Tarnstellung
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User ID: 553
Tarnstellung
9hr ago
Define "transition".
The study defines it thus:
Medical GR interventions included masculinising/feminising hormonal treatments, chest masculinisation, and/or genital surgery (vaginoplasty/phalloplasty/metoidioplasty). Hormonal GR was recorded if the register of the SII showed that the patient had purchased masculinising/feminising hormones with a special reimbursement code that is available for individuals diagnosed with F64.0 in the nationally centralised GIS when the treatment has continued for a year. Information on surgical GR was obtained from the CRHC.
It doesn't state how many just got hormones and how many got surgery.
hormones that blunt part of the effects of puberty
Not sure what you mean by this. Puberty blockers or actual HRT? Obviously puberty is difficult for many and putting it off can prevent temporary discomfort, if that's what you mean, but in fact many trans people are happier after going through puberty, provided that it's the right puberty.
If transition means some soft boys and girls uncomfortable with their sexual development donning new clothes and personae as they settle into a community of support, I'm willing to believe that that helps some people feel better.
You mean social transitioning? The study was about medical transition. If it were just clothes and personae, the controversy would be much less severe.
If transition means having your dick cut off and turned into an open wound that needs to be constantly dilated, however... I'm not sure I can believe that that really helps anybody.
You've been fed cherry-picked information about sex reassignment surgery. Many people are, in fact, happy about their surgeries. See /r/Transgender_Surgeries. Some of the dissatisfaction with SRS may be attributed to ineptly performed operations. The linked subreddit has much discussion on the quality of different surgeons, which varies greatly. One is dubbed "the butcher of Montreal"; another is widely known to be substandard and people only go to them because they're the only one covered by insurance.
And in any case, many trans people, even after socially transitioning and getting on HRT, prefer not to get SRS.
I guess you can always find someone delusional enough to feel better after almost anything.
What objective metric do you propose to measure whether or not someone is better off other than asking them if they feel better?
Trans activists deliberately made themselves subject to public scrutiny and public outreach as an attempt to re-enact the classic Civil Rights playbook. LGBT organizations deliberately moved to push trans rights as the next frontier after the success of gay marriage. Liberal activists happily complied and began campaigns to push trans equity groups in corporate spaces and pronouns in professional working environments. Bruce Jenner came out as Caitlyn in 2015. That was the point at which a generation of online debate about trans rights finally bubbled up into the mainstream. Then Jordan Peterson achieved notoriety for refusing to comply with amendments to Canada's Human Rights Act that would compel preferred pronouns.
And all of the media coverage could have been avoided if people had just treated it as a curiosity and a medical condition, and not some kind of new woke perversion to be fought. Like in Iran.
"Some people prefer to be referred to as a gender different from the one they were born with."
"Oh. Okay."
That's the normal response. The kind of response a person not looking for another culture war battle to fight would give.
Tarnstellung
10hr ago
grid of pixels
A bit reductive. Child porn is also just a grid of pixels.
I said two months ago I would reply to a comment about this study on the mental health effects of gender transition. I have only now managed to find the time, so I'm going to post my reply as a top-level comment lest it get buried. You can find the previous discussion here.
To be honest, some of the statistical manipulation seems dubious, but that's above my pay grade, so I'm going to assume the study was conducted in good faith with no shenanigans.
In short, the study finds that, contrary to assumptions that transitioning should improve mental health, the share of people needing mental health treatment rises drastically after transition. Anti-trans people conclude that this means transition actually worsens mental health, and, hence, people should not be allowed to transition.
There's some nitpicking to be done here, for example, maybe the patients already needed mental health treatment and just found out they needed it at the same time as they found out they're transgender, or that just seeing a mental health professional regularly doesn't necessarily mean that your mental health is worse than it used to be.
