FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3hr ago
Welp, the incel hysterics can go to sleep satiated.
The "please let the shooter be white cis crowd must be breathing a sigh of relief.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3hr ago
If you agree about the possibility of social contagion, you should try to minimize the attention trans people receive, yet anti-trans activists have been the main publicists of transness for about a decade now – trans people really entered the mainstream with the North Carolina "bathroom bill".
Not according to Google Trends. The bathroom bill passed in March 2016. In the US, searches for "Transsexual" peaked in January 2006, searches for "Transgender" peaked in February and September 2025, and searches for "transgender" peaked in July 2015 and May 2016. Searches for "Caitlyn Jenner" and "Laverne Cox" both peaked in June 2015 (Jenner publicly came out in April 2015). Searches for "I am Jazz" and "Jazz Jennings" peaked in July 2015. The idea that people only started talking about transgender issues because of anti-trans activism is baseless.
I also feel compelled to quote from the most popular thing I've ever written:
In his second article from last week, Freddie complains that gender-critical people have vastly overstated the significance of the trans issue, elevating it to the status of “the most important social divide of our time, apparently beating out crime and education and the collapse of the family etc” when trans/NB people make up at most 2-3% of the American population. I agree that, in the scheme of things, trans issues receive a vastly disproportionate share of column inches relative to their import. Where I differ from Freddie is placing the blame for this state of affairs solely at the feet of gender-critical people.
As noted by Wesley Yang, there are 40 separate days in the American political calendar specifically dedicated to celebrating trans people (and an additional 77 days dedicated to celebrating trans people as a subset of LGBTQ+) - in contrast to Black History Month, which famously falls on the shortest month in the Gregorian calendar, despite black Americans making up 13-14% of the US population. President Joe Biden gave a statement on Transgender Day of Remembrance, while Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren made the frankly bizarre campaign promise that her pick for education secretary would have to be personally vetted by a transgender child. There has hardly been a single political issue in the last ten years that hasn’t been framed as “how might this affect trans people?” or “what does this mean for the struggle for trans rights?” in the popular media, no matter how tangential the connection - everything from Black Lives Matter to the war in the Ukraine to gun violence in schools to the cost-of-living crisis to Covid to AI to the Israel-Palestine conflict to Brexit and even climate change (“[exposure to secondhand smoke] can exacerbate the respiratory stress that LGBTQI+ populations may experience from air pollution and chest binding, which is a common practice among transgender men to achieve a flat chest”).
It’s a bit rich to demand that Americans spend more than one-tenth of the calendar year celebrating trans people, “centring their voices” and putting their trials and tribulations at the forefront of their consciousness - only to then turn around and say "umm why do you even care about this, it’s such a tiny issue lol" when some of them offer even the mildest pushback. You brought it up.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
And you'll notice that hypothetical mass killings of trans people are very much not actual killings of trans people.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5hr ago
I think this demographic makeup dates back to the SSC days. Even in 2019, Scott noted that he attracted readers across the political spectrum, with the exception of Marxists.
Claims of "trans genocide" focus on alleged actual killings of trans people.
They do not. Consider a representative example, which claims that bathroom bills, laws requiring people to compete in sports corresponding to their sex and elevated risk of suicide for trans people are all part of the "trans genocide" currently ongoing in the US.
Or consider the Wikipedia page about the concept (of course it has a Wikipedia page). Opening paragraph:
Transgender genocide or trans genocide (also transgendercide) is a term used by some scholars and activists to describe the targeting of transgender people as part of wider genocides, as well as describe an elevated level of erasure, systematic discrimination, and violence against transgender people.
By their own admission, trans activists consider the "erasure" of trans people (i.e. failing to affirm them and refer to them by the names and pronouns they wish to be addressed by; refusing to make every other character in a teen drama trans) and "discrimination" against them (i.e. demanding that they be housed in the prisons and hospitals corresponding to their sex; lesbians refusing to have sex with male people who "identify as" women) to be examples of "genocide". They also consider the elevated risk of suicide trans people face as an example of "genocide" i.e. the transgender genocide might be the world's first self-administered genocide. Sui-genocide? Geno-suicide?
