> pushed into taking these experimental treatments for a few months
It's a shame that this person was in such a difficult situation, but, barring some extraordinarily rare reaction, a few months would not cause long term problems. The full impact takes several years, by 3-6 months the very first changes are only starting to become visible and many of them are things like changes to skin quality and fat distribution which revert after cessation.
It's still possibly a failure that your acquaintance got on HRT or Lupron in the first place. Given that long term follow ups show, consistently, that less than 2% of trans youth "desist" and are happy with their treatments, the reasonable solution to that failure would be to require some sort of evaluation by a therapist who has been trained to spot when someone has gender dysphoria and belongs to that 98% of happy transitioners versus someone from the 2% group that will desist because their issues came from somewhere else.
Instead of that sort of reasonable response, we see calls for outright bans on all treatment with many also calling for banning treatment for adults and a reversion to conversion therapy as the only "treatment" - it's not a treatment because it doesn't work and just hurts people.
The reason for this, is that the vast majority of people who suddenly have such strong opinions on trans health care are not actually concerned about people's health. They've just found a way to make their prejudices against transgender people sound like reasonable concerns.
And yet, Lupron has been used since the 1970's to treat precocious puberty and every single ban on using it for gender affirming care still allows it to be administered for that purpose. Medical associations also approve its use, in both cases.
When the people against it are only against it for one group of people, and doctors by and large disagree with them, it makes me suspicious that their motives are not based in concern for health and instead are based on personal feelings that are being projected onto an external cause.
People aren't against any group of people, they're against administering a damaging and potentially life-ruining treatment to perfectly healthy children.
Children with gender dysphoria are not "perfectly healthy."
They have a serious problem. The level of hubris in assuming that all these heterosexual parents, many of them conservative, would just up and decide to "trans" their kids is outstanding.
Whatever makes people trans is immutable. Every possible way has been tried to "fix" them, by making them happy as their assigned sex. All the attempts just led to broken people, many of whom killed themselves.
The gall to just insert yourself into the lives of these kids and their families, without understanding their struggles or knowing them, and trying to take away the one proven path to them having a happy successful life is really something to behold.
Puberty blockers have been administered as a valid treatment for precocious puberty for many decades. All of the bans on them specifically still allow them to be used for this purpose, because they are indeed safe enough. It's just that people don't like the idea of children being transgender, probably because it reminds them that they could potentially have a gay or transgender child.
The Alan Turing lie is laughable, Lupron wasn't even invented until 20+ years after Alan Turing was given hormone injections. The falsehoods you're spouting have the hallmarks of coming from Twitter infographics meant to enrage you. Trans care has been made into a wedge issue by US politicians as a way of taking advantage of people's ignorance about the topic, and their knee-jerk dislike of gender non-conformity. An incredible amount of non-sense is being spread, the same as it was about gay people in the 70's and 80's.
> In fact, "trans kids" has never been a thing until about two or three years ago.
Another blatant lie, but it's a fun opportunity to talk about the first trans kid in the US, Agnes Torres. She started taking hormone therapy as a child in 1950. Nearly 80 years ago.
Doctors declared her intersex and she was given a fast track to having her documents changed. She went on to marry and have a nice normal life, because people left her alone. Trans people today could have the same if not for the vicious ignorance propagated by political parties looking for fresh meat.
> Puberty blockers have been administered as a valid treatment for precocious puberty for many decades.
That's a different treatment though, because puberty eventually resumes. Halting it entirely is more akin to the castrati children [1] who had their puberty physically blocked through removal of testicles.
Yes, the point is that you wait until the subject is sufficiently competent to be able to make those medical decisions for themselves, which in most jurisdictions is 14 to 16. The entire point of puberty blockers is to delay permanent sexual changes until the subject can make their own decisions.
Puberty blockers are claimed to be non-permanent. However, that can't be verified at present [0]. In light of that, such a claim being made in the first place is definitely medical malpractice of some sorts.
Also, I do not think medical sources from America are reliable for this topic. The UK and the EU have moved away from gender-affirming care and designated it an experimental treatment. Medical and psychological associations in the US have been captured by such activists and are pushing false rhetoric such as "the science is settled" and "we have medical consensus" (note the misrepresentation here; consensus does not imply evidence-based).
US have a problem where radical activists have captured many influential cultural institutions. Anyone who disagree is automatically designated a "right-winger", "conservative", "white supremacist", "oppressor", "racist", "sexist", "homophobe", "transphobe", etc. This should be obvious to anyone looking from outside the anglo-sphere. For things to get to the point where US can't even recognise what a medical scandal is is frankly appalling, especially when their counterparts in Europe is able to do so.
> The UK and the EU have moved away from gender-affirming care and designated it an experimental treatment.
The UK and EU are hardly a paradise for trans people. Until recently they even REQUIRED trans people to be sterilized, I suppose under the dual assumptions that 1.) they weren't fit to have children and 2.) if there's a genetic component to being transgender it's best to weed it out.
These days, you'll notice a lot of europeans calling to clamp down on transgender people because they'd prefer for them to be gay. Conversion therapy is conversion therapy, however, and whether you do it US style where you try to make someone a good straight Christian or European style where you try to make them a feminine male or butch female, it's still wrong.
As for sterilization, people bring this up without pointing out that we can bank sperm and eggs. A treatment plan for trans youth can wait until they reach a tanner stage (these are the stages of puberty) where they can bank before starting puberty blockers. That is more reasonable than an outright ban.
