rae
1yr ago
Suppose you asked a black person which historical period of the USA they would rather live in. Very few would prefer to live in the 19th century, or during Jim Crow laws, or during racial segregation, or any time before the recent present. Would you also conclude that black people are accelerationists, and be surprised when they also agree that they would rather live in a less socially cohesive environment but also less racist environment? Same would go for gay or transgender people - my own answer wouldn’t be any different from the women you talked to.
Also I don’t understand why the answer to “in which historical period would you rather live” would be anything but “now” for literally anyone (except for a cop-out answer like 2013). What advantages are there to living in any pre-21st century period? Even setting medicine aside - higher rates of violence and warfare, fewer social opportunities (most people lived and died as farmers), living under the threat of famine, much worse food, living conditions and sanitation, repressive social conformity (look what the Catholic Church did to slightly different versions of Christianity, no need to be an atheist). All this for… what, having a vague sense of purpose? Surely you have a higher chance of getting purpose and social cohesion today by joining a community, movement or even forming one around your idiosyncratic belief system (see Rationalist), without abandoning any of the modern advancements that truly make your life better?
The fact that people are able to feel purposelessness today is an utter luxury born of the fact that their life are stripped of the daily struggle for existence and that they have time to engage in activities other than obtaining food, clothing and shelter - the answer to modern alienation is not to return to a life of privation and barbarism but to find meaning in the new social and technological landscape. Is there not a great meaningful story being told in the current digital age, where we are on the cusp of creating generally artificially intelligent beings? Doesn’t being part of an huge interconnected network of minds where thoughts can be beamed across the entire earth in less than second not fill you with wonder? Plus, for the first time you can find your community around something other than mere geographical proximity and the happenstance of your birth - why would I trade that for being an 11th century peasant who lived and died within a few kilometres of the village he was born?
rae
9mo ago
I think there is a definitely a truth to the social contagion aspect for a sizeable amount of FtMs - they comprise the majority of de-transitioners and their numbers have surged in recent years. But I disagree about this part:
The condition has no observable physical symptoms, no objective correlative. If I tell you I’m really a man, you have to take my word for it.
There are a number of physical correlations to being trans, which I’ve previously touched on in a previous post. Mutations associated with MTHFR deficiency were found in 98% of transgender patients in one clinic (versus the expected 20%) and both endocrine abnormalities and auto-immune issues are quite common. Treating the correlates actually seems to improve the psychiatric distress associated with being transgender, although it’s still very early.
The recent surge in trans people could very well be explained by similar factors as to what’s driving the increase in autism, ADHD, autoimmune diseases, inflammation, etc. For instance, micro plastics and other endocrine disrupters in the environment and diet, low vitamin D from not going outside, the recent recommendation for pregnant women to take folate supplements, etc. “Putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay” is pretty close to the truth, funnily enough.
So if you want to stop young adolescent females from transitioning, instead of blaming it on social contagion and the media, perhaps you should first see if they have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, polycystic ovarian syndrome, or abnormal testosterone levels; there’s a high chance that’s the case.
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
5mo 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
First, let me say that I appreciate you commenting, since so many posters here are conservative and/or rightist, so it's nice to also hear from people with a different perspective. That being said, I'm still going to disagree with you, since that's kind of the point of this place.
Thank you, I see a lot of posts about trans issues here but I don’t see many from actual trans people, so I thought it could be an interesting perspective.
It sounds like you are a homosexual transsexual (HSTS) to use Blanchard's typology, which means you are quite different from autogynephiles like Contrapoints. I don't think your experiences are typical of trans-identified males in general.
I think there’s a few different clusters of trans women and more than just the two Blanchard identified. I don’t know if the so-called AGP types are the majority, or if they’re just more visible - something like 50% of transwomen identify as bisexual, from what I remember.
I would put sex-fakers in the same category and afford them little sympathy.
