"I think we spoke to more people on this story than any other story I can remember reporting on in my whole time at 60 Minutes," Stahl told 60 Minutes Overtime. "We wanted to be thorough. We wanted to be fair. And we wanted to understand every aspect of this story. And it was really focused on health care. That was the primary idea for the story. Health care... We were concerned that the groups that oppose transgender people might try to weaponize our story and use it against transgender people."
She sounds very defensive, and if you watch the report — here — you'll see why she's on edge. The part about the detransitioners is very powerful. We spend quite a bit of time with a young woman who had her breasts removed and a young man who had his testicles removed. Both of them realized afterward that they'd made a terrible mistake. Obviously, they received terrible health care, and the idea was to cover the problems in transgender health care. It took some courage to include them in the story, but, of course, "60 Minutes" is being criticized for that.
Alphonso David, an advocate for the transgender community, a LGBTQ civil rights lawyer, and the president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), told Stahl in an interview that he was concerned that reporting on those who choose to detransition could be "taken out of context [and] could further victimize and marginalize" the transgender community....
Stahl also interviewed Dr. Marci Bowers, a gynecologist who has performed more than 2,000 transgender surgeries and who transitioned herself in the 1990s. Bowers said that it is an issue if someone who transitioned comes to regret the decision, but noted that it does not "damn the entire process."
"What it should do is cause pause and reemphasize the fact that our informed consent model has to be very, very good," Bowers said. "And we also have to be certain that people who are providing care do so under the standards of care that have been established."
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Tree Joe writes:
TreeJoe.
The reaction to 60 minutes inclusion of de-transitioning by doctors and advocates supporting transgenderism indicates to me:
- They aren't trying to measure how often permanent surgeries/medications are used and then regretted. They are actively shying away from such statistics.
- Including de-transitioning stories is seen as marginalizing the Transgender community, but apparently working to exclude those stories isn't seen as marginalizing the community of those who see their own actions as a mistake?
- Considering the topics 60 minutes often covers, the following is an incredibly damaging statement made by Lesley Stahl - "I think we spoke to more people on this story than any other story I can remember reporting on in my whole time at 60 Minutes," Stahl told 60 Minutes Overtime.
Good on 60 minutes for seeking to present a balanced picture. Shame on the advocates who see transgenderism as unbridled good and not as permanent, life-altering decisions that may lead to negative outcomes. Much has been said of the suicide rate of those who describe themselves as transgender; what is the suicide rate of those who undergo transformative surgery or medication?
Sydney writes:
Your commenter asked about suicide rates in transgender patients after transitioning. Here is a link to a research paper that suggests it is much higher than the general population:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7317390/
The mean number of suicides in the trans population over a four year period was 40/100,000. The mean for the general population was 11/100,000. This included both medical and surgical transitioned.
There's no way to tell whether the suicide is the result of the original gender dysphoria or the regret over the transitioning.
Alex writes: "This is why legislatures are proactively taking steps like banning hormone treatments for kids: the activists will push hormones and permanent mutilation as an unbridled good, and bully the medical establishment into keeping quiet for fear of being called bigots."
The legislation has been about the hormones, but I think it's focusing on puberty-blocking drugs, isn't it? If so, isn't that an effort to prevent the *permanent* effects of the body's own puberty? The question of permanence seems important and multi-faceted.
LA Bob writes:
I tend to consider tats and piercings to be self-mutilation as a fashion statement. Transgender surgery is orders-of-magnitude more serious.
The transgender movement needs to learn from the body positivity movement. Love your body, even if it's not the body you wish you'd been born with.
Transgender surgery is self-mutilation as an illusion, a fantasy you can be someone you wish you were but are not. Many have such fantasies in many forms: dreams of being a great athlete, a powerful leader, an acclaimed actor or musician. Few cut themselves to pieces in a vain attempt to be other than themselves.
There's plenty of plastic surgery.
Also transgender people tend to say that they know who they really are, and most of us will agree, at least on a high level of generality, that the real person is what the person is on the inside. The question of why the inside needs to match the outside can still be raised, but why should the group limit the individual?
The answer needs to be that the medical procedure in question is unethical. Why aren't breast implants unethical? Why aren't nose jobs unethical? These things are based on a much shallower idea of wanting to transform into your idea of the ideal physical form of the real you that you are on the inside.
DDB writes that what Dr. Marci Bowers is saying "Is just CYA’s from possible med mal cases. And they will come."
Yes, that's the impression I got.
She has an immense professional and financial stake in the discussion. She herself has done thousands of sex-confirmation surgeries, and she assures us that *she* does it right. It made me wonder about all the surgeons who are coming onto the scene to deal with this pent-up demand. How good are they? I see a lot of bad plastic surgery on faces (which we get to look at), so I'm suspicious about how well this surgery is being done.
Bowers stresses "informed consent." We'll see how that works in the lawsuits.
Alex writes:
You wrote, "The legislation has been about the hormones, but I think it's focusing on puberty-blocking drugs, isn't it? If so, isn't that an effort to prevent the *permanent* effects of the body's own puberty? The question of permanence seems important and multi-faceted."
Part of the problem is that we don't know whether puberty blockers are truly temporary, or if the act of halting puberty by chemical means won't have irreversible effects on their body whether or not the child decides to transition. Additionally, there are the questions of the psychological effects. Puberty isn't simply about physical changes, but psychological and emotional changes, often driven by and in conjunction with the changes to a child's body. Stopping a boy from becoming a man doesn't make him into a girl, it merely keeps him a boy in certain ways far longer than his peers.
Considering the complex system that is the human body, I think it's horrifyingly presumptuous to assume that we can treat the human body as a DVD player and hit the "stop" button casually without long-term consequences. And if there are long-term consequences for either decision, then it becomes more important to have an honest assessment of whether or not a child is truly "trans" or if such feelings will disappear over time. But again, we get to the problem that trans activists aren't interested in such a conversation, but instead want full-throated endorsements from the medical profession and society at large.
Whatever happens in a young person's life is going to permanently affect him/her. That's what I mean by the complexity of permanence. But you're making the move of switching the topic from permanence to naturalness. It's pretty easy to say that whatever nature offers is presumptively the better option, but I was asking people to think about permanence as a separate matter.
MikeR writes:
There was a period of time (a few years, a few more years ago) when Hopkins stopped doing transgender transition surgery, ostensibly because of the huge number of psychological problems they found that their patients had afterwards. That was the story when I was there regularly, don't know what happened after that to change their minds.
Part of what [makes] these questions so difficult is that with any population that has such a huge suicide rate *regardless* of what they do medically - one would normally wonder hard if they are competent to be making these decisions.
l think that until recently everyone felt sorry for people in that kind of bind. Probably no longer allowed. Anyone remember "Children of a Lesser God"?
I don't like the role that threats of suicide are playing in the argument about medical ethics. It shouldn't be that lower standards of what is good medicine can apply because the patient is likely to commit suicide. Suicide isn't that likely, is it? And for those in the group who are suicidal without the treatment, do we know that the treatment will pull them back from the edge or send them further along?
It reminds me of the "right to try" regulations about experimental drugs and dying patients. The ethics change because the person is already on track toward death because of some physical disease.
Zev writes: "For the commenter who wondered about the change at Johns Hopkins, this article:"
https://www.baltimoresun.com/health/bal-johns-hopkins-transgender-20170406-story.html
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