As for Lupron's side effects, parents are informed about possible side effects. Just like with precocious puberty. It remains telling that families are allowed to access these treatments for some reasons but not others. The double standard betrays prejudice and political meddling in the affairs of parents and doctors.
I think the issue is more technically dubious than political. I'd refer to this investigative feature by The British Medical Journal (BMJ)[0], as well as the follow up[1] of clinicians and researchers alike.
Being intersex is very rare and unfortunate, and I am sympathetic to those with such birth defects.
However, the explosion in "trans kids" has nothing to do with being intersex and has everything to do with being a mental craze. There is no explanation for feelings of "gender dysphoria" rising by 1000% among young girls except for it being a mental craze, with all the encouragement and support among themselves, in social media, and among the school administrators. [1]
> Being intersex is very rare and unfortunate, and I am sympathetic to those with such birth defects.
Agnes Torres was not intersex, she was merely classed as such which allowed her to live a normal life. Funny enough, your comment itself shows why this was successful. You see intersex as more legitimate and because of that you "give it a pass."
Agnes Torres was transgender, but was treated as legitimate back in the 1950's. Being treated like a normal human being allowed her to live a good life back then, free from hate.
It goes to show, if people would just allow trans people to live their lives, they could blend in with society. The thing holding them back is just... prejudice. How sad.
I'm not sure what the situation is like now concerning prejudice towards trans people in the US, but looking from the outside, I'm aware of the incredible amount of bad faith coming from medical and activist organisations from within the US.
For instance, any legitimate discussion or criticism about gender-affirming care, possible social cause that's driving the increase of trans-identifying teenagers (confounded by high rates of autism, mental illness, trauma), or how certain trans rights infringes on women's rights, are framed as "transphobic" by these medical and activist organisation. This would also mean that statements made by countries that are arguably more progressive than the US (i.e. UK and European countries) about the current trans issue would fall into that category as well.
Now, against the backdrop of the capture of cultural institutions by radical activists in the US who share a common foundation (critical social justice), it's hard to be sympathetic towards your claim that prejudice is what's holding them back, when the actions of the medical and activist organisations in the US is consistent with the silencing of valid criticism that other factions of the critical social justice adherents (i.e. race) have a track record of.
In other words, it's hard to believe that the medical and activist organisations in the US are actually acting in good faith; they are weaponising our empathy for marginalised groups to silence legitimate criticisms about a medical scandal and the ideological foundations driving the scandal.
Edit:
Anyone of sound mind can clearly evaluate that my point isn't transphobic. The reply to this comment is a demonstration of what's wrong with the US.
I think you're ideologically motivated, and arguing from a position of emotional distaste for trans people rather than unbiased concern about medical practice. Here's why:
> any legitimate discussion or criticism about gender-affirming care, possible social cause that's driving the increase of trans-identifying teenagers
Trans-identified is a term created by anti-trans activists initially as an "in joke" because calling someone a trans identified male or trans identified female created acronyms that spelled traditionally female and male names: TIM and TIF, where TIM would be applied to trans women and TIF would be applied to trans men. A group that is serious about improving the world wouldn't choose their terminology so as to make fun of or harass people. A hate group would.
> or how certain trans rights infringes on women's rights
It's not at all clear that trans rights infringe on women's rights. The right to segregate yourself from elements of the population that you find distasteful isn't guaranteed. Otherwise we'd still have Jim Crow laws in the American South and lesbians would still be barred from women's sports due to concerns about them being predatory in locker rooms - yes this was a big concern in the 1980's.
> the capture of cultural institutions by radical activists
This is conspiratorial thinking. "Institutions" are made up of individuals and operate under some guiding principles. They aren't captured like territories in a game of risk.
> This would also mean that statements made by countries that are arguably more progressive than the US (i.e. UK and European countries) about the current trans issue would fall into that category as well.
The UK and EU have different politics than the US. They are economically more egalitarian, but socially can be very conservative.
> it's hard to believe that the medical and activist organisations in the US are actually acting in good faith
Why would you conflate medical and activist organizations? Isn't it possible that you are the activist, and that you'd like to bend medical organizations to your will because they disagree with your own prejudices?
> Anyone of sound mind can clearly evaluate that my point isn't transphobic. The reply to this comment is a demonstration of what's wrong with the US.
Saying that nobody can disagree with you unless they are mentally unwell, and then calling someone who disagreed with you an example of "what's wrong with the US" is very odd behavior. It doesn't seem like the way someone operating in good faith would behave.
I don't appreciate your ad-hominem attacks. I'm not the "activist" you accused me of being, or the conspiracy theorist/covert "right winger" you're trying to paint me as. I clarify my position here [0].
>Saying that nobody can disagree with you unless they are mentally unwell, and then calling someone who disagreed with you an example of "what's wrong with the US" is very odd behavior. It doesn't seem like the way someone operating in good faith would behave.
I don't see how I acted in bad faith. However, it appears that your comment is an odd interpretation of the additional remarks I added to my original comment. Perhaps my command of english isn't as good as I thought (I'm not in the anglosphere), or perhaps, you're the one acting in bad faith and giving a convoluted take on my remarks. Regardless, allow me to clarify; "Feggal" replied to my original comment, accusing me of being a "transphobe" and claims that he's going to tattle to Dang for my alleged transgressions. The additional remark I added to my original comment was meant to extend the original points I made about how a particular group of ideologically motivated people are contaminating the conversation, and how "Feggal"'s ad-hominem reply is an example of that. I hope this clarifies things.
