Can someone please tell me how important this topic based on the amount of news time and eyeballs it attracts relative to the number of people that it affects?
The numbers I can find for US citizens is: 0.6% or 1,988,696 out 331,449,281 of people total for the entirety of the US in 2021.
In the UK where the featured article took place the latest poll I could find comes counts the number of people who selected "other" when choosing a sex at 0.4% or 224,632 people out of 64,596,800.
Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people.
I don't mean to downplay what is happening because it is happening but do you not think the amount of outrage this topic generates surpasses the level of impact we can have assuming we fix it? It just feels like we're being distracted.
In a world full of discrimination against trans folks, who knows how many people who would prefer being trans have failed to be identified?
But the topic is much bigger than that. You see, the ideology being pushed says that everyone who has gender dysphoria should be assumed to be trans. But a LOT of teenagers, particularly girls, go through a period of gender dysphoria when they hit puberty. What little research exists on the topic says that most of those girls will grow out of their gender dysphoria, and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire. However said research is highly controversial exactly because it undermines the politically correct ideology that we should take seriously all claims that physical appearance is less important than chosen gender.
And THAT is the real problem. I don't have statistics. But anecdotally I have a 12 year old with gender dysphoria. Many of their friends have the same. I personally know more children claiming to be trans at present than I've known people who were blind or missing a limb over my entire life.
A *LOT* of parents are in my boat. It is easy to find opposing ideologies about how we should deal with our teenage children. There is very little research. And people are so focused on yelling at each other that nobody dares DO more research. Because no matter what you find, you're going to get targeted by someone.
> What little research exists on the topic says that most of those girls will grow out of their gender dysphoria, and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire.
This is frequently claimed but is untrue, or at the very least highly uncertain. The studies most often referenced have serious methodological errors, including inconsistent definitions of dysphoria (owing partially to problems with the Gender Identity Disorder diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV that have since been fixed with the DSM-5) and desistance (in some cases counting anyone who didn't follow up with the clinic conducting the research as having desisted) https://www.gdaworkinggroup.com/desistance-articles-and-crit...
I made a claim about ideology. You made a claim about medical professionals. That is not particularly relevant to what I claimed.
I stand by my claim. The online echo chambers that children, including my own, seek out very much push the ideology that any claim to be male, female, non-binary or whatever must be accepted at face value. And that the person who is making the claim should have the right to any treatment that they wish, up to and including surgery.
As for criticism of the research that exists, I agree that it isn't very good. But then again, most research in the social sciences isn't very good. See the Replication Crisis. Or as we used to say, news at 11.
> any claim to be male, female, non-binary or whatever must be accepted at face value. And that the person who is making the claim should have the right to any treatment that they wish, up to and including surgery.
I can understand some caution around the latter part of this quote, given how traumatic, invasive, and costly surgery can be. It is a defensible and reasonable position that there should be _some_ barrier-to-entry to such major decisions (especially for children), even while there's also a simultaneous reasonable concern that such barriers will be used to prevent access to folks who genuinely do need, want, and would benefit from it.
But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part? How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do? Even the position of "they are confused" or "this is a phase that will pass" or "they have been pressured into that belief" doesn't hold water - until that phase passes, that person's gender, their self-image, _is_ whatever that phase dictates. That doesn't make the current situation any less true. If you told someone "I like broccoli" and they responded "that's just a phase, you'll grow out of liking broccoli soon", your response would, presumably be "...so? I like broccoli _now_, what does your guess about the future have anything to do with it?"
Does your position on "accepting gender at face value" change if the statement "I am male" is replaced with "I see myself as male"? Are you more comfortable accepting the fact that someone's self-image can change over time, rather than imagining that gender is some abstract immutable inherent property?
But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part? How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do?
How do you define denying the first part?
According to my child's world view, I need to ask them every day what their pronouns are today. And any accidental slip-ups on any adult's part are a demonstration of transphobia, which justifies a raised voice and lecture.
While I'm perfectly OK with making an attempt to treat people as they wish to be treated, at what point does the inconvenience and stress that your constant demands make on others become an unreasonable ask of them? (Which is a question that every parent of teenagers winds up asking at some point, for some reason...)
> According to my child's world view, I need to ask them every day what their pronouns are today. And any accidental slip-ups on any adult's part are a demonstration of transphobia, which justifies a raised voice and lecture.
I agree that their request is unreasonable, and I'm sorry for the stress it's causing you. I can't really justify their behavior on a rational basis (teens, right?). And obviously I don't know your child, and I don't know you, but as a trans person who went through a similar phase, maybe consider what they might be thinking if you want to understand why they might be behaving like this?
For one thing, they almost certainly know your opinions about the persistence of trans identity and online echo chambers of gender identity. If (real if) you're hostile to the idea that they could really be trans, it's possible they feel hostile to the idea that you could really be making a good faith best effort to support them, which is what this sounds like to me: defensiveness. I had a very similar dynamic with my parents for several years. We came out of it understanding each other a lot better, but it was certainly rough in the thick of it. I really hope you can find a way to resolve the tension.
If (real if) you're hostile to the idea that they could really be trans, it's possible they feel hostile to the idea that you could really be making a good faith best effort to support them, which is what this sounds like to me: defensiveness.
True, you don't know me.
When my child came out as pan, a few days later we had arranged for a trip to an old friend of mine who is a trans-woman, a lesbian, and who had a non-binary friend who was staying with her.
I regret the fact that you had a difficult relationship with your parents. I've seen that story play out. However I'm pretty confident that I'm not actually transphobic. My concern is not that I don't want a child who is trans, my concern is about what is best for my child's long-term well-being.
Parents make mistakes all the time. It’s a milestone of parenting. A child is a child and knows nothing. Not even themselves up to a certain age. But that’s how we are all born. Not knowing anything, until we do. Then we all make a shit ton of mistakes and learn some more. Whether a child is this or that has to be ALWAYS balanced against the back drop of their best interests.
It’s one thing to be supportive and empathetic. It’s another thing to bow down to worship your child and let them run the show.
The trans issue has risen to a point where society must face it and figure out the bigger questions of how can we accommodate them and yet balance and find natural limits. We are so fucking far away from that point. And we will get there eventually.
I agree with the parent comment saying the trans issue is way over sampled and is or has become some kinda trend. It just is. Clearly their child showcases the main point of children know nothing when the child mis-understands what true transphobia is versus a childlike ignorance of parroting a concept they just heard about.
Why is that? Well it never changes from generation to generation. If you have kids at some point they learn about attention and how to use it.
It’s kinda like personal preferences. Is it transphobic to say you are only attracted to the opposite sex and would never date or consider a trans person in a romantic relationship? Nope. But it’s a sure fired way to keep eyeballs on the screen and people in their rigid political groups.
Like this parent (although I will be more brutal) I could give two shits if they felt they were a trex or were a girl or a boy. I don’t care. What matters is that I raise a kind hearted, compassionate human being who understands the world is not your friend. And can find their grit and true will when they need it. There’s book loads more to this but boiled down I’m doing my best to not raise an inconsiderate asshole. Because they must be held to account and told when they are in fact acting like an inconsiderate asshole.
It's brainwashing of the highest order, what is happening to our young people. Professor Sam Valkin on Youtube elaborates on all this nonsense. Powerful forces seek to manipulate impressionable minds and make them question their own gender. The more educated and socially connected you are, the more you are at risk of the inversion tactics.
Not to actually accuse about this topic, but from a motive perspective, there are three powerful countries with first-rate technologists on the internet, all with proven hacking attacks, and all benefit from the weakening of the western world. They are also all generally allies against the rest of the world.
It sure sounds wild when strawmanned like this. Now "the Chinese will use any opportunity to reduce cohesion in western society, in particular by poring gas into culture war fire" is uncharitable, probably wrong, but plausible.
Again, that's not what I'm insinuating. Only that the first part, "Powerful forces seek to manipulate impressionable minds," does have motive and precedence. Just trying to answer "to what end?"
Demographic and Finance control is one example. If one chooses a life of Hedonism over a traditional path, they may be frivolous; e.g. a single person household that is not as efficient and pays for everything themselves. Just one example.
Nation States, Corporations, Moguls that that have no moral compass and use control matrices to sway minds. E.G. did you know that Snapchat is biggest peddler of child porn? Or how about Only fans being a legal pimp for narcissists and their enablers?
Can you explain what a control matrix is and how one might use it to sway minds? Would it bore you if increasingly many transgender people are expressing their identities because that feels safer than that used to?
Teenager brains have a outstanding circuitry designed at discovering what infuriates their parents (and the generation of their parents) and just hammer on it, whatever that thing is.
I was going to say, having been a teenager, this sounds an awful lot like the kind of thing I'd pull. Not exactly to make my parents upset but them being upset was an indication of success. I honestly don't know what my real end goals were but I'm sure it's at least partially understood by professionals.
I can completely understand how frustrating the situation can be - I am extremely supportive of trans rights but I also feel like that decision starts at adulthood. Puberty blockers seem like a really good way to compromise on that point since doors are being kept open but no decision is being fully committed to.
Being a teenager is really confusing to begin with, and the last thing children need is more ways to categorize and divide people into clumps.
How difficult is it to ask a simple question every morning? Or baring that, engage your kid. Could come to a compromise for defaulting to a gender neutral "they" for when you don't know how they're feeling in a given day. Upon which they could give you a reasonable clarification (or you know, just ask).
When your kid's demands are as simple as "hey support my identity, which requires nothing but thinking slightly more about the words you use" how could they not be frustrated when their parent can't even clear that low bar.
My <2 year old can already convincingly fake an accident if he believes that doing so will lead to tasty food.
I can imagine thousands of reasons why teenagers would lie, and maybe they'll come up with new pronouns just to annoy you. Because that's what kids do, they constantly test the limits of acceptable behavior and the limits of your patience.
That said, I agree with you that people can choose what gender they feel like and others should accept it as an opinion. But trying to force others to change their behavior to accommodate your opinion very quickly becomes unreasonable.
So gender is fine, but pronouns are already a slippery slope.
Do you believe a horny teenage guy would be willing to lie and say he identifies as female, if that means he gets to see all of his female classmates naked?
It's a tradeoff between people living out their believes and the inconvenience that this causes for others.
> Do you believe a horny teenage guy would be willing to lie and say he identifies as female, if that means he gets to see all of his female classmates naked?
No, I don't. Living out that type of switch for any length of time is an enormous investment, which will change the way your peers view you forever. It is worthwhile if you're actually trans, but anyone else would be so much better off just browsing the internet.
That said, I also think single-gender spaces are in need of an re-think. Same-sex locker rooms inherently assume that people of the same gender can't be attracted to one another, which is simply not the case. So what's the point?
> Same-sex locker rooms inherently assume that people of the same gender won't be attracted to one another, which is simply not the case. So what's the point?
Same sex locker rooms don't only assume people of same gender are not attracted to each other, but also that women are disproportionally exposed to potential sexual abuse from men than the other way around. Protecting women from men specifically is very central to the idea.
> Living out that type of switch for any length of time...
What "switch" are you talking about? The trans-rights movement frowns on requiring trans people to make any sort of "switch" beyond a mere declaration. The whole concept of self-identification is that a man need do nothing more than declare that he's now a woman, and he should promptly have access to spaces and resources reserved for women, such as girls' scholarships, women's bathrooms, women's shelters, women's sports teams and athletics, women's prisons, women's healthcare, women's dating websites, etc. Requiring any sort of physical transition is said to be a violation of trans people's human rights, and thus men-- biological males with penises-- should be allowed access to these spaces by simply "checking a box".
Getting self-identification enacted in laws is a primary goal of the most prominent and powerful trans rights lobbies:
You don't need surgery, but you do need to come out as trans. Everyone around you is going to take such a declaration very seriously, as they well should.
Unless someone really really commits, it's going to be terribly obvious who is acting in bad faith.
Do you know of any examples when this became a problem in practice?
Yes, and too many examples to adequately list. A small sample:
- Lesbian dating sites are facing an influx of men-- biological men with penises-- who have declared that they are lesbian trans-women, and are angry when they don't get any attention from the females on the site. This has become a significant controversy in these communities, because apparently many lesbians on lesbian dating sites are attracted exclusively to other females. Now, I'm sure some of these guys actually are earnest trans-gendered women, who are honestly and in good faith seeking to fully transition. But others are just incels trying a new strategy.
- The English and Canadian prison systems are currently dealing with the ramifications of allowing men into women's prisons-- biological men with penises who declare they are women, and demand to be placed into women's prisons. In many cases these guys have assaulted women in prison. These cases are easily googleable.
- 18 male candidates from the The Force for Mexico party registered as women for this year's municipal elections in Tlaxcala, in order to get around quotas requiring equal numbers of female candidates. These are men, just straight up men, who declared themselves women just for the registration, and defended by trans rights activists saying that self-identification must be respected with no questions.
- This guy: http://www.daniellemuscato.com/. This is a biological male with a penis who has no intention of transitioning (he has a medical excuse it seems). In legal trouble and homeless at times, he demands to be let into women's shelters and placed in detention with women. He works diligently and successfully to folks critical of him banned from twitter.
Jessica Yaniv (I know, an easy target, but he's a huge influence in Canada).
I visited nude beaches regularly because there are some in my vicinity. Although not for quite some time anymore since smartphones became that prevalent. Denying feelings of shame often is an indicator that there is a problem.
Any bathroom wouldn't be able to accommodate everyone. For these exception there can be single cabin room or something else.
There are a lot of bathrooms for both sexes, mostly in places where space is limited. But having segregated bathrooms is in no way a problem anywhere and I think many people are happy with that.
Not sure what your "feelings of shame" lines are about.
Also, I agree that any bathroom won't accommodate everyone. But no current bathroom does that either.
For unisex purposes it depends on the bathroom design surely.
People have this idea you have some semi-public space because people might see each other in a state of undress.
But almost all westernised bathrooms contain a bunch of toilet stalls.
If everyone is going into a toilet stall to do their business - standing or sitting - then the only shared space is for washing hands or preening in front of a mirror. And if that's an issue, optionally put that in the stall too.
If security is a problem - many toilet stalls have limited doors/walls around them - then make it secure. This effort would benefit everyone.
Then humans - whatever their persuasion - could simply do their business in peace and get on with their life.
Considering that one of the key arguments for gun legalization in the US is self defense - due to the argument that a criminal will find a way to get a gun anyways - is an interesting parallel to the lack of unisex bathrooms. Creeps will find a way to violate the privacy of bathrooms regardless, so why don't we just simplify things for building codes.
Granted, I really appreciate urinals and I feel like they might be a casualty of switching over to unisex bathrooms in a lot of cases.
So if I had a series of heavy processing tasks to run - your approach to optimizing them would be to divide the tasks by whether they're above or below the median and then execute each half of tasks on separate equally equipped computers so that half of your computing resources are sitting idle for a good portion of the time?
Huh? I dunno, but I do believe no guy wants to wait 4x as long to be politically correct or for whatever marginal perceived benefit there may be for some tiny population. Nevermind the cost
Your example is way off because they are not equal processing tasks obviously and resources may not be mostly idle you just made that all up
And even if there is an inefficiency or inequality that doesn't mean the answer is unisex bathrooms I could come up with an equally contrived example for how inefficient that is
Ok...What are you talking about? Don't they already? How does changing that help anything? It would certainly still be a massive slowdown for half the population and certainly not "trivial" to change them all
While it would be a slowdown for half the population - it would equally increase accessibility for the other half of the population and society would more efficiently utilize the bathroom facilities we have. If we get unisex bathroom out of trans rights I'll be happy both to see their rights respected and for society to drop an outdated prudish concept.
When I'm out at the theatre with my partner - we don't go back to our seats until both of us have taken care of business - I'd be happy to accept a bit of a personal delay in order to speed up the process overall (and I'd be even happier if an appropriate amount of urinals still existed - I don't know what that ratio is, maybe a quarter of the floor space or so, but eliminating them would likely make restrooms less pleasant for everyone).
... of course this is so redundant but urinals are an obvious solution for half the population and already in place... Like I said there would be a massive cost this is nowhere near trivial like someone stated. I also mentioned there may be other solutions (like redistributing the resources in another way, while probably similarly expensive for little utility imo). unisex bathrooms is a separate idea. Most of the time there aren't huge discrepancies anyway it's not like men's bathrooms are always idle while women's are always out of control so the efficiency isn't really an issue 99% of the time. If we are just moving urinals inside a shared area why are we doing it at all? We're just making one big line. It's nice that you don't mind waiting for your partner but try selling that to the guy who takes 15 seconds and has to go to the back of this new line. It doesn't make any sense
Intelligent building would forecast demographics and optimize for the future I guess if you really just want "max efficiency" I assume this is already being done to an extent, but changing things already built sounds expensive af for little to no value in my opinion.
This comment alone shows that HN suffers deeply from not having many women participants. If y'all had more female commenters, you'd know that you don't get to see a bunch of girls naked in a high school or college locker room. Everyone is so insecure about their bodies that they change in the toilet stalls or take their bra off under their shirt then shimmy the sports bra up under the shirt and hook it then change shirt, or put on a towel to keep it all out of view. Being a teenage girl really sucks in a lot of ways. Of course one would have gender dysphoria if it has a glimmer of a way out of the trap of having to be look perfect, act perfect, get perfect grades, be a perfect friend, be perfectly sexy but not a slut, be perfect but not stuck-up etc that teenage girls face every day. (I understand that teenage boys face another set of pressures that can also be crushing -- as a teenager though you always think that someone else has a more-perfect life or a greater set of freedoms, right?)
As for the headline "Teenager finds way to push parental buttons: this never-before-seen act is the fault of liberals" yes, can confirm that toddlers start practicing early.
Reading a comment like this I mainly think "wow TV and social media have really f-ed up young people these days".
Back in my high school days, we had some bathing events and also shared sauna. One could either voluntary use the nude beach, or walk a bit and go to an outdoor pool with proper changing rooms and dressed people.
I think the split was roughly 50/50 and there also wasn't much gender skew.
But that was a time before smartphones. When people still walked over to each other's house to hang out.
When I was a teenager on the swim team in the early 00s, the school had to ban 'deck changing' [changing into or out of your swimsuit in view of the public] because, in a game of one-up[wo]manship, it became overtly sexual with towels falling "by accident." The sort of prudishness described above surprises me.
The point is clearly that we should discourage folks from undertaking any permanent life alterations while they're still in the "it could be just a phase" stage. To use your analogy, we're dissuading the person from tattooing "I hate broccoli" on them until they've reached age 18 or whatever. Nobody is saying we should deny them their self-image outright.
While wise it ignores the fact that the intervention can save lives which would be ended by 18 years of age.
Would you be for puberty blockers so that puberty can be delayed until 18 and automatic sex transformations be paused until the person can make a decision which way they want to go?
This might come off sounding a little rough, but as someone who had one sibling die of overdose and another by suicide, I don't think teenagers are the best stewards of their own bodies or sanity. Sometimes allowing them to make their own decisions about who they're going to be friends with or what they're going to do with their bodies ends up losing a life. I can see how lives might be saved by being permissive to them having what they want, when they want it, but I've also seen lives lost that way. So I find the "save lives" argument a little disingenuous or misinformed.
An open conversation and a working plan for what they want to do later in life is a good thing. I'm not opposed to hormone therapy as an interim measure. But I'm opposed to catering to teenage whims that aren't thought through very well, or discussed well, or which are driven by a desire to be part of a popular group, because I've seen the results. Confusion and self-hate and self-destruction can happen as a result of not being able to express yourself, but they can also happen as a result of too much unrestrained emancipation for a teenager, who doesn't understand the consequences. I'm not even speaking about trans issues here, just about teenage decisions in general. They're not fully rational people. I wasn't, either.
The concepts of "man" and "woman" are already doing a lot of work in language, society, law, etc. Redefining those terms would cause/is causing a lot of upheaval.
Think of the concepts of "citizen", "resident", "immigrant", "ex-pat", "DREAMer", etc - all terms related to where someone lives and what set of laws applies to them. Regardless of how the person feels, the label isn't just for their own sake. Someone can be a citizen and an immigrant if they are naturalized, saying someone is a resident implies (but not definitely) that they are not a citizen, ex-pats are assumed to be temporarily in the place where they reside.
Labelling trans women as women is a lossy translation that ignores a lot of societal edge cases.
I think for those two examples you listed, the modifier is orthogonal. While "black" or "cancer survivor" tell me more about them as a person, they don't help understand gender/sex. Gender and sex, or the residency words I listed, provide different information about the same attribute.
