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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30019 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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The New York Times just published an article on a trans study not being published for ideological reasons (Archive)

U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says

The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care.

Has anyone else noticed a clear "vibe shift" on trans issues recently? It would have been unimaginable for this article to be published in the New York Times just a few years ago, but now, it just seems like part of an overall trend away from trans ideologues.

I'm am curious where this trend continues. Is it going to go all the way? Will trans issues be seen as the weird 2010s, early 2020s political project that had ardent supporters, but eventually withered away and died like the desegregation bussing movement? Or will it just settle into a more moderate position of never using any medication on children, but allowing adults to do whatever? Or maybe it is just a temporary setback and the ideologues will eventually win out?

Also of note, trans issues are coming to SCOTUS again. The issue presented is

Issue: Whether Tennessee Senate Bill 1, which prohibits all medical treatments intended to allow “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or to treat “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity,” violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

I recommend reading Alabama's amicus curiae brief for an in depth critique of WPATH. SCOTUS is set to hear oral arguments on this case on the 4th of December, so this is lining up to be an interesting oral argument to listen to. SCOTUS usually releases the big controversial cases at the end of their term, so the opinion on this case will probably be released in the summer of '25.

Will trans issues be seen as the weird 2010s, early 2020s political project that had ardent supporters, but eventually withered away and died like the desegregation bussing movement?

As a non-American, can you please explain that example? Was it the bussing part that got unceremoniously dropped, or the desegregation part, or both?

In the late 20th century there was a project to bus kids from majority minority schools to majority white ones. This did not go well, so it got dropped.

from majority minority schools to majority white ones

I see. Did it also take place the other way around?

So school desegregation was a big project of the 50s and 60s. But because kids attend local schools, and neighborhoods were segregated, lots of schools are pretty segregated without segregation.

So there was brief effort to live up to ideals and force schoolbuses to cross neighborhood lines. This was wildly unpopular, a bad idea, and ultimately binned.

Although not before causing sudden, massive and irreversible white flight in almost every jurisdiction where it has been used.

The Boston, MA public schools are less than 15% white now, as opposed to (IIRC) 80% in 1974 when busing began.

And Prince Georges County, MD: 79% white in 1971-72 school year, one year prior to busing.

3.9% white in 2021.

The bussing part.

I see. So I've read the other replies and I wonder in what way desegregation even remained as a policy after that. Is it basically just a case of politicians and officials paying lip service to an ideal, or are there tangible measures in place?

It remains insofar as you can't have an explicitly segregated school any more. If some non-white families happen to move into a previously all-white school district, their kids are going to that previously all-white school.

The bussing got dropped. No one seriously talks about sending busses of white kids to 99% or 100% black school districts miles away, or sending busses of black kids to 99% or 100% white school districts miles away anymore. People still occasionally talk about modern de facto school segregation, it's legacy, and how it still exists because of where people of different races live (according to them), but no one seriously suggests bussing as a solution anymore. Now, it's only ever brought up as a "look how horrible conservatives were to have racist protests against these busses of black kids!" example, but without actually defending or even really talking about the policy details of it.

So first the FBI was hiding homicide data; and now we see scientists hiding data to advance a trans agenda.

This basically reinforces the rights argument that you can’t really trust institutional data anymore, you’re better off relying on lived experience for any topic that is politically fraught

As far as I can tell, progressives have basically two playbooks for playing off their losses- pretend it was someone else’s idea, and pretend the idea never happened. Kinda hard to blame trans on conservatives.

The alternative is what happened with integration bussing, slowly stop fervently supporting it after it's clear it is a dumb idea, but never relent on criticizing conservatives for opposing that policy nonetheless. If you search for school bussing, there is very little talk defending the actual policy or responding to conservative policy critiques, but plenty of talk about how conservatives opposed it for racist reasons or that conservatives were outrageous in racist protests near schools.

Has anyone else noticed a clear "vibe shift" on trans issues recently?

I think Trans issues have been the 'high water mark' for Social Justice, and the tide may not be receding but people are not going to let this particular dam actually break. It feels like we're in a 'bargaining' stage where we are trying figure out how to slot Trans people into society in a way that doesn't reject their existence but also doesn't sacrifice, e.g. women's sports, childrens' puberty, and Religious freedom in the process.

JK Rowling probably deserves some sort of credit for giving otherwise progressive women a rallying point on this matter that doesn't require directly cooperating with the right.

Is it going to go all the way? Will trans issues be seen as the weird 2010s, early 2020s political project that had ardent supporters, but eventually withered away and died like the desegregation bussing movement?

I've made this point before. There was a time when State-Enforced eugenics was a progressive policy goal. (that thread was on the same topic as this one, funny enough)

THAT got completely abandoned. Alcohol Prohibition was also a progressive goal too (crossover with evangelicals, though). I bet the 'healthy at any size' movement goes the same way now that Ozempic is making it much easier to not be obese.

When progressives fail in their goals, they don't admit defeat. They write it off, avoid mentioning it again and may even pretend it was never their idea... unless they hold onto it and try to bring it up again later on. When they win, they just write the history to make it seem inevitable.

So to me, the question becomes, if they 'lose' now, will they try again in 10 years? Or is this project be utterly abandoned.

I think the main factor was that normie-friendly lipstick feminism gained a lot of traction at the expense of other liberal tendencies for various reasons. Eugenics in practice necessarily entails a certain level of limitation put on women’s sexual autonomy. Whether you’re giving incentives to desirable people to breed or to undesirable people not to breed, you’re in effect curbing women’s sexual choices one way or another. To mainstream feminists, that’s a no-no. You can’t do that, because it’s bad. So either eugenics or lipstick feminism had to be expelled from under the roof of liberalism.

Eugenics in practice necessarily entails a certain level of limitation put on women’s sexual autonomy.

Progressives have absolutely no issue shaming women for pairing up with the wrong kind of guy. The bigger problem right now is that eugenics in practice would require that they'd shame women for pairing up with people in their client classes. The moment surrogacy or other forms of industrial reproduction become viable, they'll happily return to eugenics.

THAT got completely abandoned.

I'll dispute this point, because if a number of my acquaintances at Caltech were any indication, for some it was not so much "abandoned" as "rebranded." The usual argument went something like: "eugenics" is a discredited pseudo-science; they had bad ideas as to which traits are "good" or "bad," and little understanding of what is or isn't genetic — they hadn't even decoded DNA yet! So when we, with all our improved knowledge, begin improving the gene pool, and removing negative traits (like whatever brain defects cause people to believe in talking snakes, private gun ownership, and voting Republican), it will be genuinely scientific, not pseudoscience, and thus, by definition, not "eugenics."

So to me, the question becomes, if they 'lose' now, will they try again in 10 years?

My guess is probably. These sorts of reversals are almost always temporary. "Cthulhu swims slowly…" and all that.

This is pretty weak. At least progressives engage with our actual opinions, even if I may think that "making sure babies are born without serious congenital defects that lead to major abnormalities is ableism and therefore evil" is insane. The arguably most radical wing is the IQ-boost-to-the-moon crowd, of which I know a few personally, and none of them have ever mentioned caring about religiousness, gun ownership, or republicans. Hell, I'm pretty sure that a decent chunk of them already vote republican, and the others are if anything much more tolerant on politics than the average academic.

Eh this seems like a hysterical bubble. I highly doubt most progressives actually think this way.

When progressives fail in their goals, they don't admit defeat. They write it off, avoid mentioning it again and may even pretend it was never their idea... unless they hold onto it and try to bring it up again later on. When they win, they just write the history to make it seem inevitable.

This seems to be what would happen by default for any long-lived political movement that is actually winning enough that the losses on objectives that don't get dismissed in the churn can be written off as an exception in the style of "unless they hold onto it and try to bring it up again later on". Do modern Christians admit the end of witch trials as a defeat? What about Mormons and polygamy? Outside of an edgy fringe, are US conservatives admitting defeat on their erstwhile goal of preventing women's suffrage?

I don't quite understand what would even be the intended purpose of getting progressives to own alcohol prohibition and eugenics and "admit defeat" on those goals.

  • Are you suggesting that they still secretly believe in those goals, and just don't want to say them out loud in order to not reveal that they stand for unpopular and discredited ideas? (That would be a bold claim.)
  • Are you hoping for them to have an epiphany that the progressive hivemind previously ordered them to fight for things that they now know were bad, and realise that this might be happening again? (Useless without persuading them that they themselves and past progressives actually took marching orders from a progressive hivemind, as opposed to fighting for what they themselves believe to be right.)
  • Is it just a base desire to associate your outgroup with losing in order to lower their status? (On brand for politics, but off brand for what this forum strives to be.)

Do modern Christians admit the end of witch trials as a defeat?

My trad-cath friend kind of does, in that he believes quite firmly that there were genuine witches at Salem, and that Tituba at the very least had a literal pact with Satan.

What about Mormons and polygamy?

The FLDS come to mind.

My trad-cath friend kind of does, in that he believes quite firmly that there were genuine witches at Salem, and that Tituba at the very least had a literal pact with Satan.

For the record, so does Arthur Miller, explicitly according to the editorial material in the version of The Crucible I read in GCSE English, and in my view implicitly in the text. Both the witches and the witch-hunters thought (incorrectly in that timeline) that witchcraft was effective.

The point made by The Crucible is that both Hathorne-Danforth and Senator Joe McCarthy moved rapidly from using witchhunting to suppress actual witchcraft (which Miller thought was mostly harmless, but the Venona transcripts make clear was effective in our timeline) to using witchhunting to attack their political opponents, and then to using witchhunting to settle their supporters' personal beefs.

