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I said two months ago I would reply to a comment about this study on the mental health effects of gender transition. I have only now managed to find the time, so I'm going to post my reply as a top-level comment lest it get buried. You can find the previous discussion here.
To be honest, some of the statistical manipulation seems dubious, but that's above my pay grade, so I'm going to assume the study was conducted in good faith with no shenanigans.
In short, the study finds that, contrary to assumptions that transitioning should improve mental health, the share of people needing mental health treatment rises drastically after transition. Anti-trans people conclude that this means transition actually worsens mental health, and, hence, people should not be allowed to transition.
There's some nitpicking to be done here, for example, maybe the patients already needed mental health treatment and just found out they needed it at the same time as they found out they're transgender, or that just seeing a mental health professional regularly doesn't necessarily mean that your mental health is worse than it used to be.
But my fundamental objection is to the conclusion that no one should be allowed to transition. Suppose the anti-trans side is completely correct on the facts, that transitioning did, in fact, directly worsen the mental health of many or even most patients. There are still some patients who are better off. There are countless anecdotal reports online of people who are happier after transitioning. The most you can conclude is that the criteria for who should transition need to be changed. (If I'm interpreting the data right, the likelihood of needing mental health treatment after transitioning was higher in those born later, consistent with the rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)/social contagion hypothesis.) But if you care about people's happiness, some people should still be supported in transitioning.
Obviously if you believe all trans people are delusional and object to transition and treating people as their stated gender regardless of the effect on their mental health, this does not apply to you. But in that case the study isn't an argument you can use.
Speaking of ROGD, its rhetorical use by anti-trans people is a peculiar example of a self-contradictory motte-and-bailey: usually the bailey is a stronger version of the motte, and thus necessarily consistent with it, but here the bailey ("all trans people are delusional and none of them are their stated gender") contradicts the motte ("some trans people with a specific presentation – primarily adolescent girls – are not actually their stated gender") because the latter presupposes that some trans people are, in fact, their stated gender. If you believe all trans people are delusional, why do you care about the specific etiology of the transness of a specific subgroup of trans people? The treatment, whichever you prefer, should be the same.
I consider myself pro-trans, but I believe ROGD/social contagion may well be a real thing. If you agree about the possibility of social contagion, you should try to minimize the attention trans people receive, yet anti-trans activists have been the main publicists of transness for about a decade now – trans people really entered the mainstream with the North Carolina "bathroom bill". It used to be that you would only find information about transness if you went looking for it because you were questioning your gender, but now that trans people are everywhere (thanks to anti-trans activists), you get impressionable young people who were not predisposed to questioning their gender hearing about it and joining in for the standard reasons impressionable young people join trends. (Cf. media coverage of school shootings encouraging more school shootings – a common argument among anti-gun-control people.)
Whoa there, slow down before accusing my lying eyes of deceiving me. As far as I can see, both IRL and online, it's most decidedly the pro-trans side that's most vocal and active about promoting its views, not int he least because in many places opposition to that view is flat-out not permitted. Maybe American mainsteram television and newspapers are an exception to this - I wouldn't know, not consuming them - but online anywhere other than on the Motte and IRL in Germany it doesn't hold at all. Pro-trans activists are everywhere, anti-trans activists are in hiding because to voice their opinions in public will get them ostracized.
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The basic issue with most trans studies is you'd need a control group of people who qualify for transition but are not allowed to (or are given placebo hormones but that wouldn't work cause hormones have pretty noticeable physical and emotional effects). Also you can't really isolate 'gender transition' as a mental health treatment separate from social treatment of transgender people which varies wildly based on social context. If everyone who got prozac had to wear a giant "I take prozac" hat all the time and some social circles considered taking prozac worthy of a social penalty ranging from mockery and derision to outright abuse, it would make it way harder to measure the effects of prozac.
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I think trans people can be largely divided into two groups:
People who had an affinity for the other sex from the time they were toddlers onward. A boy who prefers dolls and dresses to cars, etc. to the point of everyone around them knowing that this toddler is behaving like the opposite sex in a somewhat obsessive way. These people I have a lot of sympathy for, even if I disagree that this means that they are the opposite sex. Dr. Kenneth Zucker mostly treated this group, and in his clinical research about 80-90% went on to become normal gay men after puberty, with the remainder going through some sort of transition in adulthood. I honestly believe most have some kind of hormonal thing, maybe their mothers took estrogen during pregnancy, maybe some other endocrine disrupter got them early on. I still think the best thing is to wait and see if the desire to transition subsides after going through natal-sex puberty, but if the only group that transitioned was this group, as adults, then I would have few qualms for transition as a medical practice.
Unfortunately, there is the second group. Mostly consists of adolescents who for various reasons started thinking that transitioning will benefit them. The RODG group. The Autogynophelia group. Autistic girls who always felt something was off but never could put it into words. ETC. There might be some hormonal issues, but most of the time it's a social contagion of some kind. For this group, transitioning is probably the worst thing for them to do. It's a harsh medical intervention for something that will typically go away after puberty and therapy. Unfortunately, this group is the largest group getting medically transitioned and contains pretty much every transperson I know IRL.
I don't think any trans person is their desired gender, but that doesn't mean that they are delusional. It really is their desired gender. It's just that desiring a gender doesn't make them that gender.
I think you really need a third group: Autists for whom desiring to be the other sex is just one weird thing about them among many. These are the people who say ”I don’t understand why X should be linked to sex” and actually mean it. They are the most likely ones you’re going to run into in techie online spaces (by a massive margin).
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What an interesting way to put this.
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I read a bit in that study, and I am not exactly overwhelmed.
The abstract talks about X2 statistics. Now I am not a statistics nerd, but I have encountered the letter χ (chi) in passing and happen to know that it does not identify as X or x.
Also, what one sentence claims, the next takes away:
Only to note that [my addition, emphasis mine]:
In the study itself, the key variable of interest was simply boolean:
The impact of the quality of life on visiting a psychiatrist is hard to quantify. Both a patient who is undergoing exposure therapy to better deal with their fear of spiders before moving to the countryside, and a patient locked up in forensic psychiatry after killing someone during a psychotic episode would simply fall in the "specialist-level psychiatric treatment" bin.
The statistics section briefly discusses confounders:
There is no discussion of any of the less obvious confounders. After all, some patients got interventions and some did not -- based on their case histories, not on some RNG, so they must systematically differ. Trivially, having gotten a medical gender reassignment might make a patient more trusting to seek out sensitive medical help (e.g. psychiatric care) in the future. Or perhaps the eye color of the doctor deciding on the intervention is both correlated with their decision -- green-eyed doctors approve more, but getting treated by a green-eyed doctor will also drive 10% of patients mad. (Unlikely, the point here is to illustrate the required paranoia when separating confounders from the effect of the intervention.)
As a data point for the benefits and risks of gender-related interventions, this study does not tell us a lot either way.
