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Comment by drenvuk | Hacker News Reader

Can someone please tell me how important this topic based on the amount of news time and eyeballs it attracts relative to the number of people that it affects?

The numbers I can find for US citizens is: 0.6% or 1,988,696 out 331,449,281 of people total for the entirety of the US in 2021.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...

In the UK where the featured article took place the latest poll I could find comes counts the number of people who selected "other" when choosing a sex at 0.4% or 224,632 people out of 64,596,800.

>https://practicalandrogyny.com/2014/12/16/how-many-people-in...

Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people.

I don't mean to downplay what is happening because it is happening but do you not think the amount of outrage this topic generates surpasses the level of impact we can have assuming we fix it? It just feels like we're being distracted.

View on HN

That is hard to say.

In a world full of discrimination against trans folks, who knows how many people who would prefer being trans have failed to be identified?

But the topic is much bigger than that. You see, the ideology being pushed says that everyone who has gender dysphoria should be assumed to be trans. But a LOT of teenagers, particularly girls, go through a period of gender dysphoria when they hit puberty. What little research exists on the topic says that most of those girls will grow out of their gender dysphoria, and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire. However said research is highly controversial exactly because it undermines the politically correct ideology that we should take seriously all claims that physical appearance is less important than chosen gender.

And THAT is the real problem. I don't have statistics. But anecdotally I have a 12 year old with gender dysphoria. Many of their friends have the same. I personally know more children claiming to be trans at present than I've known people who were blind or missing a limb over my entire life.

A *LOT* of parents are in my boat. It is easy to find opposing ideologies about how we should deal with our teenage children. There is very little research. And people are so focused on yelling at each other that nobody dares DO more research. Because no matter what you find, you're going to get targeted by someone.

> What little research exists on the topic says that most of those girls will grow out of their gender dysphoria, and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire.

This is frequently claimed but is untrue, or at the very least highly uncertain. The studies most often referenced have serious methodological errors, including inconsistent definitions of dysphoria (owing partially to problems with the Gender Identity Disorder diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV that have since been fixed with the DSM-5) and desistance (in some cases counting anyone who didn't follow up with the clinic conducting the research as having desisted) https://www.gdaworkinggroup.com/desistance-articles-and-crit...

Julia Serano has also written extensively on this topic with much depth and nuance, at least in my opinion: https://juliaserano.medium.com/detransition-desistance-and-d...

I made a claim about ideology. You made a claim about medical professionals. That is not particularly relevant to what I claimed.

I stand by my claim. The online echo chambers that children, including my own, seek out very much push the ideology that any claim to be male, female, non-binary or whatever must be accepted at face value. And that the person who is making the claim should have the right to any treatment that they wish, up to and including surgery.

As for criticism of the research that exists, I agree that it isn't very good. But then again, most research in the social sciences isn't very good. See the Replication Crisis. Or as we used to say, news at 11.

> any claim to be male, female, non-binary or whatever must be accepted at face value. And that the person who is making the claim should have the right to any treatment that they wish, up to and including surgery.

I can understand some caution around the latter part of this quote, given how traumatic, invasive, and costly surgery can be. It is a defensible and reasonable position that there should be _some_ barrier-to-entry to such major decisions (especially for children), even while there's also a simultaneous reasonable concern that such barriers will be used to prevent access to folks who genuinely do need, want, and would benefit from it.

But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part? How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do? Even the position of "they are confused" or "this is a phase that will pass" or "they have been pressured into that belief" doesn't hold water - until that phase passes, that person's gender, their self-image, _is_ whatever that phase dictates. That doesn't make the current situation any less true. If you told someone "I like broccoli" and they responded "that's just a phase, you'll grow out of liking broccoli soon", your response would, presumably be "...so? I like broccoli _now_, what does your guess about the future have anything to do with it?"

Does your position on "accepting gender at face value" change if the statement "I am male" is replaced with "I see myself as male"? Are you more comfortable accepting the fact that someone's self-image can change over time, rather than imagining that gender is some abstract immutable inherent property?

How do you define denying the first part?

According to my child's world view, I need to ask them every day what their pronouns are today. And any accidental slip-ups on any adult's part are a demonstration of transphobia, which justifies a raised voice and lecture.

While I'm perfectly OK with making an attempt to treat people as they wish to be treated, at what point does the inconvenience and stress that your constant demands make on others become an unreasonable ask of them? (Which is a question that every parent of teenagers winds up asking at some point, for some reason...)

My <2 year old can already convincingly fake an accident if he believes that doing so will lead to tasty food.

I can imagine thousands of reasons why teenagers would lie, and maybe they'll come up with new pronouns just to annoy you. Because that's what kids do, they constantly test the limits of acceptable behavior and the limits of your patience.

That said, I agree with you that people can choose what gender they feel like and others should accept it as an opinion. But trying to force others to change their behavior to accommodate your opinion very quickly becomes unreasonable.

So gender is fine, but pronouns are already a slippery slope.

Do you believe a horny teenage guy would be willing to lie and say he identifies as female, if that means he gets to see all of his female classmates naked?

It's a tradeoff between people living out their believes and the inconvenience that this causes for others.

The point is clearly that we should discourage folks from undertaking any permanent life alterations while they're still in the "it could be just a phase" stage. To use your analogy, we're dissuading the person from tattooing "I hate broccoli" on them until they've reached age 18 or whatever. Nobody is saying we should deny them their self-image outright.

The concepts of "man" and "woman" are already doing a lot of work in language, society, law, etc. Redefining those terms would cause/is causing a lot of upheaval.

Think of the concepts of "citizen", "resident", "immigrant", "ex-pat", "DREAMer", etc - all terms related to where someone lives and what set of laws applies to them. Regardless of how the person feels, the label isn't just for their own sake. Someone can be a citizen and an immigrant if they are naturalized, saying someone is a resident implies (but not definitely) that they are not a citizen, ex-pats are assumed to be temporarily in the place where they reside.

Labelling trans women as women is a lossy translation that ignores a lot of societal edge cases.

Sure, you are what you are __now__, but as a teenager that is going through radical changes. That's why you can't even get a tattoo in the US until you turn 18. In some states, not even with parental permission. Because it's irreversible. The whole trouble with reassignment surgery for minors is precisely due to the fact that who they are today is not who they will be as adults. Of course people should be treated as they want to be treated __now__, but society recognizes that adolescents are not capable of seeing far enough ahead to adulthood to be entrusted with making certain kinds of permanent, life-altering decisions.

There's no debate I'm aware of about lowering the age for getting a tattoo, or drinking, or acting in porn, or other things which are fine for adults, but which we don't permit 12 year olds to do.

> But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part? How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do?

A lot of us remember similar mistakes from their own teenage years. I had a short phase where I thought I was gay, because my classmates were starting to date girls but I had a close guy friend and wasn't very interested in girls. Then I looked it up, found some resources clearly explaining that's not what being gay is, and walked away more secure in my identity. If someone had told me that I couldn't be wrong, because nobody knows how I feel better than I do, I would probably have come out and then been confused and insecure for years.

I think your last paragraph hints at the root cause. Many people simply have a trouble seeing gender purely as self-image since it has originated from sex, which is objective. And this development is quite recent.

> But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part?

Some people claim to be cats. The argument is fairly leaking too. You might argue it is different for gender and to a degree that is true. Doesn't But this argument is pretty leaking too.

> How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do?

Because people lie about themselves all the time. Especially teenagers. We don't take every claim made by teenagers about their feeling as true on face value. We know they're practicing how to deceive people as part of growing up.

> You made a claim about medical professionals. That is not particularly relevant to what I claimed.

I removed that part as I agree it wasn't relevant.

> As for criticism of the research that exists, I agree that it isn't very good.

Unfortunately it's so poor that I judge it as being insufficient to use to form an opinion on this issue. It's much worse than the replication crisis at large, it's not clear that their methods prove what they claim in the first place if you look at their work. The pages I linked go into greater depth about why this is a difficult question to study and what the existing research gets wrong.

> The online echo chambers that children, including my own, seek out very much push the ideology that any claim to be male, female, non-binary or whatever must be accepted at face value.

That's as may be, but I suggest you read the WPATH standards of care if you're interested in what the medical community in general thinks about the medical treatment of trans people, including kids. It's a little out of date (2012), but if you can't find a knowledgeable medical professional nearby it's pretty much the gold standard, and is very well supported by evidence: https://www.wpath.org/publications/soc In particular, adolescents seem much less likely to desist than younger children.

The fact that it spreads inside friend circles should be all it takes to defeat the idea that it is based on some fundamental internal gender dysphoria. It's more akin to a social meme.

In not saying that applies to all cases, but definitely a good number of them among young people, especially girls.

It’s the new anorexia or cutting. These things come in societal waves, and tend to impact teenage girls the most.

Birds of a feather flock together.

I do not find that sufficient to explain away the phenomenon. It could account for part of it.

Since the explosion of kids identifying as trans is a rather recent phenomenon, it seems likely that there is no good research on the outcomes yet. The people identifying as trans who were studied ten years ago may be very different from the people who identify as trans today (their reasons for feeling trans may be completely different).

It seems rather obvious that something like social contagion is going on, similar to anorexia. There may be cases with other causes, but a lot of them at the moment are probably social contagion.

If you think about it, onset of puberty is when the bodies of kids undergo drastic changes, and it is normal that they struggle to come to terms with it. Maybe worse for girls because their bodies change in more obvious sexual ways.

So they are in a vulnerable state where their bodies feel wrong until they have adjusted to their "new world".

I don't find it surprising that they are vulnerable to people telling them the reason their body feels wrong is because they are really trans, and they desperately grasp for an offered cure.

That is just me thinking, not "medical research", mind you. However, I think parental common sense is underrated when it comes to such issues. Too much expert bullshit has been injected into child rearing over the centuries.

> But a LOT of teenagers, particularly girls, go through a period of gender dysphoria when they hit puberty. What little research exists on the topic says that most of those girls will grow out of their gender dysphoria, and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire.

Could you link to this research? This is a fraught topic that includes fraudulent studies and claims like this mean little without links.

I can only pile on with anecdotal evidence from what my spouse has seen, working in middle schools: yeah, like half of kids who ask to start going by an opposite-gender name, ask to be addressed by different pronouns, start dressing differently, et c., in middle school end up changing their minds before they reach high school, and it is often girls.

From what I have heard this does not, however, lead me to believe there's an epidemic of kids receiving medical intervention in support of this, who don't "really mean it". As best I can tell it just means puberty is weird and confusing sometimes, but that usually resolves itself (at least, more or less) after a bit, which should surprise no-one. I doubt many cases that are merely confusion or uncertainty or "experimenting" or whatever, reach the point of even having a conversation with a doctor about it. I could be wrong about that, but nothing I've heard has me worried about The Children. Suicide rates do, but not that.

I'll add onto this, if people are genuinely worried about invasive surgery, the policing of trans identity is counterproductive to addressing that concern.

What would be productive is allowing kids to use different pronouns, allowing them to dress themselves the way they wish and allowing them to seek affirmative care and affirmative communities -- so that they can explore their own gender identity without feeling like they need to commit hard or lean in against opposition that tells them they're not really trans.

To the extent that gender identity can be influenced by social norms, allowing kids to identify their own genders is a way of allowing them to safely experiment in that space without invasive surgeries that they might regret. But if everything becomes policing whether or not someone really is trans, if everything involves policing even minor interventions like puberty blockers, then of course kids who suspect they might be trans are going to think that surgery is the only way that they'll be accepted or feel comfortable -- because that's what "gender-critical" groups are telling them, they're telling them that having a certain body is a barrier to their identity.

For some trans people, exploring gender is a process. Allowing people to feel safe and accepted during that process decreases the risk of rash decisions. And accepting them regardless of whether or not they pass for their gender decreases social pressure that might exist telling them they need to medically transition to be valid.

