Eleftheros

As has also been posted in this thread, "very rare" is a vague and subjective term, even if you accept that this form of butchery should be permitted at all. Go back and look at the JAMA data to see whether it fits your criteria of "very rare". It doesn't fit mine. And as has also been posted in this thread, there are no long-term data tracking the rates of suicide among post-treatment children. In fact, there can be no long-term data, since the industry at it exists today has only been operating for somewhere around 10 years in the US with the majority of treatments taking place in the last 3 or 4 years. That is even without the difficulty of actually obtaining accurate statistics on the subject, even over the short time period that is available. In short, I reject both your assertions as "mostly false", as the fact-checkers would say.

One of the main reasons offered up in favour of "gender-affirming" child mutilation is that it could help to reduce the enormously high rate of suicide among young people with "gender dysphoria".

I'm not sure that blanket statement quite works. From what I understand, Indochina was covered by what are described as "Indianized" kingdoms, but whether that implies a large influx of people we would describe as "Indian", I don't know. Also, who were those Indians - Indo-Aryans or Dravidians? One interesting line of research is the Cham people of Vietnam, a supposedly South Asian group who, via a circuitous route via Borneo and Taiwan, ended up in coastal Vietnam where they formed the Champa "Indianized" kingdom. There's still a handful of them in HCMC, and they look, well, perhaps less Sinitic than the Viets, though not noticeably "Indian". It seems possible that back then in this region there was an Indian ruling caste and a huge indigenous peasant population - maybe that's how they got Angkor Wat built.

Facts are what the skepticism is based on. There's an important difference between "facts", and what "fact-checkers" say.

I don't know if you're referring to work being done to try to prove there is a "transgender brain" due to unusual conditions in utero, but my understanding is they haven't got very far yet. If transgenderism were a biological phenomenon, then we would expect to see its presence throughout history at a steady rate, rather than the explosive growth that has accompanied the rise of the "gender-affirming" industry. Not through arbitrary markers such as dress and style, but through acknowledged concomitants such as a massively raised suicide rate, which has seen explosive growth in young people in the past few years in the US, (though not so much in other countries). It seems, therefore, that transgenderism is a social and cultural phenomenon rather than a neurological one. I imagine, though, that the "gender-affirming" industry would rather it could be traced to neurological sources, and I expect that they are "doing the work" right now.

Let's say that I have a healthy and well-earned skepticism about large medical companies spruiking their own products.

1. Most mental health disorders do not stem from neurological disorders - they have a psychiatric rather than neurological basis. 2. I don't think any legal barriers should be placed in the way of adults who want to transform their body to their own specification.

Ah, the fabulous self-styled "fact-checkers" again. As they have earned no right to credibility, nor do the people they recommend. They are not "credible" sources, but rather sources for the credulous.

Don't judge other people by your own standards.

My apologies, I didn't realize you needed the word sourced.

Yes, you're right. The old jokes are the best ones. With the best will in the world, and with my best diversity, equity and inclusion hat on, I can't figure out what point you are trying to make. If by "anti-trans" you mean opposing the chemical and physical mutilation of minors, then I certainly fit your definition, along with detesting the large and rapidly growing industry which urges and promotes those procedures and politicians who legislate in favor of these procedures. In that case, I am proud to be "anti-trans", and I wonder how the supporters of that industry can possibly feel similar pride in their stance.

Be a good citizen. Question nothing. Get in line. Do as we say. Roll over. Sit up and beg.

After the last 3 years of mistakes, misstatements, omissions, lies, half-truths and other nonsense, trust in "experts" across the world is at an all-time low. No wonder the general public take-up of this unending series of "booster" shots is in the toilet.

It's a bottom line about as reliable as Sam Bankman-Fried's.

"Over-generalization"? A hilarious misstatement on your part, to be as charitable as possible. If a vaccine is absolutely guaranteed 100% effective, then authorities at least have a plausible basis on which to demand mandates that people get vaccines for the public good. But if they are anything short of 100% effective - which they were - then even that flimsy basis for ignoring people's civil liberties and human rights vanishes. The government knew that the vaccines did not stop infection and transmission 100%, yet imposed the mandates anyway. Mandates therefore could nothing whatever to do with protecting public health, and were all about political agendas, the natures of which are various, but certainly enacted in bad faith as regards the public.

Not just mine, but that of tens of millions of Americans. A wound that will not easily be healed, and one that is likely to be far more damaging to the country than any speculative number of lives his lying might have "saved".

A constitution is supposed to be a bedrock document for how a country operates. The idea of a constitution loses all meaning if, like Thailand, you change the constitution more often than most people change their mobile phone.

How could he make such a bloomer?

Massive harm. Trust takes a long time to build, and a very short time to break. When people come to understand that their government is lying to them, they will seek other forms of authority to follow, some of which may be even worse than the government itself.

Is that the new standard for statements by the US President? "He talked nonsense, but what harm did it do exactly?" The harm caused is that when statements by those in power are revealed to be false, people lose trust in the official position, look to find some solid ground elsewhere, and are therefore more susceptible to fall into those conspiracy theories which are so much in vogue these days. It's understandable; if the people in power are talking arrant BS, you look elsewhere to try to find something that you feel makes more sense.

Then, as president of the USA, with the biggest global platform possible, he should have kept his mouth shut. Unless, of course, he had been briefed by medical "experts" or bureaucrats before he spoke. And then he should have kept his mouth shut, as things turned out.

They don't "verify" anything, except the fact that if you put certain parameters into a computer model, you get certain results out. The idea of computer modelling being able to predict things has a kind of magical allure for the ignorant, which is why it is used so often, and so disastrously, by governments.

And so, a mere trickle of people are still being assessed of dying of Covid. Perhaps the Australian government would be better off asking why the overall excess mortality rate in the country stands at 13% in 2023, which translates to 10,289 extra deaths which are not accounted for in the first 8 months of the year. Excess mortality rates have been way above the baseline since Jan. 2022, only a minor share of which can be linked to Covid (under 3% in 2023), but State and Federal governments alike seem not to care about this. Such is the nature of government these days, it seems.

Two utterly pointless studies based on those same sort of catastrophic computer models which got us into this mess in the first place. And that's compounded by the inconvenient fact that defining a "Covid death" is in itself a pointlessly vague and arbitrary exercise. The definition of "a vaccinated individual" has in itself being carefully curated to include people who have been vaccinated, but not too long ago. So they estimate a vague "Covid death rate" in the "unvaccinated", then they estimate a vague "Covid death rate" for the "vaccinated", find the difference and multiply by the population size. Lo and behold, just the result they wanted - wonder vaccines save the world! These "studies' serve no purpose but to placate the gullible and puff up their sense of moral superiority.

It would have been better if prominent politicians, bureaucrats and media types had done their homework in 2020 and not publicly stated ad nauseam that getting the jab will stop you getting Covid.