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Contrapoints released her newest video yesterday. As someone who has found a number of her past videos to be well done and interesting (they're generally better the further back you go), this one was disappointing. Some random thoughts:
Contrapoints made a name for herself through actually engaging with the "alt-right" and by being willing to make real arguments in response to conservatives; now it seems like she's totally bought into some of the worst argumentation styles of the woke left. Most annoying to me is the frequency with which Natalie begs the question by referring to "trans rights" as if they're some unobjectionable, neutral thing that only "bigots" could oppose. Interestingly, the only time she actually concretely discusses a supposed "trans right" (males competing in women's sports), she agrees that there is a debate to be had here. Of course, no mention of kids transitioning, males in women's prisons, etc. Just "trans rights" in the abstract. The one thing Contrapoints is clear about is that not acknowledging that "trans women are women" is at the least "transphobic" (if not a violation of "trans rights" in some hard to define way), which is interesting. What does it mean to be "transphobic"? Could one not be "transphobic" and still refuse to acknowledge that "trans women are women"? Because I would like to say that I'm not "transphobic" on the basis that I don't think trans people should be denied rights that we accord to others, or that they should be forcibly prevented from dressing like women, or even (if over 18) allowed to surgically alter themselves to match their desired gender identity (perhaps with some reasonable safeguards).
I think she makes some good arguments about the fact that there are always limits to debate. She talks about how LGBTQ activists essentially "cancelled" an old anti-gay activist Anita Bryant, with the implication that most people nowadays would agree with that cancellation. Of course, I would simply say that there are meaningful differences between gay activism and trans activism (e.g., gay people were fighting against laws that criminalized consensual behavior between adults; trans people often are fighting to allow children to mutilate themselves). Nonetheless, I do take her point: Arguing against "cancellation" or "illiberal" tactics in the abstract is kind of pointless, because almost no one is a true free speech absolutist here. If, say, someone was going around and gathering a following by literally advocating for the murder of Jews, I think a lot of us would agree that public shaming (at the least) would be appropriate. That means that one must always have some object-level discussion about what people are being cancelled for before one can reasonably argue that any given cancellation is unacceptable. It's hardly a groundbreaking observation, but it's true nonetheless that there must be a line somewhere that would make "cancel culture" type tactics acceptable; we're all just debating where that line is.
Finally, I was surprised to see how much more aggressive Rowling has gotten in her anti-trans rhetoric. Not that I necessarily disagree with her, but it looks like I can no longer say that she's being unfairly smeared as an enemy of the trans movement.
Anyways, I would be curious on others thoughts here (assuming anyone is willing to watch a nearly two hour video by someone most would consider an ideological opponent.
I’m a trans person and I don’t really have the attention span to watch a 2 hour video, but I’m familiar with Contrapoints and willing to engage on a few points you mentioned.
What would refusing to acknowledge that “trans women are women” entail? If you use a trans person’s preferred pronouns, don’t treat them differently than you would a cis person of the same gender, and support their right to the healthcare they need, it’s just a fight over definitions about what a woman is, which is largely fruitless - see many LessWrong and SSC posts i.e. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
However, the terms and arguments you are using would get you quickly lumped in with the transphobic crowd, regardless of your own opinions. Namely - calling gender affirmation surgery “mutilation” and implying that pro-trans right individuals want it done on kids. For most trans people the focus is on hormone replacement therapy, not surgery; allowing trans teenagers access to HRT would actually drastically reduce the need for surgeries for both FtMs and MtFs: FtMs wouldn’t need top surgery (which is almost all what’s done in minors) and MtFs wouldn’t need facial feminisation surgery, tracheal shave, voice feminisation surgery, hair transplants, etc.
You’d also be solving what l think is the crux of the issue that conservatives have with trans women: they find them disturbing to look at and interact with (FtMs, who pass more easily and at worst look like effeminate men, don’t trigger any of that same response as MtFs). People who transition early enough wouldn’t trigger that “uncanny valley” effect and would just pass as their new gender to anyone interacting with them.
Personally it also stems from the fact that I wish I’d transitioned when I was younger, and like many other trans people, would like to spare others from the hell that’s going through the wrong puberty and be stuck with a body you hate that you want to surgically alter.
