ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
The WPATH To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions
Things are starting to move fast in Genderland, or at least faster than I can cover them with while giving any sort of justice to the topic. I haven't even gone through the entire WPATH Files, when the Daily Caller (...News Foundation - an important distinction if you're searching for the source materials) released the WPATH Tapes. By spamming FOIAs they were able to get a hold of over 30 hours of video from the 2022 WPATH summit in Montreal. A lot of it is the same old same old that I brought while covering the Files (you can see the short clip playlist here) - there's a public face of gender specialists where the science is settled, you can either have a happy daughter or a dead son, puberty blockers are reversible, etc., etc... and a private face, where they discuss amongst each other the very same concerns they dismissed, when they were brought up by skeptics of Gender Affirming Care. What's new is that the raw amount of footage allowed me to confidently reach a conclusion about a question that's been bugging for a while - what is these people's deal? Are doctors trying to do what's best for their patients, or are they a bunch of ideologically captured fanatics, blind to the harm they are doing? The answer seems to simply be: yes.
I already remarked how a lot of these clinicians come off as quite sympathetic back when I covered the Files. When you listen to their talks you hear them openly expressing uncertainty about many aspects of Gender Affirming care, discussing the limits of their patients' (and their parents') understanding of some of the interventions, and the importance of bringing them up to speed, or you hear them bringing up known and potential side effects, and ways of mitigating them. With things like this, they almost come off as urging caution... the problem is that if you keep listening you get the distinct impression you're on a train with no breaks.
The Introduction to Trans Health talk is a good example of the good and the bad of that WPATH conference. It opens with a pull-at-your-heart-strings story, of Dr. Ren Massey's FTM transition and the struggle to find acceptance in society and from his parents. I ended up being quite moved by the story myself, and yet, in the fastest "Oh god, oh no, baby, what is you doing?" I have experienced to date, he drops this slide, where he proclaims everything from non-binaries to eunuchs is hecking valid.
I try to be honest about these things - I am biased, I pretty much already reached my conclusion on the subject, and it's going to be a hell of process to change my mind again, but no matter how certain I am of something there's always the possibility of being wrong. The thing is, "being wrong" to me means it turning out that people like Jack Turban were right, that gender dysphoria is a valid diagnosis, that doctors can reliably tell people who have it from people who don't, and they have treatments that are proven to alleviate their suffering.
Well, fuck me then, I guess. It turns out that the "medicalized narrative" may have been used in the past, but it's outdated now. Not all trans people have dysphoria, and not everyone wants to transition from one side of the binary to the other. The doctor's empashis needs to be on removing barriers, and on patient autonomy. Between several name drops of "intersectionality", "power and privilege", or "minority stress", as best as I can gather these folks are certified Queer Theorists, tirelessly working to deconstruct the idea that (cis)heterosexuality is normal. Sure, they'll take into account the consequences of gender treatments, and they'll try to make sure that patient's "transition goals" are within the realm of physical possibility, but there should be no other limits placed otherwise. It feels like they flipped the table. What I thought was a conversation about the state of medical science turns out to be a fight over who's worldview should prevail.
This seems to be the only explanation that can make sense out of the whole thing, and tie up the loose ends of the WPATH clinicians genuine concern for their patients, with wild off-the-wall stuff like the Eunuch Archive, or why they pull the knives out for Lisa Littman and the ROGD hypothesis or Blanchard's categorization of trans people, while remaining unbothered by Dianne Ehrensaft's gender angels and gender Tootsie Roll Pops.
Back when I covered the Eunuch Archive it was declared that I am a bad, bad boy, because in a forum with explicit rules about not booing the outgroup, I limited myself to providing evidence that child castration fetishists have an influential role in setting standards for transgender care, and are using it to promote their fetish, but refused to speculate on their motivation, and wouldn't declare them evil or insane. Other than it not mattering, and me not knowing, there was something unsatisfying about the two explanations that were offered. They were a too lucid to plead insanity, and haven't expressed a callous disregard for the well being of others, or a singular obsession with their own self-gratification, that people straight-forwardly associate with evil. What they do appear to be is completely ideologically captured. They view everything through the lens of Queer Theory and intersectionality, and are simply doing what is considered good in the light of that ideology, that this might involve affirming eunuchs, or transitioning schizophrenics doesn't phase them in the slightest.
All this seems to show the limits of analyzing motivations, and has implications on what it means to "boo the outgroup". That the road to hell is paved with good intentions is not a new lesson, but it seems that it's rarely understood as something more than "sometimes people get carried away trying to do good, and go too far", when some cases are probably better understood as "sometimes ideologies can make you commit obviously grievous harm, with a smile on your face". Perhaps the evil/insane dichotomy was the real Boo Outgroup all along?
Hi guys! Have you heard about the Eunuch Archive?
The Eunuch Archive is a friendly support site for the Eunuch Community. Originally a part of the Body Modification E-Zine (with the tagline "the fetish is reality"), since the late 90's they've been hosting erotic fiction by and for people with a kink for being castrated.
Can't say I read a lot of these stories, but going through the titles there seems to be a some amount of "wife gets back at husband", or "help, I've been sold into sex slavery". One theme that stood out was the idea of castration being normalized in the future. For example the user "Jesus" wrote a story "Orchiectomy: Is It Right for You?", describing the procedure, and praising it's health benefits. The punchline comes at the end (keep in mind the story was written in 2002):
CONCLUSION
The answer to the title "orchiectomy: is it right for you?" is obviously "yes." Most males would benefit dramatically from this minor surgical procedure, adding years to their life expectance and producing a much higher quality of life. Loving parents should seriously consider giving the gift of a bilateral orchiectomy to their sons. They will be grateful that you care enough to do so.
