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School shooting in Turkïye claims ten lives.
By this point, you know the drill. Teenaged male, terminally online, obsessed with anime (to the point of preferring to be addressed by the name of his favourite anime character), idolises Elliot Rodger and the Columbine shooters, in a polyamorous LDR with two people he'd never met in person. According to his manifesto (because these fuckers always have manifestos – the second you create a Google Doc with the word "manifesto" in the title, Google should automatically red-flag your Google account), he thinks he's the intellectual superior of everyone around him, and decides to prove it by shooting up his local secondary school. Nine students killed, along with a teacher who died heroically shielding them. Shooter is pronounced dead at the scene.
And, in what by now has become a trope just as tiresomely predictable as any of the foregoing, the perpetrator likes to be referred to with the pronouns "she/they/it", making it at least the third mass shooting by a trans-identified male so far this year (and this one, like Tumbler Ridge, occurred outside the US, so we can't just blame it on the NRA and call it a day). Boy, that sure is an awful lot of
heresymisinformation, isn't it Wikipedia? As I said recently, it infuriates me that the threat of incel-motivated mass violence is so relentlessly hyped up while trans-motivated violence is denied outright, even though the latter has surely claimed more lives this century than the former.People often talk about the demise of the monoculture, how we've splintered into a hundred niche echo chambers and no new true household names have been minted since 2014. This is true up to a point, and yet untrue in another sense: being autistic and terminally online is its own monoculture. It's not like there's one culture for mentally disturbed gender-distressed teenaged boys in the US and another for mentally disturbed gender-distressed teenaged boys in Turkïye: from San Diego to Shanghai, this demographic has just the one culture, with its own argot, cultural practices and set of values. If you're depressed, have a hard time fitting in at school and your parents buy you a smartphone, sooner or later you'll end up speaking in the same voice and with the exact same set of fixations (anime, gender ideology, Columbine) as everyone else meeting that description. I'm so grateful not to have been born a decade later.
Related, a recent Finnish paper studied youth mental health after gender reassignment surgery, they found that psychiatric morbidity worsens significantly post-surgery. This comes to the surprise of absolutely no one. I'm sure even many LGBT affirming liberals are extremely skeptical of the 1% regret rate claim, but quietly nod along fearing political exile. Transsexuals are earmarked the most social capital out of any grievance group in the woke hierarchy. Incels rank at the bottom, they're socially acceptable targets, completely toothless, you can go nuclear on their sense of self-worth (or lack thereof) without consequence because they won't leave their basements. Simultaneously, they're the biggest threat facing society (women) in 2026. Schrodinger them away!
Slightly less related: China is apparently cracking down its LGBT scene even in Chengdu.
Unfortunately like basically every pro and anti trans study, it wasn't really a good one. Their model for psychiatric health is, I'm not even kidding, how much you see a mental health professional. It might be a decent proxy in some ways, but it has very obvious issues. A schizophrenic living on the streets untouched is considered more mentally sound than a middle class student going to a therapist because of "anxiety".
This doesn't necessarily show how mentally healthy you are, it shows how willing you are to engage with the healthcare industry.
That we've selected for a group that seeks out, uses medical care and sticks to it (this is way less common than you might expect, tons of people won't even stick to life saving meds) should suggest a rather heightened rate of psychiatric medical care as well by default, they're the people who actually go use medical care to begin with! No treatment/after treatment comparisons can't get away from this selection effect, people who stick with treatments are the types of people who stick with treatments and use medical care. Even before and after comparisons are flawed. You could see reasons increased rates both from negative results (more problems) and positive results (more trust in healthcare).
Social science sucks. At best this obvious flaw in study design not being cared about is lazy, at worst it's because they're retarded and didn't even think about possible selection effects like most social scientists don't.
This would be a reasonable-ish criticism in the US (and even there "yeah, I know it's not perfect, but it's not bad enough to dismiss the findings"), but in a country with a robust public healthcare and welfare system, the dynamics are completely different. The homeless schizophrenic is far more likely to get treatment than the middle class student trying to get treatment for "anxiety", because the state doesn't have unlimited money, and will triage people.
