rae
1yr ago
So women with a mental illness making them think that they are men took medication to reduce T levels (anti-androgens) and that helped them feel better about being women? Why aren't you taking anti-estrogens to cure your gender dysphoria then?
This is an incorrect view of gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria isn't thinking you're the opposite sex, it's being uncomfortable about being the sex you are and feeling more comfortable if you adopt the characteristics of the opposite sex.
Sounds like pretty bad science to me. They should have at least given cocaine to some of them and see who reports feeling better.
Cocaine doesn't last for very long and the side effects/crash are very severe, but there's other stimulants out there! Given the high proportion of trans people that have ADHD, giving them one like Adderall or Ritalin might not be a bad idea.
Can you explain? The gay men that you were previously pursuing unsuccessfully finally took an interest in you after you grew your hair long and breasts? Or did you manage to attract a straight man who just can't wait to get married, 2 children and a white picket fence in the suburbs?
I dated and hooked up with plenty of gay men prior to transitioning. Gay men are actively uninterested in femininity and lost interest after I grew my hair long and such. I receive plenty of attention from bisexual/bicurious men - sexually speaking there's a ton of seemingly straight men that are very interested in trans women. I'm now in a long-term relationship with a bisexual man and we could certainly get married, adopt children (or go through surrogacy) and buy a house in a suburb. Ironically, I'm more comfortable now with having a family and the normal monogamous life that conservatives are a fan of, than I ever was before.
Only because you have a point of reference to what the opposite sex is like. If you moved to a male-only monastery for life eventually you would have no idea what a woman behaves like. You could also get smart glasses that correct every dumb thing any woman say around you and you'd get the impression that women are rational, pragmatic people while men are the irrationally angry, ditzy sex.
Why the thinly veiled misogyny? Your post has a fairly hostile, sarcastic tone in general. Is this a response informed from bad real life experiences with women and/or trans people?
Well that's what the headphones are for.
Not sure I understand this part?
What kind of medical treatment has other people than the patient as targets?
Any cosmetic surgery to correct a deformed but otherwise functional appearance?
You seem to believe PCOS to be a symptom of gender dysphoria while it could very well be that gender dysphoria is a symptom of PCOS, or a symptom of another underlying cause causing both dysphoria and PCOS.
I only said trans people often have those conditions, I didn't say anything about the causal chain. I agree that gender dysphoria could be a symptom of PCOS or another disorder. How else would treating the patient with antiandrogens work? If you read the post, the FtM patients had elevated testosterone levels, took medication to reduce those levels, and the gender dysphoria went away.
Source? They gave placebo hormones to transists and they compared results to transists with the real deal?
That's hard to do since hormones have obvious physical changes and you could tell easily you're in the placebo group. This is unfortunately only self reports from people that transition medically, but not socially (including some of the famous "detransitioners" on conservative media - a few said they detransitioned but admitted to still being on HRT).
It is possible to learn how to break away from negative thought patterns (for example: this part of my body is male and I need to see a surgeon, instead of: I love how male this part of my body is!)
It seems to me that you are not your gender dysphoria. If you are a person who is bad at math, then you can study hard and get a to a certain skill level where you can be confident solving some math problems.
It appears to me that if you are a person who is bad at seeing herself in her birth sex, then this is something they can practice and grow more confident in, instead of lobbing off body parts and playing with disguises for their whole life.
I tried this, I tried seeing a therapist, I tried living as a gay male. I tried everything I could not to transition because I disagreed with the leftist trans movement, for many many years. Yet a few months after I started HRT, my quality of life hugely improved, and I finally had a decent dating life. If anything, refusing to accept that I was trans and telling people I was a gay male - that was the lie.
You're telling me I should stop HRT and go back to that state of suffering - what for? I already did break away from a huge amount of the negative thought patterns, compared to before, and I have no desire to go back.
What would that even look like? How would you know what the opposite sex proprioception feels like? Even if you took cross-sex hormones and then feel that your skin feels different, how would you know that this is the same feeling that somebody of the other sex feels?