READER'S DIGEST, August 2017, pages 37 - 43.
There also many stories that are far more disturbing, or as they put it themselves:
PLEASE NOTICE! The behaviors depicted in these stories, but not the stories themselves, are likely in real life to be illegal. The stories describe activities that may be considered by society to be abusive, harmful, unacceptable or undesirable. The authors neither advocate, condone nor engage in any such real life illegal behavior. These stories, as is all fiction, are fantasy and not reality. The collectors and authors do recognize the difference between the two. If YOU do not, please seek professional psychiatric care at once.
The summary for one states:
The boys finally meet Eric. The castration laws become more strict, and more boys are castrated.
Although fantasy taking place in an alternative Universe, this story is about minors that are sexually mutilated and contains descriptions of said minors having sex with an adult. If it's not something you want to read, please leave.
Yikes... you can't say they didn't warn you.
Well, I suppose it's better that people get their rocks off on some seedy website. After all it's just fantasy, and the people running the site make it clear they don't condone anyone actually trying to do this sort of stuff.
Hey guys! Have you heard about the WPATH?
WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a non-profit, interdisciplinary professional and educational organization devoted to transgender health. It is often cited in academic literature, and invites the world's top experts in the field to write the standards of care for transgender people.
Among these experts are people like Thomas W. Johnson, Richard Wassersug, and Krister H. Willette, who attended several WPATH conferences, and all have accounts on the Eunuch Archive ("Jesus", "Eunuchunique", and "Kristoff" respectively) that were active for over 20 years. Johnson and Wassersug have even published research based on a survey of EA's users, and the stories posted there.
Well, I suppose I can't criticize what people do off the clock. Ok, so maybe their academic research was actually still on the clock, but isn't the whole point of academia to explore and document all, even the weirdest corners of society? If they can combine their work with their hobby, all I can say is: good for them!
As for their work in WPATH, I'm sure they are proffesional and wouldn't dream of letting their fetish affect their work.
Hey guys! Have you heard about the WPATH's latest Standard of Care?
As mentioned above the SOC is a set of guidelines developed by the WPATH with the goal to "provide clinical guidance for health professionals to assist transgender and gender diverse people with safe and effective pathways to achieve lasting personal comfort with their gendered selves, and to maximize their overall health, psychological well-being, and self-fulfillment".
This latest version has been the subject of some controversy. For example, the previous version contained "suggested minimum ages" for a number of procedures, like:
-
14+ years old for cross-sex hormones
-
15+ years old for double mastectomies
-
16+ years old for breast implants, facial feminisation surgery
-
17+ years old for metoidioplasty, orchiectomy, vaginoplasty, hysterectomy, fronto-orbital remodelling
-
18+ years old for phalloplasty.
In the latest version the only one that remains is the limit on phalloplasty. In another controversial decision, they decided that children can move straight to cross-sex hormones – they will no longer be requested to start with a suppression of puberty. Perhaps most controversially, the latest Standards of Care now includes an entire chapter on eunuchs, and proposes a new "eunuch-identity":
In this chapter we describe the relationship between eunuch-identified people and other transgender and gender-diverse people and present best practices specific to serving the needs of people who embrace a eunuch identity.
...
For the purpose of the Standards of Care, we define eunuch as an individual assigned male at birth whose testicles have been surgically removed or rendered non-functional, and who identifies as a eunuch.
Well, I suppose it could be a coincidence. I mean just because they suddenly came up with a eunuch-identity, doesn't mean they got it from the regulars of the fetish webs-...
While there is a 4000-year history of eunuchs in society, the greatest wealth of information about contemporary eunuch-identified people is found within the large on-line peer-support community that congregates on sites such as the Eunuch Archive (www.eunuch.org) which was established in 1998.
...
Well, I̵ ̴s̷u̸p̴p̸o̴s̶e̷ t̴̮͒ĥ̷͙a̴̦̒t̶̥́ ̴̞̓I̵̟̍ ̷̢͝c̷͜͠a̶̱͗n̷̫̽'̷͖̇ẗ̸̪.̷̢̫̂̍.̷͔̱̏̈.̴̦̳͐ ̸̡̥̪̄o̸̝̅̋́h̸̛̖̗̰̓͗ ̷̤͔̲͑͗G̵̼͒̎͝o̶̯͇͓̓ḋ̵͈̻͈͛̈́, ṋ̴̞̹͉̊̐̀ͅở̴̱̀̎̂͛!̴̖͓̟̬̊̇̓̾ P̴͕̗͚͙̘̏̿̀l̸̥͚͕̺̤̺̙͇̉̉͆̈́͗̃͘̚ë̸̟̘̟́̑̾a̸͈̗̦̟̘̱͓͊̇͋ș̷̱͚͔̤̀̇́͑͜e̶̘̿́͂̋ ̶̬̈́̒m̷͇̓͗͐̔̿̿̚͝ắ̶̲̫͖̪̺́̈͒̂́͜͠k̸͍͔̙̣̰̖̻̩͆e̴̱̤̤͎̟̐̀ ̴̹̪͇͈͚̉̾̈̚i̷̡̖̹͇̤̝͛̽̎̍t̴̻̓̾͠ ̵̭̿ş̶̧͔͖̹̣̃̂̈́͐̚̕ṱ̴̡̜̀͋̉̃̉̃͜o̶̬̹̒͌p̷͍͖̼͔̓̌͜͝!̷̛͉̎́͐̕͘̚
If you're worried that this will lead to lax academic standards or shoddy research practices, I'd reassure you that academic standards have never been laxer and shoddy research is absolutely everywhere, and the existence of review boards and similar apparatchik-filled bodies does nothing to curb these.
