Pre-internet, one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird. It would still happen but in moderation, for which I'll use the stereotype "village idiot". A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root.
Now it's as if all the village idiots of the world had a meeting and started to run society, at least culturally. The bad ideas and behaviors are not kept in check, they're rewarded, leading to the normalization of things deeply questionable.
Imagine being a youngster right now. You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input. Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points. Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you. Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity. The normalization of the hating of the other sex. Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you. The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
Comparing social media to smoking is a comparison that needs re-evaluating. It's frankly shocking how this untold harm goes unchecked. Then again, intervening can lead to creepy authoritarian legislation. As seen in China, but let's at least credit them for recognizing the harm.
I know it doesn't feel that way right now, but there is probably no time in history where racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, religious hatred, slavery, etc. were less normalized than right now.
These things are sadly all too common, there's lots of work to do, and we must not be complacent about past successes.
But when I was a kid, homosexuality was illegal. Twenty years ago gay fear and stupid women were typical jokes on most sitcoms. Some of our grandmothers could not vote. Swimming pools and schools - schools! - were racially segregated within a lifetime.
Contrary to your post, we have been gradually escaping from the extreme crazy bad ideas. Let's keep it up.
Do you have any evidence that the denormalization of racism etc. is because of social media? Or that social media even helped? The ongoing fight to change the things you cite all predate social media by decades or more. Even with the Arab Spring, was social media helpful or just the tool used to coordinate? Would it have happened anyway without Twitter being there as a means to broadcast? A common criticism I have heard of social media is that it is so easy to just retweet/like and wave the flag that many people stop doing anything meaningful and visible outside the echo chamber entirely.
I don't think OP is arguing that social media is leading to the denormalisation of racism; I think OP is noting that, whatever other madness we are dealing with in this day and age, there are some issues in the past that were crazy, abusive, exploitative and damaging, and that they have gotten much, much better over time.
In a time when people didn't question their gender, many of them might have felt themselves to be alone in their feelings. They not only learned to suppress their feelings (to avoid ridicule or worse), they were unable to understand them because literature was oppressed. Much self-isolation, even tragedy ensued. In many "less civilized cultures" these differences were not an excuse for abuse, but were recognized, even exalted ... until the colonizers came along with their 'truths'.
Exploring, understanding and accepting ourselves is an important step, for -all- of us, not just the typicals. "To thine own self be true..."
I don’t feel like either of you are wrong. We have made amazing cultural advances while also taking steps backwards. I love the internet (and technology in general), but at what point do we say enough is enough when you address the points that OP has made?
Edit: Never stop making things better in terms of equality, but perhaps we shouldn’t celebrate cancel culture or people getting internet points for gender confusion.
You're looking at a tiny elite slice of the modern West (I mean, sitcoms? Seriously?) and taking it as representative of the whole world. There's probably a whole lot more homophobia, misogyny and religious hatred now in some highly religious countries than there was 25 years ago or so. And the Internet is even less representative.
You're curious about the non-western perspective? I can tell you that social changes are arriving at a much faster pace in Asia than what we're experiencing in the west. This isn't because the Asian countries are more progressive, but because the baseline was simply lower. The west is indeed in the lead, but most countries are following closely behind, and more importantly, they're all headed in the same direction.
Think about it. Everyone is now consuming the same Tiktok, reddit, Netflix, music, video games globally. Twitter isn't some hidden cove only westerners have access to. The world is following along as George Floyd is brutally murdered in the street. Have you seen Parasite or Squid Game? They deal directly with topics like class struggle / racism and they resonated with people all over the earth. The fact that South Korean media is even producing media such as these would've been unthinkable just 20 years ago. Annual gay parade have started take place in Seoul since 2015, and interracial marriage numbers have never been higher.
I'm sure there are outlier nations who have faced regression in their cultural maturity since, but they're anything but the representative sample and claiming otherwise would be disingenuous. So no, this isn't something cooked up by the bored progressives of the U.S. This is not some obscure domain reserved for the western elites. This is where the world is headed towards - the westerners simply got there before the rest of us.
I agree that things don't move in one direction all the time. Iran, for instance has certainly de-liberalized (although they might be re-liberalizing, fingers crossed). The overall trend in the past couple centuries seems to be towards tolerance, though. As an example, in most countries at least a quarter of people think being gay is okay [1]. 100 years ago, where on Earth could you have gotten 25 out of a hundred people to say that being gay is okay? Perhaps in Berlin in the 1920s, but no where else as far as I know.
