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My son has two friends. One fell under the spell of blackpill incels, thinks he is not tall enough even though he's an inch above the mean, wants to break his legs to extend them and get taller, hasn't talked to my son for two years because my son said what his real height was in an online chat. Rumor has it he's taken anabolic steroids (but hasn't done any weighlifting or athletic training.)
The other fell under the spell of a self-described "egg-hatcher" who "aggressively" (his friend's word) worked on him for a year and a half to convince him that his being out of sync with other people was a sign he was trans. I knew him pretty well as an elementary school student and he didn't give any sign of variant gender identity then, although like my son and myself he was always a little 'weird'. (He uses a different pronoun and name at his job but tells us it is OK for us call him 'he' and use his own name so we do.) He's taking a cocktail of drugs that gets prescribed via telemedicine and was telling us about the serious side effects he was suffering: one of these drugs, spironolactone, is primarily a drug that alters your mineral metabolism but has the effect of suppressing testosterone if you take 20x the normal dose. (My doc gives it to me for my blood pressure.) He has insatiable cravings for salt as a result.
I completely believe my transsexual friend from college is for real. I believe my son's transgender friend is making a mistake; I support him as an individual and feel I owe him a lot as a person I knew from a young age but I believe he's a victim of a cult-like movement, as is my son's first friend.
(Note a lot of Christian people are brought into it by their family before they're able to make a choice by their own judgement)
It's worth noting that while Spironolactone can be used to suppress testosterone, that's not really what it's used for. Rather it weakly blocks androgen receptors so it makes the body act like the testosterone isn't there or is lower than it actually is. And this is effective at a far lower dose than the testosterone "suppression".
This is why it's sometimes prescribed to women for hair loss, improper hair growth, and/or acne.
It's for that purpose that it's normally prescribed in trans healthcare and it's generally only temporarily (~3-9 months) prescribed while an estradiol regimen suppresses testosterone production. After that it can be dropped with the estradiol doing the rest of the work.
And outside the US it's far less commonly prescribed for this purpose with other androgen antagonists generally being preferred but US doctors tend to be more weary of those other medications and therefore prefer spironolactone.
So while said kid may be a bit "weird" in your eyes, nothing about this really seems unusual. At worst they probably just need to ask their doctor to prescribe a different androgen antagonist instead of spironolactone.
It reminds me of a friend I have who is quite severely depressed and has gone through a wide range of sexual identities. Straight, to asexual, then gay, then polyamorously bisexual, and now back to monogamously straight. Each change she excitedly explained to me that she had unlocked some deep secret to her identity and now her whole life made sense. This happened well into her adult years, not adolescence.
Some people seem to have a strong sense of a "missing piece" in their lives, and might be susceptible to latching on to almost any identity or community if it can explain that feeling.
EDIT: Because of the current barrage that trans people are under, I should clarify that I know trans people who have a deep and abiding certainty that their gender is different from what it says on their birth certificate; my above comment is not meant to include those people.
My trans friend in college suffered terribly because her mother disowned her. I can say as a parent though, if I saw my child was involved with people who were as hateful and negative as the trans people I see on Mastodon, I'd think "I'd do anything at all to spare my child from that suffering."
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I think "asexual", as a fashionable label, is particularly harmful. I've met a lot of people who are definitely sexual who went on a phase of glomming on to it and it certainly contributed to their misunderstanding of themselves.
The proliferation of labels about sexuality seems harmful to me (polyamorous is another, BDSM people introduce 10s of them, like you couldn't possible be articulate about your desires but you imagine there is some place where you can pick them off a menu)
My recent experience is that when something squicky goes down or a paraphilia rears its ugly head the people you can trust the least are the ones who talk about sex as if they were liberated or who claim to have some subaltern identity. I think people like this are dangerous not just as direct social connections but even if they are 2, 3 or 4 steps removed.
This classic of French theory
https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction....
has a great part near the beginning about how glib talk about sexuality is a trap, not a way to liberation.
But lots of non-gender-related online communities also look like that to me: some political groups, antiwork, etc.
I see some people, especially young people, treat depression as a kind of virtue. Like “the world is shit and if you aren’t miserable it’s because you just haven’t woken up to reality”. And then they find groups online to reinforce that, and the depression meme spreads. I would want to protect my kids from that too.
