ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Sweet! Shame they ban / remove content they don't like. It's even harder to justify all the censorship if you can make your own feed algorithm.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
The idea for letting individual users customize their algorithms? It was ages ago. Early 2010's, or even late aughties. I read it on some blog. I can try to look for traces of it, but the blog might be long gone, and search engines have gotten terrible so I hope you understand this is a tall order.
On the flip side, are you actually saying this is something strange for blue-tribers of that era to recommend? What are you basing your opinion on? This was standard politics of the Stallman-Torvalds techie faction.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
think we do it for similar reasons to why we track whether people are married, whether they've adopted a child, etc. Because it gives the otherwise blind goverment a way to see what's happening with its citizens.
I don't think this answers my question. When they keep track of marriage, they're keeping track of which couples have entered a specific relationship with sweeping implications on rights to each others' property, and duties to one another. When someone adopts a child they're declaring they're assuming responsibility for them until they come of age, which grants them power to make decisions for that child until they grow up. What are they keeping track of when they designate someone a "man" or a "woman", and why is it important to not remain blind about it?
I also just don't take the bathroom argument too seriously.
Alright, then why are you arguing for letting men-documented-as-women into women's bathrooms instead of just abolishing sex segregated facilities?
Certainly, I don't think anyone's fears that Sarah McBride would sexually assault someone in the bathroom are super justified.
These kinds of laws aren't about specific people, they're broad rules.
We're talking about the kind of hysterical women who would answer "bear" to the infamous "Would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods?"
I can only pity the fool that took that meme literally (as opposed to seriously).
I think even a manlet would trigger such women. Or do you think their answers would change if the questions was changed to, "Would you rather meet a 5' 4'' man or a bear in the woods?
I'm saying most of them could tell a difference between a trans man, and a 5'4" male, and the event where they couldn't would be less frequent than the event where they clock a trans woman.
I'm not sure how policing bathrooms in this way doesn't end up harming "ugly" women and non-gender conforming women, which seems to go against the stated goal of helping women.
Personally I'm pretty sure it's a temporary state resulting from the ambiguities that come from blurring the category of "man" and "woman" to begin with. Once it becomes clear that men entering women's bathrooms are penalized, people will be more likely to trust that whoever entered a woman's bathroom is a woman.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Turns out more than one side has the "7 zillion witches" problem.
In conclusion, for the moderates and centrists: Your signal is jammed, and only extremism will be boosted on either twitter or bluesky.
Back when SocMeds were only taking off, and some blue-tribers of the FOSS variety were getting creeped out by the potential power megacorps could wield with control of recommendation algorithms, someone came up with the idea of letting each user customize their algorithm on each platform. Technically speaking it wouldn't be that much of a problem to implement it, but the SocMeds have no incentive to do so, so it would require government regulation. Sadly it turned out that stopping Trump / the anti-woke backlash became a higher priority than controlling corporate power. Such a shame. The "it's a private company, they can do whatever they want" crowd can now enjoy the world they created.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
I would propose an alternative framing of the question: "Can people who have official government documents that document them as women, involve non-consenting members of the public in their use of spaces for women?" To which the obvious answer is: yes. Just like my driver's license is valid whether you think I should have one or not.
How is that an obvious answer?
Why do you think we even have "man" and "woman" as a legal category? I never got the impression they're a permission to perform masculinity / femininity the way a driver's license is a permission to drive, or an arbitrary badge of honor like knighthood in the UK. I always thought they're meant to reflect physical reality. If you're saying that giving a man government documents that document them as a woman necessarily implies that they get to use women's facilities, and take advantage of all the special rights and privileges we grant women, that just sounds like an argument for never giving a man government documents that document them as a woman.
What is your proposal for how trans men (biological women) who have medically and legally transitioned should be dealt with? Do you think most women who are scared of men would be comfortable with this guy sharing a bathroom with them?