By an absolute quantity or an absolute measure? I daresay at least in India, the toleration for homosexuality, women, and general non-conformity is quite higher than it used to be. Casteism and religious hatred still exists in great quantity but has it improved relative to 1950? Probably? Things are not perfect but you’re underrating how awful they used to be.
Are you kidding? With what Modi has done and is continuing to do, India is becoming far more repressive. It is another one of the countries I would fear to visit because of reactions to what I might say.
Until just seventy five years ago India had been ruled for a century by an emperor in London and an occupying army, exploiting caste discrimination, religious sectarianism and regional rivalries to keep Indians subjugated for the profit of a racist colonial Empire. At partition, the rival religious hacked each other to bits wholesale.
So, despite setbacks, maybe there has been real progress in what is now the worlds largest democracy.
Yes, there are recent setbacks, but you really need to put yourself back in time to where India was in the earlier part of the 20th century. Caste discrimination was fully legal. Women had next to 0 legal rights over themselves and their property. The Partition of India was the most violent outburst of religious violence that has occurred in human history.
There are many problems in contemporary India but I would suggest you not generalize the average Indian in this way. Many young people are quite open minded and quite westernized in their attitudes towards social issues. Modi’s victories in Parliament are complicated and not all driven by religious intolerance.
Not only that, but if you tell the village idiot they're being an idiot you become a villageidiotiophobe.
People are afraid to set boundaries for fear of getting cancel cultured or harassed by a woke tolerance mob. All disagreement is now "toxic behavior" on social media channels. Arguing over perspectives is now sometimes branded with the extreme label of gaslighting. Day by day our Overton window continues to shift, and yet we were all told the slippery slope was supposedly a fallacy.
Ironically I feel your beliefs about this stem from whatever bubble you yourself are in. No normal person goes around afraid of being "attacked by a woke mob". This is some stories you've been told, and blindly believe, from the other side.
This is not the case. Companies for one do enforce woke culture. I believe GP wasn't talking about being physically attacked by a mob, rather their reputation and livelihood
The times we live in are absolutely brutal for people who struggle with diversity of belief (wherever they are on the sociopolitical spectrum). Never before has an individual had so many perspectives to contend with at once. It breaks a lot of people in different ways, although I think people who can navigate the noise without losing their sense of self are better for the experience.
Still, it's impossible to deny the negative impact it has on people who can't handle the vastness of opinion, and many of them turn to the comforting simplicity of reactionary extremism to cope.
I’ve absolutely met people especially with limited language skills who get confused and frustrated by all these complicated concepts they’re expected to understand to simply not be accused of being hateful.
Not to be too Orwellian, but I’ve often wondered why nobody say, talks about removing gendered pronouns altogether in formal speech instead of adding 50 new ones for instance. People seem to only talk about adding new words and concepts.
> I’ve often wondered why nobody say, talks about removing gendered pronouns altogether in formal speech instead of adding 50 new ones for instance.
'They' instead of 'he/she' is one of the things people actually use, and it's exactly dropping the gendered pronoun in favor of an existing neutral pronoun. It's strictly simpler and smaller language. My teenage kids use this construction a lot and I'm getting used to it.
It is, but some people specifically insist on "he" and "she" and will get offended if you use "they". In one such case, when I asked why "they" is inappropriate since it is by definition inclusive of all genders, the question itself was declared highly offensive and "erasing".
I think there are multiple layers behind why someone might find "they" inappropriate. I don't think they're necessarily all valid but I think they're understandable.
1) Gender is currently a political topic. The use of gender neutral pronouns is, rightly or wrongly, associated with holding certain political beliefs. People who do not hold these beliefs are likely to reject their use on that basis.
2) Gender is a matter of personal identity. A fairly common desire for people is to be "good" at the gender they identify as. A fundamental part of that is being recognised by others as that gender. Gender neutral pronouns refuse to provide that acknowledgement.
3) They can be unfamiliar. Ultimately pronouns are something that, until recently, most people never actively thought about. Some people will reactively reject them as it puts into question their understanding of the world.
It was a conversation in a private setting with several participants, some of whom were trans. It started as a broad conversation about which pronouns should be properly used when. When we got to "they", one of the participants brought up a common pattern whereby people will use "he" or "she" consistently to refer to cis people whose gender they know, but "they" when they need to refer to trans people (with known more specific pronouns) in the context where they can't get away with misgendering. We all agreed that this is rude, but then I asked whether it would be problematic if the person used "they" consistently, without discriminating. That's when it blew up.
