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Notes -
A good write-up on a detransition study by the PI (Well, it's a cogent write-up, on its own; I didn't check if it was faithful to the study.)
They subtyped detransition into "Detransitioning with regret," 'Identity evolutions," "Transition ambivalence,' and "Interrupted gender transitions." The biggest surprise to me was the last subtype, since the others were pretty much what you'd expect. (Or, at least, what I'd expected.)
The write-up has a lot of tables and graphs, so block quotes aren't very effective.
To paraphrase the author, this is higher quality information than we had, previously, but the study can't tell us how to use that information... So, how would a utilitarian interpret this? Or a deontologist, virtue ethicist, contractualist, contractarianist, etc?
If this is at all surprising to you it's likely you have a view of the transfemme community based on highly educated late transitioners with good jobs. There's still a lot of people who transition young without support and it ends up really disrupting their lives.
I'm a trans woman, I live in the PNW, I attend support groups semi-regularly and organize a hiking group for trans women. Things are a lot better than they used to be but it's still the case that a lot of young trans people move to big cities because their family doesn't support their transition, struggle to find work and stay afloat financially, and then move back in with their parents once they can't make rent. They usually socially desist if not medically. Some of them will transition again later, some won't.
There was an attendee of my hiking group who I'm still in touch with who lived in her car and did DoorDash deliveries until she fell behind on payments and the car got repo'd. She moved back in with her folks, presents male and doesn't fight them on name and pronouns but she's still talking hormones and wants to leave when she gets the resources together.
I'm also white. The trans community near me seems pretty racially divided. I'm sure that things are considerably worse for African American or Latina trans women who transition young, but I wouldn't guess how that all shakes out.
I don't think this is a particularly difficult interpretive question. Whatever the status of transness medical and social transition itself is a decision subject to incentives, and some people can be dissuaded from pursuing it (at least temporarily).
Well, what can you say about it?
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My skepticism about what's going on with the trans phenomenon doesn't really depend on detransitioners as much as other skeptics tend to but this fits well within my model of things. The piece uses the term "identity" 33 times and I think defining that term is at the heart of this whole thing. Identity has a few factors and all importantly interact with what trans even is.
Rule in criteria: This is the most discussed one on this topic for obvious reasons. The whole point of much of the debate is what should be the rule in criteria of the identities man/woman. Which naughty bits you have is the traditional criteria but some want to identify with these identities that would be excluded by this criteria. But that isn't the only identity being discussed here. There is the general LGBTQIA++ bucket that practically everyone involved in any way in this study claims membership to. There is the identity of trans or TGD itself. I think the stickiness of these markers and the fear someone who went whole hog into trans identity would fear losing access to them and the community surrounding them is a big part of the dynamic at play. Being ruled out hurts especially to an identity that you had at one point held on to tightly.
Malleability: This is heavily contested and in the linked post referred to as fluidity. There isn't general agreement on the trans affirming side of the fence on whether gender is actually malleable. The medicalists claim the existence of a real fact of the matter that is gender where if your body deviates from it you should to experience gender dysphoria which acts as proof that your body is the problem to be corrected. Another, seemingly more dominant with LGBTQIA++ circles, sees gender as a kind of basic expression. The binary can and should be queered. If you were born a male but think the truest expression of your inner light is to identify and present as a bearded woman with bolt on tits and any other random assortment of gendered markers then that's what you are and people should respect it.
To the unmalleable medicalist detransitioning is troubling, you have a person who seems to have felt dysphoria with their birth sex and transitioned but found the grass was not in fact greener on the other side. The only thing you have to work with is this idea of gender dysphoria so it being able to lead you astray is terrifying. Because we're all only blessed with one perspective and can't directly compare experiences of things like gender dysphoria to find out if that person just had a bad understanding of what gender dysphoria is then from the perspective of a rational person who feels what they believe to be gender dysphoria what are you to take from the existence of people who claim to have tried what you are considering and report it didn't work or in fact was quite bad? Could the people reporting a happy transition be subject to the sunk cost fallacy and in a counterfactual world where they hadn't transitioned and learned to live with their birth gender they might be even happier? There's genuinely no way to know. But there wouldn't be a way to know if there weren't any detransitioners either, detransitioners are just evidence.
The gender queer people can handle the existence of detransitioners more easily. They were always of the opinion that gender can change and if some people went a little too far then that's fine, that's life.
Salience: Salience is how tightly bound up your self conception is in an identity. Two people born in the same city in Texas, one might bind tightly to the identity of a Texan, attend rodeos, wear a cowboy hat/boots and exaggerate their accent, the other might act indistinguishably from what one might expect from a midwesterner. Both are by rule in criteria Texans but one holds the identity much more tightly. The low salience Texan might move to Chicago and feel no real loss, the high salience Texan might refuse to even visit other, inferior, states. People can bind to identities with a wide variance of salience depending on circumstance and nothing seems to encourage tight binding more than opposition. As a young kid I once bound my identity up with not liking a certain type of food in response to my parents attempting to make me eat it. It seemed genuinely important to preteen-aqouta that I wasn't the sort of person who ate cheese burgers - cringe I know.
So another element to the trans question is how salient should your sex and gender really be to your identity? Trans activism seems caught up in raising the salience of gender, many of their detractors would like to lower the salience of gender. Detransitioning seems like a kind of crisis in the salience of gender in an individual. This can be very hard on a person, especially if they perceive the identity to be besieged and that losing the salience of that identity would give the hated enemy ammunition. I don't think this conflict happens consciously in most people.
