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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29529 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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So, I watched Escaping Twin Flames this week. It's basically a documentary about a cult, with a fun twist at the end. The short version is it's a cult/mlm that promises true love to everyone paying in. The leader of the cult claimed he could channel who the soul mate, or "twin flame" to use cult speak, of the members was. Twin flames were often just random ass people in the cult members life. No matter what members were encouraged to stalk, harass and profess their love to their "twin flame". That approach wasn't going so great however. There was a manifest lack of success in the group, with vanishingly few members successfully entering a relationship with their "twin flame". Sensing things weren't going so great, the leader changed the rules so that everyone's twin flame was actually already in the cult. Only problem was, 80% of the members of the cult were women, and there weren't enough men to go around. But the cult leader had a fantastic idea. If you just convince half the women that they are actually "divine masculine", and get them to transition, everyone can pair off as "divine masculine" and "divine feminine". It's genius!

Why can't two ladies just be in a relationship? I donno, shut up. Cult leader says so.

So anyways, the final episode is about the cult forcing members to get "gender affirming care". Cross sex hormones, top surgery, you know the deal. And this is enforced through all the classic cult conditioning you've seen if you've ever watched a documentary about cults. The cult recruits from lonely, vulnerable, often young and impressionable people. You are encouraged to cut off everyone outside of the cult. All dissenters are exiled from the cult, creating a status quo where you must do whatever the cult leader says or lose your entire social support network. A lot of people even derived their income from the cult, making the control even more complete. Lots of struggle sessions breaking down the identities of cult members. Like I said, if you've seen a cult documentary before, none of this will be new to you.

What made this special to me is the many, frequent caveats the documentary included that you are not, under any circumstances, to apply any of the horrific trans brainwashing depicted in this documentary to anything else. This is unidirectional knowledge. You are only allowed to consider it in the context of this specific cult being bad. Now here is random trans expert we've hired to reinforce the point that these trans people have been abused into being trans, and not any other trans people you may have had in your life. Ignore your lying eyes. Especially insulting is that all the moms they interview about how their children were stolen away by the cult still use the new preferred pronouns and names of their abused and brainwashed children. Had me yelling at the screen "Have the fucking strength of your convictions you coward!"

Frankly, the nominal stories a lot of parents tell about their children deciding they are transgender doesn't differ that much from the cult experience. Their child is totally normal, not a hint of gender dysphoria, until a person the kid looks up to or wants to impress, often someone the parents can specifically identify, starts pushing it on their kid. Kid does it to fit in with their friend group, maybe a completely different friend group than they had before, maybe a friend group that only exists online. Then kid is encouraged to completely cut off anyone not 100% on board with their new identity. Most horrifying of all is how often the state involves itself in this, with schools serving as a vector to suggest to children, and glamorize, queer identities, facilitate their secret transitions, and CPS stepping in to take custody from parents who don't "affirm".

But going even deeper, where the fuck is the medical establishment? When the Heaven's Gate cult had members castrated themselves, I sincerely doubt they just waltzed into a Planned Parenthood and had it done no questions asked. How are the diagnostic criteria so wide open that a cult leader can have his members electively mutilate themselves at walk in clinics, no problem?

Most ironic of all, is there is a part of the documentary where they describe an incident where the cult leader had his top leadership watch a documentary about another cult. Then he instructed them to write essays about how he was definitely not a cult leader. This was the moment one of the interviewee's in the documentary realized she was in a cult and left. All the other cult members performed that feat of cognitive mutilation however. Meanwhile, on a meta level, the documentary is pulling the same fucking thing on us, the audience, with it's gaslighting about the explosion of trans youth. We just weren't assigned the further task of completing homework about how nothing we saw in the documentary about a trans cult applies to the other trans cult we see sitting right in front of us.

I just want to mention that the term “twin flame” existed before the object of this documentary and was probably co-opted by the group.

80% of the members of the cult were women, and there weren't enough men to go around. But the cult leader had a fantastic idea.

I really thought this was headed somewhere else.

Eliza Mondegreen Noticed™ the same parallels you did: https://unherd.com/thepost/netflixs-escaping-twin-flames-is-wrong-about-trans/

The refusal to connect with the trans issue when it's staring you in the face is also something you see with research. Like this article looking at the rapid spread of psychiatric illnesses in teen girls on social media, that somehow fails to even mention trans.

https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/11/for-teen-girls-rare-psychiatric-disorders-spread-like-viruses-on-social-media/

Or the endless line graphs of rising mental illness that Jonathan Haidt and co produce, corresponding also with social media use, but not showing the one on gender dysphoria, which shows the same trend.

Like I said, if you've seen a cult documentary before, none of this will be new to you.

This was the first cult documentary I've watched. Are there any others you'd recommend?

There's an excellent podcast by Martyrtmade that goes really deep on Jim Jones called "God's Socialist: The Rise and Fall of the People's Temple." Includes lots of background info on the characters involved and actual audio from cult meetings.

I assume you’re talking about the Netflix Escaping Twin Flames, rather than the slightly older Amazon Escaping Twin Flames Universe. Kind of weird that they were produced so closely; I doubt they have much difference in content or messaging.

With that out of the way.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully invoked the Worst Argument in the World, and now I feel obligated to defend the motte’s favorite punching bag. First: I do not think child transition is a good thing. I do not support people or charities endorsing it, implementing it, or making it school policy. Same goes for drag queen story hour, which gives me the same uncomfortable feeling as most Americans. The broader umbrella of “gender-affirming care” is something that I think is oversold, even a fad, but I would not deny it to consenting adults. I understand that you think the whole edifice is literally fake and gay. That’s no excuse for the Worst Argument.

The best of your comparisons between transgender advocacy and Twin Flames is the final ritual/medical practice. I have some objections there, mostly due to selection bias, but let’s call it a good comparison. Sure, pushing someone to undertake surgery is an extremely suspect way to shore up one’s own power.

Everything else gets shakier. Where’s the equivalent to cult control of income? To struggle sessions? Hey, sometimes people get therapy, which is kind of like being convinced to be doing something, which is kind of like what a cult would do. Or worse—sometimes they imitate their friends. Clearly, that must be further evidence of cult behavior.

One of the signature features of cults, one you mention yourself, is control of information. I agree that kids in public schools are relatively controlled. The cult of George Washington has held power for too long, and our kids are indoctrinated that lying about cherry trees is bad. Yes, schools teach things to children. Your legitimate objections to what they’re teaching is not evidence of a cult.

It’s almost a moot point, given that the youngest generation has more access to information than any before. They can go on their smartphones and find traditional gender roles. Why don’t they? How did teachers suddenly gain mythical powers of narrative control for this one subject?

The common thread, here, is that there is more than one explanation for what you’re noticing. Kids do copy their friends and take adults at their word, just as they do for everything else. Adults in positions of power are using this to promote politics or aesthetics, just as they do for everything else. You might have seen such phenomena in a cult documentary, or you might have seen it in a chess club, on a BBS, in a small 1800s town. It’s not unique to cults.

But the key piece, the one most conspicuous in its absence, is the leader. Cui bono? Who is the Jeff Divine, the Marshall Applewhite, the Jim Jones? That’s not to say a cult has to have a charismatic leader. It’s just the first thing people think about. The central example, as it were. Hence my accusations of Worst Argument.

You have one interesting piece of evidence: both this cult and these people pushed members towards invasive, extreme surgery. You have a smattering of weak evidence: trans advocates do a bunch of stuff which sort of, if you squint, looks like cult behavior instead of regular social dynamics. And you ignore any missing pieces because you’ve already made up your mind. Trans bad, cultists bad, therefore trans cultists.

And everyone clapped.

Trans communities encourage trans people to cut loved ones out of their lives entirely if the loved one in question doesn't uncritically affirm the trans person's gender identity, push for legislation which would ban any forms of therapy which don't uncritically affirm a trans person's gender identity (on the grounds that a failure to affirm it is tantamount to "conversion therapy") and push for legislation which would make a parent's failure to affirm their child's professed gender identity a factor in determining custody in divorce cases. The idea that this only resembles Scientology's suppressive persons doctrine "if you squint" is absurd.

