Rand Paul is Not Transphobic, Just Opposed to the Surgery and Hormone Pills.

american culture is now normalizing the
idea that minors can be given hormones to prevent their biological development of their secondary sexual characteristics dr levine you have supported both allowing minors to be given hormone blockers to prevent them from going through puberty as well as surgical destruction of a minor's genitalia like surgical mutilation hormonal interruption of puberty can permanently alter and prevent secondary sexual characteristics the american college of pediatricians reports that 80 to 95 percent of pre-pubertal children with gender dysphoria will exp experience resolution by late adolescents if not exposed to medical intervention and social affirmation dr levine do you believe that minors are capable of making such a life-changing decision as changing one's sex my name is elle i am a uh female to male to female d transitioner i recently detransitioned um probably like a little like a month and a half ago um and i've been actively living transitioned back de-transitioned into a woman for like two days now my name is jack and i am a female to male to female detransitioner so let's be a little more specific since you evaded the question do you support the government intervening to override the parent's consent to give a child puberty blockers cross-sex hormones and or amputation surgery of breast and genitalia you have said that you're willing to accelerate the protocols for street kids i'm alarmed that poor kids with no parents who are homeless and distraught you would just go through this and allow that to happen to a minor i would hope that you would have compassion for kyra bell who's a 23 year old girl who was confused with her identity at 14 she read on the internet about something about transsexuals she thought well maybe that's what i am she ended up getting these puberty blockers cross-sex hormones she had her breasts amputated but here's what ultimately she says now and this is a very insightful from decision from someone who made a mistake but was led to believe this was a good thing by the medical community i made a brash decision as a teenager as a lot of teenagers do trying to find confidence and happiness except now the rest of my life will be negatively affected she said adding that the medicalized gender transitioning was a very temporary superficial fix for a very complex identity issue what i'm alarmed at is that you're not willing to say absolutely minors shouldn't be making decisions to amputate their breast or to amputate their genitalia imagine how many girls have felt uncomfortable in their female bodies before growing into them and becoming strong confident women who are happy with themselves this is how it used to be before dysphoria was medicalized before women were told they could become medical professionals attributed my dysphoria to an innate identity the internet encouraged this my parents didn't know how to respond assuming the therapists and doctors would know better than to let a sixteen-year-old make the wrong life-altering decisions when you go into planned parenthood at least for me i went in and i signed like a little consent form they didn't really ask me any questions and they took a blood draw and then i scheduled to come back for two weeks later after the lab results had come in and get my prescription that was it um so my opinion first on all of that um i mean it must be nice to just be able to walk in and finally you know just say hey i want to start hormones now and then just kind of kick that off um although i will say that i mean with the whole just giving hormones to whoever walks in the door i mean i don't think is necessarily a good thing i'm alarmed that you won't say with certainty that minors should not have the ability to make the decision to take hormones that will affect them for the rest of their life will you make a more firm decision on whether or not minors should be involved in these decisions senator transgender medicine is a very complex and nuanced field and if confirmed to the position of assistant secretary of health i would certainly be pleased to come to your office and talk with you and your staff about the standards of care and the complexity of this field let it go into the record that the witness refused to answer the question i regret my double mastectomy more than i regret going on testosterone like if i had gone on testosterone and never had a double mastectomy i feel like i could almost reverse all the effects because you know my voice will always be deeper and i'll always have the body hair but at least i would have still had my whole body but parts of my body were cut off and when i look at myself in the mirror i feel mutilated and i don't mean that to be dramatic that's just genuinely how i feel like when i see myself naked it's like when i look at myself from the you know the rib cage down like the belly button down i feel like i look like a woman at least mostly but when i look at the rest of my body you know without my wig on and without my makeup and when i see my chest i i do feel like i look mutilated or like i feel like some kind of bad science experiment you know people ask me like do you regret it yes yes i regret it i think it's the stupidest thing i've ever done in my life i got very active in the trans communities on reddit um on twitter and spent most of my time online that didn't do anything in real life at all really i i didn't have any friends i didn't go to school at that point so the only people i really talked to on a daily basis were the people that i talked to online and that definitely didn't help um that didn't i i just i i was basically consumed by trans media online so it's deeply offensive uh to compare to general mutilation which is uh is not in reality of their own volition okay they do it to very young children uh it has no relationship to trans folks at all who are choosing to be who they actually are so what rand paul is saying is i don't really believe in freedom and i don't want you to follow your beliefs i want you to follow my beliefs my interpretation of my religion says you shouldn't do this so now i'm going to impose that on you because i never believed in america i never believed in freedom i never believed in equality and i most certainly did not believe in justice so i'm going to make the decisions for you and i'm going to impose my religion on you because i think saudi arabia has it right uh we should be a theocracy where we enforce fundamentalist religion on everyone else you want to make a decision to be the your true self rand paul hates freedom and he doesn't want you to be have that option and be an actual free american that's just a fact it's a fact i mean like when you go to the doctor and you want to get like a medication for something they don't just give it to you you know like they want to make sure that you're