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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Exactly.

So if irreversibility is a necessary condition for classifying something as chemical castration... than it seems that chemical castration does not meet the standard.

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.