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This whole situation seems like a perfect storm of... a lot of things, starting with the fact that it's fundamentally about children, which tends to bring out the least rational, most passionate sides in people, both for better and for worse. I've only heard of this Mermaids group in passing so I'm not intimately familiar with them, but the way you describe them and your further notes about trans activists speaking on behalf of trans kids brings to mind this old blog post that resonated with me, particularly "It felt like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people." The idea of such activists having any influence on actual care providers seems completely FUBAR to me, and likely to cause truly monstrous travesties.
I admit part of my reaction here is colored by a couple of personal factors: 1. I knew a temporarily FTM transman who decided to detransition back to woman partway in and who had felt betrayed by the community that had pushed her to transition and the permanent physical changes she had gone through during her initial transition as a girl in her late teens, and 2. I could easily see myself as having been pushed to transition MTF if I had been born 30 years later and grown up in the same places I have; I am quite fine with being cis male now as an adult. These make me feel that the dangers of false positives are very important to acknowledge and work around. It's only through cold empirical study that we can nail down the proper ways to detect and serve the true positives and false positives, and activists whose motivations seem to be to maximize the true positives with little-to-no concern for everything else should have precisely zero influence in that study.
I think back in 2016-2018, on the actual Slatestarcodex comment section (likely one of the open threads), I had a conversation with someone who believed that calling out the media lying/misleading about Donald Trump in a negative way was worthy of derision, because doing such would help Trump to get (re-? I don't remember the exact date)elected. I disagreed strongly, because my view was that the media spreading such deceptions was discrediting itself, and it was only by calling out such deceptions that the media could be pushed to correct itself and stop its self-discrediting, and it's only by having a credible media that the populace could be expected to take seriously true negative things that the media claimed about Trump. And as someone who felt very strongly about not wanting Trump as POTUS (or as 2-term POTUS), I wanted the media called out on each and every such deception, as harshly as possible.
I feel similarly about this situation. Medical care for potentially trans kids is very important to nail down, and whatever medical institutions come up with the standards for care need to have credibility that they did their homework in a scientific, rigorous way. If there's any indication of undue pressure by certain activist groups to these institutions to put their thumb on the scale, that destroys their credibility, leaving us at square 1 on figuring out this very important issue. So I would expect that anyone who actually cares about helping potentially trans kids would make it a high priority to make sure that such credibility-destroying influence gets called out and corrected. And contrapositively, anyone who's hesitant to call out such influence for whatever reason is someone who can't be trusted to actually want what's good for such kids. And this goes just as strongly for any sort of anti-TRAs that might exist who behave in a way as to maximize the number of true negatives, even if that means maximizing false negatives, who might have undue influence on medical institutions.
That's all pretty meta, and I wish I could form some meaningful opinion at the object level, but at this point, I'll admit that for most CW topics, and certainly this one, I'm just mostly suspicious of anyone who has strong opinions either way at the object level due to how, at the meta level, the ability to find actual true knowledge of the object level concepts seem to have been so corrupted, often intentionally.
Great post.
It seems to me that in both this case and the trans treatment one, there is a shared memetic original sin that is something like opposition to victim-blaming. The thinking goes something like the media was driven into a corner where they had to lie/exaggerate by Trump and his associates; in an ideal world, there would have been no Trump, and they could have stayed the honest and objective purveyors of truth that they purportedly were - and now you are criticising them because they wouldn't dial down their attacks on Trump? You are saying that after they have been driven to this indignity by Trump supporters and forced to dirty their hands, and now they should turn the other cheek and be fair to Trump so as to make more of those same followers who drove them to this happy? Surely that would be a cosmic injustice.
In fact, I get the sense that this is fully in effect whenever culture war escalation occurs from either side. Saying that you would be more successful at winning over supporters of the other side by following a principled position close to the centre is perceived by culture warriors as akin to "you shouldn't dress so provocatively next time".
I'm reminded of the very first episode of one of the most CW-involved TV shows of all time, South Park, which featured an adult teaching kids to hunt and instructing them to always shout "He's coming right at me!" before shooting any animal. I think it was a commentary on gun control or hunting licenses or something, but perhaps all of the culture wars are just that same phenomenon in different forms.
This is the kind of attitude that only seems possible if one is dogmatically confident about one's own sociopolitical views. Without such dogmatic confidence, you welcome the opportunity to receive criticism that makes your messaging better and, more importantly IMHO, makes your own position more correct. As a young left/liberal/progressive/Democrat in the 00s-10s, I had thought that my side was the side against dogma as a very concept, and that those various sociopolitical views associated with that side like pro-gay marriage, feminism, atheism, pro-immigration, etc. were the downstream consequences of that rejection of dogmatism (and embrace of science), but since then I've come to learn that this was not the case.
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I think until psychiatry is up to normal medical standards of care, I don’t expect it to be of much use to anyone.
And while transgender is the noisy one, I don’t think it’s just this particular illness that’s being mishandled and misdiagnosed. And I think the issue has come to a head now that the internet has given the public the cheat codes to getting any diagnosis or treatment they want. If a person comes in complaining of the symptoms of a given illness as given on web md or similar websites, they can get treated for it. There aren’t any diagnostic tests to run. No blood tests, brain scans, and quite often not even talking to family or friends. It’s not entirely their fault, though. The brain is difficult to study.
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Have you heard what activists were able to get the APA to remove from the DSM in 1974?
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