ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
Elite teenage wrestling / gymnastics (and possibly other sports). Sure, I'd be in favor of that. The benefit of sports is that it gets you off your ass, teaches you discipline, possibly team work, how to git gud, how to deal with failure, etc. etc., If kids are practicing sports to the point of predictable long-term health consequences, then things have gotten rather retarded.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
It feels like the original chemical castration usage must have arisen as a way to square the demands to castrate sex offenders with a means to backtrack in the face of appeals or wrongful convictions and preserve human rights: We'll castrate them [permanently] and any objections are moot because if we get it wrong it's totally reversible [and not really castration].
(...) What if you carefully constructed a definition that captures the trans youth movement but leaves clinically depressed fans of Lemmy Kilmister unaffected? Well then it just looks like you're playing your own version of the "things are what they are because I said so" game.
Even if you're right about the origins of the term, it is a simple fact that the term was used in academic / law-enforcement literature, and no one seemed to object. I'm merely asking if puberty blockers fit into that previously-used-without-objection definition. My conclusion is: yes. Do you disagree?
If you think puberty blockers are bad because they have irreversible negative effects on fertility and sexual function then you can make that argument without the need for hyperbole.
I'm using the term in the exact same way it was used before puberty blockers entered public discourse, and even allowing for some stricter criteria that would stem from the discrepancy between the technical and colloquial terms. If this is hyperbole, every academic who has ever used the term was being hyperbolic.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
What discussion do you want to have?
I mean, any discussion concerning women is impossible. Questions like "do trans-women belong in women's sports" become gobledygoock. I know it's about including some kind of people in some kind of sports category, but I can't make any meaningful conclusion about the people or sports category in question, because I have no idea who/what they are.
I rather thought the debate was "what will the consequences be for society of anyone were to accept the trans definition of woman, and would they be acceptable?
No, that's definitely not the debate I'm having. I don't even see how accepting their definition would imply any changes to society at all.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
Arguments concerning the science of anything relating to puberty blockers or hormones or anything else concerning transgenderism are useless, because no one making arguments on either side really cares about the science. All it is is cover for whatever argument they want to make.
You don't find it a little bit strange that we've been having the trans debate in this space for something like 10 years, and these "well, the science doesn't really matter" arguments are surfacing only now that it can be shown that some pro-trans claims can't be scientifically backed, and that several of the experts that we were told to trust have been proven to lie on several occasions?
So ultimately whether it's reversible doesn't matter.
Hold on, "the science doesn't matter" is one thing, "reversibility doesn't matter" is another. If I had a kid, there's many ideas that they could come up with, that I would think are absolutely retarded, but might let them go through with them, just so they get it out of there system, if nothing else, and reversibility is one of the most important criteria I'd use for making the decision whether to let them do it, or call an absolute veto. This seems plainly obvious to me, and I can't wrap my head around how anyone could claim otherwise, so maybe you shouldn't so confidently speak for others (especially for people with values different from yours).
Also, if it doesn't matter, why did the pro trans side spend so much time and effort telling people puberty blockers are reversible, even though they knew they have no evidence for the claim?
For instance, suppose some children develop a heart condition that they may grow out of but will become a dangerous, chronic problem if it persists into adulthood. There's a treatment that can significantly mitigate this risk if the child starts taking it around age ten, but it comes with a catch: It has its own risks, and can cause permanent damage itself if it's unnecessarily used. If you're a doctor making a recommendation or a parent looking to make a decision, then your conclusion would depend on a number of factors—the likelihood that the child will grow out of the condition, the amount of damage the untreated condition is likely to cause, the amount of damage the treatment is likely to cause, etc.
In these situations we tell the patient and parent the risks and benefits to the best of our knowledge, and leave the decision to them. We don't try to guilt them into overriding it, and when someone brings evidence that the original risk/benefit assessment is wildly off the mark, we hear them out and adjust the practice to be in accordance with the best evidence. We don't call them heart-condition-o-phobes, we don't ban them from social media, and we don't send the police after them.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
Why should we so strongly privilege puberty because it's "natural"?
Tell me again how transgenderism is a totally different thing from transhumanism.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10hr ago
So from their perspective what bans can end up doing is that instead of the person getting to decide which irreversible thing they go through based off their own desires, it's the government choosing for them.
