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I wanted to write about the WPATH leaks: the cancers and the shrinks debating over how many of a 12 year old's "multiple personalities" need to be transsexual before they should give them hormones and surgery.
I wanted to write about a woman I know who just got a $90,000 government grant for her instagram hobby farm, alongside hundreds of other fake businesses like "the Black farmers collective." Taxpayers gave her more money than her business will ever have in revenue to play upper-middle-class status games while the few remaining real farmers around her are going out of business.
I wanted to write about watching my friend once again change all the grocery store tags because prices keep skyrocketing as talking heads insist we're imagining it all and everyone's actually getting super rich.
I wanted to write about my state banning non-"cage free" eggs and claiming it won't increase prices... because they negotiated a kickback deal with the remaining suppliers to eat the cost until after the '24 election, after which they can harvest their monopoly rents and some lobby group can release an official report claiming the price increases were unrelated.
I wanted to write about how my state house just banned natural gas hookups and enabled pressuring companies to drop service to existing customers.
I wanted to write about the people chanting "glory to the martyrs by any means necessary" while insisting nobody could possibly suspect them of supporting Hamas, with every leftist somehow getting an identical memo about how to provide cover for them.
But what's the point? Seriously, why even talk about this just to get gaslit by the people who are celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening?
You could spend your entire life writing tens of thousands of words explaining and analyzing this insanity, and all it does it give the perpetrators the satisfaction of gloating about getting away with it.
What are we even doing here? Are we just going to keep doing it forever as the country goes completely insane?
Why? What possible good will it do? Is this whole place just a safety release valve to stop any pressure building up against the overton window slamming left faster than the eye can see?
Does anyone actually get any pleasure out of this? Does anyone think it's doing any good? Can anyone point to an example of it doing any good in the past? Has culture war discussion on the motte ever actually led to anyone solving culture war problems? The closest thing I can come up with are TracingWoodgrain's exposés, which while incredible have hardly moved the needle on public awareness.
Virtually all the energy expended here seems to be vented straight into the void, almost like it's deliberately set up to do so, keeping people arguing in circles until it's too late to do anything about it. And it's been going on for over a decade! When will it stop?
Edit:
I hope this example might get across what I mean. A few weeks ago I wasted time finding out about "multiplicity" (the new social contagion of kids who spend too much time on discord deciding they're all "plural systems" of different personalities). Did a bunch of research, got on a bunch of discords that use the "pluralkit" plugin, found examples of psychologists taking it seriously, started writing a post.
It turned out Gattsuru was already talking about it last year like it was just a normal thing that normies will learn to accept soon.
Yesterday we found out a bunch of WPATH associates all treat it like a legitimate and uncontroversial diagnosis that lots of their "trans kids" mysteriously have. It hardly made a splash in the news. Pretty soon people will be mocking anyone who cares about it.
I realized that any discussion I started on the motte would be pointless. It would just run the same circle of "noticing, denial, minimization, celebration, resigned acceptance" that literally all culture war events go through here.
What good would bringing it to anyone's attention do? Even the most bizarre event that would have been considered unimaginably stupid until the second it happens will just be rationalized away like it's no big deal.
Some other discussion here.
To be clear, I think it's (much) more likely for multiplicity to become a culture war flashpoint than to be accepted by normies, or even 'accepted' to the extent modern LGTBQIWTFBBQ+ stuff is accepted by a dominant portion of one political party. Even to the extent that it is possible to show up as a culture war thing, I'm not confident that it'd show up in the sense of "EEOC and teacher's unions start pushing it" rather than "LibsOfTikTok finds the absolute nuttiest one, and after a sequence of hilarious events, it ends up on a Presidential debate stage".
I'm aware of a lot of weird groups -- I've been following therianthropy since before Y2K! -- but very few of them mainstream to the point of normies even recognizing them enough to make fun of them, nevermind accept them, and there are a lot of pragmatic reasons that both groups are unlikely to take off in mainstream awareness.
A lot of the complaints have been floating around from anti-WPATH people for about five years.
That said, at least from the available parts of the leak, it's not clear that this is particularly good as an example of something seen as "a legitimate and uncontroversial diagnosis that lots of their "trans kids" mysteriously have", especially from trans-skeptic views. Page 76-82 from the PDF are the only leak-specific discussions of multiplicity I could find. They seem like more discussion about additional caution: one doctor mentioning that one of the three plural patients he'd seen didn't end up wanting to transition even socially despite uniform gender identity, another doctor that two out of twelve went to hormone therapy and then wanting more (presumably talk) therapy instead.
The excerpts instead show discussion of what the authors wanted to call "complicated PTSD", which is definitely a little euphemistic (and less charitably, probably to bilk some billable hours out)... but it's also partly downstream of few plural people meeting, or even attempting to masquerade as, the full criteria for DID -- which requires at least some level of amnesia and interference with normal functioning -- or the rougher categories of OSDD. It's possible that they've just found the absolute severest (or heaviest faking) plural people around, but I'd compare Scott's discussion: most plurals claim perspectives that are weird, and some even do so in ways that are especially disruptive or demanding, but it's pretty far from what someone familiar with the 1980s DID panic would have expected.
And the part where they are throwing a different diagnosis on top, where they give a diagnosis at all, suggests recognition that it would be seen as controversial.
I'll probably post my own writeup on the WPATH Files, but for now:
might sound like "additional caution" from the perspective of someone who finds the whole multiplicity thing valid - they got consent from all the alters, after all - but it's going to sound like endorsing utter madness to anyone who doesn't. To any normie you'd pose this as a hypothetical, "additional caution" is going to mean "make sure to address any other deep psychological issues, like their DID, before giving them hormones".
I don't have good insight on the normie perspective, but is that means in the sense of "addressing" as in 'managing condition and checking that nterest remains once managed', or as in 'completely cure', or if somewhere between, where?
Because the former seems a good way to avoid genuine problems like schizophrenic or fugue cross-dressing, but the latter is pretty impossible for a wide variety of common conditions (and 'conditions').
That's gonna depend on what you mean by "managed". All of the trans stuff is already on thin ice with regards to believability, so if you slap another meme-disorder on top of it, most people won't be able to handle it.
"Managing" might be a good framework for, say, depression. "I used to have crippling depression, couldn't get out of bed, but for several years now I have it under control, even if I occasionally lapse. I have a stable life, a good job I've been able to keep, etc. etc. I now want to transition, and no, I don't have any hopes that the transition is going to cure my depression" is something you can sell to people. "I now only occasionally switch to my alter 'Jessica'" is not. "We consulted all the alters, and they all want to transition" is something people expect to see in a cringe Daily Wire comedy skit, not from a practicing clinician.
The fact that this would make transition for multiples, and people with other "conditions", impossible, is the point.
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