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 -
On the first point, prison is already quite expensive. Even if a substantial number of prisoners would take advantage of this, it would probably make up less than 1% of the price of prison. And offering violent prisoners better conditions in exchange for castration actually seems like a good deal for everyone involved.
On the second, remember, crime doesn't pay, especially not random murder, so the average murderer is stupid, insane or emotionally disturbed (probably a combination, in fact). So he might be trying to game the system in a stupid way, or he might just be fucked up enough to believe it.
I notice that this reasoning could be used to justify almost any frivolous expense. "Let's give every inmate a PS5 when they're successfully paroled." "Why?" "Who cares? It'll make up less than 1% of the price of prison."
The difference between gender-affirming care and other prison expenses is that the taxpayer actually gets something back from most of the other costs associated with prisons. Most prison funding goes towards line items which will prevent convicts from escaping (walls, bars, COs), thereby protecting the taxpayer in the short-term; or which are designed to rehabilitate convicts, protecting the taxpayer in the long-term (education, shop classes, anger management training). Of course you can interrogate whether any given line item actually accomplishes its stated goal or passes a cost-benefit analysis (maybe if you're serving a life sentence without possibility of parole, any attempt at rehabilitation is a waste of time and resources, except to protect the COs and fellow inmates from you; maybe art classes to teach inmates how to get in touch with their inner child and express themselves visually actually increase recidivism rates, who knows?), but that's generally how they're justified.
Gender-affirming care for inmates meets neither criterion: it only "benefits" the inmate. At a push there's an ancillary benefit in that an inmate who undergoes a vaginoplasty can no longer rape taxpayers with the penis he no longer has, but not every inmate who requests gender-affirming care has a history of sexual violence: if Bob already was at zero risk of committing a sex crime after release and requests a vaginoplasty, we've just spent $75k of the taxpayer's money and gotten nothing back to show for it.
Perhaps a doctor will argue that the entire reason for the inmates' history of criminality or violent behaviour was unresolved distress due to their gender dysphoria, so providing them with gender-affirming care will actually have a rehabilitative effect in the long run. I haven't yet seen anyone try to justify the policy on those grounds, however.
I don't think we disagree as much as you think; I also care very little about making prisoner's life nicer. I'm not really in favor of this policy so much as thinking that among the crazy stupid stuff we're doing, this one is pretty low on my list of priorities, and might even have some unintended benefits.
This is what we disagree on, I guess. Testosterone is the primary driver of violence in general, not just of sexual nature. And castration is by far the most reliable way of reducing T-levels. Even historically it was regularly noted how tepid and submissive eunuchs tended to be; But you don't need to take their word for it, modern studies on this topic consistently find a very strong relationship between violence and T-levels as well. It's not super advertised since it leads to some conclusions that most people don't like thinking about, but in a field were many things don't replicate, this one does reliably.
On the other hand, consider this report (I've been linking to it a lot lately) which found no statistically significant differences in the rates of violent offending between males who had undergone gender reassignment surgery and the general male population.
This is quite interesting. I find no obvious problems with the design except the unavoidable (large CI, now randomisation, etc.), so it does move the needle quite a bit for me. The only possible issues I can see is that I'm not entirely convinced that criteria i) strictly requires an actual surgery to take place, that the large CI can still hold some surprises (0..3-2.1 ranges from "almost female-pattern criminality" to "holy shit even higher than male-pattern criminality") and the usual troubles with selection effects.
It's very weird that somehow FtMs have male-pattern criminality, while MtFs ... also have male-pattern criminality.
Is that true? I wasn't aware.
According to the paper the report is based on, yes. See there under "Results:Gender Differences".
Armchair hypothesis from someone with no medical training: FTMs who start taking testosterone will see a big spike in athletic ability (testosterone is essentially a PED in this context). Adult MTFs who start hormone therapy will see a reduction in athletic ability, but they've already gone through male puberty and the changes that it wrought on their bodies (bone density, lung capacity) are pretty much hard-coded, so even though they'll have reduced athletic ability, it'll still be a lot closer to the male average than the female. And if you were already a professional athlete prior to commencing hormone therapy (e.g. Lia Thomas) your athletic ability was already dramatically higher than the male average: all hormone therapy will do is reduce it to something approximating the male average (or maybe within one standard deviation below), which is still radically higher than the female average (or even many professional female athletes).
There could be a similar mechanism at play when it comes to violent criminality. Adult FTMs who start taking testosterone will see a spike in aggression and hence become more prone to violent criminality. When adult MTFs start hormone therapy, their testosterone levels will reduce and they will see reduced levels of aggression as a result, but their testosterone levels might still be within one standard deviation below the male mean. Indeed, if you were already an unusually aggressive/violent man prior to starting hormone therapy, it probably meant that your testosterone levels were unusually high, so starting a hormone therapy regimen might only have reduced your testosterone levels to the male average or something approximating it.
The end result is that FTMs on hormones have significantly higher rates of violent criminality than the female average (i.e. more similar to the male average) and MTFs have rates of violent criminality which are maybe marginally lower than the male average, but this cashes out as a rounding error for most intents and purposes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I didn't look at those numbers, but someone compiled some stats showing it's actually higher:
https://x.com/eyeslasho/status/1831735103082410239#m
Our own @ymeskhout wrote an article arguing that the stats on which this graph is based are being misinterpreted: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/contra-dolly-on-trans-criminality
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