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Last year I made a prediction about 2023 marking some sort of turning point regarding the Trans issues. But how does one judge the accuracy of a prediction that boils down to "the vibes are shifting"? To attempt that, let me explain where I was coming from when I made it.
My first exposure to trans issues was on weird rat-adjecant Internet forums, Somewhere between 10-15 years ago. Either a trans person would join the forum and bring the subject up, or, interestingly, a cis regular would bring it up, and a trans-poster would appear, seemingly out of nowhere (and in retrospect it's somewhat scary how often it turned out to be Zinnia Jones, speicifically). They spoke with confidence, they knew the Science (and in those places we respected the Science), and could dispatch any argument coming their way like pros. Through it all I had many doubts - is it really wise to let minors make that decision? How exactly can puberty blockers be reversible? How do you even diagnose dysphoria? But that was just my stomach grumbling, and they had the Science, they seemed ubeatable.
Fast forward a few years, and a whole bunch of things have happened. The replication crisis cast doubt on the Science writ large, and critical look at some of the foundational research in Trans-Science turned up massive issues in that specific branch, detransitioners started showing up, massive shifts in the demographics of transitioners started making it's way to official statistics, not to mention an exponential increase in the raw amount as well. Instead of confidence, I started seeing trans activists genuinely flustered, not dumbfounded, but clearly things were happening that they weren't expecting, and didn't know what to make of yet. For my part I still felt uncertain, maybe some new information is going to come up that will contradict what flustered them? Maybe they'll dig out some detail the critics overlooked? Maybe they'll come up with a really good argument to address the issues raised? By the end of 2022 I felt like clicked through the dialogue tree several times over, with several different people, over a long enough period of time - if they could come up with something, they would already.
So what would a vibe shift look like?
Around that time I saw the documentary The Minds Of Men (it's quite rambly, very conspiracy-theory-y, but if those aren't deal breakers, and you have 3.5 hours to kill, it's well argued, and I recommend it), it is about MK-Ultra and psychosurgery, and it is in fact what inspired me to get that copy of Time Magazine as well as a bunch of historical documents I could dig out online. One recurring question I had when watching the documentary was “how the hell did I not hear about tthis”? It's not like I'm an expert, but this is the sort of stuff that felt like it should pop up along the way in my areas of interest. I heard about the Rosenhan experiment, I heard about the Stanford prison experiment, the Milgram experiment, even the 30-50's era lobotomies, why not the late 60's to early 70's era of psychosurgery? Was it just not a big deal? Well, it was big enough to be covered in Time, it was big enough for a best-selling thriller based on the premise, and it's movie adaptation (I wasn't sure when I wrote the post originally, but the Terminal Man is indeed based on the case of Leonard Kille, sometimes referred to as Thomas R. by the media, who was treated in the clinic that was covered in that Time article), the documentary featured footage I also recall from edgy 90's grunge MTV videos, hell my mother remembered hearing about it at the time, through the Iron Curtain, no less!
So assuming psychosurgery was indeed a decently-sized issue, could it just disappear into the mists of history? I asked that very question and the consensus response seems to have been “yes, definitely!”. Your theory on that may differ from mine, but I ended coming to the conclusion that memory of such events needs to be actively maintained or it will fade. We remember things that are useful for people writing history books (or the ones who employ them) and forget the others, so while a similarly sized scandal like the Tuskagee experiment has a certain “Never Again” quality to it, others, like psychosurgery will fall by the wayside. And before you bring it up - no, this is not due to the affected demographics, which are largely the same. If you read the Time magazine article, you'll see doctors Sweet, Mark, and Ervin were planning to deploy psychosurgery as a cure against the race riots of the 60's.
Some might notice that the hypothetical I linked to in the recent paragraph is specifically about trans issues. Indeed, all these thoughts were bubbling in my head for over a year now, and I pretty much expect the hypothetical to become reality. What does a vibe shift look like? That. Was the prediction accurate? Well, I was avoiding specifics because I don't know how to even begin to pin those down, but looking at the state of the discourse on this forum, the pro-trans side seems to have officially moved from “that did not happen” to “and if it did, that's not a big deal” regarding medical interventions on minors. But it is perhaps the reactions of relative outsiders to the debate that are more indicative of the vibe shift and it:s mechanics:
If we were to see a vibe-shift-fueled memory-holing of the issue, would it not happen through People of Status suddenly finding the subject “tacky”, and “played out”?
