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Given the response to my post below about culturally bound illnesses I figured it would make sense to write out a top level post specifically discussing gender dysphoria, since I expressed a desire to avoid that topic initially. I was inspired by Scott Alexander's recent post on culturally bound illnesses.
The basic idea of my previous post is that some illnesses which seem quite common in our society, things like anorexia, depression, chronic pain, and gender dysphoria, seem likely to be highly culturally mediated - i.e. they would not exist if the cultural norms we are inoculated in didn't account for them. This goes against the standard narrative for LGBTQ+ people, who often put forth the idea that before a minority gets social approval, there are a ton of 'closeted' individuals who simply live in suffering. Under this model, the social approval actually creates the urge to, for instace, sleep with the same sex or transition gender. (I'm less confident about homosexuality being highly cultural.)
I'm sure someone here could give a better history of rough numbers of trans individuals/gender dysphoria cases over time, but the gist seems to be that numbers have exploded recently. A quick search shows laughable results such as:
And then on the exact same website:
This is some of the most clear double think I've ever seen, and I tend to be much less invested in the trans debate than many here. Other studies are more honest explaining that:
I think this whole topic presents a clear problem, but I'm less sure about the actual solution. I'm sure many would jump at the chance to say we should just tell people who have gender dysphoria to suck it up and keep it to themselves, but I doubt the feasibility of that given how easy it is to create subcultures on the internet. Also, if you try to apply that frame to other problems like say anorexia, or depression, the failure modes become extremely clear.
Then again we can't just let these culturally created illnesses run rampant through our culture, and I predict they will only become increasingly problematic as our communication infrastructure and leisure time scales up. Ideally we want to replace these unhealthy cultural memes with healthier ones, but we run into a chicken and egg problem.
So - what are your recommended solutions to the issue of transgender ideation and other culturally bound issues?
Being cruelly blunt? Treat it like mental illness. Nobody thinks anorexia is an identity and it is treated as an illness. Even if it is to an extent culturally-bound (and I wonder about that; there is certainly the element of social contagion, but excessive fasting and problems with food intake have been around for a long time even if not described as a tidy syndrome called 'anorexia'), we don't just nod along helplessly that of course, we must give them their very own flag and add them in to a month of celebration.
Same with transgender issues. Go back to so-called medical gatekeeping; if you really are suffering from dysphoria so severe you would try to cut off your breasts or your penis, then this is a mental issue that needs treatment the same way as if you tried chopping off a hand. Maybe the treatment is helping you find ways to live in your body (and fuck off with the notion of 'conversion therapy'), maybe the treatment is surgery and drugs when you're adult enough and this is long-standing enough that it's not changing any other way. And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts (oh sorry, I mean whatever today's term for alternate sexualities is).
On the other hand, if someone who looks like this insists they are too a real woman and should therefore have access to female-only spaces, that's mental illness. Maybe the best you can do is go along with their delusions, but that does not give them the right to be treated as if they really have changed sex, not alone gender. Transgender competitors in sports? That can go several ways, but mostly that there should be a separate league or division or whatever where all trans athletes can compete against each other. If you changed genders five years ago and have been beating out cis women ever since, I think we can all recognise that something is going on due to natal biology.
I'm doctrinaire enough I'd even row back on changing birth certs because fuck it, those are identity documents. If I can legally have mine changed to pretend my parents had a son not a daughter, why can't I legally have it changed that I was born in the US and so am an American citizen? Or that I was born five years later so I'm younger? Or that I'm a different race because you know, I've always identified deeply with Tibetan culture? Either it's a legal document or it can be switched around to include/exclude elements at whim, in which case it should be as binding as Monopoly money for use in any kind of official context.
That being said, treating it like mental illness should also mean de-stigmatising it like mental illness. No, it's not normal, but it's a condition people suffer from. If we don't blame people for suffering from schizophrenia or depression, we don't blame them from suffering from delusions that they're a different sex. We treat it, we help and support them, we don't mock them - but we don't invent a flag and a celebration month, any more than we have a "Happy Global Bipolar Disorder Day! Hurrah for you, you perfectly ordinary normal person!"
Perhaps I can prevail upon you to be kind to perverts? I encourage you to read my essay downthread; I believe the thing you are referring to is more common, and more complicated, than you think -- but that aside, surely having disordered desires should be treated as a mental illness, in much the same vein as the other things you describe?
If you want to call it a paraphilia, go ahead, I'm not fussed either way. I think it's a small proportion but I also think that unfortunately they are the loudest and most visible and most online.
I also think there is a difference between someone so distressed at their biological sex that they want to cut off the distinguishing characteristics, and the types who complain about the cotton ceiling and how it's transphobia if cis gay women don't want to have sex involving a dick.
I think in the rush to be accepting and supportive, a lot of sketchy stuff got past and now the allies and activists are kind of stuck - they've nailed their colours to the mast, they feel that if they row back on anything then it's giving in to the demands of, well, the likes of me and denying the reality of trans people.
But the more the crazier stuff gets out into the mainstream, the worse the backlash will be, and the genuine trans people who only want quiet lives will suffer. The trenders, the attention seekers, the sexual assault crowd and the lunatics will be okay, the ordinary person who isn't Rachel Levine or Sam Brinton will get the worst of it.
