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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.
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.
"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?
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