rae
1mo ago
Historical eunuchs who were castrated pre-puberty had remarkably increased lifespans (and that’s with no sex hormones, having estrogen in your system would decrease the odds of osteoporosis), so if there’s major health issues arising from puberty blockers, it would be a side effect of the particular medications, not of blocking puberty itself.
There’s also a difference between the compromise protocol of “go on puberty blockers until age 16, then start estrogen/testosterone”, and “start HRT ASAP to go through cross-sex puberty at a normal age”. The whole point of the former was to let the minor have time to decide if they want to transition or not, but that seems to have been lost in the debate.
rae
1mo ago
I meant that she doesn’t have anorgasmia (having started puberty blockers at 14 or 15 IIRC). But in any case you can delay the puberty blockers until tanner stage 3 or 4, or use local testosterone gel on specific areas.
I know adult cis women who never had an orgasm and that are quite unhappy about it. From a cursory search it’s around 10% of women? It’s pretty easy to talk and read about it and feel like you’re missing out.
I know two trans women.
One transitioned in her late twenties, and gets stared at wherever she goes. Anyone can instantly tell that she’s trans from her voice and appearance, she’ll need to spend a lot of money on surgery to look remotely female, and she’s at the risk of being hate-crimed just from walking in the wrong area. She doesn’t behave very femininely, perhaps from nearly 30 years of growing up as male.
The other went on puberty blockers as a teenager, she has a normal female voice, and wherever she goes, the average person just sees a normal woman. She didn’t have to spend a single dime on facial feminisation surgery, and also seems to have fairly standard straight female sexuality (no complaints about anorgasmia) as opposed to the weird fetishistic oversexualised behaviour some later transitioners have.
Without going into any studies or the difficulty of distinguishing persistence vs desistance rates, it’s unarguable that early transitioners just fit in better in society and have less chance of being perceived as “freaks” in public based on their appearance. I don’t know if that quality of life upgrade is taken into account in any studies, but that’s enough for me to support them in a broad strokes fashion, even if I don’t necessarily agree with all the details of the modern clinical practices.
rae
1mo ago
I’m attracted to men so I do think I understand male attractiveness, and I agree with the posters above. Finn looks like a git, Niko is cute but not in a 1 in 100 way (I absolutely see a lot of men equally or more attractive if I go on Tinder/Hinge…), and a lot of the other men are handsome sure but kinda unappealing. Give me men that look like they have personality, not just generic pretty boys.
I don’t see why the number of likes is that important anyway unless you’re just looking for an ego boost.
rae
1mo ago
That link doesn’t work btw.
For all the men I know who are perpetually single, it’s pretty obvious why they’re that way, whether it’s from an off-putting personality, impossible requirements, or just plain never leaving the house. I don’t know a single one of these mythical average nice guys that somehow can’t get a girlfriend despite their best efforts.
rae
1mo ago
Yeah, the actual “average” guys I know are doing just fine when it comes to finding a steady long term relationship, even if they might have issues with casual sex. It’s the high IQ, terminally online, borderline autistic guys that tend to struggle with both, and they often tend to get stuck in cognitive black holes.
rae
4mo ago
That probably depends on location? Where I live grocery stores will deliver to you for free if you order more than €40 of food.
How do we reconcile the concept of the Patriarchy with evident longstanding social norms of enforced monogamy?
How do you mean? Traditional monogamy is very advantageous for average men, who might not be able to get a partner in a polygamous society where the richest/highest status men have multiple wives.
their "love for their partner" and mine do not appear to be the same sort of thing at all.
I’m bisexual and if your love for your partner is founded on monogamy and raising children, then fair, it’s not the same as mine. Mine is founded on deep affection for my partner, feeling like an “us” like we’re together through thick and thin, feeling comfortable revealing our most intimate parts to each other. Deeply caring for them even if they become ill, even if we never have children together (although that would sadden me), even if we agree to have an open relationship (although I’m personally more monogamous, it might change say, 5y+ into a relationship).
What proportion? 51%? 25%? 10%? 5%?
According to this survey, 53% of gay men were in a relationship, and 14% of gay men were in a strictly monogamous relationship. I don’t see why the numbers matter, even if there was only a single homosexual couple out there we should still accept them.
I would contend that the previous effort was to try to create the impression that monogamy and raising children, among other signifiers of "normality", were in fact 50%+. That this was only achievable by lying shamelessly is my point.
That’s not what I personally heard, the messaging I got was that it’s fine for gay men to have relationships and to raise children together.
Gay men have been having anonymous promiscuous sex even in the most repressive societies. What would you gain by removing the social acceptance of homosexual relationships and gay marriage?
rae
4mo ago
That has more to do with the fact that they’re men than the fact that they’re gay. Male homosexuality is simply male sexuality that doesn’t have to deal with women. How many straight men would practice monogamy if they could have unlimited sex on demand simply by going on an app?