That’s a difference in values between us; you consider sex to be an important characteristic that carries with it a certain weight and thus should be truthfully communicated, while I think it’s an unfortunate holdover from our evolutionary history that has trapped people in roles they didn’t want, both biologically and socially. I recognise the usefulness of having police officers and military service members be correctly identified, but I think the sooner we make biological sex irrelevant, the better.
I don’t view my transition as “faking” being a woman. I’m taking medication that truly does give me female sexual secondary sexual characteristics, and even alters my neurochemistry to be closer to cis women’s. I think it would be accurate to describe me as chemically intersex - medically speaking, I need to be checked for both breast cancer and prostate cancer, for instance. Otherwise I don’t intentionally go about trying to be called a woman, although I’m happy if I do.
Do you think that recognizing someone as a woman is contingent on them passing as one? If so, do you agree that it is more than fair to call obvious men like Lia Thomas, Rachel Levine, Emilia Decaudin, Jessica Yaniv, Alok Vaid Menon, etc. men?
My mental concept of them is “men”, yes. But I respect non-passing trans women’s pronouns and gender identity out of kindness and empathy, in the same way I won’t call someone ugly or fat to their face because it’s insulting and unproductive, and there’s no benefit to drawing attention to that fact in most contexts. If prompted, I can give advice on how to pass better in the same way I’d give advice on how to lose weight.
rae
11mo ago
Large language models like ChatGPT are simply trained to predict the next token* (+ a reinforcement learning stage but that’s more for alignment). That simple strategy enables them to have the tremendous capabilities we see today, but their only incentive is to output the next plausible token, not provide any truth or real reference.
There’s ways to mitigate this - one straightforward way would be to connect the model to a database or search engine and have it explicitly look up references. This is the current approach taken by Bing, while for ChatGPT you can use plugins (if you are accepted in the waitlist), or code your own solution with the API + LangChain.
*essentially a word-like group of characters
rae
5mo 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
9mo ago
I’m an atheist and consider myself a moral relativist, which is to me is quite distinct from being a moral nihilist. Morality, to me, is a subjective human construct but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist; it exists in that same sphere as concepts, ideas and beliefs. It’s based on axioms which are essentially arbitrary; the only thing you can do is point out logical contradictions ensuing from them. In that manner, it’s quite similar to maths, which also don’t materially exist but certainly can be studied.
I find the very concept that morality could ever be objective to be logically incoherent; whatever moral “truth” you come up with, I can immediately just invent another worldview that contradicts it due to having different axioms. Even if God existed, I don’t see why I couldn’t disagree with his morality. The fact that he created me or the universe doesn’t grant him any philosophical authority any more than my parents, and being omnipotent just makes him a cosmic dictator with the power to punish me if I stray from his own personal beliefs.
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
5mo ago
Personally, I'm very happy it's out of the news cycle. I think the mania goes both ways and it's incredible how much both the left and right have completely blown out of proportion this private medical issue that affects a small amount of people, and I believe the ideological obsession over it (including from the left) does more harm than good.
I'll preface this by saying that I'm transgender, and I had dysphoria since I was a child myself, but I am a bit of an old-fashioned "truscum" as I don't really fully subscribe to the mainstream leftist trans views. I do know some people in the "neutral middle" - most of my more right-wing friends are opposed to the excesses of the trans movement, but otherwise either don't care or just passively go with the medical consensus.
Can anybody enlighten me why people aren't more curious, why they're happy for children to be groomed into lifelong medicalisation, with their life choices pre-emptively narrowed before they even understand what consent means? The true-believers I understand, it's supposedly smart, moral people that aren't engaged that I'm confused about.
Lifelong medicalisation happens anyway no matter when you transition, but if you do it as an adult, it's much worse. You have to pay huge sums of money (tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars) for very painful, potentially risky surgery - for MtFs, facial feminisation surgery - which is literally slicing your face open, shaving your bones with a saw, and stitching it back up - tracheal shave, voice feminisation surgery, hairline reduction, and some more. All of this you do if you want to pass as a normal member of the opposite sex instead of a freak that's the butt of jokes.
