The costs of trans visibility

So to sum up, you do not under any circumstances endorse restricting adult behavior to protect them against themselves, and you see a minors' liberties of such equal importance that you do not endorse restricting THEIR behavior to protect those around them, but you DO support mandating children's behavior (even endorsing state-sanctioned "torture" and "horrific violence" against them) if it's expressly and exclusively in the interest of protecting THEMSELVES, and in fact you're so passionate about protecting children from their own decisions that you don't see barring adults' from use of public bathrooms as a problem because (if you think about it) that's going to eventually lead to minors being allowed to receive treatments you deem unsafe.

Got it. Glad we had this talk. I'm perfectly clear on everything.

I just have one question: Isn't it just easier to say you don't think trans identities are valid? You've already said that's what you believe. It's clear to everyone watching you ride this logic rollercoaster that that's what's motivating you to your conclusions. I feel like it'd be really freeing to just be like "I'm against climate legislation because I don't believe the climate science. I'm against mask mandates because I'm not too worried about the spread of COVID. I'm against neo-pronouns and trans people using bathrooms because I don't believe in trans people."

Appealing to some broad principles of liberty seems like an active waste of time because the second you dig into those principles they have so many caveats and unique use cases that it's apparent if you had opposite views of the efficacy and costs of masks/gender-affirming care/reducing carbon emissions, you would come to the opposite conclusion. So just argue about that. That is where you and the people you're arguing with differ.

Just wanted to circle back here: children are generally allowed to take illicit substances with the prescription of a doctor and consent of their parents. There's historical precedent even for your specific example of alcohol. There's current precedent for permanent body modifications for cisgender minors, something I've seen almost no furor about before or since trans issues started receiving attention.

So the drinking age is analogous to forbidding kids from buying puberty blockers from their friends or nicking some from their parents' medicine cabinet. You do not need to pass a law banning doctors from prescribing gender-affirming care to avoid that.

No, it isn't. It's medical ethics.

I mean you could have used the same argument against banning slavery. You’re not at all supporting that meat is moral, you’re just saying you don’t want it banned and laying out steps to prevent it from happening. Haven’t made any type of positive case for meat at all.

Also I’m surprised that with your morals you would be so pro-meat, given how animals are sentient life that can feel pain but can’t protect themselves. For paternalistic reasons why don’t you want to protect animals?

This might actually be illustrative to bring it back to trans issues though. You seem to start from the point of protecting trans rights is not a moral good and work your way back from there. Really these arguments are just instrumental and not necessary from that core point. You acknowledge that trans might be a real thing but you don’t care because you think that it’s not worth protecting. If it was something you did think was worth protecting you would be going all out in the other direction and might be one of the pro neopronoun/xenogender people in another life. :p

I don't really see why this matters. If someone says they are a Jew, I'll believe them. If someone says they are trans, I'll believe them. If they get fired for being a Jew or for being trans, both of those should violate anti-discrimination laws despite there not being a 100% foolproof test in either case. Like ok maybe there are some fringe cases like in prisons or whatever that these matter, but for everyday societal things I don't think the lack of a foolproof test is all that special or all that relevant.

No, it isn't. The drugs in question are untrialled and unapproved for that use, are known to have harmful and irremediable physical effects and are also known not to improve mental-health outcomes on the evidence available. And the parents are not going to have those things in the medicine cabinet unless they are in late-stage cancer treatment.

Fortunately, in the UK, blockers are now banned, both in the NHS and the private sector, whether obtained in-country or from abroad, except for the purposes of the proposed controlled clinical trial (which, in the circumstances, faces considerable ethical issues around what is legally termed 'Gillick competence' in minors, relating to consent, and also around the known harms and disbenefits involved).

