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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   27227 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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I do see the difference, but moral panics over "think of the children" have a history of having the reactions be cures that are worse than the disease, and I see no particular reason to think that this time is different. Do you have a reason to think that this time is different?

This is particularly rich because so much of the justification for puberty blockers and minor transition has been a "You can have a live daughter or a dead (suicide) son!" fear mongering which turns out to have been based flawed/non-existent studies.

This is a gigantic own goal that's more likely to be seen as akin to lobotomies 50 years down the line than anything else. It's close to unprecedented in human history to issue major invasive surgeries which barely even impact the longterm suicidal incidence and just shrug and call it self-expression

... I don't think puberty blockers are as damaging as lobotomies, and also puberty blockers in the context of gender affirming care are like 10x less frequent than lobotomies were at the peak of that craze. I think people 50 years from now (assuming the world of 50 years from now substantially resembles the world of today) will probably think of it similar to how we think about high schoolers smoking or using tanning beds (i.e "basically not at all").

There were about 40,000 lobotomies ever in the United States over the course of decades and there are about 1.5 million Trans people in the United states. Even if only 10% of them are pursuing surgical correction/puberty blockers, that doesn't really line up. Lobotomies were likely more damaging case-by-case, but a 30%~ suicide rate indicates that there is no particular happiness coming from gender confirmation.

Most of the 1.5 million trans people in the US are not minors, and the fraction of the trans minors who go on puberty blockers is about 3%, not "only 10%". Unless you're talking about what they do once they reach adulthood, but if you want to forbid adults from doing things they want to do with their bodies, trying to add regulations around what kids can do probably won't help.

Moral panics when they're about extremely rare events like satanic cannibals are one thing. We're talking about the ascendant ideology which is extremely entrenched and uses the organs of government to do things like force parents to give up their children if they don't subscribe radical political/philosophical views. Moral panics are designed to counter things like this, and I'm glad America in particular has a habit of doing so.

I don't think the once-ascendant ideology is particularly entrenched anymore. The anti-woke/anti-trans movement at this point feels very similar to the way the atheism community felt in the 2012 era, as they ran out of defensible causes and started to turn to indefensible causes and on each other. Had they packed up and gone home once their original goals were met (e.g. no prayer in schools) I think the world would be a happier place.

Well it's a reaction to such a "think of the children" moral panic that went too far, for one.

It sure is. But to bastardize Mickens, responding to a moral panic with a second moral panic in the opposite direction is like asking Godzilla to prevent Mega-Godzilla from terrorizing Japan. THIS DOES NOT LEAD TO RISING PROPERTY VALUES IN TOKYO.

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