This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I was thinking, gun to my head, I'd rather my daughter was molested by a catholic priest (unlikely as that is, being a girl and all) than fall in with your ilk. But that got me thinking... what if the Catholic Church leaned into LGBTQ+ shit 30 years earlier than they did?
What if, instead of covering up the priest abuse scandals, they leaned into it. Claimed they were just protecting young gay boys. In fact they had a moral duty to keep these young boys sexual behavior a secret from their parents. They might not accept them after all. Furthermore, the Catholic Church should probably just take custody of them from those bigoted parents.
It's preposterous and totally insane. But that's what you sound like.
Your first comment got a lot of reports, which opened a mod conversation about whether to ding you for it. One mod said "not bannable, but warnable," another said "not even warnable." I tended to agree that it was not a great comment, but that it ultimately fell on the permissible side. The meta-moderation system agreed with me on this. However the low-quality responses you've generated certainly lend credence to the inclination toward moderation there.
This comment, though, fails the test of "write like everyone is reading, and you want to include them in the conversation." In particular, "your ilk" is a quintessentially antagonistic framing; we're here to engage with ideas above people, and watch our tone in preservation of content.
And this, of course, is worth moderating all on its own.
You do your substantive position no favors by cranking the rhetoric to 11. Your occasional AAQCs only get you so much lenience. It has been a while since your last ban, after which you became a quality-content machine for a bit! But recently your warnings have been arriving with increasing frequency. Let's try another week-long ban.
Were literally the product of a troll single-purpose-account, and you know it. But you can't let the place stray too far from leftist Orthodoxy, can you?
I appreciate you.
It honestly warms my heart to know that I can still generate responses like this in the same thread where I'm getting responses like this:
You're getting responses like that because you're talking to a group that is notorious for screaming at people who are driving the direction they want, but at the speed limit rather than smashing the accelerator. See the current redditrage blaming Harris' loss on not Centering trans persxns in her campaign.
Eventually it always converges on the rationalist "well they won 70% of this fight by calling us cis-demons enough times, you need to follow their rules now"
I'd actually be curious if you'd ban gwern for his 2012 comments linked in that thread, btw. It'd be a good demonstration of how far the Overton window has shifted left even in a place dedicated to resisting forcible shifts.
Maybe! But Gwern seems pretty cognizant of context in those comments:
Gwern perceived IRC as a sort of "locker room," speech-wise, while Startling disagreed. I wasn't there so I have no opinion as to who was right, beyond a tendency to suspect that it's always a bad idea to bet against Gwern. My guess is that a hypothetical Motte-posting Gwern would express himself a little differently, when posting here.
The SSC subreddit and the Motte are different contexts, too. Has the Motte shifted left? I don't think so, but then I am pretty regularly accused of bearing some personal responsibility for this place shifting right. We're not explicitly conservative, so Conquest's Laws say we will eventually become progressive. But maybe the foundation counts as an explicitly conservative alignment, for such purposes? We've definitely had more mods bail because they found this space insufficiently progressive, than because they found this space insufficiently conservative. On balance, I remain pretty satisfied with this space (when I'm not feeling surprised that it has managed to continue existing for as long as it has!).
But like... if you don't like entryists, you really should stop giving the mod team shit over moderation decisions, ever. We're not perfect, we make mistakes. But even our most progressive moderators are much more committed to the foundation than they are to advancing any particular political narrative.
Yes, we are; that's what the rules of this place do. "Conservative" is far too overloaded a word to really be useful ('progressive' is the same but a bit less so, and I find 'traditionalist' much more useful).
I think progressivism and traditionalism are the same thing when stated this way. Of course, because the original design of this place has so far been conserved, the traditionalists haven't taken over the forum (and the traditionalists that are moderators, and there's at least one of these, have yet [as far as I'm aware] to act in a way that privileges traditionalism over those principles).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Would you dare say that to your daughter?