Do modern Christians admit the end of witch trials as a defeat? What about Mormons and polygamy? Outside of an edgy fringe, are US conservatives admitting defeat on their erstwhile goal of preventing women's suffrage?

No, but keeping these failures in the popular consciousness and closely-tied to the respective ideologies plays a major part in stripping them of moral authority and discrediting their challenges to the moral narrative of liberalism.

I don't quite understand what would even be the intended purpose of getting progressives to own alcohol prohibition and eugenics and "admit defeat" on those goals.

To knock them off their moral pedestal and assumption that their moral instincts will always result in "justice" and people who have different instincts are necessarily evil.

Are you hoping for them to have an epiphany that the progressive hivemind previously ordered them to fight for things that they now know were bad, and realise that this might be happening again?

I wish progressives would internalize this. I know most won't, but we'd all be better off if they did.

I that does happen, except that the people it happens to are no longer progressives. I think a plurality of people on this forum are ex-progressives, for example.

Guilty as charged. I was excitedly a progressive when I moved to Seattle 12 years ago and moving there to be at one of the epicenters was cool. I even donated to Bernie... It turns out that living in a city that is so one-sided in beliefs as well as politics was a real eye-opener. The backlash from when Trump was first elected and doing nothing but just about literally doing the opposite of whatever Trump was for was maddening. You could almost see people ignore their own underlying beliefs to show to their neighbors they aren't Trump supporters.

I left Seattle five years ago as a conservative and moved to a rural outskirt of Nashville. I was equally excited to move this last time.

Are you hoping for them to have an epiphany that the progressive hivemind previously ordered them to fight for things that they now know were bad, and realise that this might be happening again? (Useless without persuading them that they themselves and past progressives actually took marching orders from a progressive hivemind, as opposed to fighting for what they themselves believe to be right.)

Genuinely having good faith belief that XYZ is right and then fighting for XYZ is how someone takes orders from a hivemind, though, whether that be progressive or conservative or any other ideology or way of thinking. And this, to me, is the sticking point of the issue I have as a progressive with the movement that's called progressive; the point of progressivism is progress, which means moving forward, not just moving in some direction and then declaring the direction as forward. In order to do the former instead of doing the latter while honestly but mistakenly believing that it's the former requires actually acknowledging this risk and finding ways to mitigate the risk. A risk which can never be reduced to zero or even all that close to zero, but which can still be reduced through things like empiricism and discourse.

As you say, though, this is useless unless progressives are convinced that they actually took orders from a progressive hivemind, or at least acknowledge the very real risk that that they are taking such orders, which seems about as likely as a snowball's chance in hell right now. The fact that this is the state of things seems pretty insane to me, akin to a world in which, say, Muslims can't be convinced that there is only one god who is called Allah or Christians can't be convinced that Jesus Christ is the son of God and died for our sins.

the point of progressivism is progress, which means moving forward, not just moving in some direction and then declaring the direction as forward.

You seem like as good a person to ask as any, and I've been wanting to for a long time: What is the pole star here? What is the point upon which principles should converge? I have my opinions as an outsider, but I'd love to know how the matter occurs to you.

Presumably there should be some consistency in the notion of 'forward'. What is the end goal which, if moved toward, tells you that the motion is progressive rather than lateral or regressive?

I wish I had a simple answer, but I think there isn't a pole star to follow other than the vague notions of making things "better" in some real sense by increasing prosperity and reducing suffering for each and every individual. One obvious problem there is that these things are highly idiosyncratic and difficult to measure, but I think e.g. getting rid of anti-sodomy laws or making gay marriage a thing helps to achieve that better by benefiting gay people, or having progressive taxes and welfare and socialized health care helps to achieve that better by benefiting poor people. I think stuff like "equality" or "freedom" are decent enough slogans for supporting bringing up people who were considered lesser than others or who were granted fewer rights than others, but only exist as end goals in some far flung future where we have so much prosperity that each individual is equally free to create a literal heaven in reality for themselves. In the here and now, I think the immediate goals include figuring out which of existing systems can be dismantled for easy gains (I think treating individuals on the basis of group identity is one such system that needs dismantling, which is where I diverge greatly from the modern progressive movement), or figuring out how to maintain economic growth so as both to uplift the poorest of us and to bring about that scifi post-scarcity future, or figuring out how better to advance knowledge so that we can build the tech needed to free us from our physical constraints (this, too, is where I disagree heavily with modern progressivism, as they seem all too happy to play-act at knowledge generation through a cargo cult of academics).

From a high level view, perhaps you can say that the goal is bootstrap our way into figuring out what the metaphorical pole star is, since we've been forced to contend with the reality that the pole stars that our civilization used to follow - and still follow to a great extent - were merely mirages that happened to be useful in certain contexts but also greatly harmful in certain others.

I've also said before that a progressive is someone who read Brave New World by Huxley and thought, "Hey, this seems like a pretty cool society to live in" like I did, and I think that's generally true, though that specific world probably isn't a realistic end state goal.

Well, thank you for the thoughtful reply. We disagree on many things but inasmuch as I wasn't asking to argue with you about it, I won't.

The goal of progress is equality. True, absolute equality, not just de jure equality before the law but to stand alone before the state on the same terms as one stands alone before God.

That metaphor is not a coincidence: progressivism is thoroughly Protestant in its view of liberalism. Liberal conservatism tends to have a more Catholic view wherein intermediating institutions are a good way, perhaps the best way, to interface with the state.

To this end, progressivism tends to be quite hostile to intermediating institutions because the goal is to produce denuded and atomized individuals so that equality before the leviathan is the only option; the prayers of the saints cannot protect you so they shouldn't be allowed. And, due to the impossibility of this aim, perpetual revolution is the only way to maintain progress because asymptotic rest states are an inherently unstable equilibrium- if you aren't going forwards, you're going backwards. There's a quote in De Maistre, 'the counter revolution is not the revolution against but the opposite of the revolution' not running the revolution results in corporatism- the human norm- which undermines majestic equality before the leviathan.

See I'd take it farther and suggest that progressivism -- the flattening of all hierarchies -- is literally just Satanism dressed up in nice intentions. This is also why pride is such a key component. Pride being the sin of Satan, who decided that he could do just as well as his own God rather than submitting to God himself who dares say that actually some things are better and higher than others, and that rightness, beauty, goodness, happiness etc. are found embracing one's role and proper place.

In my church we teach that demons have no hierarchy because hierarchy is orderly and points to God. With this in mind the connections are obvious. And yes, the desire to replace God with the state is paramount, even when the state is transparently prone to possession by evil powers and principalities.

But I'm interested in the response of the person I asked.

Do modern Christians admit the end of witch trials as a defeat?

I think that its clearly taught that way across society? Like, the general consensus is that it was at best a case of social hysteria and at worst a church-sanctioned terror campaign. There are a some well-known novels and plays on this topic.

Indeed, using a clear example of where Progressives 'won' and Conservatives lost, desegregation of schools is a topic I think almost all conservatives will 'accept' defeat on and aren't trying to bring back at any level.

Like, my point is that Progressives 'win' mainly because they do have narrative control, and that narrative control allows them to actually write the widely believed account of history. So when they claim they're on 'the right side of history' or they argue that the conservatives are just trying to stop inevitable progress, what they're really basing that on is "we'll either turn out to be right and will write the story of our victory, or if we're wrong we write it off so you won't get credit for stopping us."

I'd like them to temper their ambition with the knowledge that maybe they could possibly be WRONG about something and every time they 'win' it isn't necessarily going to make things better.

Like, my point is that Progressives 'win' mainly because they do have narrative control, and that narrative control allows them to actually write the widely believed account of history

"progressives" (and their alternative, "reactionaries") don't really exist. "Progressive" is really just the label used to describe the people with narrative control. If progressives ever lose in a more than temporary fashion, in short order they will be the ones harkening back to an idealized past while the former "reactionaries" will style themselves as the faction pushing ahead towards a glorious future.

"Accelerationists" and "conservatives" actually exist (relative to each other) but they can be anywhere on the political spectrum. It's just, "fast, reckless change" versus "slow, measured" change.

Well, the dodge that seems to be pretty universally used in both secular and Christian circles is that most of the people burned as witches were not in fact actual practitioners of black magic knowingly and intentionally in league with Satan. They were just innocent randoms convicted on sketchy evidence. This allows Christians to avoid thinking about whether burning people alive for heresy is justified, and it allows secularists to avoid having to support people who are engaging in human sacrifice in an attempt to hex and curse innocent third parties.

Has anyone else noticed a clear "vibe shift" on trans issues recently?

Funny you ask, I noticed something a year and a half ago.

I'm am curious where this trend continues. Is it going to go all the way? Will trans issues be seen as the weird 2010s, early 2020s political project that had ardent supporters, but eventually withered away and died like the desegregation bussing movement?

A question that intruiges me as well. My guess is that that it will be entirely forgotten the same way that the pedo rights movement of the 70's was. Sure every once in a while someone will dig out some receipts, and it will be seen as that weird thing that apparently happened in the past, but it will not be something pinnable on the progressive movement

The New York Times just published an article on a trans study not being published for ideological reasons

According to the brief you mentioned, WPATH is sitting on like a dozen of those. I posted about it too.

Thanks for the links to your posts. I was trying to find previous discussions on this, but I must have missed this. Off topic a bit, but I'd love to be able search for something like "top level comments, in the culture war thread, with these keywords". Top level comments in the culture war thread are very similar to new posts with the discussion they generate, so there should probably be a way to search for them like you can specifically search for posts (or maybe not given the intentional rule of sort-by-new so people are forced to skim past topic they aren't normally interested in).

