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I feel like some of the "celebration paradox" could come down to nuance around what is considered to be a specific thing happening.
I could see something like:
In this case, Person A may either consider X' to be basically the same thing as X, and so feel like Person B is basically saying, "X is not happening, but it totally is and that's good."
I feel like a good instance of this would be:
I think part of the perception of Person A that Person B is basically saying "ROGD isn't a thing. Also it's happening and it's good", is likely due to the fact that what Person A is saying isn't their true objection. I suspect that most people raising concerns about ROGD specifically are actually concerned more generally about the rise in trans people, and are happy to go to fringe theories to justify that concern. But if ROGD had never been conceptualized, it would have been another fringe theory, since trans skepticism has to be skeptical of the "mainstream medical opinion" of organizations like the APA.
Basically, if you don't believe you can find the truth in the authorities, you are going to rely on fringe sources. You see the same thing happening in reverse with trans activists and the Cass Review.
But like, either X is happening/happened or it isn't. If I assert "for fear of being accused of being racist, multiple police departments in English towns independently decided not to investigate Pakistani grooming gangs for years", that is a factual statement which must be judged accordingly. Asserting that I'm only bringing it up to foment anti-immigration hysteria (or criticise Islam) has no bearing on the simple factual question of whether I'm describing events that really happened, or describing them accurately and fairly - even if I really am only bringing it up to foment anti-immigration hysteria. Transparent Bulverism. The fact that I may have ulterior motives/a hidden agenda for mentioning a factually true statement does not in any way undermine the truth of said statement.
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Uh, is ROGD fringe? I thought it was a topic which made pro-trans doctors uncomfortable but was documented as a thing.
It seems somewhere like autogynophilia. There's definitely people who suddenly have Revelations about their gender -- even in trans communities, 'cracking the egg' is a metaphor for a reason, and before the 2010s people with long histories of gender stuff realizing that it's even a category -- but just as AGP-as-a-theory is more than 'some trans people get off on dressing up at some point', ROGD-as-a-theory is more than 'some people become trans rapidly'.
Exactly what it is, well, that's harder to nail down: there's no ROGD-Blanchard or ROGD-Bailey, even pointed to literally Bailey gets you kinda vague mutterisms (about cults, because he's nothing if not unpersuasive). That people who come out as trans in younger generations tend to have a lot of other trans people in their social circles and either did not have or obfuscated a lot of gender stuff before identifying publicly as trans is pretty uncontroversial; that they're doing it because of those social circles is really hard to measure and the data is messy; that it's just a phase for a large portion and they'd be happier not transitioning or likely to detransition (which not all ROGD advocates are suggesting!) may not even be measurable in a perfect world.
I have no idea what point this comic is trying to make. Unrelatedly, I absolutely hate how this CAD-adjacent muck is the default art style for all Western webcomics. Cyanide and Happiness is unironically more expressive and aesthetically pleasing than this.
El Goonish Shive is a long (loooooong)-running transformation and especially gender-transformation comic. The character on the right has spent a little over a year in-universe and around twelve years real-world being declared Just That Girly and having access to a magical (well, alien magic science) transformation gun regularly used to change gender. This was a bit of a Genre in that era of the internet, complete with sometimes not-exactly-kosher-by-modern-progressive-standard jokes. Unlike most of that Genre, the same comic has continued mostly uninterrupted for the whole time.
The timeline for the comic is weird and kinda alternate universe, but it's probably set somewhere between 2005 and 2012, with a world mostly like ours, but where magic is weakly available. While there are a lot of other bigger questions that the availability of magic set up, though, that alien magic science transformation gun is a little unusual in-setting for having both extreme reliability, mass production, and having some real-world uses, without being especially dangerous in terms of side effects or weaponization. (The gun itself can make disguises, but a stripped down version that just changes primary and secondary gender traits can be produced in minutes.)
Which produces a problem because it's something the character basically never considered, even as the author was increasingly getting bombarded with questions about why he wasn't actively working toward it, because after the first decade of a gender transformation comic you tend to pick up a trans fanbase, and the comic as a whole was and remains pretty unusual for almost everybody being mostly sane, reasonable, and compassionate.
The explanation that people didn't realize that was a possibility handles at least part of that, albeit by making the question suddenly relevant. And, indeed, the author didn't know, back in 2003 (cw: bad art).
