Interesting Links for 21-12-2025

[andrewducker]

1. Transgender kids change their minds only 6% of the time

(tags:LGBT transgender children psychology )

2. A train-sized tunnel is now carrying electricity under South London

(tags:electricity infrastructure tunnels London UK )

3. AI Chatbots Are Poisoning Research Archives With Fake Citations

(tags:AI research doom OhForFucksSake )

4. Italian bears living near villages have evolved to be smaller and less aggressive

(tags:bears evolution )

5. Santa Claus is still a woman

(tags:presents christmas women patriarchy society )

Comments

[cmcmck]

1 That sounds about right given that the satifaction level with transition is 94% and with GC surgery 95%.

[gingicat]

A trans nonbinary kid of my acquaintance is impatiently waiting for his beard to grow in so that he can go off T and get his feminine hips back. I don't think this counts as detransitioning, though :)

[cmcmck]

Reckon not! :o)

[andrewducker]

I wonder how long the beard will last

[juan_gandhi]

Regarding #4: probably the same on lake Tahoe, where a scared black bear sitting in a tree across the street from a grocery store only causes laughter, not fear.

[cmcmck]

Well, they are if you head the other way of course- I'm clean as a whistle facially after silly amounts of electrolysis in my late teens and early twenties.

[bens_dad]

1. So kids are unlikely to detransition, but not so unlikely that we can assume that they will not. This means that clinicians cannot go straight to treatments which encourage transition without risking harm to some.
Thus research to identify those who might or wont detransition would be useful, so that some could skip blockers and go straight to active treatments.

Is that not what Cass recommended ?
It is unfortunate that the poor state of care for (possibly or likely) trans children in the UK means that the effect of the Cass report has been to stop all blockers.

Of course this is 6% of those who socially transition, which will not include those who explore but don't reach that point.

[armiphlage]

1. And so what if people transition a second time, or a third or fourth time? People change, and should be able to be who they are at the current stage in their life. We don't consider it a criticism of the medical practice of treating low blood pressure if a percentage of the recipients later need medication for high blood pressure later in their life.

[andrewducker]

Treatments that encourage transition???

[cmcmck]

Absolutely!

[cmcmck]

Cass recommended no treatment for anyone.

There always have been those who explore but don't ever fully transition even after experimenting with blockers and I see nothing wrong with that.

I'm of a generation where blockers in the teens were simply not an option and the harm that the 'wrong ' puberty does and the damage that needs to then be undone is something I can speak to personally.

[bens_dad]

Cass recommended no treatment for anyone.

I have only looked at the Cass report, not read it.
However, in the long radio interview she gave, she recommended blockers where appropriate, but the need for research was so great that she recommended that all such treatment should be part of research.

I am aware that there is lots of research that blockers help many people, and that that seems to have been missed/ignored by the Cass report (and especially by the research survey group it relied upon), but I got the impression that she genuinely wanted to know who they helped and whether it was possibly to identify those who could go straight to more active treatment.

The effect of the Cass report is no treatment for anyone, but I do not believe that that was her intent.

[bens_dad]

I nearly said gender affirming treatment but that suggests treatment to stop transition. Promote has the same problem as encourage.

Can you phrase it better ?

[andrewducker]

"This means that clinicians cannot go straight to treatments which encourage transition without risking harm to some."

I'd go with "support".

And gender-affirming is generally treatment to support transition, as the phrase is mostly used to affirm the gender the person wishes to present as.

(It can be used for people who are present and identify in the same direction, but want to identify moreso - because they struggle to grow a moustache, or they grow breasts they don't want. But I rarely see the phrase used in that context.)

[bens_dad]

Ah. I would have said that blockers supported trans children; I was trying to distinguish between blockers which stop people growing the wrong way and things like hormones which actively move them the right way.

[andrewducker]

Ah, gotcha. I'm not sure I have a simple differentiator between those!

[cmcmck]

Well she approves of kids getting blockers for 'research' purposes and for all I've seen of what's intended, I'd label it child abuse and I know that of whish I speak as I spent 20 years working with abused kids!