site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Among these experts are people like Thomas W. Johnson, Richard Wassersug, and Krister H. Willette, who attended several WPATH conferences, and all have accounts on the Eunuch Archive ("Jesus", "Eunuchunique", and "Kristoff" respectively) that were active for over 20 years. Johnson and Wassersug have even published research based on a survey of EA's users, and the stories posted there.

Were those accounts on the Eunuch Archive used to post erotic fanfic, or were they used to study the content/users and post surveys and whatnot? You allege that they themselves are fetishists:

As for their work in WPATH, I'm sure they are proffesional and wouldn't dream of letting their fetish affect their work.

and elsewhere complain about people being unwilling to engage with the evidence, but as far as I can tell, you haven't provided any that this is the case. This sounds more like the Freakonomics story of the professor inserting himself into the Chicago drug-dealing scene or the anthro professors visiting tribes of Pacific Islanders than a trio of academics spearheading a conspiracy to depopulate the plebs with fantasies of castration. The article you linked describes it as (bolding mine):

Reduxx reached out to the Anthropology Department at CSUC for comment on Johnson’s association with a forum hosting child sexual abuse fantasies

which again makes it sound like those usernames weren't actively posting erotica. I assume if they were, the news article would be pasting that front and center. I'm not personally going to make an account on that website myself to investigate (look at what happens to people who 'associate' with such websites 20 years later) but I'm curious to see the results if someone else does.

and elsewhere complain about people being unwilling to engage with the evidence, but as far as I can tell, you haven't provided any that this is the case.

I'd agree that the evidence in this post is lacking, and this is a perfect example of the exact sort of question the OP should have concluded with. The articles I heard of this from very clearly portrayed Johnson, Wassersug and Willette as enthusiastic participants in the castration fetish scene, along with evidence that seemed to back their assertions reasonably well, but I likewise did not check primary sources, and the source I found it from was fairly partisan. I did google the names and found the papers they'd written drawing on the fiction archive as a research resource, but that doesn't answer the question.

I'd readily agree that dispassionate researchers engaging in some niche anthropology is very different from extreme-fetish enjoyers smuggling their thing into academia, and then into actual policy. If the former is the case, I'm pretty sure I still have some pointed objections, but would agree that this instance isn't directly relevant to the larger issues. The same would go if it could be argued that these guys weren't actually relevant to the WPATH drafting, or that WPATH isn't actually influential to policy. That chain is the actual story the above is hinting at, and the fact that it's hinting rather than laying it out is my objection to the post as a whole.

Rather than asking questions you don't want answered, how about you do a little background reading?

One of the Eunuch Archives’ most prominent participants is an unidentified site administrator who uses the moniker ‘Jesus.’

‘Jesus’ claims to have been involved in editing the most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), issued by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and WPATH’s newest Standards of Care draft.

One of those three people is administrator of the fetish website. If you want to claim that the persona administrating the website itself is doing so merely out of academic curiosity, then go ahead and make that claim, but the far likelier claim is that the guy who administrates, and participates, in the fetish website is himself a fetishist.

For nearly two decades, the Eunuch Archive has hosted an annual “Meeting of Members.” The event is held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Willette’s area of residence, and is co-hosted by Willette and the pseudonymous Jesus.

https://reduxx.info/top-trans-medical-association-collaborated-with-castration-child-abuse-fetishists/

https://reduxx.info/top-academic-behind-fetish-site-hosting-child-sexual-abuse-fantasy-push-to-revise-wpath-guidelines/

Rather than asking questions you don't want answered, how about you do a little background reading?

Unkind. The background reading doesn't really answer the question to my satisfaction. This is a case where the words written down are projecting an image to the reader that they don't actually, specifically support. I happen to be fairly confident that the image projected is, in fact, quite accurate, but these sorts of ambiguities drive a lot of our worst conversations here.

Unkind.

Not very, and absolutely warranted. Asking questions that were answered in the OP, or in the article he quoted, is not an indication of someone wanting to find the answer.

but these sorts of ambiguities drive a lot of our worst conversations here.

Sure. Since there seems to be a lot meta-talk about form in this thread, I'd also like to ask: do you think it would kill him to say something like "Wow, that's pretty wild! But do you think you could clarify these questions for me..."?