Now I'm not saying this is going to happen tomorrow, timing is exactly the thing that's going to be hard to get right in a prediction like this. It also might feel silly to make sweeping societal predictions off of changes in internet discourse, but who ended up being right, people freaking out about the changes in Internet discourse seen in Tumblr Social Justice Warriors, or people claiming it was just a couple crazy kids on the Internet?
A lot of history fades from public awareness, even if people actively try to maintain it. This guy is a grifter, but in case that isn't damning enough, the difference between his summary and a more genuine one is serious, and that's despite a small industry of people like David Hardy spending years of their lives to both uncover and publicize the fine details.
'Psychosurgery' falls into a similar boat -- it's a fun trivia topic to reveal that a famous and popular-until-his-death President of the United States had a sister who was treated for 'depression' in a way that left her with the mental capacity of a two-year-old, so it's not forgotten. But in turn there's also just not that many survivors who were in that place where significant but not incapacitating harm could make them cause celebres, especially by the time you get to the 1960s amygdalotomies, where only thousands of the procedures have been done worldwide, rather than tens of thousands just in the United States.
Eh, that's a possible route -- the extent people suddenly stopped caring about where and how the Chinese government might have had any involvement in early COVID stuff is an overt case -- but it's not the only one. Contrast the treatments of masks, where an initial hard press against flipped in valence toward mandates (and still floats up and down in valence by time); or with common fashion cycles among 'progressive' media where a popular culture name goes from hero to villain and sticks well past their cultural relevance. And there's a possibility it just evolves.
I'm skeptical that any of these are going to happen. There's just too many trans people already around, in ways that are too hard to extract not just from doing trans stuff, but from being in social and environmental characteristics where .
But I'm a lot more sympathetic to the trans perspective than the median American, and significantly more so than the median poster here. Which brings the more immediate issue up:
In addition to the obvious issue you already recognize where posters on this forum and unrelated outsiders aren't great signs of what direction Discourse is going, and especially where People of Status are going, there's the more specific problem where even for our subculture this particular topic is hard to make fun to write about.
I try to spice up matters when I can, and there's part of me that hopes this is some place where there could be a reasonable meeting of the minds if we better understood what the hell we were talking about.
But mostly, that's not the sort of thing that happens, or even has signs of happening, and it's boring. The disagreements here are axiom-level, and while there's somethings that can change people's minds on the edges of pragmatic policies, maybe, it's not what the actual disagreements are. That's not a fault specific to the Motte -- the few trans activist spaces that allow disagreement on the margins or recognition of Red Tribe disagreement still don't actually have much to say -- but it's more frustrating here because there's many better options.
Is that not inherent? As you note, the disagreeements are axiomatic. I think that trans women are just delusional boys, and trans men are just confused and mentally ill (disproportionately actual teenagers)girls. Like you note we might be able to come to an agreement on, say, reducing pointless dickishness, or what level of discrimination is potentially tolerable(my answer would be a large but not infinite amount), or have some discussion of transgender sports or whatever. But it’s kind of boring to discuss our core disagreements because there’s no common ground; like literally there’s nothing to discuss. You may as well be saying 2+2=5 from my perspective(and Vice versa). ‘Yes it does/no it doesn’t’ is inherently boring.
That's one model, and it's definitely one that's correct in at least some circumstances. But it's not the only possible or relevant one.
Most people have different axioms and interests and preferences than you do, or I do, at some level. To go among others is to go among mad people. Yet most things don't devolve into a war of all against all. I'd like to wax poetic about recognizing the humanity in the other or recognizing the madness in oneself, but rather than that, or even some serious negotiated settlement, or some broader Westphalian Peace. It's not even that we don't care about these things, or that there are no weirdos that make the most trivial of these things their entire personality and want to restructure society, but it's possible to see them from the outside as something examined, and examined as a concept rather than as an enemy.
And that seems a lot more interesting for me, even if it's layered over axioms that can't be solved, even if a lot of the object-level discussions overlap.
I dunno. There are genuine pragmatic reasons that this particular issue is something people care about, and as much as I might personally want the libertarian perspective as a solution I can see why that would just make both mainstream views madder. Hell, even my "outsiders examining" goal is objectionable to a lot of people who find it dehumanizing. But I don't think it's inherent to every environment, even if it's inherent to many.
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