Lastly, I'm not interested in entertaining any more ad-hominem attacks. For anyone reading this thread, allow me to point you to this investigative feature by the British Medical Journal (BMJ)[1], one of the most reputable journals in medicine alongside The Lancet. You figure out the discrepancy in claims between the BMJ and that of the medical associations and activist organisations in the US, and decide which of the both is the conspiratorial one.
> However, the explosion in "trans kids" has nothing to do with being intersex and has everything to do with being a mental craze
what "explosion"? the only explosion is the right wing suddenly realizing trans people exist and turning it into a political issue.
have you considered that the reason you're seeing more about "trans kids" or people being more open about gender dysphoria because it's more socially acceptable to be LGBTQ than it was 50 years ago? or maybe because right wing outrage is profitable?
> It's just that people don't like the idea of children being transgender, probably because it reminds them that they could potentially have a gay or transgender child.
A shallow dismissal, a perfectly reasonable argument against irreversible action for changing children’s genders is that many of them aren’t so sure as it seems and later want to transition back.
> A shallow dismissal, a perfectly reasonable argument against irreversible action for changing children’s genders is that many of them aren’t so sure as it seems and later want to transition back.
About 2% want to transition back. 98% are quite sure, and are happy with being treated. Trans youth who are not treated tend to be miserable as adults, with many committing suicide since their bodies have been shaped by the puberty of their natal sex in such a way as to draw constant negative attention. While it is very reasonable to want to lower that 2% rate down even further, attempting to rip care away from that other 98% is not reasonable. Just prejudice, masquerading as concern for children, same as the 80's when "save the children" was having a national campaign against homosexual rights.
If you're not ideologically invested in this topic and are sincerely interested in the truth, I'd urge you to look at your own country from an outsider's point of view. The point being, many sources in the US that were reputable (i.e. scientific american) are parroting misinformation about this topic in service of ideology. That much is obvious to someone who does not live in the anglo-sphere. To address your claims, I'd recommend you check out Hannah Barnes' book, "Time to Think". This much should show that the study you're relying on is dubious, and transitively, your rhetoric.
> If you're not ideologically invested in this topic and are sincerely interested in the truth, I'd urge you to look at your own country from an outsider's point of view. The point being, many sources in the US that were reputable (i.e. scientific american) are parroting misinformation about this topic in service of ideology.
You've really been running wild in this comments section, as have I. I can see that we're both very interested in this topic, but from different sides.
What I'll point out here again, is that you continue to paint reputable organizations that disagree with you as "ideological" while maintaining yourself as some sort of unbiased outside observer. This is blatantly untrue.
You are the one trying to change the facts being reported by reputable sources. You are the activist who is engaged in a campaign of attempting to ideologically modify unbiased institutions.
I think the trans topic can really rile people up, and there's no shortage of think pieces of conspiracy theories about it. Same as has existed around lots of minority groups that caught the attention and ire of the larger public.
You aren't the unbiased observer however. You are an activist, and it shows in your writing.
I don't appreciate your ad-hominem attacks. I spent two years outside of the US witnessing the idiocy of Trump, and another three witnessing the idiocy and regressiveness of the "progressives". As such, I don't take sides in your politics; both your left and right are a disaster to me.
I am not an activist, but I do care about causes that most on the left would empathise with, which is ironic given that gender-affirming care is one heralded by the "progressives" on the left. To the best of my ability, my commitment is to reason, which is something the right clearly lacked during (and after) the Trump administration, and something the left has been lacking for quite some time now.
This much should establish that I'm not some garden-variety "right-winger". Now that signalling my "creds" is out of the way (and it should never have mattered anyway), I think I have a unique perspective as an outsider. Because I have no commitment to US' abysmal politics and since I am not in the anglosphere, I'm not immersed in the local narratives that are happening on the ground. This lets me compare (much fairly) the US and UK + EU's approach to gender-affirming care, and how it's reported. So perhaps while I'm not an unbiased observer as you would put it (I have an opinion on this matter), I do think I've a much better view of what's going on than someone in a country who's narratives are dominated by their political extremes.
So here you are, making a bunch of accusations about me which you can't even bother to back up. To counter that, here's something of substance; for those who think there are no credible claims to the contrary, you can check out this investigative feature by the British Medical Journal (BMJ)[0], one of the most reputable journals in medicine alongside The Lancet.
Indeed. The Guardian is a source I consider to be fairly ideological on certain topics, and belongs to the camp that would largely be in support of gender-affirming care. Yet despite their bias, even they gave a decent review of the book.
For those who are earnest about understanding what's up, the last thing you should do when evaluating the comments of a particularly politicised topic is to automatically deem a downvoted comment as being on the "wrong" side. This is how you inherit opinions that you were never truly convinced of in the first place. Always go to the original sources, and given how politicised this is in the US, it's ideal to see how the UK and EU are handling this. It can't harm to look outside of the bubble you're in, you own your opinions afterall.
Even assuming your study is true, the argument against irreversibly treating children is still a reasonable position and not the shallowly insulting straw man argument you present as the only option.
> the argument against irreversibly treating children is still a reasonable position
Allowing a trans child to go through their natal puberty is not a neutral act. A trans person who "passes" has a much better lifetime outcome thanks to facing less discrimination and having less body image issues (not many people living as females would enjoy being called a man in a dress and harassed regularly based on their body proportions regardless of their chromosomes).
> and not the shallowly insulting straw man argument you present as the only option.
It's not a shallow straw man. Anti-trans activists want to ban care for trans people outright. They want conversion therapy - or what they have slickly labled "gender exploratory therapy" - to be the only treatment available.