Were those accounts on the Eunuch Archive used to post erotic fanfic

From the original post:

For example the user "Jesus" wrote a story "Orchiectomy: Is It Right for You?",

...

and all have accounts on the Eunuch Archive ("Jesus", "Eunuchunique", and "Kristoff" respectively)

.

and elsewhere complain about people being unwilling to engage with the evidence

Can you link the post where I say anything like that?

or were they used to study the content/users and post surveys and whatnot?

All 3 had active forum accounts for over 20 years. Johnson was apparently a founding member of the site. That's a looot of research.

If you want I can dig deeper and dig out the spicier posts, but I want you to put skin in the game - if I find it you admit you were wrong, and no more asserting I must be wrong because I didn't give you black-on-white "I'm a fetishist" posts.

This sounds more like the Freakonomics story of the professor inserting himself into the Chicago drug-dealing scene or the anthro professors visiting tribes of Pacific Islanders than a trio of academics spearheading a conspiracy to depopulate the plebs with fantasies of castration.

Did the Freakonomics guys go on to recommend policy that goes easy on drug dealers, or something?

If you want I can dig deeper and dig out the spicier posts, but I want you to put skin in the game - if I find it you admit you were wrong, and no more asserting I must be wrong because I didn't give you black-on-white "I'm a fetishist" posts.

I said I'd be curious to see the results if someone else tracks down the rest of his stories. Compared to how inflammatory your OP was, my response was fairly measured and I'm trying to engage with you in good faith.

Here's a list of potential evidence you could provide, and how it would influence my thinking. I think you might find it disappointing though:

  1. Spicy, blatant erotica around orchiectomy from Johnson -> Dude's fantasizing about cutting his balls off and maybe has a bit of a...conflict of interest when it comes to providing guidelines for trans teens.

  2. Blatant pedophilic content from Johnson -> Dude's probably a pedophile. No bueno. I assume he'll get canned if you or others circulate those stories.

  3. All three accounts post spicy takes along (1) or (2) -> Three out of 4,134 members of WPATH are fetishists or pedophiles. Slight update towards the broader point you're making similar to reading a news article about a Republican politician or Catholic priest doing similar things.

  4. Survey (or other data) of WPATH members or other academics involved in treating trans teens that X% of them are fetishists along these lines -> X% of these people are fetishists and if X is > than...I don't know, maybe 1-5% depending on how bad the fetish is, I'd probably find that disquieting?

I assume we're never going to get (4) short of some really impressive investigative journalism, so I think it'd be an interesting conversation what kinds of evidence could stand in for it. If you want to convince me that some significant fraction of people involved in the trans debate are fetishists, I need some kind of evidence that a bunch of them are fetishists. Maybe really widespread reports of children who say they are not trans who were being pressured into it? Some kind of internal slack channels being leaked? The FBI busting some kind of pedophile ring implicating a bunch of these people? Maybe something like your post implicating just a few people, but it happens again and again for months on end?

They got a nonexistent inborn-gender-identity as an entire chapter in the WPATH guidelines, which now recommends "gender-affirming-care" for it, based explicitly on the studies they did surveying their fellow posters on the forum! If your reaction is "this is unimportant because they are 3 people out of 4000", then this very event should show why that reasoning doesn't make sense.

An ideological milieu that only tolerates one side of an argument is fundamentally gullible to anyone who can invoke the automatically-winning side. Indeed, it will frequently come to the wrong conclusions whether this susceptibility is deliberately exploited or not, exploitation just increases the rate. It's the same dynamic at play whether the people determining WPATH policy come from eunuch.org or from Tumblr, whether they originally got into the idea for "want to feel special" reasons or "fetish" reasons or "social justice subculture" reasons, whether they consciously lie or believe their own bullshit. It's like if, for example, someone criticized the National Organization for Women for giving Mattress Girl their Woman of Courage award even after the text messages came out discrediting her rape accusation. And then you responded with "Sure it looks like she falsely accused him in retaliation for him breaking up with her and/or for the personal benefits, but NOW has 500,000 members, can you prove the majority of them share her motive?" Clearly they don't need to, the relevant members of their organization hold to a "Believe Women"/"Believe Survivors" ideology and so a single liar with sufficient skill at invoking the ideology was all it took. But instead of just being a response to a single incident, it's WPATH establishing a medical standard. And instead of being an openly non-neutral activist organization, it's the most prominent independent organization setting standards for trans healthcare, one that countless medical institutions listen to.