Sexual secondary characteristics are a thing - trans women have differently distributed body fat, develop breasts, softer skin (others have confirmed this), trans men get hairier, develop deeper voices, larger muscles and grow a small sort-of micropenis. Spatial and verbal abilities also change following HRT (this is where the infamous brain scan study of transwomen comes from). Proprioception in terms of those characteristics is real - I don't care that this is the same feeling that someone of the other sex has or not, it's different from the feeling I had before and externally matches the opposite sex, and that's good enough for me.
I don't see in which version of 'gender-affirming therapy' you would not be aware that you had your bones shaved etc.
The point is that other people see it too. A more interesting point would be, what if everyone wore these glasses and could alter how others saw them? Cosmetic surgery would be pointless in those circumstances, that I agree with.
They could be surgically-implanted as well.
The glasses wouldn't change how others treated me beyond the superficial - which pronouns and intonations absolutely are.
rae
1yr ago
"Never" is a strong word when it comes to technological progress, uterus transplants exist and egg cells could be made from stem cells.
How is my current existence a lie? I'm very aware that I'm not biologically female, but my male characteristics are causing me pain, and I can correct them and have a superior quality of life. After transitioning I became functional both romantically and sexually, and much less prone to anxiety, depression, and despairing over my physical appearance. People close to me know I'm trans, and I don't particularly care to correct strangers about the pronouns they use with me.
Body dysmorphia is a tragic thing and often co-morbid with gender dysphoria. But you can absolutely reach the point where you pass in your daily life to average people, and then reach diminishing returns.
rae
1yr ago
How so? The changes from hormones and surgery are real, felt by your body, and perceived by others, instead of being an audiovisual illusion that only you can see. The parallel would be like having some sort of moderately advanced but not perfect prosthetic arm, versus superimposing a CGI limb that no-one else sees, and that you can't use for anything since it's just pixels on a screen.
Do note that I have a somewhat transmedicalist point of view, which is different from the mainstream leftist view or what conservatives call "gender ideology".
rae
1yr ago
But how does anything like this make one a woman? I don't think women need to shave their bones etc to be 'women'.
If it is successful, it makes other people perceive you like a woman, which is one of the goals.
Wouldn't it be easier to address the underlying psychological issues? Allegedly, meditation and other buddhist practices aim to free one from their every desire, wouldn't such practices help liberate one from the desires of having shorter bones, higher voice, etc?
It's not purely a psychological issue. A large number of trans people have underlying hormonal issues - in FtMs, PCOS and congenital adrenal hyperplasia are very common, and there's growing evidence that a number of mutations and physical conditions are associated with it. The controversial trans health practitioner Dr Powers found he could treat gender dysphoria in natal females by administrating them anti-androgens, if it is done early enough. Otherwise, trans people report better functioning and mental health on cross-sex hormones even if they change nothing else.
Meditation and Buddhist practice help you come to peace with what you can't change, sure. But why accept suffering when you can change it? Transition might not be able to give me all of the changes I want, but I am exceptionally grateful for all the changes it did.
Alternatively, there are great advances in technology every day. If at the crux the issue is of self-perception, couldn't some version of virtual glasses help with that? AI software miniaturized in smart glasses + headphones could potentially overlay corrected audio-visual information in real-time. That way the patient would have the impression of a body matching their idealization of it, and in every social interaction, correct the pronouns, intonations, and speech content to avoid any misgendering distress.
The audio-visual self-perception is only a small part of it. This sound similar in effect to giving amputees a headset that superimposes a CGI limb on top of their prosthesis - it can help a little, sure, but it does nothing for touch and proprioception, actual functionality. Others will still see an amputee, plus you'll be acutely aware that you're living a lie - in addition to having to occasionally take off the glasses.
rae
1yr ago
Personally, I'm very happy it's out of the news cycle. I think the mania goes both ways and it's incredible how much both the left and right have completely blown out of proportion this private medical issue that affects a small amount of people, and I believe the ideological obsession over it (including from the left) does more harm than good.
I'll preface this by saying that I'm transgender, and I had dysphoria since I was a child myself, but I am a bit of an old-fashioned "truscum" as I don't really fully subscribe to the mainstream leftist trans views. I do know some people in the "neutral middle" - most of my more right-wing friends are opposed to the excesses of the trans movement, but otherwise either don't care or just passively go with the medical consensus.
