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That would make a great deal of sense if, when these exact same kids detransition after a couple years, they didn't say "you were never really trans" when the share the sordid details of how exactly the "gender affirming care" was provided to them.
I see two additional issues here, which intertwine.
The first is that there is no objective way to tell if a person is "trans." It's purely self identification. Which is reason to be skeptical about gender ideology, but it also relates directly to the second issue, which is that in many circles, there is a lot of social status accorded to trans people. There are surely organizations which are very welcoming to trans people.
When you combine that with the facts that many young people are desperate for both social status and a feeling of being accepted, I think it's virtually certain that the desire for social status and acceptance will heavily inform the decisions of young people who are deciding whether or not to self-identify as trans.
So to me, it's completely reasonable to use the word "trans" as a transitive verb. In effect, offering acceptance and social status to a young person in exchange for an acknowledgment.
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I don't see the objection; this seems precisely consistent with my claim that trans advocacy in schools is intended to target the "really trans". Those cis kids who give it a go but turn out not to like it in the long run are, indeed, told they were never really trans, and thus only collateral damage of a program which was intended to help those of their classmates who really were trans. You may shudder at the brute-force utilitarianism - I certainly do; it's why I'm opposed to children undergoing medical transition! - but I genuinely don't see where the internal contradiction is supposed to be.
The contradiction is that the program seems to be doing a spectacularly poor job at separating wheat from chaff, and that many of the purported signs and symptoms of "being trans" espoused by trans activists (including primary and secondary school teachers) are so broad and ill-defined that they could apply to literally anyone. A medical test which produces false positives at the same rate as true positives is useless. But when it's pointed out to trans activists that their program is producing false positives at an alarmingly high rate, their response is typically not "oh shit, we need to do better" but some variant on "that isn't happening, and it's good that it is".
Eventually people start wondering what the difference is between sufficiently advanced incompetence and malice. I don't agree that "the purpose of a system is what it does", but when trans activists are so resistant to switch up their system even when its shortcomings have been pointed out to them, it does inevitably make one wonder if their stated goal differs from their revealed one.
Not necessarily. If, for a cohort of 100, a test picks up 90 negatives, 5 real positives, and 5 false positives - and if the positive outcomes of giving the true positives the appropriate treatment outweigh the negative consequences of giving the false positives unnecessary treatment - the test, while not ideal, is far from useless. I think a lot of trans activists would endorse the idea that allowing a trans person to transition produces more utility than causing someone to waste a few years beginning and then reversing an unwanted transition wastes. Which seems sensible to me where adults are concerned, children are where I draw the line.
So, in other words, you agree that these "awareness campaigns" targeting children in primary and secondary school are a bad idea?
Not quite; I think that medical transition for under-16s should be functionally banned in general, thus making awareness campaigns harmless because no irreversible physical damage to minors not yet old enough to weigh the risks responsibly would occur. If the availability of SRS for minors remains constant I concede that cutting back on the awareness campaigns would probably be justified, but that's clearly attacking the problem from the wrong angle IMO, and would be far less successful overall because secondary-school kids have tons of ways to learn about transition even if no word of it is breathed at school.
Chest binders are generally considered a subset of social transition, and yet can cause serious physical damage.
Even then, I'm sure you would agree that a male child who has been wearing female clothes and referred to by female pronouns from the age of 10 onwards is far more likely to seek medical transition than a male child who has not.
As far as I can understand it, we agree on the following:
I don't really see the difference between the above and the conservative framing of "they're trying to trans my child!" It just seems like a Russell conjugation.
Maybe what you object to is the ascription of intent: that trans activists aren't setting out to make non-trans children erroneously believe that they're trans, that that's just an unfortunate byproduct of a well-intended campaign. But given trans activists' reluctance to even acknowledge the false positives, this seems like a rather pedantic objection in the scheme of things.
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If we're embracing "brute-force utilitarianism", we might as well shuck anything other than heteronormativity from school curricula anyway. Why should we care about the concerns of small minorities? The greater good is at stake!
We shouldn't do so, obviously.
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If they were never really trans, but underwent hormone therapy and got surgeries, surely that means they got transed?
