FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I want people who are indifferent, not allies who go out of their way to make me feel “accepted”.
That's fair. I sincerely apologise if I came off as hostile or defensive.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
A few months ago, as an exercise to familiarise myself with my new guitar, I recorded an arrangement of a piece of modern classical music with my brother. I finally finished mixing it over the weekend, and I think it's the best mix I've ever done.
Now to start working on the new album.
Friday is the deadline for the competition I want to submit my novel to, so I'm making my final edits.
Well, I do donate 10% of my post-tax income to charity, I have done for years, and none of that money has ever gone towards e.g. a think tank trying to combat the intrusion of gender ideology into schools. To the extent that this is my hobby horse, all I mean is that I sometimes discuss it on a pseudonymous internet forum and on my blog. Frankly, I think I have my priorities in order.
I certainly don't think I could be accused of taking on this hobby horse because it's "trendy". If anything I'd say it has more to do with my reflexive contrarian streak. I've been a "well actually" devil's advocate gadfly type for as long as I can remember.
But also, I personally want people to be less interested in trans issues
Why?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Where's @ymeskhout when you need him.
it’s hard for me to understand why if you don’t have a personal link to it.
I mean, sure, but lots of people get intensely emotionally invested in issues that have zero practical impact on their lives. I'd hazard a guess that an outright majority of Westerners attending pro-Palestine marches in the last two and a half years have never met a Palestinian or an Israeli, much less been to the region. In absolute terms, gender ideology has a minimal impact on my life, but it has a far greater impact on my life than the death of George Floyd had on any given Irish person, which didn't stop hundreds if not thousands of Irish people attending BLM protests at the height of Covid.
I've long felt that "why do you care about this, it doesn't even affect you" is a textbook Russell conjugation. Caring about the people affected by an issue, even if it doesn't affect me personally? I thought we used to call that "empathy".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
IIRC, men have a higher rate of being victims of violence than trans women?
Not sure about violence, but a per capita analysis shows that cis American men are more likely to be murdered that trans-identifying American males.
Clinton said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" in a court.
Maybe he said that in a court as well, but he also said it in a press conference. He was under no obligation to repeat the knowingly misleading answer he made in court outside of the courthouse.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
To the best of my knowledge, the defense has never been used successfully in the manner trans activists claim (that is, a person is being tried for murder, admits they killed the victim, but uses the trans panic defense and thereby secures an acquittal) – at the very least, not in a Western country. The Wikipedia article lists the states that have banned using it as a defense, but doesn't specify whether anyone had ever tried it in the states in question, and only lists four examples of people trying to use it in murder trials (which took place in Massachusetts, California, Colorado and New York).
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
How did transgender issues become your hobby horse?
There are a range of answers I could give to this question, some very flattering to me and my worldview, some much less so. The answer that feels most honest is that I have this thing where, when I see people proudly, confidently asserting things I know to be false (especially in a calculating, emotionally manipulative way), I feel this compulsion to push back and say no, that's not true, and I can prove it. Covid brought out the same compulsion in me. Basically this comic.
Another part of it is a sort of Emperor's new clothes/"are you seeing this shit?" effect, where something stands out to me plain as day, but it feels like everyone around me is tiptoeing around it and trying not to Notice™ or draw attention to it.
As a trans woman, I don’t avoid the men’s room because of the risk of violence, but to avoid unnecessary attention and disruption when I’m in a public place.
I commend your honesty.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I am a little confused as to how this fits into your argument.
Because it's a solution in search of a problem. Trans activists routinely claim that people have LITERALLY gotten away with murder by using this defense, and yet when pressed are unable to provide a single specific example of that happening.
The murder rate in the UK is so low that I find it entirely credible that every single murder will eventually be reported in the BBC.
Let's be exhaustive about Trans Crime UK's reliance on national vs. regional reporting, shall we?
- Their article on Karen Lawson includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Robert/Emma Page includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Craig Hudson includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Daniel Eastwood includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Nicolle/Kobi Earley includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Senthooran / Nina Kanagasingham includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Christopher/Crystal Hunnisett includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Richard McCabe / Melissa Young includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Peter Laing / Paris Green includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Alan Baker (#2)/Alex Stewart includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Christopher/Claire Darbyshire includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Kyle Lockwood / Kayleigh-Louise Woods includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Jenny Swift includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Gerald Matovu includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Rowan Thompson includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Scarlet Blake includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Bronwyn/Anarlyn Jones includes a BBC link.