taking the right thing to help your specific needs about a year later i started testosterone i was 16. i had been going to a therapist who tried to tell me that she didn't want me to transition then i went to a therapist from the lgbt center who told me that she was ready to get me on hormones from day one i was able to have a double mastectomy because i had one appointment with a therapist who diagnosed me with gender dysphoria i saw him one time i believe i was 16 years old i could have been 15 but i'm pretty sure i was 16. i don't know we must have talked for only like 45 minutes or something like that and he diagnosed me with severe depression i still have like the diagnosis paper severe depression severe anxiety and gender dysphoria and um that was a piece of paper that allowed me to go on testosterone and that was a piece of paper that allowed me to have a double mastectomy at 19 years old 18 years old so with planned parenthood just kind of willy-nilly you know just almost handing out hormones like candy to anybody who walks in the door you know regardless if you're actually transgender or not or just confused or whatnot um i mean i feel is almost almost disrespectful to people who are actually transgender they're trained medical professionals i mean shouldn't they be asking you more questions and like taking more care to give you what you actually need genital mutilation has been nearly universally condemned genital mutilation has been condemned by the who the united nations children's fund the united nations population fund he loves saying the term genital mutilation and he loves citing like wh o and uh un studies the general mutilation that they're talking about is like fgm it's it's it is mutilating the genitals of women so they cannot ever enjoy intercourse at all it is horrible and he is using it as a way to say like i'm sorry if you have gender dysmorphia i don't care and i don't want to uh you know honor the the the way science is set up right now medicine is set up so that we can not shut people down and and if they are insistent on eventually as miners still uh trying to get that uh you know hormone therapy then we can they they handle it that way i mean when you're just handing out hormones to anybody who wants them i mean you're bound to be giving it to somebody who shouldn't be taking hormones like myself or somebody else who detransitioned i mean the more people you just hand it out to i mean that's just going to be more detransitioners down the line somebody quoted my tweet and said to any women out there how did you feel about your body when you were 14 were you comfortable in it why are we encouraging teen girls to believe their bodies are wrong somebody says very uncomfortable in my own skin hated my periods wanted to be a boy because they didn't have to go through that every month very happy to be a woman now hating your period is such a universal female experience that is not talked about women have been feeling like this since the beginning of time i feel like i feel like teenage girls especially like in this generation are being told that they can opt out of this of all of this womanhood of expectations of society looking a certain way you can just opt out by changing the way that you identify there are so many young teen girls right now who are identifying as men because of this so many young women who don't want attention from men who don't want to deal with growing into an adult woman because of everything that you're told that means you can just say no i'm not a woman i'm a guy i had the surgery well actually let me back up i had a consultation um and my mom drove me to have a consultation and i probably saw the surgeon for maybe 10 or 15 minutes basically what happened was he walked in my shirt was off it was extremely uncomfortable he touched my breast he looked at my breasts we took photos like one facing to the side one facing to the front and then he was like okay we're good and i didn't see him again i just saw the nurses and anesthesiologists and they rolled me back and put me under and when i woke up my breast was gone um and i remember waking up and being in extreme pain the feelings of dysphoria were never there until i started having sex with a woman and i think that should have been a big red flag for me but i just didn't know i wasn't aware of what the criteria that should be meant for someone to be considered transgender and so when i came out to my mom she was like well are you sure and i was like yeah even though i don't think i was sure i'm really in bed being like well am i sure i wasn't um but i was so stubborn such a stubborn person that once i had decided on something like once i decided i am trans i was like well there's no going back and this is what we're doing now but the thing was like i couldn't reach for a plate in the cabinet to feed myself without the pain or like it was really hard for me to take a shower by myself like i really needed someone to help me and for a little while like they were willing to help me but then after some time you know maybe like the first week it kind of seemed like they were really irritated so i had a really really difficult time and i was out of work for six weeks and i could only sleep on my back and i remember not feeling anything i did not feel happy about having a double mastectomy like i don't want to say i felt sad about it but it was more like i didn't feel anything eventually i went back to work but i was still experiencing like a lot of pain and i was having i basically went immediately back to doing all this physical work because my job was basically like to throw stuff around and it would hurt me so much like i would pick up these 50 pound boxes and like throw these bags of potatoes and stuff and i would just be in so much pain like there was a few times where there was like a center island in the middle of the grocery store where i'd be with some of my co-workers it'd be like trimming vegetables or something and i would just be like keeled over on the floor in pain like i'm not a crier but i was like on the verge of tears because i was like hurting so much and my coworker was like are you okay like what can i do like they like didn't know what to do and i was like i'm really sorry like i just had reconstructive surgery like i just need a minute and i would just be literally huddled in a ball on a concrete floor at my job and i mean i think that as a doctor or some like people who are like trained medical professionals i mean you should be asking more questions instead of just having you walk in be like hey i'm transgender i want to take these and then then just like here take your prescription and get out and he's like we got our money dr levine gave the same answers to a barrage of accusations and questions from senator paul who was widely criticized on twitter i think he's a terribly misinformed and ill-educated on the subject of transgender