If we hadn't lived through many decades where such treatment was already the only option and seen how disastrous it was I may be less inclined to say they are acting in bad faith, but, alas, we know exactly what conversion therapy does: it creates incredibly traumatized adults who are still trans.
All your arguments do not change the fact that it is still possible for reasonable people to simply disagree with you, and it is not a valid argument to put up straw men to take down, just like you’re doing again here, this time anyone against irreversible actions taken on children is claimed to be someone who ‘wants to ban care for trans people outright’.
If your arguments consist of assigning outrageous opinions to people you disagree with, your argument is invalid and you’re bound to be wrong.
Controversial theory, most of the people who claim to be "ready", and seem oddly excited about the possibility of upheaval and turmoil, are already lost down some sort of algorithm induced ideological rabbit hole. Conveniently, one of the symptoms of hosting an internet mind-virus, is that you don't think internet mind-viruses are all that bad.
On one side, you see adults who believe that sexuality and cross-gender identification are immutable, or at least practically immutable. Their goal is to expose e.g. heterosexual kids to the idea that some of their peers will be different from them so that they aren't shocked and scandalized by it later, then lash out unfairly as a result of prejudice against the unknown.
On the other side, you see adults who equate deviations from acceptable expressions of sexuality and gender - you don't see many conservatives boycotting national brands over young boys at hooters or child beauty pageants featuring little girls - as being inherently obscene. They naturally want to protect children from what they see as obscene and abnormal.
They both believe that they have children's best interests at heart.
That said, based on all available data, it seems like sexuality and gender identification are mostly immutable and that truth will slowly win out in the end. For example, nearly every conservative has met a little boy who acted remarkably girlish since toddlerhood and grew up to be gay unsurprisingly. Seeing that process play out, then claiming that gayness is a social contagion requires cognitive dissonance.
It's a part of the process of social change.... The last huge wave of homophobia that had legal consequences was in the 1970's and was led by a group called "Save the Children" -- it's all just the same dynamics repeating, except today it's more-so around broader gender norms, as opposed to a narrow focus on "men sleep with women". This video does a great job of laying it out through that sort of lens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6qUxa30SFA
> you don't see many conservatives boycotting national brands over young boys at hooters or child beauty pageants featuring little girls
You must have one heck of a filter bubble of what you're seeing in the world if you're not seeing conservatives complain about child beauty pageants. There was a massive conservative backlash to a Netflix documentary about child beauty pageants and the conservative internet meme landscape is full of content against "groomers" and anything that involves sexuality and children.
the meme of "groomers" is just alt-right shorthand for anyone who holds the first viewpoint described by OP -- it's an epithet used against people they dislike, not an accurate criticism to be taken literally
for a good illustration of this, examine the politics of people who organize, attend, and participate in actual underage beauty pageants in the US -- the last US president, for example
it's not surprising, because the point of beauty pageants is to reinforce the conservative stereotype that a woman's job is to stand there and look pretty
you'll also note that, as mentioned above, conservatives don't apply the term to breastaurants when children are present there -- I didn't see a response to that, and it bears repeating
> When you disambiguate things it’s not hard to see the current trend of medicalizing gender as a form of gay conversion therapy
It is very hard to see it that way, gender dysphoria is not, and does not particularly correlate with sexual attraction to the gender of your AGAB; exclusive attraction to the gender opposite gender identity is less common than than both exclusive attraction to the same gender and bisexuality among trans people in America. If it were predominantly “gay conversion therapy”, you'd expect it to be predominantly people who had same gender attraction based on AGAB transitioning so that their target gender would result in that being opposite gender attraction. But the evidence doesn't support that.
It's a fantasy constructed by anti-trans, anti-gay forces to try to turn the successful movement against conversion therapy into an asset for them in dividing their natural opponents, but you have to be pretty ignorant to fall for it.
The LGB alliance are a weird one to mention, they have basically no grassroots members at all -- they popped up out of nowhere a few years ago, the average LGBT person in the UK doesn't know they exist at all.
They perform no advocacy to speak of within the UK except for pursuing attack lines against trans people. They're based at 55 Tufton Street which just so happens to also be where a bunch of very curiously linked conservative think tanks promoting anti-climate change, anti-immigrant populist politics are centered. They're mysteriously mixed closely with American groups like the heritage foundation. Oddly they started getting cited a bunch by openly transphobic BBC journalists, ostensibly for "balance" when discussing the rights of trans people.
I cannot think of a more obvious example for astroturfing than this group. They have literally zero presence in real people's lives the way you'd expect a charity to, they instead pop up wherever anti-trans rhetoric appears online and in papers, providing a denigrating voice to whoever needs it. They provide no services and give no advice -- here's to hoping they lose their charitable status when the Good Law Project's appeal concludes later this year.
Unclear on why the other comment was flagged, I'll pull just the facts through to this one.
> It's office space that's situated conveniently close to Parliament, and isn't just used by conservative think tanks. For example, Feeding Britain (https://feedingbritain.org), a charity dedicated towards solving hunger in the UK, and headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, is also based at this address.
This is an extremely selective statement, there are 9 businesses stationed at 55 Tufton street and every other bar Feeding Britain is controversial. Some have links to far right populist ventures, even the other charities like the Taxpayer's Alliance actually "[exploit] the taxpayer rather than protecting their interests as they claim to do"[1]
Rather than going to the LGB alliance's site to read who they say they are, I'd rather believe in their actions over their words.
