There is a government funded and insurance based industry being built around this insidious form of mental illness.
Unfortunately the foot in the door of parental rights in this country was planned parenthood providing birth control and abortions to underage women without parental consent.

I’m not sure how this ends. But the crazy train seems to have no driver, and no brakes.

First, [roller skating] is not a career.

It's amazing the things that one can actually make a career out of.

Do you think Tony Hawk's parents encouraged him to become a professional skateboarder. Yet, he's made millions at it.

There are professional video game players and bloggers today. Don't ask my why, or how.

Even YouTube and Instagram bloggers are making money at it.

Isn't capitalism great?

========================================

It was only then that Bell began to [realize] her problems were not caused by her body.

And now we're at the heart of the problems inherent in having a professional body dysphoria industry. The practitioners make money with "transitions," not counseling and patience.

Children should have a say in what happens to them, perhaps not up to veto power in all matters, but a say nonetheless.

However, psychological problems often manifest as problems in other areas of one's life. Bipolar people self-medicate and people think of them as alcoholics, that simply not-drinking is the answer. It is, but not the way in which people think it is.

What pre-pubescent child "likes" their situation? It's a stupid age in which everything "sucks." Who wants acne, hormonal rages, and uncontrollable bodily changes? Oooh, sign me up.

Some people would definitely benefit from hormone blockers and a full transition to the opposite sex. Others, however, may be grasping at a solution to a problem not yet fully understood.

Children, even teenagers, do not yet have a full vocabulary and an ability to fluently articulate feelings and issues. In fact, vocabulary skills do not peak until age 67.

Hence, they'll grasp at what seems to be a solution without being able to fully articulate the problem that this solution is supposed to solve.

The adults in the room may counsel patience and therapy, but puberty is on its inexorable way and something must be done now. Compounding the problem is that the understanding of this phenomenon by the adults in the room is still in its infancy.

There's no easy solution for those for whom a transition is truly warranted. Nor for those whose problems are masked as gender dysphoria.

Abigail Shrier was on a podcast a few months ago, reciting the litany of monstrous forces described here by Amy and by others. Shrier literally wrote the book on this, and a there came a moment when it was obvious I'd never have the stomach to read it...

This trend of trans kids, girls especially, is a social contagion. And youngster especially are susceptible to pressures and influences from social media, finding shame, comfort and motivation from the flippant thoughts of people they've never met.

Shrier noted that there are predators out there — older, male ones in online anonymity — who befriend these toddling teens in their moments of awkwardness, knowing that some of them will be ripe for intimate predation in the years just ahead.

Whelp, I thought, that shit's off the charts… Human nature is a monster, and as someone without kids, I can't imagine what advice to give to parents whose kids are feeling so very disaffected anyway.

And there's no clear way to decently warn children about the very real monsters in our world when their own parents are inviting so many oblivious zombies into their lives through schools and social media.

It's great not having kids. It's great not having kids.

All these so-called "professionals" had better realize that a parent's duty to protect their children means that that eventually (and it may take decades) these "professionals" are going to be hunted down and eliminated by parents mourning the damage being done to their children now.

If these "professionals" were at all intelligent, they would be a lot more hesitant to be saying the things they are saying now in public. Particularly about taking away parental rights. This stuff will be recorded evidence forever.

When the legal system fails, as it appears to be doing in this case, parents will solve the problem outside the legal system. And I'm rooting for them.

This is an example of why I find it so disheartening that we are constantly marinated in the message of "danger on the right." The left is barely held accountable for inviting real danger that dwarfs anything the right has been accused of.

Both my daughters are 12, and no they are not mature enough to make life altering decisions, especially irreparable biologically altering ones. Heck, I changed my major more than once as a young adult, let alone what is being advocated.

Yet there are many that will still vote democrat. Not that republicans are great, but the sure as hell aren't this bad.

Conan...well said. Teens are one thing, but kids younger than that find it harder to see the big picture - or imagine they'll ever change their minds. Also, teens are better at understanding that transitioning typically means never being able to reproduce, which makes them think, first.

Crid, in the 2009 book Two is Enough; A Couple's Guide to Living Childless by Choice by Laura S. Scott, on page 168, "Angie," who worked in public health (NOT with regard to trans kids, to my knowledge), was quoted as saying: "Despite the fact that some parents worked so hard to do everything right, in the end it was peer pressure and society that became the major influence. It was quite eye-opening." (She said it definitely had some impact on her view of parenthood.)

Isab: "Unfortunately the foot in the door of parental rights in this country was planned parenthood providing birth control and abortions to underage women without parental consent."

