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The gender ideology movement sort of feels out of the news cycle where I live, but remains very top of mind for me.
As I see it, the whole umbrella is actually multiple, almost unrelated strands, queerying category activists, social engineering progressives, AGPs, internet cults, all underpinned by unthinking legal activism and of course corporate profiteering. Did I mention an overtly political and enabling media environment bereft of any journalistic values?
I am fascinated by all these things but mainly I want to talk about the social mania aspect. I'm very interested in how smart people, who would inevitably class themselves as above-average in rationality and morality, are able to brush off child-safeguarding concerns, discarding the previous medical ethics consensus (first do no harm, evidence based medicine) in favour of ideas that barely existed even 15-20 years ago.
I have been looking into previous social manias such as the satanic panic and the child care workers given wrongful convictions and it's shocking how difficult it is to reverse the tide of mania once it's begun. Parents, police, the justice system, and media all fall into lockstep and condemn innocent people to terrible fates they and their families bear in almost total isolation, with only a few supporters able to parse the information in front of them and figure out what is going on.
I mean this is just human behaviour - we make movies about the Salem witch trials, we are modern people and have access to perspectives of humans across evolutionary time. Is it really true that people still don't know who we are, how we behave in herds?
I understand apathy, I understand things moving out of the news cycles, but I can't understand how people can maintain a neutral view on unnecessary surgeries on minors. When institutions such as medical bodies fail in their basic safeguarding responsibilities, suppressing dissent within their ranks, it is not hard to work out what is going on. How many manias does history need to present before people learn what we are?
A failure of courage I understand in any given context but the neutral middle doesn't even seem curious in private.
Can anybody enlighten me why people aren't more curious, why they're happy for children to be groomed into lifelong medicalisation, with their life choices pre-emptively narrowed before they even understand what consent means? The true-believers I understand, it's supposedly smart, moral people that aren't engaged that I'm confused about. Are they secretly true believers but just don't want to say?
Plain old cognitive dissonance?
If you think that minors are basically small people, and that people should largely be allowed to do things that they personally expect will make them fulfilled, it's pretty easy to keep a neutral view. Something like "I have no desire to do this to myself, but neither to I have a moral claim to prevent them from doing it to themselves". To be honest, this is pretty much where I fall on the issue. I am somewhat uncomfortable with the speed with which this went from rare to common, as it leaves people without solid information on how well it's likely to go in the marginal case rather than the average-as-of-decades ago. Still, I can't think of any interventions where the benefit of that intervention is worth the costs and the precedents it sets.
Empirically, people do not learn from history, only from things that they personally have seen, and so every group in every generation has to learn that lesson for themselves.
That would seem to somewhere marginalise the concept of child development, which we have consistently taken into account in applying other restrictions on choice as a society, alcohol, driving, joining the army.
But I can see the framing as being sufficient at a first, say libertarian, brush.
The problem of course, as you point to, is that the systems of trust advising on these matters are captured and are being grossly negligent in providing accurate information.
I kind of see myself at a privileged place in history, in that it's actually really easy to get information. 10 hours of reading on substack will get you all you need to know to have a visceral experience of concern. In the past, the systems of trust were limited. Also we understand biases and self deception much better than previous generations.
I met the parent of a three year old who told me their child gets to decide every day if she is a boy or a girl. Schools are responding to this Manchausens by proxy parental abuse by... obliging them... Surely an average person would look at this and say, hmmmm, that's not right? Are three year olds now masters of their own destiny?
That’s one thing that always got me with this issue. Any attempt to talk about trans-kids as kids, of comparing this desire of kids (which must never be questioned) with other things kids believe about themselves, or are capable of understanding about how things work is notably absent. Kids can, one one hand, be coerced into participating in things for peer pressure, family pressure, as a cope for other problems, or simply because the culture says it’s cool, and everyone understands that the adults need to be there as a backstop to keep them from going nuts. A six year old who wants to be a baseball player when he grows up is assumed to be going through a phase and chided for skipping homework to play ball in the sandlot. A six year old who wants to be a Klingon is told to not watch so much TV.
And adults likewise understand much better than kids that some decisions simply cannot be undone. Often this sort of thing is protected by law. Children are not allowed tattoos because we know that kids can’t understand that some decisions are unchangeable and therefore we don’t let them make them. We don’t allow kids to request an amputation and peg leg or eye removal. We don’t allow kids to do dangerous things that can result in life-changing injury. We limit work and other activities and force kids to go to school because those decisions are too important to be decided by a small child.
Yes exactly - I think it's a sure sign of a mania when we abandon long-established understandings about child development without any reason. If anything neuroscience has shown development (particularly frontal cortex, critical for being able to make judgements with long term consequences) goes on much longer than we had though.
This new thinking goes against known understandings and norms in child development psychology, medical ethics, education and culture broadly. Its a huge clue we're in a mania.
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