* They have argued it is not homophobic to oppose same sex marriage
* They have argued against a ban on conversion therapy for trans people
* They have suggested the "+" on "LGBTQ+" promotes beastiality
* They specifically excluded the names of trans victims from their condolences list after the Colorado Springs night club shooting
Fifty LGBT organisations pushed back against the LGB alliance being given charitable status. Plenty more have branded them a hate group. I think these longer lasting perspectives are far more telling than the autobiography from a group who came into existence in 2019.
Calling gender affirming care "gay conversion therapy" is a disingenuous tactic deployed by anti-trans activists. One of the most common things that parents who disown their trans kids say is "why can't you just be gay" so pitching it as conversion therapy is very... odd.
You even illustrate this point yourself when you say:
> Very few conservatives in 2023 are riled up by homosexuality.
but also...
> the current trend of medicalizing gender as a form of gay conversion therapy
Kenneth Zucker's whole practice was geared, in fact, toward converting trans kids into gay kids. He says himself in his writing that being homosexual is preferable to being transsexual, since the latter requires medical intervention. The thing is, trans people and gay people have different needs and desires. They aren't the same group. So it's wrong to try to force gay kids to be trans or trans kids to be gay. But these days what you'll find is trans kids being pushed to be gay. A perfect inversion of the image you've painted.
The reason I "conflate" transsexuality (the word has two s's, also nobody uses it anymore, you should just say 'being transgender') with being gay is because the very same arguments and tactics used against gay people in the 80's - it's a mental illness, a social contagion, they're grooming kids, etc... - is being used again against trans people today. There was even a bathroom and women's sports panic in the 80's around lesbians in women's sports "preying" on straight girls.
Trans people had been considered merely a part of the gay community, along with other gender non-conforming people who may today identify as non-binary, until relatively recently. The fight for gay rights benefitted trans people, but we're at a point now where they have their own struggles, like the struggle for medical treatment.
It's a struggle that's been fought since the 70's when Janice Raymond wrote "The Transsexual Empire" and worked with the Reagan administration to make it more difficult for trans people to get medical treatment. Nothing about it is new, except for the alliance between conservative Christians and secular anti-trans activists - an unholy union if I've ever seen one.
> Very few conservatives in 2023 are riled up by homosexuality.
This is absolutely not the case at the populist grassroots level. There are regular panics and outpourings of hatred for pride events, books mentioning homosexuality are outright banned in schools, gay teachers are targeted for harassment and fired. My state just passed a law banning drag shows, which have been a part of gay culture for decades.
Genuine question: do you live in a culturally conservative area? Do you have evangelical Christians in your social circles?
I don’t live in a red state but I was raised in the most socially conservative area of Canada and I do have a number of religious and evangelical friends though I was raised atheist. Granted I do now live in the gayest neighbourhood in Canada.
The level of homophobia I witnessed and experienced in the nineties was on another order than what exists today, there is absolutely no comparison (I’m not gay but was routinely called a fag even by strangers because I was a skinny kid with long hair and had gay friends). In the nineties I would read conservative magazines that had ads in them pushing conspiracy theories about how the NAZI leadership were all gay. DOMA was a huge issue that ate up a lot of national politics in 2004, even California voted against gay marriage in a referendum. In 2012 Obama was still compelled to campaign in defense of DOMA and was openly supportive of marriage only between men and women (though interestingly the earliest activists for marriage equality came from the centre-right (Sullivan and Rauchman)).
Now the nuttiest MAGA republicans all love George Santos, who was a literally drag queening in Brazil and Peter Thiel who got a massive cheer when he keynoted the 2016 convention and said “I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American.” Unthinkable even 4 years prior. One poll of gay men in 2020 shows 46% support for Trump. [0] On the more traditional Republican side of things (Dispatch conservatives and Reason Libertarians) it’s hard to find many living authors who are more valourized than Deirdre McClosky who has been trans for 30 years.
It’s possible that homophobia has increased a bit in the last few years amongst social conservatives, but it still isn’t close to anything like it was even a decade ago. So if it has increased, and if young people are reverting to viewing sex as a binary according to a recent Pew poll [1] the question is why. Partly it’s the weird corporate and state monomania around the topic. But more than that, as I stated above, it seems to me to be mixed with blowback to gender ideology which has been conflated with gay rights, even though it is a very different and contradictory thing with a whole separate host of questions around medical ethics and educating children that many don’t find to be consistent with the positive message that universalized gay rights - you’re fine the way you were born and you don’t need to change anything to be accepted.
The common thread between homophobia and transphobia is a dislike of gender non-conformity. Since the days of Ernst Rohm [0] there has been an element of the gay community convinced that gender non-conforming gays - femmes - were the real problem. There are plenty of straight conservatives who are willing to play along with this for a time too since a masculine man isn't hard to accept as long as you don't think about what he does in his bedroom.
What you call "gender ideology" - a dogwhistle similar to Trans Identified Male and Trans Identified Female, acronyms specifically chosen to aggravate trans people by spelling out stereotypically female and male names - is, in some ways, everything that conservative gays and conservative straights disliked about stereotypical homosexuals distilled into its purest form. It violates the taboo of males being overly feminine (queens) and females being overly masculine (d*kes). It's also why drag queens, who are not transgender, are being swept up into the current moral panic.
It's strange to watch anti-trans activists make a big fuss about trans people changing their physical appearance, then go out and support things like drag bans which are also being used to prevent trans people from appearing in public [1]. Those bans are 100% about forcing people to wear certain clothing. I feel like legislating people's wardrobes according to the sex they were assigned at birth really gives away what's really going on here.