No; it just means that they were mistaken for trans, by themselves and others. You wouldn't say that someone who got spooked by a very forceful "are you sure there's nothing deeper to your occasional twinges of bowel pain" campaign, was given an erroneous colon cancer diagnosis, and got unnecessary surgery they regretted, had been cancered.
Isn't the better analogy the person with bowel pain, Munchausens by internet and then goes to a 'provider' who confirms their motivated reasoning?
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I think cancer diagnosis is a bad analogy. Transgenderism is about a desire to be the opposite sex, so there is no way to be mistaken about it. If an XY-haver wants to be a woman, they are definitionally transgender.
The actual resolution is that gender identity can change with time (since it is a desire) - the detrans people were trans in the past, but now are cis. Obviously, it is not a resolution that mainstream activists accept, but it's the correct one.
Well, a lot of trans activists (including people in this thread) would disagree with you that "desire" has anything to do with trans identification.
And more's the point – can't people be mistaken about their desires? Have you never thought you wanted something, then realised you didn't really?
Yeah it's a little muddy when you get into the specifics. I think my definition of it as a desire captures the reality of the phenomenon, to extent it isn't made-up (word games, "male/female brains", etc)
I think it's more that you have a platonic image of the desire, but when you try and manifest the desire, the reality is lacking in ways you didn't predict in your head.
A man thinks he wants to transition, but the interventions don't work well enough. He's spending an inordinate amount of time/effort, only to fall far short of the platonic image of "transgender woman" that he formed in his mind from pro-trans media and shemale pornography. He is unhappy and wishes he didn't transition in the first place, because he misunderstood what being a "transgender woman" would actually be like.
This might sound like I'm playing word games - but the alternative is for "desire" to lose all meaning. No one can ever see the full implications of what they want.
I know what you're getting at. Having a fantasy about something, getting it, then realising the real thing can't live up to your fantasy is definitely a real thing.
What I was getting at was the related but distinct phenomenon when you think you want something, then realise you don't really want it, without ever getting it. I'm trying to think of a banal example to illustrate. Supposing you're very drunk and you have an idea for something you want to do, then after you sober up you realise that you actually don't want to do it. Maybe you could say you really did want it at the time, but then you changed your mind. Or would it be accurate to say that you thought you wanted X, but you actually didn't? Hard to say.
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Is it desire or delusion, or first one, then the other?
Delusion of competence is belief-level. Self-serving bias and motivated reasoning keep the self-assessment inflated, and the identity ("I am a singer") becomes too costly to revise. Florence Foster Jenkins is the textbook case.
Delusions that fit this pattern get called wish-fulfilling delusions (grandiose delusions, erotomania). The general principle underneath all of it is that the mind resolves the tension between what you want and what is true by editing the perception of what is true.
Many of these other delusionals don't have activists telling them exactly what they want to hear.
Yeah, it's hard to say. I've seen male people sitting at every point on the spectrum from "I know I'm not a woman, but I desperately want to be one" to "I may not be a 'biological' woman, but I have a woman's gender identity" to "I am literally a biological woman, and can menstruate, lactate and even suffer from PCOS". I suspect that grouping all of these people under the umbrella of "trans women" might obscure more than it illuminates.
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I mean... why not? It's the job of the medical professional to say "calm the fuck down, you don't have cancer" rather then "your wish is my command, cash register go 'cha-ching'!". If they go for the latter, that does sound like getting cancered.
Well, I'm not saying the medical system would have acted correctly - though they might; the optimum number of erroneous cancer diagnoses is not necessarily zero. But I'm not asking you to picture shills who get kickbacks for every colonectomy or anything. Picture, instead, sincere people so keen not to let any actual cancer patients die preventable deaths after ignoring early symptoms that they forget about the effects of their rhetoric on people who are, in fact, healthy. We may criticize such people, but we wouldn't accuse them of only caring about turning as many people into colonectomy-seekers as possible, or of being dishonest when they said their message was targeted at people who actually had cancer. And it certainly doesn't prove otherwise if what they tell the people who got unnecessary surgery is "sorry, turns out you never actually had cancer".
