Profoundly weird article that leaves me wondering why I'm subscribed.
The trans culture war is a proxy for a couple things. I am center-left, so I may have too uncharitable a view of why conservatives are so obsessed with this. But I can't help but notice that it's almost exactly the same as the culture war over gay rights, which suggests it's discomfort with nontraditional sexual mores.
On the left, we fear that giving ground even on very reasonable concerns like trans men in women's sports will open the door to more prejudice against trans people, and towards women by acknowledging that there are sex-based differences. And I understand this, as I've seen massive transformation on what women are believed to be capable of over the course of my life. People used to think women shouldn't vote or own property. And every generation thinks that they've finally hit the maximum amount of social progress possible, and should not go a step further.
But trans people are not "mentally ill," any more than gay people are. Again, the *exact same* arguments were used to argue against gay rights not even twenty years ago. Trans people are neurologically wired differently, just like left-handed people are.
However, this article is correct that the number of people affected by this is vanishingly small, and nobody should care as much as they do. There are perfectly reasonable solutions. Girl's and women's sports must be XX. Nobody with a penis should be allowed in a women's locker room. If you've taken the trouble of bottom surgery, congratulations, you're in. Kids must wait until 18 to choose "gender affirming care."
Is gender dysphoria a mental illness? If not, why does it need medical intervention to prevent suicide? Homosexuality is clearly distinct from this -- sexual expression is not bodily modification.
I don't know how old you are, but it is impossible to overstate how similar this is to the debate over gay rights. People insisted it was a choice, or a perversion, or a disease. Now we accept that it's almost certainly neurological for many gay people, possibly with more environmental factors for others.
I am left handed. I have trouble cutting paper, because scissors are "right handed." When I play cards, I naturally spread my hand the "wrong" way, which obscures the cards' symbol on the upper left hand corner. When I write, my left hand gets covered in ink. Lefties on average have somewhat shorter lifespans than righties because we are more prone to accidents in a right handed world.
Is that a disease? It has some disadvantages. It could even kill me! If I were born in the fifties, I would have been forced to write with my right hand. If I'd been born three hundred years ago, it would have been considered a character flaw. But it isn't those things. It's just a quirk of neurology.
I'm female. Which I was a three, I threw tantrums every single morning because my parents wanted me to wear plain white underwear, and it looked like what boys wore. I was a girl, and I wanted girl clothes. That's how trans girls work too. They feel in their bones they're girls as soon as they know what boys and girls are.
I didn't bring up transvestism, but I think that's a good example. I think the surgery/hormones is a red herring. For an adult, wearing women's clothes to look feminine versus hormonal treatments is simply a matter of degree. A small child may not even know that boys and girls have different genitalia, much less what surgery and hormones are for.
I mentioned below that we naturally sympathize with a woman who wants reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy. She of course is still female. But she wants her body to look feminine. We may not approve of a man using steroids to build muscle, but we understand the motivation.
I really don't think there's any intellectual basis to treat gender dysphoria as uniquely awful desire to have your outside match your inside. Which is why I suspect that people who oppose it have a visceral response to it, and backfill the justification.
It's completely normal to feel something in your gut, and then intellectualize it. But in this case, I really urge everyone to use their head and ignore their gut. The gut can be wrong. Trans people are for the most part just going about their lives, and deserve the same respect we give anyone else.
I don't think it's a matter of degree, because clothes and hormones are qualitatively different. One has irreversible biological effects, the other does not.
Being left-handed, like being homosexual, occurs naturally, free of charge, with no medical intervention required.
You insisted on girl panties because you had already been enculturated to find them obligatory. A girl who prefers boxers is still a girl, for fuck's sake. And going commando doesn't make her nonbinary either.
For the great majority of so-called "trans kids," the feeling of being "born in the wrong body" is the normal and sensible prepubescent manifestation of latent homosexual attraction that only becomes intelligible when the child reaches sexual maturity, at which point, gender issues almost always resolve safely and naturally (if anticlimactically).
The surgery is irrelevant. Many women get reconstruction surgery after a mastectomy. They know intellectually that they are still women. But they feel less womanly without breasts. And in those cases, we effortlessly sympathize with their distress. Of course they want their bodies to look feminine!
As for underwear, of course girls can prefer boxers. I used my own example to illustrate how deeply our gender identity goes. I was three, and I already had firm beliefs about what that meant.
My experience is not unusual for trans girls (again, I'm a straight woman). They throw giant tantrums when their parents dress them in clothes that don't match their gender identity. My trans friend describes knowing something was "wrong" when she was in kindergarten. They had a fire drill and formed two lines, one boys and one girls. Her teacher told her she was in the wrong line.
