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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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I think I would place less emphasis on the broader knockdown of transgender ideology in its entirety, and more on the specifics of this case. The kid is five, five year olds are easily influenced by trends, fads, and whims, and do not excel at long term planning. Even if it were possible to literally be born in the wrong body and change your sex to fix that, a five year old is going to have no idea how to diagnose that and commit to that. They have no idea what that even means. It is at least 99% likely that the kid does not have any medically recognizable form of gender dysphoria, so it's important not to commit to any changes that will be hard to walk back, even if those are just socializing as the wrong gender.

I suspect you'll have an easier time selling a plan of "Treat them as a boy for a couple years just to be safe and see what happens" than "transgenderism is entirely bogus", even if the latter is true. And convincing them of the former is 99% likely to solve the problem on its own.

Thank you for your response, other commenters made similar points which I responded to here: https://www.themotte.org/post/454/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/89837?context=8#context