Sterilization that is forced upon transgender people in order to obtain legal recognition is characterized by various researchers, including political theorist Anna Carastathis, as a violation of reproductive rights, eugenic, and genocidal.
Some countries make a gender recognition cert conditional on having undergone bottom surgery. This argument is sort of ridiculous because a) no one is forcing you to cut your dick off: if changing the sex on your birth cert is that important to you, that's a you problem; and b) unlike ethnicity, trans identification isn't hereditary.
You'll note that there's a bit of a Morton's fork here, as elsewhere in the article they claim that banning bottom surgery for minors constitutes "genocide". If you stop a trans person getting bottom surgery, that's genocide. If you say that a trans person can change the sex marker on their driver's license only if they get bottom surgery (in order to weed out bad actors), that's also genocide. As near as I can tell it, transgender genocide is just when you don't let trans people do exactly what they want 100% of the time.
Elsewhere in the article, there's a map of the US showing which states have banned gender-affirming care. You'll notice that this has absolutely nothing to do with "actual killings of trans people". The page argues that these laws meet certain criteria mentioned in the United Nations definition of genocide, as they "[cause] serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately [inflict] on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part". But this is assuming the conclusion: a major reason for these bans is because of researchers like Hilary Cass investigating and learning that the evidence base for the efficacy of these interventions is appallingly weak and poor quality. This whole discussion was started by you pointing out that some children's mental health worsens after they undergo gender-affirming care. If this is true in general, it implies that legalising gender-affirming care for minors constitutes "transgender genocide"!
Sue E. Spivey and Christine Robinson have argued that the ex-gay movement, which encourages transgender as well as other LGBTQ people to renounce their identities, advocates social death and therefore could meet some legal definitions of genocide.
In other words, if people stop identifying as trans, there will be no trans people left and hence trans people will have been (metaphorically) exterminated. (Note the popular slogan "death before detransition".) Again – absolutely nothing to do with "actual killings of trans people". If everyone stopped identifying as trans tomorrow, there would be no trans people left, without anyone actually having been killed. Nobody identifies as a mod or a rocker anymore, and yet it would be absurd to claim that mods or rockers have been "genocided".
Leah Owen highlights how far-right groups in the U.S. have been incorporating anti-transgender rhetoric and ideas, and the attempts at the time of writing that sought to eradicate transgender people through "broader cultural/legal/social action" rather than direct extermination.
There you go. When they talk about "transgender genocide", they are not talking about trans people being murdered.
I could go on and fisk the rest of the article in detail, but I think I've made my point. Only a small portion of the Wikipedia article about "transgender genocide" concerns itself with trans people actually being murdered.* The rest of it is just complaining about trans people being made to use the public facilities concordant with their sex, not being permitted to compete in opposite-sex sporting events, certain trans people no longer identifying as trans, medical bodies hitting pause on gender-affirming care for minors and so on. When you hear "transgender genocide", instead of thinking "trans people being murdered in their hundreds" you should hear "trans people being inconvenienced or failing to get exactly what they want, in any way".
Between this and Gaza, I'm starting to think the word "genocide" will need to be retired pretty soon.
*The article is 15,451 words long. "Murder" appears 15 times, "kill" 13 times, "violence" 38 times, "death" 9 times and so on.
I personally find 100x easily believable when comparing one particularly vulnerable subset of one population to the entirety of another (both being the <18 subset, of course)
This is a valid point. For the sake of argument, let's say that for each year in Ireland, 82.5% of the victims of defilement were girls under the age of 18. That would imply that the per capita rates for Irish girls <18 was 18/100k in 2005, 48/100k in 2008 and 51/100k in 2009, for an average of 39/100k across the entire period. That would shorten the odds substantially, implying that a white working-class teenaged girl in the UK is 35 times more likely to be sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang than an Irish girl under the age of 18 is to be defiled by anyone.
But I have to admit: I still have a hard time believing that the UK's rate of sex crimes is >=30 times higher than Ireland's. If you told me it was double, I'd have no trouble believing that. 5 times? No question. 10 times? Well within the realm of possibility. But 30 times or more? That strains credibility.
