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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8634 thread views

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?

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.

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.

They are no more persecuted for their self identity then the man who thinks he's Jesus, or that lizardpeople are the world elite.

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

This type of experience is often mediated by external barriers such as discrimination

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"?

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.

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