- Their article on John Stuart/Joanna Rowland-Stuart includes a BBC link.
- Their article on Aurin Makepeace includes a BBC link.
The only murderer in the paper's dataset where the corresponding Trans Crime UK page doesn't include a BBC link is Samantha Read.
If your contention is that Trans Crime UK's statistics are artificially inflated by using stories that were reported on in regional news outlets but not national ones, that just doesn't seem to be the case: 95% of the murderers in the dataset were reported on in national news.
And, Remembering Our Dead does include at least one murder victim which was not reported on by the national broadcaster (Penny Port, which only contains a link to the Sheffield Unison), implying that, if there were more murder victims only reported on in regional but not national news, they would be more than happy to include them.
I genuinely don't understand what your objection is.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Cause as I explained in the other comment, the trans victims site is clearly based off of national reporting (cause if it wasn't, they should have had to verify elsewhere for some cases instead of it all being BBC) whereas the trans crime site was using regional outlets and non BBC sources.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
If you pull from two datasets and one is good to go from the start, and the other has to have half the data taken out, which dataset do you think had more bias put into it?
I genuinely don't think this matters provided you've gone to the trouble to properly vet and cleanse the data, which the authors explicitly have.
The trans site despite the submission model was clearly not used much and in actuality was pretty much entirely based off of national reporting
This does not appear to be true:
- The primary source for their article on Brianna Ghey is an article from the Liverpool Echo, and includes links to the Warrington Guardian, the Manchester Evening News and so on.
- Their article on Zen Black includes multiple links to the Belfast Telegraph.
- Their article on Naomi Hersi includes links to the Midsussex Times, the Worthing Herald and so on.
- The primary source for their article on Vanessa Santillan is an article from London Multimedia News (although the link now 404s).
- Their article on Chrissie Azzopardi includes a link to the Islington Gazette.
- Their article on Destiny Lauren includes a link to the Islington Gazette.
- Their article on Andrea Waddell includes a link to the Northern Echo.
- Their article on Penny Port only cites an article from the Sheffield Unison.
And so on and so forth, but I think I've made my point. Both Trans Crime and Remembering Our Dead rely on both national and regional reporting.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Things that bring some amount of shame to the family socially tend to not be covered accurately. In the same way that a lot of suicide victims are apparently just people who had an accident and addicts who overdose apparently just had some sort of health problem, a lot of trans victims just wouldn't be reported as such.
Ah, I see. We have no idea of the true rate of transphobic violence, because of how widespread transphobia is. This effectively means that "trans people face an elevated risk of violence and murder" is an unfalsifiable claim.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
The numbers for the trans site also don't look to be particularly accurate, they just seem to accept random user submissions.
From the study:
To independently verify each case, we searched the BBC news website for the individual’s name. Apart from the two earliest homicides with transgender perpetrators, every homicide was reported by the BBC.
That might be good hopes, but they should also have checked if it's even true. A quick look through the "transcrime" site shows they also just count men who crossdress.
From the study:
[Trans Crime UK] lists 37 cases since 2000, but the scope is broad. Firstly, it includes perpetrators who cross-dressed but did not otherwise exhibit a transgender identity. Roderick Deakin-White, for instance, beat his girlfriend to death following conflict over his wearing of women’s clothes, especially during sex. This ‘was something in which he found great solace and was soothing’, according to the clinical psychologist at his trial (BBC News 2019). Deakin-White falls under the classic ‘Transgender Umbrella’ circulated by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, which specifically includes transvestites, defined as ‘cross-dressing for emotional comfort’, as well as transvestic fetishists who wore clothes ‘for erotic purposes’ (Green 1994:68). Cross-dressers were similarly classified as transgender by the popular Gender Book on Tumblr (Hill and Mays 2013), by a leading British sociologist of gender (Hines 2007), and by Britain’s dominant LGBT advocacy organization (Stonewall 2020b). The government’s definition of transphobic hate crime also encompasses crossdressers (Home Office 2024). Remembering Our Dead’s list of victims in other countries does include some cross-dressers. Nevertheless, cross-dressers would not normally be identifiable among victims of homicide—this aspect of their life would not be reported in news of their death—and so they could not be counted as transgender victims. Therefore we omit crossdressers....
