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I have no problem at all with the idea that the age of consent for marriage and military service should be 18.
That being said, I think there's an important difference: So called "transitioning" is a dumb idea for anyone at any age. A strong argument can be made that nobody should be permitted to do it whatsoever. However, there is a principle that in a free society, adults are given a lot of liberty and autonomy over their bodies. Therefore, at a minimum, "transitioning" can and should be banned for anyone under 18.
By contrast, marriage and military service are not necessarily dumb ideas.
I'm extremely skeptical of this. What is the evidence for this claim?
Agreed. If a man went around thinking he was Napoleon and chopping off his legs to match his desired height, we would lock him up in the psych ward until he stopped being a danger to himself. Transitioning should be illegal.
Arguments about personal liberty died in the fires of wokeness. It's clear now that someone's vision is going to rule society; liberalism is an unstable fantasy. We can have a culture that bans and shames transgenderism, or we can have a culture that encourages and celebrates transgenderism; there is no in-between. I know what I pick.
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It wasn’t a dumb idea for me, I’m very happy with the results and it has been overwhelmingly positive for me in my personal life. What strong argument could you make that I shouldn’t have been permitted to do it?
Dismissing an entire medical/psychiatric treatment out of hand is itself a dumb idea. This is a common attitude beyond transgenderism, I’ve heard similar takes about depression, anxiety, ADHD (another medical issue that involves children!) but if all you have to offer as alternatives are facile suggestions then you don’t really understand the level of distress some psychological conditions cause.
Is that due to the procedure or due to social avenues that wouldn't have existed without the procedure/joining that particular community? The whole egg-cracking/self-perpetuating thing make it tricky to discern where given lines are. Like personally I've got no issue with people choosing to be fluid in their gender identity, and I'd be all for a medical procedure that actually accomplished gender transition. I just don't really see how the existing medical suite is capable of anything but a very very crude facsimile that renders people permanently on the hook for treatment.
I do feel that there are people who are trying to get around legitimate social issues through opting to transition and/or joining those communities but to me the whole medical intervention thing is kind of its own separate matter.
To be honest I don’t really see a huge difference in social avenues, I haven’t joined any community and none of my close friends are trans women. It’s slightly easier to make friends with cis women now while men are harder to relate to, but it’s not a drastic change since I was seen as a gay man most of the time before. Although navigating gendered expectations is easier now, like I don’t have to constantly explain myself anymore if that makes sense?
For me the main benefit is that physical dysphoria has been hugely reduced, and I can finally look at myself in the mirror without wanting to claw my own face out. HRT was pretty effective in my case and I went from being disgusted at my own body every single day, to being at peace and even grateful for it (with one exception). It’s such a relief that I don’t have to retreat into fantasy land to make intimacy bearable anymore.
I’d love for the medical tech to be more advanced of course, who wouldn’t? But I gave what’s out there a go, and it lifted the dark cloud that was fogging my mind and causing me misery, and that’s good enough for me.
Edit: No “procedure” necessary for the above effects, just plain old HRT.
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Based on my general experience and observations, the vast majority (likely 100%) of trans people are some combination of (1) mentally ill; (2) delusional; (3) have an autogynophiliac fetish; and (4) want license to abuse other people by forcing them to play along with their fantasies. So that it doesn't help anyone (including trans people themselves) to play along with this nonsense, and it has a lot of potential to cause harm to others.
It's clear that the people on one side of the debate are deluded. Time will tell.
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The same as for suicide: it's a social contagion, the mere existence of which perpetuates itself through society.
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I'd need to dig out the study where this came from, I think it was one of the early Dutch ones (so definitely from pro-trans side), but I recall someone making a remark that it's very typical for transgender people to report satisfaction with the procedure, but that it doesn't seem to be reflected by their mental health actually improving.
It’s difficult to find good quality studies I suppose. A later one found a correlation between surgery and lowered psychological distress and suicidality but I don’t know if that’s the highest quality one you can find.
But in my case I was talking about HRT, not surgery.
Yeah, the Dutch stuff is about the whole shebang, from blockers to surgeries. It looks like I may have confused the source material for what the critics were saying about the same data. More recently there was a big study out of Finland looking at hormones + surgeries as well.
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