Why is it so hard is it to believe, in all the abundance of biology, that in some rare cases, the brain wires up to identify as the wrong sex? My guess is that people on this blog believe many things are built in, like intelligence, personality and of course, sexual orientation. But gender identity is a bridge too far?
But sure, if you must, call gender dysphoria a disease. The "cure" is letting them alter their body to reflect their neurology.
I love for anyone who disagrees with me to say whether or not they were an adult in the 90s, and aware of the debate around gay rights. Serious question.
The problem is that there's no actual evidence for anything you're saying. It's just an invented story about being wired up wrong. Sounds like science, almost sounds like medicine... but it is neither.
If you need to unsubscribe because a person in my comments section says something offensive, then I suppose you have to unsubscribe from every single publication that allows open comments on the internet. A very fragile worldview.
It's not that it's offensive. It's that it's stupid. This is a settled question, and if someone wants to challenge it, they will need substantially more than a couple YouTube videos. If all your commenters wanted to argue about whether the Earth was flat, or whether men should be able to beat their wives, that would also indicate the blog was not for me.
Since you're here, I have several lengthy replies that I think convincingly argue that transgenderism is probably neurological, and there's no point in describing it as a disease. Did they change your mind at all?
Ok, replace the word offensive with stupid and my comment stands. Equating "all my commenters" with one comment is a strawman. I'm working on a few essays to respond to you.
Some of your commenters are thoughtful, but a few bad apples spoil the bunch. You should curate them more carefully.
I appreciate that I inspired an essay! A couple warnings on mistakes I see transphobes make in their arguments.
1) Getting caught up in what strictly constitutes mental illness, or illness generally. Schizophrenia is a mental illness. Neurosis as a personality trait... not really illness? It ends up being pedantic, or beside the point.
2) Using pejoratives to make an emotional argument. This is part of the problem with claiming trans people are mentally ill. Calling something out of the norm "perverse" or "deviant" is technically correct, but unhelpful. My left-handedness is deviance. If I go on a day-long hike, I'm a filthy deviant.
I think metaphors for transsexuality as a handicap are usually more appropriate, but I generally don't argue that because people get so gleeful about calling it a handicap.
3) Pointing to high rates of depression and other, yes, mental illness in trans people. There are plenty of possible explanations for this. First, it may be as easy as lack of social acceptance, or the understandable distress of feeling you're in the wrong body (imagine waking up without your penis). Or it may be that the neurology that causes transsexuality also causes depression. Being creative is also associated with mental illness. Doesn't mean either are bad.
4) Pointing to the recent explosion in people identifying as trans. Yes, there's clearly some social contagion there, and perhaps you could define it as mental illness. But I think there are two separate phenomena there, people who very early in childhood firmly identify as the opposite sex, versus depressed teenage girls looking for a reason why they're miserable.
If you look at transgender identity from, say, the nineties, you'll see a familiar pattern, in that there's some male "deviance" from the norm, just as with colorblindness. Then you'll see even more rare cases where there is female "deviance." This suggests a neurological miswire that a Y chromosome doesn't completely cover.
“This is because the central telos of Christianity has been stolen by the left.”
This is so absolutely true. As someone who desires a robust, center-right, traditional set of Christian principals that can energize younger generations to find purpose outside of capitalist consumerism, I 100% agree with you on this.
Your data analysis is fascinating. My intuition prior to reading this article would have been to look for areas where the Whites vote Democrat. That is, Blue states with a low Black population. That intuition kind of works for the Northeast, but fails badly for Minnesota and the Northwest. Mississippi is a real head-scratcher.
“a 2017 UCLA study... found West Virginia had the highest per capita rate of transgender youth in the country, estimating that just over 1% of the state's youth identified with a gender other than their sex at birth. The WVU findings suggest that the 2017 study may have severely underestimated that number...”
Time to analyze the typical West Virginian's diet.
The "junk food makes you gay" hypothesis would explain West Virginia and Mississippi over Minnesota and Oregon data points rather well. But then there are those prosperous states in the Northeast with a high trans population...
I don't think the Left is going to be able to dissociate itself from the trans issue. It's going to become a highly visible counterexample to the "Left always wins" narrative.
I think the number of trans kids is going to increase, year over year, for the next 30 years. By 2054 there might be a reversal. What do you think? When will we reach peak woke?
There will be no peak woke. The left will continue to get more and more woke, while the right will go in the other direction. The two sides will get more and more distant and eventually become fully separate cultures.