To struggle sessions?

The phrase "death before detransition" returns 600k results on Google. Jehovah's Witnesses have a policy of shunning former members who leave the faith. I really don't think it's a reach to notice the parallels here.

Cui bono? Who is the Jeff Divine, the Marshall Applewhite, the Jim Jones? That’s not to say a cult has to have a charismatic leader.

I know Scientology was founded by L. Ron Hubbard, but I don't know who its current charismatic leader is, is or if it even has one. I still have zero qualms about calling it a cult.

And even if gender ideology lacks a charismatic leader, there are still many people who bono from it: mediocre male athletes who'd never win anything if they weren't allowed to compete in women's sporting events, convicted perverts who'd rather serve their sentences in a women's prison, and pharmaceutical and medical professionals making a killing in the provision of "gender-affirming care" (surgeries in the US alone were valued at $2.1 billion, while hormones are worth $1.6 billion). I'm not going to go quite so far as to claim that "gender ideology is a conspiracy by Big Pharma to sell more T", but I do find it weird what a huge blind spot so many leftists seem to have: critics of capitalism who correctly recognise that pharmaceutical companies have a financial incentive to encourage pathologisation and medicalisation of as many conditions as possible, but surely they'd never stoop so low as to persuade teens and young children to believe that they're really members of the opposite sex, perish the thought.

I don’t believe that most trans communities come close to the coordinated, authoritarian shunning practiced by the central examples of cults.

An athlete or prisoner exploiting gender categories is not the same as a leader exploiting his follower’s social dependencies. There is a difference in agency, in blame.

Labeling trans activism a cult is about eliding those differences. It’s about taking the same no-bad-wrong reaction we reflexively apply to Jim Jones, and applying it to anyone who’s sufficiently pro-trans. Sure, a doctor who gets invited to certain conferences has social and financial reasons to stay the course. Does that mean we can expect him to break out the Flavor-Aid?

Does that mean we can expect him to break out the Flavor-Aid?

In light of the fact that at least one study found that gender reassignment surgery dramatically increased the risk of suicide among trans people (compared to a control group of trans people who didn't undergo gender reassignment surgery), the analogy may be more apt than you strictly intended.

It’s about taking the same no-bad-wrong reaction we reflexively apply to Jim Jones, and applying it to anyone who’s sufficiently pro-trans.

For what it's worth, I didn't interpret the OP's post as arguing "trans is a cult" (although maybe that's how they intended it, I dunno). I have a great deal of compassion for people dealing with gender dysphoria, fully support the rights of adults to do with their bodies as they wish (admittedly perhaps not on the taxpayer's dime), and think that medical transition is the right choice for some trans people.

All that being said, I believe that a lot of trans communities (subreddits and the like) are extremely creepy, and the similarities they exhibit with Jim Jones and co. are more than just unhappy accidents: strikingly similar patterns of indoctrination, isolation, encouraging hatred and distrust of heretics and apostates, explaining away of reasonable questions and cognitive dissonance. I don't think there's anything wrong with criticising this conduct, any more than we would when the Twin Flames people do it - if anything I think we have a social responsibility to do it (doubly so when so many people who get sucked into these communities are underage). The trans movement isn't reducible to these creepy subreddits (obviously, given that gender dysphoria predates the internet by decades). But I also don't think we're Chinese robbering the whole movement by pointing out a small handful of subreddits with subscribers in three digits. /r/egg_irl has 315k subscribers, which is an appreciable fraction of the entire trans population of the US. /r/FTM has 212k.

I know Scientology was founded by L. Ron Hubbard, but I don't know who its current charismatic leader is, is or if it even has one. I still have zero qualms about calling it a cult.

David Miscavige does not inspire the same levels of personal loyalty and devotion as L. Ron Hubbard did, but he makes up for it by being every bit as dictatorially controlling.

I know Scientology was founded by L. Ron Hubbard, but I don't know who its current charismatic leader, is or if it even has one.

Scientology actually unquestionably has a leader, David Miscavige, who has also continued all the cult stuff that Hubbard did. He's not a charismatic leader, but he doesn't need to be: like in numerous cults and organizations, he can just always refer to the charismatic original founder's, who is still "at some level" regarded the leader, authority. Miscavige's identity is hardly secret either, it's among the first things one learns if one looks at Scientology at any level (and he featured in South Park's scientology episode etc.)

Congratulations! You’ve successfully invoked the Worst Argument in the World,

No, you haven't. If someone claims that everyone should be let out of jail, and you say "that means we'd let even murderers and rapists out of jail", they can't respond "that's the Worst Argument in the World, most prisoners in jail are in there for nonviolent crimes". You judge how bad the standard is by looking at the worst case, not at the average case.

While most transgendered people are not in cults, the left has no principled standards about how to distinguish between transgendered people in a cult, and everyone else. You're just not supposed to gatekeep at all, and the policy of not gatekeeping deserves to be judged by the worst cases that it enables, not the cases they would like you to think about.

Who’s arguing to let everyone out of jail in this analogy?

The left has no principled standards to distinguish between transgendered people in a cult, and everyone else.

That’s a lot more cautious, and more defensible, than what the OP was going for.

It’s almost a moot point, given that the youngest generation has more access to information than any before.

This is tragically wrong, and wildly so. I'm not (that) old and in middle school buddies used to send me goatse, lemonparty, 2girls1cup, god only knows what else over the public school wifi without any thought of oversight or repercussion. I can't even come up with a joke for how much things have changed - it's so out of control and sad - clinical, sterile, and politically corrected.

They can go on their smartphones and find traditional gender roles.

Where are those promoted these days? Genuinely asking, because I'd like to be there

How did teachers suddenly gain mythical powers of narrative control for this one subject?

It wasn't magic, or a mystery. They openly refused to hire, fired, de-platformed, or otherwise silenced anyone who disagreed. Not just on 'this one subject' - but certainly on this one successfully. Vaccines also come to mind. Or masks. These people forced toddlers to wear masks, day after day, for a long time.

Anywhere but here it would seem extremely odd you were still shrugging like 'it's a moot point' and asserting they didn't 'suddenly gain mythical powers.' People have fought total wars for generations over whether or not the cracker was actually Christ. 'Men can be women, actually, even at 3'?

C'mon.

Middle schoolers still share weird shit with each other in private discord servers/dms. I'm not sure if the prevalence of that over the whole population has increased or decreased, but it's still there.

I had thought it was obvious that wasn't my point - my point was that once upon a time 'the youngest generation' genuinely did have more access to information than any before and that is not this 'youngest generation'. You used to be able to search for almost literally anything on youtube and watch full on independent documentaries about it. Now all the results are BBC or CNN or whatever.

It was the example you gave. I'm still not sure this is true though? I think it's directionally true - see how many subreddits are banned - but it's not that true. Even pre-elon, there were a lot of nazis on twitter. There were and are a lot of nazis on tiktok. Communists, too. Lots of weird fetish stuff too. Youtube is still mostly native creators, BBC and CNN are a very small fraction of the views.

I didn't see it necessarily as trans ideology meeting every aspect of a cult just that there are obvious parallels.

The cult dynamics are most apparent perhaps in social media groups, where there is love-bombing, sanctioning and social games to influence vulnerable new members by the group and older figures, moderators acting as the cult leaders. These are places where teenage angst will be helpfully interpreted as a sign you're probably trans, and doubt about transitioning framed as internalised transphobia, or a need to stop listening to others or going to other places on the internet and just stay on 'trans-friendly sites'.

I think the current ideology has cult like manifestation but that it's better described as a culture-bound syndrome, or egregore, though that's a more nebulous concept.

There are several ways in which trans communities can resemble cults. These are also ways that other groups often resemble cults. Niche nerd hobbies are a good example.

Conversely, when I look at things that are very cult-specific, like the type of leadership, I find that trans spaces don’t have them. This may be oversight on my part—responses are certainly eager to give me anecdotes for the opposite!

The people I know who transitioned did dive into trans-friendly communities, divest from mainstream circles at the slightest hint of transphobia, and surround themselves with like-minded people. As far as I can tell, it wasn’t coercive at all. Instead, there was something missing or distressing in their lives, and the social apparatus of transgender spaces offered an alternative. I think this is a lot closer to your culture-bound label than it is to OP’s choice of cults.