Conclusion: So what should those of us on the outside think of the existence of these different types of detransitioners? It's hard to say. If we could be confident that there is such a thing as hard gender dysphoria then we should advocate for better screening of people who were led to believe they have it but don't really. But false positives are probably unavoidable. We should recognize that this same identity formation dynamic happens in many other areas of life, that it's confusing particularly from the first person and hopefully we can extend grace to people living through that confusion.
This is pretty similar to my view (anyone who wants me to be more verbose, pretend I wrote that comment), which is why I think the "Interrupted gender transition" subtype is notable: they're contradicting our expectations for how a "fake" problem would manifest. (Or, the transwomen, at least, if you're incredulous of transmen.) Perhaps the full study has more useful information, but I don't care enough to ask the author for a copy.
They defined the classes by latent class analysis, i.e. "look at the data and see what groups pop out as natural". I'm not sure that the 95% non-regret of a class that's identified that way is actually meaningful; "doesn't regret the transition" and its consequences seem to have been a big chunk of how the class is actually defined.
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There are a couple of perplexing things here. First, and most pedantically, the mention of "external barriers" implies the possible or likely existence of "internal barriers." What would that be? Not yet reconciling yourself to the fact that your trans? What If a person has never thought they were trans? Is this just "internalized" something something. This is one of my biggest epistemic problems with the Trans people and the Woke people; they posit to understand everyone's true, latent motivations better than the individuals do. They're saying the can read the 'true' mind inside my mind and, furthermore, that their generalizations in this recursive mind reading are broadly applicable to society. "Everyone has, to some extent, internalized racism. They may not know it, however." Wow. What an assertion.
Second, if "external barriers" like discrimination, limited "access" to gender-affirming care, and (the very non-specific) lack of support cause a person to totally halt their transition, am I allowed to question their commitment in the first place? If I have a strongly head opinion on any issue, I'm probably going to try persevere even in the face of resistance and lack of support. I can understand the healthcare argument where a cancer patient, for instance, fails because they're just too weak. But the whole thing about transitioning is that there are no maladies in the body, just a desire to change it.
If we open the aperture to say that "emotional strength" is required to transition and that the actions of others can damage a person's "emotional strength" and, furthermore, that this is a valid reason for interrupting or quitting a course of action then how in the actual hell is anyone ever responsible for anything?. If "It made me feel bad so I quit" is acknowledged as "valid" then every deadbeat dad is forever absolved, every addict in recovery who relapses is a saint, every smash-and-grab thief is an understandable hardship case.
I do not think it is hyperbolic to say that much of society rests on the idea that everyone will, at multiple points in their lives, feel bad but that good behavior is still required even with the reality of negative emotional states. By medicalizing this "experience" (as the report explicitly does), we're opening pandora's box to the medicalizing of subjective emotional states. As I've written before:
This goes right back to Marx and "false consciousness" i.e. working-class people already support communism, they've just been tricked by the bourgeoisie into thinking they don't.
Actually, I'd argue the idea goes even further back, at least to Rousseau — his ideas of "negative education" and the amour de soi/amour-propre distinction.
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My pitch regarding subsidies for transition is that every citizen should be entitled from birth to a finite "morphological freedom budget", calculated to cover gender reassignment plus detransition. A trans person can cash it in to transition (with just enough left over to detransition if they change their mind); an ordinary person can use the money on whatever other elective plastic surgery they want. But once you're out you're out, and further expenses are on you.
Circling back to this: I think what I find so infuriating about this framing is how the claimed purpose of gender-affirming care as life-saving healthcare is being more and more openly discarded, and yet the people who characterised it as such are refusing to acknowledge this, or in some cases (not necessarily yours) denying that they ever so characterised it to begin with.
Medical care is meant to exceed some floor of safety and efficacy, in accordance with primum non nocere. If the government pays for treatments for cancer, they should not also pay for treatments which cause cancer. If the government pays for antidepressants, they should not also pay for things which make people more depressed.
But by allotting everyone a set pot of money which can be used for gender-affirming care or reversing the effects of gender-affirming care so far as is practicable, the government would essentially be abdicating the responsibility of expressing an opinion on whether these treatments are effective medical treatments or not. "You can do this, and if you change your mind you can undo it later, and we'll foot the bill either way" sounds pretty far removed from evidence-based medicine as I understand it. The government might pay to remove someone's malignant tumour, but I can't imagine they'd ever pay to put a malignant tumour back inside; they might pay for treatment for PTSD, but they'd be unlikely to pay to retraumatise someone whose PTSD has been cured. If gender-affirming care is lifesaving treatment, it stands to reason that the government footing the bill for reversing a successful gender-affirming care procedure would be as unthinkable as their paying to reverse a successful course of chemotherapy. But framing it like this (in which you can spend money on the thing itself or the thing to undo the first thing) sounds tantamount to an admission that "gender-affirming care" never had anything to do with relieving trans people of their psychic distress (and thereby preventing them from committing suicide), and was only ever about a desire to modify the body for aesthetic reasons.
But I know you also think it's perfectly legitimate for doctors to lie to the parents of trans-identifying children and knowingly misrepresent the state of the evidence in this field provided the medics in question have a principled attitude to bodily autonomy, so I don't even know what to say to you. When I say "gender-affirming care isn't lifesaving treatment", you reply "yes, and?"; when I say "but lots of advocates for access to gender-affirming care consistently characterised it as life-saving treatment for years", you reply "yes, and?"; when I say "it's not reasonable to assume these advocates were honestly mistaken about the evidentiary basis for their claims that gender-affirming care is life-saving treatment, so the only reasonable conclusion is that they were consistently, knowingly lying, for years", you reply "yes, and?" I keep hoping that at some point you'll either deny my accusations, or own up to them and acknowledge that they were wrong: instead you just keep copping to them, but deny that anyone involved did anything wrong by so doing.
