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Perhaps a more realistic hypothetical I have seen discussed before: Imagine a pill is invented that “cures” transgenderism, as in eliminates dysphoria and causes your gender identity to painlessly conform to your birth sex. Would leftists support this? It seems undeniably good, even if you support gender affirming care as it is the perfect treatment. But I have a hard time imagining leftists actually supporting this, which I think reveals that transgenderism is actually a preferred state tk cisgenderism
I really don't think that frames trans as "preferred" to cis. Removing something is a stronger action than tolerating it, so I don't see a contradiction in doing the latter but spurning the former.
The other obvious reason to oppose this would be realpolitik, since there would most certainly be points to score. But I still wouldn't describe that as preferring a group.
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What do you mean by "support this?" I would think it would be a good thing for such a pill to be available. I'd support anyone who wanted to take it (which I think would be quite a lot of people). I would oppose it being forced on people and support people who wanted to undergo a more traditional gender transition as an alternative.
For me, "support this" would involve something akin to being either ambivalent to or promoting of a medical/social standard where when someone believes they have gender dysphoria and wants to explore options to progress from there, this pill is presented by doctors/psychologists as an equally helpful option to address their dysphoria as medical/social transitioning, modulo the relative risk/benefit ratios of the different processes. This is a pretty muddy and imprecise standard, but that's hard to avoid when talking about something as broad as "leftists" "supporting" "this."
I'm a leftist who would support this by the above standard, but I have to honestly say that I'm skeptical that agreeing with me would be popular or even common among leftists.
This is interesting. My position is pretty close to what you describe but my perception about what leftists in general would support is reversed. Between this and the downthread conversation with @SSCReader I wonder if I'm the one who interacts with unrepresentative leftists.
At the end of the day, we can't really tell who's got a more perception, I guess. My thinking is that much of the philosophical basis I hear from the left around trans issues seems to implicitly posit a sort of dualism, that there's some immaterial soul that has a gender that is decoupled from the sex of the body. As such, I would predict that for most of the left, a pill that makes someone identify their gender with their birth sex would be akin to a pill that tears off a part of the person's soul. It's the same reason why I would guess that even if gay conversion therapy were proven to be effective and with low risk/benefit ratio for a medical/psychological intervention (neither of which seem plausible to me), I doubt there would be much support at all for it from the left.
My perception could easily be colored too much by the leftists I interact with, though. And it's entirely possible that the implicit dualism I see being invoked is just a tool being used to push forward policies intended to reduce the suffering of people with gender dysphoria, and in the scifi scenario that a pill is invented to painlessly do just that, the dualism basis would get dropped entirely. Most leftists aren't activists, and most people aren't principled left or right, so it could take just a few activists supporting it and the regular everyday people going along with it to make it popular among the left.
This is true regardless of the immaterial soul thing, no? Let's say your most defining character trait is that you're very logical and detail-oriented, and your family encourages you to take a pill that makes you more artsy and creative instead. Regardless of which is actually better, the pill itself replaces part of your personality with something new, so it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to view that as partial murder.
My position on trans is essentially that gender identity is not very important (gender is, but how you feel about your gender is a category error), so it would be something more like a pill that makes you slightly prefer the color blue over the color red, except it also improves your health, financial, and social outcomes drastically. I'd take such a pill without question. If I considered gender identity to be a core part of someone then such a pill would seem somewhat evil to me.
No. For instance, in your example, being logical, detail oriented, artsy, or creative (the latter 2 and former 2 don't seem to be at all in conflict with each other, for the record, making the analogy rather off) aren't things that exist independently of the body. These personality traits come about as a consequence of the biology of the brain which is affected pretty directly by the biology of the rest of the body, such as hormones. The reason I might be any of these things isn't because there's something fundamentally "me" about being logical and detail oriented or whatever, it's because my physical body caused that to arise in my sets of behavior and my consciousness.
