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A lot of history fades from public awareness, even if people actively try to maintain it. This guy is a grifter, but in case that isn't damning enough, the difference between his summary and a more genuine one is serious, and that's despite a small industry of people like David Hardy spending years of their lives to both uncover and publicize the fine details.
'Psychosurgery' falls into a similar boat -- it's a fun trivia topic to reveal that a famous and popular-until-his-death President of the United States had a sister who was treated for 'depression' in a way that left her with the mental capacity of a two-year-old, so it's not forgotten. But in turn there's also just not that many survivors who were in that place where significant but not incapacitating harm could make them cause celebres, especially by the time you get to the 1960s amygdalotomies, where only thousands of the procedures have been done worldwide, rather than tens of thousands just in the United States.
Eh, that's a possible route -- the extent people suddenly stopped caring about where and how the Chinese government might have had any involvement in early COVID stuff is an overt case -- but it's not the only one. Contrast the treatments of masks, where an initial hard press against flipped in valence toward mandates (and still floats up and down in valence by time); or with common fashion cycles among 'progressive' media where a popular culture name goes from hero to villain and sticks well past their cultural relevance. And there's a possibility it just evolves.
I'm skeptical that any of these are going to happen. There's just too many trans people already around, in ways that are too hard to extract not just from doing trans stuff, but from being in social and environmental characteristics where .
But I'm a lot more sympathetic to the trans perspective than the median American, and significantly more so than the median poster here. Which brings the more immediate issue up:
In addition to the obvious issue you already recognize where posters on this forum and unrelated outsiders aren't great signs of what direction Discourse is going, and especially where People of Status are going, there's the more specific problem where even for our subculture this particular topic is hard to make fun to write about.
I try to spice up matters when I can, and there's part of me that hopes this is some place where there could be a reasonable meeting of the minds if we better understood what the hell we were talking about.
But mostly, that's not the sort of thing that happens, or even has signs of happening, and it's boring. The disagreements here are axiom-level, and while there's somethings that can change people's minds on the edges of pragmatic policies, maybe, it's not what the actual disagreements are. That's not a fault specific to the Motte -- the few trans activist spaces that allow disagreement on the margins or recognition of Red Tribe disagreement still don't actually have much to say -- but it's more frustrating here because there's many better options.
That's an interesting example, but I think it actually supports my point. The amount of resources required to keep something in public consciousness is substantial. Even when someone go to considerable lengths to maintain the memory of an incident, the establishment can effectively bury it with nothing more than a few cold shoulders.
I ended up being skeptical of these sort of explanations for societal trends. My problem is that I already seen too many big stories fabricated out of thin air, or hot scandalous ones that everyone got awfully quiet about. 60's Psychosurgery had at least one very sympathetic victim, who I think was instrumental in clamping the whole thing down, even when he ultimately lost his lawsuit, but his case seems to largely be forgotten.
At the end of the day I kind of agree, but not quite in the same way. Anorexics are a thing and probably will continue to be a thing, precisely there were too many anorexics already around, so in a way trans people aren't going anywhere. But given the utter state of the discourse, I don't think the current levels are sustainable. At least I don't think you'll get the same amount of trans people if it's no longer explicitly glamorized, if schools are not allowed to hide kids going trans from their parents, if doctors don't get to do "gender affirming care" by default, and threaten the family with suicide risk, if they object, etc.
For what it's worth, I appreciate your input whenever you speak on the subject. You're probably right that the disagreement is axiomatic, but I'm still curious about what axioms you're coming from, because admittedly the trans issue has always been a bit hard for me to grok. Are you coming from the transmed "body dysmorphia" approach? The "gender identity" one? Do you think transition is about relieving distress, or is it more a question of self-expression and people having the right to modify their body as they please?