I would've thought it a no-brainer, the idea that a medic's personal philosophical attitude towards bodily autonomy should not override his duty of care to his patients or his responsibility to be informed about the medical state of the art – but apparently not. I would've thought "I support the right of individuals to pharmaceutically and surgically modify their bodies as they see fit because of a principled attitude towards bodily autonomy – but acknowledge that aesthetic modification of one's body may not be an effective treatment for grave psychic distress, and it is dishonest and unprofessional for medics or activists to assert that it is" would be a no-brainer – but apparently not. Trans activists just seem to have a wholly different conception of the standards of behaviour they expect medical practitioners to adhere to than I do.
If trans activists were upfront and said "some people want to surgically modify their bodies for aesthetic reasons, and they should be allowed to" – I mean, I appreciate it's a harder sell, but at least it's honest. "... and the taxpayer should pick up the bill" is a harder sell still, but it remains honest. But instead they adopted this approach wherein they decided to knowingly mislead the public in general (and confused, scared parents of deeply distressed children in particular) with false claims about the efficacy of gender-affirming care in preventing suicide, urged and coerced medics to parrot these false claims – and then they have the gall to wonder why people are suspicious of them and think they might have ulterior motives?
For years, Chase Strangio of the ACLU characterised gender-affirming care as lifesaving medical treatment. Before the Supreme Court, under oath, Strangio admitted that there's no persuasive evidence that gender-affirming care has any impact on the rates of suicide among gender dysphoric children. Do you see how it's only logical for me to assume that everything Strangio says going forward is a barefaced lie? Do you see how Strangio has completely undermined public trust, not just in themself, but in the ACLU and the broader trans activist coalition?
You're expecting a creature who knows naught but naked will to power to apologize for the way that it is? That denial is still an exercise of that, by the way- "yes, and?" is better phrased as "bitch, you ain't gonna do shit about it". They may have lost, but you (and reality) are still too weak to hold them to account.
I don't expect contrition from bugs when they appear in my pantry, and as a consequence my opinion that it is wrong of them to be there doesn't matter- only my ability to physically remove them does.
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Jesus Christ man, how about these people just go to a goddamn psychiatrist and leave the rest of us the hell alone for once?
In what world does what I'm suggesting inconvenience non-trans people in any way? It's literally free money, distributed indiscriminately to all citizens.
(I guess you may be assuming that it would require a tax hike to implement, but I don't think so. I suspect it would pay for itself relative to the status quo by eliminating the need for a complicated diagnosis and insurance claim process; even if it doesn't, I would be very happy to reduce funding to some other over-bloated area of government to this end, while leaving overall budget the same. And in any event we aren't talking huge numbers. Counting $20k per person as a rough estimate, we're talking a maximum of what, seven billion dollars nationwide? That is a drop in the yearly Federal budget, and it would be a lifetime allocation, not yearly. Moreover a majority of people would never use their 20k, so a vast percentage of the money would be repossessed by the US gov at no loss.)
How will the market for cosmetic surgery be affected by subsidizing it for literally everyone? How will society and culture be affected by subsidizing cosmetic surgery for literally everyone? You don't know, you haven't given it a second thought. You're a progressive pulling brand new "freedoms" out of your ass that coincidentally boil down to giving other people's money to one of your pet identity groups. Bringing women who want tit jobs or whatever along for the ride is just a sop you're willing to throw in.
After all, it's free money once you take it from other people. What about the overhead, inevitable creep, and probable activist reactions, someone downthread asks? Well golly those would form a fully generalized argument against massive government spending on non-critical issues, and since those can't possibly exist I guess you don't have to answer any of the questions.
Utterly parodical.
I absolutely do not give a single shit about transgender people. I think they should all get psychiatric treatment to stop thinking they're things they're not and get the fuck out of the public sphere. I resent every political force that has behaved as if this bizarre niche sexual practice is entitled to anything but my scorn, and I think the progressive civil rights mantle has been nothing but degraded by trying to extend it to obvious mentally ill fetish bullshit.
In short, I think we're just enemies.
It isn't. I am a genuine transhumanist and I do in fact support transgender people as a special case of my broader principle of supporting people's desire to alter themselves however they damn well want.
Sure they can. But if we decide that they do and we should just have very small government, then there's not much point in talking about the politics of gender transition on its own merits. I have strong opinions on "if there are charitable government subsidies for various things, should gender transition be one of those things" but I have neither expertise on, nor particular desire to discuss, the viability of that "if". It is, quite literally, a different question.
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The cynical rejoinder is that free money is never free. Firstly it ends up taking a huge amount of time and effort and bureaucracy to collect the money, organise its distribution, and police its usage.
But that's only the start. Soon activists will begin to protest that rich people who can pay for their own cosmetic surgery get 20k of taxpayer money, while trans people who will commit suicide without high-quality gender-affirming care get the same amount. The prices for these operations will change as the cosmetic surgeons soak up the extra funds available. It will end up in the same place as UK national insurance - means-tested to hell and back, too small to satisfy the people who want/need it and far too expensive for the people who pay for it and will never receive it.
Rather, we could just say 'No. Your morphology is your own affair. If it matters to you so much, save up and spend your own money on it'. I'm not sure how in practice your pitch appeals to those who are net taxpayers and think that transness is an unfortunate delusion.
I take the point re: the general swampy Moloch-spiral of any new government scheme - but that's a fully general argument against introducing new forms of government spending, orthogonal to the innate value of the proposal. A conversation on government bloat qua government bloat is not really the conversation I was looking to have; the policy was meant as more of a "here's how I think a sensibly run state would do it" deal than an electoral suggestion.