Can anybody enlighten me why people aren't more curious, why they're happy for children to be groomed into lifelong medicalisation, with their life choices pre-emptively narrowed before they even understand what consent means? The true-believers I understand, it's supposedly smart, moral people that aren't engaged that I'm confused about.
Lifelong medicalisation happens anyway no matter when you transition, but if you do it as an adult, it's much worse. You have to pay huge sums of money (tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars) for very painful, potentially risky surgery - for MtFs, facial feminisation surgery - which is literally slicing your face open, shaving your bones with a saw, and stitching it back up - tracheal shave, voice feminisation surgery, hairline reduction, and some more. All of this you do if you want to pass as a normal member of the opposite sex instead of a freak that's the butt of jokes.
Meanwhile if you transition around the start of puberty, you don't have to do any of these surgeries - you'll go through the rest of your life as a normal-looking member of the opposite sex, and won't have to go through the trauma of watching your body turn into something that gives you psychological pain every day. There's only one surgery you might have to do and that's sex reassignment surgery, and there I don't have any issue with not allowing minors to go through it.
You know what pre-emptively narrows your life choices before you understand what consent means? Good old fashioned puberty. If given the option between a natural puberty that tortures you psychologically has you spend significant amount of effort and money trying to undo its consequences, and a different medically induced one that does not, what is the justification in going with the first one, apart from the naturalistic fallacy?
Now there is a risk of regret - catching teenagers that think they're transgender but later desist. This is where I'm against the leftist discourse glorifying the state of being transgender - you want to make it clear that it's an unpleasant, undesirable medical condition. From what I've seen, the rate of detransition is fairly low; say it was theoretically 10% (it is much lower than that from what I've read), why is preventing the regret of that 10% more important than preventing the regret of that 90% from not going through transition early?
I’m as grey tribe as they come and to me the pendulum has swung firmly the other way. I’ve come from being sympathetic to the right in ‘16, to seeing it as my complete ideological opponent. I started as an edgy online atheist watching Creationism Debunked videos, got into the Intellectual Dark Web, cheered when the libs lost in ‘16, only to realise that maybe the so-called SJWs might have had a point when the hardcore Christian Right took over the movement.
The latter were the same people I was opposed to at the start of my political journey; anti-science, anti-intellectual, dogmatic theocrats who want to suppress anything that doesn’t agree with their outdated religious views. They’ve just repackaged the old stodgy pearl-clutching views we used to mock in the Bush era as somehow “based and redpilled”. They just stole the colours of the cool, rebellious counter-culture to make the grey tribe forget they used to be their ideological opponent.
rae
1yr ago
Your links are comparing natal parents to step-parents, not adoptive parents; a single mother remarrying is completely a different environment compared to two infertile parents deciding to adopt and raise a child from infancy. Adoptive children seem to have poorer physical health but greater parental support than biological children, interestingly enough.
Also if a gay couple adopts a child, it’s not as if the child is being deprived of a mother and a father; the alternative to the gay couple is the child being raised in an orphanage and then going from foster home to foster home.
And in case you suggest it, I’m not sure a closeted gay biological parent in a sham straight marriage is preferable long-term to a stable gay marriage either.
rae
1yr ago
So why does the terminally online alt-right link itself to Trump so much? I remember in 2016 when the left accused Trump and his followers of being white supremacists, misogynists, homophobic, far-right fascists and the response from them was that Trump wasn't any of those things; what the right movement stood against was The Establishment. I remember Trump waving the LGBT flag and being proud of receiving support from Blacks and Latinos.
I personally thought the accusations of Nazism towards the Trump movement were an exaggeration, but now ZHP and his ilk are saying, no, the left was right, we are all of bad the things they said we were. Things the average Westerner would consider not only to be morally repugnant, but the very values of the most reviled enemy in recent history. Debate between a Democrat and a Republican is possible because at heart they both share similar core values and goals; but is there even a point to debating those that admit to views that are the complete antithesis of Western civilisation?
rae
1yr ago
Yes, men need to be successful to be psychologically healthy in a manner that isn't the same for women.
