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Notes -
Are puberty blockers chemical castration?
A follow-up to the discussion with @netstack
This was originally a deep-chain reply, but after a few spergy, reddit-tier replies on my end, and @netstack's saintly curiosity, the conversation resulted in a decent-quality argument, that I'd like to get more eyes on and see I missed any obvious objections.
I did some extra digging as well. The wiki for Lupron links to the paper "Reforming (purportedly) Non-Punitive Responses to Sexual Offending", and while it's about triptorelin instead of Lupron, it's another GnRH. In any case a systematic review of the use of GnRH on sexual offenders (sci-hub) should hopefully settle the matter.
As a side note this paper makes me think the difference between GnRH's and DMPA's is that the former have (or promised to have) fewer side effects, not that they work on a fundamentally different principle (and while we're on the subject, let me just say I'm rather bemused at all the handwringing in all these papers about the side effects of these drugs on convicted sex offenders, when I compare them to the dismissal of any such concerns around giving the same drugs to children).
No, it just completely went over my head, lol.
This is a fun one. From what I understand chemical castration is meant to be reversible. This is what the wiki for chemical castration says right on the top, and I saw, but failed to bookmark, a paper that made that claim about DMPA's specifically, but that seems to be the general consensus on chemical castration:
So if irreversibility is a necessary condition for classifying something as chemical castration... than it seems that chemical castration does not meet the standard.
Now, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the "non-central" argument, you can argue that something that's reversible doesn't quite have that quality of having one's balls cut off that you'd expect from a term like "castration". It is also true you're going to have a hard time finding sources about the reversibility of puberty blockers, since dr. Cass' team looked, and all they can say is:
But when gender care providers themselves tell me that "puberty blockers are reversible (asterisk)", the asterisk being you can't stay on them too long, or that if you start them too early you're never going to have an orgasm, when celebrity cases like Jazz Jennings say they don't regret going on blockers, but the downside was "there wasn't enough tissue to work with when it came to the surgery" (and also don't know what an orgasm is), when the industry comes up with procedures like sigmoid vaginoplasties or zero depth vaginoplasties to either hack around or throw up their hands about the issue, can we say that there are good reasons to suspect some of the changes may be irreversible? What is even supposed to be the mechanism for reversibility? For a fully developed adult it's just a question of restoring testosterone levels and sperm counts, but for a child that never went through puberty we're basically hoping their body will catch up with development as if nothing ever happened.
Yeah, I know that as far as evidence goes, this doesn't rise to the standard of a proper well-designed study, but like I said in the other comment, the gender industry isn't particularly transparent about results they don't like. I understand wanting to remain agnostic on the reversibility question, but if you grant that these concerns are reasonable, it seems like puberty blockers are an at least as, and may possibly turn out to be more of, a central example of chemical castration, than chemical castration itself.
I think more people could understand the depths of this debate better by steelmanning the pro puberty blocker/pro HRT side a little and seeing that allowing people to go though puberty normally is also not reversible. And a lot of transgender adults (and teens off the very basis that they are seeking out hormones) openly express that they wish they didn't have to go through their natural puberty.
So from their perspective what bans can end up doing is that instead of the person getting to decide which irreversible thing they go through based off their own desires, it's the government choosing for them.
There is no simple choice here, someone will be upset by permanent changes. A teenager who makes a mistake and gets on hormones without consideration, or a teenager who is forced to go without care and ends up as a sad trans adult who just wishes they had the autonomy given to make choices about their own body when they were younger.
And blockers came up as the compromise solution and promoting them as the free space where everything can be reversed seems just like wishful thinking from everyone. Because if it's true then it's a very easy solution that won't cause any harm.
Assuming one grants that a thing such as
meaningfully exists.
You can not like them and still acknowledge the very obvious objective reality that there are adult humans who are living their life in modern society as the other gender through medical treatment and social changes.
Whether or not you accept the identity from a categorical perspective doesn't change that there are people doing that.
Edit: to be clear since there is confusion, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing on the merits of whether or not trans people actually fall into the category they wish, I'm saying that "trans adults" is meaningfully a group. It refers to a category of people that we all understand is meant when said. It means people like Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner or Ellen/Elliot Page. This is a group that does indeed meaningfully exist.
Why would I acknowledge this? It's absurd. It's not remotely possible. There can be a milllion people pretending or claiming to do this and yet that does not make it any more real.
Again you can disagree with them from a categorical perspective. But the fact still remains that people are doing it.
There are human males who currently live their life taking estrogen, wearing clothes typically associated with women, being referred to as she/her by their associates along with a corresponding female associated name and other things like that. Vice versa with human females doing testesterone and social changes.
That's just observable reality. Whether or not you think that includes a human male as a "woman" is a categorical dispute, that these people exist and are doing such things is just plain fact.
People may be "doing it" and that still doesn't give it any validity or cause to acknowledge it as anything other than utter insanity. It's like people claiming to be from Mars. Funny if it happens once, but we're long past that point. This isn't like religion, which in the West has politely withdrawn to areas so private it can no longer bother anyone, or like ideology, which can at least be put to the test and found wanting. This starts with a completely ludicrous premise and then tries to worm its way into society by denying the obvious and demanding the impossible. I can recognize epistemic gulfs between me and an ideological enemy, or me and a foreigner from parts unknown, but "trans" anything is just out of bounds of all reason. The people doing this aren't adults anymore; not unless you want that term to also become a meaningless category.
We can maybe call them harmless crazies, ignore them on libertarian grounds, live and let live, consider it beneath notice and leave it alone. But steelman it? What's there to steelman? Alright, so you are from Mars, nice thought experiment, can we please get back to reality? I can steelman a communist, a nazi, an islamist, an anachist, electric cars, accelerationism, anything based a difference of opinion on a complex topic that's difficult to make sense of. But gender and sex or whatever it's called in English is quite seriously one of the simplest topics in existence. The simple binary logic of it is in fact the bedrock of our existence. I know people who like dressing up as women or animals and getting fucked in the ass. Alright, whatever, I don't want to be anywhere near their bedroom but I can tolerate it. But when they tell me that they now "are" a woman or a dog, there can be only one response - No, you aren't, now please stop making a fool of yourself and don't ever again ask me or anyone else to seriously validate that kind of delusion.
I don't want to sound petty, but I am entirely serious on this point: Anyone claiming to be "trans" just plain isn't an adult for social purposes. You can maybe play along with that kind of make-believe, but at that point it really is all child's play. Again, funny if it happens once, but the joke has gotten old.
Edit: I did not address the issue of this all affecting kids. I thought I had forgotten to, but in retrospect it's probably better off that way. My thoughts on pushing "trans" on teenagers, who suffer from enough idiocy all on their own, are unlikely to encode into anything motte-compliant.
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You're making a normative claim that understanding the trans position on the "wrong" puberty strengthens the activist case.
You cannot now pull back to the empirical fact that trans people exist when someone challenges that.
No, I'm saying that these people exist in response to a comment that said
"Assuming one grants that a thing such as
meaningfully exists"
But they do exist. Whether or not we accept their claimed identity as "valid" categorically has no bearing on whether or not a group called "trans adults" exists.
If a news article writes a story about groups in America and it says "Black adults, Asian adults, gay adults, trans adults" you're able to understand this as a group that exists.
It has some bearing on whether they meaningfully exist. It's a normative claim: trans adults do not exist in the same way that what we've termed "cis" adults exist, so their judgments about puberty should not be treated the same.
If a news article talked about the "AAPI" ethnicity, do you also feel like there's no context in which one can question whether that ethnicity is meaningful?
I certainly don't think of "AAPI" the same way I think of African-Americans.
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