It's not surprising that mocking gender fluidity, over-emphasizing physical attributes in gender identity, and restricting low-impact interventions like puberty blockers might make uncertain kids feel like they need to hard-commit to medically transitioning. It's not surprising that trans kids and trans-questioning kids would be alienated by that environment, and that they might be less willing to openly air their doubts and fears or seek external advice.

> What would be productive is allowing kids to use different pronouns

The debate is not about whether somebody can use a pronoun. It’s whether everyone else is compelled to use it as well. It’s the difference between positive and negative rights - whether you have the right to compel others to behave a certain way vs whether you have the right to behave a certain way yourself. Legally compelled speech creates a real Pandora’s box.

I think you should feel good for being respectful and for using whatever terms people prefer, but punishing people for not doing so seems wrong minded

The gender critical are not policing trans identity; rather, trans-activists are doing the policing of gender expression by loudly insisting that any kind of socially non-normative gender expression should be seen as tantamount to and ipso facto equated with some sort of trans identity. Your own reference to "gender fluidity" as tantamount to a separate identity rather than a characteristics that all humans may share to a lesser or greater extent, is an especially clear example of this. Need I point out how this policing may be harmful to non-heteronormatively-expressing folks?

Puberty blockers are a pretty nifty tool to this end - they allow any hard committal to be deferred - the child can reverse their decision without any serious long term ills. I am rather concerned about the possibility that invasive surgery might become normalized in non-adults but I don't believe it's something that's close to happening.

Teenagers explore their identity in a number of vectors. I have always been strongly opposed to parentally imposed career choices and gender falls into this same category except there is some genetic predisposition that will carry on bodily changes unless proactive intervention is undertaken.

Agree with you given my experience. Kids question many things (religion, cultural norms, fashion norms, etc) and gender is now something that one can question, so it happens. And why not? People have been wrestling with gender roles for centuries, from questions of royal succession to whether women could inherit property or not to suffrage. Yet gender roles continue to be rather prescriptive. What intelligent kid wouldn't dig into why? And why would they take the thoughts of "the olds" as the last word when youth have never done so in human history?

So do what you'd do when your kid is rebelling against their religion or curfew or your selection of their college major. Talk about it and ask what's up. Express your own views, respectfully. Listen.

This is it. Wrap it up. Shows over. This is all that a parent needs. Fin. -30-

The disappearing lesbian is certainly a trend that is being noticed.

More and more women as coming out as trans instead of lesbian, and the 'lesbian until graduation' phenomenon was well known for decades before this.

The general populace has a very shallow understanding of the distinction between gender vs sex. The academic/popular liberal community makes no attempt to clarify the distinctions and it leads to further confused middle/high schoolers.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095578/

I don't think this study is perfect by any means, especially as the data is coming from parents of said teenage girls, but it's a place to start.

That study might be the most flawed I've ever seen. It relied on parents' perceptions like you said. And the author selected for parents who refused to accept their children coming out as trans. Among other problems.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnc_KvWkiHw&t=3324s

Wow. You're right that's an amazingly badly constructed study. Low-n, indirect-non-patient self-report (parental reporting/perception bias) w/ no cross adjustment or multi-party correction. Biased recruitment practices... hecking YIKES.

Oh, and of course, the methodology was soundly criticised and contextualised in the same journal; imagine that. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6424477/

> The level of evidence produced by the Dr. Littman’s study cannot generate a new diagnostic criterion relative to the time of presentation of the demands of medical and social gender affirmation.

Surprise.

Worth noting that that paper not only surveyed exclusively parents but also recruited exclusively from transphobic websites (small wonder the parents found weren't particularly supportive). To the point where the conclusions had to be drastically rolled back and these failures in experimental design highlighted [0].

It's also the start and end of anyone replicating those results. This is very misleading and equivalent to linking the now debunked paper saying vaccines cause autism then telling readers to go look for more research.

For those in the back, trans people are the gender they say they are and the last people you should be asking for their opinion on a person's identity are their unsupportive parents. [0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

This is a wonderfully nuanced thread on the subject from a trans woman in her thirties: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1385411504669790208.html

Edit: I just noticed the original poster already converted this into a longform post, so the "reader app" version isn't really necessary https://liminalwarmth.com/the-hard-thing-about-hard-things-m...

It's also important noting, semi-related to your post, that nobody is pushing for trans-surgeries for teenagers -- they are pushing for puberty blockers. What this means is that puberty is medically halted until the teenager is a legal age, when they will be able to decide which puberty they want.

This avoids a lot of dysphoria-provoking secondary sexual characteristics from progressing, and also avoids accidentally "transing" a cisgender teenager.

Nobody hesitates to give puberty blockers to cisgender teenagers, for other medical reasons. I knew a young girl who had to have puberty blockers because she had a precocious puberty and it was literally destroying her young body -- she was not old enough physically or mentally to be able to deal with it.

However, for whatever reason, there is a huge backlash against giving it to transgender teenagers, despite it representing the best and ultimate choice in self-determination -- "Take these for a few years and then when you are 18 you can decide which puberty you want to go through". It leaves room for the individual to decide. If the person decides against it before then, they can stop and puberty immediately resumes as normal.

When the suicide rates are as high as they are for transgender people, and there is the option of halting the things causing the suicidal feelings, the dysphoria, all of the physical and emotional and societal pain. Halting an onslaught of pain that is utterly soul destroying, and just giving them more time to make a choice and more of an informed decision, how can there be any empathically-cogent argument against that?

What, if any, are the permanent consequences of being on puberty blockers from, say, 13-18?

I’d guess they’d be significant but that’s just a guess.

Decreased bone density is a concern. This is monitored. It can be mitigated with supplements and exercise. And it isn't known if it's permanent or only for the duration of treatment as far as I know.

AMAB patients have less penile tissue for vaginoplasty. They have other options though. I don't think anyone has studied mature penile size in AMAB patients who decided to go through male puberty. Few do.

All the research I’ve seen shows no significant consequences to taking puberty blockers. Puberty proceeds as normal once the puberty blockers have been stopped. Puberty has quite a wide range of onset ages and this is not taking the range that far beyond the historical range.

Because giving hormone suppressors to developing kids could have massive implications to their physical and mental development? Has there really been enough research on the subject to come up with a valid cost-benefit analysis?

> How can there be any emphatically-cogent argument…?

Because drugging little kids should be a last resort. Using big words doesn't change the need to be extremely cautious in doing something as serious as blocking puberty.

That's why we leave it up to the doctors to prescribe them?

A 77-fold tweet storm, that has got to be some kind of world record. It's surprising how much of it is just plain old common sense that would never be seen as sensitive or "political" in a halfway sane environment, stated in what comes off as a painfully diplomatic way, going to extreme lengths to not ruffle any feathers.

I really didn't read it that way. It was an earnest, heartfelt piece largely discussing the author's own experience.

Thank you for posting it. Some definite food for thought.

I hate to wade into a controversial topic where I'm under-educated and have limited info/opinions; but for what little it is worth to add to anecdata - the current cohort of 12-15 year old girls in my friend/family circle are virtually all in some level of gender dysphoria. Most of their parents are supportive and loving but... panicked, I guess - completely uncertain what to do, how best to help them, and without robust support themselves. I think there'll be people with strong opinions giving advice here as there are in real life - but those are in some ways people whose advice I'd personally be least likely to take - on average, more interested in propagating some ideological rightness (on any and all sides), rather than looking at each and every child, circumstance, and taking a good hard look what's best of the person. Because that is a damn difficult question, whereas loud opinions are all too easy.

I think this raises a few questions.

Has anything changed in the last 10 or 20 years?

Why does this affect as many youths as it does today?

No doubt there was unhappiness with one's identity in the past, but I doubt it was at the level it is today. And, in addition, I doubt it's at the same elevated level in all countries. In other words, we can ask 30 or 40 year olds, did you as a kid feel unhappy with your identity as much as today's youth feel about their identities but couldn't wouldn't express it?

Is it kids leading the change, is it kids following societal trends, is it other, what is it?

> Has anything changed in the last 10 or 20 years?

Labeling - There's one specific example I'm aware of: Girls interested more in "boy" things than "girl" things were once called a "tomboy", but were still accepted as a girl, just a girl with different interests. Nowadays that same kid would be described as transgender and encouraged to transition.

Has anything changed in the last 10 or 20 years?

Yes. We as a society have become dramatically more accepting of gay and trans people.

Gay marriage is a reasonable proxy. Back in 2008, and even a relatively liberal state like California passed a proposition to ban gay marriage. Today popular opinion supports gay marriage. Not just popular opinion in California, or nationwide, but even popular opinion nationwide AMONG REPUBLICANS.

This is why the parents that I know today with children identifying as trans are figuring out how to best support and help their children. The parents of trans people that I knew a few years back wound up becoming homeless as teenagers because of the reactions of their parents. A typical such reaction having been, "You are murdering my son!"

No doubt. But we knew back then we had gays and lesbians among us. We had them as friends and acquaintances so we knew the population existed and that there were quite a few people in our circles who happened to be. But trans seems a bit different.

>In other words, we can ask 30 or 40 year olds, did you feel unhappy with your identity as much as today's youth feel about their identities but couldn't wouldn't express it?

This won't be accurate for a few reasons.

First, there are certainly people in denial about these feelings. A society that is more hostile to trans people will yield a society that has more trans people denying their true identity. That should be obvious. Sometimes that denial is only outward which could result on them lying on a poll. Sometimes that denial will even be to themselves which means they couldn't be truthful on a poll.

If you have spent time around young children you have probably learned that it is difficult to understand a feeling without being able to name that feeling. Similarly it is possible for people to be experiencing gender dysmorphia without realizing that it is specifically gender dysmorphia. I have heard trans people talk about having a general lack of comfort in their body or just the sense that they were somehow wrong that they couldn't explain until they later in life realized they are trans.

Also trans people tragically have a shorter average life span due to increased rates of violence and suicide. Simply measuring the percentage of 40 years isn't going to be comparable to a percentage of 15 year olds because many of those 15 year olds sadly won't live to see 40.

According to parent comment a significant fraction of the cohort are experiencing some form of unhappiness with their identities. If that is true, and a handful of commenters are making similar claims, then we could have seen alarming numbers of suicides amongst teenage girls, but we have not, so we'd have plenty of survivors to interview and understand better.

Okay so we can't ask today's 30 or 40 year olds about their feelings growing up?

This makes your theory conveniently unfalsifiable.

Not endorsing it per-se or suggesting it should be accepted wholesale but good reading on this is _ Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters_

https://www.amazon.com/Irreversible-Damage-Transgender-Seduc...

There have been many attempts to get this book banned at booksellers. The author, Abigail Shriner, wrote about her experience through all this censorship at her Substack: https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/has-censorship-become-o...

Something I've wondered about this is the social pressure around dysphoria. Dysphoria, ironically, has become trendy, particularly about social media. See the "cis is boring" view that's been in vogue for some time across multiple social media platforms. This article on increasing rates of desistance after lockdown [1] (Disclaimer: Evidence isn't well structured and is arguably anecdotal) makes me consider the positive impact of social pressure on transition. That detransition seems like a clear blind spot in the literature (deliberately? it's another r/l culture war hotspot) means that all we get is anecdote for now though. Do note that other studies seem to report relatively high rates of desistance amongst children transitioners as compared to adults.

[1] https://4w.pub/social-media-trends-indicate-rise-in-gender-d...

I can only add with my own anecdote. My son dated a girl when they were both 14. This girl had gender dysphoria. She was suffering from a lot of other externalities, but she swore she was a boy. Fast forward 3 years and she is now mature, optimistic, and very much a girl.

Culture seems to be going through a convulsion of sorts and it is taking an enormous toll on our young girls. They do seem to grow out of it, but the phenomenon is real.

>> "and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them"

This isn't actually a thing. Certain factions who would prefer trans people cease to exist push this idea that kids are on this hot new meme of getting their bits flipped before reaching the age of consent, but it is simply not a thing. No top surgery, either.

