be used. So if I had known I was transgender when I was 5, I sure wouldn't know the word was transgender. That was the 60s. Today, we have a lot of kids able to better understand themselves, there isn't more of us, there is just more of us that understand what makes us uncomfortable.
No, there is more transgender people. At least more people claiming to be. And I am sure all of this gender confusion stuff is going to mess up a lot of vulnerable children. I have mental issues of my own though, and do not judge.
@@TheLobotomist-t1 Well what I meant was our numbers didn't suddenly increase, we were always there, but many of us had no means to understand who we are. Most vulnerable children likely wouldn't be vulnerable if they had parents who were more understanding. Nothing says never should have become parents, like ditching a child, because they discover their son is their daughter.
Sabine - I can't emphasize enough how important to me, and how much I appreciate, your ability to analyze and present a fair, balanced, and non-biased summation of the different topics you delve into. I was watching a you-tube video just yesterday where someone else was trying to do just that, and not succeeding very well - bias tends to shine through even the best efforts. I remember remarking to my wife that "Sabine would have presented a more balanced view of this".
Of all the people I trust to present the truth, (and that's a damn tiny list) you are at the top - and to me you're a national treasure. Thanks for your efforts, and please keep up the good work.
I feel really, really bad about people who don't feel right about the body they are born into, I can't imagine what a nightmare that would be, And I am also disheartened and angry about people who dismiss their feelings, or are cruel and non-inclusive in their dealings with these unfortunate folks. I hope we can put more resources into studying the problem as soon as possible, and do what we can to help them, and to create an environment where they are accepted and loved, the way we all deserve to be.
Sabine is a World treasure.
I too absolutely hope for us all to be able to provide support for anyone needing it. I also hope we can find a way to discern what exactly it is that ails a person, so we don't go and make grave mistakes and give only proper and right treatment for everyone when needed. While it's not enough for everyone, sometimes all that teenager needs is time to let the body and brain sort things out.
she's really not that unbiased. Actually, she has lots of bias.
It seems odd to consider people who voluntarily stop puberty blockers as the control group for those who don't. If they stopped voluntarily, they likely decided that they don't need them, and thus are a poor proxy for those who want the blockers but can't get them. The difference is obviously gonna be smaller.
Shouldn't the control group be those without gender disphoria in the first place.
@@GhostEmblem uhh, no? because the population of the study is those with gender dysphoria.
+
I think it'd be worthwhile to have two controls, those that are cis and those that want blockers but can't get them; this way you have more points of reference
They stopped them voluntarily likely because of the vast health complications that come with these irreversible drugs.
I disagree that the enforced right handed writing was a trivial change, I think that if you look deeper that you will find a significant increase in learning issues and school problems in those people forced to use their non dominant hand, often by corporal punishment.
The corporal punishment itself leads to learning (and many other) issues
I think you misunderstand what she meant by trivial change. It is a trivial change in that if you were to make someone write with their opposite hand for one day and then realize oops this was a bad idea they can go back to their other hand. Fundamental you're not doing anything to the other hand that causes damage. With gender-affirming care you can't undo many of the aspects of this care. As an example, A successful transition involves sterility.
You misunderstood the point she was trying to make mate
@@daxeckenberg Most Gender-Affirming care is a change of name and clothes. How is that harder than switching hands?
@@tfkia356 Care implies medical treatment. Anybody can change their clothes and name. That's not "care" in the context of this topic.
as a trans woman, for me and many other trans people i know, hormone therapy is an attempt to survive and not commit suicide more than anything else. It makes sense that mental health would not become much better, as many people socially transition at the same time as hrt, which is incredibly difficult. when i was more visibly transgender, i would frequently be called slurs, be stared at, and was ostracized because of it. hormone replacement therapy has helped me not be as noticeable, and makes life a little easier. but i still struggle with the way people see me because of my transition and life is by no means easy.
Are you sure you're just not confused and fooled yourself into thinking you're trans?
Thank you for sharing. Do you think that in an accepting society, HRT and surgery would not be as needed?
@@junkname9983are you sure i don't know more about your identity than you do??
The s**cide frequency of your demographic would be higher with or without hormones, 25% of people with GD also have ASD, and people with ASD already have a 10x higher s**cide rate than the general population. It also includes disproportionate sufferers of eating disorders, anxiety and depression. These are all preexisting conditions that are simply lumped in with GD to create the illusion that GD is causing all this distress, when it actually just co-exists with a boatloading of preexisting conditions.
@@awkymomo6954 i've been diagnosed with bulimia but it only started with the onset of gender dysphoria, i can't speak to the entire trans population but i used to want to kill myself and I don't want to as much anymore after receiving hormone therapy
Trans scientist here (not a scientist on transgender issues, rather I fall into both categories; though I do have a significant background in psychology as well as engineering). I think this is a well-balanced review of the issues (thank you, Sabine!), but I'd like to add a few small caveats.
First, I disagree with Sabine where she appears to suggest that an increase in suicidality in an untreated group is somehow less relevant than a decrease in suicidality of the treated group. This is a salient observation if it is not expected that suicidality would grow in general in adolescents, but that is not the case here, so I feel the difference between the two is what matters most. In particular, it isn't surprising that as children questioning their gender enter adolescence, suicidality will increase across the board. What Sabine fails to detail (unless I missed it) is the preponderance of unambiguous data illustrating how being the targets of bullying and violence is much more significant for queer youth than for sexuality/gender-normative youth. The effect size here is very significant.
I also take slight exception to the suggestion that the "social contagion" theory should be considered a reasonable conjecture simply because there is no good evidence for or against it. At best, this is a hypothesis with no significant support, and the onus scientifically should be to provide evidence to reject the null hypothesis, not to somehow "prove" the null hypothesis-especially when the null hypothesis is "this phenomenon is as real as it was in previous generations". Even with good data it is often impossible to demonstrate that an effect does not exist, so it is generally incumbent upon the researcher to soundly reject the null in order to make a claim reasonable. The idea certainly has some face validity, but the suggestion that it is pervasive or predictive is still an unproven assumption lacking decent support. I agree there is probably an effect of social media on inaccurate self-diagnosis (autism and ADHD may also have this issue to some extent), but it is impossible for me to determine whether the effect size could be significant enough such that stating this hypothesis in a way that suggests it is reasonable in the absence of data to support that claim would do more good than harm. This is also a very old canard familiar to queer people, as "grooming makes children gay" has been used to demonize queer people for centuries and there is still no good evidence (to my knowledge, I don't know if this has changed in the past two decades) to suggest that, for one, "being gay" is frequently due to "social contagion" despite the increase in numbers in later generations. I haven't heard people making the claim social media is "turning people gay" because it is an inflammatory supposition without strong empirical evidence to back it up. It seems equally questionable when applied to transgender people, though the issue may be more salient due to the nature of medical treatment. Ironically, most transgender people report knowing they are transgender at a very young age (I mention this on gender constancy in a couple of paragraphs), perhaps even earlier than self-reports of being gay, which often happen in adolescence as any sexual attraction in youth is usually of a different quality. (I personally knew when I was eight, but I suppressed it for years and dealt with suicidality because of it. Had I been born twenty or thirty years later, I would have had the opportunity to come out much earlier in life rather than waiting until my mid-twenties to realize what was missing.)
What a lot of this comes down to has to do with social attitudes toward people who present as unusual in defiance of social expectations, whether or not gender is the specific issue (though gender is particularly salient as I'll mention in a moment). In most societies violence is sadly tolerated toward queer individuals, usually due to authority acceptance by people in positions of moral authority making use of power structures to marginalize others for personal gain, or (I would hope more commonly) merely out of ignorance or fear. But gender is particularly thorny in part because sexism is more openly accepted than racism: you might hear somepony say, "most women...", more frequently than you would hear them say, "most Blacks...", because the latter is considered less socially acceptable. Socially, most people recognize differences between men and women and readily attribute them to biology even when the aspects of gender-typing being considered, like the wearing of a tie or the color pink, have almost certainly nothing significant to do with biology (as evidenced by these roles being different from culture to culture). Moreover, children know about gender almost immediately: not only do they understand their assigned gender prior to being able to speak in full sentences, gender constancy (the idea that it is taboo to deviate from assigned gender roles) is usually very well-understood by a child prior to age 4. Racial constancy, by comparison (such as the idea wearing dreadlocks doesn't make you Black, or wearing a headdress does not make you Indigenous American) happens closer to age 8, though this data is old and may have changed in some families over the past decade as social awareness of racial issues has arisen.
For the record, my suspicion is that a significant amount of stress leading to mental illness in gender questioning youth comes from how they are treated by others socially in person, and transitioning in an manner that changes one's appearance reduces this stress in part not only by validating their feelings which improves self-esteem, but also by reducing bullying behavior; in particular, if the child is able to "pass" easily among people who don't know them well. If a boy's identified gender is male, the less he "looks female", the less bullying and bigotry he is likely to encounter. This is very well-documented. Additionally, religious people are often more accepting of children in transition than they may be toward adults who transition later in life where they are more likely to view it as a "choice", as unrealistic as that point of view may be.
These aren't intended as large criticisms of Sabine's take, so I feel I should mention why I think these minor issues are so important. People are definitely crazy on both sides of most arguments, especially arguments with a subjective social component that butt heads with traditional values. I really appreciate Sabine's adherence to this fact. And while there is danger in not considering the possibility of the effect of social media on self-diagnosis, I am more concerned with the use of unsupported arguments as a means for attacking a marginalized group. People who are transgender adults are being dehumanized and physically assaulted at the same time as these arguments against gender-affirming care for children swell, and I don't think this is a coincidence. One thing Sabine fails to mention at all in this video is the stance of all major medical organizations in support of age-appropriate gender-affirming care, and those organizations are led by experts with decades of medical experience who are better equipped to interpret the data than, say, politicians and reactionaries. Even in societies with liberal values, violence against transgender people and suicides of transgender adults and youth are very real, very significant problems today. It is important to proceed with caution medically, but equally important to proceed with caution socially when potentially spreading unsupported hypotheses that can be used to cause and further genuine harm by bad actors.
Finally, I should point out that perhaps the biggest problem here (which I think Sabine does touch upon) is the fact that people on both sides of controversial social issues tend to have unscientific agendas. For example, detransitioning is still very rare, but it is a notable risk that doctors are hesitant to lend weight to or even discuss with young patients, because they know it will be used as a rallying cry to deny care to those who genuinely need it by overstatement of risk and oversimplification of the issue. This is due to how adversarial people averse to science are on social issues (on both sides), unfortunately by necessity. For example, I personally feel that abortion should be accessible in most circumstances, but I'd also like to see frequent inspections of abortion clinics done in a way that does not create an impediment to offering prompt and safe services; I also think fetuses in later stages of development should be anesthetized prior to the procedure. You will find neither of those arguments to have public support, because those who support abortion services are forced to argue that the fetus should not be a consideration whatsoever while those against it are forced to argue that there is no circumstance where abortion isn't unethical. This is because giving even the slightest ground on these extremist views will lead to those on the other side of the argument immediately capitalizing upon it and using it to their advantage. I don't know any solution for this.