Yep, turns out people of all sorts can be assholes, even to folks who are making a good faith effort to navigate a changing world.
That said, I think your Orwellian concerns might reflect your personal media consumption more than the state of our changing world. People do talk about removing gendered pronouns (see: nonbinary people), and the vast majority of transgender people are attempting to assimilate into the existing man/woman gender model rather than pushing a complex system of new words and concepts. As I'm sure you're aware, both of those approaches have proven controversial and generated quite a bit of backlash, sometimes violently so.
Not everyone is cut out for a world filled with people who don't think like them. Unfortunately that's the world we live in, so we all get to figure out what to do about it.
That makes no sense. An enby is saying they don't have gender, not that gender doesn't exist. In fact, if you don't use gender words for everyone else you're sort of throwing shade at them.
That sounds like a liberal feminist from ~20 years ago, trying to remove words that they think are used to oppress people. Like the people who invented Latinx.
This was my struggle with social media as it evolved. I watched it go from a predominantly techie novelty to how everyone communicated. I'd say I became more anxious and self-doubting as a result, but in some ways that's an improvement.
They aren't 'coping' with reactionary extremism, it's always had its seductive song.
What has changed is just that extremist groups have very successfully adopted the communication tools available to them for recruitment and engagement.
I don't think it's off-base to suggest individuals gravitate toward belief systems that address their anxieties, and that might be particularly true for reactionary extremism.
Completely agree on your second point though, the amplifying power of the internet aids all messages (without intervention, anyway).
Sure, I suppose so, I'll agree that both factors are at play.
It has been objectively documented that anxiety has increased over the years, and I (And every other Tom, Dick and Harry) have subjective just-so-stories and complaints that will blame particular attributes of modern society on why more people are looking for these kinds of answers today than they were before.
I wonder if this is affecting all of humanity en masse or if this is just another form of infection, mental in this case, that thins the herd and ignores people who can resist its effects and continue living normal lives. Most of us within a healthy community with plenty of opportunity for gaining status, loving family and diverse friends who are willing to call us out on bullshit, purpose in life, and in good physical health are unlikely to get sucked into extreme TERFism, white supremacy, TikTok tics and god knows what else.
Those with weaker "immune systems" succumb to the mental viruses and cause themselves possibly irreparable harm by either joining a radical cult of their choosing or falling into some medical pathology rabbit hole.
> one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird
Except for the ones that were widely believed and accepted, of course. Or are you excluding those via a somewhat circular definition of "extreme," "unhinged," etc.?
> You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input.
Reductionist, but I follow. What is insanity, and who defines it? Prior to the modern day, homosexuality was insanity or illness.
> Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points.
Outside of some very extreme circles, nobody is actually doing this seriously. Where are you even seeing this?
> Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you.
No, they just kept quiet about it. That’s the difference, and it seems many are not ready to face the complex nature of psyche.
> Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity.
Most people are reasonable enough to understand celebrating obesity and “health at every size” is a fringe, unscientific and extremist idea.
> The normalization of the hating of the other sex.
Once again, extreme communities. Not sure if you refer to incels, would love some clarification.
> Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you.
Hate and extremism was invented by the internet?
> The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
I see nothing new here. It’s more accesible, yes, but public shame and gossip (!!!) has happened for millennia.
People can organize better and agendas can be pushed easily via the internet. But these voices are fringe and minority. Outside, in the real world — most people are reasonable and understanding.
Agreed, OP's post was reductive and sensationalist, to the point that it contributes to the problems it critiques. Our nature as people hasn't changed much, the internet just prevents much of the curation of voices that occurred before it existed.
It's not reasonably possible to rid ourselves of the internet, and in fact I think it's a net Good. The issue going forward is to consider and teach responsible internet use for not just young people, but everyone. Most of the shitty, intentionally hurtful things I see on the internet don't come from young folks, but from adults trying to inflict harm. People like that have always existed, and are the real problem in these cases.
> Outside, in the real world — most people are reasonable and understanding
I think OP is expressing concern that maybe young people aren't living there as much as you'd hope.
Most of these issues, and the extent to which they are issues, are in the eye of the beholder.
> Oh, and monocultures aren’t great.
Does being terminally online contribute more or less to this? I'm still not sure, but leaning towards more. People always parroted others, but now with social reach being so concentrated, it seems like everyone parrots from a smaller pool. The consequence/reward for expression are much more well defined in the online world as well.