That's probably true, but I'm not sure that looks much different to trans activists from the social conservative perspective just winning, and perhaps more critically I think you're still going to have a million+ trans or post-trans people going around, and unless they're sold against the concept, they're going to have alternative means for bringing matters forward socially. Whatever they do might still be such that the next generation of trans people is smaller, and maybe that loops back on itself, but you're looking at decades if not the better part of a century.
My relevant underlying axiom is that it is there must be limits to what governments can do to protect people from themselves, so probably closer to self-expression or right-to-modify, though the principle applies far broader than just body modification -- it's why I'm very skeptical of vape bans, soft drink size controls, or of the Australian arguments for gun control, with the extreme being matters like 'the FDA oppressed Stalking Cat'. Many of these things might be stupid things to do (especially for Stalking Cat and the vapers), but that's their choice to make.
This principal isn't unlimited, in the sense that we reasonably restrict selling cigarettes to children or advertising ethylene glycol as a low-calorie sweetener, and there are some edges cases with trans stuff. But even to the extent I can be persuaded on the edge cases that were parallels, it's hard to present a fair or honest engagement. Bringing up false-advertising-like claims inevitably invites discussion about what extent any given procedure or policy has benefits. I've even been persuaded on a few matters! While the data for damage from short-term use of puberty blockers on bone density isn't anywhere near as strong as trans skeptics think, early-initiated long-term use of those blockers probably has some harms for sexual development in adulthood for both continuing trans and desisters that is neither being disclosed nor documented properly, for example, and in ways I'd honestly expected to have been better hammered out and wasn't.
But short of convincing evidence that adult trans people are going to keel over by the cartloads with the equivalent of the asbestos-to-mesothelioma pipeline, though, any debate on this pretty quickly turns to "sucks to be them, gotta update that documentation" or "okay, guess we should wait mid-to-late teens". Which is going to seem like a really weird goalpost-moving to someone holding this position, rather than an update-on-evidence, in addition to just coming across ghoulish when someone's just finishing talking up how a victim is now horribly dysphoric/has had their entire romantic life upended/couldn't trust that bungee jumping service.
That said, I don't think my principles are common, here. Not only are the average trans activist likely motivated by something different, in many circumstances they're actively drive toward widespread government controls (not just on this topic, such as with bans on stupid talk-only conversion therapy, but also on a wide variety of others). But if principles only mattered when they helped people you agreed with, or agreed with them, they're not principles at all.
I think that dysphoria and gender identity are more useful frameworks for understanding what motivations trans groups, rather than what would change the minds or arguments of trans activists or the median person. Indeed, I don't think they are, or should be, particularly persuasive to other people even presuming that they were true: in addition to the self-hostage-taking that social conservatives often bring up, we pretty clearly don't recognize mass suicides of other groups as cause for actions along the beliefs of those groups. But they're neither what makes the policy for within the view of trans people, nor are they what would need to be different for their advocates and activists to change their minds rather than their arguments.
Thanks for the elaborate response, I feel a bit bad now since I don't seem to have too much to say about it. It does make me wonder why you think your view is so rare here, because I don't see much of anything that I'd disagree with here. There might be something around the validity of dysphoria - I'll be the first to confess I don't grok it at all, be it personally or in the abstract - but it doesn't seem to be the cornerstone for your views on the matter, nor is it for mine. I can understand (though it frustrates me) how people immediately jump to "do you want to ban adults from making medical decisions for themselves?" upon seeing my vehement disagreement with trans activists, but I don't think this is what the disagreement is about. Everything you said the limits of the government to protect people from themselves is, in my case, preaching to the choir.
This does seem to hit the nail on the head as to why we're in such a pickle. I don't even care about alternative means of bringing the matters forward socially, as long as they're not underhanded (using the public school system to sell the concept to kids, behind the parents' back being one extreme example). But if what I consider to be setting up some basic rules of engagement is already defined to be a lose condition by the pro-trans side, well... where can we go from there?
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I'm unclear what the distribution of opinions is around here. I get the broader strokes, but on some details I'm apparently confused.