Meanwhile if you transition around the start of puberty, you don't have to do any of these surgeries - you'll go through the rest of your life as a normal-looking member of the opposite sex, and won't have to go through the trauma of watching your body turn into something that gives you psychological pain every day. There's only one surgery you might have to do and that's sex reassignment surgery, and there I don't have any issue with not allowing minors to go through it.
You know what pre-emptively narrows your life choices before you understand what consent means? Good old fashioned puberty. If given the option between a natural puberty that tortures you psychologically has you spend significant amount of effort and money trying to undo its consequences, and a different medically induced one that does not, what is the justification in going with the first one, apart from the naturalistic fallacy?
Now there is a risk of regret - catching teenagers that think they're transgender but later desist. This is where I'm against the leftist discourse glorifying the state of being transgender - you want to make it clear that it's an unpleasant, undesirable medical condition. From what I've seen, the rate of detransition is fairly low; say it was theoretically 10% (it is much lower than that from what I've read), why is preventing the regret of that 10% more important than preventing the regret of that 90% from not going through transition early?
rae
1yr ago
Do you think a normie would be impressed if they asked “who are you and why should I care” and the person answered they got 2k GitHub stars on their Rust tokenisation library? I personally don’t see how becoming the master of an incredibly niche and nerdy domain that no one cares about would be motivated by the desire not to be worthless. It would explain high-status jobs like doctor, lawyer, stock broker, etc.
I think it’s more explainable by the rates of autism in trans women. Autistic people tend to be deeply obsessive from a young age and aren’t motivated by social reasons or even a sense of cosmic worthlessness - some autistic fixations are absurdly pointless. Also, programming has an immediate, intrinsically rewarding feedback loop that can be pursued entirely solitarily, and the people in it famously don’t care about fitting into social norms (if you’re a good programmer, you’ll get a job even if you’re an awkward nerd, a furry, or a trans woman).
I’m an autistic transwoman and I spent most of my childhood in obsessive fantasy worlds - programming appealed to me because it was inherently “depersonalising” - I could get lost in code and forget about who I was, and it didn’t matter to other people as well. If anything, I’m motivated by the opposite of status-seeking.
Before that I was an artist and a writer and similarly enjoyed the deep work aspect, but in today’s shamelessly self promoting world you can’t really have art speak for itself anymore, it’s all about the story and the creator behind it. And I got far more appreciation from other people by doing artistic works, than by working alone on weird technical projects that I don’t even share with anybody.
As a trans woman, this post is like reading the world view of someone from a completely different civilisation. While I did grow up as a male, none of the points you mention about it hit close to home - I don't know how much of it is because I grew up outside of the Anglosphere, and because of my personal background. I was going to write a lengthy quote-by-quote reply, but I think it would suffice to say that all of your points would do as well to convince any pro-trans, liberal person as a trying to convince an atheist vegan to eat meat by invoking the Bible. It's not just the facts you mentioned that are dispute, but the very core values.
The transgender debate is tiresome at this point, but what draws my attention more is the gender essentialist arguments you mentioned, especially with regards to interactions between men and women. I've personally mostly grown up friends with women (although it has varied depending on the years), as they were a lot friendlier and I had more shared interests, and with none of the issues your described. I'm not even gay (I used to be 50-50 bisexual prior to transitioning, now it's about 95-5 in favor of men).
The temptation issue is also why I would never allow my daughter when she is 14-years old to go on a sleepover alone with any guy. It's not so much about the guy being a potential "rapist" -- it's about the very real possibility they both could be succumb to temptation.
Would you rather your daughter go on a sleepover alone with a masculine lesbian friend, or a very feminine gay boy? What about a trans guy of the same age, vs. a trans girl, both being straight (i.e., the trans guy is attracted to women and the trans girl to men).
I believe that men and women have a deep need for spending at least some time in sex segregated clubs. And this is rooted in biology in all the biology I noted above, that men and women have different strengths to develop and challenges to overcome. When you add just one opposite person to a group the dynamic changes -- immediately you get status posturing, sexual drama, and white knighting.
