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Indeed. But can anyone? Let's say being suicidally depressed gives you 70% agency. You can make most choices but in a depressive episode, society may try and override your choice to kill yourself (if it can) by treating you whether you choose to or not. It will then discharge you, offer you therapy or drugs and so on.
If dysphoria does lead to increased levels of suicide then the same response would be to..forcibly transition people whether they want it or not? Remember when we believe people do not have agency due to mental illness, we generally act to treat their illness whether they want that treatment or not at that moment.
So, there is another kind of dysphoria that I think is probably a closer metaphor, Body Integrity Identity Disorder, in which people feel like they have too many limbs, and desire to cut one off. If someone presenting that dysphoria says "I want to cut off my arms, and you have to tell me it's a great idea and I'm stunning and brave, but also pretend forever that I never had any arms in the first place, or I will become so inconsolably distraught that I might kill myself"... would you go grab a hacksaw and fire up the gaslights? Or would you think that maybe this person shouldn't be allowed to make that kind of decision for themselves, and they need to be forced to get some regular therapy and evaluation by sane doctors?
That depends, have they started to try and hack off their own limbs with a rusty hacksaw? Then assuming we can't actually treat the mental part of the disorder, then yes surgically removing their limbs so at least they survive the procedure might be the best option. Our options aren't necessarily magical cure, let them chop limbs off, chops limbs off for them, lock them up forever. It might only be, let them chop limbs off, chops limbs off for them, lock them up forever, at which point limb lopping might be best.
For trans people who are suicidal there does not appear to be a pill that will fix it. The treatment is making the outside "match" the mental internal state because we cannot reliably change the mental internal state (and even if we could, are they the same person? or are we just killing that version of them?). I know a person with bipolar disorder who refuses to take medication for this reason, because the person they are on medication is to their natural state not them, it is some stranger who thinks sluggishly and brokenly. I don't know what the correct option is there.
So imperfect, even shoddy transitioning may be the best option actually available.
This entire debate is more radioactive than Godzilla because it's not just about Bill says he is a Real Woman. If Bill tries cutting off his own arms and therefore surgically removing his arms and giving him prostheses is the best thing for Bill, it doesn't affect my life. But what we have is the equivalent of Bill not alone demanding you cut off his arms and give him prostheses, then everyone has to at least pretend they believe prostheses are the exact same thing as having arms. It's Bill barging into events and claiming that if he can't compete in snooker matches (insert sport of your choice that needs good motor control) against professional players, then it is discrimination and the rules must be changed. By the bye, didn't we go through this already with Oscar Pistorius? Rather an unfortunate example, I agree, but the same debates over "does he have an unfair advantage?" took place.
It's Bill saying that unless we all agree that chopping off your arms is a sane, normal, healthy activity, we are ableists and amputationphobes and that a law to protect him and those like him must be passed. It's amputee activists creating cute cartoons to kids that hey, maybe they too might be like Bill and this is how you get the doctors to agree.
Right that is why we are keeping the discussion contained to specific areas. Just to be clear, just because I don't think that saying not doing x is not abusive does not mean I think we have to actually do x. There might be a lot of other reasons not to.
If it were true that chopping off someones arms was the best option for them but it cost a billion dollars I'd still be saying sorry Bill, even with the risk of you killing yourself by self-surgery the cost/benefit ratio just doesn't work out.
My point is simply that if you are observing an impact of doing or not doing x that isn't on its own abusive behavior. You aren't yourself threatening to commit suicide. I think if it were, "If we discontinue all treatment for depressed people it is likely suicides will increase" that is most likely an uncontroversial statement, even if it were being said by an anti-depression activist.
Likewise a trans person saying if you don't accept us/allow transition/whatever could mean additional trans people killing themselves is if true something to take into account. It might still not be worth it, depending on the costs (both financial and social) but it isn't in and of itself abusive. It's not a threat because they can't actually control what all other trans people do.