Despite that, there’s still a sizeable proportion of gay men that choose monogamy and raising children, hence the demand for gay marriage and surrogacy.
rae
11mo ago
Serious question - what’s the use in calling a phenotypically female intersex person a “man” due to XY chromosomes? They have a vagina, grew up perceived and socialised as a woman, and some even have ovaries and the ability to get pregnant (if it’s Swyer Syndrome). Prior to the invention of genetic sequencing, there’d be no way of telling they’re not say, female with some hormonal abnormality. Look up CAIS - people with it look 100% like women to the point where historically they weren’t told they were anything but infertile normal women.
Barring intersex athletes from competing with women is perfectly reasonable if it’s a condition that gives them an unfair advantage. However, having pronouns and gender be tied to chromosomes seems to me like it would cause the same issues as what some trans activists request. If you’re intersex, you have to “include chromosomes in bio” so people can call you a dude/a lady despite you not looking like one at all. You’re, ironically enough, saying that men can have vaginas, some men can get pregnant, and that women can have penises.
rae
1yr ago
Was C.S. Lewis truly counter-cultural at the time? I think it’s only because the counter-culture and the mainstream flipped in recent years that C.S. Lewis’ views would be considered anything transgressive. His attitude towards women was fairly standard for a mid-20th century British man and his Christianity would have been shared by the majority in society.
rae
1yr ago
Died a horrible death with the fifth season of GOT? What are the hot new shows nowadays?
What died with GOT was a singular, high quality show dominating pop culture, but there’s been spectacular shows since. Better Call Saul, Mr Robot, Dark, Queen’s Gambit are all post S5 of Game of Thrones, and in terms of ongoing shows, there’s Arcane, which is an artistic masterpiece that has no right to be based on League of Legends, there’s also Severance, Andor, two new Star Trek shows that are actually respectful of the source material, The Last of Us, 1883…
I’d argue TV is only getting better (although maybe the recent writer’s strike will put a stop to it). But the point was that we peaked in the 20th century, so even GoT disproves the argument despite only being good until 2014.
Talk about formulaic... I couldn't make myself finish the Witcher 3, the writing was pretty good, but it didn't cut it for me as a game. By the time we got to Cyberpunk 2077, I was thoroughly burned out on AAA stuff so I never gave it a go, and never heard anything about it that would make me reconsider. Every once in a while some decent niche stuff comes out, but nothing "great".
That’s a matter of personal taste then. Baldur’s Gate 3 is an incredible work and calling it “niche” would make that word meaningless given that it was the #1 best selling game on Steam on launch and won numerous high profile awards.
In another comment I mentioned hype, it might not be the best way to measure whether something is great, but it's something.
Sounds like a “vibecession” of art rather than any real artistic decline. Maybe you’re also just suffering from nostalgia?
Or maybe one of the problems is the death of a mainstream media culture, which I agree had its last major hurrah with Game of Thrones. There’s no single “hot new show” anymore, there’s a ton of shows with a few incredible ones amidst a sea of trash, and you can’t rely on what’s #1 to tell you what’s good or bad.
Even outside of niche I think you’re still ignoring a lot of mainstream art.
What about the Golden Age of Television we’ve had this century? Before shows like The Sopranos and The Wire came along, TV programmes were mostly formulaic, episodic time-fillers and even the best were severely constrained by the need for each episode to be a self-contained narrative, and to stretch the budget across 24 episode per season. Now the most prestigious cinema has mostly migrated to the small screen and the shows we’ve gotten in the last 25 years could never have existed in the 20th century; the 90 minute Hollywood film is no longer as relevant and it’s normal that it peaked in the past.
What about video games? In terms of revenue they now completely dwarf Hollywood and the music industry combined and again the kinds of stories and experience we have today would have been completely impossible in the past. Games like Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate 3, The Witcher 3 are amazing works of art not just in the visuals but in their narrative.
CG animation in general is an amazing new medium and I’m often impressed by even random animated shorts I find on YouTube, let alone big budget productions.
To me what you’re saying would be like a Medieval English bard time travelling to 20th century and complaining that we don’t make good art anymore because we haven’t produced any better epic poems since Beowulf; that’s normal, people move on to new mediums. And before you deride TV, video games and CG as “not real art”, know that previous generations said they exact same thing about films, photography, even novels. The written word was derided by the Ancient Greeks as causing forgetfulness and that true wisdom could only be taught orally; by their standards, the works of Rousseau or any modern philosopher would be worthless.
