This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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?
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:
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 claim 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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link