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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33462 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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What’s wrong with revulsion at transness? From a natural law perspective or a utilitarian perspective and probably from a virtue ethics perspective, it’s certainly morally revolting. From an aesthetic perspective it’s certainly usually not an improvement. There certainly don’t seem to be any improvements except in keeping with a certain model of gender fluidity.

You can't argue about what causes someone to experience revulsion so it's not really a good basis for public reasoning in a democratic society. Especially if you're going to make the case that the state should do something to curtail someone's individual autonomy you generally need to ground it in the prevention of harm.

You can, in fact, argue about why revulsion is right or wrong, and I just gave you 4 arguments about why revulsion towards trans people is right(three about moral revulsion, one about aesthetic revulsion). They weren’t fleshed out arguments, but that’s because my post is short, not because they’re bad arguments.

I'm sorry but you can't argue that democracy only cares about logos when this entire issue is naught but pathos on every side.

People absolutely care what is inarguably disgusting or not. Politicians play to it all the time. And they should.

This idea that you should only appeal to the prevention of harm is only typical of precisely those people that can only use that particular moral foundation and are always dumbfounded that some care more about sanctity, loyalty or freedom.

You know, I consider myself to be a person with a very strong stomach. I very rarely feel disgust on a visceral level, even when dealing with excrement or wounds.

But I was listening to a podcast and at one point they were discussing uterus transplants in india for western trans tourists, trans women obviously.

The idea of grafting a uterus, taken from a “willing” 3rd world natal female, onto a natal man who is an autogynephile so they could feel like a “real woman” filled me with a level of disgust I have never encountered in my entire life. No lie, I had to turn the program off, pull over on the highway and just breathe for a minute.

How much of it is due to taking someone else’s perfectly functional uterus? I do wonder how it would be if we could “grow” a womb with the transwoman‘s DNA (replacing the Y with X somewhere somehow), would that be less ick.

Or just a full body transplant? Grow a body with the appropriate chromosomal configuration — again, replacing the appropriate sex chromosome from the original person — but somehow leave out the brain, then transplant the trans brain into the new body.

(I don’t think it would work out very well embryologically or in terms of surgery to reconnect all the nerves, but thought-experiment wise…)

Wouldn't it be preferable to have an intervention that allowed one to be happy and content in their birth body? Isn't this the ideal thought-experiment?

Any thought-experiments that take us to engineered wombs for men or body transplants disgust me as well. What sort of engineering would expect the furries, shota or lolis to want?

Suppose an online fad were persuading children to have their left arms amputated, and the power of the state dedicated itself to facilitating the amputations and to retaliating against parents who tried to interfere. What argument against that public policy would you consider to be fair, if any?

The argument there would be that amputation is such an irrecoverable harm that a child can't possibly consent to it, not that I find amputees aesthetically or philosophically revolting.

Then the argument moves to, well isn't puberty blockers irrecoverable harm to the child because of sterilization just like cutting off an arm? I'd say no, the issue isn't the loss of tissue it's the loss of capabilities. Prosthetic arms are nowhere near the capability of a real arm but a child born from stored eggs and sperm is genetically your child. You don't lose the capacity for fertility even if you lose some genital tissue. I also grew up in a church with many loving adoptive families and and I'm not inclined to view having to adopt a kid rather than having a genetic one as a loss of capability as significant as losing an arm. Reducing children to a means of gene perpetuation flattens one of the deepest and most transformative human relationships possible.

It also seems significant that many adults choose never to have children, where there are no adults I know of who spend their entire lives without using one of their arm. If there is human capability that a large share of the population voluntarily never exercises then I'm inclined to think it's okay for a tiny sliver of the population to modify their bodies such that they lose that capacity.

I'm not unsympathetic to the concern. There's clearly some level of social contagion going on and gender care providers need to move from a model where if a kid has any cross gender identification that must mean they're trans because there's nowhere in mainstream culture where they could have picked that up to one where they're far more skeptical of it. But I also think Gender Dysphoria is not wholly sociogenic and so I would prefer families be allowed how to approach trans children on their own rather than having it dictated to them by the state.

Minnesota's law says it will not enforce Texas's law which makes gender affirming care legally child abuse, strips parents of custody and potentially imprisons them. The idea that Minnesota would emancipate trans runaways is a conclusion posters in this thread have reached by assuming that a state claiming jurisdiction to do a custody proceeding also means it claims jurisdiction to terminate parental rights which is not in the bills text.

The argument there would be that amputation is such an irrecoverable harm that a child can't possibly consent to it, not that I find amputees aesthetically or philosophically revolting.

