Thank you for sharing this detailed account of your experience.
I’m a libertarian and a transhumanist. I strongly believe in and stand up for the principle that people should be able to do whatever they choose to with their own lives and their own bodies. People can be wildly different from each other, and what would be a terrible existence for one person is often a happy and fulfilling life for another.
Also, I’m attending to your addendum, and not assuming that your experience generalizes to all transpeople, or all transwomen.
But that said, speaking personally, I find this account disturbing. And more analytically, this makes me more sympathetic to the view that the increasing transgender identification is a symptom of some kind of social problem.
On the face of it, people taking drastic, permanent, alterations to their biology as a strategy to cope with social isolation seems unhealthy? I would guess that, for most people transitioning for broadly these reasons, that strategy will fail to address the underlying desire to be loved, and will impose additional large costs on their life.
It’s additionally concerning if, as you describe, the motivating desire is to be loved as a cute anime girl. Feminists complain about the unreasonable body-image expectations imposed by “society”. But anime girls are literally cartoons, with inhumanly cute proportions. From the post, it sounds like it’s not so a desire to look like an an anime girl, but to adopt the social role of an anime girl, and to be loved and appreciated the way they are loved?
(I’m not sure how concerning that should be to me. People often take inspiration from fictional examples, and that can be totally healthy and good. Maybe this is no different than eg someone who starts studying martial arts after watching anime? Real martial arts are different, from the fictional versions, but there’s some overlap in what’s cool about them.)
Also, while socially or even medically transitioning doesn’t preclude having kids, my understanding is that fertility rates are much lower for transpeople. I don’t think that “some people switching sexes” is even on the top 10 list of the reasons for declining fertility in developed countries, but I also think there’s something to “family values”, and that it’s not unreasonable for society to try to incentivize people, on the margin, to follow life paths that entail having kids, in the context of stable marriages and families. My impression is that there are plenty of transwomen who, if they had lived only a few decades ago, would have have been fathers.
Possibly they would have been fathers living lives of quiet desperation, much worse for them the now more-available option of socially or medically transitioning (which is why it’s so important to allow people the freedom to opt out of societal defaults). But if many of those transwomen are following a life path that disproportionately entails not having kids, not because that’s a better fit for their essential being, but because it’s a life path that functions as a coping strategy, which is more cognitively and socially available than (possibly more effective or more functional) alternatives, then I think something has gone badly wrong.
While transitioning might be the right choice for some people, I’m now newly worried that there are a small number of people who have a strong innate self-identity that differs from their sex-assigned at birth and a larger number of people who are lonely and depressed, and who are latching on to a drastic and a priori harmful[1] life choice, as a misguided attempt to address those basically social and and emotional problems.
Is this a wrong takeaway for some reason?
I’m attempting to be careful writing this. I imagine that a comment like this can be threatening to lots of transpeople, because it seems to invalidate their identity and give license to disregard their experience or limit their freedoms. I’m confident that there are people that would read a post like the above and weaponize it in the culture war. But I’ll, just say again, I don’t want to do that, at least. I’m interested in the project of how to build a healthy and flourishing society, and committed to allowing people to make choices, including those that seem bad to me.
Thanks for saying this! Do you mind if I push back on a few points? I think I don’t find your post threatening for identity reasons, but I think the data you are drawing from may be a bit miscalibrated.
drastic, permanent, alterations to their biology
I see phrasing like this a lot, I don’t mean to pick on you in particular, but in general I think there is a level of rhetorical alarmism with language like this that isn’t justified by the medical reality, and IME people using phrasing like this rarely have a gears-level understanding of trans medicine (I don’t know if that’s true for you or not). I’m trying not to say stuff that sounds like nitpicking, but I realize it will probably read like that.
Nothing is trans care is altering our genetic physiology at a deep level AFAIK. Basically there is hormones and surgery. In most places including the US we only use bioidentical hormones and in particular the effects of estrogen on a male are a lot less drastic and permanent than I think many people understand. I can go into more detail if you’re interested. Surgery is more complicated so I don’t think I can get into that here without this comment becoming painfully long. The irreversible surgeries for MtFs aren’t terribly common (<20%). The anime girl phenomenon the author describes seems to be exclusive to MtFs. If you’re interested in the latest research on detransition (skewed towards the FtM side), see https://www.thedarestudy.com/
to try to incentivize people, on the margin, to follow life paths that entail having kids, in the context of stable marriages and families...
