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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 30, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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As far as I understand, you can get better-passing trans people, but that requires "gender-affirming care" for minors, so someone like Zooey Zephyr can avoid developing a masculine face and body. So someone who is offended by both non-passing trans and "chemically castrating children" is basically saying they want to erase the whole idea of modern transness, that the majority of them should suck it up and live their lives according to their biological sex and those who can't and transition should accept being treated as exotic freaks, like someone with facial tattoos or a thousand piercings.

There's a sub on reddit called translater with people who have transitioned later than Zephyr, and many are passable.

'shooped until proven otherwise. I'd assume that people whose self-image depends extraordinarily on altering their appearance and on deceiving themselves will also be very likely to alter their photographs to deceive others.

So someone who is offended by both non-passing trans and "chemically castrating children" is basically saying they want to erase the whole idea of modern transness, that the majority of them should suck it up and live their lives according to their biological sex and those who can't and transition should accept being treated as exotic freaks, like someone with facial tattoos or a thousand piercings.

Yes, I want to erase the whole idea of modern transness. The technology is not sufficiently developed to make it workable in most cases, even if it was a good idea. We should encourage people to feel comfortable with their own bodies instead of fuelling an industry that encourages crude surgical solutions to age-old psychological issues. Let them be tomboys or effeminate males. I've seen plenty of gory photos and admissions from people who've wrecked their lives - this is not an avenue our civilization should pursue until we become much more technically sophisticated.

Without the pressure of imperfect technology better technology may never come. I suppose you'd be fine with it, they aren't.

My advice to any trans-questioning people who I could trust to listen would, of course, be to focus on everything else that troubles them and then see if they're still unhappy with the junk they were born with.

This is a very strange assertion. That photo of Zooey Zephyr looks like someone early on in transition to me. I've seen multiple people like that in queer spaces (adults who started their transition as adults) where 2-3 years later they look more or less like a woman because they've actually been taking hormones long enough (and possibly have gotten some surgery, idk, I've never interrogated any of them on the details of their transition). I guess it's a little surprising to me that she's not closeted or identifying as non-binary at that stage in her transition. (I did some superficial web searching and couldn't find any information on when she came out as trans.)

What do you expect, this is a genuine conundrum. If you assign blockers to every kid with something that looks like dysphoria, you're messing up the ones that would have desisted. If you don't, you run into the passing issue. There isn't a good way out of it, other than improving diagnostics. And even then it won't do anything to help people with late onset dysphoria pass (see Contrapoints, Philosophytube).