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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   24391 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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When discussing pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in the treatment of gender dysphoria, the gender-critical among us often draw parallels with bodily integrity identity disorder. This is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person experiences profound distress because of the presence of one or more of their limbs, and requests to have these limbs amputated to alleviate said distress (or tries to amputate them themselves). Colloquially, one might say that people with this condition are able-bodied but identify as disabled.

Given that no one thinks that surgical amputation is the correct treatment for this psychiatric disorder, we gender-criticals argued, it follows that surgical intervention is the wrong approach for people with gender dysphoria. If it's wrong to amputate a mentally ill's person's arm just because they say it's causing them distress, how can it be right to do the same for a penis or breast?

Sadly, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, the medical establishment has noted the parallels, and it is coming to a rather different conclusion:

Sensational news from late last week, that doctors amputated two fingers for a 20-year-old patient to alleviate the young man’s mental distress over being able-bodied, contained a buried clue: “He related his condition to gender dysphoria.”

... A 2018 ethics analysis in a Cambridge University Press publication concludes that there is “no logical difference between the conceptual status of BIID and transsexualism”. It goes on to say that, “given that individuals with transsexualism are offered gender reassignment surgery it seems to us that individuals with BIID ought at least to be considered for treatment, including elective amputation in some cases.”

... But what would it mean to accept the amputee identity at scale, the way we have accepted trans rights as a universal humanitarian movement? Drawing exact parallels, we would likely see a total saturation of amputee culture, from amputee story hour to centring amputee voices in DEI training, and doctors warning parents of the very real suicide risks for amputee-identifying children whose parents refuse to accept them as surgically modified cripples or invalids. Advocates would talk of being “assigned able-bodied at birth” to persuade activist teachers and medical associations to adopt the absolutist position that any attempt to talk kids out of amputee surgery amounts to “conversion therapy”.

The journalist Mia Hughes recently asked readers to imagine a society in which amputee advocates enjoyed the same cultural and political victories as trans advocates.

“Imagine there were a sudden 4000% increase in teens identifying as amputees, but we were all forbidden from being concerned. Instead we were supposed to celebrate it,” she posted on X. “Imagine schools teaching children as young as kindergarten that some people have amputee identities, that they get to choose how many limbs they have. Posters promoting body mutilation adorned the walls of many classrooms.”

Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured. It doesn't matter if the Tavistock is shuttered and there's a rash of lawsuits directed at youth gender clinics in the US: if you're a medic who's internalised (or been made to internalise) the gender ideology worldview, the implications of that worldview and the role of the medical establishment it affirms have far-reaching implications in medical domains unrelated to gender medicine itself. At this point I honestly can't rule out psychiatrists prescribing anorexics appetite suppressants to aid them in achieving their "bodily attainment goals".

*Other than why the fuck are Canadian doctors so keen to help their fellow citizens maim or destroy their bodies??!!

This is a direct consequence of having a culture that values weakness above strength. When the former is valued more than the latter is it any surprise people deliberately try and become weaker to gain status? In his society the status and utility gained by our young man from having two fewer fingers exceeds the amount of utility he would have gained from those two intact fingers so from his point of view what he did was completely rational: It isn't him who is diseased, it is the culture around him.

There is no fix to this problem either. The only way out is replacement by a new culture that doesn't do this. The prognosis is terminal.

This person was not attempting to become weaker to gain status. They just have a rare psychological disorder, it's way more like someone with severe OCD than it is a transtrender. Read the article

“He hides his fingers, keeps them flexed, leading to impaired dexterity, localized pain, irritability and anger,” Dr. Nadia Nadeau, of the department of psychiatry at Université Laval wrote in the journal Clinical Case Reports. He grew more determined to find a way to get rid of fingers he considered “intrusive, foreign, unwanted.”

It's still important to get the details right even if you're correctly diagnosing a broader trend.

Obviously there's no way to know for sure, even if you were this man and/or his health professionals, but I interpreted BurdensomeCount's comment as saying that this man genuinely having this rare psychological disorder is his attempt at becoming weaker to gain status within a culture that values weakness above strength. Very few people are going to consciously think to themselves, "My culture values weakness above strength, and so I will cynically weaken myself in order to gain status above others." Rather, their unconscious attempts to gain status within a culture that they unconsciously understand as valuing weakness above strength will manifest themselves as a rare psychological disorder that drives them to take action that weakens themselves.

To be more explicit, I do not think his voluntarily removing multiple fingers, or refusing to use those fingers and keeping them flexed pre-amputation, brought him any social status in our current culture. He'd just seem very strange. I don't see any reason for him to guess, even unconsciously, that his actions would bring him status. It makes much more sense for this to happen for other reasons.

He'd just seem very strange.

pre op. Post Op he would have a clear and visible signifier of his weakness(Virtue), easier to grind with costly signals than with just bend fingers and a grumpy disposition.

I think the weirdness factor and that it was self-imposed will heavily outweigh that tbh

Aren't there quite a few more steps than required by Occam's razor in your theory?

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