Posted by
Joel Aaron on Tuesday, December 04, 2007 12:02:25 AM
Some experts say that kids are stretched to the breaking point these days and stand a 50-50 chance of attempting suicide before age 20 (in addition to the 70-30 chance that they will be misdiagnosed by an expert). Gender variance or gender identity disorder (GID) where a child doesn’t identify with his or her own biological sex, makes these statistics spike even higher during puberty among those children who fall in this category. Enter the neuroscientists and psychiatrists with a pharmaceutical rep to push a hormone blocker through Little Johnet’s derma layers and delay his-her physical maturity until either a) he’s old enough to emotionally handle becoming more womanly or b) pharmaceutical lobby reps succeed in arguing to legalize hormones that can aid LJ’s full transition to the opposite gender.
Should we artificially delay puberty for kids who don’t identify with their biological sex early-on? How did gender variant children cope up until this point before the birth of “Miracle Treatments”? (Perhaps parents chose the sexual development of their gender variant child during their child’s infancy and didn’t wait until the cusp of adolescence). And what happens if the psychiatrist misdiagnoses one of the many children who will more than likely grow out of this naturally?
There are a host of ethics questions here. If you’re doing tests to determine gender pre-dispositions, does it mean you are forcing gender stereotypes on people and what does THAT do to gender equality? “Identifying a condition” sounds like a scavenger hunt! Suggestions of societal conditioning as a cause-effect relationship are too indicting and uncomfortable anyway…(for the child, of course). Some doctors will tell me I am confusing several issues. If I am, then help me. If GID applies as a physiological disorder and not an emotional one aided by environmental conditions in which the child is raised (at least in part), then why are we waiting until the outset of puberty to begin diagnosis and treatment? And notwithstanding extreme cases (hermaphroditic, for example) how would we know whether the good intentions of the psychiatrists recommending hormone blockers on the basis of their diagnosis is not, in fact, exacerbating a non-existent problem? Is only science suitable for serious inquiry into what makes a man a man…or a man a woman, for that matter? What happens when the inquiry produces unsatisfactory results to an agenda driven testing process? Do you then “identify a condition”? When a "condition" is pronounced upon observing varying degrees of social development, one should be wary of jumping to conclusions.