They don't:
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😹 I hereby award you🥈in the One Joke championships! (The 🥇 goes to 'vegetables thing that identifies as a beef burger'.)
Or the more obvious confounder that the tribe that is more likely to transition is also more likely to seek psychiatric help?
Woke people often complain that conservatives only know how to tell one joke, but even if that were true, I will remind them that 1 > 0.
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One time in physics class I said “doubleyou” instead of “omega” and everyone laughed at me.
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So a trans person that got a follow up psychiatrist appointment to treat ADHD or a crippling fear of heights would be counted? That’s not very useful statistic.
I suppose it would be possible, if the ADHD was severe, and and phobia was truly crippling. He was actually quoting an excerpt showing that the more mundane case were excluded (see here).
How is it not a useful statistic? Again, the study didn't just compare trans people to controls. They compared to how the mental health of trans people developed over the years as they transition / or don't, to how it develops in the control group. The group of trans people that took blockers or hormones, or had surgeries, had a higher rate of severe mental disorders than the one that didn't.
Even if the modal case is a crippling fear of heights, a result showing that these crippling phobias develop after their medical intervention, but not in people who don't go through with the transition, is interesting, no?
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This is fundamentally just a really bad way to judge whether a treatment works, one that we rightly dismiss for other treatments. There are also countless anecdotal reports of people who recover from cancer after faith-healing. And unlike spontaneous remission of cancer, which is rare, regression to the mean in mental health is the norm. "My mental health got so bad that I sought out X treatment, after which I got better" is the default result.
Go read Scott's Alcoholic Anonymous post (another treatment that a lot of supposed beneficiaries swear by that some critics accuse of being cult-like). Notice both how the evidence base is a complete mess (because it's really hard to test these things) and how the ultimate conclusion seems to be that AA (and pretty much all other treatments tested) is similarly effective to your doctor spending a few minutes telling you that alcoholism is bad and you should stop. Well, the evidence regarding gender transition is even worse. If it turns out outcomes for gender transition are equal or worse than your doctor spending a few minutes telling you "puberty can be scary but you'll be fine" or "accept yourself", that's something we really want to know rather than continuing with a standard treatment with so many downsides. Really it's something we should have known before establishing it as a standard treatment, but instead it went from "so rare you can't do decent studies" to "so common and standard that it would be unethical and difficult to have a real control group" without the step where we actually find out if it works.
A lot of arguments regarding gender transition research seem similar to other arguments that you pick up reading about medical research from people like Scott or Derek Lowe, just with the additional politicized element.
A lot of treatments are based on popular theories on how things work that make the effectiveness of the treatment seem like an inevitability, then crash and burn in randomized control trials. Suggesting a biochemical pathway is bullshit is less likely to get you fired than suggesting "inborn gender identity" is bullshit, which makes it even worse.
"The trial doesn't look good but maybe it works in a subgroup" is the sort of dubious cope you see all the time. At least the p-hackers saying "efficacy was shown in middle-aged hispanic women" have some sort of evidence, saying "okay but assuming the treatment works we just need to do a better job of diagnosing the people it'll work on" is even worse. The only saving grace is that the negative studies on gender transition aren't high-quality randomized control trials because none of the studies on the subject are.
Most fundamentally, everyone knows that the vast majority of prospective treatments fail and the burden of proof is with the people who think they'll succeed. You can have a clear mechanism, anecdotes, observational trials pointing the right direction...and people know not to get too excited. Yes there are standard treatments that are grandfathered in without going through the FDA or equivalent, but the reason why that works isn't really "standard of care", it's "so incredibly obviously effective that the result was clear with much lower standards of evidence". The argument would be that gender transition is such a case, but the various negative studies (and "positive" studies that are pretty negative on closer examination) seem to show it's not really that obvious.
Because it calls into doubt both the advisability of the current standard of care and the theoretical framework the treatment is based on. If "diagnose people with gender dysphoria if they say they're trans" is an effective diagnosis method, why is it getting so many apparent false-positives? If "gender identity" is an inborn trait that people have an internal sense of, how are all these people getting it wrong? Why don't they just feel "gender dysphoria" the first time someone calls them "he" and immediately stop? For those who think they're not false-positives, why does it seem to so obviously spread socially? If the answer is something like "because the born-trans members felt more comfortable coming out", how does it get such absurdly high rates among not-very-selected subgroups? If 40% of a classroom in a private girl's high-school comes out as trans, does that mean we should believe 40% of all women throughout the world and all of history are closeted transgender people? I don't think you have be certain about whether you think "inborn transgenderism isn't real" or "inborn transgenderism is real but 99% of post-surge ones are false-positives" or "more than 1% are real but there's a large fraction of false-positives" to point out the ways the dominant theoretical framework and treatment methodology doesn't really make sense. Nor is there going to be a lot of a agreement on those among critics. Also "Are there a group of people with an inborn 'wrong gender identity' disorder that is best treated through gender transition?", "Are those people 'really' the other gender?", and "Would it be best if society did X to encourage or enforce classifying them as the other gender?" are three different questions.
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I don't think that follows without more argument. It's setting off alarm bells of the shape:
Your summary presupposes that some trans people are their stated gender, and I don't know if it's more accurate than other summaries that don't make that assumption, for example "this subset of trans people are deluded in this specific way (while others are in other ways)".
No, absolutely not.
If gender identity and dysphoria is fixed at birth, then you have to deal with which rights to give them and what medical treatments to perform. "None" is a valid answer, even if it's not one I like.
If gender identity is mutable and dysphoria can be caused, then you also have to deal with social policies that cause or prevent it.
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I highly doubt you're arguing in good faith here.
Not sure who you're talking to, but that isn't the modal "anti-trans" view, and I doubt anyone has that strawman view on this forum. Sure, many trans people are delusional (the ones who merely declare they want to be treated as the other sex aren't, but the modern line that they are and always have been another sex is just obviously false). But adults are free to pursue happiness in their own way, including transitioning, and it's no big deal for me to be polite and play along with their preferences most of the time.
I suspect you know that most people's main objection is to forcing the rest of society to play along. That includes:
This is a hilariously absurd take. You're just shit-stirring.
It applies to me. All transgenders are wrong about a very obvious and easily verifiable fact. That is, literally, the definition of transgender. They confront proof of this wrongness every time they take a shower or use the toilet- hopefully, multiple times a day. They are, in other words, delusional, and playing along for the sake of their mental health is not actually any sort of obligation, except perhaps occasionally for actual mental health professionals, and not for the sake of increasing their comfort with their delusion but only for that of getting at and treating the underlying issues.
Now there are many lumped into the category of transgender who believe themselves to be something other than male and female, who identify as 'queer' or 'nonbinary'. I don't know what these categories are because these categories are not real, and while these people are wrong they're wrong about metaphysics- claiming to be something that isn't real on nonexistent philosophical grounds isn't falsifiable, it can't be delusional. But these people are not transgenders proper.
