Tarnstellung
No bio...
User ID: 553
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
Yes, the evidence is weak. That is precisely what the authors of the meta-analysis meant by:
The strength of evidence for these conclusions is low due to methodological limitations
If you look at the "Discussion" section, you will note that most of it is dedicated to pointing out problems with the studies under review. The article also notes that de Vries, 2014 has a "serious" risk of bias and the other three adolescent studies have a "moderate" risk of bias, and of the 20 studies they looked at, only three have a "low" risk. All of this means that further research is needed (it always is), but based on the evidence we have now I think it's perfectly reasonable to adopt a working hypothesis that puberty blockers and hormone therapy are beneficial.
Your points about self-selection among participants only imply that doctors should exercise care when choosing which treatments to administer to whom. Clearly some patients do benefit from hormone therapy, therefore the therapy should not be banned.
Tarnstellung
9mo ago
Off the top of my head there was the Loudoun County affair. Of course the trans activists went on to declare that the rapist wasn't really trans, it was just a guy in a dress... which I guess they didn't really think through.
Apparently the rapist didn't identify as trans. I think it's fair to say that someone who identifies with their gender at birth is not trans. I don't think this is a no-true-Scotsman, as @jkf claims (I assume you are both referring to the same case).
More importantly, however, he didn't enter the bathroom to find a random person to assault – he already knew the victim and had had consensual sex with her in that bathroom previously, and the meeting that resulted in the assault was also pre-arranged:
But this week, during a juvenile court hearing, a fuller picture of Smith’s daughter’s ordeal emerged. She suffered something atrocious. It had nothing at all to do, however, with trans bathroom policies. Instead, like many women and girls, she was a victim of relationship violence.
Smith’s daughter testified that she’d previously had two consensual sexual encounters with her attacker in the school bathroom. On the day of her assault, they’d agreed to meet up again. “The evidence was that the girl chose that bathroom, but her intent was to talk to him, not to engage in sexual relations,” Biberaj, whose office prosecuted the case, told me. The boy, however, expected sex and refused to accept the girl’s refusal. As the The Washington Post reported, she testified, “He flipped me over. I was on the ground and couldn’t move and he sexually assaulted me.”
The boy was indeed wearing a skirt, but that skirt didn’t authorize him to use the girls’ bathroom. As Amanda Terkel reported in HuffPost, the school district’s trans-inclusive bathroom policies were approved only in August, more than two months after the assault. This was not, said Biberaj, someone “identifying as transgender and going into the girls’ bathroom under the guise of that.”
So this is nothing like what anti-trans activists claimed would happen.
That already sets you against the current batch of trans activists, which demand self-ID.
Yes, but it also sets me against the current batch of anti-trans activists, who claim all trans people are just perverts and none of their claims should be taken seriously. I think there should be some standards to prevent people identifying as trans in bad faith, but no one on the anti-trans side is arguing this. They're all saying that all claims of being trans are illegitimate.
That said, there hasn't been a valid argument provided for putting trans people in the opposite-sex facilities.
If I understand correctly, you're asking why trans women should be put in women's prisons and trans men in men's prisons. Beyond the arguments that it makes them feel better when their gender is affirmed, there's a case to be made that a trans woman who passes well is in real danger in a men's prison. A passing trans man in a women's prison is not as endangered, but the women there would probably be uncomfortable with his presence.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
Dishonest fearmongering is the order of the day, and as I alluded to previously, it is the prevailing philosophy of those with power and influence in America. Are you actually opposed to dishonest fearmongering, or do you simply object to the outgroup enjoying its benefits?
This website exists specifically to enable intellectually honest discussion. The fact that the rest of the world is full of dishonesty is irrelevant. It's not acceptable here.
If you're killed by someone that the government had the power and even the obligation to remove from the country, but decided not to, then the government has played a role in your murder. That's an element that simply doesn't exist for the Gacys.
This is irrelevant if your actual probability of getting murdered didn't increase.