It just isn't a thing. It's a wild fantasy. The only thing kids can go on are puberty blockers. These are well-tested and their effects known and understood through their use for other medical concerns.

Whether or not that is a thing depends on where you are.

The most common type of surgery is breast. In the USA, double mastectomies on children are legal, and have been performed on patients as young as 13. As for gender dysphoria itself, according to some surveys the frequency of teenage biological girls diagnosed with the disorder has risen by a factor of 40 in recent years.

For sources on both of those facts, as well as more background on this topic, I recommend https://www.webmd.com/children/news/20210427/transition-ther....

The article cited nothing for the former claim. An unspecified survey for the latter.

It seemed to imply the 40x increase was in rapid onset gender dysphoria. But ROGD isn't a recognized diagnosis even now. Never mind 2006. A single researcher published a single paper proposing it in 2018. They relied on the assumption teenagers tell their parents everything. And they selected for parents who refused to accept their children coming out as trans.[1]

The article also claimed 100% of a small study population proceeding to transition after puberty blockers contradicts the claim puberty blockers give children more time to decide before transitioning. But doctors don't hand out puberty blockers randomly of course.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnc_KvWkiHw&t=3324s

Are the majority of child double mastectomies done for gender affirmation reasons?

I knew several women in college who had the procedure done before college to avoid familial cancer risk or back problems.

Please note that that's an opinion article, not an academic source.

It's borderline misleading to say that mastectomies "happen", and then link it with an unrelated number for diagnoses of gender dysphoria.

It's also misleading to represent the growth of a tiny number relatively. A few dozen cases grew to a few hundred. That's completely normal and what happens with any novel diagnosis that was barely accepted even just 10 years ago.

Note that there's comparatively little benefit to puberty blockers in F2M cases, because other than the obvious case of breasts, most secondary sex characteristics, even post puberty, can be radically altered by taking male hormones. So you get very little benefit, but the risk side is a lot less clear. For the same reason, most F2M's will be better off delaying both hormonal and surgical transition until well after puberty and perhaps into middle-age, when desistance rates do get very low.

The situation re: M2F is genuinely more challenging, and one has to balance a variety of factors pushing for earlier, not just later intervention.

> Certain factions who would prefer trans people cease to exist

I don't think this is fair. When we're talking about people this young, concerns about later desistance are very real. Expressing such concerns is in no way equal to preferring that these people "cease to exist".

Middle age means over 40 commonly. Is that what you meant?

Mastectomies leave scars and can have complications. And you seem to ignore the psychological and social aspects of going through opposite gender puberty.

There are concerns about erroneous transitions. There also substanctial factions who loudly proclaim their preference that trans people (and homosexual) do not exist, and openly justify their claims with centuries-old supernatural myths.

We've just had a barely unsuccessful attempt (the social democrats were in favor, but didn't want to end their coalition with the christian democrats) of legislation in Germany which included allowing gender reassignment surgery without parental consent from the age of 14.

After psychological counselling, not just on a child's whim, but still.

We've had exactly your point in the public discourse: "that's FUD, no surgery for minors is planned", but the wording in the draft law was clear, and proponents were unwilling to get rid of it, even though it would have made the law's passage much, much more likely.

Sometimes people push bills like this to make their opponents look like fools, though maybe that's not as common in the EU. Movements are infiltrated all the time. I don't know the details of that bill (much less the name or backers), so I can't really comment.

What I do know is there's tons more bills trying (sometimes successfully) to block consenting adults and older kids with parental permission from even basic stuff like counseling or blockers. That seems way more dangerous than the fraction of a percent of kids who change their mind later being able to go through with a transition they'll regret.

> The only thing kids can go on are puberty blockers.

They can also go on testosterone injections here in the UK, not sure about US.

16 according to the NHS.[1] It's the same in the US.

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/gender-dysphoria/treatment/

>> and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire

> The only thing kids can go on are puberty blockers.

So instead of specifying gender reassignment surgery, they should have something more broad, like well-meaning medical interventions. It seems like the heart of their statement is true and that these medical interventions on children can backfire.

This is just false. I personally know people in the states that make it false, and other evidence is very easily accessible.

Which states; or rather, how many? There are fifty of them.

> What little research exists on the topic says that most of those girls will grow out of their gender dysphoria, and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire.

Except... people don't perform gender reassignment surgery on children just going through puberty.

I once read an anti corporate critique of this phenomenon. The argument went something like this:

Once female beauty was commoditized, and you could literally purchase an upgrade to parts you were born with. Entire cosmetic and plastic surgery industry benefited from marketing and promoting this model of beauty. The unforeseen consequence was that men started fetishizing these upgrades themselves.

As some men hyper focus on female body parts anyway. It was a way to exploit psychological tendencies for profit.

I guess the counter remedy would be to promote female beauty as the whole, and not some collection of body parts.

| gender reassignment surgery

SRS/GRS is not recommended for pubescent children by anyone. At that age only hormone blockers are on the table, definitely not permanent surgery.

EDIT

Posting a reference backing up my claim since I'm getting downvoted:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/05/viral-imag...

| Professional organizations such as the Endocrine Society recommend against puberty blockers for children who have not reached puberty, and recommend that patients be at least 16 years old before beginning hormone treatments for feminization or masculinization of the body. The last step in transitioning to another gender, gender reassignment surgery, is only available to those 18 and older in the United States.

Does anyone have evidence to challenge this claim of fact? Otherswise it's useful information.

No claim containing the string "is not recommended by anyone" will hold up, since eventually it's easy enough to find someone (probably a troll) who does recommend X practice.

But the post that you're replying to, in general, holds up. "Gender reassignment surgery is typically only available to those 18 and older in the United States." https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/05/viral-imag...

That seems unnecessarily pedantic, since obviously it should be assumed to mean "not recommended by anyone who matters", but I've upvoted you for providing the source.

I was editing my comment with that exact link when you posted.

"typically" is bearing a lot of load there, and GRS is a broad term.

Double mastectomy is practiced, at least:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...

Define "gender reassignment surgery", please.

Are we talking about a top operation, or a bottom one? Do mastectomies count as gender reassignment, or only if genitals are involved?

Because if you include top surgery, then https://wng.org/roundups/state-mandates-payment-for-children... says that where I live in California it is legal, and insurance must pay for it.

> But anecdotally I have a 12 year old with gender dysphoria.

I think this isn't solved by education, it is caused by it and consequently the peer pressure among pupils.

The reason is probably not that trans-people are discriminated against. That is very unlikely.

> That is hard to say.

Why?

There are simply more disabled people than trans people and they are getting far less attention, right?

How is that hard to say?

I think society has made good efforts to be more accessible to people with disabilities. I'm pretty sure all of the traffic lights in America beep when the walk signal is on - that exists to assist blind individuals even in communities without blind individuals - in addition there are a lot more buildings with wheelchair ramps than there are with unisex bathrooms.

Where is this ideology that "gender dysphoria = trans" pushed? This is really bizarre -- could you give me some references?

There are competing ideologies between the United States and the Rest of the World, essentially culminating in two approaches of diagnosing psychological and psychiatric health concerns.

One comes from the American Psychological Association, called the DSM and another comes from the World Health Organization called the ICD.

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/10/icd-dsm

This doesn't address the "dysphoria = trans" claim at all. As I wrote in the other comment, one can be uneasy or unhappy with one's body/gender without wanting to switch to "the other" gender. As a mathematician, it seems like people here are claiming {1,2} = R (real numbers) which is just weird, they're sets of different cardinality.

You are arguing semantics. The specific words that the scientific community uses to refer to reality in their models of reality often change.

For example, “discomfort” in gender dysphoria is a scientific term that implies a level of suffering on par with the “discomfort” one would feel immediately after a major surgery, during the recovery phase, except this discomfort is chronic.

Scientifically, people experiencing gender dysphoria are considered to be in a state of chronic suffering for which there is a medical treatment, called gender affirming care.

Not all gender affirming care results in gender reassignment.

I wouldn't think of it as an ideology. I mean, maybe it is, but it doesn't seem at all bizarre. I'm not really aware of the details, but I'd be hard-pressed to name a difference between the two. I don't (think I) have a position on the issue.

But trans means switching from one side of the binary to the other, while dysphoria means "unease or dissatisfaction" which is not at all the same. One can easily be uneasy or dissatisfied with one's perceived gender identity yet not want to switch to the other side of the binary. What about agender people, or people who just don't like gender at all?

I certainly remember as a teen being unhappy with the constraints gender put on me in social situations but that certainly doesn't mean I'm trans.

There is a semantic shift taking place in the scientific community regarding the use of the prefix trans when referring to sex (physical anatomy) reassignment as a treatment in gender affirmative care.

Unfortunately, politics keeps interfering with the word choices of scientists.

There's a large segment of the population that feels actively threatened by trans rights. The two primary components are:

1. Parents and sexual violence victims concerned about the non-falsifiability of trans-identification and the related concerns of sexual predators claiming an identity they don't actually have to gain access to private spaces of women and girls.

2. Feminists (TERFs) who believe being a woman is a fundamental, biological identity and cannot be coopted by males.

Interestingly enough, there's not much animosity toward trans-men. These groups exclusively concern themselves with trans-women.

Mormons are probably another group due to the reliance of their theology on binary gender, but I don't see them as being particularly vocal on this topic.

> Feminists (TERFs)

One note: Nobody self-identifies as a TERF. Or at least not originally (I'm sure in Internet ire people do it ironically by now.) It's mostly a label used to crush nuanced conversation.

Interesting to compare that with WASP.

> Or at least not originally

I've heard it was the other way around, i.e. it started off as a self identification for a niche group which people started to reject once it begun to be used pejoratively.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/29/im-cre...

Interesting, thanks! Although I supposed it doesn't really speak to whether it was initially embraced (by the identified niche group) before being rejected.

> Interestingly enough, there's not much animosity toward trans-men.

One of the interesting things about spending the last few years studying Western European post-Roman history has been the discovery that, in the West, there has historically been relatively little resistance to AFAB folks "presenting" (speaking of the interpretation at the time--the dichotomy between "presenting" and "being" is one I am thoroughly not qualified to negotiate) as male unless tied into homophobia. There are historical examples of folks who outwardly identify as women taking on male roles in monastic life, and it's often portrayed as a good and pious thing.

The reverse, it seems, is generally not true, though not exclusively so. I've read of, but don't have offhand, accounts of Church investigation into "male nuns" that ruled that the erstwhile offender, a male who had suffered prepubescent genital damage, had committed no crime being raised by a particular convent as a woman. But cases going the other way round are much more common.

In terms of today's relations, however, my intuition is that the fear regarding transwomen is that it's largely a performative flavor of misogyny and the fear of those of the "superior" set somehow damaging all men, much as the performative flavor of homophobia does the same with regards to gay men but shockingly much rarely with regards to bisexual or homosexual women. But, of course, that is just an intuition.

>2. Feminists (TERFs) who believe being a woman is a fundamental, biological identity and cannot be coopted by males.

I'd wager that most people believe this. Not just feminists.

54 percent of Americans believe "whether a person is a man or a woman is determined at birth". There is a wide partisan divide with 80 percent of Republicans agreeing (so probably not radical feminists) and only 34 percent of democrats agreeing.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/08/transgender...

Polls have a way of shifting rapidly. People put down what they think they're supposed to put down. See how fast support for gay rights tilted as more people came out. Most people weren't really committed to homophobia, but they thought they were expected to seem to believe certain things.

There's a name for the phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance

The scientific community, specifically the community that conducts science on this topic, currently has a distinction on the terms sex and gender. I’d posit the possible consensus position that the term sex refers to physical anatomy whereas gender refers to one’s gender role in interaction with others.

For details on that distinction and attempts at consensus-building for the terminology, see https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysio...

In software development terms, this topic has no ubiquitous language.

In relation to your comment, their belief is not based in a shared reality.

Unless I have wildly misunderstood you, I believe you would lose that wager: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Pu...

