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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Yes. This is, in fact, what I have been saying. The discourse is a mess because trans activists actually are doing the thing GCs mean by "transing kids" ("making people seek potentially-frivolous colonectomies"), all while sincerely insisting that they obviously aren't "transing kids" because they understand that phrase as meaning something else altogether that they can't and wouldn't do ("giving people cancer").
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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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