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If we're going to entirely remove their agency why should we take their argumentation seriously at all?
Not being 100% in control does not mean they lack all agency. For example when carrying out an assessment on patients when I used to be involved in social care, we would minimize what choices they lost. A person who would spend all their money on QVC items would have their finances handled by a social worker but they could still make all other decisions. Mental competence is generally not all or nothing in that perspective.
If these patients threatened to kill themselves if you denied them some reasonably removed choice would you take that as a meaningful argument that the choice should not have been removed? My point is either they're agentic enough that their aims in making the claims weighed more than their handicap or it didn't. If they did then that overwhelms the clause against deceptive self interest. If they did not then we shouldn't take their threats any more seriously than someone in Chicago who threatens to end their life if they don't get to talk to Putin about their Russian royal blood.
Remember though the claim is person X saying if you don't allow Y the likelihood of trans people killing themselves goes up. The person making that argument may not themselves be trans.
So if Bob says hey, if you take Linda's ability to buy QVC knick-knacks from her she might kill herself AND I think Bob is correct then yes I might have to rethink my strategy. Because being dead is (generally) worse than having zero money. So perhaps now I allow Linda to spend some money on QVC or I try to get the channel removed in her home and evaluate how that affects her suicidal ideation. If my job is to get the best outcome for Linda, then Linda being dead is a failure and Linda being zonked out on Thorazine for the rest of her life is a failure. Linda spending 30% of her money on QVC is probably worse than her spending 0% (unless she is buying Zorbeez, those things were great!) but it is better than her being dead etc.
If Bob is wrong then I'm fine, but I can't necessarily tell that. Now if we assume Bob also suffers from the same issue as Linda, that doesn't mean he is wrong about her suicide risk. He might be trying to trick me because he thinks it might be precedent for him getting access to QVC back or he might have more insight because he suffers the same way. But you can't I think just ASSUME he is acting in bad faith. Is his claim plausible? Is it plausible that people suffering from dysphoria who aren't transitioned may kill themselves in greater numbers? And the answer appears to be yes, that is plausible. It's not that I think that it is plausible BECAUSE of Bob, he is just a vector for that information.
If he said, If you don't transition people they run the risk of turning into balloons and floating into space, I would say. Well I think I am ok taking that risk, thanks Bob.
I think you're too stuck on whether this is technically a threat or not. the metaphor to interpersonal threats of self harm is just a metaphor. There are two components to the objection I think people are making here. One is that the ask on the trans camp isn't for us to give them some neutral treatment, it's to validate truth claims that many of us find would make liars of us. And the practice used to demand these truth claims be validated is not argument but claims of harm, and not even just harm but self inflicted harm which to many people is a completely different category of harm that you don't seem to ever acknowledge as different. When you combine these things together you create a dynamic where reality gets defined by whichever group is most willing to harm itself to get its way. This is a dynamic that many of us viscerally reject, we cannot operate society this way. So in the end we're not really willing to weigh the 'costs' here because the costs are effectively infinite or the entirety of society breaking down. It genuinely matters more what is true than whether people will harm themselves if faced with reality.
Which is I think definitely is a reasonable objection to be clear.
My view is one of a bureaucrat, at societal level decisions, for example people smoke themselves to death or drink themselves to death and you still need to try and stop it happening as a government even though they are in some views responsible for their own problems. While balancing peoples rights to eat and inhale things. If you peel off self inflicted harms, it includes everything from weight to speeding, but that doesn't stop us putting in speed bumps and mandating better calorie labelling on food.
So society already operates in order to try and reduce self-inflicted harms while not removing freedoms entirely.
I hit go too early and tried to edit in a bit more before but you beat me to it. I don't think these costs can be so rationally weighed.
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