The costs of trans visibility

coordi, i'm really disappointed in you

you used to be better than this

What is your malfunction. These things keep getting explained to you and its just going over your head like its some sort of skit

ok first analogy that comes to mind but hopefully it illustrates the point. It's 2016 people are saying someone has trump derangement syndrome as its a real medical condition. They then reference studies of other popular but hated people rising to power. Then you say but but theres no studies of trump derangement syndrome.... right because its 2016

This whole trans thing is new. Social contagion is not. There isn't going to be a library of research considering the very new explosion of ROGD. I already explained this to you. People familiar with social contagion research and are experts in the field of human behavior are seeing this and they have sound reasoning

Here is a snippet of what I was talking about

You're also talking about musks kid transitioning at 17. Right. According to all the research I just linked you to from my previous post, that's a red flag, not the other way around. The kid was "acting gay", on the spectrum like his dad, being raised by his mom (an actress iirc), and went trans at 17. Those are all the red flags that have been raised as a social contagion and for the dysphoria to more likely be a phase. These are all the example people have been using to show this isn't like homosexuality and born-this-way in a significant portion of trans

Sure, but it isn't perfect (obviously, as everyone eventually dies).

Being suicidal is likely at least partially influenced by genetics. Someone who kills himself should be less likely to have successful offspring, so suicidality should be selected against; he has that part correct.

However, at the start of civilization, probably around 10,000 years ago, something very unusual happened - humans started changing their environment. This means that it was changed to adapt to what humans needed instead of humans needing to adapt to their environment.

Since then, there has been little to no evolution in humans, partially because of less need, but also because that is a very short amount of time in the history of life.

Then more recently, human society started to become maladaptive for what truly makes humans healthy and happy, instead just making their lives as easy as possible.

Just as an example, human eyesight has been getting worse in the last few hundred years. One reason is that since the invention of eyeglasses, people with poor vision can now be reproductively successful, instead of suffering an early death through mishaps.
Also, modern inventions like the computer and smart phone actually make the eyes weaker in individuals.

The best known example is that humans evolved to survive through periods of famine by being able to store body fat, and having the urge to eat a LOT when food was available, especially foods high in fats sugar.

But now that most people have easy access to food whenever they want, those traits lead to obesity and related diseases. While this could eventually be solved by evolution, instead we are figuring out ways to help obese people survive and reproduce, through medicine, surgery, artificial sweeteners, etc.
So humans are foiling evolution again.

So how does this get back to depression / suicidality? Humans evolved while living in small groups who helped each other survive. Breaking away from the group meant near certain death (as well as a lack of mating opportunities).

So the human psyche evolved to crave the kind of intense interaction with others and long term relationships that one gets when living one's entire life in a small group (with a possible one time group switch after puberty, to prevent unhealthy inbreeding).

But modern society of the last few hundred years has greatly changed. Again, because of technology, it is now very possible for someone to survive and propogate outside of an extended family / intense small group relationship. It likely even feels easier for many to do so, avoiding conflict that can come with intense relationships.

Even more recently, it has gotten worse. Now it is possible to survive, and even successfully reproduce, without any intense interaction or long-term relationships (except for with one's own child for half the population).

The interaction people crave is kept somewhat at bay by artifical group membership, like by watching a lot of TV, where you see the same people over and over again. The internet is more interactive, but still is not the same as in person communication, and often leads to being around real people even less often.

While that kind of interaction provides stimulus, it does not really lead to a healthy brain. Real interaction is still missed, leading to loneliness and depression. People also feel worse about themselves, because instead of comparing themselves with people in their group who live similar lives, they mostly see the lives of the rich and beautiful on television, against whom they rarely measure up. On social media they are shown how other people are living fabulously happy lives (even if those people may also have their share of hardships and depression, that's not the part of their lives they choose to share with others).

So now we have someone who often feels bored, lonely and depressed, while believing that most others lead exciting lives full of parties, travel, and generally feeling good. Of course they now feel like they are different from others, and there is something wrong with them.

This describes perfectly the kind of person likely to commit suicide. If that person is an angry young man with easy access to weaponry, he's also likely to take others out with him.

Good post.

I remember in college, someone or some institution came to the conclusion that the one word secret to happiness was progress - and I still remember and think back to that consistently.

Lottery winners are more miserable than folks who have had their legs amputated. Same with kids and growing up and sometimes just having limited things to your name.

People need a reason to live and they need to be able to struggle and fight for those things for it to be rewarding.

The U.S. Transgender Survey of 2015 Supp...

Parent reports of adolescents and young ...

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Yes, but death is a part of the process of evolution and is selected for, not against.

Lol not littman again. Never been quite clear why you cite her so much. For noobs, probably best to start here:

[QUOTE=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_controversy]Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is a controversial, scientifically unsupported hypothesis which claims that some adolescents identify as transgender and experience gender dysphoria due to peer influence and social contagion.[5] ROGD is not recognized as a valid mental health diagnosis by any major professional association, which discourage its use due to a lack of reputable scientific evidence for the concept, major methodological issues in existing research, and its stigmatization of gender-affirming care for transgender youth.[3][4][6][7]

The paper initially proposing the concept was based on surveys of parents of transgender youth recruited from three anti-trans websites;[3][4] following its publication, it was re-reviewed and a correction was issued highlighting that ROGD is not a clinically validated phenomenon.[11] Since the paper's publication, the concept has frequently been cited in legislative attempts to restrict the rights of transgender youth.[3][4][6][/QUOTE]

My position is that suicidality was never part of the evolutionary story. That it was selected against until relatively recently is not my position. There is a major difference between variation (your example of vision) and suicide. Suicide is not an extreme variation of group alienation.