Well, that's where the one-size-fits-all nature of the policy comes in. As discussed in the tangent with FttG, I'd be happy expanding the scope of the policy such that it encompasses subsidies for forms of self-improvement that Red Tribers might be interested in just as well as pro-trans progressives, such as gym memberships. Besides, in the mid-to-long term, I expect genuinely attractive self-mod options not related to gender to become more and more available and popular; one (wo)man's sex surgery budget would be another man's cyborg-implant budget. Though again, I wasn't really thinking of it in terms of how to "sell" it to a partially hostile nation, just describing how I think a state populated by what I'd call reasonable people ought to do it.
I almost went on a tongue-in-cheek tangent about the fact that rationally, a random cisgender taxpayer can't be sure he or she won't have a gender epiphany in twenty years, and spending a few extra dollars in taxes on supporting the policy would therefore be insurance of sorts. I suppose that actually does raise the serious alternative option of introducing straight-up private-sector "trans insurance" separate from health insurance. Plausibly, enough affluent Blues would buy it as a virtue signal to meet demand, without touching the wallets of anyone who objects.
I don't love that option, because it bakes in gender exceptionalism, whereas an important part of my morpho-freedom-budget idea is that it would serve as a slow lead-in for broader societal acceptance of transhumanism (within which I hope and expect today's gender specific "trans movement" to ultimately dissolve). But it would probably work better than the healthcare kludge we have right now, and would presumably be more acceptable to gender-criticals, as they could keep on buying their health insurance without funding transitions.
Fair enough, if you’re interested in a ‘wouldn’t it be cool if’ conversation. I’m most interested in sensory and mobility stuff - giving more senses and mobility seems to be basically a pure win with very little social upheaval required.
On the practical level, the strong tendency towards bloat means that any such measure would need to be catering to a very strong need that I regard as legitimate and hasn’t been solved any other way, but that’s another conversation.
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What about those of us who aren't weirdos, can we just take the money and spend on a nice house, a couple cars, and retiring early?
One of the more facile arguments made by trans activists is that lots of banal things cis people do all the time technically fall under the domain of "gender-affirming": building muscle mass, getting hair transplants, whatever. The cost of a single penectomy or vaginoplasty would probably cover a lifetime's gym membership and a return trip to Turkey.
The reason it's a facile argument is because the reason I do strength training is because I want to be stronger, more attractive and to make sad head voice quiet, not because I want to more "fully embody my masculine gender identity" or whatever. But it's not like I'd object if my gym membership was subsidised by the taxpayer. I could even imagine a hypothetical world in which such a policy represented a public saving in the long run, if paying for people's gym memberships made them more likely to exercise and in turn less likely to suffer from cardiac disease and obesity-related illnesses. Maybe the lower BMIs, improved muscle tones and higher sex drives that would result from a higher proportion of the population exercising regularly would even improve fertility rates. But my gym membership costs me less than €40 a month, which according to ChatGPT is pretty typical: I find it hard to imagine the monetary expense is a leading factor in why so many people are sedentary.
It's funny to imagine a world in which @WandererintheWilderness's nonsensical policy is put into practice and used to pay for penectomies, phalloplasties and gym memberships. Improving the inclusive genetic fitness of one large demographic while sterilising another, under the exact same policy.
Not as a rational cost-benefit thing, but I think a government subsidy could plausibly manipulate significant numbers into taking advantage of the opportunity, due to the human tendency to not want to "miss out" on a free lunch. Think of all the people who stuff themselves at buffets on free snacks they'd never touch if they had to pay for them, even for cheap. If people were told "you have [X] thousand dollars in the bank, they're yours, but they'll revert to the government unless you spend them on one of gym, hair-dyes, plastic surgery, etc." I think that would in fact increase demand for each of those items as people rush to get what's 'theirs'.
And I don't think it's fair to call my proposed policy "nonsensical" even as you grant that it might be net-positive and that you might like to take advantage of it yourself if it was on the table! Unorthodox, yes; implausible in the short term; but hardly nonsensical.
Well, the point I was making was that I think a positive side effect of such a policy might be that it encourages more people to become fit and healthy, which would pay down dividends in terms of public health expenditure and improved fertility rates. A policy which enables mentally ill people to chop perfectly healthy tissue and organs off of themselves at the taxpayers' expense (and then attempt to reverse the damage as much as possible several years down the line, likewise at the taxpayers' expense) does strike me as nonsensical, even if such a policy was sufficiently broadly-worded as to also include paying for members of the public to become more fit and healthy.
Put simply: would I support a policy of publicly subsidised gender-affirming care and detransition procedures at the taxpayers' expense (option 1)? No, I think that's silly and dumb, in much the same way as publicly subsidised boob jobs and lip fillers would be (in fact, much of the time we would be talking about literally the same procedures). Would I support such a policy if it also included publicly subsidised gym memberships (option 2)? Again, no, but it would be silly not to take advantage of it if it was already in place. Would I support a policy of publicly subsidised gym membership (perhaps under the use-it-or-lose-it model you describe)? Yes, I could be persuaded that such a policy passes a cost-benefit analysis, in a way I simply couldn't with option 1.
"The government will pay for you to chop off pieces of your own body, and will then pay for you to restore them years later after you've decided it was a bad idea" sounds like a conservative parody of wasteful public expenditure, analogous to a self-licking ice cream cone or paying people to dig holes in the ground then fill them up again. It would be exactly as nonsensical as paying people to get fit and healthy and also paying for them to sit on their couches eating ice cream.
