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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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How much is the actual lifespan reduction for a trans person? The 35 year stat that gets quotes a lot seems to be based on the mortality of black trans women who are disproportionately likely to be sex workers. What is the lifespan expectancy of a middle class white trans woman/man? A sterile kid with diabetes is going to get lifelong injections and have to adopt if they want kids but I wouldn't characterize that as a "vista of terrifying possibilities".

Is this really about outcomes or is it about regarding transition as fundamentally illegitimate? Would you prefer to have a cis straight sterile kid with the life expectancy of a trans person, or a trans kid in a T4T marriage and bio kids with the life expectancy of a cis person?

The whole question is pretty philosophically precarious. I don't know how I'd feel about trans people in a world where they were mentally healthy, lived normal life spans, and didn't tend to die young due to overmedicalization and the outcomes of their suicidality and other dangerous mental health issues. I live in the world where most "trans" people who make it to twenty without going on hormonal treatment just return "normalcy". My current biases say that the hypothetical you draw is statistically impossible, and I wouldn't trust the person offering the bargain.

A sterile kid with diabetes is going to get lifelong injections and have to adopt if they want kids but I wouldn't characterize that as a "vista of terrifying possibilities".

I actually think "terrifying" would be a pretty reasonable word if one were contemplating a scenario in which children were being persuaded at scale by niche online communities to become infertile diabetics for life and the government were employing the power of the state to prevent parents from protecting them.