Chloe’s case is a tragedy, for sure. The issue I have is that people are calling for bans rather than enhanced oversight.
Healthcare, at its core, is a numbers game. No effective treatment we’ve ever discovered is completely without risk. Every surgery or treatment, no matter how innocuous, could lead to complications or death. To use a recent example, the Covid vaccinations. They’re considered extremely safe, and over 13 billion vaccination doses have been given to date with over 5 billion people having been vaccinated. Given that Covid kills or permanently disables 2 in every 100 unvaccinated people, and vaccines lower that rate by at least 90%, that’s nearly 100 million lives that have been safeguarded by the vaccine. However, the vaccine has certainly harmed some people with extremely rare side effects. We accept that tradeoff, because saving 100 million lives is worth the risk of harming a few thousand people.
Gender affirming care for children is the same thing. We know that trans children are at extremely elevated risks of self harm and suicide, and gender affirming care is proven to be effective in preventing those outcomes. We know that some will regret their decision to transition because those cases are inevitable in any population that transitions. The focus should be on reducing the cases of regret with better screening and more oversight.
So, to debate this seriously, you need to answer the following question:
How many regretful de-transitioners are you willing to risk in order to save the lives of successful transitioners?
If the answer is zero, then you’re not willing to seriously debate the use of a medical treatment and your opinion is dogmatic and carries no semantic value.
If the answer is very few, then congratulations, you’re on the same side as many allies who want more funding for care and screening for trans issues.
Chloe would have likely been helped by more psychiatric care and screening, as from her story it’s clear that her sexual assault as a minor precipitated a complex regarding her sexuality that was misdiagnosed as a desire to transition.
The trick is to hire SEVERAL groups of people (read: wealth management advisor teams from major financial institutions) and let them each manage a $25M+ chunk of it. You’d want to have 2-3 different groups, and then a simple portfolio you manage yourself that trades in market-tracking ETFs and highly rated government bonds. That gives you the combination of excellent security with minimal personal maintenance. And you get all the perks of being a wealth management client from several large institutions like below-market loan rates and unique investment opportunities. Also, the really big institutions like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have lots of resources available for financial education for their wealth management clients.
That’s the best advice for someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing. Never give one person the keys to your entire net worth, THAT’S how wealthy people end up broke.
In this hypothetical, even if JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs collapsed or embezzled your funds (which is INCREDIBLY unlikely), you’d still have more than enough wealth to live comfortably for several lifetimes in your other accounts. Just make sure your accountant knows where everything is, because you don’t want to go to prison for tax evasion.