Polling suggests otherwise:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-women-supp...

https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/548775-new-poll...

There are a lot of shades of trans support, If you asked the most extreme questions you would probably get different answers.

It is one thing to ask people should be able can use a bathroom, and another to ask questions about personal sexlife and behavior. i.e. if you asked people if you consider transwomen equally with women at birth as sexual partners, I bet the numbers fall through the floor.

> Interestingly enough, there's not much animosity toward trans-men.

While it's true there's little animosity directed at them, there is a lot of stuff Shrier's view that "gender ideology" is seducing lesbian women into thinking they're not actually women. Which, honestly, as someone who lived through lots of the dumb gay panic in the 80s and 90s sounds exactly like what people thought about homosexuals (eg: gay people can seduce/recruit straight people and turn them gay). So trans men get treated like dupes or victims of some social phenomena, rather than treated like actual human beings with agency of their own.

In fact, pretty much every anti-trans viewpoint I see, even from otherwise highbrow publicans like the Economist, are really just rehashes of what we heard about gays in the 80s and 90s, before we realized they were, in fact, not a threat to society.

> ” sexual predators claiming an identity they don't actually have”

This is such a bizarre leap of logic. Trans women are the pariahs of contemporary Western society. Yet the same people who uphold this subhuman status also assume that rapists are nefariously claiming trans female identity.

That’s not how rapists operate! They seek positions of power. Trans women are downtrodden and powerless — the least attractive position for a sexual predator.

I think your terminology is a bit backwards. A trans man is someone assigned female at birth but who later identifies as male. From context you seem to be talking about the hypothetical of male rapists professing they identify as trans women. A person born male who later identifies as a woman is a trans woman.

Thanks, that’s what I meant. (You write an agitated comment on the phone and make a basic mistake. The usual.)

I thought that was the idea being sold by Republicans in the US, though, that a woman who is trans is going to be lurking in the bathroom to rape your daughter after beating her in tennis?

>That’s not how rapists operate! They seek positions of power.

This frames rape as some thing people plot out and rationalize over a long time.

Rape is like any other crime. Some people think about it critically and finds ways to commit it for their own amusement. Oftentimes it's just people taking an opportunity. Sometimes it's people finding ways to make opportunities and not thinking about freshman psychology power dynamics. A lot of rape involves hormones and alcohol flowing freely without consideration of the consequences or harm.

There are also people who actively enjoy feeling weak or inferior as part of a sexual fetish.

Trying to rationalize it into one group or mindset doesn't work.

You are of course right factually, but fear of sexual predators is not based in stats and facts, but in feelings. When people think about rape, they imagine a stranger in a dark alley, whereas ~90% of rapists are somebody the victim knows.

Wow - I don't think so, unless by;

"2. Feminists (TERFs) who believe being a"

... you mean the groups they represent i.e. 'a lot of women' frankly many of them who are not 'radical feminist' or even 'feminist'.

Huge numbers of women are uncomfortable with at least some parts of 'trans women' from 'changerooms' to 'sports' etc..

I don't think the very notion of 'trans' really upsets very many people at all, and that's the funny paradox.

But as soon as it crosses paths with others, then it's an entirely different issue and there's a lot of dust raised by pluralities.

> Mormons are probably another group due to the reliance of their theology on binary gender, but I don't see them as being particularly vocal on this topic.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints doesn't appear to feel threatened by transgender rights. At least, not according to official stances here: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/topics/transgender

I'm sorry to be so frank, but this is more of the same mormon bullshit.

"Love the sinner, hate the sin" is the typical line. The problem is our actions and identity are often intrinsically linked.

They have the same stance for gay people. "It's ok to be gay, god still loves you! The only catch is you can't ever have a romantic relationship with the person you love. If you do you'll be excommunicated and ostracized from your family. No biggy! God bless!"

Nobody wants this sort of faux compassion.

From that link:

> Gender is an essential characteristic of Heavenly Father’s plan of happiness. The intended meaning of gender in “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” is biological sex at birth.

> Church leaders counsel against elective medical or surgical intervention for the purpose of attempting to transition to the opposite gender of a person’s birth sex (“sex reassignment”). Leaders advise that taking these actions will be cause for Church membership restrictions.

> Leaders also counsel against social transitioning. A social transition includes changing dress or grooming, or changing a name or pronouns, to present oneself as other than his or her birth sex. Leaders advise that those who socially transition will experience some Church membership restrictions for the duration of this transition.

Their advice on what treatments they support for transgender people is kind of vague and circumspect, but the gist seems to be "A therapist should at least be open to conversion therapy," which is generally considered harmful.

Given the LDS Church's open campaign against gay rights based on the "The Family: A Proclamation to the World" (the same document referenced above), it seems reasonable to interpret this as stating opposition to transgender rights. Though as the parent noted, they are much less vocal on this topic.

> 2. Feminists (TERFs)

I worry that this can be read as "all feminists are terfs", which is not accurate.

I think the difference between treatment of mtf and ftm can be mostly boiled down to difference how males being female spaces VS females being in male spaces is perceived.

For trans exclusionary feminists one is the patriarchy coming to female protective places and females claiming their place and undermining the patriarchy. As for parents males being less susceptible to forceful sexual exploitation is true but there is also a huge societal double standard when it comes women forcing themselves on men or abusing their male partner which is also reflected in parents being less worried about something happening to their children. Possibly also because of pregnancies onesidedness.

The protection of female virtue is also an enormously successful political tactic, from the "yellow peril" in the late 1890s in Europe and the US to the "white slavery" panic (specifically referring to the cultural phenomenon in the US that gave rise to the 1910 Mann Act; check out the contrasting commentary of Emma Goldman and Rose Livingston) to the murder of Emmett Till and the burning down of Black Wall Street in Tulsa -- all of these are really responses to larger questions of opportunity and freedom of movement for folks that crystalize in the threat to a white woman's sexual virtue and the justification of violent response to crush the threat.

The bathroom bills, the panic over sports, the violence trans and gender-nonconforming people encounter (especially on racialized lines) -- it's all part of a larger political narrative. As you can see from the comments on this HN thread, you get a daddy all worked up about his daughter's virtue/place in life and you can move political mountains because it is an Existential Threat that Must Be Removed. That's weaponizable in a way that talking about military spending or tax law or gerrymandering is not.

Interesting I wasn't aware of all of these patriarchic laws.

I’ve always regarded transitioning gender — and how it is focused so much on men moving away from being a man — being equivalent to someone saying I am uncomfortable and I want off this ride, where the rollercoaster is testosterone. That’s what I’ve picked up anyway, from my friends who have transitioned.

I think that might be why it’s more common than transitioning in the other direction?

TERF is a pejorative term, I wouldn’t use it unless you are trying to attack feminists.

Its not an attack on feminists though?

I read the original comment by @caeril as saying that Feminists are TERFs, which would not be accurate as the expansion of the acronym is “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists”.

From what I’ve seen reported, cis women are on average more relaxed than cis men about trans women.

How do you define a TERF without calling them a TERF (and distinguishing them from other Radical Feminists or mainstream 4th wave feminists)?

If we can't call a spade a spade, what shall we call it?

In academic discourse, there is no consensus on whether or not TERF constitutes a slur.

But if we want to be accommodating to those who take offense with the term, we can use the term Gender Critical.

>In academic discourse, there is no consensus on whether or not TERF constitutes a slur.

All you have to do is look at how the term is used in the wild to determine if its a slur. Anyone who can claim it isn't is being disingenuous.

Citation?

“Trans-exclusionary radical feminist” sounds pretty pejorative, most especially the “radical” part.

FARTs is better, since it doesn't allow transphobia to co-opt feminism.

Those who are called TERFs are feminists in name only. The vast majority of self-described feminists don't agree with the TERF platform.

This seems like a “No true scotsman” argument.

Feminism covers a range of thoughts or beliefs, to promote advocacy.

To say nothing of the issue itself, the methods of "trans rights activists" frequently involve intimidation or vigilantism and generally cause a lot of resentment against trans people. People are afraid.

>Interestingly enough, there's not much animosity toward trans-men. These ground exclusively concern themselves with trans-women.

I second this. Maybe it's some echo chamber effect or a minority stirring shit up, but I've hardly heard anything over the years about transmen-as-men vs men-as-men. It seems like most of the focus is on transwomen-as-women vs women-as-women. Maybe we're not as vocal? Maybe we care less? I don't think we have much of a dog in this race so I'm often confused as to why this topic comes up on HN considering most of us here are men. Boring day at work?

I do feel bad for the women's Olympics, but I'd like to ask the Olympics committee what the hell were they thinking long before I start any kind of anti-trans crusade. This is one discussion that doesn't seem to be happening much. The diatribe is as always directed among the proles and the decisionmakers get a free pass. Someone must have said, "Yes, lets allow a 35 year-old recently transitioned man to compete with early 20 year-old women," and some approval process must have happened. Those are the people you want to start asking the hard questions, not look at LH and blame her for participating in the Olympics that she's allowed to participate in.

Or as someone else put it: "A female POC just lost her spot to a white, middle-aged, male-born son of a billionaire. This is supposed to be progressive?"

The Olympics has been dealing with the question of womanhood for a very long time. For a while they were literally stripping and groping female athletes. Later they did chromosome testing, until they discovered intersex individuals who confound that theory.

Even their current testosterone-levels theory is imperfect, since some people have obviously female bodies but inordinately high testosterone levels.

So they seem to be muddling along about as well as they can. If they want to have a separate women's category, it's a question they're going to have to answer.

I've basically had a thought recently about this.

The Olympics will eventually become a contest of the best humans, regardless of sex / gender. This is already how it is more or less today: people born with the right body types, into the right families, etc, will make it to the top.

Thank for you attending my TED talk.

This is the most elegant solution, but it's also functionally equivalent to "women can't do high level sports anymore"

I feel like women's sports is extremely cursed - a sporting competition with a handicap, except the handicap is not specified in the rules but is instead a randomly distributed quirk of biology, meaning that people have to judge who does or does not have it, except that the handicap is also an integral part of a person's identity...

(no I don't mean to say being female is a disability, the context is sports)

That would be the end of females in the Olympics. Male High School Athletes beat Female Olympians in most events:

https://boysvswomen.com

Wow that website is incredible!

Yeah it definitely destroys my little thought :D.

They're already in an arms race about performance enhancing drugs. And even without those, there are artificial limitations like age in women's gymnastics, because of the damage it does. Football players are grappling with decades of head injuries.

If you want to know the very best a human can do, you will destroy them. It's just not a question we can safely know the answer to.

So it's never really going to be fair, and we need to ask a different question. Exactly what that question is remains to be seen.

> I'm often confused as to why this topic comes up on HN

Take a look around, I think you'll find transmen comprise a much larger proportion of this community (and tech communities in general) than the general population.

There's also a lot of desire on HN to comment on political topics while pretending not to comment on political topics. Things like gender identity, women in tech, genetic differences, etc are all wonderful smokescreens to allow us to post politically but maintain a solid veneer of simply having an intellectual discussion on a topic of general interest.

> maintain a solid veneer of simply having an intellectual discussion on a topic of general interest

Some of us have an academic interest in biology, genetics, neuroscience, psychology, etc. while still aligning with the overall origin of this site as a place to discuss the latest in news as relates to technology startups.

It is unfortunate that this politically charged topic is so misunderstood and that ignorance of the basic science behind it is so prevalent, but here we are.

> Things like gender identity, women in tech, genetic differences, etc are all wonderful smokescreens to allow us to post politically but maintain a solid veneer of simply having an intellectual discussion on a topic of general interest.

Especially when it comes to these topics, I imagine it's very easy for people who aren't affected by these issues to "debate" them *because* they aren't the ones directly affected by it.

>maintain a solid veneer of simply having an intellectual discussion on a topic of general interest.

That's a good point.

My guess is that practically everyone knows what side they are on as things get more sporty. The rest is just weaving arguments for the fun of it.

