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I think more people could understand the depths of this debate better by steelmanning the pro puberty blocker/pro HRT side a little and seeing that allowing people to go though puberty normally is also not reversible. And a lot of transgender adults (and teens off the very basis that they are seeking out hormones) openly express that they wish they didn't have to go through their natural puberty.
So from their perspective what bans can end up doing is that instead of the person getting to decide which irreversible thing they go through based off their own desires, it's the government choosing for them.
There is no simple choice here, someone will be upset by permanent changes. A teenager who makes a mistake and gets on hormones without consideration, or a teenager who is forced to go without care and ends up as a sad trans adult who just wishes they had the autonomy given to make choices about their own body when they were younger.
And blockers came up as the compromise solution and promoting them as the free space where everything can be reversed seems just like wishful thinking from everyone. Because if it's true then it's a very easy solution that won't cause any harm.
In addition to /u/RenOS excellent comment:
Our identity is inextricably shaped by our actions and behaviours. Personality is shaped by the things you do. One of the pernicious aspects of this phenomenon is that introspection - the act of soul-searching - is a formative behaviour itself. Going through puberty is something natural that all of us do, but modern culture encourages deliberate exploration of gender identity: scrutinizing bodily discomfort, exploring potential gender expressions, and contemplating one's emotional responses to one's changing body. This thinking, stewing, brewing in the process of exploration shapes you as a person as much as biological puberty itself.
"You can be whatever you want! Are you a boy? Are you a girl? You get to decide!" - we encourage self-determination, the act of contemplation nowadays, as if it's a choice, as if the real identity somehow resides within you, you just need to discover it. Children marinate in this environment and then we act surprised when children come out as gender-havers. Of course! Modern society (and especially the internet culture) amplified their gender sensibilities deliberately and, IMO it's reasonable to assume, it created the sense of gender within them. To boot, there's already a preconceived notion that this gender that they themselves discovered within can be misaligned!
Some people go as far as reaching the conclusion of having a xenogender identification. Or it's also entirely possible to convince yourself that you are an animal through vigorous quadrobics. This is done through an act of pondering, through thorough investigation of yourself, through consciously trying to apply various genders to your identity - not vice versa. Why do we think that this gender feeling is innate? Why do we think that altering your identity like this is normal? Or even good? Or something inherent? Given the marked increase in gender identity discussions throughout the 21st century, we should at the very minimum entertain the possibility that gender-focused rumination is just a harmful meme.
If you ask me, a nobody on the internet, whether I want anyone to feel bad about permanent changes their body goes through - no! But instead of shaping your personality through questioning and extending this period using puberty blockers, why don't we also encourage, as /u/RenOS, said becoming heteronormative through puberty and then continue to lead normal lives after that? What makes puberty blockers inherently a better choice than a natural process that in most cases leads to a straightforward, normal life trajectory?
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There is no simple choice here, and any method is going to inevitably have both false positives and false negatives. I think there are a couple of good reasons to err on the side of more false negatives, though. One is the basic principle that's often summed up as "first, do no harm." This isn't some iron-clad rule even within the medical community, much less reality itself, but it's a general call for epistemic humility in medicine such that, unless we can be really really sure that some intervention won't be a net harm, we ought to allow human biology to take its course. The other reason is the base rates: the odds that any given child is trans is minuscule, likely less than 1%, from what I recall about the stats. Now, we aren't sure what the odds are, conditional on the child believing that they're trans, but it's not clear that that conditional shifts the odds significantly, much less that it shifts the odds to 50.00001%, which would be the threshold at which it would make sense to even consider any sort of irreversible interventions.
What I think any sort of people who are for use of puberty blockers in trans children ought to do at this point is to generate credible scientific knowledge on how to accurately determine if a child is trans, as well as create credible mechanisms by which children are properly filtered out. At a bare minimum, it would have to include metaphorically tarring and feathering anyone who would refuse to publicize research on this topic based on the fear that it would be politically inconvenient, as well as encouraging criticisms of any research from people who are ideologically opposed to them. It's only through building such a credible mechanism of accurately identifying trans children and minimizing false positives that I think society in general would be on board with the program. Even then, there will always be people who oppose it entirely on principle, much like, even in 2025, there are people who believe homosexuality is a sin or are against miscegenation. Those people ought to just be ignored and will simply lose their credibility over time if giving puberty blockers to kids proves itself to be fine.
It seems like this would require defining what it means to be trans... any suggestions?
Seems like you're begging the question here. If people think something is wrong in principle, then it won't be "fine" by their lights even if it doesn't cause secondary problems.
Personally, no. I agree that it'd be incumbent upon anyone who wants society to be accepting of giving puberty blockers to trans children in order to transition them to provide a definition of "trans" that society in general would accept. For the past couple decades, I think we've seen them push the idea of "really really feels like they're the opposite sex," along the same lines as homosexuality being defined as something like "really really feels like they're sexually attracted to the same sex," but that clearly hasn't stuck. Given that we're talking about actual medical intervention, the definition would probably have to be a lot more objective.
Sure, just like how homosexuals still aren't "fine" by the lights of plenty of people today. But, again, we can just ignore those people and win over the people who can be won over based on the (lack of) those secondary problems.
But the homosexual community is still struggling with the issue: Turns out they can't ignore those people and instead seem compelled to eradicate them from all public fora. And I think trans advocates are cut of this same cloth. Dissent and debate are lethal to these movements, seemingly, in very similar ways for very similar reasons. Some feelings are good for governing behaviors. Things like the feeling that touching a stovetop hurts is a very good way to avoid severe damage to your limbs. However, these more complex feelings are much more of a crapshoot. Love is notoriously ephemeral. Sexual attraction is less so, but letting attraction have a strong influence on your sexual acts is still a recipe for disaster.
This struggle seems like an entirely voluntary decision and the source of entirely self-inflicted suffering. Unfortunately, that's often not easy to pull someone out of. My hope is that enough people just walk away from this that the people who choose to inflict this unnecessary suffering on themselves (and others) are sufficiently few as not to be a major issue.
Funnily enough, your choice of the word "struggle" actually reminds me of another rather famous Struggle that also seemed entirely voluntary and led to a ton of self-inflicted unnecessary suffering both to himself and his compatriots. Hopefully it doesn't come to anything like that.
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Sounds like we agree on basically everything. Except I want to reserve the right to value things independently of whether they cause secondary problems. E.g. I'd fight to stop secretly torturing people even if the practice didn't cause secondary problems.
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The part many on the left are missing is that puberty itself is a large part of the mechanic by which teens become heteronormal. When I was around 12, I felt disgusted by teens, sexuality in general and was a somewhat odd kid to begin with. At that time there already was lots of talk about nonstandard sexualities and I strongly identified with asexuals. I also thought that I was very far from the average male, among other things refusing any kind of violence (I distinctly remember refusing to even watch shows/movies or play games portraying violence), an intellectual above all kinds of base instincts. Typical arrogant nerd stuff. Especially early puberty then felt like shit, very moody & scared of what happens with me. Then sometime in late puberty all of that went out of the window, suddenly I was a temperamentally fairly stereotypical guy. And even in retrospect, I had been to some degree in denial even when younger. In elementary school I was often beating up other kids for various reasons. I just learned that I was going nowhere with that attitude, so I had to force myself out of it and pretended that it never happened. Which combined with my otherwise bookish personality naturally led to the described intellectual self-image.
Conditionals are obviously hard to prove, but I could easily see my pre-puberty self taking puberty blockers to not become a disgusting, violent, sexual men. Especially with the argument that oh, it's reversible anyway, so just try it out. It would have been a grave mistake, but I wouldn't have known, and in particular it's easy then to then just stay the course and tell yourself you took the right option.
My wife is very similar in the other direction; She always was a tomboy who felt more comfortable with boys, then puberty hit and she changed. She also could see herself mistakenly choosing to take puberty blockers in her youth. And now our daughter is just the same, so we make sure to always tell her that her mom had the same struggles. Imagining her mistakenly getting talked into puberty blockers is horrifying, and worse, very plausible.
