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I think this is a distinction without a difference, a fig leaf of an epicycle. The context in which the argument is made is always a hysterical, histrionic affair in which responsibility is viciously externalized. "Your epistemic skepticism is LITERALLY GENOCIDE!!1"
It is a difference because the person has no control over the rest of the trans community. It's not a threat because they can't make it happen.
If I say "Either agree with me or I will kill myself" that is abusive because I can kill myself and I am (trying) to put responsibility for that on you, when really the responsibility lies with me, because I can do that.
If I say "If you stop depressed patients getting treated, more of them might commit suicide" that isn't something I can control. I might be wrong or right but I am not making a threat that I will go around killing people. If that is abusive then pro-life campaigners saying, if you vote Democrat then they will legalize abortion and millions of babies will die is abusive. In neither is the claimant saying they will do X if you do Y. They are saying X will happen if you do Y. They are not making a threat of action in order to change your behavior, they are predicting a consequence of the behaviour itself in order to change your behavior.
Whether the rhetoric is hysterical or not is orthogonal to whether the claim itself is true or false.
They're still enabling it, and treating it like a reasonable response.
I'm explicitly not talking about treatment. Transitioning is not hard anymore; if anything, it's easier than any remotely comparable type of treatment. How many men would love to be able to talk to a doctor for 10 minutes and walk out with an insurance-covered prescription for T and steroids based on nothing but "I feel like I want it"?
The "abusive" behavior is when that implied threat of suicide is lodged at everything. Find the idea of transgender kind of incoherent? GENOCIDE. Criticize this trans character? GENOCIDE. Don't want to use pronouns? GENOCIDE. Don't want to Brazilian wax this penis? GENOCIDE. Don't want to suck the girlcock? GENOCIDE.
If my failure to actively endorse your totally legal, easily permitted life choices increases the odds of you killing yourself, that's entirely your problem. Threatening me with the harm trans people might do to themselves because I decline to actively support them, or even argue that their whole deal is silly and incoherent and quite possibly harmful, is what crosses the line into "clearly abusive behavior".
And I'm sorry, but you are the only person I have ever seen do this decoupled "it's just about predicted consequences" routine. Whenever I see this stuff in the wild, it 100% redflags as textbook "shit abusers do to their victims, if you swapped the nouns and translated this into a relationship, virtually everyone would agree this was abusive behavior".
It is also societies problem. We make people do things that they don't want to do for the good of society all the time. Starting with taxes. So that isn't an out. But let me try to reset here.
If my actions contribute to someone killing themselves then I share some responsibility. Which crucially does not mean I was wrong in my actions or that I should change what I did (were it possible). If a 100% reliable time traveller tells me that if I break up with my girlfriend she will kill herself in 3 days I should take that into account. I may still choose to break up with her. I probably even should, the reasons causing me to break up with her are still there after all. But I believe then, that I do bear some responsibility. And that is ok! (Here at least, I shouldn't do it in a debate other places because it will be seen as accepting blame, most likely).
If we vote for a party in the UK that campaigns for cuts to the NHS it is likely that some additional people will die. It is still perfectly fine to vote that way because there are many other things to trade off against. But I do think we will bear some small shared responsibility for those deaths. And we should consider that as we make our choice. And then still choose to vote that way if we think it best.
I am not saying that even were trans suicide claims 100% true that we are therefore obligated to accomodate anything at all as a society. I am just saying we should consider the truth of them independent of whether its being threatened by someone wrapped in redflags. This isn't a relationship, its social engineering.
This also cuts the other way. We should also consider the costs independent of their claims as well of course. So it could be true that 1000 extra trans people kill themselves if we don't change bathroom laws and force people to use pronouns under threat of criminal sanction, and we might still say no. The costs (that they might claim are low, all we're asking for people to be nice, they might say) might actually be the potential incarceration of a third of the country, billions spent on trials and lawyers, and causing deaths the other way (a reason i don't support a gun ban in the US for example). So the right decision might be to say, we acknowledge that these stochastic deaths are likely true, but we're not going to accomodate you anyway, sorry.
I am arguing that is a better course than either calling them abusive and blindly refusing OR calling them heroes and blindly accepting.
Now obviously that isn't what is going to happen, its going to be a partisan slapfight, i would imagine. But thats why we can argue here instead.
Sorry, this all seems like orange and blue thinking to me. Do you not think people ought to be responsible for their own actions? Do you think the incentives we create matter at all? You mention social engineering, but don't seem to connect that the threat of self-harm is itself social engineering, and that my whole gripe is that its extremely susceptible to bad faith utility-monstering. You don’t give in to ultimatums in a relationship because doing so establishes that ultimatums are an effective weapon. Similarly, you should reject threats of self-harm in social engineering because doing otherwise increases the incentive for self-harm.