Some interesting analysis here, but it misses the point. Politics requires you to pick your battles, and the trans kids battle is worth fighting because it highlights the fact that the Left is insane.
If a politician you supported told you that he was a Scientologist, that would make you start to doubt his judgment on everything, even though Scientology itself is a minor issue.
Opposition to transgenderism is a winning issue for Republicans because it splits the Democrat base, it rallies the Republican base, and it peels off moderates from the Democrats because it reveals how the leading Democrats are fundamentally not sane.
Is there any data analysis regarding the increase in pro-trans media pieces, "nonbinary" representation within fiction, games, etc and drag queen events and how those corelate with increasing numbers of trans-identified children?
@Karla None of those things has any relevance to geography. It's a social media driven phenomenon, but the way in which it is received by the audience is highly geographically variable based on the factors that I cite.
Christians believe in resurrection. On this earthly plane that means redemption. Redemption can look like a person with social disease being cured and transformed into a socially healthy person.
This does happen, it’s the triumph of order over chaos on an individual. It’s uncommon and contrary to Nature. It’s heroic and miraculous.
1) Trans is mental illness and support of it is mental illness too. You don't want mentally ill people having power over anything.
2) It seems obvious to me that regular people that wouldn't otherwise be trans can get transed by aggressive ideology perpetrated at schools and in society.
3) Even if you don't go trans, it's part of an entire memeplex of harmful ideas on gender and reality. Bad enough if your daughter becomes a girl boss or your son becomes effeminate.
I suspect trans ideology lowers fertility amongst anyone that believes in it, so mostly its hitting UMC professionals.
4) The girls sports thing is insane.
5) I think its ironic that trans literally cost you guys Elon Musk, half of Silicon Valley, and the election and you're still hung ho on it because...it might make a few weirdoes that were never going to have kids anyway infertile?
2. "who wouldn't otherwise be trans" this is a weird moral construction. Here's how I see it:
Every environment has pressures which have a selective effect. We can increase selective pressures, or decrease them. The question is: should we increase or decrease them? Universally, I am in favor of increasing them as much as possible.
5. It's funny how you say "a few weirdos" as if it's insignificant, and then side with Musk, saying it's the most important thing ever. Pick one!
Derek Chauvin was white (R.I.P), also of conservatives want to win they should ban trans surgery, institutionalize as a mental disease and promote sex-acceptance therapies (like Perú)
Kids getting turned into troons is not a large enough phenomenon that it needs to be factored into the population question, and I don't think there are enough of them getting chemically castrated for it to factor into the Dutton and Bronski theories about the "mutation of Liberalism" killing itself through low birth rates. I think stopping trans kids is a good goal even if it is justified by longhoused logic because having to constantly acknowledge the existence of trans people and affirm their baloney gender ideology just kind of sucks and I would like it if we could avoid it as much as possible. Many troons in gaming, in college, in STEM, it's kind of humiliating having to pretend that this is normal.
Overall though, many good points. I believe that you hit the nail on the head with the infantilization description, and how it probably comes from the strong Christian background of the Amerikwan Right. In the Christian view, everyone is fallen from grace and spiritually equal, and people who do evil are simply suffering from their own sin. They have to be "saved" from themselves like how Jesus saved all of those whores and tax collectors and criminals. Christians will argue endlessly over what Jesus meant about eunuchs, but it is very clear that a non-insignificant number of early Christians (ex: Origen) interpreted this as evidence that castration is le good. Not sure of Castrati were ended by enlightenment thought, as they were not really a prominent thing in Western Europe until the early modern period.
In Pagan cultures, it is very clear that some people are just rotten eggs, who might even be better off dead. Effeminates and eunuchs were viewed as deformed freaks
Trans people are higher in Narcissism, like you say, and they're also actually more overrepresented among bullies than among victims of bullying (!) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33488479/
Gender non conformity in childhood is also generally associated with being homosexual in adulthood. So yeah, the kid very well might end up regretting getting their balls cut off, but they're probably still gonna be gay.
"We have to save these gay boys from castration" is an honest positions, but it's not one that conservatives want to lead with, for the reasons I state.
Aside from the moral and eugenic angle, the the LGBT issue seems like a battle that isn't worth fighting for the right wing. Even with political normalization, the vast majority of people are cis and straight anyway.