Thanks for the video, as always.
"One thing Sabine fails to mention at all in this video is the stance of all major medical organizations in support of age-appropriate gender-affirming care, and those organizations are led by experts with decades of medical experience who are better equipped to interpret the data than, say, politicians and reactionaries."
So society is anti-trans and trans people need protection to the point where we literally can't even acknowledge blatant and drastic problems with the trans community over the fear of them being "marginalized" yet apparently the entire scientific community supports trans people?
Does that sound like it makes sense to you?
It used to be widely accepted by the medical community that smoking was good for the lungs. If a normal person with no medical experience noticed every friend he has that has smoked long term has had the same health problems and made the connection that smoking was bad, would he be wrong purely because the doctors say otherwise?
Have you ever done any research into why this sudden upsurge of "transphobia" came about at the same time it became the priority of the trans community to interact with other people's children with the stated purpose of turning them trans, and fight for the continued right to expose children to sexual performances both publicly and privately?
Love your reply, Trixie. Very well said! ❤️
I think your last chapter about abortion tells how people seems to think thery are medical experts while making decisions about someone else's healt treatment, it's not a field of politics and the discussion among low understanding about medical field can't be the ones who are saying how the fine work of medical procedures should go. It's the discussion inside the departments who are evaluating the medical field.
It's like US has death penalty and ppl are speaking about the ways the ppl should be killed, not the subject itself.
What comes to trans-debate, I hope the main point would go in public conversations, that trans-ppl could live save and in caring enviroment and are supported to make their own decisions, not making a lot work to try to change their head around if they are thinking what's their gender-ideology. Also a gender-sensitivy as upbringing gives peace for all of us, who have to live inside narrow minded norms that are obsessed about babies gender or if pink and light blue are rightfully wore. In US maybe they just let kids grow up dressed as they like and prioritize on life-threatening things like mass shootings.
gonna be fun to read this comment when im home
This comment should be higher up. As a nonbinary biochemistry master’s student I felt there were some limitations to the arguments presented in this video, and you managed to explain many of my thoughts more coherently and succinctly than I could have.
As a trans woman who only came out in her 30s i 100% agree with the lack of good quality research into trans people. Just on a personal level It’s soo frustrating that there is soo little hard evidence on the best dosage of hormones and blockers or the best form in which to take them. What are the differences in outcome between oestrogen gel, patches, tablets or injections? No one knows. The form of medication you get is based largely on the collective anecdotal experiences and preconceived ideas of the gender clinic you are being treated by. And their level of funding. We still have no idea if progesterone is good, useless or dangerous for trans women. Plenty of us have our own personal experiences of perceived benefits to mental health and feminising outcomes, but we can’t quantify the risks that might only manifest 10-15 years down the line. And many clinics don’t prescribe it because of that lack of research into it. Yet trans women have been taking it for 40+ years. There’s been more than enough time to find all this stuff out. But we’ve just been ignored by most researchers for all those years. And even now when research is done it’s as good as useless half the time because it’s of such terrible quality. Why is money being wasted on studies that would never be able to prove anything because of their lack of controls or too low numbers when that money could be pooled into a few high quality studies that could actually answer the questions. And especially for trans kids. I know myself that all the most intense causes of dysphoria I have experienced would simply not have existed for me if I’d started treatment in my teens. Most of those will never be fully reversed by adult hormone treatments and I can’t afford the surgeries that might ale alleviate some of them. And yet children are now being denied that opportunity to live without extreme dysphoria because no one’s bothered to do the research that can actually prove its benefits. It’s soo very frustrating.
Just curious, did you try bioidentical hormone replacement? I just feel like tons of people who transition don't even get their hormone or cholesterol panels done. I wouldn't feel like a biological man either of all my testosterone was bound up by SHBG and you have the effective testosterone level of a birth African woman. It's just weird to me that the solution is "I'm a different gender" instead of "my environment is ruining my hormone levels". Teenagers eat horrible food, get horrible sleep, stay up on their phones all night, don't study for anything anymore, and then turn around and are claiming 1/4 are trans now. I just don't buy it, that's simply too high to make mathematical sense. Why aren't we considering that all the plastic in our bodies is crushing our free hormones? I just feel like before people transition they should try bioidentical hormone replacement to see if that's really what their problem is. The trans suicide rate shows, clearly something isn't right with the approach, and I'm hearing of so many people wishing they didn't transition.
Also, your hormone dosage is based on the hormone levels in your blood. If you don't know that you shouldn't be messing with your hormone levels. Pay to get a blood panel done, you can just pay for it. It's about $500. I don't understand what you mean by not having the knowledge required, it's basic hormone science? What's your current testosterone/estrogen levels, both free and total in your blood? Start there
@Un Listed I am very glad that that treatment worked for you, but I think if you told most people diagnosed with gender dysphoria that they should take hormones that are aligned with their assigned gender, they would immediately stop listening to you and walk away. Almost every trans person I know thought about it VERY hard before they made the decision to start their transition. It is more than a little arrogant to assume that someone hasn’t considered the alternatives to any treatment they seek.
@@Flourish38 you should TRY IT to make sure you aren't being delusional. If you live your entire life with hormone levels that are compromised by environmental factors, I really think you would MAKE SURE you're right instead of assuming you're right. You don't have the ability to see what your life is like on bioidentical hormone replacement, so you have to treat yourself like a science experiment. That's why I said 3 months. 3 months is enough time to see if it's what you need without permanently affecting your body long term. You need to MAKE SURE YOURE RIGHT before you potentially compromise your body for life. It's a BIG DECISION. I spent a lot to my life "not feeling like a man" until I decided to get my blood work done and found out my testosterone level was so low i was barely a functioning male. If I had decided to transition I can guarantee i would have ended myself. You have blood on your hands if you keep pushing the idea that every trans person is truly actually 100% trans and not potentially experiencing compromised hormone levels. Look at the trans suicide rate and tell me your approach is perfect.
Having controls in studies poses ethical problems because if it is believed that treatment is helpful, then having patients you don't treat might be seen as refusing treatment.
But it's even more of a problem when people are so strongly polarized and politicized, and yet another kind of problem when there is no strong .scientific reason to take one side over another.
The medical treatment should of course not be instantly accessible to children. However, the abuse trans people go through on a regular basis beforehand can not be understated.
Many see hormone therapy as an out, an "if i do this, people will see the real me right away". And yes, that does work sometimes. However, the much more important thing is to get society to stop taking gender roles that seriously to the point of systematized abuse based on gender assigned at birth, and not just for trans people.
It is not the unequivocal duty of someone with a uterus to bear children and care for them, and any other lifestyle is a waste or something.
Neither is it the duty of someone with a penis to bottle up all emotion, show no weakness ever and be a breadwinner for a member of the former group.
You might say our society doesn't do that anymore, but you couldn't be less blind or ignorant if you say that. It has just become much more subtle, but no less harsh.
But you have to admit that human society wouldn’t have advanced had people before us NOT conformed to certain roles. Imagine if hunter/gatherer tribes just said “naw we gonna do some other shit” and ended up starving/not reproducing. Imagine if your parents didn’t fuck.
That's what's always confused me. I'm from a place where even before the trans thing, if one bathroom broke you could just use the other one. No one was really abused or teased for being a woman or trans, and usually it's the opposite where people are confronted for being rude towards different people.
I think the trans thing is a reaction to places with oppressive gender norms, like if you're a man you must own a truck or guns or else you won't get attention from women, bullshit like that. It's a harsh country, America.
Regardless if you're man or woman you'll get punished for it. It makes sense to try to step out of that, though that's a symptom I think internet profiles being a main social touchstone have enabled, but the internet is a poor socializing medium.
@@krunkle5136 Oh no, being trans is a thing beyond just gender norms. But the gender norms are what cause like 95% of the problems for trans people, and a whole lot for cis people as well.
@@joda7697 not as much as news outlets or social media, hungry for ratings and likes. No one should be treated as sideshow freaks. Condolences.
@@krunkle5136 Who do you think enforces the gender roles? Yeah of course media hungry for ratings perpetrates all sorts of harmful and rigid views without nuance. Also other factors, authority figures who don't care, your own friend groups who don't know better, but media is a big part of it.
Gender dysphoria is a horrific experience, I'm finally at the end and living how I want to now and I'm so freaking happy, it's like a weight off my shoulders, it's how I felt back when I was 10 before it all started
so what exactly makes you happy/horrified? just that your body parts changed? That you got chemicals injected in your body?
Or is it just social expectations of how to act?
@@ysf-d9i I can dress how I want to, I can act how I want to, my body is the right shape. I don't feel out of place in social situations, I don't get called bro and excluded from the other girls, also the chemicals just make me feel nicer. hormone wise it feels like before I hit puberty and it just all feels right
Would you post your citations somewhere without a paywall, please?
Yeah I'm sorry but that is suspect as fuck.
@@GageEakins don’t bother, one of the sources is a Reuters editorial piece.
Another source is one where they got the parents of the trans kids from anti trans social media groups, so basically preselected data, Sabine then presents this study on equal footing with the counter study and then does the equivalent of “Who’s to say”.
The most charitable interpretation of this video is incompetence, then next most charitable is chasing views, then finally malice.
@@TG-to5nf Oh I know I was just pointing out how bs it is to hide your sources behind a paywall. I am completely sidelined by this video of hers because her Trans Sports video was so reasonable.
@@GageEakins did she talk about bone density in that one? If she did, did she mention the fact that black women can and often do have higher bone density than white men. Did she touch on how that scientific fact was used to keep sports segregated by race in the US?
I haven't seen it, and probably won't, so this is genuine curiosity.
Imo, it's probably the most salient and relevant point within that whole convo, so if she left that detail out, even if she didn't go into the history bits, I would be kinda sus
@@Mzzkc She did mention it but basically said it was a non-issue. She pointed out that the Olympics already has rules for hormone therapy and that handles any college sports arguments and then said that for teenagers, they haven't been on hormones long enough to make an appreciable difference and even if they did, sports has never been fair and never will be fair so any argument about fairness is sort of moot. It was actually a novel pro-trans athletes argument that I have never seen used before but I actually can get behind it.
When i was in school, words like queer were insults. Now there are children at my children's school who feel safe to be publicly different. That's why i think we're seeing more trans identification in younger age groups. They feel safer with their peers than when i was their age.
Same with people being openly gay etc
yeah, well, that's going away fast, since conservatives are legalizing the dehumanization and oppression of trans people in broad daylight and normalizing anti trans violence.
Feeling safe with your peers is obviously a good thing. Nobody is going to argue against that.
But isn't it a stretch from "being queer and feeling safe with your peers" to "cutting off fully working body parts, using life changing hormones and sterilizing yourself"?
By simply focusing on words like safety or queer, you are evading the hard questions that need to be asked.
@@EaglePicking no I think you are just phrasing it in a crass and blunt manner for shock value
@@EaglePicking I was offering a suggestion as to why, as stated in the video, a greater proportion of young people self identify as trans. I offered no opinion as to how young people doing so should be treated.