This argument worked great.... right up until the point that the issue gained more prominence and people got a good look at what trans men actually look like, rather than when they're photographed or filmed from flattering angles and favorable lighting. The majority look like manlets, have a funny voice, and distinctly feminine mannerisms, they might pass as a gay man on a good day.
To your question - unironically yes, even with non-zero amount of transmen passing convincingly IRL, I think fewer women would end up uncomfortable with trans men in women's bathroom, than with trans women in women's bathrooms. Especially when everyone is aware the law only allows females to use them, and a male would be penalized for trying to slip in, if caught.
Is beer worth it? IIRC I tried some homebrew in college and it was very okay. It seems like you'd need to invest in some nice equipment and fancy ingredients to make something that would actually be better than even mediocre craft beers, and it also seems easy to screw up and make something undrinkable.
My experience is that it's nearly impossible to make something worse than a mainstream (European) store-bought quality beer. Whether they measure up to a craft beer is a matter of taste, mine is arguably quite primitive, and I don't actually like most craft beers. Screwing up in my experience is far from easy, the only place where it can plausibly happen is when you deviate from a recipe, but if you just follow the instructions you'll be fine.
If you have a big pot at home (10+ litres, but the bigger the better) and just want to try out to see if this is for you, you won't need a lot of equipment - there are starter kits in the $50 range with all the ingredients and basic tools. If it turns out you enjoy it, you can start buying extra equipment as needed. For me the gear is less about the quality of the end product, and more about making the production easier - one downside of this hobby is that it's pretty time consuming, especially on the day of brewing.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Is that really encouraging regarding the Democrat response?
It would be, if that's what they went with. The left has some pretty good populists on their side, though I guess Trump nabbed a few of them during this election.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
Boid simulation in Redot
Googling around for an answer on whether it's possible to set primitive-type uniforms with Redot's shader API (which is how the C++ project was handling it's simulation), I ended up running into this repository. On one hand, that's a bit of a shame, not much more for me to do - on the other hand, with my relative lack of experience in Go/Re-dot, I'd be wasting a lot of time figuring out minutia, so this saved me a lot pain, and I still managed to learn a bunch of things:
Redot has "particle shaders" which grant you full control over individual particles in a system. It's what I was going to use originally, but when I was experimenting with them I noticed that there's no way to have an infinite lifetime on particles, and that the lifetime is inseparable from the emission rate, so setting a long one would just give me a slow drip of new "boids" showing up. I was quite prepared to say screw it, and just draw my own particles on a texture, with a compute shader, but I noticed that this project is actually using the particle system + shader combo. To my surprise, the particle lifetime was set to 1 second... and then it hit me - as long as the simulation is done in a separate compute shader, and the particle one is just their for setting up the position and orientation, it doesn't matter that a particle "dies" and another is created, the user won't even see that it happened.
It turns out that primitve-type uniforms - the original issue that caused me to find the project - aren't available in Redot, but you can have named properties in a buffer (like so), and that's a pretty elegant solution, imo.
Originally, starting the simulation up was a disappointment. The Readme, as well as the accompanying videos talk about simulating 100K boids. My GPU could handle 32K at 60+FPS, or maybe 50K at 30FPS. By the last week's goal of "go big, or go home", where "big" was supposed to mean millions, it felt like it was time to pack it up, and never speak of the idea again. Kind of devastating, because the big idea that made me revisit that idea was to optimize the simulation by sorting the particles / boids into a grid. This is already done, both the C++ project from last week, or this Godot version that I found go into detail about it. The shader code has a flag for turning off the spatial sorting, and indeed without it the frame rate drops by half. A part of me thought "fair enough", My hardware is pretty old, and those are roughly the numbers I ran into the first time I took a stab at it, but I felt like the sorting should be giving a much bigger boost.
So then I start playing around with the parameters. Since the boids are sorted on a grid, they only have to look up other boids from neighboring grid cells. Smaller grid, even less look-ups. That did speed things up quite a bit, and I could simulate 131K at 20FPS. Somehow this gave me a strong feeling that I'm not at the hardware limit, and there must be some issue in the code.