This then provides valuable insight into the validity of WPATH's decision-making processes, like knowing a medical/scientific organization wrote the conclusion of an argument first. And as I said in my other post, it also gives us valuable information about the processes of institutions that continue to take their recommendations seriously or "that would openly criticize something like a standard for prescribing chemotherapy if it was based on such dubious evidence, but stay silent when it's a standard for prescribing castration because of the political aspect". For instance, in the past few months medical authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the UK have issued recommendations against the use of puberty blockers for supposedly trans children, and to my amateur eye they have good reasons to. However, many other authorities like the American Medical Association have not. If a lot of institutions are making decisions on the subject are heavily influenced by social justice ideology, that is valuable information in judging this split. And yes, I already knew that so it's not going to shift my opinion very much, there's already been varying levels of other evidence like the mass-resignations complaining about ideological pressure a few years ago at the NHS's only gender clinic for children (since shut down as of a few months ago). But a lot of people think things like the shift to maximally "gender-affirming care" are just about following the evidence rather than ideological pressure and so this provides a valuable test case.

They got a nonexistent inborn-gender-identity as an entire chapter in the WPATH guidelines, which now recommends "gender-affirming-care" for it, based explicitly on the studies they did surveying their fellow posters on the forum! If your reaction is "this is unimportant because they are 3 people out of 4000", then this very event should show why that reasoning doesn't make sense.

Based on your other post, I'm curious how you account for people desperate to castrate themselves if not some odd innate quirk, but we can set that to the side for the moment.

That's a fair point on the influence of those three, although it also depends on the broader argument you're trying to push. Is it that a significant fraction of WPATH and people pushing advocating for trans folks are pedophilic groomers who get off on child mutilation? Because that was the sense I got from OP, and I still largely don't believe that (although I'm open to more evidence). Moreover, only Johnson is listed as an author for the WPATH guidelines, not the other two (only cited). I'd wonder whether other people worked on it as well, editorial oversight, etc.

But your point that I was too dismissive of their influence is well taken.

An ideological milieu that only tolerates one side of an argument is fundamentally gullible to anyone who can invoke the automatically-winning side. Indeed, it will frequently come to the wrong conclusions whether this susceptibility is deliberately exploited or not, exploitation just increases the rate. It's the same dynamic at play whether the people determining WPATH policy come from eunuch.org or from Tumblr, whether they originally got into the idea for "want to feel special" reasons or "fetish" reasons or "social justice subculture" reasons, whether they consciously lie or believe their own bullshit.

I'll grant this too. I don't mean this as a gotcha, but what would you prefer instead? It seems unlikely to me that trans-skeptic (? not sure of the term) people will do gender studies for 6 years of a PhD in order to represent their side in professional organizations, and moreover, that conservative spaces are just as hostile an ideological milieu to any evidence that would purport to find benefits to accepting trans folk as their chosen gender (which I've seen cited numerous times; whether they actually hold water, I've never tried to figure out). I find it hard to believe that in some fantastical world where some unbiased body did publish such a study that conservatives would read it, shrug their shoulders, and the issue would die.

You might argue that I'm comparing apples to oranges by juxtaposing a body of PhDs and MDs with 'Cletus from Alabama' (as other people have said when making this criticism). But with the legislatures getting involved, Cletus be flexing his muscles whatever the eggheads at WPATH say and his opinion is making decisions in this arena.

For instance, in the past few months medical authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the UK have issued recommendations against the use of puberty blockers for supposedly trans children, and to my amateur eye they have good reasons to.

Thanks for the links, and taking the time to lay out your argument. Appreciate it.

Is it that a significant fraction of WPATH and people pushing advocating for trans folks are pedophilic groomers who get off on child mutilation?

This is Kiwi Farms line, that is now official conservative line on which the "groomer" campaign is based.

https://kiwifarms.net/threads/eunuch-community.13954/page-4

It's truly fucking insane. This small fetish community started during the infancy of the internet, was completely blatant in pursuing their fucked up ideals, and now its leaders are influencing academia, the media, health, and governments into playing along with their bullshit. A tiny amount of coom-brained lunatics who get off to castrating children, and the whole fucking planet, are somehow forcing the entire forsaken world into bowing to their sick fantasies. And they just get away with it.

Is this really all what is it all about? Is small group of people dedicated to one bizarre fetish really the greatest secret manipulators and masterminds in history?