Even if all trans people stopped getting any hormones or surgeries tomorrow and even if they stopped using the pronouns that they feel fit them, and even if they stopped using the restrooms that fit them they would still be hated and attacked. They would be attacked for the same reason that feminine gay men and masculine gay women have always taken the brunt of homophobia.
Because what people hate is gender non-conformity. They want males to be reasonably masculine and wear clothing that is considered stereotypically male, and vice versa for females. The talk about scary medical procedures and men and women being erased and even fairness in sports is just a way of making that impulse sound reasonable and justified.
You'll also notice that the logo makes the face from the "NPC" memes that would have still been popular among the 4chan "politically incorrect" crowd right around the time this project was allegedly started. Sadly, for enterprising edgelords, Elon has usurped them all by turning Twitter itself into the ultimate "alt-tech" app. Like, seriously, unless you want to share illegal pornography, why not just share your spicey maymays on Twitter where they'll get more reach? Impressive amount of follow through regardless.
I'm curious to know what sorts of things you were thinking about when you wrote this. The tone of it reads as emotional and defensive rather than informative. It would probably contribute more to the discussion if you expressed your own ideas rather than attempting to pre-empt the ideas of others by listing them in bullet point format. Wouldn't you agree? :3
> treating men and women like they are the same is the first problem
Russia is rather socially conservative and their birth rates are low as well. It's quite a stretch to blame low birth rates on gender equality given the scope of cultures and societies where low birth rates have been a problem. Some other common factor would seem much more likely. Maybe economic incentives.
Unless you also think Russia is too progressive for you tastes. If so, what does your ideal social system look like with respect to the enforcement of gender roles, where women are expected to bear 3 or more children? What would enforcement of these roles look like in the society you're envisaging?
If you could honestly and clearly answer those questions I'd be very impressed. Then, I would follow it up with: and do you think many people would enjoy living in the society you've just dreamed up?
If yes, is there a status quo ante that was similar to what you're describing (seems likely given that women's emancipation is fairly recent and lots of different patriarchal structures have been tried out over the millennia)? Can you try to trace out why that status quo was left behind in favor of where we are now?
If no, how do you plan to persuade people to live less comfortably so that birth rates are as high as you'd like to see them? Persuasion is your only tool, because you've already said that you don't think government is the answer, and, without persuasion, you'd need to use force. To use force you'd need the government to act in some capacity, or at least _not_ act in a way that's complicit e.g. by not prosecuting honor killings carried out against anti-natalist daughters and sisters or at least condoning discrimination against childless women.
I think you have assumed the worst from my comment.
A culture where both men and women are expected to work and have the same roles and responsibilities is the worst treatment. It does not respect gender differences and strength differences.
> I think you have assumed the worst from my comment.
I assumed that you are against gender equality. Gender equality meaning that men and women are given the freedom to do as they wish without being sanctioned. I think you'll find that men and women tend to gravitate toward very different lifestyles in the most egalitarian societies - look at gender ratios in various job fields in Norway or Sweden - but life is much easier for those men and women who are not typical. It seems rather wasteful to organize society around the needs of 80% while forcing 20% into a box that doesn't fit them. Better to let people self sort.
If you think gender equality means that women are being sanctioned for doing traditionally womanly things like home making or mothering I'd have to ask where you got the information that led you to that conclusion because it doesn't fit with my own experiences growing up in the United States.
> A culture where both men and women are expected to work and have the same roles and responsibilities is the worst treatment. It does not respect gender differences and strength differences.
This comment is just a roundabout way of saying that you believe gender equality is bad.
> You asked me to quote birth rates so I looked up birth rates of Russian minorities.
Why minorities? What makes them substantially different from, say, an Orthodox white Russian who lives in St. Petersburg, or one who lives in Yakutia for that matter?
They are conservative, do not have modern interpretations of gender equality, and have higher birth rates.
I'm going to steer clear of the gender inequality debate. It has been hijacked by reactionary comparison-justifying women trying to claim there are no differences between men and women and try to fight gender inequality without having an accurate idea of what gender equality looks like.
Instead, I'm going to claim if the strength of women cannot be respected, their abilities are not recognized, and their high functioning roles as mothers are not honored, and yet the male obligations are held in higher regard, the female will be stretched too thin in trying to have equal authority and importance in matters. This is pure distortion and not rectifiable by authority.
> They are conservative, do not have modern interpretations of gender equality, and have higher birth rates.
What are their un-modern interpretations of gender equality that you'd like to see emulated in the USA, Australia and Western Europe?
It's also curious that you're noting that some groups have high birth rates, also global population growth is still rising, while also worrying about underpopulation. The subtext is that you're concerned about white and northeast Asian people in particular yes? That would fit into a worldview that's been called "Human Biodiversity" (HBD) iirc?
If you weren't familiar with HBD people, the gist is that they think that western European and northeast Asian people should be preserved because their genes are precious.
I can remember reading Steve Sailor and some other such HBD people when I was younger and feeling persuaded by them at first -- easy because I'm white and blonde haired and blue eyed so they appealed to my vanity lol. After thinking on it for a few years however, I came to the conclusion that HBD is just a weird little religion that hasn't actually thought much about the consequences of its propositions beyond some romantic vision of a glorious Evropean golden age -- that their proposed policies would never be able to create, since they'd destroy everything unique and interesting about the same groups that they want so badly to 'save' from themselves.
Secondarily, why do you think birthrates need to be increased above replacement level? A lower population along with technological developments, particularly recent ones around improving AI, would likely create much higher standards of living so long as the correct economic policies were laid into place.