That’s true for certain men but is that so for a huge numbers of men who seem content to work at a dead end job, and do nothing but play video games and watch porn? I’ve met and unfortunately dated men like that, and they genuinely have no drive and no ambition, no matter how hard I tried to push them.
I’ve seen that perspective on Reddit very often, many men said that if it weren’t for women, they would be content to live in a cardboard box. Achieving a minimal standard of living is pretty easy in a modern western society, so it feels to me like the ambitious, career driven man is in the minority.
rae
1yr ago
People with no dysphoria who don’t medically transition but ask to be considered the opposite sex, well, I’m fairly suspicious of their motives. I’ve personally seen people like that on dating apps, and it seems to be either men who want to hook up with female-attracted trans women, or women that want to hook up with gay men; both think that just stating they’re trans but doing nothing else is enough.
I don’t think it’s useful to gatekeep trans identity too much, but I think mainstream trans views have gone too far and made the definitions useless. If you’re trans you should at least want to transition. Allowing sexual predators and fetishists to claim the label is hurting actual trans people, who just want to be seen and function as normal members of the opposite sex.
rae
1yr ago
I’m not sure there’s a difference between how the emotions from how interpret the experience vs. the experience itself? Mental issues are by definition intrinsic. Not all soldiers develop PTSD after experiencing a traumatic event - there seems to be many variables influencing its development, such as age, pre existing conditions, support network, even genes (I’m reading that PTSD is 30-40% heritable). And there’s depressingly large amounts of women that have PTSD from sexual assaults and physical abuse - while only a small minority of men become soldiers in the west.
I’m also not sure what you mean by women’s mental issues being more intrinsic? Anxiety, depression, addiction and abusive relationships would be common reasons the average westerner would go to therapy, and I don’t see how there’s a difference in “cause” there when it comes to gender?
rae
1yr ago
That hasn’t been my experience. I did CBT and there it was quite focused on tracking my emotional state and finding actions to regulate it, and more ordinary talk therapy where I was pushed to be more assertive, recognise abusive relationships and be more emotionally resilient overall. therapy does encourage you to have more self-compassion and avoid emotional repression, but to me that’s the opposite of fragility. People who bottle up everything tend to be very brittle - seeming solid until it gets too much and they shatter.
rae
1yr ago
Why would therapy be less effective for men? I’ve heard moreso that men don’t want to start going to therapy for various reasons (associating therapy with leftism is a new one for me, which I don’t really understand) but it’s a very useful tool to have.
And there’s more than one way to practice it - cognitive behavioural therapy has been found to be effective for anxiety, depression, PTSD, ADHD, and more, and I can’t conceive of a reason it would be less effective for men.
rae
1yr ago
It’s an especially stupid reason to commit suicide because it’s still possible to provide for your family if your business fails - you can still get an ordinary job, or do consulting work, drive an Uber, whatever it takes. The only sure way to be unable to provide is to be dead, so what does killing yourself accomplish? Your spouse now has to shoulder the entire burden on their own.
The scientific evidence, from what I’ve read, seems to say that both sexuality and gender identity are influenced by the exposure to prenatal androgens and other hormonal factors. Gay men and trans women would have less androgen exposure than straight men - resulting in different physiological traits such as higher digit ratio and the infamous “gay face”. A gay man will be involuntarily aroused by homosexual sexual stimuli and there’s no evidence that psychological interventions can change that baseline physiological response. All kinds of men (bisexual, or straight men in prison) can have sex with men, but for gays, their attraction is fundamental physiological trait.
Meanwhile a trans woman is a biological male with some degree of gender dysphoria that takes steps to alter their gender presentation and goes on cross-sex hormones to alleviate that dysphoria. Again, gender presentation is a choice, but the gender dysphoria itself is an involuntary (possibly hormonally caused) condition, and psychological interventions will also have limited success - trans repressors will attest to the psychological toll it takes.
One difficulty I see is distinguishing between one’s inner state and one’s actions. A man is not gay because he has sex with men, he is gay because he is attracted to men. A gay man can be married to a woman and need to fantasise about men to have sex with her, and a straight man can have sex with men (e.g. in prison, on a ship) while thinking about women. There are people that will argue that if you’re a man who has sex with men, then you’re gay, but then does that mean that men who masturbate are attracted to their own hands? That teenage boys are attracted to couches, apple pies or whatever objects that they stereotypical use as masturbation aids?