((The character on the left is a lab experiment who escaped after a superpowered nutjob who may or may not have been a competing test subject took over the lab, but there's plot reasons she has surface-level familiarity with the topic.))
Ok, but I'm even more confused now than I was before.
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IIRC, ROGD was coined as a sort of proposed explanation to the sudden massive increase to people claiming to be trans. With this, a study was conducted interviewing parents who believed their children had suddenly come out. Liberals proposed alternate explanations for the observations - the children may not have told their parents until recently, and the study may have recruited participants who were anti-trans to begin with. This, to progressives, means that the study has been "debunked." In addition, the study was pulled for not getting the correct disclosure - it asked if they were okay with publicly using their name, but not if they were okay with using their name in a study. This incredible distinction of course meant the study was completely unethical.
The study was never meant to conclusively prove ROGD was real, simply that it might be worth studying. Of course, no one really attempted to follow up.
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Take it with a grain of salt, but the Wikipedia article for ROGD currently opens:
Which at least seems like a decent indicator that ROGD is currently considered a fringe position, since once the dust is settled most Wikipedia articles tend towards whatever is considered "mainstream" opinion of experts over time.
Doesn't mean that ROGD isn't true, just that it is considered fringe.
On the transgender issue in particular, Wikipedia seems fully ideologically captured by radical trans activists. On the article about women, the third sentence explains that women are only "typically" of the female sex (meaning at least some women are not female), and the fourth paragraph is entirely about trans women.
I actually think the Wikipedia page on women walks a fair line on the topic. The very first sentence uses "adult female human" as its core definition, and the second paragraph starts:
I don't view the use of the word "typically" here the way you do. I think it is an appropriate amount of nuance for a reference work, since it makes room for discussion of intersex women. Now, I acknowledge that there's various decisions about how and when to include references to atypical examples in an encyclopedia, but I maintain that including mention of intersex women somewhere in the article about women is appropriate. Given the article's sections:
I could see the argument for keeping discussion of intersex women to the biology section, and creating a subsection for trans women under Culture and gender roles or something. But I don't really think that the Wikipedia article on the whole screams "captured by trans activists" to me.
Does it whisper?
Does it wink?
Is it, in fact, captured, silently or with thunderous pronouncement?
The whole point of Reliable Sources is that they provide plausible deniability to smuggle your assumptions into the article, then engage in bureaucratic warfare to keep it that way.
Considered fringe by who, and whose sources?
I don't think ROGD is fringe at all, and I don't trust Wikipedia when they say it is. I think it's an obvious explanation for some very baffling behavior, but that explanation isn't allowed on Wikipedia.
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Gonna have to disagree with you. While you're correct that the article is right to acknowledge the existence of intersex women, the language around trans women screams ideological capture to me, such as the use of the phrase "assigned male at birth". Sex is not "assigned". A male baby born in an unsupervised natural birth in which the mother (excuse me, "birthing person") dies in childbirth without ever laying eyes on her child remains male, in spite of the fact that no sex was ever "assigned" to him by anyone. Humans are not subject to Schrödinger's chromosomes, both male and female until directly observed, and it takes a remarkable level of Butlerian solipsism to even consider the possibility.
This demonstrates the motte-and-bailey fallacy at the heart of the trans movement. They insist that they're not trying to collapse the distinction between male and female people, of course they recognise that sex exists, they're just arguing that something called gender identity also exists. But if that's the case, why are they so keen to insist that males are not "male" but simply "assigned male at birth"? Is "this baby is male" not a factually and uncontroversially true statement about a baby born with a penis, Y chromosome etc.? Why are you trying to water this definition down by using language that implies a mistake was made somewhere?
I believe that was originally a term used for intersex people; the transgender activists appropriated it.
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That’s only true if by “fringe” you mean “politically unpopular with the left.” Wikipedia is notorious for its leftward bias on politically sensitive topics. You can generally trust Wikipedia on non-CW topics, but certainly not on a subject as controversial as transgenderism.
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I think what usually happens is Motte and Bailey shenanigans where this is the Motte, and the Bailey is split among "people who think X is happening are insane conspiracy theorists" and "X'' is good (where X'' is superficially distinct from X to enable this argument but similar enough that people would object to it for the exact same reasons)"
The sane reasonable people honestly endorse the Motte and have good arguments for why it makes sense, and then they side themselves with and defend the Bailey people who aren't actually endorsing the same principle, and the Bailey people obfuscate and point to whichever snippets of Motte argument made by other people support their current argument.