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Why on earth would this be a good idea? I would never want to vote for anyone's "morphological freedom." This is an extremely alien thing to Western civilization you're arguing.
Do you oppose "morphological freedom," or just this idea for making subsidies for transition more palatable?
Both!
Why oppose "morphological freedom?"
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If you want to work hard, earn money, and then use it to irrevocably damage your body and future prospects, well, I'm a libertarian and I can somewhat get behind that. If you want to euphemistically throw in that word "freedom", which is being used here to mean that I should pay taxes so you can do that for free, hell to the fucking no.
Tell that to the person who proposed it.
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For example:
Sure. I mean, you are also allowed to question the sexual identity of a celibate closet gay in Kabul, or the faith of a Christian in Tehran who does not try to preach the gospel to the locals.
For most people, a faith, gender or sexual identity is not their whole utility function. There is probably a trans person somewhere who would emigrate to Somalia if that was the only country where they could transition, or be willing to murder people for their wallets if that was the only way they could affort HRT. But almost all people have more complex utility functions, where trade-offs exist.
Physics determines part of how easy or difficult maxxing certain terms in one's utility function is. If visiting the Moon was as easy as taking a tram, you can bet I would visit the Moon, and if changing your sex was as easy as picking another option in a drop-down menu before going to sleep, I would certainly experiment with being a woman. But giving the constraints of physics, both of these things have significant tradeoffs, so I am very unlikely to gaze at Earth or grow tits.
But on top of that, societies can incentivize or disincentivize the maxxing of certain terms of one's utility function ("self-actualization"). I like to eat licorice sometimes, but if my society places it on Schedule I, I will not spend half my paycheck on getting some from the darknet. Likewise, if the penalty for the possession of redhead porn was death, that would definitely affect my porn habits. Or if the government decided that unlimited vanilla ice cream was a Basic Human Right and heavily subsidized its sale, that would likely lead to me changing my ice cream habits.
If your model of mental health services is that they will give people whatever will make them feel better, then I totally agree that no society could afford this. "Doc, I am a bit down, but I think a {new dress|adventure holiday|blowjob|fancy dinner|MMORPG item} would cheer me up" - "Sure, let me just write you a voucher for that".
In the real world, the mental health services do not work like that. Feel free to visit a psychiatric hospital sometimes and check. Engaging with mental health services because you feel bad is like using a life buoy because you are wet. Either system is designed to keep you alive, not ensure your comfort. Unless you are wet to the point which we call "drowning", or feeling bad to the point we call "clinically depressed", your best option very likely does not involve these emergency nets.
Trans issues are a strange exception to all sorts of the usual bureaucracy/hangups/etc. One visit, 45 minutes-hour max, possibly even a virtual consult to get HRT through planned parenthood. Then there's the whole sports debacle, bathrooms, pronouns have kind of faded but they were fireable offense for many years, 'cotton ceiling' discourse... et cetera.
Most mental health services do not work like that. Western societies made an exception for one subset and nobody seems to know why.
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There were people who checked and the results look a lot closer to his model than what you call "the real world".
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Fantasy discrimination as ego/status preservation for dropping off the trans train?
On what basis do you jump to "fantasy"?
I posit that discrimination against the trans is a great example of what the resident right-wingers like to gloss as "it's not happening, and it's a good thing that it is", and complain about endlessly if the other side does it. Here, it's even more egregious: it can hardly be simultaneously true, as right-wingers typically believe, that trans women naturally evoke revulsion, and that any adverse social consequences that they experience are imaginary.
Yeah, I agree with this. An owner kicking a drunkard out of his restaurant is, strictly speaking, a form of discrimination. Just one most people would approve of. But it's easy and convenient to just jump to "well it's not REAL discrimination when we do it".
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Who is doing all this discrimination, and how could it possibly keep them from transitioning? The entire medical field, academic, governmental and NGO complex are foursquare behind them and discriminating against anyone who disagrees with what they imagine trans people want. What's the mechanism here? How does chuds using terms like "troon" on Twitter translate into kids in the Tenderloin dropping out of their polycule?
In the least exciting sense, non-passing trans people are facing social discrimination similar to fat people, or ugly people, or visibly mentally ill people. But if you are ugly and can choose to not be ugly, or if you are fat and can simply choose to not be fat, wouldn't you choose that? Similarly, if a trans person discovers that they are treated worse by society while transitioning, then couldn't it be a conceivable motivator for them to stop transitioning?
I do not believe that "society" treats "ugly" transitioners worse than they treat normal men. A bit worse than society treats women, which only heightens the contradictions we're talking about.
The discrimination in society is against men, and transitioners get less of it the more spectacularly their transition intrudes on the lives of those around them.
Just to be clear, are you claiming that trans women are treated better by society than how normal men are treated by society? Like, not just in academia and such, but society as a whole?
Structurally, yes.
And structurally black people are probably more advantaged than whites but it's a different thing to argue that racism doesn't exist.
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What do polycules have to do with anything here?
Also, I'm sure there is more discrimination going on than some chuds talking on Twitter. People (including yours truly) naturally avoid them, for one.
Being avoided is discrimination?
I need a lot more discrimination in my life.
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I don't think all the adverse social consequences trans women experience are imaginary. No doubt they attract a lot of funny looks, as does anyone who deliberately dresses in an unusual way (e.g. goths with loads of facial piercings and/or tattoos). But when trans activists complain about a genocide of trans people which is either imminent or currently ongoing — yes, that is imaginary.
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No, it's not contradictory at all.
They have a (delusional) persecution complex related to their dysphoria. They believe the world is out to get them and deny their innate female nature.
