This is true, but the biology of gender - including gender dysphoria - is established science. There is no ambiguity about it.
It's only "offensive" to people who don't like how reality works.
Which is clearly the real problem here.
Pretending otherwise is gaslighting, because they're doing the same thing to climate change research and pandemic research.
And there's a good chance vaccines and other public health measures will be next.
This is not a rational government for rational people planning a rational future. This is a government of angry anti-rational cranks with mental health issues working out those issues in public, to the detriment of everyone except a small cadre of multi-billionaires who share the same psychology, but whose wealth will (somewhat) protect them from consequences the rest of us will have to live with.
> but the biology of gender - including gender dysphoria - is established science
Maybe my education is just getting out of date, but isn't the biological side of that topic sex while gender is generally referring to more of the social constructs like expected social roles and behaviors?
I though body or gender dysmorphia would in fact be tied to gender rather than sex because it is more of a psychology question than a biological one.
If by "sex" you mean physical characteristics, it's not what we learn in school books but not all people have only two XX or XY chromosomes. There are other (rare) combinations.
XXY (Klinefelter syndrome),
X (Turner syndrome),
XXX (Triple X syndrome),
XYY (Jacob’s syndrome),
If we think in terms of genes, the situation is further complicated, and hormones also influence the sexual phenotype during fetal development.
There’s also chimeras who can have some XY cells and some XX cells due to the fusion of a male and female fertilized zygotes in the early stages of prenatal development.
Resulting in genetic tests of gender to result in different outcomes depending on which cells are sampled.
There’s a women in the medical literature (I have read the original paper, but can’t lay my hands on it right now) who had multiple children & was discovered to be a 99% XY / 1% XX chimera IIRC.
(edit) This is probably the case paper I was thinking of: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2190741/ It was her ovaries that were 99/1% proportions. Other parts of her body had varying levels of mosaicism.
> XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), X (Turner syndrome), XXX (Triple X syndrome), XYY (Jacob’s syndrome),
While this is true, it's completely irrelevant to the discussion. These conditions are extremely rare - certainly much rarer than gender dysmorphia - and most transgender people are either XX or XY.
Klinefelter syndrome: one to two per 1,000 live birth
Turner syndrome: 1 in 2,000 to 5,000 female births
Triple X syndrome: approximately 1 in 1,000 (female)
Jacob’s syndrome: 1 in 1,000 males
Mosaicism affecting sex determination: 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 50,000
Swyer syndrome: ~1 in 80,000–100,000 births
SRY translocation to X or autosome: ~1 in 25,000–30,000
Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome: 1 in 10,000–50,000
So there are ~0.3% of people who have an unusual sex determination because of genetics. As another poster said that means there are 900,000 people with these conditions in the USA. That's half of the transgender population in the USA.
Yet I agree that does not prove that a significant portion of the transgender population has some genetic variation affecting their sex determination, but definitely it proves that the situation is more complex than many think.
I think the point is the bad-faith effort to erase trans people by asserting that chromosomes are all that matter falls down because obviously there are people running around with unusual chromosomes, so if it was an actual good faith effort they would be defining new (rare) genders to map to these chromosome patterns.
But it’s not good faith, and nobody really believes that chromosomes are the most important definition of gender. It’s just a convenient way to erase trans people.
Nobody serious is claiming that chromosomes are "all that matter", but while you complain about bad-faith efforts to dismiss trans people, you seemingly ignore all of their bad faith efforts to dismiss the importance and reality of sex.
> nobody really believes that chromosomes are the most important definition of gender
I don't understand how you reach this conclusion given the fact that for >99% of the world's people, their gender matches their sex. Who is this "nobody" you speak of?
> I don't understand how you reach this conclusion given the fact that for >99% of the world's people, their gender matches their sex.
What is the significance of this in this context? 100% of the world's people are not lions, does that mean lions don't exist? Some people don't fit neatly into one of the two gender/sex categories. This is scientifically very clear. Why is it important to have hard categories, and why should we legislate that only two categories exist?