I'm not against this argument, at least not by temperament, but this is simply not the argument that is being made. Is it because it has implications that even the pro-trans side would be uncomfortable with (it would effectively imply abolishing all restrictions on medical procedures, and who can carry them out)? Is it because people with my temperament, who are mostly ok with giving people maximum liberty, and letting chips fall where they may, are in an absolute minority? Who knows? All I know is that the experts, actual credentialed practitioners of medicine, were swearing up and down for years that these changes are reversible, and medically necessary, not that people should be free to modify their bodies however they wish (and if any one wants to stick their neck out now, I will need to see their track record on COVID vaccines). I don't think it's steelmanning when no one wants sign their name under the argument.
Are puberty blockers chemical castration?
A follow-up to the discussion with @netstack
This was originally a deep-chain reply, but after a few spergy, reddit-tier replies on my end, and @netstack's saintly curiosity, the conversation resulted in a decent-quality argument, that I'd like to get more eyes on and see I missed any obvious objections.
I mistakenly thought that when states chemically castrate sex offenders, they use the progestogens, but when oncologists chemically castrate cancer patients, they use the GnRH drugs. Then the fact that gender clinics recommend GnRH would suggest their protocols are more like cancer treatment than criminal justice.
As @Fruck pointed out, this isn’t the case if Lupron was used for judicial castration in Australia. I’ll assume he’s correct, and I share his frustration proving it. This was the best I could find. It says that CPA, another progestogen, is the only currently approved option, but cites studies on Lupron and a couple others. Obviously, they saw some use in criminal justice.
I did some extra digging as well. The wiki for Lupron links to the paper "Reforming (purportedly) Non-Punitive Responses to Sexual Offending", and while it's about triptorelin instead of Lupron, it's another GnRH. In any case a systematic review of the use of GnRH on sexual offenders (sci-hub) should hopefully settle the matter.
As a side note this paper makes me think the difference between GnRH's and DMPA's is that the former have (or promised to have) fewer side effects, not that they work on a fundamentally different principle (and while we're on the subject, let me just say I'm rather bemused at all the handwringing in all these papers about the side effects of these drugs on convicted sex offenders, when I compare them to the dismissal of any such concerns around giving the same drugs to children).
“Political leverage” was just a joke about the stereotypical eunuch. In poor taste, perhaps.
No, it just completely went over my head, lol.
I doubt that I can find credible sources for long-term reversibility, since I assume it’s permanent at some point. Maybe 2-3 years, since that’s what the oncology websites cite when they feel defensive about gender politics. I’m not trying to push a political line.
This is a fun one. From what I understand chemical castration is meant to be reversible. This is what the wiki for chemical castration says right on the top, and I saw, but failed to bookmark, a paper that made that claim about DMPA's specifically, but that seems to be the general consensus on chemical castration:
Medical considerations are also important, and contemporary doctors should be knowledgeable of these issues. First, chemical castration is no longer effective after it is discontinued;
So if irreversibility is a necessary condition for classifying something as chemical castration... than it seems that chemical castration does not meet the standard.
Now, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the "non-central" argument, you can argue that something that's reversible doesn't quite have that quality of having one's balls cut off that you'd expect from a term like "castration". It is also true you're going to have a hard time finding sources about the reversibility of puberty blockers, since dr. Cass' team looked, and all they can say is:
No conclusions can be drawn about the effect on gender-related outcomes, psychological and psychosocial health, cognitive development or fertility. Bone health and height may be compromised during treatment.
But when gender care providers themselves tell me that "puberty blockers are reversible (asterisk)", the asterisk being you can't stay on them too long, or that if you start them too early you're never going to have an orgasm, when celebrity cases like Jazz Jennings say they don't regret going on blockers, but the downside was "there wasn't enough tissue to work with when it came to the surgery" (and also don't know what an orgasm is), when the industry comes up with procedures like sigmoid vaginoplasties or zero depth vaginoplasties to either hack around or throw up their hands about the issue, can we say that there are good reasons to suspect some of the changes may be irreversible? What is even supposed to be the mechanism for reversibility? For a fully developed adult it's just a question of restoring testosterone levels and sperm counts, but for a child that never went through puberty we're basically hoping their body will catch up with development as if nothing ever happened.
Yeah, I know that as far as evidence goes, this doesn't rise to the standard of a proper well-designed study, but like I said in the other comment, the gender industry isn't particularly transparent about results they don't like. I understand wanting to remain agnostic on the reversibility question, but if you grant that these concerns are reasonable, it seems like puberty blockers are an at least as, and may possibly turn out to be more of, a central example of chemical castration, than chemical castration itself.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
12hr ago
I don't follow, it doesn't seem personally hostile against him, even if it's very critical of the post's contents.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
12hr ago
At the object level, the person this thread is talking about is Asian-American, a demographic that is hardly solidly left.