Saying someone is a cancer surviving resident doesn't add anything to my knowledge of their medical history or which laws apply to them, but resident vs ex-pat tells me a lot.
Sure, you are what you are __now__, but as a teenager that is going through radical changes. That's why you can't even get a tattoo in the US until you turn 18. In some states, not even with parental permission. Because it's irreversible. The whole trouble with reassignment surgery for minors is precisely due to the fact that who they are today is not who they will be as adults. Of course people should be treated as they want to be treated __now__, but society recognizes that adolescents are not capable of seeing far enough ahead to adulthood to be entrusted with making certain kinds of permanent, life-altering decisions.
There's no debate I'm aware of about lowering the age for getting a tattoo, or drinking, or acting in porn, or other things which are fine for adults, but which we don't permit 12 year olds to do.
> But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part? How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do?
A lot of us remember similar mistakes from their own teenage years. I had a short phase where I thought I was gay, because my classmates were starting to date girls but I had a close guy friend and wasn't very interested in girls. Then I looked it up, found some resources clearly explaining that's not what being gay is, and walked away more secure in my identity. If someone had told me that I couldn't be wrong, because nobody knows how I feel better than I do, I would probably have come out and then been confused and insecure for years.
I think your last paragraph hints at the root cause. Many people simply have a trouble seeing gender purely as self-image since it has originated from sex, which is objective. And this development is quite recent.
Two things here.
1. Sex isn't nearly as objective as you're making it out to be. It's a bimodal spectrum of correlated traits; meaning there isn't a single marker you can choose to separate everyone into neat buckets that wouldn't misclassify some cis people (and jeez yall get mad when you get misgendered). [0]
2. None of this is even remotely new, Im not sure where you're getting that impression from. Germany had an entire institute dedicated to studying trans people at the turn of the 20th century [1]. I'd agree that for a variety of (usually discriminatory and religious) reasons it hasn't been well studied, but trans people certainly arent new.
Two limits with a large space of indeterminate in between sounds an awful lot like an analogue signal. A system that classifies as A, B, other: grab bag of unrelated conditions isn't particularly useful in a societal nor medical context (and why it isn't used anywhere). You can objectively measure certain karyotypes, measure how someone's body reacts to hormones (and what hormones they produce), how that makes them feel, what that body can then do reproductively, (almost like a spectrum of correlated traits) but not make nice neat boxes that fits in the reproduction section of the text book you had in the 6th grade. By that measure, gender is just as "objective". Ask a person what gender they are, exactly 1 measurement required boom you're done (and with better accuracy than trying to measure anything else to boot).
Your specific exposure to the public "debate" is recent, sure. But just because you hadn't heard of it before the heritage foundation spent millions of dollars to insure you did didn't mean it wasn't happening.
Humans can only produce two different types of gametes (sperm or egg), and never both in the same body. And it’s never a “spectrum” with “speg” or “sperg” variants.
This is full of false information about sex, it is most certainly NOT just a spectrum of traits that is one shallow dimension that you focused on for the benfit of your agenda and the least scientific approach.
You won't easily find support for that on hacker news =)
So, just to get the record straight this woman[0], md/phd, expert in gender and sex, is less right/qualified than you, unqualified programmer (who cites no sources for your claim) on a web forum?
Like yeah, Im aware HN (as a population) hates women, and GSM in general, but somehow im always surprised by how much yall do.
Haha, ok you can believe any "expert" you want if it makes you feel better. I have no idea who that is and I dont care. Try looking at the idea logically and within a body of science not out of context and cherry picked =)
You shouldn't believe me you should believe science. I'm not arguing any of that go read about it yourself.
> But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part?
Some people claim to be cats. The argument is fairly leaking too. You might argue it is different for gender and to a degree that is true. Doesn't But this argument is pretty leaking too.
> How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do?
Because people lie about themselves all the time. Especially teenagers. We don't take every claim made by teenagers about their feeling as true on face value. We know they're practicing how to deceive people as part of growing up.
> You made a claim about medical professionals. That is not particularly relevant to what I claimed.
I removed that part as I agree it wasn't relevant.
> As for criticism of the research that exists, I agree that it isn't very good.
Unfortunately it's so poor that I judge it as being insufficient to use to form an opinion on this issue. It's much worse than the replication crisis at large, it's not clear that their methods prove what they claim in the first place if you look at their work. The pages I linked go into greater depth about why this is a difficult question to study and what the existing research gets wrong.
> The online echo chambers that children, including my own, seek out very much push the ideology that any claim to be male, female, non-binary or whatever must be accepted at face value.
That's as may be, but I suggest you read the WPATH standards of care if you're interested in what the medical community in general thinks about the medical treatment of trans people, including kids. It's a little out of date (2012), but if you can't find a knowledgeable medical professional nearby it's pretty much the gold standard, and is very well supported by evidence: https://www.wpath.org/publications/soc In particular, adolescents seem much less likely to desist than younger children.
The fact that it spreads inside friend circles should be all it takes to defeat the idea that it is based on some fundamental internal gender dysphoria. It's more akin to a social meme.
In not saying that applies to all cases, but definitely a good number of them among young people, especially girls.
It wouldn't be easy to prove something like that, because you're claiming the causation is inverted. You can't very well construct a controlled study out of people's social connections or gender identity.
I don't think either of us can do more than an educated guess here.
You said "The fact that it spreads inside friend circles should be all it takes to defeat the idea that it is based on some fundamental internal gender dysphoria." I offered a plausible alternative. At least you admit you're guessing now.
Since the explosion of kids identifying as trans is a rather recent phenomenon, it seems likely that there is no good research on the outcomes yet. The people identifying as trans who were studied ten years ago may be very different from the people who identify as trans today (their reasons for feeling trans may be completely different).
It seems rather obvious that something like social contagion is going on, similar to anorexia. There may be cases with other causes, but a lot of them at the moment are probably social contagion.
If you think about it, onset of puberty is when the bodies of kids undergo drastic changes, and it is normal that they struggle to come to terms with it. Maybe worse for girls because their bodies change in more obvious sexual ways.
So they are in a vulnerable state where their bodies feel wrong until they have adjusted to their "new world".
I don't find it surprising that they are vulnerable to people telling them the reason their body feels wrong is because they are really trans, and they desperately grasp for an offered cure.
That is just me thinking, not "medical research", mind you. However, I think parental common sense is underrated when it comes to such issues. Too much expert bullshit has been injected into child rearing over the centuries.
> But a LOT of teenagers, particularly girls, go through a period of gender dysphoria when they hit puberty. What little research exists on the topic says that most of those girls will grow out of their gender dysphoria, and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire.
Could you link to this research? This is a fraught topic that includes fraudulent studies and claims like this mean little without links.
I can only pile on with anecdotal evidence from what my spouse has seen, working in middle schools: yeah, like half of kids who ask to start going by an opposite-gender name, ask to be addressed by different pronouns, start dressing differently, et c., in middle school end up changing their minds before they reach high school, and it is often girls.
From what I have heard this does not, however, lead me to believe there's an epidemic of kids receiving medical intervention in support of this, who don't "really mean it". As best I can tell it just means puberty is weird and confusing sometimes, but that usually resolves itself (at least, more or less) after a bit, which should surprise no-one. I doubt many cases that are merely confusion or uncertainty or "experimenting" or whatever, reach the point of even having a conversation with a doctor about it. I could be wrong about that, but nothing I've heard has me worried about The Children. Suicide rates do, but not that.
I'll add onto this, if people are genuinely worried about invasive surgery, the policing of trans identity is counterproductive to addressing that concern.
What would be productive is allowing kids to use different pronouns, allowing them to dress themselves the way they wish and allowing them to seek affirmative care and affirmative communities -- so that they can explore their own gender identity without feeling like they need to commit hard or lean in against opposition that tells them they're not really trans.
To the extent that gender identity can be influenced by social norms, allowing kids to identify their own genders is a way of allowing them to safely experiment in that space without invasive surgeries that they might regret. But if everything becomes policing whether or not someone really is trans, if everything involves policing even minor interventions like puberty blockers, then of course kids who suspect they might be trans are going to think that surgery is the only way that they'll be accepted or feel comfortable -- because that's what "gender-critical" groups are telling them, they're telling them that having a certain body is a barrier to their identity.
For some trans people, exploring gender is a process. Allowing people to feel safe and accepted during that process decreases the risk of rash decisions. And accepting them regardless of whether or not they pass for their gender decreases social pressure that might exist telling them they need to medically transition to be valid.
It's not surprising that mocking gender fluidity, over-emphasizing physical attributes in gender identity, and restricting low-impact interventions like puberty blockers might make uncertain kids feel like they need to hard-commit to medically transitioning. It's not surprising that trans kids and trans-questioning kids would be alienated by that environment, and that they might be less willing to openly air their doubts and fears or seek external advice.
> What would be productive is allowing kids to use different pronouns
The debate is not about whether somebody can use a pronoun. It’s whether everyone else is compelled to use it as well. It’s the difference between positive and negative rights - whether you have the right to compel others to behave a certain way vs whether you have the right to behave a certain way yourself. Legally compelled speech creates a real Pandora’s box.
I think you should feel good for being respectful and for using whatever terms people prefer, but punishing people for not doing so seems wrong minded
> but punishing people for not doing so seems wrong minded
That's not really what I was getting at, what I was getting at is that creating an environment where people refuse to use proper pronouns or provide even basic accommodation for trans kids is going to make them more interested in medically transitioning, not less.
If you're a kid, and you suspect you might be a girl, and everyone around you is refusing to use pronouns because you don't look like a girl... it wouldn't be unbelievable for that situation to increase your risk of body dysphoria, because everyone around you is telling you you'll never be a girl until you look enough like one.
It can be someone's right to avoid referring to people by their proper pronouns, but I don't believe them if they turn around and say they're doing it to protect the kids from rash decisions about transitioning. Making kids feel safer and more accepted is how you protect them from rash decisions. Making them feel like you respect them and their identity is how you encourage them to seek outside advice and to be open about their doubts about their own gender.
> if people are genuinely worried about invasive surgery, the policing of trans identity is counterproductive to addressing that concern.
Your theory is that being accommodating on the first request makes more extreme requests less likely. An alternative theory is that bending over backwards to the first request makes such requests feel OK, and therefore makes more extreme requests more likely.
Do you have any research indicating that one theory is more likely to be true than the other?
In specific to trans identity, I would need to look up some figures, and I doubt there's a ton of modern research out yet. A good research project on this would track not the instances of transitioning, but the percentages of people who transition who later regret doing so.
Affirmative care does drastically and pretty irrefutably reduce the risk of suicide in trans/gender-questioning youth, but that's not exactly what you're asking about, you're asking specifically about whether affirmation and respect will decrease regrets about future transitioning. With trans kids, that's tricky to get data on today, because we kind of have to wait for them to get older to find out if they have regrets.
However, this philosophy is consistent with how we approach many other topics with kids. There's a reason why psychologists offer guarantees of confidentiality, because we've learned that when people don't feel safe talking about an issue they're having, they don't talk about it. This is also the philosophy behind ending the war on drugs, it's the philosophy behind modern approaches to sex education. We are focused on management and education, not repression.
We can also point back towards the debates about gay conversion therapy and look at some of those stats. Gay identity can follow a similar trajectory to trans identity; not everyone who thinks they're gay as a kid identifies as gay when they're older, and vice-versa. Discovering a sexual orientation can be a deeply confusing process. However, we have generally accepted that affirmative counseling for children who are experiencing distress over their sexual orientation is more helpful than conversion therapy or locking down the conversation. It is likely that trans children will have similar experiences.
Trans kids will not stop questioning their gender identity just because they're told to. But if that questioning is happening in complete isolation, then how are they supposed to make educated decisions about any of this? In particular, a child who is wondering what they would feel like using girl/boy pronouns may simply burn with curiosity, rather than trying out the identity and genuinely discovering whether or not it fits them.
As a somewhat over-simplistic analogy, a child who is convinced that they want to play the piano might take lessons for a while and then decide that they don't like playing the piano. Or they might decide that they love piano, and they might go out and buy their own keyboard. Either outcome is fine. But regardless of what they choose, the early lessons will have better-equipped them to make that decision.
Affirmative care does drastically and pretty irrefutably reduce the risk of suicide in trans/gender-questioning youth, but that's not exactly what you're asking about, you're asking specifically about whether affirmation and respect will decrease regrets about future transitioning.
No, that is NOT what I'm asking about.
What I'm asking for data on is whether efforts to accommodate teens in their requests is more likely to lead to them being satisfied with what they have received, or more likely to make more extreme requests.
The specific example is whether accommodations such as offering teens a choice of pronouns, along with messages about accepting their transgender nature, whatever that might be, makes the teens more or less likely to seek gender reassignment surgery.
> The specific example is whether accommodations such as offering teens a choice of pronouns, along with messages about accepting their transgender nature, whatever that might be, makes the teens more or less likely to seek gender reassignment surgery.
Then I'm a little bit confused at your question. I suppose my prior is that acceptance of trans identity will probably lead to more people coming out and more people seeking gender reassignment surgery. I don't know that for certain (again, we don't really have studies about this in the long term yet), but again, we can look at other situations (gay rights, acceptance of left-handedness, ADHD, etc...) and based on how those movements have gone, it's pretty reasonable to conclude that the more people feel comfortable expressing their gender identity, the more people will decide to express their gender identity, including (sometimes) through surgery.
However, that is a meaningless thing to worry about unless you believe that gender reassignment surgery is inherently bad, which... it's not. We don't care whether gender reassignment surgeries become more common, we care about people making mistakes and regretting their surgeries. So the only statistics worth measuring here are the outcomes of people who choose to have surgery or choose to avoid surgery. We want to know whether as adults they feel they made the right choice.
Lowering the number of surgeries is not a metric we should be optimizing for. Improving outcomes and avoiding post-surgery regret is the metric we care about.
I guess to answer your specific question, I suspect that acceptance of transgender identities will probably lead to more people coming out as trans, and will probably lead to more surgery. But that has nothing to do with the question of whether or not affirmation is good for kids and whether it helps them make more educated decisions about their identity in the future. Having more trans-identifying people isn't a bad outcome unless those people are unhappy with their identity.
> The specific example is whether accommodations such as offering teens a choice of pronouns, along with messages about accepting their transgender nature, whatever that might be, makes the teens more or less likely to seek gender reassignment surgery.
So I don't understand why this is a question that anyone anywhere would care about, unless your insinuation is that your goal is to minimize the number of transgender people overall.
Do you care if your kid has regrets about the decisions they end up making about their body once they reach adulthood? Or do you care whether your kid is trans? Because those two concerns are completely orthogonal to each other.
My question has a very specific purpose. I'm asking you to back up the following claim that YOU made.
"That's not really what I was getting at, what I was getting at is that creating an environment where people refuse to use proper pronouns or provide even basic accommodation for trans kids is going to make them more interested in medically transitioning, not less."
I don't know whether that statement is correct. But my strong suspicion is that it is the opposite of the truth. That the more we encourage the idea of transitioning, the more interest we create in all forms of transitioning.
Moving on, you ask:
"Do you care if your kid has regrets about the decisions they end up making about their body once they reach adulthood? Or do you care whether your kid is trans? Because those two concerns are completely orthogonal to each other."
The answer is that I care whether my kid will come to have regrets. I don't actually care whether they are trans. I care about whether they are happy.
It is my belief that medical interventions in teenage years are likely to work out poorly for future happiness. I wish I could say that this is an informed belief, but after attempting to inform myself I concluded that good information is not actually available. Still, since that is my belief, I believe that increased odds of a medical intervention implies increased odds of a bad outcome.
> "That's not really what I was getting at, what I was getting at is that creating an environment where people refuse to use proper pronouns or provide even basic accommodation for trans kids is going to make them more interested in medically transitioning, not less."
I don't care about legalism and I'm not going to get into gotcha debates about, "well technically you said".
My intent behind that statement would be more accurate to say: non-affirming environments force children and young-adults to make extreme decisions without the benefit of experimentation or counseling over those decisions. In that environment, it is more likely that they will regret the choices they make, because they will never get an opportunity to try out those choices in a limited capacity beforehand. This seems to me to be an obviously logical, reasonable statement: people who have less experience living as a trans person are less equipped to make weighty decisions about their future life. People who have less experience in any area of their life are less equipped to make weighty decisions about that area.
If that seems like a different argument to you than what I said before, then I apologize for being confusing, clumsy, and imprecise, and I'll happily concede one internet-point. But beyond that I'm not really interested in those kinds of fights.
> The answer is that I care whether my kid will come to have regrets. I don't actually care whether they are trans. I care about whether they are happy.
In which case, the only studies that will be helpful are the ones that measure regret, not rate of surgeries. Unfortunately those studies are limited. Bear in mind that post-puberty regret and regret over waiting on transitioning are also possible outcomes here. Both medically transitioning and waiting to transition or avoiding puberty blockers/hormones can have negative outcomes, which is why I emphasize kids being able to get more life experience being trans before they make that choice.
While long-term studies on transitioning are limited, there is at least pretty strong evidence that affirmative care reduces suicide rates in trans youth[0], so it does seem to have some measurable positive outcomes.
Without having done any research, it certainly feels more plausible that experimenting on a small scale should satisfy curiosity more than it would engender (heh) some burning desire to take things further just for the sake of it.
And tendentious language, such as calling simple things like not giving detentions for a boy arriving to school in a skirt or a girl declaring she wants to be known as Pete "bending over backwards", really only weakens your argument.
Note that trans rights activists are pushing for the use of "personal pronouns", which are not limited to the traditional binary genders. They want you to use pronouns such as Ze/Zir/Zirs/Zirself, or Moon/Mooner/Moonself, or whatever someone feels like.
If you object, or can't keep up, you'll be labelled a transphobe.
Here's a sample, linked from the website of Stonewall UK, a prominent trans rights organization:
I don't understand how people are so upset about this. Is learning someone's correct pronouns more difficult than learning a preferred nickname? If somebody comes into work and announces that they've gotten married and they have a different last name now, is that a major inconvenience to people? I had professors in college who wanted me to call them prof, and some who wanted me to call them doctor, and some who wanted me to call them Mrs/Ms/Mr. It's fine, you learn their preferences and you do it.
Transphobia isn't manifested in messing up someone's pronouns or getting a tiny bit behind on something, or accidentally calling someone the wrong thing. When people start to get suspicious of transphobia is when they see someone acting like using a pronoun is a giant imposition rather than very simple sign of respect.
Seriously, who the heck cares if someone wants to use a different pronoun? I don't have any validation criteria for that. Heck, if you want me to alternate pronouns every other day of the week, I'll do my best to accommodate that and I'll respond respectfully if I mess up and I'm corrected.
I just don't see what the big deal is here. We have so many different inconsistent rules in modern society about how to politely refer to other people, asking people's pronouns doesn't seem much more inconvenient to me.
These aren't great examples. Names, nicknames, surnames, and professional titles are all things that typically make sense given the context.
If your professor wants to be called "prof" or "Dr.", it's probably because they're a professor or a doctor.
But a personalized pronoun is like someone informing you that they identify as a doctor, even though they have no degree, and you must therefore address them as Dr.
This makes no more sense than when someone says they identify as a non-binary pan-sexual gender-fabulist (yes, I know such people), and you're now required to memorize their customized pronouns.
Now, to your point, I used to work with a trans woman who was very obviously a biological male, but also very obviously identifying as a female in gender. She wore dresses and feminine hair styles. Her demand for female pronouns made perfect sense, and her overt appearance and behavior made it easy for everyone to remember her self identification. I have no problem with that.
But I'm probably not going to put much effort into remembering anything beyond the traditional binary pronouns. Pick one of those and I'll stick to it, but if you expect me to call you xe/xim, you'll likely be disappointed.
I don't personally run requests like this through an internal filter to figure out whether or not I agree with them or whether they make sense to me. To your point of titles:
> But a personalized pronoun is like someone informing you that they identify as a doctor, even though they have no degree, and you must therefore address them as Dr.
I don't think I've ever looked up someone's PHD after they asked me to call them doctor. I just do it, it's no skin off of my back. If I find out that they're not a doctor later, I might think that's kind of weird, but I'm probably not going to fight them over it.
Same if someone says they got married, or if they're getting married and keeping their last name, or if someone gives me a pronunciation of their name that doesn't match phonetically with how it's spelled. I don't really know that I have a validation criteria for any of those things, I don't think I've ever needed one.