Same with gender identity, except there definitions get even more controversial (i.e. “what is a woman”). The mainstream trans orthodoxy, from what I understand, says there is an inner “gender state” that can be reflected by your gender presentation, and the inner state is what we should call man/woman/non-binary/etc. Conservatives say there’s just biological sex and someone that’s an adult human male is a man, and someone that’s an adult female human is a woman. Personally I’m not sure there is really an inner “gender identity” in the same way there’s an inner sexual orientation, but gender dysphoria is definitely a thing, and it’s possible to change your gender presentation so that other people see you as the opposite sex and consequently call you a man/woman.
rae
1yr ago
That’s the first time I hear of such a hypothesis and I would say that while there might be a subgroup to which this applies to - the exhibitionist type that flaunts their bodies regardless how well they pass and engage in hugboxing on Reddit - the majority of trans people I know are the opposite in that they have body dysmorphic disorder, imposter syndrome, and issues with self worth. Of course the former group is going to be more visible, but applying conclusions to the entire transgender phenomenon based on them would be a mistake.
If an institution gives preferential treatment to individuals based entirely on their identity, it’s absolutely understandable why someone would fake it if all it takes is self-declaration.
It’s completely the prison’s own fault if Nazi inmates are pretending to be Jewish so that they don’t eat the standard prison slop, and I have little sympathy for the abusive, violent institution that is the US justice system. If they wanted to “fix” the problem, they should make the kosher food as unpalatable and inconvenient as the rest of their offerings, not test inmates for Judaism.
Personally, my preferred solution would be to limit or remove the circumstances where individual identity matters at all. For instance, my preferred solution to the pronoun issue would just be to remove gendered pronouns completely; in languages like Hungarian or Turkish for example, they don’t exist and people communicate just fine, while romance languages go further than English and have almost every single noun and adjective be gendered. Obviously this is not always practical but the general goal should be towards less identity politics, not more.
rae
1yr ago
I was under the impression that straight men were into seeing breasts and butts, but weren’t particularly visually into vulvas on their own, as that’s what the (admittedly limited) conversations I’ve had with straight men focused on.
rae
1yr ago
Wouldn’t straight men not also be weirded out by an unsolicited labia pic? Dick pics aren’t the same as a nude or a thirst trap, they’re an impersonal, disembodied close-up robbed of context and personality, and when they’re unsolicited, it’s like they’re intentionally there to shock or provoke; the equivalent of someone flashing their genitals at you but in the digital world.
rae
1yr ago
If just looking at attractive people is being a slave to unproductive passions, then surely making the extra effort to have sex with them is even worse? The recipe for sexual success is relatively straightforward and you probably know what’s involved - on some level I’m sure you’re aware that it would require you to invest a significant amount of time on what is ultimately a vacuous pursuit and you’re choosing to spend it on things you care about instead. So there’s no reason to feel let down.
Personally I was very promiscuous in the past but all my hook-ups were exactly as you describe being around attractive women - transitory happiness, like eating a nutrient-bereft slice of cheesecake but feeling empty despite all the calories, a quick fix of validation to make me feel better when I felt unattractive or worthless. No amount of sex can substitute for genuine human connection, but it’s hard to really internalise that when society is pushing hard for equating self worth with sex appeal - but I hope you’re able to make the leap and go for forming genuine friendships and romantic connections without spending huge amounts of energy at the meat market first.
rae
1yr ago
What do you mean “deal with”? It’s not like you can’t control yourself, and I don’t see how the fewer clothes women are wearing, the more you’re more depressed about your dating life. Whether you mostly interact with women in hijabs or bikinis won’t make you any more or less single, so isn’t it a positive to be around people you’re attracted to?
The straight men I know seem to enjoy and get cheered up by being in Southern European beaches where a decent proportion of women look like outright models, vs. say the UK where most English women are plain at best; that’s even if they’re married and aren’t looking to cheat. Single men I know are happy just being in the presence of attractive women.
rae
1yr ago
One point is that trans people are far more likely to be the victims rather than the perpetrators of sexual assault and violence, and you won’t have much luck convincing groups like rationalists to focus on the statistically smaller externalities of bad actors that they don’t know, versus the statistically more common occurrence of their friends being threatened, abused, raped or victimised.