One major problem, in my opinion, is that people think what they see online is a representative sample of the population. It’s clearly not.
You don’t have to browse Reddit for long to to see plenty of self-described loners, people dealing with anxiety and other mental issues. And it makes sense that these people would find community online.
But if kids are going online and being bombarded with “the world is doomed”, and “what I thought were just the challenges of growing up are actually a mental illness” or “once I did [unhealthy coping mechanism], I felt like my problems were solved”, they developed unhealthy and distorted views of how kids their age think and act. I can see it being very easy to get sucked into the worst kind of community.
And if kids isolate themselves further the online world is literally 99% of their entire world view. And what an awful distorted world that is.
>A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root.
>The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. Back in the pre-internet days, the "village idiot" was "canceled". No one bothered to listen to his idiotic blatherings or attempting to debate or debunk him; everyone just ignored him because he was a waste of time. Hence, he was "canceled", or "isolated" as you put it. But now you're complaining about similarly stupid and dangerous people being "canceled" (i.e., ignored and shunned).
I personally believe that this is a great example of a moral panic. There isn't much of a there, there. If you look closely.
For example, let's look at the Tide Pod incident, how many teens in total ate tide pods?
86.
A global moral panic was launched over 86 teenagers doing a very stupid thing as teenagers are wont to do.
> It’s true that since the Tide Pod Challenge began, the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPC) has received 86 reports of teenagers intentionally ingesting laundry detergent. Yet at the end of last year, the AAPC reported that over 10,500 children under the age of five were exposed to laundry pods in 2017 (for example ingesting, inhaling, or absorbing the detergent). If we are going to have a mass panic about poisonings, ten thousand children are clearly in greater danger than less than a hundred teens. So why was it that only the Tide Pod Challenge that made pearl-clutching headlines across the globe?
The actual threat is accidental ingestion or inhalation by little children and elderly adults with dementia. They form the tens of thousands of cases that end up at poison control centres. But there's no moral panic around that, because "Elderly lady with dementia who lives alone accidentally ate a tide pod and then ended up in the ER" is less of a salacious story than "Teen eats tide pod for tiktok challenge"
Let's examine this 'Tourettes-like' story,
> Over the past 2 years, a remarkably high number of young patients have been referred to our specialized Tourette outpatient clinic presenting with symptoms closely resembling the ones Jan Zimmermann shows in his videos
What's a remarkably high number? As far as I can tell, this Op-Ed doesn't specify it. The author has only examined one patient that he classifies with this diagnosis. Ever.
Also interestingly enough, in most of the articles that talk about this subject, guess whose name repeatedly pops up? The same patient named in this Op-Ed.
We are told that there are "hundreds" of such patients, but we're never given an actual number, citation, or source.
If you try to track the source down, you find pieces like these, here's the "concrete" evidence that's offered,
First the background rate,
> The new surge of referrals consists of adolescent girls with sudden onset of motor and phonic tics of a complex and bizarre nature. In London, UK specialist tic clinics at each of the two children’s hospitals, each centre received four to six referrals per year (out of a total of approximately 200 in 2019/2020), which were acute onset tics in teenage girls
Then the "surge"
> In the last 3 months (end of 2020–January 2021), both centres have been receiving three to four referrals per week of this nature which, if it continues, would amount to 150–200 cases per year and effectively double the referral rate.
4 * 12 = 48. There are two centers so 96.
And this is during the onset of the pandemic, where global quarantines produced a constellation of anxiety in people of all age groups around the world.
This entire moral panic has been driven by referrals, not diagnoses, not confirmations but referrals from primary care physicians during one of the most stressful events of the past few decades (for ordinary people). No evidence has been presented if any or all of these cases are related to social media use or not.
The paper goes into this aspect and theorizes that this is an acute stress response,
> It is hypothesised that this unusual presentation is related to lockdown, change in usual structure and routine, social media related events/bullying and pandemic-related stress in vulnerable adolescents. Stress may be unmasking a tic predisposition in some, while in others compounding existing vulnerability to anxiety, for example, underlying neurodevelopmental or emotional difficulties to the point of becoming overwhelming.
No specific numbers are provided anywhere w.r.t. how many people were influenced by social media or not, v. how many were patients that were predisposed to such a response that then presented with it in response to a hyper-stressful event.
So no, there is no epidemic of people watching tik toks and running around and changing their gender or becoming tourette-like.
