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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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The basic idea behind trans ideology is that sometimes you get a person, a trans woman, who is born as a guy. Despite this, they feel a strong desire to modify their body to have breasts and a vagina. When they modify their body in this way, they become much happier - it is one of the most successful medical interventions, on that axis.

Yes, and this is a body dysmorphia, like phantom limb syndrome.

It may well be that the best treatment for gender/sex dysphoria is some form of physical transition surgery. But, if you can acknowledge that that is what is going on here, the only thing we really might disagree on is where exactly that line is on various axes of treatment.

Tada! Nothing circular, and nothing referring to any sort of immutable biology.

Of course, you're no longer talking about anything like 'gender' as separate from sex. Trans women are natal males who are born with an intense desire to be female and vice versa. This desire can cause such serious stress that it becomes clinical and they must be treated in some way, possibly (and, honestly, probably, once the evidence base catches up) including surgical transition.

I'm totally aware that plenty of trans activists want to go beyond this, of course

Yes, and they're the people I have a problem with. At heart, they're communists or the useful idiots of communists and their whole ideology destroys everything it touches, intentionally.