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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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With parental consent (PC), a 16-yo can marry a 30-yo and bear his children in a lot of states.

As others pointed the entire culture is against such marriages, and even sees pregnancies from low age gap relationships as something to be prevented. I don't know how it is now, but it looked like a sizeable amount of money was being spent when I was an adolescent, to stop this from happening.

That being said, I do not consider mastectomies to be that irreversibly life-altering. If you change your mind, you can still get implants

I'm sorry, that's deranged. That's the sort of stuff that makes me want to go to the local feminists and say "I'm sorry, you were right". What you said only makes sense if you believe the breasts' only function is decorative, for the enjoyment of men.

And while we are discussing genital surgery without medical indication in minors, we should probably acknowledge that the median case is not the 15-yo getting her breasts removed, but the baby getting circumcised for religious reasons of his parents.

Yes, circumcision is barbaric, next question.

With regard to puberty and interventions, I will notice that 'natural' is not the same as 'good'. 'Natural' is when half of the kids die before puberty, and nobody remotely sane would suggest we go back to that. We have seen how God has planned out human life, and collectively decided "fuck that guy". The natural fate of a 12-yo with no health anomaly is not puberty. It is death through asphyxiation within minutes -- basically everywhere in the observable universe.

That's a pretty absurd argument, if that's where you want to leave it at. When a kid loses their baby teeth, we don't try to halt that process because "natural is not the same as good". When a kid grows, and experiences growing pains, we also don't try to halt the process no matter how much he whines about it. These things are a normal part of healthy development, and we recognize an argument needs to be made to intervene in it, not to defend the process from taking place.

But there is certainly a subset who have a different gender identity hardwired and would be harmed not helped by letting puberty happen.

If it's certain, what sort of evidence do you have for the claim? Every systematic review of pediatric gender care that I'm aware of, came out saying the evidence is of low or very low quality. As far as I recall the history of these interventions, this isn't even a case of small studies showing promising initial results, but failing to scale, the results have been pretty poor from the start, but we went ahead with it for ideological reasons.

This means that medical interventions must be made based on trade-offs. Anticipate how the patient would view the intervention with 20 years of hindsight. Try to minimize the excepted reduction in QALYs -- no matter if it is due to suicide, sterility, surgical interventions etc. This involves guesswork, but every moral decision in the real world involves guesswork

Ok, and when it turns out they're not doing it, can I point that out? When it, in fact turns out that they might be maximizing the reduction in QALY's, can I point that out? When it turns out they're not even so much interested in figuring out whether any of these things are medically justified to begin with, as they are an autonomy and self-expression, can I point that out? When it turns out that the approach you're proposing is not only not being followed, but is pretty much impossible under the current framework, because by definition anyone who wants a trans-surgery is trans, and thus justifies the surgery being performed, can I point it out? Can I point all of these things out without being called "just as bad" as the side that's doing them?