David Cole from Takimag (someone known as Jewish Holocaust denier is not someone expected to be too woke) strongly disagrees.

https://www.takimag.com/article/doom-and-groomer/

The key point here is that the indoctrinators are spreading a belief system. They’re mentally scrambling kids on gender. But the goal is not to physically rape them. To reduce this complex dynamic down to “sexual grooming” is misleading, because what’s going on has way more in common with the Khmer Rouge than it does with Albert Fish.

...

Last week I described the educators who labor quietly and single-mindedly to further the tranny agenda as “worker bees.” They’re successful because like all worker bees, they’re banal. Yes, we all love to mock those “libs of TikTok” videos of freakish tattooed teachers with pierced septums. But they’re the minority. Think of every pro-CRT, pro-tranny school-board member you’ve seen. They’re ordinary people you wouldn’t notice at the grocery store.

They’re invisible, doing their work out-of-sight. They’re predominantly women, and they’re not trying to have sex with kids. They’re working with quiet, fanatical dedication to remake how children see gender and themselves, in service of an ideology, not their own personal sexual desires.

Of course, they are talking about different people, leaders and common soldiers.

Still, why this particular fetish was normalized?

Follow the money. There is no profit out there. Look, for example, at furry fandom - even the most dedicated fans could not spend more than low four figures on fursuit, and exit is easy - just put your fursuit in wardrobe and let it here.

Transgenderism is for life, and it is unprecedented money maker for big pharma and big medicine.

If people were rationally following their interest, we would see them support T cause, and we do.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers

https://archive.ph/XH5v5

These are the three sources of movement that changed the world.

Transgenderism is for life, and it is unprecedented money maker for big pharma and big medicine.

This is a little hard to believe, because the "for life" parts (i.e., hormones) are generic medications and they're dirt cheap.

Sorry to single you out, but this is exactly the sort of response mindset I was addressing with they "well, I suppose ... Hey guys!" rhetorical flourish that bothered @SSCReader so much.

My claim was simple: castration fetishists managed to get positions of influence in a fairy impactful organization, and are using them to push their fetish into the standards of care for transgender people. To prove my claim I:

  • Pointed to a forum where castration fetishists gather.

  • Showed that some of it's most veteran members of the WPATH, who were invited to several conferences where the standards of care are debated.

  • Quoted an excerpt from that standards of care that is directly to the fetish.

  • Pointed out that the chapter cites the very forum these members regularly post at, and have been active for over 20 years.

If my post was limited to the first 3 points, I could understand dismissing it as a run of the mill conspiracy theory. I'd disagree, but I could understand it, as this is how the conspiracy discourse has gone on for the past several decades. I'm not going to call the fourth point the final nail in the coffin, but we are getting to the point where it's going to be quite a bit of work to reopen it again.... I was expecting pretty much everyone to agree, that at the very least this raises several red flags.

What I got in response was:

This sounds more like the Freakonomics story of the professor inserting himself into the Chicago drug-dealing scene or the anthro professors visiting tribes of Pacific Islanders than a trio of academics spearheading a conspiracy to depopulate the plebs with fantasies of castration.

"Move along, nothing to see here...". Then I was asked:

  • whether the academics attending the WPATH conferences actually wrote any stories (addressed in the OP)

  • whether they were fetishists, or just academics studying them (addressed in the article I linked, and was quoted to argue against me)

  • to provide examples of more "blatant" and/or "pedophilic" content, because evidence that at least one of them wrote stories there suddenly wasn't enough (and if I managed to do that it would "slightly" updated towards my original claim, and all it would conclusively prove is that 3 out of over 4000 WPATH members are eunuch fetishists, which is not relevant to my claim at all).

  • to provide survey data about the fetishes of all WPATH members?! Which... how am I suppose to that to begin with, and what does it have to do with my original claim?

This is just reflexive denialism, and exactly what my rhetorical flourishes were poking fun at. I'll plead guilty to not staying with the spirit of the forum, but I hope it's clear now that it wasn't a broad attack on the blue tribe, but at a certain epistemology.

I tried to engage you politely and in good faith, but since you disagree, I apologize for the offense and I'll leave you to your more productive conversations with other folks.