This stance does not, incidentally, actually determine whether people should be banned from transition. Not least, transition is sufficiently difficult to define as to make that hard.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but OP was addressing imaginary people who say "no one should be allowed to transition". It doesn't sound like you fit that mould. Of course, the pro-trans media will throw people who don't want kids to transition, or who don't want to be forced to pay for others transitioning, into that category. But that's politics for you; and you shouldn't do their work for them by self-identifying as such.
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I don’t understand what’s the delusion? The vast majority of trans people are acutely aware of the reality of their biological sex, otherwise they would not be taking hormones and having surgery.
Being trans is about wanting to be the opposite sex, or at least being distressed by your own biological sex and sexual characteristics. What are they wrong about?
It’s like thinking overweight people who take GLP-1 antagonists are delusional about thinking they’re actually skinny. That seems… completely backwards? There’s anorexic people who take Ozempic but the delusion is thinking they’re being fat - the equivalent would be a cis woman taking estrogen because she has a delusion that she’s biologically male. A trans woman is 100% correct about not being biologically female, which is why she’d want medical interventions instead of doing nothing!
There’s an ontological debate over the definition of the words “woman” and “man” and the whole gender vs sex kerfuffle, and some activists’ definition of “woman” is circular to the point of uselessness, but that’s a separate issue and more of a debate around values, not facts.
I know, I know, nutpicking and all that, but I've encountered more than my fair share of trans-identified males who will complain about being described as "male" and who insist that they're every bit as female as any cis woman. I have no idea how common such people are, but they absolutely exist.
Regardless of how many people actually believe this, it's obvious that politically this is the line mainstream trans activism has to take, because otherwise to exclude trans people from spaces, all their opponents have to do is relabel them from, say, "women's sports" to "female sports", and that would defeat the entire purpose of trans activism.
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The delusion is in insisting that wanting to be something is exactly the same thing as being that something, which is obviously ridiculous. Honestly you are starting to sound wilfully ignorant which makes me think you are trans-identified yourself, because consistently denying reality and pretending not to understand things that have been explained to you ad nauseam is a key characteristic of trans-identified people and their allies.
But I'll bite and explain once more. According to mainstream gender ideology:
To apply this analogy, it would be like thinking that overweight people become skinny merely by expressing the desire to become skinny. And moreover, not only are they now skinny (even though they are objectively still fat), they have retroactively always been skinny, and if you deny this, you are a bigot and you will get banned for misweighting a stunning and brave transskinny person.
The fact that nobody actually thinks like this when it comes to fat people shows how ridiculous gender ideology is.
And sure, there is a type of trans person who actually tries to transition. They will take cross sex hormones, change out their wardrobe, change their behavior, and so on. Those people have at least some valid claim to be treated as the opposite sex. But importantly, gender ideology doesn't require anyone to do anything like that (claiming someone needs to transitions to be “valid” as a transgender makes you truscum which is practically as bad as being a TERF) and even if you go through all that trouble, obviously it doesn't change who you were before your transition, although gender ideologues will insist that who you were in the past depends entirely on what you identify as today.
@rae is trans, yes.
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My understanding of the matter is more:
The premise that gender is merely a separate thing from sex was used as a foot in the door twenty years ago. No modern gender ideologue operates on the basis that biological sex is real and important today.
If you disagree, I will ask you the same thing as I asked Rae: go ahead edit the fact that Imane Khelif is male and that Elliot Page is female into their respective Wikipedia pages. If you manage to do that, I will concede that gender ideologues in the real world separate sex from gender identity.
Sure, that's what gender ideologues believe, but why shouldn't it be? Especially if they use their false claim to get special privileges, like Imane Khelif falsely claiming to be a woman to compete in the women's boxing tournament.
Again, that's perfectly reasonable up to the point where they make false claims to access resources they shouldn't have access to. The analogy fails because people with embarassing skin conditions or missing limbs don't generally claim to have flawless complexions or complete bodies.
The closest case I can think of is someone like Oscar Pistorius who is a sprinter with artifical legs who was eventually banned from competing against natural humans because he had an advantage over regular athletes. If we can ban Pistorius from men's sports, why can't we ban Khelif from women's sports?
Also, the euphemistic "should" in "should keep that to yourself" is playing the part of a motte. I have no problem with the idea that it's just as impolite to point out that a transwoman looks ridiculous as it is to call attention to somebody's missing arm (although I would hope the transwoman had someone in their life who was honest with them). The actual bailey is "you MUST keep that to yourself, or you are a declared Enemy and we will publicly advocate for doxxing you, getting you fired, and (in the UK, at least) jailing you".
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That’s my understanding as well. Maybe @MartianNight and @hydroacetylene don’t believe in the gender/sex distinction but it’s central to the mainstream trans viewpoint and it’s either a straw man or a misinterpretation to interpret “x was always a man” as “x is and always was biologically male”.
Progressives will be very sensitive about language and avoid explicitly calling a trans man a biological female, but they aren’t (completely) denying reality, they’ll just use euphemisms and softer language (like AFAB/AMAB, “presenting as female at the time”). If you don’t have hold the sex/gender distinction it’s easy to think it’s complete nonsensical absurdity and that they’re saying a man can will himself into having a uterus, as opposed to having this nebulously defined conception of the inner self as a woman.
No it's not, and I've already pointed you to enough examples that I now believe you are being completely disingenuous the way all gender ideologues are always completely disingenuous.
If gender ideologues embraced the sex/gender distinction, Wikipedia's Elliot Page article would start with: "Elliot Page is a female actor who identifies as a man"
And Wikipedia's Imane Khelif article would start with "Imane Khelif is an intersex male suffering from 5AR2D who identifies as a woman..."
The Khelif article literally contains the false claim that "Khelif was born female" and for months contained the completely unsubstantiated sentence "false claims that she was a male circulated online": while these claims did circulate online, they were factually true, and this is still not acknowledged, though the sentence has been modified by replacing "male" with "man" which is still a lie since Khelif is a man in the trivial meaning of the word.
There is no "sensitivity" or "soft language" here. There is just a complete denial of objective reality. And it's not an oversight: this was one of the most-viewed articles of 2025. Many people tried to correct the "born female" and "false claims" phrasing; these people were all overruled by the gender activists that watch these articles like hawks and police the language carefully with the intent to maximally deceive the public.
If you disagree and you think the statement "Khelif was born female" was not meant to deceive the reader into thinking Khelif was born female (when in fact Khelif was born male) I would love to read your argument to that effect. But stop your bullshit about me not “believing” in a gender/sex distinction that obviously real world gender ideologues don't believe in either, considering that they're always intentionally conflating gender with sex, and never plainly state the sex of transgender/intersex people.
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How have I denied reality? I guess we can argue over the proportions of people with extreme beliefs about gender. I’m not even saying I agree with the mainstream pro trans position, I don’t, but I feel like you’re painting a straw man here.