> 100% of the world's people are not lions, does that mean lions don't exist
No, 100% of the world's people are not lions, therefore people are not lions.
> people don't fit neatly into one of the two gender/sex categories
Don't conflate gender and sex. All people fit into sex categories because all people have a definite sex, and sex allows for a range of development, even malformed ones.
As for "gender", if it's defined separately from sex, then I don't know what it means because it hasn't been defined. My response was that the vast majority of people don't distinguish between gender/sex, because not only have they never encountered a person where these are distinct, they don't even have any inclination that this is even a thing. That's why I'm confused by the original claim that "nobody" thinks gender comes down to sex. It's just a bizarre claim. If you go to remote tribes in the Amazon, even they think gender and sex are the same.
If you go to remote tribes in the Amazon, you'll find a lot of things modern day society tries to distance itself from, like kidnapping women and beating them until they're docile. You have literally no idea what those people were to think of themselves, given the freedom to do so. Ancient is not the same as good.
> Here's some other "ancient" stuff, that can be used to say the opposite of your point
Yes, native Americans had gay people too, and slightly varying ideas of division of labour. I'm not sure how you think this proves the notion that distinguishing gender and sex is or was some dominant mode of thought.
Just look up transgender history on Wikipedia, literally the opening paragraph says these concepts were invented in the 1950s.
> All people fit into sex categories because all people have a definite sex
I mean, no? Not really? There's a whole history of people who do not have a definite sex, and even then, there are lots of people who appear to have a definite sex but their body is varied massively from the "baseline". Such people are actually more numerous than red-headed people or albinism, within society. All of this is pretty trivial in terms of talking points and very well supported within the encompassing scientific literature, which is why I don't actually feel the need to cite myself here — any introduction to biological psychology, or the general subject of sex/gender, from a biological or sociological view, will very easily get you up to speed on this.
> I mean, no? Not really? There's a whole history of people who do not have a definite sex
Phenotypical sex characteristics do not define sex, and developmental disorders tied to one's sex do not somehow refute one's sex. This talk of "appearances" is exactly the kind of confusion I've been trying to argue against. Biology has a more rigourous definition for sex to avoid exactly these confusions. I do acknowledge that even some biologists have fallen into this trap lately, to our detriment.
The tl;dr of it is "the bimodal sex distribution model is really bad at a lot of the things we use it for, including predicting results to prescribed medication, or questions about who can give birth". There's some links to actual papers included in the gallery, if you want to follow this up further.
> I do acknowledge that even some biologists have fallen into this trap lately, to our detriment.
From 'knowing people in the field of biology', I can say rather clearly that it's less "some biologists are mistaken/foolish" and more "the majority of biologists who are up to date have decided to revise their beliefs about sex in line with current research".
That seemed clear? Meaning: there is a population of people who believe gender is abstracted from chromosomes by factors including psychology, and there isn’t a population who claim the believe that gender is 1:1 with chromosomes, but who handwave away the inconvenient < 1% who have a chromosome pattern not mapped to a gender.
Thus, nobody actually believes this. It’s just rhetoric to support an ideological position. There are 8B people on earth; no serious scientific or political position can be built on “if you ignore millions of people who don’t fit”
> Meaning: there is a population of people who believe gender is abstracted from chromosomes by factors including psychology, and there isn’t a population who claim the believe that gender is 1:1 with chromosomes, but who handwave away the inconvenient < 1% who have a chromosome pattern not mapped to a gender. Thus, nobody actually believes this.
I don't think this is true at all. I actually think the population that really believes there is some abstract distinction between gender and sex is relatively a tiny minority, mostly in Western nations.
Edit:
>There are 8B people on earth; no serious scientific or political position can be built on “if you ignore millions of people who don’t fit”
To clarify, nobody ignores people who "don't fit". Prior to the spread of transgender awareness, feminism spent a lot of time and effort breaking down stereotypes of what it means to be one sex or the other, in order to allow anyone to express any kind of behaviour or presentation. Taking the position that you have a definite sex regardless of your behaviour or presentation is not "ignoring people who don't fit", it's just recognizing the reality of sex and letting people do what they want, while avoiding a commitment to some completely undefined, fluid notion of "gender".
