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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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around minors that have gone through the unethical transgender science grinder.

It's not a wonder you don't care about reforming the science to have evidence based results on if trans healthcare for minors has positive or negative results for patients if you've already made up your mind that it's unethical off other grounds.

Science should not be

Step 1: Have a view established off something else Step 2: Only accept evidence, research, and experts that agrees with the pre-established view and not the ones that disagree. Step 3: Declare the issue done with and stop further research.

Running these experiments is itself a violation of the ethics of human experimentation because, as detransitioners would be able to tell you, it can't be opted out of.

The same argument applies for signing up for experimental heart surgery.

Do people undergo experimental heart surgery because they don't like how their heart looks?

If there was an experimental heart surgery which changed the color of a patients heart from vaguely red to bright pink, I wouldn't support people doing it. I definitely wouldn't support impressionable teenagers who read about this on the internet doing it.

I'd be a tad bit concerned if my heart was, for example, a shade of blue. I'm not quite sure how I'd find out in the normal course of things, but it can happen, and represents a rather concerning situation.

Note that I'm objecting to the standards being used by the person I was replying to. I'm not a fan of gender reassignment surgery, or hormones, or putting on a dress.

I'm not a fan of gender reassignment surgery, or hormones, or putting on a dress.

I'm actually kind of surprised by that. As a transhumanist, I would've thought you were all in support of gender reassignment surgery (since it fits in nicely with the idea of breaking out of the limitations of the meat body one was born with). Can you expand on your thinking there?

You're in luck, because just a day or so ago I went into a lengthy explanation of why I'm not an advocate of gender reassignment surgery, and why transhumanism is as distinct from trans ideology as cats are from dogs:

https://www.themotte.org/post/1794/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/311661?context=8#context

When I want to be a 6'9" muscular 420 IQ uber-mensch, I want that to be a fact about physical reality. There shouldn't be any dispute about that, no more than anyone wants to dispute the fact that I have black hair right now.

I do not think that putting on high heels and bribing my way into Mensa achieves my goal. I do not just want to turn around and say that because I identify as a posthuman deity, that I am one and you need to acknowledge that fact.

This explains why I have repeatedly pointed out that while I have no objection to trans people wanting to be the opposite sex, that they need to understand the limitations of current technology. I would have hoped that was obvious, why else would I pull terms like ersatz or facsimile out of my handy Thesaurus?

Gotcha. So it's not that you're opposed to those things per se, but that you're opposed to pretending like they are reaching the goal (when in fact they aren't).

That's a good summary. If there was a pill that magically turned you into the opposite gender, what business of mine is it if people take them or not? If there were people claiming to have that pill, convincing other people that worked, and resisting evidence to the contrary, then I'm against poor epistemics on principle, and I'm also a psychiatrist (in training).