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What do you think the political solution would look like? AFAIK no other society has had to deal with trans
Lots of societies have had to deal with some folly of youth causing some number of kids to ruin their lives in one way or another in their quest for status and acceptance. In ancient Rome, kids seeking social status joined gladiatorial schools, and many of those kids ended up crippled or dying. In Victorian England, girls wore incredibly tight corsets which caused reduced lung capacity, skeletal deformations, and abdominal muscle weakness, which led to lots of health problems (including much higher chances of miscarriage or death in childbirth).
Just because something is a problem doesn't mean a political solution exists. The politician's fallacy ("We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this") is frequently cited as a fallacy due to the third line, but the first line is often also wrong - we don't actually have to try to solve every problem.
I think the use of puberty blockers is a problem of small enough scale and low enough severity that it's probably better to just let it ride.
Ok, what do you think a political solution looks like? My guess is, at most, a planned parenthood doctor gets railroaded for gender affirming care every other year or so, and this may or may not have a chilling effect on adolescent specialized medicine but that was all activists anyways.
Or loses a malpractice suit when they do malpractice, yeah. Again, 40k kids a year start "gender affirming care", only 1k of those 40k start puberty blockers. I really don't think puberty blockers warrant special attention here.
Sure, the rest of gender affirming care is dubious too, and needs just as much attention as puberty blockers.
I would say "more attention than puberty blockers", because the number of affected kids is much higher. Something caused a massive uptick in either the experience of dysphoria, the reaction to dysphoria, or some combination thereof. I think "social contagion" is a thought-terminating non-explanation here. To reduce the rate of trans identification, I think it would be worth looking into what generally leads to discomfort with being embodied (as that seems to correlate extremely strongly, and also seems to be much more common than it used to be).
Of course, if you don't actually care about that and your main objection is to "point deer say horse", that is perfectly valid. But in that event I also don't take statements of concern about puberty blockers at face value, and will discount your policy suggestions in that area accordingly.
On the other hand, other parts of gender affirming care, might not have such a big impact, and aren't actively being sold as reversible. Either way, puberty blockers alone warrant a massive amount of attention if we compare them to other issues that entered social consciousness. Harvey Weinstein affected way fewer people, but we spent way more time on him then we do on blockers, for example.
Also, if blockers aren't such a big deal, then let's just ban them. After all very few people would be affected by the ban.
We don't actually know whether more people experience dysphoria, vs. interpret their experience as dysphoria. This goes right to your point about social contagion. Just look at some of the other contagions - the Satanic Panic, alien abductions, recovered memories, anorexia - the incidence of these, and many other things, increase with coverage from the media, and there's no evidence they increase with the actual phenomenon increasing in frequency, or at least I'm yet to see evidence of an actual alien abduction. So I see no reason to assume that gender dysphoria is any different.
Social contagion is exactly one of the explanations offered for this. It says that what leads to discomfort with being embodied is talking about discomfort with being embodied, especially when you glamorize it during the conversation.
Nope, that's more of an argument against mantras like "trans women are women", I agree it's not related to any discussion on gender affirming care. I'm quite puzzled why you'd think otherwise, actually.
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.
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