So overall while I have quite some sympathy, going through puberty seems like the less-bad option even for the majority of those who feel somewhat uncomfortable with their sex.
Hardcore gender activists aren’t missing this; they openly say they want to dismantle heteronormativity. What did you think that meant, thoughts, conferences, essays?
Empirically, yes.
The number of man-hours put into those categories dwarfs anything related to puberty blockers, or to medical intervention at all.
The tooth to tail ratio is a bitch, but it’s not that much of a bitch. Woke activism really is aimed at producing more of the alphabet soup type of trans. The social media influencers, the public school lessons, the puberty blockers- they’re all part of the direct ecosystem in a way that supremely stupid academic papers are not.
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I'm going to play Devil's Doctor here:
You underwent a drastic change in your personality as a consequence of a hormonal surge that was out of your control. That's 'normal'. It's puberty.
Yet the person you became isn't the same person as the one before. I mean, puberty hit me hard, but I never felt as if my values or goals changed because of it (beyond being even more eager for the company of the fairer sex).
This seems to me to be analogous to a person who, for their entire life, had sworn off addictive substances, but ended up on benzos or opioids for Medical Reason and found themselves hooked, and are now unwilling to try and become sober.
Why should we so strongly privilege puberty because it's "natural"? Many things are natural, such as 50% infant mortality rates, dying of a heart attack at 50 or getting prostate cancer by 80.
Nature, a blind and indifferent force, cares nothing for our individual well-being or our carefully constructed notions of self. To equate "natural" with "good" or "desirable" is a fundamental error, a logical fallacy we often fall prey to.
In the UK, the laws around consent for minors are relatively simple. Past the age of 16, they're assumed to be competent to consent to or decline medical procedures until proven otherwise. Below that age, there's no strict cut-off, if they can prove to their clinician that they are able to weigh the risks and benefits, they are able to consent or withhold it, and even override parental demands.
Someone who wishes to be the opposite sex is someone I pity. Medical science as it currently stands can't provide them more a hollow facsimile of that transition, it's Singularity-complete based off my knowledge of biology. Even so, the desire is one I consider as valid as any.
If they understand that:
A)Puberty blockers have risks and might not be truly reversible if they change their mind.
B) It won't solve all their problems, it won't physically make them indistinguishable from their desired sex.
Then I see no reason to declare that they're making a mistake. By the values they hold, it's the right decision. If they're forced to pass through puberty, they might desist, or they might spend their life wracked with regret that they didn't pull the trigger (hopefully not literally). You can pass far easier before testosterone wracks your body. It's a helluva drug/hormone.
A lot of life-changing decisions can be ones that change the person making them irrevocably, and into a person who would affirm them in retrospect. But I would yell at someone who suggested that couples who are iffy about childbirth be forced to have a child in the hopes that'll change their mind, or fix their marriage or some other well-intentioned goal. Or if we suddenly were to say that everyone should be made to try alcohol and cigarettes because the kind of people who try them tend to stick to it.
We're forced to deal with a messy world that doesn't always readily cough up pathways to our desires when we ask. I'm all for overcoming biology, and I think that people who understand what they're getting into are entitled to ask for even imperfect solutions.
Want to be more muscular? Try tren, if you know what you're in for. Want to lose weight? Take ozempic, while keeping an eye on your eyesight and pancreas. Want to be the other sex? This is the closest we can get you today.
Good news! You get to choose the entire genome for your next kid.
Bad news: It's only two choices.
Worse: It's a) a naturally occuring genome and b) a randomly generated genome.
So what'll be?
I know I'm being mean here, but the premium natural gets is justified. Natural evolution doesn't really care about us, certainly not our feeling, but it leads to something that works. On the other hand, the average for careless major deviations from natural is oh my god fuck fuck what have I done and the best case is something like Down's.
And don't get me wrong, I'm the kind of guy who dreams about replacing his full body with improved cybernetics one day. But you have to be serious about this. Natural gives us a pretty high floor, all things considered. Especially if you get to choose the best among all natural options (which is what, for example, embryo selection with PRS is). You're correct it's not a categorical difference, but getting over this floor is damn hard. I'm not aware of any currently available major change to basic human biology that a) improves overall wellbeing and b) isn't just a correction towards a different, better natural option. Yes running blades let you run damn fast, no they're not overall better than regular feet.
Unless you're intersex or have other major biological sexual deformities the honest answer to "should I try to change to a whole different sex" is "sorry, we're not there yet". Sure that sucks and it doesn't mean we shouldn't keep on improving, but the current reality of trans medicine is much worse.
That said I have very little problem with letting adults to crazy stuff to themselves out of their own pocket. But it should be discouraged, it shouldn't be for kids, and it certainly shouldn't be paid for by society.
hello would you like to pick between my position and random bullshit that's nowhere near your position
Sure as I said, the beginning was a bit of a digression and it was somewhat mean. But that's because I'm quite annoyed nowadays by the blanket "natural doesn't mean good", and his stated position, as far as I understand it, is that natural shouldn't be privileged at all.
And to that no, actually, natural biology is pretty good, and improving on it is very, very hard. It absolutely should be privileged. Any deviation is most likely bad, which means even if the preliminary evidence looks decent, it'll still probably turn out to be bad. Medical transition already was quite questionable based on the early evidence, and now with more evidence, it seems worse. Which was expected, because see the sentence before it.
Edit: Also, after reading some of the other replies here by him ... Classifying, for example, "brushing teeth" as transhumanism and equating it with major changes to your own biology is far more silly. Firstly because brushing teeth isn't even necessary in the natural state, it's merely a solution to a problem of modernity, namely excessive sugar. And second, because it's just a variation of the very natural behaviour of cleaning yourself.
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Briefly, I agree that you that arguments from nature can be fraught but I think that we can show more discernment here.
I think it’s fair to say that your body is naturally designed to mature during puberty, your heart is designed to pump blood at an appropriate pressure and rate, and that women are naturally designed to be able to produce healthy children without dying in the process.
These processes sometimes fail in the ancestral environment for various reasons, thus eg. 50% child mortality or angina. These processes are pretty clearly failures of function rather than successes.
Therefore I think we can say quite confidently that puberty is a natural process of human maturity whilst excluding heart failure.
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Because puberty is a necessary step to making babies. Which we need to continue society and the human race. Your other examples are not analogous to puberty because they lack what is, not just a redeeming feature, but an excellent feature of a generally excellent process. Few people in this world were more capable human beings at 11 than at 25, and those few usually had something unusual happen on the way.
Were there a way to mad science up some reproductive capacity without requiring puberty, would opting out then become acceptable?
I half suspect that, between cloning and the Monkey testicular transplant experiment, the mad science could have been there by now, had we been performing the mostly-unethical experiments to master the tech.
Although some transhumanists shriek in horror at the mere implication, there are factions in both pro- and anti-trans movements who believe the transgender debate is actually a transhumanism debate. Your answer to this will depend on your answer to that question vs Natural Law. I'm a Natural Law guy, much like I believe Yudkovskian schemes of uploading your body and freezing your brain, or whatever, is suicide with extra steps, unrolling these kind of body modifications throughout the human species effectively means extinction.
I might be ok with letting the willing do it, but not in a multicultural framework, where they get to advertise their ideas to the naive and impressionable.
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Yes this.
But also yes to the "puberty is part of the process" catch 22. Why do you have to die to appreciate who you were/are/will be?
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Tell me again how transgenderism is a totally different thing from transhumanism.
I bet I already have.
If not, I'll answer your rhetorical quasi-question:
Transhumanism seeks to liberate us from the existing limits of the human flesh. The exact goal can vary, be it practical immortality, becoming superintelligent or immune to disease. The only common thread is looking at the Human Condition, deeming it deeply suboptimal, and aspiring to do better through technology.
Transgenderism? That could mean anything from affirming that a desire to change sex is Valid™, that it is desirable to do so, or claims that we can do so. Some might say that people who have made efforts to emulate the opposite sex should be extended the polite courtesy/social fiction of being treated like them. Hardliners might say that they are the opposite sex, and any efforts to distinguish them from those natally blessed is bigotry.
