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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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To clarify, you are saying that if the right-wing accusation of LGBT+ grooming children is truthful, then you personally support the shooter?

What does this mean specifically?

It means the LGBT+ community is trying to influence children to join their sexual culture. Do you think this is happening?

just set them on course to join in the future as adults?

So this is not "grooming" in your mind???? Conservatives would consider cultural influence "setting them on the course" to join that community as grooming their children. If you've set a child on the course of sexual development, the grooming is done.

However leftist normies usually don't even believe that one can be influenced in their sexual orientation like that,

This is not how most LGBT activists (particularly T) act. They behave as a population that knows it will go extinct without the ability to hard indoctrinate children out of the view of parents.

What, in your mind, separates modern fears about the trans community indoctrinating children, and the old fears in the 1950's that gay men were hoping to turn your child gay?

I feel like human psychology is easily manipulated when it comes to children - see the Satanic Panic, Stranger Danger, and a dozen other hysterias that were wildly out of proportion to what was actually happening on the ground.

While a surprisingly high number of kids are putting "they/them" in their profiles, and saying they're non-binary, the number who are seeking surgery or other medical interventions is fairly low still. See, for example, this article which says that "[i]n the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis." That's around 258 a year, in a country of 330 million people. Even if you accept the "irreversible damage" line of thought, and think that a good portion of those girls will go on to regret it, that is a really tiny number of cases to use as the basis for fearing for the fate of your own children, or those in your community.

It just seems like people are myopically focused on a fairly unlikely outcome, and using that to justify clamping down on the freedoms of a lot more people as a result.

Don't get me wrong - I do think the medical establishment has a responsibility to take the well-being of patients into account, and so the moment the evidence is strongly in favor of discontinuing a particular practice, we should stop. The history of lobotomies is all one needs to believe that doctors can sometimes be horribly wrong - so we have to humbly consider that with any intervention we're doing. All the same, even if you consider every mastectomy of a female-bodied adolescent to be a terrible tragedy, the tragedy is much more bounded than lobotomies were back in the day.

To me the main difference is the epistemics involved. One can experiment with homosexuality and pretty quickly evaluate if they like it. And if they later realize they don't like it or like heterosexuality better they can later change their behavior. Gender care however is in a much shakier epistemic place.

One can't actually know what it's like to be both male or female and compare the experiences. A full transitioned transwomen has no actual possible way to know if their experiencing anything like natal female qualia. Likewise a young male cannot possible differentiate between the mental state of "I am a woman trapped in a male body" and "I am a man in a male body that mistakenly thinks I might be a woman trapped in a male body". There is no conclusive test that anyone can preform from any vantage point.

The only meaningful heuristic we can use to guide these kids is "would you be happier if you grew up undergoing natural puberty or medically guided cross sex puberty". The kid, having experienced neither, is in no epistemic places to make this decision and adults rightfully should take this question very seriously. What they absolutely should not do is insist that it should be up to do the kid and confuse them with nonsense about gendered souls.

As to make my position falsifiable, if you could actually show real evidence that the answer to that question is "Yes, this particular kid would be happiest undergoing medically guided sex puberty" I would be willing to listen. But gaslighting me about how actually gender is some privileged epistemic marker that no one could possibly be confused about while you also support things like gender demi fluidity is not convincing. You are going to need to throw a whole lot of the movement under the bus before you can even pretend to start addressing this concern.