medicine and surgery dr sherman lease is a world renowned transgender surgeon who operates in the philadelphia region he calls senator paul's comments discriminatory those remarks have nothing to do with with rachel levine who's a highly qualified physician the people who have reached out to me especially privately and told me about their regrets regarding surgery whether that be a mastectomy or any type of top surgery or hysterectomy or basically like any uh sex reassignment surgery or cross sex hormones like it made me a lot more upset than i thought it would and not in like a sadness type of way but like a very angry type of way like it made me really mad that this has happened to other people and doctors were just like yeah i'll take your money and i'll take out your organs but i mean i mean of course hindsight because i mean back when i wanted to take hormones i mean i thought planned parenthood oh my god this is like a godsend i mean i don't have to go because i didn't want to talk to a therapist um i mean so i don't have to jump through any hoops i don't have to do anything um i just walked in and got it and yes that's on me for not knowing what i wanted to do but i also feel like if it wasn't just as easy as just walking in and signing a form for something that permanently changes your body for essentially the rest of your life in some aspects um i think like if it wouldn't have been so easy for me to just walk in i don't think i probably would have transitioned because i think the longer i would have thought about it and given it more time to think and con given it more consideration i think i think it may have played a pact or a part and may have influenced me transitioning at all um if it just wasn't so easy just a willy nilly on impulse just go and decide to take hormones there is a currently popular catchphrase in politics and i'm concerned that it's going to become a thought-terminating cliche especially but not only on the left-wing end of the political spectrum the catchphrase i hear again and again is in reference to police reform police misconduct police violence that we should only listen to the voices of african-americans in reference to transgender people that we should only listen to and believe the voices of trans men and trans women themselves this is fundamentally incompatible not just with the concept of deliberative democracy it's also fundamentally incompatible with the concept of research itself in cambodia many decades ago there were violent calamitous disastrous events that today some people call the cambodian genocide some people might call it the cambodian holocaust or the cambodian civil war the cambodian famine you could say a little bit more neutrally the cambodian revolution do you think we should only trust and we should only listen to the voices of cambodians about what happened and why and that's an easy question because we're talking about something happened decades ago when i was a small child basically before many of you were born what about the current political situation in cambodia do you think we should only ask cambodians do you think there's some unique value in the perspective of a detached outsider in evaluating what went wrong in cambodia before decades ago and what's going wrong now if you want to bring about police reform reform to the way the police operate in the united states canada australia france england that is not a decision for black people to make a loan that is not a decision only for the victims of police brutality to make alone which are obviously a tiny minority of the black community and also there's a tiny minority of the white chinese first nations american india if you just gather together every person who had proven in court that they were the victim of police brutality or police harassment i don't know how many thousands or tens of thousands you get but then you'd have a very small minority and guess what they shouldn't make the decision they shouldn't write the legislation either if you actually believe in research i know it sounds ridiculous to say but this is a real question do you think that research could reveal facts yes or no do you think that a researcher could discover something that a native born cambodian themselves might not know might not appreciate do you think a researcher can discover something that a transgender person might not know or might not see the significance of if you don't if you think research just doesn't exist if you think it's like the tooth fairy that would be a very different view on some level to some extent everyone in this audience believes in research you just might not have thought through the implications because a researcher is not qualified to do that research by being cambodian a researcher is not qualified to do that research because they're black they're not qualified to do the research because they themselves are a victim of police brutality or police misconduct right you're qualified to be a researcher precisely by having the detached outsiders perspective having the integrity the commitment to the truth and so on that being a researcher entails and again i can sympathize but obviously if you are yourself personally the victim of police brutality the police kicked in the door of your house and killed one of your children or killed your husband or wife nobody expects you to have the detached perspective of a researcher and nobody expects you to write the legislation to come up with a new plan for what is the best decision not just for the police and not just for the victims and not just for black people but for all of us as a society right so there's a certain set of beliefs that include beliefs about research in terms of what deliberative democracy means not just in its process but in its outcomes if you really think it's inappropriate for a detached outsider to have a perspective on and to be advocating new laws and new policies on the hormone replacing therapy the drugs given to transgender people whittle me this do you think that only professional athletes should be allowed to vote on whether or not they get to use exogenous testosterone steroids or other performance enhancing drugs do you think there's a decision to be made there that's not just what would be convenient for the athletes themselves athletes who want to win in their sport they may want to look beautiful not all them may be athletes some people may be using steroids because they want to be in pornography they want to be models they want to be actors they want to be in the movies those people they may make one decision what's good for them right but you and i right now if you believe in deliberative democracy if you believe in research there's the possibility that we might know something we might learn something through investigation where we have to make a decision as for what's best for all of us as a society moving forward [Music] maybe we can we can practice