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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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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.

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?

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.

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.