Two things:

1. The right-wing media typically have to search hard for women who regret their abortions. Why? Because girls and women who are likely to regret aborting don't have abortions in the first place, which is one reason so many teen girls are legally allowed to get them. In the same vein, last I heard, parents cannot legally force a teen daughter to surrender a newborn for adoption. Why? Because the vast majority of the girls and women who give birth without planning to, when single, DON'T choose adoption, since they know they'll likely regret it - and there's no shortage of sad and angry baby boomer women and older women who were forced by their parents to choose adoption.

2. It's been pointed out that once a girl has had sex, it's unrealistic to expect her to stop just because her doctor and/or parents refuse to help her get any truly efficient birth control. So, then she risks pregnancy, which means the adults in her life are aggravating the chances of an unwanted child. What good does that do? Especially once the unwanted baby is born? How is that fair to the baby?

> If these "professionals" were at
> all intelligent, they would be
> a lot more hesitant

It would be helpful if they were kinder, as well. More humble. More worldly. It's actually quite a list.

Lenona, adoption leaves ample room for regrets. The child is still "out there" somewhere, alive. In addition, the bonding that comes between a mother and child during pregnancy and childbirth progresses unabated.

Abortion leaves little room. There is no pregnancy and childbirth, so none of the bonding that occurs during those processes. In addition, the child was never born, so there is no imagining a child pining for his biological parents.

A while back, I read a Salon article by a woman who came close to regretting not giving her child up for adoption. She was poor and regretted that she was condemning her son to poverty by keeping him. She pointed out that adoptive parents must go through a screening process and giving her son up for adoption would have given him an express ticket to the middle class.

The article was a rebuttal to a New York Time Magazine article by James Traub saying that poor kids need middle class parenting. It comes across as defensive and a bit whiny, but raises some interesting points.

I remember that anti-abortion commercial from the '80s showing a woman displaying regret for having an abortion and missing out on the child she didn't have. In reality, I have met women who went through a wide range emotions following an abortion, but only one of them actually regretted it. She did it because she felt she was too young and the guy who got her pregnant would not have made a good father. She wanted to wait for the right person and the right time to have a child. As it turned out, those two elements never aligned and she said that if she'd known that was going to happen, she would have kept that child.

I remember that anti-abortion commercial from the '80s showing a woman displaying regret for having an abortion and missing out on the child she didn't have.
__________________________________

So do I.

And, IIRC, there was no claim that it was based on any true story. (It would have been far more memorable if there HAD been such a claim, in print. Makes one wonder why they didn't search harder to find at least two women like that, so they could make the number plural.)

From a letter to Utne Reader, Jan. 1992:

"...Every time I'm driving behind a car with a bumper sticker on it that says 'Adoption not abortion,' it's all I can do to keep myself from ramming into the back of the car. 21 years ago I, like Diana Selsor Edwards, unwillingly signed relinquishment papers giving up my child for adoption. I am 40 now, childless, and have never really recovered..."

The "Edwards" referred to is a mental health counselor. She wrote a 1995 paper: "Transformations of motherhood in adoption : the experiences of relinquishing mothers."

https://archive.org/stream/transformationso00edwa/transformationso00edwa_djvu.txt

Btw, when the parents of a teen girl want her to have an abortion, and she refuses, often the parents are shocked to find they CANNOT legally force her to abort.

Yet, interestingly, one never hears of any parent OR abortion-rights advocate demanding that parents be given that right.

Crid, I think it's no coincidence that polarization and the general level of insanity has come on the heels of the devaluation of humility as a virtue. A humbler population would tend to be kinder as well.

✔ Gene at July 15, 2021 9:45 AM

Fortunately, 🌟I🌟 was smart enough to recognize this all along!

🥇 👼 🏄‍♂️

> This ignores the fact that parents love their children and have a strong sense of what is in their best interests. Joanna Williams

Bless her heart. But we will always have statistical outliers:

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/13/facebook-promotes-videos-of-transgender-couple-pushing-their-newborn-to-suck-a-mans-chest/

That's Entertainment!

> She was poor and regretted that
> she was condemning her son to
> poverty by keeping him.

Being raised in wealth or in the aspiring middle class doesn't exactly punch your ticket. It was either Jordan or Harris who said that you're more likely to be doing well at forty if, at twenty, you have an additional 20 IQ points rather than 20 million in your checking account.

It would have been a fun truism to test, either way.

Alas....

...who said that you're more likely to be doing well at forty if, at twenty, you have an additional 20 IQ points rather than 20 million in your checking account. ~ Crid at July 15, 2021 10:29 AM

I'd agree with that. Some 20-year-olds can spend $20 million pretty quickly, and pretty stupidly.

On the other hand, poverty, with its attendant poor diet, poor education, poor health, and stress, can contribute to a reduction of IQ points. NPR reported that one study found it can contribute to a loss of "something like 13 points."