I'm well aware, and that's not what I'm worried about at all.
I know a bunch of social workers, some of them a generation or so older than me, and I heard a few stories of how things used to run. Like nowadays there was actual work, and there was a bunch of bureaucratic stuff to deal with. Back in the day you had to type it all out on actual paper, mail it etc. Then everybody and their dog started using computers for everything, everything got digitized, hundreds of apps meant to automate the drudgery got deployed, you could instantly send documents via e-mail... do you want to take a wild guess in which of these eras people spent more time doing actual work than they did dealing with bureaucratic nonsense?
I worry the same will happen with AI. No, it will not "make us equal", it's a side-rant but I'm shocked anyone could even utter such a sentiment with a straight face. There are, and there have always been, entire institutions devoted to the task of ensuring this will never happen. What will happen is that you will need AI to even keep up. You will need an AI text generator to output sheer amount of text you will now be required to write in order to cover your ass, and you will need an AI summarizer to "read" the tonnes upon tonnes of paper that will be sent your way. The best part is that all of this will be centralized in the hands of a few companies, who's owners hang out at the same cocktail parties as various panopticon fetishists at the top of our society, who will dictate how exactly this AI needs to be lobotomized to only output goodthink. It will now be the perfect tool for them to "nudge" us, old geezers like you or me might remember a world where you needed to process information yourself, but children born in the new one will only ever know information summarized to them via AI.
I've mentioned this before, but this is what drives me up the wall with AI-optimists. I know it's hard to learn the lessons of history, but this doesn't even count as history. We literally just watched Big Tech bitch-slap the ever-loving hell out utopian tech-nerds like 5 minutes ago, and I'm now supposed to jump on the next bandwagon that is going to "make us equal"? Give me a break.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
What's this? A Culture War Christmas Truce?
Wake up babe, the definition of woman just dropped.
The year was 2020, trans issues have already made their way through our social consciousness, and some women were getting frustrated at the inability to congregate without trans women showing up, and - in the minds of the TERF inclined - spoil the party.
Enter Sall Grover, a bold enterprising spirit, that recognized two facts:
- There is now unmet demand for a female-only social medium.
- Skynet is an unrepentant bigot.
She quickly joined the dots, and thus the Giggle app was born. In order to register you had to upload a selfie, which would be run through a sex-recognition AI, and non-females would be automatically rejected. The AI was deliberately calibrated to minimize false negatives, wanting to spare cis-women the humiliation of appealing the process, Grover figured it's better to let a few false-positives through and deal with them manually. For a while, the whole system worked wonderfully, and the women congregated, giggling happily.
But, as we all know, there is no Giggle without a Tickle... In February 2021, Roxy Tickle uploaded a selfie to the Giggle app and the AI was so amused at the word pun, it forgot it was supposed to be an image recognition algorithm. Roxy got through! Her joy lasted for several months, until she was caught by manual review as she was applying for premium features of the app. After a short and unsuccessful appeal attempt, she decided that the only way to resolve this dispute is in court.
Roxy Tickle argued that this was an outrageous injustice, that she was being discriminated against for being trans, and that this constitutes a violation of the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984. Sall Grover argued that this is nonsense, that Giggle does not discriminate against trans people, it merely excludes people on the basis of sex. The law hasn't outlawed sex-segregated spaces over the 30 years it was in effect, Roxy Tickle was treated no different than any other male-sexed individual, and therefore no illegal discrimination has taken place. The judge had to rule if Giggle excluded a man, and was well within it's rights, or if it excluded a woman and indirectly committed discrimination against a trans person. He was therefore forced to settle that ancient question - what is a woman? Last week we finally received the verdict, and the way I understood it is "a woman is anyone who the state identifies as a woman". It turns out that sex is mutable, and that Ms. Tickle is a woman because she has a state issued document saying so. Australia's legal system seems a bit complex to my eyes, but at first glance that seems to also boil down to "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman".
The consequences of the verdict might be more interesting than the verdict itself. After all, if an app for women cannot keep an AMAB out, how can all the other controversial spaces like sports, prisons, waxing salons, etc.? We've covered enough of these cases over the years that I think it should be clear this isn't a hypothetical, and as connoisseurs of TERF content will know, hacking "gender violence" laws has become a pretty regular occurance in countries that lean on the self-ID side of the debate. More importantly, and/or ammusingly, normie men are deciding all that male privilege just ain't worth it, or perhaps the Spaniards are just more cheeky than average. In any case, if any such self-ID laws / rulings are to be maintained, I think they'll require some major qualifications.
I was already severely backing off from strategic protest hearing that J.D. Vance endorsed some insane Red Scare book that promotes the "Cultural Marxism" myth
I hate to break it to you, but the idea that Cultural Marxism is a myth, is a myth. There literally were academics calling themselves Cultural Marxists, and they were promoting exactly the kind of thought that would later become SJWism, and now Wokeness.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6mo ago
it will always be surprising to me that the people on the Internet who experienced the New Atheism movement, which is to say, they had firsthand experience with the dangers of authoritarian religion, were so consistently and persistently blind to the fascism
You are, of course, referring to how they they turned on their heel and started mocking the very idea of freedom of speech, organizing campaigns to get people fired from their jobs for wrongthink, and collaborating with the corporate surveillance state, right? Right??