I casually dismissed white nationalism recently and received more pushback against that than for any other opinion.
I don't think we are largely a cabal of rightoids. But maybe I'm confused on how large of a subfaction they are around here. We need an ideological consensus around here. I predict the Motte is more sympathetic to trans people than the median American, and by a large degree. But also vastly more critical of trans talking points than the median upstanding PMC progressive.
I didn't see exactly what happened in that case, but as someone who was occasionally part of pushback like that, my perspective is that it is simply because there's a lot of lazy thinking when it comes to criticism of the white nationalists. When you're talking in mainstream society you can just say "x is a white nationalist" and if true that's a devastating critique that destroys someone's reputation by itself, let alone the argument they're making. But that's not the case here - they can actually mount arguments without just instantly being obliterated from the discourse. This means that if you use the same lazy and poorly thought out attacks that get by just fine when the white nationalists have no ability to respond, you'll get destroyed when they can actually mount a defence at all. That's not to say that there aren't any white nationalists here, but I really don't think they're a majority at all.
I also don't think white nationalists are more than a small minority here. But I didn't expect significant pushback again rejecting their silly redefining of terms. One of them tried a lazy gotcha redefinition. I said "no". A number of them leapt to defend the lazy invalid gotcha redefinition.
The redefinition of otherwise sensible terms in question was: if you care about white people, then you necessarily must be a white nationalist. "Ethnostate or you don't care" was the completely invalid false dichotomy. Given that level of argument: they are the ones being obliterated by their wrong redefinition of terms. A single "no" is a complete argument against hostile fringe redefinition of common terms. That's indeed not what "care" means to almost everyone almost always. They can't trap me into saying I don't "care about white people" because I'm not a white supremacist. They don't get to define these words or make me answer to them.
But I have seen young American progressives and religious immigrant Muslims being completely unable to form a counterargument because they've never before been challenged. They think merely asserting their group's consensus is a knock down argument. "I understand you think that, but I don't agree" is beyond their experience or ability to deal with. So I get your larger point.
This sounds strange and unlike most interactions I see on these forums, are you able to find a link?
That’d be hammi in this train wreck of a thread. See also his response for some of the pushback he got.
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Is that not inherent? As you note, the disagreeements are axiomatic. I think that trans women are just delusional boys, and trans men are just confused and mentally ill (disproportionately actual teenagers)girls. Like you note we might be able to come to an agreement on, say, reducing pointless dickishness, or what level of discrimination is potentially tolerable(my answer would be a large but not infinite amount), or have some discussion of transgender sports or whatever. But it’s kind of boring to discuss our core disagreements because there’s no common ground; like literally there’s nothing to discuss. You may as well be saying 2+2=5 from my perspective(and Vice versa). ‘Yes it does/no it doesn’t’ is inherently boring.
That's one model, and it's definitely one that's correct in at least some circumstances. But it's not the only possible or relevant one.
Most people have different axioms and interests and preferences than you do, or I do, at some level. To go among others is to go among mad people. Yet most things don't devolve into a war of all against all. I'd like to wax poetic about recognizing the humanity in the other or recognizing the madness in oneself, but rather than that, or even some serious negotiated settlement, or some broader Westphalian Peace. It's not even that we don't care about these things, or that there are no weirdos that make the most trivial of these things their entire personality and want to restructure society, but it's possible to see them from the outside as something examined, and examined as a concept rather than as an enemy.
And that seems a lot more interesting for me, even if it's layered over axioms that can't be solved, even if a lot of the object-level discussions overlap.
I dunno. There are genuine pragmatic reasons that this particular issue is something people care about, and as much as I might personally want the libertarian perspective as a solution I can see why that would just make both mainstream views madder. Hell, even my "outsiders examining" goal is objectionable to a lot of people who find it dehumanizing. But I don't think it's inherent to every environment, even if it's inherent to many.
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