But what is actually happening is that the majority of trans individuals are mentally ill men, who are obvious fetishists/have no hope of passing/who were autistic to begin with. This is a perfectly reasonable set of criteria to discriminate against. They want to be treated like women, identified as women.
But they're ugly women. Ugly women with penises. Most tend to call those kind of women 'men'. To come to any other conclusion is fantasy.
And because of this obvious fact, these individuals demand as much social deference and privilege as possible to prevent their soap bubble self-identification from popping. The oppression they are experiencing is coming from inside of their own heads - not from meany transphobes, but that internal voice that is screaming they are living a life of deception, aspiring to something they cannot have.
They are no more persecuted for their self identity then the man who thinks he's Jesus, or that lizardpeople are the world elite.
This is out of date. It used to be the case that MtFs outnumbered FtMs 3:1, but these days FtMs outnumber MtFs. This is why 37% is the highest rate of being born with a penis out of the four groups in this study.
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Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
Oh, so you already know!
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So? It would be perfectly fair to say that a trans-Jesus detransitioned because of persecution, too. Persecution does not need to be baseless.
Do you even notice what you are saying yourself? The paper quoted in the original post says
and then the response that you are here defending is calling it "fantasy discrimination". And yet, you proceed to say yourself, "This is a perfectly reasonable set of criteria to discriminate against." If this is not "it's not happening, and it's a good thing that it is", then what is? Do you actually have an argument, or does the driving principle just amount to "this post was directionally anti-trans, so I should agree; the post arguing with it must have been pro-trans, so I should disagree"?
In common parlance, persecution is understood to mean being harassed etc. for no good reason. Per Wiktionary:
If there's a nationwide manhunt for a convicted murderer who escaped from prison, no one says that the murderer is being "persecuted", even though the people hunting for him obviously want to do harm to him (in the form of arresting him and returning him to prison).
"To discriminate" simply means "to tell two different things apart" e.g. a discriminating taste in fashion. In common parlance, it's often used to mean "unfairly discriminated against". I presume the paper was using the word "discrimination" in the latter sense of the term, but perhaps @crushedoranges was arguing that, while certain trans people may have been discriminated against, they have not been unjustly discriminated against as they claim. (To illustrate: if you don't get picked for a basketball team because you're short and unfit, in a very real sense you have been discriminated against — but outside of the Harrison Bergeron universe, few would argue that you have been unjustly discriminated against.)
In my experience, trans activists tend to characterise a lot of perfectly banal behaviours as "transphobic", such as describing trans women as "biologically male" or similar. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that a trans-identifed male reported that he was stopping his transition because of "discrimination" on the part of his family members, but if you were to dig into this "discrimination", you would find that it amounted to the person's family members saying something along the lines of "I love you and I am deeply sympathetic to your situation, but it's a simple statement of fact that, given your physiognomy, you are unlikely to ever convincingly pass as female, and if you medically transition you will probably regret it a few years down the line". This is "discrimination" in the sense that it's true that tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed men have a much harder time passing as female than men with none of these characteristics; but I don't consider it unjust discrimination, any more than not picking the short unfit person to play on your basketball team.
The study is saying discrimination happens and that it functions as a motive for de-transitioning. In JTarrou's first comment, he says the discrimination is a "fantasy" and it's not a real external reason to de-transition. But it seems to me that even "not-unjust" discrimination can function as a motive to cause people to de-transition. So at the very least you are using a different definition than him, would you agree?
I think being told "because you are tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, it will be exceptionally difficult for you to convincingly pass as female no matter what medical interventions you undergo" might strictly speaking qualify as "discrimination" (in the same way that a short, unfit person not getting picked for the basketball team is "discrimination") – and yet it's so far removed from what ordinary people think of when they hear a scary word like "discrimination" that "fantasy discrimination" seems like a reasonable gloss.
Sure, if that's the modal "discrimination" they face. But it isn't.
Let's explore your scenario further. Telling them "because you are tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, it will be exceptionally difficult for you to convincingly pass as female no matter what medical interventions you undergo" is not really where the discrimination occurs.
If my friend is tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, and he wants to transition to be a woman, I'd try to use that argument to dissuade him. Why does that argument hold any persuasiveness at all? It's because we know if he actually transitions, he/she would face great adversity in the society as a manly, ugly, non-passing trans-woman.
And if they are tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, and they decide to transition, but half-way through, pre-op, they feel the society treat them as a freak, or a sexual deviant, or mentally ill, or just an extremely ugly woman, and they decide to not go through with it. Is that really inconceivable?
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It's really not hard to understand. The orderly manhandling the self-proclaimed Christ isn't anti-Christian: he's handling a schizoaffective person. He may not like actual Christians or the mentally ill, but that's irrelevant to the situation at hand, that his patient is severely disturbed. He doesn't have to enable that delusion. It will make the situation worse.
Similarly...
People don't like ugly people (prettyism). People don't like the mentally ill (ableism). People don't like autistics (normies get out, ree?) The primary contention is that MtF trans are alleging misogyny and denial of the femininity, and conflate the three as 'anti-trans'. And you are doing it, right now. It's perfectly fine for people to discriminate against trans people who don't pass for those reason. I'm not a liberal, or a white woman. I don't have to be nice. If a woman doesn't look or act like a woman, you don't have to accept her as one. This is, so as far as I know, the status quo for men. Is this not equal treatment? Do men not have similar performative efforts for their masculinity?
I don't have to take their claims of femininity seriously when their aesthetics and demeanor are terrible. There is a reason why the Bailey Jays of the world disappear into the ranks of the feminine gender and the Chris-Chans do not. And so, I can only evaluate them on what can be objectively observed: that those who lack the appearance of women and the behavior of women are not women - no matter how many good-thinking liberals would tell me otherwise.