It's been a while since I took that GPU programming course, but roughly from what I remember: At some point it got a lot easier to squeeze in more cores into hardware than to squeeze more speed out of a core, and with GPU's in particular it turns out you can squeeze a lot more processing units in, if they are all performing the same instruction at the same time. If you want to run a linear algorithm on a GPU, it will blaze through millions of data points like it was nothing. Even when you go quadratic, things still run pretty smooth, this is why it wasn't necessarily surprising that the spatial sorting increased performance, but not by that much. If you can eliminate data points from the list of what needs to be processed that is in theory a plus, but the bane of all GPUs is thread divergence. If one group of cores goes one way of a particular if-block and another goes via the else, what happens in practice is that you have to run the same code twice. First you run all the threads where the condition is met, and then all the threads where it is not. The more flow-control you use, the more divergence, and the bigger hit on the performance.
Still, that should not have happened here. The boids are sorted, so on each pass the threads should be processing boids that are next to each other, and looking up the same neighboring grid cells. There might be some divergence, but things should be mostly staying in-sync, which again should mean much higher performance. What could possibl... oh, that motherfucker - he's not actually using the sorted indices. When a thread selects a boid to process, it just goes through the unsorted buffer containing the boid data (position, velocity, etc). Since the boids can move around there's no guarantee that they're next to each other at any given time. Sure, the sorting helps, because when you're looking up the neighbors, you don't have to check on all of them for each boid, but like I was saying above I was getting divergence up the wazoo.
Well, one "if (use_bins) my_index = bin_reindex.data[my_index];" later that 131K simulation was running at 100FPS. I can go as high as 262K at 40FPS. By 524K, the shader program crashes, by the looks of the error my GPU doesn't have enough memory, though the message is not very clear.
Not a lot of code written, but that was quite fun. Now I want to if I can reimplement my old simulation. "Follow player, collide with each-other" should be a bit easier on the GPU, since it necessarily requires that the boids are seperated, and spread equal-ish on the grid. I'd also like to do something about the spaghetti GD script. Let's see how it goes.
That's not the same thing.
Yeah, that's why I said "not directly". Point remains if a parent makes a mistake they'll usually by wrecked with guilt, for the doctor it's tuesday.
But often they don't make the same decision their child would have if mature. Many parents attempt to override their child's decisions even after their child is mature.
If you mean something more than disagreeing with them and putting some social pressure, than I agree it crosses a line. Luckily the law is on the adult child's side in such cases.
No, I think that clears the higher bar.
Cool. So it just so happens that this blog post was talking about the exact same drug - down to the brand name - that gender clinics sell as "puberty blockers", the first line of medical intervention that they recommend for the youngest children, and claim is completely reversible. Funnily enough data from UK's Tavistok indicates that as many as 48% of kids referred to a gender clinic are autistic, so this is giving the exact same drug to a largely the same cohort. The only difference is the disorder they aim to cure, but both disorders are wishy-washy and not objectively verifiable (I guess autism might be, in the more extreme cases, but that's a point against gender affirming care).
If there's an argument for the government forbidding the doctor to administer it in one case but not the other, I'm not seeing it.
They said the same thing about kings once....
What can I say? If you want to live in platonic / marxist utopia where all children belong to the state, you're free to want it. I even wish that you get to live in the society you desire, as long as you don't go full Jihadi, and claim that this is the one true way for all of the world to live. This is why asked how are your ideas not based on your non-universal ideology.
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all ... are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights
If you actually believed that this means parents have no authority over their children, you'd be quoting Rousseau, not the American founding fathers.
But they aren't deciding for themselves! They are deciding for another person! In the purest form of libertarianism, the child would decide everything for themselves.
I am not advocating for pure libertarianism, but that is what I mean by 'your children aren't your property.' The base state isn't parents having absolute power over their children, it's them having no authority whatsoever.