> I don't think this is true at all. I actually think the population that really believes there is some abstract distinction between gender and sex is relatively a tiny minority, mostly in Western nations.
The opening paragraph literally says, "The modern terms and meanings of transgender, gender, gender identity, and gender role only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, opinions vary on how to categorize historical accounts of gender-variant people and identities."
Applying these labels to historical peoples is projection at best. The whole problem with "gender" is that it is either undefined or it has no universal definition, therefore it's meaningless to apply it historically.
To say someone was "gender-varying" at the time is to say they didn't conform to the typical roles associated with their sex in that culture, because there was no notion of gender as we know it, nor is there even a universal definition of gender that we can apply retroactively.
> To say someone was "gender-varying" at the time is to say they didn't conform to the typical roles associated with their sex in that culture[...]
You agree that similar concepts have existed across the globe and in other eras, but want to have a semantic (and convenient for your argument) position that there must be a universal definition for some reason. Are there any societal or cultural concepts that actually do have a universal definition?
I’ve lost interest in the “obv gender equals sex, because sex defines gender” nonsense, but your question is interesting.
Murder comes to mind, but lots of asterisks there (it’s not murder if it’s an honor killing). I’m hard pressed to think of universal mores. Respect for elderly maybe? Or unacceptability of theft?
> You agree that similar concepts have existed across the globe and in other eras, but want to have a semantic (and convenient for your argument) position that there must be a universal definition for some reason.
I don't think I did. I said historians noted that cultures often had roles and duties divided along sex lines, but that some people did not strictly conform to those divisions of labour. In what way does that entail that they had some notion of gender that was abstracted from sex?
> Are there any societal or cultural concepts that actually do have a universal definition?
Law. Government. Trade. Religion. Gods. These all have a definition by which we can look at a system and say, "that was a religious belief", or "that was not a law but a local custom", "this was a deity they worshipped". They're not "universal" in the sense that they are identical in all cultures, they are universal in the sense that you can look at the definition and use that definition to classify cultural characteristics in a meaningful way.
The people passing laws and executive orders trying to define "male" and "female" by chromosomes, and thus deny people human rights and/including medical care, are pretty serious.
> the importance and reality of sex.
The what and what? Just because it's "important" to a bunch of extremist religious fundamentalist bigots doesn't mean what's in someone's pants or genes is important to anyone but said someone.
"Reality"? FFS.
Stay in your lane and stop fixating on how other people lead their lives or their self identity. The only degree it affects you is that you're bothering yourself about it.
Those account for a number half the size of trans populations. Are you saying trans is also exceedingly rare and irrelevant, yet they are under attack?
I am sorry but I am specifically speaking of cases where the phenotype contradicts the genotype. For example, there are cases where an individual has an XY karyotype but develops female traits due to a mutation in the SRY gene.
The word "sex" is ambiguous, do we speak of phenotype (sexual traits/appearance) or genetic characteristics? And if you categorize people by their appearance, how do you categorize people with atypical genitalia (~1/5000)?
> Your sex is defined only by the gamete size you produce.
So you have no sex until puberty? After menopause women stop being women? Infertile people also have no sex? What about euneuchs and people who have their ovaries removed?
Your definition seems to create more problems than it solves. It creates billions of new sexless humans.
> So you have no sex until puberty? After menopause women stop being women? Infertile people also have no sex? What about euneuchs and people who have their ovaries removed?
Don't be obtuse, you know perfectly well that's not what it means.
You've made a lot of strong, specific assertions here that contradict my own understanding. For example, you seem to be dismissing some troubling questions regarding sex assignment at birth based on on-the-spot judgment calls. It's probably a good idea for you to provide links to some objective sources.
The fact that you're confused about this most basic biological fact is exactly what I've been trying to communicate is the problem with gender activists in this space. They've spread considerable misinformation on this topic.