But my fundamental objection is to the conclusion that no one should be allowed to transition. Suppose the anti-trans side is completely correct on the facts, that transitioning did, in fact, directly worsen the mental health of many or even most patients. There are still some patients who are better off. There are countless anecdotal reports online of people who are happier after transitioning. The most you can conclude is that the criteria for who should transition need to be changed. (If I'm interpreting the data right, the likelihood of needing mental health treatment after transitioning was higher in those born later, consistent with the rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)/social contagion hypothesis.) But if you care about people's happiness, some people should still be supported in transitioning.
Obviously if you believe all trans people are delusional and object to transition and treating people as their stated gender regardless of the effect on their mental health, this does not apply to you. But in that case the study isn't an argument you can use.
Speaking of ROGD, its rhetorical use by anti-trans people is a peculiar example of a self-contradictory motte-and-bailey: usually the bailey is a stronger version of the motte, and thus necessarily consistent with it, but here the bailey ("all trans people are delusional and none of them are their stated gender") contradicts the motte ("some trans people with a specific presentation – primarily adolescent girls – are not actually their stated gender") because the latter presupposes that some trans people are, in fact, their stated gender. If you believe all trans people are delusional, why do you care about the specific etiology of the transness of a specific subgroup of trans people? The treatment, whichever you prefer, should be the same.
I consider myself pro-trans, but I believe ROGD/social contagion may well be a real thing. If you agree about the possibility of social contagion, you should try to minimize the attention trans people receive, yet anti-trans activists have been the main publicists of transness for about a decade now – trans people really entered the mainstream with the North Carolina "bathroom bill". It used to be that you would only find information about transness if you went looking for it because you were questioning your gender, but now that trans people are everywhere (thanks to anti-trans activists), you get impressionable young people who were not predisposed to questioning their gender hearing about it and joining in for the standard reasons impressionable young people join trends. (Cf. media coverage of school shootings encouraging more school shootings – a common argument among anti-gun-control people.)
Maybe. My familiarity with copyright is mostly from editing Wikipedia, which shies away from fair use except in certain very narrowly defined cases, even though the entirety of Wikipedia could be construed as an educational project. But they might be doing that for ideological reasons (wanting everything to be free content), rather than legal liability.
Edit: For example, they compress images to basically a thumbnail to make them unusable for anything except illustrating an article. That's probably more to do with lawsuit paranoia than free content concerns.
Tarnstellung
12hr ago
At least in the former Yugoslavia, where some of the tallest people in Europe are, basketball was already very popular during the Cold War. The History section of the Wikipedia article on the European Basketball Championship has an entire subsection titled "Rise of Yugoslavia" about the 1970s. See also the team statistics – a number of wins in the 70s and 80s.
My perception is that Croatian basketball, at least, is, if anything, well past its prime. But I don't care for basketball at all and I've never watched a game, so take that with a grain of salt.
It might be that people from the region only started playing in the NBA more recently. I understand Dražen Petrović was (one of?) the first. But even that was nearly 40 years ago.
Tarnstellung
12hr ago
It's an argument by a lawyer. They're not expected to be intellectually honest, or consistent across cases.
Tarnstellung
12hr ago
Could the reconstructions have to do with copyright? Internet memes are a legal grey area copyright-wise. A proper academic journal would presumably want to avoid copyright infringement, even if the probability of an actual lawsuit is nil.
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
I agree with the gist of your post. I just want to comment on:
As for the manosphere, Andrew Tate literally got streisand effected to fame. He had less than 4M followers on Twitter/X when he started making headlines around 2022. He's sitting at 11M now.
A person with 3M+ followers on Twitter is not a nobody. The Streisand effect may well have contributed somewhat, but that kind of growth in four years isn't unusual.
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
Wow, what a cancerous website.
"What I think that is referring to is there is no evidence in the studies," Strangio replied, "that this treatment reduces completed suicide, and the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully, and admittedly, is rare, and we're talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don't necessarily have completed suicides within them. However, there are multiple studies, long-term, longitudinal studies, that do show that there is a reduction in suicidality, which I think is a positive outcome to this treatment."