But if many of those transwomen are following a life path that disproportionately entails not having kids, not because that’s a better fit for their essential being, but because it’s a life path that functions as a coping strategy, which is more cognitively and socially available than (possibly more effective or more functional) alternatives, then I think something has gone badly wrong.
This is all darkly ironic to me, because outside of the terminally-online-anime-LW memeplex, getting married and having kids is a common coping strategy. To your credit, you’re aware that this is something that can happen. But I think you’re underrating the frequency and the harms, especially if you care about happy stable families, vs just getting the birth rate up. In particular, it can be really horrible and unfair for the wives. I personally tried to do this when I was young (unconsciously, long story), and I know several others who got further along and had kids. Our brains are shifted female so some of us can end up much more predisposed to childrearing monogamy than the median cishet man. I just worry that people reading this post are overindexing on a particular kind of MtF.
I can’t give you a full accounting of the internal/external factors affecting fertility among trans people. I can say that people generally aren’t aware it’s possible to restore the production of viable sperm in most MtFs:
I believe very strongly that—if you care about happy, stable families—at the margin, having a default attitude in society that pushes questioning trans people to get married and have kids is bad—it’s not fair to the spouses and kids. Spouses deserve to be married to people who are happily and fully embodied and sexually present with them, and kids deserve to grow up with parents who aren’t fighting each other over a divorce, because one parent got to a point where they couldn’t repress any more, and needed to transition.
Last—and this is kinda separate—I felt surprised reading your post, given you said in the 2nd paragraph you’re a libertarian and a transhumanist.
I wouldn’t expect someone who identifies with either of those labels to endorse some of the things you said, including about voluntary amputation (implied) of a trans person’s gonads being tragic in almost all contexts. Can you help me understand that? Am I miscalibrated about what libertarian/transhumanist means?
My assumption was that a LW libertarian would basically say it’s fine for people to do whatever they want, and if it affects fertility, well, there is an equilibrium process at work, and eventually changing allele frequencies will right the ship.
I see phrasing like this a lot, I don’t mean to pick on you in particular, but in general I think there is a level of rhetorical alarmism with language like this that isn’t justified by the medical reality, and IME people using phrasing like this rarely have a gears-level understanding of trans medicine (I don’t know if that’s true for you or not).
To be fair, virtually any kind of medical intervention at all seems too much if all your goal is is “find a group within which you can fit and feel loved”. Most groups don’t require that. Not saying being trans requires it as some kind of ritual—in fact afaict people in this sphere tend to be very accepting of all degrees of transitioning, including only social—but rather that if you decide “maybe I am trans” you will be more likely to undergo such medical procedures than you would ever be if you decided “maybe I like cosplay” and hung out with that community.
Agree with you that as a transhumanist one shouldn’t really see mutilation per se as a tragedy, though it obviously is the kind of thing that’s high stakes—if you’re wrong then you lose something that’s not recoverable. So I can buy the argument as far as “this is the kind of thing you really need a very low false positives rate on”.
virtually any kind of medical intervention at all seems too much if all your goal is is “find a group within which you can fit and feel loved”. Most groups don’t require that. Not saying being trans requires it as some kind of ritual—in fact afaict people in this sphere tend to be very accepting of all degrees of transitioning, including only social
I agree.
if you decide “maybe I am trans” you will be more likely to undergo such medical procedures
If you’re willing, could you elaborate on this argument? It sounds like you think there is a causal connection (not just a correlation) between “maybe I’m trans” and medical transition. Is that right? If yes, I would be really interested to hear how quantitatively strong you think the causal relationship/evidence is.
If you’re willing, could you elaborate on this argument? It sounds like you think there is a causal connection (not just a correlation) between “maybe I’m trans” and medical transition. Is that right? If yes, I would be really interested to hear how quantitatively strong you think the causal relationship/evidence is.
I mean, I’m just comparing it to virtually any other community. The vast majority of communities do not require or encourage surgery to join or fit in (exceptions: some religions, and maybe if you’re like, in a body-mod centred community). Obviously not all trans people medically transition, but all who medically transition are trans? I’m a bit confused by the question because obviously there is a causal connection. If there wasn’t a casual connection you’d expect equal odds for a cis person to just up and go medically transition for no reason whatsoever.