Furthermore, we applied uniform criteria to victims and perpetrators, hence the exclusion of cross-dressers from the list of perpetrators.
Consider reading the study before criticising it.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Are you referring to Male-to-Female trans people here?
No, the table lists the perpetrators' natal sex. (I wish we could just say "sex" rather than "natal sex": the sex you're born with is the sex you're stuck with.) Of the 20 transgender murderers, two were female (i.e. trans men).
[Yes, it's my monthly post about my hobby horse.]
Perhaps the most recurrent complaint made by the trans activist coalition is that transgender people in Western countries face an elevated risk of violence and murder, and that this increased risk is directly attributable to anti-trans bigotry. The Transgender Day of Remembrance is observed every November 20th, to memorialise those murdered as a result of transphobia. Organisations like Human Rights Watch claim that violence against trans people in the US has reached "epidemic" levels. A Trump-instated genocide of trans people is either claimed to be imminent or already ongoing, albeit in its "early stages" (conveniently). Various US states have passed laws banning defendants from using the "trans panic" defense (i.e. the defendant was so shocked upon discovering that an object of their sexual desire was transgender that they lost control of their faculties) in murder trials, under the historically dubious claim that this defense has resulted in vastly reduced sentences or even outright acquittals. The increased risk of violence and murder that trans people ostensibly face is sometimes used to justify other policy demands made by TRAs (e.g. trans women must be permitted to use ladies' bathrooms, because if they're forced to use the men's room they'll get beaten up).
Gender-criticals like myself routinely push back on these claims, pointing out that one cannot simply attribute every murder of a trans person to transphobia (any more than every murder of a white person can be attributed to anti-white animus): many of the victims touted by Human Rights Campaign were murdered by a close acquaintance or a domestic partner, and in some cases the perpetrator was also trans. Similarly, a disproportionate share of the cited murder victims are usually sex workers, an already at-risk demographic even leaving transgender identity aside. A simple per capita analysis indicates that, in Western countries, trans people face a vastly reduced risk of murder compared to the general population. A major limitation of the per capita approach, however, is uncertainty over both numerator and denominator: it's possible that there are some murder victims whose transgender identity was not made public knowledge, and getting hard data on the absolute number of trans people in a given country is remarkably difficult and dependent on inherently noisy methods like polls and surveys (which become all the noisier if the question is worded in such a way that it's likely to be misinterpreted by a non-native English speaker).
Two academics at the University of Oxford, Michael Biggs and Ace North* (!), have developed a novel method of investigating the claim that trans people face an elevated risk of violence: comparing the ratio of murder victims to murder perpetrators. If the ratio for a particular demographic is greater than 1, murder victims in that demographic outnumber murder perpetrators, and vice versa. If trans people in the UK face an elevated risk of violence, one would expect the ratio of victims to perpetrators to be greater than 1; if their risk of violence has reached "epidemic" levels, one would expect the ratio to be much higher than other demographics (such as female people).
One detail I particularly like is that the researchers sourced their figures for transgender murder victims from a trans activist website, while their figures for transgender murderers were sourced from a gender-critical website, in hopes that the two organisations' respective incentives to make each figure as high as possible would offset each other. To be as generous to the trans activist coalition as possible, the researchers disambiguated murderers who already identified as transgender prior to their arrest and those who only began doing so afterwards. After assembling a dataset of victims and perpetrators, the researchers analysed their respective media coverage in the national broadcaster, the BBC.
What did they find?
- Since the beginning of this century, the ratio of trans murder victims to perpetrators in the UK was 0.8: there have been more transgender murderers than murder victims.
- Transgender people follow the male pattern of homicide, rather than female. For all British males in the period, the ratio of murder victims to perpetrators was 0.7, while for British females it was 2.9 (i.e. even though women make up a minority of murder victims, they are three times more likely to be a murder victim than to commit a murder).
- The BBC covers trans murder victims far more extensively than it does trans murderers, with an average of 12.5 articles per victim vs. 3.9 per murderer. (The researchers acknowledge that the primary cause of this discrepancy is the single outlier case of Brianna Ghey, something of a man-bites-dog story as both victim and perpetrators were only sixteen at the time.) If a murder victim was transgender, this is usually mentioned prominently in the article, whereas a murderer's transgender identity is often not mentioned at all, or omitted from initial reporting and only stealth-edited in after complaints from readers.