And bear in mind: 1,383/100k isn't the rate at which white working-class teenaged girls get sexually exploited by anyone, but by Pakistani grooming gangs specifically. If we assume that most defilements in Ireland in the period were committed by co-ethnics (e.g. (extended) family members, teachers, Catholic priests etc.), then if the intra-ethnic rate of sexual exploitation of children is broadly similar across Ireland and the UK, white working-class teenaged girls in Briton would have had to contend with this risk in addition to their risk of sexual exploitation by Pakistani grooming gangs. So if the 250k figure is correct, that implies that the difference between the two countries is significantly higher than 35x.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
7hr ago
Yes, I imagine this is what happened. For the sake of clarity, I'm not denying that grooming gangs were a big problem and that they were almost exclusively Pakistani men almost exclusively targeting white girls. I can believe that the rate at which these gangs targeted girls was comparable to the equivalent rate in Pakistan, or even higher (I've heard a theory that Pakistani men don't even see raping an infidel as a crime compared to raping one of their co-religionists, especially if the infidel girl is a "whore" i.e. doesn't wear a hijab). But I have to admit, I have a hard time believing that, in every year between 2000-18, 1 out of every 71 white working-class girls was sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang. That figure strikes me as impossibly high.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
7hr ago
My mum argued that pronouns can be helpful, not for the purposes of trans inclusivity, but because sometimes she gets emails from people from foreign countries and isn't sure if their forename is a boy's or girl's name.
I pointed out that we used to have a perfectly effective means of solving this problem: Mr./Mrs./Ms. This seems like a great example of jugaad ethics.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
7hr ago
Well, I certainly wouldn't trust any statistics published by public bodies in Pakistan. I'm honestly not even sure how I'd begin answering the question of how common child sexual abuse is in Pakistan, only that I'm sure it must be an order of magnitude higher than just about any country in western Europe.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
7hr ago
As I pointed out in another comment, I don't think anyone's claiming that Pakistani grooming gangs were targeting newborns or toddlers for exploitation, and everyone has been keen to highlight that one reason the police looked the other way is because the victims were disproportionately from working-class backgrounds. If we limit our population to white girls aged 10-15 from working-class backgrounds, it shrinks to about 1 million as of the year 2000. 1.4% of those getting sexually exploited by Pakistani grooming gangs strikes me as staggeringly high.
According to Wikipedia, in the year 2000 the UK's population was 59 million and 92% white. 20% of the population was 15 or younger, of which 49% was female. That gives us a population of 5.3 million girls. If 14,000 of them were sexually exploited by Pakistani grooming gangs every year, that would mean a rate of 261/100k.
How does that compare with other common things people experience as children? This study (table 2) provides estimates of the rates of hospital admission for children aged 0-15 in the UK, and the reason for the admission. If we assume that the rates of hospital admission are roughly equal across every sub-group within that cohort (i.e. if the rate at which teenage girls are hospitalised is roughly equal to the rate at which children in general are hospitalised), then the 250k figure implies that a white British girl was more likely to be sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang than she was to be:
- Hospitalised for blood disease (255/100k)
- Hospitalised for circulatory disease (110/100k)
- Hospitalised for mental illness (121/100k)
- Hospitalised for eye disease (183/100k)
But even this is too generous, because I very much doubt the Pakistani grooming gangs were targeting one-year-old baby girls, and as so much coverage of the scandal has gone to great lengths to point out, one reason the police turned a blind eye for so long was because the victims were disproportionately from working-class backgrounds. ChatGPT estimates that, in the year 2000, the population of white girls aged 10-15 from working-class backgrounds was probably about a million, which implies that the rate of sexual exploitation was 1,383/100k. This implies that a white working-class teenage girl was
- 4 times more likely to be sexually exploited by a grooming gang than to be hospitalised for a skin condition
- 8 times more likely than to be hospitalised for eye disease
- 11 times more likely than to be hospitalised for mental illness
- 13 times more likely than to be hospitalised for circulatory disease
Of course, we're all well aware that extremely long appointment waiting lists are the norm rather than the exception in the UK, so maybe using hospital admissions as a sense-check is really just a big indictment of the NHS. So let's come at it from a different angle.
