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One thing that rolls around in my head when talking about the rise in transgenderism is the complexity of comparing outcomes. Now I don’t personally think this topic should be primarily judged through an outcomes lens, and my position isn’t based on it. However, it inevitably gets tossed around, and it’s also related to the question of how much a rise in transgenderism is revealed preferences vs changed preferences, so to speak.
It shouldn’t be controversial to say that a person who transitioned in the past, say even 2003, would have poorer outcomes on average than a person who transitioned today, due to both medical progress and social acceptability etc. Consequently, the baseline unhappiness for a person to transition should end up being higher in 2003 than 2023.
Thus there’s a lot of argument that the rise in transgenderism is at least partly due to a lot of people who would have transitioned in 2003 in a 2023 environment. And I think that’s straightforwardly true.
But I still think that doesn’t show the whole picture Consider the difference in comparing the level of happiness of a person who transitions today as compared to…
• If they didn’t transition today vs
• If they didn’t transition in 2003.
I think social contagion is certainly partly responsible in cause. [There are certainly some people who would never have felt gender dysphoria if they weren’t socialized into this, and I think it accounts for a lot of ROTD in young women, but I suspect it’s also less so in men with AGP, though I definitely suspect things like porn as @2rafa suggest also cause an increase in amount of AGP.] But I think it is also responsible partly for degree of dissatisfaction. How many people in a social context where transition wasn’t an option, would have been happier not transitioning than people not transitioning in a social context where it is an option? Again, the answer seems obviously a lot.
A person tempted to drink, but trying to remain sober is probably going to have a harder time at a party where they’re being encouraged to drink than in an environment where everyone is sober and encouraging them to stay so. So the real comparison is how much happier is a person who transitions in 2023 than that same person would have been if they hadn’t transitioned in 2003.
Obviously it’s a difficult if not impossible measurement. But I think there’s reason to believe that the answer on average is less happy. And if that were true, there’s an argument for a society that is less accommodating, knowing that the person who transitions is less happy, but on average the individual doesn’t transition and is happier for it.
Consider it a related thought experiment that could be measured:
Take a group of children and divide them into four blind groups. **Groups A and B **are given an enthusiastic conversation about and shown advertisements etc for Disney World and told they might get to go there this weekend. Only Group A is taken. Group B is brought to a local playground for the day.
Group C is also shown the advertisements and get the topic presented, but not told that they have a chance to go, and are told upfront they will be taken to a local playground, which they are. Group D is also taken to the local playground after being told they would be, and not shown any adversement for Disney, even though they are likely aware of it.
Even though we might expect that the kids in Group A might have a better time than the kids in group D, it’s reasonable to assume B will have the worst time of it.
Now suppose one wanted to make an argument that A’s overall satisfaction was not great enough over D’s or even C’s to be worth the expense of taking them there, and that C’s and B's satisfaction could be most effectively increased by including them in group D (avoid showing them DW promotions), rather than A’s (taking them to Disney World).
Now imagine that your opponent’s response was to compare A to B (the group who was told might go and then denied) and used B’s dissastisfaction to argue for making D’s into C’s, dissatisfied C’s into Bs, and then arguing it’s human decency to make A available to all Bs.
TLDR, my, not particularly unique point, is that I bet there's a lot of people with a given level of dysphoria, who would have lived a hardly affected life untransitioned 20 years ago, but would suffer much more for it in today's context, and that should be accounted for in extending social permissiveness.
Since many here will already agree with me, I'll go ahead and make the more controversial: The same argument above but for divorce, extramarital sex, and religious participation.
yes_chad.jpg
Or to elaborate: a lot of what our modern culture is selling as freedom and pursuit of happiness is absolutely fake, and we'd be a lot better of just forbidding it (in fact, I'll go out on a limb and say the only reason these things were allowed and promoted was to meet depopulation goals).
I don't even think the satisfaction / dissatisfaction comes quite from the mechanism you describe. Does cake taste good because I'm not allowed to eat it every meal, or do I not eat it because I know it would come with negative consequences, and would end up not tasting as good as a result of eating it so much? I'm pretty sure it's the latter, and so it is with all the other things you mentioned.
I would much rather live in a ball busting autocracy where things are stable and the trains ran on time, than a free and liberated San Francisco where a thief or homosexual can attack or berate me, as I'm walking down the sidewalk, trying to get to work on time. I certainly think the western conception of freedom is largely a ridiculous notion in many ways.
Perhaps the best open display I ever saw that amounted to a defense against 'freedumb' loving stuff, was Tharman Shanmugaratnam's interview with Steve Sackur of the BBC, some years ago. 'Freedom' as a concept calls itself home to many camps, which aren't exclusive to the social laissez-fairism you find in the US. An acknowledgement that you need compromises on certain civil liberties to achieve others, which results in a healthier and more free society, of the variety people can respect or truly appreciate, is a goal that's far more meaningful in my view, than someone's right to burn down the whole social system by screaming the N-word at someone, while standing on the roof of their house.
What about the freedom of people to walk the streets at night, without the fear of assault or being raped; particularly if you're a woman or a child? What about the freedom of economic and social mobility that's tied to one's effort and used to be the whole point of a meritocracy, instead of pointing the fingers at others and claiming it's society that's keeping you down?
I think that many people have missed the point of the western conception of freedom and view it as an end in itself. The people who want to scream the N-word don't seem to realise that the ultimate freedom they extol is freedom that requires they build a fortress in which to scream it. It's the freedom to defect while overlooking the implication of being unprotected from being defected against. Suffer what wilt be done would be the whole of the law.
The freedom we have in the west, or at least the concept, is that we have the freedom to choose which compromises we make on our liberties. That is, we can (theoretically, imperfectly) exercise some choice in which personal freedoms to trade away for a greater social gain. It's a quid pro quo.
The trade-off isn't the problem. The failure to deliver (cynically, the failure to honour) the deal is the problem.
And this is precisely why it always seemed to be a pipe dream that only ends in failure. Because if people have missed the entire western conception of freedom on this point, then virtually the 'entire' population missed it long ago, and by a very substantial margin. Any true condition of freedom at play, ultimately requires that its adherents take the good with the bad. Any conception of freedom truly worth the name, can't stand to reason on a one-sided conception of freedom of action and liberty, which also ignores consequence. You have the free will to act as you will as far as your agency goes, and call someone the N-word, but if you demand insularity and protection from the consequences of someone who pulls a gun out and shoots you for it, you aren't a person that wants freedom.
Observing the way people in the west choose to live their life, gives me no logical indication to suggest that what they want is "freedom." Because if freedom entails 'responsibility', most people don't want to have 'anything' to do with it. The freedom Americans want and feel they're entitled to, is the same freedom a selfish 5-year-old believes he's entitled to, to demand and be given what he wants on a whim and have someone else pay the cost for it down the road. I would submit contra your final point, that the trade-off is precisely the problem. Freedom is certainly important. But it is most definitely 'not' an absolute value. Not even concepts like freedom of speech are absolute values. It doesn't give you the right to harass people. Science isn't an absolute value. It ends at the Nazi's human medical experiments. 'Nobody' has an unbridled absolute right to freedom, let alone to do whatever they want, whenever they want. Which is certainly how most Americans conceptualize their right to it.
One of those is a word, the other is murder, my 𝓃𝒾𝑔𝑔ℯ𝓇. Nobody advocates for the freedom to murder, people in sane countries do advocate for the freedom to say whatever words you want.
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