"Just exactly what is going on? No one really knows, but the most reasonable expectation is that the current increase in reports of gender dysphoria is caused by a mixture of two causes.
Young people are more comfortable being openly trans AND some of them erroneously believe they are trans because they've heard so much about it.
I'd say that anyone who insists that one of those possibilities doesn't exist is pushing an agenda and shouldn't be taken seriously."
Well said.
well i just think we should be careful ESPECIALLY with the young.
a 5 year old transgender is in my opinion like a vegan dog. in 100% of the cases a parents decision. cause i remember when i was 5-6 years old and i didn't think about those things. i had the sexuality of a potatoe. there was man and woman yes and different body parts but no idea or thought about anything else or what to do with them.
and even teens haven't really fully developed. they haven't fully discovered themselves. like when i was 13-16 about every other girl at one point was convinced to be lesbian. well fast forward 20 years later except for one all are married and with children. however transitioning is nothing you can do on a whim and go back later like exploring your sexuality with your bestie. that's why in many countries the entire process is VERY long and VERY difficult with multiple psychologists and only done to adults. and that's how it should be. for christs sake, we don't let children vote, drive cars, drink, have sex but let them make their own decision when it comes to life altering irreversible medical procedures that make them infertile when they are 12? what's this insanity? i was at that age myself and i was a complete and utter morron and certainly not fit to make such a decision. i would have hated myself and everyone involved in this process forever and most likely wouldn't be here anymore.
@@Dunkelelf3 I already didn't liked what was between my legs when I was 4, and knew I was meant to be a girl aged 6. I'm 56 now, those feelings never went away despite all my efforts (including being married etc), and I'm only starting my transition because of the amount of stigma attached to transgender people when I was younger. Just because _you_ didn't experiment this doesn't mean it doesn't exist and isn't real and doesn't ruin your life. Also you're making it looks like 5 or 12 yo kids can get HRT and SRS on a whim, which is the exact opposite of truth. Letting kid freely explore their own gender doesn't require any treatment, isn't a "life altering irreversible procedure", and can only help them finding out who they really are. Puberty "blockers" aren't "life altering irreversible procedure" either and are used for other means as well without anyone making any fuss about it - and to get them as a transgender kid usually requires already having a regular followup from a psychiatrist for a few years. I know of very few countries where you can start HRT before you're at least 15 or 16, and there again not without prior a regular psychiatric followup. As far as I know you can not have SRS before legal majority, and even then you have to have been on HRT for at least a couple years already.
Oh and yes: if you're genuinely worried about kids getting "life altering irreversible procedure" from a very young age, you may want to look at what is _still_ being done (even in countries where it's officially illegal) to 10 of 1000s of intersex kids every year "for their own good". Strange as is it might seems, absolutely nobody gives a fuck about it (except of course intersex people themselves and a small handful of allies). If you "kid protectors" were really concerned about protecting kids you would know about this and would act on it instead of spewing disinformation.
@@bettybee605 I already didn't liked what was between my legs when I was 4, and knew I was meant to be a girl aged 6.
see that's where the problems begin. what you "feel" like doesn't matter. that's the cold harsh truth. yes i didn't experience gender dysphoria and it sounds pretty sucky. but the reality is just that no hrt and srs will ever change what you are born with. xx or xy. you can't change sex.
i was talking about srs when i talked about life altering medical procedures. and there are a lot of those transitioned at a young age now in their 20s who regret. and that's why i think what i think. it's nothing that should be treated lightly.
ofc trans people should be treated with dignity like everybody else. but sorry if i have hard times to accept people for what they are when they can't accept themselves for what they are.
i don't care what's between your legs and what you do in your bedroom and with whom and how. just keep all of those things away from my children. and schools doing drag shows without parental consent well..
same.. keep that away from my children and we can all be friends.
@@Dunkelelf3 Thanks, you just made it very clear you are deliberately spewing transphobic hate here - "you will never be a woman", "can't accept people who can't accept themselves", "xx female xy male basic biology", "ofc trans people should be treated with dignity like everybody else. but (...) keep it away from my children", congratulations, you've learned your lesson well.
@@Dunkelelf3 "Children have no mind of their own" -you. Also, sexuality isn't gender. Don't speak for trans experiences. It's not a good look.
It's like being taught to wear your shoes on the wrong feet. Everyone tells you to do as they say, but it hurts too much.
You're a man.
Also, changing them to be more comfortable results in you being ostracized.
@@theothertonydutch This is the stupidest analogy I've ever seen.
This video didn't age very well. A new study dropped that shows the vast majority of children who complain of gender dysphoria grow out of it.
@@beestingza They are under compulsion to find excuses for their abuse, they don't hold allegiance to the truth, only their abusive behavior. Imagine a gambler, he will make all kinds of crazy excuses as well, like that 99% of gamblers quit before hitting it big.
In this case doesn't "a control group" imply that we would have to deny potentially life-saving care to an enormous number of people for a very long time? There seems to be a good reason why that kind of research is less common in medicine.
@Syd4 1stAmendment i'm gonna exercise my first amendment rights to tell you to please lowtiergod yourself. thank you!
You are correct, but how do you think other research into long term issues was conducted? If the test is to determine whether treatment X helps or harms then technically both groups are at risk since you do not know which group is safe. There are cancer studies where people literally got cancer and died just to help prove a treatment was beneficial.
Ideally an animal model would be used for the majority of this kind of research, but that won't fly in this case
We are not particle physicists, we can't simply run the experiment one more time or get a test group out of wimp, and retroactive studies always have their selection and adjustments issues.
Thats why our significance values are so low vs other Sciences
@@RichConnerGMN we don't even need to tell you to lowtiergod yourself. It pretty much assumed lmao
An important thing to remember is that often times any sort of these studies would be _unethical_ to perform with an untreated control group.
Wouldn't the control group just be people who don't identify trans/get no treatments? So, for example, if there some widespread factor, like another pandemic, mental health decline might be record in all groups, including the control group? There is no ethical issue with a control group that just lives their lives normally.
@@mikecurtis11 the point of a control is to remove variables. The primary problem with using a cis control when studying trans treatment options is that cis individuals aren't trans, which creates a variable which cannot be easily reconciled.
Even if you tracked a representative cis population to see any mental well-being changes over time, the best you could do, from a conclusion standpoint, is point at the numbers.
It would be impossible to say with high certainty what caused any differences between the cis and trans samples. Cis people, as an example, don't have their existence in public life or their access to healthcare as a constant daily subject of international debate. You'd have to account for that reality in the data, along with other differences in lived experiences between cis and trans people.
From a study design standpoint, that's a huge ask. Better instead to use trans controls when studying trans treatment outcomes.
Unethical or ineffective?
@@jorehir unethical, according to ethics review boards.
I thought this was only the case when a placebo was used instead of the current best standard of care. For example, when a new cancer drug is compared against placebo, which causes enormous harm, rather than to the current best cancer drugs. (Yes, there are such cases.)
I've gotten to know a few transgender people over the years and have watched as they came out and then transitioned and went on to live thier lives. It's a hard world out there and their treatment pre transition and during transition can be and often is traumatic. And trauma often leads to mental health issues.
I see this as being even more complex and nuanced than it is usually given in media (this video is a wonderful exception). I hope you do a follow up in a year or two - and I hope there is higher quality studies out there to help guide kinder treatment of all involved.
They have a differently structured brain from endocrine disruptors and environmental pollution. Stop treating it as if it's some metaphysical phenomenon. It's not. Most people just can't handle reality. I am not condoning hate. I am just telling you the truth of the situation.
The whole thing is a mental health issue. It is extremely PC to pretend that the mental health issues are secondary to the being transgender.
My mental health improved vastly when I started began taking hormones and again when I socially transitioned.
My traumas stem from abuse by those who claimed to love me when I came out to them.
Luckily for your friends, they didn't join the 43%. This garbage has to stop. Honestly, it's satanic.
@@Livi_Noelle If you're talking about a partner, that is kind of messed up to hide that and then later come out. That's as good as lying to them (by omission) and that is not how you build a lasting relationship. That kind of thing should be discussed very early into a relationship if you want it to be a serious one. But if you're talking about relatives... well. Unfortunately you can't choose relatives, but you can choose friends and who you're going to spend your life with. There is no way to change what they did to you, but it's possible to change how people that are going to go through it are treated.
As per Sabine's presentation, one thing is clear. There is clearly an dearth of reliable and significant scientific and psychological studies that can offer definitive insight, conclusions or recommendations. This should especially be heeded with considered caution in the case of young children and their parents assenting to transitions. Adults, though also lacking the benefit credible, in-depth studies, obviously have free rein to make such will decisions for themselves. It is a very sensitive, difficult and challenging subject of our society's epoch and will require more time to land on terra firma. We must, in the interim, be respectful, patient and tolerant.
We can't prove that there is no God or other sky daddy who created the universe. Neither can i.e. Christians prove that there is one.
Should Christians be allowed to force atheists to affirm their god? Is it disrespectful for an atheist not to do so?
Why should a T gender person have the right to demand affirmation of their unproven self-belief?
Where is the evidence for humans having an "internal sense of being female, male or something else." rather than just a self-belief akin to a religious belief.
Humans have been demonstrably shown to have incorrect feelings as well as beliefs about their physical existence - why should we treat this differently?
Where is the evidence that an "internal sense of being something else" can exist. How is that different from a person claiming to see a color that no other can see. How would we prove that? Why assume that they are right about something no one can confirm, even if that something is their own nature? Why do we shift the burden of proof for such a positive claim?
This all seems highly unscientific to me.
The problem with no control group is understandable since essentially a control group would demand a group of teens getting placebo instead of blockers or gender affirming care, we do control groups with many illnesses and symptoms but those are larger than 0.5% of the population. There's no getting around the need for controlled study but its going to be difficult to achieve, its gonna take time.
The thing is that, in the meantime, young people suffer irreversible health damage even before a single proper study has been done, and the term "transkids" is officially used in primary schools.
The control group is those who willingly don't transition, which we know the outcome
^William, the flaw in your argument is that you unscientifically assume that not receiving healthcare is not harmful.
Omg, the way you dissect scientific papers instead of just citing them is unparalleled. You presented it with facts, addressed all the points and critiques all the conclusions. That's how I like a scientific approach to be.
I saw many experts discussing on the topic here on youtube on both sides of the spectrum and nothing got even near the quality you outputted in this one. Thank you for the clarification.
Sabine is a Quantum Physicist, formerly an Astrophysicist, and being able to get at the actual data through all the noise is kind of important to her fields of study. Removing the skew put on the data by bias is like looking for the galaxy behind a black hole through all the gravitational lensing. I would expect Sabine to be able to handle that without batting an eyelash.
@@drakkondarkspell It's more impressive than you're making it out to be. Many scientists, including quantum physicists and astrophysicists, don't put in a lot of thought when they talk about fields they aren't part of.
