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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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The only other reasonable alternative is that there is some internal sense of gender that I and people like me are blind to, and this is really hard for me to believe.

Even Blanchard's typology allowed for "homosexual transsexuals" ("gay men" who transitioned young in order to score straight men), so even in his theorizing there's more reason than sissyfication fetishes to explain being trans.

That said, I'm not sure I think one needs a bespoke "sense of gender" to explain trans people either. I doubt people evolved a specific biological mechanism to become true "weeaboos", and yet some subset of American youth immerse themselves in Japanese culture and entertainment all the same. I think this can easily be explained by more general mental mechanisms - autism-like special interests, being an outcast from mainstream culture, being extremely online, etc.

I suspect that sex is such an obvious social trait, that there would always be a non-zero number of people who get a trapped prior that their life would be better if they had been born the opposite sex (or could start living as the opposite sex), or who have general feelings of body dysphoria or feelings of social ostracism that get channeled through envy of the opposite sex in some way.

The question then becomes the best way to deal with this trapped prior. Unlike with a phobia, where the person is going to keep living in a world with, say, dogs, and it is probably best to use a reliable, evidence-based therapy to lessen or eliminate the person's trapped prior, I suspect that the existence of hormone treatments and surgeries make it more difficult to remove this trapped prior.

Supposedly, people's pain tolerance is lower if they know they can get a pill that will block their pain. This makes sense to me - if your only option is to endure pain, better that your baseline biology pony up with natural painkillers or distractions that make it easier to endure. But if you now know that there's a quick fix, your strategy naturally shifts to convincing the gatekeeper of pain pills that you deserve pills to block your pain. You'll subconsciously convince yourself that your pain is unbearable, because truly believing that your pain is unbearable is the best strategy to convince a gatekeeper of that fact.

Maybe the trapped prior of sex or sex role dysphoria is the same thing? You think the grass is greener some way (your soft male physique would be better received with boobs and make up, people would treat you more nicely, etc.), that your current life sucks (possibly true), and that your best option is to jump through all the hoops the local doctor sets up for you and get some hormones (or to just acquire some hormones from the black/grey market.)

In this model, the "social contagion" would just be the simple knowledge of the fact that semi-reliable treatments exist.

I don't know what the most responsible thing to do if the trapped prior model is correct. Do we have reliable ways to move trapped priors? Somehow, what gets called "conversion therapy" by opponents doesn't seem like a very likely way to work, but I don't know what the evidence actually looks like on that front.

Even Blanchard's typology allowed for "homosexual transsexuals" ("gay men" who transitioned young in order to score straight men), so even in his theorizing there's more reason than sissyfication fetishes to explain being trans.

My understanding of the sissification stuff is that it's also usually at least bisexual if not outright homosexual. During the pornhub/mastercard happening someone said all the forced feminization/sissy stuff was being kicked off and linked warning this is a porn site very NSFW sissyhypno.com warning this is a porn site very NSFW as where a lot of that group of people migrated to and it looks very much like the viewers are expected to be if not primarily male attracted attracted to the idea of male attraction.

That said, I'm not sure I think one needs a bespoke "sense of gender" to explain trans people either. I doubt people evolved a specific biological mechanism to become true "weeaboos", and yet some subset of American youth immerse themselves in Japanese culture and entertainment all the same. I think this can easily be explained by more general mental mechanisms - autism-like special interests, being an outcast from mainstream culture, being extremely online, etc.

I disagree that this is a good way to model the transgender phenomenon. Weaboos aren't usually making claims or demands and those they make are not taken seriously. I don't think transgenderism in general can be modeled like a hobby.

I suspect that sex is such an obvious social trait, that there would always be a non-zero number of people who get a trapped prior that their life would be better if they had been born the opposite sex (or could start living as the opposite sex), or who have general feelings of body dysphoria or feelings of social ostracism that get channeled through envy of the opposite sex in some way.

I definitely find this line of reasoning compelling. I can model the headspace of a perspective trans person who has convinced themselves that all of their problems are downstream of their gender and rationalize something that looks a whole lot like modern transgender theory. What I don't understand is why so many people that should know better endorse these rationalizations.

I suspect that the existence of hormone treatments and surgeries make it more difficult to remove this trapped prior.

I think the treatment availability takes a far back seat to the memeplex and community surrounding the phenomenon. Even if all we had no treatment whatsoever I think this same thing can happen, which is underlined by apparently the trend of young trans people who feel no need to undergo any treatment.

I don't know what the most responsible thing to do if the trapped prior model is correct. Do we have reliable ways to move trapped priors? Somehow, what gets called "conversion therapy" by opponents doesn't seem like a very likely way to work, but I don't know what the evidence actually looks like on that front.

I think a lot of this collapses if society can broadly agree that this isn't how sex/gender work. At the very least this will stop doing harm by giving more people the meme of being born the wrong sex with which to form the prior even if it can still come about naturally. Then just basically the therapies Scott oulined in that article to deal with the natural cases. This is of course assuming that there is no there there with trans people which I'm not quite ready to do although I grow tired of the complete lack of engagement on these topics with the trans advocate side.