Most groups in the world have lower violent crime rates than American natives, because the American native crime rate includes the absurdly large black crime rate. Disaggregation by race would tell a different story, albeit not one that people prefer to hear, since in the popular imagining an American "native" is just some cornfed Southern good-old-boy, and there's a great audience waiting to eagerly believe such people are more violent than one's cherished client groups.
The breakdown of the native crime rate is irrelevant. Letting in immigrants with a lower crime rate still makes the country safer overall.
Tarnstellung
9mo ago
This technically qualifies as "a trans woman assaulting a woman in a women's bathroom", but it is nothing like the hypothetical situation anti-trans activists warned about. For one, it was not a sexual assault. My comment said "assaulting" rather than "sexually assaulting", but the claim has always been that women would be sexually assaulted, by a pervert who is or claims to be trans.
More importantly, the fact that it happened in a bathroom isn't relevant because it had none of the characteristics of the stereotypical bathroom assault. The debate is focused on bathrooms because they're enclosed spaces where a victim may be alone, which makes them uniquely dangerous. The typical hypothetical bathroom assault scenario involves a woman, usually understood to be a random woman unknown to the assailant, who is alone in the bathroom with the assailant, who has followed her in or was waiting for her. This is dangerous because she can be cornered with no way to escape and no way to call for help.
But this case is nothing like that. The victim was with a group of friends who saw the entire thing. The fight was presumably stopped as soon as possible (apparently the friends tried to intervene but were unable to stop the fight; presumably they called someone who could). The perpetrator and the victim already knew each other, and the incident started as a verbal altercation when the perpetrator approached the victim and escalated into a fight. This exact scenario could have played out anywhere. It had nothing to do with the reasons why bathrooms are claimed to be uniquely dangerous and why bathroom bills are claimed to be necessary.
Tarnstellung
9mo ago
This incident "happened in a private bathroom at a residence". Bathroom bills don't cover private homes and could not have prevented this.
Addressed here.
Having posted this I have to admit I sadly don't trust the media to report on this topic in good faith.
Certainly not the NYT or WaPo, but there are plenty of media organizations with an anti-trans editorial stance. They would surely publicize any such cases.
Tarnstellung
9mo ago
Is it really? It's people having consistent principles. Which, I can agree is strange, but on TheMotte I don't think is that strange.
My point is that it is entirely possible to have consistent principles that result in treating trans people as their preferred gender in most cases, but not when it comes to women's sports. An example of such principles would be the basic liberal/libertarian maxim "let people do what they want as long as they're not harming anyone".
It's a standard mistake to say "this never happens", because it's happened quite a lot. For example, this case.
The article notes that the perpetrator had not yet transitioned at the time of the crime, so he would not have been allowed in the bathroom anyway. So no, this doesn't count.
Any sources that it was consensual?
I was referring to this case:
Two inmates serving time in New Jersey’s only state prison for women became pregnant after they had sex with a transgender inmate, according to a report Wednesday.
The unidentified jailbirds became pregnant at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility after engaging in “consensual sexual relationships with another incarcerated person,” the state Department of Corrections told NJ.com.
There's generally a clue when the shooter leaves behind a 'manifesto', but until it is released it's hard to be certain.
The shooter didn't call it a manifesto and some of the people who've read it have also objected to the term. It may well turn out to be an explicit call for violence against Christians in the name of trans rights, but it may also turn out to be the incoherent ramblings of a crazy person. Public statements from police officers who've read it imply that it's the latter.
But the entire message coming from the media in the wake of every other mass shooting is that white people/gun owners/right wingers are in some way responsible for the actions of one violent person.
So it's quite noticeable when the message differs from that.
My understanding is that the blame is not placed on gun owners as such, but on gun ownership as a phenomenon and, indirectly, on those who support it, who, yes, tend to be mostly gun owners and right wingers. The view of people advocating gun control is that reducing access to guns reduces mass shootings, hence those who support easy access to guns are actively preventing the prevention of mass shootings. It's not just a vague tribal association between them. In contrast, how does an ad featuring Dylan Mulvaney actively promote mass shootings by trans people?
