General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
That we're reading this educational policy change in the newspapers and not from a professional teaching group tells you that this is simply a political manoeuvre.
These kids are already watching porn on their phones, you aren't protecting them from anything by refusing to teach.
Even if this was an actual problem, which it isn't, this is not the way to deal with it. Children ask all sorts of awkward questions, not answering their question is literally the worst way to deal with it. They'll just ask the question more loudly in a very clear voice in the middle of a crowded Tesco. It's best to just answer them and move on.
You can tell no Conservatives ever actually raised their own children.
Screw TERF Island
Section 28 bullshit all over again. It didn't help anything then, it won't help anything now, it will just hurt people. Fuck's sake, what is wrong with this shites?!
Because we all know 12 and 13 year olds never have sex. One study says nearly 3000 of them got pregnant between 2000 and 2007 but clearly immaculate conceptions all round.
Because telling them "I'm not allowed to answer that question." isn't going to make them look it up themselves anyway. I mean, you could lie to them, but I can't imagine that being a popular policy.
Even if the sentiment behind this wasn't so horrid, this'd still be stupid.
The legislation requires me not to tell you that you can change your gender.
Fair. No clue why we should be teaching children stuff like this.
Stuff like this? Gender stuff?
It's been normal for schools to teach stuff like this for decades, stuff has been gendered in schools forever.
The only recent change is giving children choices and recognising reality.
"I reject your reality and substitute my own!" - Conservatives
Because some kids are different than others and need support and care so they can become the person they see themselves as
Good. Think too many people act like huge hormonal and surgical options are no big deal.
Seen loads of trans people say they always knew. Well they won't need to be told if they know.
The UK has recently done research on the matter and realised that children were not getting the support required for not transitioning.
That is so wrong.
I'm 41. Figured it out around 36 because I never had the vocabulary to describe it and understand it. And I was miserable.
That's "don't say gay" bullshit aimed at making us invisible. And you.ve regress from "no pu blocker" to "don't talk about it". Nice support.
Enjoy your youth suicide rate...
Trans people know they should be the other gender and that puberty causes massive permanent changes to their body they are horrified by. They often do not know that everyone else around them’s deepest fantasy isn’t to wake up one day as the other sex.
They do not know that there is a easy and harmless way to delay these permanent changes effecting their bodies until they are an adult and can make a informed decision, that if started early enough these medications create a path to eliminate the need for nearly all of the intensive surgeries that are otherwise in their future, can be stoped at any time if they don’t want to continue with it, or that these medications are deemed harmless enough to be freely handed out to their fellow cis children for a wide body of disorders, but which the NHS suddenly requires years of regular therapy trying to talk them out of it to “prove” they are deserving of if there is even a hint of them being trans.
Yes, this means that the NHS has for decades required that the child and their parents must know they are trans and how they feel about the exact effect of puberty years before the child even starts puberty in order to gain the majority of the benefits from these medications which doctors can freely prescribe for non trans children without any of these barriers.
When you talk about the recent UK “research” you are talking about the Cass report yes? The report that outright stated it ignored over a century of scientific research because thouse papers went double blind, meaning they secretly gave an equal number of cis children puberty blockers without their knowledge or gave trans children sugar pills without them realizing they are still going through puberty, which was subsequently ridiculed as a purely politically driven by hundreds of UK pediatricians and experts in the field, who’s authors were actively helping draft policy with American far right politicians that defines a child gaining any acess to puberty blockers or even social transition as child abuse and requiring years of prison time for the parents, and who despite all this own author’s stated that even with their standards that while the NHS gives little support for non-binary children the high barriers it maintains against trans children pausing puberty, socially transitioning, and other forms of gender confirming care are actively harming them.
But hey, if so many people are apparently treating acess to these medications as no big deal dispite all the evidence to the contrary, why do nearly half of trans people in the UK end of having to get these medications from grey market dealers in southern europe instead of their local chemist?
Trans people know they should be the other gender and that puberty causes massive permanent changes to their body they are horrified by. They often do not know that everyone else around them’s deepest fantasy isn’t to wake up one day as the other sex.
Can confirm. As a kid, I saw a lot of jokes about how horrible puberty is. I thought everyone felt the same way as me, since they all acted like it.
