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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16384 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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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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