The trans issue seems to be the only one where intellectual conservatives are capable of any kind of fanaticism. MAGA is fanatical but only as a personality cult, not as a set of moral precepts. I think Trump could be pro-abortion, pro-immigrant and still win a majority of Republicans. But pro-trans might break the camel's back, for now. This issue will probably be seen very differently in 20 years -- I mean, Iran does trans surgeries, so why not conservatives? I think Simon has a point in that the trans issue is very easy bait, despite having few economic or racial consequences. The audience has to be fired up somehow. The split in the right that I see is people who would keep 30 million immigrants but ban trans surgery, and those who would give free trans surgeries to every immigrant as long as they leave and never come back. For some of these people the trans issue is really all that they have, with abortion being a totally losing issue.
Homosexuals and transgenders will always be a small subsection of the population, but it is more possible for people to "identify as nonbinary" or "bisexual" based on environment
"Jesus endorsed genital mutilation, which was not strange given the popularity of circumcision in his time."
This is a complete misunderstanding. There are cultural vantage points from which circumcision and castration might be considered two versions of the same thing (genital mutilation), but within Jesus's Jewish cultural context they were opposite things. Cirumcision is mandated by the Law, and castration is forbidden. Both castration and a foreskin were seen as physical deformities amounting to ritual pollution, which justified exclusion from full membership of the community. What Jesus is doing is tapping into a tradition of apocalyptic antinomianism. He is saying 'you can still be a good person, indeed a very good person, and be a eunuch'. He is probably being metaphorical, and referring to celibacy, but you never quite know with him, which was part of his charm. Note, a different version of this would be 'you can still be a good person and not be circumcised', but this appears to have been too radical for Jesus, though his later followers adopted it.
"made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake" implies that it was a religious movement that he endorsed. He never refutes them saying "they thought it was for heaven's sake, but they were wrong." I will defer to your opinion regarding how the Pharisees would have judged eunuchs, but Jesus disagrees with them.
It doesn't really in the context of the passage, but Jesus was a specialist in making enigmatic comments with massive deltas between the motte and bailey. The point is that what whe was saying was extremely 'strange' in the cultural context and that was the whole point. If he was around today he might say 'some have made themselves racists for the sake of heaven'
Yes Jesus loved to leave things open to interpretation. I agree that within the context of Jewish culture Jesus was extremely strange. I'm laughing out loud: 'some have made themselves racists for the sake of heaven' perfect line
"First, teenage boys ages 16 to 17 are victimized and deprived of sexual agency through infantilization. Anyone who is skeptical of the persecution of female teachers is villainized as a supporter of child abuse or pedophilia. Male participation and initiation is apologized for, saying that “those teen boys are too young to understand sex.”"
Well, female teachers *are* in positions of power over these teenage boys. Might as well make it legal for teenage boys of that age to plow their mothers and sisters as well while you're at it, not to mention plowing their aunts and great-aunts.
BTW, some of the people who excuse this also excuse it for younger boys, and for more serious cases, such as Richard Hanania excusing a 27-year-old woman non-consensually groping a 13-year-old boy. No thanks!
Though I honestly wouldn't mind lowering the age of consent to 14 across the board, for both boys and girls. But with exceptions for people who are in positions of power or influence over such minors, such as parents, teachers, tutors, babysitters, et cetera, for whom a higher age of consent would be required in order to have sex with them. Germany already has such laws, to my knowledge, and it has not gone to Hell!
There's a huge difference between age gap relationships with teen boys and teachers and literal incest. You equating the two shows that you are the exact kind of moral panicker that I describe.
Do you support Bayesianism in regards to race in the law as well? For instance, not just racial profiling by police (which I actually support due to the compelling state interest), but also using the race (and sex, and age) for people who are convicted of various crimes as a factor in determining their sentence, if race (and sex, and age) is a significant predictive factor in determining whether they will later reoffend?
Profoundly weird article that leaves me wondering why I'm subscribed.
The trans culture war is a proxy for a couple things. I am center-left, so I may have too uncharitable a view of why conservatives are so obsessed with this. But I can't help but notice that it's almost exactly the same as the culture war over gay rights, which suggests it's discomfort with nontraditional sexual mores.
On the left, we fear that giving ground even on very reasonable concerns like trans men in women's sports will open the door to more prejudice against trans people, and towards women by acknowledging that there are sex-based differences. And I understand this, as I've seen massive transformation on what women are believed to be capable of over the course of my life. People used to think women shouldn't vote or own property. And every generation thinks that they've finally hit the maximum amount of social progress possible, and should not go a step further.
But trans people are not "mentally ill," any more than gay people are. Again, the *exact same* arguments were used to argue against gay rights not even twenty years ago. Trans people are neurologically wired differently, just like left-handed people are.
However, this article is correct that the number of people affected by this is vanishingly small, and nobody should care as much as they do. There are perfectly reasonable solutions. Girl's and women's sports must be XX. Nobody with a penis should be allowed in a women's locker room. If you've taken the trouble of bottom surgery, congratulations, you're in. Kids must wait until 18 to choose "gender affirming care."