Yes, because they want gun control. Which is a position that the right would not agree to and, likewise, is unlikely to solve the problem.
You see the problem here?
In the wake of a mass casualty event, if it is perpetrated by a white male, or anyone with possible right wing affiliation, then the message is "white males and/or right wingers are a dangerous threat that must be curbed, and we can do that by banning guns." They demonize outgroup, and demand gun control.
If it's perpetrated by a nonwhite person or someone who has lefty affiliations, it gets buried immediately, and then they demand gun control.
The message always demonizes one side, and the proffered solution is always a policy the right opposes fervently. There is no acknowledgement that the problem runs deeper than guns or that whites, males, and righties are not the main driving factors of violence in the U.S.
But they're made to bear all the stigma.
The right has noticed this for a long time. But in this event, it was a lefty shooting up a bunch of Christians.
And oh boy seems like we don't get to have any discussion on this issue because that would cloud the waters on who the bad guys and good guys are.
So the disagreement is on whether gun control will reduce mass shootings. As I said above, the reasoning is "we want gun control" -> "gun owners oppose gun control" -> "gun owners are bad", not, as you are suggesting, "gun owners are bad" -> "gun owners oppose gun control" -> "we want gun control". This means that, if you could, theoretically, convince them to oppose gun control, they would no longer believe gun owners are bad. (The major assumption here is that politicians are sincerely trying to make the world a better place and aren't just playing tribal signalling games.)
The position of gun control advocates is consistent with the above. They're not trying to ban guns for their outgroup, they're trying to ban them for everyone, because removing access to guns prevents mass shootings, and then the discussion of who is to blame for mass shootings is moot because, even if the outgroup are violent neo-Nazis who want to massacre minorities, they can't access guns and are therefore unable to do so.
I don't know if you're really missing the context here but consider the following:
Biden didn't visit the town, he didn't talk to any of the victims' families, and as far as I know has not actually condemned the shooter.
Kamala Harris visited... but didn't meet the victims or their family, and instead met with the expelled legislators.
MEANWHILE, those same three Nashville legislators GOT INVITED TO THE WHITE HOUSE.
Please, can you possibly explain the difference in messaging and treatment between the victims of the shooting and the legislators, other than the victims being red-tribe coded and the legislators blue-tribe coded?
Do sitting presidents usually visit the site of a mass shooting and meet the victims' families? (Two randomly selected examples: in 2018 Trump visited the victims, in 2021 Biden didn't, even though the shooter was in the outgroup and apparently personally disliked Biden.) Do presidents usually explicitly condemn mass shooters, or is their belief that mass shootings are bad and the shooter is a bad person implicit in their order to fly flags at half-staff, their expressions of condolences, etc.?
Honestly, meeting the victims and their families seems like a pointless PR move. He'll say how sad he is, thoughts and prayers and all that, take a few photos, but will anything useful come out of the meeting? (This applies in general, not just in this particular incident.)
In contrast, from the Democrats' point of view (I'm trying to steelman here), the legislators are heroes who are trying to prevent this kind of thing from happening again and who are being persecuted for it. A meeting with them won't be used just to express condolences, it can be used to discuss political matters, to further their cause, to facilitate the enactment of policies that would prevent mass shootings. This is real, meaningful action, not just a PR stunt.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
My beer consumption in general is small enough to not be a real market for brewerys. But for those of you who do, I encourage you to continue with the boycott. I'm far from the most anti-trans poster here, but I'm excited to see a big company brought to its knees when it give into corporate woke.
Did they really "give in" to wokeism? Given that:
The WSJ states that: "[M]any people, including bar and store owners, wrongly came to believe that Ms. Mulvaney's video ad aired as a television commercial or that the can with her picture on it was stocked on store shelves, wholesalers said." Because the content did not appear to people organically, they really didn't know what it was, and people assumed it was so much bigger than it was because the usual suspects of CW flame fanning amplified it. A throwaway insta video became a TV ad, Bud Light making a custom can as a joke became people fearing that the beer they bought on a store shelf would have a trans woman on it.