A pill that changes my personality in that way would be a pill that changes my personality in that way. It would be changing my biology the way pills tend to do, and I do consider it quite a stretch to say that that's partial murder.
I don't see why it being a consequence of biology is relevant. My point is that people really do consider their personalities to be their souls, so changing your personality is ripping out a piece of your soul. I think this is basically the correct way to look at it too. Let's assume for a second that people do have souls. Which would you prefer: to have your personality changed drastically, but your soul remain the same, or to have your personality remain the same, but your soul damaged somehow?
My view of the "soul" is that the latter hypothetical is impossible, precisely because the very most important thing about one's soul is their personality.
I didn't claim that the cause of your detail-oriented personality is your soul. The cause doesn't matter. What matters is how much you value that personality now that you have it. Changing it via a pill on a whim seems like a very drastic decision akin to replacing yourself with a similar person. Like I said, I'd feel comfortable doing so if that other person is very similar to me in the ways that matter to me, but if they're drastically different then that starts looking more like "tearing off a part of my soul."
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I’m not sure that that many people would want to take it; while there would probably be a lot of people pressured into taking it, I do not have a very charitable view of motivations for transgenderism and I don’t think it’s possible to field much evidence for a charitable view. The more conventional gender transition appears to be part of the draw, despite its obvious drawbacks.
Frankly, I think if your prior is "most trans people would prefer to undergo difficult, painful, expensive surgery to achieve middling results rather than take a cheap one time pill to be comfortable in their bodies" your prior is being guided by a very vocal minority.
I think this is more complicated, some trans people may take the pill, but others I am sure would have the same reaction that changing your mind fundamentally is a bigger change than your body. I have a friend who feels his medication "kills" him because the person he is on it is not his real self. If your identity is a core part of your mental conception of self, then there is an argument that changing how you think is bigger than surgery.
Like if many people here had a choice between having a hand lopped off, or taking a pill that dropped our IQ by 20 points or removed our contrariness, or enjoyment of 10,000 word comments on culture war esoterica. I think I might take the hand lopping off, because then I am still me absent a hand, whereas changing the way I think, may in fact erase this version of me.
I mean, jeez, just look at the autism community vs. Autism Speaks; the latter's mission has mentioned finding a cure for autism, which causes the former to understandably recoil in fear and horror.
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Sure, I know trans people with this perspective. That's why I said in my original reply I'd support them in transitioning as well. I'm curious, what fraction of the people who take the medication your friend does feel similarly, that it kills them, and what fraction are satisfied that the medication resolves their condition? I did not claim, and do not believe, that every single trans person would be ecstatic to take such a pill, merely that most quite a lot of them would be happy to.
I think more would oppose the pill, believing it would erase their self, but the number of trans people I know is low so it certainly isn't a robust determination. So I think "most trans people would prefer to undergo difficult, painful, expensive surgery to achieve middling results rather than take a cheap one time pill to be comfortable in their bodies" is an accurate description. But with low confidence.
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From a perspective that most of them have munchausen’s, however, that prior is extremely plausible.
And even if we go by the statements of trans people themselves, they want to be the opposite sex, through painful, expensive, difficult treatments. Not the same sex.
Only some of the treatments are painful, expensive, and difficult. SRS certainly is, but very few trans people actually get that. HRT is dirt cheap and painless, and that's the core of what most people would consider trans healthcare. I think for many of us taking HRT nowadays, it's not really such an imposition that we would be willing to risk a lobotomy to get rid of the desire to do it.
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What is the evidence that most of them have munchausen's? I'm also a little unclear what it means for them to have munchhausen's in this context. Do they not actually have gender dysphoria? Are they not really distressed by their bodies?
Given the small fraction of trans people who go through with both top and bottom surgeries this seems unlikely to me. Rather I think what most trans people want is to feel comfortable in their bodies and surgery is currently the option for effecting this change. I suspect most trans people would love to have a pill to fix their gender dysphoria.
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