@@drakkondarkspell Believe me, I heard many doctors and scientists speaking on this topic. Some were for and some were against. Both cited papers. But ultimately they just took papers that defended their position.
Here, we just see the facts. She does not voice her opinions but just drew the line that more research needs to be addressed and pointed out the flaws on the current results. It's not about taking sides but following where science leads and this is the peak of scientific approach IMHO
@@drakkondarkspell A thing I would caution people to remember. Having a degree in and being a great scientist in one area does not make one an expert in another area.
@@globalincident694 Great point.
Trans people are still rare where I live, but the few I've met have been very nice and seemed happy.
As far as I can tell, the vast majority of trans people are very sensitive and intelligent which unfortunately leaves a lot of room for neurotic tendencies and self criticism which is what leads to the feelings they have.
@@mintgumornothey man, describing a group of people like that, when you are not a Scientist referencing Actual Data, makes you sound like a lunatic.
but how about people about whose gender you are not so sure?
Those are the ones still alive...
@Terre Schill Thank you. I really don't get why it's such a stretch for people to understand that the hate is real and hate makes you hide. It can also just take a really long time to realise that "trans" is the name for a feeling of disconnect you've had your whole life.
"And leave the toilet seat up" -lol
I'm actually a rare form of male that pees sitting down. I hate splashage.
ive always had cats so i keep the seat down or get ready to find what looks like a giant rat trying to jump out the toilet
Bad news buddy, look UNDER the seat. Splash still happens
@@BD-yl5mh you're either doing it wrong or are suffering from a condition, either way i'm sorry for you.
A wise man once said
"Mumsnet is not a valid journal of science"
Sabine is truly fearless 😄
Dear lord, this really needs some sort warning like those explosive science videos - "Never attempt broaching this topic at your workplace, in school, in public or anywhere else"
Either that or she's bat shit crazy. Possibly both. I'd say 70/30 fearless to crazy.
She puts ideology appart and only digs the science, so she can be confident she stays neutral
Isn't it sad that even touching this subject from a purely scientific point of view requires bravery and involves risks.
@@preppen78 Quite the opposite. There is no reason people shouldn't be able to talk about this, and we shouldn't allow extremists to scare us off just talking about this with stupid tricks like shooting cases of beer with machine guns.
If you make trouble over this, you need to go to jail, that's all. The 1st amendment doesn't include a right to terrorize those you disagree with.
Let's start with Kid Rock, the most shameful American we have right now.
If you asked any of the teens I grew up with in the 70s, (about 10 of us), who was gay, no one would have raised their hand. Today about 20% of them easily admit they are gay b/c times have changed and they feel much more free to be who they were all along. I suspect this is highly true for the increase of young people identifying as Trans today. But yes, I'm sure there is also some amount of teens thinking it "trendy" to claim to be Trans. Either way it should not be reduced to simply following a trend, and any kid who does, either real or imagined, needs proper attention and treatment. And politicians need to stay the hell out of it. This is between a doctor, the patient, and their family.
Back then, they lived under strict social forced conformity. Today, society is more open. A lot of people are more understanding, thus, more people are able to express themselves freely. This is good thing.
the number of people who are willing to imagine that generally lifelong identification is something people might flippantly buy into on the basis of being "trendy" reflects poorly on our society's empathy and capacity to really consider the positions of those who are "othered." -- to say not a word of the average person's general intelligence. for all my fellow gays out there please don't pretend to have forgotten what it's like to be on the receiving end of these obnoxious nonsense-arguments. and moreover do not fail to recognize that the heteronormative supremacists are applying it here in precisely the same way because they've never had respect for anyone but themselves - let's not kid ourselves into pretending the social acceptance that cis gays/lesbians have now from some of the anti-trans contingent is anything more than a forced toleration.
I feel it’s less trend and just teenagers doing what teenagers do and exploring themselves and who they want to be as they approach young adulthood. It’s simply more acceptable and much safer to explore gender than back then (tho that’s becoming marginal.) But it’s also why actual hormone replacement is very rare in minors and actual procedures are almost unheard of for minors. Most gender based procedures are done by their parents because they may be intersex (XXY or whatev wacky stuff genetics occasionally does) and the parents were thrust into the responsibility of making that decision. Even if not forced they chose because of how they were raised and wanted “best” for their child as misguided as it is. That or circumscision is technically genital mutilation so it’s pretty common for Abrahamic religions to do genital surgeries on literal babies lol
I doubt that 20% would be homosexual. The meaning of the word "gay" used by young people is sometimes more like "queer", but I doubt that 20% exclusively have sex with the same sex. I think surveys show that the proportion who are gay has stayed around 2% for decades.
"And politicians need to stay the hell out of it. This is between a doctor, the patient, and their family."
Just like the abortion issue!
I heard somewhere that Sabine was transphobic and came here to watch the video and I can't understand that accusation at all. This is incredibly level-headed.
Exactly
This is simply false, especially if you consider the fact that in this video she is purposefully cherrypicking her scientific information and misrepresenting studies in favour of hormone therapy and or puberty blockers. For example, she is saying that the longitudinal studies in favor of hrt are bad simply because they don’t have a control group which is a bad argument, because it would be unethical to artificially withhold treatment and gender affirming care for trans people just to have a control group. Also in longitudinal studies the baseline later becomes the control group. :)
@@b3n048 nonsense, you can always do "cherrypicking" with social and even medical studies, so it´s easy to accuse someone, whose statement doesn´t fit your world view.
@@Thomas-gk42 well even if she wasn’t cherrypicking info there would still be the issue that she conveys false info in this video, because she says that there is no conclusive evidence on the topic when there is tons of research in favour of puberty blockers and gender affirming care which she is for whatever reason deliberately leaving out of the video.
@@b3n048I´m sure there are also tons of research to support the opposite claim. I never saw a social/medical study without an anti study. So I have some understranding for parents who don´t want to feed their kids with medication. This has nothing to do with the rights of minorities, to live a free and respectful life. Sabine´s video does absolutely not contradict that.
As a psychologist I can confirm that researching mental health is extremely difficult. Psychological data are notoriously difficult to obtain, analyse and interprete. Research subjects of a certain demographic are usually 'few and far between' . Finding a group that is homogenous is virtually impossible [in most cases] Keeping a group[ of subjects together over a period of time can be like herding cats. Where does that leave us?
IMHO research is about ' asking questions, being curious' regarding a certain aspect of human life. To try and capture human life in statistics can be very useful, however more often than not it is by the nature of the subject researched like chasing a phantom.
That begs the question if research methods used in say physics are the correct instruments to research ' the human condition'.
What psychological research has taught me is that every human is unique. Life is ever changeing. Humans need room to develop and 'grow into themselves'. Social / cultural pressures can both be stimulating and stifling. Those people that find a path for themselves to negotiate these pressures will thrive, the others will struggle. Parents, communities and mental health workers can create and environment that is condusive to a stable and positive development of young people into adulthood.
Love, opportunity, acceptance, open-mindedness, exploration, education and support are key elements, for us all. Go where you find these and you'll 'grow into the best version of yourself'
Great points. How can you measure the degree of 'feeling better' or 'worse' between people? It's all subjective. Further, on'e feeling at the time the answer was given may change the next day. How one feels right now depends upon so many other threads in one's life. It's remarkably fuzzy at best.
As a STEM guy it took me a lot to understand that methodologies differ in different sciences and are not as applicable. Lots of people disregard the social sciences because of the difficulty and impossibility of actually applying the scientific method. You can never have replicable experiments in social sciences. That doesn't mean you should disregard the research that doesn't conform to the standard of experimentation in physics.
Professionals getting shouted down, complaints made, being reprimanded &/or fired for saying a trans person may have an underlying mental health issue resulting in the gender dysphoria in the UK, leaves most psychologists too afraid to challenge it.
Much of the research is being funded by gay rights organisations & pressure to provide positive evidence in the way of continued financial backing.
@Jonathan Rose BS. Britain is flooded by TERFs getting loads of access to an anti-trans mainstream media stoking the fears of the public. What evidence do you have that studies are funded by pro gay groups? What evidence does anyone have for an underlying condition? This bleating about getting shouted down seems mostly complaining because others point out flaws in their position.
That's a bit of a cop-out. The biggest problem I see with some psychology & sociology studies is sample sizes being too small, selection bias, survivorship bias, and the survey or other assessment tool being poorly designed.
Let me give an example outside of the trans area to avoid the pitchforks and torches. There have been attempts to determine how many times are guns used defensively In the US Harvard has their firearms research center which has a strong gun control or anti-gun bias. Their survey starts with h"ave you been the victim of a crime in the past year? yes or no?" If a person says no, the survey is over. If they say yes they then go into gun ownership and then ask them if they happened to have defend themselves during that crime. And that's the problem. .. Many people who've used a gun defensively where the criminal decided oh crap I'm outta here don't remember or consider that to be a crime. And so the survey filters out anyone who might have used their gun defensively and then considered no crime to have occurred. Which is why they report something between 60k to 80k defensive gun uses per year. On the pro-gun side they have equally odd surveys where they do improper extrapolations from the sample size ended up with something like four million defensive gun usage per year. So snotty 80,000 it's not four million it's somewhere in between.
So yeah poor surveys, post-hoc analysis and some ridiculous selection and survivorship with nearly every trans research paper I've seen.
But no one can force themselves to be right handed or left handed or both. That’s where you’ve missed John Oliver’s point. It was easier to say you were left handed cause it was more acceptable to be left handed. Thats the whole point, people who were left handed were punished. Once it was ok to be left handed more people came out as left handed.
You can retrain handedness.
This was useful, balanced and nuanced as I would have expected.
Two takeaways that I think are worth thinking about :
1. The numbers are small but the vehemence of the culture war rhetoric is not proportionate (in my opinion) especially that from the Right of the political spectrum.
2. It was almost an aside but the point about "normality" is actually crucial (again in my opinion). Is it possible some of the irrational responses to this topic are an unconscious reaction to having this "normality" challenged? This is the tip of a very large argument but this video shows it is possible to approach the topic with critical thinking and (as Sabine clearly demonstrates) still maintain compassion for others.
It is the left that is pushing this....
I actually do think that the negative reaction has to do with what we consider “normal” being challenged. People gravitate to beliefs that make sense to them because it gives them a sense of control in their life, and given how we live on a rock in empty space and we have limited lifespan, that anything that challanges our notions can be seen as threat, and thus we feel like we have lost control. Despite the fact what we consider “normal” is constantly changing
@@Psychedlia98 I don't. We humans also seek novelty. We would hate being bored. Are transgender people a threat? I don't think so. I don't think I've ever met a trans person but if I have.. I didn't notice. Humans are humans. Good humans are good humans. Bad defective humans are conservatives. Life is about change and growing. We are not what we were on day 1 and I hope we will be different even next week.
It's the conservatives who can't handle this life. they need everything to be plastic and unliving so they can feel safe. But that means that they stifle all of us because of their excessive psychological fear of change. These are the people who would go to a place like France and eat Mcdonalds rather than eating the food that the French are known for. You can tell I'm not because McDonalds will never be on that list unless it's adapted for that culture and then.. sure. I'll eat that paneer burger whatever. I can't get that back home.