> The rest is just weaving arguments for the fun of it.

Interesting discussion is the HN way!

Some enterprising scientists may have some cutting edge insights reviewing HN comments on technology topics, no reason to suspect otherwise for social sciences.

TERFs primarily don't focus on trans men because they see them as misguided women. You can find many TERFs blaming trans women and "gender ideology" for convincing butch-identified lesbians that they're actually straight men. Personally I think this denies trans men the dignity and autonomy to define themselves as they see fit, but then again, I would say that, I'm trans.

It's ironic that this transphobe fantasizing has led to non-conforming cis women being harassed in the bathroom. Whatever minimal problem there was with women being harassed or assaulted in the bathroom by men or AMAB people has been completely surpassed by these fantasies sparking a witch hunt.

Seems like a reasonable hypothesis to build a psychological study out of, but there’d be a lot of work to do on operationalizing your definitions.

Not sure what part you're referring to but it's more or less overt that many of them think trans men are basically women. This combined with what they say about trans women is most of where the accusations of essentialism come from.

> TERFs primarily don't focus on trans men because they see them as misguided women.

Not well versed in feminist theory, but I’m curious whether anyone has formally documented in the scientific literature these sorts of psychological attitudes.

Probably a cross-disciplinary masters thesis worthy topic if no one has done that research yet.

I think it is the same reason no one has ever cared much about lesbians compared to gay men. [1] But I am not sure why that is.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/lesbians-more-accept...

I was thinking exactly the same thing. A man with a vagina is much less sodomy-y than a woman with a penis.

It's because there is no reason to have animosity toward a woman becoming a man. The main objections to MtF are about safety (a MtF will always be stronger and bigger than a woman on average) and fairness (should male born people get female scholarships, compete in women's sports?). A FtM is not hurting anything or taking any opportunities away from anyone really.

You are making broad statements about the prevalence of psychological attitudes in the general public.

Do you have an academic citation to back up your assertions?

No.

Here’s some interesting research on the prevalence and varieties of reasons why people have negative attitudes towards transgender individuals.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C50&q=att...

The scientific community may not yet have crafted any research on the specific question of attitudes towards transgender athletes, but it shouldn’t be hard to find the research if it exists.

> fairness (should male born people get female scholarships, compete in women's sports?). A FtM is not hurting anything or taking any opportunities away from anyone really

fairness is an issue when considering MtF, but not FtM? why exactly?

Transitioning female to male doesn't make you more likely to win Olympic weightlifting competitions in your new gender, so you'd be vanishingly unlikely to do it for the sake of gaining an advantage.

Ah. We are only considering physical advantages then. There can be many other advantages that are not physical.

Keep in mind that transgender individuals are almost certainly, in general, and by regulation if they are transgender and an athlete, undergoing hormone therapies. In the case of estrogen treatment, that implies a reduction in muscle strength in addition to the other physical changes caused by the addition of estrogen and the removal of testosterone.

This is a factor in why there are regulations requiring testosterone levels below a certain amount in order to qualify in the women’s section of certain sporting programs.

There are no zero sum advantages to being a man that can be harmed by a FtM entering the pool.

>I've hardly heard anything over the years about transmen-as-men vs men-as-men. It seems like most of the focus is on transwomen-as-women vs women-as-women. Maybe we're not as vocal? Maybe we care less?

It's really not that hard to understand. It's the same sort of thinking that motivates the slogan "don't punch down". Males aren't threatened by females identifying as men. But females are threatened by males identifying as women for many obvious reasons. For example, with self-id as the only criteria keeping men out of women's prisons, it undermines the protection women have against abuse from men while in forced proximity. A female in a male prison or male changeroom is a novelty, not a threat.

Seeing as how the historical perspective is almost directly reversed from what you claim, I'm going to have to be skeptical about this. The European-historical aversion to largely one-way nonconforming to gender and sexual roles (men acting as women being a problem, ditto male homosexual behavior) is pretty explicitly due to a rejection of (heterosexual) masculinity translating as a threat to that (heterosexual) masculinity.

Those currents run deep, and run through to today. And that's not to say that "but a guy might go in the girls' bathroom!" is not what bigots say, because as a prima facie claim that's certainly common--but I very much doubt, were we to see some unvarnished honesty, that bathroom fears are actually a primary motivator rather than a convenient battleground.

There is certainly a longstanding cultural thread of defending traditional manhood through explicit castigation of male deviants, but notably the source of the explicit castigation is largely from other males. The pushback against trans-women's acceptance as women isn't largely driven by men. It is pretty evenly distributed, or perhaps even more driven by women. The point is that these seem to be distinct phenomena driven by distinct concerns.

> perhaps even more driven by women

Can you substantiate this? It doesn't match my understanding of the situation either from a cultural or an interpersonal perspective.

I don't have any hard numbers, but it is the impression I get from various organizations and legal challenges to trans legislation in the UK. The organized opposition seems to be largely driven by women.

I suspect it has much to do with the idea that trans-men are transitioning into a gender "in power." That is, adopting masculine social behavior and lifestyle allow transmen to enter the patriarchal fold and slip quite seamlessly into a male dominant society, as long as they remain unknown. Once they are known, the idea that they must be excommunicated or "proven" as female becomes imperative. Transmen are subject to inordinate degrees of violence like transwomen. This is all to say that cis men aren't as afraid, be it in washrooms or on a sports field, of transmen as much as transwomen.

Transwomen, on the other hand, are much more defined, in the eyes of a patriarchal society, by their rejection of masculinity in favor of femininity. To some cis-men, they appear as aberrations or duplicitous (hence the nickname "trap"), to some cis-women they appear as potential unfalsifiable unknowns, and a potential thing to be feared for sexual violence. Transwomen are thus caught in the crossfires of fear from both genders.

I don't think so, that's a work of fantasy and quite the leap.

It's probably more that in the grand scheme of things trans-men don't pose any sort of threat to other males. I don't recall ever discussing trans-men with my peers.

I think it stems from privilege.

Trans women are seen as seeking female privileges (like the ability to compete against women in sports, which is easier than competing against men). Which enrages some people.

Trans men are seen as giving up their female privileges, to which everyone shrugs and says "you want less privilege? Fine by me!"

Are there no privileges afforded to men?

I can think of at least one -- working in tech.

I've met quite a few trans women working in tech!

Of course men have privileges too, but I think many of men's privileges come from confounding variables. Like men are on average taller, and people are biased to view taller people as having more authority, so taller people are more likely to become CEOs etc.

Whereas women's privileges come from society compensating for men's privileges. So society sees women on average are smaller and physically weaker, and thus decides they need privileges like separate sports to compensate.

Trans women who went through male puberty often have the size advantage of men, so them also have the social privileges of women is seen as double dipping.

While for trans men it's the opposite, they're often small like women, but not afforded social protection for it.

Anyway that's just my theory why some people hate trans women more than trans men. I myself have sympathy for both cases, dysphoria sounds pretty awful.

" "A female POC just lost her spot to a white, middle-aged, male-born son of a billionaire. This is supposed to be progressive?" "

Perhaps it's simply a way to more firmly define the progressive stack.

We need an ISO standard in this area.

>There's a large segment of the population that feels actively threatened by trans rights.

I'd say that's a vast overreach. It isn't like the Trans Army is going to come burn down your house.

If anything, it's a general notion that transsexuals are mentally ill and that there is something odd about normalizing it. In a sense, that it's not different than people who want their limbs amputated or wear animal costumes at all times.

> a general notion that transsexuals are mentally ill and that there is something odd about normalizing it.

That seems like a defensible position to take. At least as plausible as the common alternative -- that it is a physical illness (thus we 'fix' the body to match the mind).

The problem is the suppression of reasoned speech. People are forbidden to discuss this topic. People in power (e.g., University Deans) use this topic to abuse those under their power. Students use it to abuse professors (e.g., students claim that they don't feel safe around a particular professor). In the name of trying to stop abuse of trans people, we're abusing non trans people (e.g, people get fired over this topic).

In Australia and most other developed countries now, this ideology is heavily promoted to children, encouraging them to believe they are trans. They are connected with websites that promote the ideology, and then connected with a trans specialist who helps prescribe puberty blockers without parental knowledge.

If you are a parent who believes that children should be taught to love their own bodies as they grow rather than have surgeons pretend to fix them by removing essential organs, then this represents a massive assault on your offspring.

> The numbers I can find for US citizens is: 0.6%

And there's a huge number of "trans" who later realise they were sold a lie and have to undergo further surgery to try and restore their original sex. Selling this to ideology to children is going to dramatically increase that 0.6%. How many of the new cases are going to actually be trans, vs children that thought they were trans and started puberty blockers at school, but actually were just never taught to love their body?

This post has a very noticeable lack of citations and vague terms like "huge" which make it very likely that you are speaking from personal bias rather than any kind of expertise.

Australian parent here. While recognising I'm a sample of one, Ive never seen or heard from many other parent friends trans ideology being promoted.

If you have some examples please share. I suspect you've come across an article pushing a an edge case that tried to make it out as normal. This type of media is common at the more extreme ends of whatever views.

> And there's a huge number of "trans" who later realise they were sold a lie and have to undergo further surgery to try and restore their original sex.

There is no way this is a huge number. I'd be shocked if you could find a credible source on this. This sounds like conservative agitprop.

Studies have consistently shown that most trans children revert to their original gender identity post-puberty [0]:

>The exact rate of desistance varied by study, but overall, they concluded that about 80 percent trans kids eventually identified as their sex at birth. Some trans activists and academics, however, argue that these studies are flawed, the patients surveyed weren't really transgender, and that mass desistance doesn't exist.

>Indeed, some of the studies cited by Cantor had sample sizes as low as 16 people and were more than 40 years old, and one was an unpublished doctoral dissertation. But the most recent study, published in 2013 in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, followed up with 127 adolescent patients at a gender identity clinic in Amsterdam and found that two-thirds ultimately identified as the gender they were assigned at birth.

This does not imply any percentage of patients who underwent surgery to "restore" their original sex. Orchiectomies, mastectomies, and histerectomies are irreversible in any case, not to mention bottom surgery.

[0] https://www.thestranger.com/features/2017/06/28/25252342/the...

From your article

> By all accounts, detransitioners make up a tiny percentage of that already small population: A 50-year study out of Sweden found that only 2.2 percent of people who medically transitioned later experienced "transition regret."

I was speaking specifically to GP's point about gender affirming surgery being reversed. If only 2.2% of people who have had this surgery experience regret, the proportion which reverses the surgery must be even smaller.

"Huge number who [...] have to undergo further surgery to try and restore their original sex" is not supported by the data.

It is not easy for trans people to get gender affirming surgery, so I think the conservative "concern" that "children are going to get surgery and regret it" is vastly overblown: children receiving gender affirming surgery is so rare today, and involves jumping through so many hoops, that a tiny proportion of a tiny proportion of a tiny proportion of people seems like a silly subject for policy debate.

Teenagers are dumb and fickle (I know I was!), so I think there should be a non-zero number of hoops for teens jump through to filter out the "just a phase" cases for any surgery (or even just tattoos) that will have permanent impact on their bodies. But 'concerns' about surgical detransitioning is primarily just scaremongering.

The study they cited included both gender non conforming and gender dysphoric children. Non conforming doesn't mean trans.

They cited a wide body of studies, including studies which included only trans kids. All studies produced consistent results. For those who didn't read the full article, here's the preamble to the 80% figure quoted above:

>There have, however, been almost a dozen studies of looking at the rate of "desistance," among trans-identified kids—which, in this context, refers to cases in which trans kids eventually identify as their sex at birth. Canadian sex researcher James Cantor summarized those studies' findings in a blog post: "Despite the differences in country, culture, decade, and follow-up length and method, all the studies have come to a remarkably similar conclusion: Only very few trans-kids still want to transition by the time they are adults. Instead, they generally turn out to be regular gay or lesbian folks." The exact rate of desistance varied by study, but overall, they concluded that about 80 percent trans kids eventually identified as their sex at birth.