Anyone who believes trans people literally become the opposite sex by self declaration is delusional and an idiot. That might be a big proportion of people arguing online about it, I don’t know, but I’ve thankfully never met anyone who believed that IRL.
That is so stupid it has so be a straw man or a minority of hardcore activists that don’t represent most trans people (which I have never encountered). Trans activists are all about separating gender from sex, and saying you being a man or a woman is different from you being male or female. That’s why there’s the whole “what is a woman” debate, otherwise how would that work, would they believe you can spontaneously manifest a uterus by believing you have one?
This is the vast majority of trans people I know, at least for hormones and wardrobe, behaviour is somewhat hit or miss.
Guess I’m as bad as a TERF then. If you make no attempt to present as a woman before going to the woman’s bathroom or locker room, obviously you might make people uncomfortable and they wouldn’t be out of bounds in asking you to leave.
OK but that is literally the standard model of gender ideology in the real world, and if you argue for your interpretation you will get banned from half the internet and fired from every job in academia, hollywood, sillicon valley, and wherever else the woke reign supreme.
Go try and edit Wikipedia to reflect your belief that Elliot Page was a woman when he played a pregnant teenage girl. Heck, go on Wikipedia and edit the Elliot Page article to state that Page might be a man now but he still is biologically female and was born female (rather than merely being “assigned female at birth” by an ignorant doctor) If you manage to do that without getting banned or ganged upon by a rabid troupe of gender ideologues who will swiftly revert your changes, I might consider your hypothesis that gender ideology might possibly mean what you claim it means.
But who are we kidding? We both know that your conception of gender ideology doesn't exist outside The Motte. It's actually a fantastic example of the motte-and-baily fallacy. Only in The Motte, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, where people don't automatically agree that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, does transwoman mean “person who wishes they are a woman but is a male in reality”. Everywhere else it means “woman, and if you deny it you're banned”.
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Wikipedia is a private organization and is allowed to set their policies as they please.
Employers should have a right to free association and should be able to fire someone for any reason they please.
I am not aware of this ever happening in the US. There may be some other nations that have done so, but those nations also tend to be highly censorious in other areas too (like how the UK has effectively outlawed a lot of Palestine support) so it seems to be a general free speech issue with them.
Same thing with this. Employer right to free association is based, government compelling something is not.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
The only instance I know of people actually trying to feign transness to enter sports was for the Daily Wire's movie LadyBallers in which they failed to get a man actually willing to undergo the transition requirements in joining the women's competitions.
Makes sense, nobody cares about women's sports to begin with so people aren't giving themselves hormones and surgeries for multiple years just to win in them. Every trans participant in women's sports I've heard of (the vanishingly few already) seem to have been transitioning for real and persisted even after they stopped participating.
and they should choose different policies.
and they should choose different policies.
and they should choose different policies.
and they should choose different
policiescategories.People can freely choose to do bad things, and I can object to it. The government isn't the only valid target for disapproval.
I saw that pattern of arguments a lot more in "free speech" debates, where one side would highlight something that suppressed viewpoints, stifled debate, and prevented the free flow of information, while the other side would dismiss it because the American government did not violate their First Amendment.
Once the government-only frame is accepted, it's really hard to get the debate out of it.
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I don't think anyone is suggesting otherwise. I do not believe that it should be illegal for Wikipedia to do what they do. But just because it's legal doesn't mean it's acceptable. I believe that it is unreasonable for Wikipedia to act in the way they do, and I (and others) criticize them on that basis.
You are allowed to disagree with them, you have just as much rights as any of them do. The only reason I'm pointing this out is because the comment included them as an example of
Wikipedia is not forcing you to "play along". If they were using the threat of violence in some form they would be. But as is, they're a private organization that gets to decide their own policies.
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http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/
The problem with this response has always been is that categories vary wildly between groups.
Even something as simple as "what is a sound?" gets a fierce debate when you ask if a tree falling in a forest with no one around makes one. No one contests the base level reality, that the air around the tree vibrates. They disagree over whether or not the vibrations itself counts as sound, or if it's the perception of said vibrations that do.
We see this everywhere. Is water wet? Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is a palm tree a tree?
And the words themselves can shift depending on the context they're used in. The tomato as a fruit vs a vegetable is a common example of this. And Scott's own example of whales and dolphins as dag for the department of dag.
And words change over time too. And it's not just trans activists who commit this either. When someone refers to Caster Semenya, Imane Khelif or other intersex individuals with female presenting genital as a man, they have changed the definition of man and woman. They are applying a new modern definition over words far far older than chromosomes were known to exist for. Historically intersex people like Semenya and Khelif would have been women, it is the changed definition that says otherwise.
The trans debate is often like this. A debate over categories, a debate if sound is the vibrations or the perception. A debate if a tree is the morphological structure of a tall perinnial plant with a trunk and crown and thus the palm tree is included, or if a tree is that but also as a woody plant with secondary growth. Or if we wanted to define it even more exclusively, we could do a woody dicot with secondary growth and exclude stuff like conifers as well since they're of a different lineage. We can do all sorts of things like that! And we do. And we argue about them all the time. Categories are made for man, not man for the categories.
This is simply not true. Historically, most males with 5ARD (which is the condition that Semenya and Khelif have) would be considered men after going through puberty.
This varies between cultures, obviously, but for example, in the Dominican Republic boys with 5ARD are called guevedoces (literally: penis-at-twelve) and they are considered men who only grow a penis when they hit puberty. They aren't considered women, which makes sense, when they don't have any of the traits of women: they don't have breasts, wider hips, they don't have ovaries or a uterus, and cannot give birth. But they can impregnate women, like men, just like Caster Semenya has.
So historically, intersex males with 5ARD have been considered men, not women. You are changing definitions if you insist that Semenya and Khelif are women.
There's actually an incredibly easy way to check this simply by looking at how Semenya and Khelif were treated before their intersex conditions were known. Semenya was assigned female and raised as a girl, and lived through her life as a woman. Likewise Khelif was also assigned female, raised as a girl, and lived through her life as a woman. Their specific lives were as girls and women.
Yes it does vary among cultures, which is a great example of how even biological categories can be really fuzzy. After all, categorization systems are created by humans for humans. The map is not the territory.
It also depends on the intersex condition in question too, there is way more than just 5ARD so even if every case of 5ARD in every single culture throughout all of history was treated as men, we would still have tons of other fuzzy conditions to consider. And things like the SRY gene test can not be following the historic definition, as genes were not known until very recently. It is literally impossible unless time travel is invented and someone taught our ancient Germanic/Norse/whateverelseispartofEnglish ancestors about genetics.
You're dodging the central point, which is that ancient cultures already knew that geuevedoces weren't women. They called them "penis at twelve" exactly because they thought of them a special kind of boy that only grows his penis when he hits puberty (when most boys are born with them). They weren't considered women.