The difference is as mentioned before is between a threat and a prediction. They are not the same things.
You're treating the spokesperson as if they can control the trans community.
They could be lying about what they think will happen, they might be wrong, they might be hopelessly biased, but they are not threatening anything. You've said before you think that is not a distinction, whereas i think it is a huge one.
If trans people acted as one monolithic group that would be one thing, but they do not.
I agree threats of self harm are a problem, but definitionally that only applies to threats about what you will do to yourself, not what you predict other people will do to themselves. That is a non-trivial distinction. It is only the fact that you can yourself control if whatever you say will happen that makes it a threat.
So if your girlfriend's BFF says "If you break up with her, she'll kill herself. Also, if you don't empty your savings to take her on a fantasy vacation, she'll kill herself. Also, if you don’t post a glowing, thoughtful comment on every Instagram post, she'll kill herself." That's not a threat because it has an extra step? The BFF totally isn’t in on the social engineering, she's just making predictions, honest!
Sorry, doesn’t pass the smell test. If your BFF is that suicidal, you need to be getting them committed under suicide watch. You are very charitably assuming a level of sincerity and decoupled remove that I think is just utterly lacking in evidence. I believe the odds of any given TRA lying to manipulate people is incomparably higher than the odds of some trans person deciding to end it because they were misgendered in a reddit comment.
Well that is the question, you are ASSUMING her intent, you might be right, or you might not. But it doesn't actually make any difference. If she tells me that I'm going to get my gf committed for her own protection. I'm not going to agree to those terms, because they are as you point out unreasonable. Whether the person communicating them to me is sincere in pretending to be disinterested is irrelevant.
I assume sincerity yes, I think that is the best way to operate. Because just because I assume they are sincere does not mean I have to agree or accommodate them. Assuming people are sincere does not wave a magic wand where you have to do what they say. You can just say..no.
Edit: In other words whether the BFF is telling me to try and push me to accommodate the demands or because she is warning me of the crazy demands, neither impacts my ability to decide on the merits. Her motivation is not relevant, so assuming sincerity as a default does not change the outcome but is in my opinion better for the world.
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That wouldn't be abusive unless killing babies was a result of not doing what the Democrats demanded that you do.
It's the pro-life campaigner making the demand. They are predicting what Democrats will do and the outcome.
Rephrased they are saying: Vote Republican because if you don't Democrats will win and they will legalize/loosen restrictions on abortion and then millions of babies will be murdered.
What if instead it's a pro choice activist who says: Vote Democrat because if you don't Republicans will win and they will ban abortion and then millions of women will be forced to carry pregnancies to term they don't want and thousands of rape victims will have to bear their rapists child and women at high risk during pregnancy will find it harder to have life saving terminations leading to more women dying.
Thete's a difference between "do this or my allies will act" and "do this or my enemies will act". If they're your enemies, you presumably aren't going to signal boost them in a way that incentivizes their acts. If they're your allies, you might if it also helps with their goals.
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"Side with me, or people on the other side do something horrible"
versus
"Side with me, or people on my side will do something horrible."
seems like a pretty crucial difference to me. Pro-lifers and democrats are opponents. Democrats and Trans folk are allies.
This whole argument hinges on the assumption that trans suicide rates are caused by the actions of trans opponents, a claim that is pretty clearly treated as plausible for partisan reasons. Far, far less ambiguous chains of causation are routinely denied consideration due to insufficient evidence. This one is presumed because the people doing the presuming are bigots with the mother of all megaphones.
My point is that the truth of the statement is independent of who says it. If it feels better it can be an anti-trans advocate making the statement or a Martian or an AI.
If it is false then it is absolutely fine to ignore it. Even if its true depending on the costs (financial and social) it might still be fine to ignore it. But who says it doesn't actually change that.
I understand that the people using it and the people opposing it are probably both doing so for partisan reasons. So we can try to ignore that and look at the argument. That won't change how partisans look at it or which arguments they use out there in the wider world, competely agreed.
If it is true, and the benefits outweigh the costs then it should be considered, even if the people making that argument are partisan hacks. Stopped clocks and all that. Just like if it is false then even if the people making that argument were literal Nazis then we should not.
I regard transness as a mental illness with no great treatments. Which should tell you i am not part of the progressive orthodoxy on this.
In the abstract, yes, and only there. In the real world of motivated agents, more stringent heuristics apply.
If one side of an argument demands power for the purposes of ameliorating a harm directly inflicted by their allies, with the assessment of the causal chain assigned to that harm proposed and assessed by their allies, and the efficacy of the solution judged by their allies, that is not in fact a reasonable starting place for discussion. In the real world, arguments from formal logic do not outweigh naked self-interest. In that cartoon, is it reasonable to presume, based on context, that the guy with the gun and the guy asking for $20 are colluding in some way? On hat evidence would one draw this conclusion?