I agree with your post here. I think the word cult is mostly just being used as a snarl word to advertise to everyone how much the speaker doesn't like transpeople. That's not to say that the trans community is flawless and does nothing wrong - I think there are serious issues with how they present themselves and act, but using cult to describe them is just incorrect.

I don't think a typical hobby group credibly meets the threshold of cult-like, although some would have their own characteristics, you must like X thing and not Y etc.

Agreed, the second part of what you talk about is what I am referring to by a culture bound syndrome, but there's also explicit manifestations that if not exactly characteristic of cults, are cult like. It's a modern social construction/transhuman cult perhaps. Religious belief is another relevant paradigm. I feel like we're arguing in the margins.

I don't think a typical hobby group credibly meets the threshold of cult-like, although some would have their own characteristics, you must like X thing and not Y etc.

Have you read The Ballad of MsScribe?

Ah ha, yes perhaps my comment needs a few caveats, great link :) To be fair I was thinking real life woodworking clubs or walking groups, not internet fan-fiction clubs but on reflection I can see all sorts of human behaviour would be out there regardless.

I think cults are probably on a spectrum, where different degree ultimately separates into different kinds.

Where’s the equivalent to cult control of income?

Ummm....

Maybe the way the cult will get you fired from your job if you get too heretical, or alternatively get you some sweet DIE points to help with a better job if you are one of the stunning and brave ones?

(I mean I don't necessarily disagree with your thrust here, but I'm not sure the line between 'regular social dynamics' and 'cult behaviour' is as bright as I'd like for literally anything these days. See "You know what nobody hates each other about yet?")

To struggle sessions?

Have you seen the reaction to Contra points saying she doesn't like being asked about pronouns? Have you ever seen how they treat detransitioners?

One of the signature features of cults, one you mention yourself, is control of information.

Websites like transgendermap.com, and apps like Shinigami Eyes tell you which sources of information are good, and which are bad, so you know who to avoid as a good practicing member, and who your friends will know to dismiss if you bring them up.

But the key piece, the one most conspicuous in its absence, is the leader. Cui bono? Who is the Jeff Divine, the Marshall Applewhite, the Jim Jones?

If this is they key than the case falls flat on it's face. I straight up disagree a cult needs to have a leader.

Websites like transgendermap.com, and apps like Shinigami Eyes tell you which sources of information are good, and which are bad, so you know who to avoid as a good practicing member, and who your friends will know to dismiss if you bring them up.

Why is it bad to give people more information to make a decision? That seems like the opposite of controlling information!

  • -11

I was referring to their profiles on critics of transgender medicine.

How did you miss the part where I said "tell you which sources of information are good, and which are bad, so you know who to avoid as a good practicing member, and who your friends will know to dismiss if you bring them up"? You quoted the text!

Well the way you phrased your comment made it sound like transgendermap or Shinigami Eyes were themselves the problem, rather than the way people use them.

They are themselves the problem. Shinigami Eyes is literally an app for marking social media accounts as TERFs so you can dismiss them (at best). Likewise the problem with the profiles written by transgendermap.com isn't the people who read them, it's the people who write them. Their entire purpose is to demonize the critics of gender medicine.

This still sounds like an objection of the way people use the tools. The demonization or dismissal are the issue. There is nothing that forces someone to dismiss (or take seriously) a person or website on the basis of Shinigami Eye's evaluation. Similarly there's nothing that forces people to demonize those profiled on transgender map.

Their entire purpose is to demonize the critics of gender medicine.

This do not seem to be true, to me. The profile you linked identifies specific beliefs O'Malley has that the website considers anti-trans. Specific groups she's affiliated with that the website believes oppose trans writes. It links to outside resources as citations for these claims and even links directly to a number of social media and other websites operated by O'Malley herself so people can do their own evaluation.

This still sounds like an objection of the way people use the tools. The demonization or dismissal are the issue. There is nothing that forces someone to dismiss (or take seriously) a person or website on the basis of Shinigami Eye's evaluation. Similarly there's nothing that forces people to demonize those profiled on transgender map.

At this point I have to ask you, how do you think cults do control of information?

This do not seem to be true, to me. The profile you linked identifies specific beliefs O'Malley has that the website considers anti-trans. Specific groups she's affiliated with that the website believes oppose trans writes. It links to outside resources as citations for these claims and even links directly to a number of social media and other websites operated by O'Malley herself so people can

...dismiss her, and all the groups she's involved in, without ever engaging with them directly.

More comments

You're all for the app that marks social media accounts as Jewish then, presumably?

What do you imagine my objection to this app would be?

That's interesting - I'd personally find it distasteful at best but can't but into a short sentence why. Let me think on it

Are we talking about the jew finder or the TERF finder? For starters, being ethnically jewish isn't a choice.

It breaks the gentlemen's agreement that a pseudonym you encounter for the first time online is a blank slate.

Outside of 4chan and a handful of other places, that gentleman's agreement disappeared 10+ years ago when mass adoption of smartphones enabled normies to use the internet easily.

I can. It's coordinating meanness against people who don't deserve it. That's always a bad thing.

I suspect this is tongue in cheek, but one wonders about the gish-gallop style of rebuttal that takes place here in contrast to debate on the substantive issues.

I'm lost, who's doing "Gish gallop debunking"?

Im over generalising and it's not the right term probably. I mean picking at the margins, like the 'well that doesn't sound exactly like a cult to me', when the OP was making parallels. Or, pointing out how rare it is, when the argument is not about volume.

It's not arguing the substantive points but rather deflecting in a manner that can be defended as being a legitimate argument, this hiding the true motive.

I may be projecting however...

Oh, that's fair enough as a criticism, but yeah "gish gallop" usually refers to spamming with sources in hopes of their sheer volume leaving your opponent unable to respond.

Yes, it's not the right term, I agree.

I agree that other groups count as cults, too.

OP’s choice of comparisons had clear examples of financial and informational control, emotional abuse, and personal gain/leadership. I felt it was appropriate to argue that trans activism lacks some of those.

One of the signature features of cults, one you mention yourself, is control of information.

Websites like transgendermap.com, and apps like Shinigami Eyes tell you which sources of information are good, and which are bad, so you know who to avoid as a good practicing member, and who your friends will know to dismiss if you bring them up.

My mental model of a cult is just "religion, but less popular," so I probably have a lot to learn about how cults work, but this comment and the one to which you are responding made me think about how cults and religions have to adapt to new environments. With respect to the information environment, obviously the 21st century is vastly different from - and more liberal than - anything that came before, which means information control is very difficult and thus will have to look very different from cults in the past in order to achieve similar things. The stuff you point to seem like decent analogues to past censorious technologies; they can't outright control what you have access to, so they manipulate which sources that you actually choose to access.

And this connects to my own observation from about a decade ago when I began to recognize the social justice movement of which I had been a part as a modern incarnation of religion. In this modern world of science, the traditional notions of faith are much more difficult to keep popular, and so religions that rely on that suffer, and religions that find other ways to get people to believe things prosper. The beauty of social justice (aka Critical Race Theory, aka "wokeness," aka "it's just basic human decency," aka "empathy") is that it allows people to enjoy all the beliefs of faith while eschewing most of the leap that's usually required. You still have to leap, but now you have a whole structure built to reassure you that this leap is totally justified because of historical reasons and very smart scholars who have done the Work and published in their peer reviewed journals to prove that simply listening and believing (the Right People) is the correct way. So if you're (like me at the time - whether that has changed now is something I honestly couldn't answer) someone who thinks of himself as non-religious and, in fact, better than those deluded religious people who cling to their faith, this is the perfect religion to latch onto.

However, I've also heard people call social justice a cult, and I would agree with that to the extent that a cult is just a less popular religion. But I also recognize that a cult is often more than just that, because being less popular comes with it many of its own complications, such as the whole recruitment process that can require much more brainwashing and thus much more control than a typical religion. I wonder what other cult-specific patterns we will see 21st century versions of, which route around the additional difficulties of the new environment. Obviously cutting one off from one's friends and family is a big one, but that seems to be just following the standard playbook as best as I can tell.