You'd really rather her undergo a horrific, traumatizing experience that basically no one recommends... rather than do a relatively safe medical process that has numerous positive recommendations?
And you think this is a rational decision based on the facts, that your daughter should suffer horribly rather than grow a beard? What would you have done if the poor kid had PCOS or something?
More options
Context Copy link
It's preposterous and totally insane sounding because you analogized a situation where a child is raped without consent to one where the child willingly undergoes a medical procedure (regardless of whether you think it's warranted or not). That is a preposterous and insane analogy to make so it's no wonder that's what your conclusion is.
Hello, and welcome to the Motte!
This response is not sufficiently charitable. You may note that I have banned the user to whom you were responding; one big problem with rule-breaking comments is that they tend to proliferate by encouraging further rule-breaking responses. But responding to a rule-breaking comment in a rule-breaking way does not excuse you!
...actually, looking through your rather fresh comment history, you seem to have a remarkable knack for sussing out problematic posts and making the discussion even worse by responding, not to the substance of the post, but to its rhetoric. Somehow that is, actually, most of your posts! The odds of this are so low as to not be worth contemplating.
Still, in the interest of charity, I will hold off perma-banning you as a suspected alt until the next time I notice this peculiar pattern. Once, after all, may be happenstance.
Hello, thanks for the welcome.
I won't deny I have a habit of responding to the posts that seem egregious to me with rhetoric in kind. This is true. I can work on my charitability.
I don't want to come across as if I'm complaining about the moderation (I think it's fine) but I am a bit confused about the rules of engagement here and would like some clarification before posting further so that I don't get unceremoniously permabanned. If this comment is unacceptable on the forum please feel free to delete and continue the convo in messages, but I am actually asking for clarification in good faith.
First of all, am I being moderated for the tone/content of my posts or for ban evasion as a suspected alt? I'm assuming from your comment that there was a previous user on this forum who used to engage similarly to me and was banned for it. If that's the case and you think this person is me, then what can I actually do to make you believe otherwise? I recognize as a moderator the need to restrict ban evasion from problem users, but from my perspective I am unaware of previous users having similar rhetoric (and it seems onerous to expect me to write deliberately in a different tone or avoid certain topics) so what is my recourse to avoid a permanent ban for this reason?
Secondly, my understanding was that as a new user all my comments have to be approved by moderators before becoming public. Until this comment I had not received any mod feedback. If it is not just ban evasion I'm being modded for, is it only this most recent comment that goes over the line into being problematic? If not, does this comment act as a warning that all of my previous posts were unacceptable?
I'm not trying to be deliberately difficult here, I actually don't understand or know the answers to these questions. I'd like to retain the ability to post here, and in order to do that I need to know where the line is.
We moderate on tone, not content. Your post was uncharitable and antagonistic.
More like "a never ending stream of users," actually. Bad faith posters who use "just asking questions" rhetoric to troll the forum are a dime a dozen; in the parlance of the age, "ya basic," sorry. "New" users who jump in on election day and seem immediately comfortable navigating various community norms are suspicious enough. Following up by "just asking questions" rules lawyering in response to moderation dramatically increases my suspicion that you are a repeat customer. We've had hundreds of new users over the years, and to put it mildly--you do not fit the profile.
But it's not impossible, so... here we are.
We can't moderate every comment, and queue approval should not be taken as a sign of endorsement, beyond perhaps "this isn't obviously spam." Moderation is qualitative and adaptive; we usually mod comments directly, but sometimes we have to take into account a pattern of commenting instead. This is a reputation economy; post lots of good stuff that isn't rage bait, then occasional rage bait will get a shrug.
Many of your previous posts are bad. But the goal is not to try to get away with being just enough of an asshole that you are allowed to continue being an asshole. Rhetorical brinkmanship is bad. At a glance, your comments with negative karma scores should probably be taken as a sign, to you, that you did something wrong. (This isn't always the case--some substantive positions just get downvoted, which is annoying--but if you can't spot the difference, I don't know what to tell you.)
