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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33523 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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Its either a serious case of ideological blindness or serious levels of intellectual dishonesty to actually claim trans child == dead child.

All the posters saying the bloodline ends at sterility, do you prefer sterile but alive or dead? As if parents only want their kids to be alive for the bloodline.

To add onto the other comments here, I'm under the perception that a significantly-non-zero amount of trans teens and young adults tend to have strained relationships with their parents precisely because they no longer resemble the parent's idea/vision/memory of the child they once sired. No, this doesn't have anything to do with the fact that their ability to have children of their own has been compromised, but for some parents, yes, a trans child is so dissimilar that the "original" might as well be dead.

I don't think it is necessarily a serious level of intellectual dishonesty. There are a lot of statistics available on the survival rates of trans individuals, and in terms of long-lasting consequences or death you're probably better off hearing that your child was just shot in the chest than hearing that they've just transitioned.

Its either a serious case of ideological blindness or serious levels of intellectual dishonesty to actually claim trans child == dead child.

It's stealing a base, but it's as apt a metaphor for the parents as it is for the trans people who use it to describe themselves.

I have a nephew who has claimed to be a girl for the last few years. He recently told his parents that he was encouraged to do this by his therapist as a way to mitigate suicidal feelings. He's still suicidal and worse now that he went through this insanity and it didn't help. In a way, his transition was a kind of failed metaphorical suicide attempt. I have no idea how parents react to a child who tried and failed to kill themselves, except from movies like Ordinary People, but it's like a kind of death. There's grieving for sure. It turns death from a remote specter to an omnipresent reality in every future interaction with that child. Parents tend to irrationally fear the worst, anyway; although you compartmentalize such fears as irrational. After a suicide attempt, however, they have pictured their kid dead as reality and now will fear suicide every time the phone rings and probably for most minutes in between those phone calls. If it's not death it must be an excruciating and unrelenting tease of death.

It's not a huge leap for me to assume that the parental reaction to a serious suicide attempt would be similar to a reaction to a supposed gender transition.

There's also a kind of an "undead" quality to their presence after transition, like in a horror movie where a loved one has returned as a vampire or zombie. There's this uncanny valley between the person you used to think you knew and this disturbing thing that has replaced them that signifies something no one wants to address or think about. While is does not threaten harm, it casts a pall of unease over every interaction. If it's not the death of a person, it is like the death of normalcy. Maybe normalcy was a fantasy, but it was a mutually agreed fantasy that has been destroyed by this thing that lives between the lines of order and now stares everyone in the face in broad daylight, and you know that both you are shamed by how you react to its presence as it is shamed by the disruption of its unspeakable presence in its current form. It's a death that has half-happened and stands in the room as a reminder of its possibility and yet can't be spoken about. Is that worse than death? With death there is peace. Maybe there's not a word for it yet, and death is the closest we can come up with so far.

In practice, it's pretty close.

It's not just the superficial transformation, because it's usually accompanied by a kind of religious conversion, and the transition is like a "born again" experience, with the old identity becoming a "deadname". Moreover, if you question or resist this along the way, you will cast as a villain in the ideological grand narrative. There are so many ways this can either ruin your child or ruin your relationship with them, and in the end they are no less likely to commit suicide anyway.

Do you take the same issue with the term “dead naming”?

This is not as much of a gotcha as you think it is because I am not a big believer of the descriptions and prescriptions put forward by the trans activists.

But I am a big believer in not letting politics cloud my judgement.

Just checking!

The whole idea is that your old child died and a new one replaced it

I'd be more interested in knowing whether they'd equate a normal but childless-past-some-significant-age child (as many Millenials are) to a dead one. I know that some would, in traditional societies especially.

But here, obviously this bloodline thing is a rationalization for a moral intuition about badness of trans. I'd prefer if people argued directly for what they believe. Fear of reprisal warps human reasoning into really strange and inauthentic shapes, unfortunately.

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