I have often been the only male in a group and this has not happened. If anything, I would be vastly more awkward in a traditionally masculine men-only group, due to having few interests in common, and I would be far more sexually attracted to them. When I was with a group of male friends and an attractive guy I had a crush on joined, I developed those behaviours you mention - white knighting, favouritism, always taking his side, etc. It has nothing to do with the sex of the person, and you should learn to deal with it rather than avoid the opposite sex altogether.
From time-to-time, I sometimes do an overnight getaway and spend a night out on the town with an old friend, maybe I crash on his couch, etc. As a married man, I feel like this would be very inappropriate to do with a woman. Even if I had certainty that it would be entirely chaste, it would cause my wife anxiety. But I also don't even want to lead myself into temptation.
Time away spent purely in fun with a woman friend might seem magical...temptation would arise... From everything I've heard, deep one-on-one time with someone of the opposite sex is the fast road to ruining a marriage.
This just seems sad. Are you clearly not capable of having deep one-on-one time with a woman without it being potentially sexual? I'm sexually attracted to a lot of my male friends and I had to learn to resist the temptation, and was able to develop strong friendships with people I was attracted to regardless of their gender.
I've shared beds and hotel rooms with both men and women with no issue. I'm bi and could potentially have sex with anyone I spent the night with - should my boyfriend be anxious whenever I'm alone with literally anyone? Especially in my liberal circles, a lot of people are bi, or open-minded enough to have sex with a trans woman.
Otherwise he will arrive at young adulthood, and the girls he was friends will forget him, as they will be interested in actual masculine guys, and he will not have the experience in relating to other guys as guys.
I was a feminine bisexual man and this was not my experience. If anything, women were even more interested in me, both sexually and as friends, once I became an adult. Flip it around - wouldn't you rather have your girlfriend be interested in the same masculine hobbies you have, than feminine ones you have 0 interest in? It's the same with women.
When I say with regards to a person 'he is a boy' the words 'he' and 'boy' refer to biological sex, as the words always have meant in the English language up until a few years ago.
That I don't get. We gender people based on secondary sexual characteristics, not biological sex. If you see someone who looks like Hunter Schafer or Emma Ellingsen (https://aschehoug.no/media/catalog/author/e/m/emma_ellingsen_foto_jakob_landvik_mg_7819.jpg), your brain will go "she" and you will have to correct yourself. If you're meeting Emma at a restaurant and you say "I'm meeting a blond guy" to the waiter, do you think you'll be pointed in the right direction? If you're mugged by Buck Angel, are you going to point and yell "catch her, that woman robbed me!"? Even Ben Shapiro had to correct himself when he subconsciously referred to Hunter by she/her.
I’ve seen your blog in the wild before and always wanted to respond, so I’m happy to see you here!
I will second a few comments and encourage you to attempt to condense your writing; your two linked articles are long even by the standards of this community and engaging with them in their entirety would take a lot of effort. I think I can summarise, from skimming them and having read a bit of your blog, but do correct me if I make any mistakes:
- You disagree with Scott et al’s assertion that categories are purely man-made and believe that there are natural ways to “carve reality at its seams”
- This comes up with trans people where you state there’s natural binary categories of male/female or man/woman, and disagree with the pro-trans view
- You further support the Blanchardian taxonomy of autogynophiliacs (AGP) vs homosexual transsexuals (HSTS) as opposed to the gender identity or “brain in a body of the opposite sex” mainstream view
- You yourself have very intense autogynophilia and mild gender dysphoria which has caused you significant amounts of distress (hence the long posts)
- You tried HRT but it didn’t do much for you, and stopped
- You claim fulfilling the AGP fantasy is impossible for the foreseeable future as it requires you not only to have a body typical of the opposite sex but also a brain (as per Yudkowsky’s post that RandomRanger brought up).