But moreso I fail to see why trans people need any special policies. Assault or sexual harassment in bathrooms is illegal regardless of the perpetrator’s gender or biological sex; trans people should go where they pass/are safest. Segregating by biological sex is a losing battle; if trans men are forced to use the bathroom of their biological sex, they can get assaulted for being “men in women’s bathrooms”.
Rape in prisons should not be tolerated, people who sexually assault their cell mate should be isolated and dealt with appropriately.
Women’s sports is more thorny, but I don’t see anything wrong with banning anyone who went through male puberty or more generally went above a certain threshold of exogenous or endogenous androgens in the past (a former trans man who took T from ages 13-17 would have an advantage against cis women, a trans woman who took puberty blockers since the age of 12 would not).
I’ve seen your blog in the wild before and always wanted to respond, so I’m happy to see you here!
I will second a few comments and encourage you to attempt to condense your writing; your two linked articles are long even by the standards of this community and engaging with them in their entirety would take a lot of effort. I think I can summarise, from skimming them and having read a bit of your blog, but do correct me if I make any mistakes:
- You disagree with Scott et al’s assertion that categories are purely man-made and believe that there are natural ways to “carve reality at its seams”
- This comes up with trans people where you state there’s natural binary categories of male/female or man/woman, and disagree with the pro-trans view
- You further support the Blanchardian taxonomy of autogynophiliacs (AGP) vs homosexual transsexuals (HSTS) as opposed to the gender identity or “brain in a body of the opposite sex” mainstream view
- You yourself have very intense autogynophilia and mild gender dysphoria which has caused you significant amounts of distress (hence the long posts)
- You tried HRT but it didn’t do much for you, and stopped
- You claim fulfilling the AGP fantasy is impossible for the foreseeable future as it requires you not only to have a body typical of the opposite sex but also a brain (as per Yudkowsky’s post that RandomRanger brought up).
- You had a break with progressivism in 2017
With that in mind, I do wonder if perhaps one of your issues is that you saw a false dichotomy between two extreme viewpoints of “gender theory”: either men are men and women and women and accepting trans people is lying about biological reality (perhaps for the sake of a fetish), or that being trans is purely due to an innate sense of gender identity that’s not aligned with the body, and that we should 100% respect someone’s self-declared gender no matter their appearance.
But I don’t think I’ve seen you address the “trans medical”/truscum POV which would be relatively uncommon nowadays but which is to me the most sensible one. There’s a condition called gender dysphoria, which is psychological distress towards one’s biological sex. The most effective treatment is transitioning, and the goal is to pass as the opposite sex and have people refer to you by the right pronouns based on your appearance. Your sexual orientation, “gender identity”, etc. is basically irrelevant, the only thing that matters is, do you feel better on HRT and is your life improved by transitioning?
And I agree you that being trans gender is not a physical intersex condition in the sense of “brain stuck in an opposite sex body”, what do you think about hypotheses like Meyer-Powers syndrome or the RCCx hypothesis? You stated you were neurodivergent but I do wonder if you have any of the other physiological symptoms - almost all the trans people I know do. I ask this because there are anecdotal reports of possible treatment for mild gender dysphoria that can be an option if you are open to possibilities other than “I have a fetish” or “I am a woman on the inside”.
I’ve brought these links up before and very aware that any conclusion they have are purely conjecture, but checking physical symptoms and getting tested for a gene mutation is something that might give you objective results. I am also biased towards the trans medical POV because that’s what worked for me as a trans woman who didn’t fit in either the Blanchardian typology or the woke gender identity narrative.
On the other hand, you have people like Kim Petras, Hunter Schafer, Valentina Sampaio, etc., young transitioners who seems to be mostly ignored by the right. I also know some trans women that transitioned early-ish (~14) and they have no regrets or sexual dysfunction. If you're trans, you're very unlikely to care about being sterilised or not having biological children the "natural" way anyhow.
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