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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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.
The part many on the left are missing is that puberty itself is a large part of the mechanic by which teens become heteronormal. When I was around 12, I felt disgusted by teens, sexuality in general and was a somewhat odd kid to begin with. At that time there already was lots of talk about nonstandard sexualities and I strongly identified with asexuals. I also thought that I was very far from the average male, among other things refusing any kind of violence (I distinctly remember refusing to even watch shows/movies or play games portraying violence), an intellectual above all kinds of base instincts. Typical arrogant nerd stuff. Especially early puberty then felt like shit, very moody & scared of what happens with me. Then sometime in late puberty all of that went out of the window, suddenly I was a temperamentally fairly stereotypical guy. And even in retrospect, I had been to some degree in denial even when younger. In elementary school I was often beating up other kids for various reasons. I just learned that I was going nowhere with that attitude, so I had to force myself out of it and pretended that it never happened. Which combined with my otherwise bookish personality naturally led to the described intellectual self-image.
Conditionals are obviously hard to prove, but I could easily see my pre-puberty self taking puberty blockers to not become a disgusting, violent, sexual men. Especially with the argument that oh, it's reversible anyway, so just try it out. It would have been a grave mistake, but I wouldn't have known, and in particular it's easy then to then just stay the course and tell yourself you took the right option.
My wife is very similar in the other direction; She always was a tomboy who felt more comfortable with boys, then puberty hit and she changed. She also could see herself mistakenly choosing to take puberty blockers in her youth. And now our daughter is just the same, so we make sure to always tell her that her mom had the same struggles. Imagining her mistakenly getting talked into puberty blockers is horrifying, and worse, very plausible.
So overall while I have quite some sympathy, going through puberty seems like the less-bad option even for the majority of those who feel somewhat uncomfortable with their sex.
Hardcore gender activists aren’t missing this; they openly say they want to dismantle heteronormativity. What did you think that meant, thoughts, conferences, essays?
Empirically, yes.
The number of man-hours put into those categories dwarfs anything related to puberty blockers, or to medical intervention at all.
The tooth to tail ratio is a bitch, but it’s not that much of a bitch. Woke activism really is aimed at producing more of the alphabet soup type of trans. The social media influencers, the public school lessons, the puberty blockers- they’re all part of the direct ecosystem in a way that supremely stupid academic papers are not.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link