"Sex assigned at birth" is one example of the kind of misinformation I'm talking about. They're equivocating on the term "sex", because doctors are not determining biological sex, but making a determination of legal sex. If they had argued for "gender assigned at birth" for legal purposes, and argued that both sex and gender be determined and recorded (because sex is important medically), there would be no such confusion.
Legality is what we're talking about, though. The government decided, against all reason, that this was something they needed to get involved with. So that means what whatever your definitions of sex and gender are, or whatever definitions the Wikipedia editors are accepting this week, they should not be used to discriminate against any individual, no matter how uncommon their physical traits and sense of identity may be.
I don't know why you think we're talking about legality when this whole thread was about biology. The legal status of one's sex is supposed to follow from biology, but the point is that this is an imperfect process at this time.
As for the legal issues, nobody supports "discrimination" in an abstract sense, but the point is that there's a strong difference of opinion on what counts as "discrimination". If "sense of identity" is all that's needed to trigger some discrimination clause, a quality that cannot be verified physically in any way at this time, then that's a recipe for abuse by bad actors.
fMRI studies have found differences in the brain that are highly correlated with gender dysmorphia. So while we may treat it as a psychological condition, it, like many other psychological conditions, also has an underlying biological basis.
Correlation still doesn't tell us too much though. In general its nearly impossible to find likely causation for psychological conditions. That doesn't mean the links aren't there, its seems likely to me that there is a biological factor, its just really hard or impossible to design proper studies for causation.
Sure but the point of research is to improve understanding. Today there is correlation, tomorrow we find causation.
Are you suggesting we should stop looking for a physical cause of depression? Many neurologists believe that psychological conditions map onto physical structural or chemical differences. Maybe that is the case, maybe that’s not the case but we use the tools we have to do that research so that we can better understand, and if necessary treat, these conditions.
I'd be very curious to see how causation may be found for most psychological conditions. I'm sure there are ways I haven't seen or considered, but it seems really difficult to structure a study that would lead towards potential causation.
Traumatic brain injuries are one standout, though even then I think its just correlative as no one is going to attempt a study that intentionally causes TBIs in the test group.
> fMRI studies have found differences in the brain that are highly correlated with gender dysmorphia
No they haven't, that study was debunked. There is currently no physically detectable way to identify gender dysmorphia or trans identity, there is only self-report.
Sure, so to clarify, the study that claimed to find differences in trans brains:
* Did not control for sexual orientation (same-sex attracted people exhibit preferences and behaviours of both sexes, and many adolescents who start as trans desist and come out as gay)
* Did not control for whether the person was on HRT or puberty blockers (people on opposite sex hormones start developing behaviours and preferences of the opposite sex)
* Did not control for body perception disorders (body dysmorphia results in distorted perceptions of one's own body)
> many adolescents who start as trans desist and come out as gay
Citation needed. The actual hard evidence with respect to regret rates with GICs are very clear that "desistance", using your word for it, is vanishingly low (less than 1-2%, c.f. knee surgery with 20-30%), and that lack of social acceptance is a huge factor in deciding if someone desists or not — the less social acceptance, the less likely someone is to be able to comfortably transition socially, the more likely they're going to "desist".
In other words — not only is the "desistance rate" for treatment vanishingly small, there isn't a straight line between "desisting" and "not being transgender", and one of the most recurring explanations for "desistance" in the study groups basically boiled down to "society has bullied them into hiding themselves".
> people on opposite sex hormones start developing behaviours and preferences of the opposite sex
Citation needed. In the 70s - 80s there were experiments to try and treat both intersex people and transgender people by giving them the "correct" (cis) hormone, and the subjects involved found it so intolerable they committed suicide.
> body dysmorphia results in distorted perceptions of one's own body
Correct! And given that you know this, you should also know that treatments for body dysphoria do not work for gender dysphoria, and that for almost 100 years now, the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria has been transitioning.