To what degree do you think simply asking “am I trans?” actually causes someone to be more likely to medically transition?
Clearly the two are correlated. But there may not be a causal relationship here. I’m not saying this is 100% true, but for the sake of argument, imagine that having gender dysphoria (A) causes both:
B. asking oneself “am I trans?”
C. medically transitioning
But that B statistically does not “cause” C because the full strength of the correlation is explained by the dysphoria variable, A (cf The Book of Why).
If this were true, you could do an experiment where you take 1000 people from the general population, measure their dysphoria in a way that minimizes priming effects, have them write about whether they’re trans or not, and after longitudinal follow up, controlling for dysphoria, the people in the “am I trans?” group would be no more likely to medically transition than controls.
To what degree do you think simply asking “am I trans?” actually causes someone to be more likely to medically transition?
So first, while I wrote it like that in the post, it was in the context of joining a community, so I actually meant probably something a bit more advanced than just literally idly wondering whether you are trans (something I’ve probably done at least once in my life myself), even just to answer in five seconds flat “nah, I’m not”.
But second, mathematically speaking, yes, I still think that is obviously causative. There are two groups of people: those who have asked themselves at least once, “am I trans?”, and those who never have. Those who never have have no reason to ever medical transition. Those who medical transition all must at some point have asked themselves “am I trans?”. Furthermore they must have answered that question with “yes” the last time they asked it, obviously. And obviously the path to any medical transition always starts with asking yourself “am I trans?” and answering “yes”; it is a necessary albeit not sufficient condition.
So yes, obviously there’s a causative link there! I don’t know how strong but it’s logically inevitable that there is one.
But that B statistically does not “cause” C because the full strength of the correlation is explained by the dysphoria variable, A (cf The Book of Why).
If you have dysphoria but never ask yourself whether you’re trans, how are you going to even get to medical transition? Suppose having dysphoria and living in a civilization that somehow has the capability for medical transitioning but lacks completely a construct of “transness” (let’s say they use the technological capability only for farfetched purposes like some deep cover infiltration or such). So you can have dysphoria in this society but also never ask yourself “am I trans?” because the word and concept don’t exist. Wouldn’t that make you less likely to medically transition?
yeah, so we’re totally agreed on the logical structure here! Like you said, it’s a tautology that asking “am I trans?” is a necessary condition for medical transition.
When I say causative I mean “you/me predicts we could show statistically significant “causation” using a study like the one I described above”.
I don’t mean logically causative (Hume’s problem of induction and all that). I’m an anti-realist.
So yeah, the real question here is, how strong as the “causation”? At the margin, does a nominally cis person joining the trans community become significantly more likely to medically transition?
I am fascinated by this question, and I almost never get to talk about it, let alone with thoughtful cis people. So thank you for indulging me. I would love to hear more of your thoughts on the issue. Like could you put a number on it? How much of the variation in medical transition status can be explained by social factors?
I’m happy to share my answer as well. But being trans myself I’m probably working off very different data, and I have strong beliefs on this (I’ve thought about it a lot) so I think there is more risk of an anchoring effect if I go first.
I wouldn’t really know the numbers. My general point is what I said, that to acknowledge/consider yourself as trans seems like a necessary step to actually transitioning. There’s gotta be people who have dysphoria and simply never really think about that option, misunderstand it for some other sort of malaise and live with it without realising it. Anyone who transitions isn’t just dysphoric, they went through the additional step of realising it too.
Oh totally. In my case I decided transitioning was unethical so I spent over 13 years willfully avoiding the “am I trans?” question. I convinced myself my dysphoria was just regular depression combined with sexual perversity. Some take it to the grave.
Based on:
if you decide “maybe I am trans” you will be more likely to undergo such medical procedures than you would ever be if you decided “maybe I like cosplay” and hung out with that community.
I got the impression you maybe had a stronger opinion on “social contagion”. I.e. society should downplay/discourage the social aspects of transition to reduce the risk that cis people who just want community end up transitioning medically. I would really like to talk to a cis person who has a sincere steelman for the social contagion hypothesis.
