I agree with a lot of your points too Tiger, but a lot of it comes down to generalisations. 

Every specific child, teen or adult going through a transition will be in a totally different circumstance. Yes, there will be trans people who advocate for less stringent gender reinforcement, and celebrate support younger teens transitioning and perhaps it is too enthusiastic. But regardless of that I don't think the answer is Graham fuckin' Linehan.

Sadly I imagine a lot of concern comes from wanting to protect them from the harsh reality of the world.

If a 6 year old boy wants to be a girl then changes their mind 6 months later it's shouldn't be an issue, the brilliance of kids that age is that they will probably accept it.
They wouldn't bat an eyelid.
It's what happens later, if and when they get bullied for it in teenage years. Or the reactions of other parents who are ignorant enough to make it an issue.

Oh, absolutely not.

The problem there is society.

RedDave2 wrote:

On the toilet debate, and I realise that this isn't actually practical for older buildings, but surely get rid of urinals in public toilets and just go for unisex cubicles. I'm raging the money people in our restaurant didn't foot the extra money when we redid the bathrooms. It would have been easier from a usage point of view as well.

More than I thought here are toilets for everyone. They're often pretty big, sink and everything is in the same room. So regardless of who needs to use it, it's big enough for wheelchairs, kids, changing diapers etc. There's always soap and a trash bin available in the same place. This way a dad doesn't need to feel uncomfortable when only the female toilets have a diaper changing table. When my nephew was over (7 year old) he needed to go at some point and I went to look for a toilet with him. I waited outside the men's, but when he was taking longer than I expected I walked in to check on him. Got some weird looks.

It's so much easier for everyone. Also means you can just go for the first available in stead of feeling like a fool waiting for the women's to free up when there's no one at the men's.

I find the gender debate incredibly complicated, and I'm yet to meet anyone who leaves me feeling convinced of a specific answer.

One of the few things we can say fairly definitively is that there is a significantly higher risk of suicide in trans people - and that this unsurprisingly increases if they're not supported in that decision, feel harassed or discriminated against.  (So, yeah, Linehan is seriously not helping.)   It also goes up if they feel that it's obvious that they're trans. (Summary here if it helps.)  

Medicine being medicine, has tried to solve this problem by "fixing it" and making these individuals sex match their gender.  There's a strong argument that by doing this at a young age you address the problem before it tips into a significant risk (it's primarily young adults who are at the highest risk of suicide).  From a societal perspective it also means that these individuals have apparently the same sex and gender by the time that they reach an age where people are likely to be concerned about them entering shared bathrooms.

Which is fine, except I'm never quite convinced that the issue isn't at least partly more cultural than hard wired.  Certainly I've seen people who have gone into transition who have cited reasons that I guess I would describe as reflecting cultural expectations rather than strong desire for a physically different body.  (I have also seen people who have very, very clearly stated that they resent the fact their physical body reflects the "wrong" gender.)  Gender, to me, still feels very much like a social construct - but then I have the advantage of being a straight cis male, so I have very little reason to think otherwise.

Irrespective of whether gender is social or hard wired, ultimately a lot of the problems really relate, as ever, to patriarchal stuff, and that certainly is cultural.  The issue around toilets for instance comes down not just to the fact that women don't want men entering their bathrooms - but that they fundamentally feel a strong need to have some sort of women only safe space in most establishments.  A problem that cubicles alone doesn't solve.  A problem that's ultimately down to not being able to trust men not to be arseholes.

So for me, I appreciate the medical approach to trans people is probably the best answer we have at present, but only because everything else seems so irredeemably screwed up.  My worry though is that it runs the risk of reinforcing some of those gender roles in the future, by medicalising a social problem, and offering a "solution" that allows us to mostly dodge the altogether more difficult issues we have as a society.  (I'd add though that I know some trans people, including a member of my extended family, who would fiercely disagree with that viewpoint.)

The amendment at the bottom of the article sums the whole thing up.

This story has been amended. It previously said Mermaids was "campaigning to allow those under 16 to be able to undergo gender reassignment surgery", which it does not.

Lies from scumbags makes peoples lives worse should be the headline.

I cant say I understand it either, up to him of course but i agree, a good actor should be free to act in the role.
I look at Leto in Dallas Buyer's Club and struggle to see how that performance would be improved upon simply by the actor being trans.

It also kind of implies that in turn a gay actor can't play a straight character, which simply isn't true.

It's not something I'm going to get worked up over and it is down to individual actors and their choices, but it feels a bit of a non-subject.

Always seen it as more of an equaliser than “this is the only actor do the role!”

Gay and trans people don’t get a lot of roles, straight white folk get loads. Giving them opportunities to portray lives and characters that they have experiences in is a concession to them being frequently underrepresented elsewhere.

I assume it was Brooks who posted the baffle piece called daddy issues?

Good read.

https://thebaffler.com/all-tomorrows-parties/daddy-issues-frost

Hadn't posted but had read. I think invoking class appreciation re: how men do and don't misbehave is very important and a good thing to do.

Robert Webb now the latest to be torn apart.

At least the 'Are we the bad guys?'. gif is getting good use.

Oh, fair.

I've literally never seen him mention it.

EDIT: Trawled his twitter feed and found some bits from his book. Seemed innocuous stuff to me, but... I'm not well versed in the debates.