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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.
This is paper, not steel. Puberty is not reversible in the same way that birth is not reversible, nor aging. These are normal, natural, and expected processes. This is what humans do, as much as trees grow to the light and fish swim upriver to spawn.
The problem is not just that it's not reversible, it's that it's an intervention to disrupt normal maturation, and also not reversible. The default isn't unfettered biohacking, it's growing as your body is built to grow. It's feeding hunger and sleeping when tired and, yes, going through puberty when mature.
One day I'll stop running into the naturalistic fallacy in the wild and consider that my 10^28 years of existence leading up till that point worthwhile.
If someone said that 50% infant mortality was natural and not reversible, or the same for heart attacks being inevitably fatal.. They'd have been right for almost all of human history. Fortunately, we still have people alive who've witnessed this state of affairs, fortunate only in that we're not usually tempted to think this was somehow a superior state of affairs.
Pre-mature infants are far more likely to survive these days, thanks to modern incubators and resuscitate technologies doing at least some of the work a womb could or would. We've got proof of concept artificial wombs that have gestated mammalian embryos months for as long as 4 weeks without any physiological abnormalities:
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112
Give me a billion dollars and change, and I'll put any damn baby back into the womb and keep it there happily.
Give me a hundred billion, and I'll pocket one, and spend a few million delegating more competent people to the task of solving aging.
As rabies proliferated through your peripheral nerves and is transported to your brain. As Onchocerca volvulus happily turns children blind.
Nature is not very nice. The congenial environment you find yourself in is very strongly the property of artificial efforts to keep it that way.
Would it be fair to say that you view the word "healthy" to be meaningless outside of direct reference to atomic individualist personal preference? That is to say, the question of whether something is "healthy" begins and ends with their subjective opinion of their current state?
I think that when I use the word "healthy", it reliably constrains expectations. If I tell you my shirt is red, and then you examine it, you wouldn't be expecting it to emit or reflect only light that's 460nm in frequency, even if the term "red" leaves room for subjective interpretation where it bleeds into orange or pink.
It would be rather awkward if I had to append the WHO definition (Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity) every time I used that phrase. Even said definition is implicitly subjective.
So no, it's not meaningless beyond an individual observer. If I delivered a baby missing a head and handed it to a mother, I'd be rather aghast if anyone in the room called it a healthy child.
I couldn't really be a psychiatrist if I subscribed to that notion, could I?
Sadly human language is rather imprecise. It's still useful. I'm unable to define health in a way so rigorous I could program it into a computer in Lisp, but LLMs prove that that's not necessary.
Consistancy is the hobgoblin of small minds, or so I'm informed.
I think "healthy at any size" is crap, and I say this as a member of the target audience. But in order to take that position, I'm implicitly making an objective claim that some states are healthier than others, regardless of what the people experiencing those states think. It doesn't seem to me that this sort of position is compatible with your critique of the naturalist fallacy above. The argument against obesity is that it's divergent from our natural state, from what we ought to be. But as you say, rabies, infant mortality, etc, etc, and it seems to follow that any downside to obesity could easily be framed as just a matter of insufficient technology.
I would argue that we should value the places where nature is consonant with our desires, and we should be skeptical of places where our desires require wholesale rejection of nature. To the extent that our desires potentially bring us into conflict with nature, I think we should favor the desires that are as concrete and general as possible, over the desires that are highly individual and unusual. I think doing so would allow us to pursue common ground for a supermajority of the population.
To the extent that values are sufficiently mutually incoherent that the rabies vaccine, reduced infant mortality, and prepubescent gender transition can't be distinguished, it seems to me that Dril rules are in effect.
I don't follow. I'm not the one arguing that obesity is bad because it's not natural. I think it's bad because it makes you slower, weaker, ruins your QOL, makes you more likely to die early and less likely to find an attractive partner.
If there was a magic pill or surgery that let you be obese without any of the present downsides, that's a matter of aesthetics. It would be no different to dying your hair a weird color or getting a garish tattoo.
Being super fit and muscular isn't natural at all. Yet that's the revealed preference in terms of what people look for or aspire to, and they at least feel bad about not being there. The closest humans to a "state of nature", hunter gatherers, aren't super models or killing it on dating apps.
Humans have been rejecting nature ever since they sharpened sticks and lit fires. It's worked out pretty well overall.
I think that questions of whether something is natural are often irrelevant to whether its good or desirable, noting that this unavoidable requires a subject to decide what counts as good or desirable. If that was you, then you might intrinsically think natural = better in many situations.
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