But again. Nobody should care!
Is gender dysphoria a mental illness? If not, why does it need medical intervention to prevent suicide? Homosexuality is clearly distinct from this -- sexual expression is not bodily modification.
I don't know how old you are, but it is impossible to overstate how similar this is to the debate over gay rights. People insisted it was a choice, or a perversion, or a disease. Now we accept that it's almost certainly neurological for many gay people, possibly with more environmental factors for others.
I am left handed. I have trouble cutting paper, because scissors are "right handed." When I play cards, I naturally spread my hand the "wrong" way, which obscures the cards' symbol on the upper left hand corner. When I write, my left hand gets covered in ink. Lefties on average have somewhat shorter lifespans than righties because we are more prone to accidents in a right handed world.
Is that a disease? It has some disadvantages. It could even kill me! If I were born in the fifties, I would have been forced to write with my right hand. If I'd been born three hundred years ago, it would have been considered a character flaw. But it isn't those things. It's just a quirk of neurology.
I'm female. Which I was a three, I threw tantrums every single morning because my parents wanted me to wear plain white underwear, and it looked like what boys wore. I was a girl, and I wanted girl clothes. That's how trans girls work too. They feel in their bones they're girls as soon as they know what boys and girls are.
Transgender surgeries, operations, and hormonal injections are not the same as transvestism, which is dressing up in different clothing.
I didn't bring up transvestism, but I think that's a good example. I think the surgery/hormones is a red herring. For an adult, wearing women's clothes to look feminine versus hormonal treatments is simply a matter of degree. A small child may not even know that boys and girls have different genitalia, much less what surgery and hormones are for.
I mentioned below that we naturally sympathize with a woman who wants reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy. She of course is still female. But she wants her body to look feminine. We may not approve of a man using steroids to build muscle, but we understand the motivation.
I really don't think there's any intellectual basis to treat gender dysphoria as uniquely awful desire to have your outside match your inside. Which is why I suspect that people who oppose it have a visceral response to it, and backfill the justification.
It's completely normal to feel something in your gut, and then intellectualize it. But in this case, I really urge everyone to use their head and ignore their gut. The gut can be wrong. Trans people are for the most part just going about their lives, and deserve the same respect we give anyone else.
I don't think it's a matter of degree, because clothes and hormones are qualitatively different. One has irreversible biological effects, the other does not.
Hormones are mostly reversible, though. That's the who reason you have to keep taking them. You also sidestepped my point about surgery.
You said you're working on an essay about this, so I will limit my response here.
Being left-handed, like being homosexual, occurs naturally, free of charge, with no medical intervention required.
You insisted on girl panties because you had already been enculturated to find them obligatory. A girl who prefers boxers is still a girl, for fuck's sake. And going commando doesn't make her nonbinary either.
For the great majority of so-called "trans kids," the feeling of being "born in the wrong body" is the normal and sensible prepubescent manifestation of latent homosexual attraction that only becomes intelligible when the child reaches sexual maturity, at which point, gender issues almost always resolve safely and naturally (if anticlimactically).
The surgery is irrelevant. Many women get reconstruction surgery after a mastectomy. They know intellectually that they are still women. But they feel less womanly without breasts. And in those cases, we effortlessly sympathize with their distress. Of course they want their bodies to look feminine!
As for underwear, of course girls can prefer boxers. I used my own example to illustrate how deeply our gender identity goes. I was three, and I already had firm beliefs about what that meant.
My experience is not unusual for trans girls (again, I'm a straight woman). They throw giant tantrums when their parents dress them in clothes that don't match their gender identity. My trans friend describes knowing something was "wrong" when she was in kindergarten. They had a fire drill and formed two lines, one boys and one girls. Her teacher told her she was in the wrong line.
Why is it so hard is it to believe, in all the abundance of biology, that in some rare cases, the brain wires up to identify as the wrong sex? My guess is that people on this blog believe many things are built in, like intelligence, personality and of course, sexual orientation. But gender identity is a bridge too far?
But sure, if you must, call gender dysphoria a disease. The "cure" is letting them alter their body to reflect their neurology.
I love for anyone who disagrees with me to say whether or not they were an adult in the 90s, and aware of the debate around gay rights. Serious question.
The problem is that there's no actual evidence for anything you're saying. It's just an invented story about being wired up wrong. Sounds like science, almost sounds like medicine... but it is neither.
And yes, I was around when the LGB was still debating adding the T.