The big problem with using crime statistics as an intuition pump is that this is a scandal about police officers sitting on their hands, meaning statistics collected during the period are inherently unreliable. So rather than using British crime stats, I'll use crime stats from Ireland, which is similar to the UK in many respects aside from (until recently) having a much higher percentage of native-born people, making it a natural control. At the beginning of the period under discussion, it had a very similar intentional homicide rate to the UK (~1/100k for Ireland vs. 1.5/100k for the UK), and intentional homicide rate is generally considered a useful proxy for the crime rate in general.
In 2005, Ireland reported 119 "defilements of a boy or girl less than 17 years old"; in 2008, 348; in 2009, 377. Per capita, that means 10 defilements/100k in 2005, 29/100k in 2008 and 31/100k in 2009.
I can imagine that the UK's large Pakistani population might mean that a working-class teenaged girl faces an elevated risk of sexual assault or exploitation compared to Ireland. But the 250k figure requires me to believe that, in 2005, a white working-class teenaged girl in the UK was 138 times more likely to be sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang than an Irish child was to be sexually exploited by anyone. I can believe that the UK has a higher rate of sex crimes than Ireland, but I do not believe it is over 100 times higher.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
9hr ago
Right, but as I said in the OP, according to the report itself, the 250k figure is not the estimate of the total number of victims since the beginning of mass immigration to the UK, but rather the number of victims just in the period 2000-18. I could buy a quarter of a million victims over the course of seven decades. A quarter million over the course of less than two decades is significantly harder to swallow.
250,000/18 = 13,888 victims a year.
The anti-trans side believes very strongly in their conception of gender, hence all the bathroom bans. Someone who actually rejected the concept of gender might preach some kind of pansexuality where you simply do not care what kind of sex bit your partners have. They might reject the very concept of straight and gay couples because There Is No Gender, Man.
By contrast, the people most offended by trans people believe very strongly in the existence of gender, they just happen to think that it is identical to sex-assigned-at-birth.
This is a weird framing. I wouldn't say I believe in gender, but think it's identical to sex (not "sex-assigned-at-birth", just "sex"). I would say that, of the two, sex is the only thing that actually exists. No one actually has a "gender identity" (hell, no one can even provide a cogent, non-circular definition of what "gender identity" even is), but even if they did, it's a bad idea to design public policies around unfalsifiable claims people make about their own inner experiences. "Gender identity" meets this description, "sex" does not, ergo "sex" is a good basis on which to design public policies and "gender identity" is not.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
I know, I know, nutpicking and all that, but I've encountered more than my fair share of trans-identified males who will complain about being described as "male" and who insist that they're every bit as female as any cis woman. I have no idea how common such people are, but they absolutely exist.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
16hr ago
Woke people often complain that conservatives only know how to tell one joke, but even if that were true, I will remind them that 1 > 0.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
16hr ago
I'm not sufficiently familiar with Rupert Howe to know if this kind of 4-D chess would occur to him.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
22hr ago
I was amused today to learn that even Karl Marx's father thought Karl was a spoilt, entitled, ungrateful little shit:
Frankly speaking, my dear Karl, I do not like this modern word, which all weaklings use to cloak their feelings when they quarrel with the world because they do not possess, without labour or trouble, well-furnished palaces with vast sums of money and elegant carriages. This embitterment disgusts me and you are the last person from whom I would expect it. What grounds can you have for it? Has not everything smiled on you ever since your cradle? Has not nature endowed you with magnificent talents? Have not your parents lavished affection on you? Have you ever up to now been unable to satisfy your reasonable wishes? And have you not carried away in the most incomprehensible fashion the heart of a girl whom thousands envy you? Yet the first untoward event, the first disappointed wish, evokes embitterment! Is that strength? Is that a manly character?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
22hr ago
Yeah. I wish Howe had gotten it right the first time, but the cat's out of the bag now. Strategically, I think anti-immigration activists would be better off emphasising that there were thousands of victims and that the police knew about it but sat on their hands, but avoid mentioning the specific number of victims the report claims if they can help it.
