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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7558 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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encouraging closeted people to come out as gay" is not the same thing as "making them gay

I think an insurmountable gap here is that it's easy to accept that gay people exist. Sodomy and homoeroticism has been documented since biblical times and even some animals do it. Meanwhile people wanting to chop off their own oragans and pump themselves full of hormones is a modern world.

Average people can also easily understand how it's possible to achieve sexual pleasure throug homosexual activity even if they do not personally want to participate. Meanwhile the average person cannot understand why soemone would gain satisfaction from severe genital and body mutilation. Therefore they can only conclude that it must be the result of either mental illness or brainwashing.

Meanwhile the average person cannot understand why soemone would gain satisfaction from severe genital and body mutilation.

I think most people can easily make sense of the idea that you might wish that certain aspects of your life were different. Someone might wish they were taller, or they had a million dollars, or they lived in Germany instead of America. These are all considered normal and comprehensible; most people don’t have trouble with the mere notion of a counterfactual.

If someone could wish for all these things, then why couldn’t they wish to be the opposite gender as well? Is it so much of a stretch?

And if you can accept the comprehensibility of that sort of wish, then I don’t think the comprehensibility of SRS is too much of a stretch, although I absolutely understand why many people would evaluate that the drawbacks are not worth the benefits, and that it might be considered odd or disconcerting for that reason.

I think most people can easily make sense of the idea that you might wish that certain aspects of your life were different. Someone might wish they were taller, or they had a million dollars, or they lived in Germany instead of America. These are all considered normal and comprehensible; most people don’t have trouble with the mere notion of a counterfactual.

You're gerrymandering because these are all harmless as desires. Consider another example: I understand why people might want another roll at the die of high school. This is normal, in the sense that people often have regrets.

It's not normal, nor does it make sense to me, to actually make this into a life project. In fact, it would be very alarming and I would not trust the person who sincerely attempts to redo their high school experience (at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars and medical procedures with non-trivial effects) to have a good view of what would fulfill them since they seem mentally imbalanced/lacking basic prudence and social insight to explain why this is a very bad thing to try to impose on people (the mental health comorbidities make it even harder with trans).

In any case, it would not suffice as a justification to let them pull a Steve Buscemi even if they could convince me they'd be happier. High school doesn't exist for the pleasure of adults.

You’re conflating two things that I never conflated. There are two separate questions:

  1. Whether the desire for SRS (or being trans in general) is coherent and understandable, outside of being a product of “mental illness or brainwashing”.

  2. Whether society should rearrange itself to accommodate the desires of trans people.

I was only addressing (1). Personally, I answer yes to (1) and no to (2).

I don’t believe that, at our current level of medical technology, men can become women. If you’re born a man then you’ll stay a man. And as a corollary, I don’t believe that MTFs (i.e. men) should be given access to women’s spaces, nor should they expect to be recognized as women by other people. But, in line with my general libertarian priors, I think that consenting adults should mostly be free to dress how they want and get whatever medical procedures they want, and I understand why some people would opt for SRS for psychological comfort, even though it can’t actually at the end of the day fully realize their desires.

If a person desires to have a limb amputated (which does happen) we accurately assess this to be mental illness.

If they desire to become the different gender, we say that is valid and give them the medical option to pursue it.

I really can't see a space morally between allowing a doctor to amputate someone's arm and allowing them to amputate someone's genitals. I can see why someone might want it. But I can't see why it should be allowed under our current system of medical ethics. Although, as a libertarian, perhaps you are okay with both surgeries, which would be a logically consistent position.

I just feel like the metaphor obviously doesn't work. If a trans woman gets SRS and has a functional neovagina that she can have sex and orgasm with then she still has genitals that do most of what people use genitals for. Whereas if someone gets their arm chopped off they don't have a different appendage that does most of what an arm does, they just don't have an arm anymore.

Also if you're for example, a trans woman, your penis is not often "usable" sexually either because of psychological issues with using it, or because of long term atrophy from hormones, or because you're straight and wouldn't be using it anyway. In such cases using the tissue to construct a neovagina allows for functionality where previously none existed.

I just feel like the metaphor obviously doesn't work. If a trans woman gets SRS and has a functional neovagina that she can have sex and orgasm with then she still has genitals that do most of what people use genitals for.

Any hole is something a man can have sex with, that doesn't make it a functional vagina. The ability to orgasm post-surgery is also more of a distant possibility than a reliable result. There's a reason why most trans males never go ahead with surgery.

So have I convinced you that your original analogy was wrong? That even if not a "functional vagina" doctors giving a trans women some sort of genitalia that will facilitate mutually pleasurable sex with their preferred partners is a wholly different question from amputating an arm?

Then the issue is just the rate of success? If doctors could consistently produce genitals that allowed trans women to orgasm with minimal side effects you wouldn't think this posed any sort of ethical question anymore?

My original analogy?

That even if not a "functional vagina" doctors giving a trans women some sort of genitalia that will facilitate mutually pleasurable sex with their preferred partners is a wholly different question from amputating an arm?

I don't think so, no. I could imagine that in the future prosthetics could become so advanced that they're actually better than natural appendages, and at that point it would be an entirely different question. However, if someone wants their leg amputated so he can get a peg leg, because he always wanted to be a pirate, that sounds like a pretty apt comparison to where we are with transgender care.

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