Transgender and Intersex Kids Must Have a Voice in Health Care Decisions

Scott Nass
thenation.com
Originally posted 13 Feb 20

Here is an excerpt:

We physicians are not allowed to take critical care away from patients, nor to force interventions on them, just because their bodies and needs don’t fit our personal expectations of “normal.” That’s not a part of our oath. Prioritizing patients means focusing on what they say they need, supporting each patient and their family in age-appropriate ways. The answer is very simple: Individuals must take the lead in making decisions about their own bodies.

Just because individuals are minors now does not mean they won’t have wishes for their bodies in the future. Transgender and intersex youth grow up. When they are denied their own choices, families bear the resulting stress and trauma.

If you don’t know any transgender or intersex kids, it may feel easy to shrug this off. But this is about more than just a few bad bills. Intersex and transgender children’s bodies are being used to uphold regressive ideas about gender’s being based on anatomy and fixed at birth, with medicine used to enforce rather than affirm.

It’s clear to me, as a physician who helps intersex and transgender children live healthy lives, that those who supported the South Dakota bill are putting youth at risk. Nearly 45 percent of transgender youth considered suicide in 2017, according to the Trevor Project. Those numbers are highest when children are not allowed to affirm their gender. Of intersex children who had infant clitoral surgery, 39 percent could not achieve orgasm as adults, compared to 0 percent in a control group. Many families are never told about these types of risks.

The info is here.

Cognitive science suggests Trump makes us more accepting of the morally outrageous

Joshua Knobe
Vox.com
Updated January 10, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

At the core of this research is a very simple idea: When people are reasoning, they tend to think only about a relatively narrow range of possibilities. You are sitting there in a restaurant, trying to decide what to order. Almost immediately, you determine that you are going to get either the chocolate cake or the cheese plate. You then start to consider the merits and drawbacks of each option. "Should I get the chocolate cake? Nah, too many carbs. Better get the cheese plate." One important question about human cognition is how people end up choosing one option over the other in a case like this.

But there is another question here that is even more fundamental — so fundamental that it’s easy to overlook. How did you pick out those two options in the first place? After all, there’s an enormous range of other options that would, at least in principle, have been possible. You could have stormed into the kitchen and started eating directly out of the chef's saucepan. You could have reached under the table and started trying to eat your own shoe. Yet somehow you manage to reject all of these possibilities before the reasoning process even begins. It’s not as though you think, "Should I try to eat my shoe? No, it’s not very tasty, or even edible." Rather, possibilities like this one never even enter your reasoning at all.

This is where the notion of normality plays its most essential role. Of all the zillions of things that might be possible in principle, your mind is able to zero in on just a few specific possibilities, completely ignoring all the others. One aim of recent research has been to figure out how people do this. Though the research itself has been quite complex, the key conclusion is surprisingly straightforward: People show an impressive systematic tendency to completely ignore the possibilities they see as abnormal.

The article is here.