You've been fed cherry-picked information about sex reassignment surgery. Many people are, in fact, happy about their surgeries. See /r/Transgender_Surgeries.
Firstly, I think it's profoundly condescending to tell someone they've been "fed" cherry-picked stories, dumb sheeple that they are. Secondly, @Shakes wasn't passing a value judgement on the efficacy of bottom surgery: the part of his comment that you quoted is literally just an (accurate) description of what a vaginoplasty entails. Thirdly, it's rather hypocritical of you to accuse someone of having fallen for cherry-picked stories that portray bottom surgery negatively, then link to a subreddit that selects for people who are happy with their surgeries while excluding detransitioners (or, more sadly, people who took their own lives after undergoing bottom surgery). Fight cherry-picking with studies and meta-analyses, not cherry-picking in the opposite direction.
What objective metric do you propose to measure whether or not someone is better off other than asking them if they feel better?
This proves too much. Heroin addicts claim to feel better when they use heroin. (I don't even disbelieve them – I'm sure they do feel happier in the short-term.) The fact that gender reassignment surgeries open their recipients up to a host of health problems they would not otherwise have had seems as good an "objective" metric as any other. As you more or less concede in the top-level comment, the question of whether surgical transition actually improves trans people's mental flourishing certainly seems to be an open one, and the point of medical studies is to give us hard data which will inform our decisions on whether it's a good idea for individual patients. If 90% of people diagnosed with gender dysphoria saw a durable uplift to their subjective well-being after undergoing surgical transition, it would be a no-brainer. 70%? Sure. 50%? Hmm – you might need to have a bit of a think about that one. 30%? Probably not until you've already tried several years of talk therapy. 10%? Only as a matter of last resort for those in such severe psychic distress that it's this or suicide.
If a person is considering undergoing a major elective medical procedure which will render it impossible for them to have children and opens them up to a host of medical problems they would not otherwise have had, we need robust data on the efficacy of that procedure in improving its recipients' subjective sense of well-being. Shrugging your shoulders and saying "well, some people feel better afterwards" simply isn't good enough. (All of this goes double if you're expecting the taxpayer to foot the bill, as some trans activists demand.)
Personally, I support bodily autonomy for adults – but if one of my loved ones was considering surgically transitioning, I would do everything in my power to try to dissuade them. (In much the same way that I support the right of adults to practise polyamory or pursue careers in pornography or the entertainment industries, even though I know that the overwhelming majority of people who do so will see their subjective well-being take a hit as a result. If a close female friend of mine was considering starting an OnlyFans, I would support her right to do so, but I would also tell her that this is a decision she will almost certainly regret.)
and not some kind of new woke perversion to be fought
When convicted male rapists with intact genitalia are demanding to serve their sentences in the female estate and these demands are being granted – then yes, this is a woke perversion to be fought. It's pure historical revisionism to claim that gender-critical people started this fight and that "trans people just want to live their lives in peace".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
23hr ago
13,000 victims over the course of several decades is a national outrage, and revolutions have started over less. But it's important to get our facts straight. If there was no good reason to believe the 250k figure was accurate, Howe should not have included it in his report.
What "opinion"? @Shakes gave an entirely accurate description of what a vaginoplasty entails. Are you claiming the description is inaccurate? If so, how?
And a used-car salesman wouldn't describe a lemon as a lemon. Of course the person selling something will try to present it in as flattering a light as possible.
Citation requested. Many heroin addicts (and alcoholics, gambling addicts etc.) never admit that they have a problem or that their lifestyle is unhealthy.
Who are you to decree who is and isn't acting rationally? According to you, it doesn't matter if medically transitioning sterilises the recipient and opens them up to a host of health problems they wouldn't have otherwise – the only thing that matters is that they subjectively report feeling happier afterwards. By your own logic, a heroin addict who consistently maintains that heroin makes him happier is acting rationally, and the fact that heroin objectively destroys his mind and body and imposes negative externalities on the broader society is immaterial.
Then why does /r/detrans have a five-figure number of subscribers? Why do most trans children desist before adulthood?
When did I do that?
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