site banner

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.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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”.

Gender dysphoria is a genuine medical condition.

What would be the argument for that? Calling anything in psychology a genuine medical condition seems to be a bit of a tall order.

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.

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.