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I'd be more amenable to that if it seemed like therapeutic solutions had actually been tried and found wanting. Instead, it seems like therapeutic solutions have been deemed mean and politically incorrect, and not tried. And I get the metaphor with bipolar, but bringing this back to the original point, I am not responsible for someone else's behavior. If Kanye West doesn't want to take his meds, then he gets to deal with the consequences of his unhinged behavior. If you really want to transition, go for it. If you want to surgically turn yourself into a cat, or an orc, have fun! But when you threaten self-harm if I don't buy into your delusional framework, you're either too ill to get to make those decisions for yourself (and need to be committed and treated for general suicidal ideation separate from your gender issues), or you're an abusive piece of shit.
Again though largely, they are not themselves threatening to commit suicide themselves. They are saying if you do X or don't do Y, it increases the likelihood of some trans people committing suicide. Whether the person saying that is or is not trans themselves does not have any bearing on the truth of that statement.
If they say if you don't do X I specifically will kill myself then that is a different statement.
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.
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