I’m sure that in the future when we’re all playing fully immersive virtual reality experiences, people will look to the current day with nostalgia and complain that art is dead because we don’t make good video games you can play on a flat screen anymore.
rae
1yr ago
That picture shows Buck next to Laverne Cox who’s quite tall and wearing heels, he’s actually the average height for a cis man in many countries at around 5’9. I personally wouldn’t use Buck Angel as the go-to trans man because he’s turned into a proto-TERF himself strangely enough, and far more physically impressive trans men absolutely exist, see Mitch Harrison who can stand next to the Rock and is 6’3 and is quite muscular.
How are you supposed to enforce sex-segregated bathrooms anyhow? Should you pepper spray anyone who you think doesn’t belong, like what happened to this tall biological female thinking they were in the presence of a biological male?
The sources I’ve looked up show no link between gender inclusive bathroom policies and crime rates, but if you have any that contradict that, feel free to share.
rae
1yr ago
I’m a liberal and a centrist, and I’ve heard the exact same argument from leftists, but reversed, in that I’m basically a fascist because I support capitalism, am against identity politics, quotas, unrestricted immigration, and am geopolitically pro-Western.
How much of that is due to the fundamentals of either religion as opposed to the whims of cultural change? Today mainstream Islam is conservative and fundamentalist while Catholicism is the milquetoast liberal religion, but historically the roles were actually reversed!
Muslims were famously more tolerant of Jews in Al-Andalus than the catholic Spanish, and while Justinian the Great criminalised all homosexuality from the 6th century onwards, classical Islamic cultures had an approach very close to Greco-Roman mores where men were expected to be attracted to both girls and pubescent boys. Numerous caliphs, emirs and sultans (including Mehmed the Conqueror) were known to have male lovers, and these are kinds of societies that produced many instances of effeminate, sexually available male dancers from the Ottoman köçek to the Egyptian khawal. Literary works in the Muslim world were quite shameless in the amount of homoeroticism compared to anything in the West.
But as other commenters have noted, if you’re a Catholic and start disagreeing with the direction of the church, converting to Islam makes little logical sense. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to convert to any of the thousands of other Christian branches? Or even just start following the former Bishop Strickland and say Pope Francis is the anti-Christ and a usurper of the papal position.
rae
1yr ago
The Dunning-Kruger effect just showed that people at bad at estimating their score on a test, nothing more. It didn’t show that lower skilled people think of themselves as more competent than higher skilled people (the latter’s estimation was higher than the former on average).
The “overestimation” and “underestimation” is just a statistical artefact - if you get a 0, any random estimation is going to be an overestimation unless you get it precisely right, and if you get 100, an underestimation, and the same goes for anything in-between to a lesser extent.
But people absolutely loooove to take these limited psychology studies and twist them to sound like it gives some clever insight into the human condition (generally one that supports their preconceived notions and biases), so that’s how we got “dumb people think they’re clever and smart people think they’re dumb” from “people can’t estimate their result on a general-knowledge test very accurately on average”.
rae
1yr ago
The gay men I know spend just as much time and energy as straight men on getting sex, they’re just more successful at the hooking up part. They’ll spend way more effort on their appearance compared to straight men (with corresponding higher rates of body dysmorphia and eating disorders) since male sexuality is primarily visual. Ironically straight men should be more motivated by their sexuality in pursuing financial success, as things like status, money and charisma matter a lot less to sexual success if you’re gay (unless it’s a sugar daddy situation).
I think it’s more to do with the kinds of people that are openly homosexual - having used Grindr in rural or poor areas, the gays there tend to be extremely closeted, often in sham straight relationships. Many won’t even admit to being gay (which is why medical professionals use the term “men who have sex with men”). You need a certain level of introspection and non-conformity to come out (even to yourself!) and I bet that’s correlated with financial success - plus you’ll likely want to move to an urban, more affluent area as that’s where LGBT acceptance is the highest nowadays, and that surely motivates you to have a high paying career due to the cost of living.
rae
1yr ago
Why do you feel disgust at trans people? Is it disgust at the concept of being trans, or the uncanny appearance some of them stereotypically have? Many trans people look perfectly normal. Trans men especially just tend to look like short effeminate men and it’s very likely you’ll interact with them without noticing they’re trans if you don’t know what to look for.
Tbh it’s the same as with any minority. Once you get to know them as people and realise they’re not the caricatures the media portrays them as, the disgust and hate tends to go away. What Daryl Davis did would probably work quite well for trans people as well; if you’re not familiar with him, he’s a black man that befriended members of the KKK. Many left the organisation as they couldn’t reconcile what they’d been taught about black people, and the normal human being they were talking to.
rae
1yr ago
I guess it’s another victim of the toxoplasma of rage? Important issues that no one disagrees with are largely ignored, whereas less important ones will get talked about if you can create a debate over them.