I really like that analogy. Especially since it works for how modern medicine is practiced. People have unnecessary tests done all the time, patients demand frivolous CT scans, and psychiatrists overdiagnose as people medicalize ordinary suffering due to awareness campaigns.
Seeing trans-activism as another overzealous awareness campaign does seem to explain a good part of the movement.
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But to the extent we don't do that, it's because they have objective-ish diagnostic criteria that tell with a high degree of accuracy (even if it never reaches 100%) whether or not they have colon cancer, and in the event they degree of accuracy is not high, that information is shared with the patient. If the official diagnostic criteria was "patient says they have colon cancer, and does not change their mind for the period of 6 months" we would, in fact, accuse them of only caring about turning as many people into colonectomy-seekers as possible.
But the salient point is that in the progressive terminology, "being trans" maps onto "actually having cancer", not onto "seeking a colonectomy", whose actual equivalent is "transitioning". In the advocates' own view, the transness or cisness of the audience is already an immutable fact whatever you do, and the goal of trans advocacy is to persuade all the undetected already-trans people in the audience to seek transition; you can "transitionerify" people to some degree, much as you can "colonectomy-seekerify" people, and you might choose to do that more or less indiscriminately, but you can't actually "trans someone" any more than you can peer-pressure someone into actually having cancer, that's just not a thing, and moreover, it's not actually something they'd want to do even if it were possible, any more than the cancer awareness advocates would use a give-people-cancer ray on anyone if they had one. So anyone accusing them of "transing kids" comes across to them as a not-even-wrong MAGA zombie accusing them of something ghastly and made-up.
And obviously this is all semantics. That's the point. The right and left talk past each other on this issue because they're stubbornly using different definitions of "trans", sometimes without even realizing it.
That there are desisters and detransisitioners suggest either it isn't immutable or the advocates have a high false positive rate and frequently mis-identify these individuals.
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But when people worry about their kids getting transed, they worry about them getting invasive body modification procedures for no reason, not about them discovering that they actually have a condition where the only way to avert suicide and lead a happy and fulfilling lives is to undergo said procedures, so the analogy seems pretty 1:1.
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Defenders would say that those procedures and treatments can be done for many reasons besides being trans, so even if someone got them, it doesn't mean they're transed
But there are cases of people who come out in public and say they thought they were trans, were affirmed by everyone around them from the public school system to social workers and medical professionals, then detransitioned, and then get told they were never really trans.
Defenders would say that if someone undertook an unnecessary procedure out of delusion, then it's a personal failure and is not something the fault of what trans advocates have done. They never were and never will be part of the trans community.
Ok, but even if it was out of delusion, and it was a personal failure, how does that not mean they got transed? Aren't medical professionals supposed to be able to accurately diagnose cases?
Funny that "trans" is a transitive verb.
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Detransition statistics are one of those things where the left and the right live in different realities. Trans advocates claim it basically never happens and so it does much more good to focus on encouraging transitioning for those who want to. Anti-trans claim that it happens a lot and is a deep, disturbing tragedy.
If they really actually believed it basically never really happens, they would debate it. They still, however follow the #nodebate tactics, which means they don't.
They do tend to cite statistics for medical detransition, where the numbers are indeed quite low. In this case, the right wingers are the ones using only anecdotes. I imagine debate seems like a waste of time when your opponent's seem to exist in a world entirely separate from your own. That goes for both sides.
iirc this is because the collected statistics are for people who registered detransition at the same clinic they transitioned at, as the process is to ask clinics which of their registered patients do they know detransitioned, which... doesn't exactly capture the whole scope of the thing, especially when a lot of it is "stop taking the medication" and a lot of the medication is gotten from brazilian bathtub brewers vis shady discord servers and subreddits.
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They'll receive brownie points for citing statistics once they stop trying to ruin the lives of scientists who provide inconvenient statistics.
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Online polls ran by explicitly pro-trans organizations, with "people who still identify as trans" being an entry criterion. And the issue I raised was they don't debate, so their arguments can't be addressed.
Literally anyone other than a pro-trans org will give you numbers ranging from 30 to 80% desistence.
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