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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 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?
The alternative is clearly worse. Because what sucks more than not having Euro sunscreen? Giving someone money for a jar of "SPF50 coconut oil" and burning lobster red. Giving somebody money for bootleg Asian sunscreen and getting a batch contaminated with benzene (carcinogenic in California, and everywhere else). Both happened. Both are worse than having a small selection of reliable sunscreen.
And sure, I can do the research myself. But I don't want to do that every time I go shopping. I also don't trust 90% of the population to do it right, especially not against hostile advertising. And sure, both sunscreen brands can be sued under some libertarian arbitration scheme. But I like not having skin cancer more than a 7 figure settlement (or getting nothing besides the privilege of watching my opponent go bankrupt). I can see the argument for experimental drugs for terminally ill patients. But terminally ill people are desperate, and absolutely need some form of protection - at least against financial exploitation.
And don't get me wrong, the FDA isn't really doing a good job here. But it's a job that needs to be done, and probably to a standard that's not so far removed from what is done today. Regulations are written in blood, ect.
That's called fraud. We can enforce against fraud without requiring genuine suppliers to pay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars "proving safety" of something widely used around the world without issue. People lying about the contents of a product or what it can do is a different category than "here's product A, it's used as a sunscreen in Countries X, Y and Z"
Some do get written in blood sure, but tons of regulations are just made up. Lots of regulations are even made just to make it more difficult for competition to exist, like why does being a barber in NC require almost 1600 school hours plus a 12 month apprenticeship? Do we genuinely think that this is because there was a bunch of wild barbers out there chopping people's ears off like they're Sweeney Todd? No. It's to make it more difficult for haircutting alternatives and drive up prices.
In the US, the FDA defines what "SPF50" even means. They have norms and test protocols to ensure this significance. Without the FDA, coconut oil has SPF50 for all intents and purposes. Could some other industry committee define "SPF", and sue cosmetic companies that use it wrongly? Sure. But I have to think for a long time until I can think of the first product at a supermarket that has an industry-defined label I respect (in fact, I can only think of greenwashing labels I don't trust ("fair trade", "organic") and technical standards I trust unconditionally ("USB-C" is a very reliable label, even on AliExpress).
Can we? Sunscreen is like the lowest common denominator, and it already gets tricky. Someone has to check for efficacy and side effects. The age of mineral-based UV filters is long past, today sunscreen often contains organic UV filters. A common conspiracy theory is that those organic rings are more harmful than sunburn itself - so someone better check side effects. And, sure enough, the organic UV filters from the 80s easily end up in detectable doses in blood, urine and breast milk of people who use them, and sure enough, they interact (weakly) with estrogen, androgen, or thyroid hormone receptors. Should this be allowed? Is this still acceptable? And should we really let sun screen producers answer those questions for us? (Ironically, those old aromatics are still in use today in US sun screen, most other countries have moved on to newer, larger and better organic filters, which the FDA hasn't evaluated yet and which pass through the skin much less readily)
Yes, without doubt. I'm not actually all that pro regulations. But that doesn't mean we can just remove them all, Chesterton’s Fence is there for a reason - maybe not a good reason, but I like my food and my drugs well tested. My barber may be held to lower standards.
Top Tier gasoline (1 2) comes to mind.
Huh, interesting. That one was firmly on the long list of labels I was fairly confident to be complete garbage. I never buy that stuff, and my last three cars made it well past 200k without a single instance of engine troubles. "Gunk" in the engine itself sounds like such a 1970's problem, I haven't ever heard of anybody having trouble with that.
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