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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1036 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 30, 2025

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I'm finally going to write an overview of the whole trans cult/ideology because I'm tired of otherwise seemingly intelligent and well meaning people arguing with me about it.

Could you all send me your best deep dives into the topic of transgenderism, both pro and con?

I hope you look into the trans medical perspective as opposed to just debunking the modern progressive viewpoints.

Gender dysphoria is a genuine medical condition and even you write a the perfect rationalist takedown of the “trans cult”, it wouldn’t change anything for the average trans person. No one who has profound distress at having breasts and can’t bare to look at themselves in the mirror will cancel their top surgery (or stop wearing a binder, or go abroad if you made the surgery illegal locally) after a convincing philosophical argument about the definition of “woman”.

Like others mentioned, Zack M. Davis has written tens of thousands of words on the subject from a rationalist point of view, and it’s clearly a desperate coping mechanism for a psychiatric condition/neurological problem that he’s unwilling to have properly treated.

For some medical deep dives, I like Dr Power’s subreddit and its wiki for a bleeding edge take, and this classic from 1966 which shows the medical necessity of treating transsexuals from a time before there was any “gender ideology”.

Sure. I think my general approach is that if trans is some weird mental disorder that like .2% of the population get, whatever. I can see that happening, and it's probably not too harmful to let them cross dress.

Modern trans ideology is far, far, far away from that and is evil. Even if we let transgender people cross dress, it still needs to be weird. Normativity being enforced around the heterosexual family is crucial imo.

Being a transsexual is not treatable by crossdressing and requires hormonal replacement therapy at a minimum, and usually surgery. If you look at that 1966 book I linked, the author brought up a treatment plan where the patient would take hormones but otherwise dress and appear as their natal sex.

Do share what angle you’ll be going for if I’m wrong, but I don’t think you will have much headway with the people you’re arguing with (I assume highly educated, compassionate people with a progressive bent, perhaps in the rationalist sphere or STEM), from what you’ve shared so far. Those people also view your own ideology as an evil cult, and will oppose you on principle for wanting to enforce hetero norms.

Those people also view your own ideology as an evil cult, and will oppose you on principle for wanting to enforce hetero norms.

Oh I'm well aware. To be quite frank I am mostly writing this to settle my own niggling doubts, and to have an article to refer someone to for the hundredth time someone asks me to explain why I'm anti-trans. I hope it convinces people, but that is not the main goal.

Frankly most of the people I've talked to in the twitter post-rat scene (or tpot) don't seem to have a coherent ideology explaining why they are pro-trans at all, besides "some people are born intersex" and "it's mean to not let them do whatever they want." Along with the classic sob stories followed by the implication that my views are going to make people commit suicide.

Sadly I do believe they're straw men, but hey what can you do. Most people don't think about things very deeply, news at 11.

I think you might strawmanning their replies yourself. The intended message is probably something like

  • Intersex people show that the gender binary is not inviolable - someone can have XY chromosomes but appear completely female externally
  • It costs nothing to be polite and use trans people’s preferred pronouns, and not doing so, or making their lives more difficult, is pointlessly rude and mean spirited
  • If the majority of people had views like yours, the life of trans people would be significantly worse and some would commit suicide, see how it was before widespread trans acceptance in the West, or how it is currently in many parts of the world where being trans means your family disowning you

Although it is X/Twitter, so it is possible you got the replies you wrote verbatim. But I would still encourage you to consider their arguments more charitably, otherwise they might just dismiss you what you wrote after a single one paragraph.

Fair points! Yes and these are the arguments I plan to investigate and take down in depth. I have looked into this topic at length and concluded all of these arguments are fallacious, or at least not worth the costs.

If you're arguing in favor of cisheteronormativity, you probably should be at least aware of the Freedom of Form-style arguments. It, and a thousand weirder variants, are each individually too uncommon to be really necessary to counter or even counterable, but they or stuff like them underlies a lot of the nonbinary and what-you're-probably-seeing-as-ROGD stuff.