Shinigami Eyes

Naming your app after the ability to see people's names so you can murder them with your grim reaper notebook certainly isn't great optics, eh?

It's anime and the target userbase is autists that live online. It goes with the territory.

According to stats I’ve found, something like 1390 adolescents went on puberty blockers in the US in 2021, out of a population of about 42 million total teenagers. 282 teenagers got a mastectomy. In comparison, 2,590 kids died from a gunshot in that same year.

With those numbers, you’re exceedingly unlikely to know anyone with kids going through those procedures. To me, this just seems like a moral panic amplified through the news in order to distract the masses from real issues - the housing crisis, corruption, school shootings, inflation, wealth inequality, social services being stripped away, the erosion of the middle class. Why do you care about this? Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?

You know what issue really affects children in the US? 1 in 4 kids are obese or overweight. Where is the medical establishment there? What about the 8.4% of kids on psych meds, some of whom are on them involuntarily?

Also maybe it’s because I don’t live in America, but in my modern Western country, transitioning isn’t a matter of waltzing into a clinic and getting your breasts chopped. Just getting evaluated by the gender service takes upward of 5 years, and you need to be vetted by a series of psychologists. Getting any kind of surgery requires an official gender identity disorder diagnosis and a letter from 2 separate professionals (and good luck getting those). Sure, you can go private - have you got ten thousand pounds in cash? You have to be incredibly dedicated, child or adult, to go through this system.

And as far as I know, America doesn’t have much public healthcare, so these kids getting surgeries while they’re underage have got to be the beneficiaries of rich parents who can afford to foot the bill. You can get all sorts of crazy ridiculous procedures, even as a minor, if you have more money then sense. Is it not absolutely disproportionate to have so much air time occupied to whatever most likely very low % of those few hundred kids from privileged backgrounds that might regret it later?

Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?

Trans issues are ideal for generating toxoplasma of rage. They affect a vanishingly small number of people, but touch on core fundamental attitudes that everyone has strong opinions on: you can take whichever side you want without ever having to interact with real people who care about it in a deeply personal sense. Regardless of whether someone is Right or Left, if someone lists trans war stuff as a top ten issue affecting the world, I think it's a safe assumption that they're full of shit (unless they identify as trans, in which case I give some leeway).

That's not to say it's irrelevant: different public policy around trans issues can affect O(1M) people, and there are pros and cons for both sides. But education, tax policy, foreign relations (as well as other things) are far more important and seemingly get a tenth the media attention that trans stuff does.

There's an additional wrinkle on social media (and Reddit in particular) where egregiously heavy handed moderation of anything that can be construed as even vaguely anti-locomotive drives a strong oppositional reaction. But it's silly for people to let that drive them to centering their worldview on it to the point of hysteria.

O(1M)

What kind of Big O notation is that?

An egregious abuse, I recognize.

According to stats I’ve found, something like 1390 adolescents went on puberty blockers in the US in 2021, out of a population of about 42 million total teenagers. 282 teenagers got a mastectomy. In comparison, 2,590 kids died from a gunshot in that same year.

Do you happen to also have stats on HRT? My impression is that that's more common than either puberty blockers or surgery, but I have no particular knowledge of whether "more common" is "2x" or "200x".

With those numbers, you’re exceedingly unlikely to know anyone with kids going through those procedures.

Then I guess I'm exceedingly unlucky to have a cousin who went on puberty blockers then HRT. I lived with another person who began HRT at 16, no puberty blockers. Given that a quarter of the teenagers I've been close with have undergone some sort of medical transition, it does seem relevant to me.

But I also suspect that your source is a huge undercount, and also many of the people medically transitioning do not go on puberty blockers because they don't identify as Trans* until they are 14 or older. And even the people who do not medically transition might face health issues from chest binding and other encouraged practices.

…why would someone go on blockers if not for trans-adjacent reasons?

I know they’re used for certain medical situations, but I wouldn’t expect those to be very common at all.

Precocious puberty was the original reason before the trans thing came along.

And as far as I know, America doesn’t have much public healthcare, so these kids getting surgeries while they’re underage have got to be the beneficiaries of rich parents who can afford to foot the bill.

Aside from what others have mentioned about private insurers, there are 90 million people enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP, including 41 million children. People under 18 make up 21 pct of the 331 million people in the United States, so most children are covered by public healthcare.

You know what issue really affects children in the US? 1 in 4 kids are obese or overweight.

I've expressed my contempt for the "fat acceptance" movement plenty of times in this space (in addition to routinely beating the drum on how obesity is the single biggest risk factor for death from Covid among young people), so I, for one, don't think I can reasonably be accused of monomaniacal fixation on the trans thing at the expense of all other important social issues.

Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?

I'll put it the other way around - why are establishment bodies constantly pushing trans stuff when it's a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people? In the US, there are 39 separate days in the calendar specifically for celebrating trans people (and an additional 77 days for celebrating trans people as a subset of LGBTQIA+), even though trans people represent about 0.4% of the population. (By contrast, black Americans represent 12% of the population, yet Black History Month famously takes up the shortest month in the Gregorian calendar.) Gender ideology is being actively promoted in schools throughout the Anglosphere. The modern pride flag (the new, horrendously overdesigned one with designated stripes specifically for trans people) is routinely flown for weeks at a time in cities throughout North America and Europe, often at the decree by civic bodies like city or county councils, including no less than the White House.

The trans rights movement can't enthusiastically push this shit and then turn around and go "why are you even talking about this, it doesn't affect you lol" whenever they get the slightest amount of pushback on it. You brought it up. When you stop pushing it (or at least dial back the aggression and penetration of the message), we'll stop pushing back against it.

According to stats I’ve found, something like 1390 adolescents went on puberty blockers in the US in 2021, out of a population of about 42 million total teenagers. 282 teenagers got a mastectomy. In comparison, 2,590 kids died from a gunshot in that same year.

On the other hand, referrals to the UK's Gender Identity Development Service increased by 1,460% for boys and 5,337% for girls, in less than ten years. I think people are perfectly entitled to look at a graph like this and feel a certain amount of alarm about where it might end up if the trend continues unabated. A 50% increase in gun deaths among children in the US over a two-year period was considered a shocking jump by the Pew Research Centre, and you're asking us to look at a 5,000% increase in referrals for gender issues with "ho-hum, nothing to see here, pass the butter".

Out of interest, how many children/teens have to receive "gender-affirming care" in a calendar year before you consider it a topic worthy of discussion? If the figures you quoted were tenfold higher? Fifty-fold? A hundredfold?

Also, it's generally good form to cite your sources.

1390 adolescents went on puberty blockers in the US in 2021, out of a population of about 42 million total teenagers

I reject this because I know of someone prepubescent who was put on puberty blockers in like 2008. And it has exploded since then. My life is interesting, but not so much that I'd be part of the initial cadre in-the-know if the numbers of adolescents were still so low.

My life is interesting, but not so much that I'd be part of the initial cadre in-the-know if the numbers of adolescents were still so low.

Depending on what particular social circles you ran in in 2008, it is entirely possible that your life is sufficiently interesting for you to be in the top 0.1% of people in terms of likelihood to run into this in your social circles (e.g. if you lived in a coastal state and knew this person from a state-level robotics or performing arts event).

1390 out of 42 million is way less than .1%

You know more than 1 person, and you know of a lot more people than you know personally. A typical American knows something on the order of 500 people, and knows of probably 20x that many. If there was exactly one person on puberty blockers out of 300 million Americans, you'd expect ~10k / 300M or 0.0033% of Americans to know of them. To get to "0.1% of people know of someone on puberty blockers" you'd only have to have 30 such people in the entire country.

And 1390 is supposed to be number for today, not 2008.

I'm just going to assume your numbers are true. I agree, in the grand scheme of things, the kids being trans issue is not as important as compared to many issues you've identified in terms of scale and impact on our personal lives.

It's also not as small as you present it to be. First five sources I found had higher amounts. Here's one for example:

The number of children who started on puberty-blockers or hormones totaled 17,683 over the five-year period, rising from 2,394 in 2017 to 5,063 in 2021, according to the analysis. These numbers are probably a significant undercount since they don’t include children whose records did not specify a gender dysphoria diagnosis or whose treatment wasn’t covered by insurance.

