How US right wing sites like Townhall censor the facts about being transgender

Townhall deleted my comments on what research really says about trans people.

I recently came over an article in the American Conservative news site Townhall. It has the promising headline “A Compassionate Response to The Transgender Issue”.   There was nothing compassionate about it. Indeed the whole article was designed to invalidate and marginalize transgender people

Most of the “facts” presented in the article was false or put in a misleading context. So I posted a comment presenting current research on each item, without using inflammatory language. It was deleted. I posted a new version (removing a paragraph on the dubious theology of the article), and it was deleted again. And then for a third time.

This does not mean that all comments in support of trans people where deleted. A short comment still remains, as do others, but a systematic, science based, refusal of the article’s arguments was clearly too much for them.

What this tells me is that facts still have power, even in this age of Putin and Trump. Some people fear the truth so much, that they have to hide it.

Here’s what I wrote:

“I posted a  response to this article with some actual facts about trans people, based on real research and with references to the medical community. Of all the comments here, that one was deleted, even though my tone was civil and respectful.

I expect people to disagree with me, but since this site is devoted to an open and democratic discussion, I do expect it to give transgender people room to defend themselves as the kind of aggressive and invalidating  arguments that have been posted in this thread.

Here are the facts, as given by scientists and other experts:

There is no research that shows that 90-95 percent of gender dysphoric kids “grow out of it”. Dr. Felipe Vizcarrondo of the American College of Pediatricians may be referring to the Steensma study of 2011 which alleges a 84 percent desistance rate.

Steensma later admitted, however, that they had been mixing up gender nonconforming kids with gender dysphoric kids. There are a lot of kids who display gender nonconforming behavior; that does not mean that they are gender dysphoric.

(The American psychiatric manual, the DSM-5, defines gender dysphoria as significant distress or problems functioning caused by a difference between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender. It is not classified as a mental illness.)

Dr. Steensma went back to the data in 2013 with this in mind, and found that gender dysphoria was a very good indicator for which children would eventually transition.

In other words: If a kid strongly and persistently argue that he or she is of the opposite gender, and suffer from being forced to live as their assigned gender, they are most likely of the gender they say they are.

This is obviously what most professionals in the field believe today, including the The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which is the main organization for pediatricians in the US.

Walt Heyer can in no way be considered representative for the transgender population. Until quite recently, nearly all trans kids were invalidated, harassed and oppressed if they came out to family and friends. The resilience of their gender identity, given these social and cultural conditions, gives you a clear indication of how real that core identity is.

There are other examples of “regretters”, who have detransitioned. That is to be expected, given how hard it can be to present as trans in a transphobic society. But there are very few of them. Research indicates regret rates of 1 to 2 percent among those who have transitioned. A recent Dutch study found that only 0.6% of trans women and 0.3% of trans men experienced regret.

It true that some 40 percent of trans people attempts suicide, but this number includes all those who have not transitioned. Those who have transitioned are no more likely to commit suicide than non-transgender people. Most of them report an significant increase in their quality of life after transitioning, and far fewer psychological problems.

The high suicide rate is caused by the way trans people are treated, not by their identity.”

Please note that not all Conservative sites or politicians behave in this way. I live in a country where a Conservative government is defending trans people.

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