But if for some reason you're referring to the sentiment against immigrants turning sour, it's a simple question of getting mugged by reality. When the big wave of Syrian refugees first hit in 2015, I was cheering for them. Even when cars started driving into crowds, and things were going boom, I figured it's just a tiny minority of assholes. It wasn't until Cologne happened that I had the sinking feeling that people who were talking about incompatible cultures may have had a point.
WPATH Files
Hey guys have you heard about the WPATH Files? Well, you did, they were already brought up earlier this week, but unlike our resident doomers, I think they're worthy of a top level thread.
No, this isn't about the Eunuch Archive story breaking containment (although Genevieve Gluck is striking the iron while it's hot). Long story short someone on the inside of WPATH contancted Micheal Schelenberger and released some of their internal discussions. So what's all the hubbub about? At a cursory glance might even look like the WPATH members are urging additional caution. Well, let's take a step back.
To avoid going full-Putin, I'll start at Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage. A lot of the arguments presented in the book aren't new, but it's a convenient compilation - transition is serious shit with huge health implications, kids don't know what they hell they're talking about and shouldn't be taken at face value with regards to such a serious decision, past research shows most of would-be trans youth desist after puberty, new research indicates there might be a social contagion component to the recent increase in trans kids, puberty blockers themselves might be pushing kids further down the trans rabbit hole, etc., therefore we should hit the breaks on the whole thing.
A lot of the counter-arguments are also conveniently compiled in critical reviews of the book, or critical responses to positive reviews, for instance:
Within medicine, gender-affirming care for transgender and gender diverse youth is not controversial, outside of a few fringe groups like The American College of Pediatricians (an anti-LGBTQ group that is not to be confused with The American Academy of Pediatrics). There is broad consensus from The American Psychiatric Association, The American Academy of Pediatrics, The Endocrine Society, The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, and The World Professional Association for Transgender Health that gender-affirming medical care is appropriate for transgender youth so long as clinicians follow guidelines set forth by these major medical organizations (e.g., The Endocrine Society Guidelines).
(...)
Furthermore, those studies were of very young prepubertal children. Under the current medical consensus, gender-affirming medical interventions are not offered to prepubertal youth. They are only offered after youth have reached adolescence. Once youth reach adolescence, it’s rare for transgender youth to later decide they are cisgender.
(...)
She notes that only 1.9 percent of adolescents who started pubertal suppression in a large study in The Netherlands did not proceed to gender-affirming hormones (i.e., estrogen or testosterone). This is not because pubertal suppression made them identify more strongly as transgender. Rather, it is a result of the strict guidelines followed in the Netherlands before an adolescent is considered eligible for pubertal suppression: six months of attending a specialized gender clinic and undergoing rigorous assessment.
(...)
Though Shrier is quick to provide anecdotes from teenagers like "Riley" and stories from estranged parents as evidence, she is relatively less interested in the peer-reviewed scientific research that shows the benefits of gender-affirming medical care for transgender adolescents. I've listed several in the references for those interested in reading more.
The message is clear: We know what we're doing. We have strict standards that filter out those that might not benefit from transition. We have scientific consensus and studies, all you have is speculation and anecdotes. It is the departure from this deadpan, "we know what we're doing" discourse, delivered with iron confidence that I commented on earlier this year, and which is a useful lens to look at the WPATH Files through, given that it's one of the explicitly named organizations responsible for setting these supposedly strict standards.
Part of the Files is a video of the "Identity Evolution Workshop" held on Zoom by the WPATH, a significant portion of it is devoted to the question of informed consent:
Dianne Berg: Yeah, I just wanted to piggyback on all of the importance that comes up with the informed consent.
I often see people who, because there's such a backlog of therapists to do some of the mental health therapeutic support, I often see people who have already engaged in some sort of, and this is again with youth, some sort of medical intervention. And so one of the things I do is sitting with the youth and their parents and I say "so tell me more about what you know about that medical intervention", and kind of like what Dan was saying, children and young adolescents... we wouldn't really expect them... It's kind of out of their developmental range sometimes, to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them. And so I think I, I try to do whatever I can to help them understand, as best I can. But what really disturbs me is when the parents can't tell me what they need to know about a medical intervention that apparently they signed off for. And so I think informed consent has to happen very differently for parents.
(these are slightly edited for the removal of awkward speech patterns)
So there's a few ways to look at it charitably. One that comes to mind is "they aren't talking about issues with the current state of gender affirming care, they're describing the sort of problems a clinician will run into, and how to handle them". The problem with that is that they themselves would disagree with that interpretation:
Dianne Berg: I worked in an intersex, or disorders of sex development clinic for a number of years as the psychologist. And I would come in to the session with the parents and usually these were very young kids. (...) and the pediatric endocrinologist came out and said "yeah, they totally get it, they're on board, I don't have any concerns about their understanding". I would go in and I would say "okay, so tell me what you learned from him", and they'd just be like, "we have no idea what he was talking about." Because they, they feel deferential.
(...) And so I think the more we can normalize that it is okay to not get this right away, it is okay to have questions, the more we're going to actually do a real informed consent process. Then what I think has been currently happening and that I think is frankly, not what we need to be doing ethically.
