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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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I don't think the gender skeptic side thinks doctors immediately recommends medical intervention, although some rhetoric around puberty blockers being harmless and "buying time to question" being held as important is worrisome. I think the main concern is that everyone is just so unquestioningly affirming in such a way that there isn't a good offramp. Growing into your body is an often not affirming process and an alternative where you're constantly affirmed, on a topic where there isn't actually some objective or even internally subjective way to really verify the truth value of a claim like "I'm really a woman" is troubling. I don't trust the advocates to frankly lay out the case that a kid might not be trans and the only people in the pipeline are advocates. Hell, I have trouble actually rigorously proving to myself that I'm not trans if I adopt the framework that these advocates advance and I'm a pretty masculine person who is quite happy with my station in life. Seriously, I can't stress enough just how underdefined the whole thing is, a sufficiently charismatic person may be able to talk nearly anyone into questioning their gender if they buy in the premises of the ideology. I fear that the social groups these kids will find them surrounded by are the likes of /r/egg_irl who have memetic antibodies against all counterevidence that it's a phase. I fear puberty happening might actually be the thing that cures many of gender dysphoria and naive use of puberty blockers might force someone who could have been perfectly happy with their body to live as a permanent and sterile consumer of pharmaceutical drugs to poorly imitate the opposite sex.