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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?
The Gay Science, Book Three, §120
-Socrates, or so I'm told.
Can these perspectives be reconciled?
Is there a good as such? Have not all attempts to define such a thing failed miserably?
...I think this argument relies for its persuasive power on either ignorance of or a peculiar axiomatic commitment to its evident results. I have in my life "enjoyed" variant and deviant forms of "health" at some length. Once upon a time, I did not care much about conventional notions of health, because I quite consciously did not particularly wish to live to advanced age. Now I contemplate that I am rather unlikely to live to hold my grandchildren, and rather likely to leave my wife a widow, despite all promises to the contrary, and I wish I had not been so foolish in my youth. I wish further that others had not been so cruel as to encourage my delusions.
Concrete examples would be really ideal here, and given the language, the higher-contrast, the better.
Sure.
Some men evidently accomplish a great deal without being "fit" in the physical sense. And that's perfectly fine for them. That is their "health". But we might still find it regrettable that there are opportunities they never explored, because in the general sense every choice involves forsaking other possibilities and there is always something regrettable in this despite its necessity.
One of the greatest lessons I took from Nietzsche is how to approach things with more nuance. Something can be good, and virtuous, and necessary, and regrettable. Something can be bad, and deleterious, and undesirable, and yet still necessary. You can mix and match.
There is such a thing as "the good", but it escapes any attempt to define it in terms of basic axioms or repeatable guidelines.
You probably just made the wrong decision then. No one ever said that people couldn't just be wrong. There are innumerable healths, which means there are innumerable unhealths as well.
Concrete examples illustrating which part, exactly?
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