>In Australia and most other developed countries now, this ideology is heavily promoted to children, encouraging them to believe they are trans.

Proof? As an Australian with multiple family members in the education industry, I've never heard of this.

Seems a bit overly dramatic. Lots of aggressive adjectives.

Based on the numbers I've seen, there are slightly more trans people in the world than blind people, but overall — you're not wrong. I don't even think most trans rights advocates would disagree with you that the amount of attention devoted to transgender people is excessive. The reason transgender people are getting more attention than blind people is because there is currently a strong movement to regress transgender rights, while there isn't an equivalent movement for blind people. Transgender people have some asks in terms of societal support (e.g. British law has some awkward legal red tape for trans people around things like marriage), but in general, most of the noise is being generated by the anti-transgender side (e.g. bans on therapy for transgender people, bathroom bans, sports bans, outrage at voluntarily chosen gender-inclusive phrasing like "people who have a uterus").

So it's a bit of a hard subject. I really don't think it's worth this much attention, but if hate groups are devoting this much attention to opposing transgender people, we're faced with the choice of either also giving it a lot of undue attention or throwing transgender people to the wolves.

>The reason transgender people are getting more attention than blind people is because there is currently a strong movement to regress transgender rights

Firstly, a resistance to expanding rights is not a movement to regress rights. For the most part (exceptions apply), the margins of the culture war here are not about trans people being on the defensive against long-standing rights being stripped.

Secondly, obviously the margins of this battle are often (again, not always, particularly when it comes to health care issues) pretty small-stakes, especially in comparison to the outsized amount of attention they're given. Certainly not important enough to justify the "you're trying to murder me / dehumanize me / erase me" rhetoric that one predictably receives when mild resistance is offered towards this agenda.

I gave several examples of people wanting to strip long-standing rights, which are probably some of the first examples people would think of when you mention "the trans debate," so I don't know what to say here except that you're mistaken.

I also think your portrayal of the stakes for transgender people is a bit flippant. Gender dysphoria is a pretty painful mental illness that often leads to suicide, so forbidding a transgender girl from getting treatment and forcing her to go to the boys' room does seem both dehumanizing and dangerous to her life.

>I gave several examples of people wanting to strip long-standing rights

I don't think you did. You threw out terms like "sports bans" but I don't think trans individuals being able to compete based on gender identity is a "long-standing right". If you're referring to other stuff you'll have to be more specific.

>Gender dysphoria is a pretty painful mental illness that often leads to suicide, so forbidding a transgender girl from getting treatment and forcing her to go to the boys' room does seem both dehumanizing and dangerous to her life.

Many policy issues will have some sort of effects on overall mortality. But I think it's pretty important in functional democracies that you should be able to have policy disagreements where these sorts of stakes are present without believing that the people taking the opposite stance are sadists or murderers instead of individuals who come to these debates with somewhat-different priors of empirical reality and somewhat-different but not fundamentally-abhorrent values. Trans issues seem to lack this normal presumption, however.

> I don't think you did. You threw out terms like "sports bans" but I don't think trans individuals being able to compete based on gender identity is a "long-standing right".

If these bans had already been in place, they wouldn't have needed to pass them. Trans people have been using the appropriate bathroom for their gender for ages, but now that transphobia is on the rise, they're actually being prevented from doing so. Trans people have been allowed to compete in the Olympics for longer than many Olympians have been alive, but now than a trans woman has actually made it in, for the first time ever, suddenly it's a debate. Some people have always preferred inclusive language, but now that people are on the lookout for "gender ideology," there's a decent chance that using it in passing will get you 10 thinkpieces and a JK Rowling tweetstorm about whether the phrase "menstruating people" erases women.

> Many policy issues will have some sort of effects on overall mortality. But I think it's pretty important in functional democracies that you should be able to have policy disagreements where these sorts of stakes are present without believing that the people taking the opposite stance are sadists or murderers instead of individuals who come to these debates with somewhat-different priors of empirical reality and somewhat-different but not fundamentally-abhorrent values. Trans issues seem to lack this normal presumption, however.

I don't completely disagree, but I think this is not so much about trans issues, and more an unfortunate product of the way bigotry works in our age. You don't have the KKK out burning crosses in front of people's houses anymore, instead you have people who are "race realists" and are just "worried about preserving culture." Nobody — not even virulent transphobes who believe all trans women are pedophiles — identifies as a transphobe, they are "gender critical feminists" who are "worried about preserving women's sex-based rights" or "worried about the children." Bigots have realized that bigotry isn't cool anymore, so they've learned to dress it up as moderate concern-trolling. So it's harder to tell who's speaking in good faith, especially since some actual moderates who haven't thought deeply on issues will parrot the bad-faith actors' talking points.

https://www.diabetesresearch.org/diabetes-statistics#:~:text....

I don't know from blind people, but in America, there are anywhere from 10.2 to 17.5% of the population that are diabetic. While not pursued by hate groups, they are actively preyed by pharmaceutical companies and politicians who don't let insulins go generic - one of the few medicines that can't. Yes there is complaint about the medical system in America, I have yet to see diabetic/nondiabetic show up under facebook ID's like He/Him/His, normalization of syringe usage in restaurants, blood sugar testing not become a spectacle (of course I pick this one because I know the most about it, but there are many disorders that could be used with it). Stigma, predation and debate is associated with many things, but this one will get you fired/excommunicated from society. Speaking ignorantly about "just eat less sugar" to a type 1 diabetic does nothing.

I sympathize with your overall point and agree that it's shameful how America treats diabetics like an ATM, but I think you're very far off-target if you envy the way transgender people are treated. Lots of anti-transgender people do just fine in our society. A person who actively fought against trans rights in California is currently the Vice President of the United States (though she has gotten much quieter on trans issues in the meantime). We have several openly anti-trans members of Congress. The fight for trans rights is so defensive that covering the insane medical costs isn't even on the radar. A lot of transition-related expenses are rarely covered by insurance, and they cost as much as a luxury car. Yet when you hear about "trans activists," what they're fighting for is not to have their ability to use the bathroom taken away.

I'm not envious of the way transgender people are treated, and if I came across sounding that way I do apologize. My tone was for the disproportion of attention, not of action. In truth, very little action will be taken for good for the transgender population or health disorders. That isn't how these things play out, unfortunately. As a society, we only know the stick and not the carrot. While I sympathize with the sentiment that there are several openly anti-trans members of Congress, nearly all of Congress is anti-Medical Reform in action, if not in voice. My point is a scale of difference, which was brought up at the start of this thread. I really do appreciate the struggle that the trans community has to go through, and I am not deaf to their cries (and, though somehow this makes me a worse person to some who would hear it, I do know people who are trans). But if we are going to look at things on a societal scale, how can we ignore the statistical numbers of the societal woes and population impacts?

As for insurance, you might be shocked at what insurance doesn't cover for diabetics. They don't just "cut a check" for everything. I can't tell you how many times my doctor and I have to get on the phone to argue with them for literal months to get things covered. For things to keep me alive. Not to feel right in my skin. Not to keep thoughts of suicide away. To keep bare minimal physical biological function going.

As for Kamala Harris, she has a whole lot to be displeased about. Prison labor, drug prosecution, questionable school bussing policies, anti trans right policies. Yeah, I'm not a fan.

There is definitely some ground for solidarity between trans and diabetic people when it comes to access to healthcare - however, and I don't mean it to downplay the struggles of diabetics - discrimination against trans people has a social component that as far as I know doesn't apply for diabetics. People can be rejected by their family, struggle to find employment, be beaten and killed by their dates, harassed in the street, etc... Based solely on the fact that they are transgender.

Here's a chart I love showing how the news distorts based on what people want to read (or what they are pushing) versus reality:

https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...

I'm not sure how the world would be if proportional importance news were the norm, but it's certainly not the case today.

The media does absolutely soak it for eyeballs and outrage, but at the same time it really is a bellwether for how gender works in a society at larger. Gender is simply a more social / less individual phenomenon than blindness itself is (to use your example).

I find it funny and illuminating to read about conservative cis gays complaining about those darn genderqueer "kids, these days". All media fads aside, we simply haven't reached "queer equilibrium" yet where increasing acceptance of past social categories no longer triggers the emergence of new ones.

I think the importance is based not on the numbers involved - which are small - but on the significance of the demands. People are discussing our fundamental understanding and definitions of people's sex and gender that potentially affects everyone. A major concern is that once you let everyone self identify where does it stop? A caucasian woman was vilified a few years ago for identifying as black. Had she identified as male she would have been celebrated by the same people

I think there will be rather a lot of us who are quite animated by this issue—one that doesn’t directly affect us—because of our own past experiences.

As a gay man growing up in the 90s, I very acutely remember some of the public discourse around gay rights while I was a teenager. In the UK, that specifically included a coordinated campaign against mentions of homosexuality in education, with some pretty stark attempts to smear gay men in particular as dangerous predators and paedophiles intent on sneaking their agenda into schools so that they could abuse children.

If I’m honest with you, I wouldn’t be particularly animated about trans rights myself (beyond being generally supportive) if it weren’t for the fact that I see exactly the same techniques and accusations levelled against the trans community—specifically trans women—as were used against people like myself 20 years ago.

So I’ve personally gone from generally supportive-if-disinterested, to being absolutely fucking furious that this is being allowed to happen again. I’ve observed absolute outright lies about a minority group being repeated by people in positions of influence, and while it might not affect that many people directly I am so absolutely disgusted by it that I fully intend on being extremely vocal about it.

In the 1990s I don’t recall stifling of speech, and firing of professors on campus for having a position in the matter.

Allowing the discussion and research to take place, if anything, is what allowed LBG rights to come to fruition.

The article is pointing out that this isn’t allowed happen with trans concerns and so the inevitable backlash and a regressive outcome.

Back in the nineties I remember scare campaigns about gay schoolmates in locker rooms taking advantage of other students - it is literally the same playbook.

Thank you.

> Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people.

It's not impactful in terms of the number of people, but its a civil rights issue for those on the left. And for those on the right its just one more group trying to change things from the status quo.

It's also a complex issue. I sit pretty far on the left, but the various issues related to trans policy I find to often not have a clear solution -- most notably around sports and fairness. Sigh.

Honestly though the question around sports fairness is less a problem raised by trans people and more just an existing issue exposed. Female and male bodies work differently on average but there are a good number of women more fit and physically capable than 99% of men - gender is not an independent variable in physical fitness but I do wonder if there's really much of a reason to keep insisting that the genders be separated into exclusive leagues.

> I do wonder if there's really much of a reason to keep insisting that the genders be separated into exclusive leagues.

The world champion team of female soccer gets beat by a boys under 15 high school team https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-b...

The 203rd male tennis player absolutely crushes the Williams sisters https://www.marca.com/en/more-sports/2017/06/27/595296da468a...

Women 100m record is 10.49. High-schoolers can run in 10.00 s https://www.athletic.net/TrackAndField/Athlete.aspx?AID=1265... Men's record is under 10.

If you do away with the women leagues, you will see 99% males in almost all sports.

While we do have the special olympics, there are all sorts of classes of people who lack genetic traits to excel at sports and no allowance is made for them to compete within their own bracket - the only bracket we have is men and women.

I will admit that this is not a hill I'll die on though - I have almost no interest in sports as a profession so it's a fair bit out of my wheelhouse.

Sports fairness is basically a transphobe dogwhistle at this point. Major athletic organizations already have policies in place that say that trans women can’t compete unless x,y,z criteria are met which is typically a minimum number of years on HRT and T levels not more than something.

The issue is that there is a trade-off being made here. A trans woman athlete likely has a better bone structure than the average cis woman but not better than the most naturally gifted cis female athletes. Athletic orgs have largely decided that this is fine and it’s not a significant enough advantage to care about because the question for them was “how can trans women compete” not “if trans women can compete.”