It definitely lowers it. You can't claim they don't engage with the healthcare system, if they already signed up for gender dysphoria treatment, and are just waiting for it.
We've been allowing an exponential increase in transgender medical interventions, including for children, on the basis of even poorer quality studies claiming they improve mental health outcomes. This study, at the very least, serves as evidence against the pro-trans studies who use similarly flawed methods, except they have no controls, and use way smaller sample sizes. If you want to reject it, there's no reason to take any pro-trans study seriously, and we'd have to admit we're performing massive, dangerous, interventions on children, with absolutely no evidence they help at all.
Robust public healthcare still doesn't mean that people engage in it equally. Especially because you can't make the comparison with the US like that when healthcare in the US for the poor is essentially free for them too! The poor schizo is gonna get all their costs covered by Medicare. So the US is not actually as different as you think.
And the schizo example is just a more obvious way it fails. Again like I said there's an issue in healthcare about how many people won't even take prescribed medicine that they literally have covered by insurance. Tons of people just don't use the resources available to them.
This is just a reading problem, I said that they are selected for being the types to use healthcare. People who engage in voluntary healthcare for years are the types of people who engage in voluntary healthcare.
Yep, that's why I said "unfortunately like basically every pro and anti trans study, it wasn't really a good one.". Social science being low quality is basically the default.
This makes the assumption that the default should be that government bans people's choices unless it's "proven" to help. Why can't the default be that government stays out of what people, including children and their parents, want to do with their lives?
But the comparison in the study takes two groups who, by your argument, are likely to engage in voluntary healthcare. The only difference you can potentially point to is how likely they are to stick to a treatment. Also keep in mind that the effect size you're trying to explain away this way is pretty big. Big enough that I'd think the idea should be backed by evidence itself
This isn't a social science paper, and these issues are pretty common in other fields as well.
It's an extremely unpopular idea. There's a reason why trans activists don't even bring it up.
Not nearly the same rate. It's also not the only issue. Because the Finnish youth on treatment were also being monitored every 3-6 months during checkups, there's also going to be a higher rate of any possible flags being noticed and referred compared to a group who doesn't get monitored by doctors 4x a year. So it's not even just measuring willingness to use healthcare, but also measuring "do people who see doctors regularly get referred to other doctors more?" This is a known issue called surveillance bias.
So yeah, I assume all things equal that a group seeing psychiatric checkups 4x a week, especially voluntarily doing so, are going to have more psychiatric treatments elsewhere.
The effect size is pretty massive sure, but that doesn't mean much. Why should I assume the selection effect of "people likely to utilize healthcare are likely to utilize healthcare" is itself small?
It's actually pretty popular that parents, not government, makes the choices about parenting. Parents can even do things like get their children permanently circumcised, there's a growing movement against requiring childhood vaccines, and in general parents can refuse medical care for their children unless it's directly and immediately endangering the life of the child for US laws. While that might not be the case for some other western nations, I believe the US way is superior to more restrictive and less free countries.
Where are you getting the 3-6 month number from? I see no indication of it in the paper. I can imagine this being a problem if the relevant comparison was to the controls only, but you're comparing two subgroups of people already interacting with the medical system due to gender dysphoria.
Because both groups are already utilizing healthcare, for one. Also, when you criticize a study as "lazy or retarded" the possible bias should be big enough to wipe away or invert the finding, and I think it's reasonable to ask for some backing on how likely that is given the numbers at hand.
Not really. Even on the trans issue itself, the very same people who defend these treatments as being "between the child, parents, and their doctor" will routinely defend institutions hiding a child's transition from their parents.
The US has medical licensing bodies, that take away licences from doctors that prescribe or carry out unproven treatments. It also has a system in place that prevents people (adults!) from voluntarily buying the drugs for themselves that they want. I'm not sure about what the US laws say on the matter, but I don't think they would take kindly for parents getting a hold of prescription drugs, and giving them to their children, on the basis of nothing more than their personal belief it will make them better. I'm not proposing anything different here.