I guess I can theoretically think of examples where it would be an issue, but I've never personally encountered them, and I don't think xe/xim rises to that level. Memorizing xe/xim isn't any harder to me than memorizing how a name is pronounced.
I don't understand how people are so upset about people disliking it when others respond coercively, threaten legal action, cause job loss, or enact excommunication from society (if you're a celebrity) when somebody demands that you call them something unconventional in the grander scheme of societal norms.
I don't think it's all that abnormal, at all, for a grand majority to push back on a vocal, disruptive, abusive, coercive, entitled group of activists sprinkled throughout the world who represent a slightly larger group of otherwise peaceful, passive people who have embraced a chosen (or inert) identity (or fad, for many) that flies in the face of society as a whole.
Disclaimer: this next paragraph is wholly and entirely satirical, and I, with full sincerity, do not intend to take any of the actions portrayed in the following example:
Dan, if you don't remember that I like my coffee with milk and agave nectar tomorrow, I'm unfortunately going to have you lose your job. Sorry man. That's just how I feel. You must remember, or I will continue to lose respect for you. I'm not going to just leave you alone and get over the fact that you won't remember -- I'm going to use social media to destroy your life and complicate your relationships at work, with your friends, family, and revel in any other damage I can do because you didn't remember the way I like my coffee. You must be my friend, but if you forget my coffee preference once, you're fully subject to my verbal and emotional abuse.
See how that works? This is the reality. And people wouldn't be calling this out in droves if the news headlines, TV show skits mocking it, the endless reports & anecdotes of people's lives destroyed, etc. didn't already prove this phenomenon. Irrefutable. And it has to stop dominating everyone's minds. It is psychological torture on an unimaginable scale, to hold most of society hostage to an unmerited stigma for the sake of "respect" demanded of it. And what good is respect if it is not earned by demonstrating positive intent and action in everyday conversation?
Activists on this front would do well to understand this, lest they continually fail in their mission to create a unified and equal society. Animosity, labels, and threats endorsed -- by proxy -- by the media, government institutions, and major corporations are the last thing that will unify people.
It's really not, as far as I've seen? At least not in the spaces where I'm active.
If you came into work with me and started to call me George, and refused to call me Daniel, yeah, you might face consequences at work for that. If it became a really serious problem, you might get fired, partially just out of the confusion of why this was such a big issue for you. I'm a little more tolerant of stuff like this, I'm not sure I care if people use the wrong name for me, but I don't advise going around and trying it, you're probably going to run into issues. And I have definitely met adults and professors who would openly reprimand someone for using their wrong title.
But you're not going to get thrown into jail for using someone's pronouns incorrectly, and you're certainly not going to get cancelled because you messed up one time. To the extent you are followed around by aggressive activists who are berating you for small errors, you can safely ignore them, society as a whole and the trans community as a whole doesn't think that way.
That's not to say that purity spirals and cancellation isn't a thing, it's not to say that people don't get overzealous about stuff. And certainly, Twitter is gonna Twitter. But Twitter represents maybe 20% of the population. I think you're going a little overboard with this characterization.
BUT... let's assume for a second that you're right. Let's assume that you are facing stigmatization for using the wrong pronouns, let's assume that enforcement is out of control and people are just getting canceled left and right for simple mistakes. We'll assume for the rest of this comment that literally everything you've said is accurate.
> I don't understand how people are so upset about people disliking it when others respond coercively, threaten legal action, cause job loss, or enact excommunication from society (if you're a celebrity) when somebody demands that you call them something unconventional in the grander scheme of societal norms.
What you are describing is the reality that trans people have faced for generations. Come out, get fired. Come out, get disowned by your family. Get shunned by society. Have politicians call you a menace, get told that you're dangerous to have around kids. Get evicted from properties, get used as a talking point. Have entire books written about how there's something wrong with your brain, that there's something wrong with you. Get attacked in prisons, get constantly accused everywhere you go that you are a fraud. Forget about having your online life ruined, have your regular life ruined. Get harassed as you're walking down the street, get thrown out of your church. Get told that you're a symptom of a decaying society.
Do you understand why some members of that group might end up having a short fuse about being misgendered? Do you understand why they might start to get worried about transphobia, why they might start to read into incorrect pronoun usage, or get a little bit paranoid sometimes?
What percentage of the US was openly disappointed that the Supreme Court ruled that sex discrimination laws applied to LGBTQ+ people? Look around you at the laws states are passing right now. Transphobia in the US is alive and well, and its agenda is actively being pursued today.
That is why this stuff dominates people's minds. Because the trans community understands better than almost anyone else in this country what it actually means to be cancelled by society, and they recognize a vocal group of Americans who are not just refusing to use pronouns, but that are trying to demonize them and erase them from society.
----
Now, you are not obligated to pay attention to militant, bad faith, or unreasonable activists. Those people are a minority, you don't need to feel bad about ignoring them. And no reasonable trans person is going to get mad at you for accidentally messing up a pronoun.
You are also not legally obligated to use anyone's pronouns. You might get fired or disinvited from some social groups, but if that's a big fear then you can vote to repeal fire-at-will laws. I can't control what a company does or who people associate with, I can't override someone else's freedom of association. In any case, you should not be losing sleep over whether you're going to get arrested for misgendering someone.
But it is utterly disingenuous to argue that there's a completely new, novel plague of cancellations over trans people. That plague always existed, and in the past it was even worse. It just affected different people than you.
The biggest difference we're actually seeing today is that more of society is realizing that refusing to accommodate trans people even in extremely trivial matters is kind of a jerk move. What we are seeing as cisgender people when we watch someone get cancelled is a very tiny portion of what many trans people have been living with throughout the majority of American history.
So if the backlash people have against anti-trans rhetoric really is terrifying, or you really do feel that people are on a hair-trigger to cancel each other, then pass some equal rights legislation and maybe everyone will be less on edge. On the same thread that people are openly complaining that trans women are "erasing the identity of biological women", at the same time that states are literally banning affirmative care for kids, you have to understand why some trans people and activists are a little bit reserved and prickly about this stuff at the moment.
thanks for writing this Dan, it's a breath of fresh air in an otherwise pretty exhausting thread. sometimes I think I shouldn't even bother in these conversations because it takes a lot of patience but I worry about people on here assuming the bad faith activists you mention speak for me and my trans community. comments like this make it worth it.
I'll add onto this appreciation post. I really enjoy reading things on HN but the perspective on issues like this tends to be very one-sided.
Anecdotally, pretty much every trans space I participate in is usually full of people trying to be themselves without getting fired, disowned, or murdered. There is nary a mention of going into women's or men's spaces without passing first AND some pressing need where a public bathroom cant be avoided. The fact that so much focus in this discussion is on use-cases which most people agree aren't practical already paints it in a suspicious light.
The image painted here is very much giving the impression that bad faith activists are the primary worry of society rather than most trans people trying to figure out if they have the right to exist in the society in the first place.
With attention being drawn to us yet again by a conservative party trying to distract its base from its own policy failures, it is hard to have this cyclical discussion again and again without getting exhausted. At least every time this hits the mainstream it feels like there is a little progress.
Oh right, that article! Sure, but if I'm making assertions about organizations like Stonewall, I'd rather cite them directly, rather than indirectly from an Economist story.
A) You weren't making a comment about Stonewall, but about some link that you'd found on Stonewall.
B) I, OTOH, was commenting about Stonewall, pointing out that it seemed a crappy source. As such, quoting a known reputable source's judgement of them seems far more prudent than the primary source itself. They're not likely to say "We're a crappy source", are they?
(Heeey, I think I may finally have figured out Wikipedia's obsession with explicitly secondary sources.)
If someone required me to chant "Chocolate is god" whenever I enter their home, and my refusal to do so is a punishable / jailable offense, then that is a massive breach of my own rights to control my own speech.
I would probably choose to no longer spend time with those people if they felt they could compell (or more accurately, coerce) me to speak a certain way.
The same applies to identity, given that immediate obvious biological traits are present that can be used to infer a person's identity, and if asked to refer to them as something different, to respect that as long as the request is as respectful as me asking someone to do me a small favor.
Anything beyond that is toxic, purely from an emotional/verbal abuse lens.
Fair point -- then I suppose I won't come over to your home if I find the rules unreasonable. The ball is in your court at that point, because I have a choice that you can't take away from me outside of an unreasonable or immoral means. Would I be the "Karen" in this situation? Perhaps. The critical party is always seen as the enemy, so no loss there.
At that point, it all boils down to control on either side. One side is demanding control of one's speech (in one's own home, in this example, let's be specific). On the other side, they are demanding respect for one's right to think and speak freely without being compelled by complete strangers, and in the case of Canada, by the government.
Just as I am free not to participate in a religion and all of its chants and sayings, I am also free not to participate in the demands of a fellow human who uses personal rules and boundaries in excess to exert control over others. It's really no different than someone 50 years ago screeching "you will call me sir," -- in fact, I would argue a good portion of Leftists would absolutely flip their shit if they learned someone's father demanded their children call them "sir".
"What gives?", they'd ask. In that situation, there's an authority figure using that as a way to teach his children respect in the context of an authority/subordinate relationship, yet something about it still seems silly, especially if the father was using it as a way to strong-arm his children leading to a poorer relationship later.
In a nearly identical way, some (not all) in the trans community, especially in the public sphere, exert that same control by strong-arming their way into gaining respect from complete strangers they never earned it from, and without overt and obvious physical traits to denote one's gender falling into 1 of 2 major buckets by deduction.
"Don't guess what I am, know what I am," and guessing wrong is minus 3 points on the relationship building scale. Nice way to start! It could have been much simpler. For those who are more forgiving of those mistakes and ask politely for others to call them a certain way -- that would make it more reasonable; and I would venture to say that the majority in this community are that way. The only other issue now is the sheer complexity of remembering 50+ genders and growing.
Many people can barely remember others' names after asking 3 times, much less N number of possible genders.
"Don't take yourself too seriously" never had a better moment to shine. The world would be so much different if everyone treated those genders as something faddish or silly, where one's job, reputation, standing with friends, and even criminal status aren't hinging on a few mistakes not remembering others' preferred pronouns, especially for public figures and celebrities. God forbid they mess up or setup boundaries against more angry/coercive types. The same goes for employers or anyone else refusing employment or service to members of the trans community. That also is a real shame.
What good is a society not built on grace, rather than punishment, for something so frivolous as pronouns?
I'm a male, and I've been called "she" by accident (and even jokingly) too many times to count. All of those people still have jobs and good standing in society because I didn't take to social media to mount a campaign against them.
I'm proud of that. :) Though, it didn't take much for me to brush it off, because that's what good people do. Turning it into a harmless joke only evolved the interactions into something memorable that left both parties feeling seen and respected.
If you're going to cherry-pick, at least recognize some of the other cherries:
> If someone refused to use a preferred pronoun — and it was determined to constitute discrimination or harassment — could that potentially result in jail time?
> It is possible, Brown says, through a process that would start with a complaint and progress to a proceeding before a human rights tribunal.
Sure sounds like "potential" to me, no matter how unlikely its proponents claim that will be.
And any talk of tribunals always makes my ears perk up, as it should anyone who values representative democracy.
> I would probably choose to no longer spend time with those people if they felt they could compell (or more accurately, coerce) me to speak a certain way.
This is the solution to your problem; and, if you were continually offensive to those people, one you may be forced to enact - by their rejection of your presence. However, if you do choose to interact with them, or choose to engage in activities where you will interact with them (during your work duties, for example) - that's the social contract you're going to have to adhere to if you want to continue doing so. You wouldn't argue that you should be able to go around verbally assaulting people without consequence because that would be an infringement to your right to free speech (which has always been limited, by the way; like it or not - you can't shout fire in a crowded theatre), would you?
Yup, precisely. In a nutshell, you're saying this goes both ways, and I think that's perfectly acceptable.
I will caveat that I believe people who are opposed to the gender pronoun salad should also have the right to share that publicly, and in the event a person who subscribes to that way of life stumbles upon those public comments would benefit most by live-and-let-live, and simply write off or ignore those individuals if they feel upset.
Unfortunately every single permutation within intersectionality, whether "normative" or not, are going to face mild disagreement or prejudice towards their own ideologies.
A humble response is one that lives beyond it, rather than consuming all of one's time fighting it in the name of justice, IMHO. Seeking perfect insulation from disagreement is unachievable in society without also severely marginalizing a few groups at any given moment.
That is, unless there is a clear sign that said prejudice is on track to grow rapidly in the direction of genocide or overt societal exclusion and/or the belief that reeducation is necessary. All of these are unacceptable.
Though we are witnessing this being done against normative groups en masse in companies and public institutions today, unfortunately. It appears that most are reaching a breaking point and pushing back, and those who do represent many different races, creeds, and backgrounds. It's encouraging to see.
> I will caveat that I believe people who are opposed to the gender pronoun salad should also have the right to share that publicly, and in the event a person who subscribes to that way of life stumbles upon those public comments would benefit most by live-and-let-live, and simply write off or ignore those individuals if they feel upset.
What do you mean by this? In what circumstances do you think it's acceptable to make these comments? What qualifies as "stumbling upon"? Do you mean to include group interactions in non-dedicated forums of discussion? Personal interactions? Should neither party be permitted to raise objection? Why should either party be expected to simply leave the discussion without contributing?
> That is, unless there is a clear sign that said prejudice is on track to grow rapidly in the direction of genocide or overt societal exclusion and/or the belief that reeducation is necessary. All of these are unacceptable.
> What do you mean by this? In what circumstances do you think it's acceptable to make these comments?
Excellent questions, and ones that are complicated to answer in any truly objective sense. The measuring stick I would maybe use to judge an appropriate context would be the same as how we would maybe treat a particular interest or political stance.
Does it feel appropriate to minimize someone else's political views to their face in a casual group setting? Probably not.
Does it feel appropriate to share a political rant in one's workplace chat that may have deeply personal implications? Maybe not. But if it did happen, could the offended party forgive the person who shared? That'd be favorable.
Does it feel appropriate to share the same political rant with a close friend? Sure, why not? Family? Definitely, if you're on good terms.
How about on Facebook? Twitter? Sure -- a point of disagreement is a few scroll wheel clicks away from passing over it, if a cool, measured response can't be mustered.
We are surrounded with opposition daily in various forms. The measure of our character is judged by how we choose to handle those moments. Sometimes walking away is a more mature response, because it acknowledges that the person is capable of thriving despite their opposition. It indicates that their ego is in their own control, not swayed by any insult that passively comes their way.
In the event you have a persistent harasser, it's time to either respond in kind, or get help from someone with the power to stop such harassment, but a single passive statement of belief or opinion shared is hardly even close to classifying as harassment.
> Who judges this and how are they chosen to do so?
Another tricky one, and very difficult to qualify.
If I had to choose, I might say the military if I've entrusted them to have intelligence data and a general pulse of potential threats within or outside a nation. Maybe that trust is misplaced? Who then would I turn to? The media? Would the media faithfully represent the issue in an unbiased manner? They've done very well to shatter that trust, as a collective institution.
Who then? Citizen journalists and average people recording and sharing video footage of evidence of mistreatment, but shared en masse? Reports of in the hundreds? Thousands? That'd be a good indicator that something's amiss.
Parents approaching their school boards en masse across the country to confront Critical Race Theory's damaging effects on school-aged children leading to fundamentally racist views against white people? That's a pretty good indicator something's wrong, especially if there hadn't been a past history of malicious / nefarious confrontations of the same sort, to where the recent recordings and reports of this happening are objectively novel situations within a larger period of time.
Despite those reports, there still would need to be a fairly unbiased judge of the broader situation, and one (or many) who could act decisively in enough time to prevent catastrophe should a threatening scenario for any given race or group arise.
It's the same sort of question as "did the Allies act soon enough against Nazi Germany's genocide?" or "did anyone act soon enough or... at all, against the Bolsheviks?"
Well, people finally acted, but was it enough? Or was the potential disaster they prevented grander than what had already been committed?
I couldn't confidently say there is anyone on Earth who is qualified to answer that question outside of God Himself.
> The debate is not about whether somebody can use a pronoun.
It sort of is, though: someone's use of a pronoun only exists to the extent that others refer to them that way. My pronouns for myself are I/me/mine. Your avoidance of the pronouns I prefer denies me the "use" of those pronouns. I can't use them without your help.
Not disagreeing about the positive/negative rights characterization. And bigger picture: you're right that this really is about respect. Many people want to demand (even if not compel) more attention to mutual respect; many others want to use disrespectfulness as an indicator of their independence, because they view that as a more important value.
Right? It's like if someone asked me "Hey, I'd prefer you call me Robert instead of Bobby" and I got pissed about it because they're trying to infringe on my free speech.
It's their identity, they're asking you to identify them a particular way.
Are they asking you to expend a small amount of effort to mentally adjust how to refer to them? Yes. Have people been changing nicknames over their lives for probably hundreds or thousands of years? Also yes.
But you ask someone to use a different pronoun and suddenly it's just too much.
I see it being compared to demanding people call you "King Robert (the Beloved) III, the Resplendent." Is it disrespectful not to meet their demands because it makes you feel silly? At what point are you allowed to say that they require excessive external effort to help them maintain their identity?
I mean I know plenty of people who want to be called ridiculous things, on the internet for example I'm talking to someone who apparently is called DangitBobby. And I'm KittenInABox. I'd be super weirded out if someone demanded that my name is too ridiculous and they'll call me Susan instead on the internet because its their free speech rights.
In the context of the internet it wouldn't be silly at all for us to call each other those things! But the internet is also sort of a wild west of etiquette so all bets are off.
Well, not at the point where you say "she" instead of "he". The fact that you can come up with a ridiculous example doesn't mean the actual request is ridiculous.
I don't think that she, he, or they are ridiculous. I personally have never been instructed on someone's pronouns before so I have no real life example of something that I would find ridiculous. But it's not difficult for me to imagine a set of pronouns that I would not enjoy using, and would probably avoid interactions with someone who insisted that I use them.
So you're making an argument against the concept of respecting someone's requested pronouns, because it's "not difficult for you to imagine" a situation where you would "feel silly" even though you've never even encountered someone who asked you to use even non-silly pronouns.
Great contribution.
The sad thing is that while this is only a conversation on the internet, there are people out there passing laws affecting actual humans with the same amount of actual exposure to those humans and based entirely on their own imagined discomfort.
Okay. I can tell you feel your logical position is much stronger than it actually is. We need not live through things to form opinions, and since I've never had to deny anyone's pronoun request I'm not really sure what you think you're defending against. Maybe explain how you think my opinion wrong instead of huffing and puffing about hypotheticals being evil. I don't feel the shame you've tried to direct my way. Maybe some second hand embarrassment for what I'm reading. Great contribution.
Their are plenty non ridiculous examples, but no clear place to draw the line.
What if I asked to be addressed as "Sir"? Would it matter if I were nobility, or a nobody just trying to assert dominance? Or if you hated me and thought I was the opposite of a gentleman? But what if I thought of myself as a perfect gentlemen? Are you bound by my self perception?
Ridiculous is a relative term. If I think a request is ridiculous, am I free to ignore it?
> But you ask someone to use a different pronoun and suddenly it's just too much.
It may indeed be. I likely don't have the time or energy to correctly address people who insist on being called they/them, or xe/xem. I have enough trouble remembering people's names.
Getting someone's pronoun wrong by accident happens. And it's generally just an "oh sorry, I'll try to get that right next time" and you move on. The problematic people are the ones who make a deliberate point of not using the pronouns that someone would like them to use, because they've independently decided that those pronouns are wrong.
Well, they say it's too much - but really it's just that they believe you aren't a valid member of the group you're claiming to be and they can't directly call you a liar. They're wrong, of course; but they're also lying when they say it's too much effort - that's not why.
Yes, very much a lack of respect for someone's choice of identity.
Forget nicknames, how would these people feel if somebody just said "Hey I'm going to call you Arnold now, because you fit my mental image of Arnold." Wildly inappropriate thing to do?
If you want to go and impose whatever pronoun you want on someone based on how they look, don't act shocked when you get called out for being a dick to them.
We don't have an obligation to call somebody by their real name nor should we have an obligation to use their preferred pronouns. We should do it out of respect, but we shouldn't be obligated to do so by law or some other rule.
I've not seen someone suffer negative consequences for calling someone else the wrong real name. I've seen instances of negative consequences for someone using the wrong pronoun though.
Is that because there would be no consequences if I showed up to my job and started calling every customer I talk to "Frank"?
