Amadan
I will be here longer than you
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User ID: 297
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
6d ago
There are exceptions, yes. The ones I've seen all involve parental consent.
You know, it does not convince me you are arguing in good faith when you say "It basically never happens" and when someone points out it does happen, you say "But that involves parental consent." First of all I'm no more convinced you're being accurate (or honest) about parental consent than you were about it happening in the first place. Second, we're having a whole discussion about parental consent where scared parents are convinced by medical professionals that they can choose between "a dead son or a live daughter." It's hard for me to be convinced that it's informed and non-coercive consent.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
6d ago
Really? My intuition is that I would give the lender $100 and go on my way. Largest bill there is, big enough tip to make someone's day, small enough to be trivial to me. I would do the same if I won a million bucks at the casino; give the croupier a hundred to satisfy the social obligation to tip after a big win and think no more of it.
Tipping the dealer or croupier a hundred on a million dollar win is cheap af. In the other scenario, I'd consider "I got rich, here's a hundred dollar bill" to be insulting.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
7d ago
That's... basically exactly what the actual standards of care say to do? You start with therapy and just discussing the issue to get a feel for where the kid really is. You don't just drop them on HRT instantly.
So here's the problem - I hear that this is how it works. This is how it is supposed to work. A child with gender dysphoria will receive multiple, comprehensive counseling sessions and only after a long and deliberate, informed process will the child and his/her parents elect to move forward with transition. That seems reasonable.
What I have actually seen, in multiple cases, is schools and counselors alike uncritically jumping on board the transition bandwagon with very little intake process or evaluation beyond the child's self-evaluation and expressed desires. Usually expressed as you do, that it's such an urgent and immediate need that you risk the child committing suicide if you don't immediately affirm and validate them and let them do what they want.
I would like to believe that the first case is the usual and standard procedure and these latter cases are exceptions, but that does not appear to be the case in the US. It did not appear to be the case in the UK and Sweden and several other countries until recently, when a plague of scandals forced lawmakers to reevaluate the agencies they had given responsibility for these decisions.
Basically no one is getting surgery before 18.
This is one of those claims where each side claims "Yes it's happening" or "No it's not," and I am not well-informed enough to say who's right, but there seems to at least be enough anecdotal evidence that it has happened that I am skeptical of your blanket denial that it ever happens.
Would you be okay if I consistently misgendered people on this forum?
No one here is a minor (at least to our knowledge) and no one here has parental authority. People are not allowed to be rude to you; they are allowed to say they don't believe someone born with a penis is a woman. You might perceive that to be rude, and a child might perceive that to be emotionally distressing.
You're an adult who can walk away from the conversation, so presumably this is a thousand times less bad than having it come from your own parents. I think most people here would get pretty reasonably upset with me if I leaned into trolling like that.
So your answer is yes, parents who refuse to go along with a child's self-identification as the opposite sex should risk having the child taken away from them for abuse?
I mean, c'mon, you're objecting to an article of clothing? Teach the kid how to do it safely rather than forcing them to risk it with ace bandages and overly tight compressions.
I mean, c'mon, you're pretending this is about objecting to an article of clothing? But yes, sure - parents are allowed to make decisions for their children, including controlling what they wear. By the time they are teenagers it's usually counterproductive to try tell them what they can and can't wear, but parents do still exercise this authority ("You may not wear that in public!") And binders specifically have a lot more significance than merely stylistic expression, and they do pose a risk. So yes, I think parents are entitled to expect that schools will not secretly encourage their children to wear binders without their knowledge or approval.
What happened to "perhaps choose to transition when they are an adult if they still feel that's what they need"?
Honestly, I am allowing for the possibility that it might make medical sense to allow a minor to transition in some rare cases. My actual belief is that this is a terrible idea in pretty much all cases and I think it shouldn't happen, but with sufficient evidence I'd be willing to defer to medical authorities on this. I would not be willing to allow them to supersede parental approval on this, however.
I read scientific studies, hang out in trans communities, keep my ear out for about news, and so forth. I mean, if nothing else, I'm involved in numerous trans communities, have numerous trans friends, and presumably have a much better vantage point into the community than you do.
