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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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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 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.

Young teens make many life changing decisions with uncertain payoffs. Opting for a less conventional field of scholarship might be one.

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.

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.

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.