It may be good to consider all questions with an open mind. It is absolutely not good to consider all questions with an equally open mind, because questions can be selected not for truth value but for efficacy in social engineering. For some questions, it is reasonable to require some threshold-level of evidence up-front before you take them seriously.
If it's true, the evidence indicating it so should be provided in the appeal for consideration. In this case, the people gathering and assessing that evidence and the people reporting their findings have proved themselves to be profoundly untrustworthy, and the people raising the argument obviously stand to benefit and accept zero responsibility for negative consequences if they're wrong.
...I get the feeling that none of the above will be persuasive to you, so I guess the best I can do is ask the following:
Which arguments get the serious treatment from you? Any argument, regardless who makes it? Once accepted, on what basis do you assess the veracity of an argument?
Well my background as a central government bureaucrat is definitely a factor, when you look at social level decisions then you don't really have a choice but to take the individual out of it, even if you are not a utilitarian. When you are looking at factors where you are aggregating group behaviors the actions or statements of any one person are essentially meaningless, swamped by the group. Is it true that trans suicides would be by definition self-inflicted? Yes absolutely, but obesity is much the same and we still put in place government initiatives around those such as funding lap band surgery for high risk people because pragmatically the costs of doing that are outweighed (no pun intended) by the costs of not doing it, even if the actual best solution would be for those people to eat less.
To give examples of arguments that go the other way (as in rightish leaning) I can give Christianity and Gun Control
I was raised Protestant but became an atheist at a pretty early age, maybe 12 or 13 because none of it ever made sense to me, I'm also from Northern Ireland so Christianity being a problem was pretty front and centre in my life. My uncle disowned his gay son, one half of my family are rural farm types with fairly standard conservative Protestant beliefs, on the other side my grand parents were fleeing from a not-quite Amish sect, so my overall view of religion was very dim. I am also a veteran of the online Atheist wars so my beliefs certainly at one time ran hot indeed. The arguments Christians largely make don't move me because they largely rely on the existence of a being I don't believe in, however after experience I do now believe that Christianity as a social glue is probably net positive in the US (potentially less so back home, but we are a special case), to the extent that I'd be entirely ok with it making a resurgence outside of its current heartlands to become the dominating ideology once more. I still think a few tweaks would be needed to ensure its long term stability (gay marriage would probably have to be accepted in order to keep that fringe, so that the same coalitions can't be assembled) but even if not, it's ok. So like with the trans argument, I ignored the reason Christians were making the argument that Christianity is good (because I still view them to be entirely incorrect on the factual existence of God, and probably too biased), and evaluated with my own experiences the truth of the situation. It's likely some Christians make arguments in bad faith (again no pun intended), but there are others (the majority I think) who operate in good faith, which means the good or bad faithness of a particular proponent is just not a very good proxy at population levels for whether the claim is actually either useful or true.
For Gun Control, I think the US would be better with approximately zero guns in private hands, and the arguments made by standard 2A advocates do not move me. And some people making those arguments will be doing so in bad faith, some in good faith. What has moved me is looking at the mechanisms for how that would have to be enforced and the likelihood of actually being able to drop gun ownership (legal and illegal) to any lower threshold. I think it could be done but the cost would be so astronomical in both dollars and social costs that I think it entirely unfeasible to attain without the costs massively outweighing the benefits. So I no longer support gun control for pragmatic reasons. That would be the case even if every pro-gun spokesperson was exactly the worst progressive's strawman who only wanted guns to murder black people and Bambi. Because that would not be representative of the vast majority of legal gun owners as far as I can tell.
As to why that should apply in the trans debate, the trans people I have met in person have been reasonable, and given I hold that most activists for a cause are likely to be the most committed and extreme then it makes sense that no matter what they claim it is unlikely trans people as a group are using threats of suicide as an abusive tactic, no matter how hyperbolic or stereotypical the spokesperson might be. So setting aside whether the person making a claim is making it in bad faith or not, at a macro level is irrelevant unless the majority of the group in question is also acting in bad faith, which in my direct experience of people is that most people in most groups are not. They may be wrong, they may be terribly misguided, they may even switch beliefs as the wind blows but they are generally good faith actors. And if you treat them as such, things work a lot better.
If you compress this down to individuals working together like the example of your girlfriends bff pressuring you or the guy with the gun and the non mugger example, you lose the fact that at macro population levels that is just not generally how these things work in my experience. And just to wrap up, none of that means the conclusions I come to are correct, it might be the case that Christianity is really going to end in a militant Theocracy a la the Handmaid's Tale and that Trans people are really all conspiring to threaten suicide as a group and that gun control could be easily achieved with just three easy steps. And my conclusions do change over time as I am exposed to new situations, new view points and new arguments.
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