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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23008 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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It's fascinating that The Handmaid's Tale has been so widely interpreted as a satire of Christian fundamentalism, when my understanding is that Atwood intended it as a critique of radical Islam.

Probably because the two are much of a muchness; at least I don't see a hair's breadth of difference between them....

How many fundamentalist Christian communities do you know in which women must cover their entire bodies with the exception of their eyes?

How many suicide bombings have been committed in the name of fundamentalist Christianity?

And when are you going to admit you were wrong to claim that we have good reason to believe gender-affirming care has lower rates of regret than knee replacements?

I'm not going to admit to being wrong about that, because I'm not wrong.

Also, bringing up the matter in an unrelated comment isn't very nice. I don't bring up trans issues every time I reply to you on another topic; I would appreciate the same courtesy.

Also also, phrasing it with the assumption that it is already decided who is right and who is wrong sort of resembles the age-old "Have you stopped beating your wife?" manoeuvre.

From the study each of your links cites:

Quality Assessment

Based on the NIH quality assessment tool, the majority of article [sic] ranged between “poor” and “fair” categories.

In the current study, we identified a total of 7928 cases from 14 different countries. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest attempt to compile the information on regret rates in this population. However, limitations such as significant heterogeneity among studies and among instruments used to assess regret rates, and moderate-to-high risk of bias in some studies represent a big barrier for generalization of the results of this study. The lack of validated questionnaires to evaluate regret in this population is a significant limiting factor. In addition, bias can occur because patients might restrain from expressing regrets due to fear of being judged by the interviewer. Moreover, the temporarity of the feeling of regret in some patients and the variable definition of regret may underestimate the real prevalence of “true” regret.

You've shared that airplane bullets meme with me in the past. I think it's reasonable to assume that a person who underwent an elective procedure and doesn't regret it will be more willing to participate in a study about the efficacy of said procedure than someone who regrets undergoing said procedure. A person who sadly took their own life after undergoing one of these procedures wouldn't appear in any of these studies, and there's at least one study which found that trans people who underwent gender reassignment surgery were more prone to suicide than trans people that didn't. (I'm not claiming the relationship is necessarily causative, but simply illustrating that these procedures aren't the silver bullet they're commonly presented as. Note that this was a longitudinal study following participants over thirty years, over three times longer than the longest study included in the regret meta-analysis and four times longer than the mean.)

The authors tabulate all the people who participated in the original studies, but don't give us any indication of what the denominator is (as obviously they couldn't, this information not being available to them).

Suffice it to say that I think "gender-affirming care has lower rates of regret than knee replacement surgery" is an irresponsible claim to make in a vacuum and without qualification. If I cited an otherwise identical meta-analysis making the opposite claim, you'd be pointing out all of these methodological shortcomings.

Also, bringing up the matter in an unrelated comment isn't very nice.

Ignoring my replies to you while talking about me in dismissive tones in replies to another commenter also isn't "very nice".

One of them cuts off your head and blows you up, the other doesn't.

I think that that is less from any inherent differences in the religions and more from cultural differences in the places in which they are practised; if Enlightenment Liberalism had emerged in the Middle Of The East instead of in Europe, people today might remember where they were on Jumada at-Tania 22nd when Christian extremists attacked the Emirates Towers and the King Khalid Military City.

There's an argument that the christian religion is more conducive to enlightenment liberalism, though I don't know if this is true. I know during the middle ages the Muslim empires were generally considered to be more advanced in science math and technology than the Europeans but that doesn't necessarily mean much either.

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