luc - masks were not a full on preventative such as a condom, but they absolutely did decrease transmission rates

even if their effectiveness was overblown at the time, we had no real reason to believe otherwise and it's not much of an ask

also, it's incredibly important to understand just how much of an unknown covid was - we really had no idea what the mortality rate would be at the time and were being overly cautious because it's better to put on a seatbelt for all the times you don't get in accident than to not be wearing one the one time you get in one

also if you look at how asian countries - despite everything working against them with much more population density and far more poverty and fewer medical resources just absolute curb stomped covid compared to the west and while masks may not have been the reason for that, it was part of their plan

also, i often had a pretty big beard during covid, yes, some masks really sucked with them, but there were too easy solutions - find a mask type that did work well (there were many) or shave which is a normal thing - i know some people are quite attached to their beards but it's not a big deal to shave it and then grow it back - i spend about half the year with a beard and the other half looking like rasputin so i guess it's easier for me

the big thing i hated about masks was when it was hot and i'd sweat into it - that's when i just bought the cheapest ones possible and rotated them heavily

I mean we can’t have it both ways and say that transracial is different from transgender/transsexual and then make the same category error when it favors us. There is just something fundamentally different about the claim of being Jewish vs the claim of being trans, and the types of accommodations needed are waaaaay different.

But yeah if there was some type of religion or culture that was demanding stuff of society that is unreasonable, that should not be respected. I don’t want to go too far into hypotheticals because again like I mentioned in my previous post I think it’s a category error. I would just say to your point I think different religions should be integrated into society in a way that is fair and respectful for all involved, and I would take the same approach to trans people.

So what? There's no "foolproof" test of being a Jew OR being trans OR I guess being transracial, I don't see how that affects how we should treat trans people. I've never really found the "but what about transracial?" line compelling. Like lots of people had takes about Rachel Dolezal what a decade ago now and that seems to be the main example of some supposed hypocrisy or distinction still raised today.

Ya, I mean this is the big ask from the trans community right? That trans people can be fairly and respectful integrated into society and it doesn't really matter if you are christian or jewish, trans or cis?

yes going to the dentist for a kid can be torture as well but when needed children have to be forced to go there. and if parents disagree at some point, hating the process, we have to do it and push the parents aside (and remove them from the picture even, in some bad cases).

I never endorse punishing peter to try to help Paul at all ages for peter btw, not only for baby peters.

no this you got wrong. I don't think you can be trans for sure, as in be clearly convinced in a way that will last for life with certainty (which would justify the body modifications) as a minor, but later on you can.

but at the very minimum you need years lived in your fully developed biological sex to be sure of that.

if then someone lives constantly, with no back and forth, as the opposite sex, with the markers of the opposite sex (clothes, behavior, life choices and so on) then yes that's actual trans identity and as the law allowed since a while ago with procedures you could even get a sex change legally.

which wouldn't legalize "trans identity" rather would allow you as an individual to change your legal sex between the only 2 options that exist.

And after that legally people would be mandated to treat you as the new sex with all the benefits and the costs of that, depending on your society.

people as a courtesy could act as you already finished all the passages sooner sure, but the legal event would only happen in a specific way.

a part of gender theory goes beyond that and that I reject in full (the "spectrum", the undefined non binaries and so on).

appealing to liberty works because the exceptions among adults aren't as frequent as you want to claim.

for masks, climate change and trans issues the basic idea is that socialism, and state cohercion in general, is never the solution to anything. it's always far worse than any problem you try to solve and even when it solves some problem partially, the consequences are always far worse than the problem itself was.

any problem people discuss for which the solution is cohercion, I don't believe for a second that's where they want to stop.

and I have proof: it's the same ****ing people pushing for all of that. if for example you in general are anti-capitalist, no one sane of mind will ever believe you about any topic for which your proposed solution is less capitalism.

it's not random that the worst people in society (and on social media) moved from COVID paranoia to climate change paranoia.

it's not random that the people pro Palestine share most of the worst possible other ideas on the left.

it's not random that Greta is pro Hamas.

it's not random that trans activists are all to the radical fringes of the left on many other purportedly not correlated topics.

it's a set of ideas shared by people who proved more than once to be inimical to everything I value in human life, time and again.

in a sense the fact that "real leftists" are pro trans issues automatically should make everyone who knows the real left is evil anti trans issues. nothing else is needed to feel deep inside yourself you are on the right side of history. the probability they are actually correct this time after being deeply wrong on the most important questions of humanity is negligible.

because it's all correlated and all linked to a will to use the state to control people.

a very good heuristic is to identify 10-20 really hellish leftists in your country, and every time they push anything you can be sure the literal opposite is beneficial for your country and you can act accordingly.