No, she didn't live life as a woman. She lived as a girl until puberty. Then when girls started to develop into women, Khelif developed into a man. He grew taller, with broad shoulders, and narrow hips, while his female peers developed wider hips and started menstruating. Khelif has never had a period in his life, because he lacks any female organs, which is how he knew he was male. He must have figured it out at age 15 or 16 at the latest. Since then, he has been living a lie.
Sure, but 5ARD is the most common and it is what Khelif and Semenya and a bunch of other male athletes who competed in women's sports have. Let's start by getting the gender ideologues to acknowledge that, then we can move into more obscure conditions.
Humans knew about the male and female sex before the discovery of chromosomes. You don't need to know the genetic details to understand that males and females are built differently. In any case, it doesn't excuse the current state of the world. It's settled science that Imane Khelif is a man in all ways that matter for the purpose of boxing.
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Bostock begs to differ.
Anti discrimination laws are largely bullshit and unnecessary (as any society that passes and maintains an anti discrimination law is one already broadly against discrimination) so they shouldn't really exist.
But in so much as they do exist, Bostock was a logical decision that discrimination against gay or trans employees is defacto discrimination against them for their sex, under the logic that allowing X from male employees (like certain names or clothes or medical treatments or spouses) but not female employees or vice versa requires sex discrimination.
They're not good, but it's not the court's job to decide what is and isn't good. It's to decide constitutionality and interpretation.
Sometimes the broader society is against discrimination, while some areas within it are less enlightened. (This was approximately the case with the origin of anti-discrimination laws.)
A 'something sort of like left-libertarianism-ist' solution might be to have anti-discrimination laws, to establish non-discrimination as the baseline standard, but allow businesses to buy exemption from such, with the price going to an organisation rendering assistance to whichever group with which the business owner does not wish to associate; in a major city with fifty bakeries, forty-nine of whom will cater anyone's wedding as long as their money's good, the fiftieth would pay a purely nominal sum to an LGBTQWERTY+-*/ advocates' firm, and be allowed to have a 'one-man-one-woman weddings only' policy; in a small town with two bakeries, both of whose owners hope to attract customers who resent that gay people are permitted to keep their blood inside their bodies, the fee would be increased until either one of them yields, or someone opens a third bakery and undercuts them.
This was actually one of the reasons why big business pushed for the anti discrimination laws. General society wasn't open to blatant discrimination anymore, but there was strong enough pockets left they feared it could create a market niche and enable smaller competition to take their more bigoted customers away. The solution then was to make sure that couldn't happen by enshrining it everywhere as illegal instead.
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This is strawman libertarianism. People should have a right to do these things, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be criticized for doing so. The only thing that libertarians require here is that it not be made illegal. Nobody, of course, is saying that it should be illegal for Wikipedia to have pro-trans policies.
And if you say "that isn't a strawman, I really believe that", I don't believe you, unless you follow that to its logical conclusion and say that, for instance, employees should be able to fire people based on race. But I bet you would reject that conclusion.
In what way have you not been allowed to criticize Wikipedia?
Yes. Government actions and private actions are different things. Government has a monopoly on violence and everything they do is with violence backing them up. Individual bad actors do sometimes use violence too (we can not constantly monitor and control every person 24/7), but that is illegal and we lock them up and punish them for it when we can prove it.
Or put it this way, John calls his boss's wife a whore.
His boss punches John in response: Not acceptable.
His boss calls the police chief and John is locked up via government force: Not acceptable
His boss fires John: Acceptable. He has free association for his business.
I believe they should be able to do that if they wish. Let the market and the private actors they associate with respond to that as they please.
You were the one who implied he shouldn't criticize Wikipedia, by giving the "but it's legal" retort. Come on now.
But he said
He is allowed to criticize Wikipedia. In the same way I am allowed to point out that Wikipedia exercising their rights is not "forcing" him to do anything.
If Wikipedia was actually forcing him to do something that would be wrong. But they aren't.
He is also welcome to start his own version with deadnames and deadpronouns if he feels like it.
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The case of rapist Isla Bryson, still referred to by Wikipedia as a 'woman', literally brought down the Scottish government because Nicola Sturgeon could not be made to admit the possibility that putting a man who was going to jail for raping women into a prison full of women might be inappropriate.
Is it appropriate to put a man who is going to jail for raping men into a prison full of men?
Yes.
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In sports, there are not actually "Men's leagues" and "Women's leagues". There are "Women's leagues" and "Open leagues". The Women's leagues are a special category created because they generally can't offer table stakes level competition in the Open leagues.
Just so with prisons.
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Neither of those argument doesn't work. There are 3 groups in the study:
The conclusion isn't based on just comparing trans people to controls It's based on how theie mental health deteriorated after transition. I also remember the author of the interview saying all students get a regular (yearly?) mental health assesment in Finland.
I agree that this study is not enough to conclude that, but I don't I've seen anyone say "this study clearly shows that no one should transition". Instead, it is a rebuttal to the pro trans narrative that claims they are able to accurately diagnose dysphoria, and that these interventions not only help, but are medically necessary. This conversation has a long running context, where the pro-trans side was deliberately misleading people and attacking skeptics for years, so I don't think it's right to try and portray them as saying "well, we just think there's a non-zero number of people who might benefit from this"
The kind of people who say "no one should transition" don't so much believe some one "isn't their stated gender", they question the very concept of gender. I think it's a strong argument, "gender" is effectively a religious belief. Specifically it seems that it's a secular version of the belief in a soul, and I think it's fair to say that this is not a valid basis for a medical intervention
I also don't see the contradiction. You can say "no one should transition", and "this social contagions seems to be affecting mostly adolescent girls". I see no presupposition of validity of other people's gender dysphoria.
One problem is that when considering the effect of an intervention, this is basically an apples-to-oranges-to-licorice comparison.
The gold standard for determining the effect of an intervention would be a randomized controlled trial (RCT). Take a patient and then prescribe them either a puberty blocker or a placebo, so that neither you nor they know what they got, and then follow up on the outcome years later.
Obviously this is hard to do for ethical reasons. But anything else risks simply measuring confounders. Perhaps the people opting for intervention simply had a higher trust in their medical system, and consequently were also more likely to seek psychiatric help with other problems. Or a million other things.
This is not my experience. The anti-trans side believes very strongly in their conception of gender, hence all the bathroom bans. Someone who actually rejected the concept of gender might preach some kind of pansexuality where you simply do not care what kind of sex bit your partners have. They might reject the very concept of straight and gay couples because There Is No Gender, Man.
By contrast, the people most offended by trans people believe very strongly in the existence of gender, they just happen to think that it is identical to sex-assigned-at-birth.
This is a weird framing. I wouldn't say I believe in gender, but think it's identical to sex (not "sex-assigned-at-birth", just "sex"). I would say sex is the only thing that actually exists. No one actually has a "gender identity" (hell, no one can even provide a cogent, non-circular definition of what "gender identity" even is), but even if they did, it's a bad idea to design public policies around unfalsifiable claims people make about their own inner experiences. "Gender identity" meets this description, "sex" does not, ergo "sex" is a good basis on which to design public policies and "gender identity" is not.
