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Notes -
They're both epidemiologically sociogenic.
It's dicey to rely on academic scholarship in an area as ideologically captured as transgender issues, but nonetheless my impression had been that desistance rates for transgender-identifying children who do not begin puberty blockers to be in the vicinity of 80% -- judged from surveys, not Twitter anecdotes. We should expect the rate to grow dramatically given the recent explosion in teenage natal girls expressing transgender identification in the past five years. Basically, trans teenage (natal) girls fit the cluster of other sociogenic teenage girl afflictions (self harm, eating disorders, tourettes) so well that we should expect them to follow the rest of this cluster in growing out of it, assuming they haven't been allowed to pass any points of no return on their journey (including puberty blockers, which seemingly interfere with the development process that causes them to grow out of such phases).
I intended the "in the 'they usually grow out group'" to be the focus there - i.e. how do you know that both are "things they usually grow out of"? 'sociogenic' is not a useful category either, IMO - 'epidemeologically', iron forging, belief in general relativity, self-identification of homosexuality, and "eating potatoes" are all epidemiologically sociogenic, in the sense that they're all behaviors that spread from person to person. It doesn't tell us anything useful about the behavior, almost all good human behaviors are partially learned, as are almost all bad ones.
I agree entirely. My only disagreement is that - even if the surveys weren't ideologically captured, they'd still be very unreliable.
I agree that those examples spread sociogenically, but (setting aside your example of homosexual identity) they aren't mental illnesses, insofar as they don't pose significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. I would further argue that homosexual identity also isn't a mental illness insofar as it is the healthiest response one can have to a homosexual orientation, and homosexual orientation appears not to spread sociogenically but rather to be inborn and immutable. If homosexual orientation were spread sociogenically, I'd have no quarrel with including it in the litany.
Which is my point, the "sociogenic" part plays no role in a judgement that trans is bad or should be discouraged. Claiming it is a "mental illness" is what that relies on, which is honestly an uninformative term itself - "doing X" is only a mental illness if X is bad, and you still need to determine that.
On your second point, I got halfway through a literature review before being distracted and losing progress, but there wasn't really convincing evidence the desistance rate was 80% - it just seemed all over the place.
The definition of gender dysphoria includes "clinically significant distress" as a critical diagnostic element. There's no doubt that being transgender is a harder road than being cisgender, as are the medical interventions that pose indisputable harms and are justifiable (like chemotherapy) only as being less bad than the harm of untreated gender dysphoria; hence we should treat sociogenic transgender identity as a contagion to be suppressed.
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Sure it does, though it often relies on the help of another argument, that trans medical interventions have serious and often irreversible effects on your body. If the trans identity is sociogenic, then a social intervention to help people come to terms with their bodies is at least worth a try, since it will spare them a life of medicalization.
Even without the medical argument, the sociogenic part plays some role. I can somewhat understand rearranging all of society for the benefit of a minority who is "born this way" and cannot change, but if they aren't and they can, why exactly is society required to bend rules around sex segregation in sports and prisons to accommodate them?
Even if it isn't sociogenic, that's still true though? One could have a genetically-caused desire to be trans, and it'd still be better to say some one shouldn't do that.
Anyway, my argument is just - the actual contents of 'being trans' are, individually, dumb - the aesthetics of being a woman are signals of various traits improving ability to bear and raise children. Mimicking that if you can't raise children is dumb!
It could be, but it being sociogenic makes a stronger argument. If it's genetic you're stuck with dysphoria, and the only way to alleviate it would be with body modification. The costs might still not be worth it, but that would be the only known "cure". If it's sociogenic the costs might be entirely unnecessary, as a social intervention could alleviate dysphoria altogether.
This doesn't follow - at all. A condition being entirely genetic in the current environment doesn't mean it couldn't be changed in a different environment. And 'trans' isn't a medical condition, it's a complex set of desires and actions on the part of a person. "Being trans" may be a complex outcome of many decisions, social factors, and other things. Type 1 diabetes is genetic, but we can treat it.
You're splitting hairs, and taking your argument way too far than is justifiable.
Yes, we can treat Type 1 diabetes, and some extreme social factors might cause irreversible damage, but if we take all things caused by genetics, and all things caused by society, which group do you think would tend to be easier to change?
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