It's hard to find information for the more recent stories, but this seems to cover up to 2008. Of the three named accounts, only "Jesus" has pieces listed. Of those two, "Orchiectomy: Is It Right for You?" could be arguably just academic and medical discussion, if somewhat overly optimistic about its frameworks, but "Making of the Modern World" is the sort of 'world-building' that makes the gay stories with 'and all the women went on a vacation/died of irrelevance' seem like high art. And it does include some material focused on young people :

"During the transition to the new system, while all boys from eight to fourteen were being reexamined for suitability for genetic reproduction, all boys were required to report to their neighborhood clinic on their fourteenth birthdays. School records and existing health reports were used to select ninety percent of these boys for immediate sterilization. Of course all boys who had been selected to become drones at their eighth birthday examination were castrated, but so were a majority of those boys who had thought that they were to become breeders."

The piece starts with a foreward openly inviting other authors to write about:

"Erik and I would both like to encourage readers to create additional stories for the Archive set in this future world. Erik would like first person accounts of boys becoming drones--what happened to YOU on and around your fourteenth birthday (or to your brother for women writers). I would appreciate gentler stories of the domestic life of drones, wives, and their children, church services, classroom discussions, etc. "

This is not porn in the poles-and-holes sense, and I don't think it's the sort of thing that should get someone fired, but I've seen less fetishistic vore stories. On the other hand, I do think it dramatically reduces my confidence that this paper is meaningfully useful: there are people who can describe a fetish community from the inside, but there's remarkably few who can do so in a sphere with policy ramifications hitting their interests without putting a thumb on the scales. Worse, having the same persons also involved immediately with the SoC8 draft allows and encourages a lot of citation massaging: that paper is summarized at one point to "As such, eunuch individuals are gender nonconforming individuals who have needs requiring medically necessary gender-affirming care."

"Eunuchunique" and "Kristoff" do not seem to have published stories under those names, at least as of copies of the story archive I can find, and the forums a) seem to have been nuked a few times and b) don't seem to be publicly available, so it's a little hard to talk on that side.

Thanks! That was a wild ride.

This is not porn in the poles-and-holes sense, and I don't think it's the sort of thing that should get someone fired, but I've seen less fetishistic vore stories.

It's hard to say, no? The eugenics angle from the second story alone is probably enough in today's climate if he weren't already emeritus. The passage about castrating children certainly seems like some kind of disquieting fantasy, to @arjin_ferman 's point. I think it might be different if it were more personal in nature, but these weird, bigger-picture fantasies about redesigning society that don't seem particularly sexual in nature? It's all utterly bizarre. Mr. Johnson certainly seems to have some kind of castration fetish, and I'm skeptical of his opinions on the treatment of trans children.

As an aside, many moons ago, a group of my friends discovered and passed around the pain olympics for shock value. Funny how these things come around. At least (to my knowledge) none of the youth of Athens were sufficiently corrupted to castrate themselves.

All three accounts post spicy takes along (1) or (2) -> Three out of 4,134 members of WPATH are fetishists or pedophiles. Slight update towards the broader point you're making similar to reading a news article about a Republican politician or Catholic priest doing similar things.

Generally when the Republican Politicians and Catholic Priests are caught doing unspeakable things, they've made some effort to hide the behavior. These guys were pretty open about their unspeakableness, and nobody at WPATH seems to have had a problem with them. Elsewhere in the thread, people are linking to claims that Wikipedia's staff likewise doesn't seem to have a problem with them. I think your 1 and 2 are reasonable expectations, but what do we conclude if WPATH actually was presented with 1 and 2 and just shrugged it off?

If a Republican is dallying with gay prostitutes and gets caught, that's one thing. If a Republican gives a speech on the house floor about how a given bill is a good idea, and his experiences with gay prostitutes proves it, and the other republicans nod and clap and then pass the measure, I think probably your eyebrows would be going up a bit, no?

...you mention that he'll probably be canned if we or others circulate these stories enough. I think that's probably true. Should he be canned? Is there actually agreement that what he and his comrades have done is actually objectionable? From where I'm sitting, it sure doesn't look like the people in question think they've done anything wrong, and they don't seem to have made much effort to conceal their activities. Their communities, both academic and therapeutic, seem to have acted as though this was all fine. Is it worth talking about what this says about community norms in high-status blue circles?

I think your 1 and 2 are reasonable expectations, but what do we conclude if WPATH actually was presented with 1 and 2 and just shrugged it off?