Think of how normal is constantly challenged. You get a new boss. Do you have a tantrum because you have to learn a new name? A new routine? No. That's silly. What about if there is a strike and you need to find alternate transportation? Sure. You'll be upset but it's about the inconvenience. It's not some event that leads you to collapse on your bed and say "the world is going to end". If you were told that you were going to have hamburgers and instead, you get pizza, do you get super upset rather than say .. "Huh. I thought we were having burgers. This is good too."
Conservatives squander this time, this brief snippet of life, because they can't handle living. That's why they fantasize about a heaven. They want a vapid insipid version of life because they can't handle reality. I mean.. have you looked at say the Muslims. They don't drink alcohol here but in their heaven, they do. Why? Why is it magically good in "heaven" but not here? Same for those Christians who think that they will enjoy their 24/7 hymn singing to their egotistical god. That sounds like listening to elevator music (bad music) 24/7 and having to smile.. They're pathetic.
The negative reaction from the right is due to our view that institutions (including medical ones) are perpetrating physical harm against children with mental illness, often against the wishes of their parents, and declaring that the mental illness in question cannot be challenged as a matter of human rights.
@@Psychedlia98 Most reasonable people were fine with someone else not being "normal". The reaction toward gay and trans people has been steadily getting better and better. Only now, relatively recently, is it getting worse. Why? Because now theyre bringing peoples children into this. Its a natural and unsurprising reaction.
Most people have no idea of the scope of the social soup in which they live, particularly if they are young or have no conception of history.
"have you ever seen a normal human being" 😂😂
Yes. Height is normally distributed. Gender is bimodal in 95.5%
I recall seeing a story about how the US airforce tried to build cockpits configured for the average pilot and found that pretty well every pilot found them uncomfortable.
@@KonradZielinski seems life is like a movie... if you try and make it good for everyone, nobody is happy.
@@KonradZielinski yep. they took something like 80 different measurments and averaged them, but found that exactly nobody was actually average on more than about seven of the measurements. Humans vary a LOT.
Joe Bauers, but some corrupt military officer put him in a fridge 15 years ago and he will not go out of hibernation before the 26th century
Why are the sources locked behind a paywall? I mean, I can guess why, but if they're not provided to back up the claims presented in the video, the scientific method says they should be disregarded entirely.
Well if you want to apply "the scientific method" and use her efforts as a scientific source for your scientific advancement you can very well pay her for her scientific work.
Or you can just watch a TH-cam video as a free lunch.
Edit: You know that Sabine works at a German University? And in Germany all the lectures are public and for free. But you have to be enrolled to get the transcripts. Got it?
@@j.m.w.5064 No. she’s hiding the fact that she’s using bad studies.
@@j.m.w.5064 Hey buddy, I actually have evidence that you're completely off base on this one! I'll let you look at it so you can see for yourself, if you paypal me 5 bucks.
@@randyohm3445 See, if it was important for me and if I thought you were a credible or at least interesting source and put some work in, then I would pay a fee. Like I did many many times, when I went to book stores, lessons or libraries.
But you're not, so I don't.
Schade Schokolade.
@@j.m.w.5064 So, I sarcastically tried to scam you and your response was "only people I like can scam me." That's.... interesting. I guess I'm just crazy for thinking that scientific claims made based on sources should provide those sources rather than demanding money first. :/
I wonder if the (apparent) increased ability for trans men to pass means that natal female to male transitions are "overrepresented" because they are less targeted by society
It’s much more likely to be a combination of genetic factors and hormone balances during pregnancy. Certain estrogens contribute to brain development during pregnancy, and it now looks like autism could be (at least) partly caused by this. This would explain why there is a correlation between trans men. Basically autism is a disorder that exhibits more masculine traits people female at birth with autism are more likely to be more masculine. So autism and ftm gender dysphoria are comorbid.
@@icecoldnut5152 misinformation.
The idea that autism is "hypermasculine brain" is outdated and since debunked and simply misinformation. There is a larger percentage of trans people in the asd community, but this is also true for trans woman, not just man...
My little brother think he is trans but is a blatant trend chaser, so yes they do exist. Many many young people are doing it cos its trendy, which is dangerous and acting like this isnt so, is also very very dangerous.
also 2:55 "have you ever seen a normal human"
Normal in psychiatry is called euthymic.
I think the desire to belong becomes amplified in adolescence and that desire can show up in many many different ways depending on their environment. If one way they attempt to influence their belonging is through gender expression, that could also go either way. For example, I am a fully transitioned trans man (female to male) but when I was in middle and high school, before I transitioned, I put extra effort into appearing much more feminine than was natural to me because that’s what “belonging” dictated in my environment. So, while there are certainly kids who are “performing” the opposite gender, there are also many who are “performing” their assigned gender.
The stresses of modern youth don’t cause someone to be transgender, but they can certainly cause kids to act ways inauthentic to themselves. I think that’s why it’s important to understand one thing she mentions briefly, but is the linchpin of her argument, which is that she’s concerned about rapid onset of gender dysphoria - meaning the adolescent had no previous symptoms. I think that’s a strong indicator that extreme caution should be taken before any medical transition.
As a mostly-transitioned MTF I think you make a very good point! I would definitely fall into the category of 'sudden onset' dysphoria for most of the people around me, having no apparent signs of trying to be more like girls/women, not even in private. However, the process of picturing myself as female and desiring (what I could only describe as) this female body appearance in the mirror, had been taking place for a long time.
Once I decided to go trough with transitioning, I opened up to everyone around me as well as multiple psychs, explaining this longwinded route of intense disappointment surrounding my physical attributes and how transitioning might alleviate this for me, and the response I got was overwhelming acceptance, support and even recognition to the extent that was possible - my story just 'clicked' for them, resonated enough to see that this could be the right step for me. For the people closest to me, it also explained this long period of depression that no one could previously understand, as well as little quirks like being so uncomfortable with being talked about in 3rd person (because of pronouns, I then explained)
I won't ever advocate for people 'becoming' transgender - being at a significant incongruence with your body is a painful experience, if it had been at all a choice, I would have never made it. However, I fully recognise the potential benefit of transitioning, as I've experienced myself (I consider myself blessed to be fully passing in both appearance and voice, took a few years though)
Therefore, I arrive at the same conclusion: at a young age, it's imperative that 'we' explore the thought process behind this desire to transition, and try to uncover any alternate explanation or issue that might indicate that transitioning is NOT the right solution!
To accomodate some of the people in the comments section: no, I do not consider myself as female, I fully recognise that's not how I was born, I simply wanted to appear like that, and I have succeeded - society is now actually the one that treats me as female! (I've never asked for pronouns in public, people use the female ones automatically)
Cheers to both of these comments
on the other hand if one is able to 'perform' and not suffer as an adult for it, that begs the question are any of the treatments actually worthwhile. do they improve anything.
but i agree it might be a twist of biology or culture that women tend to 'perform' more. though ill caveat that just because someone has to perform as female doesn't mean they'd want to perform as male if there was not any friction.
Such a good point that deserves so many more likes! Can't believe it hadn't clicked for me until I read this but it is so true. There is indeed a strong pressure to perform in heterosexuals so why are people surprised if anyone in the rest of the spectrum 'feels' like they are overdoing/performing their gender! It just makes sense everyone does, especially in an age of constant ads and social pressure from all sides to 'look your best' (according to what the ad, magazine or celebrity tells you). I always was very dress-oriented myself but without the typical girl cuteness or need to use makeup. Yet pressure was high and you got bullied for not looking girly enough and just being who you wanted (or could afford in my case).
@@originalsinquirls1205 totally agreed, I hope people can uncover or separate this friction component from their desires before they commit to irreversible changes
Great video as always. My takeaway points are.1 more quality research required. 2 first step of gender affirming care, such as name change, pronoun change, alternative dressing styles and activities (such as physics club 😂) are easy and cheap to undertake and fully reversible so no reason not to go with it.
Put another way, it costs little to nothing to be supportive, and can cost *everything* to be unsupportive. Indeed, being unsupportive all but guarantees negative outcomes, while being just as irreversible as surgery.
I'm not sure if the physics club thing is truly reversible I've seen some terribly long lasting side effects
@@alyssahallister well stated.
@@alyssahallisteri would like to add that the reason why the trans suicide rates are so high is because of unsupportive families, friends, and current systems in place (ex. the justice system not taking trans people’s assaults seriously, the government actively working to make it harder to transition, discrimination happening in places of employment, etc.). it is VITAL that cis people support their trans peers, especially right now.
@@alyssahallister Lies always have a price. In this case, a terrible price.
Sabine
A few aspects of this video stand out to me.
Re: ROGD, the Littman paper that initially advanced the idea was not just 'heavily criticized', but retracted. Therefore, it would be more accurate summarize the state of the data as 'there is no evidence of this' rather than the more generous 'there is evidence, but it's pretty bad' that you opted for. Additionally, the study recruited survey respondents from websites like Mumsnet, which is notoriously anti-trans, and ROGD was a common belief among mumsnet posters before it was given name by Littman. The study could very well just be describing people colluding to create a narrative or transphobic parents from whom their children hid everything until the last possible moment.
Re: Jesse Singal, while what Jesse points out in this specific instance may or may not be true (idk), Singal has been criticized for himself being misrepresentative of evidence in a way that is persistently biased against transgender people. It's, to say the least, a red flag to see his name included in a video like this.
I'm not accusing you or anybody on your staff of being anti-trans or misrepresenting anything, but it does seem like a few careless slip ups found their way into this video.
The ROGD paper was not retracted, it was corrected.
These are two extremely different things, don't spread misinformation if you care at all about your argument.
@@filiecs3 My bad, Brown retracted a press release about the paper on ROGD, not the paper itself. I haven't thought about it since 2019 so I forgot the specifics.
It was "retracted" because it undermined trans ideology, not because it was false. Both anorexia and trans ideology are social contagion, which girls are more prone to, which is ironic since it causes them to think that they are men, their female trait causes them to think that they are male.
i am someone who came out as trans to my family when i was 13, and was able start feminizing hormones with the support of my family and doctors just before i turned 15. i'm not exactly happy or content with my life as it is now, and as the past 4 years of HRT have progressed, i've actually started to identify less and less with the gender i came out as.
however, i don't say this to say i regret transitioning. i'm actually extremely grateful my unhappiness has nothing to do with my gender identity now, because even after all the ways i've changed (and i've been through a LOT of personal changes), my conviction that i am not the gender i was assigned at birth has never faltered, nor has my belief that feminizing hormones are the right choice for me. maybe now i don't identify as fully female, but i've always seen myself as a "fem" person, and HRT absolutely does its part in sparing me from the gender dysphoria i would be feeling if i still wasn't aligned with that.
from my perspective, gender is too sensationalized. sex serves a simple biological purpose, but humans are the only species that have had the intellectual agency to establish genders, and for some reason we think they're this law of nature that is dangerous to interact or play with. in the end, the goal is to live in alignment with the person you see your best self as, which is more realistically about gender expression than gender itself.
of course, as someone who has remained happy with their transition since starting as a minor, i don't think minors should be restricted from transitioning. however, in order to mitigate the potential harm of young people being dissatisfied with their choice to make permanent changes to their bodies, i think a degree of medical "gatekeeping" is important, which i certainly faced. though, i also think a less gender-enforced society would alleviate the some of the pressure impressionable teenagers experience to chain themselves to certain identities.
it's just hard to get good data for this stuff.
