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Argh no this is exactly the reaction I am worried about from the people who want to ban puberty blockers because trans. About 20k kids a year enter puberty extremely early (before 8 for girls, before 9 for boys, sometimes much before). This number is going up extremely rapidly over time. You could perhaps ban puberty blockers for kids over a certain age but I am not confident there wouldn't be substantial negative effects from that, and I bet you aren't either, because this is not our field of expertise. If I expected that, conditional on legislation existing here, the legislators would consult with pediatricians and write the legislation to actually be sane and minimally scoped, I wouldn't raise this objection, but I don't expect that legislation in this area (or any area really) would be sane and minimally scoped.
Calling both alien abductions and recovered memories "social contagion" is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about when I say that "social contagion" is a non-explanation. Those had very different causes from each other. Effective interventions aimed at reducing the incidence of false recovered memories (e.g. "the APA stops endorsing dream interpretation therapy") would probably not help very much for the alien abduction craze.
With gender dysphoria we see that there is a particular personality (two personalities, actually: mtf and ftm seem like two pretty much non-overlapping personality groups) that is much, much more prone to it than others. My understanding is that, to the extent that "social contagion" is a coherent hypothesis at all, it predicts that trans hit these groups hardest just because it reached those social groups first and then spread within them, and if it had started in a different social group we would see a different distribution over trans frequencies by personality type. This strikes me as unlikely, especially since "antisocial and lonely" is a risk factor for the mtf group.
Base rate. Lots of people care start caring about things when they become personally affected by them, and orders of magnitudes more people were personally affected by the pronoun craze and the corresponding threats to livelihood and job security than even know someone personally affected by puberty blockers.
Sorry, I might be missing something, but I honestly cannot grasp how I should shrug at the extremely poor quality of evidence for prescribing puberty blockers, because it hasn't been prescribed to that many kids, but shriek in horror at the suggestion of banning them, because the number is growing. If the number is growing, than your original argument for dismissing my concerns is invalid, isn't it?
If anything, I'd want to ban it for kids under a certain age.
Feel free to disagree with the analogies, it's entirely possible that dysphoria is not like alien abductions or recovered memories, but the comparison does show that social contagion is not a non-explanation.
Scott had a bit about how parapsychology is a placebo for studies, in that we know that, say, remote viewing is bunk, but it will still yield a statistically significant result in a properly done, controlled, double-blinded, peer-reviewed studies. So whatever that result is on average, it should be seen as the "placebo effect" for any other phenomenon, and any study that cannot beat it should be dismissed. It's a similar case here, we know that alien abductions aren't real, but we see them being reported, and we see how they correlate to their portrayal in the media. If you can't show that a purely self-reported phenomenon like gender dysphoria doesn't break out of the same media exposure pattern, there's no reason to believe it's a real thing to begin with.
What is incoherent about it? We do have other references for phenomena that are social contagion for sure, because no one has been abducted by aliens. Are these hypotheses incoherent too?
The internet is a thing these days. People can read, watch Netflix shows with capital "D" diversity up the wazoo, etc. There's parasocial effects stemming from following influencers. Subreddits, Discords. Sorry, but this is pure cope.
Well, a swing and a miss in my case. I take the issue personally, because when I was originally exposed to it, I had to reluctantly concede, even though it went against my instincts, as the other side had all the studies and experts on their side. Then the studies turned out to be bluffs, and the experts were proven to be actively lying. I resent overriding my instincts for a lie, which is why I'm so invested in pointing out that the liars have, in fact, been lying.
It has not been prescribed to that many kids for purposes other than delaying extremely precocious puberty. Puberty blockers are in fact useful at blocking precocious puberty, which most people agree should be blocked, and that is the primary thing they're used for. The rate of precocious puberty happening is growing rapidly, and so banning the only effective means of mitigating the problem we have would be a moderately large problem today and a much larger problem in the future.
What observations does the social contagion hypothesis exclude? If there is some evidence that would lead you to think that "social contagion" is more likely to be the correct explanation, there must be some other evidence which would lead you to decrease your credence in that hypothesis. What specific evidence would that be, in your case?
The specific observations I make here about MTF people (I have many more MTF than FTM in my social circle, can't speak to FTM)
I suspect you can make a quite accurate FTM risk score with a linear score over how many of these descriptions apply to a particular person. Now it is possible that this just indicates social spread through this particular demographic, but it very much feels like there's a "type of person" who is into all of these things. Specifically, it feels like the type of person who was at risk of being a furry in the early 2000s or a ham radio operator in the 1980s.
If mere exposure to trans was the primary explanation, I would expect the normal FTM demographic to instead look like normies who happen to like stuff which portrays a lot of trans people, e.g. I'd expect them to
As such I don't think "this is a purely social phenomenon, and it is only by chance that it spread through this particular group of people" is a parsimonious hypothesis, at least for the MTF demographic (again, I don't really know much about the FTM demographic, maybe they do look like normies who were convinced to become trans by positive portrayals in mass media. I doubt it, but that doubt isn't really informed by anything).
That is fair and valid and also not a very good basis for making policy about what medical treatments should be forbidden. It is a good basis for deciding who to listen to in the future for general policy stuff - my objection is narrowly scoped to having policy people make uninformed broad sweeping decisions about medical treatment, because that does not have a history of going great.
I meant banning them for off-label use, like gender dysphoria. Though to be honest, precocious puberty was a bit dubious itself, the last time I checked, but I can let it fly.
Analogous to the placebo effect: exposing a population to a foreign idea, and it not coinciding with a self-identification with that idea.
I see no reason to grant that assumption. Do alien abductees look like normies?
Isn't it a good basis for reversing policies about medical treatments that have been approved, based on trust in the people who have been proven to lie?
Why do you say that puberty blockers for precocious puberty are dubious?
I've only ever seen papers mention psychological reasons for treating it, and I feel like dicking around with hormones to avoid awkwardness in school is rather excessive.
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