SatanicNotMessianic

There’s two tricks I have that work pretty well for me.

The first is like the advice from Hitchhiker’s Guide about the secret to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Think about the problem long enough to get an idea about where the trouble is coming from, then go do something else, like take a shower or work on something else. Don’t watch tv - that will fuck it up - but basically it’s distracting your conscious mind to give your subconscious time to work on it without being bothered. When it comes up with something, that’s when you’ll become aware of it. Going for a nature hike or bike ride is also a great approach.

The second is to try to prove the opposite. Try reversing the argument and say “such-and-such is impossible” and try to build an argument around that point. When I do that, it makes the other part of my brain - the annoying and iconoclastic part - say “But what if…” and the answer might lie somewhere down that path.

I think a lot of people in the comments don’t know what “transitioning” actually means. The most basic and common meaning is that it is the act of changing how you present to the world. It can include clothes, makeup, play activities, names, haircuts - all of those external markers we as a society treat as gendered. Conservatives are pulling off the exact same thing they did with the satanic panic, the red scare, and other artificially constructed crises. Allowing your child to transition means allowing them to present in a way that matches their self-identity. Most of the rest of their hysteria is driven by Chick Tract level bullshit.

Different studies show different statistics, but in general between a quarter and a third of all trans persons get surgery at all. It is much more common among trans men than trans women, with the most common operation being gender conforming mastectomy. The reason should be obvious - it is far harder to present as a man if you have breasts that show through your clothing. Trans men with smaller breasts will often opt to simply wear a binder, which is basically an article of clothing that compresses the breasts to make them less noticeable. That obviously includes young people.

So when you’re arguing against “letting a child choose their gender” (they’re not choosing it, they’re expressing it just like every other single child does), that’s pretty much what you’re arguing against. You’re arguing that “Boys can’twear dresses” and supporting laws to that effect.

We’ve had those laws already, until we realized that they do society no good and are needlessly cruel, so we got rid of them.

I have never heard of a study of child abuse resulting in a child having a trans identity. Child sexual abuse can have an effect on sexuality going forward, but that’s different than gender identity.

Generally the abuse associated with LGBT kids is coming from a parent who thinks that the abuse can alter their identity. Gender identity formation can start as early as during fetal development.

Another important factor to consider is that, like the concept of race, these categories are social constructs. They are different in different societies, and even within a society they change over time. A man who had sex with other men or both men and women was not considered gay in the 1930s, as long as they were male presenting. They would be considered libidinous and socially conservative people would look down their noses at them, but those people did the same to women who smoked cigarettes and went to jazz clubs. There’s an old saying that runs “Fish don’t know what water is.” It means that when we’re completely immersed in a culture, we think that what we’ve been taught and have absorbed are accurate and objective descriptions of reality.

But in any case and to answer your question - no, I am not aware of any studies that found that reverse causality. Kids know their genders at a very young age. It is a combination of neurological formations which began development during gestation and interactions with cultural artifacts.

In our current society, girls wear dresses and play with Barbies and take ballet, while boys wear sneakers and play sports and like trucks. Each of these things have culturally defined semiotic content - there’s layers of symbolic meaning. How they resonate with a person will depend on that person’s biology.

The abusive behaviors - especially the most problematic ones - come from socially conservative, often religious households. They correlate with a preference for traditional social roles for men and women, misogyny, and a phobic approach to change. Can you think of how a right wing abusive environment leads to the development of a trans identity? Is there a hypothesis there? The data actually indicates the opposite - as social approval grows, the number of people identifying as LGBT goes up. If it was intolerance and abuse causing the formation of an LGBT identity, we’d expect it to be highest in the most conservative times and places.

I’m going to be talking about abuse here, just as a warning for anyone reading this.

I absolutely believe conversion therapy is abusive. I’d like to answer this followup in two parts.

First, I think that conversion therapy should be illegal. I believe that the companies and organizations hosting those services should be shut down and that the people operating them should be investigated and prosecuted if their practices constitute defined definitions of abuse, such as physical punishment, forced isolation, and so on. The organizations sponsoring them should be fined and dissolved. That’s going after one end of the problem.

The second one is looking at the parents. It doesn’t matter whether they think it’s abusive or not, any more than a man who beats his wife because she deserves it thinks he’s just giving her discipline. It’s abuse.

However, this is another one of those indicators I was talking about. It’s part of a pattern of behaviors, but again I think we’d need more information on the parents’ conduct to their kid to establish whether removing them from the home would result in an improvement in their life going forward. It’s not like we have a clone army of Jonathan van Nesses to rehome these poor kids with.