As a "normal" male person, I want to thank you for sharing this. Shows, That there are a lot of people, who look on their life problems without hating-glasses.
Of course it never faltered because you’re succumbing to sunk cost fallacy. You’ve gone too far to go back and admitting you were wrong would be quite painful, so you don’t, and comment here to try and continue gaslighting yourself into believing a 13 year old has any goddamn idea what they’re talking about.
@@SB-mr2nk A little bit more respect would be useful to support a good one together. This person is open and shared her life story for a better understanding. That's exactly the goal of this video by Sabine.
I think it's terrible that the references are behind the patreon pay wall. Awful.
you're right.
She literally shows the papers in the video. You're either too lazy to do even a 5 minutes research or you're just trying to find reasons to critisize her.
"On one hand, there are the crazies who don't want to kill any followers of Moses. On the other, people who really want to kill them all. And then there are normal people like you and me, who only want to kill half of them"
There is actually a lot of room for in between positions and the true crazies are a minority on both sides. However, the fact that you make that comparison suggest that you might be one of the crazies on one side.
@@neandrewthal to stop missing my point, google false balance
@@starry_lis You are missing the point. The statement that there are crazies on both sides is true. Anything about oppression or who has power or whatever does not change that.
@@neandrewthal she's presenting herself as an objective sceptic and a scientist, yet just by framing it this way she fails. She wouldn't compare homeopathy to antibiotics the same way.
@@starry_lis Because antibiotics have overwhelmingly proven benefits and homeopathic cures have none beyond placebo.
You cannot try to claim that giving puberty blockers to all gender non-conforming pre-teens is equivalent to antibiotics and that carefully considering whether there are other factors at play in each case is equivalent to homeopathy.
The very idea that transness could be a "fad among teens" assumes trans teens have a good time. And here's another thought: it may not be "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" when a gay kid has to come out to their parents for the fifth time because they were in denial the first four times. It may just as well point to a "glacial onset of parents finally listening to their kids".
You assume that fads cannot be bad.
A fad from a few years ago was for kids to eat Tide Pods(laundry detergent). Another fad: flash mob with potential for violence and vandalism. Another: hazing. A current one in the fitness wordld is Dry Scooping protein powder which has choked people to death.
i would look for another comparision.
@@hdjwkrbrnflfnfbrjrmd nobody is going through years of medical nonsense for a fad.
the really sad thing is that this fad is there BECAUSE the teens are not having a good time. It's the same reason people join cults; they are suffering in life and lonely and feel different from everyone else or have problems they can't solve.
Then the cult reaches out to them telling them how they belong to this group and how the cult will solve all of their problems magically.
instead of actually treating the problems and mental illnesses, western leftists just push a horrible solution that does far more harm than good and then pat themselves on the back for being so compassionate and open-minded and tolerant.
I am a trans woman and agree with everything you said Sabine. My own personal experience is that I knew something wasn't right from a very young age but only recently did I have the vocabulary to express what I was feeling. I spent several years in therapy starting at age 40 before I began any kind of transition; I wanted to be sure. If I knew as a teenager what I know now, I absolutely would have transitioned. However at that age I just thought what I was feeling was wrong, so I suppressed it. I suppressed it for as long as I could until I was on the verge of ending my life. And yes, it is harder to be a trans woman than it is a trans man. The vitriol that is out their is primarily directed at trans woman.
I love to talk about my experience and what it means to be trans. What we see in the media is an oversimplification of something very complex. In turn that has been weaponized. When I do talk to someone who is willing to have an open mind and be respectful, they are absolutely amazed at the complexities involved. Trans people have been demonized in recent years and people have formed their opinions on a strawman. Believe me if it was as easy as taking a pill to align my gender and sex, I would have done it in a heart beat; but its not. I just wanted to be comfortable in my own skin, I didn't care how that was achieved. I have been on HRT and have had surgeries, dealt with hatred, dealt with being fetishized, discriminated against, sexually assaulted, and had my father reject me when he supported me at first. But despite all of that I wouldn't change my decision to transition; I have no regrets.
Given the strawman that most people base their beliefs on, I have found that most people just lack an understanding and and discover that I am a human with feelings and emotions just like them. For myself, and I suspect most other tans people, I don't wanted to be treated any differently or put into a group. I just want to be treated like every other woman. Yes, the irony, i get it. How do people treat me like any other woman, given the complexities? Unfortunately I don't have the answer, but I think it starts with people not listening to the media and having a conversation.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I was not very familiar with this topic, but this video gave me a lot to think about. Happy to find people like you, sharing their thoughts and experiences without hate.
_The study problem is that physicists can build huge colliders and smash an unlimited number of particles together to get large sample sizes. If doctors did the same with children, that would be horrifying._
It's not the best analogy, but it really illustrates the problem of harming children to complete a study or not preventing harm to children to complete a study.
That analogy goes hard.
Honestly I'm really disappointed in this video from Sabine. I hope she makes a followup or just takes it down.
There will never be a double-blind study on gender-affirming care, because denying gender-affirming care to ANYONE who identifies as transgender is monstrously unethical and no ethics board would ever approve giving transgender patients a placebo instead of actual treatment. The risks of untreated gender dysphoria are well-documented and seriously deadly, as Sabine said in the video.
If the gender-critical insist on waiting for "more data!!!" before allowing trans people to receive healthcare, then a lot of those trans people are going to live horrible lives, and many will die by their own hand. We cannot deny care while we wait for studies on the long-term complications, that's unethical. We can't give trans kids a placebo to gather data for those studies, that's unethical. Besides, it will be obvious to any patient if they're receiving a placebo and they WILL go elsewhere to get actual treatment - at which point the study will no longer have the oh-so-important control group. These standards are impossible to meet and honestly are just a poor excuse to deny gender-affirming care, which should not be done in any case when a patient identifies as transgender and seeks gender-affirming care.
I'm so disappointed that Sabine missed the obvious problem with asking for control groups with this type of illness. Such a study would put many lives at risk, and it will never happen. The key point is that it's unethical to purity test transgender people in a skeptical way when they seek out gender-affirming care.
Saying that we can't tell apart the "true" trans and the "mistaken" trans people apart is a complete misdirect from transphobes. There will never be a way to tell these two groups of people apart in a general healthcare setting, and ANY attempt at doing so will do immeasurable harm to countless trans people.
Why on earth would Sabine suggest that such a distinction among transgender patients is relevant to the standard of care, or even a possible distinction to make? It's just an excuse for every transphobic doctor and parent to insist that their patient/child is mistaken, when there is absolutely no way to determine this one way or the other, which will lead to immense suffering.
There are some key things missing from this analysis:
• There could be a lack of control group data in studies because of the very small number of studies so far conducted and the inherent ethical dilemma with withholding gender affirming care for a control group.
• The risks associated with gender affirming care could be considered alongside the risks and costs of not getting it. Puberty blockers, for example, could mean later top surgery is unnecessary. And there is no remedy for the skeletal changes that puberty causes trans-femme people.
• The measure of success of gender affirming care seems to have been presented here as how much it improved conditions such as depression and anxiety. Gender affirming care is targeted to reduce gender dysphoria. It might reduce depression and anxiety to the extent those are directly caused by dysphoria. But what if the depression and anxiety are not caused by dysphoria but rather rooted in how hard it is to live as a trans person in a world which is structurally transphobic? Gender affirming care can’t fix structural problems. Or what if depression and anxiety are present and have nothing to do with the dysphoria? I’ve lived with gender dysphoria, depression and anxiety, which in my case have complex interactions, given I’m also ADHD and living below the poverty line. I’m not engaging in frivolous what-ifs here.
• The video talks about the distress caused by not experiencing puberty alongside your peers, but not the distress of experiencing the wrong puberty. For a person who identifies as a boy to start menstruating and growing breasts is very challenging for them.
• The analogy with left-handedness is not weakened because gender affirming care can involve irreversible treatment. The analogy helps explain the uptick in people transitioning, but doesn’t remotely claim that transitioning is as trivial as left-handedness.
• It’s a shame there is a missing exploration of possible causes of the demographic shift, because there’s plenty to explore there. For example, socio-politically, there is a much greater pushback and stigma against trans-femme people than trans-masc people which could still be suppressing the numbers of trans-femme people coming out and transitioning.
• The statement that many trans-masc youth also present with other “psychological problems” is a tricky one. There is a noticeable pattern with autism and being trans-masc, for sure. But many autistic folk would take issue with autism being labelled a “psychological problem,” rather than a neurodivergence. Given apparent correlations with autism, we could look into what about autism may increase the likelihood of gender incongruence? Could it be that being autistic helps some be less susceptible to being pressured into the boxes that allistic people are?
• I’m not sure what was happening with the statement that top/bottom surgery are euphemisms for “BiTs BeInG cUt OfF! 😱“. In the trans community, we use those words not as euphemisms but just shorthand that avoids us needing to give private details in a world which seems obsessed with portraying our life-saving healthcare as body horror 🤷🏻♀️
• I think that the statement, “some erroneously believe they are trans because they’ve heard so much about it,” requires evidence which is not provided here. If you think people resistant to this statement have an agenda, then you ought to at least suggest what that agenda might be and what those pushing it hope to gain. To leave this hanging arguably opens you to charges of dog whistling. Some of the missing analysis in this video could as well point to an agenda 🤷🏻♀️
Full disclosure: I am a 48 year old trans woman and transitioned I’m my late thirties. I am a volunteer youth worker at a charity supporting LGBTQIA youth, and I have many friends and acquaintances with children who identify as trans or non-binary/genderqueer. It’s fair to say the anecdotal evidence I’m party to is from a self-selecting group. I try to be self aware and open minded, and I’m open to the suggestion that I have an agenda, although I think my agenda is just to respect and advocate for the views and wishes of young people that relate to their identity and choices.
@@minaondrums The video is not without bias.
You may want to review Rebecca Watson's response entitled: "Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder Screws up on Trans Kids' Care"
Some other comments are recommending Therapist Reacts: "Being Trans is Not a Fad". That channel looks like it was created just to post that response.
Thanks, @@jamesphillips2285 - I appreciate that ☺️
I'm a middle school teacher. I always need to bite my tongue during these conversations. I will say, my personal observations in the classroom line up with your conclusions 100%. I especially loved the line "anyone suggesting either of these possibilities is completely false is pushing an agenda."
everyone who has anything to say is pushing an agenda. the only question is what they want. the undeserved conceit of centrism that it can use 'having an agenda' as a proxy for rejecting a point of view is ridiculously nonsensical. i for one have an agenda which embraces the fact that gender is arbitrary and performative and agrees that people freely choosing to reflect that as they please (including expressing a transgender identity) are people who have just as much place in society as a white heterosexual childrearing couple. the fact that you claim to feel a need to 'bite your tongue' implies quite strictly that you, too, have an agenda. what is it? answer that for yourself.