Or is it because deliberately going out of your way to call people the wrong name to make a political point isn't a thing that anyone does, so nobody has needed a rule to make them knock it off?
The gender critical are not policing trans identity; rather, trans-activists are doing the policing of gender expression by loudly insisting that any kind of socially non-normative gender expression should be seen as tantamount to and ipso facto equated with some sort of trans identity. Your own reference to "gender fluidity" as tantamount to a separate identity rather than a characteristics that all humans may share to a lesser or greater extent, is an especially clear example of this. Need I point out how this policing may be harmful to non-heteronormatively-expressing folks?
> The gender critical are not policing trans identity
I don't know how anyone could look at the swath of laws introduced throughout 2020-2021 in both the US and in the UK and actually believe that people are not trying to police trans identity.
> by loudly insisting that any kind of socially non-normative gender expression should be seen as tantamount to and ipso facto equated with some sort of trans identity.
I mean, no. One of the good side-effects of allowing people to be more comfortable with gender fluidity is reducing stereotypes about what men and women need to look like and how they need to act. It means less telling women that something is wrong with them if they inhabit traditional male roles or have certain body types.
This is helpful not only for trans people, but also for non-conforming cis people. The less that people are freaking out over somebody calling themselves a girl if they don't look a certain way, the better things are for everyone who is not inhabiting a traditional gender role, whether they be cis or trans.
> Need I point out how this policing may be harmful to non-heteronormatively-expressing folks?
No, you don't need to. As I pointed out above, this policing isn't happening, and breaking down social norms about gender expression creates safe spaces for non-heteronormatively expressing people, regardless of whether or not they identify as trans.
An advantage of separating concepts like gender, sex, and presentation is that non-conforming cis people can feel more comfortable saying, "my appearance/interests do not make me less of a woman/man."
The idea that trans people are telling girls who like sports that they have to be men just so fundamentally misunderstands what the trans community actually believes about sex and gender. Trans people largely believe the opposite of what you say, they are pushing back against the idea that you can be "prescribed" an innate gender-identity by society.
This description is the opposite of my experience of the trans community. In my experience of trans people they are welcoming of any combination of gender expression and identity and are universally supportive of gender exploration and non-traditional gender expression for trans and cis people alike.
Unfortunately, trans-activists are not at all co-extensive with 'the trans community'. Many self-proclaimed activists "for trans rights" are not even trans themselves, and pursue social positions, points of view and policies that are largely opposed by actual trans people.
Who? Your argument appears, to me, to be dangerously approaching what resembles that of a "true Scotsman" or "straw man" fallacy. You should provide some data and sources to back up your anecdotal observations or you risk appearing disingenuous in your discourse.
Also, why is it that you refer to people who advocate for the validity of the trans experience as "trans activists" but insist on using the term "gender critical" to describe those who advocate for the position that the trans experience is invalid? Would not a more appropriate term be "anti-trans activists"? Is the resemblance to the "pro-choice/pro-life" argument - i.e. using a euphemism to avoid saying what the position is descriptively and clearly - purposeful?
> "gender critical" to describe those who advocate for the position that the trans experience is invalid
While some people with highly traditionalist views might indeed believe this, many gender critical folks do not. Trans identity can definitely be valid, but so can cis identity. And it's definitely wrong to conflate any and all non-normative gender expression or presentation with some kind of all-encompassing "trans experience", at least in the strict identity sense.
Puberty blockers are a pretty nifty tool to this end - they allow any hard committal to be deferred - the child can reverse their decision without any serious long term ills. I am rather concerned about the possibility that invasive surgery might become normalized in non-adults but I don't believe it's something that's close to happening.
Teenagers explore their identity in a number of vectors. I have always been strongly opposed to parentally imposed career choices and gender falls into this same category except there is some genetic predisposition that will carry on bodily changes unless proactive intervention is undertaken.
Impossible. Your request is a distraction and is deceptive - at best - because medicine doesn't work that way - and it never has. There's always the risk of long-term and short-term side-effects when any medication or treatment is given to treat any condition; the question is one of the benefits outweighing the risks. Accepting responsibility for the outcomes of these decisions is what lies at the heart of practising medicine.
Frankly, transgender youth who seek these treatments generally suffer from clinical mental health disorders - including anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. These carry a significant risk of long-term suffering and anguish - not to mention the obvious fact that suicide is far too common in this population.
The risks of treatment are well studied and well known - the drugs used have existed for decades. They absolutely do not have to be completely safe and free of long term side effects - and even then the risk present is incredibly low - if what it does is keep them from committing suicide because of the suffering they endure as their bodies slowly turn into what they don't want to be. Surely you can imagine the distress that would cause?
The studies and metastudies and International Endocrine Society metareviews and treatment protocol recommendations are there and the vast majority of them say that you do less harm by providing blockers than you do by withholding them - do your own googling.
I am very much an advocate for trans rights, notwithstanding my hesitation about surgical and hormonal interventions being pushed for pre-pubescent children, and some of the more aggressive self-id advocacy.
> the question is one of the benefits outweighing the risks
Naturally, and this is the essence of the "safety and efficacy" goal that is at the heart of our medical regulatory framework.
> Frankly, transgender youth who seek these treatments generally suffer from clinical mental health disorders
I absolutely agree. That makes the subject a difficult one to study, and all the more important to devote resources to that study, and to warrant great care before we have good data, which we don't yet.
> the drugs used have existed for decades
Yes they have, and we have decades of data on the negative side effects.
Apparently Pink News forgot to actually read this study, a careful reading of which reveals the following:
- The percentage of people who ideated and planned suicide (but did not attempt it) was nearly the same between those with and without puberty blockers (55.6% vs 58.2%).
- The percentage of people who attempted suicide was higher for those who had blockers (24.4% vs 21.5%).
- The percentage of people who attempted suicide and were hospitalised was nearly double for those who had blockers (45.5% vs 22.8%).
I see similarly shoddy treatment of data in many other ostensibly pro-intervention studies.
Perhaps you know of some other, higher quality work I could look at?
> notwithstanding my hesitation about surgical and hormonal interventions being pushed for pre-pubescent children
Surgical and cross-hormonal therapies are, by most nationally recognised and implemented standards of care, reserved until the patient reaches at least 16 years of age. Pubertal suppression is used as a method of reducing harm and is widely associated with improved mental health outcomes.
> Perhaps you know of some other, higher quality work I could look at?
Yes, I do. It's the same one covered by the PinkNews article you cited. A "careful" reading is insufficient. A careful, statistically literate reading is required. Such a reading of the study shows that the data do support the conclusion. The "contradictions" you cite are derived from statistically insignificant correlations. Please read up on P-value and the necessity of corrections in multi-variate analysis.
The claimed reduction effect with P 0.001/multivariate corrected is total lifetime suicidality in individuals with a history of suicidal ideation, who wanted pubertal suppression and received it. Absolutely none of the "contradictions" you cite are claimed and the study isn't powerful enough to give realistic results for any of them.
Please, in the future, try to criticise studies like this. I certainly don't agree with many of Bigg's points but they do raise the right questions. More data is certainly needed - but that doesn't mean that the proposed treatment is necessarily wrong. That remains a clinical decision with this as but a small input factor.
> Surgical and cross-hormonal therapies are, by most nationally recognised and implemented standards of care, reserved until the patient reaches at least 16 years of age.
Those standards of care are transphobic and a violation of trans children's human rights, according to trans rights groups. Policies that seek any kind of age limits are universally attacked by trans activists.
For example, observe the storm around Tavistock in the UK, which has for years aggressively pushed children into transition surgeries and hormone treatments, and censored and persecuted internal dissenters and wistleblowers with accusations of transphobia.
Last year's High Court ruling that Tavistock must limit these treatment to children over 16 was attacked by trans activists. Here's Mermaids:
"It’s frankly a potential catastrophe for trans young people across the country and it cannot be exaggerated the impact that this might have, not only on the population of trans young people that require hormone blockers, but it may potentially open the floodgates towards other questions around bodily autonomy and who has the right to govern their own body."
And in a recent example from the US, in response to South Dakota's effort to limit surgeries and hormonal treatments to kids older than 16, the Trevor Project said, "[these bills] not only contradict reality and majority medical opinion in the United States — they would also put young lives in jeopardy".
Regarding the study, you're looking at the wrong one. The one cited at the Pink News link is here:
No, there's no p-value fuckery going on here (and yes, I understand p-values; I worked at a medical device company analysing statistics from human trials.) This is just bad analysis. And I see bad analysis and bad data everywhere I look within this admittedly fraught subject.
Thanks for the other material though, I'll take a look.
Agree with you given my experience. Kids question many things (religion, cultural norms, fashion norms, etc) and gender is now something that one can question, so it happens. And why not? People have been wrestling with gender roles for centuries, from questions of royal succession to whether women could inherit property or not to suffrage. Yet gender roles continue to be rather prescriptive. What intelligent kid wouldn't dig into why? And why would they take the thoughts of "the olds" as the last word when youth have never done so in human history?
So do what you'd do when your kid is rebelling against their religion or curfew or your selection of their college major. Talk about it and ask what's up. Express your own views, respectfully. Listen.
The disappearing lesbian is certainly a trend that is being noticed.
More and more women as coming out as trans instead of lesbian, and the 'lesbian until graduation' phenomenon was well known for decades before this.
The general populace has a very shallow understanding of the distinction between gender vs sex. The academic/popular liberal community makes no attempt to clarify the distinctions and it leads to further confused middle/high schoolers.
That study might be the most flawed I've ever seen. It relied on parents' perceptions like you said. And the author selected for parents who refused to accept their children coming out as trans. Among other problems.[1]
> The level of evidence produced by the Dr. Littman’s study cannot generate a new diagnostic criterion relative to the time of presentation of the demands of medical and social gender affirmation.
Worth noting that that paper not only surveyed exclusively parents but also recruited exclusively from transphobic websites (small wonder the parents found weren't particularly supportive). To the point where the conclusions had to be drastically rolled back and these failures in experimental design highlighted [0].
It's also the start and end of anyone replicating those results. This is very misleading and equivalent to linking the now debunked paper saying vaccines cause autism then telling readers to go look for more research.
It's also important noting, semi-related to your post, that nobody is pushing for trans-surgeries for teenagers -- they are pushing for puberty blockers. What this means is that puberty is medically halted until the teenager is a legal age, when they will be able to decide which puberty they want.
This avoids a lot of dysphoria-provoking secondary sexual characteristics from progressing, and also avoids accidentally "transing" a cisgender teenager.
Nobody hesitates to give puberty blockers to cisgender teenagers, for other medical reasons. I knew a young girl who had to have puberty blockers because she had a precocious puberty and it was literally destroying her young body -- she was not old enough physically or mentally to be able to deal with it.
However, for whatever reason, there is a huge backlash against giving it to transgender teenagers, despite it representing the best and ultimate choice in self-determination -- "Take these for a few years and then when you are 18 you can decide which puberty you want to go through". It leaves room for the individual to decide. If the person decides against it before then, they can stop and puberty immediately resumes as normal.
When the suicide rates are as high as they are for transgender people, and there is the option of halting the things causing the suicidal feelings, the dysphoria, all of the physical and emotional and societal pain. Halting an onslaught of pain that is utterly soul destroying, and just giving them more time to make a choice and more of an informed decision, how can there be any empathically-cogent argument against that?
Decreased bone density is a concern. This is monitored. It can be mitigated with supplements and exercise. And it isn't known if it's permanent or only for the duration of treatment as far as I know.
AMAB patients have less penile tissue for vaginoplasty. They have other options though. I don't think anyone has studied mature penile size in AMAB patients who decided to go through male puberty. Few do.
So an "AMAB patient" who takes puberty blockers never develops into an adult man and would require surgery to simulate the appearance of being an adult man if he decided he wanted that?
You're speculating without data and catastrophising. No drug given for any condition is harmless or without risk, don't be daft. It's all about the benefits outweighing the risk, and taking responsibility for that is at the heart of what it means to practice medicine; which is also between a doctor and their patient. You know very well that the risk of not treating the condition is suicide and long-term mental health problems - not to mention a worsening of dysphoria symptoms. Whether or not the patient is willing to risk that potential outcome and other risks later to almost eliminate their risk of psychological distress up to committing suicide now is up to the patient and their team of medical advisers. Not anyone else.
It's neither speculating nor catastrophising. The risks are real and documented. A confused child cannot give informed consent in this situation:
"The primary risks of pubertal suppression in gender dysphoric youth treated with GnRH agonists include adverse effects on bone mineralization, compromised fertility, and unknown effects on brain development."
"GnRHa therapy prevents maturation of primary oocytes and spermatogonia and may preclude gamete maturation, and currently there are no proven methods to preserve fertility in early pubertal transgender adolescents."
> A confused child cannot give informed consent in this situation:
I'd imagine you take the position that a child seeking this care is always confused. Could this be mistaken? Your argument would be void, if so.
Further, the quotes you make from the studies you cite are misleadingly cherry-picked - the studies themselves do not support the conclusion you imply they do. They are both calls for further research - they are not studies which draw any conclusions about the risk/benefit trade-offs of treatment and they do not state that treatment should be withheld.
> "The primary risks of pubertal suppression in gender dysphoric youth treated with GnRH agonists include adverse effects on bone mineralization, compromised fertility, and unknown effects on brain development." -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5290172
No one denies this. Again, it comes down to benefits of treatment versus risks of no treatment.
> "GnRHa therapy prevents maturation of primary oocytes and spermatogonia and may preclude gamete maturation, and currently there are no proven methods to preserve fertility in early pubertal transgender adolescents." - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31319416/
Same here.
Surely a patient and doctor have the right to decide to risk infertility or a lack of bone density later in life in order to prevent severe mental anguish and potential suicide now? Would you rather demand the child continue to suffer so that they can have, according to you - as though it were your decision for whatever creepy reason, the best chance of making more children they may not even want or strong bones they may not even use on account of having committed suicide before reaching adulthood?
> I'd imagine you take the position that a child seeking this care is always confused. Could this be mistaken? I'd conjecture that you believe this to be the case, because you don't address the simple fact that you assume that all children in this circumstance must be confused. If they are not, then they can give informed consent and your claim is void.
A child who insists that he is no longer a male (or never was) is definitely confused.
If that same child insists that he's black, even though both of his biological parents are white, would you take him at his word or save him from getting Dolezal'ed by an unforgiving woke mob?
Children don't make good decisions. Their brains are literally missing the hardware until about age 25. [1] We don't allow them to make permanent changes that they might regret.
I'm baffled by this because you're acting like not having puberty for a few years is a permanently regretful choice that can never be made by a medical professional assessing a child. If a medical professional assesses a child and determines a prescription of puberty blockers why should I give a shit?
> A child who insists that he is no longer a male (or never was) is definitely confused.
Circular, self-reinforcing, argument. Invalid.
> If that same child insists that he's black, even though both of his biological parents are white, would you take him at his word or save him from getting Dolezal'ed by an unforgiving woke mob?
Non-sequitur. Dismissed. Child still in need of psychological treatment.
> Children don't make good decisions. Their brains are literally missing the hardware until about age 25. [1] We don't allow them to make permanent changes that they might regret.
Sure we do. All the time. We allow them to grow up - that's rather permanent. You're not upset about that. Of course, it just so happens to be something you don't personally disagree with, unlike the topic of discussion.
"The primary risks of pubertal suppression in gender dysphoric youth treated with GnRH agonists include adverse effects on bone mineralization, compromised fertility, and unknown effects on brain development."
"GnRHa therapy prevents maturation of primary oocytes and spermatogonia and may preclude gamete maturation, and currently there are no proven methods to preserve fertility in early pubertal transgender adolescents."
I addressed bone density. The 1st paper said it wasn't clear if the effects were permanent. It identified several confounding factors in the relevant study. It went on to recommend monitoring, supplements, and exercise. It also said switching from puberty blockers to cross sex hormones at 14 instead of 16 would help.
The 1st paper said fertility may be compromised "if puberty is suppressed at an early stage and the patient completes phenotypic transition with the use of cross-sex hormones". Not if they decide not to transition. And cross sex hormones can compromise fertility on their own. The 2nd paper said "There is no substantiated evidence that GnRHa treatment for CPP impairs reproductive function or reduces fertility." Because those patients don't take cross sex hormones when they stop the blockers.
Unknown effects on brain development means no known effects. The only study mentioned found no significant detrimental effects.
All the research I’ve seen shows no significant consequences to taking puberty blockers. Puberty proceeds as normal once the puberty blockers have been stopped. Puberty has quite a wide range of onset ages and this is not taking the range that far beyond the historical range.
What research have you done? Because it doesn't take long to find evidence that they have a list of side effects including some not-so-innocuous ones, and the admission that research is lacking:
Possible long-term side effects of puberty blockers
Lower bone density. To protect against this, we work to make sure every patient gets enough exercise, calcium and vitamin D, which can help keep bones healthy and strong. We also closely monitor patients’ bone density.
Delayed growth plate closure, leading to slightly taller adult height.
Less development of genital tissue, which may limit options for gender affirming surgery (bottom surgery) later in life.
Other possible long-term side effects that are not yet known.
Quite extensive research actually. The overwhelming medical consensus is that puberty blockers are safe, and this is backed up by over three decades of their use in treating trans youth and even longer in treating precocious puberty.
I leave it to the reader to determine whether they think having to take vitamin supplement counts as a significant side-effects.
I would note, however, that it is also important to put these side effects in context. The contraceptive pill, for instance, also has reduced bone density as a possible side-effect.
My reading of the research also does not indicate that it is majorly lacking. Medical research is written in a very conservative manner. Researchers avoid making claims beyond the limits of their research. This can look like doubt or uncertainty when it is not.
Because giving hormone suppressors to developing kids could have massive implications to their physical and mental development? Has there really been enough research on the subject to come up with a valid cost-benefit analysis?
> How can there be any emphatically-cogent argument…?
Because drugging little kids should be a last resort. Using big words doesn't change the need to be extremely cautious in doing something as serious as blocking puberty.
A 77-fold tweet storm, that has got to be some kind of world record. It's surprising how much of it is just plain old common sense that would never be seen as sensitive or "political" in a halfway sane environment, stated in what comes off as a painfully diplomatic way, going to extreme lengths to not ruffle any feathers.
I hate to wade into a controversial topic where I'm under-educated and have limited info/opinions; but for what little it is worth to add to anecdata - the current cohort of 12-15 year old girls in my friend/family circle are virtually all in some level of gender dysphoria. Most of their parents are supportive and loving but... panicked, I guess - completely uncertain what to do, how best to help them, and without robust support themselves. I think there'll be people with strong opinions giving advice here as there are in real life - but those are in some ways people whose advice I'd personally be least likely to take - on average, more interested in propagating some ideological rightness (on any and all sides), rather than looking at each and every child, circumstance, and taking a good hard look what's best of the person. Because that is a damn difficult question, whereas loud opinions are all too easy.
Why does this affect as many youths as it does today?
No doubt there was unhappiness with one's identity in the past, but I doubt it was at the level it is today. And, in addition, I doubt it's at the same elevated level in all countries. In other words, we can ask 30 or 40 year olds, did you as a kid feel unhappy with your identity as much as today's youth feel about their identities but couldn't wouldn't express it?
Is it kids leading the change, is it kids following societal trends, is it other, what is it?
> Has anything changed in the last 10 or 20 years?
Labeling - There's one specific example I'm aware of: Girls interested more in "boy" things than "girl" things were once called a "tomboy", but were still accepted as a girl, just a girl with different interests. Nowadays that same kid would be described as transgender and encouraged to transition.
Yes. We as a society have become dramatically more accepting of gay and trans people.
Gay marriage is a reasonable proxy. Back in 2008, and even a relatively liberal state like California passed a proposition to ban gay marriage. Today popular opinion supports gay marriage. Not just popular opinion in California, or nationwide, but even popular opinion nationwide AMONG REPUBLICANS.
This is why the parents that I know today with children identifying as trans are figuring out how to best support and help their children. The parents of trans people that I knew a few years back wound up becoming homeless as teenagers because of the reactions of their parents. A typical such reaction having been, "You are murdering my son!"
No doubt. But we knew back then we had gays and lesbians among us. We had them as friends and acquaintances so we knew the population existed and that there were quite a few people in our circles who happened to be. But trans seems a bit different.
>In other words, we can ask 30 or 40 year olds, did you feel unhappy with your identity as much as today's youth feel about their identities but couldn't wouldn't express it?