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Oh, that's rich. When the Cass Review pointed out that the evidence for trans medicine is of low quality, the pro-trans side was claiming that it's oh-so-unfair that Cass would only declare a study "good" if it's double-blind (spoiler: she didn't), but now we're supposed apply that standard to studies with negative results, otherwise the interventions should be deemed good by default? How does that make any sense?
Thay sounds lime your belief in gender being so strong, that you can't conceive of someone having an alternative belief, and interpreting their thoughts through your lens. Why would I need to believe in "gender" to segregate people by sex?
That makes no sense. Let's say I accept "gender" exists, even under that belief system it's possible to say "even though we sometime segregate people by gender, in this context it's more appropriate to segregate them by sex". I've been told that by pro-trans people! So if I can segregate people by sex when gender exists, I can do so when I think it doesn't.
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Gender-as-distinct-from-sex is either of nonsense or actively reifying stereotypes, take your pick. Souls are more coherent than strict self-ID gender. That sounds harsh, but for those following along at home, play this out for a minute. If your gender has no connection to the outside world, it's just your internal experience and label for yourself that you definitionally can't be wrong about, then there's absolutely zero reason for anybody to ever treat anybody else differently based upon their gender. There's no reason for gendered spaces or activities or anything at all, and so since the outside world has no reason to care, poof! Bye, gender. Trying to hold onto it is going to just wrap around into it not mattering or build up inconsistencies and nonsense. So for gender to be A Thing about which We Should Care, it has to have some ties to the outside world. Being distinct from sex, we're already ruling out biology. So that leaves social/cultural factors, which are not innate, not inherent, and indeed we see them vary by culture. So we should care about a bundle of traits and properties a particular culture has decided go together - that is a stereotype!
If women are people who X and only X, then let's just deal with X directly rather than lay an extra category on top. If women are people who X and Y, then baby you've got a
stewstereotype going! If women are people who call themselves women and nothing else, then we've no reason at all to care. Once you take the biology out of the gender, you have nothing left that anybody can or should care about but social and cultural baggage, and so by clinging to it and impressing how important it all is to you, you're just strengthening your cultural stereotypes and calling 'em sacred. Quit it.The '90s had the right idea. Boys can wear dresses and have tea parties, girls can play with monster trucks and hit one another with sticks, etc and so on, and none of those things make them not boys or not girls. Let the words refer to the biological reality underneath that is true and correct in 99+% of cases, invent special terms for the outliers if you must, drop the social/cultural barriers, and just let people do their thing. There's no reason for all the hassle, and it can't and won't get anybody any more freedom anyway.
You want to take hormones and are otherwise okay with opening the gates on letting people put stuff in their bodies if they feel like it, go for it. You want to wear 'gender inappropriate clothing' and are otherwise okay with a general lack of expected dressing standards, go for it. You want elective/cosmetic surgery so that your body is more pleasant for you and are otherwise okay with people having other such surgeries, go for it. Do What You Want, up to the limit of what you think society should allow in general, because you are not a special case. You cannot be a special case, because there is nothing special underneath. You're just a boy or a girl who wants to do an activity which is not gated by gender.
IMO trying to completely separate gender from its biological aspect is partly cope for the fact that transition is an imperfect technology and not everybody ends up passing, and no surgery can make you have the reproductive functionality of the opposite sex yet.
Most trans people desperately want to be the opposite sex on a biological level and a trans woman being allowed to wear dresses because boys can dress however they want won’t help with the fact that her hips are too narrow and she hates having stubble and that having a penis means most men will be uninterested in dating her, and that she won’t be able to have a normal sex life regardless, or have children the normal way, etc.
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I take the opposite stance, regardless of mental health outcomes banning people from transitioning is wrong. The discussion isn't just about trans people, but the underlying thought processes involving the role of government and restrictions to "save people from themselves". And those thought processes have real consequences.
The FDA is already really bad for this, the US government takes an approach that everything is basically banned until "proven" safe. Our default is that you are a moron who can't be trusted to take any risk. And this means small stuff like why you can't buy good sunscreen, to more serious issues like why it's difficult for terminally ill patients to try new risky procedures, or as this ACX post has gone over before, why your child might have died because they couldn't get European fish oil.
And it delays medical and scientific advances a lot! Look at this estimate putting the COVID vaccine by 2033. Thank god for operation warp speed allowing us to bypass tedious bullshit (or at least do them simultaneously) and get it out in less than a year. Imagine if other medicine could come out so quickly like the GLP1s! Imagine how many lives could be saved or improved if not for the nanny state "protecting" us.
The we must protect morons from themselves stance inevitably means treating you as a moron too. You must be kept safe from the sunscreen that is widely used in Asia and Europe. You must be kept safe from experimental treatments before you die. You must be kept safe from saving your kid. You must be kept safe from deciding that you're happier with cross sex hormones. You must be kept safe from scientific advancements. You are a moron, you do not get to make your own choices, the central bureaucrats simply know better.
We don't stop this by engaging in more banning. We have to throw away the entire concept in the trash, and accept that yes morons will sometimes make moronic decisions that hurt themselves but restrictive government just means treating everyone as a moron. I don't see myself as a moron. Does anyone here think differently of themselves?
I'm often pretty moronic. That doesn't make me more in favor of restrictive government, though. The average representative there seems to be even dumber than me, and we may be unable to choose better ones, because the median voter seems to be even dumber than them! I'll take my chances with my own decisions, thanks.
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A fine stance to have, but it runs into difficulties with children and minors and the question of whether they can, or should be allowed to, provide consent.
That's a similar issue of how much more controlling we have gotten about children as well. My parents are old enough that as children they would go out biking around the neighborhoods miles away without supervision, without cell phones, and without much worry from my grandparents. In fact it was expected that you would go out and play for the most of the day and come home for dinner. This was the norm.
I wasn't allowed very far, but I could bike around the neighborhood some, go to neighbors houses to hang with the kids there, go down to the local pool. Maybe get dropped off at the mall as a teen and hang out there or whatever.
Now, 11 year olds aren't trusted to go to a different aisle in the grocery store. A different aisle in the same store.
We have decided that modern kids are morons in ways that they weren't for the entire rest of history. And we've culturally decided that too, where parents who don't engage in hysteria get CPS called on them constantly and some parents have ended up arrested. Which means even I have to be cautious in the freedoms I give my own kids, not even the same ones I had growing up yet alone those of my parents. Not by choice, but because government enforcers decided my kids are apparently too stupid to walk down to a nearby store or something.
Modern society coddles our children and trains them to be immature and incapable in their teens. But not too long ago, a good bit of those teenagers would have been off from their families working jobs as squires or farmhands or "youngsters" midshipmen or something else speaking of ships, a cabin boy or an apprenticeship for the local blacksmith/tailor/etc or whatever else. The world wasn't rich enough to coddle older children and teens from serious work and serious decisions, so the teens were capable. They had to be.