One of the reasons for this state of affairs that they brought up is a simple lack of resources - "backlog of therapists", "20 minute medical appointments" - which is consistent with info that got out of the Tavistock or through whistleblowers like Jaime Reed. The other way to look at it is @gattsuru's "urging additional caution", which they are indeed doing throughout various excerpts of the Files, but if additional caution needs to be urged, because patients, or even their parents, don't understand what they're signing up for, that paints a very different picture than the one that Jack Turban painted in his review. This is a lot less "we know what we're doing" and a lot more "this is all new, and we're still figuring it out", the difference is portrayed in this analogy:
I don't know if other people do, but I really struggle with it, because I kind of want the kids that I work with, whether they're 9 to 13 and looking at puberty suppression or hormones in some ways to be a little pediatric endocrinologist. Like I want them to understand it at that level in an age appropriate way. And I struggle with that on one level because, well, when a kid takes diabetic medication, do they have to understand?
The reason for the discrepancy in the level of understanding that is expected, is acutally later explained by Jamison Green:
Jamison Green: They may be able to get their hormones prescribed through their primary care provider who doesn't really know necessarily everything about trans care. They're basically trying to be supportive and, you know, our health care system leaves us in the lurch all the time. I agree that we don't necessarily need to be able to have... If you have a known condition, like diabetes, you don't have to understand every nuance about what the insulin is going to do to you, in order to give informed consent, because there's so much experience with that. But in this field, this is all new, this is all contentious, and that's where we run into problems, because everyone's afraid.
And I know for a fact, people, even adults, even well educated, older adults, accessing care for the first time, sit down with the person who's going to prescribe their hormones, and they look at an informed consent form that says your hormones are going to do this, this, and this. They don't take any of that in yet because they're so scared that they're not going to get what they need. They're just.. "so show me where to sign".
The issue brought up in the second part of the quote, that patients might not want to read, talk about, or ask questions about their treatment because they're afraid this will result in them not getting it, is brought up later in the conversation, but this is where things go from bad to worse:
Dianne Berg: At least with the kid that I worked with, where we kind of got to, was not wanting to talk about things, because they were at that kind of [non-binary] place. But also that they really thought that if they said anything about this, and really delved into it, it would mean that their options for any of that medical transition that they had always thought they were going to do, would be off the table. And so they were like, I can't, I don't want to explore that the non-binary shift, because if I explore that, that means that I'm never going to be able to get estrogen, and it was kind of like having some education around - no, it doesn't mean that. What it means is we are trying to meet your embodiment goals.
(...)
It's a growing edge for me, so I certainly don't want to misspeak, but my understanding and what I'm trying to kind of incorporate in my clinical practice is, in some ways, moving away from what is your identity and therefore because you have this identity, you're going to want to do these particular medical interventions to change your body. Not having it be as identity driven, because I think that's been the historical basis of how things have operated.
(...)
At least I have had many clients tell me "I did not tell you the truth about a lot of things about my sexuality, because I figured if I told you that, you would gatekeep and assume it was a fetish" , or, you know, some of the terms that we no longer are using. And so I think there is a huge historical context to sexuality being seen as a way that creates barriers to access to care. And I think it's very important that we acknowledge that historical context, and that we work against that historical context, by talking more about positive sexuality and pleasure and that that they can go together and that it's okay, and not create barriers to care, because people have that belief that that's what we're going to do.
Ok, simply put: you can't tell me how you have it all figured out, how you have strict standards that filter out people who might change their mind later, and how rare it is for trans youth to change their identity, and how all the concerns raised are invalid precisely because you have it all figured out so much, only to turn around to talk about patients' shifting identitties, how they were hiding their motivations, or didn't want to ask questions because they were afraid tripping that filter stemming from those supposedly strict standards, and then for your response to be "don't worry about it, we'll give you the treatment no matter what".
This already got quite long, and I already got one or two other angles to approach this topic from, so I think this will become a series*. My general conclusion is: contrary to Jack Turban, and the general pre-2022-ish pro-trans discourse, gender affirming care, especially it's pediatric variant, is not uncontroversial within medicine, it's not The Science, it's an experiment. There is, of course, room for those within medicine, psychiatry and/or psychology, but rule #1 of ethical experimantation is that you tell people they're participating in an experiment. You don't tell them things like "would you rather have a happy daughter, or a dead son", you don't dismiss critics because you don't like their politics, and you don't try to push through bizarre social reforms on the back of The Science that just isn't there.
As always, time will tell if my conclusion is correct, I'm not going to pretend I'm not biased, and it's only natural for someone biased in the other way to come to a different conclusion, especially that a lot of people in these WPATH Files comments and transcripts come off as quite sympathetic. But before signing off, I'll allow myself a bit of speculation: this is either the tip of the iceberg, and/or WPATH members themselves think the organization is no longer credible, as WPATH membership dropped from 4119 to 1590 from January 2023 to 2024. This is after the Files were announced, but way before they were released, but it's hard not to get a "fleeing a sinking ship" impression from it, and in fact such a sudden departure of so many members might even be the cause of the Files being leaked (out of many disgruntled people, some decided to leak stuff), and the effect is yet to come.
*) Hey mods, are we still doing the "Culture War goes into the Culture War Thread" thing? I would really rather have these as standalone posts.
Yet Another Part Of the WPATH Saga
You may have heard about the controversy around the latest Standards Of Care removing the age minimums for various transgender care procedures. What I didn't make clear in that post was this wasn't about the difference between SOC7 and SOC8, the removal took place between different versions of the SOC8 itself. Shortly after the original guidelines were published, a correction notice was issued, and WPATH republished the SOC with the minimum ages removed (among other changes). Curiously the current version of the notice says the original version was published by mistake, and contains no details about the text that was changed.