Thanks for the links to your posts

Thanks for making this top-level post, I have to rate-limit myself, or this place would become a TERF twitter feed!

so there should probably be a way to search for them like you can specifically search for posts

Every once in a while I promise myself I'll start helping out with the code and add a few features like that for the benefit of users and mods, but I can barely find time to work on the projects I do for fun, so...

Anyway I don't mind people coming to similar thoughts to mine (quite the contrary), just couldn't resist the opportunity to say how I was doing this before it was cool.

A question that intruiges me as well. My guess is that that it will be entirely forgotten the same way that the pedo rights movement of the 70's was. Sure every once in a whole someone will dig out some receipts, and it will be seen as that weird thing that apparently happened in the past, but it will not be something pinnable on the progressive movement

I wonder about this. Unlike the 70s or any time before the 21st century, the dialogue and commentary around this is largely done on the internet, which is very easily accessible. Memory holing something that can be looked up with a single click of a hyperlink on your phone is harder than doing so for something you'd have to look up old newspapers or journals in a library.

Yet it certainly seems doable. Stuff like the Internet Archive can be attacked and taken down or perhaps captured, thus removing credible sources of past online publications. People could also fake past publications in a way to hid the real ones through obscurity. Those would require actual intentional effort, but the level of effort required will likely keep going down due to technological advancements. More than anything, human nature to be lazy and ambivalent about things that don't directly affect them in the moment seems likely to make it easy to make people forget.

I wonder how much people in the 20th century and before were saying "We're on the right side of history" as much as people have been in the past 15 years. Again, people saying that has never been as well recorded as it has now. It'd be interesting to see in the 22nd century and later some sort of study on all instances of people saying "this ideology is on the right side of history" and seeing how those ideologies ended up a century later.

Suppression of undesired facts is entirely possible without Minitrue-style erasure and rewriting. It can be done pretty much as effectively with but a single word:

"Ew."

If it's common knowledge that anyone who'd even begin to question the default narrative is Gross, Icky, and Super-Low-Status, then people won't listen to challengers no matter how much evidence they bring. (In fact, bringing more evidence just makes it worse, because that "proves what obsessed sickos they are.")

Not to put too fine a point on it, but isn't this is how "HBD" is handled? The awful IQ statistics are still out there, neither erased nor rewritten, but to even wonder if they might exist and show anything contrary to the default narrative is to be declared racist, deserving exile.

While this doesn't perfectly erase anything, it does ensure that any dissent on the matter is scoured out of polite society and limited to - well - thrice-banished communities like this one. Probably it's less risky to use sheer social force like this than to attempt an outright cover-up and risk being caught in the act.

I know this method works, at least for a time, because it worked on me. I did not look into HBD deliberately and I still have an aversion to looking in detail lest I be an "obsessed sicko." I can only wonder how many other things I avoid without realizing it.

Memory holing something that can be looked up with a single click of a hyperlink on your phone is harder than doing so for something you'd have to look up old newspapers or journals in a library.

The persistency of the Internet is somewhat overrated to begin with. My goto example is usually this compilation of epidemiologists saying Covid is no big deal.

But aside from that, it's not a question of accessibility, it's a question of who cares. In the linked thread I gave an example of a similar episode in medicine, where scientists were selling the idea of solving personal and social issues with brain surgery. The academic papers are there, the newspaper articles are there, the bestselling books and Hollywood adaptations are there... it's all just collecting dust, all these people are long dead, nobody cares.

Without a constant drumbeat of how we must Never Forget, this will be the fate of any atrocity.

Wouldn't the obvious stance be "we aren't the progressives of the past?" Residential schools have plenty of evidence towards their existence in Canada, and were certainly pushed by what would've been a progressive mindset back in the day.

I think by their very nature, conservatives are more tied to the past of their movement than progressives are. I don't think it'd be memory holed - it would simply be treated as "how awful that society did this - good thing we are making progress to change the horrors of the past"

Yup. There is some irony there considering how in vogue collective responsibility is right now for those with a progressive proclivity. Progressives in 20 years will feel no responsibility for a tired, irrelevant movement of yesteryear that, thankfully, didn't succeed. If it plays out that way. People's hearts were in the right place, after all. Until we grow enough time that we can well and truly consider the past as ignorant and backwards as any other.

It's not necessary to scrub the Internet Archive. Unless we get the really bad ending.

Let society make history. Irrelevant, old, and forgotten. The progressive drive and impulse maintains direct connection, but the cause of day in the future won't be directly related. Except maybe transhumanist stuff. It is not as if we can't go read Days of Rage today. Perhaps if conservatives take the cultural reins they can bring up the historical excesses of progressivism more frequently. There will be no introspection at scale and nobody should expect any-- and that is the good ending.

Learning from history is not a commoner's interest, but learned men are meant to know how we got where we are. We are all too great and unique and, for progressives, too sophisticated to repeat mistakes or learn from the inferior past.

Wouldn't the obvious stance be "we aren't the progressives of the past?"

My rejoinder would be "you are making the same mistakes they did."

One problem is that when Progressives win they write the history to make it seem that the victory was inevitable. When they lose it just gets quietly ignored, and conservatives likewise get no credit for holding the line against them for the greater good.

Oh, sorry, I may have been unclear - I am not a progressive. My comment was simply a model of how I think they would respond in this circumstance.

I think your model is on point, I'm mostly just considering the point and seeing what seems like a solid 'rebuttal.'

My main point is that progressives are consistently convinced they're in the right at all times, and dismiss any arguments that might disprove that belief. So even after they've been 'proven' wrong, they don't have to admit it. So yeah "we aren't like those old progressives, we're smarter and we won't make the same mistakes" is an argument I can believe they'd make.

Wouldn't the obvious stance be "we aren't the progressives of the past?" Residential schools have plenty of evidence towards their existence in Canada, and were certainly pushed by what would've been a progressive mindset back in the day.

The issue is that "we aren't the progressives of the past" is the stance of the progressives of today. So saying that doesn't escape one from repeating the mistakes of the past; it's how you repeat the mistakes of the past.

“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said.

By which she means politicised, while herself choosing to act politically both by withholding from publishing and using the frame of threat protection to justify her political choice.

I don't know if Jesse Singal has changed his tune, but this always enrages me. There is a political party that is pro child mutilation and sterilization. The entire rest of the world is against this practice, even countries that once upon a time were more open minded about it. The pro child mutilation and sterilization party keeps doubling down, and the Jesse Singal's of the world point to the "Lets not mutilate and sterilize children" party as "politicizing" or "weaponizing" the issue. Because his side can only do good things, and if his side is doing bad things he can't possibly ignore, he must somehow blame them on the other bad side which can only do bad things. Even when they are championing the side of the issue he believes is correct.

I get there is a significant contingent of "Vote Blue No Matter Who" NPCs, but it's astounding to me to witness someone who breaks from the "It's not happening and if it were it would be a good thing" programming, sees the bad things, writes articles endlessly about the bad things, and then still turns around and choses to die on the hill of the party of the bad things.

There is a political party that is pro child mutilation

No major politician or political party supports this, unless you're talking about religious stuff like Jewish circumcision.

Unlike the other parties, which are all pure as snow?

Funnily enough, Jesse posted this just an hour and a half ago:

I haven’t become a conservative since [I was 23 years old]; I’ve just become more skeptical, and much, much more aware of the fact that conservatives have no monopoly on groupthink, intolerance, and other forms of bias. I also no longer think that you can just flip a “Liberal Policies” switch and it will fix things, at least not in real life. Just look at cities like San Francisco, which are run entirely by liberals and leftists and beset by serious problems stemming from or exacerbated by the governance decisions these supposed “good guys” have made.

It's all well and good to make mouth sounds about how your team isn't all good, and the other team isn't all bad. It's another that when pressed on any specific issue, you start doing summersaults about how the only reason you side does bad things is because the bad side is riling them up with their "heated rhetoric". Push come to shove, on any specific issue, I've never seen him admit his side bears the moral culpability for any specific wrong. Nor provide a path forward where his side should just admit they are wrong and stop doing the thing he admits is wrong. His only "answer" to the mass sterilization and mutilation of children, last I saw, was that Republicans needed to stop making an issue out of it first so that his side (the side that's been pushing it in the face of all reason, evidence or morality) could break from the trance and backtrack without any political consequences.

Because that's likely to ever happen.

I also can't read the entire article because it's paywalled. Maybe he gets there.

I think a big part of it is that it galvanized the right, and it has been recruiting and motivating gold for republicans. Trans kids hits a lot of very sensitive spots, and it’s easy to understand why. First of all, you have the schools not only promoting, but enabling the trans kids. A kid who goes to a public school will be told that trans people are special, be told to celebrate them, etc. any kid who decides they might be trans will be given access to trans clothing, be allowed to change their name and pronouns, be allowed in cross gender spaces and sports teams, etc. the kids around them will be told how awesome they are, and be forced to acknowledge the new them. Parents are told none of this.

This first part alone is going to give a lot of parents the ick. They don’t trust schools anymore because the schools — by written policy — are keeping very serious matters secret from them specifically. They don’t like it when schools are teaching things that their religious beliefs call evil or wicked as normal and even praiseworthy. They would also eventually become concerned simply because the schools are much better at teaching state propaganda than they are at teaching reading, writing, math, and science.