Stray thoughts:
- I was surprised to find that the researchers' dataset of murder victims includes no female victims at all, while their dataset of murderers includes two female perpetrators.
- As noted above, sex workers are overrepresented among the victims, making up 36% thereof, and it appears that several were murdered by their johns. Likewise, many victims were murdered by friends, romantic partners or family members, which suggests that transphobic animus plays a minimal role in violence against trans people.
- While the number of male inmates in women's prisons ought to be zero, I am sympathetic (up to a point) to the idea that transgender inmates may face an increased risk of violence from their fellow inmates, and that they ought to be protected. (Some people think that extrajudicial violence from fellow inmates is just part-and-parcel of incarceration and if you can't do the time, don't do the crime: I am not one of those people.) However, I think the best way to accomplish this is by segregating violent offenders from non-violent (this is already the entire impetus behind minimum- and maximum-security prisons) and placing especially vulnerable prisoners on protection if necessary, on a case-by-case basis. @Celestial-body-NOS, while sensible enough to recognise that putting male inmates in the women's estate is a bad idea, thinks the best solution is to house all trans-identifying male inmates in a dedicated facility, lumping together those who've been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria with opportunists who only came out as trans post-conviction. I argued that, even from the narrow perspective of protecting transgender inmates, this policy proposal seems worse than mine: I'm not persuaded that the best way to ensure the safety of non-violent offenders who've identified as trans their entire lives is to house them in a facility with violent offenders who only started identifying as trans immediately prior to conviction. In light of this exchange, it was interesting to find that one of the murderers in the researchers' data set is Daniel (later Sophie) Eastwood, who was convicted of murdering a fellow inmate while serving a prison sentence for dangerous driving.
- The researchers compare their dataset with comparable data in the US, and find that trans people in the US face an elevated risk of murder compared to the UK. But the US has a higher murder rate than the UK in general, and this is probably primarily explicable by the proportion of the population which is black.
- The researchers compare their study with a Swedish study I've referred to many times, which followed trans people who medically transitioned over three decades, and found that trans-identifying men were twenty times more likely to be convicted of a crime than females, while trans-identifying females were ten times more likely to commit violent crimes than cis females of the same age (testosterone causing increased aggression?).
- The prominent mentioning of the victims' transgender identity and omitting of the perpetrators' transgender identity is not entirely attributable to editorial bias, and may be downstream of official guidance for judges in murder trials.
- Even some of the reporting about transgender murderers seems intended to promote the idea of trans people as uniquely oppressed and ostracised e.g. articles about Jenny Swift and Rowan Thompson emphasised their suicides in prison and only belatedly mentioned that they'd been convicted for murder, almost as an afterthought.
- As I recently complained about, several articles about transgender murderers referred to the perpetrators as "women" without any kind of qualification or disambiguation. These are not our crimes.
*Sounds like the name of an American character in an anime.
Drinking with a bunch of friends or at a bar is mostly pretty good, presuming you are capable of not overdoing it. Even going to a decent bar by yourself, where you are getting out of the house, and maybe have the opportunity to chat a little bit with a bartender or some other customers, or maybe possibly even make a friend or two, overrides the negative effect of the drinks and even of some not super great food.
Better still would be to go to the bar but stick to non-alcoholic beers, but I agree that the benefits of socialising with your friends would probably outweigh the costs of drinking a few alcoholic beverages.
Your latter paragraph is so important and I'm kicking myself for not including it in my original comment. Forcing yourself to take a shower, comb your hair and brush your teeth is absolutely vital for pulling yourself out of a slump, as is keeping your living space clean and tidy.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Reminded me of Scott's "Freedom on the Centralized Web". It's easy to say that private companies are under no obligation to host your conservative blog and can kick you off whenever they please. But if there isn't a robust ecosystem of competing firms, Amazon refusing to host certain kinds of political content (or payment processors refusing to process transactions for certain kinds of organisation) amounts to de facto total censorship.
Why so teetotaling here?