So, there is evidence it does improve mental health (suicidality being a component thereof), just no evidence it reduces the rate of successful suicides. You will note both my comment and yours talked about mental health, not the rate of successful suicides, which, as Strangio noted, are rare.
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
"Die Cis Scum" was a meme over a decade ago.
I did think of this, but I thought it was obvious that it was a joke. Do you seriously believe trans people want the 99% of the human population who are cis to be exterminated?
Spicy rhetoric, yes, but I don't see any actual calls for violence. The event, which was cancelled, was supposed to be peaceful protest.
The avalanche of death and rape threats directed towards JK Rowling or Kellie-Jay Keen
This is not about trans people specifically, but in general, I find it odd that people talk about "death and rape threats" as if they were actual, credible threats, and not, you know, just a thing a random anonymous person wrote online. I imagine these are boomers taking these things seriously, people who grew up before the internet. This applies just as much to the alleged victims of Gamergate, to trans people who receive such "threats", etc.
(the latter of whom was actually physically assaulted in public)?
No, I hadn't heard of her having tomato juice poured on her. The perpetrator was convicted. Was there widespread sympathy for the perpetrator among trans people?
Assorted macabre, threatening protest placards like "The only good TERF is a ____ TERF"? SNP members photographed standing next to a placard reading "decapitate TERFs"? None of this ringing a bell?
No, I hadn't seen any of those, either. Perhaps the problem is that I hung out in trans spaces – places where trans and questioning people talk to each other and the odd curious observer like me – and not at public events where the rhetoric is meant for the general public. You'd think they'd want to tone things down for the public, and be forthright about their ill intentions in more trans-focused spaces, but in fact, in the latter, I've seen zero calls for any kind of actual violence.
But, in general, I'm sure you could cherry-pick a similar amount of violent rhetoric if you looked at the fringes of anti-trans activism. (One that comes to mind is the emote of a trans person being hanged on rdrama.net. "Trannies get the rope" gets 196 hits on Google – and that's just one, highly specific phrase.) In neither case is it representative.
This was, ironically, a profoundly uncharitable reading of what I said. All I'm advocating is consistency. If we must trawl through the entire digital footprint of every trans mass shooter to determine exactly what it is that drove them to commit their horrific misdeeds, we should do the same with every mass shooter and resist the urge to buy into a simplistic narrative of their having been radicalised by Andrew Tate or whoever. I'm not advocating for trans criminals to be treated especially uncharitably, but rather for consistency in how criminals are treated regardless of their identity characteristics.
You seemed to be advocating for consistency in the opposite direction: that trans people and incels should both be treated as violent threats to society. If you agree that both are overblown as a whole, and that individual cases should be examined individually, then we are in agreement.
I rather resent your implication that there is no moral difference between a) reading too much into a real case that actually happened and b) producing a fictional miniseries about a problem that does not exist and using it as a cudgel with which to beat an entirely blameless demographic.
I don't know, arguing over which is worse seems a bit pointless. Can we agree both are bad?
It is not untrue for me to assert that there have been at least three mass shootings committed by trans people so far this year.
Tumbler Ridge and Turkey, what's the third one?
It is not untrue for me to assert that there have been at least eight mass shootings or killing sprees committed by trans people so far this decade. It hardly seems unreasonable for me to infer that a pattern seems to be emerging here, nor that it might be worth investigating what commonalities the perpetrators might have besides their gender identities.
Eight events in the entire world is not enough to suggest a pattern of any kind, given that there are tens of millions of trans people in the world.
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
That is not true, see elsewhere in this very thread that transition increases psychiatric morbidity.
Reading the study now. I'll respond to the original post later.
See also the 41% suicide rate of transitioners, which is not a sign of a mentally healthy population on average(after all, most depressives manage not to kill themselves).
Well, on this one, you're blatantly wrong. First of all, it's a suicide attempt rate. Secondly, it's for all trans people, not just transitioners – including those who weren't able or allowed to transition, due to social or other circumstances. Also, the survey this figure comes from was conducted in 2011; a lot has changed in the meantime.