I don't know of any good summary articles, but there's also a bit of a will-to-power one: what Defense Distributed's 3d printing and Cathode_G's DIY nitration mixture said to gun control exists for hormonal modifications. You don't really have the ability to make things weird, just difficult. Never underestimate minor inconveniences, perhaps, but it points to policy limitations.

"The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions" by Zack M. Davis, a devastating takedown of Scott Alexander's "The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories".

"Changing Emotions" by Eliezer Yudkowsky approaches the issue from a transhumanist angle.

Not a deep dive as such, but I also enjoyed AntiDem's "On the Creation of Unicorns".

Seconding "Categories" as the post to read on Zack's website, though he has plenty of other bangers too.

On the more philosophical side of things:

Brief, 1 hour interview with a Gender Philosopher: https://youtube.com/live/w8D5tyvodSM?si=1tORdLvMpXnTDLLi

Extended discussion/book club on Gender from a Catholic lens (but holy shit I learned so much about contemporary "queering the gender norm" academics): Season 1, Season 2.

On the more medical side of things: https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/15hhliu/the_chen_2023_paper_raises_serious_concerns_about/

https://old.reddit.com/r/detrans/comments/hp0ee4/so_im_actually_a_doctor_who_specializes_in/

How deep do you want to dive? What sort of angle do you want to take? Medical / scientific? Sociological / philosophical? I don't think it's a subject that can be covered by a single write up, and worse, I can't think of a single source I could link you that would cover all the beats. Aside from what the others have recommended, I'd give a shout out to Mia Hughes, who has a knack for covering the history of the phenomenon, and digging out it's historical analogoues. She's the author of the WPATH Files (see chapters "A Brief History Of Transgender Medicine And The Early Days Of WPATH" and "Past Cases Of Pseudoscientific Hormonal And Surgical Experiments"), and the recent review of the NYT "The Protocol" podcast.

My go-to references for the pro-trans side are usually people like Jack Turban and Steven Novella & David Gorsky, though these "muh science" arguments have lost a lot of popularity on the pro-side recently, in the wake of the Cass Review (as well as every other systematic review on the subject that has been published to date), so I don't know how far you'll get addressing them.

@ymeskhout's "In This House, We Believe in Gender Stereotypes", which he originally cross-posted here: there's an interesting discussion in the comments.

In rationalist circles, Scott's post "The Categories Were Made for Man, not Man for the Categories" is a very respected pro-trans article. I used to find it persuasive.

On the pro side, Freddie deBoer has waded into this topic on several occasions, which prompted my response to him:

Wonderful! Huh, didn't realize you were on Substack too, I'll have to follow. Ty for the links.

Excellent! These are wonderful sources ty. Phew this is going to be... interesting.

Jesse Singal is pretty even-handed, even if he's vilified a lot by activists; His position is, as far as I understand it, that the evidence on the entire topic is far too unreliable to act on it the way the medical establishment is currently doing. Diagnostic standards are far to deferential and all the available treatments have muddy positive impacts; If anything, the negative impacts have far better evidence than the positive ones. Nevertheless, he still stresses that we should be tolerant, that most trans-people are perfectly fine, and that this is especially about protecting teens and children from haphazard decisions that will impact their entire life.

Andy Ngo really trashes crazy (violent) left extremism in general, which includes a trans-rate of seemingly >50%. Of course you can't call this representative of anything, but it still gives you a good view into a subgroup that nevertheless enjoys widespread support in media & academia.

Colin Wright (note that this substack also includes some other authors) lands somewhere in-between, generally also primarily highlighting the low evidentiary standards. But he also regularly makes a deliberate point about the primacy of biological sex, and is more openly dismissive of large parts of trans medical care.

Obligatory self-promo: https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/p/contra-deboer-on-transgender-issues

I recommend binging everything @zackmdavis posted on his old site.

Gender:Hacked by Sarah Mittermaier formerly/also known as Eliza Mondegreen.

A review of Shannon Thrace's memoir 18 Months, her account of how her marriage collapsed after her ex-husband came out as trans.

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