This is a very reasonable motivation, and the mirror image of this would be people who transitioned when they were young and regret it, knowing that they would have been happier if they had just waited it out and realized that they were cis. I've personally known someone like this, who started transitioning FTM in her late teens only to regret it and try to reverse it in her early 20s, which still left her with many permanent changes that she didn't like. There's also the fact that if I had been a preteen in the current social environment, there's a high chance I personally would have been convinced to transition MTF, which, as an adult now, I know for a fact would have been vastly harmful to my life.
Unfortunately, until we achieve true technological transhumanism, false positives and false negatives will always be with us and cause immense suffering for the people in those groups. I do think it's incumbent on anyone who wants to make life better in the future for children to acknowledge the downsides of both and to seek out better ways to identify and prevent them. This not only means more concern for making sure that kids who believe themselves to be trans have to go through sufficient screening to determine if they truly are trans, but also making sure that kids are provided the resources needed to even know what transness is and whether or not they actually fit it. Which I see both the self-proclaimed trans rights activists and their opponents mostly failing at, respectively.
The base rates also make the mirror image scenario far likelier than you'd think.
Let's assume that about 0.5% of the population would benefit from medical transition and about 20% of gen-Z are drawn to being LGBT / gender-questioning at same point in their lives. Then a 10% false positive rate for gender-affirming care, would mean 4 detransitioners for every real trans person. Those are terrible destructive odds and I was rather generous to the current state of trans care with my the numbers I assumed. My personal intuition is that far more of gen-Z is drawn to gender-questioning ideas, that the base rate of trans-ness is less than 0.5% and that the rates of desistance/de-transitioning are significantly higher than 10%. But, I'll stick to these numbers for now.
This is exactly why doctors do not mass refer people for invasive surgeries early into a rare diagnosis. The odds of you not having the disease and reducing your lifespan due to surgery, are much much higher than the odds of saving a life due to early surgical intervention for said rare disease.
Stepping out from the moral argument, these kinds of statistical and logistical issues with transitioning are a bigger and dangerously ignored problem.
There is no end to the expensive surgeries needed by trans people to feel fully integrated into their new gender. If trans-ness is accepted as a human right, how do we plan to handle this massive new healthcare burden. If it is not covered by insurance, then does this mean that only the top 10% of trans people can actually transition ? If it treats body-dysphoria, then should all superficial surgeries be covered by insurance ?
I sympathize with trans people. They seem to be dealing with the 'big man in a hoodie walking down a dimly lit street' problem. Irrespective of a young woman's moral judgement, she is better off crossing the empty street. It sucks that those who tick more of those boxes are treated unfairly, but rather an accidental bigot than dead.
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I'm not sure I read you right, but I take it your post means that you do want hormone treatments for children and teenagers?
That’s the current medical consensus (for teenagers - actual pre-pubertal children don’t need hormones).
I can only speak to my personal experience, but I’ve been through childhood gender dysphoria and I wish I had know transition was an option then. I grew up outside of America and before it became engrained in the popular consciousness, so when I was a child the only thing I could come up with was pretend I’d gotten in an accident that cut off my genitals, so doctors would be forced to reassign me. I didn’t go through with it due to low pain tolerance, but that would have been actual (self-)mutilation, and I had no awareness that being trans was a thing so you cannot blame social contagion.
I think it was a mistake for current trans activists to focus on a nebulous concept of gender identity instead of gender dysphoria, which is a serious psychiatric condition that has widespread medical consensus about how to treat it. For people with it, puberty is an unwanted, traumatic experience that ends up giving you a body you despise and that you end up spending tragic sums of money fixing. Perhaps if that was the primary discourse, you’d also get fewer people that only do it because it’s trendy or whatnot.
Do you think you would have been better off with medical transitioning pre-puberty, even if that meant you would never orgasm or have functional male or female sexuality (like what seems to have happened with Jazz Jennings)?