Yes, that's my point. If you were advocating pure libertarianism, I could consider your idea of removing all authority from parents, and ensuring the child's autonomy. But since you don't, the idea is completely absurd to me. If parents have no authority over their children, than an adult has even less authority over another unrelated adult.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
The study referred to in the article is relatively fresh, so didn't make it to any of the systematic reviews published in the last years, and I can't even access it on sci-hub.
Studying desistence and detransition is a tricky subject. Clinics don't necessarily want to hear from detransitioners (who wants to parade an unsatisfied customer in front of potential ones?), and for that matter detransitions don't necessarily want to talk to people who feel they wronged them either. Criticism of the older studies on regret rates has reflected this - typically they're criticized for low follow-up rates (there was one popular study going around citing a 94+% satisfaction rate, but had a 63% dropout rate), another issue typically cited is short follow-up periods.
On the flip side there's a recent German study showing a >50% rate of desistence of medical treatment over a 5 year period, but this also needs to be studied further before it's declared a slam-dunk for the anti side.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
When an adult refuses medical care for themselves, the negative consequences fall on the person making the decision. When an adult refuses medical care for a child, the adult does not experience those consequences.
Not directly, but usually parents go through suffering of their own when something bad happens to their children.
And there are many examples of that going wrong, usually from parents who think of their children as their property and refuse to distinguish between 'my child's long-term interest/coherent extrapolated volition' and 'my personal preferences/non-universal ideology'.
Sure, but I don't think that's enough to have doctors override the decisions of the parents outside of extreme circumstances.
The bit about personal non-universal ideology is interesting. How is your idea on who should decide the child's treatment not based on your non-universal ideology?
Because the next of kin is expected to make the decision based on 'what the patient would decide if conscious' and not 'what the next of kin wants'.
And we give it to parents because we expect them to make the decision the child would have, if they were mature.
1. Overruling parents in the case of 'parents and child agree; we think both are wrong' should be a higher bar to clear than 'parents disagree with child; we think child is right and parents are wrong.'
So in a case like this, if the parents managed to convince the child that this treatment will help, would you say the state has no right to intervene?
2. The case for giving any authority to parents rests on the assumption that they are usually right,
I disagree. For one, it's an impossible standard to go by, because I don't know if we can agree on what's "right" between the 2 of us, let alone between a country of millions of people. But to the point, personally I'd say they have that authority by default, and you need a strong positive argument if you want to take it away.
3.What do you mean by 'the evidence for paediatric transgender care is determined to be very poor'? A literal reading would be 'the evidence seems to support it, but we have low confidence in that assertion.' akin to the evidence for ivermectin vs. COVID-19, or aducanumab vs. Alzheimer's disease. In that case, where we cannot predict long-term effects, we should do what results in the least immediate suffering. If you meant 'the evidence shows with strong confidence that it is harmful', akin to the evidence regarding 31 g of aspirin vs. the 1918 influenza,
I kind of see it as both. To the extend positive evidence exists it's low-confidence, and for many metrics it's just inconclusive / not enough to form any opinion. As to the harm, the problem here is that the intervention itself is inherently harmful - surgeries remove healthy body parts, hormones have many side effects, etc. The rationale here is that the benefits of addressing "dysphoria" are balance out the downsides, but I think that's the claim that needs to be justified, rather than skepticism of it.
4. 'Blocking transgender care that is desired by a minor patient and approved by both parents and doctors' is not the mirror image of 'allowing transgender care that is desired by a minor patient and approved by doctors but opposed by the patient's parents';
It might not be a mirror image, but if we're going by "they are usually right" I feel confident in my arguments that such treatment should be denied - children don't know what the hell they're talking about, normie parents mostly trust authority figures like doctors, but some doctors I can only describe as completely ideologically captured (they explicitly say dysphoria is not necessary to transition, and that transition is about expressing yourself authentically rather than treating any ailment) or certifiably insane (one go to example of mine was involved in the Satanic Panic back in the 90's, and now writes / gives talks about "gender angels" and hands out blockers to non-verbal autists), and the most prominent world-wide association of gender-care specialists has been caught red-handed hiding evidence that doesn't go their way.
