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Please use more paragraph breaks, it was a challenge to make my way through this.
I have hope that this will sort itself out through better education and general osmosis at about the same rate that the "use a trans person's preferred pronouns" social norm will spread. In the meantime, if we think it's relevant, I'm fine with saying "LaSota, born male…", calling her "biologically male", or whatever.
Okay, but... I don't think über-progressive journalists are actually fully cognizant of that fact. The 'people may interpet trans woman backwards' thing, in particularly, is so deeply at odds with progressive vernacular that it genuinely doesn't register. I'm aware of it intellectually, which is more than most, but still hadn't thought of it in relation to this question until you brought it up! 'My side aren't lying, they're just terminally out of touch' isn't a very glowing defense, but in this case, it's the honest truth as best I can figure it.
Above all else, though:
This is where you lose me from the start. The premise fundamentally repels me. I cannot and will not subscribe to this rad-fem-descended idea that being a biological male is some sort of dreadful disease so potentially dangerous to bystanders that you inherently harm them by keeping your maleness from them. Men aren't fucking werewolves. I'm not just offended by this approach on behalf of trans women, I'm offended by it for myself as a cis man.
Are men more muscular and more aggressive on average? Yes. But those are fringes. The furthest edges of trend lines. "This person is a man" isn't some all-important piece of information that the public absolutely must know about some weird cult-leader who escaped to Mexico. No one is out there thinking 'well, I was going to have a nice chat with this escaped murderer I ran into, when I thought she had a vagina, but if you're saying (s)he's got balls, that's a whole different story', or if they exist now, I'm sure one of our many-if-statistically-less-prevalent biologically female murders will fix that in a hurry.
Ziz's transness, so far as I can tell, is not relevant to her crimes. Her biological sex isn't any of Joe Public's business either way. Maybe it makes her fractionally more likely to commit a completely different violent crime than if she was a biological female - so what? Do you want to go around wearing labels for every demographic bin you fall into that's vaguely correlated with bad behavior at the edges? (You post on anonymous right-wing political forums. That's a hell of a risk factor right there.) Would a journalist be lying if they wrote a story about you, but failed to mention one of them?
To me, complaining about the potential ambiguity of 'she/her'-ing Ziz LaSota isn't like taking Clinton to task for being a smartass about the meaning of "sexual relations". It'd be like taking him to task for off-handedly mentioning he used to play "football" in the same public address without clarifying that he meant soccer and not American football. Yeah sure a lot of listeners might get the wrong idea, so what.
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.
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.
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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