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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   21012 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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Blanchard’s theory is true in the sense that AGP and HSTS populations exist, but it’s overly reductive in the sense that they’re not the only categories of trans people out there.

I agree that the "autistic, nerdy, often terminally online kind" of trans person is in a category of its own compared to homosexual males or archetypal AGPs. I also think the etiology behind trans-identification in females is completely different from that behind trans identification in males. "Gender dysphoria" isn't a condition like "lung cancer" or "depression" which affects males and females in the same way, and diagnosing males and females with the same condition hides more than it illuminates.

maybe those individuals would have been celibate monks or nuns in the past, when monastery life and asceticism was a viable alternative to the normal life script.

I've been thinking about this a lot. As much as people criticise Catholic institutions, they were a very effective Chesterton's fence for a particular kind of person who felt uncomfortable in their own skin and wasn't terribly interested in forming romantic relationships. It makes me sad thinking about all the young women who've gotten double mastectomies they'll likely regret, who would've been perfectly happy as nuns if they'd been born a couple of generations earlier.

I've been thinking about this a lot. As much as people criticise Catholic institutions, they were a very effective Chesterton's fence for a particular kind of person who felt uncomfortable in their own skin and wasn't terribly interested in forming romantic relationships. It makes me sad thinking about all the young women who've gotten double mastectomies they'll likely regret, who would've been perfectly happy as nuns if they'd been born a couple of generations earlier.

A couple of generations here meaning what, 600 years? The convents were dissolved in the Anglosphere in the sixteenth century, and the kinds of elite families producing trans ‘sons’ have never been Catholic.

It’s also inaccurate to point to mid-20th-century convents and monasteries as performing a warehousing function; they were high status institutions that recruited widely from a broad spectrum of the population and tended to reject overwhelming oddballs. If you go back to the pre-Pian church you saw lots of upper class women who didn’t fit in sent to the convent so they don’t have to deal with men(and autistic or downright odd monks), but this was well on its way out by the time of living memory of the boomers. The post-Pian reform RCC overproduced clergy and religious beyond its ability to accommodate, there were things like shortened formation periods to try to cope; this changed with Vatican II, of course, but it wasn’t really for unusual people- although warehoused Sheldon Cooper types in the monastery were part of the story of the reformation.

Of course, there were sects of nuns that got double mastectomies anyway. But maybe not all of the trans-adjacent women would join those.

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