They have superficial similarities. Both sides are usually less than pleased with their current bodies and wish to remedy that.
If you're happy that I'm conceding some kind of point you've made, then I will helpfully point out that if you consider them equal and indistinguishable:
Are all sterling examples of transhumanism! The evidence is clear for all to behold, are they not all examples of overcoming human limitations through technology?
Look at this featherless biped, is he not a fine specimen of Man?
If your wife were to dye her hair blonde, would you divorce her as a reckless transhumanist obsessed with undermining the sanctity of the human form she was blessed with? Probably not.
Ahem.
I'm a transhumanist. I'm not a transgenderist in any meaningful sense. I'm very happy being a man rather than a woman. I'd be even happier as a post-gender Matrioshka Brain.
If you want to restrict yourself to the kind of trans-activism that demands people who disagree make concessions beyond minor ones like going along with a new name or remembering new pronouns, then they're usually making some kind of metaphysical claim that a trans-woman is as female as a born woman.
Which I think is nonsense. At the very least it's not possible to pull off today, no matter how much surgery or gene therapy they can afford or survive.
When I want to be a 6'9" muscular 420 IQ uber-mensch, I want that to be a fact about physical reality. There shouldn't be any dispute about that, no more than anyone wants to dispute the fact that I have black hair right now.
I do not think that putting on high heels and bribing my way into Mensa achieves my goal. I do not just want to turn around and say that because I identify as a posthuman deity, that I am one and you need to acknowledge that fact.
This explains why I have repeatedly pointed out that while I have no objection to trans people wanting to be the opposite sex, that they need to understand the limitations of current technology. I would have hoped that was obvious, why else would I pull terms like ersatz or facsimile out of my handy Thesaurus?
Self identification only equals identity if I asked you about which football club you're a fan of. I haven't actually met someone with who asked me to use different pronouns in real life, if they did, I'd probably oblige them because I'm a polite person with better hills to die on. If they saw me in a treatment room, I'd put their birth sex in the charts and helpfully append "trans" or "identifies as X" alongside it.
I doubt you wouldn't be able to get into Mensa legitimately, the IQ bar is not that high. Save your bribing for some other exclusive club!
Good, 9 inch heels and a urgent medical care when I trip and break something is expensive enough as is!
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I get that you don't care for all the talk about identities and validity, but I don't think the similarity is superficial, and I think transhumanism tends to go far beyond remedying the lack of satisfaction one has with one's body. With the examples you gave, you've expanded transhumanism to include all humans, and at this point I have to ask what's so "trans" about it? I mean, hell, arguably you even included several non-human species. Are crows fashioning a wire into a hook to get to a snack trapped in a bottle transcrowists? Are beavers building dams transbeaverists, and ants building anthills transantists?
If we insist that all these things are trans*ism, what do we call people who are ok with using tools and body modification to restore original function, but are against modifications that go beyond that? That seems to be the major similarity between between transhumanists and transgenderists. Are you just trying to redefine the word that describes you, so that it includes everyone, in order to claim that this means everyone must agree with you? (That might be another similarity to the transgender movement)
My examples like brushing teeth or wearing clothes were intended as a reductio ad absurdum against the knee jerk reaction that any modification or augmentation of the "natural" human state is inherently suspect or falls under some grand, unified theory of "trans*ism". If we define transhumanism simply as "using technology to overcome a limitation," then yes, by that absurdly broad definition, a crow with a wire hook is a transcrowist, and anyone who wears shoes is a transhumanist. That wasn't my serious definition, but rather a way to point out that the boundary between "natural human" and "technologically augmented human" is not some bright, sacred line. Humans have always used tools and modified their environment and even their bodies.
If you are able to note that entirely normal behaviors that most humans, and even some smarter non-human animals engage in can be distinguished from transhumanism despite lying on a clear continuum, then please consider the obvious differences between it and transgenderism.
After all, I'm not the one who asked:
If you can't appreciate the rather minimal and nuanced differences between getting a haircut and uploading a brain into a computer, then I suppose that's a reasonable question to ask.
There's no bright line between "fixing issues" and "making things better than they were, and on average, are". If you went to an ophthalmologist for LASIK when you developed myopia, you wouldn't get a refund if your complaint was that he'd ended up giving you better than 20/20 vision.
The fact that I don't go about saying how desperately I wish to be the opposite sex and how I could achieve that with modern technology makes me rather different from the average trans ideologue.
There you go. Majority similarities aren't the same as equivalence, and implies major differences. Communism isn't Fascism even if they're both authoritarian in practice. White ethnonationalism isn't the Nation of Islam.
The majority of trans advocates believe that the changes we can make at present, through makeup, surgery, hormones and asking other people nicely, are enough to justify treating a transperson just like a natal individual of the same identified sex. This has next to nothing to do with transhumanism.
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Since I wrote it in another comment and I consider it unfair to "write behind someones back": Classifying "brushing teeth" as transhumanism and equating it with major changes to your own biology is quite silly. Firstly because brushing teeth isn't even necessary in the natural state, it's merely a solution to a problem of modernity, namely excessive sugar. And second, because it's just a variation of the very natural behaviour of cleaning yourself. Similar arguments go for most of the examples; Riding a bike changes nothing about your nature, and clothes have been, evolutionary speaking, long part of our natural state. A genuine example of transhumanism is imo only the pacemaker.
And the pacemaker is designed to make sure that a natural part of the body does its job in the natural way.
Yeah. But it itself is a genuine piece of non-natural object added to your body that improves its function. So for me it's good enough to count, even if it's with some caveats.
I appreciate that I’m being a pedant here but it seems relevant that a pacemaker doesn’t and AFAIK can’t improve a naturally functioning heart. We use it to turn a malfunctioning (unnatural?) heart into a functional ‘naturally’ healthy heart. A trans human alternative would be actually improving the function through hyperoxygenation or something. (But all the methods we know of to do this have long term issues, fitting your original point).
Same with glasses - they correct my deformed eyeballs to give me natural human vision. Transhumanism would be something like a telescope and again lens physics doesn’t really allow for massively expanding the kinds of things you’re able to see. Being able to infrared or something would be neat though.
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Dont your body, your brain chemistry, your experiences and limitations make you "you"? Matrioshka Brain Self_Made_Human wouldn't be you. It would be something entirely different, akin to a Praying Mantis Self_Made_Human or a Spider Self_Made_Human. To me, it sounds like you are okay with killing yourself and replacing yourself with something that was created from you but is not fundamentally you.
I don't know if that makes sense, this statement just sounded utterly alien to me.
I'm the dancer, not the dance. I'm the waves, not the water.
To be a little more concrete:
Every part of your body is endlessly recycled while you're alive. This is true for every structure more complicated than fundamental particles. If two electrons have the same mass, spin, charge and other quantum numbers, then it's impossible to distinguish between them.
The majority of the atoms in my body have swapped around since I was born. I have a consistent self-identity that is conserved even if I have a banana for breakfast or take a big dump, or if I go to bed and wake up tomorrow. I'm never the exact same, any more than a river is. Yet a river and a self_made_human are consistent entities about which it possible to make broad statements.
So it can't be pure and perfect identity. It can't be truly continuous consciousness, unless one wishes to believe that sleep is lethal.
What remains are the patterns of information and the algorithms that act on them. If I copy a png of a flower and share it with you, there is nothing lost or gained in the process, assuming standard error correction.
Right now, these algorithms and their data are instantiated in meat machinery: neurons.
Yet the neurons churn. And eventually, without advanced technological intervention, will die and take me with them.
If you can perform addition using both an abacus, a TI-84 and a supercomputer, in a very real sense they're all doing the same thing. It doesn't make much sense to say that your CPU can't actually add numbers.
(Ignore details such as how the floating point arithmetic would work, that's beside the point)
I think there's no fundamental barrier to extracting the algorithms and information in my neurons and creating a replica in-silico. It is a ridiculously difficult engineering challenge, but not something forbidden by the laws of physics.
