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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2235 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 30, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Gender Dysphoria is a genuine medical phenomenon feels more accurate than assigning it as a 'condition' perse.

But why, though? In my opinion for something to be classified as medical, it need to have some physiological mechanism behind it. I suppose you can say that the condition / phenomenon is real, we just don't quite know the mechanism yet, but in that case the bare minimum would be being able to tell fake cases apart from the real ones. For example doctors were able to tell Tourette's apart from TikTok-Tourette's, do we have anything like that for gender dysphoria?

One of the links I gave above shows a surprisingly large correlation between gender dysphoria and measurable physical conditions (e.g. atypical oestrogen signalling). Unfortunately few people bother investigating these due to political factors - many pro-trans people are afraid of a "trans cure", and most anti-trans people see it as a made-up condition and that you fix it by making being trans illegal/socially unacceptable.

What "counts" is a difficult problem, and I don't think almost anyone has meaningfully consistent lines. I recall looking at some work long ago that found a neat correlation between particular physical signals and infidelity behavior (with a nice theoretical mechanism explanation and an animal model to boot). I remembered it mostly because it was a surprising contrast to the complete lack of results that were anywhere near that quality in the raging public discussion concerning sexual orientation. I doubted that any of the people who wanted to take a strong stance on sexual orientation would take a similar stance on infidelity, and well, yeah, I kind of doubt that most people would be willing to compare the types of evidence available for gender dysphoria stuff and have a consistent view on what "counts".

One of the links I gave above shows a surprisingly large correlation between gender dysphoria and measurable physical conditions (e.g. atypical oestrogen signalling).

Which one? I clicked all 3, ctrl+F'ed for "atopical" and "oestrogen" and got nothing.

Also, isn't this a bit hasty? Potentially having a physical condition to point to is a good start, not a smoking gun showing this is genuine medical condition.

many pro-trans people are afraid of a "trans cure"

I'd guess the bigger issue is there being objective criteria for telling people they're not trans.

and most anti-trans people see it as a made-up condition and that you fix it by making being trans illegal/socially unacceptable.

Uh, not really. Most anti trans people see it the same way they see anorexia. In both cases some form of distress is driving people to take drastic, detrimental to their health, steps to modify their body. In one case we try to dissuade them from it, in the other the medical establishment decided it's a great idea to do affirmarion only. The part that is seen as made up are the sociological theories on gender identity.

They don't want to make being trans illegal or socially unacceptable, they want to ban medical providers from offering unethical services (again, consider an alterntive world where anorexia clinics are there to help people starve themselves), repeal pro-transt laws and/or remove the social pressure that forces everybody else to play along with trans ideology.

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