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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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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.)

Interrupted gender transitions (Class D)

The main way to understand this detransition experience is as a temporary transition interruption, usually involuntary. This type of experience is often mediated by external barriers such as discrimination, limited access to gender-affirming care, or lack of support—not by changes in identity or self-understandings. They predominantly reported satisfaction with treatments and no or very low decisional regret.

Compared to the other three groups, Class D contains the largest portion of trans women and other participants who were assigned male at birth (37%), with 62% being trans men or nonbinary people born female. On average, participants realized their transgender or gender-diverse (TGD) identity at age 14—slightly younger than the other groups. Though, they typically began medical transition at older ages than the other groups, with 62% having ever started a medical transition.

At the time of the survey they were an average age of 27 years. Nearly half in Class D were bisexual (48%) while 8% identified as straight. Most participants (95%) continued to identify as TGD, the highest of all the classes.

They generally reported decision-making supports, with a majority reporting access to assessments or talk therapy.

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?

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.

The actual conflict is between Natural Law people and transhumanists.

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?

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.

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).

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.