"Not drinking" makes for a good Schelling point. Notorious alcoholic and drug addict Matthew Perry (RIP) claimed that he can choose whether or not to have the first drink, but having had the first drink, every subsequent drink is entirely out of his hands. I don't believe this and agree with his interlocutor that he does have a choice about whether to drink the subsequent drinks: as Bryan Caplan would say, if Perry had one beer, and somebody put a gun to his head and told him they'd shoot him if he had another one, I'm sure he could summon the willpower to stop there. But that preamble aside, for most people, if you have one drink, the temptation to have another will be much greater compared to if you didn't have any. And two drinks turns into three, three turns into four, and before you know it it's the following morning and you're feeling like shit, much worse than you felt before you started drinking. Hence, the most effective way to prevent yourself from drinking to excess is simply not to start drinking in the first place, and not trusting yourself to have the self-control to only drink in moderation.
I appreciate that some of the below may seem obvious to the point of coming off as condescending, but the reason obvious advice is seen as obvious is because so much of the time it really works. I will be limiting myself to lifestyle choices you can do yourself without interacting with a healthcare professional or therapist. Ranked in order from most to least importance/effectiveness/relevance:
- Don't self-medicate: Alcohol, weed, whatever. All of it has to go. If you're already drinking so much that going cold turkey would trigger DTs, then you'll have to wean yourself off it slowly; if not, then you must stop drinking completely, immediately. Not even a glass of wine with dinner "for the antioxidants". If you have any drink in the house, pour it down the sink today. If you have weed in the house, destroy it. Don't give it to a friend to hang on to until you think you're in a better headspace: destroy it.
- Intense cardio exercise: By far the single most effective antidepressant I've ever tried, and I've tried many. I only got into running during Covid, and after a few weeks I found that going for a run (>=5k, or 3 miles) several times a week did wonders for my mood and energy levels. Having struggled with depressive episodes for many years, I was kicking myself for not trying this one sooner. But if you're going to try this, take it seriously and invest in a proper pair of running shoes and synthetic socks (the latter may not seem as important: believe me, it is, perhaps even more important than running shoes if you want to avoid nasty blisters). It may be a few weeks before you start to notice any change: give it time. (The last sentence applies to everything.) Regular cardio exercise will also help you to fall asleep more easily (see point #4).
- Eat, but don't eat shit: Some depressives lose their appetite; others eat their feelings. (I fall into the latter camp.) If you're in the former, you must make yourself eat even if you don't want to, so set alarms on your phone reminding yourself to eat at regular intervals. If you're in the latter camp, resist the temptation to eat shitty fast food/junk food: in addition to being bad for your body, you'll experience a comedown when the sugar rush wears off which will make you feel even worse than you did before you started eating. Conveniently, the solution to both "not eating" and "eating like shit" is the same: stock your kitchen with nourishing, healthy snacks that require minimal preparation (so you won't have the excuse of "I'm too tired to cook, I'll just [order a pizza]/[eat nothing]"): as Scott notes (Ctrl-F "2.1.2"), nuts are particularly well-suited to this purpose. Go to the supermarket and buy a few different kinds of nuts and several kinds of fruit. When you feel up to cooking again, eat plenty of green vegetables. Cut out junk food entirely: no ice cream, frozen pizza, chicken nuggets, fizzy drinks (incl. energy drinks). If you must drink caffeine, tea or coffee without sugar.
- Stick to a regular sleep schedule: When you're depressed, all you want to do is lie in bed all day and take endless naps. Force yourself not to. Don't drink any caffeine after noon. Stay awake till nine PM, at which point you put your phone away and don't look at it until the following morning (disable Wi-Fi and mobile data so you won't receive notifications). From nine–ten PM, read a physical book, not a Kindle or e-reader. You will probably not be in the mood to read a book, and derive no enjoyment from doing so: do it anyway. At ten PM, close your book and try to sleep. Stay in bed with the lights off until your alarm goes off. If you wake in the night (or can't get to sleep in the first place), resist the temptation to look at your phone, not even for "five minutes". Ideally, use a dedicated alarm clock so that you can leave your phone in another room, or at least out of reach of your bed. Even if you have trouble falling asleep, sticking to this routine will make your body associate the period 10 PM–7 AM with darkness and restfulness, so that when the insomnia passes you'll be out like a light.
- Minimise your phone usage: Once a day, go for a walk for at least an hour. Don't bring your phone with you. "But I need Google Maps to find my way—" you'll find your way home. Leave your phone at home.