The second part is that the transition itself harms kids. They’re starting kids on puberty blockers at 9-12 years old, and cross sex hormones follow after a few years. There’s the surgeries that remove or reposition healthy tissues on healthy bodies to fit a trendy mental health issue. And these things are driven by children the same kids who can’t remember to bring home their math book, or won’t eat vegetables, or can’t work up the courage to quit the baseball team. They simply are not mature enough to even grapple with the idea that what they’re doing toady will be something they will be living with at 40 or 60 or 80. They can’t even imagine what it’s like to really be an adult.

Finally, parents especially in cases of divorce are finding themselves threatened by the state if they don’t transition their kids. There are cases where a father and mother are fighting over custody and the judge will say “if you don’t allow your child to be transitioned, then you lose custody and visitation rights.” CPS has gotten involved in some liberal states because the child think they’re trans and the parents don’t agree, so the state comes in and says either get on board, or we take the child.

Now all of this creates fertile ground for GOP/MAGA recruiting. They are the party that will protect your kids from all of this. They are the ones who want the schools to stop teaching kids that trans is cool. They are the party that wants to force schools to actually tell you what your child is up to in school. They also are the party standing up to surgeons who want to medically and surgically transition your kids.

It's hard to think of a more toxic ideology if one actively wanted to turn off parents.

Maybe some sort of justification for tutelary pedophilia, I don't know

First of all, you have the schools not only promoting, but enabling the trans kids. A kid who goes to a public school will be told that trans people are special, be told to celebrate them, etc. any kid who decides they might be trans will be given access to trans clothing, be allowed to change their name and pronouns, be allowed in cross gender spaces and sports teams, etc. the kids around them will be told how awesome they are, and be forced to acknowledge the new them. Parents are told none of this.

That last bit is what really got me to break my cautious neutrality on this issue. It is absolutely bad enough what Public schools do to kids normally but if they are allowed to press political ideals into their brains and work to influence their actual psychological development without parents involved, it looks extremely dystopic. "The state will shepherd your kid through the psychological turmoil of puberty without your involvement" is a bone-chilling statement.

If I were a parent (I am not) I would insist that it is NONNEGOTIABLE that I be informed of any medical or psychological issues my child exhibits. I would flip tables if the teachers were allowed to actively engage with my kids regarding their sexuality without me being in the loop, full stop.

The argument against 'parental notice' as the standard is simply too weak. "What if the child is hiding their identity because of abuse/risk of abuse at home?" Then figure that out and call fucking Child Protective Services. I am going with the assumption that the parent is inherently more invested in the child's wellbeing than a teacher. Many teachers don't even have kids of their own, why in the hell would they be expected to want and know exactly what is best for others' children?

And as we've seen, the inevitable ratchet on this process is that it will eventually gets defined as child abuse to deny a child's gender identity. In that scenario we now have a situation where a teacher can 'induce' the very condition that can then be used to take the child from their parents. The teacher convinces the child to express a trans identity, and if the parent finds out and is skeptical, teacher gets to report the abuse too.

Sorry, bridge too far for me, I don't care what other justifications you can contrive for it, even if you argue that its such a rare situation I shouldn't worry, the consequences are far too grave for me to ignore.

Now, I live in Florida, and since Desantis took some pre-emptive steps to prevent these sorts of outcomes, I'm not too worried about it happening to me. But yeah, the GOP managed a propaganda coup by centering this issue and more or less forcing the Progressives to defend it and, as it seems, retreat from it a bit.

why in the hell would they be expected to want and know exactly what is best for others' children?

To paraphrase the attitudes of various teachers and administrators my mother had to deal with over the course of my public school education: because while any two fertile, horny morons of opposite sexes can have a kid — they don't even have to get a license or take a class first — educators are trained professionals with the credentials to prove they know what's good for kids better than the kids' non-credentialed parents.

In short: I (the teacher) have a degree in Education and you (the parent) don't, therefore I always automatically know better than you when it comes to your own kid.

Yes, the "we're trained experts thing" seems to be the main thrust. Nevermind the abysmal results we can see.

But I don't think they can ever override the fact that a parent is biologically inclined to want the best for their kid. No way to explain why the teachers are somehow willing to advocate nearly as strongly for the interests of a child that isn't theirs than the ones who birthed the child and will spend immense amount of resources raising it.

OBVIOUSLY this doesn't mean parents 'always know best.' I'm just saying that's a presumption that is difficult to rebut without specifically examining their behavior. The odds of the teachers, in aggregate, feeling as strong a loyalty to the kid as the parents do is very low.

But I don't think they can ever override the fact that a parent is biologically inclined to want the best for their kid.

Sure they can- just point guns at them. The self-preservation instinct in the parent can be successfully leveraged in this way, which is part of why there’s no effective resistance to the faction who believes themselves the True Parents.

Let's look at the moral math on that: "If the state kills/jails/bankrupts me and takes my kids, my courage has no protective effect. Only if I survive/am free/am financially capable can I continue to protect my kids. Therefore I will appear to acquiesce but plan to renew the fight."

Never underestimate the lengths a parent will go to. Thousands of years of evolution in societies has ensured that humans will fight every arm of the state in every way possible to ensure that their kids are safe.

Never underestimate the lengths a parent will go to.

Their track record over the last 40 years has been an uninterrupted string of defeats- parental rights are a vanishing shadow of what they were 60 years ago (to the point they're fighting, and losing, the battle over having their children seized for wrongthinking parents when it comes to trans ideology; they'll already be prosecuted for having their 12 year old walk half a block, and they fucking welcomed that outcome in the '80s).

I think an assumption that they're trying not to lose everything is even less complimentary than assuming they're just too busy. They're similar to traditional-type conservatives in that regard, just like how they're a dying breed (since some of the calculus is "well, is the risk the State will seize my children worth having them?").

I live in a blue county in a blue state. I am a father. My kid is in private school in order to dodge the worst excesses of public schools. There's no secret transitioning at my kid's school. Also class sizes are smaller and the academic standards are higher.

I agree with the points of your post. It being a drag is probably a huge part of the shift. Can I get a citation for this:

CPS has gotten involved in some liberal states because the child think they’re trans and the parents don’t agree, so the state comes in and says either get on board, or we take the child.

I think I first posted such a case 5 or 6 years ago. Shit maybe it was 8 years ago? It was the first one I knew of. Everyone at the time just hand waved it away. The "child" was 17, and was moved to her Grandparents who were willing to "affirm" the child's identity. By the time the article was written, and the court cases over, the child was 18 or 19 rending it all moot. The fact that a massive violation of parental rights had occurred, and that those parents had now permanently lost their child was viewed as not being a problem at all since the whole thing had been accomplished fait accompli.

Since then it's been a steady drumbeat.

Here are some more.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/school-hid-teens-gender-transition-from-parents-leading-runaway-abuse-nightmare-lawsuit

https://reason.com/volokh/2022/10/21/court-upholds-removal-of-child-from-parents-related-to-childs-transgender-identity/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dc-family-loses-custody-of-autistic-son-over-gender-transition-fight/ar-BB1qJeZT

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/montana-parents-say-they-lost-custody-of-daughter-after-opposing-14-year-old-s-gender-transition-report/ar-BB1hwjcE

I could keep going. It is happening. Please don't say it's great.

It is good when abusive parents lose custody of the children they are abusing.

  • -31

Cutting off your child's penis or breasts is the abuse. Declining to do so is not abusing them.

In fact if your child had cancer in their penis or breasts then not cutting them off may very well be abuse.

  • -19

Quibble accepted. Cutting off penis or breasts except in cases of necessary removal due to gangrene or cancer.

Define abuse. And I think honestly this is a thing where people are going to stop trusting the state even more, because here, it’s obviously political. The parents don’t agree that the child has trans, so they aren’t affirming. But this isn’t abuse, and further, given that this is a situation that can be induced, it’s an excellent weapon against the wrong sorts of parents raising kids.

Is it also political when the state wants to give children blood transfusions and parents object?

  • -12

Seems like it might be, if the blood transfusions were for treating a psychological condition, and the supporting science was sketchy at best.

Who decides what counts as abuse?

The state, obviously. They're the ones who pass the laws defining abuse!

  • -16

It’s great that Texas is removing children from parents who encourage and allow gender transition. The law is very clear that it’s abuse.

Yes.chad

  • -12

Taken together, your two statements would seem to indicate that you believe anything the state does is good by definition.

Obv.

  • -20
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So I take it you'll also cheer the state taking away children from affirming parents?

Ya.

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I've read the Skrmetti case and the amicus brief, and I really hope the petitioners fail.

That said, I'd bet money that the amicus brief (an inherently one sided argument) is broadly accurate in its claims, and is far closer to ground truth that the current US medical consensus. IMO the APA, AMA, and WPATH are completely out to lunch with regard to gender care, peddling harmful anti-science bullshit. I think trans insanity is waning slowly but surely, but the remedies proposed in Skrmetti set a precedent I don't like on principle. And principles are occasionally bitter pills to swallow, otherwise they're not principles.

If Skrmetti prevails (and I think it will), the effect will be a long standing precedent in case law that legislatures can eschew a medical consensus. Science will be decided in the courtroom; then the legislature. Granted, I think the US scientific consensus is wrong in this case, but I'm hewing to my principles, which sucks big fat amputated cock in this case. I want doctors, not legislators, to determine medical care. I don't want legislators deciding if mifepristone is safe, if my doctor/psychiatrist can prescribe me therapeutic ketamine, testosterone, MDMA, a lethal dose of whatever if I'm terminal, etc.

I loath safteyism, and won't clutch my pears and "think of the children" because other avenues of justice are available, namely torts. Suing doctors for negligence will change medical standards without opening a wider door permanent legislative intrusion. Torts have worked before. Anyone remember when fake tits were (erroneously, in retrospect) deemed unsafe for a period in the 90's? (In re Dow Corning Corp, 1996).