I can dig up a link, but we already know that that artifical neural networks can near perfectly replicate the behavior of their biological counterparts (usually in a 1000:1 ratio). You can make them arbitrarily more precise, to the point where the original brain is noisier.
Hence, I want my mind to be uploaded into a computer. It's more robust than flesh, and unlocks far more scope for improvement. Going from a dumb baby to a reasonably intelligent adult didn't kill me, so I don't think becoming more intelligent will.
I'm also fine with multiple copies of myself running around. All that matters is that they begin as indistinguishable in terms of behavior to a blinded observer. If there's a "copy" of myself sitting in a black box, which says the exact same things, acts like me in simulation, and so on, then I accept that as me.
Consciousness isn't computation - it's fundamentally embedded into the biological processes. It also doesn't emerge from neural networks regardless of how well they mimic behaviours of real humans. Neural networks are statistical models, while you are your un-statistical emotions, you are your hormonal systems, microbiomes, other physical systems within your body. If you just extract the consciousness + the memories, just the raw contents of your brain and put them into the machine, you lose everything else, which is arguably the most important part. You get alien consciousness. Your consciousness is your consciousness BECAUSE of all of those icky yucky things attached to your brain, not DESPITE. If your replace them, why do you assume continuity?
All of this irreducible complexity can't be reimplemented by assuming that everything is an algorithm. Emotions aren't algorithmic abstract patterns, they are complex interactions between neurons and other biological systems and they are a fundamental part of the biological reality that makes you "you". Omitting them makes you a spider, an alien.
Hang on. Please note that you're just saying these things.
Why isn't consciousness computational? I mean, I can't prove that it is either, but that's just assuming the opposite side. The correct stance is agnosticism, albeit I think it'll turn out to have a mechanistic explanation eventually.
How do you know with, any confidence at all, that something like an LLM isn't conscious? It might not be conscious in the same manner as humans, but the same might be true for birds or octopi. They demonstrate all the hallmarks of intelligence, even if it's not the human kind.
The human body operates on biology. Which is abstracted chemistry. Which is abstracted physics. Which can be mathematically modeled. There's nothing in the human body or brain that violates the laws of physics, you need supernovae or massive particle collides to produce behavior the Standard Model can't explain (leaving aside dark matter and energy, which aren't relevant to human biology).
That physics, while intractable to compute at the quantum level or even the microscopic scale, still holds true. A lot of it can be usefully described and wrangled with statistics.
Well, emulate the body too! The neurons are electro-chemical, and surprisingly binary, in the sense that they're either firing or they aren't. This behavior can be well approximated.
If a disconnected brain emulation goes nuts, then if you have that kind of tech, you can trivially design a virtual body with the usual sensory modalities.
The brain is also very noisy. You can probably get away with saving a lot of computation by approximating events at the chemical scale. Not every random jiggle of proteins matters, it simply can't at scale.
I am not convinced that this complexity is irreducible at all. A single neuron, or even a thousand, misfiring: Happens all the time. Doesn't matter. An emulation can withstand a lot of noise, because the object it's representing is also noisy.
Emotions can be both algorithmic patterns and the product of a complex interplay between systems. All that really changes is that the algorithms in question become more complex.
This is already accounted for. Estimates for the amount of compute needed for a brain emulation vary multiple orders of magnitude. I never said this would be easy. It just isn't impossible, look, something evolution cobbled up manages. We even have our own alien artifical intelligences that can run on your phone.
If that was really the outcome, I'd take it over death when my fragile biological form fails me. I don't think this is likely at all, beyond the first imperfect uploads.
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I basically agree with you about values and freedom. I guess my main fear is around the information environment we provide re: "This is the closest we can get you today." I'm not an expert but I get the impression that many (maybe most?) people who attempt to transition are deeply mislead about both the best and worst-case outcomes. I just don't expect any modern Western institution to be able to honest about what wretched results most transitioners end up having, nor about what most people honestly think of them.
Relatedly, Blanchard wrote about how his MtF patients could usually see that the other MtF patients clearly did not pass, but believed that they themselves did.
I think you could make similar arguments about the information environment surrounding lots of other early life choices, or educational choices such as pursuing arts degrees. But most of those are less catastrophic and irreversible. I guess at least Western society now does a pretty good job of showing the downsides of joining the army.
I have no opposition to making every reasonable effort to expose people to reality. Of course, with the matter as politicized as it is, easier said than done. There are just as many people committed to cracking eggs at all costs as there people who will claim that puberty blockers gave their cancer cancer.
At any rate, if I had solutions for people making bad decisions, I'd probably be accepting a dozen Nobel prizes right now. All I can say is that we should let people make their own choices, and if they're hard and risky choices, do our best to ensure they're exposed to the facts they need.
I don't think that's true. Or at least, my impression is that almost every elementary through high school teacher in north america who talks about the issue gives the impression that it's basically possible to successfully transition.
I don't think I'm willing to bite the libertarian bullet here. E.g. I don't want my kids to have the option to do heroin, even if it's paired with a pamphlet explaining the real likely outcomes. However, I don't even think that that's a viable option. Seems like our options are: ban and demonize heroin, or legalize it and subsidize its use (as was recently done in British Columbia).
Same with transitioning kids: I don't see how we ever get to a world where it's both legal and the pros and cons are presented honestly. So I think I'd rather throw the few kids who could conceivably benefit from it under the bus and ban it for everybody.
What if they need surgery and a helpful anesthetist asks them if they'd like some diamorphine for the pain and hands them a brochure? That's heroin.
I like neither option, or at least not the "subsidize its use". We live in a world where heroin can be legally used, in the appropriate context. I reject all the bad options and advocate for the good ones. If that doesn't suffice, then I'll choose the least bad one, as I presume you would too.
There are plenty of psychiatric interventions I grapple with at work that require careful scrutiny and vetting! Electroshock therapy was highly controversial and demonized. It's still being used as ECT, and saves lives.
A prospective filter would have to be very expensive to outweigh my other goal, which is to increase personal liberty. Someone who doesn't value the latter is entirely correct if they have a lower threshold for giving up early. We would have the issue of having similar values, but weighting them separately depending on the context.
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It's because it's both natural and we have a long track record of that path working.
It's a very difficult problem to come up with an alternative pathway that leads to physically and mentally healthy humans at our current level of tech. Unconstrained thinking is probably not a good idea when it comes to complex biological and psychological changes.
It becomes even more absurd to even attempt this in the name of people with disordered relations to their own body, when puberty itself may help resolve that disordered relationship.
Maybe people's intuitions that living their values will make them happy are just wrong. Maybe this is especially true for a group that is prone to a bunch of other mental disorders.
...
We can't exactly take it for granted that mentally ill people are holding values that will actually make them happy , or that they have a reasonable understanding of the risk they're taking on (especially when faced with dubious information from medical practitioners)or have reasonable expectations for these treatments.
Or hell, that their stated euphoria and relief will be lasting.
Society is entitled to say no. My doctor won't give me SARMs for some reason.
Discussions like this make you feel the void left by any natural law or common understanding of virtue.
I did stress that I'm playing Devil's
AdvocateDoctor. I don't want puberty blockers, if I had the misfortune of having a child who desired them, I would do almost anything in my power to dissuade them. I'm not in the business of prescribing them either, I'm not a psychiatrist for kids and teenagers. In fact, the UK is cracking down on even the relatively few (compared to the US) "legitimate" gender transitioning clinics.That being said: Natural law is bullshit. There is no coherent collection of principles that the term usefully refers to. Most adherents ignore the literal meaning and embrace a gazillion unprincipled exceptions. The closest it has to a working definition is status-quo bias.
Even teleological definitions have absurd conclusions. Is the meaning of life to maximize entropy? It is, if the outcome of a process defines its purpose.
Even mild exposure to different cultures and their associated values will tell you that beyond a small core (often contentious itself) there's no "common understanding of virtue".