> Citation needed. The actual hard evidence with respect to regret rates with GICs are very clear that "desistance", using your word for it, is vanishingly low (less than 1-2%, c.f. knee surgery with 20-30%)
No, the actual detransition rates are completely unknown because gender researchers had crappy long-term follow-up with patients, eg. they stopped tracking individuals beyond only a few years, and simply dropped people from the data entirely if they ceased communication, which is a clear bias towards favourable stats for transition. The poor quality of the evidence in this field is why virtually all Western nations are taking progressively stricter approaches to trans care to improve the quality of the long-term data.
Furthermore, this 1% regret rate number doesn't even pass a basic sniff test. The regret rate for literal live-saving surgeries, like artery bypass, are upwards of 25%. A 1% regret rate is just completely implausible and I honestly can't believe anybody swallowed it.
The desistance I was referring to are cohorts that experience gender dysphoria for various reasons and then ultimately desist. A large subset of this cohort are gay, sexually confused or uncomfortable with puberty for various reasons, and throw in a bunch of other comorbidities and the affirmative model is a recipe for disaster. The lawsuits from detransitioners have just begun, and I think they will only increase for a few more years. Only the will we have a better picture.
> In the 70s - 80s there were experiments to try and treat both intersex people and transgender people by giving them the "correct" (cis) hormone, and the subjects involved found it so intolerable they committed suicide.
This causation for their suicide is conjecture (trans people have many mental health comorbidities), but I don't see how this is even relevant to the point I was making. Do you really need a citation that testosterone and estrogen supplementation changes behaviours and neurology in accordance with the sex to which those hormones is primarily associated? Just because it does so, doesn't mean it would solve whatever ailed the trans or intersex people, and I never claimed it would.
The point was that hormones alter your neurology closer to that sex, so if you perform an fMRI on cis women, trans women on HRT for a number of years, and trans women not yet on HRT, then those on HRT will look different and closer to females than those not on HRT. This confounds any fMRI analysis that purports to show that "trans brains" have some innate structural similarity to their gender.
> No, the actual detransition rates are completely unknown because gender researchers had crappy long-term follow-up with patients, eg. they stopped tracking individuals beyond only a few years, and simply dropped people from the data entirely if they ceased communication, which is a clear bias towards favourable stats for transition.
There are multiple longitudinal studies of trans people many years after transition, and their numbers fit the already-existing numbers known by GICs — but I'm sure given your predisposition for research on this topic, you've already seen them and disagree with them. I'd agree that more research is fine, but the fact that the vast majority of trans people report feeling way more comfortable after 5 years of transitioning, to me makes it very clear. Who follows up with knee surgery patients after 10 or 20 years? Do we have long term data that 30 years after a bypass surgery someone isn't regretting having it? The existing data we have for trans people is comparative in length and scope to the followups performed on said people with life-saving surgeries. I'd agree that more data = better, sure. But I really doubt that you're actually going to find the smoking gun here that you're so blatantly looking for.
Also, it should be said that, again, the main reason we don't have very, very long term data on trans people is because most of the trans people that transitioned in the 1920s - 1980s kept it very, very close to their chests and later went stealth. It is literally only the last 10 or so years that acceptance of trans people has hit a point that many don't feel an impetus to go stealth in the first place. Wanting very, very long term data is like asking "Where are all the studies on old gay people, if being gay is natural" and ignoring that the AIDS pandemic happened — it's ignorance of social factors precluding data gathering.
> The lawsuits from detransitioners have just begun, and I think they will only increase for a few more years. Only the will we have a better picture.
To be honest, I'd wait another 30 years for the anti-gender cult[1][2][3][4] to run it's course first, before we start getting actual data :)
> Do you really need a citation that testosterone and estrogen supplementation changes behaviours and neurology in accordance with the sex to which those hormones is primarily associated?
Yes, I'll take the citation please.
What you said was "people on opposite sex hormones start developing behaviours and preferences of the opposite sex". Which is dubious in terms of the evidence available for that position in relation to humans, as the majority of evidence for that in terms of sex hormones were done on rats — which, notably have a very different psychology to humans. There is a phenomenon where some trans women realise that they are straight and attracted to men, after transitioning, but it's very unclear whether or not that's simply the case that they feel able to be attracted to men — occam's razor kicks in here, I think. Regardless, it would be difficult to get figures on this because speaking from personal experience, the vast majority of trans women I have met and been in contact with (probably a couple of hundred or so) are dating (cis and trans) women.