There are also estimates that 300,000 of youths aged 13-17 identify as trans (Data up to 2020, the number is probably higher today). It's an issue because the numbers are growing.

You also bring up school shootings, which according to your numbers is nearly as small as the trans issue. Anyone can get shot? Well anyone can have kids and their kids might go on puberty blockers, which there seems to more and more evidence that these things are not fully reversible and may have permanent effects.

The trans issue seems to be pushed more and more into my face these days, from both an anti and pro trans perspective. There are examples that the trans issue is impacting our daily lives. For example, does your company enforce or encourage people to put pronouns on their email/profile? Why do we need to do that? For 99.99% of people it should be obvious what your gender is. I work with a lot of different companies due to my industry and more and more companies are implementing pronouns into their HR systems.

We're also seeing trans ideas showing up in our culture through movies, books, video games, tv shows, etc. And I'll be honest, more of then than not, the experience is ruined by the inclusion of a trans person, because it's usually forced into for the sake of diversity and inclusion rather than for the sake of telling an interesting story. The Japanese seem to do better job of exploring these ideas. Inside Mari is a manga I read many years ago that explores the idea of a man waking up in a woman's body. It displays the experience of dysphoria quite well, so a story that explores trans issues can still be interesting. But so many modern entertainment just want to push it into my face now, and it's executed horribly.

Do you care about women's rights/issues? The common example is the trans in women's athletic competitions. I don't know how anyone who claims to support women's right can also support having trans people in women's athletic competitions. We're seeing trans athletes dominate the space, taking away opportunities for women. There's a reason we have a women's only league/competition in so many different sports.

It's also impacting language and the way we speak. I know it's a bit of a meme, but there are people who can't even define what is a woman anymore. I'm pretty sure the attempt to remove gender from gendered languages e.g. saying latinx instead of latino/latina is related to the trans movement. It's no longer pregnant women, it's pregnant people, because now a man can get pregnant. If trans people are such a small percentage of the population, why are so many people trying to reshape our language and the way we speak to be inclusive of such a small percentage of the population?

And if you ever engage in a discussion about trans issues and say anything that could be anti trans, so many people seem to get offended and will even make attempts to dox you, get you fired, yell at you, scream in your face, call you Nazi scum, or any other myriad of rude and toxic behavior. And many of these people are activist types that try to change culture and society. The reason Jordan Peterson got famous in 2017 is because trans activist types recorded themselves confronting him about his views on Canada's Bill C-16. This is over 6 years ago, has the trans issue gotten better or worse since then? I remember reddit was fawning over this man around that time, now he's actively hated and despised. More and more young people support the idea that misgendering should be a crime. It seems to me that the trans issues have only become more prevalent in our lives.

I used to not care about trans issues. But when the trans issues start popping up over so many different areas of life, and many of the loudest proponents for the trans issues seem to be angry, anti-intellectual activist types, well it makes me want to be on the opposing side. Given the impact the trans movement has had on our modern culture and society, I'm not sure I can agree trans issues are no longer irrelevant in our lives anymore. It certainly doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

And as far as I know, America doesn’t have much public healthcare, so these kids getting surgeries while they’re underage have got to be the beneficiaries of rich parents who can afford to foot the bill.

Just because we don't have public healthcare doesn't mean it's a free for all. Every single state has an Insurance Commissioner who is charged with regulating insurance in the state. Through this type of regulation, states have required any health insurance plan offered to include coverage for hormone supplementation and cosmetic surgery. Of course, this is not exactly the same from state to state, but in many, many places the only kinds of plans you are allowed to offer are required to pay for this, so every single different employer-offered health insurance plan is going to pay for your child to be sterilized as a teenager.

That number is likely an undercount -- even the most comprehensive data provider, Komodo, acknowledges this in their reporting-- and regardless why is the number important, or why is the fact that some people are particularly exercised by it an issue? Also your comparison is off, at least the way youve worded it -- you need to compare the number of adolescents who are already receiving puberty blockers with their baseline population, not just the annual figure of those who start puberty blockers.

Moral panic? The reality is numbers of dysphoric adolescents and those receiving blockers and hormones is rising exponentially. When something changes rapidly, some people are curious why -- there is an inherent urgency implied in understanding rapid change. And the sphere of influence, and age of influence of these ideas has gotten wider and younger, so depending on where you live and whether legislative changes occur, it will likely continue to grow. Unless individuals act to do something.

Some people have children (autistic children even) who are entering an education system where they will learn that they don't have a sex until they decide what it is, so they have actual skin in the game. We're also talking a legal, and progressive campaign to change society wholesale fundamentally, with people effective being compelled to accept unproven ideas around gender in the workplace, in medical clinics, in education. Factually inconsistent and wrong ideas about sex are spreading through medical institutions and acadme. I agree that this is just one manifestation of problems in science, academia, medicine and psychology, but it is a flagshap example and to paraphrase Blake, one where you can see the whole world-- progressive attempts at social engineering, post-modernist queerying of categories and truth, transhumanism, philosophical relativism and nihilism leading to bad ideas. Plenty of people are witness to transitioning children and adolescents and a growing number of parents are grieving there children and dealing with dissonance of being in a completely unemphatetic environment to their plight, all while kindness and inclusivity are preached.

Relative to drug addiction, gun and road deaths, yes it's small but rareness doesn't exonerate wrongness, and it's possible to care to varying degrees, or at least have an informed opinion about, many different issues at once.

This is a canary in the coalmine as part of woke progressive social engineering (along with anti-whiteness etc), so a lot of people have an interest. I would argue it's an important manifestation of where we are at as liberal societies with rising mental health issues for children and youth and a pervasive lack of meaning broadly.

Also, you're always interested in responding, so it's a funny charge to make when you are just as focused on the issue.

I think part of it is that highly vocal trans activists and their writings are disproportionately represented online compared to the how few actual trans people there are in the world. For example, if you based your idea of America just on reading Reddit, you might think that something like 10% of Americans were trans. And I also think, based on the kind of slang they use and the fact that they regularly write thousands of words about politics, that probably most people on The Motte are also highly online. So from a Motte commenter's perspective, trans people might seem to be everywhere.

I know a few elementary school teachers and it's apparently normal now that there are a few trans kids in each class. I assume they aren't on hormone blockers at that age but they picked a new name and they dress and act like the opposite sex. I think the rates of this stuff in young kids are just absolutely exploding.

Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?

I tire of this style of dismissal. It's posted continuously because intelligent people disagree and the most uncomfortable feeling in the world is knowing that people you otherwise respect disagree on something that seems so obvious with no explanation you can imagine an intelligent person believing readily available. No intelligent people really disagree about the problem of obesity, there are some disagreements on what should be done about it and those are talked about consistently but they often terminate in an agreement that more information is needed or a few reasonable theories to be investigated.

I guess it’s another victim of the toxoplasma of rage? Important issues that no one disagrees with are largely ignored, whereas less important ones will get talked about if you can create a debate over them.

This happens on a micro scale as well in trans issues; the trans people that will attract the most attention will naturally be the most divisive, e.g. Dylan Mulvaney. Fewer people care about say, Rebekah Bruesehoff, the trans girl activist who plays field hockey and just looks like your typical boring blonde American girl; but everybody knows Lia Thomas because leftists look virtuous defending a male looking 6’1 broad shouldered trans woman, and most importantly, they can have a flaming debate with conservatives online about it.

I guess it’s another victim of the toxoplasma of rage? Important issues that no one disagrees with are largely ignored, whereas less important ones will get talked about if you can create a debate over them.

Sure, but especially on a debate forum this doesn't even seem like a failure mode. If you want to say the republicans focusing on it as a point in the last mid terms lead to bad outcomes for them then I'd agree with you.

Put another way, if you come in here and claim to be able to see out of the back of your head and also think that we should focus on increasing fiber rather than decreasing sugar in American school lunches the claim that objectively impacts more people is absolutely not the claim I'm more likely to want to discuss. To many of us that claim that there is an internal feeling of gender is more like the former than the latter.

