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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29550 thread views

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.

I note that this is an empirical statement, not a normative one (like "adults have the right to modify their body however they please, and it's none of your damn business whether you think it's a good idea or not"). Hypothetically, if you were presented with persuasive evidence that the majority of trans women who fully medically transition later come to regret their decision, feel markedly less happy afterwards (according to, for example, a PHQ-9 or HAM-D survey), or feel that their quality of life has declined as a result of their transition - would that persuade you that trans ideology is a bad thing on net?

Well, keep in mind: I know thousands of trans women online. That's a lot of evidence that it is successful. So any study has to overcome my prior, and explain why there's a huge cluster of visibly-happy trans women, but I never meet any of these people who regret it. I'm the sort of trans woman who wanders onto The Motte and TERF forums and so forth, and I have yet to encounter any such cluster. (There's certainly a few, of course)

I'm also referring to actual studies when I say we feel happier, so you'd have to reconcile why the two studies disagreed.

But, yeah, if 10% of trans women regret it, I think we maybe need to tighten up the gates a little bit, or at least make that warning a LOT clearer within the community. If 50% regret it, I think I'd have to spend a few days seriously reconsidering my world view.

This is all assuming actual regret, too. Right now, "happiness" is a bit tricky to measure: Maybe someone gained 100 happiness points from transitioning, but lost 150 because now they're subject to a lot more bigotry. I think in that case, the right solution is to fix the cultural bigotry, not to block transition.

Just FYI, that was a literal hypothetical question. I'm not personally aware of any strong evidence that the majority of medically transitioned trans people eventually regret their decision, although the increase in subscriptions to /r/detrans over time suggests that the rejection rate is higher than the most outspoken trans activists would have me believe.

If 50% regret it, I think I'd have to spend a few days seriously reconsidering my world view.

It takes a great deal of intellectual integrity to acknowledge that and I commend you for doing so.

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