People have done this all the way back time eternal, the only thing that's different today is that people are allowed to be more open about it and that there are many discrete labels that allow people to easily describe what they are specifically feeling.
I don't think a gender transition will make this person whole, this person will just be a weird person who is also trans. The old problem will persist but now he (maybe she or something else later) will have additional side effects and other baggage not to mention lost opportunities such as not being able to be a father.
> not to mention lost opportunities such as not being able to be a father.
This isn't true. Even if you stay trans the entire rest of your life you can still often have kids. This goes for trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people. Generally at worst you'd just need to supplement with some hormones to support fertility but often even that isn't necessary.
But supposing someone de-transitioned, fertility generally returns completely or near completely within 6 months to a year.
The only case where you can't "undo" any degree of loss of fertility is with an orchiectomy (testicle removal) but even then the standard procedure is to preserve sufficient semen in cold storage for future use.
I think it is more complex than that. Some people, they've been raised in a religion, it's been part of their life since they've been a small child. They never sought it out and actively chose it for themselves, they inherited it from their parents and their ancestors. It can be a very deep part of their identity.
Also, try replacing the word "Christian" there with "Muslim" or "Jew", and see how it sounds.
> No-one choses to be trans.
I think transgender feelings exist on a spectrum. Some people don't have any. Some people have a tiny inkling of it that they know is never going to go anywhere. Other people, they are very strong, and they are convinced they'll never be happy unless they live life true to them. But, there are people in the middle, for whom it is more of a choice whether to cultivate these feelings or suppress them – and they might be able to find happiness going down either path. For them, being "trans" is a choice – it wasn't a choice to have those feelings to begin with, but they have a real choice about what to do with them – and if they choose to suppress them, and manage to find happiness in doing so – aren't they in a sense choosing not to be trans? But conversely, if they make the opposite choice – are they not choosing to be trans? From which I think it follows, some people really do choose to be or not to be trans – which isn't to say there aren't other people for whom there isn't anywhere near as much choice involved in it.
I have no idea how big a group of people this "people in the middle" is, but I suspect it may be bigger than you think. It isn't the kind of thing one goes around telling everyone about.
So, I think the analogy, at least for those people, holds.
Or to be more direct, how do you work?
You choose to be a Christian and the idea that a God exists makes sense to you? It's not that the arguments for it are strong, you just choose to believe them.
Then atheism becomes fashionable and your old thoughts stop making sense to you? Not because of any new evidence, refutation or anything of the sort, but simply because you make a choice.
Are your politics the same?
Do you believe in the existence of truth? If you do, are your professed beliefs just a facade?
I think this is a very confused remark. You are mixing up the existence of choices with the philosophical question of the nature and existence of "free will".
I had a real choice as to what to eat for breakfast this morning. There were several live options and I chose one of them and discarded the others. Was that choice of mine "free"? Was it "predetermined"? That's a vexed philosophical question. But however we answer it – it was still a "choice". An unfree choice, a predetermined choice, is still a choice. Choice is a process in the mind/brain, the subjective experiences associated with those processes, an externally observable behaviour – and whether or not it is free, whether or not it is determined, it obviously exists.
By contrast, I did not have any choice at all as to the circumstances of my birth–the day and month and year in which I was born, the place and country, who my parents are, what chromosomes I have, etc. And that, likewise, is true completely independently of how we answer philosophical debates over free will
I don't want to believe what that book says but it is quite a strong argument. It is really too sweeping and complicated to discuss in this format though. It really would need an entire counter book to it that dissects each point.
The point of my comment was not whether free will exists or not – it was whether choices exist or not.
I haven't read Salopsky's book myself, but I don't believe it argues that choices don't exist, only that they aren't free. And the comment to which you are replying wasn't expressing any stance on the question of whether our choices are "free" or not, only distinguishing it from the separate question of whether they exist at all.
That said, the impression I've gathered of his book – e.g. the review in The Atlantic by Kieran Setiya (a professor of philosophy at MIT) – doesn't impress me – Sapolsky largely ignores the philosophical literature on the topic, despite its essentially philosophical nature. "Free will" is more fundamentally a question of philosophy than neuroscience, because a big part of the debate is how the phrase "free will" should even be defined – and that kind of definitional question is one in which neuroscientists have no special competence, but for philosophers it is their bread and butter.