If you put out any research going against giving children puberty blockers you'd be labelled as a "trans phobe" and be cancelled immediately by social activists who aren't scientists. Children should be given therapy to love their bodies and who they are, even if they don't fit male or female social norms. Not hormone blockers and HRT.
The scientists of the 1880s, through every decade up to the modern day were all so terrified of being called transphobes that they secretly conspired to fake the entire field’s research? Right, that makes sense.
You definitely promise that they’d be canceled too, and not given constant interviews by the Daily Mail, Fox News(the largest and most watched television news station in America), and the BBC(looking to show both sides of banning only certain people from getting otherwise uncontroversial and freely prescribed medication). None of thouse outlets would ever be interested in interviewing them say things their editors are pushing for.
They would also certainly not then get millions in dollars to continue their research by groups like the Heritage Foundation, the group which in 2016 focused group tested ways to create new culture war issues and identified the decades old practice of prescribing puberty blockers to children who have fought through years of therapy as one of the effective things for conservative outlets and politicians to push.
Yes, questioning children should be given love, therapy, and the choice to delay the permanent changes brought on by puberty until they are an adult and can make an informed decision, and not forced to because a politician copied an American far right party’s method to distract voters form the impacts of their economic policies by screwing over the thirty thousand English who are physically incapable of otherwise loving their own bodies.
You are so incorrect that I'm amazed you were able to use a keyboard that must have been covered in your own drool. Go get a grip and use it to keep hold of a fucking clue.
The UK has recently done research on the matter and realised that children were not getting the support required for not transitioning.
Citation?
I assume op is referring to the recent Cass review
https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
The overview had no mention of a lack of support for "not transitioning" it's certainly possible I'm missing it or it's in the full report (which I'll read when I get a few minutes).
One mention of the need for corresponding levels of support for de-transitioning and some mentions of increased support for other issues alongside the gender based ones.
It sounds like OP had a specific section/sections in mind, if this is indeed the report they were referencing I'd appreciate some indication to which part they were referencing specifically.
"The overview didn't mention it, but its somewhere in this 232 page report" isn't the most useful when trying to understand where someone is coming from.
Yes I'm also not entirely sure what op meant, I assume they will be along shortly to update us.
Personally I think we should be giving kids a lot more support in not transitioning. And by transitioning, I mean transitioning from a girl to a woman or from a boy to a man. If the child isn't 100% certain they want to go through with massive irreversible hormonal changes, they shouldn't. I don't care whether those hormones come from a pill or from a gonad. They can make an informed decision whether to continue with puberty when they're 16-18
Do you have any information on how easy the resumption of puberty is after that sort of delay?
It never occurred to me that this was possible and I'm interested in how it might work.
It'll start right back up again completely naturally as soon as you stop taking the pills. The pills are hormone blockers. The gonads still produce sex hormones, but the blockers react with the hormones and render them inert. The inert hormones are passed as urine like any other waste product in the blood. A few days after you stop taking the blockers, they'll run out and the sex hormones will start expressing themselves just like they would in someone who never took the blockers. Puberty will begin (or resume) just as nature planned.
The only side effect is that you won't go through puberty. Unfortunately, this does mean you'll have a child's amount of bone density, which is not good for a lifetime. But there's absolutely 0 risk in delaying puberty until age 18. You'll just grow up slower, the same as any late bloomer.
Hormone blockers are actually a component in an adult trans person's hormone replacement therapy. To take me as an example, I have a pair of testes which produce testosterone. So I take an antiandrogen; a testosterone blocker, to suppress the effects. And I take estrogen pills so that I have a female blood chemistry. When I started taking hormone pills, my body reacted just like any teenage girl's body. I got softer skin, mood swings, and better hair. I tell you what, having the emotions of a teenage girl as an adult is an absolute trip. I'm glad they've settled down since then. Some trans women I know even got period cramps, despite not having a uterus. I don't envy them.
The body is genetically programmed to respond to sex hormones in a certain way. It doesn't matter what you were born as, everyone's organs, muscles, bones, and brain have a genetic programming that responds to estrogen one way, and testosterone another way. The potential is already inside every living human. That potential remains there for your entire life. Puberty blockers can't do anything to take it away.