This happens on a micro scale as well in trans issues; the trans people that will attract the most attention will naturally be the most divisive, e.g. Dylan Mulvaney. Fewer people care about say, Rebekah Bruesehoff, the trans girl activist who plays field hockey and just looks like your typical boring blonde American girl; but everybody knows Lia Thomas because leftists look virtuous defending a male looking 6’1 broad shouldered trans woman, and most importantly, they can have a flaming debate with conservatives online about it.
According to stats I’ve found, something like 1390 adolescents went on puberty blockers in the US in 2021, out of a population of about 42 million total teenagers. 282 teenagers got a mastectomy. In comparison, 2,590 kids died from a gunshot in that same year.
With those numbers, you’re exceedingly unlikely to know anyone with kids going through those procedures. To me, this just seems like a moral panic amplified through the news in order to distract the masses from real issues - the housing crisis, corruption, school shootings, inflation, wealth inequality, social services being stripped away, the erosion of the middle class. Why do you care about this? Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?
You know what issue really affects children in the US? 1 in 4 kids are obese or overweight. Where is the medical establishment there? What about the 8.4% of kids on psych meds, some of whom are on them involuntarily?
Also maybe it’s because I don’t live in America, but in my modern Western country, transitioning isn’t a matter of waltzing into a clinic and getting your breasts chopped. Just getting evaluated by the gender service takes upward of 5 years, and you need to be vetted by a series of psychologists. Getting any kind of surgery requires an official gender identity disorder diagnosis and a letter from 2 separate professionals (and good luck getting those). Sure, you can go private - have you got ten thousand pounds in cash? You have to be incredibly dedicated, child or adult, to go through this system.
And as far as I know, America doesn’t have much public healthcare, so these kids getting surgeries while they’re underage have got to be the beneficiaries of rich parents who can afford to foot the bill. You can get all sorts of crazy ridiculous procedures, even as a minor, if you have more money then sense. Is it not absolutely disproportionate to have so much air time occupied to whatever most likely very low % of those few hundred kids from privileged backgrounds that might regret it later?
rae
1yr ago
Yes, though I was under the impression that cancer treatments are extremely potent, and dangerous, and are only prescribed when you actually have cancer, rather than given out like candy as a prophylactic?
There are many kinds of medications used as cancer treatment. Chemotherapy would probably fit the description of extremely potent and dangerous, and you don’t want to go on it unless you have cancer.
Meanwhile bicalutamide is a popular cancer treatment for malignant prostate cancer, but is also given out to cis women with androgen-dependent conditions like acne, hirsutism, hair loss; it’s also given to men who have overly long erections. It has very few side effects except rare liver interactions (so you have to get frequent blood tests).
Either "some form" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, or this is plain unlikely to be true? Even WPATH kept the 18+ age limit for female bottom surgery, even as they abolished limits for every other procedure.
I was talking about hysterectomy, which many cis women get for cancer prevention (or treatment). Removing the uterus and ovaries will obviously go a long way in preventing uterine and ovarian cancer. The 18+ limit seems sensible to me in any case.
Thanks!! The only thing I’d disagree with is that transition isn’t necessarily an irreversible all-or-nothing process. You can start by changing your presentation to something more feminine or masculine, transition socially, and even HRT is a very gradual process that leaves you with multiple months to decide and for MtF patients there’s one irreversible change and that’s breast growth, but they’ll rarely grow big enough that they would require double incision mastectomy should you detransition. FtM patients will get voice deepening, male pattern baldness, facial hair growth (although laser hair removal isn’t a big deal), and bottom growth, but it’s much easier for FtMs to socially transition than MtFs without hormones.
What made the gender dysphoria go away for you if I may ask? I was able to repress it for a while after adolescence, but it came back with a vengeance once the infamous “twink death” hit.
I’ve never heard “what’s up with all the canes” despite being pretty active in trans communities (I actually don’t know anybody that uses a cane or crutch), although I’m seeing that canes are popular in the broader American queer community for some reason? I do know that various disorders are more common among trans people (e.g. endometriosis, PCOS in FtMs, EDS in general) but they’re not related to puberty blockers. Delaying puberty for too long without any sex hormones is bad for bone health, that’s for sure.
To have the best chance of passing, you should skip the 2 years of puberty blocker and just go straight into opposite-sex HRT. Once you are on estrogen or testosterone, you’re not at a higher risk of osteoporosis than cis women/men respectively, and it’s conceivable your risk could actually be lower than someone who goes through menopause. Trans women that are on only puberty blockers for a while will actually grow taller and have a barrel-like chest (the classic eunuch physique), even if they avoid masculinisation.
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