I confess, I'd never heard of WPATH or those three academics until yesterday. I don't pay much attention to the academic side of things. Most of my exposure to the trans community is just real life friends that I have; we don't spend a whole lot of time haggling over DSM-5 definitions or whether they're mentally ill or fetishists. We're just friends who play sports together, or video games, or go out dancing. I don't misgender them or discriminate and it doesn't come up aside from some snark about nasty conservatives now and then, but my trans friends are hardly unique or outliers in that regard.

My (our?) generation sidestepped this issue as all of these people transitioned as adults.

So, say OP is right and the medical field is run by a freewheeling cabal of pedophiles and/or castration and/or autogynephilic fetishists who get off on, as I think naraburns put it, mutilating children. Then, uh, probably WPATH or whatever the other relevant orgs are delenda est. Say the first bailey to that motte is correct, and some higher-than-background level of pedo-castro-autogynes are members of WPATH, what do we do? I don't know. If it's 40% and they're swinging votes, probably delenda est. If it's 5% and the majority of the decisions made are still coming from a place of medical opinion rather than fetishism, it's a bit of a tough call. If it's background level (on par with Republicans or Catholic priests) should we do anything at all besides fire the people who get found out?

If a Republican is dallying with gay prostitutes and gets caught, that's one thing. If a Republican gives a speech on the house floor about how a given bill is a good idea, and his experiences with gay prostitutes proves it, and the other republicans nod and clap and then pass the measure, I think probably your eyebrows would be going up a bit, no?

The better analogy would be the Republican himself is the gay prostitute, no? But then, everyone does this. If a Republican gun-owner gives a speech on the floor about gun rights and decries non-gun-owners who don't know an AR-whatsit from a bump-stock-shotgun writing gun control legislation, do your eyebrows go up? Or the wealthy Republican business-owner pitching lower business tax rates, or union busting, or axing parental leave?

The steelman is that gun-owners understand guns better than liberals, Black people understand the struggle of the inner city better, trans people understand trans youth better. The critique is that all of those people have potential conflicts of interest.

Someone with a castration fetish writing guidelines for trans youth is probably a bridge too far for the majority of people though, no?

...you mention that he'll probably be canned if we or others circulate these stories enough. I think that's probably true. Should he be canned? Is there actually agreement that what he and his comrades have done is actually objectionable? From where I'm sitting, it sure doesn't look like the people in question think they've done anything wrong, and they don't seem to have made much effort to conceal their activities.

Having read the actual writing thanks to Gattsuru, it seems pretty likely that the eugenics is enough to give him the boot, although he's already emeritus. The optics alone are probably enough for the University to cut ties. The fact that a medical professional is fantasizing about castrating people certainly seems to present a conflict of interest around treating trans (or eunuch?) identifying children. I'm sure elements on the left will say 'blah blah personal life doesn't affect medical opinion' but I don't think your average suburb-dwelling normie will be buying it.

Their communities, both academic and therapeutic, seem to have acted as though this was all fine. Is it worth talking about what this says about community norms in high-status blue circles?

The fact that he was so bad at opsec is what made me assume he was doing it purely from an academic lens. Yes, it's worth discussing, although I'd hesitate to call the gender studies department at the University of Chico high-status.

To be fair, all of the papers I can access skip over the question of how Johnson/Wassersug developed a relationship with the eunuch forums, in favor of summarizing how the survey specifically was performed. Johnson didn't do a great job of obfuscating his identity, but it's both plausible and likely that it's only obvious in retrospect or if you were already following the community extremely closely.

The academic papers and citations aren't great, but on their own they're not clearly malicious rather than just weirdly amoral.

Republican politician or Catholic priest

I don't think "republican politicians" are experts on anything other than their own beliefs, nor do I present them as disinterested authority figures.

But trans-activists cite consensus of experts such those caught posting castration fantaties that, no really, welfare of children is improved by giving them access to PBs and HRT.

But trans-activists cite consensus of experts such those caught posting castration fantaties that, no really, welfare of children is improved by giving them access to PBs and HRT.

Well, I've been asked to detail the evidence that would support a change in my beliefs. You (I assume, perhaps incorrectly) think that some significant fraction of academics have conflicts of interest based on their sexual preferences. What evidence would convince you that a robust majority (say >95%) of these experts are, in fact, coming from a place of wanting to do what's best for the youth rather than pursuing their own sexual fantasies?

I wouldn't go so far as to say 'disinterested' as the criticism that these academics believe in a broader trans rights agenda independent of their research or data almost certainly is true for a majority, and it's not clear to me at least that the data warrant some of the claims that are made.

