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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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I'm 100% sure that trans isn't real and the medical treatment these people need is for mental illness

I'd be more careful with absolutes.

My burning hatred for presentism and general displeasure towards technocrats and their solutions to human problems can't be overstated; but they do all have a point in that the phenomenon behind "trans" is a real thing that has existed for pretty much all of history in some form or another.

The present obsession with it and its political implications helps nobody, but let's not pretend the problem doesn't exist. It's not just a symptom of other mental illnesses.

Call it its own type of mental illness if you will, we certainly used to, but it's real and we don't really understand the cause of it.

It is this ignorance that's the fertile ground for would be experts to push convenient solutions they swear have no drawbacks. The way out isn't more willfull ignorance. The flawed frame of understanding that is leading to the present problems must be replaced with the truth, whatever that may be. Not a different sort of convenient lie.

FWIW I agree with both @hydroacetylene and you here, and I expect that he'd agree with you too. What I would mean, and what I expect he means, by "trans isn't real" is that none of the people being classified as "trans" are "born into the wrong body" or "assigned" the wrong gender, nor are they "really" (in some sense) the opposite sex -- that it's not just a matter of overdiagnosis and a classification of some people as "trans" who aren't, while there is still some smaller subset who are "really trans" and where that the most appropriate treatment is the constellation of "gender-affirming" (what a euphemism!) treatments of hormones/surgery/social transition/etc.

I do agree that there is a separate mental illness (probably more than one) which correspond to "trans" -- that it's not just depression or anxiety or whatever that causes boys/men to want to be girls/women (or vice-versa), or to be unhappy because they aren't, or to (at times) convince themselves that they "really are" what they want to be. And I get that there are some people who don't believe that and think that the entirety of "trans" is just some current-day-cultural nonsense. But I do think that there is a meaningful and important sense in which "trans isn't real" is true, and I think that's what he's getting at.

Yes I doubt we all disagree very much, but some things deserve to be stated at least inasmuch as it allows us to map things out.

The story we've all been told (i.e.: there are people born with brains that correspond to the other sex and bringing their bodies in line with their brain heals them) has many problems, not least of which the fact that it has incredibly little to no evidence supporting it. In this at least, "trans isn't real". But the problem is the alternatives, like Blanchardism, are really no better on that front.

There's a deep irony in the fact that learning more would require pretty wild experimentation that would and has been suppressed by a political movement that is hell bent on large scale experimentation but only of a very specific kind.

If there's one thing we ought to learn from this it is that building identities around specific medical treatments is a terrible idea. And it's a mistake we keep making. See the weirder parts of the deaf community for another example.