I don’t really, I don’t feel like I know the data well enough, I was just talking about this on the assumption that what the post describes (looking for a community) is what’s going on for at least a non-insignificant amount of people. My point was just, if what’s happening is simply people who are looking for a community, then obviously it’s worse if they find a community which requires them to undergo medical procedures than if they find one that doesn’t (since unnecessary medical procedures are always a net negative, and the benefits would be the same anyway).
I don’t think social contagion is like, an impossible concept. People seem very fixated on some things being ontological truths about you, but even if dysphoria is innate (it seems to be), it hardly seems impossible that if you have some kind of psychological hangup you may misidentify it as being trans, just as you describe the opposite, of being trans and misidentifying it as something else. The latter used to be far more common in the past because of course being trans was a thing no one would really talk much about and generally framed negatively. It still suffers quite a lot of discrimination but also has more positive discourse and more public communities so I think it’s entirely possible for either direction to happen, though probably the “am dysphoric/trans but stay in denial about it” is still more common. That doesn’t mean it needs to straight up become an epidemic, which for me would entail something like, not only a few non-trans people mistakenly think they’re trans, but so many of them doing so that they then convince more non-trans people that they must be trans, and the community is straight up dominated by non dysphoric people who just memed themselves into believing they’re trans. I don’t think that’s happening and I don’t think that sounds likely. But a few sparse episodes of lonely people who are just desperate to fit in somewhere and end up persuading themselves that the one community where they’re being accepted might be where they belong in other ways too? That probably happens, it feels like it’s just a common human thing.
ok based. yes, this is why we need to accept people who just want to change their pronouns. I don’t personally understand with why someone would want to join the trans community if they’re not dysphoric, but these people clearly exist.
Trying to exclude them from the trans community for not medically transitioning probably increases the likelihood that they do, simply as a means to gain entry. Nor should we push anyone to go on HRT after they’ve joined the community. HRT is the single best thing I’ve ever done for myself but I try not to project that onto others.
I don’t have a lot to say in response. I think you make several good points, especially about fertility. I’m not so sure about the following though:
On the face of it, people taking drastic, permanent, alterations to their biology as a strategy to cope with social isolation seems unhealthy? I would guess that, for most people transitioning for broadly these reasons, that strategy will fail to address the underlying desire to be loved, and will impose additional large costs on their life.
Maybe I’m way too pessimistic, but for many people, it may be very difficult (or even impossible) to otherwise satisfy this desire.
But if many of those transwomen are following a life path [...] not because that’s a better fit for their essential being, but because it’s a life path that functions as a coping strategy, which is more cognitively and socially available than (possibly more effective or more functional) alternatives, then I think something has gone badly wrong.
Likewise, I’m not sure there are viable alternatives in many cases, much less more effective or functional ones.
Maybe I’m way too pessimistic, but for many people, it may be very difficult (or even impossible) to otherwise satisfy this desire.
To be fair, does that say more about our society right now than anything else. Be it due to gender roles or general social norms, this degree of tight connection that some groups (like trans communities) seem to form shouldn’t be that alien to us in general or require any particular sexual orientation, and yet.
Thank you for sharing this detailed account of your experience.
I’m a libertarian and a transhumanist. I strongly believe in and stand up for the principle that people should be able to do whatever they choose to with their own lives and their own bodies. People can be wildly different from each other, and what would be a terrible existence for one person is often a happy and fulfilling life for another.
Also, I’m attending to your addendum, and not assuming that your experience generalizes to all transpeople, or all transwomen.
But that said, speaking personally, I find this account disturbing. And more analytically, this makes me more sympathetic to the view that the increasing transgender identification is a symptom of some kind of social problem.
On the face of it, people taking drastic, permanent, alterations to their biology as a strategy to cope with social isolation seems unhealthy? I would guess that, for most people transitioning for broadly these reasons, that strategy will fail to address the underlying desire to be loved, and will impose additional large costs on their life.
It’s additionally concerning if, as you describe, the motivating desire is to be loved as a cute anime girl. Feminists complain about the unreasonable body-image expectations imposed by “society”. But anime girls are literally cartoons, with inhumanly cute proportions. From the post, it sounds like it’s not so a desire to look like an an anime girl, but to adopt the social role of an anime girl, and to be loved and appreciated the way they are loved?