- Socialise: My mother is significantly more introverted than I am and prefers to work remotely as much as possible. Nonetheless, she compared going into the office with working out: she dreads doing it, but never regrets having done so afterwards. No matter how introverted you are, or how much you "hate people", human beings are social animals, and there's a very good reason why solitary confinement is considered cruel and unusual punishment. We are meant to socialise, not just with the handful of people we call our loved ones, but with people we don't know very well, people we hardly recognise, people we actively dislike. The modern world makes it far too easy to isolate oneself, and just about anything you want can be ordered to your home without leaving the comfort of your bed. You must fight back against the luxuries. Don't apply for fully remote jobs. If you have a hybrid job and your boss says you only have to come in one day a week, make yourself go in two days a week; if he says two, do three. You won't want to do this, and you'll feel exhausted by the end of your morning commute, and you'll be dreading going in the night before. Do it anyway. It's no accident that the worst period of most people's lives in the last few years (including mine) was Covid. People told themselves that the reason Covid sucked was because they couldn't spend time with their friends and loved ones, and they couldn't go to gigs, and they couldn't go to the cinema. All of that is true: and yet, not going into the office and spending time with your colleagues (even your annoying colleague who types too loudly and chews with his mouth open) also had a negative impact on our moods and quality of life, even if it didn't feel like that, even if we told ourselves that fully remote working was the one silver lining to this awful cloud. It's not psychologically healthy to roll out of bed at 8:59 AM; it's not psychologically healthy to have nothing preventing you taking three naps a day (or more); it's not psychologically healthy to be able to crack open a beer at 5 PM on the dot, every day. There are people for whom Covid lockdowns and attendant fully remote working had no material impact on their lifestyles and quality of life. These are not psychologically healthy people.
- Don't use social media: I feel like this one is self-explanatory, but it would be remiss of me not to include it. Uninstall Instagram, Facebook, TikTok etc. from your phone. If you have friends you keep in touch with via any of these platforms, get their phone numbers so you can keep in touch via WhatsApp or similar. If you have an Android phone, uninstalling YouTube is a bit circuitous and you have to enable developer mode: do it, it's worth it. By "social media", I'm including LinkedIn: if you're looking for a job, then depending on the industry LinkedIn may be pretty much unavoidable, but at least limit your usage of it to your computer browser, and don't install the app on your phone. ("What if I get a message from a recruiter when I'm out, and I don't see it until I get home?" – an hour's delay in responding to a message is not going to make or break you landing your dream job. You know it, I know it, let's not kid ourselves.) The Motte doesn't have many of the worst features of social media, but it has enough of them that requesting the mods to temporarily ban you for a few weeks couldn't hurt.
- Don't watch porn: Some depressives lose their sex drive, some don't. If you're in the latter camp, don't watch porn. It will make you feel worse in the long run.
- Don't read the news: I don't care if you think you need to in order to stay informed on current affairs, or if you think your depression is an entirely logical reaction to how awful and unjust the world is (admittedly, the latter rationalisation is more common among left-leaning people than the kind of user who tends to frequent this space, but it's easy to unintentionally blackpill yourself). Don't read national or international news of any kind. Local news printed in an actual newspaper is probably okay, but if you want to read something, your first port of call should be a fictional book. When you're depressed, no hypothetical situation exists in which reading the news will improve your mood.
- Don't overthink: There was a period during Covid in which I was routinely self-administering depression questionnaires to myself (I'm not going to tell you what they're called, because then you'll start doing the same thing). It will come as no surprise to you that constantly asking myself "Am I depressed?" inevitably made me feel more depressed and anxious than I would have otherwise. The goal is not for you to wake up one morning and think "I don't feel depressed anymore": the goal is for you to wake up one morning and think "today I need to do X before lunch and then I have Y after lunch and I mustn't forget to do Z in the evening". Your mood shouldn't be something that you're consciously aware of: constantly asking yourself if you feel good or bad is a recipe for making yourself feel bad.
I have not followed all of the above advice consistently: I still drink too much, I still eat too much fast/junk food, my sleep schedule is far from consistent, I spend far too much time looking at my phone (including social media) and so on and so forth. But even following some of the above advice some of the time, my mood, energy levels and so on are leaps and bounds ahead of where they were during Covid, which in turn were leaps and bounds ahead of my worst depressive periods in 2015-17. For large chunks of the latter period, I was drinking too much, eating mountains of shitty fast food, never exercising, staring at my phone for hours, smoking weed several times a week, watching too much porn, taking naps whenever I could and shutting myself off from the outside world – and this was while taking antidepressants (in addition to antipsychotics, some of the time). We can play the chicken-and-egg game all we like, but what would it accomplish? Even if doing these things didn't make me depressed, I have little doubt that they exacerbated my depression. I still have days where I feel down, but they're nowhere near as bad as my worst days.
