Reality is beginning to sink into even the thickest heads that the battle to stop equal marriage is lost. Yes, we will still have to suffer from more nonsense lawsuits, and the rhetoric won't die down for awhile, but its really all over but the waiting for SCOTUS to get off their wrinkled behinds and rule that denying anyone the ability to marry any adult is unconstitutional.
And so the culture wars are already shifting into their next phase. Trying to pass laws legalizing discrimination for religious reasons, and thankfully so far, none of these has managed to pass. The only way I can see these hideous laws stopped for good is yet another ruling from SCOTUS. But as slow as they move on anything, this will be years and years if not decades into the future.
So, what minority will next wear the mantle of hate and bigotry? Why none other than my trans sisters and brothers. The haters have found a whipping child in the sad tale of Leelah. I read this article today, and was moved between tears of anguish and anger.
Read it and weep.
January 5, 2015 | 7:12pm
Hell hath no fury like a 17-year-old with a political cause: If the
outcome weren’t so tragic, we might draw that conclusion from Ohio teen
Leelah Alcorn’s suicide note.
Born a boy and named Joshua, Alcorn had come to identify as female —
and been frustrated by her parents’ response when she came out to them
as transgendered. Before walking into traffic on Sunday morning, she
left this message on her Tumblr blog:
“The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people
aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid
feelings and human rights.”
There’s more: “Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the
earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to
be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this
year. I want someone to look at that number and say ‘that’s f - - ked
up’ and fix it. Fix society.”
According to Alcorn, her parents reacted “extremely negatively” when
she broke the news. She wrote that her mother told her that it was just a
phase and “God doesn’t make mistakes.”
Alcorn’s parents are Christians; they initially banned their son from
social-networking sites and decided to homeschool him, in order, they
said, to help him get over his inclinations. They sent him to Christian
therapists who tried to talk him out of his transgender feelings.
Yet they later relented and let Leelah go back to school and allowed access to social media.
Alcorn’s mother told CNN that her son was on medication for
depression and that, while she and her husband didn’t support his choice
to be a girl, “We told him that we loved him unconditionally. We loved
him no matter what. I loved my son. People need to know that I loved
him. He was a good kid, a good boy.”
The Alcorns have suffered a tremendous loss, but sex columnist Dan
Savage thinks they have only themselves to blame. He wants them
prosecuted for child abuse.
He tweeted: “We know that parental hostility rejection doubles a
queer kid’s already quadrupled risk of suicide — rejecting your queer
kid is abuse.”
He added, “Leelah Alcorn’s parents . . . should be ashamed — but 1st they need to be shamed. Charges should be brought.”
Dan Savage ✔
@fakedansavage
Follow
We know that parental hostility &
rejection doubles a queer kid's already quadrupled risk of
suicide—rejecting your queer kid is abuse.
Dan Savage ✔
@fakedansavage
Follow
#LeelahAlcorn's parents threw her in front of that truck. They should be ashamed—but 1st they need to be shamed. Charges should be brought.
Others agree. A Change.org petition demanding that the headstone say “Leelah,” not “Joshua,” has 55,000 signatures.
The Princeton, NJ-based Transgender Human Rights Institute is pushing
Leelah’s Law, a federal ban on “conversion therapy” of all kinds.
This is outrageous. First off, Carla Alcorn wasn’t wrong on the merits: For many transgender kids, it
is a just a phase.
As Paul McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins
Hospital, recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “When children who
reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical
treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic, 70
percent-80 percent of them spontaneously lost those feelings.”
McHugh warns against the sex-reassignment surgery that Leelah
demanded from her parents for just that reason. (After all, it’s no
trivial step — the full course takes years, and key parts are
irreversible.)
Second, as McHugh explains, just because you think you were born into
the wrong body doesn’t mean that’s actually your medical diagnosis.
We don’t tell anorexics that they’re right about feeling they’re too fat, and need to work to get thinner.
But back to the Alcorns. Are parents now required to embrace
everything their teens decide is part of their identity or be accused of
child abuse?
What of all the 16-year-olds who think they’ve found love and want to consummate the relationship as often as possible?
Is this what Savage’s “It Gets Better” movement is really about? It
was supposed to inspire young people who were being “bullied” or
“harassed” to know that there are people out there who love and support
them.
Yet the parental behavior Leelah Alcorn described doesn’t constitute
abuse. They just didn’t accept her announcement with open arms.