Which is another important point. Coddling makes us weaker. When government treats us like morons, we slowly become morons even when we are capable of more. We are lobotomized by paternalist attitudes.
I heavily agree with this post and the one up above about allowing medical procedures.
There is a frustrating modern tendency to either have allowed and encouraged, or discouraged and forbidden.
I'm libertarian and I'd like drugs, gambling, prostitution, plastic surgery, porn, etc to be legal and discouraged.
Seeing them legal and encouraged has really strained my principles here. If I'm absolutely forced to choose between the two realistic options ... I'd pick legal for everything to deny the state the capacity. But if they already have the capacity, I'd be picking illegal for some things. Gender reassignment is probably one of them.
Well do keep in mind that there's also illegal and encouraged. People will just ignore the law and at some point you're stuck fighting a losing battle trying to actually enforce it too much. You haven't actually stopped it, you're just harassing people every once in a while.
Traffic enforcement is at constant odds with this issue, no one wants speeders in their neighborhood but everyone wants to speed in other neighborhoods. People even get pissed at you if you don't speed. We all accept it as technically against the law, but there's no winning the fight here. You can't even automate the process because no one wants it. We will not stop the speeders, so we just give everyone a x% chance of being unlucky and paying a fine each time they drive.
It's the same thing with a lot of drugs, and prostitution and gambling. There's just only so much you can do, because lots of people want it and they want it very much. And enforcing against it can just make them pissed. Joe Rogan famously smokes weed on his podcast despite being in Texas. Will Texas authorities ever go after him? No. Actually enforcing Texas's marijuana laws like that is unpopular and they know it.
You can change a fair bit with law, and you can harass random people every once in a while like we do with traffic enforcement and prostitution stings but in general if people want it they'll just do it anyway. The people who really want to gamble will find a way to gamble. The people who really want a prostitute will find some sort of escort loophole. The people who really want drugs will get it. And the markets will respond, the demand pulls in more supply. There's a reason why Trump's drone strikes on traffickers hasn't done much, because markets. If supply goes down then price goes up and there's more reward to providing new supply. Even Singapore struggles.
And likewise people who really want to transition will find a way. People manage it in Russia of all countries, they will handle it here.
I deleted a section on kids, that I think would have completed my post.
Snoop Dogg is effectively allowed to encourage people to smoke weed as a matter of free speech.
Your average school teacher is effectively prevented from doing so as a matter of job security.
I'd probably be fine with gender reassignment surgery being in the same legal category as weed currently is. Some more liberal states allow it. Some require basically a fake doctors note. Everyone agrees to keep it should generally be kept away from children, even if some 16 year olds manage to get access. Cops won't arrest you for it. Banks won't take money from businesses that engage in it. (By the way I'm not saying that I think weed is treated appropriately, I'd prefer it be treated more like alcohol)
I'm not a paternalist, and I was much more not a paternalist when I wasn't an actual father. The way the legal landscape and public school works these days means that I want transition soft banned so schools can't advocate for it and do it behind my back. You might think I'm crazy to be worried about such a thing, the only place that sort of craziness occurs is in like two counties in northern Virginia that keep making national news over those issues ... well I live in one of those counties. And I have three daughters, and one of them already insists on calling herself a boy and she isn't even in kindergarten. So I have worries about how that kid and the school system will interact.
I'm at a stage in life where a lot of my legal preferences are highly selfish. I really don't care if a stranger gets a transition and ruins their life and looks, or fulfills their lifelong dream and never experiences hardship again. I just don't want my daughter being talked into it by an ideologically captured teacher that only feels fulfillment in their life by acting out the most extreme forms of progressive activism. So I want it softly illegal. If I can't get that, at least make motorcycles illegal (guess which daughter really wants to ride one of those).
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Define "transition". If transition means teenagers receiving more mental health counseling and hormones that blunt part of the effects of puberty, I'm willing to believe that that helps some people feel better. If transition means some soft boys and girls uncomfortable with their sexual development donning new clothes and personae as they settle into a community of support, I'm willing to believe that that helps some people feel better. If transition means having your dick cut off and turned into an open wound that needs to be constantly dilated, however... I'm not sure I can believe that that really helps anybody. I guess you can always find someone delusional enough to feel better after almost anything. Doesn't the term "Stockholm Syndrome" exist to diagnose a particular case where the objectively bad experience of being kidnapped can be seen by the victim as a good development? What are we being asked to concede here? It's not clear to me.
... Is that really how you see it? That is not my impression at all. Trans activists deliberately made themselves subject to public scrutiny and public outreach as an attempt to re-enact the classic Civil Rights playbook. LGBT organizations deliberately moved to push trans rights as the next frontier after the success of gay marriage. Liberal activists happily complied and began campaigns to push trans equity groups in corporate spaces and pronouns in professional working environments. Bruce Jenner came out as Caitlyn in 2015. That was the point at which a generation of online debate about trans rights finally bubbled up into the mainstream. Then Jordan Peterson achieved notoriety for refusing to comply with amendments to Canada's Human Rights Act that would compel preferred pronouns. North Carolina's "bathroom bill" in fact was only a response to ordinances from local municipalities that passed pro-trans legal codes first.
Likewise, JK Rowling only started associating with TERF causes after perceived trans excesses that began the whole debate. It isn't as if conservatives woke up and decided that they needed a new scapegoat one day and the trans community was as good a target as any.
If anything, it seems to me like trans activists succeeded in their public outreach, then overreached by doubling down on trans kids. Now that the tide is shifting against trans rights, the movement is unable to admit that their own strategies had anything to do with anything.
In that particular case, the police somehow managed to make literal bank robbers the lesser evil!
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The study defines it thus:
It doesn't state how many just got hormones and how many got surgery.
Not sure what you mean by this. Puberty blockers or actual HRT? Obviously puberty is difficult for many and putting it off can prevent temporary discomfort, if that's what you mean, but in fact many trans people are happier after going through puberty, provided that it's the right puberty.
You mean social transitioning? The study was about medical transition. If it were just clothes and personae, the controversy would be much less severe.
You've been fed cherry-picked information about sex reassignment surgery. Many people are, in fact, happy about their surgeries. See /r/Transgender_Surgeries. Some of the dissatisfaction with SRS may be attributed to ineptly performed operations. The linked subreddit has much discussion on the quality of different surgeons, which varies greatly. One is dubbed "the butcher of Montreal"; another is widely known to be substandard and people only go to them because they're the only one covered by insurance.
And in any case, many trans people, even after socially transitioning and getting on HRT, prefer not to get SRS.
What objective metric do you propose to measure whether or not someone is better off other than asking them if they feel better?
And all of the media coverage could have been avoided if people had just treated it as a curiosity and a medical condition, and not some kind of new woke perversion to be fought. Like in Iran.
"Some people prefer to be referred to as a gender different from the one they were born with."