> I'm going to steer clear of the gender inequality debate. It has been hijacked by reactionary comparison-justifying women trying to claim there are no differences between men and women and try to fight gender inequality without having an accurate idea of what gender equality looks like.
Any examples of this that aren't just Twitter hot takes? Gender roles are alive and well all over the world. People today, in some ways more than ever, revel in adhering to them. IME it's just seen as taboo to try to force people to adhere to them.
> Instead, I'm going to claim if the strength of women cannot be respected, their abilities are not recognized, and their high functioning roles as mothers are not honored, and yet the male obligations are held in higher regard, the female will be stretched too thin in trying to have equal authority and importance in matters. This is pure distortion and not rectifiable by authority.
The point is that every group has outliers. 80% of women might have dispositions that lend themselves very well to mothering but some 20% will have dispositions that lend themselves better to other things. Similarly about 80% of men seem drawn to developing stereotypically masculine traits, but some 20% will have a more stereotypically feminine disposition. It makes no sense to attempt to organize all of society around pretending that 100% of men and 100% of women fit into the same mould as that 80%. It's equally delusional to the idea that men and women have no differences at all.
It's trivial to measure just about any trait that varies between the sexes and notice that they form two overlapping normal distributions. You've accused 'modernity' of pretending that the distributions overlap completely while simultaneously pretending that the distributions have no overlap at all.
You're on HN so you probably like technological development. Human efforts are wasted when we don't let people do what suits them. Technological development will move more quickly if we aren't wasteful.
My husband and I have a child and I would be more open to having a few more if we could maintain our standard of living on his salary alone. Despite my strange propensity for studying extremist literature online and then trying to de-radicalize people I'm otherwise pretty normal so I'd hazard a guess that fixing economic inequality would do as much to drive up birth rates as abolishing gender equality, but the former would cause much less human suffering.
> You have seriously misunderstood the entire premise of my comment and created a shadow of it that you are now fighting.
Okay.
> Feminism is a hate masquerading as a fight for women's rights. And I am not engaging any further.
But then you follow up with this, which makes me even more confident that I didn't misunderstand you. From the start my impression has been that you're a little shy about saying exactly what you mean, thus my attempts to read between the lines so that we can have a real direct conversation in lieu of beating around the bush so to speak.
I don't know you, but when I read your responses I can't help but imagine that you're in a dark place. When life has hurt us in some way it's easy to project that negativity out onto the world, but a part of healing is separating what's inside of us versus what's outside. I hope we can all get there. Sending good vibes.
> Russia is rather socially conservative and their birth rates are low as well
Russia looks conservative compare to Europe or western world more broadly, but liberal compare to most countries in Africa and Middle East (where birth rates are higher). See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Inequality_Index
They used to be communist. Communism generally gave women much more equality than most traditional societies. While Russia may be more conservative now, I think the effects take at least one or two generations to permeate through a society.
> They used to be communist. Communism generally gave women much more equality than most traditional societies
Only partially true. Yes, women were equal to men in many regards, being accepted to work in pretty much positions (there were even women fighting in the army during the big wars), had the same rights and etc. but, and this is a massive but, it was on top of their "traditional" roles, and the opposite didn't apply. Meaning that women were equal and free to work as whatever, but also expected that women fulfil the vast majority of traditionally female roles (nursing, teaching, etc.) while also being the primary caretaker of children. As an example, maternity leave in the Eastern Block was usually 1 year and more (e.g. in Bulgaria it was 1+1+1 years, and still is but with massive caveats for 2nd and 3rd year around money), while paternity leave was practically non-existent. Spousal relations were also pretty conservative (e.g. domestic abuse, up to and including marital rape, was fine).
So women were more equal in some, mostly economic, aspects, but not at all in other, mostly social aspects.
I think you're onto something, but I think capitalism is the cause. Especially looking back at former communist countries, and comparing them with today. They had higher birthrates despite opportunities being often gender equal (communist countries sometimes being more progressive than the West) and both parents working (although there probably was more leisure time). AFAICT every post-communist country had a birtrate drop after switch to capitalism, and it wasn't accompanied with the cultural change in gender roles or equality (these happen more gradually).
Capitalism sees human labor as a resource to be exploited, and that is a powerful incentive (especially to educated women) to avoid procreation and family life. You want to work on your career early, and young people make the best labor.
Harassing transgender people and defaming them the way that Peterson did Eliot Page is not simply saying "men are not women." What he actually said was that the surgery that he had, to reduce his breast size in the same way a cis man who had gynecomastia would, was criminal.
Matt Walsh trolls transgender people and enjoys making their lives miserable because he believes their existence is a threat to his personal code of morality. He also wishes to ban transgender people, even adults, from receiving any sort of care beyond conversion therapy which is considered abusive and banned in many countries.
None of them are simply saying "men are not women."
It's like the difference between saying you think homosexuals are deviants who should burn in hell and saying "marriage is between a man and a woman." In both cases you're trying to be a jerk, but in the former you're being a lot more aggressive about it. There's a reason why even most homophobes don't like the Westboro Baptist Church. Only the biggest jerks support openly harassing and trolling people because of things that they can't control. Even if you think being gay or trans is a mental illness, a mental illness is still something you can't control. Trolling people is obviously not an attempt to help them. It's an attempt to make them suffer because you hate them.
> Harassing transgender people and defaming them the way that Peterson did Eliot Page
Did you read the tweet you posted? Peterson’s criticisms of Ellen Page’s physician (not even Page herself) are not harassment or defamation any more than your criticisms of Peterson are.