> The point was that hormones alter your neurology closer to that sex, so if you perform an fMRI on cis women, trans women on HRT for a number of years, and trans women not yet on HRT, then those on HRT will look different and closer to females than those not on HRT. This confounds any fMRI analysis that purports to show that "trans brains" have some innate structural similarity to their gender.
But you should already know, Sandro, that for the last ten years multiple authors doing fmri studies on trans people have been performing them on non-hormone treated, and hormone treated trans people. The data is already there and collected.
If someone started grinding up those pill things and putting them in your salt shaker, you wouldn't be able to prove that you didn't like the results - unless we can believe self-reports.
Believing swlf-report for an n of 1 question of personal preference is very different from trusting a self-report survey meant to extrapolate the results of one cohort to a larger audience.
Sex-segregated spaces for one. For another, is anyone obligated to call a Catholic priest "father" simply because his beliefs give him a special title? Of course not. Clearly gender is not treated this way.
> This is true, but the biology of gender - including gender dysphoria - is established science. There is no ambiguity about it.
There is no biology of gender, biology is concerned only with sex. If you'd ever seen a mention of "gender" in biology prior to 10 years ago, it was a reference to sex because at the time they were not distinct.
So if you meant "sex" in your sentence then I agree with you, it is settled science, but if you really did mean to say "gender" then I have no idea what you're talking about because "gender" has no definition in biology.
Gender diversity encompasses the range of differences between an individual's
internal, subjective experience of their gender identity and the sex assigned to them at birth. In gender diverse individuals, shifts in neurobiology are frequently observed, shifts that are frequently towards patterns typical of the other binary assigned sex.
> Gender diversity encompasses the range of differences between an individual's internal, subjective experience of their gender identity and the sex assigned to them at birth.
That's a) not a biological definition, and b) circular because now you still need to define "gender identity".
> In gender diverse individuals, shifts in neurobiology are frequently observed, shifts that are frequently towards patterns typical of the other binary assigned sex.
No, this is a misconception based on flawed fMRI studies that did not control for sexual orientation, did not control for HRT, and did not control for body perceptual disorders. There is no known physical test that can assign or distinguish gender as there is for sex.
Calling it “established science” seems like an attempt to shut down scientific discourse and normalize gender dysphoria even though it is a complex topic that causes distress to many people and has ongoing ethical concerns. It becomes even more complex when considering the decades of funding of gender studies which has attempted to normalize and promote it rather than research solutions. Further complicating the issue are financial incentives that encourage treatments. And, there are social and legal incentives that encourage expanding the number of people with that diagnosis. For example, there currently seems to be a push to immediately affirm adolescents with histories of mental health conditions when a more cautious approach may be more helpful.
Edit: Anecdotally, I have a transgender nephew, and three of my good friends have transgender children. Both of my best friend's two children are transgender. My friend went through a bitter divorce a few years ago and was estranged from his 17 year old son for over a year. When he next saw him, his son had already started irreversable treatment even though he hadn’t had any symptoms a year prior. To me, someone who experimented with what they call 'gender fluidity' as a teenager in the 90s, this all seems unusual and should be handled more cautiously.
There are two problems at play here. One is that the science involved pertains to mental health care, which means psychiatrists. Meaning the same specialty that tried psychotherapy and blaming "cold" mothers for autism, and then had a lobotomies for everyone fad, and then got too enamored with electroconvulsive therapy.
I'm too young to have witnessed those, but I did personally see the effects when they launched the Drug of the Month Club in the 1990s. It's hard to look at how they treat gender dysphoria and not suspect it's yet another episode.
BUT....
At the same time what's going on with the Republicans is sheer malice. And it must be fought on those grounds.
Gravity is established science and billions of dollars a year are spent studying it, including efforts to refute parts of our understanding.