This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief, and also intricately tied to moral responsibility. So compatibilists might be better served by tabooing the phrase—which some do, replacing it with "free choice" or similar.
There's also this bit:
> Still, when you act with indifference to the rights and needs of others, we can blame you for what you do—unless you have a good excuse. What counts as an excuse is a question of morality, not metaphysics.
When developers write code with security bugs, there are sometimes "good" excuses for it and sometimes not. We tried apportioning blame for many years, and it never worked. What worked is large-scale tooling and environment changes. I believe this generalizes quote broadly.
[0] https://archive.is/20231223221002/https://www.theatlantic.co...
> This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief,
I disagree. I don’t think the average person’s belief in “free will” is “fundamentally supernatural”. Most people say they believe in “free will”, but (unless they’ve had some exposure to philosophy) they are pretty vague about what it actually is.
If by “supernatural” you mean “religious”, I think you might be overestimating how much influence religion has on the average person’s views on the topic. While it is true the majority of Christian denominations will endorse some version of metaphysical libertarianism in theory, it is a rather secondary doctrine - the Bible never explicitly discusses the topic, and opinions differ on whether or not it presumes it implicitly. [0] The Nicene Creed, which most Christians accept as a statement of the most important points of Christian teaching, never explicitly mentions it either. In many denominations, services will rarely or never address it. Hence, for many Christians, Christianity doesn’t contribute a lot to their understanding of “free will”, because it just isn’t the focus of a great deal of Christian teaching
Now, of course, there are exceptions: for example, there are the Free Will Baptists, for whom the concept of “free will” is so important, they even put it in their name-but they are minuscule in comparison to Christianity as a whole
In fact, some Christians are compatibilist determinists. There are actually two main forms of determinism - physical determinism (all our choices are predetermined by physical processes) and theological determinism (all our choices are predetermined by God’s will)-and the compatibilist versus incompatibilist distinction exists for both. Most Calvinists reject metaphysical libertarianism in favour of compatibilist theological determinism, although a minority (primarily the so-called “hyper-Calvinists”) are incompatibilist theological determinists instead.
[0] I’ll limit the discussion to Christianity, in part for reasons of space, but I think if you look at Judaism or Islam you will find it is a similar situation - most Jews and Muslims will affirm belief in “free will”, but both religions tend to spend relatively little time on this topic in comparison to others, especially if one is talking about the experiences of the average follower, as opposed to the arcane theological debates covered in advanced study
I absolutely do not believe anyone chooses to be of any religion. It's just luck.
Whereas you said "No one chooses to be anything", which is a denial of the existence of choice altogether
Whether or not you are confused inside your own head, you are expressing yourself in an imprecise and confusing way
Compatibilists: free will is a term for something real that we do.
Incompatibilists: no, that thing is trivial and should have a different name. Free will is a term for something impossible. But despite being impossible it's a meaningful concept. And it's somehow hugely important and deserves a name.
I'm unclear about the motivation for this, especially the last part.
So one can say "I should do XYZ", but this soon descends into blame: "hey you, why didn't you do XYZ?", and that can be mean-spirited recrimination to do with bullying and social pressure, coercion and guilt and labelling people as no good, and main function of the question might not be to seek an answer.
Or, more rarely, it might be an honest enquiry into philosophical differences, or practical problems. Developers shouldn't write bad code. But they do, so we can "blame" them for it. That doesn't mean we should hurl rotten vegetables at most of them. On Wikipedia, I routinely blame people for fucking up an article, but the objective isn't to make them feel bad, it's to fix the article (and to check their reasons, to make sure that I'm not the one with the bad idea). Blame is one thing, but what to do with blame is a separate question.
It's definitely about the way people function, though, about enquiring into their mistakes and motivations. They have "responsibility" in the sense of being expected to respond to "why did you do XYZ?", and even if the answer is "it was inevitable because of the way I am", there's still more practical aspects of the answer ("because I was sleepy, because I was trying to avoid PQR, because I like XYZ") in which to seek knowledge. If we're all autonoma, so what: these autonoma want to solve moral problems.