For some examples, this comment, if I had seen it when you posted it, would probably have gotten you a short ban. This comment's "citation needed" snark honestly tempts me to ban you now.
Be charitable. Be kind. If someone else is breaking the rules, report that instead of breaking the rules in response. The more closely I look at your profile, the more I am inclined to permaban you rather than go through the motions with what appears to be a (so far) consistently garbage level of engagement. If you really would like to continue posting under this account, knock it off.
Okay fair enough. I will say for the record that I am a new poster (jumped in for the discussion after election day as you noted) but have lurked reading every so often for at least a few months so I'm not unfamiliar with the forum as a whole.
I somewhat disagree with the characterization of my behaviour as 'just asking questions', but I understand how it appears that way. I do have a habit of questioning people to poke at underlying disagreements, and I can acknowledge that sometimes I do this too much or with somewhat inflammatory rhetoric, but it is usually with a goal relevant to the discussion in mind.
In this particular case, the questions regarding moderation were genuine. If there's something in the forum's history thats relevant to my moderation I wanted to know it. I did receive a message from another poster yesterday, that in hindsight, makes me think they also suspected me of being a specific different user evading a ban.
I want to stress again at the end here that my picking apart of this moderation may come across as being in bad faith, but I am genuinely attempting to understand the rules of engagement and how I would have to change my rhetoric in order to consistently participate. If I engaged less now, I might misunderstand something else down the road. The impression I get is that my familiarity with the forum is suspicious and also my asking questions is suspicious, but I felt that not asking questions would make it more likely that I was banned in the future for a reason I did not fully understand.
In any case, I will endeavour to make future posts acceptable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is it not charitable anymore to honestly state your opinion on the analogy a user made (as opposed to their beliefs or character)?
The charity failure in cartman's comment was that WhiningCoil argues that children consenting to sex acts is analogous to children consenting to treatment for reasons of sex or gender preferences, i.e. "if children can't consent to sex acts then children can't consent to puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or sex-altering surgeries, and if parental authority does not extend to vicarious consent for sex acts then it also does not extend to vicarious consent for puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or sex-altering surgeries."
People can argue about whether that analogy is a good one. But if one person builds their argument on the validity of the analogy and another person builds their response on the invalidity of the analogy, then they are not really talking to each other, they are just competing for who can make their take on the analogy into the consensus by being loud and insistent about it.
This is a complicated thing to moderate because we moderate on tone rather than substance, but like most informal fallacies, it's hard to recognize this one without some grasp of the substance of the argument.
More options
Context Copy link
Never has been?
I might honestly think a lot of things people post here are absolutely retarded, but I am not allowed to say that. Also note that the ban went to the parent comment, and this is just a warning to not make the conversation worse.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Frankly I find it more preposterious and insane that you don't see removing parental authority as the salient category.
What's your position on castrati? Willing undertaking of medical procedure or abduction of minors for sinister purposes?
Can you elaborate on what you want me to respond to? Are you referring to singers who in the past were castrated for their singing voices? I don't think that was a morally good practice.
I obviously would agree that 'abduction of minors for sinister purposes' is bad, you literally put sinister in the description. I suspect we disagree on what sinister purposes refers to, so you need to describe something more specific if you want to prompt my thoughts to see our differences of opinion.
Comment on the obvious parallels between castrati and trans children. The glaring, obvious parallels, and why one would be not morally good while the other is somehow more morally good.
Castrating boys is what we're referring to, and what is being called sinister.
I laid out the differences in another comment, the distinction is the reasoning and intent behind the act.
Society deems that killing is murder unless you kill the right person in the right context (self defense). Cashing a check that you stole from someone is fraud/theft, while cashing a check that you were given legitimately is a business transaction. I believe that the vast vast majority of doctors providing gender affirming care through therapy, puberty blockers, and in very rare cases surgery, are doing so with the best interests of the child in mind, which was not the case for castrati historically as I understand it.
