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Comment by yarg | Hacker News Reader

I really don't feel that's a fair comparison.

The transgender community needs to stop pushing the notion that it's healthy and desirable; it's not - it's a devastating hormonal/fertility disorder.

We can't even look into the extent to which the androgenisation of humanity is the consequence of the pollutants that we've introduced into the environment.

Now, comparing this to trans-humanist body mods - how many of those result in sterility?

The changes that trans-humans want are intended to extend the capabilities of the human; but a sex change leaves an individual in a physically compromised super-position of the body that they were born with, and the body that fits the mind.

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> trans people make body modifications that don't prioritize my values (fertility)

Doesn't seem like a very strong argument that it doesn't fit into the cyberpunk ethos. Modifying your body for reasons you care about seems very cyberpunk, and exactly the sort of thing that other people would have moral qualms over, especially if they don't share your values. Certainly the technology could be improved for people who do care about fertility, but, well, newer, improved versions of body modification technology is also very cyberpunk.

A disingenuously paraphrasing quote?

Sure thing.

But I'm not espousing my values, but values vital to the continuation of life.

Values that have been around for thousands of millions of years.

Perhaps there's the potential for this to change, but it'll just be fertility in another form.

who cares though? species have come and gone, and will continue too

if you died and then a millisecond after a chicxulub scale asteroid obliterated all mammalian life (again), who would be there to care about fucking fertility or propagation of the species??

the point is we don't have to be limited to biological mandates -- that's what transhumanism is about. moralizing it is just wasted and you clearly don't understand what it's about.

instead you decide to whinge about trans people being mentally ill. please

Where did I say that they were mentally ill?

(Misremembering other people's arguments is a poor strategy in a technical forum.)

And regardless of what transhumanism as a whole is about, it will always be about continuation of sapience and its evolution through time.

Biological or otherwise.

> The transgender community needs to stop pushing the notion that it's healthy and desirable; it's not - it's a devastating hormonal/fertility disorder.

what exactly is your word for unhealthy and undesirable? you are clearly referring to dysphoria. i don't know if you realized, but the DSM has changed in recent years.

No mention of mental illness there, but you already knew that.

sorry, you just disagree with them being happy even if it makes them infertile.

classic intellectually dishonest HN concern troll

If you stopped acting in bad faith, looking for some gotcha, for one single second, you'd realize that by "unhealthly" they were referring to the effects of hormone treatments, which clearly have significant effects and side effects on the physical body.

People literally do hormone treatments to solve things like pattern baldness. If you're concerned about unhealthy hormone treatments you should probably start with the stuff that's far more common. Finasteride is used for both hair loss as well as hormone therapy for transgender people.

The classical consumerist hedonist mentality : if they are happy then who can say anything about that ?

Well it seems you're the one trolling here.

If you deny the right to people to have opinions and judgments based on their beliefs about anything they wish, you're doing worse than you complain about.

i am not denying any right, i have neither authority nor power. we all have equal right to comment and disagree.

though you are right, i am kinda a hedonist. do you mourn for me, or lament the condition I would bring upon civilization, right before chicxulub blows us up? haha.

don't worry, i have no power offline either.

He's actually putting words in my mouth again; I really have no problem with people having a sex change.

Acceptance was a vital social step, but promotion crosses a line for me - and there are severe deleterious consequences are ignored and dismissed by the community.

I think in general the answer is to let kids be themselves and not to judge them for it; give them a say in their clothes and toys - and do not punish them for their selection.

That was meant to say 'misrepresenting' (the phone said 'misre...ing' since the complete word didn't fit on the screen.

The human race isn’t in an immediate danger of dying out for lack of babies. People are allowed to and do take many actions with a risk of sterilization. For goodness sake’s people get vasectomies and their tubes tied. This can’t be about fertility or else you should be out campaigning against the pill, condoms, and just plain old normal drinking. Also do you imagine grafting electronics, really progress of any kind to be free of risks? Honestly, I’m sort of anti cyberpunk, because that sort of body modification is on a whole different level of risk

I can assure you, my only concern here is inate fertility - (idiocracy aside) I don't give a shit about people deciding not to have children.

