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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.)
The problem is we were told for years and years and years that any mental health issue or depression a trans person (and all LGBTs by extension) was facing can be squarely pinned on "minority stress". In other words, the majority should un-bigot themselves and stop punishing victimless acts. Fair enough. But the expectations departed from "stop commenting or interfering in people's personal lives" and segued to "how dare you not care, do you know silence is VIOLENCE, indifference is p-word" (the p-word being privilege, original sin of woke morality). I am a straight man, not religious, I don't care if a man I'll never meet marries another man. But the thought of a man sticking his hairy dick inside another man's hairy poop-chute is just a disgusting fetish to me, even if I'm polite enough to not say it out loud. I also believe sex and gender are the same thing, edge cases notwithstanding. I believe all transgenders are mentally ill and their delusions are encouraged only by algorithm, but I'm polite enough to keep that bit to myself. I don't really care if an adult man chooses to mutilate his own genitals, even if suicide was a 100% guaranteed outcome of transitioning.
But I absolutely do not want any kind of LGBT education in schools. I'll go further, if I could reliably diagnose an "LGBT marker" in my unborn child, I would want to abort it.
Please, let's not make this a decibel contest. There are no objective metrics or units of measurement to quantify which side is "louder and more annoying", even if I should agree to points being awarded for silence. Now who you find louder is heavily filtered by:
Every tribe experiences the other side as overwhelmingly loud and aggressive while viewing their own side as reasonable pushback. Look how DEI threads go in Star Wars and gaming forums. When you point out "why should Luke Skywalker and his bloodline be sacrificial lamb to uplift no-name girbloss", you get responses like "ugh every single time... dude why do you care? Stop making everything political!" from the other side, after they succeeded in having their way after years of complaining and outraging, the things they accuse you of. But it's always a cope deployed when the previously dominant narrative starts facing serious resistance. In any hotly contested issue, both sides amplify what serves them. The side with institutional capture tends to be louder in legacy channels. The dissident side tends to be louder and cruder where it actually has open space. I'll be more honest though. I am super anti-woke, I'm well aware many anti-wokes engage in behaviour I'd find insufferable were it directed at me. But I don't care, because I still agree with their objectives and heavily dislike woketopia.
How do you expect me to not pay attention and also put on performative enthusiasm for pride parades and pride month every year? If your sexual preferences and gender identity should not matter, why can't I just ignore you? If they should matter, why should I not get upset about pinkwashing legacy straight-male oriented media? I am fine with you living your life as you please, but why do I have to celebrate your perceived identity and fetishes? Why are you looking around the room to see who stops clapping first? Why are you expecting me to watch Brokeback Mountain as a media literacy test? Because it's cinematically artful? The raw emotional acting? Or because it's an important progressive conversation? To me, it's just Oscar bait gayslop. I'd rather watch a poor man's Fast & Furious for 12 hours. Everyone gets aggressive if you breach their red lines.
I was at Chicago's Navy Pier the other day and the theater there was showing ads for a play of Brokeback Mountain.
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