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They don't do calculus, but they clearly do judge differently intuitively in my experience. People are much more likely to forgive someone with motivations they judge to be good. Accidental harm and deliberate harm are treated differently through most of our legal systems as a reflection of that.
Even the legal system, which only criminalizes a minority of 'bad behavior,' commonly treats some cases of accidental harm as equivalent to deliberate harm. In most cases, committing a prohibited harmful behavior 'recklessly' is quite sufficient for a criminal conviction. ('Negligent' behavior isn't generally criminal, but can easily be tortious.)
Translating this intuition where crime is concerned back to the more general political arena, the assertion being made is that once a certain level of evidence is available that a particular policy set is net-harmful, continuing to pursue that policy set may be viewed as 'reckless,' and therefore justifiably equivalent to 'intentional.'
In this particular case, I'm convinced that WPATH's behavior is reckless at a minimum. It may be intentional, in some cases, but I think the distinction is splitting hairs at best; recklessness is enough to make it fully condemnable.
Sure, I am not claiming reckless or negligent behavior can't be bad or even criminal. But negligent homicide or manslaughter and the like are lesser crimes than first degree homicide for a reason.
And that is because it jibes with the general rough understanding that intent matters.
I'm not arguing it can't be bad, I'm arguing that all else being equal negligence or recklessness are seen to be not quite as bad as a planned intention.
That is what the people around me seem to believe, it's what I believe and I don't think its a coincidence that our criminal justice system operates the same way.
If you want to condemn WPATH as being bad, and reckless I think thats reasonable! But we don't consider reckless and intentional to be the same. I think that is apparent in pretty much all of society.
You should have known better may well land you in trouble (and should!) but did know better and still intentionally did it is worse.
It is entirely possible to commit murder recklessly--the classical term is "depraved heart murder." Your intuition does not match criminal law, which does generally put some forms of recklessness in the same category as intentional action. There are cases where a distinction is drawn between them, but those are exceptions (attempt; crimes with the specific element "did X with the intent to do Y;" etc.), and those exceptions are due to the particulars of those crimes, not their severity.
Recklessness is approximately defined as "knew that a significant risk of harm existed, took prohibited action despite the risk." It is distinct from negligence in that the negligent person was not consciously aware of the risk at the time, while the reckless person knew and disregarded.
Sure, possibly. But the rest of your argument doesn't automatically follow--if one may be executed for an intentional murder, and also executed for a reckless murder, does it matter that "recklessness [is] not quite as bad"? Just because you've shown a distinction does not mean you've shown a categorical difference.
I don't doubt that's what you and the people around you believe. It is not true that the criminal law agrees with you--again, the default rule in criminal law is that recklessness is an equally culpable mental state to intent.
Sure, possibly. But the rest of your argument doesn't automatically follow--
But that's my whole argument! You might well get the same punishment, it might well still be bad, but my entire argument with OP is that we see recklessness or negligence as being just as bad as intentional harm and I argued that did not appear to be true.
If you are conceding that, then that is the totality of my point. I don't have a further argument beyond that.
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I don't think this is true. Religious people don't treat cults and fanatics as "accidental harm". Progressives reframe harm caused by the excesses of their ideology as accidental, and my whole argument is that this is based on flawed reasoning.
Sure they do, in that they sympathize with the victims as being misled. Now of course what they see as a cult and what they see as a religion may vary from their own biases. But many of my Christian neighbors think Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons are a cult and think most of the people are being taken advantage of. See how they react to people trying to deny blood products to their kids that will kill them. We don't arrest them for attempted murder, we generally just override their decision. We clearly do in fact treat people differently where we think they are making bad choices for what they see as good reasons.
That doesn't mean we don't do anything, we have negligent homicide and the like for a reason. But we do not as a society see it as harmful as a direct planned harm.
Yeah, when the cult drives people towards self-destructive behavior. When it drives them to harm others, you see people's sympathy starting to wear thin.
And to the extent you're right you're only proving my point. This is a lot closer to how we treat real, actual, historical Nazis vs Nazism, and how I argue we should treat progressives vs. progressivism.
Yeah, it's almost like we have a taboo against imposing medical procedures without informed consent, and we only override it in extreme circumstances, let alone imprison people for refusing it. If you didn't go with one of the most milquetoast examples of a cult causing harm, it would become obvious how faulty this logic is.
So you agree that with informed consent then trans people should generally be allowed to have surgeries and we should only step in, in the most unusual situations? I'm confused by your position here.
