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I honestly just decided I’ll be a bigot and have worked out that trans people don’t exists. Realistically I think there’s an incredibly small percent of the population that some hormone thing went wrong and really have gender confusion.
It feels a lot like anorexia. Where Scott just wrote a piece about how it wasn’t common in society until one case got publicized and now you have an epidemic of anorexia and the same process has occurred in multiple societies. Or like one mass shooting leads to multiple Maas shooting.
So it’s part of the culture war I get no interest in reading the nuances of. It’s like trying to debate caring about a cult of Scientology.
Rather than saying they don't exist, it would be more accurate and productive to say that they have a mental illness. Like with people with anorexia. It exists, it can cause suffering, it's complicated and hard to solve rather than just "made up" in a way that a five year old pretending to be a cowboy is. But it exists within the realm of psychology, and therefore effective treatments will also be within the realm of psychology: therapy and medications. And it is socially irresponsible to enable the behavior and reinforce the illness, even though sympathy may be appropriate as it is for most mental illnesses.
I don't think the conclusion follows.
I, like many men, have a similar problem to transgender folks: I'm Dwayne Johnson in the body of a 40+ computer programmer. The solution is squats, deadlifts, bench press, road work and clean eating, not therapy and medication. Body transformation >> body acceptance, at least in this particular case where body transformation has so many other benefits. And it's pretty easy to reverse the transformation and go back to dad bod if desired.
The principle that "what starts in psychology stays in psychology" seems to be false.
Now in the transgender case it's trickier because body transformation doesn't work very well and it seems like the desire for body transformation is often far less permanent than the transformation itself. But that is fundamentally a question of cost/benefit analysis (and I think the modern world is getting it wrong).
Abstract principles like what you describe don't help. If we had a 100% perfect and reversible gender transition, there would be no reason not to let people try on an opposite gender body just for fun.
If those things are actually similar, that blows up the entirety of trans discourse into atoms.
If "I'm a woman stuck in a man's body" is just a more dramatic way of saying "I wish I was a woman", there's no good reason to concede any of the demands of the trans community. Not the bathrooms, not avoiding "misgendering", not women's sports, or women's prisons. You can wish all you want, why should anyone care?
People should care because it's good for us to care about one another.
Rather, you can wish all you want, but why should anyone bear the costs of your wishes?
This is, for me, a recurrent political challenge as an American, because I end up stuck between the bifurcated "standard positions" constantly. I object to abortion but I value doctor-patient confidentiality, so as long as I don't know it's happening, I don't think I have much to say about abortion--but if you want to spend tax dollars making it affordable, accessible, etc. then I have a problem. If a man wants to dress in lipstick and ballgowns, enjoy! But if he wants to police my language and my thinking by making implausible demands concerning his pronouns, he can fuck right off.
The law is at its most ethically plausible when it is mediating conflicts between important interests. Modern welfare states, however, are substantially modern manipulation states, deploying government coercion not to mediate legitimate conflicts but to thumb the scales in furtherance of questionable aims. People think it's not good enough for the state to merely abolish segregation laws; they think states must proactively "integrate" communities, even over the objections of historically oppressed minorities. People think it's not good enough for the state to decriminalize activities; they want the state to subsidize those activities. This, I think, actively erodes the care that we should quite naturally feel toward the other humans in our lives. I should care if my friend wishes to have a different body; if the technology existed to actually change them into what they want to be, I'd be all for it!
But I wouldn't pick up the tab for it, and should not be required to pick up the tab through insurance pooling or taxation--any more than I should be required to pick up the tab for their wished-for sports car.
Nope. I'm sorry, I'm just one man, and there's millions of human tragedies unfolding every day. I don't have that many fucks to give away, if I actually cared for everyone I'd be a nervous wreck. I'm actually happier to pick up the tab for someone's fanciful wish, than to be forced to care for it. You're Dwayne Johnson stuck in a dadbod? Here, have a gym subsidy, or something. You want a sports league for guys who wish they were women? Why the hell not, knock yourself out. You want me to care? Why? Who are you anyway, and why did you follow my daughter into the locker room?
It's off topic, but I don't get that argument. Doctor-patient confidentiality is not absolute. We let doctors handle pretty hard drugs, but my understanding is that if a doctor starts prescribing hard drugs for the explicit purpose of getting their patients to trip balls, they're getting locked up. Doctor-patient confidentiality would get even more disregarded when the lives of third parties were involved. I don't think a doctor is allowed to say "I have just the thing for your condition! Here's a prescription for carrying out an assassination!"
That's fine, but it's probably worth noticing that this is not what you said. What you said was:
This is meaningfully distinct. "Why should anyone care about that" is very different from "I have no reason to care about that." I quite agree that you have no reason to care what some rando wishes, or even what a great many randos wish. Some dude in a dress follows your daughter into the locker room, well, you have great reason to care about your daughter's comfort, and no reason at all to make that a lower priority than his comfort. But noticing that you don't have any reason to care, while important, is not the same as saying that no one should care.
I didn't say that it was, but as you note, it was just a side point to illustrate my frustration with the polarization of certain arguments.
You are being excessively literal in a way which is the scourge of rationalists.
"Why should anyone care" means "why should people other than the ones central to the situation care", not literally "why should any human being care".
I'm never going to apologize for seeking clarity. Or maybe put a little differently: if I'm an autist at heart, then telling me I'm being too autistic is like telling a bird it is being too feathery. Like, look around you. If you have a problem with rationalists, you've come to a funny part of town...
Looks like a motte-and-bailey to me. "What? No! I just meant me, personally--I don't mean literally no one should care about the outgroup I'm railing against and weak-manning right here in the thread. What kind of monster do you take me for?" Uh huh. Try pulling the other one.
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