This won't be accurate for a few reasons.
First, there are certainly people in denial about these feelings. A society that is more hostile to trans people will yield a society that has more trans people denying their true identity. That should be obvious. Sometimes that denial is only outward which could result on them lying on a poll. Sometimes that denial will even be to themselves which means they couldn't be truthful on a poll.
If you have spent time around young children you have probably learned that it is difficult to understand a feeling without being able to name that feeling. Similarly it is possible for people to be experiencing gender dysmorphia without realizing that it is specifically gender dysmorphia. I have heard trans people talk about having a general lack of comfort in their body or just the sense that they were somehow wrong that they couldn't explain until they later in life realized they are trans.
Also trans people tragically have a shorter average life span due to increased rates of violence and suicide. Simply measuring the percentage of 40 years isn't going to be comparable to a percentage of 15 year olds because many of those 15 year olds sadly won't live to see 40.
According to parent comment a significant fraction of the cohort are experiencing some form of unhappiness with their identities. If that is true, and a handful of commenters are making similar claims, then we could have seen alarming numbers of suicides amongst teenage girls, but we have not, so we'd have plenty of survivors to interview and understand better.
“The proportion of mental health–related emergency department visits among adolescents aged 12–17 years increased 31 percent in 2020 compared with the same period in 2019, the report said. Visits for suspected suicide attempts among girls aged 12-17 then jumped 50 percent from February to March 2021 compared to the same period in 2019. The increase among boys the same age over the same period was just 3.7 percent.“
It doesn't follow that the rate would need to be "alarming" previously. Imagine 1% of teenagers are trans and 5% of suicides of teenager are trans. It wouldn't matter what the suicide rate would be and it would still have an impact on the total trans rate among 40 year olds.
I never said we couldn't ask. I said it wouldn't be accurate to use their answers to project onto current young people. And just because it might be unfalsifiable doesn't mean it would be any less true.
Not endorsing it per-se or suggesting it should be accepted wholesale but good reading on this is _ Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters_
Something I've wondered about this is the social pressure around dysphoria. Dysphoria, ironically, has become trendy, particularly about social media. See the "cis is boring" view that's been in vogue for some time across multiple social media platforms. This article on increasing rates of desistance after lockdown [1] (Disclaimer: Evidence isn't well structured and is arguably anecdotal) makes me consider the positive impact of social pressure on transition. That detransition seems like a clear blind spot in the literature (deliberately? it's another r/l culture war hotspot) means that all we get is anecdote for now though. Do note that other studies seem to report relatively high rates of desistance amongst children transitioners as compared to adults.
I can only add with my own anecdote. My son dated a girl when they were both 14. This girl had gender dysphoria. She was suffering from a lot of other externalities, but she swore she was a boy. Fast forward 3 years and she is now mature, optimistic, and very much a girl.
Culture seems to be going through a convulsion of sorts and it is taking an enormous toll on our young girls. They do seem to grow out of it, but the phenomenon is real.
>> "and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them"
This isn't actually a thing. Certain factions who would prefer trans people cease to exist push this idea that kids are on this hot new meme of getting their bits flipped before reaching the age of consent, but it is simply not a thing. No top surgery, either.
It just isn't a thing. It's a wild fantasy. The only thing kids can go on are puberty blockers. These are well-tested and their effects known and understood through their use for other medical concerns.
Whether or not that is a thing depends on where you are.
The most common type of surgery is breast. In the USA, double mastectomies on children are legal, and have been performed on patients as young as 13. As for gender dysphoria itself, according to some surveys the frequency of teenage biological girls diagnosed with the disorder has risen by a factor of 40 in recent years.
The article cited nothing for the former claim. An unspecified survey for the latter.
It seemed to imply the 40x increase was in rapid onset gender dysphoria. But ROGD isn't a recognized diagnosis even now. Never mind 2006. A single researcher published a single paper proposing it in 2018. They relied on the assumption teenagers tell their parents everything. And they selected for parents who refused to accept their children coming out as trans.[1]
The article also claimed 100% of a small study population proceeding to transition after puberty blockers contradicts the claim puberty blockers give children more time to decide before transitioning. But doctors don't hand out puberty blockers randomly of course.
Please note that that's an opinion article, not an academic source.
It's borderline misleading to say that mastectomies "happen", and then link it with an unrelated number for diagnoses of gender dysphoria.
It's also misleading to represent the growth of a tiny number relatively. A few dozen cases grew to a few hundred. That's completely normal and what happens with any novel diagnosis that was barely accepted even just 10 years ago.
Note that there's comparatively little benefit to puberty blockers in F2M cases, because other than the obvious case of breasts, most secondary sex characteristics, even post puberty, can be radically altered by taking male hormones. So you get very little benefit, but the risk side is a lot less clear. For the same reason, most F2M's will be better off delaying both hormonal and surgical transition until well after puberty and perhaps into middle-age, when desistance rates do get very low.
The situation re: M2F is genuinely more challenging, and one has to balance a variety of factors pushing for earlier, not just later intervention.
> Certain factions who would prefer trans people cease to exist
I don't think this is fair. When we're talking about people this young, concerns about later desistance are very real. Expressing such concerns is in no way equal to preferring that these people "cease to exist".
Middle age means over 40 commonly. Is that what you meant?
Mastectomies leave scars and can have complications. And you seem to ignore the psychological and social aspects of going through opposite gender puberty.
There are concerns about erroneous transitions. There also substanctial factions who loudly proclaim their preference that trans people (and homosexual) do not exist, and openly justify their claims with centuries-old supernatural myths.
We've just had a barely unsuccessful attempt (the social democrats were in favor, but didn't want to end their coalition with the christian democrats) of legislation in Germany which included allowing gender reassignment surgery without parental consent from the age of 14.
After psychological counselling, not just on a child's whim, but still.
We've had exactly your point in the public discourse: "that's FUD, no surgery for minors is planned", but the wording in the draft law was clear, and proponents were unwilling to get rid of it, even though it would have made the law's passage much, much more likely.
Sometimes people push bills like this to make their opponents look like fools, though maybe that's not as common in the EU. Movements are infiltrated all the time. I don't know the details of that bill (much less the name or backers), so I can't really comment.
What I do know is there's tons more bills trying (sometimes successfully) to block consenting adults and older kids with parental permission from even basic stuff like counseling or blockers. That seems way more dangerous than the fraction of a percent of kids who change their mind later being able to go through with a transition they'll regret.
>> and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire
> The only thing kids can go on are puberty blockers.
So instead of specifying gender reassignment surgery, they should have something more broad, like well-meaning medical interventions. It seems like the heart of their statement is true and that these medical interventions on children can backfire.
> What little research exists on the topic says that most of those girls will grow out of their gender dysphoria, and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire.
Except... people don't perform gender reassignment surgery on children just going through puberty.
I once read an anti corporate critique of this phenomenon. The argument went something like this:
Once female beauty was commoditized, and you could literally purchase an upgrade to parts you were born with. Entire cosmetic and plastic surgery industry benefited from marketing and promoting this model of beauty. The unforeseen consequence was that men started fetishizing these upgrades themselves.
As some men hyper focus on female body parts anyway.
It was a way to exploit psychological tendencies for profit.
I guess the counter remedy would be to promote female beauty as the whole, and not some collection of body parts.
| Professional organizations such as the Endocrine Society recommend against puberty blockers for children who have not reached puberty, and recommend that patients be at least 16 years old before beginning hormone treatments for feminization or masculinization of the body. The last step in transitioning to another gender, gender reassignment surgery, is only available to those 18 and older in the United States.
No claim containing the string "is not recommended by anyone" will hold up, since eventually it's easy enough to find someone (probably a troll) who does recommend X practice.
That seems unnecessarily pedantic, since obviously it should be assumed to mean "not recommended by anyone who matters", but I've upvoted you for providing the source.
I was editing my comment with that exact link when you posted.
Mastectomies are performed for non-gender-related reasons, such as prophylactic mastectomies, so it's arguable whether that falls under the definition of SRS/GRS. For any reason, it is exceedingly, vanishingly rare in children.
It seems like an oddly small number to obsess over, especially considering over 8,000 non-trans teenagers between 13 and 19 receive breast augmentations each year.
From your link:
| the mean (SD) age was 19 (2.5) years for postsurgical participants and 17 (2.5) years for nonsurgical participants
Surgical patients would be the ones who are in the most danger of suicide or self-harm or for whom nonsurgical (hormone) treatment is not an option.
Also,
| Self-reported regret was near 0.
Here is the document that the report refers to as the standard for care for transgender patients:
> I paid little attention to what site that was on, just looked for the content.
Sometimes people lie on the internet.
And quite often, when they lie, they do so by omission or by inaccurately summarizing facts.
In any case, the two points in this thread are in agreement. Top surgery is "typically only available to those 18 or older," as 'john-radio wrote. In atypical cases, it is available to those under 18, and it requires a doctor to a) decide that it's necessary and b) consciously go against WPATH recommendations when doing so. The legal opinion here is that an insurer may not come up with a rule that says that doctors may never decide that it's the right thing to do for a particular patient, because that's a decision a doctor is allowed to make.
The point that you're missing is that when there is a demand, a supply tends to rise.
My child is smart enough to look for a doctor that is known to have evaluated cases on a "case by case basis" to provide the surgery that they want. As for how to find said doctor, if anyone in their online social network finds one, that information will be shared. In fact I would happily take an even money bet that my child would have no problem laying their hands on the name of such a doctor within 24 hours.
| The WPATH standards of care also state, however, that male chest reconstruction surgery for female-to-male
patients “could be carried out earlier” than the age of majority in certain cases, and ultimately should be considered on a case-by-case basis “depending on an adolescent’s specific clinical situation and goals for gender identity expression.”
What do you think that specific clinical situation was in those situations?
I think society has made good efforts to be more accessible to people with disabilities. I'm pretty sure all of the traffic lights in America beep when the walk signal is on - that exists to assist blind individuals even in communities without blind individuals - in addition there are a lot more buildings with wheelchair ramps than there are with unisex bathrooms.
There are competing ideologies between the United States and the Rest of the World, essentially culminating in two approaches of diagnosing psychological and psychiatric health concerns.
One comes from the American Psychological Association, called the DSM and another comes from the World Health Organization called the ICD.
This doesn't address the "dysphoria = trans" claim at all. As I wrote in the other comment, one can be uneasy or unhappy with one's body/gender without wanting to switch to "the other" gender. As a mathematician, it seems like people here are claiming {1,2} = R (real numbers) which is just weird, they're sets of different cardinality.
You are arguing semantics. The specific words that the scientific community uses to refer to reality in their models of reality often change.
For example, “discomfort” in gender dysphoria is a scientific term that implies a level of suffering on par with the “discomfort” one would feel immediately after a major surgery, during the recovery phase, except this discomfort is chronic.
Scientifically, people experiencing gender dysphoria are considered to be in a state of chronic suffering for which there is a medical treatment, called gender affirming care.
Not all gender affirming care results in gender reassignment.
I wouldn't think of it as an ideology. I mean, maybe it is, but it doesn't seem at all bizarre. I'm not really aware of the details, but I'd be hard-pressed to name a difference between the two. I don't (think I) have a position on the issue.
But trans means switching from one side of the binary to the other, while dysphoria means "unease or dissatisfaction" which is not at all the same. One can easily be uneasy or dissatisfied with one's perceived gender identity yet not want to switch to the other side of the binary. What about agender people, or people who just don't like gender at all?
I certainly remember as a teen being unhappy with the constraints gender put on me in social situations but that certainly doesn't mean I'm trans.
There is a semantic shift taking place in the scientific community regarding the use of the prefix trans when referring to sex (physical anatomy) reassignment as a treatment in gender affirmative care.
Unfortunately, politics keeps interfering with the word choices of scientists.
There's a large segment of the population that feels actively threatened by trans rights. The two primary components are:
1. Parents and sexual violence victims concerned about the non-falsifiability of trans-identification and the related concerns of sexual predators claiming an identity they don't actually have to gain access to private spaces of women and girls.
2. Feminists (TERFs) who believe being a woman is a fundamental, biological identity and cannot be coopted by males.
Interestingly enough, there's not much animosity toward trans-men. These groups exclusively concern themselves with trans-women.
Mormons are probably another group due to the reliance of their theology on binary gender, but I don't see them as being particularly vocal on this topic.
One note: Nobody self-identifies as a TERF. Or at least not originally (I'm sure in Internet ire people do it ironically by now.) It's mostly a label used to crush nuanced conversation.
I disagree, those labels have many aims, none of which are good and most of which seem to be a form of ending conversations before any meaningful conclusion is reached.
I've heard it was the other way around, i.e. it started off as a self identification for a niche group which people started to reject once it begun to be used pejoratively.
Interesting, thanks! Although I supposed it doesn't really speak to whether it was initially embraced (by the identified niche group) before being rejected.
> Interestingly enough, there's not much animosity toward trans-men.
One of the interesting things about spending the last few years studying Western European post-Roman history has been the discovery that, in the West, there has historically been relatively little resistance to AFAB folks "presenting" (speaking of the interpretation at the time--the dichotomy between "presenting" and "being" is one I am thoroughly not qualified to negotiate) as male unless tied into homophobia. There are historical examples of folks who outwardly identify as women taking on male roles in monastic life, and it's often portrayed as a good and pious thing.
The reverse, it seems, is generally not true, though not exclusively so. I've read of, but don't have offhand, accounts of Church investigation into "male nuns" that ruled that the erstwhile offender, a male who had suffered prepubescent genital damage, had committed no crime being raised by a particular convent as a woman. But cases going the other way round are much more common.
In terms of today's relations, however, my intuition is that the fear regarding transwomen is that it's largely a performative flavor of misogyny and the fear of those of the "superior" set somehow damaging all men, much as the performative flavor of homophobia does the same with regards to gay men but shockingly much rarely with regards to bisexual or homosexual women. But, of course, that is just an intuition.
54 percent of Americans believe "whether a person is a man or a woman is determined at birth". There is a wide partisan divide with 80 percent of Republicans agreeing (so probably not radical feminists) and only 34 percent of democrats agreeing.
Polls have a way of shifting rapidly. People put down what they think they're supposed to put down. See how fast support for gay rights tilted as more people came out. Most people weren't really committed to homophobia, but they thought they were expected to seem to believe certain things.
The scientific community, specifically the community that conducts science on this topic, currently has a distinction on the terms sex and gender. I’d posit the possible consensus position that the term sex refers to physical anatomy whereas gender refers to one’s gender role in interaction with others.
There are a lot of shades of trans support, If you asked the most extreme questions you would probably get different answers.
It is one thing to ask people should be able can use a bathroom, and another to ask questions about personal sexlife and behavior. i.e. if you asked people if you consider transwomen equally with women at birth as sexual partners, I bet the numbers fall through the floor.
Well, sure. If you ask people whether they consider Black and Asian men equally as sex partners, the numbers would also fall through the floor. This doesn't mean Black or Asian men are less of men, or even that they're necessarily against either of those groups, it just means people have preferences in what their partners' bodies are like. My point is just that "trans women are women and trans men are men" is actually a common opinion, contrary to the claim in the comment I was replying to.
I think you may have missed the point in GP’s post. “Trans-women are women” is a common opinion in a casual context (like when greeting a colleague in an office), but in contexts where the stakes are higher (like when choosing a sexual partner), very few will treat trans-women as women.
I don't think this conclusion is justified by the data, though. If this were just a matter of "they'll humor trans people, but everyone secretly knows trans women are men and treats them accordingly," you'd expect gay men to generally be attracted to trans women. But by all accounts I've heard, the people who are attracted to trans women tend to be straight men, just like any other woman. It's true that straight men are generally less likely to be attracted to trans women than cis women, but this just shows that being transgender is unattractive to them. Gay men are even less likely to be attracted to trans women, so it's clearly not as simple as "people actually perceive them as male and treat them accordingly."
This data supports my point. It does not say "trans women are treated as men for purposes of dating," it says "trans women are not broadly considered attractive." They specifically call out that few people of any sexual orientation want to date trans women. But those who are interested in dating trans women tend to be people who date women.
The question is not "would you consider a trans person as a sexual partner" -- the question is, "do you consider a trans person to be the gender they identify as".
There are a lot of women I would not want to sleep with. Does not mean I question their gender.
It shows that most people don't consider them equivalent to women as sexual partners. We were discussing how in some demands trans people are considered and are not considered as their gender of choice. If you ask would you date a woman and someone says yes, then ask would you date a trans woman and they say no, that shows that they are differentiated for the purposes of this question
I don't think that passes the smell test. What study would you cite to support that assertion?
You could ask whether there is a study to assert parent poster's assertion, too. All I could say is that the burden of proof seems to fall on you with your statement, but most would take parent's at face value.
> Interestingly enough, there's not much animosity toward trans-men.
While it's true there's little animosity directed at them, there is a lot of stuff Shrier's view that "gender ideology" is seducing lesbian women into thinking they're not actually women. Which, honestly, as someone who lived through lots of the dumb gay panic in the 80s and 90s sounds exactly like what people thought about homosexuals (eg: gay people can seduce/recruit straight people and turn them gay). So trans men get treated like dupes or victims of some social phenomena, rather than treated like actual human beings with agency of their own.
In fact, pretty much every anti-trans viewpoint I see, even from otherwise highbrow publicans like the Economist, are really just rehashes of what we heard about gays in the 80s and 90s, before we realized they were, in fact, not a threat to society.
> ” sexual predators claiming an identity they don't actually have”
This is such a bizarre leap of logic. Trans women are the pariahs of contemporary Western society. Yet the same people who uphold this subhuman status also assume that rapists are nefariously claiming trans female identity.
That’s not how rapists operate! They seek positions of power. Trans women are downtrodden and powerless — the least attractive position for a sexual predator.
I think your terminology is a bit backwards. A trans man is someone assigned female at birth but who later identifies as male. From context you seem to be talking about the hypothetical of male rapists professing they identify as trans women. A person born male who later identifies as a woman is a trans woman.
I thought that was the idea being sold by Republicans in the US, though, that a woman who is trans is going to be lurking in the bathroom to rape your daughter after beating her in tennis?
Yes. Republicans are trying to pass bills under the guise of protecting against trans women. Trans women are people who were assigned male at birth, and now present as women.
>That’s not how rapists operate! They seek positions of power.
This frames rape as some thing people plot out and rationalize over a long time.
Rape is like any other crime. Some people think about it critically and finds ways to commit it for their own amusement. Oftentimes it's just people taking an opportunity. Sometimes it's people finding ways to make opportunities and not thinking about freshman psychology power dynamics. A lot of rape involves hormones and alcohol flowing freely without consideration of the consequences or harm.
There are also people who actively enjoy feeling weak or inferior as part of a sexual fetish.
Trying to rationalize it into one group or mindset doesn't work.
You are of course right factually, but fear of sexual predators is not based in stats and facts, but in feelings. When people think about rape, they imagine a stranger in a dark alley, whereas ~90% of rapists are somebody the victim knows.
> Mormons are probably another group due to the reliance of their theology on binary gender, but I don't see them as being particularly vocal on this topic.
I'm sorry to be so frank, but this is more of the same mormon bullshit.
"Love the sinner, hate the sin" is the typical line. The problem is our actions and identity are often intrinsically linked.
They have the same stance for gay people. "It's ok to be gay, god still loves you! The only catch is you can't ever have a romantic relationship with the person you love. If you do you'll be excommunicated and ostracized from your family. No biggy! God bless!"
> Gender is an essential characteristic of Heavenly Father’s plan of happiness. The intended meaning of gender in “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” is biological sex at birth.
> Church leaders counsel against elective medical or surgical intervention for the purpose of attempting to transition to the opposite gender of a person’s birth sex (“sex reassignment”). Leaders advise that taking these actions will be cause for Church membership restrictions.
> Leaders also counsel against social transitioning. A social transition includes changing dress or grooming, or changing a name or pronouns, to present oneself as other than his or her birth sex. Leaders advise that those who socially transition will experience some Church membership restrictions for the duration of this transition.
Their advice on what treatments they support for transgender people is kind of vague and circumspect, but the gist seems to be "A therapist should at least be open to conversion therapy," which is generally considered harmful.
Given the LDS Church's open campaign against gay rights based on the "The Family: A Proclamation to the World" (the same document referenced above), it seems reasonable to interpret this as stating opposition to transgender rights. Though as the parent noted, they are much less vocal on this topic.
I think the difference between treatment of mtf and ftm can be mostly boiled down to difference how males being female spaces VS females being in male spaces is perceived.
