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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18627 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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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.

A medical test which produces false positives at the same rate as true positives is a useless medical test.

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.

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:

  1. Trans awareness campaigns lack precision in their targeting, and produce a significant number of false positives i.e. they lead children who would not otherwise identify as trans to erroneously believe themselves to be trans
  2. Even in jurisdictions in which gender-affirming care for minors is banned, a child who has been socially "affirmed" for years prior to the age of majority is far more likely to seek medical transition as an adult than a child who has not.

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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