Im really impressed that you dared to take on such an infected subject. We need more people like you Sabine!
"dared"
this is literally the take most of the right pretends that they think
Sabine, thank you so much for covering this important and sensitive topic with such professional care. You've focused on the science without managing to disparage the anecdotal experiences of so many people who are living this reality themselves, parents and medical professionals. It's very difficult to report on this topic while remaining neutral and you've done it beautifully. I hope others in this sphere can follow your lead so we can have rational discussions that focus on the most important aspect that links us together- the desire to ensure human beings get the right care and can lead healthy and productive lives.
Non-binary myself. Certainly tp the outright terf in my family, and my elderly parents; coming out as such to them, in my late 30's, was seemingly confusing and sudden. Even though up until then I was thought of by them as a very "feminine man". To me, it's a matter of settling at what point is it okay to accept that a person has rights to their own body, and even the right to decide their own identity. The family terf still tried for months after my coming out, to argue that I don't know who I am. That social media had brainwashed me. That I also mistake my lack of masculine traits for being transgender.
So with this level of push back, lack of support, and failed attempts at gaslighting. As an adult who had plenty of time to draw the conclusions I have. It sadly doesn't shock me that trans youth, aren't suddenly happy people in the year or two right after their transition starts. As the social pressure to conform to a majority cis culture is much worse for them.
Learn to be comfortable in the body you’re born with. Transgender dysphoria simply means you are a guy who thinks that he is a girl and vice versa. All surgery does is require lifelong hormone replacement and sterility. And it’s not up to fetusphobes to demand for everyone else on having a pubescent ‘romper room’ dystopia that casually discards old people and fetuses is good for anybody!🤔
"right to decide their own identity" Isn't quite right. Big part of it is own action, the way you carry yourself ect. Usually it's the same thing, but sometimes there are clear discrepancies between identity a person believes to be entitled to, and the way they act. Such as making 0 effort into looking like a woman while identifying as such, and also expecting complete strangers to know to use female pronouns without telling them (a clip where customer starts yelling at an employee for calling him a man when he identifies as a woman comes to my mind).
Never been all that manly myself, did consider just for a moment if transition would be the way to go but no. I do not believe it's going to do me any good when I do not even view it as legitimate way to 'change gender'. And that is the polite way I would describe it. Since I cannot get what I want anyway, my own solution is very different: Indifference. I am me and my gender doesn't define who I am. As for gender identity, I do not see any reason to change it since it would only cause pointless confusion, changing it doesn't change what's between my legs and by the end of the day it is the only thing that matters from reproductive point of view. Trying to change that through surgery... as I said I do not view is at viable for myself, because I only view it as same as putting on a permanent mask on top of my face after burning it to make it unrecognizable. It is not my face, but it is the only face I have left.
But that is only the way I view it, everyone can decide for themselves how they view it and choose if it's the correct choice for themselves.
@Spugleo It's okay for you to do what you want for yourself, based on your own evaluation of your needs and what you feel you can have. Where I take issue with your comment is the use of phrases like "permanent mask" and the violent imagery here and there. In addition, your reference to the clip of that one person having an overreaction in a store is suggestive. Really while customer service workers take a lot of shit, I take exception to the spectacle of filming and posting a person's public meltdown, much more making news of it, inventing stories about it, and using the dissemination of those stories to make broad statements about a minority group. You saw one person having a really bad moment; I question why this lingers in your head as characteristic of trans people, that you seem to not be considering whether there may be further context that would change your perspective, especially when, as I'm sure you're aware, people very early in transition are typically at the peak of their distress related to dysphoria (as it is only as it gets worse that people seek treatment, and tends to improve with treatment).
Similarly with the references to violent imagery; I am not sure I can judge where that comes from, but these are very harsh and emotive descriptions of what you think transition is, and may be rooted in either disgust or the condemnations of others, rather than a sober appraisal of what medical transition entails. This negativity is not uncommon with people who, as you confess, have some desire not to have the gender you started out with, but don't see it as possible for them. I'm just an internet rando so I'm not interested in telling you what you should do with your own body. That's yours, it's up to you to make whatever decisions you make for whatever reasons you think are important. I will, however, voice some criticism of projecting these sorts of harsh thoughts onto other people and their bodies. Many people do not feel they've put on a permanent mask or burnt themselves, and while you say this is only something you're talking about in terms of your own feelings and experience, the way in which you're articulating it clearly suggests generalization. I don't think that's a really healthy way to think about other people, and I don't think it's great to say things like that in a public forum as a response to someone else voicing their experience.
Well, individuals do not get to choose their gender in society. We almost always assume the gender of people we see, rather than asking for their input.
So yea, the very idea that you are choosing a gender different from what society judges you as will cause problems.
To give perspective, not excuses, if they are like me they have never met a trans person. Back in late 70's nobody at my high school was gay. That changed when I hit college and they became my social circle. That slipped away has life happens. I've always wondered how many of my friends did not survive AIDS. That is all it took was to have gay friends.
Fast forward 40 years and I don't know and have never met a "trans". (I did move to Idaho. I don't even know any democrats.) I do know we have gay kids at high school here in Idaho. It may seem slow to you, but that amount of social acceptance is astonishingly fast. Just know your kids will be raised (hopefully) in a more loving world.
I was born in 1995. I have considered myself Trans since I can remember but I didn’t even know what I was really proclaiming. I always liked the female lifestyle so that’s how I drifted, the clothes, the hair. As for the current situation in the United States I don’t know but for me I just wanted to fill the niche of what was a girl growing up and doing that fun stuff. I’m still not sure about the surgery I’m scared to death of anybody touching anything on my body and hormones I’m not on them I don’t know if I want to take them i am fine with my appearance between male but presenting female. As for your question I don’t know if it’s a fad but I believe kids should be open to being themselves but I don’t want them to be put into a situation where they feel like they need surgery or hormones blockers or hormone therapy to feel complete maybe you just want to dress a certain way and wear your hair a certain way and that’s fine,
That’s my honest take. Being as friendly as I can be in the situation were in in modern America.
I get it. There are so many gender clichés in our everyday life, how can you completely identify with just one? Though beeing non-binary is different than trans.
I wouldn't want any kid to feel pressured into changing themselves, but I don't think any really do. The medical guidance is to start with plenty of counseling, and the point of that is to figure out what the patient actually WANTS. They might be offered the _option_ to take certain steps, and be talked through everything that would involve, but no good doctor would say "well, you _must_ get surgery done, and try to convince the patient of that.
I know that doctors are not perfect, and that there might be some shoddy doctors out there who would be overly aggressive about such things, but I think that for the most part such doctors only live as boogeymen on right wing social media, meant to scare parents and politicians. I do think that we need to take reasonable good faith steps to ensure that doctors treating potentially trans children are well educated on the dos and don'ts, that before any massive changes are made that the child has received effective medical guidance, but I also think that it's important that these tools remain available for those individuals that WANT to have them, and that proper medical guidance indicates would be helpful to them.
My thing is about the kids thing is still kids are still young and developing. I truly don’t know if that’s a good time to push something like this because maybe they are just bewildered by the world. I just don’t want kids to think they are trans unless they really are Trans. I guess we have to ride the line to make certain that they are. It shouldn’t be a decision made lightly or overnight and it definitely needs to be consulted with the parents and there should just be a long process in my opinion to make sure you know they know what they are doing because I don’t want anybody’s kid to feel pressured to change their life especially in that big of a way. Kids are young. Their minds are developing. It’s truly a hard thing to say. Adults or teenagers are best equipped to make big decisions like this. That’s just my honest opinion.
Indeed have been living in everyday life a female presenting for years. It's just been a difficult process, really knowing what to change about yourself if you'd get to. I mean its normal to not like things about yourself or your body. So am I doing any medical interventions because I want to conform? Or is it just to correct for going through the "wrong" puberty?
Getting the choice to explore this at an earlier age without judgement would go a long way to finding out who you really are.
To me there is an elephant in the room. It is the society that we are embedded in, and the assumptions and expectations of what gender means. What could happen if we changed as a society in terms of acceptance and care for individuals, what if children grew up where there gender played more of a minor role in their social structures. If we had a society that celebrated individual expression and reduced labelling and recognised also that we are changing dynamic beings, who go through all sorts of transitions and oscillations. How much gender dysphoria is caused by discomfort with context rather than the individual? This extends far wider than gender, but into all forms of labelling and prejudice, and our deep need for care, acceptance and connection with our shared humanity.
if someone has physical gender dysphoria, no amount of social acceptance will alleviate it. that takes a medical transition to fix
💯
For those studies without a control group, its important to note that a lack of any large improvement is also a lack of deterioration. A control group with no treatment may have produced worse results, if only one had existed
It's also important to understand that the gold standard of a properly controlled, double-blind experiment isn't always a luxury that's practical in all sciences. It's easy for a physicist to scoff at such practices when you can conjure up a billion collisions in a particle collider and get six-sigma results, but that's not the reality in psychology or medicine or sociology.
I once met a man who was convinced there was no evidence that masks prevent the spread of COVID, when I presented the man with three studies that all concluded that masks prevent the spread of COVID, he said, "none of those have control groups". I suggested he sign up to be part of a study where he's purposefully exposed to COVID infected people coughing without masks on. He could be in the control group! Analyzing the effectiveness of masks to limit the distance traveled by water drops that cary the virus just wasn't enough evidence.
Similarly, you have to find children with gender dysphoria (and their parents) who will agree to forego treatment and the associated 3-fold increase in suicide rates for years. No wonder the control group numbers dwindled to 7 in the one study Hossenfeld presented with a control group...
It should also be noted that the kind of sociological / psychological studies this video is about tend to have smaller sample sizes and often cannot be the gold standard double blind that you might see in medicine.
I understand the impulse to say pump the breaks on this one from a physicist's view, but I am very hopeful you do a follow-up on this one. While I don’t doubt that there may be factors pushing people who aren't transgender to perceive themselves as such, there is little evidence of widespread regret of gender affirming care in which the main reason given isn't societal lack of acceptance. Acceptance is basically the largest factor in all issues of trans-well being.
There is also little evidence there is not widespread regret in this new cohort of young people assigned female at birth transitioning, because the sudden spike in examples is atypical.
Trying to use self-reported statistics from decades ago to argue that the experience of young people today will be the same, is tenuous and disingenuous.
There is evidence of widespread regret.
Don't just write words and pretend you're right.
The suicide attempt rate goes up after transition.
Meaning, once people take the plunge and transition they realise changing genders didn't fix their mental illness.
That's what the data shows, those are the facts.
Sorry.
What source do you based this on?