Both transgender and gay people are mentally ill.
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/homosexuality-is-a-mental-illness?utm_source=publication-search
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmlzGTGlN5g&ab_channel=SeanLast
https://persononline.substack.com/p/what-is-being-gay
A ridiculous perspective that once again leaves me wondering I'm subscribed.
If you need to unsubscribe because a person in my comments section says something offensive, then I suppose you have to unsubscribe from every single publication that allows open comments on the internet. A very fragile worldview.
It's not that it's offensive. It's that it's stupid. This is a settled question, and if someone wants to challenge it, they will need substantially more than a couple YouTube videos. If all your commenters wanted to argue about whether the Earth was flat, or whether men should be able to beat their wives, that would also indicate the blog was not for me.
Since you're here, I have several lengthy replies that I think convincingly argue that transgenderism is probably neurological, and there's no point in describing it as a disease. Did they change your mind at all?
Ok, replace the word offensive with stupid and my comment stands. Equating "all my commenters" with one comment is a strawman. I'm working on a few essays to respond to you.
Some of your commenters are thoughtful, but a few bad apples spoil the bunch. You should curate them more carefully.
I appreciate that I inspired an essay! A couple warnings on mistakes I see transphobes make in their arguments.
1) Getting caught up in what strictly constitutes mental illness, or illness generally. Schizophrenia is a mental illness. Neurosis as a personality trait... not really illness? It ends up being pedantic, or beside the point.
2) Using pejoratives to make an emotional argument. This is part of the problem with claiming trans people are mentally ill. Calling something out of the norm "perverse" or "deviant" is technically correct, but unhelpful. My left-handedness is deviance. If I go on a day-long hike, I'm a filthy deviant.
I think metaphors for transsexuality as a handicap are usually more appropriate, but I generally don't argue that because people get so gleeful about calling it a handicap.
3) Pointing to high rates of depression and other, yes, mental illness in trans people. There are plenty of possible explanations for this. First, it may be as easy as lack of social acceptance, or the understandable distress of feeling you're in the wrong body (imagine waking up without your penis). Or it may be that the neurology that causes transsexuality also causes depression. Being creative is also associated with mental illness. Doesn't mean either are bad.
4) Pointing to the recent explosion in people identifying as trans. Yes, there's clearly some social contagion there, and perhaps you could define it as mental illness. But I think there are two separate phenomena there, people who very early in childhood firmly identify as the opposite sex, versus depressed teenage girls looking for a reason why they're miserable.
If you look at transgender identity from, say, the nineties, you'll see a familiar pattern, in that there's some male "deviance" from the norm, just as with colorblindness. Then you'll see even more rare cases where there is female "deviance." This suggests a neurological miswire that a Y chromosome doesn't completely cover.
“This is because the central telos of Christianity has been stolen by the left.”
This is so absolutely true. As someone who desires a robust, center-right, traditional set of Christian principals that can energize younger generations to find purpose outside of capitalist consumerism, I 100% agree with you on this.
Another excellent read, thank you.
Your data analysis is fascinating. My intuition prior to reading this article would have been to look for areas where the Whites vote Democrat. That is, Blue states with a low Black population. That intuition kind of works for the Northeast, but fails badly for Minnesota and the Northwest. Mississippi is a real head-scratcher.
“a 2017 UCLA study... found West Virginia had the highest per capita rate of transgender youth in the country, estimating that just over 1% of the state's youth identified with a gender other than their sex at birth. The WVU findings suggest that the 2017 study may have severely underestimated that number...”
https://www.foxnews.com/us/west-virginias-already-highest-per-capita-trans-youth-population-undercounted-study
Time to analyze the typical West Virginian's diet.
The "junk food makes you gay" hypothesis would explain West Virginia and Mississippi over Minnesota and Oregon data points rather well. But then there are those prosperous states in the Northeast with a high trans population...
I don't think the Left is going to be able to dissociate itself from the trans issue. It's going to become a highly visible counterexample to the "Left always wins" narrative.
https://simonlaird.substack.com/p/the-left-cant-drop-trans-kids
I think the number of trans kids is going to increase, year over year, for the next 30 years. By 2054 there might be a reversal. What do you think? When will we reach peak woke?
There will be no peak woke. The left will continue to get more and more woke, while the right will go in the other direction. The two sides will get more and more distant and eventually become fully separate cultures.
Exquisite
Some interesting analysis here, but it misses the point. Politics requires you to pick your battles, and the trans kids battle is worth fighting because it highlights the fact that the Left is insane.
If a politician you supported told you that he was a Scientologist, that would make you start to doubt his judgment on everything, even though Scientology itself is a minor issue.
