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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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But there is a cascade from social transition that makes it much more likely they get puberty blockers and progress on to cross-sex hormones. Social transition is a powerful psychological intervention.

Except for all the stories (ironically popular among the anti-trans side) of gender psychologists of the past trying to assign children different genders and raise them that way and the children rebelling and reasserting their 'natural' gender.

All the evidence I'm aware of is that this is how things actually work. People who ask to socially transition and then medically transition later do both because they are actually trans. People who are not trans are very very resistant to both measures and will not go along with it of their own will forever.

You are making a separate prediction, which is that you can convince someone that they're trans for their entire life, strongly enough that they'll fight for years to get long-term life-altering medical interventions and surgeries, just by calling them a different name and pronouns when they're in middle school/highschool.

That seems shockingly unlikely to me given everything else I know about human psychology, and I wonder whether you really think that human gender is that mutable (which would put you a million miles closer to the trans activist side on how gender works than most people), or if this is just a convenient argument for your bottom line.

I think you might be some distance from what I meant but I can't parse what you've said to know where we departed shared understanding. I don't understand what your saying and am not making any of the claims you are stating as far as I can tell.

I was referencing this research:

https://segm.org/early-social-gender-transition-persistence

Right, the point is that your source is trying to interpret the study as saying 'social transition causes medical transition', as if it were really easy to brainwash people this way, which goes against all other psychological evidence I'm aware of.

As opposed to what I would see as the much more natural and plausible explanation, 'social transition and medical transition are both caused by the same third factor (being trans).'

The capacity to brainwash people is well documented, in one form you may call it culture, or mimesis. Then there's concepts like mass-formation psychosis, crowd hysteria, culture-bound syndromes, and plain old garden variety propaganda and myth making, which we swim in.

PS, I forgot manias, madness of the crowd.

PPS, cults.