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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”.
You put several claims into one sentence:
Obviously, some of these claims could be true without others being true at the same time. I could probably grant you 1 and maybe a part of 2, but others are in no way a given.
I’m very confused as to how you made the leap to those other claims. If you’re at all familiar with progressive views on being trans, they literally say you don’t need dysphoria to be trans, and they are firmly opposed to transmedicalism, favouring an identity affirmation based approach.
@ArjinFreeman has it right, I think you’re the one conflating my views when I’m only arguing for point 1.
The claim I am addressing is:
If you are only arguing point 1, then gender dysphoria being a genuine medical condition does not support the "trans cult" and has little bearing to the discussion about the cult and the "average trans person", because as you yourself said, the cult's claims go way beyond medical conditions, and they also do not identify "average trans person" with one having the condition. So it's like saying "vitiligo is a real medical condition" and arguing that is a very important insight into racial relationships in the US. Yes, it also about skin color, but it's completely different issue.
I’m getting a bit confused by your point so let me try and clarify what I meant:
A lot of the debate around being trans - e.g. are trans women truly women? Do people have an “inner gender identity”? Doesn’t change the reality which is that some people are distressed by having the characteristics of their natal sex and being perceived as a man/a woman, and want to transition with the goal of reducing that dysphoria. Some succeed in that they are eventually perceived as the opposite sex in most social situations and significantly reduce their dysphoria.
You can argue that alternative treatments should be researched instead, that medical transition is now insufficiently gatekept, that there is bias in research with regards to outcome, or even that it should be banned because it will lead to more harm overall.
But debates like “a woman is an adult who produces large gametes, so trans women aren’t women” versus “no, a woman is anybody who identifies as one”, would have no bearing on the above, and even if you thoroughly debunked the second collection of viewpoints, it wouldn’t matter to the practical reality of treating gender dysphoria.
I'm sure some of the debate concerns these points. But the trans debate includes much more than that, and the "trans cult" demands much more than agreeing about "inner identity".
On the above no, because people are free to have "inner identity" completely untethered to any real events or facts. I could think I am actually a teapot, and nothing in medical science would convince me otherwise. There's no argument that may prevent me from feeling this way, and there's no argument that can prove I am not, in my deep inner thoughts, consider myself a teapot. There's nothing to debate here - either I think this way, or I don't, and if I do, then I do, there's nothing to debate. The debate is about what does this mean and what consequences and actions are appropriate for the society to take in this situation. And to that debate, of course, a lot more things than "could some people in their inner thoughts think they are other things than they are" have bearing. We know for a fact that yes, people can have "inner thoughts" that disagree with objective reality. The question is what to do about it. And to that question, saying "yes, could be are such thoughts" advances us very little towards the answer.
Of course it would matter, since there are multiple ways to treat a medical condition. But also you just said that "average trans person" and "person having gender dysphoria" is not the same thing, so if we talk about the whole debate, it would of course also matter whether or not we are dealing with actual medical condition in a particular case - even while we recognize the actual medical condition is real.
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