Your own post pointed out the people writing WPATH were concerned about making sure their patients were aware of the risks and potential outcomes. Given that, then by your own logic above why are you worried about this at all? If the patient gives informed consent then no-one is imposing a medical procedure.
Well, the confusion seems to be that you're taking my point about not imposing a medical treatment on someone unwilling, and applying it to turning medicine into a free-for-all where anyone who asks for a particular treatment should get it. The former is how modern medicine is supposed to work in the West, and the latter very much is not. Otherwise we wouldn't have tons upon tons of regulations, licences, and various limits on who is allowed to do what in that field.
While I'm a bit anxious about turning medicine into a free-for-all, I'm not against it on principle. Even in cases like the trans issue, it would be a marked improvement over the status quo, where currently specialists lie to parents about the accuracy of diagnosis, negative effects of lack of treatment, the reversibility of the treatment, and where alternative treatments are sometimes banned as "conversion therapy".
In private. In public they work very hard to minimize the perception of those risks. Compare the videos I linked to, to the article from (WPATH member) Jack Turban, for example.
Other than what I mentioned above, that the concept is supposed to prevent unwanted treatment, rather than open the doors to any wanted treatment, the problem is that there is no informed consent, as admitted by WPATH itself.
Given that you completely dropped the argument about "good intentions" justifying different treatment of ideologies, and are now changing the subject, I take it you concede it?
Not at all, I don't think you were able to provide a good argument against it. Indeed you conceded it when you said those ideologies only got treated better when the outcome was self-destructive. Trans people wanting surgeries is (assuming you think it is destructive at all), self-destructive! Therefore my point was correct!
And it can't be that spreading the ideology counts as harming others because otherwise Jehovahs Witnesses who are famously aggressive about spreading their faith which then causes people to refuse life saving treatment would fall afoul of it.
So far your arguments seem to come from a place of disliking the trans movement then rationalizing why it is uniquely bad, when it simply does not seem much worse than things we do tolerate when it comes to self-determination, then tying your arguments in knots about it.
Your own post doesn't show there is no informed consent, it says specifically for children (only a subset of trans people!) Informed consent is hard because sometimes parents giving consent don't understand and sometimes kids don't understand. I agree thats a tough issue, but its one that happens in medicine all the time. Do you think young kids understand what death is, and it might happen because their parents are against blood transfusions or the like? Do the parents having been raised into a religion that teaches them weird things really have the ability to give informed consent?
And the answer is we basically shrug our shoulders and say yeah, close enough. And its only in the most dire circumstances where courts sometimes decide to override it. And I think thats reasonable for trans issues too. If going ahead is going to lead to death then sure override the parents and kids choices. Perfectly happy with that.
But we accept that people (or parents on behalf of their children) get to make risky decisions all the time. But it seems an isolated demand for rigor to require people to be (as the WPATH person themselves said would be ideal) "tiny endocrinologists" when we do not demand that for people going through even riskier treatments.
Hell the JW'S have a whole network of people whose job it is to convince the hospital and pressure the parents on behalf of the church to not use blood treatments. And we allow that in 99% of cases with no problem at all. When the outcome is a higher risk of death, we allow parents or patients to make stupid calls all the time, yet for trans issues all of a sudden, it's way too risky?
If the parents disagree then absolutely I am on board with restricting trans care. If the parents and kid are on board, well we don't intervene until their actions are about to cause a high risk of death in most cases (and sometimes not even then!) why should this issue be different?
Then in the future, don't change the topic without further comment, if you don't want to leave the impression you're conceding.
When applied to trans people requesting the surgeries, yes. When it's applied to gender-affirming doctors providing and promoting it, it becomes completely incorrect.
Yes. It's not just spreading the ideology, it's carrying out the actual procedure that is harmful. Also, Jehovah's Witnesses, for all their faults, stay away from other people's children.
False. There are massive qualitative differences between it, and the things we tolerate as self-determination, which you are ignoring.
You know full well this is irrelevant to the argument. I never explicitly argued against "gernder affirming" procedures for adults. I only argue about the scientific accuracy of how they're being sold, but if an adult wants to do it regardless I'm not against it. When it comes to adults, I only oppose the imposition of the trans worldview. The demands to affirm them as women, by allowing them access into female spaces, etc.
"And so I think the more we can normalize that it is okay to not get this right away, it is okay to have questions, the more we're going to actually do a real informed consent process. Then what I think has been currently happening and that I think is frankly, not what we need to be doing ethically."
Is not a statement of "informed consent is hard" it's a statement of admission to failure of getting real informed consent.
No.
Yes.
The funny thing here is that this logic justifies completely banning GAC. You've been trying to catch me on an inconsistency, but you're the only one with inconsistent views.
