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First of all, as far as you can tell is no metric, it's just your opinion. So if you are arguing for 'here's why I would trust ziz with my children' then go for it, but if you demand society follow suit you need to actually prove that being trans had nothing to do with the cult or murders, which is just ridiculous - in the world where ziz didn't become trans he wouldn't have started a trans cult.
But secondly and way more importantly, who are you to decide what's relevant or not? Why can't progressives just fucking listen to people instead of constantly telling us what opinions we should have? After the past decade of progressive dominance, it sounds like a threat you can't really back up any longer.
Oh and to twist that into 'oh well then we're going to have to label everything and everyone all the time!' is also ridiculous when you don't even have to go back two decades to find out how it would actually be handled - everyone is allowed to behave towards trans people exactly as their conscience dictates - a system which worked fine for everyone except 0.3% of the population.
No I don't. You're the one making a non-obvious positive claim; the burden of proof is yours. You have to prove relevance, not ask your opponent to prove irrelevance.
Also, I didn't mean 'Ziz's biological sex had no causal influence on her crimes'. I meant 'Ziz's biological sex is not of public interest in and of itself once Ziz's crimes have been established'. If someone picks a person in a crowd at random and asks you to bet on whether they've committed violent assault, sure, you should give slightly higher odds if it's a man. But if he's already holding a bloody knife and trying to hop the border, it's tendentious at best to call everyone's attention to the fact that he's a man as if it's some crucial point of the case.
I am struggling to word a reply to this that doesn't sound like 'right, so you're just a heartless monster, got it'. I guess I could make a desperate appeal to some kind of decency or compassion within you by pointing out that 0.3% of 350 million people is still a staggering amount of people. Or point out that you're discounting the uncountable number of people who would counterfactually have transitioned and led much happier lives if the option had been on the table. Or ask what makes you so sure that the current arrangement ruins more than 0.3% of the population's lives - if hundreds of thousands of oppressed trans people's lives are an acceptable sacrifice, why not hundreds of thousands of cancelled and witch-hunted right-wing curmudgeons? But frankly I don't hold high hopes of getting through to you.
If all you know about a given murderer is their sex, you can reasonably assume that a male murderer will pose a greater threat and be significantly more difficult to subdue than a female one, given men's greater physical strength, speed and aggression.
"Male murderer at large, considered armed and extremely dangerous" conveys significantly more actionable information to a police officer than "murderer at large, considered armed and extremely dangerous"; unlike "blond murderer at large" vs. "brunet murderer at large".
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I feel obliged to note that the sign of this effect is actually in question, not just its magnitude, because "desist and become happy with birth sex" and "never become dysphoric in the first place" are much better than "transition". If desistance rates are high without permitting transition, then we're doing dysphorics a disservice on average by tolerating them. Alternatively, if dysphoria rates scale with trans awareness, then raising such awareness is staggeringly -EV because it massively raises the incidence of the problem it's trying to ameliorate.
Disagree with this, along with the general framework of transition as a solution to a problem.
Take out social stigma, and I think transition, on balance, is a very positive experience for the average person who tries it. Trans people talk a lot about "gender euphoria", and it clearly means more to them than just "the absence of dysphoria"! Now I'm not at all sure that's a distinct, gender-specific feeling in the same sense that medical dysphoria is. But I think it's sheer common sense that a years-long process of reinventing your entire identity would make people happier: it gives you a sense of purpose while it's going on, and a lasting sense of accomplishment when it's over.
Frankly a lot of people might find it enjoyable to reinvent themselves in the same way, including picking a new first name etc., without bringing a sex change into it. I'm sure lots of self-help books have been written about this, few of them ever implemented. The way I figure it, the gender element just gives people an extra motivator to really make a clean break with their old self, whereas it's all too easy to backslide and fall back into the same old doldrums if you've just made a series of arbitrary choices with no unifying target-identity in mind.
Less charitably than your interpretation, it's a euphemism for "the sense of intense arousal autogynephiliacs experience upon fulfilling their sexual fantasies". I can't remember ever seeing a trans man describe experiencing gender euphoria, although I'm open to correction on this front.
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There are lots of ways to re-invent yourself. Most of those ways don't sterilise you, don't frequently render you permanently unattractive, don't have side-effects lists including suicide (yes, suicide; tampering with sex hormones can do that, which is why we try to avoid doing it unless necessary), and/or don't leave you dependent on pharmaceuticals for the rest of your life. Admittedly, there are quite a few that can do one of those (tattoos, joining a cult, wild orgies without protection), but not many that do all four.