This mother's realization is that, by letting her son be adopted, she would have made him not only financially better off, but given him a less-stressful life with better schools, better healthcare, and, likely, a better diet. With adoption, he would have had role models and adults in his life that could help him find a job, find an apartment, and do the things that middle class children learn to do by watching the adults in their lives, things middle class parents take for granted their children will know how to do or figure out when the need arises.

Should we "help" anorexics to lose weight? Should we give bulimics drugs to help them throw up? If a child wants to be an amputee, should we just chop off a leg? Yet this is what they are asking. These changes are not reversible. Children have no idea what it means to be either a man or a woman. They may want to grow up to be a bulldozer or a dog. You can't take one wish seriously while ignoring how absurd their other wishes are.

By the way, girls these days can dress as men, act masculine, not wear makeup, and nothing bad will happen to them. Many women are in fact going around in jeans and t-shirts.

I have pointed out before that men cannot imagine what goes on inside women's heads (and we often comment on that to each other)--in what sense then could a man "feel" he is a woman? The "feelings" in particular are hormonal. Many trans m-to-f look and act like a cartoon of a woman, perhaps for this reason.

> NPR reported that one study
> found it can contribute to a
> loss of "something like
> 13 points."

Dear man...

Of course… NPR reported "that one study." Those words from Amy's blog comments leap out in neon…

Because the distinction between the mean of white and the mean of black IQ scores, as cited by Murray in his most recent book tour (i.e., in podcasts two weeks ago) is precisely thirteen points. The number he's cited used to be a little higher, but never any lower. If you know Charles Murray's career trajectory, you understand why he might be fastidious about citing only the strongest, most recent research.

Listen, I don't think anyone at NPR gives a rat's ass about black Americans. (Excuse me, Black Americans.) They just want to shuffle the language and punctuation around in a few trivial ways to convince themselves that they're truly clued into, and supportive of, the downtrodden down in the 'hood. They aren't.

I cut off the bottom half of this comment.

I hate the left.

Basically, Coney, in graf 3 at 1:01pm PST, you're talking about the mother's presumption, rather than her realization.

Personally I'm looking forward to Boston Dynamics creating Mombot3000 and putting these meth-addled chain-smoking baby-drowning morons out of business once and for all.

Then we can get on with the business of living in gleaming glass tubes, plugged into the Web 24/7.

Think of it: the Ivy League out of business, forever, as actual data is pumped into the brains of the young instead of faux issue-of-the-moment. No more Che Guevara tee-shirts, no more calling the janitor a Nazi.

> Boston Dynamics creating Mombot3000

And... Dancing!

Some years ago, a couple of twelve year old girls concluded Slenderman wanted them to murder somebody. They nearly did.
Getting a dumb idea off the dumber and more vile parts of the web and the slime trail of current culture isn't the same as figuring out, say, the Sermon on The Mount.

Lenona - statistics please.

There is a huuge cohort of womyn who have been cheated by the bait-and-switch of feminism. They aborted children to pursue more empowering goals, confident that they would have time in later life to find a partner if their caliber and have children.

And many never do "have it all".

This basically describes the plurality of college educated women in the last 2-3 decades.

So, sorry: the intertubes and left-leaning media are full of this group's agonising over fertility, egg freezing, why-won't-they-man-up, etc.

It's implausible that none of these gals regret their abortions... Along with their general regrets about the years wasted on the Promiscuity Carousel.

.... We are so often told that "crushing shame" keeps people from speaking out about their "oppression" by western cultural norms... And yet we see that the Progressive milieu is 1p times more visious in repressing dissent. Maybe that's what's limiting public expressions of regret over abortion.

"...forever, as actual data is pumped into the brains of the young instead of faux issue-of-the-moment. "

Aaaaa... guess who gets to determine what "actual data" is?

The same people who "counted the votes"?

"guess who gets to determine what "actual data" is?"

Me. I'll be in charge of that, along with baby names.

BenDavid, all I'm saying is:

1. I HAVE heard news stories of deformed teens/adults, telling their stories on stage, at rallies. Their mothers tried to abort them (either alone or via a back-alley quack, of course) and failed. However, I can't remember ANY news stories of women saying, at anti-abortion rallies, that they regret their abortions.

2. If women like that were at least somewhat easy to find, the anti-abortion movement would be only too happy to make them the mouthpieces of the movement, on a daily basis, since it would make the movement look more sympathetic to women.

3. Again, even a teen girl cannot be legally forced to have one, and even teens, these days, have heard of girls and women who raised babies with no help or sympathy from anyone, so, even a teen girl who chooses to have an abortion is not that likely to regret it. (Especially since giving birth is seriously dangerous for teens, and the odds would be against her ever finishing college if she did raise a kid.)

