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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35167 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Imagine you're out and about in the city, suddenly you hear a noise, you turn to see a truck heading right for you. Maybe you were too distracted, maybe the driver is drunk, either way you never had a chance.

Next thing you know, you wake up in a hospital, and the year is 2122. Turns out someone close to you signed you up to one of those cryonics experiments, where they unfreeze you when the state of medicine is advanced enough that they can help you. You grieve to loss of everyone you knew and loved, and given no other options, you move on with your life. You've made some friends, and one day as you're all chilling out, you find yourself in the middle of a discussion, reminiscent of the ones that happen on The Motte every once in a while: progressives always win... or do they? You hear your friends exchanging the usual arguments about whether or not eugenics was a progressive idea, when you realize you haven't really seen anything about trans issues, since you got revived. You bring it up, but no one knows what you're talking about. You check the current history books, and there's something about gay marriage, but nothing really about trans issues. You check Wikipedia, there's more details there, and while to coverage is not unsympathetic to the 21st century trans narrative, it's oddly terse. Your friends go "huh, the more you know..." and move on with the conversation, but you feel unsatisfied with being unable to show just how big the issue used to be.

There's a decent archive of the early 21st century. You can access articles in the NYT, the Atlantic, Washington Post, Vox, etc, and you can retrieve any academic paper from our current era. What would you try to use, to show how important the issue was in 2022?

Search out the papers that pushed 'affirmation only care' on gender questioning teens and the laudable editorials on these topics in mainstream US media.

Puberty blockers are pretty nasty, early surgery ditto, surgeries performed on young women etc.

That'd get their attention, that such outrages were condoned in papers of records and allowed by the laws of the land.

Pointing out Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize doesn't get much of a reaction these days, is that the kind of thing you're talking about?

I expect you'd get similar disinterest in any future ideological position that had been quietly dropped and historically revised in the same way support for Stalin was.

Pointing out lobotomy does, so who knows..

Does it?

My impression is that the reaction is more "Haha, yeah that was weird! Good thing The Science progressed and we don't do these things anymore!"

Nah, usually it's more like 'they insane, kept doing it for decades'. E.g. see here.

I think greasing the skids under distressed teenage girls so they end up getting mutilated and castrated, by policy is going to rank up there with lobotomies.

A quick Google search suggests 50k lobotomies between 1949 and 1952, vs. "In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo's data analysis of insurance claims." That's a multiple-orders-of-magnitude difference, and the US population in 1949 was about half of what it is now.

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