As for the danger, population collapse is often precipitous - and by the time you notice it, is very hard to roll back.

And it's not just our species impacted by the changes.

Ok, so are you also against birth control and or opt in sterilization, otherwise your position is inconsistent and I don’t claim morals are logic, but they should at least be consistent.

Oh also since we’re on a technicality forum. Trans hormones don’t necessarily cause permanent sterilization. Plenty of trans people have children

Citation for plenty needed.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15295192.2020.1...

> Of the adult trans population, between 25% and 49% of individuals are believed to be parents (Dierckx, Motmans, Mortelmans, & T’sjoen, 2016)

That was much higher than I had expected.

Me too, but I suppose being trans doesn't eliminate all the other aspects of human behaviour and psychology, including the desire to have or care for children.

Parenthood doesn't imply fertility. From that link:

> Trans parents may form their families in a range of ways, including through biological parenthood, step-parenthood, adoption, fostering, and assisted reproduction, with an increasing number of options available to trans people wishing to become parents.

So what? Human societies have always and everywhere included multiple modes of parenthood. I don't understand this obsession with personal biological reproduction. That's not how human societies work. Adoption, fostering, etc are an important part of social sustainability and always have been.

The original assertion was about fertility:

> Trans hormones don’t necessarily cause permanent sterilization. Plenty of trans people have children

I was just pointing out that the evidence provided with the 25% number doesn't really speak to fertility, but rather all the possible ways of having children.

I don’t think there is great science on this but here’s a paper focusing on tactics to preserve fertility https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6626312/. It gives rates as high as 100% for mtf fertility (and as low as 25). And I may have missed it, but doesn’t seem to for trans men. Stories of trans men pausing hormones to have a kid are anecdotally pretty common though

Population collapse is likely not going to come from too many people becoming steralized (I mean what percentages are we talk g about here, there would have to be a massive growth to even make a measurable dent into populations). Typical population collapse in biological systems comes from overpopulation that cannot be sustained by the ecosystem, which results in the sudden collapse. When we talk about the survival of the human race people not having children are likely a net positive, but somehow I get the impression that's not really what your opposition to gender conversion is about

> Population collapse is likely not going to come from too many people becoming steralized

And if it did, it would probably be from something like pollution/climate change, not a tiny minority of trans people.

> But I'm not espousing my values, but values vital to the continuation of life.

> Values that have been around for thousands of millions of years.

I could make the same arguments about modern therapeutics for asthma and short-sightedness being againsts millions of years of nature.

>"But I'm not espousing my values, but values vital to the continuation of life."

There are no self-grounding values. You cannot objectively justify why fertility is the overriding value here, rather than, say, fairness, liberty or anything else. So yes, you are absolutely espousing your values. If you want to make an argument, make it, don't pretend it's self-evident.

Not all of your ancestors had lives that were free or fair, but every last one of them was fertile.

Humans are a communal species, our cultures and psychology include behaviour that sacrifices our own personal reproductive chances in favour of the survival of the group, or simply deprecates personal reproduction as a priority. It’s genetic propagation by proxy, and it’s called kin selection or genetic altruism in the literature. A member of society can contribute to the survival and propagation of that society in many ways, propagating the group genome, and that doesn’t have to include through personal reproduction.

We have all benefited from the contributions made by members of past generations that didn’t reproduce, but their genes live on through their relatives that did reproduce. If all we care about is survival of the species, the best thing for all of us is that trans people get the help and support they need to leave the healthiest and most fulfilling lives possible, so that they can maximally contribute to society. I think that’s an overly reductive attitude, but that’s one way of thinking about it.

What of people who were fertile but didn’t have children, through choice, medical reasons, death etc? Surely a person who is fertile but doesn’t have a child for any reason has the same net impact on the growth of population as an unfertile person (trans or not)?

Sure, but some causes of infertility are correlated and persistent.

If I'm exposed to poisons in the air or water, it's likely to happen to others as well - especially if it's at levels where it's not immediately noticed.