I personally feel very strongly that treatment under these circumstances is wrong, but I don't know if I have the authority to step in here and tell people what treatment is right for their child. But since we're not living in the libertarian utopia where parents decide for themselves, I see no reason why I shouldn't lobby that my values are implemented.
I certainly didn't think it was unnecessary. What makes you the expert here?
I think the burden of proof is on the person arguing for the removal of healthy body parts, and the arguments haven't been convincing.
That might be believable if there was a huge number of people who regretted these decisions, but people actually seem pretty consistent.
There is a decent amount of people loudly regretting these surgeries, and there are obvious reasons for why others might not want to do it so loudly - the ones that did come out have been rather ruthlessly attacked. I don't know how you determine that people seem consistent, there isn't good long-term data on the outcomes of these interventions, particularly on the new cohort of patients that showed up around 2015.
I challenge the idea that a 16 year old doesn't have any idea what they want - 16 is young enough to be tried as an adult or apply for emancipation
All of these require extraordinary circumstances that need to be argued in front of a judge. 16 is not enough to vote, not enough to drink a beer, and not enough to sign a contract without the parents' consent, not even enough to get a tattoo. All of these things are far less risky than any part of gender-affirming care, except social transition.
At 16 you're either still going through puberty, or barely out of it. You're still figuring out basic things about your place in the world.
In most states, two 16 year olds can have sex, get pregnant, and have a child - a massively life changing decision that involves significantly more severe medical risks.
The long-term consequences of pregnancy is precisely why this behavior is discouraged in teenagers. People with my worldview even discourage sex outside of marriage, even if it can be reasonably assured it will not result in pregnancy, and that's regardless of whether we're talking about teenagers or adults.
That said, the big differences is that sex resulting in reproduction is part of the healthy life-cycle of any sexually reproducing species on this planet, not a medical intervention. A better analogy here would be a 16 year old going through IVF, and in that case I'd say it's absurd, and any doctor encouraging it has no business in medicine or psychology.
We even allow kids to drive! Traffic accidents are one of the top ten leading causes of death, but we trust kids with it.
You need to pass a test proving you're competent, and that you understand the rules of the road, in order to be allowed to drive. The high amount of deaths is a result of the raw number and frequency of people driving, rather than the risk to the person once they make a decision to drive with a car.
Are you saying that's all a mistake? We need to keep kids away from any sort of responsibility or freedom until they're a legal adult?
No, like you see, I think most of these are bad analogies. These examples also conveniently ignore the far less consequential things we do legally forbid teenagers from doing.
There's plenty of evidence that this intervention results in positive outcomes.
There actually isn't. The evidence for positive outcomes if often inconclusive, where it's positive it's low-confidence. The lack of long-term follow up is endemic in the literature.
You're talking to one of the positive outcomes right now. I'm not sure what else to call it when you do a medical intervention and it fixes a problem?
People also swear on the effectiveness of homeopathy, crystal healing or reiki, but that is not enough to declare these therapies as effective. There are people who seek out exorcists, and likewise swear that it helped them, but we don't usually take that as evidence of demonic posessions.
When it comes to physical illnesses we have developed a robust protocol to assess effectiveness. The fact that physical ailments are externally verifiable - so we can tell that the patient has it and isn't just imagining things, or is free of it and the treatment actually worked - is of great help. None of that is available for psychological issues, and so the evidence tends be pretty poor. Even for non-political issues like depression you often end up with stuff like "oops, our miracle drug turns out to be no better than placebo".
Things get even worse when body image issues are involved. An anorexic is going to report satisfaction from losing weight, but we tend to not accept that as a valid reason for going along with their decision.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
Looks like naraburns link is a lot more reliable: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9555285/ gives us 209 patients over a 7.5 year period, so 30 instead of 5,7000
His paper is from a single clinic, not the whole country, and it's for a single type of surgery. A rough eyeball-extrapolation of that into the entirety of US would give you roughly the number from my link.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
This leads me to wonder, as someone who does not have a Twitter account, what is the steelman of the liberal claim that Twitter has now become actually biased against them?