4. Because of all that, even a woman who DOES regret it is not likely to give support to those who want to make it ILLEGAL, per se. (Btw, there are even women who will say "abortion is fine for other women, but I wouldn't have one." Of course, those women aren't going to help to make it illegal either. Even women who were bullied into choosing abortion tend to blame the bullies rather than the fact that the clinic exists - or, again, they'd be trying to make it illegal, and we'd hear about it.)
_______________________________________

There is a huuge cohort of womyn who have been cheated by the bait-and-switch of feminism. They aborted children to pursue more empowering goals, confident that they would have time in later life to find a partner if their caliber and have children.
______________________________________

Huh? I don't get it. As Katha Pollitt wrote in 1994:

"...you don't find many 15-year-olds dropping out of the Dalton School to have babies. Girls with bright futures--college, jobs, travel--have abortions. It's the ones who have nothing to postpone who become mothers."

MY point is that conservatives supposedly despise single motherhood, but even THEY don't chant "adoption not abortion" as much as they used to. Women who give birth, liberal or conservative, won't stand being bullied into "choosing" adoption anymore. Even so, only a minority of women WANT to be single mothers, in part because even when they do plan it that way, but then decide to marry other men, stepfamilies are highly vulnerable to divorce - and then the women would be single mothers again.

Therefore, becoming a teen mother or an unwed adult mother is a great way NEVER to have a good marriage. Or a job you really like. Whereas, if a woman decides, in her 30s, that she wants a child more than she wants a spouse, she can likely adopt. If she really wants a spouse first, well, again, being a single mother would only make her less popular in the dating pool. If she's childless and can't get a spouse, maybe she's just plain unpopular. (But I personally think the main problems with American dating are Americans - and shallow American culture. I don't want to talk about TV or video games or technology or sports - and too many people can't imagine talking about anything else.)
__________________________________

And many never do "have it all".
__________________________________

I'd love to know the names of at least two famous feminists who ever DID claim, in so many words, that women could have it all. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton had her career, plus her many beloved children, but she admitted she was lucky.)

Besides, as many have pointed out by now, MEN have never "had it all," as a rule, since they couldn't spend as much time with their kids - and only in the last 50 years or so did they expect to have long lives.

To clarify: If a woman actually wants abortion to be illegal, but she HAD one as a teen or early adulthood and regretted it, it's hard to imagine why she'd keep quiet about it. After all, if MOST women who'd had abortions regretted it, there's almost no way that would still be a secret - and she would want everyone to know that most such women regretted it.

In the meantime, a great many clinic workers can tell you stories of women who demonstrate outside the clinic regularly - and then show up to HAVE abortions or to bring their daughters to have them. One saying to google is "the only moral abortion is my abortion."

Some stories (it says Canada, but many of the stories are from the U.S.):

https://www.prochoiceactionnetwork-canada.org/articles/anti-tales.shtml

"... if, at twenty, you have an additional 20 IQ points rather than 20 million in your checking account"

Twenty-year olds with 20 million in the bank don't usually live to make it to forty.

statistics please.
_____________________________

I don't know if there are any hard statistics from unbiased sources, but here are a few articles I found.

From Forbes:

"Women Overwhelmingly Don’t Regret Abortion, Research Finds. But Denying Them Care Is Costly."

From Healthline:

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/study-finds-99-of-women-say-they-do-not-regret-having-an-abortion

Quote:

"99% of women said having an abortion was the right choice 5 years later.
Certain states have started requiring waiting periods before having an abortion.
Some women do report feelings of guilt or sadness if they live in a community where abortion is stigmatized."

Both articles are from early 2020.

And those who criticize the study all seem to come from religious institutions of one kind or another.

Again, just because a woman might have regret doesn't mean she wants to make abortion HARDER to get - or that she would have been better off if she hadn't had one. (Just as it's too easy, when you're old, to wish you could have a grandchild to play with and then send home, it's too easy for a woman to imagine that unwed motherhood wouldn't have been so bad - when she's never experienced it.)

More from Katha Pollitt, years ago:

"The fact is, when your back is against the wall of unwanted pregnancy, it doesn't matter whether or not you think the fetus is a person. That's why, in this country, Roman Catholic women, who are less likely to use effective birth control, have a higher abortion rate than Jews or Protestants."

(If things have changed much in the last third of a century, since she wrote that, I'll be surprised.)

I know or knew three women who I know had abortions. All had the abortion when they were early to mid twenties.

One was like "it sucks but had to be done."

The other two I would describe as regretting it but no real strongly. One sounds likely she really wanted to have a child at that point and thought the guy would have an Ok father...but the father "disappeared" shortly after finding out and she didn't think she could handle a child alone...though now she thinks she could have...and has never ended up having a child...which she dearly wanted.

The third one a heard less of the story. She never had any kids. I have her say things like "maybe that was my chance and didn't take it. Maybe God is punishing me." Note that context is the only one I heard speak of God.

None of them would talk about it publicly.