But then it’s such an easy issue to drive a wedge on because you can get people riled up about whether trans women should be able to compete with a sprinkling of misinformation about what HRT does and dash of “so a man can just say he’s a woman and compete.”

What about basketball as another example. Height is probably the single most important physical attribute of the game and the height advantage men have is overwhelming. HRT after puberty has no impact on height.

And in that situation you may have very real case for saying that women over a certain height shouldn't be allowed to play women's basketball. That's fine, it's really no different than weight classes in wrestling. But then a trans woman who is of average height for a female basketball player shouldn't be barred from playing.

However, the WNBA sports so many women who are 6'+ (tall people play basketball, go figure) with the tallest player ever being 7'2" so the range of heights of women is pretty broad.

You seem to not be taking into account that fact that on average trans women will be taller than cis women, not that every trans woman is taller than every cis woman. And when talking about a sport that naturally selects for people who are outliers in height a trans woman being 5'7 (taller than the average woman) will be one of the shorter players.

Not just bones. Muscle mass and the rest doesn't just disappear. In the sport i do (rugby), it's been evaluated to be a danger to players (increased risk of injury), and i would wager most contact sports are similar.

Muscle mass does just disappear in the exact same way as it does when someone stops steroids. It’s not instantaneous which is why places require 12-24 months of constant hormones.

Also you picked the one single example where trans women have been sorta kinda banned with basically no concrete justification, caused the world to roast them publicly, and then clubs largely ignored them and came up with their own rules — like France and the US changed the requirements to time on HRT and T levels like every other sport and the UK did a height and weight limit which, while odd, is actually a lower bar than time on HRT.

Outright bans on trans women will basically never be necessary when HRT is so effective. If by some chance there is a sport where it’s not enough you can start imposing greater restrictions like requiring trans women reach a certain (low) weight to shed any pre-transition muscle.

This is how the ruling class controls us peons. They have us fight each other vociferously over things like this or abortion or gay marriage, while they stay above it and do nothing except minor moral victories.

The sad thing is that this works.

Yep, most the activism is about politics, gender is just the current vehicle for it.

It wouldn't work if we didn't subject ourselves to it. The "ruling class" may be working to control us, but they don't have to work very hard. They don't even make the lies plausible. There are an awful lot of people willing to die on the hill of the most astonishing idiocies, just because it's their idiocy.

The difference is that there aren't groups cheerleading the deconstruction of human sight because blind people exist.

I have no real visibility (pun not intended) into the blind community, but similar groups do exist in the Deaf community; Deafness-as-identity/culture is very much a thing and some of the general cultural views around adaptation and integration with the hearing world look not-dissimilar to what you see in some aspects of LGBTQ+ movements.

> I don't mean to downplay what is happening because it is happening but do you not think the amount of outrage this topic generates surpasses the level of impact we can have assuming we fix it? It just feels like we're being distracted.

There is something about tech, though, that seems to concentrate the male to female transitioners far above background levels.

I can count more than a half-dozen male to female transition folks in my tech circles. I can't even think of one that I bumped into doing any non-tech social activity.

Autism/Asperger’s is likely the common factor. There are studies that show this.

"There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people."

There are more white people than black people in the US. More Christian people than Jewish people. More able-bodied people than disabled people. More descendants of immigrants than Native Americans.

That's what makes all these people minorities.

What level of outrage? I notice a lot of outrage online from people whose identities I cannot verify. I have noticed zero outrage IRL from real people that I interact with.

Small sample size but I think that judging outrage from online presence is inaccurate.

Yeah, there is a huge disconnect between online and IRL discussion of trans issues. Online you see all this seething outrage but IRL there are two camps — either you run in a ‘blue’ crowd and someone being trans is a non-issue. Nobody cares, they use your name and pronouns, let you live your life, celebrate legal victories, and commiserate losses, but when push comes to shove won’t actually do anything that requires effort and can’t be posted on insta. Then if you run in a ‘red’ crowd you’re quietly not accepted, you’ll be party to dinners where phrases like “gender ideology”, “the trans agenda”, “indoctrination”, “free speech” are brought up whenever articles hit the news. And if you come out you either are kicked out of your family, ghosted by your friend group, or just ignored and expected to never speak of it again. If you do being up that people aren’t using your name, pronouns, or being otherwise not treated like your gender you’re called “political” and it’s taken as an attack. And if you say, “no it’s because what your doing hurts me” it’s doubly taken as an attack because now you’re “playing the victim.”

Only when the two groups mix do you get this fired up hate because the mechanisms within the groups that lead to people not talking about it don’t work and the social graces that tamp out arguments aren’t present on the internet so it explodes.

I hate so much that my existence is the hot button political topic right now. Like it’s good I guess — seems like we need to get this out of our systems but ugh does it bring out the worst in everyone. This should have never been a party thing and it’s so stupid that it’s now a billion times more political because of it. Both sides are trying to out woke or out red pill each other while the actual lives of trans people fall by the wayside.

Distraction is exactly what’s important about it. It triggers everyone and keeps people from paying attention to other things. Also helps get clicks, sell ads, and boost social media engagement.

Personally I don’t care at all if people want to be trans and be called by a chosen gender pronoun. I just can’t think of a reason I should have a problem with that.

There are a few edge case areas like women’s sports and prisons where it is a very complicated issue, but those are rare cases among rare cases. This is not an issue that should be monopolizing headlines.

When it comes to issues in which there is a conflict between a small group and some larger group, you can't just brush this aside as only a problem affecting the smaller group.

For instance, there are situations in which transgender rights (someone identifying as a woman using a for-women-only space) are in conflict with women's rights (women not wanting to be in a for-women-only space when whom they perceive as a male is present).

You can't just disregard the women and say, don't worry about it, it's just a 0.6% problem.

We have the American Disabilities Act.

We provide braille books, and TTS options.

We invent wheelchairs and ramps and lots of prosthetic limbs.

We (recently) approved a drug to treat Alzheimer.

We offer nursing homes and in-house help and care to old people with mental issues.

We do little more than argue about trans individuals. And many trans individuals are killed or commit suicide. The average life expectancy for a trans person is likely a lot smaller than a blind or disabled person.

THAT is why trans people and the related community are making a lot of noise.

Couldn't agree more. The airtime on this topic is insane. People's email signatures filled with their pronouns. The anger. The division. I get it's an emotive conversation but then so are gay rights, gender rights, race rights, democratic rights, inequality, and about a gazillion other topics. That's not belittling trans as an issue, but it's so incredibly noisy.

IMO the wider question here is nothing to do with trans but about what being "liberal" means. We're in this insanely weird moment in history when the hard left is eating itself by being so Woke it's nearly impossible to even have a conversation any more.

I'm as left wing as they come, but being left wing means being able to have open, honest and sometimes uncomfortable debates. Being left wing is not, and never has been, about shutting down conversation, de-platforming, dogma, chilling effects. These are the things of the hard right, and the sooner people on the left start realising it and start being empowered to be vocal in defence of the freedom of ideas, the better.

"I'm as left wing as they come, but being left wing means being able to have open, honest and sometimes uncomfortable debates. Being left wing is not, and never has been, about shutting down conversation, de-platforming, dogma, chilling effects. These are the things of the hard right, and the sooner people on the left start realising it and start being empowered to be vocal in defence of the freedom of ideas, the better."

That has not been true anywhere in the world where a left wing (the) party dominated the discourse. No socialist or communist party has ever had tolerance to an opposing view.

I hope you're aware that "left wing" doesn't mean "socialist" or "communist" and that plenty of liberal democracies have had social democratic parties in power for some period or another without there being any breakdown in tolerance to opposing viewpoints.

Came to say just that but you got there first and did it better than I would have

Of course it also means socialists and communists among other leftist parties. They represent the pure leftist ideology from which other leftist parties take ideas from, and the closer to center those parties are the more they tone the communistic ideals down. In essence the tip of the left wing is completely intolerable and illiberal.

Problem is that people on the left support de-platforming. Perhaps it is wrong and business leaders are really responsible for this, but combating hate speech is popular in those circles. You can guess how hate gets define by zeitgeist.

You're right. And they shouldn't. Being liberal is about being able to take on opposing views.

Most countries in Western Europe have/had socialist and communist parties, that have been pretty tolerant to opposing views. Most US citizen have very strange ideas about socialism.

> Being left wing is not, and never has been, about shutting down conversation, de-platforming, dogma, chilling effects.

>>These are the things of the hard right

Woah. Hey now. People can change.

Those aren't mutually exclusive. It's not uncommon to create distractions by purposefully treating a small group badly. And the solution can neither be to allow it to dominate all the bandwidth nor to ignore it.

Meanwhile, unlike Alzheimers, amputations or blindness, there doesn't really need to be any scientific breakthroughs to handle this. We just need to somehow fix society. It's at least controllable.

> There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people.

That's a little bit of a non-sequitur, no? If this should be compared to anything, it's to earlier left-right "cultural war" flash points such as same-sex marriage and abortion.

Say that people with Alzheimer's should get access to better medical treatment, and no one will disagree with you (although some might say "as long as I don't pay"). Say the same about people who have lost a limb, and you'll see the same thing.

But try making any such statement about trans people, and you'll get vehement, polarized agreement and disagreement. Now, you've entered the territory of how people should and shouldn't be able to express their physical identity in public, in both sexual and non-sexual manners. And you are about to run into many strongly held opinions and pre-existing cultural mores.

With that said, I don't disagree with your last point. Sometimes, I do feel like cultural war inflammations are purposely constructed to hack the human psyche by playing into these strongly held beliefs and pre-existing cultural mores. At least in the present day, these kinds of inflammations work very effectively for generating engagement in the attention economy. But I don't know if that's a good thing. On the contrary (and maybe you'd agree with me here), I often get the sense that it's a bad thing.

Human society has no "laws" by nature, the closest observable in nature with the great apes is a brute "winner" takes it all society, that is not capable to create and sustain complexity and coherence.

To compensate this, humanity has "contract" cults who form a basic law providing form of society, protecting the weaker party form getting exploited and abused. These contract cults exists since the dawn of time and have been shaped into various forms, mostly with mythological wrappings, we designate as religion today. Hounded into the service as contract cultists, have been all sexual deviants of a society. Always. Which is why if you watch carefully, its actually selected for.

A emotional reaction to question regarding sexual deviancy from the norm, is a important signal during the mating process, regardless on what side of the political spectrum you are.

Gender ideology is a synthetic contract cult, and while it has all the other negatives, previous religion incarnations carried with them, it also brings alot of freedom to the cultists and tries to do away with alot of pain. Abolishing it, is not possible, as it will simply lead to other contract cults forming.

The best that can be accomplished is, preventing the church from intervening in fields of science society depends on and finding a new separation of church and state, with this contract cult.

PS: Bad engineered religions, lead to a faltering rule of law in societys, which then return in the long run to the "winner" takes it all societal model, destroying complexity capability.

On the other hand, there isn't any controversy as to whether blindness is a real condition.

People who don't qualify as legally blind but have extreme vision impairment would like to talk to you. My stepson is profoundly deaf but still has hearing and wears hearing aides to assist him, he'll often read lips during conversations to supplement that audio information and that can result in pretty big communication breakdowns.

Pretty much everything in life is a spectrum of possibilities - trying to boil those down to binary states can be helpful for some purposes but is never clean.

Well, it's undoubtedly a condition but there are probably some who dispute whether it's a "disease" or "disability". This resistance is more commonly associated with the deaf community, and drawing parallels between this population and the trans population will get you in hot water pretty quickly..

Yes there is.

Being "legally blind" is a thing. The cut off for how little vision is enough to be blind is debatable.

Not that simple.

I would imagine that the rate of violent attacks on blind individuals specifically due to their blindness is also lower than hate crimes against Trans individuals.

I don't hear about a lot of amputees being dragged behind pickup trucks for not having as many limbs as their attackers, but maybe I'm not reading the right publications.