Abuses that I’ve seen LGBT kids suffer under include withholding of food, physical abuse, and what amounts to forced incarceration. I’ve spoken to kids who have had their clothes physically torn from their bodies, resulting in injury. One of the most common ones you see is children being thrown out onto the streets. I think that under those circumstances, the state should be empowered to act. That doesn’t necessarily mean taking the child from their parents, but it might. There’s also things like court mandated counseling and required followup visits from child services. Any intervention has to be proportional to the facts of the given case.

That’s one hell of a question. I’m a cis-gendered gay man who has been active in LGBT rights since the days of ACT UP, for context.

My honest feeling is that it should be evaluated on a case by case basis. I think that it can be a sign of abuse - trans children face incredible rates of physical and emotional abuse, and there are clusters of behavior that can be used to identify them. This would be what I’d call an indicator.

I think that parents should be supporting their children with regard to their gender identity and sexuality. I think it is vital to the mental wellbeing of the child, and non-support can have consequences that last for years and decades including things like changing how their brains are wired, which changes their probability of self-harm, substance abuse, and so on. These are very real, clinical outcomes.

However, removing a child from a home also has very real consequences. The foster care system is also quite challenging for children and can also be associated with long lasting clinical outcomes. It might not improve the child’s life to remove them, even if their home life is sub-optimal.

So my proposal is that the situation be investigated by appropriately trained personnel. If there are additional aspects of emotional or physical abuse, then they’d have to make a very difficult call. Otherwise, I think something like family counseling would be preferred.

Do you think all countries arm all of their regular police officers with firearms?

bare arms

Those aren’t the type of guns we’re talking about…

It is absolutely infuriating when you see this and put it next to cases filed against people like Trump and Gaetz.

I think we can agree to disagree on the sneak attack/sniper from a half a kilometer away.

I did not know that about the Jedi, though. I really was going to write “Sith” but said fuck it because I figured someone with the wherewithal to cut a bad guy in half wouldn’t have a moral system that would prevent them from crushing a head. Plus, it was a callback to a long forgotten skit (I think it was on SNL, but it could have been any of those sketch shows) where the character would look at a person standing far away through his thumb and forefinger and make it look to him like he was crushing their heads.

The Jedi do use their force power to kill droids, though, and droids in the franchise certainly possess self-awareness, and are conscious beings who demonstrate every human behavior, so I have to wonder how that’s handled. I think I remember someone getting offended because he was called “just a droid.”

I kind of lost interest in the franchise after the first prequel, and so I’m obviously forgetting a lot. Plus, I skipped most of the recent movies (although I’m told the new series is really good, and I did enjoy the first season of Mando.

Anyway, thanks for teaching me something!

Plus, killing an Abrams with a rock is pretty funny. It reminds me of the Beverly Hill Cop scene where Eddie Murphy puts a banana in the guy’s tailpipe.

Cops have plenty of discretion in choosing which laws to enforce, and how. They have to - they have limited resources and we have a ridiculous number of laws. I’ve had a cop say that if he wants to pull someone over, he just has to follow them for a while. They’ll drift their lane, fail to signal, speed just a bit - there’s always something. Her doesn’t have to, he just does it if he feels like fucking with someone. They chose to do this. He’ll, I think Seattle was one of the cities where the cops basically went on strike and refused to enforce the law almost at all during some dispute with the mayor.

Harassment at LGBT bars has been historically one of the main ways the LGBT community was systemically oppressed and made to stay in the closet. It happened all the time in the 50s and 60s, and bar owners used to have to bribe the cops to stay open (and sometimes still get raided but with advanced warning). Hell, some of the bars were run by the mafia.

This was exactly the kind of thing that kicked off the LGBT rights movement when their arrest of Stonewall patrons triggered a riot. There were laws on the books then, too, including full on criminalization of homosexuality.

That’s exactly where a significant chunk of this country wants to go. And this is the kind of thing that starts it.

Hopefully, this will force them to change those laws, but that’s just removing the opportunity for these kinds of raids. They should no more be having these raids than Texas should have enforced its antiquated and never-enforced sodomy law, which resulted in the Lawrence ruling (which they also want to overturn).

“AI Winter is coming”

-Ned Stark

She just wants that golden fiddle.

But seriously, a golden fiddle would sound like crap, I think. It’s really no wonder why the devil lost that one.