According to stats I’ve found, something like 1390 adolescents went on puberty blockers in the US in 2021, out of a population of about 42 million total teenagers. 282 teenagers got a mastectomy. In comparison, 2,590 kids died from a gunshot in that same year.

With those numbers, you’re exceedingly unlikely to know anyone with kids going through those procedures. To me, this just seems like a moral panic amplified through the news in order to distract the masses from real issues - the housing crisis, corruption, school shootings, inflation, wealth inequality, social services being stripped away, the erosion of the middle class. Why do you care about this? Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?

If even 139 adolescents of the 2,590 kids gunned down every year were all targeted by followers of the same ideology who were all following a standard playbook on best practices to gun down adolescents and members of that ideology were openly teaching it in public schools with support from public institutions, that would absolutely be a controversial issue that people talk about all the time. Heck, I'm pretty sure that'd apply even if it were just 14 adolescents a year. Salem Witch trials killed what, 19 people like 300 years ago? It's not a culture war issue, but it's still brought up a bunch to this day, in a large part because it was a case of our religious and governmental institutions all being complicit in, if not actively participating in, the unjust killing of those people.

And that's the missing piece from all these things like the housing crisis, corruption, school shootings, etc. At best you can say that social services being stripped away is largely from conservative/Republican ideology, but the rest, there's no particular ideologically aligned group of people actively pushing for this stuff with support from powerful institutions at every level of society. These are mostly just standard-issue societal problems which often do have culture war implications but which lacks any powerful institutions who are full-throatedly yelling to the skies that this is a Good Thing. The amount of people who say they love corruption and want more of it and will shout down anyone who tries to convince others that corruption is a bad thing is too small to matter. Even the Trumps of the world will frame their corruption as actually not-corrupt or a correction to a deeper corruption. In contrast to youths going through medical transition where you do see plenty of people doing those very things, all following a similar playbook from the same ideology which has massive institutional support.

With those numbers, you’re exceedingly unlikely to know anyone with kids going through those procedures. To me, this just seems like a moral panic amplified through the news in order to distract the masses from real issues - the housing crisis, corruption, school shootings, inflation, wealth inequality, social services being stripped away, the erosion of the middle class. Why do you care about this? Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?

Welcome to the culture wars in America. This trend dates to the early 90s, in which a few suicides possibly due to lyrics was the most pressing thing in America at the time. 'Big issues' are understood to be hard to fix and out of anyone's control. Smaller-stakes culture war battles get more mileage. Trans issues are seen as being symptomatic of broader-scale problems...the canary in a coal mine.

'Big issues' are understood to be hard to fix and out of anyone's control. Smaller-stakes culture war battles get more mileage.

This line of thinking is why I sometimes think that the Culture War is best described as bike shedding at the scale of governance: we fight hardest about the things we think we understand most, even if they are, at the end of the day, mostly inconsequential.

the Culture War is best described as bike shedding at the scale of governance

This analogy is so uncomfortably accurate that my knee-jerk reaction was to downvote. Instead I'm nominating it as an AAQC. It was a real life "they hated him because he spoke the truth" moment.

I agree we should focus on economic issues and intergenerational disparities but gender ideology is ubiquitous - in the sense of scale it's huge, an attempted takeover of a prior social consensus. Just because a lot of people ignore it, doesn't mean it's not consequential.

According to stats I’ve found, something like 1390 adolescents went on puberty blockers in the US in 2021, out of a population of about 42 million total teenagers. 282 teenagers got a mastectomy

Would you stake your reputation on these numbers? I'm willing to put a bet on "no way is this true". Combined with "minors don't get hormones or surgeries, they only get blockers" argument we heard a few years, it really looks like we're hitting every step on the road from "it's not happening" to "it's a good thing that it is".

Inseparable from the issue of medical care for trans children is the entire 'gender ideology' that some worry threatens to permeate every aspect of public life in a way school shootings don't, by definition. Obesity probably inches closer to that, what with the fat acceptance movement and the glamorization of unhealthy celebrities. But it's hard for anybody to take the fat man seriously for complaining he's being charged two tickets for filling two seats on a flight. Gender affirming care and the ideological umbrella it operates under is one of the few things where criticising or doubting it from any angle, in any context, to any degree can risk severe professional and often personal disadvantage in a way other political or social topics don't despite their polarization. The only other subject matter I can think of that prompts this 'zero-tolerance' treatment is race. By contrast, I don't think my employer really cares that much about how I feel about climate change, even if it annoys them. I'm not risking a lawsuit if I think the science is 'fake and gay'.

Given that, I don't think it's too surprising that trans issues will get more fuel because it's something we've found will raise its head anywhere and everywhere in due course. I haven't been to a high school or been a teenager for decades. Meanwhile, 'gender crap' is something I have to endure on multiple fronts both public, personal, and professional. And it can be this way even if a trans person only physically enters my orbit once a year.

With those numbers, you’re exceedingly unlikely to know anytime with kids going through those procedures.

Yeah, and yet I do. You know, this actually reminds me of the discussion downthread, about some author misrepresenting/misunderstanding stats to try to show that a greater proportion of whites are illiterate than blacks in CA.

When you posted the site with those stats before, I wanted to push back then, but got distracted. But your own source pointed out it was likely undercounting, because it was only capturing a very narrow statistical category of trans youth. Namely, youth with a formal diagnosis and formal prescription for gender dysphoria.

Meanwhile, using older stats, there are at ~150,000 transgender youth from age 13-17 in the united states. So something here isn't adding up by several orders of magnitude.

I recently made a comment linking an article that gives the same numbers rae did, which might be the article you're thinking of: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/ . That article's total number of teens diagnosed with gender dysphoria agrees with yours (the years/ages don't line up so the numbers aren't directly comparable):

Overall, the analysis found that at least 121,882 children ages 6 to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria from 2017 through 2021.

So, according to that article it is orders of magnitude more common for a teen to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria than for any medical intervention to be taken. That seems like exactly what you'd expect: we think medical interventions are a major step that should be carefully considered, and especially should be avoided for people under 18 because we think they are too young to make that decision. Although I don't know the ratio of adults diagnosed with gender dysphoria to those undergoing some sort of medical intervention to compare.

You know, this actually reminds me of the discussion downthread, about some author misrepresenting/misunderstanding stats to try to show that a greater proportion of whites are illiterate than blacks in CA.

This is weak. You can’t just associate a statistic you cannot debunk to one that has been. If trans researcher lie, I think it’s much more likely that they lie on the positive effects of transition rather than on raw numbers like these.

But your own source pointed out it was likely undercounting, because it was only capturing a very narrow statistical category of trans youth. Namely, youth with a formal diagnosis and formal prescription for gender dysphoria.

I don’t think it’s a narrow category. The adolescents, and the parents who go along with it, think it's What The Science Says. They're not out there getting gonzo surgeries on their own initiative. If you want to play up scary numbers, it seems that the number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria rose from 25k to 42k from 2020 to 2021, and the mean age for the diagnostic is decreasing. It could be that there’s tens of thousands of kids in the pipeline for such surgeries, they just didn't have the time to get to the previous ones in large numbers before they matured.

This is weak. You can’t just associate a statistic you cannot debunk to one that has been.

There has to be a way to push back against suspicious statistics. The information is not public so common people can't verify them, so a "you can't deboonk this" approach leaves others with the ability to make numbers up, and get away with it for years.

If trans researcher lie, I think it’s much more likely that they lie on the positive effects of transition rather than on raw numbers like these.

They were lying about hormones and surgeries being done children at all. So even with these stats it has to be conceded they lie about the numbers.

There has to be a way to push back against suspicious statistics.

But just pointing to a completely different false statistic + your intimate conviction is not the way. What is the rule being applied here? All statistics are false if I feel like it?

Your ‘deboonking’ quip is invalid, it’s supposed to make fun of people’s tendency to falsely claim they have debunked their opponent’s statistics. But on the literacy numbers, it would be hard to find a halfway reasonable ‘antiracist progressive’ who would still support the original claim after the debunking. Ergo, it’s a true debunking, not a ‘deboonking’.

They were lying about hormones and surgeries being done children at all.