The implication of your idea would be that we'd get rid of this system, or at least make it entirely voluntary, which would be hugely controversial. I'm pretty sure it would be only popular with hardcore libertarians.
Unless they're 'for your dog'. Or a doctor takes the word of your chiropractor that he heard you say you needed them. Or you have money. Or...
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Medical checkups for the hormone treatments and getting new prescriptions.
The controls here are not people actively engaging with the healthcare system over several years, as you can tell by the fact that they are controls not receiving ongoing treatment.
Ok let's look at this specific topic, here's a poll from South Carolina which asked
~71% responded should not! Even the republican respondents were a large majority opposing state intervention against parental decision making. This makes sense, the left leaning side are pro trans and the right leaning side is typically in favor of small government. Traditional conservatives typically say "get the fuck away government regulators"
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So you're in favour of legalising female genital mutilation for teenaged girls of African descent?
I've noticed pro-medical transition people making this argument more and more often lately. "Even if it doesn't work, people should free to do with their own bodies as they please." Okay, sure – but can you* at least acknowledge that you were mistaken** all these years you spent browbeating us about how medical transition is "safe and effective", conservative lawmakers trying to ban it are banning lifesaving treatment (no matter different from taking insulin away from diabetics) and "would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son"? If you've now come out as a principled libertarian who thinks people should be free to do with their bodies as they please while remaining agnostic on whether medical transition is an effective treatment for teenagers' psychic distress (in other words, whether it even qualifies as medical treatment at all) – can you at least be honest enough to admit that you spent quite a long time claiming or pretending otherwise?
Basically what I said here.
*Every instance of "you" in this paragraph is directed towards pro-medical transition people collectively, not towards you in particular.
**To be charitable. Uncharitably: lying.
Why not? We already allow childhood mutilation of genitals for males! In fact teenagers are probably more ethical to do on than babies cause the teenagers could always push back while the baby can not.
I get you mean the unspecified you, but that makes the rest of it kinda unfair right? My argument is that I'm a libertarian who believes in pretty maximal individual rights. But a lot of those pro transition people don't make that argument to begin with! A lot of them are fine with restricting freedoms, they just believe that transition is overall effective.
They don't need to admit something over my personal beliefs.
I'm going to push back on this- circumcision is yes bad but not as bad as FGM, and and one meets the threshold for child abuse while the other one doesn't.
My son isn't circumcised, my future ones won't be either, you don't need to convince me it's bad. But, as a circumcised guy, it's nowhere near as bad as FGM is supposed to be. There's a major difference in severity.
The most commonly practiced forms of FGM are at most as bad as circumcision (removal of the clitoral hood) and often significantly less (eg. ceremonial pin-prick on the clitoral hood), but remain illegal and condemned. If it is true that circumcision should be permitted because it is not as severe, then these types of FGM should be as well. Instead we use the existence of more severe forms to condemn all forms. For men, we have a separate category for the more severe form--castration.
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Below are a list of things that Western societies generally believe that minor children are too immature to engage in with informed consent:
Obviously there is enormous heterogeneity between jurisdictions (in some jurisdictions it's illegal for anyone to smoke weed regardless of age) and the age of consent varies a great deal just within Europe. Nonetheless, you will be hard-pressed to find an example of a Western jurisdiction in which prepubescent children are legally free to practise all or most of the above.
I'm legitimately curious which of the above you think minor children (esp. prepubescent children) should be legally permitted to practise.
A lot of those are actually false. Plenty of states have laws allowing underage drinking with parental consent for example. And various forms of child marriage (and yes, sex in those marriages often) with parental consent is still legal in the majority of states.
Yes in most of the US, you as a parent can consent to your child marrying and having sex with an adult.
Some of your examples are also "X not allowed without parental consent" which yeah, parents right to parent means they get to make choices. Some of them also follow into your "applies to everyone" category, no one of any age can make and spread porn of young minors for instance.
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Not just surgery, hormonal treatment as well:
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