The only case I can see is a relative one - people opposed to liberal views aren't banned as much anymore, and that's a disadvantage compared to what they have. Also, since Musk sided with the Red Tribe, he regularly makes politically inconvenient news / memes go viral, which didn't use to happen when he was more neutral. I have seen no claim that blues are getting banned or throttled more than reds. The only possible exception would be stuff that targets Elon directly - there was some guy tracking the movement of his private jet that got banned, but I think it got resolved due to the controversy it caused.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
I never said that they are, so I don't see how that implies a psychologist should get to overrule them.
Generally we allow people to refuse treatment, even if that will have negative consequences for them. We also generally recognize children lack the maturity to make long-term decisions, so we grant the power to make medical decisions about them to their parents (or whoever has custody of them). Even with adults, if someone is unconscious, it's their next of kin that generally make medical decisions for them, not the doctors. None of that implies owning another person as property.
Also how consistent are you with "rightness" overruling parental authority. If the evidence for pediatric transgender care is determined to be very poor, are you ok with a blanket ban on transgender care, even if the child, parents, and a bunch their doctor agree that it's right?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
Thanks for the correction.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
They have twisted themselves into becoming beings that are not capable of producing more light than heat and so are a negative to have around.
I disagree, the whole reason they need an echo chamber is because their level of twisting is unsustainable otherwise. Pretty sure if they couldn't retreat, they'd have to become more reasonable.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
Not much.
Even in cases involving rigorous medicine, where we can be near-certain that a doctor is correct and the parents are wrong, informed consent and parental authority are recognized as necessary. Psychology is nowhere near that level of rigor and certainty, so I don't know on what grounds you wish to overrule parental authority or ignore the lack of informed consent from the child.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
Is X over? Is this push organic, or coordinated? Are journalists helping contribute to a more positive platform, or are they running away to a hugbox in an effort to punish Elon Musk for supporting Donald Trump?
Yes, it's coordinated. I don't know if "hugbox" is necessarily what they're aiming for, but they want algorithmic control over information.
Earlier today I mentioned that the election knocked the wind out of the Blues, and this is actually one of the things I had in mind, counter-intuitive as it may sound. I think that until now they were holding out hope that with their people in the admin, they can crack down on Elon and take back control over Twitter. A retreat to Bluesky feels more like a form of resignation, they can't punish Elon, so they have to start from scratch.
Is X over? Rumble, Parler, Locals, and 7 zillion SocMed alternatives will tell you it's an uphill battle to get people off a platform that everyone else is using. Of course Bluesky has the advantage of benefiting from these kind of coordinated pushes to get all major and minor celebrities off it, but I don't know if this will accomplish more than something like the Great Sort, because I don't see a good reason to follow them in the first place. Hollywood / the music industry / AAA gamedev are all dead. What will I be missing out on if they switch over to Bluesky?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
There's a recurring theme here, where responsibility is out-sourced from the people actually initiating things. "Schools" don't transition kids; kids transition.
No one thinks of children this way. Adults are responsible for what happens to children under their care. A school can say they didn't "drug kids" when some students start smuggling weed into school, but that works only as long as they can plead ignorance. If they have designated smoking rooms covered with weed-themed flags and slogans, and teachers keep track of who smokes and when, but hide that information from the parents, that means the school is actively participating in the child's drug consumption, and therefore "schools are drugging children". Same applies to transition.
"Courts" don't take away kids, the other parent is bothered enough to demand a divorce and argue for full custody.
And the law in question explicitly demand that the courts weigh favorably the parent that affirms a child's gender and negatively against the one that doesn't. And I gave you an example where a court did take away a kid, any way you slice it.
So, again, for starters: none of that is mutilation, just regular surgery.
