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I will have to disagree on the implication that transition is fruitless and a false hope by comparing it to Death Valley. Many trans people are able to pass and integrate society successfully as members of the opposite sex (trans men generally moreso than trans women), and while medical science may not be advanced enough for a complete sex change with a functional reproductive system, HRT + surgeries are enough to improve mental healthcare outcomes. There may be no gold in the hills, but there’s at least some silver.
I recently read the Transsexual Phenomenon (link here: https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/2019-04-07_5ca961529c262_HarryBenjamin-TheTranssexualPhenomenon1copy.pdf ), a seminal work from 1966, and I would highly encourage you to skim through it as it’s a work on trans people that predates the current gender ideology lens, with none of the present terminology. It shows how the phenomenon clearly existed in what many conservatives think is the golden age of America - and the amount of harm the system did to people who didn’t fit into the sexual and gender norms of the period. Psychotherapy to make trans people desist was seriously attempted back then and just didn’t work - as a medical clinician, the author of the work found HRT and possible surgeries to be the most effective remedy for many, and this was in post-war USA.
One interesting element he mentions is how there’s a scale of being transgender, and that some patients need no intervention at all, some are helped simply by taking estrogen but otherwise living their lives as male, while some should indeed have the full gender transition including surgery. I personally agree that current approaches and societal mood are perhaps too quick to push people into a transition pipeline and that not all people with gender identity dysfunction need to go all the way - a scale like Harry Benjamin proposed, revised for more contemporary mores, has tremendous value and would perhaps curtail some of the excesses of the current approach.
As a person who’s suffering from gender dysphoria and is undergoing medical transition, what delusion am I suffering from? I know my biological sex, I’m very much aware that I’m not female, but the hormones I’m taking clearly are having a positive effect. Gender dysphoria is an awful psychological condition that can be incredibly debilitating and intense, and I’ve tried repressing for years, I’ve tried going to the gym, I’ve tried therapy, I’ve tried living as a feminine gay man, I’ve tried reading TERF blogs and conservative rhetoric to the point it became self-harm, but HRT is the only thing that managed to reduce the daily feeling of disgust and despair I had towards my body. I know very well it’s not perfect and that I won’t become a real 100% woman, even if I may pass, but why should I deny myself what’s currently the most effective medical treatment for my condition?
Perhaps I can summarise; as a trans person, I don’t think I’m the opposite sex in any way, instead I’m in deep distress over being the sex I am, and I take medication that alleviates that distress.
This is, I think, the core of our disagreement. I think there is pyrite in those hills.
I can at times be talked into believing in some quite rare version of gender dysphoria analogous to body integrity disorder. The 'Truscum' faction of the the trans discourse I think makes the most sense of any 'pro-trans' faction by quite a large margin. But I very quickly lose patience for this when it's used as cover for the excesses of the much larger vocal and powerful rest of the 'pro-trans' movement. Transwomen in women's sports is one such excess, it is an attempt to pass pyrite off as gold on the open market - no matter how much it matches the luster and no matter how much you adjust the alloy in it to match the weight they are simply different elements/compounds. Pyrite at a fundamental level is different than gold and if you try to use it in electronics as you would use gold your electronics will not function. Likewise males and females have fundamental differences and society has developed special cases for these difference in things like sports, romance, prisons ect. We could perhaps take a look at some of these but it needs to actually be a discourse, it cannot be demands by people who refuse to even acknowledge fundamental difference and society is not in a place where we can have this kind of frank debate.
And more important than how we handle relative trivialities like sports we need to address the faction of the 'Pro-trans' side of the aisle that is actually running the narrative because they don't agree with you about this whole dysphoria requirement thing and without that all of the points you have made fall apart. To be as frank as possible and truly with no joy, if the trolley problem is people like you with Dysphoria on one track and an order of magnitude or three more kids who will be pushed down an unnecessary and life altering transition that they would not have wanted without the messaging on the other track it does not look go for you. Part of why I say this, and why I find the current state of the discourse so distressing is that I recognize that there but for the grace of god go I. I was precisely the kind of kid that would have ended up being put on blockers as a child and the kind of kid that would have become a zealot for the "pro-trans" side. I now know, and I would not have known in this counterfactual, that I grow up to be very happy to be a man. I think this kind of susceptible kid outnumbers people like to greatly and I am very unimpressed with the guardrails in place. It's like the section in Scott's old old blog post The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo Where he goes into the dangers of eliminating all false negatives at the expense of sending runny noses into surgery.
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