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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   21601 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Arguments concerning the science of anything relating to puberty blockers or hormones or anything else concerning transgenderism are useless, because no one making arguments on either side really cares about the science. All it is is cover for whatever argument they want to make.

You don't find it a little bit strange that we've been having the trans debate in this space for something like 10 years, and these "well, the science doesn't really matter" arguments are surfacing only now that it can be shown that some pro-trans claims can't be scientifically backed, and that several of the experts that we were told to trust have been proven to lie on several occasions?

So ultimately whether it's reversible doesn't matter.

Hold on, "the science doesn't matter" is one thing, "reversibility doesn't matter" is another. If I had a kid, there's many ideas that they could come up with, that I would think are absolutely retarded, but might let them go through with them, just so they get it out of there system, if nothing else, and reversibility is one of the most important criteria I'd use for making the decision whether to let them do it, or call an absolute veto. This seems plainly obvious to me, and I can't wrap my head around how anyone could claim otherwise, so maybe you shouldn't so confidently speak for others (especially for people with values different from yours).

Also, if it doesn't matter, why did the pro trans side spend so much time and effort telling people puberty blockers are reversible, even though they knew they have no evidence for the claim?

For instance, suppose some children develop a heart condition that they may grow out of but will become a dangerous, chronic problem if it persists into adulthood. There's a treatment that can significantly mitigate this risk if the child starts taking it around age ten, but it comes with a catch: It has its own risks, and can cause permanent damage itself if it's unnecessarily used. If you're a doctor making a recommendation or a parent looking to make a decision, then your conclusion would depend on a number of factors—the likelihood that the child will grow out of the condition, the amount of damage the untreated condition is likely to cause, the amount of damage the treatment is likely to cause, etc.

In these situations we tell the patient and parent the risks and benefits to the best of our knowledge, and leave the decision to them. We don't try to guilt them into overriding it, and when someone brings evidence that the original risk/benefit assessment is wildly off the mark, we hear them out and adjust the practice to be in accordance with the best evidence. We don't call them heart-condition-o-phobes, we don't ban them from social media, and we don't send the police after them.

I think you're misunderstanding me; I'm not saying that the science is useless, but that the arguments based on the science are useless. They're almost always made in bad faith, because the people making them, at least on the anti-trans side, won't agree that gender dysphoria or whatever you want to call it is a condition in need of treatment. Thus, weighing the risk of treatment against the risk of no treatment is useless because any treatment will have some degree of risk, and to them the risk of no treatment is zero. It's like taking a medication for a dangerous condition.

I would add that, when it comes to the science we have now, I generally agree with everything you said, and that the pro-trans side similarly acts in bad faith by downplaying the risks and acting like every kid who plays with his sister's dolls is obviously trans and needs to be put on medication immediately. My gut feeling tells me that puberty blockers probably aren't a good idea, and that even if they were fully reversible, going through high school looking like a ten year old probably isn't any better for your mental health than being the "wrong" gender. But I recognize that a lot of my own apprehension is more cultural than scientific, and things change in the world of science. Maybe the current treatments are crude, but I imagine that there's a lot we still don't understand about endocrinology and physical development, and I wouldn't foreclose the possibility that more sophisticated treatments will become available in the future that reduce the risks associated with the current ones. But I don't trust that, if and when that day comes, the Tennessee legislature (for instance) will revise their opinion on the matter and change the law accordingly. To that end, despite my personal objections, I tend to bristle at state legislatures that seek to make the decision themselves rather than allow parents and doctors to make it together.

I partiallly agree, and partially disagree (or still misunderstand). I think you're right that science doesn't matter in the sense that this is, to a large extent, a conflict of values. I wrote about it in the past, how I thought the discussion is centered around science, and how to best treat the condition called gender dysphoria, or whether such a condition actually exists rather than being an artifact of another psychological issue, and how it turned out that the pro-trans side admitted that it doesn't care, that it was using the "medicalized narrative" strategically to build acceptance for their true goal - patient autonomy, and the pursuit of authenticity through body modification.

You might be right that this is symmetrical, in that it's merely convenient for the anti-trans side that the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is dubious, and that there are all these scientific, medical, and health concerns about the treatment, and if all of these concerns were shown to be moot by advances in technology, they'd still be against letting people modify their bodies to such a radical extent, but you're wrong about the science-based arguments being useless. The Science™ is the framework for resolving disagreements that our society has agreed upon, given conflicting values. This is the battleground that was picked, so this is where we have to fight. Also, trivially - if they were useless, the pro-trans side wouldn't be using them so much, even as they knew they can't be backed by evidence.

To that end, despite my personal objections, I tend to bristle at state legislatures that seek to make the decision themselves rather than allow parents and doctors to make it together.

Why? This is business as usual, we get between parents and doctors all the time, sometimes about the very same drugs (and arguably about the very same condition) that we're discussing right now, and no one bats an eye. Is it somehow worse because it's the legislature doing it, instead of the medical licensing board?

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