(I’m not sure how concerning that should be to me. People often take inspiration from fictional examples, and that can be totally healthy and good. Maybe this is no different than eg someone who starts studying martial arts after watching anime? Real martial arts are different, from the fictional versions, but there’s some overlap in what’s cool about them.)
Also, while socially or even medically transitioning doesn’t preclude having kids, my understanding is that fertility rates are much lower for transpeople. I don’t think that “some people switching sexes” is even on the top 10 list of the reasons for declining fertility in developed countries, but I also think there’s something to “family values”, and that it’s not unreasonable for society to try to incentivize people, on the margin, to follow life paths that entail having kids, in the context of stable marriages and families. My impression is that there are plenty of transwomen who, if they had lived only a few decades ago, would have have been fathers.
Possibly they would have been fathers living lives of quiet desperation, much worse for them the now more-available option of socially or medically transitioning (which is why it’s so important to allow people the freedom to opt out of societal defaults). But if many of those transwomen are following a life path that disproportionately entails not having kids, not because that’s a better fit for their essential being, but because it’s a life path that functions as a coping strategy, which is more cognitively and socially available than (possibly more effective or more functional) alternatives, then I think something has gone badly wrong.
While transitioning might be the right choice for some people, I’m now newly worried that there are a small number of people who have a strong innate self-identity that differs from their sex-assigned at birth and a larger number of people who are lonely and depressed, and who are latching on to a drastic and a priori harmful[1] life choice, as a misguided attempt to address those basically social and and emotional problems.
Is this a wrong takeaway for some reason?
I’m attempting to be careful writing this. I imagine that a comment like this can be threatening to lots of transpeople, because it seems to invalidate their identity and give license to disregard their experience or limit their freedoms. I’m confident that there are people that would read a post like the above and weaponize it in the culture war. But I’ll, just say again, I don’t want to do that, at least. I’m interested in the project of how to build a healthy and flourishing society, and committed to allowing people to make choices, including those that seem bad to me.
ie In almost all contexts, we consider it a tragedy if someone’s body parts, and maybe especially sexual organs, are amputated
Thanks for saying this! Do you mind if I push back on a few points? I think I don’t find your post threatening for identity reasons, but I think the data you are drawing from may be a bit miscalibrated.
I see phrasing like this a lot, I don’t mean to pick on you in particular, but in general I think there is a level of rhetorical alarmism with language like this that isn’t justified by the medical reality, and IME people using phrasing like this rarely have a gears-level understanding of trans medicine (I don’t know if that’s true for you or not). I’m trying not to say stuff that sounds like nitpicking, but I realize it will probably read like that.
Nothing is trans care is altering our genetic physiology at a deep level AFAIK. Basically there is hormones and surgery. In most places including the US we only use bioidentical hormones and in particular the effects of estrogen on a male are a lot less drastic and permanent than I think many people understand. I can go into more detail if you’re interested. Surgery is more complicated so I don’t think I can get into that here without this comment becoming painfully long. The irreversible surgeries for MtFs aren’t terribly common (<20%). The anime girl phenomenon the author describes seems to be exclusive to MtFs. If you’re interested in the latest research on detransition (skewed towards the FtM side), see https://www.thedarestudy.com/
This is all darkly ironic to me, because outside of the terminally-online-anime-LW memeplex, getting married and having kids is a common coping strategy. To your credit, you’re aware that this is something that can happen. But I think you’re underrating the frequency and the harms, especially if you care about happy stable families, vs just getting the birth rate up. In particular, it can be really horrible and unfair for the wives. I personally tried to do this when I was young (unconsciously, long story), and I know several others who got further along and had kids. Our brains are shifted female so some of us can end up much more predisposed to childrearing monogamy than the median cishet man. I just worry that people reading this post are overindexing on a particular kind of MtF.
I can’t give you a full accounting of the internal/external factors affecting fertility among trans people. I can say that people generally aren’t aware it’s possible to restore the production of viable sperm in most MtFs:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9873819/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12456576/
I believe very strongly that—if you care about happy, stable families—at the margin, having a default attitude in society that pushes questioning trans people to get married and have kids is bad—it’s not fair to the spouses and kids. Spouses deserve to be married to people who are happily and fully embodied and sexually present with them, and kids deserve to grow up with parents who aren’t fighting each other over a divorce, because one parent got to a point where they couldn’t repress any more, and needed to transition.