For trans exclusionary feminists one is the patriarchy coming to female protective places and females claiming their place and undermining the patriarchy. As for parents males being less susceptible to forceful sexual exploitation is true but there is also a huge societal double standard when it comes women forcing themselves on men or abusing their male partner which is also reflected in parents being less worried about something happening to their children. Possibly also because of pregnancies onesidedness.
The protection of female virtue is also an enormously successful political tactic, from the "yellow peril" in the late 1890s in Europe and the US to the "white slavery" panic (specifically referring to the cultural phenomenon in the US that gave rise to the 1910 Mann Act; check out the contrasting commentary of Emma Goldman and Rose Livingston) to the murder of Emmett Till and the burning down of Black Wall Street in Tulsa -- all of these are really responses to larger questions of opportunity and freedom of movement for folks that crystalize in the threat to a white woman's sexual virtue and the justification of violent response to crush the threat.
The bathroom bills, the panic over sports, the violence trans and gender-nonconforming people encounter (especially on racialized lines) -- it's all part of a larger political narrative. As you can see from the comments on this HN thread, you get a daddy all worked up about his daughter's virtue/place in life and you can move political mountains because it is an Existential Threat that Must Be Removed. That's weaponizable in a way that talking about military spending or tax law or gerrymandering is not.
I’ve always regarded transitioning gender — and how it is focused so much on men moving away from being a man — being equivalent to someone saying I am uncomfortable and I want off this ride, where the rollercoaster is testosterone. That’s what I’ve picked up anyway, from my friends who have transitioned.
I think that might be why it’s more common than transitioning in the other direction?
I read the original comment by @caeril as saying that Feminists are TERFs, which would not be accurate as the expansion of the acronym is “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists”.
From what I’ve seen reported, cis women are on average more relaxed than cis men about trans women.
Aren't a majority of the TERFs specifically 2nd wave Feminists who who do not like the idea of 'passing' as a female being reinforced. This as because they spent their lives fighting so that women did not have to abide by social norms enforced on them. From their POV, since gender is social, a trans-gender person reinforcing the need for transition to enjoy social aspects of being a woman is actively hostile to their goal of making social norms around gender be deemphasized.
The criticisms of transgenderism by TERFs have being a Feminist (in this case 2nd wave) at its very core. Removing it loses a lot of nuance of their specific criticisms.
It's tricky. They are certainly used in slur-like ways these days. I would say the difference is that white supremacist and racist are pre-existing terms that are widely considered to be neutral descriptive terms. You can use neutral terms in non-neutral ways and over time they may start to take on the slur connotation. But I don't think we are there yet with the established terms.
You can certainly be explicit about the negative evaluation, e.g. "racism sucks", "being a racist is not cool". The issue with language is that context imbues words with meaning. So when you use a term in such a way that the dynamics between the term and the context leads to associating the negative connotation of the context to the word itself, further usages of the word then carries that negative connotation with it. In the case of slurs, they no longer (or never did) carry any neutral meaning. So the difference between expressing distaste and using a slur is how the negative connotation is expressed.
For some reason I cannot recall, a friend of mine had me read a bunch of proper radfem terf blogs back in like, 2010. I remember being impressed with the coherence of their worldview, even if it, uh, was not flattering.
Men were all inherently bad, penis-in-vagina sex was inherently rape, lesbians were good, trans-women were infiltrators and trans-men deserters.
You can say "gender essentialist" if you feel that TERF is too loaded, but it boils down to the same thing; it's a position that denies identity rather than accepting it.
It's only pejorative in the sense that it attempts to accurately describe the motives of a set of individuals who aren't comfortable with the way those motives are widely regarded. In that sense it's about as pejorative as "racist".
That is the danger of interpreting technical jargon without having the technical background. It will get you in trouble when you are talking about software just the same as when talking about science.
It might be loaded with denotation outside of the scientific community, but the word “radical” has some various scientific meanings, as other commenters have noted.
To say nothing of the issue itself, the methods of "trans rights activists" frequently involve intimidation or vigilantism and generally cause a lot of resentment against trans people. People are afraid.
>Interestingly enough, there's not much animosity toward trans-men. These ground exclusively concern themselves with trans-women.
I second this. Maybe it's some echo chamber effect or a minority stirring shit up, but I've hardly heard anything over the years about transmen-as-men vs men-as-men. It seems like most of the focus is on transwomen-as-women vs women-as-women. Maybe we're not as vocal? Maybe we care less? I don't think we have much of a dog in this race so I'm often confused as to why this topic comes up on HN considering most of us here are men. Boring day at work?
I do feel bad for the women's Olympics, but I'd like to ask the Olympics committee what the hell were they thinking long before I start any kind of anti-trans crusade. This is one discussion that doesn't seem to be happening much. The diatribe is as always directed among the proles and the decisionmakers get a free pass. Someone must have said, "Yes, lets allow a 35 year-old recently transitioned man to compete with early 20 year-old women," and some approval process must have happened. Those are the people you want to start asking the hard questions, not look at LH and blame her for participating in the Olympics that she's allowed to participate in.
Or as someone else put it: "A female POC just lost her spot to a white, middle-aged, male-born son of a billionaire. This is supposed to be progressive?"
The Olympics has been dealing with the question of womanhood for a very long time. For a while they were literally stripping and groping female athletes. Later they did chromosome testing, until they discovered intersex individuals who confound that theory.
Even their current testosterone-levels theory is imperfect, since some people have obviously female bodies but inordinately high testosterone levels.
So they seem to be muddling along about as well as they can. If they want to have a separate women's category, it's a question they're going to have to answer.
The Olympics will eventually become a contest of the best humans, regardless of sex / gender. This is already how it is more or less today: people born with the right body types, into the right families, etc, will make it to the top.
This is the most elegant solution, but it's also functionally equivalent to "women can't do high level sports anymore"
I feel like women's sports is extremely cursed - a sporting competition with a handicap, except the handicap is not specified in the rules but is instead a randomly distributed quirk of biology, meaning that people have to judge who does or does not have it, except that the handicap is also an integral part of a person's identity...
(no I don't mean to say being female is a disability, the context is sports)
They're already in an arms race about performance enhancing drugs. And even without those, there are artificial limitations like age in women's gymnastics, because of the damage it does. Football players are grappling with decades of head injuries.
If you want to know the very best a human can do, you will destroy them. It's just not a question we can safely know the answer to.
So it's never really going to be fair, and we need to ask a different question. Exactly what that question is remains to be seen.
> I'm often confused as to why this topic comes up on HN
Take a look around, I think you'll find transmen comprise a much larger proportion of this community (and tech communities in general) than the general population.
There's also a lot of desire on HN to comment on political topics while pretending not to comment on political topics. Things like gender identity, women in tech, genetic differences, etc are all wonderful smokescreens to allow us to post politically but maintain a solid veneer of simply having an intellectual discussion on a topic of general interest.
> maintain a solid veneer of simply having an intellectual discussion on a topic of general interest
Some of us have an academic interest in biology, genetics, neuroscience, psychology, etc. while still aligning with the overall origin of this site as a place to discuss the latest in news as relates to technology startups.
It is unfortunate that this politically charged topic is so misunderstood and that ignorance of the basic science behind it is so prevalent, but here we are.
> Things like gender identity, women in tech, genetic differences, etc are all wonderful smokescreens to allow us to post politically but maintain a solid veneer of simply having an intellectual discussion on a topic of general interest.
Especially when it comes to these topics, I imagine it's very easy for people who aren't affected by these issues to "debate" them *because* they aren't the ones directly affected by it.
> The rest is just weaving arguments for the fun of it.
Interesting discussion is the HN way!
Some enterprising scientists may have some cutting edge insights reviewing HN comments on technology topics, no reason to suspect otherwise for social sciences.
TERFs primarily don't focus on trans men because they see them as misguided women. You can find many TERFs blaming trans women and "gender ideology" for convincing butch-identified lesbians that they're actually straight men. Personally I think this denies trans men the dignity and autonomy to define themselves as they see fit, but then again, I would say that, I'm trans.
It's ironic that this transphobe fantasizing has led to non-conforming cis women being harassed in the bathroom. Whatever minimal problem there was with women being harassed or assaulted in the bathroom by men or AMAB people has been completely surpassed by these fantasies sparking a witch hunt.
Not sure what part you're referring to but it's more or less overt that many of them think trans men are basically women. This combined with what they say about trans women is most of where the accusations of essentialism come from.
> TERFs primarily don't focus on trans men because they see them as misguided women.
Not well versed in feminist theory, but I’m curious whether anyone has formally documented in the scientific literature these sorts of psychological attitudes.
Probably a cross-disciplinary masters thesis worthy topic if no one has done that research yet.
It's because there is no reason to have animosity toward a woman becoming a man. The main objections to MtF are about safety (a MtF will always be stronger and bigger than a woman on average) and fairness (should male born people get female scholarships, compete in women's sports?). A FtM is not hurting anything or taking any opportunities away from anyone really.
The scientific community may not yet have crafted any research on the specific question of attitudes towards transgender athletes, but it shouldn’t be hard to find the research if it exists.
> fairness (should male born people get female scholarships, compete in women's sports?). A FtM is not hurting anything or taking any opportunities away from anyone really
fairness is an issue when considering MtF, but not FtM? why exactly?
Transitioning female to male doesn't make you more likely to win Olympic weightlifting competitions in your new gender, so you'd be vanishingly unlikely to do it for the sake of gaining an advantage.
Keep in mind that transgender individuals are almost certainly, in general, and by regulation if they are transgender and an athlete, undergoing hormone therapies. In the case of estrogen treatment, that implies a reduction in muscle strength in addition to the other physical changes caused by the addition of estrogen and the removal of testosterone.
This is a factor in why there are regulations requiring testosterone levels below a certain amount in order to qualify in the women’s section of certain sporting programs.
>I've hardly heard anything over the years about transmen-as-men vs men-as-men. It seems like most of the focus is on transwomen-as-women vs women-as-women. Maybe we're not as vocal? Maybe we care less?
It's really not that hard to understand. It's the same sort of thinking that motivates the slogan "don't punch down". Males aren't threatened by females identifying as men. But females are threatened by males identifying as women for many obvious reasons. For example, with self-id as the only criteria keeping men out of women's prisons, it undermines the protection women have against abuse from men while in forced proximity. A female in a male prison or male changeroom is a novelty, not a threat.
Seeing as how the historical perspective is almost directly reversed from what you claim, I'm going to have to be skeptical about this. The European-historical aversion to largely one-way nonconforming to gender and sexual roles (men acting as women being a problem, ditto male homosexual behavior) is pretty explicitly due to a rejection of (heterosexual) masculinity translating as a threat to that (heterosexual) masculinity.
Those currents run deep, and run through to today. And that's not to say that "but a guy might go in the girls' bathroom!" is not what bigots say, because as a prima facie claim that's certainly common--but I very much doubt, were we to see some unvarnished honesty, that bathroom fears are actually a primary motivator rather than a convenient battleground.
There is certainly a longstanding cultural thread of defending traditional manhood through explicit castigation of male deviants, but notably the source of the explicit castigation is largely from other males. The pushback against trans-women's acceptance as women isn't largely driven by men. It is pretty evenly distributed, or perhaps even more driven by women. The point is that these seem to be distinct phenomena driven by distinct concerns.
I don't have any hard numbers, but it is the impression I get from various organizations and legal challenges to trans legislation in the UK. The organized opposition seems to be largely driven by women.
I suspect it has much to do with the idea that trans-men are transitioning into a gender "in power." That is, adopting masculine social behavior and lifestyle allow transmen to enter the patriarchal fold and slip quite seamlessly into a male dominant society, as long as they remain unknown. Once they are known, the idea that they must be excommunicated or "proven" as female becomes imperative. Transmen are subject to inordinate degrees of violence like transwomen. This is all to say that cis men aren't as afraid, be it in washrooms or on a sports field, of transmen as much as transwomen.
Transwomen, on the other hand, are much more defined, in the eyes of a patriarchal society, by their rejection of masculinity in favor of femininity. To some cis-men, they appear as aberrations or duplicitous (hence the nickname "trap"), to some cis-women they appear as potential unfalsifiable unknowns, and a potential thing to be feared for sexual violence. Transwomen are thus caught in the crossfires of fear from both genders.
I don't think so, that's a work of fantasy and quite the leap.
It's probably more that in the grand scheme of things trans-men don't pose any sort of threat to other males. I don't recall ever discussing trans-men with my peers.
Trans women are seen as seeking female privileges (like the ability to compete against women in sports, which is easier than competing against men). Which enrages some people.
Trans men are seen as giving up their female privileges, to which everyone shrugs and says "you want less privilege? Fine by me!"
Of course men have privileges too, but I think many of men's privileges come from confounding variables. Like men are on average taller, and people are biased to view taller people as having more authority, so taller people are more likely to become CEOs etc.
Whereas women's privileges come from society compensating for men's privileges. So society sees women on average are smaller and physically weaker, and thus decides they need privileges like separate sports to compensate.
Trans women who went through male puberty often have the size advantage of men, so them also have the social privileges of women is seen as double dipping.
While for trans men it's the opposite, they're often small like women, but not afforded social protection for it.
Anyway that's just my theory why some people hate trans women more than trans men. I myself have sympathy for both cases, dysphoria sounds pretty awful.
>There's a large segment of the population that feels actively threatened by trans rights.
I'd say that's a vast overreach. It isn't like the Trans Army is going to come burn down your house.
If anything, it's a general notion that transsexuals are mentally ill and that there is something odd about normalizing it. In a sense, that it's not different than people who want their limbs amputated or wear animal costumes at all times.
> a general notion that transsexuals are mentally ill and that there is something odd about normalizing it.
That seems like a defensible position to take. At least as plausible as the common alternative -- that it is a physical illness (thus we 'fix' the body to match the mind).
The problem is the suppression of reasoned speech. People are forbidden to discuss this topic. People in power (e.g., University Deans) use this topic to abuse those under their power. Students use it to abuse professors (e.g., students claim that they don't feel safe around a particular professor). In the name of trying to stop abuse of trans people, we're abusing non trans people (e.g, people get fired over this topic).
In Australia and most other developed countries now, this ideology is heavily promoted to children, encouraging them to believe they are trans. They are connected with websites that promote the ideology, and then connected with a trans specialist who helps prescribe puberty blockers without parental knowledge.
If you are a parent who believes that children should be taught to love their own bodies as they grow rather than have surgeons pretend to fix them by removing essential organs, then this represents a massive assault on your offspring.
> The numbers I can find for US citizens is: 0.6%
And there's a huge number of "trans" who later realise they were sold a lie and have to undergo further surgery to try and restore their original sex. Selling this to ideology to children is going to dramatically increase that 0.6%. How many of the new cases are going to actually be trans, vs children that thought they were trans and started puberty blockers at school, but actually were just never taught to love their body?
This post has a very noticeable lack of citations and vague terms like "huge" which make it very likely that you are speaking from personal bias rather than any kind of expertise.
Australian parent here. While recognising I'm a sample of one, Ive never seen or heard from many other parent friends trans ideology being promoted.
If you have some examples please share. I suspect you've come across an article pushing a an edge case that tried to make it out as normal. This type of media is common at the more extreme ends of whatever views.
> And there's a huge number of "trans" who later realise they were sold a lie and have to undergo further surgery to try and restore their original sex.
There is no way this is a huge number. I'd be shocked if you could find a credible source on this. This sounds like conservative agitprop.
Studies have consistently shown that most trans children revert to their original gender identity post-puberty [0]:
>The exact rate of desistance varied by study, but overall, they concluded that about 80 percent trans kids eventually identified as their sex at birth. Some trans activists and academics, however, argue that these studies are flawed, the patients surveyed weren't really transgender, and that mass desistance doesn't exist.
>Indeed, some of the studies cited by Cantor had sample sizes as low as 16 people and were more than 40 years old, and one was an unpublished doctoral dissertation. But the most recent study, published in 2013 in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, followed up with 127 adolescent patients at a gender identity clinic in Amsterdam and found that two-thirds ultimately identified as the gender they were assigned at birth.
This does not imply any percentage of patients who underwent surgery to "restore" their original sex. Orchiectomies, mastectomies, and histerectomies are irreversible in any case, not to mention bottom surgery.
> By all accounts, detransitioners make up a tiny percentage of that already small population: A 50-year study out of Sweden found that only 2.2 percent of people who medically transitioned later experienced "transition regret."
I was speaking specifically to GP's point about gender affirming surgery being reversed. If only 2.2% of people who have had this surgery experience regret, the proportion which reverses the surgery must be even smaller.
"Huge number who [...] have to undergo further surgery to try and restore their original sex" is not supported by the data.
It is not easy for trans people to get gender affirming surgery, so I think the conservative "concern" that "children are going to get surgery and regret it" is vastly overblown: children receiving gender affirming surgery is so rare today, and involves jumping through so many hoops, that a tiny proportion of a tiny proportion of a tiny proportion of people seems like a silly subject for policy debate.
Teenagers are dumb and fickle (I know I was!), so I think there should be a non-zero number of hoops for teens jump through to filter out the "just a phase" cases for any surgery (or even just tattoos) that will have permanent impact on their bodies. But 'concerns' about surgical detransitioning is primarily just scaremongering.
They cited a wide body of studies, including studies which included only trans kids. All studies produced consistent results. For those who didn't read the full article, here's the preamble to the 80% figure quoted above:
>There have, however, been almost a dozen studies of looking at the rate of "desistance," among trans-identified kids—which, in this context, refers to cases in which trans kids eventually identify as their sex at birth. Canadian sex researcher James Cantor summarized those studies' findings in a blog post: "Despite the differences in country, culture, decade, and follow-up length and method, all the studies have come to a remarkably similar conclusion: Only very few trans-kids still want to transition by the time they are adults. Instead, they generally turn out to be regular gay or lesbian folks." The exact rate of desistance varied by study, but overall, they concluded that about 80 percent trans kids eventually identified as their sex at birth.
They cited various problems with the other studies.
All of Cantor's sources included non conforming behavior or "sub threshold" gender identity disorder.[1] He just ignored the numbers lost to follow up. And several studies found predictors of persistence. Like meeting the criteria for gender identity disorder.[2]
Based on the numbers I've seen, there are slightly more trans people in the world than blind people, but overall — you're not wrong. I don't even think most trans rights advocates would disagree with you that the amount of attention devoted to transgender people is excessive. The reason transgender people are getting more attention than blind people is because there is currently a strong movement to regress transgender rights, while there isn't an equivalent movement for blind people. Transgender people have some asks in terms of societal support (e.g. British law has some awkward legal red tape for trans people around things like marriage), but in general, most of the noise is being generated by the anti-transgender side (e.g. bans on therapy for transgender people, bathroom bans, sports bans, outrage at voluntarily chosen gender-inclusive phrasing like "people who have a uterus").
So it's a bit of a hard subject. I really don't think it's worth this much attention, but if hate groups are devoting this much attention to opposing transgender people, we're faced with the choice of either also giving it a lot of undue attention or throwing transgender people to the wolves.
>The reason transgender people are getting more attention than blind people is because there is currently a strong movement to regress transgender rights
Firstly, a resistance to expanding rights is not a movement to regress rights. For the most part (exceptions apply), the margins of the culture war here are not about trans people being on the defensive against long-standing rights being stripped.
Secondly, obviously the margins of this battle are often (again, not always, particularly when it comes to health care issues) pretty small-stakes, especially in comparison to the outsized amount of attention they're given. Certainly not important enough to justify the "you're trying to murder me / dehumanize me / erase me" rhetoric that one predictably receives when mild resistance is offered towards this agenda.
I gave several examples of people wanting to strip long-standing rights, which are probably some of the first examples people would think of when you mention "the trans debate," so I don't know what to say here except that you're mistaken.
I also think your portrayal of the stakes for transgender people is a bit flippant. Gender dysphoria is a pretty painful mental illness that often leads to suicide, so forbidding a transgender girl from getting treatment and forcing her to go to the boys' room does seem both dehumanizing and dangerous to her life.
>I gave several examples of people wanting to strip long-standing rights
I don't think you did. You threw out terms like "sports bans" but I don't think trans individuals being able to compete based on gender identity is a "long-standing right". If you're referring to other stuff you'll have to be more specific.
>Gender dysphoria is a pretty painful mental illness that often leads to suicide, so forbidding a transgender girl from getting treatment and forcing her to go to the boys' room does seem both dehumanizing and dangerous to her life.