Am I transphobic? No. That category I refuse to accept. But what I am definitely is not liking the ugly, the autistic, and the mentally ill. I wouldn't go as far as hating them, but I don't think that my attitude would change much if I suddenly started treating them as ugly, autistic, mentally ill women instead. In that respect, I am egalitarian in my discrimination.
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Or to be more succinct, their definition of discrimination is just plain invalid because it includes any instance of anyone anywhere admitting to not sharing their beliefs/delusions/whatever.
Honestly I think it's your definition of discrimination that is invalid, you seem to think it must have a negative connotation. A discriminating taste means you choose well what to include and exclude. Discrimination isn't inherently bad and you seem to reflexively think it is likely because you've internalized some progressive dogma.
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The insane amount of institutional power that they wield, for one.
a) If this place is such a massive rightwing echo-chamber, and since trans issues are often discussed here, you should have no problem linking a few examples of this, no?Well damn, looks like they showed up unprompted.b) I don't see a reason for why these things can't be true, "revulsion" does not mean you won't be treated professionally in the public.
You can't expect me to resist, no more than Don Quixote can resist riding into action when a Dutch Waterwheel-And-Windmill Poldering Society has their yearly convention at La Mancha. I hear hoofbeats...
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It makes some sense. First, the design somewhat lends itself to this, since they use a very broad category (TGD can mean almost anything). Second, it's the group with highest percentage of males, and the rapid-onset worry was specifically about teenage girls that have shown no or very little indications beforehand. Most importantly however, it's clearly the most ego- and status-protecting option; I've heard about cases where a detransitioner would lose large parts of their social environment since their decision was seen as a direct attack on the shared worldview. Saying, in essence, that you didn't really change, you just chose to discontinue your transition due to discrimination gives you a gentler way out.
Personally, my biggest concerns is orthogonal, if not opposite, to detransitioners; I think that the concept of "gender" as-used in the social sciences is mostly bunk and better seen as "social realization of sex-based differences". For example, woman prefer interacting with/caring for people over other activities. In some (especially ancestral) societies this is realized through informal, usually familial, caring and organizing behaviour which is not directly paid but there is instead a general expectation for the men to provide for the women. In others (especially in modern), it's realized as formal, paid caring and organizing work. The basic underlying needs/expectations, and often even the actual behaviour, can be near identical, just the framework it's embedded in is different.
And I know they hate it, but most trans-individuals I've met fit in much better with their biological sex in both interpersonal interaction and general choice of occupation/hobbies. Using female-only pilots, painting your battlemechs in bright colours, creating large, detailed spreadsheets to optimize your firepower and occasionally making comments about the hot steaming yuri sex you want to have is just not very feminine (not making this up, I swear, though it's admittedly a particularly extreme example). Neither society nor them really benefits imo from enabling their delusions. That's not to mean that they necessarily are perfectly average manly men; They just certainly aren't female in a meaningful sense, either.
Worse, it has been quite conclusively shown that at least a substantial part of these needs/expectations come from sex-specific changes in puberty modulated by your hormonal state. That means if you screw with that, people biologically become sort-of intersex and will struggle even harder to fit in with either side of the natural sex dichotomy. You can't actually postpone puberty indefinitely, so after a while you get locked into an irreversible intermediate/undeveloped state. At that point, it's actually de-transitioning that becomes delusional; it's a one-way street. So, I don't actually expect a large number of de-transitioners to begin with, despite viewing the entire enterprise as rather questionable.
Overall, the data is better, but the results don't really seem notable enough to change anyones view on this, I'm afraid.
I discussed this here and here. Virtually all the trans women I've met in my life either have perfectly conventional male interests, or interests common to that subset of men who are nerdy and/or autistic. I genuinely can't recall ever meeting a trans woman who was heavily interested in knitting, crochet, astrology or murder podcasts. I've met more gay men interested in one or more of these things than trans women.
Which is especially funny considering the amount of 'first woman to do X in nerdy hobby' claims in the last few years have been 'pre-existing eminent practitioner transitions' moreso than any further penetration from people of the XX.
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Must take a ton of work, what with their brains really being female and all. Can you imagine resisting the urge to knit for years on end while you paint miniature fantasy soldiers?
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I kinda don't believe in utilitarians, they tend to use "utility" to cover up their actual values. For example, I'd say that a utilitarian would recommenend improvimg the diagnostic process so that there's less people detransitioning for "identity evolutions" reasons (they hurt their health only to end up where they would have been anyway, without thebmedical interventions), but another utilitarian can just as easily say "well, if they don't regret it, have they *reaaaaally* lost any utils?". Similarly there aren't really utilitarian reasons for favoring hormones and surgeries, over coping strategies to deal with body image / identity issues.
The actual conflict is between Natural Law people and transhumanists.
How do you disentangle this from the uncertainty of measuring utility and estimating effects on utility, given the complexity of the policy questions?
Because I have on many occasions asked claimed utilitarians how utility can be assessed in principle, and gotten either synonyms that dont explain anything, or "heres an approximation in practice, but Ill totally make an exception when I feel the heuristic breaks down" combined with not seeing the point when I ask what impractical thing the approximation approximates. They just walk around with an is-utility gap, and dont see how thats a problem for utilitarianism.
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By looking at the reaction to a given proposal. "We should favor coping strategies to deal with body image issues, rather just prescribing hormones" would be met with a huge amount of hostility, which is not indicative of uncertainty.
Or they rank it low among candidates for greatest utility.
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Depends on what you mean by "utilitarian".
