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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?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
...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".
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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.
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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.
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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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.
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.
What? Most guys want their wives to desire and enjoy sex with them.
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.
But if it is the preference, then naturally men will put a higher SMV on women who haven't done that. (This is simply describing an emergent system property; I'm not making a moral judgment about those things or otherwise Slootposting.)
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See eg
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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.
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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.
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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?
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.
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.
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"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.
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.
Tomboys, especially the older ones, will complain to no end about people doing exactly this.
It's probably technically accurate based on how I've observed them to act, but it's obviously not particularly productive to say that (and they're certainly not "confused"; this is what I mean when I complain about the normies picking up descriptive/academic terms and using them as weapons). It's also not really non-conformist-with-intent, which is what most people mean when they say that; that is just the way they are, and that is fine.
This can cause some problems for men who want/need to be the only one filling the dominant (male) role in a relationship; we don't exactly publish "how to be gay married in a straight relationship" books... since the only people who would ever read them are the ones that don't need to.
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There were professional women in 1950, and nobody thought that made them men. This post has mostly women who were in traditionally female professions, but also has a "security sales woman", pharmacists in training, a machinist, and a sales engineer.
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