Would you not say this is a major overreaction to what was, objectively, a minor screw-up, which they, if I recall correctly, quickly apologized for?
Tarnstellung
3mo ago
Birthright citizenship shall be granted only to children where at least one biological parent is a citizen or resident having legally remained in the country continuously for a period of at least 3 years. Children may have no greater than two biological parents.
So even the children of citizens would be subject to a residence requirement? I don't think any other country does this and it's an easy way to get thousands of stateless people.
Tarnstellung
5mo ago
Are Iranians white? Are they Aryan? What about North Indians? Pashtuns?
I'm trying to understand your racial taxonomy.
Tarnstellung
9mo ago
"Any dude will be able to claim they're trans and walk into female toilets" is pretty much exactly what anti-trans activists said would happen. All the other details you mentioned are not relevant. Toilets are sex-separated, among other things, to help school staff to prevent horny teenagers from hooking up in them.
- The dude in question did not claim he was trans.
- He did not just walk into a women's bathroom and find a random victim, which is what anti-trans activists claimed would happen. The meeting was pre-arranged with the victim.
- How do you know trans-related policies are why school staff didn't prevent them from hooking up? Again, he didn't even claim he was trans, and "the school district’s trans-inclusive bathroom policies were approved only in August, more than two months after the assault". Given all that, a more banal explanation, for example that they just didn't notice, seems more likely.
You're playing language games. No one says that they're not trans, just that being trans doesn't change your sex, and that some facilities need to be sex seperated.
I tried to phrase that so as to avoid language games. That some facilities need to be sex-segregated, and that people identifying as trans should not be allowed to use such facilities under any circumstances, is what I meant by "all claims of being trans are illegitimate" and "none of their claims should be taken seriously".
It would make men feel better if they were put in female prisons too, why is happiness from affirmation more important here?
I tried to phrase that so as to imply that it is the typical argument, which means you have most likely already seen it and it is unlikely to change your mind, and I am therefore not putting much weight into it. Anyway, the specific claim is that it would make them feel better without making anyone else worse off.
There's also a case to be made that a trans woman will be a danger in a female prison.
A trans woman who has spent several years on HRT, or has had surgery, and is therefore unable to even get an erection? Again, I support having certain standards for trans people. All the cases of assault by trans women in women's prisons seem to be from prisoners who only realized they were trans after they went into prison and were promptly placed in the facilities meant for their claimed gender. This is a system that is very easy to abuse.
Has anyone asked them? I'd bet most women would be more comfortable around a trans man than a trans woman, provided they knew for a fact it's a trans man and not a cis man.
Well, I would bet that most women would be more comfortable around a passing trans woman than a passing trans man. But I admit I have no polling data on this.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
With emissions, the absolute quantity is what matters. With crime, it's the rate that the we care about. It's possible for the absolute number of crimes to increase while the rate decreases. As @Nantafiria said, immigrants may commit crime, but they may also be targeted by crime.
You're right that immigration of lower crime rate groups doesn't necessarily make the natives safer. The major assumption is that the victims of crime are random, or at least evenly distributed. If immigrants disproportionately target natives, for example, then even immigrants with a lower than native crime rate might make natives less safe. However, I am not aware of any evidence that this is the case.
Alternatively, if the crime rate varies geographically, immigrants might have a lower crime rate than the country as a whole, but higher than a certain city or region, and therefore may increase crime rates locally. This is what @CriticalDuty brought up:
It matters a great deal where these immigrants are and who exactly they're victimizing - it is small consolation to a murder victim in Boise, Idaho if the inhabitants of St. Louis, Missouri are more violent than the illegal immigrant population.
If the rate of violent crime in Boise, Idaho really is lower than the rate among immigrants, then yes, immigration would increase the rate. However, I would assume the effect is minimal, since immigrants, legal and illegal, tend to gravitate towards large cities, which already have high rates of violent crime.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
I actually considered using Chauvin as an example instead of Gacy. I opted for Gacy because his actions are much more unambiguously evil and indefensible. Given this site's bent, there was a possibility that some might believe Chauvin's actions were justified, in which case the example wouldn't work.
