jimm
11mo ago
He works on training a chatgpt instance to provide gender affirming care
Yeah, he's already gone wrong there. That's not a problem with therapy though so much as this person's attempt to blow smoke up his own ass and call it therapy.
The opposite doesn't really work either though. If a human therapist says "Tim, I think you're delusional", the most likely result is broken rapport and Tim shopping for a new more gender affirming therapist. Even if the therapist managed to get enough buy in that Tim doesn't walk, he's still left with "Okay, I'm delusional. Now what? I still feel like shit." rather than "Okay thanks, all better!".
You really have to come at things without a pre-prescribed ending point in mind. Like, "I feel really shitty every time I look in the mirror and see a man. I feel like I am a woman, and that doesn't match what I see. What do we do about this?", and finding out what to do about it as you seek to understand the issue together. I guess it's pretty non-obvious how to do this effectively, now that I write it out.
jimm
11mo ago
Therapy is inherently opinionated.
Where are you getting this idea? It's certainly not true.
jimm
11mo ago
Therapy doesn't require accepting anything on authority. It's not particularly hard to tear people down by their own judgement without asserting any of your own, just by pointing at the things they try to look away from. There's no reason a LLM couldn't be trained to do that.
jimm
11mo ago
"Can people who have official government documents that document them as women, involve non-consenting members of the public in their use of spaces for women?" To which the obvious answer is: yes.
My completely male cousin had a drivers license that identified him as female due to pure governmental incompetence. I think even the most extreme trans advocates would agree that this ought not give him a pass to use the women's bathroom.
Passing the buck to the government only passes the buck. The question is over what exactly makes one a "woman" in the sense of deserving bathroom privileges, and the answer is not "the infallible government said so".
You can keep your beliefs about the relative prevalence of these things, and I have no interest in challenging your perspective there. But there's something interesting to notice, which I hope you'll take an interest in exploring.
Obviously one could say the opposite of your statement, with "The vanishingly small likelihood that I or somebody I know gets themselves justifiably shot seems to not outweigh the additional risk that comes with not having a firearm available for self defense in time of need."
The interesting part is about what this choice of what to minimize and what to focus on says about our implicit worldviews.
What experiences have you had, or not had, which leads you to the opposite? Is it easy to imagine losing your cool "randomly", and ending up shot? Easy to imagine people you care about doing the same? Hard to imagine anyone being genuinely above that? Have you had any experiences where you or someone you care about were threatened by a predator of either the two or four legged variety? If so, is it hard to imagine the situation being safe if the "good guys" were armed?
In spirit of going first, I have a hard time imagining myself or anyone I care about getting shot by someone who can then pull off a self defense claim. I have had experiences, and known people to have experiences, where there's serious threat of harm in the ways that firearms can stop. Given how these events played out it's easy to imagine having firearms making things worse too, but there's still a clear possibility that not having that option could prove disastrous. Naturally, this leads to me being sympathetic to the idea that we should allow firearms for self defense, and if someone gets themselves shot by being "randomly aggressive" in ways that puts an innocent person in reasonable fear of serious injury or death... so be it?
What about you?
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