Opposition to transgenderism is a winning issue for Republicans because it splits the Democrat base, it rallies the Republican base, and it peels off moderates from the Democrats because it reveals how the leading Democrats are fundamentally not sane.
I started off trying to convince you to change your mind, then I became absorbed in experimenting with data and lost the plot. No regrets.
It's really not a left/right fight. Too much money is involved.
Right gynocracy: the Drug War in general as well as raising the drinking age to 21.
Left gynocracy: the tobacco lawsuit and banning of Joe Camel ads.
Regarding grooming, it is real: https://www.advocatesforyouth.org/resources/curricula-education/sex-education-collaborative-professional-learning-standards-for-sex-education/
Imagine the furor that would arise if there was a Joe Camel storytime movement.
I disagree that sex education is grooming.
The Right's Gender Scam: How They're Conning America with Fake Outrage
A grotesque theater of bathroom panic and pronoun hysteria, designed to keep you scared, distracted, and obedient—while they ignore the real problems.
https://open.substack.com/pub/patricemersault/p/moral-panic-for-dummies?r=4d7sow&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Is there any data analysis regarding the increase in pro-trans media pieces, "nonbinary" representation within fiction, games, etc and drag queen events and how those corelate with increasing numbers of trans-identified children?
@Karla None of those things has any relevance to geography. It's a social media driven phenomenon, but the way in which it is received by the audience is highly geographically variable based on the factors that I cite.
Christians believe in resurrection. On this earthly plane that means redemption. Redemption can look like a person with social disease being cured and transformed into a socially healthy person.
This does happen, it’s the triumph of order over chaos on an individual. It’s uncommon and contrary to Nature. It’s heroic and miraculous.
Liberalism universalized this phenomenon of divine election and claimed that everyone is eventually redeemed. Which morphed into the claim that everyone is redeemed into a person possessing virtue right now. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/07/universalism-postwar-progressivism-as/
1) Trans is mental illness and support of it is mental illness too. You don't want mentally ill people having power over anything.
2) It seems obvious to me that regular people that wouldn't otherwise be trans can get transed by aggressive ideology perpetrated at schools and in society.
3) Even if you don't go trans, it's part of an entire memeplex of harmful ideas on gender and reality. Bad enough if your daughter becomes a girl boss or your son becomes effeminate.
I suspect trans ideology lowers fertility amongst anyone that believes in it, so mostly its hitting UMC professionals.
4) The girls sports thing is insane.
5) I think its ironic that trans literally cost you guys Elon Musk, half of Silicon Valley, and the election and you're still hung ho on it because...it might make a few weirdoes that were never going to have kids anyway infertile?
2. "who wouldn't otherwise be trans" this is a weird moral construction. Here's how I see it:
Every environment has pressures which have a selective effect. We can increase selective pressures, or decrease them. The question is: should we increase or decrease them? Universally, I am in favor of increasing them as much as possible.
5. It's funny how you say "a few weirdos" as if it's insignificant, and then side with Musk, saying it's the most important thing ever. Pick one!
Derek Chauvin was white (R.I.P), also of conservatives want to win they should ban trans surgery, institutionalize as a mental disease and promote sex-acceptance therapies (like Perú)
Kids getting turned into troons is not a large enough phenomenon that it needs to be factored into the population question, and I don't think there are enough of them getting chemically castrated for it to factor into the Dutton and Bronski theories about the "mutation of Liberalism" killing itself through low birth rates. I think stopping trans kids is a good goal even if it is justified by longhoused logic because having to constantly acknowledge the existence of trans people and affirm their baloney gender ideology just kind of sucks and I would like it if we could avoid it as much as possible. Many troons in gaming, in college, in STEM, it's kind of humiliating having to pretend that this is normal.
Overall though, many good points. I believe that you hit the nail on the head with the infantilization description, and how it probably comes from the strong Christian background of the Amerikwan Right. In the Christian view, everyone is fallen from grace and spiritually equal, and people who do evil are simply suffering from their own sin. They have to be "saved" from themselves like how Jesus saved all of those whores and tax collectors and criminals. Christians will argue endlessly over what Jesus meant about eunuchs, but it is very clear that a non-insignificant number of early Christians (ex: Origen) interpreted this as evidence that castration is le good. Not sure of Castrati were ended by enlightenment thought, as they were not really a prominent thing in Western Europe until the early modern period.
