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Well, as long as you know that’s what you’re doing, and what everyone else sees you’re doing.
Listen. If you don't those close to you to be susceptible to love bombing in general, make sure their needs are met.
But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about sitting around a table at board game night and having fun. I'm talking about...
People hate TRAs because of their negative experiences with TRAs. If they had positive experiences with them they wouldn't hate them as much.
People think transition is awful because they're experiencing the miserable trans people and not the happy ones.
Most people operate on induction and bayes. It's pretty simple.
I happen to think transition is terrible because it's poor quality, one-way, body modification sold to kids as a cure for all their problems.
The people I know seem satisfied with the product. They also don't want to change back and it solved a bunch of their problems.
But you're pointing at more concrete concerns about the people it isn't going well for right?
If TRAs were more willing to open a dialogue about those concerns...
Well. You might still not end up agreeing but I don't see it being so vitriolic.
If the goal is becoming a woman, then the product cannot be seen as anything other than a poor substitute. If the goal is looking like a woman, it's somewhat better, but still pretty hit or miss.
Sort of. It's concern for people who are considering transition, and we don't know yet whether it's going to go good for them or not. If there was a way to know ahead of time that would immediately resolve a lot of issues I have.
Yes! The stifling of the debate raises a lot of concerns for me, not just on freedom of speech grounds, but also on the "if you had good arguments, wouldn't you want to show them off?" grounds.
other goals include: having estrogen in your brain, gender euphoria, watching your body change as you go through a second female puberty, moving in the direction of femininity, learning to master your preferred gender expression...
You can totally figure it out ahead of time too- you can present as female online behind a digital mask, you can take hormones for 2 weeks with no permanent effects, you can see how it feels when people treat you like the other gender-
It sounds like a lot of people are pushing forward too quickly... or feeling bad and assuming that it will all be ok once the transition is finished? If it's not feeling good the whole time that's a bad sign. If you want an emotionally healthy transition you need to be someone who is enjoying the journey, because yeah. You can't be certain about the destination.
Sure, if you treat estrogen as a recreational drug, I guess it makes sense, but that's not how it's being sold right now.
I'm not convinced that even exists.
Since you're an unabashed transhumanist, I can see how these make sense for you, but that kind of looks like these things are supposed to be an end in themselves, which is, again, not how transition is sold.
You don't really need to transition for that.
I'm not sure that would work. When something is sold as a solution to your problems, going through with it will tend to give you a rush of euphoria. Also the sunk cost fallacy will also make you shout down lingering doubts. I don't think 2 weeks on hormones would be enough.
I'm not sure I believe this would solve all the issues, but it would be a marked improvement over the status quo.
This feels like a fairly neat closing point to this thread. We've more or less reached our cruxes and the way things would have to move forward for you and I to be mutually content I think. Though, I am weird. It would seem I can't just speak for TRAs in general.
I don't want to speak for the emotions of everyone who's ever transitioned- I could just be wrong here. But here's my honest working model.
For me- the version I experience- I think it's the same emotion some president elects have felt, or that some people feel after liposuction. For me it's not a qualitatively different phenomenon than other identity based euphorias, just contextually different. Euphoria caused by having your self image map up with your aspirational self image.
So in my model I don't think of gender euphoria as anything unique to gender. I think it's become such a talking point because the people historically who transitioned when things were just starting up- were people with debilitating self image issues that were solved by transition, so they experienced identity euphoria with respect to gender with a huge contrast of prior dysphoria. And now- I think most people experience some level of identity euphoria, but if you've been told about gender euphoria in the context of transition, you're much more likely to experience this emotion and remember it and contextualize it and discuss it in the context of transition. I don't want to use the term 'placebo' though. I think it's easy to understate the long term effects or gloss over the structure of shared emotions by calling them 'placebo'. Being placebo doesn't make it less real, meaningful, powerful, or even categorizable- and if you think transition is bad- you should still be considering how the experiencing gender euphoria plays into the development of the identity.
I'm not certain, but I have a hunch that you're trying to get at the idea that- if it's a social/placebo phenomenon that makes it more arbitrary, it makes it weaker evidence of transness being an underlying condition, and- I think that's a fair assessment of the implications of my model.
But- well. You probably understand by now that I don't have as much skin in the game on the details as most TRAs. I just think of transition as another transhuman thing you can do. My ideological roots aren't concerned with the 'reality' of transness to begin with (I've heard things about white-matter grey-matter balance differences between trans and cis people for instance. but I didn't care, so I never verified the information, and if I had, I'd only want to talk about it for the sake of our edification on related matters... hmm. I suppose I should be looking for better diagnostic identifiers for predicting outcomes at this point. Maybe I should look into it...). So I don't think you can model yourself as seeing a typical TRA position right now.
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