Many policy issues will have some sort of effects on overall mortality. But I think it's pretty important in functional democracies that you should be able to have policy disagreements where these sorts of stakes are present without believing that the people taking the opposite stance are sadists or murderers instead of individuals who come to these debates with somewhat-different priors of empirical reality and somewhat-different but not fundamentally-abhorrent values. Trans issues seem to lack this normal presumption, however.
> I don't think you did. You threw out terms like "sports bans" but I don't think trans individuals being able to compete based on gender identity is a "long-standing right".
If these bans had already been in place, they wouldn't have needed to pass them. Trans people have been using the appropriate bathroom for their gender for ages, but now that transphobia is on the rise, they're actually being prevented from doing so. Trans people have been allowed to compete in the Olympics for longer than many Olympians have been alive, but now than a trans woman has actually made it in, for the first time ever, suddenly it's a debate. Some people have always preferred inclusive language, but now that people are on the lookout for "gender ideology," there's a decent chance that using it in passing will get you 10 thinkpieces and a JK Rowling tweetstorm about whether the phrase "menstruating people" erases women.
> Many policy issues will have some sort of effects on overall mortality. But I think it's pretty important in functional democracies that you should be able to have policy disagreements where these sorts of stakes are present without believing that the people taking the opposite stance are sadists or murderers instead of individuals who come to these debates with somewhat-different priors of empirical reality and somewhat-different but not fundamentally-abhorrent values. Trans issues seem to lack this normal presumption, however.
I don't completely disagree, but I think this is not so much about trans issues, and more an unfortunate product of the way bigotry works in our age. You don't have the KKK out burning crosses in front of people's houses anymore, instead you have people who are "race realists" and are just "worried about preserving culture." Nobody — not even virulent transphobes who believe all trans women are pedophiles — identifies as a transphobe, they are "gender critical feminists" who are "worried about preserving women's sex-based rights" or "worried about the children." Bigots have realized that bigotry isn't cool anymore, so they've learned to dress it up as moderate concern-trolling. So it's harder to tell who's speaking in good faith, especially since some actual moderates who haven't thought deeply on issues will parrot the bad-faith actors' talking points.
Regarding your last point, what do you think the practical implications of this are for those who seek social change? While there are plenty of obvious examples of what you're talking about, I worry that it's dangerously psychologically attractive to dismiss any and all criticism as bad-faith bigotry, at the expense of potentially convincing those actual moderates. That's especially true if the topic is personally sensitive and/or it's the nth repetition of a particular talking point. In a moral sense an explanation might not be owed, but that often seems like ceding a pragmatic opportunity to push for change.
It feels like there's a narrative metagame where there's a risk that taking concern trolling too seriously is a vector for being baited into savaging increasingly innocuous questions from actual moderates. And since people seem, generally speaking, to not like being told to sit down and shut up even in the service of causes they could otherwise be brought to support, I worry that could broadly harm public sentiment towards movements that go too hard into these kinds of tactics.
I don't know from blind people, but in America, there are anywhere from 10.2 to 17.5% of the population that are diabetic. While not pursued by hate groups, they are actively preyed by pharmaceutical companies and politicians who don't let insulins go generic - one of the few medicines that can't. Yes there is complaint about the medical system in America, I have yet to see diabetic/nondiabetic show up under facebook ID's like He/Him/His, normalization of syringe usage in restaurants, blood sugar testing not become a spectacle (of course I pick this one because I know the most about it, but there are many disorders that could be used with it). Stigma, predation and debate is associated with many things, but this one will get you fired/excommunicated from society. Speaking ignorantly about "just eat less sugar" to a type 1 diabetic does nothing.
I sympathize with your overall point and agree that it's shameful how America treats diabetics like an ATM, but I think you're very far off-target if you envy the way transgender people are treated. Lots of anti-transgender people do just fine in our society. A person who actively fought against trans rights in California is currently the Vice President of the United States (though she has gotten much quieter on trans issues in the meantime). We have several openly anti-trans members of Congress. The fight for trans rights is so defensive that covering the insane medical costs isn't even on the radar. A lot of transition-related expenses are rarely covered by insurance, and they cost as much as a luxury car. Yet when you hear about "trans activists," what they're fighting for is not to have their ability to use the bathroom taken away.
I'm not envious of the way transgender people are treated, and if I came across sounding that way I do apologize. My tone was for the disproportion of attention, not of action. In truth, very little action will be taken for good for the transgender population or health disorders. That isn't how these things play out, unfortunately. As a society, we only know the stick and not the carrot. While I sympathize with the sentiment that there are several openly anti-trans members of Congress, nearly all of Congress is anti-Medical Reform in action, if not in voice. My point is a scale of difference, which was brought up at the start of this thread. I really do appreciate the struggle that the trans community has to go through, and I am not deaf to their cries (and, though somehow this makes me a worse person to some who would hear it, I do know people who are trans). But if we are going to look at things on a societal scale, how can we ignore the statistical numbers of the societal woes and population impacts?
As for insurance, you might be shocked at what insurance doesn't cover for diabetics. They don't just "cut a check" for everything. I can't tell you how many times my doctor and I have to get on the phone to argue with them for literal months to get things covered. For things to keep me alive. Not to feel right in my skin. Not to keep thoughts of suicide away. To keep bare minimal physical biological function going.
As for Kamala Harris, she has a whole lot to be displeased about. Prison labor, drug prosecution, questionable school bussing policies, anti trans right policies. Yeah, I'm not a fan.
There is definitely some ground for solidarity between trans and diabetic people when it comes to access to healthcare - however, and I don't mean it to downplay the struggles of diabetics - discrimination against trans people has a social component that as far as I know doesn't apply for diabetics.
People can be rejected by their family, struggle to find employment, be beaten and killed by their dates, harassed in the street, etc... Based solely on the fact that they are transgender.
The media does absolutely soak it for eyeballs and outrage, but at the same time it really is a bellwether for how gender works in a society at larger. Gender is simply a more social / less individual phenomenon than blindness itself is (to use your example).
I find it funny and illuminating to read about conservative cis gays complaining about those darn genderqueer "kids, these days". All media fads aside, we simply haven't reached "queer equilibrium" yet where increasing acceptance of past social categories no longer triggers the emergence of new ones.
I think the importance is based not on the numbers involved - which are small - but on the significance of the demands. People are discussing our fundamental understanding and definitions of people's sex and gender that potentially affects everyone. A major concern is that once you let everyone self identify where does it stop? A caucasian woman was vilified a few years ago for identifying as black. Had she identified as male she would have been celebrated by the same people
I think there will be rather a lot of us who are quite animated by this issue—one that doesn’t directly affect us—because of our own past experiences.
As a gay man growing up in the 90s, I very acutely remember some of the public discourse around gay rights while I was a teenager. In the UK, that specifically included a coordinated campaign against mentions of homosexuality in education, with some pretty stark attempts to smear gay men in particular as dangerous predators and paedophiles intent on sneaking their agenda into schools so that they could abuse children.
If I’m honest with you, I wouldn’t be particularly animated about trans rights myself (beyond being generally supportive) if it weren’t for the fact that I see exactly the same techniques and accusations levelled against the trans community—specifically trans women—as were used against people like myself 20 years ago.
So I’ve personally gone from generally supportive-if-disinterested, to being absolutely fucking furious that this is being allowed to happen again. I’ve observed absolute outright lies about a minority group being repeated by people in positions of influence, and while it might not affect that many people directly I am so absolutely disgusted by it that I fully intend on being extremely vocal about it.
Back in the nineties I remember scare campaigns about gay schoolmates in locker rooms taking advantage of other students - it is literally the same playbook.
> Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people.
It's not impactful in terms of the number of people, but its a civil rights issue for those on the left. And for those on the right its just one more group trying to change things from the status quo.
It's also a complex issue. I sit pretty far on the left, but the various issues related to trans policy I find to often not have a clear solution -- most notably around sports and fairness. Sigh.
Honestly though the question around sports fairness is less a problem raised by trans people and more just an existing issue exposed. Female and male bodies work differently on average but there are a good number of women more fit and physically capable than 99% of men - gender is not an independent variable in physical fitness but I do wonder if there's really much of a reason to keep insisting that the genders be separated into exclusive leagues.
While we do have the special olympics, there are all sorts of classes of people who lack genetic traits to excel at sports and no allowance is made for them to compete within their own bracket - the only bracket we have is men and women.
I will admit that this is not a hill I'll die on though - I have almost no interest in sports as a profession so it's a fair bit out of my wheelhouse.
There is plenty of brackets so all can play at their respectives levels, separation in different leagues for collective sports, different levels in individual sports, etc. You can have fun in your local amateur <whatever>, but there would not be any point in a game against professionals. And at the top level, olympics or international competitions, there would be no match in mixed genders for most sports.
Sports fairness is basically a transphobe dogwhistle at this point. Major athletic organizations already have policies in place that say that trans women can’t compete unless x,y,z criteria are met which is typically a minimum number of years on HRT and T levels not more than something.
The issue is that there is a trade-off being made here. A trans woman athlete likely has a better bone structure than the average cis woman but not better than the most naturally gifted cis female athletes. Athletic orgs have largely decided that this is fine and it’s not a significant enough advantage to care about because the question for them was “how can trans women compete” not “if trans women can compete.”
But then it’s such an easy issue to drive a wedge on because you can get people riled up about whether trans women should be able to compete with a sprinkling of misinformation about what HRT does and dash of “so a man can just say he’s a woman and compete.”
What about basketball as another example. Height is probably the single most important physical attribute of the game and the height advantage men have is overwhelming. HRT after puberty has no impact on height.
And in that situation you may have very real case for saying that women over a certain height shouldn't be allowed to play women's basketball. That's fine, it's really no different than weight classes in wrestling. But then a trans woman who is of average height for a female basketball player shouldn't be barred from playing.
However, the WNBA sports so many women who are 6'+ (tall people play basketball, go figure) with the tallest player ever being 7'2" so the range of heights of women is pretty broad.
You seem to not be taking into account that fact that on average trans women will be taller than cis women, not that every trans woman is taller than every cis woman. And when talking about a sport that naturally selects for people who are outliers in height a trans woman being 5'7 (taller than the average woman) will be one of the shorter players.
Even if you capped height, to say 6'8", you will still see likely eventually see trans women dominating the sport.
<i>You seem to not be taking into account that fact that on average trans women will be taller than cis women, not that every trans woman is taller than every cis woman.</i>
No, I am taking that into account. Because of how dominant height is in basketball, you rarely see men in the NBA at 5'9" (the average height for a man in the US). Probably less than .5% of the NBA is that height or less.
So in women's basketball what this means, even if you cap the height, you will see the average height in the league grow because of the addition of trans women. 6'3" point guards will become the norm -- as of today I don't think a single 6'3" PG exists in the WNBA. And almost all of the eventual 6'3" PGs will be trans women.
Whereever you cap the height -- that height will be dominated by transwomen.
The only way to really blunt the impact is to cap the height so low that there is a substantial pool of top talent from transwomen and cis. Something like 6'. But that ends up now drastically hurting a bunch of cis women who are tall and prior to this, this being the preferred sport for them. And the WNBA already has issues with popularity and comparisons to the mens game (although I perosonally really enjoy womens basketball) -- if they capped the height to 6', that just makes the problem worse.
Not just bones. Muscle mass and the rest doesn't just disappear. In the sport i do (rugby), it's been evaluated to be a danger to players (increased risk of injury), and i would wager most contact sports are similar.
Muscle mass does just disappear in the exact same way as it does when someone stops steroids. It’s not instantaneous which is why places require 12-24 months of constant hormones.
Also you picked the one single example where trans women have been sorta kinda banned with basically no concrete justification, caused the world to roast them publicly, and then clubs largely ignored them and came up with their own rules — like France and the US changed the requirements to time on HRT and T levels like every other sport and the UK did a height and weight limit which, while odd, is actually a lower bar than time on HRT.
Outright bans on trans women will basically never be necessary when HRT is so effective. If by some chance there is a sport where it’s not enough you can start imposing greater restrictions like requiring trans women reach a certain (low) weight to shed any pre-transition muscle.
This is how the ruling class controls us peons. They have us fight each other vociferously over things like this or abortion or gay marriage, while they stay above it and do nothing except minor moral victories.
It wouldn't work if we didn't subject ourselves to it. The "ruling class" may be working to control us, but they don't have to work very hard. They don't even make the lies plausible. There are an awful lot of people willing to die on the hill of the most astonishing idiocies, just because it's their idiocy.
I have no real visibility (pun not intended) into the blind community, but similar groups do exist in the Deaf community; Deafness-as-identity/culture is very much a thing and some of the general cultural views around adaptation and integration with the hearing world look not-dissimilar to what you see in some aspects of LGBTQ+ movements.
> I don't mean to downplay what is happening because it is happening but do you not think the amount of outrage this topic generates surpasses the level of impact we can have assuming we fix it? It just feels like we're being distracted.
There is something about tech, though, that seems to concentrate the male to female transitioners far above background levels.
I can count more than a half-dozen male to female transition folks in my tech circles. I can't even think of one that I bumped into doing any non-tech social activity.
"There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people."
There are more white people than black people in the US. More Christian people than Jewish people. More able-bodied people than disabled people. More descendants of immigrants than Native Americans.
What level of outrage? I notice a lot of outrage online from people whose identities I cannot verify. I have noticed zero outrage IRL from real people that I interact with.
Small sample size but I think that judging outrage from online presence is inaccurate.
Yeah, there is a huge disconnect between online and IRL discussion of trans issues. Online you see all this seething outrage but IRL there are two camps — either you run in a ‘blue’ crowd and someone being trans is a non-issue. Nobody cares, they use your name and pronouns, let you live your life, celebrate legal victories, and commiserate losses, but when push comes to shove won’t actually do anything that requires effort and can’t be posted on insta. Then if you run in a ‘red’ crowd you’re quietly not accepted, you’ll be party to dinners where phrases like “gender ideology”, “the trans agenda”, “indoctrination”, “free speech” are brought up whenever articles hit the news. And if you come out you either are kicked out of your family, ghosted by your friend group, or just ignored and expected to never speak of it again. If you do being up that people aren’t using your name, pronouns, or being otherwise not treated like your gender you’re called “political” and it’s taken as an attack. And if you say, “no it’s because what your doing hurts me” it’s doubly taken as an attack because now you’re “playing the victim.”
Only when the two groups mix do you get this fired up hate because the mechanisms within the groups that lead to people not talking about it don’t work and the social graces that tamp out arguments aren’t present on the internet so it explodes.
I hate so much that my existence is the hot button political topic right now. Like it’s good I guess — seems like we need to get this out of our systems but ugh does it bring out the worst in everyone. This should have never been a party thing and it’s so stupid that it’s now a billion times more political because of it. Both sides are trying to out woke or out red pill each other while the actual lives of trans people fall by the wayside.
Distraction is exactly what’s important about it. It triggers everyone and keeps people from paying attention to other things. Also helps get clicks, sell ads, and boost social media engagement.
Personally I don’t care at all if people want to be trans and be called by a chosen gender pronoun. I just can’t think of a reason I should have a problem with that.
There are a few edge case areas like women’s sports and prisons where it is a very complicated issue, but those are rare cases among rare cases. This is not an issue that should be monopolizing headlines.
When it comes to issues in which there is a conflict between a small group and some larger group, you can't just brush this aside as only a problem affecting the smaller group.
For instance, there are situations in which transgender rights (someone identifying as a woman using a for-women-only space) are in conflict with women's rights (women not wanting to be in a for-women-only space when whom they perceive as a male is present).
You can't just disregard the women and say, don't worry about it, it's just a 0.6% problem.
We invent wheelchairs and ramps and lots of prosthetic limbs.
We (recently) approved a drug to treat Alzheimer.
We offer nursing homes and in-house help and care to old people with mental issues.
We do little more than argue about trans individuals. And many trans individuals are killed or commit suicide. The average life expectancy for a trans person is likely a lot smaller than a blind or disabled person.
THAT is why trans people and the related community are making a lot of noise.
Couldn't agree more. The airtime on this topic is insane. People's email signatures filled with their pronouns. The anger. The division. I get it's an emotive conversation but then so are gay rights, gender rights, race rights, democratic rights, inequality, and about a gazillion other topics. That's not belittling trans as an issue, but it's so incredibly noisy.
IMO the wider question here is nothing to do with trans but about what being "liberal" means. We're in this insanely weird moment in history when the hard left is eating itself by being so Woke it's nearly impossible to even have a conversation any more.
I'm as left wing as they come, but being left wing means being able to have open, honest and sometimes uncomfortable debates. Being left wing is not, and never has been, about shutting down conversation, de-platforming, dogma, chilling effects. These are the things of the hard right, and the sooner people on the left start realising it and start being empowered to be vocal in defence of the freedom of ideas, the better.
"I'm as left wing as they come, but being left wing means being able to have open, honest and sometimes uncomfortable debates. Being left wing is not, and never has been, about shutting down conversation, de-platforming, dogma, chilling effects. These are the things of the hard right, and the sooner people on the left start realising it and start being empowered to be vocal in defence of the freedom of ideas, the better."
That has not been true anywhere in the world where a left wing (the) party dominated the discourse. No socialist or communist party has ever had tolerance to an opposing view.
I hope you're aware that "left wing" doesn't mean "socialist" or "communist" and that plenty of liberal democracies have had social democratic parties in power for some period or another without there being any breakdown in tolerance to opposing viewpoints.
Of course it also means socialists and communists among other leftist parties. They represent the pure leftist ideology from which other leftist parties take ideas from, and the closer to center those parties are the more they tone the communistic ideals down. In essence the tip of the left wing is completely intolerable and illiberal.
Your point doesn't really work, if it is "at the heart of any left wing moderate is a left wing fringe lunatic" because obviously you could just claim the same of the right, and suggest that every moderate right wing has fascism at its core. This sort of reductionism ends up with nothing useful.
Both right and left approach a similar looking set of ideologies at their extremes. I'm arguing that the left runs the risk of being overrun by something that moderate liberal lefties like me should be very concerned about.
> Your point doesn't really work, if it is "at the heart of any left wing moderate is a left wing fringe lunatic" because obviously you could just claim the same of the right, and suggest that every moderate right wing has fascism at its core. This sort of reductionism ends up with nothing useful.
I disagree. Maybe we understand the terminology differently. For me both wings of the left and right spectrum are extremes, while liberals and conservatives are on another axis. Liberals and Conservatives have existed long before there were leftist and rightist ideologies. (the -isms)
> Both right and left approach a similar looking set of ideologies at their extremes. I'm arguing that the left runs the risk of being overrun by something that moderate liberal lefties like me should be very concerned about.
The terminology question is confused by the fact that, in the US, "liberal" means "leftist", whereas in much (all?) of Europe or maybe even the rest of the world, "liberal" is more associated with classical liberalism, i.e. closer to what is called "libertarian" in the US (although I do feel that libertarianism is like classical liberalism taken to the extreme).
In any case, classical liberalism was only developed in the 19th century, while the usage of "left" and "right" is slightly older: it dates back to the French Revolution where it just happened that opposing factions would sit at opposite ends of the assembly. Given the chaotic nature of the French Revolution, what these opposite ends would represent would change countless times, but in general, the left wing was more associated with progressivism and the will of the Third Estate and the right wing was more conservative. Communism didn't even exist at the time, although arguably the first proto-communist advocate, Gracchus Babeuf, did emerge later in the French Revolution (he was offed by the "left wing" itself, though).
Yes, although that "something" isn't even socialism, it's... I don't know what it is. I'm not a socialist by any stretch but I am told that some hard-core Marxists are quite skeptical of modern "wokeness" which strangely never seems to question power imbalances due to capitalism itself.
Problem is that people on the left support de-platforming. Perhaps it is wrong and business leaders are really responsible for this, but combating hate speech is popular in those circles. You can guess how hate gets define by zeitgeist.
Most countries in Western Europe have/had socialist and communist parties, that have been pretty tolerant to opposing views. Most US citizen have very strange ideas about socialism.
> I don't mean to downplay what is happening because it is happening but do you not think the amount of outrage this topic generates surpasses the level of impact we can have assuming we fix it? It just feels like we're being distracted.
Those aren't mutually exclusive. It's not uncommon to create distractions by purposefully treating a small group badly. And the solution can neither be to allow it to dominate all the bandwidth nor to ignore it.
Meanwhile, unlike Alzheimers, amputations or blindness, there doesn't really need to be any scientific breakthroughs to handle this. We just need to somehow fix society. It's at least controllable.