I think it's a massive reach to take "real outcomes are maybe a smidgen better than refusing transition i.e. utterly awful" and then assume that if we sent the transphobes to the corn field it'd be actively good. Transition belongs in the "cost" column, not the "benefit" column.
Well, I'm not necessarily assuming medical transition here. I agree the medical dependency and side-effects should be weighed very carefully.
Either way, I think a poll would support my claim. I think if we polled trans people who live in very trans-friendly communities, and detransitioners/people who considered transition but decided against it, about their self-reported level of happiness, life satisfaction, sense of fulfillment, whatever - the trans people would as a matter of fact come out ahead. Do you predict otherwise, or do you simply write them off as too biased to report their own happiness level accurately?
(Which, to be clear, I wouldn't consider crazy. It's not the vibe I get from the trans people I know personally - most seemed massively happier and more at peace with themselves after transitioning than they had ever been, not just before they transitioned, but before they themselves decided/discovered they were trans. But I can see why you would think that.)
The second one might show up if people get wind of exactly what the study's measuring (albeit on both sides, to some degree) due to wanting to make the result friendly to one's tribe (note the third and final section of this), but if you can keep that under wraps I wouldn't expect it. The first one is more complicated.
The first snag here is that there are some differences between the control group that you're positing and the control group we previously assumed. Detransitioners are generally going to be pretty miserable, I would assume, but detransitioners don't exist in trans-rejection-world because they were never encouraged/allowed to transition in the first place (indeed, this is the most inarguable point in favour of trans-rejection-world) so they should be part of the experimental group, not the control group. Also, we're talking here about potential social contagion effects, so a bunch of the people in trans-rejection-world who would have gone trans in current-world would potentially have looked like "people who never considered transition".
The second snag is with selection bias in your experimental group. Super-trans-friendly communities in current-world are going to attract those that think transition was the best thing that ever happened to them, and repel detransitioners and ex-trans (who tend to wind up places like here; hi, I'm ex-trans although I don't quite count as a detransitioner). They're also, for obvious reasons, not going to include anybody who committed suicide, although that one does apply to the control group as well to an unknown extent.
The third snag is that because of the fairly-recent explosion in transitions, most transsexuals are fairly recent; regret's not always immediate. Whether they're happy now is only part of what we want to know; we care about whether they're happy over their whole lifetimes.
Hence, I think that the experimental and control groups you propose would probably have the result you think, but that that doesn't prove much about the question we actually want answers to. A better experiment would be to take 10,000 people who present with GID, transition half, stop the other half from transitioning, and compare outcomes 40 years later. This one still isn't perfect, but it avoids literal survivorship bias and selection bias, puts detransitioners in the correct group, and follows up. Unfortunately, we can't currently run that better experiment, because the trans movement would consider the experiment an outrage and either get it cancelled, or evacuate the control group to trans-friendlier jurisdictions. It should have been run before transition therapy was allowed to become standard practice, but AFAIK it was not.
This is interesting, though yeah, it'd never fly, at least in the Western world. But the problem here is that it restricts us to trans people who meaningfully 'had' GID in a psychiatric sense before, which puts us askew from my theory. As I said, I'm very much of the mind that there are lots of people who aren't dysphoric with their birth sex, but still find themselves happier once they transition. Genderfluid people, for a start. Indeed, this is what I think is behind a lot of the "social contagion" model: people who definitely didn't have dysphoria before they learned transition was a thing, but definitely want transition once they know it's available, because they correctly predict they would like it. I don't find there to be anything sinister about this.
If we had invented surgery that can make people fly like Peter Pan, I expect a lot of people would start to yearn for it very badly, and be very miserable if it were denied to them for arbitrary legal reasons - even people who hadn't previously thought of "I want to be able to fly" as some great unfulfilled desire in their life. That doesn't make "wanting the flight surgery" a mysterious social contagion, and it doesn't mean huge chunks of the population were flight-dysphoric "all along" without knowing. It's just people starting to desire desirable things once they're on the table.
(I picked an out-there example here, but the same reasoning might apply for a completely mundane intervention with legal ramifications. Suppose that "changing your legal name" or "moving houses" was this bold new concept that had only recently and tentatively been enshrined in law; not such crazy hypotheticals, both might be difficult to get across to an indentured medieval peasant. Let them know the option exists and I predict a lot of peasants would start to want to take it; and be happier once they had; which doesn't mean they had 'name-dysphoric' or 'house-dysphoric' written on their soul from birth, or that I've done them some great evil by broadening their horizons.)