Even simple sounding ideas, like "don't murder, or steal from your neighbors" will have people arguing ad-nauseum what counts murder or stealing or even a neighbor.
If I pity people who want to be the opposite of the sex they were at birth, then I pity people who genuinely believe in natural law or "objective" morality even more.
One of them is a matter of personal values. The other is basing your moral foundations on wishful thinking.
I'm a moral relativist and a moral chauvinist. I know my values are just as valid (or not) as anyone else's. I also happen to think they're better, with the implicit understanding that to use such a comparative term necessarily needs an observer by whose light it is better or worse (me). Anyone who has convinced themselves that there's objective grounding to their morality, well, I don't want to have what they're smoking.
Quite a few gynecologists and many endocrinologists would be out of a job if the outcome of human hormones acting as they would always had the desired outcome.
I don't contest that the overwhelming majority of people are neutral or slightly positive towards puberty, assuming they even cared to reflect on it.
I would be the last person to disagree about the limits of modern science, engineering and medicine. I also think we should be improving our tech (and we are).
On the other hand, constraining thinking to only that which is known to be possible is... a choice.
You might have gotten away with it a thousand years back, when the lives you and your grandpa lived were nigh interchangeable. That's not the case today, we're living in a scifi novel with reality's rather lax attitude towards plausibility.
And it might not. The rate of desistance with puberty is not 100%. A non-zero number of people will find themselves still wanting to transition, and face even greater hardship for even less change.
I'm for reflecting on whether or not that risk is worth taking, from the perspective of someone who has to:
They need to add up the benefits and risks themselves.
I do not hold happiness as the only terminal value, nor do most people. If they disagree, then they're welcome to start a fent habit.
Whether doing something will make a person happier, either in the short-term, in the long term, or just on average, is far from the only consideration when making a choice.
There are plenty of people who are just depressed, so we wouldn't be out of a job.
Mental illnesses are not made equal.
Someone who had an overwhelming desire to fly and tried to do so might have been better off in an insane asylum if they were born in the 1700s.
Today, they might be a hang-glider hobbyist, a pilot, an astronaut.
Did the people who jumped off cliffs or the Eiffel Tower with inadequate parachutes or mechanical contraptions count as mentally ill or suicidal? Not by most definitions I've heard of. They would still have been "better off" if society had caged them, or at least lived longer. Yet today, we soar.
Your argument argues, just as strongly, for doing our level best to present reliable information to patients. You could also force doctors to present information that better represented reality, on the pain of liability. You could have people be grilled by a different doctor or some other Authoritative Individual who had to be convinced that the patient understood the risks and benefits. This is already common practice in psychiatry, at least where I work. Things like detention under the Mental Health Act or forced treatment require multiple people uninvolved with the original case to sign off. This isn't trivially gamed either, I've seen the headaches my bosses get went they're trying to put these in place without unimpeachable evidence.
Death, be it ours, or that of the universe, doesn't mean temporary endeavors are worthless. At least not to me.
Even in the short term, the hedonic treadmill goes brrr. I'd love to win the lottery, even if a year later my happiness would have regressed to near baseline levels.
You should try a different doctor. Some are more flexible. If I had a patient who understood the risks and benefits, and I wasn't violating laws (because I wish to keep my license, my own moral proclivities aside), then I'd prescribe them.
There are many things that would nice if they were real. You know, a benevolent Creator, objective morality, a pill that changes your gender with no consequences.
Sometimes, you're shit out of luck. Sometimes you can make something just as good. Sometimes you pick the lesser evil out of available options while working on making better ones.
If you have a god-shaped hole, in a universe that doesn't have a god, make one yourself from applying linear algebra to {the majority of text Mankind has written}. If you can't become the opposite sex today, maybe settle for the terrible ersatź substitute.
All I say is maybe.
Hooo buddy, have I got some news to break to you about natural science. People debate conceptual primitives and what "counts" as them all the bloody time. I presume that you pity people who genuinely believe in natural physical law or "objective" reality, too?
These sentences contradict one another and result in something that is conceptually incoherent.
Ontology is a matter of convenience. All models are flawed, some models are useful. If there are two different models of reality that output the same results for all ranges of possible inputs, then choosing between them is a matter of convenience. If, for some reason, it became relevant, you could then worry about which one had the lowest Kolmogorov complexity or something.
Objective reality is a very useful concept to have, even if establishing it is likely unreachable. I can happily concede that the universe might be a cosmic dream, that this could be a simulation, that I'm perhaps a brain in a vat or a Boltzmann brain while happily acting as if this reality is shared, stable and predictable. The ability to compartmentalize or hold multiple levels of abstraction in your head when necessary can be handy.
There is certainly far more evidence for consistent and universal laws of physics than there is for objective and universal morality. Physicists can predict the outcome of systems spanning dozens of orders of magnitude within the limits of experimental error. Philosophers are lucky if they can get their buddy reading Kant in the cafeteria to agree with them.
1 to 4 establish the relativism. 5-7 explain why that's not a barrier for me preferring my morality over all others, as I believe that it both needs no justification beyond personal preference and that there isn't any more deep-seated justification for anyone's morality.
In other words: "Because there's no objective standard, all moralities are equally ungrounded. However, from my subjective viewpoint, I find my own morality preferable, and therefore I advocate for it." I avoid claiming objective superiority while still asserting subjective preference and a desire for propagation.
Please, do tell me me how these two concepts are impossible to reconcile. I think I just did that, so there's an existence proof for you. I would be much obliged if you also established reasons for there being an "objective" morality, or a reason why I should prefer that of someone else's over myself.
If you somehow succeed, I will either concede the point, or disappear into a gibbering mess of congealing brain matter from the cognitive dissonance I expect to experience.
...and yet, you must pity people who actually believe it, right?
Let's start with, "What does this sentence mean?" What does it mean for values to be "just as valid (or not)"? You seem to have not touched on this at all in your latest comment.
The same way I pity someone with a bad haircut. It's not a big deal, or a lot of pity.
It means precisely that from any imagined objective standpoint (which I argue doesn't exist for morality), no set of values has a greater claim to inherent correctness or truth than any other. They are "equally valid" in the sense that they are all subjective constructs, arising from individuals or cultures. They are "equally (or not)" valid because the very concept of objective validation is moot here – they are all equally ungrounded in objective truth. Think of it like favourite colours: saying my favourite colour (blue) is "just as valid" as yours (red) means neither has an objective claim to being the 'correct' favourite colour; the concept doesn't apply.
This lack of objective grounding doesn't prevent me, as a subject, from having preferences. I prefer my moral framework. I find it more consistent, more conducive to the kind of world I want to live in, etc. That's the chauvinism. But it's a preference asserted without the illusion of objective backing. It's saying "I prefer blue and think others should too because I find it aesthetically superior," not "Blue is objectively the best colour according to the laws of the universe."
Not that I feel like this point requires elaboration, I strongly expect that if you had an actual way to show me up as incoherent, you'd have produced it by now.
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I know. You just run into places in these discussions where you're clearly in need of a common touchstone, even if we can't get back.
True. But, practically, internal dissension seems more relevant than the inability to get the entire human race to agree. Nobody in America is overly bothered by the fact that Saudis have a different moral code.
Although the balance has shifted with how connected we are.
This is the majority of philosophers btw. I personally don't take a strong stance on metaethics (another way to put it is that I'm too lazy to read enough to formulate one and always puts it off) but that always gives me pause here. What many people find very unintuitive is the consensus position.
It doesn't disprove the "narrow is the path and few find it" argument if even otherwise healthy people have issues that require correction imo. Seems like it does the opposite.
The standard for any treatment (or social convention for that matter) has never been that it's 100% successful.
I actually think that's part of the problem: society is constantly being overturned in the name of smaller and smaller minorities until we hit one where the tradeoffs for doing so are actually serious and visible.
The situation before the general pullback, where public cachet was redistributed to a small number of people who would likely be even smaller given healthy puberty, combined with credulous diagnosing and taboos against "conversion therapy" seems totally backwards.