"Oh. Okay."
That's the normal response. The kind of response a person not looking for another culture war battle to fight would give.
The normal response to defecting from gender roles is, uh, not a polite 'oh. okay.'. Go wear a dress in public(and not in the gay district) with a big bushy beard if you don't believe me.
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Firstly, I think it's profoundly condescending to tell someone they've been "fed" cherry-picked stories, dumb sheeple that they are. Secondly, @Shakes wasn't passing a value judgement on the efficacy of bottom surgery: the part of his comment that you quoted is literally just an (accurate) description of what a vaginoplasty entails. Thirdly, it's rather hypocritical of you to accuse someone of having fallen for cherry-picked stories that portray bottom surgery negatively, then link to a subreddit that selects for people who are happy with their surgeries while excluding detransitioners (or, more sadly, people who took their own lives after undergoing bottom surgery). Fight cherry-picking with studies and meta-analyses, not cherry-picking in the opposite direction.
This proves too much. Heroin addicts claim to feel better when they use heroin. (I don't even disbelieve them – I'm sure they do feel happier in the short-term.) The fact that gender reassignment surgeries open their recipients up to a host of health problems they would not otherwise have had seems as good an "objective" metric as any other. As you more or less concede in the top-level comment, the question of whether surgical transition actually improves trans people's mental flourishing certainly seems to be an open one, and the point of medical studies is to give us hard data which will inform our decisions on whether it's a good idea for individual patients. If 90% of people diagnosed with gender dysphoria saw a durable uplift to their subjective well-being after undergoing surgical transition, it would be a no-brainer. 70%? Sure. 50%? Hmm – you might need to have a bit of a think about that one. 30%? Probably not until you've already tried several years of talk therapy. 10%? Only as a matter of last resort for those in such severe psychic distress that it's this or suicide.
If a person is considering undergoing a major elective medical procedure which will render it impossible for them to have children and opens them up to a host of medical problems they would not otherwise have had, we need robust data on the efficacy of that procedure in improving its recipients' subjective sense of well-being. Shrugging your shoulders and saying "well, some people feel better afterwards" is not good enough. (All of this goes double if you're expecting the taxpayer to foot the bill, as some trans activists demand.)
Personally, I support bodily autonomy for adults – but if one of my loved ones was considering surgically transitioning, I would do everything in my power to try to dissuade them. (In much the same way that I support the right of adults to practise polyamory or pursue careers in pornography or the entertainment industries, even though I know that the overwhelming majority of people who do so will see their subjective well-being take a hit as a result. If a close female friend of mine was considering starting an OnlyFans, I would support her right to do so, but I would also tell her that this is a decision she will almost certainly regret.)
When convicted male rapists with intact genitalia are demanding to serve their sentences in the female estate and these demands are being granted – then yes, this is a woke perversion to be fought. It's pure historical revisionism to claim that gender-critical people started this fight and that "trans people just want to live their lives in peace".
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The implementation of the liberal affirmative model accompanying a medical model put this to bed. You can't have a medical condition and a socially affirmative model assisted by wide celebration of concepts of identity placed in proximity to the general population, including children. You can't do so and claim you are adhering to rigorous medical research which has a default answer of "We don't know" to many basic questions about the condition, causes, and populations effected. Not when advocates and experts in medicine insist dysphoria is not a prerequisite for transgenderism.
If the Dutch Protocols led to 20 years more rigorous study with small experimental cohorts that invited critical dissent and testing, trans people not only would be better off but we might have a more advanced understanding of the condition. Of course if you tolerate slow, plodding research that demands dissent to progress in experimental areas -- to question and define the nature of gender, sex, identity and dysphoria -- you will have condemned some small number of trans people to suffering. They would have suffered for a purpose, namely a greater understanding and a lower profile that provided more tolerance via obscurity. Maybe we could do brain scans by now to screen or something.
The ideal outcome was for trans research to go on as a medical venture without ideological or social interest. An interesting article in The Atlantic would have popped up every few years. By now trans people would know know about the trans-Mecca neighborhood in Seattle in the event they were born in Utah.
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This is a little disingenuous. It was treated as a curiosity and a medical condition. It was specifically the activists who declared that it is an identity and absolutely not a medical condition, which was the genesis of the whole controversy.
Transvestites have been a curiosity since time immemorial. Dysphoria has been a medical condition in the books ever since we've had books. Don't pretend like it was the anti trans lobby that made this an issue.
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Surely this can't be serious? I've worked with numerous people who went down the autistic adult male to trans woman pipeline. I doubt I would have known even a single person like this thirty years ago. Are we really to believe that this was all due to anti trans activists?
I feel like Mottizens are probably more likely than most to have run into MtFs in their day-to-day life as a result of affluence, education, industries of choice etcetera. Admittedly mostly the 'Speedrunning-American' class of such.
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Surely there's a deadnaming joke in there somewhere.
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An interesting question with all the “autistic trans programmers” where is the trans-Bill Gates in his 60’s who transitioned a decade ago when it became normalized. Last I checked Bill Gates is on Epstein Island in his old age not suddenly trans.
When I read or watch information about some of the best game programmers of the 80s I remember multiple times where the person transitionned later in life. The only one that comes to my mind spontaneously is Daniel/Danielle Bunten (creator of M.U.L.E, one of the best early Electronic Arts titles). Going by google, there's quite a few more, including some with some notable credits to their names, certainly more than you'd expect for that generation.
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Seldomly on hacker news a woman is linked „look at this awesome womens youtube channel collecting miniature-clocks/explaining-soldering-electronics/extremely-male-nerd-hobby“ and it is always an old geezer who recently transitioned to a womens name.
It's kind of a meme or cliche in the gaming communities that any time someone talks about a woman speedrunner or pro e-sports player who performs at a world-class level, the odds are at least 9/10 that it's a trans male. That said, your comment reminded me of the YouTube channel Britta Food4Dogs, who, AFAICT, is just a regular old woman who seems to have genuine love for extremely nerdy JRPGs and other anime-related media, from watching some videos of her covering some very niche nerdy visual novels that I'm familiar with.
To be honest, at this point whenever I see mention of a woman in programming (or other very nerdy things like speedrunning), I assume that it's a dude until I see evidence to the contrary. It's just by far the more likely bet, in my experience.
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Bill Gates isn't rich because he was a great programmer.
I am using his name as a stand-in for great programmer then.
But he’s credited with developing MSFT originally software and had a 1590 SAT score back when that was rare and students could get into Harvard with 1300. If he’s not a stand-in for great programmer then I have no idea whose a great programmer.
He was a fine programmer, but there were many better programmers to work at Microsoft then and now. What he was, and what the autistic programmers often are not, was a brilliant businessman, and that made all the difference.
Yeah, the way the small Microsoft basically slew the juggernaut IBM's personal computer division (it took some time to bleed out, of course) and secured itself a place as one of the most powerful and important companies on the planet is the stuff of business legends.
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