This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Comment on the obvious parallels between castrati and trans children. The glaring, obvious parallels, and why one would be not morally good while the other is somehow more morally good.
Castrating boys is what we're referring to, and what is being called sinister.
I laid out the differences in another comment, the distinction is the reasoning and intent behind the act.
Society deems that killing is murder unless you kill the right person in the right context (self defense). Cashing a check that you stole from someone is fraud/theft, while cashing a check that you were given legitimately is a business transaction. I believe that the vast vast majority of doctors providing gender affirming care through therapy, puberty blockers, and in very rare cases surgery, are doing so with the best interests of the child in mind, which was not the case for castrati historically as I understand it.
The parallels may seem glaring and obvious, just like a self defence killing might look like murder, but there are quite substantial differences.
I inquired about what OP meant by sinister purposes, your answer refers to an act and not a purpose and does not reference abduction. I am still unclear what they meant by abduction for sinister purposes.
"I believe that the vast vast majority of doctors providing gender affirming care through therapy, puberty blockers, and in very rare cases surgery, are doing so with the best interests of the child in mind, which was not the case for castrati historically as I understand it."
While I'm sure that a great many of the people in the process have good intentions, I do not think that they are often acting with good judgment. In your example, killing is murder unless you kill the right person in the right context. But it does not merely suffice that you think that what you're doing is the right situation ("they really had it coming"), but that it actually be that.
I don't really have a good sense of what things were like for castrati. I think they (or at least, those who were successful) were not infrequently of fairly high social status, but I'm not at all sure of that.
More options
Context Copy link
I didn't mean more or less than the common definition.
sinister /'sɪnɪstər/ adj.: stemming from evil characteristics or forces; wicked or dishonorable.
Solely intent based moral (or legal) system are rare for good reason. Not only are we not mind readers, evil has a pernicious tendency to believe itself righteous and we ultimately have to live in consequence, not in intent.
In any case, any such coherent deontological system that would base itself on intent (such as Kantianism) would still have to recognize parental authority as it has to deal with the subhuman quality of children and appoint someone to protect them against themselves and the world.
Institutions such as the State, Church or any other large scale administration with no ties of blood is inherently unable to provide the same incentives as family, and is therefore only recognizable as legitimate in edge cases of parental tyranny.
The only debate being had here is if making certain medical decisions for your children can be such a tyranny and which specific circumstances trigger it.
Any reasonable answer to this question must remember the initial incentive base and can not be tantamount to seizing decision power from parents altogether, as that would simply be seeing them supplanted by a worse protector.
There are essentially two ways of thinking about transgenderism. Either it is a medical condition, for which there are medical interventions available, or it is a lifestyle choice.
Let's immediately evacuate the second one. If your child is tucute, you have full authority to deny them this choice by the same justification you can deny them tatoos or particular forms of dress.
What if your child is trutrans, however?
The problem then is one generalizable to many decisions about mental illnesses: treatment decisions can not be vested in the patient (for many reasons, and even more in this case) and we must then decide whether the family or medical experts prevail if there is a strong disagreement.
Since the legitimacy of family is to be defaulted to for reasons we discussed earlier, we are left to ask one question: do experts know this disease well enough to make decisions that have levels of confidence high enough to override personal knowledge of the patient. It is not right that a child would have his TB prayed away if antibiotics are available.
And here (as in, for GD) the literature is quite clear for whoever dares look: the confidence that was had in the Dutch protocol was very much unearned and our understanding of GD is ridiculously primitive. To the degree that none of the available procedures and treatments provide such obvious benefits that a person of sound mind wouldn't seriously consider the very significant side effects. And that medical decisions in this case are not obvious medical questions but rather important life choices.
It seems then, to me, that "good intentions" in removing parental authority from such decisions would be more negligent than it would be reasonable. Which is thankfully now the position of basically every medical authority on the matter outside of the Americas.
Okay. I'm unclear what distinction you're trying to make between evil intent and what you described as sinister purposes, or 'stemming from evil forces'. Is something done for a sinister purpose if those performing the act do it with good intentions but another participant may be affected negatively by the act? If this is not what you mean and simple evil intent is not what you mean then I still don't understand what you're getting at without more specific elaboration. I'll also state for the record that intention is not the be-all and end-all of my moral philosophy but it still plays a significant role. Intent is by far the best predictor that I'm aware of for whether someone is a generally morally 'good' person who is likely to do 'good' things.
The meaning of abduction that I am familiar with involves taking someone somewhere against their will through violence or threats. If what you were asking me was whether I support minors being taken against their will through violence or threats to surgeries that are done with sinister purposes (I'm reading this part broadly here since I don't understand your meaning) then yes, I am against that. If what you meant by abduction was that the parents of the hypothetical minor did not give consent for whatever the procedure is, then my answer will again depend on the specific context and details. This leads into the next point.