I thought they are? Perhaps not as ridiculously overwhelmingly left as, say, African-Americans, but still solidly left.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
12hr ago
If FDR, or even Obama, wasn't a problem for America, then neither is Trump.
To have a meaningful discussion you need to be able to specify the parameters of the debate, and draw meaningful conclusions, and a circular definition doesn't allow for that. "A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" only specifies that we're talking about sentient beings capable of self-identification, but these conversation are usually already constrained to human subjects, so it's literally of no use, and indistinguishable from not having a definition at all.
I also disagree that it's my side that is unwilling to have the conversation about social rules, while using the other side's definition of "woman". "Ok, how about we rename it to 'female sports'?" is literally the first off-the-cuff response anyone comes up with when these topics come up.
I see the argument about the trans definition of "woman" being circular as the bailey that's not really the central objection. The central objection is that "woman" is one of the words that mean things, unlike "Bill", and the meaning that includes "people sharing key traits with the 'human females' cluster" is the most useful one to most people, rather than "anyone who says their pronouns are she/her".
Do I get to define what your central objections are as well, and ignore anything that you say?
It's definitely not about "people sharing key traits with the 'human females' cluster" being more useful than "anyone who says their pronouns are she/her". For that matter, I don't even care if "woman" is a word that has a meaning, like I said in another comment you can say that "woman" is an arbitrary label, but you do actually have to say it. I can make my case for my preferred laws, and social rules, regardless of which definition we use, but for a conversation to take place, we do actually have to settle on a definition. However, settling on a definition will have logical consequences, and I can argue that no matter which definition you pick, those consequences will be unacceptable to some part of the progressive coalition, but if we don't settle on a definition, or insist on a circular one, we can't even have that conversation.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17hr ago
What?!
Reply moved to a new top level post in the new CW thread.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
There is no meaningful group trying to ban abortion and thus no opposite group pushing for equally ridiculous policy in the other direction.
The whole conversation started with how there is a push towards ridiculous permissiveness. As you note there is no corresponding push to criminalize it, so this entire Myth of the Reasonable European seems to be on very shaky ground.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Ok, but I'm in favor of the death penalty for extremely violent criminals and sex offenders. This is unrelated to the homeless problem, bit since you said putting people in prison is not much better than executing them, you shouldn't be that much bothered by executing people who are serving life with no parole, for example, right?
I thought it's standard operating procedure for pedos?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
The source would be WPATH's own top specialists' lectures, and clinical experience.
If you're disappointed that it's not based on a large-scale clinical study, bear in mind we're talking about a drug that's being used off-label, so it was never prescribed based on evidence, and about people with a bad habit of burying results they don't like.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
You call it a strawman to to talk of executions, but your proposed solution is really not much better,
Well, if it's not much better, can we start executing criminals then? No skin off your nosenat this point, right?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Though I notice we’re talking about voluntary cancer treatments rather than state-mandated sterilization. I get the impression there’s some noncentral uses of “chemical castration.”
Unless I misunderstood something, we're talking about both. It's not that there are non-central uses, it's that the same drug is also used for cancer treatment.
The load-bearing questions are things like safety, reversibility, political leverage.
I'm not sure what you mean about political leverage, but sure. I don't see how you can halt someone's puberty long-term, and then reverse that. Maybe you can grab a source for that?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
I think you got too fixated on the DMPA thing, GnRH agonists are also used for chemical castration. Off the top off my head Lupron is used for both chemical castration and puberty suppression.
It's pretty much entirely historical as a result of Jim Crow. Localism in the UK is weakly left-coded, although in practice it is generally supported by the party out of power in Westminster at the time. In Spain localism is strongly left-coded, but it is right-coded in Italy.
I agree that localism (much like free speech) is often used cynically, but that's neither a typical response, nor an actual argument against localism.
"Muh Jim Crow" also doesn't quite explain it either. Are you saying American anti-localists will change their mind if you constitutionally take that issue off the table?
Healthcare policy is run at a subnational level almost everywhere - even in the UK Scotland and Wales have their own NHSs.
The world consists of more than the UK and the US.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
Do you have any evidence that it's not true? Like I said, they use the exact same drug, with the exact same purpose (sex-hormone suppression).
Also, answer my question: do you want my views applied globally or locally?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
Anyone who's on puberty blockers is being chemically castrated. It's the same did ug that's used for both.
This is your brain on Substack, kids. Like I said, don't do Substack, or at least stay connected to neiche pseudonymous internet forums where your friends will make fun of you when you get too full of yourself.
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