Last—and this is kinda separate—I felt surprised reading your post, given you said in the 2nd paragraph you’re a libertarian and a transhumanist.
I wouldn’t expect someone who identifies with either of those labels to endorse some of the things you said, including about voluntary amputation (implied) of a trans person’s gonads being tragic in almost all contexts. Can you help me understand that? Am I miscalibrated about what libertarian/transhumanist means?
My assumption was that a LW libertarian would basically say it’s fine for people to do whatever they want, and if it affects fertility, well, there is an equilibrium process at work, and eventually changing allele frequencies will right the ship.
To be fair, virtually any kind of medical intervention at all seems too much if all your goal is is “find a group within which you can fit and feel loved”. Most groups don’t require that. Not saying being trans requires it as some kind of ritual—in fact afaict people in this sphere tend to be very accepting of all degrees of transitioning, including only social—but rather that if you decide “maybe I am trans” you will be more likely to undergo such medical procedures than you would ever be if you decided “maybe I like cosplay” and hung out with that community.
Agree with you that as a transhumanist one shouldn’t really see mutilation per se as a tragedy, though it obviously is the kind of thing that’s high stakes—if you’re wrong then you lose something that’s not recoverable. So I can buy the argument as far as “this is the kind of thing you really need a very low false positives rate on”.
hey thanks for the reply :)
I agree.
If you’re willing, could you elaborate on this argument? It sounds like you think there is a causal connection (not just a correlation) between “maybe I’m trans” and medical transition. Is that right? If yes, I would be really interested to hear how quantitatively strong you think the causal relationship/evidence is.
I mean, I’m just comparing it to virtually any other community. The vast majority of communities do not require or encourage surgery to join or fit in (exceptions: some religions, and maybe if you’re like, in a body-mod centred community). Obviously not all trans people medically transition, but all who medically transition are trans? I’m a bit confused by the question because obviously there is a causal connection. If there wasn’t a casual connection you’d expect equal odds for a cis person to just up and go medically transition for no reason whatsoever.
The crux of my question is this:
To what degree do you think simply asking “am I trans?” actually causes someone to be more likely to medically transition?
Clearly the two are correlated. But there may not be a causal relationship here. I’m not saying this is 100% true, but for the sake of argument, imagine that having gender dysphoria (A) causes both:
B. asking oneself “am I trans?”
C. medically transitioning
But that B statistically does not “cause” C because the full strength of the correlation is explained by the dysphoria variable, A (cf The Book of Why).
If this were true, you could do an experiment where you take 1000 people from the general population, measure their dysphoria in a way that minimizes priming effects, have them write about whether they’re trans or not, and after longitudinal follow up, controlling for dysphoria, the people in the “am I trans?” group would be no more likely to medically transition than controls.
So first, while I wrote it like that in the post, it was in the context of joining a community, so I actually meant probably something a bit more advanced than just literally idly wondering whether you are trans (something I’ve probably done at least once in my life myself), even just to answer in five seconds flat “nah, I’m not”.
But second, mathematically speaking, yes, I still think that is obviously causative. There are two groups of people: those who have asked themselves at least once, “am I trans?”, and those who never have. Those who never have have no reason to ever medical transition. Those who medical transition all must at some point have asked themselves “am I trans?”. Furthermore they must have answered that question with “yes” the last time they asked it, obviously. And obviously the path to any medical transition always starts with asking yourself “am I trans?” and answering “yes”; it is a necessary albeit not sufficient condition.
So yes, obviously there’s a causative link there! I don’t know how strong but it’s logically inevitable that there is one.
If you have dysphoria but never ask yourself whether you’re trans, how are you going to even get to medical transition? Suppose having dysphoria and living in a civilization that somehow has the capability for medical transitioning but lacks completely a construct of “transness” (let’s say they use the technological capability only for farfetched purposes like some deep cover infiltration or such). So you can have dysphoria in this society but also never ask yourself “am I trans?” because the word and concept don’t exist. Wouldn’t that make you less likely to medically transition?
yeah, so we’re totally agreed on the logical structure here! Like you said, it’s a tautology that asking “am I trans?” is a necessary condition for medical transition.