The parallels may seem glaring and obvious, just like a self defence killing might look like murder, but there are quite substantial differences.
I inquired about what OP meant by sinister purposes, your answer refers to an act and not a purpose and does not reference abduction. I am still unclear what they meant by abduction for sinister purposes.
"I believe that the vast vast majority of doctors providing gender affirming care through therapy, puberty blockers, and in very rare cases surgery, are doing so with the best interests of the child in mind, which was not the case for castrati historically as I understand it."
While I'm sure that a great many of the people in the process have good intentions, I do not think that they are often acting with good judgment. In your example, killing is murder unless you kill the right person in the right context. But it does not merely suffice that you think that what you're doing is the right situation ("they really had it coming"), but that it actually be that.
I don't really have a good sense of what things were like for castrati. I think they (or at least, those who were successful) were not infrequently of fairly high social status, but I'm not at all sure of that.
More options
Context Copy link
I didn't mean more or less than the common definition.
sinister /'sɪnɪstər/ adj.: stemming from evil characteristics or forces; wicked or dishonorable.
Solely intent based moral (or legal) system are rare for good reason. Not only are we not mind readers, evil has a pernicious tendency to believe itself righteous and we ultimately have to live in consequence, not in intent.
In any case, any such coherent deontological system that would base itself on intent (such as Kantianism) would still have to recognize parental authority as it has to deal with the subhuman quality of children and appoint someone to protect them against themselves and the world.
Institutions such as the State, Church or any other large scale administration with no ties of blood is inherently unable to provide the same incentives as family, and is therefore only recognizable as legitimate in edge cases of parental tyranny.
The only debate being had here is if making certain medical decisions for your children can be such a tyranny and which specific circumstances trigger it.
Any reasonable answer to this question must remember the initial incentive base and can not be tantamount to seizing decision power from parents altogether, as that would simply be seeing them supplanted by a worse protector.
There are essentially two ways of thinking about transgenderism. Either it is a medical condition, for which there are medical interventions available, or it is a lifestyle choice.
Let's immediately evacuate the second one. If your child is tucute, you have full authority to deny them this choice by the same justification you can deny them tatoos or particular forms of dress.
What if your child is trutrans, however?
The problem then is one generalizable to many decisions about mental illnesses: treatment decisions can not be vested in the patient (for many reasons, and even more in this case) and we must then decide whether the family or medical experts prevail if there is a strong disagreement.
Since the legitimacy of family is to be defaulted to for reasons we discussed earlier, we are left to ask one question: do experts know this disease well enough to make decisions that have levels of confidence high enough to override personal knowledge of the patient. It is not right that a child would have his TB prayed away if antibiotics are available.
And here (as in, for GD) the literature is quite clear for whoever dares look: the confidence that was had in the Dutch protocol was very much unearned and our understanding of GD is ridiculously primitive. To the degree that none of the available procedures and treatments provide such obvious benefits that a person of sound mind wouldn't seriously consider the very significant side effects. And that medical decisions in this case are not obvious medical questions but rather important life choices.
It seems then, to me, that "good intentions" in removing parental authority from such decisions would be more negligent than it would be reasonable. Which is thankfully now the position of basically every medical authority on the matter outside of the Americas.
Okay. I'm unclear what distinction you're trying to make between evil intent and what you described as sinister purposes, or 'stemming from evil forces'. Is something done for a sinister purpose if those performing the act do it with good intentions but another participant may be affected negatively by the act? If this is not what you mean and simple evil intent is not what you mean then I still don't understand what you're getting at without more specific elaboration. I'll also state for the record that intention is not the be-all and end-all of my moral philosophy but it still plays a significant role. Intent is by far the best predictor that I'm aware of for whether someone is a generally morally 'good' person who is likely to do 'good' things.
