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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?
You might benefit from looking at previous medical manias, such as lobotomies. Though it was never entrenched to the same degree as gender surgery seems to be today, lobotomies are an irreversible surgery performed on adults as well as children that gained rapid acceptance.
The 1949 Nobel Prize in medicine was given to the doctor who developed the lobotomy, and has never been rescinded.
Lobotomy is a legitimate therapeutic intervention and is still used daily all over the world to treat patients suffering from drug-resistant epilepsy.
I wonder if anybody has ever tried lobotomy to treat gender dysphoria. Considering the sort of procedures that medical experts seem to deem appropriate to treat it, it should not be a big deal to get it approved.
I would not be surprised if lobotomy could successfully treat gender dysphoria, the question is merely how big of a chunk of a brain you need to lob off to stop the condition.
Are you thinking of electroshock therapy?
No, the practice of surgically removing parts of the brain to treat disease.
For example It seems that now they call it lobectomy but it's essentially the same thing.
For one thing, epilepsy is NOT a psychiatric disorder, and surgery is not the first line of treatment for it. Considering seizures in themselves cause brain damage, and in the most extreme cases can be deadly, that is an extreme far cry from shoving a metal spike into your daughter's eye so you can make her tractable and retarded.
Yeah. I first learned about lobotomy when I was 12.
I decided that as far as I was concerned: if that was me, they might as well save the doctor's bill and finish the job with a 12-gauge instead.
Haven't changed my personal view on the procedure; if lobotomy instead replaced a troublesome child with a roughly-equally-capable child who was less troublesome and had an entirely different personality, my thoughts would be different.
IIRC it's done occasionally as an absolute last resort for refractory cases of schizophrenia in Europe. I don't really have a position on this; by the time you are so far gone that you're in the worst 0.1 percent of schizophrenics you're pretty far gone. You might be living on a Christmas tree farm, eating food from dumpsters and pine needles because you think they contain microchips that connect you to Lord Elon Musk. And you're covered in tick bites and you're starving. You fight anyone that tries to stop you like a wild animal, which has gotten you beat up, hospitalized, and sometimes jailed. Pretty much every psychotropic medication under the sun has been tried on you, but you're either a zombie on them or screaming to be let out and given access to pine needles almost 24/7.
There are no good solutions for this guy.
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