Dave Chappelle has released a new Netflix special, The Dreamer, which is full of jokes about the trans community and disabled people.
“I love punching down!” he tells the audience, in a one-hour show that landed on the streaming service today (31 December).
It’s his seventh special for Netflix and comes two years after his last one, the highly controversial release The Closer.
That programme was criticised for its relentless jokes about the trans community, and Chappelle revisits the topic in his new show.
He tells jokes about trans women in prison, and about trans people “pretending” to be somebody they are not.
So you’re saying if we had a set of identical twins and only one of them was on hormone blockers until they were 20, their body would grow to look exactly the same as the twin who wasn’t on the blockers?
Obviously not the same, but very close. And you’re still choosing to ignore the fact that you’re taking away the choice from the kid who’s telling you that they’re not or don’t want to be a girl or boy, therefore imposing your own choice on them.
You’ve changed my opinion enough for me to believe that in rare circumstances hormone blockers could be okay. But I don’t think it should be the child or the parents decision. It should be a psychological professional that decides. If the kid goes to therapy every month/week from the time they decide they are in the wrong body until they would need the drugs and the medical professionals decides it’s more than consistent and not just a kid saying stupid shit then fine. But I’m just imagining me as a kid saying something like that then the adults in my life changing me forever even though I didn’t really understand what I was saying. I said/believed a lot of stupid shit as a kid so the idea of my body changing forever because I said something, really scares me.
Keep in mind that hormone blockers are, obviously, gatekept by the requirement of a doctor actually prescribing them, most usually by requiring the kid to go through a psychological assessment that should help them get their ideas in order, so it is very difficult for a minor who doesn’t have a continued mismatch in their gender identity to actually receive any kind of hormone therapy they don’t need. Some data that points in the direction that these assessments can be done accurately is that the immense majority of kids who take hormone blockers go onto HRT as adults, so you can rest assured that the kids seeking these interventions are quite well aware of what they’re doing.
Have a good day.
Thank you for educating me instead of getting mad. I appreciate it. You have successfully changed my opinion on the matter.
The process you’ve described is basically the informed consent model used by the most lenient areas of the US for transgender care, and exactly the kind of process puberty blockers are used to support - they delay puberty until a kid is old enough to decide for themselves whether or not they want to go on HRT or let puberty happen naturally (usually at the age of 18), in which case all they have to do is stop taking the blockers. The issue with requiring that long wait time for puberty blockers themselves is that by the time somebody realizes they’re transgender, it’s usually because they’re suffering psychological harm from the effects of puberty.
If you’re 18+, in order to get HRT (which is different from puberty blockers), under an informed consent model you usually need: a written note from a therapist or psychologist saying that you’ve consistently had this desire/an official diagnosis of gender dysphoria for 2+ years, plus the written consent of at least 1 doctor who confirms that you have been informed of the effects of HRT and are still wanting to do it. Some states have a more relaxed model specifically for adults that just requires that their doctor has told them about the effects of HRT, but that’s the requirements in the states with the easiest regulations. If you start the process at an early age, your doctor might prescribe you HRT as early as 16 (usually in cases where patients have consistently said they’ve wanted HRT since prepubescence), but most often you have to wait until you’re 18. If you’re somewhere like the UK? Then you have to do all that, and be put on a potentially 8+ year long waiting list to see a doctor who can deny you with no justification, and a bunch of other hoops. At one point doctors could deny you if they didn’t think that you’d be hot as a woman.
There’s a lot of misinformation and half-truths surrounding puberty blockers (and transgender healthcare in general), but they were originally developed in the 70s and have been in regular use since the 80s to treat a condition known as precocious puberty - basically, when puberty happens at like age 6-10, which can have harmful effects on the body and cause psychological issues. People didn’t care until about 10-20 years ago when people realized they could also be used to delay puberty in transgender kids until they were old enough to decide for themselves and avoid potentially permanent unwanted changes to their body that could cost thousands of dollars in surgeries and medicine to change (not to mention years of therapy). An 18 year old girl can get breast implants or a full body tattoo on a whim, and nobody really cares. But the drug a minority is using to pause bodily changes that could potentially have a permanent negative effect on them? Suddenly it’s “untested” and “causes permanent harm to kids’ bodies” even though they’ve been in common use for 40+ years.
Thanks for more info, my opinion was definitely wrong and like I said to the other person, thanks for the education instead of judgment. I still don’t blame misinformed people for being scared though, because when you don’t know all the facts it seems completely wrong to alter a child who can’t make it’s own decisions.
I agree, that’s why it’s important to get the info out there. There’s so much scare-mongering involved over a minority of people who just want to be able to live their lives normally. If it can help you and the other people who might stumble across it to hear that science actually supports protecting trans people, with the evidence to back it up, then it’s worth writing it out.
Mainly because they’re a child. When I was a young kid I thought I was and acted like a dog. If my mom then got me a collar and only let me potty outside that would also be child abuse.
That being said you have opened my mind more and I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as I initially thought. I still don’t think it’s great though. I also think choosing not to give your kid hormone blockers definitely isn’t imposing a choice on them. It’s literally just letting their body do what is was always going to do.
It’s imposing a choice on them by letting a permanent change happen to them without their consent. Similar to circumcision on babies based on religion rather than for medical reasons. Just because it aligned with your sense of self doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be harmful for somebody else. For you, it was normal. For a transgender person, it could be like being the main character in a body horror movie. Watching your own body twist into something grotesque and alien while the people around you act bewildered at your distress.
Cleft lip and palate is also natural and “just letting their body do what it was always going to do”, but we still perform surgery on babies to fix it anyways and nobody would say that refusing to allow them to have that surgery wasn’t imposing a choice on them. Humanity has been defying nature since surgery was invented thousands of years ago. We were drilling holes into our heads to let the bad spirits out long before we started writing.