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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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https://unherd.com/2023/04/is-trans-the-new-anorexia/

I’m not sure exactly how culture war-like this idea is, but I’ve never actually heard anyone else compare Anorexia with trans people before. I can see the social contagion factor in both especially for women who are much more conforming than men tend to, and because women have higher neuroticism than men. What I’m not sure about is some of the other ideas, that being trans is about self-negation and a sort of renouncing of their body.

I’ve been making that comparison for atleast 8 months. Ever since Scott ran an article on social contagion in anorexia and how anorexia wasn’t common at all until females herd about it.

Honestly been curious if I was the first to use the term like that. But it’s been popping up a lot on social media past few months and others here have been using for atleast 3-4 months. I probably wasn’t first but the social contagion comparison between trans and anorexia I’ve been using for a while.

Ever since Scott ran an article on social contagion in anorexia and how anorexia wasn’t common at all until females herd about it.

He didn't make the connection explicitly, but transgenderism was surely on his mind when he wrote it. "Looking back on the debate, it seems as if acceptance of neurasthenia had been so successful that psychiatrists felt obligated to restigmatize this mental disorder in hopes of limiting its adoption. [...] He who has ears to hear, let him listen."

It's disappointing how chickenshit Scott has become in his ACX days. He's effectively cancelproof so there's no need to be this cagey.

He's effectively cancelproof so there's no need to be this cagey.

I think more important than being cancelled is his continued ability to get laid in his social circles. Getting a reputation as a transphobe will most likely make that substantially harder, so I'd expect to see some odd rhetorical contortions in this area.

Isn't he married now?

I think more important than being cancelled is his continued ability to get laid in his social circles.

I thought he wasn't into getting laid.

I thought he wasn't into getting laid.

In his social circle you have to say that to get laid.

No, he's not saying that. You've got it exactly backwards. Read more closely:

What if transphobia is our culture’s version of the penis-stealing witch panic? Wise but evil women (gender studies professors) are using incomprehensible black arts (post-modernism) to make people lose their penises. Sure, those people are losing their penises through voluntary sex-change surgery, but this is just another case of the general principle that we replace the magical explanations natural to other cultures with the medicalized explanations natural to our own.

Scott isn't saying that the belief that transphobia is a threat is the panic and that transphobia isn't very big. He's saying that transphobia itself is the panic; transphobes are treating the pro-trans movement as evil penis-stealing witches.

Scott's dunking on his transphobe outgroup here. It's the exact opposite of saying that the trans movement has gone too far.

It's kind of weird dunk though -- if there actually were witches stealing people's penises in Africa, it seems like the Africans would be entirely correct to panic about it? Witch panics in general are mostly bad when the witches don't exist. For instance, one could argue that the problem with the Red Scare was being bad at identifying the Soviet spies -- they were a real problem!

Scott’s whole deal with transphobia is the argument that because trans want to be identified with their adopted sex, it doesn’t matter that they aren’t really. The ‘transphobic’ view is that it does matter.

Right, but either way the doctors are in fact stealing penises, yeah? To those that think stealing penises is bad, this position just makes Scott witch-adjacent or something.

Stealing, or taking with informed consent? Of course, one can argue that for some things, taking with full informed consent is just as bad as stealing, and that the penis is one of those things, much like how voluntarily selling oneself into chattel slavery is considered unethical and illegal in most of modern society. But there seems to be very different perspectives in the various tribes when it comes to how big a difference there is between stealing and taking with consent for this particular thing.

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He made the comparison explicitly in section VI here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness

That might be ground zero for trans as social contagion. And his reader base is smarter enough to make the connection between anorexia history and the current trans movement.

For his writing style not saying it directly can slowly change the minds of true believers and the middle ground if he’s not immediately labeled a transphobe.

Also I’d say social contagion is a bit of high class way to say grooming and lacks the pedophilia connotations.

Regardless of the extent that social contagion didn't become top-of-mind for the readership until maybe then, I recall comparison between trans/anorexia as far back as 2015 (you have to read down a few comments, but the context probably starts around there). Perhaps there was already some undercurrent of folks implicitly believing something like social contagion for anorexia at the time, even.

It’s a different phenomenon though. Grooming at least in the traditional sense is someone trying to create the disorder for their own reasons. The Geography of Madness version of social contagion is more that people become aware the disease exists, and then some portion of them get the disorder. The way the disorder is introduced is different.

The Geography of Madness version of social contagion is more that people become aware the disease exists, and then some portion of them get the disorder

My reading of the book was that the take is more that people already have distress and the knowledge of the disorder means they express it in that light. The publicization of the symptom pool gives them a way to finally get a response from medical professionals.

In that sense, taking a distressed autistic kid and telling them - not just via media but by people clearly acting in loco parentis - that their distress is due to transness, affirming them in this and potentially locking them into it imo can justly be called "grooming". Especially when we get into "you don't have to tell your parents".

I think social contagion is actually a completely distinct concept from grooming. When I talk about social contagion I mean "a teenage girl starts restricting her diet/self-harming/identifying as a boy because all her friends are doing it". It's an organic undirected process.

When used metaphorically, "grooming" is more like teachers distributing literature to impressionable children which heavily implies that even banal gender nonconformance may be evidence of clinically significant gender dysphoria, and which misrepresents the efficacy of gender-affirming care.

"Social contagion" is a bit like mass hysteria. "Grooming" is recruitment. Believing that one of them is happening does not imply believing that the other is.

I can agree they are different words. And social contagion is likely the better word for this. That being said I think grooming and social contagion are happening at the time. And they have a lot of similiarities and I believe overlaps.

For his writing style not saying it directly can slowly change the minds of true believers and the middle ground if he’s not immediately labeled a transphobe.

Yeah, I don't believe in pendulums anymore, but here I'm getting the feeling the more savvy parts of the progressive movement are starting to believe they drove off a cliff, and are bracing for impact.

Also I’d say social contagion is a bit of high class way to say grooming and lacks the pedophilia connotations.

Social contagion is more like your teenage daughter getting obsessed with K-Pop or whatever it is teenage girls get obsessed over these days.

Grooming is more like Yvette Falarca using her position to recruit students into her political cult.

Lisa Littman published her study on rapid onset gender dysphoria in 2018 where she argues it could likely be caused by social contagion. And she suspected it was a kind of social contagion back in 2016 when she first made the study. But the parents of these kids suspected something like social contagion much earlier even if they didn't have the word for it.

I think it's getting talked about more now, because the once successful effort to suppress talk of the idea has failed and even very mainstream center left publications have been talking about it as a not crazy idea.

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