The Alabama amicus brief gives a good argument that the medical consensus in this case rests wholly on advocacy and not on science. It demonstrates WPATH as an advocacy-first organization that actively suppresses conflicting or even ambivalent research, and therefore any "consensus" based on its recommendation ought to be suspect--especially given the general climate where medical researchers not part of WPATH also voluntarily suppress research contrary to that org's guidelines.

Completely aligned. The current medical standards are hogwash, Skrmetti will likely prevail, and yet I am not satisfied by that outcome. Wrong tool for the job, second and third order effects worse than the cure. This is just How Things Are Done These Days, apparently. I want to get off Mr Bones' Wild Ride.

While I think Tennessee would love to have the legal question ride on whether these particular procedures are Good or not, that question only really comes up after resolving several others first: what level of sex-based classifications raise heightened scrutiny under the 14th amendment, whether trans-related classifications count as sex-based classifications, if these trans-related procedures count, what level of scrutiny that all rolls out into, and only then whether the procedures are Good or Not.

There's a lot of ways to punt, on either direction, about the underlying validity of these processes and procedures, and especially given the makeup of the court right now, I would not be very confident that they will not punt to some extent.

Meanwhile, the rule that legislatures can overrule medical consensus is pretty-well-established, no matter what happens. See matters like right-to-try laws, or the entire existence of the DEA. Even if SCOTUS jumps whole-heartedly in favor of trans rights on the matter, the questions presented here are solely about sex discrimination; the case does not argue a right to specific medical practices in general.

((I'm also separately very skeptical of the negligence/malpractice route as 'better', from either direction. Malpractice and negligence lawsuits have wonky rules and impacts: doctors have good reason to practice extremely defensively even where they may eventually win the case, and can avoid liability for pretty bad behavior so long as it falls within certain standards.))

Science will be decided in the courtroom; then the legislature

An improvement over the current state of affairs, where it is decided by the moral fads of unaccountable administrative bodies.

If we must be the toys of power, let it at least be power that has a chance to feel the consequences of mistakes.

Thats why having principles sucks. It will be an improvement in this one case. But the expansion of legislative caprice can be broadly interpreted for a long time. There are equally useful alternative toys of power to exact justice. Torts maintain a comparatively narrower scope, and stay within the realm of liability.

We signed a death warrant on Science the moment we thought it could be a "neutral" way of resolving political disputes. The instant that idea was entertained Science was doomed to either go the Olson Kennedy route, where scientists themselves abandon the scientific process in pursuit of their political agenda, or to be brought to heel by another institution with political power (and I agree with the other poster, that it's better to have politics be done by a transparently political institution, than under the guise of "neutrality").

For you to get what you want, we'd need to take science out of politics.

What's sad is that had it been kept out of hot political issues, it could still be useful to validate our answers to these questions once they are no longer politically hot. Now that it's balls deep into political issues, even old mistakes will have to be maintained or memory holed because previous examples of Science being wrong are going to be used as examples of why today's Science could be wrong, and we can't have that!

We signed a death warrant on Science the moment we thought it could be a "neutral" way of resolving political disputes.

In the absence of a shared religion or culture you need something. Seemed like a smart idea at the time.

Seemed like a smart idea at the time.

Yeah, I can't judge, I cosigned it too back then.

In 2017 Oren Cass published an a great article on the problem of "policy based evidence making" in my favorite magazine, National Affairs. Part of the thesis was a call against government expansion, which won't be the case if Skrmetti prevails. Unlike policy, science gets mugged by reality in comparatively short time spans. I'm confident that "gender science" won't hold for a hundredth as long as the precedence Skrmetti will establish. Moreover, it would broaden the scope of legislative intrusion. Imagine a scientific consensus emerges that natal males playing female contact sports poses statistically significant injury risk. An ideological legislature could dismiss that, and instead pursue their own policy, ethical, or ideological goals. The same principles are in play.

Science remains the best way to find out what is true, all else being equal. No passenger would be tempted to troubleshoot a high-flying faulty airliner by the legislative process; to defer to a representative for the best way to perform life saving surgery.

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/policy-based-evidence-making

Part of the thesis was a call against government expansion, which won't be the case if Skrmetti prevails.

No one arguing against Skrimetti actually wants to stop government expansion. What they want, as the Alabama brief eloquently argues, is to have political controversies be resolved by unelected, supposedly scientific bodies like the FDA, or the alphabet soup of medical associations.

If you actually want a government that does not interfere in science, you need to roll back the entire regulatory state. Otherwise the supposedly neutral institutions will simply become a political faction, and science will go out the window anyway (which is exactly what happened).

I'm confident that "gender science" won't hold for a hundredth as long as the precedence Skrmetti will establish

Well, first you'll have to explain what's so bad about that. Unless I'm missing something Skrimetti is just about banning / age limits on gender medicine. I don't see how it's qualitatively different from banning heroin or other recreational drugs.

An ideological legislature could dismiss that, and instead pursue their own policy, ethical, or ideological goals.

And if these controversies are settled through scientific institutions, all that will happen is that political factions will use underhanded means to take them over, and produce shoddy science that serves their political goals. Which, I repeat, is exactly what happened. The WPATH and Olson Kennedy did not fall from a coconut tree, as they say.

Unless I'm missing something Skrimetti is just about banning / age limits on gender medicine. I don't see how it's qualitatively different from banning heroin or other recreational drugs.

I think I've been pretty clear that entire reason I'm against Skrmetti prevailing has noting - whatsoever - to do with banning flawed gender medicine. The precedent it sets can be argued in favor of the next Bad Thing(tm). Just sue the current bad thing for torts.

The precedent it sets can be argued in favor of the next Bad Thing(tm).

What I'm asking is what precedent is it setting? As far as I can tell it's nothing new. Are bans on surrogacy some "dangerous precedent"?

Just sue the current bad thing for torts.

Again, if that's what you're going for you shouldn't be arguing against Skrimetti, you should be arguing for the total abolishing of the regulatory state.

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No passenger would be tempted to troubleshoot a high-flying faulty airliner by the legislative process

I don't think this is as good of an example as you think given how Boeing has been doing lately. Someone gets mugged by reality alright, but it doesn't have to be the scientist or the people who give him money. And until you have a way to close the loop, they can keep being insane for long enough to destroy your society.

Science is good at figuring out precise models of the natural world, it is absolutely terrible at making decisions about the results of those models, or itself.

The modern world being so complex you need layers upon layers of experts to even understand problems is the story the managerial class tells about why it should rule, but that's only a story. We could be doing other things, with other tradeoffs.

The modern world being so complex you need layers upon layers of experts to even understand problems is the story the managerial class tells about why it should rule, but that's only a story. We could be doing other things, with other tradeoffs.

I think what did the most damage to this story in recent times is Elon Musk. I think that's what they hated most about him, before the Twitter purchase.

The managerial class had evaluated the question and decided that while electric cars were a cute idea, they were not a realistic replacement for ICE cars. It also concluded that space exploration was just too expensive and that it should just be about launching drones to increase the prestige of institutional Science, and as a way to transfer more ressources to contractors so embedded in the US government they're practically an arm of it.

Trans issues were never going to be a permanent part of the Dem ideological setup because it’s precisely the children of PMC urban Democrats (ie NYT readers, DNC and associated think tank / lobbyist staffers etc) who are at increasing risk of coming out as trans. Nice upper middle class Democrats often don’t like it when their own kids want to transition and the result is something inherently unstable. The same thing is happening to center-left parties across the West. Stuff that primarily affects poor people like crime is one thing. This is another.

I’ve made this point before- even socially liberal reds are at a fairly low risk from gender lunacy. It’s the blue tribe that loses their children to it, and eventually, blue tribe parents winning over to supporting republicans will cause a change in political support.

eventually, blue tribe parents winning over to supporting republicans will cause a change in political support.

Meet Mr. Eventually.

Trans issues were never going to be a permanent part of the Dem ideological setup

If it was so obvious, howcome you never said anything about it? The only thing I remember from you was you saying how the issue was played out by the Bush era.

because it’s precisely the children of PMC urban Democrats (ie NYT readers, DNC and associated think tank / lobbyist staffers etc) who are at increasing risk of coming out as trans

Didn't stop the from still being pro-gay. If there was nothing wrong with transition, the concept of "at risk" would make no sense.

Because homosexuality has always existed and it’s easy for blues to believe that their kid can be gay when they had a transparent “committed bachelor” uncle or a spinster great aunt who lived with her “best friend” or whatever (both t happened in my own family). Their daughter going on hormones, chopping off her breasts, growing a beard and having a rudimentary penis fashioned out of skin from her forearm, however, is a new development.

So how was the conversation "played out" if progressive PMCs were yet to realize that?

Trans issues were never going to be a permanent part of the Dem ideological setup because it’s precisely the children of PMC urban Democrats (ie NYT readers, DNC and associated think tank / lobbyist staffers etc) who are at increasing risk of coming out as trans.

I'd argue that this is incorrect because, as far as I can tell based on my ideological prejudices (yeah), the children most likely to want to transition are the children, especially male children, of left-leaning single mothers (mostly stressed-out and miserable ones), and single motherhood is rather rare among the demographic you described.

Anyway, do you think this is something they're aware of themselves? If yes, when did that realization set in? There has already been ample time for that. The trans culture war has started more than a decade ago.

Yeah I see it more happening to girls in unstable home environments, where the kid is also socially unpopular and spends a lot of time on social media especially tik tok

Also, single mothers are probably rather susceptible to liberal trans propaganda on average.