The now unsealed documents show that this was the result of pressure from none other than Admiral Rachel Levine:
The issue of ages and treatment has been quite controversial (mainly for surgery) and it has come up again. We sent the document to Admiral Levine. . . She like [sic] the SOC-8 very much but she was very concerned that having ages (mainly for surgery) will affect access to health care for trans youth and maybe adults too. Apparently the situation in the USA is terrible and she and the Biden administration worried that having ages in the document will make matters worse. She asked us to remove them. We have the WPATH executive committee in this meeting and we explained to her that we could not just remove them at this stage.
Another quote from the article says that "we have made changes as to how the minimal ages are presented in the documents", but this wasn't just a simple change in presentation, all age limits, other than for phalloplasty, are gone, and replaced with procedural steps the patient should go through. They claim this makes the standards more restrictive, but in my opinion that's contradicted by the statements from admiral Levine.
Jesse Singal also points out standards were supposed to be determined by the "Delphi process":
As the document itself explains: “Consensus on the final recommendations was attained using the Delphi process that included all members of the guidelines committee and required that recommendation statements were approved by at least 75% of members.”
This process was violated according to SOC contributors themselves:
I don’t see how we can simply remove something that important from the document—without going through a Delphi—at this final stage of the game [. . . ] I realize that those in favor of the bans are going to go right to the age criteria and ignore the fact that we actually strengthened the strictness of the criteria to help clinicians better discern appropriate surgical candidates from those who are inappropriate [. . . ] It’s all about messaging and marketing.
So between the "correction notice" shenanigans, and outright admission that rules were broken to push through that particular change, it seems like a pretty slam-dunk case for the Biden administration putting political pressure to loosen criteria for transgender care for minors.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
Having that official box there just because a bunch of Twitter users wanted to put that box there is just tyranny of the majority.
All the other forms of feedback - getting ratiod, getting dragged in quote tweets by high-clout accounts, etc - are also basically just tyranny of the majority. The problem is that if, say, the BBC posts something absurdly wrong, and a swarm of users points it in the replies, many people won't bother reading the replies, and even when they do official institutions will have a clout-shield by virtue of being official institutions. The reason Community Notes is awesome is that that official box lets the opinion of the common people be put on par with the mainstream media, NGOs, factcheckers, etc. This is why Elon is never getting any brownie points for fighting misinformation on social media, even though he probably did the most to stop it out of all SocMeds - none of it was ever about misinformation, but about imposing the official opinions on the common people.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
If there was an election today, the conservatives would almost certainly win
And do what, specifically?
We used to have a guy here (or back on reddit) singing praises of UK conservatives, and how Multicultural Torryism is going to show us the way to combat wokeness. The UK now routinely sics the cops on people for denying progressive orthodoxy. Establishment conservatives are playing on the same team as the progressives.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2yr ago
Gays destroyed the what now rule?
You don't have to look all that far back to remember days where the dynamic you see was, in fact, entirely upside down. DADT was implemented in the 1990's, and was replaced by gays being allowed to serve openly a cool two decades later. When my parents left high school and the male graduates applied at the draft office, the military still undertook serious effort to root out anyone gay - and I live in a nation that is friendlier to gay people than most of Europe is.
DADT was not a serious effort to root anyone gay out, it was a serious effort to keep them in. It's fair to say it was still unfair, too restrictive, and discriminatory, but it is extremely dishonest to claim that the goal was to get rid of gay people.
Even with this example in mind, it is pretty clear that progressives are explicitly destroying attempts to keep non-political spaces. Given that their protestations that they just want to be left alone quickly turned to bullying bakers, and promoting mastectomies for minors, it's fair to say their goal was never to keep anything apolitical.
It's not weird, we just need to abandon the idea that companies actions are exclusively market-driven.
Contrapoints made a name for herself through actually engaging with the "alt-right" and by being willing to make real arguments in response to conservatives.
I haven't followed her that closely, but that description feels extremely off. Ages ago he (it was still before transitioning) had a conversation with the Distributist, and a few with Sargon, but since years her entire brand was talking to sockpuppets, and smuggly dismissing viewpoints she disagrees with. The idea she was actually responding to conservatives, let alone making serious arguments is bizarre to me.
Nonetheless, I do take her point: Arguing against "cancellation" or "illiberal" tactics in the abstract is kind of pointless, because almost no one is a true free speech absolutist here.
This is one of the issues she always brings up and never addresses properly. If you want to talk about limits of free speech, have at it, but you have to do q better job then "there are some limits to speech, therefore this instance of speech I don't like should be limited".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2yr ago
In the most famous case, Schwab was alleged to have told the public that, in the future "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy"
...
Instead, the WEF posted a video on its Facebook page
If you're going to deboonk the embarrassing rightoid conspiracy theorists, who lack baseline critical thinking ability, can you at least look up Know Your Meme? I have no idea what you're talking about, I never heard anything about a sinister announcement. The first I heard of it was literally from the Facebook video, and it was embarrassing enough to the WEF all on it's own, that they ended up taking it down, as well as the original article.
Other examples are myriad, but include in many cases phrases about 'eating bugs' and 'living in pods'. The former stems from a 2017 twitter post by the leftist magazine 'Mother Jones' (which, by the way, made fun of the idea of eating bugs) and some human interest stories by food blogs about eating bugs
Yes, us embarrassing conspiracy theorists absolutely did not look up things like Novel Food or Food 2030 research policies. We are guided like sheep by Mother Jones.