Anyway, White Americans are not responsible for Chauvin's actions either.
And that's setting aside that no one had the ability to stop Gacy from being in the country, since he was born an American. Mexican migrants, particularly illegal ones, are here as the result of deliberate policy decisions to do nothing about them. If a father who has just lost his daughter cannot even question the wisdom of those policy decisions, he deserves contempt. But my sympathy is limited, as I'm sure his daughter would have never questioned those policies either, even as the knife went in.
No one decided to deliberately let in murderers. Yes, if you let in millions of people, some of them are probably going to commit murder. But unless they commit murder at a higher rate, you are not actually increasing the natives' probability of being murdered. In that case, highlighting individual murders committed by immigrants is dishonest fearmongering.
The question then is whether immigrants do commit violent crimes at a higher rate. Apparently this is not the case and illegal immigrants actually commit less violent crime than natives.
One day about 'born in the wrong body', another day queer theory transgression. But the reality model doesn't allow both, either gender identity is an essential attribute or it's something that you can choose, that changes, you can't have both. So many contradictions, sex and gender norms need to be thrown off, yet it's sex appearance and gender stereotypes that define the desire for, and results of, transition.
Are different people saying these different things? Or have you actually seen a single individual with two clearly contradictory viewpoints?
**Eugenicists
Well less people can't hurt the environment really. If some people want to opt-out of reproduction all the power to them.
That's anti-natalism, not eugenics. And I seriously doubt that anyone is pro-trans because of anti-natalism.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
What about the Irish?
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
Oh what do you know, it's actually biased in whites' favour somehow. You know, unless you are in the armed forces, or the police, or the media, or working for the royals, and so on.
The first article is about a case where an employment tribunal ruled the discrimination was unlawful and awarded compensation to the victim. The third article, unless I am misreading it, doesn't quite support your point, either.
Tarnstellung
21d ago
History is being mangled to suit the current leaderships far left idea of the world by eliminating any trace of the Aryan Invasion theory.
Surely that should be "far right"?
Tarnstellung
9mo ago
Again, not relevant, the whole point is any dude can put on a dress and go into female toilets.
I would expect the dude to at least have to declare that he is trans before being allowed.
To be fair, the thing being pre-arrenged means it's not an example of what people were worried about, but I don't understand your fixation of the victim being random. If someone targets a friend or a co-worker and abuses the trans-policy to get access, then suddenly everything is fine?
No, of course that changes nothing. The point is that the perpetrator didn't specifically select the bathroom. The debate is focused on bathrooms because they're enclosed spaces where a victim may be alone, which makes them uniquely dangerous.
The other issue is that other people gave you examples that fit better, and your response was only to nitpick further. Another attacker who did identify as trans also doesn't count according to you, because they didn't take hormones or get surgeries, even though the entire point of critics was that anyone can say they identify as anything.
I assume you are referring to the 2014 California case. In another comment, I said that:
The article notes that the perpetrator had not yet transitioned at the time of the crime, so he would not have been allowed in the bathroom anyway.
The point was not that he hadn't taken hormones or had surgeries, but that he didn't even identify as trans when he committed the crime. He only started identifying as trans afterwards. Therefore the case is completely irrelevant.
And you didn't even respond to the Oklahoma one.
I hadn't responded because it hadn't been posted yet when I was responding to the others. I have now addressed it here.
Admittedly I have no access to a parallel universe where different policies are in place, but the fact that the school was trying to cover the story up, indicates they are feeling guilty about it somehow.
They obviously have a strong incentive to cover up or downplay the occurrence of such a serious crime at their school regardless of the specific circumstances and regardless of whether it pertains to a current national political controversy.
I suppose it's possible he was showing up in a skirt for a completely unrelated reason, but come on, at the very least it screams "dude trying to take advantage of a loophole", no?
Maybe he just liked wearing a skirt? It's a thing.
I guess that's exactly the thing under dispute. Aren't all these women protesting precisely because they feel they're being made worse off?
What protests are you referring to specifically?