Amputees are not revolting, the voluntary amputation of a healthy limb is.

Then the argument moves to, well isn't puberty blockers irrecoverable harm to the child because of sterilization just like cutting off an arm? I'd say no, the issue isn't the loss of tissue it's the loss of capabilities. Prosthetic arms are nowhere near the capability of a real arm but a child born from stored eggs and sperm is genetically your child. You don't lose the capacity for fertility even if you lose some genital tissue.

Stored sperm or eggs that you may decide to use later - assuming they aren't lost or tainted or destroyed, and at great expense - is a dramatic loss of capability compared to the old in out in out, which is so simple even animals can do it. You don't just lose a bit of tissue, you lose the capability to produce sperm or ovulate. Hell I struggle to think of a clearer portrayal of destroyed capability than castration - one of its synonyms, neutered, is simultaneously defined as 'make ineffective'.

Edit: either SwiftKey's auto correct is getting shittier or I am losing my mind, but I keep finding grammatically incorrect or just plain wrong words in my posts. Changed straight to simultaneously, which I meant to write.

Then the argument moves to, well isn't puberty blockers irrecoverable harm to the child because of sterilization just like cutting off an arm? I'd say no, the issue isn't the loss of tissue it's the loss of capabilities.

There is good reason to believe that puberty blockers permanently hinder brain development, which hormones during puberty play an important role in. Unfortunately there are zero randomized control trials examining this, and even less evidence regarding using them to prevent puberty entirely rather than to delay precocious puberty a few years, but they have that effect in animal trials:

A reduction in long-term spatial memory persists after discontinuation of peripubertal GnRH agonist treatment in sheep

The long-term spatial memory performance of GnRHa-Recovery rams remained reduced (P < 0.05, 1.5-fold slower) after discontinuation of GnRHa, compared to Controls. This result suggests that the time at which puberty normally occurs may represent a critical period of hippocampal plasticity. Perturbing normal hippocampal formation in this peripubertal period may also have long lasting effects on other brain areas and aspects of cognitive function.

That study also cites this study in humans which found a 3-year course of puberty blockers to treat precocious puberty was associated with a 7% reduction in IQ, but since it doesn't have a control group I wouldn't put much weight on it.

Similar concerns were mentioned by the NHS's independent review:

A further concern is that adolescent sex hormone surges may trigger the opening of a critical period for experience-dependent rewiring of neural circuits underlying executive function (i.e. maturation of the part of the brain concerned with planning, decision making and judgement). If this is the case, brain maturation may be temporarily or permanently disrupted by puberty blockers, which could have significant impact on the ability to make complex risk-laden decisions, as well as possible longer-term neuropsychological consequences. To date, there has been very limited research on the short-, medium- or longer-term impact of puberty blockers on neurocognitive development.

Then the argument moves to, well isn't puberty blockers irrecoverable harm

By moving the argument to puberty blockers, are you agreeing that all gender confirming care for minors that is more aggressive or less reversible than puberty blockers should be banned?

Otherwise, I assume you'd move the argument to those instead, right?

What if the children just wanted their ears removed? This wouldn't render them deaf, just leave them visibly mutilated by prevailing standards. Is that irrecoverable harm? Who is to decide what constitutes harm, and what constitutes the realization of one's inner truth however aberrant by wider standards?

The harm must be weighed against the harm of not engaging in a particular intervention. The argument from those in favor of permitting teens to receive gender affirming care is that puberty is going to cause their bodies to change in a way that causes them severe psychological distress for the rest of their lives and greatly increases anxiety, depression, and suicide, and that this likely isn't just some adolescent phase that they can ride out or that they'll come to regret in the future if interventions are performed. And the reason we know this is because people such as this exist in significant enough numbers and throughout a long enough timespan that they can be studied and we can determine which kinds of interventions are likely to succeed and which aren't. I don't know enough to know if these claims are true or not but I suspect that whether or not one believes them to be true is solely a function of one's politics. However, at a certain point this becomes more a scientific question than a moral one. Children wanting their ears removed or some other medically benign but socially damaging procedure only becomes a relevant question if the child in question is suffering from a well-recognized condition from which having the procedure done is an effective treatment.

What if the children just wanted their ears removed? This wouldn't render them deaf, just leave them visibly mutilated by prevailing standards. Is that irrecoverable harm? Who is to decide what constitutes harm, and what constitutes the realization of one's inner truth however aberrant by wider standards?

Existential conflict over values, and determined knife-wielding teenagers.

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