[This concludes the "advice" portion of my comment.]
To get philosophical for a minute: there are many people in the West who purport not to be religious, who purport not to believe in souls or Heaven or Hell or the rest of it – and yet many of these people still reflexively, unthinkingly adopt a worldview which is implicitly dualist. This comes out in many forms (per my recurrent hobby horse, "I don't believe in souls, I just believe that everyone has an innate gender identity unrelated to their physical sex and knowable only to themselves"), but perhaps the most common is a conception of mental health as something wholly uncoupled from their bodies and what goes into (and out of) them; mental illness as a disease of the mind, not a disease of the body. But we don't have minds: we have brains, and every mental sensation we feel is ultimately a set of neurons firing inside them. It therefore follows that all of our moods (incl. mood disorders) are ultimately products of i) our underlying neural architecture; ii) the mechanical processes our bodies undergo (digestion, hydration, cardiac exercise etc.) and iii) the sensory stimuli we experience*. Small children have to consciously learn the causal relationship between eating and needing to defecate the following day; even many adults don't drink enough water and wonder why they have headaches and feel nauseated all the time. And a great many adults have this implicitly dualistic conception of moods as things that just happen, independent of ii) and iii) above. (The more scientifically literate will simply overweight the role of i) while downplaying ii) and iii) to the point of complete negligence, insisting that their propensity for negative moods is just "how they're wired" or a "chemical imbalance".)
What all of my recommendations have in common is that they are designed to force you to recognise the importance of ii) and iii) in determining your moods. Scrolling on Instagram and watching porn will make you feel worse, regardless of your underlying neural architecture; eating healthy food and exercising will make you feel better. It is incredibly easy to rationalise away your depression as solely the product of i) and deny utterly the role that ii) and iii) play in determining it. I know a girl who has been diagnosed with depression and is taking antidepressants. What kind of lifestyle does she lead?
- She doesn't have a job (her parents pay for everything) and hence has no responsibilities to speak of
- She's in college but could hardly be said to be actively applying herself, and routinely sleeps in late and misses her classes
- She doesn't appear to know how to cook, and eats shitty fast food for every meal
- She never exercises, and with her slowing metabolism the latter two points are starting to become obvious
- She drinks too often, and too much
- She stays up late every night and sleeps in the next morning
- She never reads books, and spends hours watching Netflix or scrolling on her phone
- She doesn't have a boyfriend, but will often go to the pub, get drunk and let some man take her home and have his way with her, never to hear from him again
Is she "here for a good time, not for a long time"? No – every time I see her she moans about how depressed she is. Gee, I wonder why?
Sometimes this failure to draw reasonable causal inferences is the result of denial or motivated reasoning (e.g. the alcoholic who pretends not to know why he always feels depressed the morning after going on the piss) – but in other cases, people appear to have so totally internalised the idea of "mental health" as something distinct from "physical health" that they simply don't recognise a connection between the things they do and how they feel: bad moods just happen to them, for no reason. This was made most apparent to me in Theodore Darlymple's magisterial piece "The Rush from Judgement", which ought to be required reading for every would-be doctor, therapist or social welfare: so many of Darlymple's patients appeared to believe that they felt depressed because they suffered from a medical disorder, and simply failed to join the dots with the fact that their lives were depressing (as @self_made_human calls it, Shit Life Syndrome): if you don't have a job, are dependent on the state for everything, have no interests beyond watching TV or going to the pub, are in a relationship with a man who doesn't respect you and who hits you – is it any wonder you feel miserable all the time? Moreover, Darlymple prescribing these women antidepressants would not come close to addressing the root cause of said misery. If they wanted to not feel like shit all the time, they had to change their lifestyles – they had to change ii) and iii).
