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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.)
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.
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.
Citing employers free association rights are rich when they will get sued by the government for creating a hostile work environment if they for example didn’t want trans.
I'm against anti discrimination laws and think they should be overturned.
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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.
XKCD 1357 argues that free speech is the ultimate concession because your only defense is that it's not literally illegal to express a viewpoint. To this day, I'm still wondering why Randall Munroe didn't also apply this argument to censorship itself: Censorship is the ultimate concession because your only defense is that it's not literally illegal to get people fired for expressing thoughts you don't like.
Probably because it was a stupid argument to begin with, and the second worst strip on the site.
what's the first worst?
Half your age plus 7.
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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.
And when Wikipedia is trying to operate on an idea of being an impartial open source collective of human information. Then on certain issues they hardcore advocate for certain opinion driven stances.
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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.
Note that I said "rewriting history and Wikipedia". There is absolutely compulsion involved here. In the happy event that the Wikimedia Foundation decided tomorrow that they would like to return to the ideal of a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, and unlocked all the trans-adjacent pages to allow mainstream views, they would be attacked and sued. And anyone else who publishes information that includes "deadnames" is declared as anti-trans and will, in some countries, be in serious trouble. (Not the US - yet - but not for lack of trying! I'm grateful that the US has the strongest free-speech protections in the world.)
This is 100% Orwellian. "We have always been at war with Eastasia." "Elliot Page has always been a man."
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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.
The problem is that Scott's essay was silly, socially motivated, and shot a hole through the chest of Rationalism as being anything more than postmodern word games with a nerd's coat of hobby paint.
HA! You know, I just realized that in context the phrasing highlights quite explicitly the TERF complaint that most trans discourse is inherently misogynistic. Indeed, the categories were made for man.
Can't believe it took me this long. I wish I could think Scott was being subtly Straussian but no chance of him being less than a true believer.
In other words, you just don't like it. Meta discussions about words and meaning have been here since the beginning of rationalism https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb
Speaking of, that's an example! "Man" in Scott's case is referring to humans, homo sapiens.
If you want to be reductive, sure. I don't like murder either, or green bell peppers.
Does it make sense to put all those in one category?
That is what I call damning with faint praise.
I can give actual substanted reasons for why I don't like murder, like "having people live in fear of violence makes them less economically efficient" or "allowing murder dismantles a functional society" or even just the basic "I think murder is morally wrong".
What you provide here is just fluff. Pure ad hominem.
It's disguised in a wordy way to appear sophisticated, but there is nothing substantial said here.
But even with the fluff, it's still wrong. These "word games" have been a part of rationalism since at least the sequences, thus Scott playing word games couldn't have blown a hole open, if there is a hole it was already there. So even the fluff is wrong.
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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.
One ancient culture, which also isn't even fully true as plenty do continue to live as women
So even in the specific Dominican Republic culture, 5ARD is not always man.
A man with female on their birth certificate and presumably female appearing outer genitalia treated as a woman in an extremely anti trans Muslim country. If Algeria with religious fatwas ordered against transitioning considers Khelif a woman, perhaps she is in many contexts and it's not a "lie".
Sure, but they didn't (couldn't) test it through genes but instead stuff like the outer genitalia. Which Semenya and Khelif both seem to have female presenting outer genitalia. They would have been considered female by many people in many areas such as the anti trans Algeria!
Declaring it settled doesn't mean it is. Again Algeria, a country even more anti trans than many of the people here, considers her as a woman. The doctors who handled her at birth considered her as female. Clearly there is still dispute.
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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.
Bostock was not logical. The question is what did the words of the civil rights law mean (not quite the same as intent). It seems obviously clear that in the 1960s the words had a specific meaning and we then used a meaning in the 2020s to read into the historic statutes a specific requirement.
Stated differently, nobody but nobody would have believed in the 60s that the law passed created Bostock. Once you accept that, you have to believe that the meaning of law can change overtime.
Neil Gorsuch addressed this already as a staunch textualist.
Gorsuch is a remarkably consistent textualist when it comes to statutory interpretation. Maybe you disagree with textualism as a concept, but it is a coherent and understandable legal philosophy.
Congress should get rid of such anti discrimination laws, but that is not the court's job so long as they do not violate the constitution. It is to adjucate interpretation, and from a textualist standpoint I agree with Gorsuch that Title VII includes LGBT people.
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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.
What a lovely, neutral, non-inflammatory way to describe people who don't want to bake cakes for things against their conscience. Can we get non-discrimination laws that will force Jewish delis to serve bacon sandwiches too, or at least pay a fee which "would be increased until either one of them yields"? How about we make daycare centres cater to adult babies, or pay through the nose for not serving such?
One, I specified that one of them yielding is only one possible outcome; the price of an exemption would stop increasing even if all the incumbent businesses continue their discriminatory policies, if new businesses were founded to cater to the discriminated-against group and anyone who doesn't care one way or the other, and can offer lower prices by dint of not having to buy said exemptions.
Two, if you don't like the modest proposal on which I have speculated, and don't like the status quo of legally forbidding discrimination, what solution would you propose to the problem of all the businesses in an area having a policy of "We don't sell to your kind."?
If you were in charge of U. S. Federal civil-rights policy in the mid-20th century, and could get any solution you saw fit passed by the Legislative Branch, put in place by the Executive Branch, and upheld by the Judicial Branch, and were informed by whatever source you would find sufficiently convincing that, in the absence of Federal intervention, the southern states would not moderate on their own, and Black people in the southern states would continue to find very few businesses willing to sell to them, and effectively none that were either integrated or separate-but-actually-equal, thus giving rhetorical ammunition to the Communist powers, ultimately leading to the West losing the Cold War?