I think the same argument can apply to the people that the activist is talking about: If they're responsible for their own actions, we aren't obliged to accommodate them. If they're not responsible for their own actions, we are obliged to accommodate them, but they should be treated as mentally ill.
Also, this situation can be described as the activist enabling people who make abusive demands and passing on abusive demands, even if he is not being directly abusive himself.
Sure, but remember that suicidal ideation usually comes and goes, it can be possible that people who commit suicide "while the balance of their mind was disturbed" were fine the previous three days. The question is whether the treatment helps or not and the costs of the treatment compared to the benefits. Those things are independent of whether there are some people making abusive demands.
If you measure it and the suicide rate does increase when denied treatment, then whether some people are threatening it abusively doesn't really matter, because the ones that actually did kill themselves were not, they really were disturbed. Those that use the threat to coerce people either don't go through with it or if they do were again actually disturbed.
Which again still doesn't mean you MUST provide that treatment, we make trade offs all the time and that is ok. In the UK we limit funding to various NHS treatments knowing that will mean some people will likely die as a result. Insurance companies do the same. If it is too expensive either financially or socially we can still say no.
This reasoning implies that if you have some abusive people who can flawlessly hide among the legitimate ones, you have to treat them all as if they are legitimate.
I think that we have no choice to say "yes, it does matter". Saying that it doesn't matter how many abusive people hide among the legitimate ones creates very bad incentives, and it's a pattern that can be seen in other areas. Believing apparently suicidal people unconditionally is like believing #believewomen unconditionally.
Remember this is at a population level, if the population is indeed commiting suicide at a greater rate then that is happening regardless of what percentage of liars there are.
You don't have to believe any particular individuals claims, you are looking at the actuality. You are specifically NOT believing A suicidal persons claims because as you point out they can be lying, you believe the numbers of people who actually commit suicide.
You are cutting out the need to believe or disbelieve any individual. That's why its more useful.
Just like if you try to guage how fat your populace is you can't trust any individual to accurately report their calorie intake but you can still measure it by weight of patients and numbers of diseases associated with obesity and so on.
If they are all lying you will find that out, when despite everyone saying they eat healthily and exercise, half your population needs lap bands and keeps getting diabetes.
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I'd be more amenable to that if it seemed like therapeutic solutions had actually been tried and found wanting. Instead, it seems like therapeutic solutions have been deemed mean and politically incorrect, and not tried. And I get the metaphor with bipolar, but bringing this back to the original point, I am not responsible for someone else's behavior. If Kanye West doesn't want to take his meds, then he gets to deal with the consequences of his unhinged behavior. If you really want to transition, go for it. If you want to surgically turn yourself into a cat, or an orc, have fun! But when you threaten self-harm if I don't buy into your delusional framework, you're either too ill to get to make those decisions for yourself (and need to be committed and treated for general suicidal ideation separate from your gender issues), or you're an abusive piece of shit.
Again though largely, they are not themselves threatening to commit suicide themselves. They are saying if you do X or don't do Y, it increases the likelihood of some trans people committing suicide. Whether the person saying that is or is not trans themselves does not have any bearing on the truth of that statement.
If they say if you don't do X I specifically will kill myself then that is a different statement.
I think this is a distinction without a difference, a fig leaf of an epicycle. The context in which the argument is made is always a hysterical, histrionic affair in which responsibility is viciously externalized. "Your epistemic skepticism is LITERALLY GENOCIDE!!1"
It is a difference because the person has no control over the rest of the trans community. It's not a threat because they can't make it happen.
If I say "Either agree with me or I will kill myself" that is abusive because I can kill myself and I am (trying) to put responsibility for that on you, when really the responsibility lies with me, because I can do that.
If I say "If you stop depressed patients getting treated, more of them might commit suicide" that isn't something I can control. I might be wrong or right but I am not making a threat that I will go around killing people. If that is abusive then pro-life campaigners saying, if you vote Democrat then they will legalize abortion and millions of babies will die is abusive. In neither is the claimant saying they will do X if you do Y. They are saying X will happen if you do Y. They are not making a threat of action in order to change your behavior, they are predicting a consequence of the behaviour itself in order to change your behavior.