Not Syo, but I would assume the majority, likely significant majority, of academics choose a field of research based on personal interests, whatever that may be.

Depends on the field and generation. At least in the life sciences/medicine, there seem to be an even mix of altruists and ego monsters, but no conflict of interests in the same way that I could see in the humanities. I expect it's similar in the harder sciences. Maybe you're right for the humanities, although it would be interesting to see, for example, the breakdown of cis vs. trans academics in WPATH.

In a highly unscientific poll, I picked 8 profiles at random from WPATH and of the 6 I could track down 2 were transgender. So you're probably right that a significant fraction are trans. As (I think) you gesture at, they may well punch above their weight in terms of influence.

I'd venture that the evidence that would convince a skeptic to not be so concerned is roughly parallel, and equally impossible, to the evidence that would convince you that the skeptic's level of concern is remotely justified.

So, what's to be done? Are we just going to be partisans poking each other in the eye for eternity? When we reach an impasse without the data to get an answer, do we just shrug and lower our guns for the time being and move onto other things?

Sidhbh Gallagher is a heck of a creep

Well, at the risk of people complaining I'm not doing my homework again, why do you think she's a creep? Because of the way she advertises to minors on tiktok, or glamorizes plastic surgery? Ah, I see your edit. So you think she gets off on removing body parts from healthy people?

Surgeons have been doing radical mastectomies for breast cancer for decades, and it was quite controversial for a while. If I remember the section from Emperor of all Maladies correctly, common practice in the early days was to take all of both breasts regardless of the stage or size of the cancer. Do you think cannibals and fetishists were/are overrepresented among surgeons as well? Or do you think she's specifically into the pedophilic aspect of it?

the particular costs and lack of (visible?) critique from "within the movement" says something concerning. That WPATH seems to be removing guidelines (removing age recommendations for most procedures) when most of the world is adding more says something, too; we can disagree about exactly what that means, but I would be hard pressed to accept that it says anything good. How bad does the failure mode need to be, and how lacking the internal pushback?

To clarify, you want pushback against the three individuals from OP and Dr. Gallagher from within WPATH?

Did you read the post? The article with the reader's digest punchline is noted as written by Jesus, the purported username of one of the doctors.

I was confused by that. He said it was written in 2002, but it's cited as Reader's digest 2017. Is that like...The reader's digest? Or is it some kind of internal Eunuch Archive reader's digest? That excerpt wasn't from the other article he mentioned, so is he citing it directly using his own account on the site?

What's the rest of the story? Also, what about the other two accounts?

I was confused by that. He said it was written in 2002, but it's cited as Reader's digest 2017. Is that like...The reader's digest? Or is it some kind of internal Eunuch Archive reader's digest? That excerpt wasn't from the other article he mentioned, so is he citing it directly using his own account on the site?

It is fictional story set in utopian (for the author) far future, I think it was clear from the context.

The shining future predicted by the author indeed came true, we are all wearing mirror shades and we love it.

Was it a conspiracy, or just people working together to achieve their dreams?

Many cases of fiction influencing real life - just remember all the science fiction fans who worked on real space program and helped to make their vision a reality.

See, what happened there is that this was a story, a work of fiction, set in the future. So, while the story itself was published in 2002, the internal elements included things like "this is a Readers' Digest article from 2017". You know the way George Orwell published a novel in 1948 that was set in the year 1984?

I agree, it's very odd to think Readers' Digest would still be a thing in 2017, maybe that is what confused you?

You know the way George Orwell published a novel in 1948 that was set in the year 1984?

Wait, but how did he know what would happen in 1984 if (as you claim) he was writing the book in 1948? How did he avoid getting in trouble for misinformation by, like, the 1948 version of facebook mods?

Shocking, I know, but they didn't even have mods back in 1948! Can you imagine?

It's official, Hitler happened because they didn't have mods.

Fortunately though we got mods in the fifties, eventually culminating in the greatest mod of all time, Mick Jagger.

Bravo. If Zorba ever gets around to adding a version of reddit gold, I'll come back to this comment.

The reader's digest 2017 citation was the punchline within the story, the joke being (on EA in 2002) that by 2017 becoming a eunuch will be a normie, reader's digest type activity.

The "2017" was part of the story posted in 2002 about castration being normalized in (then) future year.