In Pagan cultures, it is very clear that some people are just rotten eggs, who might even be better off dead. Effeminates and eunuchs were viewed as deformed freaks
Trans people are higher in Narcissism, like you say, and they're also actually more overrepresented among bullies than among victims of bullying (!) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33488479/
Gender non conformity in childhood is also generally associated with being homosexual in adulthood. So yeah, the kid very well might end up regretting getting their balls cut off, but they're probably still gonna be gay.
"We have to save these gay boys from castration" is an honest positions, but it's not one that conservatives want to lead with, for the reasons I state.
Aside from the moral and eugenic angle, the the LGBT issue seems like a battle that isn't worth fighting for the right wing. Even with political normalization, the vast majority of people are cis and straight anyway.
The trans issue seems to be the only one where intellectual conservatives are capable of any kind of fanaticism. MAGA is fanatical but only as a personality cult, not as a set of moral precepts. I think Trump could be pro-abortion, pro-immigrant and still win a majority of Republicans. But pro-trans might break the camel's back, for now. This issue will probably be seen very differently in 20 years -- I mean, Iran does trans surgeries, so why not conservatives? I think Simon has a point in that the trans issue is very easy bait, despite having few economic or racial consequences. The audience has to be fired up somehow. The split in the right that I see is people who would keep 30 million immigrants but ban trans surgery, and those who would give free trans surgeries to every immigrant as long as they leave and never come back. For some of these people the trans issue is really all that they have, with abortion being a totally losing issue.
Homosexuals and transgenders will always be a small subsection of the population, but it is more possible for people to "identify as nonbinary" or "bisexual" based on environment
We should probably talk about John B. Calhoun's "Universe 25"
"Jesus endorsed genital mutilation, which was not strange given the popularity of circumcision in his time."
This is a complete misunderstanding. There are cultural vantage points from which circumcision and castration might be considered two versions of the same thing (genital mutilation), but within Jesus's Jewish cultural context they were opposite things. Cirumcision is mandated by the Law, and castration is forbidden. Both castration and a foreskin were seen as physical deformities amounting to ritual pollution, which justified exclusion from full membership of the community. What Jesus is doing is tapping into a tradition of apocalyptic antinomianism. He is saying 'you can still be a good person, indeed a very good person, and be a eunuch'. He is probably being metaphorical, and referring to celibacy, but you never quite know with him, which was part of his charm. Note, a different version of this would be 'you can still be a good person and not be circumcised', but this appears to have been too radical for Jesus, though his later followers adopted it.
"made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake" implies that it was a religious movement that he endorsed. He never refutes them saying "they thought it was for heaven's sake, but they were wrong." I will defer to your opinion regarding how the Pharisees would have judged eunuchs, but Jesus disagrees with them.
It doesn't really in the context of the passage, but Jesus was a specialist in making enigmatic comments with massive deltas between the motte and bailey. The point is that what whe was saying was extremely 'strange' in the cultural context and that was the whole point. If he was around today he might say 'some have made themselves racists for the sake of heaven'
Yes Jesus loved to leave things open to interpretation. I agree that within the context of Jewish culture Jesus was extremely strange. I'm laughing out loud: 'some have made themselves racists for the sake of heaven' perfect line
"First, teenage boys ages 16 to 17 are victimized and deprived of sexual agency through infantilization. Anyone who is skeptical of the persecution of female teachers is villainized as a supporter of child abuse or pedophilia. Male participation and initiation is apologized for, saying that “those teen boys are too young to understand sex.”"
Well, female teachers *are* in positions of power over these teenage boys. Might as well make it legal for teenage boys of that age to plow their mothers and sisters as well while you're at it, not to mention plowing their aunts and great-aunts.
BTW, some of the people who excuse this also excuse it for younger boys, and for more serious cases, such as Richard Hanania excusing a 27-year-old woman non-consensually groping a 13-year-old boy. No thanks!
Though I honestly wouldn't mind lowering the age of consent to 14 across the board, for both boys and girls. But with exceptions for people who are in positions of power or influence over such minors, such as parents, teachers, tutors, babysitters, et cetera, for whom a higher age of consent would be required in order to have sex with them. Germany already has such laws, to my knowledge, and it has not gone to Hell!
There's a huge difference between age gap relationships with teen boys and teachers and literal incest. You equating the two shows that you are the exact kind of moral panicker that I describe.
Do you approve of age gap relationships with teen girls and adult men?
no, i'm sexist and i believe in double standards
Do you support Bayesianism in regards to race in the law as well? For instance, not just racial profiling by police (which I actually support due to the compelling state interest), but also using the race (and sex, and age) for people who are convicted of various crimes as a factor in determining their sentence, if race (and sex, and age) is a significant predictive factor in determining whether they will later reoffend?