If I ever stopped taking my testosterone blocker, I'd start growing bigger muscles and hair in strange places. My body would resume functioning like a male body. One day I'll get my testes removed, and I'll never have to worry about that again. But that surgery is only available to adults, and it requires a psychiatric assessment. I've been openly trans for years and years and I'm still not allowed to do it yet. There's absolutely no risk of a child going through the procedure without the absolute greatest caution, and a very urgent, life-saving need. And even if a horrible one in a billion mistake was made, they could just give the kid hormone pills the same as I take in order to restore their original sexual chemistry.
Personally I think we should be giving kids a lot more support in not transitioning. And by transitioning, I mean transitioning from a girl to a woman or from a boy to a man. If the child isn't 100% certain they want to go through with massive irreversible hormonal changes, they shouldn't.
I think you're underestimating the care and caution with which these decisions are approached. No one is rushing kids into transitioning. No one is imposing it on young people who are not sure. There are many safeguards to make sure transitioning only happens where it's appropriate and the person fully understands and agrees to it.
No, that's not true at all. I was pretty clearly nonbinary growing up, but every adult told me that natural puberty was a good thing and there was no way to avoid it. They didn't tell me that puberty blockers were an option. They should have. It would only be 2 years after reaching natural puberty that I realised I was trans. 2 years of puberty blockers might have made a huge difference to my life. I was sure as shit rushed by every adult I knew into transitioning into a man, just because I was born with a penis.
Sorry, I misread "from a girl to a woman or from a boy to a man" in your first comment, so I misunderstood your intent.
I thought so. As a soulist, I'm interested in deconstructing and remixing social constructs into forms that benefit social justice. I noticed the hypocrisy of transphobes crying wolf about kids going through irreversible changes, and figured out it takes next to zero effort to use their own language. In appropriating the forms of our enemies' arguments, we reduce their disagreement with us down to its fundamental form - in this case, a religious belief in genetic destiny. That's the only thing setting their arguments of "for the children" apart from my arguments of "for the children". And this is a much harder thing for a bystander to accept unquestioningly than "for the children". I like showing bystanders what's really setting our enemies apart from us.
Think of it like rhetorical kung fu. Using the opponent's force against them
I like it, it's a smart and revealing strategy. Glad I originally misunderstood now because this comment of yours is really helpful and interesting.
If you like the tactics soulism adds to the leftist arsenal, you should read the soulist manifesto at http://soulism.net. There's only a few dozen of us, but after reading the manifesto, I saw some pretty huge failures in the mainstream leftist worldview. Most leftists want to win a material victory against Capital, but they categorically refuse to deconstruct the social reality created by Capital to control us. Socially, they're reactive. They take the way their opponent describes the world at face value and only disagree when the scientific method disagrees. But most of our reality is social, not scientific, and the scientific method doesn't help you with that. The mainstream right is much better at crafting realities - a process we soulists call magic - than the mainstream left is. Escaping the body prison doesn't really help if you can't even begin to challenge the mind prison.
A lot of people I grew up with who thought they were trans simply grew out of it. Many of them were pressured into it, or were doing it because they thought they weren't masculine/feminine enough to fit with societal norms. Or just wanted to be different. I was pressured into it as well when I was younger and made to identify as non binary because "cis men are bad" and I couldn't be a cis man in that friend group or something. Could have went worse.
So what your saying is that you have gone through years of therapists telling you not to transition every two weeks, and accidentally been given a medication that delayed the decision until you were more mature and which you could stop taking at any time with no serious side effects. Turely that was a fate so horrible that it’s worth taking the decision away from the thirty thousand English for which it was demonstrably the right decision.
You're a murderer of children.
Case in point. Anyone who tries to argue against the agenda gets pressured out of it by being called a "murderer".
Labels aside, the only thing that post contains is a personal opinion, a personal anecdote and then an unspecific reference to something that may or may not exist.
Calling that an argument is a very generous interpretation.
That's not true, but I wish it was. I wish everyone who tried to argue against saving children's lives was pressured out of it by being called a murderer. Instead, murderers like Robert Galbraith are freely appearing in parliament to argue in favour of this legislation.
And I know you can't tell from the headline, but this new rule against sex ed in schools also prohibits telling children what parts of their body are not okay for an adult to touch. Thanks to this new law, we will have a generation of children who are unable to report sexual abuse. Anyone who is in favour of this law is aiding and abetting pedophiles and getting children raped.