I've seen some really interesting commentary that it seems to have displaced anorexia, and in many cases the resulting recommended treatment looks a lot like affirming anorexia. Testosterone is really effective at reducing those feminine features (adipose tissues in all the right places) that anorexics often obsess over reducing or eliminating. Both seem in practice to be strongly correlated with abuse survivors.

I'm not going to say that's the whole story, but the anecdote from a trans-questioning feminist recovering from an eating disorder I remember seemed to justify at least some concern.

as far as I can tell based on my ideological prejudices (yeah), the children most likely to want to transition are the children, especially male children, of left-leaning single mothers

Your ideological prejudices are wrong, the increase in trans youth has been concentrated mostly in females:

Adolescents assigned female at birth initiate transgender care 2.5 to 7.1 times more frequently than those assigned male at birth

(...)

In October, researchers at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine published a paper showing a 389% increase in gender-affirming chest surgeries performed nationally from 2016 to 2019 on patients under age 18. The total of 1,130 procedures during the period, nearly all of them for chest masculinization, represents a weighted estimate based on records from more than 2,000 U.S. medical facilities.

(...)

The predominance of patients assigned female at birth is a reversal from the past. For years, when very few minors sought gender care, those assigned male at birth accounted for the majority. But about 15 years ago, that began to change as care became more accessible and the overall number of patients started climbing, according to studies and interviews with gender-care specialists.

For example, at Amsterdam University Medical Center’s gender clinic, a pioneer in adolescent gender care, the proportions flipped. From 1989 to 2005, 59% of its adolescent patients were assigned male at birth, the Dutch clinic reported in a 2015 study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Since 2016, about 75% of the clinic’s patients have been youths who were assigned female at birth.

Fair enough. The part about sons is wrong then. But the rest of my argument stands, I think.

Any information on whether these females are disproportionately children of divorce?

Obligatory observation that this wouldn't imply causation.

Of course not.

Yeah, I'm operating on no sleep atm and think I was stating that for myself as much as anyone else.

I think that your comment would work equally well if one replaced 'trans' with 'gay', and I don't see the Dems rolling back gay rights so that the urbanites have more grandkids or something.

Personally, I think that we should treat gender dysphoria as a medical condition and leave the treatment options (from getting over it to full transition) up to the medical establishment. Kids should learn that the condition exists, just like other psychiatric conditions such as depression, but we should not bestow special status on trans kids. No 'she is so courageous for coming out', more 'I am sorry that she is suffering from GD'.

The woke victimhood totem pole is not helping here. Going from straight cis-male to lesbian trans-female turns you from the evil oppressor to the blameless victim.

Personally, I think that we should treat gender dysphoria as a medical condition and leave the treatment options (from getting over it to full transition) up to the medical establishment. Kids should learn that the condition exists, just like other psychiatric conditions such as depression, but we should not bestow special status on trans kids. No 'she is so courageous for coming out', more 'I am sorry that she is suffering from GD'.

Doesnt work. Politics + Medicine = Politics. The medical establishment has demonstrated it cannot be trusted on politically fraught issues multiple times in the last decade.

For reasons I don't understand, sexuality seems far less susceptible to social contagion than gender identity. Sure, the proportion of Gen Zs identifying as "bisexual" or "queer" has skyrocketed, but this hasn't translated into elevated levels of same-sex sexual activity in that generation. If anything the opposite is true and Gen Z are the most sexless generation probably ever. Hence, Dem staffers and activists can promote homosexuality to their heart's content without fear of the leopards biting their face.

And even beyond that, I genuinely believe that the median Democrat would be far more chill with having a gay son or lesbian daughter than a thot daughter trans child.

For reasons I don't understand, sexuality seems far less susceptible to social contagion than gender identity. Sure, the proportion of Gen Zs identifying as "bisexual" or "queer" has skyrocketed, but hasn't translated into elevated levels of same-sex sexual activity in that generation.

I can't do the math now, but you could probably say the same about "gender identity". It only appears otherwise because we're comparing different things.

"Gender identity" is to "medical transition" what "identifying as 'queer" is to actual homosexuality.

Plenty of people can get a buzz cut or change names without actually going through with the procedure. Meanwhile, unlike gay sex, even a small amount of people in absolute terms getting "medical treatments" can set off alarm bells in sensible organizations if the rise is high in percent terms. Which is what happened in Europe.

I know what you mean, but there's two different things going on here.

Over the last twenty years, the proportion of young people identifying as something other than heterosexual has shot up. But the proportion of young people actually engaging in same-sex sexual activity has plummeted (as part of a secular trend towards sexlessness which is also visible in trends in opposite-sex sexual behaviour in that generation). This is a negative correlation (and not causally linked: the increase in sexlessness is largely caused by technology, social atomisation, smaller family sizes and so on; the increase in LGB identification is driven by fashion and social contagion).

Over the last twenty years, the proportion of young people identifying as transgender (or related terms like non-binary) has shot up. The proportion of young people pursuing medical transition has also increased dramatically. Not at the same rate, of course: only a minority of people identifying as trans will even take hormones, never mind undergo surgery. But the two trends are positively correlated.

Part of the issue is that it happens so young that it raises serious consent problems. I saw a video of a mom taking her crying 9 year old son to get a puberty blocking implant from Dr. Olson-Kennedy. If the boy were going to have a gay tryst at 9 years old, while his mom got him ready for the date, that would set off every alarm bell.

And even beyond that, I genuinely believe that the median Democrat would be far more chill with having a gay son or lesbian daughter than a thot daughter trans child.

I've got an infant daughter right now and I'd much much prefer that she came out as a lesbian than transitioned. One's a lifetime of medical procedures and massively heightened suicide rate, plus has far more issues around reversability if it turns out to just be a phase.

I guess a young woman who identifies as queer or bisexual doesn't have to actually do anything. She doesn't even have to dress any differently. All she does is collect a cool new identity label that her peers will praise her for. Combine that with the fact that most women are a little bisexual anyway (but usually don't act on it) and I can see why these labels are popular. For a young man, it's similarly easy to pick up one of the many bespoke identity labels and not actually change anything about his behaviour or even dress.

By contrast, actually acting on a minority sexuality actually requires them to, you know, act. For straight men (of whom I think most are instinctively repulsed by the idea of sex with a man) this isn't going to happen. And for bi-curious women, this requires her to either take the initiative (which women hate) or wait on a lesbian to come and try to convert her (many such cases, but I doubt there are enough lesbians to make a difference in the stats).

Modern people don't seem to care much about the grandkids question, and even that has modern solutions for gays.

But the difference between your son being gay or trans is about on par between being a juggalo and having cancer. Only one of these comes with a lifelong medical issue and major drop in life expectancy and outcomes.

Being gay, maybe, but for being trans? cross sex hormones have some been devastating effects on health. The female body was never designed for such high level of steroid testosterone abuse. Heart attacks in mid life is going to be a huge issue amongst the trans community in a decade or so

That's my point, being gay is not exactly great for you, but it's nowhere near the same ballpark of life shattering as being trans.

Well... there is a significant drop in life expectancy associated with being gay vs. straight, although it's narrowing year-on-year since the nightmare of the AIDS epidemic.

I don't think the native blue tribers I have met in the US would actually be bothered by their kids being gay; to the extent this sentiment still existed it was confined to first-generation immigrants. Any objection to their own kids going trans is probably not about not getting grandkids either, considering that this is a culture that increasingly isn't even convinced to have kids of their own. Rather, the crux is that people are not actually convinced that transitioning is predetermined and makes their kids happy, despite outwards pressure to subscribe to this view. Few people have nagging doubts that gays are at least as happy as straights.

I don't think that is true, as much as I wish it was.

From what I see, elite democrats and their followers often support policies that are directly detrimental to them and their children. White PMC urban Democrats support racial ideologies and policies that give their white children disadvantages, both psychological and scholastic. Why would this be any different?

Progressivism is not a business. It has religious characteristics. True believers don't follow rational self interest. The more ardent believers will happily make choices that are bad for them and their children, because they see those choices as holy. I know people from the urban PMC class who would happily let the mob burn down their house and apologize for owning property while it happened.

But you could be right. The PMC urban democrats I am exposed to may not be representative of the group in general.

White PMC urban Democrats support racial ideologies and policies that give their white children disadvantages, both psychological and scholastic.

In practice these policies are directed against the children of republicans.

Cautiously hoping this is a sign this is becoming useless as a political wedge and we can go back to studying what GD is and how to help people that have it instead of wallowing in the hell of using it to destroy social norms at the expense of everyone involved.

No, we should drop the whole exercise and stop giving the concept any thought space at all, because it doesn't exist other than as a cognitohazard/toxic meme. A child (especially an autistic one, which appears to make up a huge proportion of "trans" individuals) going through puberty and having a hard time does not know what's going on. They don't know why they're having a hard time, they don't understand their own emotions, or why they are having a hard time relating to others but what they do know is that it is unpleasant and they would like it to stop. The child doesn't know that approximately everyone has a hard time during puberty and adolescence, since they've got no frame of reference outside of themselves, and they don't know that nobody who is honest has a solution to that difficulty other than growing out of it.

