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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36584 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Thank you for articulating this. I long suspected that something like this was the case, but my friend group is fairly thin on people with any negative reaction to trans issues. (Not surprising, considering my partner is trans.)

So, two points. One, I think it might behoove activist types (assuming we're not in pure conflict theory) to try to notice when one of their pushes is hitting this sort of reaction and figure out a path to undermine or alleviate it.

Sadly, I think that in spite of me recognizing the edges of this phenomenon before your post, I'm light on ideas on how to route around this.

Part of it is that I believe there are other forces much more likely to "psychically castrate" your offspring than trans ideology. Almost my entire friend group is queer people, and none of them have plans to have biological children. Even my old college friends who are in long term relationships or getting married have no plans for children. My sister is dead set against children (and that was before she learned about the heritable medical condition she has.)

The birth rate is low in the Western world, and the trends depressing it are bigger than any one object-level fight in the culture war. Sterility and the end of legacy is the water we swim in and the air we breathe. Lack of issue is the curse of modernity. The trends in Bowling Alone and since the advent of the internet are only making things worse. We are slowly becoming Japan.

I understand that imagining your own child becoming a modern trans eunuch touches a nerve. I don't necessarily think it's healthy to focus on one relatively unlikely source of "castration" when society is full of these kinds of pitfalls and in much more likely forms like feminism and certain kinds of environmental activism. Parts of Western society have become a nihilistic death cult, waiting for the End and unwilling to propagate itself into the future with offspring.

But what are the odds? 0.3%? That's not that much worse than the odds of childhood cancer, or other kind of unexpected death that a healthy mind doesn't overmuch worry about, and deals with gracefully if it comes. But now it's apparently something more like nearly 2%? That hits me in the Papa-Bear-Who-Wants-Grandkids-In-Space-Forever. And it seems very likely that a lot of that is social contagion or could otherwise be wildly reduced with a minimal degree of skepticism towards youth fads.

I was hoping to dig into your 2% figure here, but the linked page didn't really break things down the way I hoped.

I'd speculate that the 2% figure is a bit misleading though. There's a big difference between 2% of youth using alternate pronouns, and 2% of youth becoming de-sexed eunuchs. What percent are on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and undergo surgeries? I would suspect it's much lower than 2%. That might be a small comfort for a parent worried about the worst case scenario for their own child, but even if your child comes out as "trans" it might not be the end of your bloodline.

I'm reminded of my dad constantly checking if the front door was locked growing up. It was like a ritual to alleviate worries for him. Never mind that if an intruder was truly determined to get into our house, the front door would hardly work as a deterrent. I think it is a mistake to focus your worries too much on one angle of attack, especially one where the "average" case isn't as bad as you're imagining (insofar as a lot of "transition" for younger people is purely social.)

You should also think about whether you'd be okay with your children being "psychically castrated" in other ways as well. It would be disappointing obviously, but would you still love your children if they came to you at 18 and made it clear that they have no intention of ever having kids? Could you be happy living in the doomed world where your kids decide they would rather travel the world and party their 20's and 30's away, instead of having children or starting a family?

I think this comment is pretty much spot on. The fight over the effects of puberty blockers, the surgeries et al are a kind of a proxy battle for a war that's already been lost. Even if the kids aren't being literally sterilized, they're being culturally sterilized by the waters we're all swimming in and the sociocultural forces at work are so large and complex that they're impossible to compress down into something that can be fought against in a way that puberty blockers for minors can be, so you get these vicious fights that are sort of stand ins for these abstract and borderline unopposable forces. I fully expect fertility rates for western countries to hit well below 1.0 before the close of the 21st century.

Have we really made the transition from “they’re not recruiting your children” to “so what if they are?”

It's more "They've already recruited (most of) your children, it's just a matter of degree now".

I understand that imagining your own child becoming a modern trans eunuch touches a nerve. I don't necessarily think it's healthy to focus on one relatively unlikely source of "castration" when society is full of these kinds of pitfalls and in much more likely forms like feminism and certain kinds of environmental activism. Parts of Western society have become a nihilistic death cult, waiting for the End and unwilling to propagate itself into the future with offspring.

It's less "I am generally deeply worried about trans issues" and more "When the topic of trans kids is brought up, I have a disproportionate emotional reaction, let me dig in and try to understand where this is coming from."

Some people get extremely apoplectic about racism in a way I don't understand either.

Generational greavences are always like this.

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