you can use AOC & ilhan Omar in the USA for example

One of the roadblocks we come to when talking about this is actually defining what people mean when they talk about social contagion. So, for example, homosexuality clearly isn't contagious. However, I grew up in the punk and rave scenes. When I was 16-17, a lot of the girls in my circle identified as lesbian or bisexual. They had girlfriends, bragged about it, held hands in the halls and stuff like that. Fast-forward just a couple years and all of them were back to dating guys. It's normal for kids to experiment or go through phrases, and there are definitely genuine lesbians at that age, but kids will also act out things that get them attention, acceptance from their peers, etc.

The good news is that baring for some homophobes that history has not judged kindly, these kids were generally told that it is totally ok if they want to be lesbians or not, there is nothing wrong with that, and they are loved and accepted and included regardless.

Exploring lesbianism for a while doesn't require medical procedures either, which is the whole point of objection

What is the difference exactly? It's ok if you are lesbian. It's ok if you are not. It's ok if you are trans. It's ok if you are not. Unfortunately LGBT long experienced significant discrimination in society and while there have been tremendous strides on the LGB portion of that group, unfortunately there still is quite a bit of anti-trans rhetoric floating around in today's society and that's what I'm arguing against ITT.

The difficulty with trans-activism is that it is based on the idea that gender-nonconformity is 'wrong' and requires medical correction. This is not a good idea and is at least in part homophobic. In the Appleby v Tavistock case it came out that Tavistock GIDS clinicians were boasting, 'There soon won't be any gay people left, the rate we're going.' That's not good. There isn't anything wrong with girly boys or boyish girls, who should just be who they are, and there is something distinctly wrong with older adults telling them they were 'born in the wrong body' and offering supposed treatments to 'correct' them as a default programme. Only a few are likely to benefit long-term from transition, and, given the known disadvantage in terms of fertility, as well as the apparently accelerated risks of heart disease and cancer, it is probably something they should only undertake as responsible adults with a settled determination.

It's also normal and fine for people to be lesbians, transgender, etc. But here we are.

interestingly there's a lot of people who change their sexual preference after undergoing transition - definitely giving strong evidence a lot of it are closeted homosexuals who can better come to terms with the idea of being born in the wrong body than they can come to terms with being gay

even 2p2s own top surgery ama thread, she talks about "realizing she was into men" only after taking her doctor's advice and trying to live as a woman

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article...

even more telling is that the instances in changing sexual preferences is much higher when they were straight pre-transition as opposed to being gay or les pre transition

Uh, no, this isn't the position of most "trans-activists". Some trans people desire medical interventions, some don't. That's ok. There isn't any sort of requirement to have medical interventions, and I don't know what you mean with your scare quotes "wrong" but there is nothing inherently wrong with being trans.

I posted it before but here is an hour long interview with Robert Sapolsky about it. (There are shorter ones, easy to find.)

He is a top scientist at Stanford studying the brain/mind. He is, by his own account, ultra-liberal and very sympathetic to people suffering GD. (His popular books are great btw).

The actual science says something like 1) some people have symptoms of GD and 2) this sometimrs has biological causes that can be observed in the brain.

That's it. Everything else is ideology or theory.

To state what should be obvious, something like "trans women are women" is not a scientific claim at all. It's not even very meaningful English. It's def not supported by science.

All of this also applies to most opposing claims.

https://www.youtube.com/live/dGBYYcH7CS8...

Uh, I don't think anyone who says that - I'm happy to for instance - are suggesting it IS a "scientific claim" or "supported by science" like that it is some biological claim about their sex that is at dispute here. Instead it is more definitional, saying that of the people who identity as as women in society - i.e. a gender identity not a sex - that some of those people are cis and some are trans and that is totally fine and ok.

You’re calling it (“trans women are women”) definitional, but it’s really a moral claim.

a) It's okay if you are lesbian/trans.

b) You are lesbian/trans.

.....and???

Neither of these are remotely problematic. If someone has told me they are lesbian or trans, I'm completely happy to say they are indeed lesbian or trans - and that this is ok. You haven't managed to find some big difference between the two.