The costs of trans visibility

Is that 50% absolute or compared to baseline suicide rates which might be very different among different populations?

Like non LGBTQ Thais suicide x percent, LGBTQ Thais suicide 10x, while in USA the factor is like 20?

Or (random numbers) American LGBTQ suicide 3% vs 1.5% for Thais, with no reference to baseline?

There is no known rate. Just polled contemplation/attempt %s

There are known baseline rates for the rest of the population though, should compare to that (for both countries)

yeah luciom phrased it better than i did

8/14.5
vs
16/35.5

But its not exactly comparing apples to apples, more like apples to cranberries, raspberries, strawberries, and apples

One set of numbers is suicide rate for the populations
One number is % of US trans individuals who polled that they had attempted suicide before transitioning
Another number % of Thai LGBTQ who polled that they had attempted suicide at all

But again, "Being more accepting and empathetic towards individuals will lead to them having a higher quality of life", isn't exactly a hot take.

You can put me in the boat of people who felt alone and isolated and often fantasized about dying and observing the world not even notice I was gone. I didn't feel isolated and alone because I was mentally ill, I was mentally ill because I felt isolated and alone.

i never said you shouldn't be accepting and emphathetic, the's just the standard meta around here for "he didn't agree with me he must be a bad person"

and i'm sorry you've had a rough time, truly, that really sucks

Tbh if someone has a strong delusion it is not necessarily the case that pandering to it will help that person long term.

It can be, but it's not obvious at all.

For reference think of very fat people, who are recently sometimes being convinced they are "beautiful anyway in that condition" and should be accepted as that, we should be empathic toward them and so on.

It's absolutely not obvious that the removal of fat shaming helps people, Inasmuch as fatness can be linked to behavior, and shame works to make people change their behavior, we are hurting them by not pushing them socially to eat less, or eat better, or exercise more.

So yes, sometimes being mean toward someone helps that person.

If fatness is something you disagree with, think lazyness, should we be emphatic toward lazy people telling them it's their identity to be lazy and no one should I silt them for being lazy and society should reorganize to give lazy people the same resources non lazy people have access to?

Now is "feeling bad in your biological body" similar? We don't know.

But it doesn't follow automatically that telling someone who feels like a woman inside a man body that he is right and helping him change his body toward what his mind feels like, will help him long term, compared to (if that's a possibility) let him cohabit with his natural body with less struggle, or only change portions of it which don't remove his capacity for orgasm, his reproductive chances and so on.

Yeah, we know that being fat is bad for you. Just like we know that lobotomies are bad for you.

Implying that because we know being fat is bad, and that we know being lobotomized is bad, that maybe that means being Trans is bad is basically the definition of bad faith.

I truly hope I am reading the room wrong here, but I think there are about 4-5 different people currently trying to argue this right now.

That's called depression. Depression can get worse if you are isolated, but unless we are talking actually solitary, people in good mental health will push strongly toward having more human connections and will be fine.

If you are paralyzed in action following adverse life events, like being isolated and not working toward developing more relationships with all your strength rather staying at home sorry for that situation, that is actually mental illness

It was 25+ years ago. I am not mentioning it to get sympathy, just as a frame of reference for the suicide contemplation discussions

Not being able to have children is considered bad by a lot of people, do you consider sterility an irrelevant condition?

Does being trans lead to sterility? Not necessarily, but it does more when society pushes "full gender transition" as a normal option for people who feel they are the opposite sex of their body.

Not being able to experience orgasms is a very bad condition, and full gender transition often leads to that as well.

If being more empathic toward that group of people leads more of them to become sterile and incapable of having orgasms, then perhaps the analogy with fatness isn't that absurd is it?

Ye and I am saying it's clearly mental health in your example

that's very comforting, was debating whether not to reach out but i don't imagine you're my biggest fan right now so wasn't sure if that would make it worse or not

glad to know things are better

what about suicide?

I don't think most people's sense of self is tied to their ability to orgasm but as long as its presented up front as a possibility that transitioning could potentially affect ones abillity to orgasm then who are you to judge their decision?

Just like much of the science on this subject, there is conflicting results. Some people report longer orgasm duration and satisfaction after transition. Are you in favor of finding the properties that lead to that case so people can experience longer and more satisfying orgasms as well?

We've been arguing on and off for years lol, mostly in a respectful manner.

I have no issues with you my friend, even if we disagree on many things.

Compare the pulsion to overeat to the feeling you are of the opposite sex of your body.

Both are conditions that will invariably lead to some problems compared to people that don't have them, because the endgame of pursuing both pulsions to the fullest will be bad (I hope you agree it is inherently very bad to lose the capacity to have orgasms and the possibility of having children, and in general it is bad to need a drug for all your life to live decently, although it's a frequent case for many people it's still suboptimal).

There are way to cohabit with those pulsions minimizing the damages, and for trans people in general it will be about on one side, living as much as what your idea of the opposite sex is (and about this, society should be empathic as much as possible), while being extremely careful about any permanent changes that can lead to losing access to orgasms and fertility, leaving those procedures as very rare, last resort options which shouldn't be pushed by society in any way, but could still be considered as necessary in extreme cases.

Same as a person with a strong overeating pulsion won't end up optimizing his overall quality of life at the same weight a person without such pulsion will, for example ending up with 20-30 lbs more than optimal even when being careful about eating (because doing more would cost too much in terms of life satisfaction, more than the damage of this extra lbs to health), then a trans person will find his transition equilibrium at some point down the spectrum of transition (and that's what you see in the trans community, they don't all transition to the fullest).

But society shouldn't swing the pendulum too far into the "mutilating your genitals is obviously proper the moment you feel of the opposite sex" and stuff like that, I hope this make my opinion on the matter clear

likewise man

Fatness is also a proper comparison inasmuch as we can decry the medicalization of human conditions a terrible outcome for society.

In many/most cases we don't need physicians to deal with our pulsions, and we should move away from the idea that dealing with our imperfections is just about finding the correct pill or medical procedure that will solve it for us.

Technology can help but only after we assessed ourselves properly, knowing our limitations, holistically looking at everything that matters for us to try to achieve a good quality of life. Giving up agency about all of that to physicians is usually among the worst possible ways to deal with the complexity of life

"Who am I to judge their decisions":

1) we are often talking about minors, and for now we collectively decided that minors can't decide for themselves, and for extreme cases not even the parents alone can

2) I am the person paying for those procedures

3) i am the person who could end up paying for the bad consequences of those procedures

If we talk about adults, who pay everything out of pocket, and will pay out of pocket down the line for any healthcare expense related to the consequences of their transition years and decade after that, then of course I don't feel I have any right to decide for anyone

The point being that I wasn't born bi-polar or clinically depressed, I became that way due to societal pressures.

You were born with a predisposition to such conditions, but evidently not a strong one, and society triggered those outcomes, but those outcomes aren't triggered in the totality of people who get those pressures, so how do you want to call the fact that some people crack and some others don't, if not illness? Weakness? You decide the word but there is something inherent inside you that makes you sick and paralyzed when those things happen, but not other people

I see a lot of articles about infrastructure, and they usually mention something or other about gov't. Clearly it is a thing. They are supposed to be doing something or other about a rail line between LA and Las Vegas. Plus. I see lots of orange cones around, so presumably they are doing something about infrastructure. Haven't seen a tampon vending machine in a public restroom yet.

Literally the only place I see anything written about tampon vending machines is here. As far as I can tell it is nearly 100% discussions of tampons and this is probably the first time I've seen infrastructure mentioned.

Of course, I do only click on threads that will provide me with entertainment here, so the sample is highly biased (and will remain so).