96 possible, undiagnosed referrals does not a pandemic make.
This is just as silly as the moral panic over D&D back in the 80s. It's just updated for modern times.
> For example, let's look at the Tide Pod incident, how many teens in total ate tide pods?
You say 86, but that was just the number of children reported to the AAPC. I think it'd be reasonable to assume that there were many more cases that were not reported (due to varied levels of ingestion/concern) or were reported elsewhere and so not included in AAPC stats.
Some of what you call "Moral Panic" and "Pearl-Clutching" in regard to the whole tide pod thing was also what I'd call "Education". It informed both parents and children that this was occurring and why it was a bad idea. I think it's also safe to assume this helped prevent a few cases.
Young children were and still are the primary concern when it comes to ingesting household poisons, and there have been active efforts and ongoing campaigns for ages warning both parents and children about that particular danger (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Yuk), but what made the tide-pod challenge remarkable and newsworthy is that very few people would have expected that so many teenagers would be stupid enough to do something like that.
All that isn't to say that the media didn't jump at the chance to generate clicks by exploiting parent's fear and exaggerating the phenomenon, but it wasn't simply something invented to panic parents the way the D&D scare was, and it was just one of several stupid dangerous things children were doing around that time motivated by internet points and social media attention.
In the case of this "Not Tourette’s", while I'm sure it has been being reported elsewhere and perhaps even irresponsibly, the source is an academic paper and no matter the actual prevalence of this behavior it's absolutely appropriate for something like this to be reported and discussed in that setting. Even if this does turn out to be nothing but a blip in referrals that never amounts to a larger trend of great concern and the fad of kids pretending to have Tourette’s dies off quickly, that's perfectly fine.
What matters is that there are records and reports so that all available evidence can be collected, compared, and studied in the event that it isn't simply a non-issue that dies off on its own. In the meantime, because it is happening, it seems like a good thing for healthcare providers to be aware of what's been observed so far and that researchers can look into the "Why" behind it.
> The normalization of the hating of the other sex. Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class.
If federal, state and local legislation or exclusive constitutional rights qualify as normalization, then we've been here before in the US... on several occasions.
> The sheer volume of it.
%100 agree. The difference between now and all the other times is that it's hard to escape it if you want to function in society-at-large. But I'd add that an obsession with growth is also key to the deleterious effects of social media.
The problem is that the internet enables the sociopaths, narcissists, power hungry etc. to easily spread their toxicity. And the internet rewards this behaviour by giving them attention.
Challenging gender roles isn't a new thing. I assure you that not being able to inherit property, or other gender-based discrimination has had people questioning gender roles for a long time.
From my reading of the article (which is hard to parse not being an expert) it seems there is a German YouTuber with Tourette's who also on his YouTube shows displays non-tourette's tics. And these tics are being copied by other young people watching his shows, and being presented as Tourette's until they arrive at the clinic where these experts go "hang on this kid does not have Tourette's but does have tics similar to the German youtuber above"
So, the weird thing is not they pick up someone else's tics but they cannot get rid of them.
Learnt behaviour, copying, or physical tics that once learnt get stuck in the brain?
There may be a relation to military conditioning. I spent just a single week at a military academy introductory program in high school and when I returned home I was "uncontrollably" (if I thought about it I could avoid doing it, but if I was on autopilot it happened by itself) squaring my corners and calling my family "sir" and "ma'am". The thing was, those patterns were my entire life for that week, and they were very deliberately drilled into me. Eventually they faded because they weren't reinforced outside of the academy (if anything, they were "deinforced"), but there may be a connection here.
If someone spends many hours a day watching someone with particular quirks, it doesn't seem surprising (drawing parallels here to my experience) that those quirks may transfer because their brain starts to make those associations through observation. I would expect that stopping watching that particular person would probably let the transferred tics decay over a period of time (I'd give it a month).
In behavioural psychology the antonym is "punish". There are positive/negative axes (whether a stimulus is added or removed) and reinforcement/punishment axes (whether the consequence is desired).
Negative reinforcement is what boot camp uses. If you square your corners, you won't get shouted at. The "negative" aspect relates to the lack of shouting, and the reinforcement relates to the fact that the shouting is unpleasant.
At home, positive punishment would be making fun of the tendencies, and negative punishment would have meant receiving no validation for the behaviour.
