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