I see that you're not ideologically motivated here. ^_^
It's decidedly not "criminal" for an adult to get a surgery that is commonplace for men with gynecomastia just because they have an "F" on their birth certificate. Breast tissue is breast tissue and there is no regulation that says that anyone has to have a minimum amount of it based on their sex assigned at birth. Women have breast reductions, especially at advanced ages, to help with their mobility all the time after all.
Peterson's objective was to slur Eliot Page by casting him and the doctor who treated him in a negative light. It's slimy trolling and provocation. Not speaking truth or even a simple fact like that "men are not women." Just thinly veiled hate for his hungry audience to feed on.
Nobody is saying Page isn’t allowed to have cosmetic surgery to have her breasts removed. Rather that her doctor is being harmful in letting her do so. Again please read the actual tweet you’re referring to.
Separately: an adult “with F on their birth certificate” is called a woman. Ellen Page was Ellen Page when she had the surgery.
The past, much like the Tweet you keep talking about, does not change because you wish it to. It’s fascinating you labelled someone that disagrees with you as ideologically driven when you believe you can determine reality with your mind.
Nah, when someone changes their name like in the case of marriage but I don't approve of the marriage for some reason I don't go around calling them by their "real name" and refuse to acknowledge the change. When someone wants to go by another set of words to identify themselves, like pronouns, I'm also not a jerk about it.
You don't know anyone's medical history. You haven't given anyone a karyotype test. You'd use a new set of names for people in many circumstances and even pronouns likely in the case of an obvious intersex condition. Your decision to call Eliot Page she against his wishes is clearly ideologically driven and hateful. A petty snub more or less.
Doing it makes you a cruel person. I'm sure you don't see yourself that way, but, newsflash, humans generally want to be "good" so most cruel people think they are good and justified in their actions. They just have some toxic/anti-social ideas rooted into their sense of morality.
In this case it seems you've convinced yourself that by snubbing transgender people you're somehow protecting... truth? BiOloGiCal ReAlItY? Gendered terms predate any concept of sex chromosomes or even gametes. Jeez Ottomans worried about their concubines getting pregnant from EUNUCHS because they didn't fully realize that testes created sperm or that sperm was separate from semen. That's why they preferred dark skinned eunuchs, so they could tell if a baby was illegitimate.... Which is just to say that if you want to be "traditional" gendered terms are about surface level assessments of a person's physical appearance and social roles considered appropriate to such an appearance, not biology. If you transported Patti Harrison[1] (a very passable trans woman) back to King Arthur's court she'd be treated like a lady I assure you.
The even more fundamental thing though is respecting people's autonomy. It's a very aggressive act to call someone by labels that they dislike. Try continually getting someone's name wrong on purpose, maybe call a guy named Ted Bruce all the time, and see how your relationship with that person develops....
> The even more fundamental thing though is respecting people's autonomy
Yes, and this includes people's linguistic autonomy; their freedom to say what they see.
We all know that Page is female. We also know that Page most likely wants everyone to refer to her as if she is a man.
Some people, who believe in the ideology of gender identity, will say that she really is a man, so this is no problem for them. Others will acquiesce out of a feeling of politeness, or social pressure. But many will say, no, she's female, so she's actually a woman.
Please respect the autonomy of the latter group to express a view that you disagree with, due to your differing beliefs. In particular, there's no need to start haranguing people with unfounded accusations of hate.
> Please respect the autonomy of the latter group to express a view that you disagree with, due to your differing beliefs. In particular, there's no need to start haranguing people with unfounded accusations of hate.
Does it make me a jerk to call you out for being a jerk? No....
Do I think you should be put in prison for being a jerk? No....
But I'll be honest, if you refuse to be kind to transgender people I'll find you distasteful and untrustworthy the same way I would a homophobe or a racist to be.
I realize from conversations with conservatives that many people consider supporting trans people as a form of virtue signaling, but from my experience it's the opposite. I live in a small town in a deep red county in a deep red state and the trans topic has become a shibboleth where not extending the basic respect of labeling trans people how they wish to be labeled is something that people do with prideful smiles and jolly laughter. It's a public display of cruelty that people bond over. There's nothing about it that smacks of protecting dignity or truth. It's just the same old human meanness that's popped up time and time again in history and always leads to nothing good.
I hope you'll grow as a person and treat people from outside of your experience with kindness and openness rather than callousness and suspicion. It's not the easy thing to do, but it's the right thing to do.
It's meant to convey a sense of defeat. So in this case the sentence would read as implying that the author wanted Mastodon to replace Twitter but that it's not able and that fact is causing her emotional pain.
It's a shame that this person was in such a difficult situation, but, barring some extraordinarily rare reaction, a few months would not cause long term problems. The full impact takes several years, by 3-6 months the very first changes are only starting to become visible and many of them are things like changes to skin quality and fat distribution which revert after cessation.
It's still possibly a failure that your acquaintance got on HRT or Lupron in the first place. Given that long term follow ups show, consistently, that less than 2% of trans youth "desist" and are happy with their treatments, the reasonable solution to that failure would be to require some sort of evaluation by a therapist who has been trained to spot when someone has gender dysphoria and belongs to that 98% of happy transitioners versus someone from the 2% group that will desist because their issues came from somewhere else.
Instead of that sort of reasonable response, we see calls for outright bans on all treatment with many also calling for banning treatment for adults and a reversion to conversion therapy as the only "treatment" - it's not a treatment because it doesn't work and just hurts people.
The reason for this, is that the vast majority of people who suddenly have such strong opinions on trans health care are not actually concerned about people's health. They've just found a way to make their prejudices against transgender people sound like reasonable concerns.