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In 2016 ISIS attackers bombed the airport in Brussels killing over a dozen people. A seventeen year old girl was present but uninjured. This May she chose to be euthanized because of her psychological trauma. She was 23 and she had no physical injuries. The news of her death was just announced recently.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/10/2016-brussels-attacks-victim-granted-euthanasia-after-years-of-ptsd_5999805_4.html
This seems absolutely insane to me. I don't doubt she was suffering but she was only 23. A lot could have changed over the next 70 years. She wasn't terminally ill, she didn't have cancer, she wasn't paralyzed from the neck down. She was very sad and very scared and had attempted suicide twice. But I know that at least some people who have survived suicide attempts have gone on to lead happy lives.
I used to disapprove of euthanasia but wasn't strongly in favor of making it illegal, even though it was never a choice I would make myself or approve of making for a relative. But cases like this have made me strongly opposed to it. It seems like the medical establishment can't be trusted to restrict it to only the most extreme cases. The people saying that allowing euthanasia is a slippery slope have been proven right in my opinion.
Some people are suicidal, and this is a nicer and more dignified way to commit suicide. It's easy to support this on generic libertarian or even (trans)humanist grounds; the state and society are, ideally, not entitled to deny people their exit rights.
What's more unpleasant about the situation is that this libertarianism is very skewed by what one could call «Cheems mindset» or perhaps medical ethics. We don't have a legally enshrined freedom of form and being: we have only freedom of diminution, freedom to make yourself something lesser or avoid some medically recognized pain at some cost, rather than modify arbitrarily.
You can get feminizing hormones and antiandrogens much, much easier than you can get T (unless you're an FtM trans with «dysphoria») and HGH. You can get euthanasia but not euphoretics and not any serious research into cognitive enhancement. Some claims to the pressing need to change are recognized and affirmed; others are laughed out of the room (imagine incels petitioning for state-mandated masculinization treatment).
It shows that this isn't really about freedom, but rather about some blind and selective idea of compassion. The sort that's grounded in the notion of humanity which doesn't seek to grow, only to stop suffering. It's not the sort of humanity I want to live together with; hopefully there'll be an answer superior to the euthanasia booth.
Yep, my mind immediately jumped to the Trans comparison as well on this one. I think that the medical powers that be have shown over the last few years that they're just not really fit for purpose in terms of properly spelling out the issues at play. I think it's probably a matter of "doing what is best for society", as deemed by elites.
It's worth saying on the T point- there was a video doing the rounds of a 21 year old F2M man speaking to camera about how they were too far gone (too androgenised) to consider detransitioning. Besides the mastectomy (which is actually sort of reversible, same as breast cancer patients), the T had led to insane male pattern baldness (Norwood 5 or so) for a 21 year old. And I suppose the tragedy of the situation was that you think Testosterone->some kind of Adonis, in the eyes of what would have been a teenage girl who felt out of place, but the reality was a small, bald little man-child who wouldn't register as a 4/10 on the attractiveness scale.
Obviously T for Cismen will be different (different starting points), and baldness isn't that big a deal if you're improving muscularity etc. but it was just an example of how this constant fuckery with our bodies usually doesn't match up to expectations, and as someone more used to seeing detransitioning/side effects/unfortunate results of M2F individuals, this was quite sad.
All pretty off topic on Euthanasia I guess, beyond the general principle of "we should try much harder to stop people doing irreversible things to themselves, and we should try harder the more years of life they have left to live (or not) with the consequences".
If we viewed hormone supplementation for men as a worthy goal, presumably we'd make progress on converting manlets to Adonises while minimizing the risk of them ending up as balder manlets. SARMs seem like a promising avenue, selectively increasing muscle mass and bone density but possibly avoiding hair loss and testicular side effects of traditional anabolic steroids. I've little doubt that a fraction of the medical experimentation that has gone into converting penises into ersatz vaginas and vice versa could do wonders to advance our ability to guide natural sexual dimorphism more carefully along its natural path.
This comment is an excellent demonstration that the claims from the anti-trans side of this or that being "natural" or "unnatural", and therefore objectively right or wrong, are just an attempt to rationalize their own completely subjective aesthetic preferences. How do you not see the absurdity in claiming that giving trans people actually natural hormones – ones that actual humans actually have, in nature – is wrong and denying biology, etc., while giving people with body dysmorphia (who are, like trans people, unsatisfied with their "natural" bodies) chemicals that have never existed outside a lab, and are functionally unlike any natural substance, is just "guiding" their body "along its natural path"?
I don't think I ever actually claimed that.
Because it is. Wanting to be a more perfectly realized version of the path that nature set you on is normal and even healthy. Wanting to be the other sex is at least severely maladaptive.
arent both behaviors maximally natural just as any behavior, because we and everything we can interact with exists within nature? how do you define natural such that taking gender transition hormones is unnatural while taking hormones as a male to become stronger and more masculine is natural?
No, I don't agree with a definition of natural in which everything that occurs in our universe qualifies equally. But no, I also don't want to go down a rabbithole arguing semantics with you.
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Trans people wouldn't need to be given hormones if they were making them naturally.
The hormones they're being given at least exist naturally in humans. All humans have both estrogen and testosterone. It's just the levels of each being altered in trans people. This is apparently unnatural. But giving people synthetic chemicals that don't exist anywhere in nature is apparently "natural". This is absurd.
Both are unnatural. 'Something is natural' is a pretty shitty argument in general. Gravity is natural too, jumping off a cliff isn't healthy.
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