This post is well-written, thoughtful, genuinely interesting, and articulates a theory that may be very helpful to some trans or questioning people.
I strongly disagree with some of the main peri-factual claims. In particular, I think there is confounding of ASD and being trans.
It likely perpetuates epistemically shallow attitudes of suspicion towards trans peoples’ cognitive health, ability to function rationally, and introspect accurately.
The author is clearly going through a hard time emotionally.
The attitudes of (3) had a negative effect on me personally (I’m trans). So (2) and (3) make we want to post criticisms, but I also feel a lot of warmth and compassion towards the author (i hope that comes through and i REALLY hope this doesn’t sound patronizing), and I don’t want to hurt her. So I feel pretty torn.
Mainly I just want to say that this post underrates medical theories of transness. I’m deeply into this, and I think the frontier here is significantly further along than most people realize. But the political situation is so bad, it’s not safe to share our knowledge openly.
I would bet with 80% confidence that current knowledge (iykyk) is already enough to develop a genomic screen for gender dysphoria with enough significance to be medically useful.
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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.