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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32919 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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I wouldn't consider gender dysphoria to be a red herring, it's more of a flagship. The most prominent example due to it being deliberately spread and promoted above and beyond what most of the others are, and therefore the most obvious example of this trend.

But yes, it is but one example among many, and probably noncentral given that it has significant opposition and thus culture war effects while the others mostly go unnoticed and unopposed.

To quote my response to @aqouta below:

I suppose I think that compared to depression, anxiety, chronic pain, anorexia, and other issues I see trans as something that doesn't cause nearly as much harm, but generates a disproportionate amount of outrage. It's definitely one of the best examples of a subculture driving mental illness though.

Are you talking about in absolute terms? That is, transgenderism is significantly rarer than most of those conditions, and therefore fixing it would be less significant in total value than fixing one of the others.

Or do you mean per person? Because transgenderism causes significant distress in many of its sufferers, driving many to suicide, social ostracism, and mental anguish up to the point where they are willing to undergo expensive and permanent surgeries, including castration, in an attempt to alleviate it. The more serious cases (people who seek actual physical transition) seem comparable to the more serious cases of depression and anorexia, which also lead to suicide, self harm, and other forms of self-imposed physical harm to otherwise physically healthy people.

A transtrender who dresses up like the other sex and uses a different name for a few years before going back to normal isn't especially suffering, but neither is someone with minor social anxiety or self-diagnosed ADHD.

I think in comparing like to like it's pretty comparable to most of the others, aside from the disproportionate promotion/opposition it receives from each political side.

Yes in absolute quantitative terms. I don't particularly care about whether individual trans people have it worse than depressed or anxious people, I think the question is beyond confused anyway.

When you're looking at societal issues it makes sense to focus it on the aggregate, in my view. Why the heck would anyone talk about a mental illness 100 people had? (Obviously trans is larger but the media massively overplays the numbers.)

This is a reasonable point.

I still think it is appropriate to talk about in disproportion to its prevalence due to the unique nature of its advocacy. That is, it is deliberately being promoted and celebrated and spread, as opposed to incidentally spread via cultural knowledge as the other conditions are. As a result:

  1. It is increasing at a faster rate than the other conditions are. So its prevalence in the future may be greater than theirs even if its current prevalence is not

  2. It is significantly simpler to reduce. Stop digging the hole. Mental health conditions which are treated as mental health conditions and spread via general cultural knowledge of them would require deliberate anti-awareness campaigns or other anti-memetic shenanigans to reduce this way. Transgenderism just requires you to stop celebrating it. Or, it would have, the cat's probably out of the bag now and it's probably going to stick around for a long time even if a consensus were to be reached that it's negative for its sufferers. But at the very least, stopping its increase would improve mental health in the future. So it's possible to create more value per effort, at least in theory, because of its current position in the culture war.

People being depressed don’t gain access to facilities they would otherwise be barred from.

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