Who is ‘they’? To make the “282 teenage mastectomies” claim false here, one researcher has to lie, and then all the other researchers have to support it by not publishing any contradictory evidence (since you haven’t found it). And that group includes a lot of people who think it’s a very good thing that those surgeries are being performed, so the dubious claim can be attacked both from a pro-trans and anti-trans perspective. The ‘they’ obscures the difference between a few liars within a broadly sympathetic group and an extremely well-coordinated conspiracy, requiring all to act as one.

But just pointing to a completely different false statistic + your intimate conviction is not the way.

I'm not invested in any particular form of pushback, just in there being some response available, when people do the equivalent of newspapers publishing bullshit on the frontpage, and a correction notice in tiny print, on page 19.

What is the rule being applied here? All statistics are false if I feel like it?

More like: just because it's a officially published statistic, doesn't mean it's true. If you expect people to change their mind based on the statistic you're citing, but it turns out to be false, you should be willing to suffer reputational damage if it turns out to be false, going forward people should have a right to be skeptical of any statistics posted in favor of the idea you're arguing for.

Who is ‘they’?

"They" is people arguing in favor of transgender care. It was an extremely popular at the time, including from researchers albeit not ex-cathedra. It was based on the assumption that the WPATH standards of care were being followed to the letter, and anyone disputing the assumption had the burden of proof shifted onto them.

(since you haven’t found it).

This is dishonest. I have not not found it, I have not gone looking for it. I don't think anyone should have to go looking for a refutation of any numbers, unless the person making the original claim vouches with their reputation for the statistics used to that back it.

To make the “282 teenage mastectomies” claim false here, one researcher has to lie, and then all the other researchers have to support it by not publishing any contradictory evidence.

No. All the other researchers have to do, is need a few years to try an replicate the original finding.

And that group includes a lot of people who think it’s a very good thing that those surgeries are being performed, so the dubious claim can be attacked both from a pro-trans and anti-trans perspective.

People who think it's a good thing those surgeries are being performed are still aware of their political environment, and the backlash that will come if the awareness of high numbers spreads to the public.

The ‘they’ obscures the difference between a few liars within a broadly sympathetic group and an extremely well-coordinated conspiracy, requiring all to act as one.

Ok, so someone does a study estimating the number of gender-affirming surgery in the US, but they aggregate the youngest age group into 12-18 year olds, so you don't actually know how many have been done on minors, and when a journalist asks them "hey can you sand me the raw disaggregated data", they answer with "all of the analysis we did was based on the age groups that we specified, we haven’t done analyses with other age groups", and refuse to send the data. Nothing comes out of it in the months that follow, is that an "extremely well-coordinated conspiracy"?

This is dishonest. I have not not found it, I have not gone looking for it. I don't think anyone should have to go looking for a refutation of any numbers, unless the person making the original claim vouches with their reputation for the statistics used to that back it.

Do you need an official “I vouch for those numbers on my children’s children lives” ? Rae and I will suffer some reputational damage for defending those numbers if you find contradicting ones, and that is usually enough of a motivation for others.

I did find them suspiciously low myself, did a quick search, saw no contradicting statistic. This is the point where your priors should move somewhat (since, as in the literacy numbers, there is an alternate universe where they are easily debunked by the quick search), not where you double down on your intuition. And please don’t call me dishonest lightly. Whether you went looking for them or not, you haven’t found them. I am not trying to deceive anyone.

People who think it's a good thing those surgeries are being performed are still aware of their political environment, and the backlash that will come if the awareness of high numbers spreads to the public.

Then why haven’t they lied on the 42k diagnoses ?

Ok, so someone does a study estimating the number of gender-affirming surgery in the US, but they aggregate the youngest age group into 12-18 year olds, so you don't actually know how many have been done on minors

The study said “3678 (7.7%) were aged 12 to 18 years“ (gender-affirming surgeries over 4 years). That’s in the same ballpark as “282 mastectomies per year on minors”, no matter how they choose to massage the disaggregated data.

Do you need an official “I vouch for those numbers on my children’s children lives” ? Rae and I will suffer some reputational damage for defending those numbers if you find contradicting ones, and that is usually enough of a motivation for others.

I don't actually think you should suffer reputational damage since you're just trying to get to the real numbers, rather than throwing a wet blanket on the conversation. So from Rae I'll either need an official statement, or a rephrasing of their post in a way that doesn't imply my loicence to care will be taken away if I don't prove the number of surgeries exceed a certain threshold (which, I will notice, is not even specified).

This is the point where your priors should move somewhat, not where you double down on your intuition.

I don't know if I agree. Like I said, for some time I have been frustrated at the "posting bullshit on the front page - posting a retraction on page 19" dynamic, and I'm not in the mood to keep letting it happen. I did move my priors somewhat, back when people were posting WPATH guidelines to tell me surgeries on minors don't happen at all. My reward for that is people telling me to stop caring, because even though surgeries on minors absolutely are happening, it's not a lot. If I am to give this argument any credence, it needs to come with pre-declared costs to the people putting it forward, if the statistics they're using turn out to be wrong. Either that or I feel entitled to reject the argument in it's entirety.

And please don’t call me dishonest lightly. Whether you went looking for them or not, you haven’t found them. I am not trying to deceive anyone.

The implication seems to have been (and apparently still is) that since I was unable to provide any contradicting numbers, I should move my priors as you said. That would be a good argument, but I think there's a massive difference between "unable" and "haven't even attempted", and it's not right to conflate the two in this type of argument.

Then why haven’t they lied on the 42k diagnoses ?

A diagnosis says nothing about the interventions that will take place, you can always say keep repeating the old "reversible interventions only" line that used be popular. We also don't know whether these are undercounted or not.

The study said “3678 (7.7%) were aged 12 to 18 years“ (gender-affirming surgeries over 4 years). That’s in the same ballpark as “282 mastectomies per year on minors”, no matter how they choose to massage the disaggregated data.

I haven't posted this study as an example of contradicting numbers, I've posted this study as an example of how they can hide inconvenient data without an "extremely well-coordinated conspiracy" (alternatively, as proof that one exists), so I'm rather miffed this is precisely the point you chose to not answer.

If you want to know why I'm so skeptical of the numbers, one of the reasons is that Kaiser Permanente was doing 40-50 mastectomies on minors per year by 2020 (it being the year of COVID the numbers actually went down somewhat). Now sure, it's a big clinic, it's a progressive state, so probably they'll be doing more of them than the national average, but there's a couple hundred pediatric gender clinics in the US. Maybe they don't all have surgeons, or there are none around to refer to, but it just doesn't pass the sniff test at first glance. Then, even if the mastectomies are in the right ballpark, is opening a new clinic worth it for an average of 5-ish or so blocker prescriptions? I only know of one American whistleblower from a clinic so far, but she reported it being overwhelmed.

Maybe my various inferences about the numbers are wrong, and maybe Rae's numbers do pan out, but given how the goalposts have shifted in the broader debate, I feel entitled to strong skepticism unless overwhelming evidence is provided.

...Yeah, most trans teens don't get any medical treatment yet.

This part actually jumped out at me:

80% of the members of the cult were women, and there weren't enough men to go around.

This seems unexpected because if there were any social group that had a gender imbalance of that degree, AND all the women in question were self-described as looking for love, you'd think this would lead to men joining up to exploit the imbalance until it was wittled down some.

I notice I am confused. Even accounting for women in general being more drawn to weird spiritualist remedies.

Sure the premise that you're looking for one specific person kind of limits the playing field, but that rarely stops motivated males.

Also, the basic description of the group made it seem less cult-like than the central example of cults, but upon looking at some of their background beliefs and their youtube channel yeah, this is definitely a classic-style cult with some slick presentation.

Like, I'm actually willing to tolerate psychic matchmakers because they basically take all the standard tactics and tricks to finding a mate for someone and dress it up in some woo language to make it more palatable.

But the harms being done in the Twin Flames Universe seem pretty obvious even before the coerced transition, and most of the other hallmarks are there.

This rests on the assumption that the women are young and attractive. Not even MtFs bother trying to muscle in on middle aged women's book clubs and knitting circles.