Yeah, I agree. Look, if we went from self-ID to medical-gatekeeping, that would definitely be better, but I don't like how all my concerns with self-ID were dismissed with "it will never happen", and after it did happen people like you are still trying to dismiss my concerns, after taking a step back to a minimally defensible position.
You say it would be better, but presumably it still wouldn't be ideal? If so, why not? Using this as an argument in favour of the position that "trans people should not be allowed into opposite-sex facilities" (under any circumstances) proves too much.
Tarnstellung
9mo ago
Why wouldn't you be able to walk to a park in a dense urban area? Or go kayaking or shooting (presumably at a range, not in your backyard)? Gardening is a bit more difficult, depending on how dense the city is exactly. On the other hand, in an urban area, you could be 3 minutes away from shops without even needing to drive.
Apologies for the late reply.
I agree that social contagion/ROGD is a real thing. The denial of this phenomenon by trans activists is one of their more ridiculous stances: they are essentially asserting that teenagers are not susceptible to fads and peer pressure and general social reinforcement, which is of course absurd. Though I want to note that, as with other mass psychogenic disorders, those with ROGD are not faking it or doing it for attention, etc.
I think there exist some people who are, for lack of a better term, "really" trans. They experience intense dysphoria which is alleviated by transitioning. These are the sorts of people who identified as trans long before it became fashionable. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in interwar Germany performed experimental sex reassignment surgery "in response to the ardent requests of patients". I vaguely recall reading about a trans woman who requested a legal sex change from the German emperor (before the war) and was obliged. I couldn't find any sources on that, but I did find this.
The distinction I draw here is similar to, but IMO not quite the same as, transmedicalists/truscum vs transtrenders/tucutes.
I'm curious how people square the circle of child-safeguarding and the risk of social contagion/sociogenic trans.
Ideally, we would identify who is really-trans and who is suffering from social contagion/ROGD. The latter would be made to wait it out and the former would be given treatment as soon as possible. Some people on this website have expressed the view that they are fine with adults doing what they want but that they object to any kind of treatment for minors. But if you accept that really-trans adults exist, then it naturally follows that really-trans minors exist too. Going through the puberty of their birth sex is extremely distressing for them and it also makes it permanently harder to pass, so we would want to provide them with treatment sooner rather than later.
Here's my practical policy proposal. There should be paediatric psychiatrists who specialize in treating trans patients, to whom any children or adolescents claiming dysphoria would be referred. They would approach the case with a degree of scepticism, acknowledging that really-trans people exist but so does ROGD, and with their experience, they should be able to tell the two apart. I think this is feasible. After all, wasn't the existence of ROGD first postulated by a psychiatrist?
My proposal is not a compromise between two sides, rather, it is the policy that maximizes everyone's welfare, derived from first principles. I think it would have been arrived at eventually by the medical profession had trans stuff not become so politicized. As is, anything may happen, though I still hope it will become the standard. In any case, I am very annoyed by the politicization and the dishonesty coming from both sides of the transgender debate.
(Aside: Why do those who disagree that really-trans people exist, those who believe everyone claiming to be trans is delusional or has an extreme fetish, etc., care about ROGD? Shouldn't they advocate treating all trans people the same – ostracizing them, forcing them to desist, or what have you? Why does the aetiology or time of onset of the perversion matter?)
So I agree that there should be some restrictions, especially relating to children and adolescents, and I fully support debate on what the optimal policy is. My comment about "metaphysical discussion" was in reference to, for example, the incessant questioning of "what is a woman?" by anti-trans activists. The question has no practical implications, it is pure posturing.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
Are you from the EU?
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
It seems you have rediscovered the principle pushed by Ibram X. Kendi and company that there is no such thing as being neutral and by being neutral you are siding with the oppressor.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
Or you could have a dense city with a park no more than 10 minutes away from anywhere, where kids can play on grass rather than asphalt.
Notwithstanding the problems with density alleged in the comment above. If those problems didn't (or don't) exist, parks would clearly be better than cul-de-sacs.
More options
Context Copy link