Actual, honest to God philosophical utilitarians who would happily kill someone if it meant they would be able to induce mild sexual gratification in a warehouse of BB(6) rabbits -- few, if any. Same way there are few if any people who genuinely hold any wacky philosophical position.
People who generally try to consciously try to align their values with a utilitarian framework, e.g. the people who are really involved with EA -- they definitely exist, and I see no particular reason to doubt the sincerity of their convictions. There is of course still plenty of room for personal bias to sneak in, but, you can say the same about any ethical system, including Natural Law, so I don't think that the utilitarians are any worse off here than others ("it just so happens that the Natural Law ordained by the creator of the universe aligns perfectly with what I wanted anyway, ain't that the darndest thing").
People who live in a "utilitarian manner", if it feels good then that's all that matters, thinking too "deep" about it is for nerds -- undoubtedly, there are many.
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Also between 'people who believe Elliot Page to be a woman with mental defects, causing her to change her body away from its Natural Form' and 'people who believe Elliot Page to be a man born with a defective body, causing him to try to bring it closer to its Natural Form'.
I'm not seeing it. For one, I've never heard anyone argue fornthe pro-trans position in those terms, so even if such people exist, they're a tiny minority.
Even purely theoretically the position doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I could understand it with regards to someone like Imane Khelif, who's one sex, but due to a development disorder looks more like the other. You could then say that by adjusting his body to be more male, you're bringing it closer to it's natural form.
With Eliot Page, where you have someone with a perfectly healthy and normal female body, but try to change it to be more male, how is that bringing it closer to the natural form?
This is the official, top expert approved line. Why you think "sex change" is obsolete bigoted term and gender affirming treatment is the proper terminology now?
Because the real gender was always deep down there, in soul that got stuck by mistake in wrong body, and must be affirmed by hacking and chopping the body until it conforms to the soul (just like statue was always inside the boulder, and the sculptor just gets it out).
Not to mention the farcical phrase "sex assigned at birth". Wikipedia itself has fully adopted the Orwellian language - e.g. it incorrectly claims that Kitty Pryde was played by "Elliot Page", and there's a small note that Page "came out" as transgender, rather than deciding to switch genders.
The "man born with a defective body" belief may indeed be held by a "tiny minority" - but they've managed to capture many institutions and get them to adopt it wholeheartedly.
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The official, top expert approved line is "bodily autonomy above all else". It doesn't matter if you want to be male one day, and female the other, thus showing there is no single natural state you're aiming toward, it doesn't matter if you have gender dysphoria, thus showing there could be anything unnatural about your current state to begin with, hell, it doesn't matter to them if you are of sound mind. All that maters is that you want to do it in the moment, they believe it's a part of self-expression , and you should be able to change your body the way you change clothes.
"Gender affirming care" is the proper terminology precisely because they wanted to separate the treatment from the questions of the body and what is natural to it, "gender" is a social construct after all.
To be fair, I think that bodily autonomy generally makes a good Schelling point. There are certainly limits, few would argue that the psychotic who is stabbing himself to kill the spiders crawling inside his skin should get bodily autonomy, but for the most part respecting bodily autonomy seems like a rule which leads to beneficial outcomes.
Nor is the solution of non-interventionism in the absence of a sound mind preferred by the natural law people and cishumanists very coherent. They might excuse the mother who kills her child by refusing the measles vaccine because she does not want her child exposed to chemicals, but get really upset with a mother who does a better job of protecting her kid from chemicals, even though death from oxygen deprivation is the natural fate of a human almost anywhere in the observable universe.
At the end of the day what is an act and what is an omission depends on your subjective moral frame of inertia (obligatory xkcd). Failure to prevent the onset of puberty is not meaningfully different from purposefully inducing puberty, just like killing a patient by turning off their ventilator is not meaningfully different from killing them through the injection of pentobabitone.
Naturally, that does not mean that any intervention is good, just that there are no moral shortcuts which save you from looking at the outcomes. (On the object level, I do not have a race in the "gender interventions in minors" topic, my suspicion is that likely no short and simple rule will maximize utility.)
Yes, well, few as they may be, there seems to be a higher concentration of them in the biggest international association concerned with transgender health.
The majority of the observable universe being the cold vacuum of space, you're quite correct, but the one bit of the universe where humans are typically seen, depriving them of oxygen does usually require some form of intervention. If you want a real gotcha you can say they would be upset at refusing a blood transfusion or a dialysis machine, though even there the Natural Law enjoyers have arguments for why they are ok with that, and not other things.
Puberty is a necessary process for development of not just all humans, not just all primates, not even only of all mammals, but practically every animal observable to the naked eye, that anyone will ever run into. Without it it, you lose access to one of the core functions of your body. You can say that it might be worth it under specific circumstances, bot it's loony say they're the same.
The ventilator itself is an active intervention, while puberty is, again, the process of developing a core function of one's healthy body, making the analogy somewhat stilted.
This is where most utilitarians cheat. It's not enough to look at the outcomes, you need a moral framework to judge those outcomes by.
I got used to the "no dog in this fight" folks, but I'd imagine you'd have somethimg to say about your "real world" model of mental health not really reflecting reality because of this issue.
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This is why medical profession advocates for legalizing all drugs, free market in human organs, end of conscription (in countries where it is applicable), legal dueling and gladiator fights among consenting adults and absolutely opposes any proposals for compulsory vaccination.
Oh no... did I forget to add "...on this issue"? Or were you expecting people to be logically consistent?
The claim itself is easily defensible, I just linked you to a source where the "top experts" talk about everything from transitioning non-dysphorics to schizophrenics.
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