I meant it in the broader sense. I suppose what the Greeks would call eudaimonia and now philosophers translate as "human flourishing", to avoid exactly these problems.
And I suppose that's a coherent personal position. However, society clearly has certain standards for medical treatment.
Yes, it would be better if everyone was given accurate information on blockers. But that's not the only medical ethic. It seems like we have some pretty high standards for things like amputations which is precisely why exuberant claims were made about the necessity of transition to save a child's life. Even my opponents have implicitly yielded the point: the goal is not short-term gender euphoria in exchange for things we know tend to give people meaning like the ability to experience sexual pleasure and have children or not suffer side-effects from cross-sex hormones.
It's to literally save lives and improve human flourishing. It is not like your own personal decision to spend $3 on a lottery ticket (which costs you almost nothing and doesn't require any medical professional to be complicit).
Maybe that's what I see myself as doing, but for society.
The arguments against a lot of TRA claims and medical practices to help them are usually on pragmatic grounds.
I've done my best to explore what drives philosophers to endorse objective morality, and found all their arguments lacking. It would help if the people who believed in objective morality could agree with each other on what it looked like, but alas.
I belong to the most oppressed minority of all,
gamers, individuals. It doesn't get any smaller than that.I also strongly value personal liberty. It's far from my only consideration, but it is a powerful one. The same arguments, namely paternalism, thinking that you can't allow such far-fetched thinking, would also restrict me.
I'm willing to support people in their quest for personal liberty, even if I think they're misguided, for the same reason that you want the right to free speech to cover heinous kinds as well. Nobody needs to have speech that's popular and favored protected by law.
Society isn't actually a monolithic entity (I'm not claiming that you're saying this, you appear to appreciate nuance). It's made of individuals, and some of them, like medical professionals or regulators, have disproportionate influence.
As the former, if not the latter, I consider it my duty to explain my views. At the absolute very least, I'm painfully self-consistent, and many of my opponents (the average philosopher, for example) aren't. There's plenty of vagueness and moral gray in that field, let alone when it becomes political.
It is certainly not consistent. As @RovScam helpfully illustrates in his own comment, it is trivial to consider an isomorphic example where almost nobody would consider it their business to interfere if the patient, their parents and the treating physicians were all on board.
Modus ponens, modus tollens. I've addressed the specific example of elective limb amputation before. To summarize, if the person was otherwise sane (or at least had capacity), couldn't be dissuaded despite plenty of effort, found a surgeon willing to help, and could afford it, then I see that as entirely fine. I wouldn't like to pay for it with my taxes, there are better things to waste them on.
Young teens make many life changing decisions with uncertain payoffs. Opting for a less conventional field of scholarship might be one.
"We know that leaving school at 11 and then tilling the fields leads to a satisfying and happy life, why bother with the stress and expense of uni".
If someone is busy sacrificing their ability to party with friends in high school in exchange for grinding for med school, what of it? They'd definitely be getting more sexual pleasure in the short term, and likely have more kids if they didn't have to finish residency.
The issue is that the people you're trying to look out for vehemently disagree on what counts as human flourishing. They certainly don't appreciate your attempts to dictate what they should choose, even if you good intentions.
If money is the biggest factor, then I have little objection to saying such procedures shouldn't be paid for by the public, any more than breast implants or a boob job typically are. I say typically for a reason, because someone who had a mastectomy for cancer might qualify.
The core of this is that meme:
"I consent." Says a distressed young child. "I consent." Says their worried but loving parents, and some doctor making sure they're ticking the consent boxes. "I don't-" Says someone whose consent seems entirely unnecessary to me, at least when they're not paying for this.
As a matter of such longstanding custom or clear law that it can easily be said to be "society's" position.
If we lived in a libertarian world where people were expected to take on all of the costs of a procedure and balance the risks themselves I think your personal take would be coherent for society to adopt.
In practice, neither of those things may be the case. Society collectively pays for a bunch of services and we insist on rigorous epistemic and ethical standards even when people might willingly take the risk. Even the people arguing for the specific case we're discussing pay deference to that expectation.
I think this status quo has a lot to recommend it but, even if I could be convinced it should change, I'd like to know why this topic (given how I feel about the object-level issue) should motivate that change.
tl;dr: They can have it when I have the same easy access to steroids.
The consequences of majoring in programming right now with AI is unclear. The consequences of lopping of your limb are.
We seem to think that matters, which is why one involves far more ethical requirements.
I'm not sure they actually do though?
The argument for gender affirming care has always been that it will reduce things like suicide rates and suicide ideation and the comorbidities associated with trans identification and thus it functions as medicine, as it's commonly understood. The controversy is about whether gender affirming care achieves some broad definition of human flourishing but the general goal it should be achieving if it is effective medicine (and a brief, heroin-like moment of bliss doesn't count) doesn't seem to be controversial.
The whole emotional blackmail line of "dead son or live daughter" has this assumption built in.
If it turns out that the evidence isn't good for this then their case falls apart by its own standards.
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And a lot of people who turned out to be non-transgender adults (like, a LOT) also say that their gender feelings dissipated upon completing normal puberty. There's no real concrete way of knowing which camp someone will fall into before it happens, so let's err on the side of no costly medical intervention, shall we?
Blockers seem to inhibit normal desistence, so this is really just tantamount to shoving confused kids down the trans pipeline.
I also have to cast some extreme suspicion on most transgenders who wish that they had taken puberty blockers, and making efforts to allow minors to take them, legally or non legally, because they are projecting adult feelings onto children. Most of them discovered their trans-ness as an adult, and that particular activism feels like trying to rectify your own shortfalls by enabling other kids to have better outcomes, except it's very much not a better outcome to most normal people and to pretty much any kid, for reasons given in this thread (infertility, stunted growth, tiny genitals, probably even more significant deleterious health effects that I don't know about). The interest in trans kids is actually kind of sickening to me for these reasons. It's a lot more "adult" than it tries to present itself as.
One dude I know online who likes to crossdress once said that conservatives and transphobes only oppose puberty blockers because it would make it impossible to determine if someone was a real female or not, thus giving the risk of being attracted to the wrong sex (which only a transphobe would find to be a bad thing). I had nothing to say to that, because it was so extremely bad faith and also completely inaccurate, both in its reading of conservative motivations and also the actual outcomes of puberty blockers.
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This is paper, not steel. Puberty is not reversible in the same way that birth is not reversible, nor aging. These are normal, natural, and expected processes. This is what humans do, as much as trees grow to the light and fish swim upriver to spawn.
The problem is not just that it's not reversible, it's that it's an intervention to disrupt normal maturation, and also not reversible. The default isn't unfettered biohacking, it's growing as your body is built to grow. It's feeding hunger and sleeping when tired and, yes, going through puberty when mature.
One day I'll stop running into the naturalistic fallacy in the wild and consider that my 10^28 years of existence leading up till that point worthwhile.
If someone said that 50% infant mortality was natural and not reversible, or the same for heart attacks being inevitably fatal.. They'd have been right for almost all of human history. Fortunately, we still have people alive who've witnessed this state of affairs, fortunate only in that we're not usually tempted to think this was somehow a superior state of affairs.
Pre-mature infants are far more likely to survive these days, thanks to modern incubators and resuscitate technologies doing at least some of the work a womb could or would. We've got proof of concept artificial wombs that have gestated mammalian embryos months for as long as 4 weeks without any physiological abnormalities:
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112
Give me a billion dollars and change, and I'll put any damn baby back into the womb and keep it there happily.
Give me a hundred billion, and I'll pocket one, and spend a few million delegating more competent people to the task of solving aging.
As rabies proliferated through your peripheral nerves and is transported to your brain. As Onchocerca volvulus happily turns children blind.
Nature is not very nice. The congenial environment you find yourself in is very strongly the property of artificial efforts to keep it that way.
There is no such thing as nature, and there's no naturalistic fallacy. Just as traffic is other people, nature is just other life. The things that are not nice are other organisms trying to do the same thing as trees and fish and humans: successfully reproduce. Everything else has been ruthlessly culled by those willing to do so. This is not nature, it is life and death. It is the world as it is, not as it ought to be.
