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My point is that the truth of the statement is independent of who says it. If it feels better it can be an anti-trans advocate making the statement or a Martian or an AI.
If it is false then it is absolutely fine to ignore it. Even if its true depending on the costs (financial and social) it might still be fine to ignore it. But who says it doesn't actually change that.
I understand that the people using it and the people opposing it are probably both doing so for partisan reasons. So we can try to ignore that and look at the argument. That won't change how partisans look at it or which arguments they use out there in the wider world, competely agreed.
If it is true, and the benefits outweigh the costs then it should be considered, even if the people making that argument are partisan hacks. Stopped clocks and all that. Just like if it is false then even if the people making that argument were literal Nazis then we should not.
I regard transness as a mental illness with no great treatments. Which should tell you i am not part of the progressive orthodoxy on this.
In the abstract, yes, and only there. In the real world of motivated agents, more stringent heuristics apply.
If one side of an argument demands power for the purposes of ameliorating a harm directly inflicted by their allies, with the assessment of the causal chain assigned to that harm proposed and assessed by their allies, and the efficacy of the solution judged by their allies, that is not in fact a reasonable starting place for discussion. In the real world, arguments from formal logic do not outweigh naked self-interest. In that cartoon, is it reasonable to presume, based on context, that the guy with the gun and the guy asking for $20 are colluding in some way? On hat evidence would one draw this conclusion?
It may be good to consider all questions with an open mind. It is absolutely not good to consider all questions with an equally open mind, because questions can be selected not for truth value but for efficacy in social engineering. For some questions, it is reasonable to require some threshold-level of evidence up-front before you take them seriously.
If it's true, the evidence indicating it so should be provided in the appeal for consideration. In this case, the people gathering and assessing that evidence and the people reporting their findings have proved themselves to be profoundly untrustworthy, and the people raising the argument obviously stand to benefit and accept zero responsibility for negative consequences if they're wrong.
...I get the feeling that none of the above will be persuasive to you, so I guess the best I can do is ask the following:
Which arguments get the serious treatment from you? Any argument, regardless who makes it? Once accepted, on what basis do you assess the veracity of an argument?
Well my background as a central government bureaucrat is definitely a factor, when you look at social level decisions then you don't really have a choice but to take the individual out of it, even if you are not a utilitarian. When you are looking at factors where you are aggregating group behaviors the actions or statements of any one person are essentially meaningless, swamped by the group. Is it true that trans suicides would be by definition self-inflicted? Yes absolutely, but obesity is much the same and we still put in place government initiatives around those such as funding lap band surgery for high risk people because pragmatically the costs of doing that are outweighed (no pun intended) by the costs of not doing it, even if the actual best solution would be for those people to eat less.
To give examples of arguments that go the other way (as in rightish leaning) I can give Christianity and Gun Control
I was raised Protestant but became an atheist at a pretty early age, maybe 12 or 13 because none of it ever made sense to me, I'm also from Northern Ireland so Christianity being a problem was pretty front and centre in my life. My uncle disowned his gay son, one half of my family are rural farm types with fairly standard conservative Protestant beliefs, on the other side my grand parents were fleeing from a not-quite Amish sect, so my overall view of religion was very dim. I am also a veteran of the online Atheist wars so my beliefs certainly at one time ran hot indeed. The arguments Christians largely make don't move me because they largely rely on the existence of a being I don't believe in, however after experience I do now believe that Christianity as a social glue is probably net positive in the US (potentially less so back home, but we are a special case), to the extent that I'd be entirely ok with it making a resurgence outside of its current heartlands to become the dominating ideology once more. I still think a few tweaks would be needed to ensure its long term stability (gay marriage would probably have to be accepted in order to keep that fringe, so that the same coalitions can't be assembled) but even if not, it's ok. So like with the trans argument, I ignored the reason Christians were making the argument that Christianity is good (because I still view them to be entirely incorrect on the factual existence of God, and probably too biased), and evaluated with my own experiences the truth of the situation. It's likely some Christians make arguments in bad faith (again no pun intended), but there are others (the majority I think) who operate in good faith, which means the good or bad faithness of a particular proponent is just not a very good proxy at population levels for whether the claim is actually either useful or true.
For Gun Control, I think the US would be better with approximately zero guns in private hands, and the arguments made by standard 2A advocates do not move me. And some people making those arguments will be doing so in bad faith, some in good faith. What has moved me is looking at the mechanisms for how that would have to be enforced and the likelihood of actually being able to drop gun ownership (legal and illegal) to any lower threshold. I think it could be done but the cost would be so astronomical in both dollars and social costs that I think it entirely unfeasible to attain without the costs massively outweighing the benefits. So I no longer support gun control for pragmatic reasons. That would be the case even if every pro-gun spokesperson was exactly the worst progressive's strawman who only wanted guns to murder black people and Bambi. Because that would not be representative of the vast majority of legal gun owners as far as I can tell.
As to why that should apply in the trans debate, the trans people I have met in person have been reasonable, and given I hold that most activists for a cause are likely to be the most committed and extreme then it makes sense that no matter what they claim it is unlikely trans people as a group are using threats of suicide as an abusive tactic, no matter how hyperbolic or stereotypical the spokesperson might be. So setting aside whether the person making a claim is making it in bad faith or not, at a macro level is irrelevant unless the majority of the group in question is also acting in bad faith, which in my direct experience of people is that most people in most groups are not. They may be wrong, they may be terribly misguided, they may even switch beliefs as the wind blows but they are generally good faith actors. And if you treat them as such, things work a lot better.
If you compress this down to individuals working together like the example of your girlfriends bff pressuring you or the guy with the gun and the non mugger example, you lose the fact that at macro population levels that is just not generally how these things work in my experience. And just to wrap up, none of that means the conclusions I come to are correct, it might be the case that Christianity is really going to end in a militant Theocracy a la the Handmaid's Tale and that Trans people are really all conspiring to threaten suicide as a group and that gun control could be easily achieved with just three easy steps. And my conclusions do change over time as I am exposed to new situations, new view points and new arguments.
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