- You had a break with progressivism in 2017
With that in mind, I do wonder if perhaps one of your issues is that you saw a false dichotomy between two extreme viewpoints of “gender theory”: either men are men and women and women and accepting trans people is lying about biological reality (perhaps for the sake of a fetish), or that being trans is purely due to an innate sense of gender identity that’s not aligned with the body, and that we should 100% respect someone’s self-declared gender no matter their appearance.
But I don’t think I’ve seen you address the “trans medical”/truscum POV which would be relatively uncommon nowadays but which is to me the most sensible one. There’s a condition called gender dysphoria, which is psychological distress towards one’s biological sex. The most effective treatment is transitioning, and the goal is to pass as the opposite sex and have people refer to you by the right pronouns based on your appearance. Your sexual orientation, “gender identity”, etc. is basically irrelevant, the only thing that matters is, do you feel better on HRT and is your life improved by transitioning?
And I agree you that being trans gender is not a physical intersex condition in the sense of “brain stuck in an opposite sex body”, what do you think about hypotheses like Meyer-Powers syndrome or the RCCx hypothesis? You stated you were neurodivergent but I do wonder if you have any of the other physiological symptoms - almost all the trans people I know do. I ask this because there are anecdotal reports of possible treatment for mild gender dysphoria that can be an option if you are open to possibilities other than “I have a fetish” or “I am a woman on the inside”.
I’ve brought these links up before and very aware that any conclusion they have are purely conjecture, but checking physical symptoms and getting tested for a gene mutation is something that might give you objective results. I am also biased towards the trans medical POV because that’s what worked for me as a trans woman who didn’t fit in either the Blanchardian typology or the woke gender identity narrative.
rae
4mo 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.
rae
9mo ago
And then when those externalities do happen, and a male-born trans person wins against a female athlete (inherently, unfairly), or a trans person assaults a woman in the bathroom, or a trans prisoner impregnates a woman, those objections are at best handwaved away and dismissed as outliers or discredited, or at worst labeled "transphobic" and censored.
As others have said, trans people (and other gender non-conformists) are a significant part of the rationalist community. The points you mentioned simply do not come up when it comes to the daily interactions that people in it would have.
Take the prototypical Bay Area trans woman someone like Scott Alexander would know: autistic, nerdy, moderate-to-high income, involved in tech, polyamorous (but mostly dating other trans women), and largely similar to other rationalists in terms of mentality. This type of individual is not particular athletic (unless it’s rock climbing), unlikely to be involved in criminal activity or engage in violent behaviour (much like the average male nerd).
This is a stereotype perhaps, but familiar to anyone that hangs around those circles; there’s very little downside to being accepting of them, and the factors you brought up have no direct impact and are in fact very low-probability events when it comes to that demographics.
rae
10mo ago
I’m fine with both transition and correction being available. I doubt there will be a 100% effective way to correct gender dysphoria at any age - from Dr. Power’s preliminary research, T suppression in potential FtMs works only if started in early adolescence (and there’s currently no pathway for MtFs), and the individuals still remain gender non-conforming.
I’m favouring the “mosaic brain” hypothesis of gender dysphoria where certain brain structures are improperly feminised/masculinised to varying degree, starting in the womb. So if you wanted to be sure to prevent gender dysphoria, you’d have to start monitoring foetal conditions. This is actually a promising path, there’s potential evidence that ties folate supplementation to increased estradiol production in the womb in certain mothers, which would be linked to increased rates of autism and gender variance. I wouldn’t have any opposition to this kind of “prevention”.
In my case I feel like trying to correct gender dysphoria at puberty might have already been too late - by the time male puberty arrived, my brain had developed enough to feel incredibly not only emotionally traumatised but intellectually against the very concept of growing up to be male. So transitioning needs to remain an option for those that wouldn’t be able to get the endocrine abnormalities treated in time.