I fundamentally disagree that parents have some inherent incentive structure to care for their children that is superior to the incentives of social institutions. Parental incentives go wrong all the time! (as do institutional ones). You acknowledge this with your reference to cases of 'parental tyranny'. I would likely acknowledge that in the current world, parental incentives are more probable to be aligned with their child's than other institutions, but I dont think this is an inherent property of parenthood. In a different worldly circumstance with different institutions, it could easily be the case that the State is more aligned with child interests than parents are.
We already recognize the right for minors to escape from the potential tyranny of their parents in a variety of scenarios. The common practice of minor emancipation in Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere points to this phenomenon. My understanding (which could be wrong, i haven't looked at it too much) is that these emancipated minors are able to make all sorts of legally binding decisions for themselves, including medical ones. What are your thoughts on this practice?
Treatment decisions about mental illnesses are vested to the patient all the time! There are certain circumstances where this is not the case (imminent risk of suicide or psychosis, etc.) but I am confident that the vast vast majority of mental illnesses experienced by adults (excluding the subset of minors that we are directly disagreeing about) get treated based on decisions made by the patients which are informed by their medical team. If you were talking only about minors here, then again, I disagree.
I'll skip any factual argument and just agree that the scientific literature now demonstrates what you say it demonstrates about GD. Do you think doctors (especially in America) were making these medical decisions with the full knowledge that the medical literature did not support these decisions? You can say they were wrong about the facts, but do you believe that all these doctors were performing procedures that they knew were likely to be on average harmful for the patient? If the answer is no, then I object to the framing of this state of events as 'abduction for sinister purposes'. Making a decision that turns out to have negative consequences but was done with the best of intentions for all involved (and not simply on a whim but based on some amount of research) is not what I would consider sinister. If the answer is yes, then I guess we have a big factual disagreement that I don't know how to resolve.
If your sole point was that such decisions were perhaps too hasty in some cases given the relatively limited quantity and quality of research on the topic, then I would have a hard time disagreeing.
A hypothetical for you: A doctor has a patient who is a minor and is heavily depressed and suicidal. They have attempted to commit suicide in the past, and are still at high risk in the present. The doctor now learns that the minor's parents inflame this suicidal ideation by repeatedly making comments that the minor is trash, that they'd be better of without them, that the minor's death might solve a lot of problems. They leave sleeping pills open and in plain view on the kitchen table regularly. The doctor now faces a choice: does he intervene through some legal process in order to take parental authority away from these people to protect the minor (with the minor's approval), or does he stay silent and try to help the minor as best he can without changing the predicament?
You might say this hypothetical is hyperbolic and unrealistic. I agree. I bring it up only to poke at the fact that in certain circumstances, mental illnesses and their surrounding complications are more than enough to warrant considering revoking some or all parental rights.
Then the rest of this debate is moot. But you're proven so utterly and violently wrong by history that I have a hard time believing you've ever seriously considered the question if you think the State is a good guardian.
Have you met many children raised by the State? Or checked the
It was fine to believe Rousseau before the XXth century. I don't think it's fine anymore.
We have tried that world and discovered that the worst thing an individual can do to does not raise to the horrors that States can visit upon you in both scale and intensity.
Sure some weirdo can kidnap, rape, torture and eat you, and this stuff has been done at scale by institutions too. But is he really going to give you horrible diseases on purpose and keep you alive to study how you die?
Granted the far edge of evil is not necessarily instructive of your median expected treatment. But there is something to how different the incentives are when you're a relative versus a number on a spreadsheet. It's far easier to argue the human experience of the number doesn't matter, in the grand scheme of things.
Yes. I think they intellectually knew the risks but let their interest, curiosity and politics get in the way of their better judgement.
It is my belief that:
the American medical system is uniquely corrupt and ill conceived in that it demands large amounts of scrutiny for new drugs but waives much of this scrutiny for off label use
the psychiatric community at large has handled GD very poorly since constructivist arguments made is a political issue and overcorrected its terrible historical handling of homosexuality as LGB and T got put together in a political coalition
I don't think there is much to learn from this situation since it is a very clear cut case of abuse, which is of course one of the edge cases of parental authority we can all agree on, alongside drug use, wanton violence and the like.
Now let's alter it to make it actually interesting. Say there is no physical evidence of this abuse and you are getting all this from the minor, but you also know for a fact that the minor is mentally ill.
It's not so clear cut then is it?
I've been in the unfortunate position of having to care for people who are paranoid schizophrenics, and the amount of hallucinated lies I've been told is staggering. But then again some people do abuse their kids.
The issue isn't so much how that particular hypothetical could be resolved, but what a good general rule is for dealing with such problems at scale. And I find that despite its pitfalls, leaning on parental authority does provide the best results.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link