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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25989 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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I also find it hard to square Freddie’s claim that “no one” is trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female altogether with his apparent belief that trans women competing in female sporting events is entirely fair and legitimate. How can such a policy possibly be justified without ignoring the indisputable biological reality, consistent across time and space, that the average male person is stronger, faster and more resilient than 99% of female people?

I think there are gender-heavy assumptions that could square that particular circle. At the trivial level, there's a bit of a motte-and-bailey where sometimes we're talking about simply having XY chromosomes, having gone through a male puberty, and having fully reached male adulthood before transition, which can have significantly different effects; there are also difference traits needed for different sports.

Some of them are wronger (eg, comparing the height of someone who transitioned at 22 to someone who started transition at 12) than others (eg, Olympic-level shooting sports strongly suggests women have comparable or better attributes for some trials), but even the wrong ones are questions of fact, rather than incoherent positions. Some of them are facts that I don't even know -- how does the average strength or resilience of someone with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome compare, or someone who never went through male puberty?

Now, there's a stronger criticism that this is a motte-and-bailey -- your link goes to an ACLU page that links to an NCAA page that is broken, but it's supposed to be based around this policy, which says transfem players "may not compete on a women’s team without changing it to a mixed team status until completing one calendar year of testosterone suppression treatment", citing this study. But the study only finds that :

... The effects of cross-sex hormones in the dosages commonly used have reached their maximum effects after 1 year of administration. In spite of a large difference in testosterone exposure between men and women, there is a large overlap of muscle area between them. Androgen deprivation of men induces a loss of muscle area, further increasing this overlap with women. Therefore, depending on the levels of arbitrariness one wants to accept, it is justifiable that reassigned M –F compete with other women.

Even this is still compatible with a gender binary, if one different than what you'd accept of understand. (Arguably, it demands it; there's actually a lot of internal conflict between the transmedical side and the enby-heavy sides of the trans movement, but it's hard to find that discussed in external-facing communication.) It's just really misleading.

Why are these concerns legitimate to express, and not: the unintended consequences of abolishing single-sex bathrooms and changing rooms; male rapists with intact genitalia being incarcerated in female prisons; convicted sex offenders coming out as trans and changing their names in order to evade child safeguarding policies - or any other of the litany of reasonable-sounding objections gender-critical people have raised over the last decade or so? No idea.

Largely, because the acceptable concerns have either (or both) solutions that are acceptable to the public mores of the progressive movement and especially deBoer's place in it, and because the things that those solutions demand don't crush the goals of the transgender movement. The former is definitely a larger controlling aspect -- there are definitely places where uncertainty about a specific procedure's efficacy is unacceptable, as Trace has found out -- but it's not like this is new or specific to this particular movement.

Bathrooms and changing rooms can't be discussed because the only solution that would solve the proposed threats would cut off access to much of the public sphere; trans rapists and sex offenders because 'everybody' knows that it's really about the Chinese Cardiology over the specific policy questions.

As noted by Wesley Yang, there are 39 separate days3 in the American political calendar specifically dedicated to celebrating trans people

To be fair, naming days for stupid things is what people offer instead of policy behaviors; this is a funny factoid rather than a meaningful counter.

It’s fascinating contrasting the passage above with an article Freddie published in 2022 about the recent phenomenon of social media-addicted teenagers suddenly “discovering” that they suffer from dissociative identity disorder (“DID” for short, popularly known as “multiple personality disorder”), an exceptionally rare condition in which a person has multiple distinct personalities (called “alters”).

That's true, but it's probably a better argument against deBoer's writing qualities in general (I will again bring up that time he had a psychotic break and fasely accused someone of sexual assault). I've probably gotten a sanewashed version of multiplicity compared to the TikTok variant, but compared SSC. Which isn't to say that the DID fandom is right or useful, just that deBoer's critic doesn't even make sense within its own framework (eg, TikTok DID revolves around everyone having had intense childhood trauma, also that was controversial as a claim for even classic-DID, beyond the extent classic-DID was controversial itself).

If you think I’m exaggerating, consider this bill in the state of California which would make a parent’s decision to “affirm” their child’s gender identity (or not) a factor in custody disputes (at the time of writing, it has passed both houses but not yet been signed into law).

Specifically, the bill would require judges to consider it, and has been vetoed. Judges may still do so as a matter of policy.

A “detransitioner” has not simply pressed Ctrl-Z and reverted their body to factory settings - the changes they have made to their body are generally irreversible and will completely change the course of their life. Michael Neary’s victims were furious upon realising that they were denied the ability to have further children for no good reason at all - the idea that medical professionals would downplay the magnitude of the decision to transition is unconscionable.

I get that this isn't a space with a lot of good parallels, but Neary's behavior was a lot worse in terms of informed consent. Neary's victims not only did not know they'd be sterilized before they went into the surgical rooms, but in at least a couple cases the man didn't even tell them what parts he'd removed (or told them incorrectly). We don't have too much detail about how his process worked given all the magically disappearing records, but looking through the patient interviews in the Lourdes report point toward bringing patients in for normal processes or minor surgery and then performing a hysterectomy as an 'emergency' due to complications, only discovering that they've had a supposed life-threatening experience after they've had the surgery completed.

Even if we are to presume that medical professionals are downplaying both the decision and overstating the ramifications for refusal/detransition, these are things happening in daylight; both adult and teenage patients can and should examine statements from medical professionals. I expect that this doesn't have a huge impact on the perspectives of detransitioners, and it doesn't cleave away regulation as an acceptable case, but it really does have an impact on what policy recommendations are available.

I agree that I was being a bit hyperbolic comparing detransitioners to Neary's victims, and obviously there's a world of difference between "agreeing to be sterilised (perhaps when you don't really appreciate the magnitude of this decision) and later coming to regret it" and "being involuntarily sterilised without your consent or knowledge".

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