As an aside, I find the idea of being unwillingly born into a sex that defines so much of your life, socially and physically, with no choice to opt out or change or try other options, to be morally abhorrent and the equivalent to a dystopian caste system. While dysphoria is an unfortunate condition, I’m actually very grateful for having had the opportunity to explore possibilities beyond straight and cis-gendered norms, and I think gender variance is a net positive for the world - the ideal human takes the best of both masculine and feminine traits, rather than rigidly adhere to either box.
rae
11mo ago
Maybe you personally have an extremely good ability to detect trans women, but most people don’t. Plenty of trans women don’t arouse suspicion in their daily lives, some are able to go stealth, some are able to have medical professionals think they’re biological women and get asked about pregnancy/periods (a real anecdote). Have you not heard stories of straight men flipping out once they’re told the woman they’re attracted to/slept with is trans? E.g. this story of a teen flirting with a trans woman, them going to his hotel room, then going back to hers and violently beating her once she says she’s trans, because he had no idea and felt humiliated.
If you check my post history, you'll find my tale of attending a cabaret show, one run by ladyboys. And I genuinely couldn't tell that they weren't real women, despite straining my eyes trying. Is there something about the Asian physiognomy that makes it easier for them to pass? The closest thing I found to a tell was the waists, but even then they were well within the range for natal women. The railway community in the West take note, that's how you pass with flying colors.
In addition to selection effects (non-passing ladyboys wouldn't attract much clientele), you've probably been less exposed to Thai faces and so have less practice distinguishing males and females. Funnily enough, it goes both ways; I'm a trans woman and when I visited Asian countries (e.g. Malaysia, not known for its wokeness) I got called ma'am a lot more than back home in the West.
rae
1yr ago
That’s actually a very good question - the answer is that with feminising HRT, you won’t age as a male at all. Estrogen gives you a feminine fat distribution - hips, breasts and bum instead of a beer belly - along with softer skin. Female-level testosterone means body hair is substantially reduced (although I’m still getting laser to be sure), masculinisation of the face and body is halted, and low DHT ensures you don’t go bald (although you won’t magically recover your hairline if it’s already gone).
My fear of aging as a male was part of my motivations for transitioning, and I’m essentially safe from that now. And past a certain age, both men and women kinda start looking the same anyway, outside of hair loss and facial hair. Men’s testosterone naturally lowers with age, and women are far removed from menopause. Trans woman might even age better than cis women as they don’t go through the latter and can maintain appropriate levels of estrogen indefinitely.
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
6mo ago
Your links are comparing natal parents to step-parents, not adoptive parents; a single mother remarrying is completely a different environment compared to two infertile parents deciding to adopt and raise a child from infancy. Adoptive children seem to have poorer physical health but greater parental support than biological children, interestingly enough.
Also if a gay couple adopts a child, it’s not as if the child is being deprived of a mother and a father; the alternative to the gay couple is the child being raised in an orphanage and then going from foster home to foster home.
And in case you suggest it, I’m not sure a closeted gay biological parent in a sham straight marriage is preferable long-term to a stable gay marriage either.
rae
1yr ago
There is growing evidence that associates being transgender with a cluster of physical disorders linked to a genetic abnormality on chromosome 6p21. An enormous proportion of transgender patients have nearly all of the below conditions:
-
Hypermobility/Ehler-danlos syndrome
-
impaired thyroid functionality
-
gastrointestinal issues of varying severity
-
autism
-
adhd
-
dysautonomia/postural orthopedic tachycardia syndrome
-
in natal females, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, and PCOS
-
some more random markers like acidic urine
Transgender healthcare specialist Dr Powers*, who noticed the above list and corroborated it with other doctors, also managed to successful treat teenage female dysphoric patients with a completely different approach: prescribing them anti androgens. The earlier, the higher the chance of the dysphoria being “cured”. Unfortunately he has not had much luck with natal male patients and the hypothesis is that it could be due to androgen exposure in the womb.
In the light of the above, a hypothesis based on endocrine disruption instead of cultural contagion makes more sense as an explainer of gender dysphoria. Perhaps elevated micro plastics in the environment, or perhaps chemical in the water turning people gay, I don’t know.
But the “wait until they’re adults to do anything” approach for dysphoric teens is clearly not optimal, especially when you have patients that fit so neatly in a cluster, and have some for who transition is not necessary if the endocrine abnormality is treated early enough.