The meaning of abduction that I am familiar with involves taking someone somewhere against their will through violence or threats. If what you were asking me was whether I support minors being taken against their will through violence or threats to surgeries that are done with sinister purposes (I'm reading this part broadly here since I don't understand your meaning) then yes, I am against that. If what you meant by abduction was that the parents of the hypothetical minor did not give consent for whatever the procedure is, then my answer will again depend on the specific context and details. This leads into the next point.
I fundamentally disagree that parents have some inherent incentive structure to care for their children that is superior to the incentives of social institutions. Parental incentives go wrong all the time! (as do institutional ones). You acknowledge this with your reference to cases of 'parental tyranny'. I would likely acknowledge that in the current world, parental incentives are more probable to be aligned with their child's than other institutions, but I dont think this is an inherent property of parenthood. In a different worldly circumstance with different institutions, it could easily be the case that the State is more aligned with child interests than parents are.
We already recognize the right for minors to escape from the potential tyranny of their parents in a variety of scenarios. The common practice of minor emancipation in Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere points to this phenomenon. My understanding (which could be wrong, i haven't looked at it too much) is that these emancipated minors are able to make all sorts of legally binding decisions for themselves, including medical ones. What are your thoughts on this practice?
Treatment decisions about mental illnesses are vested to the patient all the time! There are certain circumstances where this is not the case (imminent risk of suicide or psychosis, etc.) but I am confident that the vast vast majority of mental illnesses experienced by adults (excluding the subset of minors that we are directly disagreeing about) get treated based on decisions made by the patients which are informed by their medical team. If you were talking only about minors here, then again, I disagree.
I'll skip any factual argument and just agree that the scientific literature now demonstrates what you say it demonstrates about GD. Do you think doctors (especially in America) were making these medical decisions with the full knowledge that the medical literature did not support these decisions? You can say they were wrong about the facts, but do you believe that all these doctors were performing procedures that they knew were likely to be on average harmful for the patient? If the answer is no, then I object to the framing of this state of events as 'abduction for sinister purposes'. Making a decision that turns out to have negative consequences but was done with the best of intentions for all involved (and not simply on a whim but based on some amount of research) is not what I would consider sinister. If the answer is yes, then I guess we have a big factual disagreement that I don't know how to resolve.
If your sole point was that such decisions were perhaps too hasty in some cases given the relatively limited quantity and quality of research on the topic, then I would have a hard time disagreeing.
A hypothetical for you: A doctor has a patient who is a minor and is heavily depressed and suicidal. They have attempted to commit suicide in the past, and are still at high risk in the present. The doctor now learns that the minor's parents inflame this suicidal ideation by repeatedly making comments that the minor is trash, that they'd be better of without them, that the minor's death might solve a lot of problems. They leave sleeping pills open and in plain view on the kitchen table regularly. The doctor now faces a choice: does he intervene through some legal process in order to take parental authority away from these people to protect the minor (with the minor's approval), or does he stay silent and try to help the minor as best he can without changing the predicament?
You might say this hypothetical is hyperbolic and unrealistic. I agree. I bring it up only to poke at the fact that in certain circumstances, mental illnesses and their surrounding complications are more than enough to warrant considering revoking some or all parental rights.
Then the rest of this debate is moot. But you're proven so utterly and violently wrong by history that I have a hard time believing you've ever seriously considered the question if you think the State is a good guardian.
Have you met many children raised by the State? Or checked the
It was fine to believe Rousseau before the XXth century. I don't think it's fine anymore.
We have tried that world and discovered that the worst thing an individual can do to does not raise to the horrors that States can visit upon you in both scale and intensity.
Sure some weirdo can kidnap, rape, torture and eat you, and this stuff has been done at scale by institutions too. But is he really going to give you horrible diseases on purpose and keep you alive to study how you die?
Granted the far edge of evil is not necessarily instructive of your median expected treatment. But there is something to how different the incentives are when you're a relative versus a number on a spreadsheet. It's far easier to argue the human experience of the number doesn't matter, in the grand scheme of things.
Yes. I think they intellectually knew the risks but let their interest, curiosity and politics get in the way of their better judgement.
