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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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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?

I'm not entirely certainly this post is just straight up trolling giving how far I had to read into it before it being clear whether you were pro- or anti-trans.


What are you going on about? Gender-affirming surgeries on trans minors are exceedingly rare (that data does show a small upward trend, even controlling for population). That data gives under 30/year genital surgeries and under 300/year top surgeries on a population of about 40 million children. In comparison, gender-affirming surgeries on cis minors are about 20 times more common.

I'm not sure why any children are getting cosmetic surgeries; that seems like it's probably best left age-gated to adults. But they're rare enough that it sounds to me more like there's a handful a weird special cases, not that there's an epidemic of unnecessary harmful surgeries.

What are you going on about? Gender-affirming surgeries on trans minors are exceedingly rare (that data does show a small upward trend, even controlling for population). That data gives under 30/year genital surgeries and under 300/year top surgeries on a population of about 40 million children.

Well first it is worth pointing out, that trans activists started off by saying they don't happen at all. That all is ever done to kinors is reversible puberty blockers. As it turns out puberty blockers are not reversible, and surgeries do happen. Trans activists should not be allowed to move the goalposts to "they're rare though".

And like I said in the another comments, the numbers blow the Tuskagee experiments out of the water. Can you link to yourself making a similar argument about them, before we give this any more credence?

The original question was "why do neutral people not care?" not "is it good or bad". I think it is right to say that people do not care as it happens only to a small number of children, and also that it doesn't happen to children without their parent's consent. Which means that it may happen to children, but not to those of neutral people. That is why they don't care.

The original question was "why do neutral people not care?" not "is it good or bad.

The original question was more "how can people be neutral". Not caring was taken out of the scope of the question when he said "I can understand apathy".