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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.
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.
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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