Enter the well-meaning teacher or activist, who offers a silver bullet: the reason you feel weird and like you don't fit and your body is uncomfortable isn't because you're autistic or going through puberty, it's because you're in the wrong body, so all you have to do is transition. Kids are susceptible to believing what an authority tells them, especially one proffering a solution to their problems, and on top of that the authority often primes them by asking if they "feel like a boy" or other questions about internal state that no one healthy ever thinks about and then uses the kid's ambivalence as evidence in favor of the theory. (And now the poor autistic kid thinks normal people have either a pink or blue light in their head telling them what they are, and this is just one more reason they're not normal, and etc)

Of course this is a basically unfalsifiable theory under the best of circumstances, and there's no way to "try it on" to see if it works. When it inevitably fails to solve the problem and in fact makes it even worse, proponents can blame the failure on not doing it early enough, not doing it hard enough, or "transphobia", all of which boils down to "do the thing that isn't working harder". Even if the kid could see through the smokescreen and realize that this isn't helping, the cult-like qualities of the social changes (love bombing, breaking down of relationships, renaming) make it borderline impossible to walk back. It's a social and cognitive trap that vulnerable people are susceptible to, it makes their lives measurably worse, and the only way to cure it is to burn it out of the culture entirely before it gets any more rooted. Giving it legitimacy by taking it seriously as a field of medical research only empowers it.

I understand the problems with the current approach with dealing with the problem. All of which are tied into politics.

But how do you propose we deal with the real phenomenon then?

God is not going to stop sending us people who want to be the other sex to a pathological degree. You're engaging in the same wishful thinking as the gender constructionists if you think tabooing the concept is going to make that stop.

And we don't really know how or why GD happens, we just know that it does and has been before we had a word for it. Anybody that tells you we know the mechanics of it (including muh brain scan studies) is selling something.

So if we are to find any sort of solution, surely it has to provide for studying the problem. Or we're just leaving these people to fend for themselves.

Surely you wouldn't be against studying schizophrenia because it also has the potential for social contagion?

But how do you propose we deal with the real phenomenon then?

My position is that it's not a real phenomenon, and I thought I made that clear from the first sentence in my comment. There are sexual fetishists that can be dealt with largely by ignoring them, but GD is not a real thing with a medical cause. Telling people that it is is the thing that creates it.

So if we are to find any sort of solution, surely it has to provide for studying the problem. Or we're just leaving these people to fend for themselves.

Yes, you deal with it the same way you deal with furries/otherkin/people that think they're literally able to do magic. You pat them on the head and say "no you aren't a girl, you've got a dick and that's what that means." If they want to play pretend beyond that, fine. But if we collectively stop giving it space, then the number of people that want to play pretend will drop back down to a totally unnoticeable number and we won't have to care as a society at all.

I would say that it is a real phenomenon, in the same manner that chronic pain is a real condition even if no cause is found. If you feel you're experiencing it, you're experiencing it, even if it were psychological in nature. Body dysmorphia doesn't go away by saying it's not real any more than you can cure depression by simply telling someone they don't actually have it that bad.

The way I see it, I don't care if an adult wants to get bolt-on boobs for any reason. My breaking points are:

A) Children. In particular, the constant framing of trans children as suicide risks I believe is social contagion. If "there have always been trans people" then why is this danger of suicide only talked about now?

B) The elevation of the meaningless concept of "identity."

C) The accompanying suppression of noticing or speaking about a person's sex.

D) That any research towards curing gender dysphoria without transitioning would be framed as genocide.

Surely you wouldn't be against studying schizophrenia because it also has the potential for social contagion?

If the people studying schizophrenia were causing the rates of schizophrenia to leap by 5x without actually helping people who had it... then yeah, knock it off.

It's very unclear that trans people are being helped. And the people studying it are tainted by activism and by shoddy science.

I reject the myth that a trans person is suicidal unless they can medically transition. It appears, instead, that after a medical transition, the mental illness is not in fact cured, and now there are serious physical impairments as well.

Trans people existed prior to the present epoch. No one said they didn't. But there is clearly a huge amount of social contagion that dwarfs any conceivable benefit from all the "science" that has accumulated in this area during the last two decades.

Toleration, not celebration, should be the order of the day.

If the people studying schizophrenia were causing the rates of schizophrenia to leap by 5x without actually helping people who had it... then yeah, knock it off.

But that did happen for a bunch of other legitimate mental illnesses. Surely we all remember the bulimia/anorexia or the DID fads of the past decades. And we did manage to put a lid on the social contagion for those without completely denying their existence.

the DID fads of the past decades. And we did manage to put a lid on the social contagion for those

...we did?

I think so but then again I haven't looked at recent numbers. Maybe all those tiktoks about talking to your mind buddies reignited it.

Yeah, I remember it was big on Tumblr a decade ago, too, and it seems like it's worse today. I would expect that if the graph added two more data points for "2010s" and "2020s" they'd probably be a lot higher than the "2000s".

Toleration, not celebration, should be the order of the day.

Perhaps intolerance should be on the table as well, particularly if it is spread via social contagion.

Or at the very least gatekeeping. Ostracizing posers or not granting them entry/status would make it much less socially enticing to take on any "trait" that you want. Bring back shame. Everyone knows that a large portion of people claiming statuses conferred by being trans or gay or nonbinary are clearly doing it for status. Not being able to turn people away from a group means that the incentives of the group change to fit the people that don't belong.

I feel like a lot of the people getting their status out of things like: nonbinary, genderfluid, aromantic, pansexual, pronouns, or getting status out of things like unverifiable or self-diagnosed illnesses, or even things like homosexuality and bisexualty are getting that status because of the power that has been given to trans ideology. If you take away the idea that you can just claim an illnesses or trait and become a protected, unique, and celebrated person then, in an ideal world, the words become just words again.

I hear a lot of younger people call themselves many things but I find it very hard to believe them, even to the point that I don't really believe some people when they say they're gay because when they do they're 90% of the time obviously doing it so that people will treat them differently/better and I base this on it being brought up apropos of nothing and having yet to see said person give off any other tell that they might be gay, like ever having a boyfriend/girlfriend or even exhibiting other traits that I'd associate with being homosexual. Might be just a normal response of a person who is actually gay trying to fit into society these days but if that's the case it's a sad state of affairs.

Studying GD (gender dysphoria) is not innocent. It also creates GD.

Call it Heisenberg's principle of sexuality.

Sometimes it's better to just let people do their thing without labeling it and making it part of the state religion. The less we talk about it the better.

Look, whatever the name you want to put on the phenomenon it's been with us for a very long time. I balk at the idiocy of presentism all the time, but "rare case of pathological desire to be of the other sex" goes back to the beginning of history.

The constructionist position on this is nonsense, you're not going to get rid of this by removing the concept of sex from reality, because not only is that not possible, it's going to cause insane harm to 99% of people.

The medicalist position has giant flaws, not least of which that it's turning into an industry to extract value out of the misery, but at least it's an attempt do deal with the pragmatic phenomenal reality.

You can't tell people who are confused to death about their own identity to "just do their thing" unless you want marginals that kill themselves. They need some help.

And yes, social contagion is a real issue here, and this is indeed a problem what would benefit from less attention. We can have a solution to the problem that doesn't require integration with the state religion, or at least we could before the state turned total.

Well said.

I think there’s room for a stable equilibrium, and it probably involves distinguishing sex from gender. I don’t know if that’s enough to do right by people who experience the world so differently from me. But it would be better than the strategic ambiguity of the current discourse.

and it probably involves distinguishing sex from gender

Except that's been used as a trojan horse for eliminating biological sex entirely (or rather pretending it doesn't exist). See bathroom access arguments (bathrooms are sex segregated) or the use of phrases like "assigned male at birth."

I think there’s room for a stable equilibrium, and it probably involves distinguishing sex from gender.

What benefit is derived from distinguishing sex from gender?

Given that I believe they’re two separate clusters of traits? Accuracy.

Most of today’s trans culture warring involves a motte and bailey between the two. It’s the Trojan horse @ChickenOverlord mentioned. You want to be polite and accommodating and not rock the boat, and next thing you know, there’s a spate of pregnancies in the women’s prison.

I think a lot of that goes away if people admit that, hey, some of these traits don’t go away if you ask nicely. Make it clear when a decision (prisons, bathrooms, story hour) is based on the gametes and the BRUTE STRENGTH. That’s the best way to avoid empowering people who do want to ignore biology.

Also, I know it’s wishful thinking, but I want off the euphemism treadmill. “Assigned male at birth” is a mouthful.

We already have words for masculine women (butch, tomboy...) and feminine men (there's a lot!) though -- unless you want to argue (as somebody downthread seems to be) that "being a machinist" makes a woman a man, why would you want to invent/bend this concept of 'gender' into some new categories?

It's possible I'm not understanding you here though -- do you mean literal trans people? In that case we also have a word for them: trans.

I think there’s room for a stable equilibrium, and it probably involves distinguishing sex from gender.

I think this was the equilibrium 10-25 years ago when I was growing up/young adult, and it's been proven to be unstable. I think the only stable equilibrium at this point would be far future scifi where literal sex change is possible.

I have a similar impression.

The bleeding edge of teenage identity politics was calling people gay. A statement about gender roles, no doubt, but not sex. Er. You know what I mean.

What do you think happened? Was there some technological development in medicine or information? Do we blame tumblr?

I have no great overarching theory, but a couple of thoughts. One is that, at least since the 90s, and I'm guessing earlier, the idea that "separate is not equal" was taught as dogma to kids due to the history of the US, i.e. Plessy vs Ferguson & Brown vs Board of Education. We took that to heart. That meant that any difference at all in how people were treated - i.e. being "separate" - was, definitionally, unequal. So treating transwomen as literally indistinguishable from women in every single way, i.e. in their sex and not just in their "gender identity," became a moral prerogative.