I don't think there's enough studies on the sexual development of trans women who completely blocked male puberty, as it's fairly rare. I probably would have preferred that at the time, since my sexuality made me feel very distressed in general, but "completely block puberty" and "transition as an adult" aren't the only two options. I don't see why I couldn't have transitioned shortly after the onset of male puberty, enough to gain the ability to orgasm and some sexual functioning, but before my voice dropped and height increased. And there's also the potential use of topical testosterone for normal genital development, that's very promising but under-studied.
FWIW, it isn't even true that starting medical transition early on results in an inability to orgasm or a lack of sexual function. Even trans women who start puberty blockers so early that they don't have enough skin to use for a penile inversion vaginoplasty are still as likely as cis women to report being able to orgasm, after vaginoplasty using an alternative technique.
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Where? Certainly not across Europe.
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Yeah, I guess there's a line in the sand somewhere around here. It'd take a lot of convincing for me to consider your misfortune more pressing to prevent than the harm likely done to impressionable teenagers who needlessly undergo such treatment. I'd wager many conservatives have similar preferences in this issue.
But there's probably an underlying debate about the rights of parents to override the wishes of their children that we'd need have first. Or differently phrased, in how far the state should be able to override parental authority.
Thats been tricky for a while, if a Jehovahs Witness raised child and their parents all agree that they don't want a life saving blood transfusion should the state override them considering the childs best interests?
If the child wanted the transfusion and the parents did not, does that change the calculus?
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There's not sufficient evidence to justify this anecdotal opinion and while you're welcome to have your opinion, especially about yourself, I'd suggest you think about how you don't have the counterfactual, even for yourself.
P.S. I would think the ethical bar and evidence standard would need to be very high for the puberty blockers, then HRT treatment for children when we know the majority of people who don't go through their natal puberty, will be infertile. Not to mention the problems with inability to orgasm. Can a child make that decision?
To be clear, that's an effect of HRT (cross-sex hormones), not puberty blockers.
There's no evidence for that. Even trans women who start puberty blockers early are as likely as cis women to be able to orgasm.
That link is not very good evidence even if you have access to the paper.
I know it might be hard to believe, I thought it was a right-wing talking point at first but when you think about it, it makes sense. Biological sex does actually mean something.
The sterility is all about not going through natal puberty (so puberty blockers). Puberty is the process of gaining sexual function (who knew?) What do you think happens to your body if you stop the process and go straight onto cross-sex hormones? For boys, this will lead to permanent sterility as sperm production doesn't occur, for girls the ovarian follicles don't develop (though girls could preserve their eggs which they are born with).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40618-023-02077-5
The effects of puberty blockers on sexual function:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2022.2121238
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonadotropin-releasing_hormone_agonist
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It's a fight over the definition of what a woman is all the way down. Whether or not trans people are the gender they've claimed is the whole and entire point and the disagreement on this is not some minor squabble. If you believed what they did you likely would not consider yourself a trans person. And they know this, it's why they don't want their children to believe what you believe.
I disagree, I couldn’t care less about gender “identity” myself. I have gender dysphoria and the most effective treatment has been to transition. I don’t care about “really” being a woman or not, what matters is, does my body distress me, and do people perceive me in ways that make me uncomfortable? If I look enough like a woman that people assume I am one when they see me, that’s good enough for me.
If you are laying claim on the perception of others then you do care about their concept of 'woman', I can't see any way around that unless you'd be just as happy with 'feminine man', a concession I think conservatives would be willing to make.
I suppose I didn’t make that clear enough - I didn’t mean I want to people to see me, know that I’m a trans woman, and then classify me as a woman because they respect my gender identity and that they should thus consider me a woman. Instead I want to pass well enough that people see me and just assume I’m a woman based on how I look, sound and act, and not give them any reason to think I’m actually a feminine man instead of a normal woman. If once they learn of my chromosomes they come to another intellectual conclusion, that’s a different story than a shopkeeper calling me “sir” or “ma’am” when they see me.
Both the modern left and right perspectives on gender is wrong imo. People won’t think you’re a man or a woman based on your chromosomes, but neither will they think that because you have a tag with your pronouns on it. They’ll look at you and their brain will subconsciously put you in one category based on your physical characteristics - with mental effort, you can force yourself to go “oh, this tall broad shouldered person with a deep voice is a woman”, but the brain is still making that snap judgement. Note that it also goes both ways - in a recent video Ben Shapiro instinctively called Hunter Schafer “she” and had to consciously correct himself, in an ironically similar way to how some leftists correct themselves when they misgender someone.