Now the medical treatment needs to be optimised for the best outcomes, sure, but currently the detransitioners are a small minority (2-5%), with most of them detransitioning because of social reasons and not due to desistance of dysphoria, and many retransitioning later. You are thus suggesting throwing 95% of the trans population on the bus to protect 5%.
*Dr Powers is also known for reversing sterility in transgender patients and also enabling normal genital development in younger patients by the use of topical HRT.
The scientific evidence, from what I’ve read, seems to say that both sexuality and gender identity are influenced by the exposure to prenatal androgens and other hormonal factors. Gay men and trans women would have less androgen exposure than straight men - resulting in different physiological traits such as higher digit ratio and the infamous “gay face”. A gay man will be involuntarily aroused by homosexual sexual stimuli and there’s no evidence that psychological interventions can change that baseline physiological response. All kinds of men (bisexual, or straight men in prison) can have sex with men, but for gays, their attraction is fundamental physiological trait.
Meanwhile a trans woman is a biological male with some degree of gender dysphoria that takes steps to alter their gender presentation and goes on cross-sex hormones to alleviate that dysphoria. Again, gender presentation is a choice, but the gender dysphoria itself is an involuntary (possibly hormonally caused) condition, and psychological interventions will also have limited success - trans repressors will attest to the psychological toll it takes.
One difficulty I see is distinguishing between one’s inner state and one’s actions. A man is not gay because he has sex with men, he is gay because he is attracted to men. A gay man can be married to a woman and need to fantasise about men to have sex with her, and a straight man can have sex with men (e.g. in prison, on a ship) while thinking about women. There are people that will argue that if you’re a man who has sex with men, then you’re gay, but then does that mean that men who masturbate are attracted to their own hands? That teenage boys are attracted to couches, apple pies or whatever objects that they stereotypical use as masturbation aids?
Same with gender identity, except there definitions get even more controversial (i.e. “what is a woman”). The mainstream trans orthodoxy, from what I understand, says there is an inner “gender state” that can be reflected by your gender presentation, and the inner state is what we should call man/woman/non-binary/etc. Conservatives say there’s just biological sex and someone that’s an adult human male is a man, and someone that’s an adult female human is a woman. Personally I’m not sure there is really an inner “gender identity” in the same way there’s an inner sexual orientation, but gender dysphoria is definitely a thing, and it’s possible to change your gender presentation so that other people see you as the opposite sex and consequently call you a man/woman.
I’m a trans person and I’m honestly tired of how politicised this condition has become. I’m going all-in on the hypothesis that’s it’s a physical condition caused by an endocrine abnormality. I highly recommend reading this post or any of Dr Powers’ posts on his subreddit.
All of this philosophising on the nature of transgenderism is like trying to psychoanalyse the cause of stomach ulcers (which is something clinicians did until they were revealed to be caused by bacteria). There’s clearly something physically abnormal with transgender people and their brains, and one of the manifestations of that is gender dysphoria and behaviour atypical of the patient’s birth sex.
I don’t care one iota about my “gender identity”, following any gender scripts, or whether my interests are typical for men or women. I don’t “identify as a woman”, whatever that means. I would vastly prefer if pro-trans clinicians focused on actual clinical markers like improper methylation of testosterone, or the extremely high rates of PCOS in trans male patients, or MTHFR mutations. This is the kind of scientific research that would actually help our understanding of transgender people.
Instead we have this focus on babies turning their onesie into a dress. Anybody on both sides can write a lengthy essay full of navel gazing on the sociological basis of gendered behaviour that supports their pet theory, and turn being trans into a moral problem. You can debate endlessly about what is a woman, which is a philosophical problem. Or you can do DNA testing on trans patients and discover rates of certain mutations far in excess of the normal population, examine aromatase and sex hormone production, and look at correlations between gender dysphoria and other physical conditions.
Seems to be like the latter is far more useful. Plus, no one can have a political argument over DNA methylation patterns.
More options
Context Copy link