Another is the success of the gay rights/gay marriage movement on the idea that it was an innate "born this way" thing. I remember back in high school, a friend of mine dated a girl who came out as gay after they broke up; when I talked about how he dated her back when she was straight, my friend "corrected" me by telling me that she was already gay when she dated him, she just didn't know it yet (I bought it at the time, but now I wonder how I could have taken this on faith when it's obvious that such a definitive statement about how sexual orientation works would require absolute mountains of empirical evidence to prove - I was very good at coming up with epicycles for this kind of stuff, I think). The movement to normalize trans people took the same tactic, hence the claim that, say, Bruce Jenner was a woman when "she" won the men's decathlon gold medal or Ellen Page was a man when "he" was nominated for best actress for Juno. This reinforced the idea that someone's "transness" is not tied to anything in physical reality but rather entirely up to the individual's personal judgment, which meant that autogynephiles were encouraged to and celebrated for transitioning, and such people absolutely want access to female-only spaces, and so discriminating against them on the basis that their sex was male despite their gender being otherwise became verboten.

Look, whatever the name you want to put on the phenomenon it's been with us for a very long time. I balk at the idiocy of presentism all the time, but "rare case of pathological desire to be of the other sex" goes back to the beginning of history.

I think the real presentist error people make here is treating transgenderism and homosexuality as more distinct phenomena than they actually are. They're separate manifestations of a single underlying ancient pathology, which could have manifested in any number of other ways if our culture had developed differently. When conservatives express tolerance towards homosexuality and disgust towards transgenderism, it's a clear example, IMO, of not being nearly as free from the ideas of the surrounding culture as you think you are. The deviancy of homosexuality is downplayed and the dangers of transgenderism are exaggerated. They're the same basic life-destroying contagious confusion about the binary of sex. If history had played out differently, we easily could have wound up with transgenderism normalized a generation ago and homosexuality being normalized now, and then the same conservatives would be treating the latter as the bridge too far, with very elaborate arguments as to how this set of priorities made perfect sense.

You might not endorse homosexuality but I'm reasonably confident you and homosexuals would both agree on the basic facts of the matter: Homosexuals are people who are sexually attracted to people of the same sex. Right or wrong, good or bad, nice or nasty, nobody is arguing about what the term signifies. Nobody is claiming that a man who wants to have sex with men isn't a man who wants to have sex with men.

Transgenderism advocates and trans sceptics don't agree on the ground level. Transgenderists believe that they can stop being what they are and become what they already were if only they weren't what they already are, which they're not, and want to stop being. Trans sceptics think that's self serving circular anti-sense.

Both homosexuals and transgenderists are nonconforming in certain aspects of stereotypical gender expressions but they have radically different interpretations of what that signifies. Gays interpret it as a subjective preference ("I like x"), trannies interpret it as an inversion of objective reality ("x, which is defined as not y, is y, not x").

You might not like gays but I suspect you'd find them that bit worse if they told you their having gay sex with other gays was proof they're not gay.

Both of them present to me as outcomes of abuse by adults.

On what basis?

Last time this came up, that wasn’t supported by the stats for homosexuality. I really doubt it’s true for transgender kids either.

When conservatives express tolerance towards homosexuality

Which conservatives, the classical liberals or the evangelicals?

Which homosexuality, the one that acts like any normal couple except same-sex, or the hyper-effeminate/5000 orgies a night type?

They're separate manifestations of a single underlying ancient pathology

I agree with this, but not for the reasons you think; I think that there are different challenges for relationships that are built on the ancient exclusive prostitution agreement between a man and his wife (and the drives and personality types that make people prefer this arrangement), and those that are not for other reasons. Confusing the two on purpose because “the prostitution is the telos of a relationship” is itself a destructive and intellectually lazy thing; traditionalists and progressives do it because it’s psychological isolation from an infohazard.

I wouldn’t benefit from constantly being reminded that some people have more secure relationships either- that's kind of why marrying a virgin is really important to most guys, as a signal that the prostitute sees the sex work as work to be done (and her body as an asset), not as pleasurable in and of itself, which from an evolutionary biology standpoint is obviously as disordered as homosexuality is.

that's kind of why marrying a virgin is really important to most guys,

No it’s not, like even trivially most guys expect to have sex with their wives before marriage, and don’t seriously expect she never had sex with someone else? I have old fashioned views about sex and gender but I recognize that I’m in the minority.

as a signal that the prostitute sees the sex work as work to be done (and her body as an asset), not as pleasurable in and of itself, which from an evolutionary biology standpoint is obviously as disordered as homosexuality is.

What? Most guys want their wives to desire and enjoy sex with them.

and don’t seriously expect she never had sex with someone else

Judging by the commentariat here, this is the overwhelming preference; that it isn't expressed in polite company doesn't make it untrue.

It’s the preference but clearly not the reality, both for the majority of married men here and in general. Men also “prefer” tall, hourglass blondes with huge tits and perfect faces and women “prefer” 6’5 billionaire bad boys with sexy voices, that isn’t the destiny of most people.

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If history had played out differently, we easily could have wound up with transgenderism normalized a generation ago and homosexuality being normalized now, and then the same conservatives would be treating the latter as the bridge too far, with very elaborate arguments as to how this set of priorities made perfect sense.

See eg

I can’t agree with that.

There’s a cluster of traits which I find attractive. That doesn’t give me any interest in expressing those traits.

I simply do not agree that these are similar modes of thinking. I've known many homosexuals and many transgender people and they are not the same or have the same issues or challenges insofar as they aren't both things at once.

It really is something different. If only in terms of mental stability.

We can put it all in a big bucket called "sexual deviancy" as people did at various points in history, but it's a thought terminating cliché that allows us to learn nothing helpful to mitigate the outcomes of either.

How are homosexuals "confused about the binary of sex?" Maybe I don't know enough homosexuals but -- I get the impression that lesbians don't like transwomen, by and large. It seems to me that the homosexual lobby and the transgender lobby can be at odds with each other. The only way I can consider them similar is through the powerful outgroup homogenizing lens of "they repulse me" and "they are about gender." Was women entering the workforce another manifestation of that pathology?

How are homosexuals "confused about the binary of sex?"

The only thing I can think is the gender non-conforming behavior of some homosexuals, who perform the gender/sex roles of a sex they're not (studs, femme male homosexuals). I don't know that "confusion" is the right word there. They're not confused like transpeople who claim to be women, they're deliberately non-conforming.

If you remove medicalization the boundaries get much fuzzier, because there's really no sharp dividing line between these things and "trans". They're all just varying levels of gender non-conforming behavior with more or less psychological instability thrown in.

It seems to me that the homosexual lobby and the transgender lobby can be at odds with each other.

Seriously asking as someone who doesn't pay much attention to LGBT foundation myths:has it been that way historically? A transwoman didn't throw the first brick but does anyone deny that they were part of the same club of non-conformists (along with drag queens and studs and so on) that we now call the "LGBT movement"? I've not seen anyone debate Marsha P.'s membership, just his centrality (or self-identification)

Gay and trans were absolutely part of the same club back in the day, and coincidentally pretty much the only people who wanted to live as the opposite sex at that time were super effeminate gay men and super butch lesbians. Nobody in 1980 would ever have anticipated the modern phenomenon of straight men putting on dresses and calling themselves trans lesbians, nor the prevalence of the religious belief among young women that such men must be respected and treated as women in all ways.

I don't know that "confusion" is the right word there.

"Confusion" is just what a straight person calls it, because everyone is straight, obviously.

I have never been "confused" about who or what I am (even through the time when most straights 'wake up'- that time being puberty, which must naturally be why most straights believe that time to be "confusing" to them). I find the notion that I ever would be kind of insulting, but I keep that to myself because expressing that is not generally beneficial.

Once you hear that, you have two options- you can accept it and move on (maybe make up some academic-sounding term for people who do that), or you could choose to get turbo butthurt over it, cry to some under-worked authority figure, and take the word the neutral[ish] people used and use it as a weapon because it makes you sound as smart, which automatically makes you better than everyone else.

They're all just varying levels of gender non-conforming behavior with more or less psychological instability thrown in.

Which is why that cluster of non-straight behavior belongs together. I figure sexuality is probably made up of a bunch of modules, and sometimes some people do not get the "correct" ones. Personality may then either enhance or corrupt this (or indeed might back-fill sexuality if you either don't have one or are out of a situation where it's relevant); so what might be productive for one group to do might be extremely destructive if another group does it, and vice versa.

Obviously in 2024 a woman who wants to be in the professional workforce is normal and doesn't have a defective brain module. Can the same be said of the woman in 1950? Would people (you, or others) lump the 1950s woman in with queers and call her "confused" because she is non-conformist? Would people not lump her in with queers, because queers gross them out, but she's just a little weird?

The only wrench in my argument is there may not be such a woman in 1950 - or rather, any woman in 1950 that wanted to be in the professional workforce was probably also a butch queer.

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I think Democrats are realizing trans issues are the albatross tied around their neck. It alienates suburban whites, it alienates minority and immigrant voters, it alienates women, including a large part of feminists. They can’t keep bending over backwards to pander to a segment of the coalition that’s 0.3 percent of the voter base.

The trans issue isn't there to win voters. People who are militantly pro trans to the point that it steers their vote aren't voting conservative in the first place. The goal with trans is to keep the left wing activit crowd from being engaged in occupy wall street style ideas, anti war stuff and complaining about expensive health care.

The trans issue is a way for the left to give something to their base while pushing policies that benefit their oligarch donors. Except for woke issues there are few issues on which the donor elite and the activist base agree on.

Who gets out of bed in the morning and thinks, “hmm, I need to throw the activists off the trail, time to start a phenomenon”? The Clintons? Pelosi?

I think you’re right about being used a distraction away from class issues. But it has still turned into an obstacle in the way of power, and will be swiftly discarded as a result.

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