Many other causes of effective infertility are unlikely to impact entire groups of people across long periods of time.

This argument is disingenuous: not only your direct ancestors contributed to your existence. You are also dependent on all of the aunties and uncles, and other members of the community around your direct line that contributed to their survival.

No it's not; most of those people also reproduced. It's like Covid - think of the R number.

Every one of them also had kidneys, but that's not an objective argument for the pre-eminent moral value of kidneys.

There is an inescapable choice in choosing the grounds from which to reason out to an ethical conclusion - there is no self-evident starting point, hence the riotous confusion of moral philosophy over the last two millennia.

If you go back far enough, no they didn't.

Kidneys evolved, mutative replication remains the source of life.

There are lots of conditions of the possibility of life - biological, physical, chemical - but the real point is that there is no incontestable reason to think that the conditions of the possibility of life are the pre-eminent source of moral value. Kant argued from the conditions of the possibility of understanding to moral conclusions. Sarte reasons from the conditions of the possibility of existential personality to morality. Rawls reasons from the conditions of the possibility of morality to morality. My point is, lots of people make this move, in a much more sophisticated way than you, and none is obviously better than the other - or indeed any other form of moral argument. There is no self-grounding foundation from which to reason about morality. What incontrovertible reason can you give for starting from the conditions of the possibility of life, or indeed one particular condition, rather than any other place? You can't.

Cyberpunk != transhumanism

Is an amputee cyberpunk?

Yeah if your replacing it with something better for you

There are a million things more dangerous to the continuation of the human race than a few people willingly becoming sterile to solve other issues with their body. For decades we were shoving lead into gasoline and poisoning an entire generation for the sake of more money, for example. And the 'androgenization of humanity' seems like some nonsense, considering there's zero data or otherwise to back that up.

> a few people willingly becoming sterile to solve other issues with their body.

Most of the controversy around trans issues that I've seen would not exist if this was the only dimension to it.

Most of the controversy around trans issues is made up nonsense being pushed by a propaganda machine pining to politicize an entire group of people. The same group of people that have turned towards trying to harass gay, lesbian etc individuals because they know they can harness a certain virulent part of their base to harass and antagonize people.

Citation needed.

how convenient. relegating any concern for the modern trans movement to pure malevolence. I guess it makes it easier for you.

By all means, if you think you can come up with any issues or concerns that don't involve the typical political talking points then please, do so.

I mean you're quite frankly arguing with a straw man, and being vague with the word "healthy", no trans community is advocating that taking opposite hormones is physically healthy.

They push for it because that's the only viable option for them to appear as the opposite gender which helps them mentally.

Although it is funny you're in a way talking about how men are turning into femboy meme.

You mention sterility. As a thought experiment, what if the science was perfected that you could change gender perfectly (ala The Culture novels). Would you still feel the same way about it?

Personally I think that would fantastic and fun. Who wouldn’t want to see what life is like on the other side?

95 to 99% of the population...

But if there was no real downside in terms of social stigma, and it was totally reversible? You don’t think most people would want to switch just out of curiosity?

Grow a hollow in a vat and insert the brain?

It'd be prohibitively expensive for most, but why not?

It was free in the culture novels. So, the problem is with the fact we can't do it properly yet?

Also, you mentioned environmental factors, is that thinking based on a paper or similar?

https://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?q=endocrine+disruptors+...

Everything was free in the Culture novels; more interestingly, gender swapping was a built-in biological function that one could activate by willpower alone, and hold in a part-way state, even allowing two people to get each other pregnant concurrently.

I think if you could undergo a perfect and reversible sex change operation as easily as changing your clothes, it would become simply a matter of fashion - but with that kind of technology, changing your sex would be one of the least interesting things you could do, and new controversies would arise: for example, is it ethical to modify your body to look exactly like someone else’s body? And how far can you go with body modification before it stretches credulity to identify as a human, and what does that mean for the concept of human rights?

Oh, so the reason conservatives are concerned about the birth rate is so they have ammo against gay, trans, and women on the pill. Got it. I was wondering why an issue that won't be a major concern until after 2100 was becoming popular.

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