If you like lobster, you already eat "bugs".
This, and the bit about pods just sounds like "it's not happening, and if it's happening it's a good thing".
The fact that some people on the right unironically fall for this is embarassing.
No. Business, and government leaders aren't spending millions on this conference for fun, and public figures around the world are not simultaneously chanting the same slogans like "Build Back Better" by coincidence.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7mo ago
People like to dismiss this with references to meaningless cultural politics
Sorry to dismiss a high-effort argument with a one-liner, but: so "meaningless" that he'll fight to the death for (at least one of) them, and literally ban all discussion of them on his Substack because his audience refuses to agree with him.
My offer to these "the culture war is distraction" people is always the same: you get the economy, or whatever else you find "meaningful", I get total uncontested control over culture - deal?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
8mo ago
Can you think of any other innovative tactics that could disrupt the election
Not today, federal agent.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
There is something hellishly dystopian about fleeing to another country, possibly even across the ocean, and your country of birth is still trying to pull you back. Particularly because women are given a free pass.
No there isn't. The idea that people have duties and obligations to their nation was considered so normal you could mistake it for the air we breathe until, like, yesterday. That women get a "free pass" from violent conflict is basic common sense, a conclusion reached by any society that isn't actively suicidal.
What there is something hellishly dystopian about, is that the very same people who demand you fulfill your duties to the nation, are working tirelessly to abolish the very idea of there being a nation to start with. That they're demanding you fight and die for the privilege of having your replacement shipped in in an Amazon package, from the country of the lowest bidders, and for your children - if you have any, and they make it through the war - to be raised with the values of Californian progressives.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1mo ago
Buying Twitter did not improve things.
You mean in the eyes of Blues / Greys, or actually? Because in my opinion it objectively did.
Are puberty blockers chemical castration?
A follow-up to the discussion with @netstack
This was originally a deep-chain reply, but after a few spergy, reddit-tier replies on my end, and @netstack's saintly curiosity, the conversation resulted in a decent-quality argument, that I'd like to get more eyes on and see I missed any obvious objections.
I mistakenly thought that when states chemically castrate sex offenders, they use the progestogens, but when oncologists chemically castrate cancer patients, they use the GnRH drugs. Then the fact that gender clinics recommend GnRH would suggest their protocols are more like cancer treatment than criminal justice.
As @Fruck pointed out, this isn’t the case if Lupron was used for judicial castration in Australia. I’ll assume he’s correct, and I share his frustration proving it. This was the best I could find. It says that CPA, another progestogen, is the only currently approved option, but cites studies on Lupron and a couple others. Obviously, they saw some use in criminal justice.
I did some extra digging as well. The wiki for Lupron links to the paper "Reforming (purportedly) Non-Punitive Responses to Sexual Offending", and while it's about triptorelin instead of Lupron, it's another GnRH. In any case a systematic review of the use of GnRH on sexual offenders (sci-hub) should hopefully settle the matter.
As a side note this paper makes me think the difference between GnRH's and DMPA's is that the former have (or promised to have) fewer side effects, not that they work on a fundamentally different principle (and while we're on the subject, let me just say I'm rather bemused at all the handwringing in all these papers about the side effects of these drugs on convicted sex offenders, when I compare them to the dismissal of any such concerns around giving the same drugs to children).
“Political leverage” was just a joke about the stereotypical eunuch. In poor taste, perhaps.
No, it just completely went over my head, lol.
I doubt that I can find credible sources for long-term reversibility, since I assume it’s permanent at some point. Maybe 2-3 years, since that’s what the oncology websites cite when they feel defensive about gender politics. I’m not trying to push a political line.
This is a fun one. From what I understand chemical castration is meant to be reversible. This is what the wiki for chemical castration says right on the top, and I saw, but failed to bookmark, a paper that made that claim about DMPA's specifically, but that seems to be the general consensus on chemical castration:
Medical considerations are also important, and contemporary doctors should be knowledgeable of these issues. First, chemical castration is no longer effective after it is discontinued;
So if irreversibility is a necessary condition for classifying something as chemical castration... than it seems that chemical castration does not meet the standard.
Now, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the "non-central" argument, you can argue that something that's reversible doesn't quite have that quality of having one's balls cut off that you'd expect from a term like "castration". It is also true you're going to have a hard time finding sources about the reversibility of puberty blockers, since dr. Cass' team looked, and all they can say is:
No conclusions can be drawn about the effect on gender-related outcomes, psychological and psychosocial health, cognitive development or fertility. Bone health and height may be compromised during treatment.
But when gender care providers themselves tell me that "puberty blockers are reversible (asterisk)", the asterisk being you can't stay on them too long, or that if you start them too early you're never going to have an orgasm, when celebrity cases like Jazz Jennings say they don't regret going on blockers, but the downside was "there wasn't enough tissue to work with when it came to the surgery" (and also don't know what an orgasm is), when the industry comes up with procedures like sigmoid vaginoplasties or zero depth vaginoplasties to either hack around or throw up their hands about the issue, can we say that there are good reasons to suspect some of the changes may be irreversible? What is even supposed to be the mechanism for reversibility? For a fully developed adult it's just a question of restoring testosterone levels and sperm counts, but for a child that never went through puberty we're basically hoping their body will catch up with development as if nothing ever happened.