I have a theory that we are seeing a "Times Square Billboard Effect" where as we progress and some marginalize groups are being better heard and included other groups are both seeing an opportunity and need to get more noticed. Similar to Times Square billboards having to get brighter, flashier and larger to be noticed. With how traditional and social media are working to get noticed it has be as big and loud as possible.

Where this goes I have no idea.

I mean, 2 million people in the US being discriminated against seems like plenty enough people for this to be a worthwhile discussion. But it's not just the number of people. It's also about how severe the discrimination against them is.

>Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people.

Ok but is there a large portion of the population that believes blind people don't deserve health care for their disability? Is there a large portion of the population that believes blind people shouldn't be afforded working rights?

You can't just go "there's only 2 million trans people in the US, who cares about their healthcare, there's more important things out there", when the consequence of doing so severely impacts the quality of life of .5% of the population.

I don't think you would be sitting here going "only .5% of the US has type 1 diabetes, why are talking so much about making sure they get appropriate health care? Who cares if they're discriminated against during hiring?"

> Ok but is there a large portion of the population that believes blind people don't deserve health care for their disability?

Actually, health insurance doesn't cover the cost of a guide dog, which can cost between $40-60k [0]

From personal experience (I'm not blind, but I know one), there is also workforce discrimination in the form of "don't ask her to do that, she's blind" when in fact the blindness doesn't impact the work at all.

>I don't think you would be sitting here going "only .5% of the US has type 1 diabetes, why are talking so much about making sure they get appropriate health care?

I know a diabetic who says he is COMPLETLY dependent on his work's health care to pay for his medicine. I'm not certain we are giving ENOUGH attention to this. [0] https://puppyintraining.com/how-much-does-a-guide-dog-cost/#....

I read that trans people suffer from high rates of violence, homelessness, etc. In contrast, amputees and blind people don't usually get kicked out by their parents or randomly stabbed.

If BLM (vs e.g. StopAsianHate) is any indication, the level of outrage in activism seems to be directly correlated to the level of violence in high profile incidents, more so than percentage of affected population

>In contrast, amputees and blind people don't usually get kicked out by their parents or randomly stabbed.

To counter this, I'll quote someone close to me during college "where I'm from, people like him get drowned in a bucket before they are 2"

For the record, in case it wasn't clear, I was talking primarily about US. But if we must compare, in some parts of the world anything under the LGBT umbrella is considered a crime punishable by death. I'm not aware of any place in the world that considers killing toddlers with disabilities legal.

Adult percentages are too blunt an instrument. With young adults and children this is a big issue.

In the school where I teach, sex, gender, and most importantly gender identity come sharply into focus during puberty and I have several students taking a time-limited therapy course to help them with gender id questions. That puts us into the 5% to 10% range, though that is of course purely anecdotal and from a tiny sample size.

Puberty hasn’t suddenly become more complex and access to these ideas and therapies may be driving gender-identity as a fashionable topic amongst the kids. But from what I’ve seen it’s a genuine need with most of them who ask for it.

Puberty is fascinating: it is a time of identity turmoil for every human being and while in the majority of cases that means going down a difficult but pre-determined path, for many others it throws up a huge number of questions about how to match their genetic/hormonal programming and the way they think, with the society in which they live. Intersex itself is a spectrum, for example.

Those groups aren’t subjected to violence just for existing. The comparisons aren’t at all one to one.

Very important, because it affects education of children:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YWuD9RwJD4

This is a video from a source I normally don't trust. But if we really want to learn something about bias, I think it is worth a watch. This is about racism, but I think we see similar problem with gender.

This is a real problem, especially since a too strong backlash would hurt too. But at this point I don't think it is sustainable to feed pupils wrong or ideological information.

Honestly, I would have difficulties deciding to send my kids to a school this or a pious catholic boarding school. In both cases countermeasures might be helpful.

For the topic itself I agree with you. There are countless issues that should get more exposure compared to these topics.

Does it matter, or make the cause any less noble?

A minority group, by definition, has no power. It needs the majority to speak for them. So regardless of how small a number they represent, scaling the conversation up is required.

So the 1% don't have power? Or aren't a minority?

“The 1%” are a statistical minority. They are not a minority group.

“Minority group” is term of art that explicitly refers to a collective of people who are discriminated against.

But downplaying it is exactly what you are doing, literally.

To answer your main question, though: the very small community that we are talking about is disproportionately being subjected to murder, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and widespread discrimination.

The disproportionate harms that this small community is subject to is the key to understanding the level of outrage being evoked on their behalf.

> disproportionately being subjected to murder, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and widespread discrimination.

This is provably untrue. Not that it isn't a tragedy, but in 2020, 44 trans people were killed[1] in the US. This is a rounding error even when looking at "merely" just hate crime statistics (for example, in 2019, the FBI reported ~7000 criminal offenses[2] in the "hate crime" category). I get it, people are passionate about it, companies change their logos, everyone posts about it on social media, but let's not perpetuate these myths.

[1] https://www.them.us/story/44-trans-people-killed-2020-worst-...

[2] https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-release...

> This is provably untrue.

Both of you are correct, you're just looking at probabilities conditioned in the opposite way. You're looking at P(trans | killed), which is low. The parent post is looking at P(killed | trans), which is quite high. Understandably, if you are trans P(killed | trans) is a lot more relevant to you than P(trans | killed).

I don't agree, we were talking about proportionality. 0.6% of the US adult population identify as trans (1,254,000). Of that 0.6%, 44 were killed. The math is simple. The overall murder rate in the USA is 0.005% (population: 328 million, yearly murders: 16,425). The per-capita murder rates of trans people in the USA is 0.0035%, barely over half the national average.

To make the claim that trans people are disproportionately affected by crime/violence is simply not true.

> Not that it isn't a tragedy, but in 2020, 44 trans people were killed[1] in the US. This is a rounding error even when looking at "merely" just hate crime statistics

I'm confused. How can you compare 44 deaths to 7000 offenses? (Including 55 deaths, across all hate crimes.)

I'm not arguing that trans people are disproportionately killed or assaulted, but that we are in no way a rounding error.

Using your source, the 2019 FBI report:

Of the 8,559 criminal offenses, 51 were Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/tables/table...

224 offenses were based on Gender Identity, this includes 173 Anti-transgender offenses, and 51 Anti-Gender Non-Conforming offenses. 342 offenses not included in those numbers we’re targeting “Anti-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender (Mixed Group)”

5 of the 51 Murders and Nonnegligent Manslaugters were perpetrated because the victim was in the group "Anti-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender (Mixed Group)".

1 of the 51 Murders and Nonnegligent Manslaughters were perpetrated on the basis of Gender Identity.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/tables/table...

5 of the 30 rapes as hate crimes, were perpetrated on the basis of the victim's Gender Identity.

1 of the 30 rapes as hate crimes were perpetrated because the victim was in the group "Anti-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender (Mixed Group)".

Disproportionate in relation to the rates of the same for blind people, per the parent commenters assertions.

> the very small community that we are talking about is disproportionately being subjected to murder, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and widespread discrimination.

Citation needed.

From what I can tell they are being given more leeway than any other group, and anyone who dares argue against their “rights” risks losing their job.

Trans-people does absolutely not to seem to be at risk anywhere.

> Citation needed

Technically, no, I’d posit that in the scientific community of focus on this topic, it is considered common knowledge and likely an “a priori” logical conclusion.

But let me Google that for you: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=tra...

> From what I can tell they are being given more leeway than any other group, and anyone who dares argue against their “rights” risks losing their job. Trans-people does absolutely not to seem to be at risk anywhere.

You might refresh yourself on HN site guidelines.

Your comment would have been much more interesting if you had declined to include the quoted portion.

Leeway? You think murderers and batterers give leeway to transpeople?

Republicans think it's a wedge issue, so they're happy to distract from real issues and ruin trans people's lives.

> It just feels like we're being distracted.

Some politicians would call this a feature and not a bug.

Yep sad that we cannot think of anything better to do ….

Uyghurs are less than 0.1% of China's population, but their treatment is (rightfully) a huge issue globally.

Most people just aren't as utilitarian in the way that your comment implies they should be.

Given the data we have now, you’re right— if humans were rational we’d be focusing topics that affect the masses. Using minority groups (BLM, LGBT, Immigration, etc.) as shields for larger agendas is an effective defense strategy.

This is more nuanced than you think.

If you choose one variable that describes people, and assume for simplicity it's approximately bell shaped, then sure, most people are in the middle, which is "average" or "normal", and if we want to help the most people, it seems logical to focus on them.

But if you start adding independent variables, it becomes increasingly unlikely that any given person is in the middle on all of them. Even with three, let alone dozens.

So you, or any other randomly chosen person, are probably very like "the masses" in some respects, but given, say, ten dimensions, nobody is average.

Which is why disregarding minorities in general isn't a viable way to run a society.

(I got this idea from an item on HN, which I think was more or less this: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...)

> if humans were rational we’d be focusing topics that affect the masses

Are there any academic articles on ethics that you could cite to back up that assertion?

Well, communism is heavily documented in history books.

I suggest that you read the article, here is archived version https://archive.is/2021.06.05-230906/https://www.economist.c...

But to answer your question “why is this important” - the extreme minority of transgender people and the army of their supporters and activists in their quest for recognizing trans rights step on and disregard women rights and aggressively “cancel” anyone who dares to disagree with gender ideology, now that affects all of us, if you care about free speech.

It’s not about trans people. It’s about VERY LOUDLY having the “correct” opinions.

100% of people have gender.

No, look at agender here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-binary_gender.

Isn't that like pointing out an empty set being still a set?

I am an agender exclusionary radical feminist

Empirically false.

I have a government pension, and when I log in to the online self service, it says my gender is "unknown".

I have been informed it can not be changed.

If the issue is that voices are being censored then the issue affects everyone who is studying in a university - massively more than your figures.

If I understand correctly, trans people get beaten to death far out of proportion to their numbers. No, I don't have statistics, but if true you can't just look at the number of trans people to see how serious the problem is.

Here are the numbers:

In 2019, the most recent year for which the FBI has data, the total US homicide rate was 4.3 deaths per 100,000 people [0] (possible underestimate; incident reporting is voluntary, and 25% of police departments don't submit expanded homicide data). Human Rights Campaign recorded the deaths of 25 transgender and gender non-conforming people in 2019 [1]. There are an estimated 1 million people who identify as transgender in the US [2], and an estimated 1.2 million people who identify as nonbinary or gender non-conforming [3]. That produces a US trans and nonbinary homicide rate for 2019 of 1.1 per 100,000.

Of all homicides reported by HRC with transgender or gender non-confirming victims in 2019, just one was determined to involve a clear anti-LGBT motive. HRC's data may be an underestimate. However, it is consistent with their estimated homicide rates and rate of hate crimes reported in other years.

Any murder is a tragedy, hate crimes all the moreso. However, a single-digit number of annual anti-trans and nonbinary murders is thankfully not an epidemic. The overall homicide rate for trans people seems much lower than the national average.

Notably this data excludes assaults, harassment, stalking, or any other attacks which don't result in fatalities.

[0] https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/cri...

[1] https://www.hrc.org/resources/a-national-epidemic-fatal-anti...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/group/gender/transgender/index.html

[3] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/nonbinar...

Don't role your own aggregate statistics when the thing you try to derive by mashing together things created for different purposes is measured or estimated by people.

I don't role my own encryption for public use either.

Come on, that is just false. Don't believe a statistic you haven't doctored yourself is a common saying.

But data evaluation is certainly something you should do yourself, because blindly trusting anyone else would be naive.

You're going to criticize and be condescending, but not supply better data? That's quite unhelpful...

If higher-quality statistics are available, I'd certainly be curious to see them.

Excellent analogy, thank you.

At my university, the fratboys were far, far, FAR more disruptive than the LGBT groups. But we go with it; fratboy are an accepted pupal stage of American men it seems

>It just feels like we're being distracted.

It is how they killed OWS. Now it is cool to be a member of the party of the rich, and to support megacorps and endless war.

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