If you did something wrong, and you are morally responsible for it, then we are morally permitted (or even obliged) to make you suffer for it (where "suffer" can mean potentially anything from mild social opprobrium up to torture and execution). If you did something wrong, but (for whatever reason) lack moral responsibility for it, then it is morally wrong for us to make you suffer for it. If your moral responsibility is impaired but not completely absent, then it is wrong for us to make you suffer to the normal degree, but it might be justifiable for us to do so to a more limited degree.
But, many people today reject the idea of retributive punishment. And if you do so, it isn't clear how important the concept of "moral responsibility" still is. It is a logically coherent position to accept the evaluative/axiological aspects of morality (the labelling of states of affairs as "good" or "evil" or "neutral", their ranking as greater or lesser goods/evils), and its prescriptive aspects (you ought to do this, you ought not do that, you may do this but you aren't obliged to), while rejecting the concept of "moral responsibility" as misconceived, useless, harmful and/or erroneous.
(1) Do we have choices?
(2) Are our choices "free"?
(3) Should we be held morally responsible for our choices?
How we answer (1) and (2) doesn't necessarily determine how we answer (3). And if (3) is your real point, maybe you should focus on that, rather than confusing things by conflating it with (1) and (2).
I'm saying as an irreligious trans person who sees the wreckage that fundamentalist religion is causing on my community at the moment.
But I still think several things you said on the way here were put in a rather imprecise and conflationary way.
Some incompatiblist determinists might view metaphysical libertarianism as a logically coherent possibility, albeit a false one. They might then view "free will" as useful in naming a way the universe coherently could have been, but turned out to actually not be – much like they might view Ptolemaic epicycles, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, and steady state theory. And, much as a person might object to the position "the luminiferous aether is actually true, if we redefine all the terms involved to refer to concepts from special and general relativity" as a form of unhelpful obscurantism, they might view compatibilist determinism as doing the same kind of thing to metaphysically libertarian free will.
There's also the other kind of incompatibilism: metaphysical libertarianism is itself a form of incompatibilism. Both incompatibilist determinists and metaphysical libertarians agree that determinism and free will are incompatible. They just disagree on whether that means we should junk free will or junk determinism.
Although I think here "determinism" is a bit of a misnomer. Most physical determinists don't actually have a problem with the idea that there might be irreducible quantum indeterminism (whether or not they believe there actually is). An incompatibilist determinist would say "a clock doesn't have free will, and a roulette wheel doesn't either, so neither can some hybrid between the two". A compatibilist determinist will say that whether it is a clock or a roulette wheel or a hybrid of them, if it gets sufficiently complicated in the right ways, then it will have free will. For both, the real objection is to metaphysically libertarian ideas that human choice involves some irreducible "third thing" which is neither deterministic causation nor impersonal chance, nor any mere combination of the two. There are also claims (e.g. by Roger Penrose) that quantum indeterminism operates in some special way within the human brain, different from how it operates normally, and that human free will is somehow rooted in that. Many "determinists" (whether compatibilist or incompatibilist) would view that as uncomfortably close to metaphysical libertarianism, even if it does attempt to partly replace the transcendental metaphysics with something closer to the realm of the empirically testable (even if not quite there). But, while "quantum indeterminism operates in a very special way in the human brain" makes them uncomfortable, I don't think most of them view in the same way "quantum indeterminism is real and irreducible, but it doesn't operate in the human brain in any way differently from how it operates anywhere else"–again, whether or not they actually believe it. Some will prefer purely deterministic interpretations of quantum theory instead, such as many worlds or de Broglie–Bohm theory–but that debate has no inherent connection to the topic of human free will.
And you aren't using the standard common sense definition either – for, surely per the common sense definition, this is true: "I can choose what I eat for breakfast, but I can't choose what Donald Trump eats for breakfast" (because the first is clearly within the scope of my own personal causal power and influence, the second is well outside it) – yet by your own definitions you'd have to reject that statement, and say "no, you're wrong, you can't choose what you eat for breakfast" – whereas most incompatiblists would instead say "yes, you can choose what you can eat for breakfast, and you can't choose what Donald Trump eats for breakfast – but your choice of what to eat for breakfast isn't free"
So I'm using the word "choice" in the standard way, and you're using it in your own personal idiosyncratic way