I guess you could call me a gender descriptivist, which is oddly enough a perspective I haven’t seen much of.
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I agree "mutilation" is a little tendentious, but only a little. You are removing healthy body parts, which in almost all other circumstances is mutilation. I also note that you do admit that minors are getting top surgery, so I wouldn't say hormones are the only focus for minors. Not to mention that hormone replacement can leave minors sterilized and sometimes unable to orgasm for the rest of their lives, or cause osteoporosis-type symptoms, so I wouldn't exactly consider it a minor intervention even if no surgeries were being done.
A lot of our disagreements probably come down to empirical questions. How many kids would simply get over their transgender phase and never experience the "hell" of being in a body they hate if they weren't "affirmed"? For how many people does gender transition actually lead to long term mental health gains? How many people will regret being put on hormones or going through surgery as minors? How many people would go through the "hell" of being stuck in the "wrong body" in the absence of trans activists constantly telling them about transgenderism? These seem like very relevant questions to how we should approach this issue.
There is growing evidence that associates being transgender with a cluster of physical disorders linked to a genetic abnormality on chromosome 6p21. An enormous proportion of transgender patients have nearly all of the below conditions:
Hypermobility/Ehler-danlos syndrome
impaired thyroid functionality
gastrointestinal issues of varying severity
autism
adhd
dysautonomia/postural orthopedic tachycardia syndrome
in natal females, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, and PCOS
some more random markers like acidic urine
Transgender healthcare specialist Dr Powers*, who noticed the above list and corroborated it with other doctors, also managed to successful treat teenage female dysphoric patients with a completely different approach: prescribing them anti androgens. The earlier, the higher the chance of the dysphoria being “cured”. Unfortunately he has not had much luck with natal male patients and the hypothesis is that it could be due to androgen exposure in the womb.
In the light of the above, a hypothesis based on endocrine disruption instead of cultural contagion makes more sense as an explainer of gender dysphoria. Perhaps elevated micro plastics in the environment, or perhaps chemical in the water turning people gay, I don’t know.
But the “wait until they’re adults to do anything” approach for dysphoric teens is clearly not optimal, especially when you have patients that fit so neatly in a cluster, and have some for who transition is not necessary if the endocrine abnormality is treated early enough.
Now the medical treatment needs to be optimised for the best outcomes, sure, but currently the detransitioners are a small minority (2-5%), with most of them detransitioning because of social reasons and not due to desistance of dysphoria, and many retransitioning later. You are thus suggesting throwing 95% of the trans population on the bus to protect 5%.
*Dr Powers is also known for reversing sterility in transgender patients and also enabling normal genital development in younger patients by the use of topical HRT.
I respect Dr. Powers, but one clinician noticing that he has a lot of patients with certain comorbidities and doing informal surveys on the internet with his fanbase is not high quality evidence.
One possibility is he's too good at his job, he's one of the few endocrinologists who actually run hormonal assays on his patients before prescribing them new hormones. He always does a mental health referral before doing anything else. In other words, he's ethical. It is entirely possible that he and his band of clinicians using the "Dr. Powers'" method have already weeded out the tucutes from their patient list and are only looking at a smaller subset of the transgender phenomena - those with actual hormonal issues and would have a problem regardless of the culture. Not every underweight person has anorexia!
I am 100% supportive of trans-identifying teens having a hormonal assessment and then prescribed methods of making their hormonal profile more closely fit with their sex assigned at birth. Medicine should be focused on restoring health and biological functioning when possible. I would love if the battle over trans-identified individuals took place over polluting corporations, identifying all the endocrine disruptors and removing them from our environment.
I do want to note that opponents of transitioning have also noticed the correlation with ADHD and Autism, and have taken it as evidence that it is a social contagion (we would expect these groups to be more susceptible to feelings of not fitting in with peers, body dysphoria, etc.)