The standard answer to that seems to be "set up your own" (in the context of driving out BadThink online spaces). At the most extreme, if nobody will sell to black people or gay people or trans lawyers, then the black, gay, and trans lawyer people set up their own businesses selling to their own people.
That's the place where government can legitimately intervene: you can choose not to sell to these people, but you can't stop them or anyone else setting up shops to sell to them.
It has to be equally applied, if it's going to be applied. No more "okay we'll rule that the Christian fellowship college society has to allow atheists to run for leadership, but we're not going to compel the Afro-Latino-Hispanic engineers' club to allow white people to run for leadership, that would be absurd!" kind of interventions. If atheists can be in charge of the Bible reading classes, white guys can be in charge of the black Spanish engineers.
But nobody wants that, they want to force the holdouts to capitulate to the new régime.
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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 have implied that criticism of Wikipedia does not fit libertarian principles. Unless I am saying that Wikipedia should be made illegal, criticism of Wikipedia does fit libertarian principles.
You are allowed to criticize Wikipedia, of course you are. I am allowed to point out that Wikipedia has their rights as a private organization and their exercise of their rights does not constitute "forcing" a person into anything.
The same way if I were to kick you out of my house for chewing on my couch doesn't force you to not chew on couches. You can go chew on your own. It just means you can not chew on my couch in my home since I have the right to remove you from my home for whatever reason (including no reason!) as I deem. As you leave, feel free to call me a fascist couch Nazi or something.
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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.
I don't believe you. Not for a second.
Just look at the Kiwi Farms. One of the first attacks came from Jonathan Yaniv, a surprisingly powerful Canadian man who used transgender ideology to harass women into waxing his balls. When all criticism of his actions was censored from every corner of the Internet, you might have said:
"Build your own website!"
Ok, most documentation of Yaniv's activities got largely concentrated on the Kiwi Farms. But then Yaniv directly targeted its data center in Buffalo, NY and got them to physically unplug its devices by sending in false complaints.
"Build your own data center/ISP!"
Sure, whatever. It looks like Josh managed to get a dedicated ASN for KF and have found other ISPs that are fine peering with it. But now some random video game emulator developer committed suicide, therefore the domain name for the site must be terminated.
"Build your own domain registrar!"
It actually costs thousands of dollars a year to become your own domain registrar, so after getting dropped from DreamHost the domain was simply moved over to Cloudflare, but for the sake of argument, I'm ignoring that.
The next volley comes from a motivated group of trans activists, led by one particular trans activist (Keffals) gloating about deplatforming Destiny for wrongthink opinions. This group manages to get Cloudflare to #DropKiwifarms. Without Cloudflare, the Kiwi Farms is limited on options for DDoS mitigation.
"Build your own DDoS mitigation!"
Ok, sure. Josh managed to vibe-code Tartarus. It was that easy!
I'm just going to gloss over that after Cloudflare dropped, the site floundered around several DDoS mitigation solutions before Josh decided to roll his own, and Tartarus was actually only installed this year as the successor to several attempts.
I'm also going to super-gloss over the fact that DDoS mitigation is a lot more complicated than just "install X" and requires actual thousands of dollars in infrastructure to handle attacks! (If it was that easy, half the Internet wouldn't be gated behind Cloudflare right now.)
I think you see where this is going. I haven't even talked about:
"Build your own payment processors!" because they can just ban you and you have no appeal, you don't even get to know why you were banned. Building your own Internet cost thousands of dollars? Tough luck. Eat shit and do it without being able to raise funds from 99% of the population.
"Build your own forum software!" because yes, they can and will just revoke your license off of the word of an insane British man. (Josh is in fact trying to build his own forum software.)
"Build your own... legal firm?" Did you know that no one is going to stop you from filing frivolous lawsuits, forever, and you don't have to pay a dime for it, and the forum has been withstanding asinine litigation for years at this point, to the tune of several thousands of dollars in legal fees? And I haven't even talked about the threat actor who does have money to spend on lawfare? No? Well, now you do.
I think you get my point. Not a single time has the "start your own" argument ever been stated in good faith. Not a single proponent of such an argument actually wishes for their interlocutor to start their own website/ISP/data center/DDoS mitigation/payment processor/forum software/everything. This interpretation assumes that the problem of the censor (in this case, the trans activist) is merely that dissenting opinions are expressed on a platform they share with them, and that everything would be fine if those opinions were expressed elsewhere. The "we're just showing you the door!" school of censorship, in other words. This assumption is false.
No, what the "start your own" argument is actually saying is this: "I don't want your thoughts to be expressed, so I am going to censor you. However, I still want to have even the smallest of fig leafs that I somehow support free expression. To that end, I am going to point out that it is possible for you to start your own website/ISP/data center/yada yada. Nevermind the huge costs of doing this with few benefits in return, I do this to imply that because this option is theoretically available to you, you don't have anything to complain about. Now I don't have to concede that what I am doing is in fact censorship." And even this nanometer-sized fig leaf is proven false, when time after time, you build your own X and they do everything in their power to censor your X anyway.
So I am going to say no, @Jiro can't just start his own Wikipedia, and moreover, he shouldn't have to. When Wikipedia is still a frequently cited source seen as credible in the popular imagination, it ought to accurately reflect reality. That it doesn't and actively resists attempts to correct it is a travesty. And "just start your own Wikipedia bro" is not a credible counterargument to any criticism of Wikipedia not accurately reflecting reality, when it's highly likely to be targeted by trans activists and censored in the same way as the original.
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The old "recreate pillarized civilization from the ground up" retort, really?
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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?
Solitary's always an option, but I suspect the "put men in women's prisons" folx aren't too fond of that for other reasons.
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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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