I think things that help me are good, and things which hurt me are bad. I apply that backward through time via my ancestors, and forward through time via my descendants, because I owe the former my existence and owe the latter my efforts to secure the same for them. I'm not bemoaning a roof when it rains, or heat in the winter, or light in the darkness.
Saying that hindering reproduction is the same as helping reproduction is your misunderstanding, not mine.
Since you claim that nature is a very ill defined concept (which I agree with), then what was the point of your previous comment? Why even point to something being natural?
I invite you to show me where I can be said to have made this "misunderstanding". An earlier comment of mine explicitly said I don't want puberty blockers, and if my future kids did, I'd do everything I could to stop them.
The point is that in all the world, I haven't found much firmer ground to stand on than "be fruitful and multiply." It seems every living thing in the world follows such a rule, and so I think it's probably a good rule, and one I should apply to myself. It's not because it's natural, it's because that's how and why I am, instead of am not. I happen to like me, so I consider this a good thing.
All well and good, can't fault that.
Yet I must note that you accuse me of some kind of misunderstanding, and have yet to clarify what possibly could have made you say that.
You accused me of a fallacy, one which I don't think is particularly relevant or useful. Then, this:
Artificial efforts are good where they do good, and bad where they do bad. They are good when helping, and bad when hindering. There are plenty of both. This is not a fallacy.
You're playing word games and being intentionally obtuse.
You initially argued against puberty blockers by contrasting them with "normal, natural, and expected processes" like puberty, framing the intervention itself as the problem partly because it disrupts something "natural."
When I pointed out that "natural" doesn't automatically mean "good" (the naturalistic fallacy, using examples like disease), you then pivoted quite sharply to say "There is no such thing as nature." You were rather quick to contradict your own starting point.
Then you accused me of a specific "misunderstanding," claiming I said "hindering reproduction is the same as helping reproduction." I said no such thing. My point was about interventions against harmful natural processes (like disease) being generally considered good, challenging your implicit framing that interfering with any natural process is inherently suspect because it's natural:
See that first bit I've bolded for you? That's the problem.
I asked you twice, directly, to clarify where you think I made that specific error. Both times, you avoided answering the question. First, you restated your personal philosophy ("be fruitful and multiply"), and second, you vaguely talked about good vs. bad artificial efforts without actually substantiating the accusation I challenged.
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Is owing something to people who are dead and to people who will live when you're long dead a thing that helps you or a thing that hurts you, and why?
Without my forebears, I would not be. If I leave no posterity, then what was the point of me? I am the continuation of a long line, and while various branches have broken and terminated, I see that as bad and not good.
Not all of us can be Caesar, but Caesar has no heirs. The history of aristocracy has a depressing number of great men who left no descendants. I also think this is a bad thing.
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Not to mention that aging is to an extent evolutionarily advantageous because you're not supposed to perpetually compete with fresher, better genes.
There are animals, like jellyfish, that are biologically immortal in the sense they don't age.
You could argue that the first progenitor of life, whatever color of microbe that was, is still alive. During mitosis or meiosis, both the daughter cells have equal claim of being the original, if one insists on using that term.
Jellyfish have existed largely unchanged for half a billion years. If aging was always bad, I'd expect such exuberant youth would have been stamped out by now.
It seems to me far more likely that aging is a very difficult problem for evolution to solve in complicated, macroscopic organisms. Human females are one of the few (or only) animals that experience menopause, which is postulated to help them divert their resources towards their offspring's young instead of producing more. That seems like a consequence of blind evolution being unable to find a more optimal solution, and kludging together a fix.
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Would it be fair to say that you view the word "healthy" to be meaningless outside of direct reference to atomic individualist personal preference? That is to say, the question of whether something is "healthy" begins and ends with their subjective opinion of their current state?
The Gay Science, Book Three, §120
-Socrates, or so I'm told.
Can these perspectives be reconciled?
Is there a good as such? Have not all attempts to define such a thing failed miserably?
...I think this argument relies for its persuasive power on either ignorance of or a peculiar axiomatic commitment to its evident results. I have in my life "enjoyed" variant and deviant forms of "health" at some length. Once upon a time, I did not care much about conventional notions of health, because I quite consciously did not particularly wish to live to advanced age. Now I contemplate that I am rather unlikely to live to hold my grandchildren, and rather likely to leave my wife a widow, despite all promises to the contrary, and I wish I had not been so foolish in my youth. I wish further that others had not been so cruel as to encourage my delusions.
Concrete examples would be really ideal here, and given the language, the higher-contrast, the better.
Sure.
Some men evidently accomplish a great deal without being "fit" in the physical sense. And that's perfectly fine for them. That is their "health". But we might still find it regrettable that there are opportunities they never explored, because in the general sense every choice involves forsaking other possibilities and there is always something regrettable in this despite its necessity.
One of the greatest lessons I took from Nietzsche is how to approach things with more nuance. Something can be good, and virtuous, and necessary, and regrettable. Something can be bad, and deleterious, and undesirable, and yet still necessary. You can mix and match.
There is such a thing as "the good", but it escapes any attempt to define it in terms of basic axioms or repeatable guidelines.
You probably just made the wrong decision then. No one ever said that people couldn't just be wrong. There are innumerable healths, which means there are innumerable unhealths as well.
Concrete examples illustrating which part, exactly?
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I think that when I use the word "healthy", it reliably constrains expectations. If I tell you my shirt is red, and then you examine it, you wouldn't be expecting it to emit or reflect only light that's 460nm in frequency, even if the term "red" leaves room for subjective interpretation where it bleeds into orange or pink.
It would be rather awkward if I had to append the WHO definition (Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity) every time I used that phrase. Even said definition is implicitly subjective.
So no, it's not meaningless beyond an individual observer. If I delivered a baby missing a head and handed it to a mother, I'd be rather aghast if anyone in the room called it a healthy child.
I couldn't really be a psychiatrist if I subscribed to that notion, could I?
Sadly human language is rather imprecise. It's still useful. I'm unable to define health in a way so rigorous I could program it into a computer in Lisp, but LLMs prove that that's not necessary.
Consistancy is the hobgoblin of small minds, or so I'm informed.
I think "healthy at any size" is crap, and I say this as a member of the target audience. But in order to take that position, I'm implicitly making an objective claim that some states are healthier than others, regardless of what the people experiencing those states think. It doesn't seem to me that this sort of position is compatible with your critique of the naturalist fallacy above. The argument against obesity is that it's divergent from our natural state, from what we ought to be. But as you say, rabies, infant mortality, etc, etc, and it seems to follow that any downside to obesity could easily be framed as just a matter of insufficient technology.
I would argue that we should value the places where nature is consonant with our desires, and we should be skeptical of places where our desires require wholesale rejection of nature. To the extent that our desires potentially bring us into conflict with nature, I think we should favor the desires that are as concrete and general as possible, over the desires that are highly individual and unusual. I think doing so would allow us to pursue common ground for a supermajority of the population.
To the extent that values are sufficiently mutually incoherent that the rabies vaccine, reduced infant mortality, and prepubescent gender transition can't be distinguished, it seems to me that Dril rules are in effect.
I don't follow. I'm not the one arguing that obesity is bad because it's not natural. I think it's bad because it makes you slower, weaker, ruins your QOL, makes you more likely to die early and less likely to find an attractive partner.
If there was a magic pill or surgery that let you be obese without any of the present downsides, that's a matter of aesthetics. It would be no different to dying your hair a weird color or getting a garish tattoo.
Being super fit and muscular isn't natural at all. Yet that's the revealed preference in terms of what people look for or aspire to, and they at least feel bad about not being there. The closest humans to a "state of nature", hunter gatherers, aren't super models or killing it on dating apps.
Humans have been rejecting nature ever since they sharpened sticks and lit fires. It's worked out pretty well overall.
I think that questions of whether something is natural are often irrelevant to whether its good or desirable, noting that this unavoidable requires a subject to decide what counts as good or desirable. If that was you, then you might intrinsically think natural = better in many situations.