Perhaps her suicide was a reaction to a recent conversation with her
parents. Perhaps it was the result of a lot of emotional issues.
After all, she wrote, “I’m never going to have enough friends to
satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never
going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy.”
To judge by her final note, though, Leelah Alcorn saw her suicide as a
political act. “Gender needs to be taught in school”; we need to “fix
society”; transgender people need “human rights.”
She even wanted her possessions donated to a transgender “civil rights” group.
These are the words of a teen who thinks her own death is going to contribute to a cause.
If you think that finding a “community” online is always going to produce a positive outcome, think again.
Emotionally unstable teens may get some loving notes of support on
their Facebook pages, but they may also absorb the rants of activists
like Dan Savage.
And those impressionable teens may be inclined to believe that
they’re engaged in some kind of larger struggle — one for which they
should make the ultimate sacrifice.
*
http://nypost.com/2015/01/05/exploiting-tragedy-transgender-teens-suicide-poses-parenting-puzzles/
If you are wondering about how valid the 80% is. Here is an snippet of an
article.
At last year’s Gender Odyssey conference, where families with kids like mine gather from all corners of the country, I attended a talk given by Dr. Johanna Olson.
She works with transgender kids in Los Angeles. She’s a smart and
outspoken advocate for these children, and she’s been featured on
national TV talking about her work.
Here’s what she said: “The ‘80 percent’ statistic is based on a
flawed 2008 study done in the Netherlands.” She then described the
study, explaining that the researchers looked at young children who were
initially identified as transgender. It then checked back on them after
a year or so. But it lost track of a bunch of those kids. For some
reason, these kids didn’t come back for the follow-up research. So the
researchers made the assumption that these kids had reverted
back to their original gender. These kids were simply assumed to be not
transgender, and these kids created the “80 percent.”
Like all the stupid crap throughout the years written about lesbians, gays and bisexuals, the stupid is afoot in the hater world dealing with the transgender folk.
And then there is this, appropriately enough on Fox err
Faux News.
Heyer
also cited a Dutch study that said 61 percent of individuals who desire
a gender change are found to have secondary psychiatric disorders, such
as depression or dissociative disorder, which he suffered from.
Other critics asked whether Tommy’s same-sex parents may be unknowingly influencing his questions about his gender.
“Undue
influence on the child simply has to be ruled out,” said psychiatrist
Keith Ablow, a Fox News contributor. “It's the psychologically correct
thing to do, the ethical thing to do and the moral thing to do."
"Obviously,
when two females adopt a male child, then assert that the child is not
actually male, but is, instead, actually a female -- like both of them.
Everyone in the family should be psychologically evaluated in a
comprehensive way before a step like gender reassignment is considered,”
said Ablow.
This time, its blame the parents. And these are such easy targets for the hater baters, two lesbians who of course must have confused their child into thinking men are an unwanted species and so their wee laddie decided that it would be better to be a girl.
What this article skirts around is that yes, trans children of all ages have issues with secondary psychiatric disorders, ie depression, and why would that be? Hmm, could it be the fact that who they are isnt reflected in a mirror?
Like usual, Faux Newz takes a dash of actual statistics and stirs it well into their "articles" so that the unwary think they are getting an actual hard news piece. Yes, yes, they are watching/reading Faux Newz, but those who dont have their minds already closed to transgender children and adults how many would still have an open mind on this issue after finishing this article? Few to none I would imagine.
In 1973 the APA declassified being homosexual as a mental disorder, which helped immensely to win civil rights. That's what needs to happen for transgender/transsexuals now.
DSM-IV and DSM-IV-TR
Gender Identity Disorder in Adolescents and Adults replaced the term transsexualism. In the DSM-IV-TR,
GID is placed in the category of Sexual Disorders, with the subcategory
of Gender Identity Disorders. The names were changed in DSM-IV
to "Gender Identity Disorder in Children", "Gender Identity Disorder in
Adolescents or Adults", and "Gender Identity Disorder Not Otherwise
Specified".
As long as we are listed in a mental health guide book, we will be painted as mentally ill. While I do think its important for people to talk things through with an therapist before having reassignment surgery, I think its utter hogwash to make those wanting to transition to see a therapist before starting hormones.
The straw man arguments about men in dresses raping ladies and children in the bathrooms. The teenaged boys in school who just want to peek at naked girls and possibly sexually molest them in locker rooms and bathrooms canard. It all boils down to the same damned worn out shit that gay men have been painted with for years and years.....