How does acknowledging the reality of current scientific understanding in any way “shut down” further exploration? It sounds like the opposite — that peoples’ discomfort with the current state of understanding should be a reason to revert science to a much older state and never mention the subject again.
Typically, though not always, the people who complain about established science shutting down new research are the ones pushing crank and conspiracy theories.
I don't mind if you call me a 'crank'. At least I'm not being shouted down - and I appreciate that.
It's important to understand that I believe that gender dysphoria is a real condition. I mainly question the scale, social dynamics, and the rapid cultural shift. I'm also concerned about the strife and (ironically) dysphoria that it causes.
I am open to the idea that 10% of my adult friends actually have gender dysphoria and just aren't able to talk about it. However, given I knew zero people with gender dysphoria 25 years ago but now 10% of the adolescents (and two 4th graders!) that I know have gender dysphoria, it is a surprising change.
Also, I feel like science should be open to scrutiny, and shutting down discussion only increases distrust. And, over the past 10 years, many people have been shut out from the conversation.
I’m genuinely curious why you care if other people, with their own loving families, are too quick to diagnose dysmorphia.
Sure, there can be bad outcomes from overdiagnosis. But also from under diagnosis and from stigma. It seems like a very difficult and challenging thing to get right, so why put energy into second-guessing experts and people directly affected? What good can come from a semi-knowledgeable person with no personal stake forming strong opinions that they’re doing it wrong?
I’m old enough to remember when liberalized attitudes towards homosexuality were blamed for a huge increase in incidence. And it’s been long enough now that it’s pretty obvious that no, there really were that many closeted people suffering in ways small to large.
Not being gay or suffering from body dysmorphia, it’s hard for me to imagine wanting to tell people they’re wrong about their (or their children’s) gender identity.
Sorry if that came across as lecture-y, I honestly meant it as background for curiosity about why you feel the need to have strong opinions.
It's a reasonable question. Looking back, I can see how it seems that way. On the contrary, I believe people should do what they want. I've always supported my sister, my nephew, my friends and their kids, and their kids' friends. I've voted 'yes' to transgender policy for as long as it's been an issue.
It's only after struggling to motivate my lifelong liberal friends to vote that I started to re-think my opinion and research more. And, now my opinion is more mixed. I've read a few of the landmark papers on suicide rates for instance. And, there are big problems with the methodologies. However, you can't question or you will get labelled a bigot.
Maybe I'm too utilitarian, but I've been working toward liberal / progressive goals for the last 30 years. And, I just saw most get set back 30 years largely because of this wedge issue.
And, I don't not support them now. But, I feel like the approach that's being taken is unrealistic and way too heavy-handed and top down. It's not a strategy that will succeed, but it's taking a lot down with it.
I hope transgender activists will take a more pragmatic approach in the future. I hope they understand that lots of people over 40 can't relate to what they're talking about. This is different from other social justice activism in which most people could at least kind of relate to. Activists should also work on better outreach and good-will activities so that the average person recognizes them as nice, kind, and helpful people. You're not going to win support by shouting at people online. And, be happy with incremental wins. Changing culture takes time.
Thanks - very eye-opening. My rough calculations show that four million US lives could have been saved over the past 100 years if only we had adopted handedness-sensitivity and modified schools and workplaces to account for left-handedness. I'm now thinking of pushing for a right-to-left version of written English.
One aspect that I find alarming about gender dysmorphia as a diagnosis is that it seems to pathologize gender non-conformity. For example, in some circles it's more acceptable to be a trans man than a "butch" woman. And the diagnostic criteria for gender dysmorphia might put a butch woman in the "trans" bucket if she were to talk to a doctor.
To me this is a betrayal of what feminism was after in the early 2000 - namely moving away from rigid gender stereotypes.
What we're witnessing is active malice against two populations: people who are dysphoric and would like help to be comfortable in their own bodies, and people who are perfectly comfortable as they are and would like the rest of us to accept that they will not take measures to change their trans-gender physical characteristics.
What we need is a campaign with a firm message of "hands off, all of them."