It isnt quite soon enough yet as those generations effected hadnt reached the age to consider detransitioning, not to mention the even greater levels of shame transgenders display towards those who do detransition, and the massive backlash that happened to some.
I suspect we’ll see it happen though, and itll probably cause a massive uproar. Even some of the transgender community who are reasonable already fear its to late to stop it to.
13:38 I have been told that no skin is actually "cut off" but rather reshaped and grafted to a new position. Was that wrong?
You can literally look it up
no you were not
The answer is: it depends on the procedure. Generally speaking, tissue is preserved and reused whenever possible.
There is a vocal feminization procedure, as an example, which merely sutures the thicker vocal folds. It's completely reversible and has excellent outcomes compared to similar procedures.
But yeah, there's like, dozens of different surgical methods for all sorts of things that are constantly improving over time. One, which was first used in cis women, involves using fish skin to help create a neovagina. It's pretty neat.
It is not even the most wrong thing in this video.
if you mean the muscle gets repurposed sure... it just won't grow back in your arm. And if you do it as a kid, for other procedures your penis/labia is not big enough to successfully make something else "properly" to the extent that this prosthetic can be considered fit for purpose.
Also if the abstract of a study cites "Latin-x" you can assume the study researchers are biased AF
The most important studies on trans people are 10 - 20 years after transitioning.
To see how many regretted their decisions. No control group required.
You would be surprised at the amount of things - positive, negative, harmful, beneficial, etc. - that people will SAY the do not regret. There is ample scientific proof that identifying as trans is persistent and that is basically it. Obesity, in fact, is more persistent than identifying as trans. We cannot identify trans people reliably unless THEY self-report it. We are at the tip of the iceberg with regards to understanding the phenomena and more studies are necessary because "gender affirming care and calling it a day" is obviously not good enough and even if it helps 4 times more people than it harms, that is still very far away from good enough and we should try to do better.
i am not trans/nonbinary, but have several close personal friends who are. very appreciative for content that is so detailed and based in objective fact. objective information is hard to find but so important to have when demonstrating support for loved ones. the first video i saw from this channel was a discussion of trans athletes and really set the tone for the academic detachment that i admire in your videos. thank you for the work you do!
Your friends are not those things. Humans can't transition. Human development can't be reversed.
@@robdel_actual comment was directed at sabine, not you. absolutely no interest in debating the merits of a third party with some rando on the internet. show some tact.
@@333konneko there is no debate to be had. Men can't become women. This is a fact that can't be refuted. To believe otherwise is lunacy.
@m_train1 no such thing as your mom
@@robdel_actual right, men can't become women. Women are women, whether they are cis or trans, they are born that way. Same with men. Men are men, whether they are cis or trans, they are born that way.
Hi Sabine. I would like to correct your statement that, although generally Indonesia is socially much more conservative when it comes to the transgender community in Indonesia, a person living as a transgender in Indonesia is not "illegal".
I think that is why counseling is so important. With such a rare and not well studied issue, you need to get individual care and be treated like an individual and not just a statistic. All a person can do is make the best choice they can at the time. What we should all be able to agree on though, is that no one should be made fun of or mocked for their choices.
I can honestly say that the bullying I received throughout school made me a stronger person. I wasn't brought up to expect society to tiptoe around my feelings. I'm a normal woman ( I find the term cis offensive) and I was made fun of because I grew up poor. Very poor.
While it's certainly not nice of children to mock other children, it does build character, as well as reveal, in stark relief, the lack of character of the bully.
Unfortunately even counsellors and therapists are starting to become affected by the insidious lack of nuance that plagues both sides, such that many of them seem to be there just to “validate” what the client wants to hear.
@@flappyfeet1147 Or they fall back on their "standard of care" scape goat. Everyone seems to ignore the amount of money a person will spend on a lifetime of "care" if they decide to take the plunge. Even just pills can cause all sorts of future health problems, especially with the heart and bones.
Very sad.
@@JanicePhillipsCis is a descriptive term, it’s odd to find it offensive. It’s like saying you don’t like being called a homo sapien. But if it bothers you, perhaps it’s further building your character, as you mention
@@gnocchidokie Cis is a made up term so people won't have to use the word NORMAL.
It is in no way comparable to being called homo sapiens, as it is made up slang...for normal. That is the reason I find it offensive. If abnormal people can demand what they are called, how does informing someone what I do not like being called show a lack of character on my part?
I personally dont care about it that much, its a form of body modification and everyone should have that right once reaching a certain age. If it helps your self image and/or is something that a person wants for themselves they should be allowed. I myself dont understand gender identity or its importance, perhaps thats because I myself just don't care what labels I am stuck with because I just am what I am. Ones identity and physicality are both part of them and you don't have much agency in either, even one's identity is influenced by things that they cant control whether external or internal.
I myself went through puberty really late and I am well below the average in height, I am somewhat androgenous though my biological sex is still obvious. None of that mattered to me though because why should I care what my body is like? I just do what I do and am what I am, it doesn't really need a label and no one else needs to understand me but out of pure laziness the answer I put when asked my gender is male but id rather just not have to be asked a question that is pointless to me.
All you said is that you're mentally stable
@@I-call-it-the-poop-loop Yeah I know but considering this doesnt seem to be the norm I dont know lol. People are always crying about what gender they are perceived as whether trans or cis.
If I walk up to the average man where I live and in any way insinuate he isnt manly I could get punched.
Did you just imply that me, as a man, would get angry about gender stuff like I'm a girl or something? You're lucky you're on the internet buddy, otherwise I'd hit you right now!@@Exquailibur
@@Exquailibur when you're in the "default" group it can be really hard to see how someone else's experience could be so different. Trans people are at high risk of murder, rape, and other violence precisely because of their identity. For some groups "Identity Politics" is a life and deaths struggle for existence.
@@orpal Yeah I am in the default group, I am a male that is smaller then most women and I am neurodivergent. I am totally not at risk of any form of violence when most other men are twice my weight and I struggle to identify people's facial expressions.
The point I was trying to make is that I believe in people's rights even if I dont understand those rights. I dont understand why it matters for a person to be a man regardless of whether they are cis or trans but I think people have the right to do so. I dont think I need to understand a person to advocate for them, if I did need to then I wouldnt be able to advocate for many people at all.
11:30 "If you want to be a girl, you join the physics club." Ha! Ha! I love you, Sabine!
She's a treasure 😊
NO WAY NOOO omg i cant; learning jokes aren't usually this fun to me, but 11:30 -oh boy
If you want to be transgender, you join the socialist club.
I remember socialist activists in the 1990s dressing as females and trying to popularize this ''movement.' I remember an International Socialist Organization open meeting where an overly excited sodomy advocate was taken aside by the leadership, who explained that this was ''in the pipeline' but that they were not ready for it yet.
Its not hard to figure out what's going on.
Short answer, no. The number of people who fit a category inevitably increases as understanding of that category increases. It really is that simple.
There is, however, a concentrated moral panic surrounding trans people and in some circles on the right, a push to straight up eradicate trans people from public life.
Leaving sources behind paywall is pretty bad for such a controversial video
I think it's crazy paywalls exist. Maybe it's there to control who is able to make studies with more funding from people with resources wanting to see research that supports what they want to see. There are new platforms with people posting research without paywalls... Where you might be able to look up papers. I think it will not be a thing for much longer and those companies will just be forced to adjust. kind of like how downloading music couldn't be stopped.
It isn't controversial. She had a bad take and promoted lies and pseudoscience to push an agenda. She should honestly just take this video down. It's just bad takes from beginning to end.
@@inejunta6569 It’s there to restrict access to knowledge to the middle and upper classes. Knowledge is power, and in a capitalist society, it is in the interests of the ruling class (wealthy industrialists and mega-corporations) to disempower workers and the poor. A poorly educated, ill-informed populace is easier to control and exploit.
@@nobody.of.importance what do u mean?
@@nobody.of.importanceit’s pseudoscience because you don’t agree with the studies? she never said trans people aren’t valid. it’s facts that there are a lot of things we don’t know, otherwise there wouldn’t be this huge wave of detrans too. instead of saying she lied, maybe look up all the studies yourself and learn a little bit more about this topic.
I really respect how true scientists can have the ability to look at polarizing and sensitive issues with nuance and care. It's so normal for people to pick a side, defend it, and never question anything they believe. I feel like this has helped me take a more compassionate and nuanced perspective on the matter. Thank you.
Sure. She straw manned the gender critical position right out of the gate.
@beestingza care to elaborate?
@@coniferous4637"Socially contagious fad among the brainwashed woke who want to mutilate your kids". That's a dismissive exaggeration of the gender critical position and then she flatters herself as 'normal' for saying so.
I applaud you having a honest and clear conversation as much as possible in this format. I hope everyone would be allowed to live and pursue happiness in whatever gender they prefer. If they are harming noone then noone should harm or hinder their right to live as they wish.
What if they are defending people who are harming others?
@@MegaLokopo then that is a bad thing that has no bearing on their right to persue happiness in whatever gender they prefer.
I don't suddenly get to take away a dudes right to life just because he is defending drug dealers. I don't get to start yelling racial slurs at a wife who is defending her abusive husband.
@@deckie_ And you dont have to carry water for them either. Like you are.
@@deckie_ Stay away from the kids or your friends get it. Get it?
I think the overall criticism is on the harm part
I do appreciate the summary of results that was presented in this video. However, I deeply object to how this presentation frames the decision-making process as lying entirely in the hands of scientists, physicians, and parents. I failed to notice Sabine even once mentioning the agency of the adolescents and youths that might receive gender affirming care. Their informed consent should be the ultimate factor in deciding whether a medical intervention's benefits outweigh its costs. I do agree that parents, physicians, and scientists have a vital and essential role in informing and advising a young person on the potential costs and benefits, but the patient's agency must be the central focus at all times.
absolutely true, great point
A child doesn’t have the wherewithal to decide what their lives should be, or what their bodies should be. They can barely choose a favorite color
Same way you can't get your body altered at 13 because you don't think you'll ever want kids... is the same rationale that applies to other treatments that are effecting the body. No matter what they are the feelings of an adolescent kid are just that. It should ultimately be irrelevant in terms of treatments that will literally change them until they're legally old enough. That is after all the reason parents are the ones given all legal authority over their consent until that age. If treatment is causing provable harm especially, that means they literally caved in and allowed kids to medically harm themselves just to possibly make them happier or maybe less depressed. These decisions are for 18 year olds to tackle at bear minimum.
Children believe in Santa Clause and are not allowed to smoke or drink. Your talk of informed consent among minors is weird man.
@@daddybarber1214 That’s a pretty gross generalisation. Sure teens don’t have the experience or understanding of implications that adults might, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have personal freedoms. Isn’t what you are suggesting fairly similar to, for example, not allowing those who don’t complete a secondary education to vote; due to their potential lack of understanding as to what may be at stake?
I’m going to unsubscribe if they don’t make a response to the issues many brought up. I hope that a scientist won’t hide from the comments that are constructive criticism.
bye
Whaa I’m leaving if I don’t get my way! - said every spoiled brat ever