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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37999 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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According to NPR, 43% of Americans support criminalizing gender-affirming care and 54% oppose it, whereas two years ago, 28% supported it and 65% opposed it. What caused the surge in opposition? Did people just not know what gender-affirming care was two years ago? Did they assume that psychological evaluations of trans kids were more thorough than they actually were?

I remember sitting at the table with an M.D. who's doing some kind of fellowship at Harvard and hearing her say airily, "Yeah, blockers are safe and totally reversible." Even with my rudimentary freshman bio understanding, this never sounded plausible to me.

Indeed, this is extremely implausible a priori, and so people repeating this must have crimestop in their mind preventing them from doing any thinking on the subject at all.

The image I have in my mind is this: we have someone who is taking “puberty blocker” from age 10 to age forty 50. He never went through puberty as a teenager (or at least, I am led to believe this is the outcome of taking these drugs). Because of this, he now looks and behaves as… well, definitely not a middle aged male. Am I really expected to believe that once he stops taking these drugs, he goes through normal puberty at 50, and his body ends up the same as if he never took these drugs, and went through puberty around 15? This is simply ludicrous on its face.

Or, even better, consider a woman in post menopausal age, who finally gets off puberty blockers. Will she now finally begin menstruating, and be able to bear normal children? Highly unlikely.

I would expect the typical retort to this from pro sex modification side to be “but you are not supposed to take this drugs for so long”, which is a tacit admission that the effects of these drugs are only reversible for so long, until they aren’t. This much makes sense, but then repeating the mantra that they are reversible without saying loudly that this is true only if you stop taking them until they are no longer reversible (which might very well only be a couple of doses!) is criminally deceptive.

Indeed, this is extremely implausible a priori, and so people repeating this must have crimestop in their mind preventing them from doing any thinking on the subject at all.

More or less. I mean, did none of these advocates ever know someone on the wrestling team who's growth was permanently stunted from trying to make weight for their entire wrestling career? You don't get to "catch up" on missed development. At least not naturally.

Something tells me these people didn’t hang around the wrestling team in high school.

I wonder if school wrestling teams were even a universal thing at the time GIDS was founded.

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