When I say causative I mean “you/me predicts we could show statistically significant “causation” using a study like the one I described above”.
I don’t mean logically causative (Hume’s problem of induction and all that). I’m an anti-realist.
So yeah, the real question here is, how strong as the “causation”? At the margin, does a nominally cis person joining the trans community become significantly more likely to medically transition?
I am fascinated by this question, and I almost never get to talk about it, let alone with thoughtful cis people. So thank you for indulging me. I would love to hear more of your thoughts on the issue. Like could you put a number on it? How much of the variation in medical transition status can be explained by social factors?
I’m happy to share my answer as well. But being trans myself I’m probably working off very different data, and I have strong beliefs on this (I’ve thought about it a lot) so I think there is more risk of an anchoring effect if I go first.
I wouldn’t really know the numbers. My general point is what I said, that to acknowledge/consider yourself as trans seems like a necessary step to actually transitioning. There’s gotta be people who have dysphoria and simply never really think about that option, misunderstand it for some other sort of malaise and live with it without realising it. Anyone who transitions isn’t just dysphoric, they went through the additional step of realising it too.
Oh totally. In my case I decided transitioning was unethical so I spent over 13 years willfully avoiding the “am I trans?” question. I convinced myself my dysphoria was just regular depression combined with sexual perversity. Some take it to the grave.
Based on:
I got the impression you maybe had a stronger opinion on “social contagion”. I.e. society should downplay/discourage the social aspects of transition to reduce the risk that cis people who just want community end up transitioning medically. I would really like to talk to a cis person who has a sincere steelman for the social contagion hypothesis.
I don’t really, I don’t feel like I know the data well enough, I was just talking about this on the assumption that what the post describes (looking for a community) is what’s going on for at least a non-insignificant amount of people. My point was just, if what’s happening is simply people who are looking for a community, then obviously it’s worse if they find a community which requires them to undergo medical procedures than if they find one that doesn’t (since unnecessary medical procedures are always a net negative, and the benefits would be the same anyway).
I don’t think social contagion is like, an impossible concept. People seem very fixated on some things being ontological truths about you, but even if dysphoria is innate (it seems to be), it hardly seems impossible that if you have some kind of psychological hangup you may misidentify it as being trans, just as you describe the opposite, of being trans and misidentifying it as something else. The latter used to be far more common in the past because of course being trans was a thing no one would really talk much about and generally framed negatively. It still suffers quite a lot of discrimination but also has more positive discourse and more public communities so I think it’s entirely possible for either direction to happen, though probably the “am dysphoric/trans but stay in denial about it” is still more common. That doesn’t mean it needs to straight up become an epidemic, which for me would entail something like, not only a few non-trans people mistakenly think they’re trans, but so many of them doing so that they then convince more non-trans people that they must be trans, and the community is straight up dominated by non dysphoric people who just memed themselves into believing they’re trans. I don’t think that’s happening and I don’t think that sounds likely. But a few sparse episodes of lonely people who are just desperate to fit in somewhere and end up persuading themselves that the one community where they’re being accepted might be where they belong in other ways too? That probably happens, it feels like it’s just a common human thing.
ok based. yes, this is why we need to accept people who just want to change their pronouns. I don’t personally understand with why someone would want to join the trans community if they’re not dysphoric, but these people clearly exist.
Trying to exclude them from the trans community for not medically transitioning probably increases the likelihood that they do, simply as a means to gain entry. Nor should we push anyone to go on HRT after they’ve joined the community. HRT is the single best thing I’ve ever done for myself but I try not to project that onto others.
I don’t have a lot to say in response. I think you make several good points, especially about fertility. I’m not so sure about the following though:
Maybe I’m way too pessimistic, but for many people, it may be very difficult (or even impossible) to otherwise satisfy this desire.
Likewise, I’m not sure there are viable alternatives in many cases, much less more effective or functional ones.
To be fair, does that say more about our society right now than anything else. Be it due to gender roles or general social norms, this degree of tight connection that some groups (like trans communities) seem to form shouldn’t be that alien to us in general or require any particular sexual orientation, and yet.