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Genuine question - in what way(s) are trans people in the United States (and other Anglophone nations) "oppressed"?
I'm not saying they are now, I was bouncing off of @Fruck talking about the days when things were "fine for everyone except 0.3% of the population". I think going back to those days would be prima facie unacceptable. Fruck disagrees.
Can you define oppression then please? Also for clarification, while I don't think it would be unacceptable to go back to the previous situation, I do think it would be impossible - my point was that you don't need to imagine bizarre dystopian situations to handle something we used to handle fine until trans ideology was used as a wedge issue to tear the country apart.
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IGI has already said most of the things I would say in response to your core argument, and much more eloquently as usual, although I would add that if your idea of heartless monstrosity is opposing compelled speech, societal gaslighting and the forced restructuring of society to mildly benefit a minority who appear to largely want it for a sexual fetish, if my choices are heartless monster and deceitful snake, then watch out Tokyo, I'm a heartless monster.
In reality, I am not a heartless monster, I was just raised by manipulators so I can easily see through emotional blackmail. And I am well aware you would prefer right wing curmudgeons suffer rather than trans people, I lived through the past decade where progressives enacted policies to ensure just that. I feel like I've already used the word ridiculous too much in this conversation, but it is most appropriate for the idea that you can 'get through' to someone and convince them to make their own life miserable on the off chance it benefits strangers who hate them. Which is precisely why the trans ideologues never bothered to win over the public and immediately employed escalating coercion tactics. And when those tactics were called out, they employed more. And more. And more.
And please don't respond asking 'are you really suffering?' or the equivalent. My being forced to say trans person (instead of the quicker, more natural and poetic tranny) in this den of witches seems about equal to the suffering trans people suffer when someone misgenders them. I can threaten to kill myself if it's still not enough though.
As a purely-descriptive point, while SJ now hates the word "transsexual", theMotte still tolerates it, including as a noun. Or at least, I've never seen anyone (including me) get in trouble for using it.
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What about the odds that they are MTF? Are those higher? Surely they must be just because of the comorbidities.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, do they not?
People don't seem to have this sort of reaction when the oppressed minority is victims of vaccine injury. Then we're all heartless monsters.
At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself if you're willing to upend social order and cause immense problems in the name of 0.3% of the population. Because there's vastly, vastly more right-wing curmedgeons than there are trans people. However large the overlap may be.
I've said it here before and I'll say it again: the best social arrangement for marginals is to be politely glossed over and politically inconsequential. Because then maybe people can actually try to solve your problems instead of recruiting you for causes. Queering all of society instead is a fool's errand, a reckless fool at that.
In the sense of justfying acceptable sacrifices when there are people tied to the tracks and the train is arriving. In the long term, however, what you want to do is try to untie people, stop whatever supervillain has been kidnapping them, build fences around train tracks, get train drivers with better eyesight, etc.
When we're talking about real human lives being ruined by the thousand, 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few' must never excuse complacency. A status quo in which tens of thousands of people are deeply unhappy with their lot with no hope of betterment is not acceptable in the long term. Until a thousand generations of our brightest, best-intentioned, most open-mined thinkers declare with absolute certainty that there is literally no other way to order a society that would alleviate their suffering, we must not stop searching. Even in the event that other, even more urgent causes must take priority in the active search, we must at least remember what is owed, and keep firmly in mind that the current state of affairs is "the least terrible outrage we could muster", not "fine".
(For what it's worth, I also think the Left's attitude on this point has been scandalous. How they could claim to support bodily autonomy, and have so little regard for it w. regards to vaccine mandates, is beyond me.)
Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with individual tragedy more than you might think, especially in this case.
But the problem is that, as we have been reminded harshly in these past few years, you can't run your society in the service of marginals to the exclusion of everything else. It just doesn't work. Not even for the marginals themselves.
In fact, it is in the service of searching for betterment that I recommend others and myself to discretion. Not complacency, discretion. Indeed nothing has made it more impossible to study Gender Dysphoria and its still mysterious mechanisms and causes than turning transgenderism into a social movement. And I'm immensely frustrated that I now have to in every instance ask myself, reading any study on the topic, whether or not the author is trying to con me, to the service of whichever side.
It didn't used to be like this. And stupid shit like these language games over pronouns made it so.
We're indeed not at "fine", we're at "some people had their kids taken away from them over this". This sort of behavior is not very popular, and even less so when you're a visible but extremely tiny minority.
I'm not hypothesizing that things were better when we didn't care so much about this issue. I'm telling you. Because I cared then, and I care now, and I can see the difference.
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