> There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people.
That's a little bit of a non-sequitur, no? If this should be compared to anything, it's to earlier left-right "cultural war" flash points such as same-sex marriage and abortion.
Say that people with Alzheimer's should get access to better medical treatment, and no one will disagree with you (although some might say "as long as I don't pay"). Say the same about people who have lost a limb, and you'll see the same thing.
But try making any such statement about trans people, and you'll get vehement, polarized agreement and disagreement. Now, you've entered the territory of how people should and shouldn't be able to express their physical identity in public, in both sexual and non-sexual manners. And you are about to run into many strongly held opinions and pre-existing cultural mores.
With that said, I don't disagree with your last point. Sometimes, I do feel like cultural war inflammations are purposely constructed to hack the human psyche by playing into these strongly held beliefs and pre-existing cultural mores. At least in the present day, these kinds of inflammations work very effectively for generating engagement in the attention economy. But I don't know if that's a good thing. On the contrary (and maybe you'd agree with me here), I often get the sense that it's a bad thing.
Human society has no "laws" by nature, the closest observable in nature with the great apes is a brute "winner" takes it all society, that is not capable to create and sustain complexity and coherence.
To compensate this, humanity has "contract" cults who form a basic law providing form of society, protecting the weaker party form getting exploited and abused.
These contract cults exists since the dawn of time and have been shaped into various forms, mostly with mythological wrappings, we designate as religion today.
Hounded into the service as contract cultists, have been all sexual deviants of a society. Always.
Which is why if you watch carefully, its actually selected for.
A emotional reaction to question regarding sexual deviancy from the norm, is a important signal during the mating process, regardless on what side of the political spectrum you are.
Gender ideology is a synthetic contract cult, and while it has all the other negatives, previous religion incarnations carried with them, it also brings alot of freedom to the cultists and tries to do away with alot of pain. Abolishing it, is not possible, as it will simply lead to other contract cults forming.
The best that can be accomplished is, preventing the church from intervening in fields of science society depends on and finding a new separation of church and state, with this contract cult.
PS: Bad engineered religions, lead to a faltering rule of law in societys, which then return in the long run to the "winner" takes it all societal model, destroying complexity capability.
People who don't qualify as legally blind but have extreme vision impairment would like to talk to you. My stepson is profoundly deaf but still has hearing and wears hearing aides to assist him, he'll often read lips during conversations to supplement that audio information and that can result in pretty big communication breakdowns.
Pretty much everything in life is a spectrum of possibilities - trying to boil those down to binary states can be helpful for some purposes but is never clean.
Well, it's undoubtedly a condition but there are probably some who dispute whether it's a "disease" or "disability". This resistance is more commonly associated with the deaf community, and drawing parallels between this population and the trans population will get you in hot water pretty quickly..
I would imagine that the rate of violent attacks on blind individuals specifically due to their blindness is also lower than hate crimes against Trans individuals.
I don't hear about a lot of amputees being dragged behind pickup trucks for not having as many limbs as their attackers, but maybe I'm not reading the right publications.
I have a theory that we are seeing a "Times Square Billboard Effect" where as we progress and some marginalize groups are being better heard and included other groups are both seeing an opportunity and need to get more noticed. Similar to Times Square billboards having to get brighter, flashier and larger to be noticed. With how traditional and social media are working to get noticed it has be as big and loud as possible.
I mean, 2 million people in the US being discriminated against seems like plenty enough people for this to be a worthwhile discussion. But it's not just the number of people. It's also about how severe the discrimination against them is.
>Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people.
Ok but is there a large portion of the population that believes blind people don't deserve health care for their disability? Is there a large portion of the population that believes blind people shouldn't be afforded working rights?
You can't just go "there's only 2 million trans people in the US, who cares about their healthcare, there's more important things out there", when the consequence of doing so severely impacts the quality of life of .5% of the population.
I don't think you would be sitting here going "only .5% of the US has type 1 diabetes, why are talking so much about making sure they get appropriate health care? Who cares if they're discriminated against during hiring?"
> Ok but is there a large portion of the population that believes blind people don't deserve health care for their disability?
Actually, health insurance doesn't cover the cost of a guide dog, which can cost between $40-60k [0]
From personal experience (I'm not blind, but I know one), there is also workforce discrimination in the form of "don't ask her to do that, she's blind" when in fact the blindness doesn't impact the work at all.
>I don't think you would be sitting here going "only .5% of the US has type 1 diabetes, why are talking so much about making sure they get appropriate health care?
I read that trans people suffer from high rates of violence, homelessness, etc. In contrast, amputees and blind people don't usually get kicked out by their parents or randomly stabbed.
If BLM (vs e.g. StopAsianHate) is any indication, the level of outrage in activism seems to be directly correlated to the level of violence in high profile incidents, more so than percentage of affected population
For the record, in case it wasn't clear, I was talking primarily about US. But if we must compare, in some parts of the world anything under the LGBT umbrella is considered a crime punishable by death. I'm not aware of any place in the world that considers killing toddlers with disabilities legal.
Adult percentages are too blunt an instrument. With young adults and children this is a big issue.
In the school where I teach, sex, gender, and most importantly gender identity come sharply into focus during puberty and I have several students taking a time-limited therapy course to help them with gender id questions. That puts us into the 5% to 10% range, though that is of course purely anecdotal and from a tiny sample size.
Puberty hasn’t suddenly become more complex and access to these ideas and therapies may be driving gender-identity as a fashionable topic amongst the kids. But from what I’ve seen it’s a genuine need with most of them who ask for it.
Puberty is fascinating: it is a time of identity turmoil for every human being and while in the majority of cases that means going down a difficult but pre-determined path, for many others it throws up a huge number of questions about how to match their genetic/hormonal programming and the way they think, with the society in which they live. Intersex itself is a spectrum, for example.
> Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people.
Those groups aren’t subjected to violence just for existing. The comparisons aren’t at all one to one.
This is a video from a source I normally don't trust. But if we really want to learn something about bias, I think it is worth a watch. This is about racism, but I think we see similar problem with gender.
This is a real problem, especially since a too strong backlash would hurt too. But at this point I don't think it is sustainable to feed pupils wrong or ideological information.
Honestly, I would have difficulties deciding to send my kids to a school this or a pious catholic boarding school. In both cases countermeasures might be helpful.
For the topic itself I agree with you. There are countless issues that should get more exposure compared to these topics.
A minority group, by definition, has no power. It needs the majority to speak for them. So regardless of how small a number they represent, scaling the conversation up is required.
> I don't mean to downplay what is happening because it is happening but do you not think the amount of outrage this topic generates surpasses the level of impact we can have assuming we fix it? It just feels like we're being distracted.
But downplaying it is exactly what you are doing, literally.
To answer your main question, though: the very small community that we are talking about is disproportionately being subjected to murder, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and widespread discrimination.
The disproportionate harms that this small community is subject to is the key to understanding the level of outrage being evoked on their behalf.
> disproportionately being subjected to murder, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and widespread discrimination.
This is provably untrue. Not that it isn't a tragedy, but in 2020, 44 trans people were killed[1] in the US. This is a rounding error even when looking at "merely" just hate crime statistics (for example, in 2019, the FBI reported ~7000 criminal offenses[2] in the "hate crime" category). I get it, people are passionate about it, companies change their logos, everyone posts about it on social media, but let's not perpetuate these myths.
Both of you are correct, you're just looking at probabilities conditioned in the opposite way. You're looking at P(trans | killed), which is low. The parent post is looking at P(killed | trans), which is quite high. Understandably, if you are trans P(killed | trans) is a lot more relevant to you than P(trans | killed).
I don't agree, we were talking about proportionality. 0.6% of the US adult population identify as trans (1,254,000). Of that 0.6%, 44 were killed. The math is simple. The overall murder rate in the USA is 0.005% (population: 328 million, yearly murders: 16,425). The per-capita murder rates of trans people in the USA is 0.0035%, barely over half the national average.
To make the claim that trans people are disproportionately affected by crime/violence is simply not true.
> To make the claim that trans people are disproportionately affected by crime/violence is simply not true.
It's well-known that many trans hate crimes go unreported or misreported (as the victim is misgendered). So unless you really think it was highly unlikely for there to be >= 19 unreported/misreported trans deaths (19 + 44 / 1_254_000 > 0.005%), then trans death rates are probably higher.
We're dangerously getting into "no true Scotsman" territory here. Even being as charitable as I can, it just seems that you don't like the data because it doesn't fit your narrative.
> Even being as charitable as I can, it just seems that you don't like the data because it doesn't fit your narrative.
And you seem to like the data because it does. You are right, I don't trust reported numbers of trans people hate crimes, because I'm not aware of any unified reporting standards around trans hate crimes (in general I don't trust reported numbers on newly reported hate crimes, especially when advocacy groups are doing most of the reporting; it means the issue is poorly understood (so badly reported) and highly politicized). I have a pretty large prior here that I believe trans hate crimes are underreported, much like I have a prior that sexual violence is underreported, due to the nature of these instances. Moreover, numbers this low have large uncertainty bands, just using basic frequentist or Bayesian probability methods, enough that I doubt we can even come to much of a conclusion over our topic of discussion. I think we'll have to agree to disagree, and please stop downvoting me. I felt like our discussion was productive.
I don't have a narrative. I look at the data and draw conclusions. You start with conclusions and try to morph the data to fit them. I'll even grant you that sexual crimes go underreported (heck, have 43% to bring up that number up), but even so, it wouldn't account for a "disproportionate" number of crime against trans people. It would barely equal the rate of the general population. You're seriously trying to argue that trans crimes are underreported by multiple factors? That's quite the claim.
> I think we'll have to agree to disagree, and please stop downvoting me.
If you'd prefer working with the data we have presented, take a look at https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/tables/table-1.xls . Other than racially motivated hate crimes which comprise most FBI recognized hate crimes, the next most is religious hate crime, below which is sexual orientation motivated hate crimes. And sexual orientation motivated hate crimes rank very similarly to religiously motivated hate crimes. In other words, sexual orientation oriented hate crimes are the 3rd most frequent, and very close in # to religiously motivated hate crimes, the 2nd most frequent hate crime.
Specifically with anti-gender-identity based hate crime, we can see that anti-transgender hate crime has one of the highest incident numbers for any individual cohort, despite knowing that only 0.6% of the population identifies as trans according to data presented earlier in this thread.
> It would barely equal the rate of the general population.
You are generalizing from the specific, here. The data that you appear to be referencing is only looking at murder rates.
You’ve then set up a straw-man argument. The straw is in the data that you’ve not incorporated into your mental model: the rates of crimes other than murder.
Yeah, I used murder rates specifically for three reasons: (1) they are often cited in news articles, including my citation above; (2) they are the easiest to compare side-by-site in an apples-to-apples comparison (gen pop vs population X or population Y); and (3) murder rates tend to be a good indicator of other, proximate, criminal activity (be it sexual assault, physical assault, etc.).
Homicide rates are also quite reliably measured, and comparable across populations and jurisdictions (as opposed to robbery, assault, etc. that are less reliably reported and consistently defined). It is, generally speaking, a good measure.
No one is arguing against the validity of measurements of homicide rates.
At question is 1) the validity of using murder rate to predict to frequencies of other victim-having crimes and 2) the validity of ignoring between-group variation when drawing conclusions about the relative frequency of crime between different groups.
> Also, your methodological techniques are faulty - ease of comparison is not a means in which to determine the validity of a comparison.
This is a straw-man, nowhere do I argue that "ease of comparison is a means in which to determine the validity of a comparison." I do, however, argue that the comparison of murder rates in gen pop to the murder rates of trans pop is a valid comparison. Perhaps you'd like to elucidate why you don't think it is.
I’m not seeing where “U.S. violent and property crime rate have plunged since 1990s, regardless of data source” that you cited shows evidence that murder rates are reliable predictors of rates of other types of victim-having crimes?
Additionally, pointing out errors of generalization and particularization is not a straw-man tactic of argument. It is a direct conflict with your argument on the grounds of scientific validity - are you actually measuring what you think you are measuring?
Setting aside that we haven’t yet established that murder rates are reliable predictors of other victim-having crimes, there is a deeper problem, that another commenter was trying to point out to you in terms of Bayesian probability.
To draw the conclusion that I drew, which I continue to defend (for clarities sake: that the LGBTQIA+ community is disproportionately affected by victim-having crime), you would need to look at data that partitions the general public into its various sub-groups and compares the frequency of victim-having crime between all of the individual sub-group, in all combinations.
Such a statistical technique is frequently used in empirical studies of populations, across disciplines.
Statistical analysis of these between-group variations is where you are able to draw out conclusions such as “blacks are disproportionally convicted of certain crimes” or “LGBTQIA+ are disproportionately victims of murder, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and widespread discrimination”.
> Perhaps you’d like to elucidate why you don’t think it is [a valid comparison]
There may very well be some valid conclusions to draw from data about murder rates for the whole population compared to a given sub-group, but that methodological technique suffers from the so-called “law of averages”.
In the scientific community, it is common knowledge that research methodologies based on statistical analyses of between-group variations is a technique that is sensitive to patterns that would not appear in a comparison with the average.
> I’m not seeing where “U.S. violent and property crime rate have plunged since 1990s, regardless of data source” that you cited shows evidence that murder rates are reliable predictors of rates of other types of victim-having crimes?
I'm not sure if you're being purposefully obtuse here, but there's an obvious correlation between the drop in "violent crime" (homicide, murder, assault, manslaughter, etc.) and "violent victimization" (physical abuse, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, etc.). Do I have to calculate the correlation coefficient for you?
> In the scientific community, it is common knowledge that research methodologies based on statistical analyses of between-group variations is a technique that is sensitive to patterns that would not appear in a comparison with the average.
I don't believe the comparison here suffers from the law of averages. And even if it did, the difference between the two data sets' deviation isn't high enough to be of any significance.
Well just have to agree to disagree, but I’ll refer you to the empirical evidence cited by myself and other commenters that ultimately supports my original assertion.
Possibly violating HN site guidelines here, but I wanted to add a civilly-toned comment to thank you for illuminating one area where our mental models had diverged on this topic.
> you don’t like the data because it doesn’t fit your narrative
In counter argument, you don’t like the laws of logic and probability because they don’t fit your narrative.
Edit: Furthermore, do we not agree, in the United States, under the rule of law, that it is a failure of civil responsibility, punishable by death in some jurisdictions, to murder even 1 person, let alone 44?
How is your argument anything other than we must do everything within our rights and capacity, as a country, to prevent each and every failure of civic responsibility?
> How is your argument anything other than we must do everything within our rights and capacity, as a country, to prevent each and every failure of civic responsibility?
Apart from the insults (accusing me of not liking logic, etc.), this is a straw-man and, just to be clear, is absolutely not what I'm arguing.
I believe this paper ought to suffice as the entry point for the non-scientific community to pursue the academic research that supports my original assertion:
Violence against transgender people: A review of United States data,
Aggression and Violent Behavior,
Volume 14, Issue 3,
2009,
Pages 170-179
That paper (full text in [1]) does not support your argument at all. In fact, murder rates are only mentioned in §3.2:
> The report related stories of 51 transgender and gender non-conforming individuals under the age of 30 who were murdered in the United States between 1995 and 2005.
Quite frankly, this number is even lower than the FBI's statistics.
> What is beginning to emerge from these multiple sources of data are the increased risks of variety of types of violence, though in particular sexual violence, faced by transgender people
Their conclusion directly states that there is an increased risk of violence for transgender people.
Secondarily, their conclusion also hints at there being empirical evidence that one cannot extrapolate from murder rates to cover all forms of victim-having crime. That would imply that your argument is indeed suffering from the law of averages.
You seem to be succumbing to a psychological phenomenon called projection.
In fact, you have set up a straw man argument, contrary to HN site guidelines of using the most charitable reading of my original comment, and then inverted your mental model such that you believe I am the one setting up the straw man.
> Not that it isn't a tragedy, but in 2020, 44 trans people were killed[1] in the US. This is a rounding error even when looking at "merely" just hate crime statistics
I'm confused. How can you compare 44 deaths to 7000 offenses? (Including 55 deaths, across all hate crimes.)
I'm not arguing that trans people are disproportionately killed or assaulted, but that we are in no way a rounding error.
Using your source, the 2019 FBI report:
Of the 8,559 criminal offenses, 51 were Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter.
224 offenses were based on Gender Identity, this includes 173 Anti-transgender offenses, and 51 Anti-Gender Non-Conforming offenses. 342 offenses not included in those numbers we’re targeting “Anti-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender (Mixed Group)”
5 of the 51 Murders and Nonnegligent Manslaugters were perpetrated because the victim was in the group "Anti-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender (Mixed Group)".
1 of the 51 Murders and Nonnegligent Manslaughters were perpetrated on the basis of Gender Identity.
> the very small community that we are talking about is disproportionately being subjected to murder, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and widespread discrimination.
Citation needed.
From what I can tell they are being given more leeway than any other group, and anyone who dares argue against their “rights” risks losing their job.
Trans-people does absolutely not to seem to be at risk anywhere.
Technically, no, I’d posit that in the scientific community of focus on this topic, it is considered common knowledge and likely an “a priori” logical conclusion.
> From what I can tell they are being given more leeway than any other group, and anyone who dares argue against their “rights” risks losing their job.
Trans-people does absolutely not to seem to be at risk anywhere.
You might refresh yourself on HN site guidelines.
Your comment would have been much more interesting if you had declined to include the quoted portion.
Given the data we have now, you’re right— if humans were rational we’d be focusing topics that affect the masses. Using minority groups (BLM, LGBT, Immigration, etc.) as shields for larger agendas is an effective defense strategy.
If you choose one variable that describes people, and assume for simplicity it's approximately bell shaped, then sure, most people are in the middle, which is "average" or "normal", and if we want to help the most people, it seems logical to focus on them.
But if you start adding independent variables, it becomes increasingly unlikely that any given person is in the middle on all of them. Even with three, let alone dozens.
So you, or any other randomly chosen person, are probably very like "the masses" in some respects, but given, say, ten dimensions, nobody is average.
Which is why disregarding minorities in general isn't a viable way to run a society.
But to answer your question “why is this important” - the extreme minority of transgender people and the army of their supporters and activists in their quest for recognizing trans rights step on and disregard women rights and aggressively “cancel” anyone who dares to disagree with gender ideology, now that affects all of us, if you care about free speech.
If I understand correctly, trans people get beaten to death far out of proportion to their numbers. No, I don't have statistics, but if true you can't just look at the number of trans people to see how serious the problem is.
In 2019, the most recent year for which the FBI has data, the total US homicide rate was 4.3 deaths per 100,000 people [0] (possible underestimate; incident reporting is voluntary, and 25% of police departments don't submit expanded homicide data). Human Rights Campaign recorded the deaths of 25 transgender and gender non-conforming people in 2019 [1]. There are an estimated 1 million people who identify as transgender in the US [2], and an estimated 1.2 million people who identify as nonbinary or gender non-conforming [3]. That produces a US trans and nonbinary homicide rate for 2019 of 1.1 per 100,000.
Of all homicides reported by HRC with transgender or gender non-confirming victims in 2019, just one was determined to involve a clear anti-LGBT motive. HRC's data may be an underestimate. However, it is consistent with their estimated homicide rates and rate of hate crimes reported in other years.
Any murder is a tragedy, hate crimes all the moreso. However, a single-digit number of annual anti-trans and nonbinary murders is thankfully not an epidemic. The overall homicide rate for trans people seems much lower than the national average.
Notably this data excludes assaults, harassment, stalking, or any other attacks which don't result in fatalities.
Don't role your own aggregate statistics when the thing you try to derive by mashing together things created for different purposes is measured or estimated by people.
I don't role my own encryption for public use either.
At my university, the fratboys were far, far, FAR more disruptive than the LGBT groups. But we go with it; fratboy are an accepted pupal stage of American men it seems
The numbers I can find for US citizens is: 0.6% or 1,988,696 out 331,449,281 of people total for the entirety of the US in 2021.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...
In the UK where the featured article took place the latest poll I could find comes counts the number of people who selected "other" when choosing a sex at 0.4% or 224,632 people out of 64,596,800.
>https://practicalandrogyny.com/2014/12/16/how-many-people-in...
Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people.
I don't mean to downplay what is happening because it is happening but do you not think the amount of outrage this topic generates surpasses the level of impact we can have assuming we fix it? It just feels like we're being distracted.