Sure, and I'm sure they all think being trans is wonderful and they should all be validated. If you hung out in Christian communities I'm sure you'd be very aware of what Christians think and how wonderful Jesus is and how God truly manifests in people's lives. If that sounds a little bit snide, it's because I do actually think that trans ideology has much in common with religious belief (including a vibes-based conviction in things that make you feel good without any rational evidence).
If people really regret it so much, it should not be nearly this difficult for me to find those people.
There's a whole subreddit about detransitioners. Multiple detransitioners and regretters have YouTube channels. They may be a minority, but they certainly exist. And a common story from them is how they essentially got shunned by the trans community when they detransitioned because they are seen as having betrayed trans people, or are potentially giving ammo to their enemies. If you are a trans person who has doubts but know that if you detransition you will lose essentially your entire social network, and you are already a psychologically vulnerable person (as most trans people are), it's not hard to see how the actual numbers are probably greater than what might show up in the surveys that allege regret is something ridiculously low like <2%.
I am not arguing that most trans people regret their transition. I am arguing that enough do that children shouldn't be allowed to make permanent decisions about their bodies, and that parents shouldn't be judged unfit for refusing to agree with their decisions.
Is there some specific source here, or am I just supposed to spend a week deep-diving him? I'm happy to take a peek, but I will absolutely admit that I don't think he's a source worth investing a lot of time in, right now.
I mean, he's got a Twitter account, he's got a Substack, he's published dozens of articles over the years. No, I don't expect you to do a deep dive on him, but since you're clearly familiar with him, I'd like just once for someone to pick apart one of his studies (or his picking apart of studies) with more than just ad hominems and bad faith impugning of his motives. Because from my perspective, he goes into the numbers and the research methodology in detail, in every case finds serious, objective flaws in the studies, often finding that they literally say the opposite of what activists say they do, and the response is never "Here's why you're wrong and here's what you missed, you misunderstood these numbers, you made an error here," etc., but essentially "You are bad person for asking these questions and we don't need you to tell us about trans lived experiences." Jesse Singhal isn't a perfect person (he cares too much what people think of him, he's argumentative, and he probably is obsessed on certain topics), but I haven't found him to actually be in error on this topic. Not only that, he's clearly not anti-trans, and yet he gets the JK Rowling treatment for questioning the narrative.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
7d ago
If a kid is in horrible pain, and their parent refuses to do anything about it, and the kid is actively looking to escape? Yeah, I think it's pretty reasonable to remove the kid.
Here's the problem - it's very much debatable whether this "horrible pain" is actually something requiring medical treatment. I know you think it does. We are all familiar with the rhetoric that gender dysphoria is so real and urgent and painful that not allowing the child to transition is likely to lead to suicide, and akin to refusing to let a child receive treatment for schizophrenia. So you frame it as, essentially, parents letting their children die because of their bigoted religious beliefs. But this is almost never the case. Parents almost always treat a child being "trans" as a psychological issue, a child in distress who needs help - but you will not accept that "help" could be anything other than affirming their entity and even allowing them to begin medically transitioning, when there is good reason to think help should actually be helping them work through their gender dysphoria (if it is really gender dysphoria), becoming comfortable in their bodies, and perhaps choose to transition when they are an adult if they still feel that's what they need. Can you at least acknowledge that this is a reasonable, loving, and non-abusive response, even if you think it's not the correct one?
If a kid is terrified their parents will find out about them getting a tooth fixed, wouldn't you be a bit concerned about how the parents are treating that kid? Would you really feel guilty for sneaking your son's best friend to the dentist to help him deal with a cavity that's been getting worse for years?
Again with the "terrified." I'm sure there are children in abusive households who still face abuse, or being thrown out on the streets, if they are revealed to be gay or trans. This happens and those are extreme cases that may require state intervention, as with any other abuse. But almost all the cases I have seen are not of trans kids with parents who will reject and abandon them for being trans, but parents who simply don't agree with putting their kids on hormones, wearing binders, planning to get surgery, etc. Refusing to change the pronouns they use for their son or daughter might upset the child, but it's not abuse!
If you can point me to an epidemic of kids getting abducted against their will, I'd probably change my tune.
I don't agree with @WhiningCoil's framing of hordes of children being abducted by the state, but I would ask you in return, do you have any numbers regarding parents who are actually abusive and neglectful of their trans children, such that state intervention is required? Do you think schools should socially transition children secretly if the child says their parents won't go along?