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I don't see how this can explain it at all. "Adding context" is one of the most common deboonking tactics employed by progressive fact-checkers, and other discourse-participators. If they could take an anti-trans statement, and explain how it's all an oversimplification stemming from ignorance and bigotry, and how a pro-trans statement is the thing that thoughtful and educated people should believe, Vox, Snopes, etc. would be off to the races. What I've seen instead in this conversation is blanket denial and trying to smear the reputation of opponents. Any attempt at a nuanced explanation only comes after the blanket denials have been issues, and the evidence to the contrary becomes undeniable.
If you're going to question someone's motives, you should do so directly, rather playing the "it's not happening, and it's a good thing that it is" game.
First of all, this part is a bit confusing, what does it have to do with this "celebration parallax"? Secondly, I'm pretty damn contrarian / anti-authority, and even I wouldn't say that I "don't believe you can find the truth in the authorities", rather I don't believe authority determines truth. Finally, I don't see the symmetry here. When you brought the trans community's criticism of the Cass Review, saying it unfairly rejected studies by insisting on an impossible to meet double-blind RCT standard, we didn't do the "it's not happening, and it's a good thing that it is" bit, we just said "it's not happening" and sent you the evidence.
Right, I agree. Authoritativeness-fringeness is orthogonal to truthfulness. Fringe things sometimes turn out to be true, authoritative things sometimes turn out to be false. Continental drift was a fringe theory until it wasn't.
My larger point was more about what people tend to do when they feel like what the authorities are saying doesn't make sense, and decide to do their own independent investigation. Existing fringe theories form a Schelling point for the people rejecting authorities on a particular point, since it is often hard to build original theories and syntheses of one's own. As an example, I've always found Blanchard's typology incomplete and inadequate. It's not that I think autogynephilic and "homosexual" transsexuals don't exist, but that I'm fairly certain there are at least one or two other categories that exist as well (especially in the modern queer community.) People who believe in Blanchard's typology as a complete explanation of transness often remind me of Karl Popper's criticism of Adlerian psychoanalysis:
I could easily replace the references to Adlerian constructs with reference to "AGP." Heck, we even have /u/KMC doing it in this very thread. I don't know how people who have never met the person under discussion, have never tried to get to know their thoughts or why they transitioned are so sure that they know the person masturbates in women's clothing. It feels like AGP-totalizers take advantage of the fact that there will usually be silence about a person's sex life due to social mores, and fill in the gap with whatever best fits their preconceptions.
I'm fairly willing to accept that some number of "trans" people are AGPs who lie to fit the most acceptable societal narrative, but I'm less willing to assume that literally every trans person who transitions later in life is one of them. Especially because, for every seeming confirmation of AGP online when people are speaking candidly, there is always a chorus of people saying, "Eh, I've considered the AGP and HSTS hypotheses, and I think I've actually transitioned for reason X", where X is something completely plausible as a component of human psychology and desire.
I pretty much agree about Blanchard. To the extent I talk about it, it's mostly the mirror image of your objection - I keep hearing how it's discredited, pseudoscientific, and whatnot, while the most I could see in any substantial criticism is that it's incomplete. If incompleteness is the objection from the start, I have no issues with it.
But I still don't see your broader point. I could quibble with your interpretation of the examples you gave - I don't think ROGD was a preexisting fringe theory, rather it's an academic formalization of an already existing idea. When a 12 year old declares they're trans and want to go on hormones, thoughts like "are the friends you're hanging out with putting some goofy ideas in your head?" are the most intuitive and natural to pop into a parents' heads, no one needed Littman for that. In fact, the entire criticism of her study boils down to her recruiting from mommy forums where these conversations where already taking place, thus biasing her sample.
I could also question the idea that what you're describing is descriptive only / mostly of people rejecting authority. In my opinion the mainstream authorities also rely on fringe theories as a schelling point in exactly the way you described. You might protest that how can a theory be both fringe and endorsed by mainstream authorities? To which I'd point out that the majority of the world still thinks the whole "gender identity" theory is academic gobbledygook, and a basic question about definitions, even from a meathead like Matt Walsh, can reduce said mainstream authorities to a blubbering mess.
But more importantly I don't see the point of your argument at all. What are the consequences on the conversation if you're correct vs. if you're wrong? I don't see what relevant conclusion I can draw in either case, but maybe I'm missing something.
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