Yeah, I know that as far as evidence goes, this doesn't rise to the standard of a proper well-designed study, but like I said in the other comment, the gender industry isn't particularly transparent about results they don't like. I understand wanting to remain agnostic on the reversibility question, but if you grant that these concerns are reasonable, it seems like puberty blockers are an at least as, and may possibly turn out to be more of, a central example of chemical castration, than chemical castration itself.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2yr ago
Tired: Feminists accidentally reinventing traditional marriage.
Wired: Greytribe galaxy-brain rationalists accidentally reinventing Army Boot Camp.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money,
I'm the resident Musk-skeptic here who called him a fraud, and expects SpaceX and Tesla to crash and burn in the middle-term. I don't think he's wrong here. The disproportion between the funding they're raising and the funding they need to run the site is massive and insane. I think someone back on Reddit mentioned it was literally running out of some guys closet for many years, until it became a Respectable Nonprofit, and they started looking for things to spend money on.
So while it doesn't literally cost no money, you can more or less round it down to it costing no money, and that's without attempting further optimizations like P2P hosting.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2yr ago
Nice rant and all, but I wish you waited until tomorrow with it, because I have no idea what your point is supposed to be.
And Jesus said:
"Do not give bread unto the poor, as life is a repeated game, and the poor will learn that optimal strategy is not to source their own bread"
Hilarious! Really stuck it to those hypocritical Christians. But it's been a while since I read the Bible, what was the actual quote from Jesus? "Do not give bread unto the poor, but do give them a handful of candy, as long as it doesn't cut into your strip-club budget. Oh, and don't forget to be extremely judgmental of people who disagree with you!"?
I'm not religious, I'm for the welfare state, I'm even for small random acts of kindness towards people on the margins of society, but I have no idea what your point is, and your worldview is bordering on parody for me.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
8mo ago
Back in 2020 some people here tried to say a Biden win will the blue tribe to de-escalate, only for all the things you're warning about here to happen anyway. They'll keep on clamping down on dissent no matter what, they're doing it even in countries with no Trump. The idea they'd go easy on us if we let them win is hard to take seriously at this point.
An Ode To The Opinionated Committee Of Miserable Scolds And Ankle-Biters
A short treatise on individual vs. communal activities
Another year has passed, and I guess I'm getting all reflective. This doesn't happen so often anymore, but over the years we spent some time debating "old-Internet vs current-year-Internet". Typically when people talk about it, they bring up how "wild west" it used to be, free from shadowbanning, algorithmic manipulation, and cancel culture, and while it sure would be nice to again be free from Big-Tech shenanigans, recently I started feeling like that analysis is missing a piece. New- vs Old-Internet isn't just about deplatforming and smartphone-driven Eternal September, the advent of social media was a revolutionary change to the structure of the Internet itself. All of a sudden you, yes you, had some chance of becoming an Influencer, possessing the adoration of thousands, and would no longer be just another dude, forced to mingle with the plebeians on some shitty phpBB forum.
As an example of the shift, after the advent of social media, but before The Awokening was in full swing, it seemed like everbody and their dog had to have an "animated avatar ranting about feminism" Youtube channel, and later when they implemented livestreams and superchats, you could see everybody move to unstructured 4-hour streams. I suppose chasing trends is only natural, but at some point things started getting weird... or rather, depressingly ordinary. Suddenly content creators started talking about "branding", A/B testing their thumbnails, and probably deploying scores of other marketing tricks that I'm not even aware of. They have to churn out content at a regular and constant pace, because if you don't. you fall off and people will forget you exist. All the cool kids have spreadsheets now, it's probably less surprising that Kulak, in his quest to be a full-time writer is making extensive use of them, but apparently you can't even do prostitution without them these days.
A while back @DaseindustriesLtd asked if this place feels like home to others, my answer was horribly trite in retrospect, but it tried to get at the ability to speak my mind here, and the desolation of once dynamic and generative communities brought by the semi-recent cultural changes. But the more I think about it, the more it seems like there's something deeper about why this place feels more like "home". A long time ago, back when the crash of 2008 was still fresh in people's minds, I read Modern Political Economics by Yannis Varoufakis, the ex- finance minister of Greece. The final chapter, devoted to solutions to the crisis, had this little paragraph which, for some reason or another, has engraved itself in my brain:
Since this is a post-crash book, Varoufakis was trying to put forward some synthesis of all the economic memes floating around, from libertarianism to communism, trying to balance out planning vs. spontaneity, and individual freedom vs. collective interests. Setting the economics aside, there's something about this metaphor that I find quite fitting here. Ironically it was Dase himself who called us an "opinionated committee" that he doesn't want to justify his writing to, and prefers to write about important issues directly - a clear turn towards becoming a composer free to write whatever music he likes, and sink or swim on his own merit. While there's something to be said about not being so opinionated and set in our way, I'm more and more appreciative of being a part of an amorphous committee blob. I really enjoy that no one has any money to make, clout to chase, or anything to prove here, at least beyond the standard internet forum dick-waving. What's more the problem with the composer route is that you have to compose, compose, compose! As I mentioned above, in the world of Substack, Twitter or Youtube, it's churn or die. Meanwhile, back "home", I can pick up my instrument and join in when I have time and when the fancy strikes me, and when I get tired I can put it back down, confident that the music will still be there when I come back. My old libertarian self would probably spit on me, but there's something to be said about these sort of communal activities, where one does not have to fret about their relative status, or line going up.
I suppose all this is a long-winded and disjointed way to thank you all for keeping the lights on, and the music playing. For all the discontents dissing us, I think this is one of the very few places where the Dead Internet Theory, in it's AI or Human-NPC form, does not hold. Happy New Year to y'all!
More options
Context Copy link