But I get the sense that most of the kids in question are quite happy with the decision. I haven't seen anything that suggests they're particularly prone to regretting it later, either.
You "get the sense" that most of the kids are quite happy with the decision, but this seems to be vibes and personal bias. I think the actual level of regret is very hard to evaluate. I'm sure you hate Jesse Singhal, but I have yet to see a trans activist who can actually dispute his numbers and his deep dives into studies on the subject.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
7d ago
Do you think parents who love their children and will not disown them, but refuse to go along with either social or medical transitioning, should lose their parental rights? Do you think they should not be allowed to veto the school facilitating transition, without their knowledge or approval?
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
I'm certainly aware of the word's origins and why feminists object to it.
Whether or not hysteria is something women are more naturally susceptible to, though, I have seen enough hysterical men not to consider it to be a female-specific thing.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
I'm not sure what "y'alled" means. Is this a reference to some feminists saying it's a "gendered" insult?
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
Well, "very far from a representative sample" indeed. If there is anywhere that I would expect 90% of the posts to be hysterical meltdowns, it's Tumblr.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
11d ago
My personal social circle is unhappy and distressed and posting lots of doomer posts, but mostly sane. They think the world is going to suck with Trump in charge, but they aren't threatening to leave the country or start underground railroads or join the 4B movement.
Online, it's hard to tell to what degree all the cataclysmic tweets and videos from leftists melting down hysterically and screaming that we're going to enter an era of plantation slavery and the Handmaid's Tale are nutpicking (the reason LibsOfTikTok is so popular is that Millenials and Zoomers so freely provide so much content) and to what degree they reflect a genuine widespread sentiment.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
11d ago
But I'm also a bit skeptical of attempts to place male aggressive humor beyond political analysis because it's supposedly so impartially transgressive and also 100% facetious and harmless.
Isn't political analysis exactly what @doglatine was doing? I didn't read him as saying male aggressive humor is 100% facetious and harmless; it's that the seriousness and harmfulness is very context-sensitive. Nick Fuentes's "joke" was intentionally meant to freak out liberal women who right now are already freaking out over Trump's election, and to the degree it's not serious, he's capitalizing on the fact that so many women will take it seriously. Nick Fuentes is an asshole (because people who go out of their way to poke people in the eye are always assholes) for verbalizing something that would be a joke between men in private but will be read as a threat if voiced in public. Locker room jokes about banging your mom are funny (for a certain kind of man) in the locker room; made on Twitter, you'll get people reading you as sincerely threatening to rape someone's mom, and while a certain kind of man will find that funny too, it's not at all the same kind of humor.
I know humorists who are wildly transgressive but still don't make any jokes of the dick-swinging, put-down sort - so just pointing out that men love breaking rules doesn't fully account for what makes women uneasy about YOUR BODY MY CHOICE.
This is true, and there are a lot of men who don't like put-down banter, would not find "your body, my choice" amusing, and most roll their eyes at such jokes. But the difference here is that a man will still understand that it's "boys being boys" and just roll his eyes, whereas to a woman, the very idea of "boys being boys" seems to excuse and justify such humor, which they find morally reprehensible and threatening. A lot us (speaking as the sort of man who doesn't particularly like the locker room stuff) sense that women, if they had the power to do so, would love to enter the locker room and tell us "You can't do that." How often have I read an overwrought think-piece by a liberal (often single) mother about her teenage sons, whom she loves dearly but she's absolutely terrified that they will become those sorts of boys - the sort of boys who tell locker-room jokes, the sorts of boys who roll their eyes when she's haranguing them about the Patriarchy, the sorts of boys who will become rapists!!!
Two follow-up questions: do men think it's funny to joke about raping each other's daughters, the way it's funny to joke about raping moms? I feel like the former isn't as common. Why? How about each other's sons?