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
Do you believe incel/manosphere attackers should receive the benefit of the doubt, i.e., their attacks should not be attributed to them being incels/part of the manosphere?
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
Source?
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
You are just repeating that they are being dishonest. That you should be dishonest in turn is a non sequitur. Again, why not point out their dishonesty and double standards and be better than them? At least on this website, if in the real world you feel a need to act dishonestly for pragmatic political reasons.
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
On the contrary, empirically, treating them as crazy and trying to make them not-trans makes them miserable and doesn't stop them from thinking they're trans, while treating them as their preferred gender and allowing them to medically transition lets most of them lead happy, fulfilling lives. The question of whether they are their preferred gender or should merely be treated as if they were is academic.
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
trans spaces which contain violent, hateful rhetoric
Spend enough time in trans spaces and you'll see plenty of people arguing that trans women are outright superior to cis women
I've spent plenty of time in trans spaces and I haven't seen any of that.
or that people who don't buy into gender ideology are hateful and backward.
Well, yeah, believing your political opponents are backward is par for the course, is it not? Do you not believe trans activists are backward?
Sure, they could have. I'm just fed up of the double standard. If he was a self-identified incel, that would have been the end of the story: no one would be going full internet forensics trying to find out what else might have radicalised him other than participation in incel communities. "He once liked an Andrew Tate video– case closed!" But no matter how much violent, hateful rhetoric they spew, online trans communities seem to be awarded an inexhaustible benefit of the doubt.
"My political opponents are being uncharitable, so I'll be uncharitable back!" Many such cases. But isn't that against the rules on this website? And, you know, a bad thing in general?
I'm going to reply to @ZeStriderOfDunedain here since this is the same basic idea. He writes:
But this rhetorical charity is never extended to incels as a group. Just look at the hysteria "Adolescence" kicked off. A fictional 13yo boy fictionally killed his fictional classmate and everyone was acting like there was an actual irl pandemic of manosphere incels murdering your daughters, but statistically violence against women has been trending down over the years.
If the other side is being uncharitable or plain dishonest, point it out and ask them to be charitable and honest. Don't stoop to their level.
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
A screenshot is in the first link in the top-level comment. Not the whole thing, but it does have the bit I was talking about.
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
Did you read the "manifesto"? There was clearly much wrong with this person beyond anything to do with being trans. Do trans communities generally tell people they're "the ultimate human" and "better than everyone around me intelligence wise"?
And if the shooter had these beliefs not caused by being trans/hanging around in trans spaces, then could their other beliefs – such as that shooting up a school is a good idea – also have come from elsewhere?
(I will also say that it's amusing seeing them write how they're intellectually superior to everyone else because they are "fluent at [sic] English".)
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
Your objection is that they're not American nationalists? Do you know what the word "catholic" means?
And I doubt any "internationalist SJ wokie" would agree with their (very strongly held) stance on abortion.
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
The sunlight hours theory is suspect. I would expect them to have adapted to it over the millennia, the same way they evolved lighter skin. Meanwhile, in places with ample sunlight, people do their best to avoid it: historically in the form of the siesta, nowadays awake but in an enclosed, air-conditioned space.
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
Oops, I was confusing adultery with fornication. My confusion stemmed from "thou shalt not commit adultery" commonly being interpreted as also prohibiting fornication. I was actually asking about your opinion on non-adulterous extramarital sex.
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
By adultery, do you mean cheating (even if only technically, given that the man Kamala was with was separated), or does it include any form of extramarital sex?
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
To be honest, I was just interested in what the forum had to say on this. My own comments were perfunctory, made solely to avoid falling afoul of the low-effort rule. I didn't really have anything to add. Was there a better way to do this?
A fine stance to have, but it runs into difficulties with children and minors and the question of whether they can, or should be allowed to, provide consent.
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