First do lots of harm
A prosperous barrister sounding like an agitated teenager.
He blathers as if puberty blockers are an entirely established, uncontroversial, unquestioned health-improver with zero harms and even zero risk of harms.
But that’s not the case, and he’s in a position to know perfectly well that’s not the case, unless he systematically shoves his thumbs into his ears whenever anyone tries to tell him so. But he’s an adult, and a powerful adult at that, so he has no right to shove his thumbs in his ears and go right on promoting puberty blockers, given how drastic and life-altering the results of taking them are.
Shorter: there’s no such thing as “the wrong body.”
It’s the constant bad faith of their arguments that does so much to discredit them.
Exactly, @me. Does he deny that anyone transitions after puberty is complete? Looks like it to me.
Okay, I’m playing along. No one actually transitions, early or late. But the foxhunter is being a bit histrionic here, a bit dramatic, in claiming that it all must be rushed through while anyone desiring to transition must be given the medical intervention as a child or face a lifetime of misery and woe.
Yet it sounds like many who are encouraged to go down this path still end up with a lifetime of misery and woe, except that nobody has the nerve to follow up to determine the actual numbers. If being “born in the wrong body” is not an actual phenomenon, then “treatment” for this non-existent condition is unlikely to solve the real, underlying problems these people have. They might feel or imagine they are trapped in the wrong body, but then it’s a matter of helping them find peace in the body they are in, because it’s the only one they’re ever going to have. Suggesting they arrest normal development of that body, carve bits of it off, and pump the remainder full of wrong sex hormones, does not sound like a very good recipe for happiness and self acceptance.
There’s no such thing as living in the wrong body, Jojo.
Living in the wrong body requires that the mind be distinct from the body; i.e., mind-body dualism. But we know that the mind supervenes on bodily processes, so mind-body dualism is bunk.
Nullius, that’s just the thing that is bothering me so much about this claim – the dualism. And, also people like PZ who used to deny there were “men’s brains” and “women’s brains” (and probably still does in that context) that can blithely say that TiMs have a woman’s brain. No, they have a person’s brain, and it happens to tell the body to produce the testosterone level that will give them male secondary sexual characteristics. And frankly, most of them act like stereotypical males, they look like males, they have penises (or did at one time), they are bigger and stronger than females, so what exactly is it that makes them a woman? Until they can answer this question without resorting to stereotypes or circular arguments, every thinking person (and those who don’t think, too) is entitled to question the dogma, or reject it outright. Just like I reject chakras and crystal healing and vedic medicine and jade eggs, I am entitled to subject this bit of pseudoscience to the same critical analysis.
iknklast: Isn’t it fascinating how plastic people’s belief systems are before social pressure? I’d guess that the phenomenon of skeptics and scientists and other sorts-who-should-know-better owes much of its proliferation to the people-pleasing (more accurately audience- or crowd-pleasing) behavior incentive structure of the internet broadly and social media / “content creation” specifically. Combined with ideological foot-in-the-door, progressive escalation, it’s easy to see how someone starting at the default Liberal position and enter into an extremity spiral merely by expressing that support a bit too strongly. Positive reinforcement and cognitive dissonance are powerful things.
Not that I’m excusing the abdication of reason, mind you. I’m just hypothesizing how we got here so Santayana wouldn’t be cross with me.
Oh, yeah, another thing: I’m not sure they’re being circular anymore. “A woman is someone who [blahs] [like|as] a woman,” is circular if you treat it as a definition of a word. For the true believer, this doesn’t seem to be the intent. Rather, they’re defining the admittance requirements for a social club. What it actually means is, “anyone who [blahs] while wearing a Woman badge is a member of Woman.” It is as content-free as Green and Purple.
As I wrote elsewhere:
Nullius, I do realize they are doing that, but as a woman, I refuse to accept being treated as a member of a “club”. A club anyone can join…except, apparently, those of us who were the “founders” and charter members of that “club”. It is trivializing our existence, and ignoring our “lived experience”, the one thing they claim to believe above all others. But none the less, I refuse to have my sex considered a club, and I certainly was not given a vote in admitting all these members who just want to destroy the “club”, trash the neighborhood, and colonize the clubhouse. And who in the world elected a man president of the “club”? I didn’t have a vote.
@7 that’s so obvious when you look at how they use/define the word ‘lesbian’. Literally anyone ‘can be a lesbian’, apparently; I guess you just have to want the label enough.