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Exactly.
I think the problem with this standard where puberty blockers are concerned is that nothing is reversible.
I listened to Lex Friedman's interview with Aella some time back, and part of her personal history was growing up in a very strict evangelical Christian household. She never went through a "normal" process of sexual development, learning to date and grow into herself. Instead, she ran away from home and got...this. And no amount of careful effort would have allowed her to experience the way a normal person grows up, and certainly it is impossible to do so now.
Similarly, a kid who starts puberty two or three or five years late is going to have a very different experience than a kid who follows a "natural" puberty. We already know this because the experience of hitting puberty early or late is understood as critical to and generative of people's personalities. I didn't really hit puberty until later than some kids, though earlier than others, and I've no doubt if you moved that number around a few years either way you get a vastly different FiveHour. Two years earlier and maybe I make the high school baseball team and go through high school a varsity jock; two years later and maybe I'm not really ready to blossom in college and socially become more of an outcast, certainly never meeting my wife.
When they talk about puberty blockers being reversible, what they mean (at best) is that the kid will still go through some version of puberty. But it will never be the puberty that would have been, it's impossible that it would be, and I'm fairly certain that later than one's peers is for the most part worse outside of random unlikely chance. They'd be 13 when they are 16, and 16 when they are 20. I don't know that society is going to be set up for that.
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Every other domesticated species gets fixed to make it easier to handle, why not humans?
I’m barely joking. Trans kids make excellent institutional pets. You’ll notice that working dogs are not castrated, and that pets usually are timed to prevent puberty. This is a natural part of hajnali Europeans separating themselves into different landraces.
The thought is horrifying but why wouldn’t domesticating ourselves have the same effects it has on everything else?
AFAIK this is another good example of
medicalveterinary misinformation, driven by the convenience and "we know what's best for you"-ness of the purveyors.There's pretty solid studies that fixing a dog (particularly bitches) before canine puberty leads to lower lifespans and greater risk of various health problems at younger ages -- breeders who care will usually recommend a year +.
People who prioritize other stuff, such as puppy-millers (concerned that their customers will set up shop and compete) or SPCA spay/neuter all the things types (too many puppies, I guess?) will either demphasize this or outright lie about it -- because they know that if they let a puppy out out of their sight there's a good chance it never gets spayed, and might even reproduce. (horrors)
You can google right now and find all sorts of bullshit about how four months is Just Fine(tm) for the animals -- but it's really for the people.
Mhhmm. Institutions which think adolescent fertility is the worst thing in the universe, damn the long term effects, certainly rhyme.
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I'm not against this argument, at least not by temperament, but this is simply not the argument that is being made. Is it because it has implications that even the pro-trans side would be uncomfortable with (it would effectively imply abolishing all restrictions on medical procedures, and who can carry them out)? Is it because people with my temperament, who are mostly ok with giving people maximum liberty, and letting chips fall where they may, are in an absolute minority? Who knows? All I know is that the experts, actual credentialed practitioners of medicine, were swearing up and down for years that these changes are reversible, and medically necessary, not that people should be free to modify their bodies however they wish (and if any one wants to stick their neck out now, I will need to see their track record on COVID vaccines). I don't think it's steelmanning when no one wants sign their name under the argument.
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Assuming one grants that a thing such as
meaningfully exists.
You can not like them and still acknowledge the very obvious objective reality that there are adult humans who are living their life in modern society as the other gender through medical treatment and social changes.
Whether or not you accept the identity from a categorical perspective doesn't change that there are people doing that.
Edit: to be clear since there is confusion, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing on the merits of whether or not trans people actually fall into the category they wish, I'm saying that "trans adults" is meaningfully a group. It refers to a category of people that we all understand is meant when said. It means people like Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner or Ellen/Elliot Page. This is a group that does indeed meaningfully exist.
Eunuchs are not a meaningful biological category. They're a sociocultural affectation.
If there is no privileged moral standpoint, they don't exist. Or rather they don't have to, which is the same thing.
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I don't think @Southkraut's point has anything to do with "like". I can like drag queens and not grant that drag queens exist in any sort of sense that places them in a similar place as the category of women.
The question is whether it makes any sense for society to place the interests of a few people who want to avoid the otherwise normal healthy developmental pathway with the rest of the human race as if they're equivalent.
If you're not a transhumanist and "trans" is not a mirror of "cis" and is instead just a compassionate term for people who identify with the opposite sex for whatever reason it simply doesn't mean anything to you that puberty is also irreversible.
What of it? Puberty is the normal pathway.
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Why would I acknowledge this? It's absurd. It's not remotely possible. There can be a milllion people pretending or claiming to do this and yet that does not make it any more real.
Again you can disagree with them from a categorical perspective. But the fact still remains that people are doing it.
There are human males who currently live their life taking estrogen, wearing clothes typically associated with women, being referred to as she/her by their associates along with a corresponding female associated name and other things like that. Vice versa with human females doing testesterone and social changes.
That's just observable reality. Whether or not you think that includes a human male as a "woman" is a categorical dispute, that these people exist and are doing such things is just plain fact.
People may be "doing it" and that still doesn't give it any validity or cause to acknowledge it as anything other than utter insanity. It's like people claiming to be from Mars. Funny if it happens once, but we're long past that point. This isn't like religion, which in the West has politely withdrawn to areas so private it can no longer bother anyone, or like ideology, which can at least be put to the test and found wanting. This starts with a completely ludicrous premise and then tries to worm its way into society by denying the obvious and demanding the impossible. I can recognize epistemic gulfs between me and an ideological enemy, or me and a foreigner from parts unknown, but "trans" anything is just out of bounds of all reason. The people doing this aren't adults anymore; not unless you want that term to also become a meaningless category.
We can maybe call them harmless crazies, ignore them on libertarian grounds, live and let live, consider it beneath notice and leave it alone. But steelman it? What's there to steelman? Alright, so you are from Mars, nice thought experiment, can we please get back to reality? I can steelman a communist, a nazi, an islamist, an anachist, electric cars, accelerationism, anything based a difference of opinion on a complex topic that's difficult to make sense of. But gender and sex or whatever it's called in English is quite seriously one of the simplest topics in existence. The simple binary logic of it is in fact the bedrock of our existence. I know people who like dressing up as women or animals and getting fucked in the ass. Alright, whatever, I don't want to be anywhere near their bedroom but I can tolerate it. But when they tell me that they now "are" a woman or a dog, there can be only one response - No, you aren't, now please stop making a fool of yourself and don't ever again ask me or anyone else to seriously validate that kind of delusion.
I don't want to sound petty, but I am entirely serious on this point: Anyone claiming to be "trans" just plain isn't an adult for social purposes. You can maybe play along with that kind of make-believe, but at that point it really is all child's play. Again, funny if it happens once, but the joke has gotten old.
Edit: I did not address the issue of this all affecting kids. I thought I had forgotten to, but in retrospect it's probably better off that way. My thoughts on pushing "trans" on teenagers, who suffer from enough idiocy all on their own, are unlikely to encode into anything motte-compliant.
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You're making a normative claim that understanding the trans position on the "wrong" puberty strengthens the activist case.
You cannot now pull back to the empirical fact that trans people exist when someone challenges that.
No, I'm saying that these people exist in response to a comment that said
"Assuming one grants that a thing such as
meaningfully exists"
But they do exist. Whether or not we accept their claimed identity as "valid" categorically has no bearing on whether or not a group called "trans adults" exists.
If a news article writes a story about groups in America and it says "Black adults, Asian adults, gay adults, trans adults" you're able to understand this as a group that exists.
It has some bearing on whether they meaningfully exist. It's a normative claim: trans adults do not exist in the same way that what we've termed "cis" adults exist, so their judgments about puberty should not be treated the same.
If a news article talked about the "AAPI" ethnicity, do you also feel like there's no context in which one can question whether that ethnicity is meaningful?
I certainly don't think of "AAPI" the same way I think of African-Americans.
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