Unnecessary surgery that removes healthy body parts is mutilation, as are unnecessary hormonal treatments.
Second, right there in the guidelines: this is the section for adolescents. Children is section 7. When your actual source makes the distinction between kids and teenagers, I feel like it's a bit disingenuous to keep calling them "kids"
When people say "kids" they mean "minors", performing these treatments on even younger children is even worse, but a mastectomy performed on a 16 year old girl is still atrocious.
Third, that's the section on "treatments requested by the patient".
No one cares, the patient is a minor that doesn't know anything about what they're talking about.
I don't see how this is different from anyone else trying to get medical treatment for their illness.
There is no evidence that any illness is involved. The only criteria necessary to get a dysphoria diagnosis is:
-
Say you're trans
-
Don't change your mind for a few months
Even those loose criteria aren't always followed.
Would you be horrified to learn that we also let children be treated for cancer and depression?
Cancer has proper diagnostic criteria, so no on that, but if a doctor insisted I have to give drugs to 14 year old for "depression" (or "anxiety" or ADHD) I'd find it absurd.
Should there be a minimum age for those, too?
Probably. Psychology is very unrigorous, and we should not let these kind of doctors make decisions about children, that go against the wishes of parents.
Basically no one is getting surgery before 18.
Depends what you mean by that. There've been about 5,700 gender affirming surgeries performed on minors between 2017 2019 and 2023. Some might call ~1K per year it "basically no one", but I've heard claims from pro-trans people claiming it's single digits annually, so I want to make it clear that if this is what you meant to imply, you're off by 3 orders of magnitude.
Also, @Amadan - in case you wanted a source.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
If you can only provide one example, that's hardly supporting your case. If anything, that suggests the opposite: this is so incredibly rare that it made the news.
Originally you said it doesn't happen, and the reason why authorities do it, is because the child is denied medical care. At the very least I'd expect you acknowledge that it happens sometimes given the evidence. The reason this was such a big story was it's particularly egregious nature (the double sex-trafficking part), but there were other stories of custody disputes based on nothing more than pronouns / identity affirmation. It was almost enshrined in law in California but for a veto.
The medical community, the scientific community, and the community of people who have actually undergone the process all recommend it, so I'm not sure on what grounds you would claim that it's not a valid medical treatment.
This is false. Anybody that made a comprehensive review of evidence came to the conclusion that the evidence is of poor quality. This includes WPATH, which commissioned several systematic reviews, and refused to publish them when the evidence didn't say what they wanted to say it.
While trans issues are something of an obsession of mine, I usually steer clear of the whole AGP debate, partly because "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people", and partly because some sense of compassion is indeed stopping me from piling on people who are having a hard enough time going through their life, but the charge of lack of empathy is valid.
Sorry, I just can't understand it, and not for lack of trying. Like you said, empathy for gay people is easy. Love, infatuation, and sexual attraction have largely been involuntary in my experience, so it's not hard to imagine that the target of these feelings ends up being another dude, through some twist of fate.
Dysphoria? Not seeing it. The idea of discomfort at being the wrong gender is alien to me. I'm quite comfortable in my male body, and if you put me in a woman's body tomorrow, I can't think of anything deeper to say about it than "it is what it is", and moving right along.
AGP? Sorry, but your attempts to explain it name it sound even weirder than just leaving it be as an unknown:
Can't relate. That the feelings of infatuation and love end up intertwined with sexual desire is quite expected. Indeed, I'd say that is the very point for either of these feelings to lead to the other, and I'm as skeptical of "pure" infatuation as I am of raw animalistic lust, so I can't at all understand where the thought of "why the f&!k are you getting a boner right now" is coming from.
But actually you lost me right at the start, if there's anything valid to the analogy of infatuation, even the "pure" kind, that just sounds like a very advanced case of narcissism. These feelings are meant for others, not for yourself.
Like I said, far be it for me to add to your burdens, but asking that I understand where you're coming from feels like a tall order.
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