What gives you the idea that we do not demand it for other treatments? On what grounds are you claiming they're riskier? If you give a kid chemotherapy, and tell them "we're giving you poison hoping that it will kill the thing hurting you. You're going to feel bad for a while, but there's a good chance you will be healthy after that", they will have a far better understanding of the treatment than anything they give related to GAC. These kids are often too young to grasp the first thing about sex, and even when they do, their notion of long-term consequences is still completely warped. This is when parents are supposed to take over, but the ones that are skeptical are often being outright lied to.
Again, there's a massive difference between letting someone opt out of a treatment, and letting them opt in. We have mountains upon mountains of books of regulations preventing arbitrary opt-in for medicine. Why is transgender care supposed to be different?
You're the one advocating for treating it different
I notice none of this addresses the previous topic of the conversation. If you wanted to talk about the substance of my issues with transgender care, that's fine (I'm more interested in that than the ethical calculus applied to ideologies. But you started with the latter, and are moving on to the former, while leaving me with no conclusion. Please concede or come back.
They do not. They attempt to convert them. They even take their own kids along to help. As they attempt to convert adults as well. And if they convert them, then they will refuse blood products and risk death or greater harm than would otherwise befall them. If it is the spread of the trans ideology that is a problem, then JW's also fall afoul of it. Because they try to change you and your children into believing what they believe. That is why they come knocking at your door. Now of course they believe they are saving you. And if they are right, then them spending their time knocking on your door for the 1% chance you might believe them and convert is a great service to you and your children.
No, because i don't think you are understanding my position. If the evidence shows that GAC leads to an increased risk of death then I am perfectly happy for that choice to be overridden parental or not. I don't care enough about it, to be an advocate for it. I am not really for or against GAC, my position is that if the parents and child are all on board then that is up to them and not really my business. What I do care about is how it is used as a pinata when many of the arguments against it are also arguments against many things we do allow and this is conveniently ignored. So my position is not inconsistent, I am just against the perceived hypocrisy. We have established processes for how to deal with potential harm to kids where their parents are behind/ in agreement with it. We can just use those as necessary. Trans ideology is no worse than many others that we currently mostly ignore. That's what annoys me (well a bit, enough to post about it here, but not enough to actually do anything about it, because I don't actually care THAT much). If GAC is harmful then sure ban it, but then I want to be able to be taking a good look at all the other harmful things we allow parents to do, because there is no reason the trans issue should be the only one.
I also don't agree that opting into a treatment or out of one in this context is relevant. We allow parents to make many choices for their kids some of which increase harm by doing something (taking them white water rafting or hiking in the desert, or allowing them to drink enough sugar to float a battleship) and some where they increase harm by not doing something (not giving them blood, not allowing them surgery, turning down chemotherapy, not making them go outside and exercise). And in almost all of those cases we simply allow them to get on with it up to the point of a very serious risk of death (and even then intervention is spotty). And that is regardless of whether they have been influenced by their religion or their belief system in crystals or astrology or veganism or because they are unfamiliar with how risky certain things are. We give parents very broad autonomy to indoctrinate their children into what ever oddball belief system they like, but this is the one all of a sudden where we draw the line? It looks like blatant special pleading.
It does not matter if the parents or kid have been influenced by trans ideology, everyone is influenced by some ideology and it does not generally invalidate their decision making, whether we think their ideology is nonsense or not , and regardless of whether we think the people championing it are talking nonsense or not. This is again special pleading. If Bob and Linda want to tell Gene he can be a girl if he likes, then that is their business not mine. Just as it would be if they want Gene to be raised believing space aliens live in volcanos and how this will cripple his cognition for the rest of his life, or teach him God is always watching him masturbating so that he will have horrible guilt around sex. That is the deal. We all get to try and spread our ideologies then people can act on which ever one they believe.
Either I get to be involved in these decisions or I do not, I just dislike it when people are inconsistent about how much other people's kids belong to them. I am teaching my kids the truth, you are brainwashing your kids into a harmful ideology. Pick one or the other. Either I get to be involved before we are literally talking about kids about to die, or I don't.
Separately, if specific doctors are not explaining the procedures and potential outcomes such that patients/parents cannot give informed consent then those doctors should be subject to whatever local disciplinary measures they have. If they are, but are themselves just wrong about those outcomes then that is sad but again something we tolerate every day. This is not some new thing we just came up with. We already had this conversation as a society and decided the answer was, your kids, your choices, until you are literally about to kill them, then maybe we will stop you. Let's not open that can of worms because that truce is there for a reason.
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