Whether the rhetoric is hysterical or not is orthogonal to whether the claim itself is true or false.
They're still enabling it, and treating it like a reasonable response.
I'm explicitly not talking about treatment. Transitioning is not hard anymore; if anything, it's easier than any remotely comparable type of treatment. How many men would love to be able to talk to a doctor for 10 minutes and walk out with an insurance-covered prescription for T and steroids based on nothing but "I feel like I want it"?
The "abusive" behavior is when that implied threat of suicide is lodged at everything. Find the idea of transgender kind of incoherent? GENOCIDE. Criticize this trans character? GENOCIDE. Don't want to use pronouns? GENOCIDE. Don't want to Brazilian wax this penis? GENOCIDE. Don't want to suck the girlcock? GENOCIDE.
If my failure to actively endorse your totally legal, easily permitted life choices increases the odds of you killing yourself, that's entirely your problem. Threatening me with the harm trans people might do to themselves because I decline to actively support them, or even argue that their whole deal is silly and incoherent and quite possibly harmful, is what crosses the line into "clearly abusive behavior".
And I'm sorry, but you are the only person I have ever seen do this decoupled "it's just about predicted consequences" routine. Whenever I see this stuff in the wild, it 100% redflags as textbook "shit abusers do to their victims, if you swapped the nouns and translated this into a relationship, virtually everyone would agree this was abusive behavior".
It is also societies problem. We make people do things that they don't want to do for the good of society all the time. Starting with taxes. So that isn't an out. But let me try to reset here.
If my actions contribute to someone killing themselves then I share some responsibility. Which crucially does not mean I was wrong in my actions or that I should change what I did (were it possible). If a 100% reliable time traveller tells me that if I break up with my girlfriend she will kill herself in 3 days I should take that into account. I may still choose to break up with her. I probably even should, the reasons causing me to break up with her are still there after all. But I believe then, that I do bear some responsibility. And that is ok! (Here at least, I shouldn't do it in a debate other places because it will be seen as accepting blame, most likely).
If we vote for a party in the UK that campaigns for cuts to the NHS it is likely that some additional people will die. It is still perfectly fine to vote that way because there are many other things to trade off against. But I do think we will bear some small shared responsibility for those deaths. And we should consider that as we make our choice. And then still choose to vote that way if we think it best.
I am not saying that even were trans suicide claims 100% true that we are therefore obligated to accomodate anything at all as a society. I am just saying we should consider the truth of them independent of whether its being threatened by someone wrapped in redflags. This isn't a relationship, its social engineering.
This also cuts the other way. We should also consider the costs independent of their claims as well of course. So it could be true that 1000 extra trans people kill themselves if we don't change bathroom laws and force people to use pronouns under threat of criminal sanction, and we might still say no. The costs (that they might claim are low, all we're asking for people to be nice, they might say) might actually be the potential incarceration of a third of the country, billions spent on trials and lawyers, and causing deaths the other way (a reason i don't support a gun ban in the US for example). So the right decision might be to say, we acknowledge that these stochastic deaths are likely true, but we're not going to accomodate you anyway, sorry.
I am arguing that is a better course than either calling them abusive and blindly refusing OR calling them heroes and blindly accepting.
Now obviously that isn't what is going to happen, its going to be a partisan slapfight, i would imagine. But thats why we can argue here instead.
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That wouldn't be abusive unless killing babies was a result of not doing what the Democrats demanded that you do.
It's the pro-life campaigner making the demand. They are predicting what Democrats will do and the outcome.
Rephrased they are saying: Vote Republican because if you don't Democrats will win and they will legalize/loosen restrictions on abortion and then millions of babies will be murdered.
What if instead it's a pro choice activist who says: Vote Democrat because if you don't Republicans will win and they will ban abortion and then millions of women will be forced to carry pregnancies to term they don't want and thousands of rape victims will have to bear their rapists child and women at high risk during pregnancy will find it harder to have life saving terminations leading to more women dying.
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