Darlymple's patients are extreme cases, but that failure-to-join-the-dots, that conception of bad moods and negative thoughts as things that just come upon you for no reason in particular (as opposed to the inevitable outcome of the mechanical processes your body undergoes, the sensory stimuli you take in and your underlying neural architecture) is something that afflicts even the educated and gainfully employed. I very much doubt Phoebe O'Brien attributes any of her negative emotions to the fact that she spends hours every day staring at her phone – it must be the "rise of the far-right" that's got her feeling down. Yeah, sure.
To clarify: am I saying that everyone who eats right, gets enough exercise, sticks to a proper sleep schedule and uninstalls Instagram will feel pretty much okay most of the time? No – I'm not denying that one's underlying neural architecture plays a role in one's mood, merely arguing that people overweight it relative to the other factors. And I'm sure someone will have a counter-example of a high-earning CEO who ran five miles every day, stuck to his macros, was 100% teetotal and still killed himself. But these counter-examples inevitably remind me of the obese people who talk about how Dr. So-and-So completely overlooked that Patient Such-and-Such had a tumour because they were convinced that Such-and-Such's health problems were caused solely by his weight. Mistakes can happen, on the margin, but the existence of people who eat right, get enough exercise, don't use social media and still feel depressed should not blind us to the fact that the average person doesn't eat right, doesn't get enough exercise and uses social media too much, and that most people would feel happier if they improved their diet, exercised more and used social media less.
*Really a subset of ii), but it's such an abstract framing that it's easier to understand if you uncouple them. "I saw a photo of an OnlyFans model on Instagram, which caused neurons to fire in my brain and in turn triggered a surge of blood into my penis resulting in an erection" is hardly an intuitive way to frame that sequence of events, even if it's literally true. It's mechanical processes all the way down.
Given how many men object to the slightest hint of femininity in a natal-anatomy!man, I suspect that they would.
I wouldn't expect men who "discovered" their trans identity immediately prior to being convicted of a violent crime to display any hints of femininity at all. Because they're not men who have been struggling with their gender identity from a very young age, but rather ordinary violent men taking advantage of a poorly-thought out policy.
I can imagine a man who has been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria and has been cross-dressing from a very young age might have a hard time in a men's prison. I have a hard time imagining that e.g. "Isla" Bryson would face an elevated risk of victimisation in a men's prison compared to the modal prisoner. Because he is a vicious, remorseless thug whose solicitor presumably advised him to take advantage of a poorly-thought out policy.
No, I understand that it is possible that a cis-man might falsely claim to be trans in order to be moved to the trans-women's section; I merely consider this a less bad outcome than abandoning actual trans-women to the ghastly fate to which your proposed policy would lead.
The fact that every policy implies trade-offs does not imply that all policies are created equal. A policy which is dramatically more likely to be abused by bad actors than to be used by those who legitimately need it is a bad policy on its face. The fact that doctors are allowed to administer morphine inevitably means that some drug addicts will be administered morphine who don't really need it – but a doctor who administers morphine to every patient who requests it, no questions asked, would quickly find the ratio of drug-seeking patients to the legitimately needy becoming unacceptably large. One of the many skills a doctor must learn is distinguishing the legitimately sick from the malingerers: a doctor who failed to learn this skill would be struck off, or ought to.
Your policy would not even accomplish its own stated aims: it does not even optimise for protecting the most vulnerable prisoners. It optimises, as I said, for protecting the prisoners willing to make unfalsifiable claims about their inner psychological states, with no gatekeeping of any kind. I simply don't understand your unquestioned belief that legitimately dysphoric prisoners would be safer if housed in a facility containing every prisoner who claims to identify as female, even if they only began doing so immediately prior to or after conviction. If you were a young man who'd been struggling with his gender identity for as long as you can remember and had partly medically transitioned, who would you rather share a cell with: a cisgender man who'd been convicted of tax evasion and who has never hurt a fly, or a vicious violent thug like "Isla" Bryson? I know how I'd pick.
I really do not how you arrived at your conclusion that the best way to protect legitimately dysphoric prisoners is to house them in a facility with every prisoner who claims to identify as female, even if they only began doing so very recently, even if they're violent offenders, even if they've been convicted of raping male victims. I genuinely don't know why you're patting yourself on the back about how compassionate your proposed policy is when to my mind it seems obviously worse at your stated aim of protecting female-presenting male prisoners, when compared to offering "focused protection" of the most vulnerable prisoners on a case-by-case basis.
Plenty of Uyghurs have been intentionally murdered by the CCP.
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