It is my belief that:
the American medical system is uniquely corrupt and ill conceived in that it demands large amounts of scrutiny for new drugs but waives much of this scrutiny for off label use
the psychiatric community at large has handled GD very poorly since constructivist arguments made is a political issue and overcorrected its terrible historical handling of homosexuality as LGB and T got put together in a political coalition
I don't think there is much to learn from this situation since it is a very clear cut case of abuse, which is of course one of the edge cases of parental authority we can all agree on, alongside drug use, wanton violence and the like.
Now let's alter it to make it actually interesting. Say there is no physical evidence of this abuse and you are getting all this from the minor, but you also know for a fact that the minor is mentally ill.
It's not so clear cut then is it?
I've been in the unfortunate position of having to care for people who are paranoid schizophrenics, and the amount of hallucinated lies I've been told is staggering. But then again some people do abuse their kids.
The issue isn't so much how that particular hypothetical could be resolved, but what a good general rule is for dealing with such problems at scale. And I find that despite its pitfalls, leaning on parental authority does provide the best results.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Your right, i forgot to include the priest telling some wild yarn about how the kids actually want it. Despite everything we know about kids not being able to consent to that. Good call. Now its perfect.
Do you actually not understand the difference or did you just want to get a cheap dig in?
Do you see all medical interventions in under-18's as 'grooming'? No? Just the one you already have a prior about not liking?
If I'm wrong please tell me how. There's a huge host of reasons why they are different, but I'm only going to bother explaining them if you're not going to respond with another sarcastic one liner that is indistinguishable from an inflamed partisan spouting nonsense about 'the transgenders grooming my kids to want to be raped'.
You are correct, I perceive no difference between children "consenting" to sex or "consenting" to sterilization.
I will repeat: do you think children can consent to surgery for appendicitis? treatment via antidepressants? Antibiotics?
I actually don't! I think without a parent involved in the decisions, malicious actors could convince a child to get any surgery or take any drugs. And sometimes even then!
So no, I do not believe a child can consent to any of those things, which is why parents make those decisions for them.
Right, but these 'malicious actors' could be anyone, even the parents themselves. I don't think parents should have a special right to make these decisions for their children if their interests are not aligned with their child's. I can't remember the exact details, but there was a news story a year or two ago about a couple whose child died because they refused to get a basic medical treatment for religious reasons.
In such a case, do you think the parents have the moral right to refuse treatment for the child? (I believe in the case I'm thinking of the child was a newborn, so the question of consent was obvious).
If you answer negatively to the above (as I do) then we switch from having a discussion about what is absolutely allowed or not allowed to one in which we must judge the pros and cons of taking away agency from parents depending on what the issue is.
I largely agree with you that children can be convinced of anything depending on the right context, but here is my main contention with your points: The key difference between a groomer targeting a child and a doctor performing a surgery is their interests; the latter is doing so based on what they believe to be in the best interests of the child based on medical/scientific literature, the former is doing so for personal reasons.
Malicious actors can convince children of things, but that does not mean any expert telling any child about a solution to their medical issues is grooming them. You might want a parent to sign off on antibiotics, but I hardly believe that if a doctor came up to a severely sick child and recommended they start antibiotics, you would label them as a groomer.
The groomer most likely believes that having sex with the child is mutually beneficial and while it serves his own interests, also serves the best interests of the child.
And in the case of trans surgeries, I can easily see the doctor as thinking the surgery is good for trans activism, as well as good for the child.
More options
Context Copy link
Every peer nation in the world has "done the science" and decided transitioning children leads to worse health outcomes. Except in the United States, where a 2 hour telehealth appointment gets you fast tracked, and schools staffed by hysterical activist will go behind parents backs.
I would rather parents have an iron clad right to exercise their own judgement with respect to their child's medical decisions, than let weird fads like electroshock, icepick lobotomies, methamphetamines or sterilization drugs get pushed on them because of "the science".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link