The voice of suicidal ideation which knows your darkest sources of shame - that voice is intelligent. It’s completely different than the feelings and impulses of Darwinian evolution because it’s a different story exapted on top of Darwinism.

Not only is this voice intelligent, it’s powerful. It’s the voice of the mysterious man who can hijack a large segment of minds and convince them to violate the bodies of children for their “true gender”.

It’s almost like it could convince a population of people thousands of years ago to sacrifice their own children in his name. Child sacrifice - explain that one in Darwinian terms.

FYP.

Suicide is not selected by evolution. It's most likely a spandrel. So, take a mental health condition like anxiety. Anxiety is adaptive as fear of future events can motivate us to act to avoid the potential stressor. So, if we have an important exam or presentation, we can take steps to prepare for and overcome the stressor.

However, when anxiety becomes pathological then the fear of the event may be so overwhelming that suicide becomes a viable way of avoiding the stressor.

The purpose of fear and anxiety is to avoid death. Your explanation is that evolution provides suicide, a form of certain death, as a response to avoid the potential of death? And this isn’t just a rare, one off mistake. Suicidal ideation is incredibly common in humans.

After millions and millions of years, the evolutionary process just falls apart and becomes pathological in humanity? That’s the story?

No it isn't. If it was then older people would be the most fearful and anxious in society, but they are not - in fact, they are among the least fearful and anxious.

That's not what I said.

That's your story, not mine, as I never said this either.

That is a new one for me (and apparently pretty new overall), but it looks like some studies from a decade or so ago show that it likely is true, based on what must be very complex computer modeling of organisms with limited resources and limited mobility (which is obviously most of them, though not as true for modern humans).

https://phys.org/news/2015-07-death-spat...

Ok, sorry for the incorrect attribution.
The question asked of me implied that was your position, and I didn't reread your recent posts before responding.

I'm not sure I understand your "major difference between variation and suicide". Of course those two concepts are so different as to be incomparable. However, I do think that variation in vision is comparable with variation in the psychological need for group interaction. They're certainly not an exact match, the vision example is just the one that has always come to my mind when considering the possibility that modern humans experience very little of the significant environmental pressures required for natural selection to function.

I definitely either disagree with, or else don't understand, what your second paragraph is getting at.
I have suffered from major depression for most of my life, occasionally to the point of being suicidal, and none of it was related to shame.

Possibly I am different from most people though, as I don't remember ever feeling shame, at least not as an adult. I truly care very little what most others think about me, and I have never suffered from a lack of self-esteem. Possibly most suicides are related to shame, but my close calls were only related to loneliness, along with the repeated feelings of severe rejection and disappointment, and the hopelessness that those feelings would not be endlessly reoccurring.

He didn't say that suicide was selected for, but that it is basically a side effect (spandrel) of emotions which were adaptive in the past but can get out of control, especially when the environment has profoundly changed. Again, evolution isn't perfect.

The evolutionary process in modern humans has been at least severely slowed down by the lack of environmental pressure, and the span of time since humans started significantly changing their environment is insignificant on an evolutionary scale.

It seems counterintuitive. However, organisms optimise for a life as long as is necessary to ensure their genes are successfully passed to their offspring. "Success" in this context is largely depends on how the environment has shaped selection.

Organisms that live beyond their reproductive usefulness risk competing with their offspring, which would be counterproductive when considering their genetic survival.

I already understood this to be true.

But the study I linked above shows that an extended lifespan could be counterproductive even if fertility could be indefinitely extended.

yes, because resources are always limited, you therefore need constrains on population growth. If life continued indefinitely, then resources would eventually be consumed and the population would collapse.

This is most evident in species that live in the harshest environments.

How familiar you are with this suicidal voice depends on your level of introspection. It guards against individuation and self transformation by shaming you and telling you how worthless you are. When you don’t back down, it will call for your suicide. It’s trusted because it IS the survival mechanism in the Darwinian story.

People who feel alienated are going to be more likely to seek change and individuate, but it isn’t the loneliness or depression which causes the suicidal voice to attack, it’s the individuation or trespassing against that which the mysterious man guards. The way to think about it is once you’ve trespassed against this “mysterious man,” you’ve started a type of war and opened a door that can’t be completely closed. In other words, your suicidal ideation is likely to persist in the future. For most people who’ve experienced suicidal ideation, this story is happening at the edge of their conscious awareness.

This is why for people who gender transition, suicidal ideation persists. The mysterious man convinces John that gender transition is the solution to his problems, not because he’s right and is being caring, but because he is trying to keep John from individuation. It’s like a trusted security guard who turns against you and starts lying to you.

Ultimately, the solution is to turn inward and finish individuating. This mysterious man isn’t powerful enough to stop anyone in actuality. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

In mythology, this entity guarding individuation has been depicted as the dragon who guards the treasure. It is the wizard in The Wizard of Oz.

In the religious domain, it’s the man standing in the God position who shames Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit.

You really posted a study that polled parents in an on-line forum about their kids rapid onset?

The first study is at least not blatantly egregious but its pretty serendipitous that you posted a Littman study since shes widely considered a quack whos debunked studies have been used to drive anti-trans policy (ie: a plant).

I'm being generous as they are trying to present statistics and counter point directly so its probably the best material available in support of ROGD

Craig, what are exactly are you meaning by "individuation"? The definition I found online doesn't seem to match what you're talking about.