I first want to say, as one of those men @doglatine mentions who thinks locker room humor is puerile, that you may be overestimating just how common and blatant such jokes are. Having been in plenty of male environments, yes, I've heard lots of crude humor and innuendos that wouldn't be voiced around women, but "I'm gonna fuck your mom" isn't really something I hear a lot. I'd guess it's more of an online gamer thing (the same sort of crowd that likes dropping n-bombs and "faggot" just to try to distress their opponents). But yeah, to the degree that someone might joke about banging someone else's mom, "mom jokes" are an ancient and well-understood form of low humor that no one really takes seriously. Jokes about banging your daughter are a lot more aggressive and threatening - not threatening in the sense that you'd likely believe they really intended to rape your daughter, but threatening in the sense that the message is not funny. The message is "You're such a pussy I could rape your daughter and you wouldn't be able to stop me." So no, a man wouldn't find that funny.
Threatening to rape your son would be the same, with the added implication that your son is gay (or will be a "bottom" for a dominant man), so you'd be explicitly insulting both the father's manhood and his son's.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
13d ago
Several would-be very funny people reported you with "He can't post that, it's boo outgroup."
Of course it's not "boo outgroup" to post an actual argument, without being inflammatory and rage-stroking over it, which is why this post is not being modded.
But you knew that. You always know what you're doing. You just pretend to be confused when you get modded for ranting about "Biblical plagues of retards" and the like.
Carry on.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
13d ago
Look, demanding "cite?" can be an obnoxious form of argumentation and you are not required to provide one on demand. People here are very prone to (selectively) demanding links to evidence when they don't believe something, but that is the nature of this forum - you are supposed to proactively provide evidence, especially in proportion to the inflammatory nature of your claims.
But I'm not admonishing you here for failing to provide evidence. I'm admonishing you because your response to someone asking you for evidence was "Well, I do real work, not like you worthless paper-pushers, I'm too busy with my real and valuable life and family to care about what I write here."
And, you know, good for you. Spending time with your daughter is undoubtedly a better use of your time than arguing with Internet randos. But don't jump into an argument with inflammatory claims, and when challenged, play this "I'm too busy and I have a real life" card. That is really obnoxious.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
13d ago
I wonder if their genius idea was to stage a "predator catch," but they went full vigilante with it (because young dumb males).
If you're not aware, there are a ton of "pred-catcher" YouTube and Rumble channels. Basically doing the Chris Hansen thing (who has his own channel now as well): a decoy pretending to be a minor will hang out on dating apps or social media sites until some guy (a guy 99.9% of the time) takes the bait, and then they set him up to come meet the minor. They confront him, try to get him to confess, and then call the police - filming the entire thing.
The YouTubers, however, are familiar with the law and are generally very careful not to do anything that could get them arrested (especially not putting hands on the pred). They also make very sure their targets have thoroughly and unambiguously incriminated themselves. Their decoys usually pretend to be 12 or 13 - well below any possible age of consent - and they wait until they have hours and hours of sexually explicit messages, with the perp clearly stating he's aware of the decoy's (supposed) age.
Usually these are straight men going after young girls, but sometimes they get a gay guy trying to hook up with a boy.
Anyway, that's what this looks like to me: they got the idea from watching a pred-catcher video, but decided to beat the shit out of the perp instead. Very stupid, but probably not a hate crime, although since they found the perp on Grindr, I can imagine a DA who wants to make it a hate crime arguing that they were specifically targeting gay men.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
16d ago
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
16d ago
Is this a comment? A question? What are you saying? I can take a guess, so can other readers, but make your point clearly and with some effort.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
17d ago
This comment is bad. It contains no insight, analysis, information, or content except the fact that you evidently don't like the guy and don't care about dead squirrels and wanted to express it in a belligerent fashion. You could have just not commented on a story you don't care about, or you could have put some minimal effort into explaining why you don't think it's a story worthy of discussion (though generally we take a dim view of telling other posters what they should or shouldn't be talking about, since obviously plenty of people did think it was worth discussing), or you could have added some content (like details, with links, about this individual and why you think he's unworthy of sympathy and therefore no one should care about his squirrel). Instead you just decided to uncork and spew. We do not like it when people do this. You have a history of doing this. Stop it.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
21d ago
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
22d ago
Don't call people stupid.
"... makes you sound stupid" is not a loophole.
If you think someone is saying something stupid, explain the flaw in their argument, do not simply call them stupid.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
22d ago
If you need a timeout until after election day, we can oblige.
Stop doing this.
I ain't telling you how to live your life, man. Merely observing.
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