It seems we differ in our estimates here. Maybe it would help to draw a distinction between, let's say, people with disordered sexual desires (in which group I would include any autogynephilia in natal males), and people who are "visible perverts" (you know about them because they do perverted things in public or are publicly loud about their proclivities). I agree that the latter group is rare and unrepresentative of trans people, and it's crazy that the trans lobby doesn't want to get rid of them (probably this is downstream of "pride" stuff). I think, though, that the former group includes probably the majority of MtF trans individuals as well as a decent percentage of men who don't transition. This is probably not usually acknowledged because it's perceived as unflattering to trans people, and to be fair the people loudly crowing about how "it's just a fetish" are being cruel and are not helping the matter.
I think we ought to have some charity even for the "visible perverts" crowd; they need it even if they don't deserve it -- but what I'm really referring to here is the other group. Right now all they are hearing is either total silence, "Eww, you pervert", or "That means you're really a woman deep down! You must be trans!" I think there is a need for counseling, along the lines of "So, you know how you really really want to be female? And how you find that idea sexually arousing, too? Yeah, that's a thing; it's something a bit wrong with you, but it doesn't mean either that you are disgusting or that you are 'really' a woman or should try to become one. Let's try to help you figure out how to deal with your feelings."
It's difficult to work in the interests of a group who is doing obvious, immediate and lasting damage to everything they touch, who do not actually want the help you advocate offering, and who will make their best effort to harm anyone who tries.
It's a big ask, is what I'm saying.
Are you referring to trans activists, the "visible perverts", or to the "disordered desires" group? Granted there is overlap, of course, but I think it's the first two groups who are doing the damage. A lot of the third group doesn't (or doesn't yet) even consider themselves trans! If you want them to not get eaten by the trans meme, you've got to provide some kind of compassionate support. Because when the options are suffer in solitude, get shamed and ridiculed, or listen to the seductive whispers telling them that they can satisfy their desires and join a group that will continually affirm them, it takes a pretty strong will to not pick the third option.
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Not if they're going to be officially deputized by the State to (mission-)kill anyone who offends them.
I don't actually think people are generally unwilling to accept people like this- after all, there was no pushback on deputizing them partially for this reason- but I don't trust cops, least of which those that are in uniform, even less if they're Thin Blue Liners. If I had to talk to one of them, I wouldn't even admit to jaywalking lest they take that as an excuse to bust out their inner Eric Cartman. The ride is indistinguishable from the rap these days.
There was a comment upthread about how people are afraid to denounce Islam and functionally treat its adherents as wearing suicide bomb vests because they threaten violence to those who say those things. This is the same thing, except top-down rather than bottom-up.
And yes, it makes things objectively worse for any member of the violence-advantaged class (for example, men adopting the Pence rule makes the life of the honest woman more complicated). But that class, on a population level, does not generally care enough to change this- it is useful when the economic game is zero-sum.
I confess that I am confused by this response. Who is being officially deputized by whom to kill whom? And how does any of this make sense in the context of @FarNearEverywhere's parent comment, which already posits a massive change in how the official parts of society deal with trans stuff?
Trans people are being deputized by the state to wreck the lives of normal people. They've been granted official "victim" status, which gives them a frankly absurd level of protection from normal criticism, which they then routinely abuse in a variety of novel ways. When normal people who haven't kept abreast of our mercurial social reality object, they get hammered, often as not via state or pseudostate enforcement mechanisms.
You're saying that it would be better for people to be kinder to Trans individuals. But only a vanishing minority of the objections to Trans individuals have to do with their Transness, as such. People are objecting to the active "recruitment" of children by agents of the state, the vociferous defense of actual perverts, the extension of charity to sexual criminals, the weaponization of serious state power to enforce fringe ideology, and to the damage done to ordinary people who attempt to exercise their purported civil rights in response. Trans people, as such, wield immense, absurd, and almost entirely unaccountable power under our current system, a highly visible fraction of them are quite gleefully abusing that power in highly visible ways, and the rest are refusing to restrain this fraction, refusing to criticize or hold them accountable, and vociferously attaching anyone else who tries to do so.
You are right that they need help, but they need to be stopped more, because they are cooperating with efforts to do serious damage to our society.
I guess I don't see how this has much to do with what I'm saying. The post I was originally responding to suggested:
as a way to dissuade these people from transitioning. In other words, tell people with autogynephilia that they are disgusting and should go away, which seems both cruel and unlikely to work. I'm proposing compassion instead, because I don't want these people to end up deciding they are trans, I want them to get help.
For whatever it's worth I have little love for the trans lobby and am pretty incensed at all the propagandizing and abuse of state power to enforce their ideology. I just happen to think that many, probably most, trans individuals are also victims here, in much the same way that lonely people who get targeted by lovebombing and join a cult are.
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People absolutely do, particularly on social media. It's a well-known problem.
Yeah, but that's part of the mental illness aspect. There aren't (I hope) people rushing to proclaim themselves "allies" and that this is something to be celebrated, not treated.
The day we get to "starve yourself to death day" as a national celebration, then we can throw in the towel.
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