I'm going to assume most of the women recruited were so eager to join specifically because they'd failed to find love through conventional means and were becoming increasingly desperate as they could feel their biological clocks ticking down.

Most men don’t actually optimize their lives around attracting women.

This seems unexpected because if there were any social group that had a gender imbalance of that degree, AND all the women in question were self-described as looking for love, you'd think this would lead to men joining up to exploit the imbalance until it was wittled down some.

There are some women who are more or less genuinely unfuckable, and I don't mean because they're ugly, old, or crazy. Knowing nothing about this particular cult and therefore not in any way commenting on it, many of the cultists at Jonestown were mentally incompetent, morbidly obese, etc

Well, there is always the verboten topic of the "meme sex". Probably going to get modded again for even uttering the words.

Big five personality traits agreeableness and neuroticism are a helluva drug. And, specific to this cult, more or less every single former member they interviewed said they found the cult by googling "twin flame", a woo woo spiritual concept they'd heard about before, after having an intense personal connection with someone. Twin Flame Universe is apparently the most search engine optimized result for that query, and off to the cult they go. The struggle sessions prey on their neuroticism and the intense social conditioning preys on their agreeableness.

Well, there is always the verboten topic of the "meme sex". Probably going to get modded again for even uttering the words.

Meme sex? What does that mean? That one sex is more susceptible to cultural programming?

Thats my plain read of it, yes. Not unlike "cultural marxism" however, plenty of people will insist the plain reading is wrong, and the true meaning involves literally every evil that lurks under the bed of a neoliberal at night.

I have never - in my entire life - changed a man's mind with a single but especially clever response.

Just seems like they shouldn't have had any trouble recruiting males once the word got out that there were eligible females seeking companions to be found. That's how most social groups end up working. Attract the ladies and then expect the men to follow (and spend money)

Maybe the word never got out.

Or maybe the women were conventionally unattractive or just overly picky, both of which are overstated but extant problems that women sometimes have.

Many of the women in the documentary were definitely on the chubbier side, and were encouraged to get fatter from the cult leader's diet plan.

Are you confused about why most cult leaders are charismatic men?

I presume some of the gender imbalance is linked to intentional recruitment practises by such a cult, especially since I think that most cult leaders (being overwhelmingly male) certainly enjoy having more submissive women around for their sexual enjoyment, and this only ceases to apply when a cult gains some degree of legitimacy or a large amount of growth, where the dude in charge has reached saturation for the number of women he can fuck, and doesn't particularly care who they rope in next. Or they might pass away and hand the torch to other followers, who I suspect are more likely to be "True Believers" and less internally motivated by such.

I also believe that women are naturally more inclined to fall for cultish practises/woo, not that it's exclusive to them. How many men do you see unironically espousing astrology or healing crystals?

I’ve long suspected that such a dynamic actually is what drives recruiting. A group of men cannot attract women to join for the purposes of sexual access. Women can. In fact, in most cases it’s the woman who looks after the spiritual side of things. If she’s devout, then the children and the husband will be in church. If she doesn’t care, then odds are that the family won’t be observant. Even in dating, men are far more likely to play act religion even if they don’t believe it if they think they’ll have access to a woman they want.

Children are more likely to stay in the religion if their father practices than if the mother practices. It isn't obvious to me why

Are you confused about why most cult leaders are charismatic men?

Nah.

But as to the rest of your comment, was there any evidence that the leader of the group was getting laid by the female members?

Seems like the whole premise of the group is "there's one (1) singular person out there for you, I'm here to help you find them" which seems less likely to lead to drug-fueled orgies than claiming "I am Jesus born again, bang me to secure your place in heaven" or whatever.

And that's why you would think, as word spread, that men might join the group and play the game for a chance to become a given woman's "twin flame".

I guess the question is why did men's innate horniness drive more of them to the group?

How many men do you see unironically espousing astrology or healing crystals?

Not much, but you get the weird gymbro/tradbro sort of thing like perineum tanning and whatever the Liver King advocates. And of course there are those who accuse Andrew Tate of being a cult leader.

Anyhoo, my last thought is that as we've seen a large rise in the share of single adults, I bet more cult-like groups that promise to help find love rise to prominence in the near future.

But as to the rest of your comment, was there any evidence that the leader of the group was getting laid by the female members?

I think that's a fair assumption to make in the case of most modern cults, even if it's not necessarily applicable in this one.

I joked with my wife in the first episode "How long until the cult leader just starts fucking all the women?"

Surprisingly, it hadn't gotten that far yet. Although the final episode talks about him buying several hundred acres in the middle of nowhere, and wanting his cult members to move out there. He wants his "harmonious couples" to start having "golden children" that are already ascended. However, since most of them are sterilized women pretending to be men, he will be picking who the biological fathers will be.

Pretty sure you only need one guess how that's going to end up.

Although the final episode talks about him buying several hundred acres in the middle of nowhere, and wanting his cult members to move out there. He wants his "harmonious couples" to start having "golden children" that are already ascended. However, since most of them are sterilized women pretending to be men, he will be picking who the biological fathers will be.

Ah.

Yeah this just sounds like the Branch Davidians with extra steps.

Heaven's Gate sterilized many of its members before their more famous mass suicide.

All the other cult members performed that feat of cognitive mutilation however.

This is utterly unsurprising. People want to belong more than they want to be right. People want to belong more than they want to be safe. People want to belong more than they want nice things, or sex, or space, or sanity, or health. Frankly the surprising part is that one member refused the feat of cognitive sodomy.

And I think trans is similar- like it or not, trans are provided belonging in a world that’s bereft of it. It’s the same thing behind munchausen or anorexia; you now belong to a community of other practitioners by virtue of doing something crazy and stupid, United against the rest of the world which can never do enough to cater to you and yours. Yes, trans is getting supported by big institutions that never supported anorexia or munchausens, but I think that’s tribal dynamics driven by polarization- remember that ‘people want to belong’ thing again? And as the US white population undergoes ethnogenesis where the blue and red tribes live in different worlds, I think you’re going to see more stupidity and craziness get declared sacrosanct because the wrong tribe opposed it, so you can declare yourself closer to the core of your tribe by declaring your support, damn the consequences.

Now obviously we should get people back to family, church, neighborhood associations, local sports leagues, etc. But those mostly aren’t coming back. We’re stuck with a cycle of pillarizarion into obvious craziness. Trans is the first expression(well, that hit the mainstream), it won’t be the last. And that’s a damn shame.

80% of the members of the cult were women

Why this skewed representation? Thinking about it: Most cult leaders I can think of are male, are conversely most followers women? Why is that? But how skews that the leader structure? I looked up Jonestown and two third who drank the cool-aid were female. Leader Jim Jones was of course male, but there is a documentary about his helping „all-female inner circle“.

Downvoted Reddit comment about the twin flames documentary:

I hate to be mean but a lot (but not all) of the followers are conventionally unattractive women. They probably had a lot of trouble dating, not many relationships and are desperate for love. They are willing to do or say anything to someone who can promise them this love they are looking for. So, Ofcourse they don’t question it when they see “twin flames couple coaches” thinking it worked! So they double down.

In pretty much every region and religion, more women identify as religious than men (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/03/22/the-gender-gap-in-religion-around-the-world/). In the U.S. that's something like 60% to 47% for women and men respectively, according to Pew. More women believe in things like healing crystals, astrology, soulmates, etc. Even ignoring things like specific personality traits, I'd expect women to be more common in cults than men.

I watched both documentaries, and IMO the vast majority of the cult members were unattractive, a few were exceptionally so (I'd rate at 2/10s). The only two attractive girls were redhead sisters, both of whom were very targeted by the cult probably for exactly that reason, with one ending up as CEO and the other as a poster child for relationship success.

Nice find! I sometimes fantasize about founding a museum about all this, once it's all over, this would be a nice piece for it.

But going even deeper, where the fuck is the medical establishment?

They're entirely complicit. Whether it's because they have dollar signs in their eyes, or because of ideology, I'll leave for you to decide, but I heard an interview with an APA member that tried to get them to do a systemic review of the evidence for transgender care, and the tricks they pulled to bury the idea really were something else. But the good news is they recently announced they'll actually do one.

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