In 2021 a survey by the Pew Research Center found that about 4.5% of U.S. adults identify as gay, but when asked what percentage of the population they believe is gay, Americans on average estimated around 20%. Similarly, a study from Britain's NHS found that British youths were 50 times more likely to suffer from gender distress since 2011. To back that up, Reuters worked with Komodo Health recently and found a 3 times increase the diagnosis of gender dysphoria from 2017 - 2021.
So with this context as a backdrop, and knowing that fascists and their money were behind it, did they manipulate narratives to create an impression amongst Americans that there are 5 times as many gay people as there actually are? And did they also create a sudden surge in demand for gender affirming care?
Tactically, how did they go about that? Did they takeover Hollywood? The media? Was their plan to create a narrative that normalizes the fringe so as to ignite hatred towards that fringe? Sounds like a pretty clever chess game.
Billionaires experiencing midlife crisis and andropause started receiving gender affirming care, the same enjoyed by the military and law enforcement for decades, were courted by the fringe to amplify their ideas to disaffected people failed by the institutions that created those billionaires. The fruit of your individual merit is threatened by these chemically altered silver-spoon fed man-children threatened by mortality filling the greedy black hole in their psyche with your unexamined acceptance. But feel free to instead focus your ire on the current analog for "the Rootless Cosmopolitan" that is the source of all of your perceived discomforts. Make no mistake, I understand that there is a greedy black hole in the minds of many, and for some, it is filled by adopting ideas considered secret unacceptable truths contrary to the unwell mainstream that finds them despicable. You're not sick, they are, and there is only one cure-all solution. But at last, your brave difficult truths are told openly and you are emancipated from the shadows! Congratulations and good luck trampling the few to build monuments for the even fewer.
You mean gender dysphoria. Body dysmorphia is also something trans people experience. You’re basically making the “they’re killing the twinks!” argument with absolutely no evidence for diagnosticians leading patients towards transition. My experience as a trans woman is that I had to fight my doctors to believe me, and this is a common experience in my circles. I know dozens of trans people, and not a single one was told by a doctor that they were trans. We call it the prime directive, and we even apply it between friends.
As a gay man, I will begrudgingly volunteer as a sacrificial genital checker. I will sit at the entrance to the men's restroom, like a bouncer of a club, and the men that are concerned about who is in which bathroom can show me their penis prior to gaining entry to the restroom. That way, we can make sure restrooms are safe for all.
The most rapes involving trans people are in men’s prisons where trans women are put. You’re very thinly veiled in your fascist rhetoric.
If misused bathroom rape was the actual issue at play, men would simply push the fucking door open and rape the women you apparently care so deeply to protect. Men with motive to use the opposite bathroom would not go through the often sterilizing trouble of hormone replacement therapy when the doors are already unlocked. You tell on yourself badly with this argument, rightbound.
My “fascist rhetoric” involves protecting jailed women from being raped, yes.
It’s strange how great leftist ideals transfer into horrible daily life. It’s qualified as fascist to want to avoid being knived on the street or not administering hormons to 5-year olds.
The leftist rhetoric is eerly close to the NSDAP program:
- Administering hormons to children,
- Rapes,
- Freeing criminals,
- Mixing bombing population into normal crowds,
- Raising pensions and teacher wages,
- Promoting false science,
- A humongous racial plan,
- Veganism, dogs and painting,
- A senile leader that lets corporations govern america.
If it were me, I’d say the Democrats’ plan is nazism. And fortunately 51% people voted against this nonsense.
That's because male-on-male violence, including sexual violence, is endemic in many male prisons. How any particular male victim may identify is secondary to this safeguarding failure within the male prison system.
It's only "offensive" to people who don't like how reality works.
Which is clearly the real problem here.
Pretending otherwise is gaslighting, because they're doing the same thing to climate change research and pandemic research.
And there's a good chance vaccines and other public health measures will be next.
This is not a rational government for rational people planning a rational future. This is a government of angry anti-rational cranks with mental health issues working out those issues in public, to the detriment of everyone except a small cadre of multi-billionaires who share the same psychology, but whose wealth will (somewhat) protect them from consequences the rest of us will have to live with.