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Yeah, I think, especially with the rise of what I think are more transitioners due to cultural contagion, that the 2-5% detransition number is quite likely a severe undercount (and as far as I know, some of the low detransition numbers were collected from studies that had serious flaws).
The empirical landscape here is really complicated, both because it's a relatively new phenomenon and because the political stakes are so high for any given study that it can be hard to trust the results/interpretation from either side. So I don't think either of us will be able to convince the other by throwing studies/etc. at each other. I will mention that some European countries are pulling back from the affirming care model as more evidence comes out that the mental health gains claimed for transitioning are less certain than was claimed. See, e.g., here.
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Which we have to if we want sex-segregated sports or prisons, especially in the setting of self-ID. So this seems like a bigger pill to swallow than you are presenting it as.
As I don't have to ask about/learn/memorize new pronouns for a cis person, from square one I'm being asked to treat a trans person differently.
I saw a video yesterday of an interview with a trans person whose declared pronouns were "he/they," which doesn't even make sense as a typical pronoun pairing. There's no way to incorporate this narcissistic chaos into a workable reflexive vocabulary, so I reject participating in it. And now you're being treated how I would treat anyone else.
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Speaking for myself: you have, like many decent folks on the trans activist side, buried a lot of very salient details in reasonable-sounding language.
As a general rule, yes, I will use someone's preferred pronouns. But what if I earnestly believe someone is a fraud, a bad actor, someone whose "transition" is at best highly suspect, and at worst, a cynical grift? Someone like Jessica Yaniv, or Dylan Mulvaney, or a convicted rapist who discovered during his trial that he is actually a woman? I would like to reserve the right to say "No, I don't think you are claiming a trans identity in good faith and I refuse to respect it." A lot of trans activists would tell me that I need to use whatever pronouns someone tells me to, period.
"Need" is a bit of a question mark, though. But again, if you are an adult of sound mind, sure, do whatever you want to your body, I guess. But trans inmates who demand that the prison system foot the bill for their transition, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars from an already overstretched prison budget that barely accommodates the very real medical needs of other prisoners? To say nothing of minors who say they "need" to make permanent alterations to their body at the age of 14? Phrasing it as "the right to the healthcare they need" sounds like opponents want to deny them medical treatment in general, and ignores the actual issues.
Again, if it was just trans women saying "I'm a woman, please call me a woman," I think most people would accept that, with varying degrees of grudgingness. One of the thiings that's made it such a flashpoint, though, is trans people demanding that references to "women" (when talking about, e.g,, pregnancy, menstruation, etc.) be changed to awkward if not offensive circumlocutions like "pregnant people" or "uterus-havers." There are many examples of even more egregious howlers. These are things being pushed by the same folks who say they just want us to accept their "reasonable," flexible, and constantly changing definition of "woman."
It is unfortunate that so much of the debate is driven by bad actors, and not by reasonable people like (I assume) yourself who just want to live your lives and be left in peace. But the fact that even the reasonable people will generally refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of bad actors means that when you get the "trans woman" who makes a point of strutting around a women's locker room naked, waving "her" erect penis at a captive audience, it discredits all the other trans women who say "No, really, I just to want to use the locker room and change in peace."
I could have said this, word for word, re: Islam during my Internet Atheist years. And the fact that this epistemic rigor was not observed by the people I argued with really opened a lot of cracks in my old, blue-tribe worldview. (Charlie Hebdo and the reactions to it opened those cracks into fissures, and from there it's been rabbit holes all the way down.)
I don't really have a point here, but I found the historical resonance startling.
Interesting that Sam Harris is one of the people targeted by Contra in this video too for saying the activism has gotten a bit crazy when there're reasonable questions.
He's still showing cracks.
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The primary one is noticing and rejecting the following general pattern: if we have a good thing G, and we add some stuff to G, we still get a good thing G that is just as good. It shows up in many contexts. Some examples:
The addition of "arts" to STEM, making "STEAM" (while liberal arts are fine in their own right, they're completely different to STEM);
The addition of arbitrary numbers of foreigners to a country, while expecting the host country's culture to remain completely unchanged;
The addition of experimental mRNA medicines under the label of "vaccine"; or
The addition of anything with vaguely-positive emotional valence to the label "democracy".
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