Why not indeed?
Peak academic authoritative credible evidence-based verificationality. Five stars.
Deal with the substance, damn you! I was speaking to an expert!! Who made!!! The comment!!!! To me!!!!!!
Tip Jar
Peak academic authoritative credible evidence-based verificationality. Five stars.
Deal with the substance, damn you! I was speaking to an expert!! Who made!!! The comment!!!! To me!!!!!!
I didn’t know that debate was a substance so toxic that it could lead to death.
I don’t think we’re really seeing a wave of trans suicides in Scotland. But it’s plausible that some people with trans identities may commit suicide as they reckon with the new reality, which is that their invented identities are not going to be accepted across society and law.
People with transgender identities are typically already in very poor mental health, and the suicide rate has always been high with that group. I have a lot of sympathy for such troubled people, especially the ones who were misled into doing irreversible damage to their bodies. Some of them surely will end up dead. I’m obviously far less sympathetic to the chancers — the straight men who invaded women’s spaces just because they could get away with it.
But the inevitable burdens on mentally ill people with trans identities that will result from rolling back trans entitlements are not a sign that “terfs” are evil; they’re a sign that the transgender subculture should never have gotten this far out of hand in the first place. The trans movement is dependent on a cultural ecosystem that perpetually reinforces the lie that “gender affirming” body modifications are good and necessary, rather than harmful and entirely unnecessary. The irreversibility of such procedures serves as a kind of cultural blackmail to keep the system going: on some level, almost everybody knows it’s a big lie and that “sex changes” don’t remotely work as advertised. But consciously or not, what they’re really thinking is: What are we gonna do with the people it’s aready been done to? Let’s just keep letting it happen so that we don’t have to reckon with them. The fact that they’re already mentally vulnerable, plus the fact that so many of them have already had irreversible procedures, plus plus the fact that the activists are shouting that it’s helping people (despite all evidence showing it clearly isn’t)… This gives people a sense that doing the right thing isn’t worth the trouble.
(There are some parallels with the medical profession’s complicity in the practice of FGM in Northeast Africa.)
You could say the same about any unhealthy situation that society needs to roll back: the people already caught up in it are going to face some hardship. Phasing out tobacco with sin taxes puts a burden on nicotine addicts, but we can’t just keep letting more and more people die of lung cancer. Phasing out coal negatively affects West Virginians and rural Pennsylvanians, but we can’t just keep on cooking the planet. Heroin addicts struggled after it was banned in the 1920s. On and on…
Employment in the coal industry has been declining for decades. In West Virginia, it is now far surpassed by employment in health care. West Virginians are arguably better off for this.
@Steven,
Goes to show, support for those negatively impacted by change ends up benefitting them. Like addiction treatment programs for addicts, economic reorganization for coal-dependent communities…. and for people with gender dysphoria and/or transgender identities, better mental health resources I would hope.
I suspect it will seem like a traumatic, life-destroying experience at first, but I imagine for many who identify as trans it will end up being better. A lot of them may not be getting the care they actually need because it is thought that ‘validation’ and ‘transition’ will solve the problem.
One question I’ve always had: what if their problem isn’t gender dysphoria at all? There are too many things I’ve seen from the trans advocates, from internet ‘trans’ tests, and elsewhere (including my own son, who is caught up in the madness), to believe that all of these kids are suffering from gender dysphoria. Most people do not recognize the symptoms of depression or anxiety (or schizophrenia or bipolar), so they might google their symptoms. In the current internet environment, that is likely to lead them to trans. There have been at least a couple of stories here about children who didn’t present with gender dysphoria, but were convinced by their therapist that’s what they had – these stories sometimes from the voice of the therapist. I am reminded of the pop tart in the wrong wrapper story.
Others might not even be in that situation. They are surrounded by peers who are transitioning, and they are getting lots of positive attention, and it is the ‘in’ thing to do. One big lie about youth is that they are non-conformist. They are actually incredibly conformist, they just conform with their peers, not with their parents. So if their peers are all transitioning, well, they must transition. Social contagion. ROGD. AGP. There are so many things that lead to a record number of adolescents and pre-adolescents demanding gender-affirming treatment.
When I was in high school, a lot of the kids smoked. There was pressure to smoke if you wanted to fit in. Now they don’t ruin their bodies through tobacco, they ruin them through chest binders, cross-sex hormones, major, life-changing surgeries, and pronouns.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on Why not […]
Same. I was thinking about that just yesterday, and not for the first time. Step One: yes but however silly all this is, there’s likely a lot of real misery. Step Two: Is “trans” just the latest label put on misery in order to explain/understand/manage it?
That’s consistent with thinking that a lot of people are just being trendy.
Does Gerry find his unnamed experts who are willing to opine in the exact manner he likes at the same agency Trump uses?
It’s such a completely ridiculous thing for an academic to say. So ridiculous I thought he must be bullshiiting about being an academic, so I googled him. He really is one. How is this possible?
‘Step Two: Is “trans” just the latest label put on misery in order to explain/understand/manage it?’ Several people have written about ‘trans’ as this kind of phenomenon – like anorexia, cutting, or the ‘glass delusion’:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_delusion
Some human experiences transcend time and space, but every culture develops its own framework to understand and allow people to express these experiences.
This claim tweaked my interest and I do enjoy the odd rabbit hole. Here are some links (I know this will get caught in moderation).
Trans listed as a risk factor, but no data provided. Main risk factors are deprivation (more deprived more likely to suicide), sex (males more likely), and age.
https://spice-spotlight.scot/2024/03/07/suicide-deaths-in-scotland/
Suicide rate increasing in small towns compared to urban centres (linked to deprivation?)
https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/news-and-features/latest-news/detail/2024/08/13/suicide-rate-increased-in-scotland-last-year–figures-show
Scotlands EHR report talks a lot about risks to trans people, but acknowledges a huge data gap. They present figures that appear alarming, but seem to be based on small self-selecting surveys. Start at page 112.
https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/2023/Is%20Scotland%20Fairer-%20Equality%20and%20Human%20Rights%20Monitor-%20accessible%20PDF.pdf
GenderGP makes a splashy and alarmist claim about skyrocketing suicide rates. Their attribution is a tweet by the fox killer.
https://www.gendergp.com/transgender-suicide-rate-youth-explodes-in-uk/
The tweet has exactly as much attribution as those in the OP above.
https://x.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1803729360731406489
As Arty says, it’s entirely possible that there is a bump in suicides by Trans people. Statistical bumps occur in all sorts of metrics for weird reasons no one ever identifies. Trends are more worrying. The answer from many seems to be ‘avoid trans suicide by transitioning quickly.’ But it’s also acknowledged that trans are over represented in other major risk factors for suicide: co-existing mental illness (depression and anxiety especially), are young, are often financially insecure (deprivation), have poor family or societal links (lowest suicide rate is among religious!). There is simply no good evidence that transition fixes any of that.
One would think requesting a source for a claim would be directly dealing with the substance…