@elliottkember is giving the correct complimentary antonym to "reinforce" in behavioral psych - "punishment" reduces the frequency of a behavior, "reinforcement" increases the frequency. There's a spectrum, but the terms only refer to the opposing effects on behavior rates. In the GP's comment, "deinforcement" appears to also mean "actively reducing the frequency of the behavior".
The article says that one thing differentiating these kids from acutal Tourette symptoms is that instead of symptoms waxing and waning, they only deteriorate. So that definitely squares
After your first sentence I thought the next would be “uncontrollably dropping two f-bombs for every noun and one for every verb” but the classic hallway “at ease, make way” is good fun too. It was hilarious how it could travel in waves up a hall ahead of the drill like a preceding shadow. My floor was enthusiastically and maliciously conformant and loud about it.
Reminds me of how Americans spend a couple of months in the UK and return with an affected British accent.
Before social media, there were movies that molded society. Bollywood and more recently K-dramas/K-pop have influenced an entire generation.
Often these were used for shaping a younger generation as a long term strategy for a desirable adult demographic. To a certain extent, it is happening in our American public school system. Everyone who comes through it are kind of identical. It may not be apparent to those who have never stepped out of the States, but it is obvious to those outside or have known other cultures.
With social media impacts, its effect is like an oil spill. Even if you can contain it, it will be messy, expensive and traumatic for years and years. This is a Faustian bargain we have made.
I read about "mirror neurons" where humans watching others do physical activity also have some of the same neural pathways fire.
(V. S. RAMACHANDRAN)
The author/researcher says he believes that is one of the main mechanisms of human learning (babies look at adults and imitate. Adults look at other adults and imitate. Subconsciously)
When I was raising my first child, I discovered a strange, apparently innate instinct which presumably is related to the mirror neurons:
At some point the child gets old enough that you start to feed them 'baby food' on a spoon. The child isn't used to eating off of a spoon so for many weeks the process is messy. The initial challenge is getting them to open their mouth wide enough for the spoon to enter. And telling them 'open your mouth' is not particularly useful since they don't understand English at that age.
Instead, the following instinct kicks in: as you approach their mouth with the spoon, your own mouth opens. They see your mouth open and then open theirs. The crazy part is that your own mouth opening happens involuntarily at the moment you want their mouth to open. It is physically difficult to suppress it, even if you try.
I've also noticed the reverse. When the child gets a little older, they at some point want you to open your mouth, because they want to feed you something or they are curious about the inside of your mouth (this is a phase they go through). They seem to also involuntarily open their mouth wide when they want you to open yours.
I am by all accounts neurotypical (except perhaps for a touch of Aspergers) but I have an involuntary tic. Every now and then (like once or twice a week) a memory of some incredibly stupid thing that I once did -- sometimes decades ago -- will pop into my head and before I can re-establish conscious control I'll make a vocalization that sounds like a cross between a whimper and a sneeze. It's kind of embarrassing, but usually I cover it up with a cough afterwards. I don't think anyone has ever actually noticed except me.
I have this happen to I've always assumed it was an anxiety response. The interesting things is I am able to control it to some extent, I used to hit myself, now I mutter profanities. Anyone else do something like this?
Well sure? Remembering embarrassing stuff is annoying.
I've found that sitting with the thought for a little while and processing the emotion prevents it from coming up again. You can't just remember that girl in first year of uni that made an effort to hug you every day and flee the thought every time, painful as it is. You have to sit there and go through it. Yes I was young and stupid, but the reason I even cringe thinking about it is because I am now better. And that is ok.
Well, there are a bunch of us in this thread, and I've heard many people talk about it over the years both IRL and elsewhere on the internet. Maybe "normal" is the wrong word, but it does seem to be exceedingly common.
Is this not totally normal and very common though? This exact thing happens to me all the time, with some specific memories linked to seemingly random acts like shaving the left side of my neck.
I do it. When i'm alone, and one of those thoughts hits, me, i often vocalise a bit. If i'm in company i just wince (if i made a noise in front of other people when i thought of something embarrassing, that would be embarrassing, so that would lead to a sort of embarrassment Kessler syndrome).
I have no idea if it's common or not. It might be. It's not the sort of thing people generally discuss. This is the first time I've ever talked about it.
A (long) time ago, I noticed something not dissimilar in my behavior. I've never noticed it in others, so it quite likely that your behavior goes unnoticed too.
But what I did was tell myself to not react like that again next time. Of course, that didn't work, but it made me notice it better. And after repeating that for some time, I had timely control over the reaction (not over the stimulus that provoked it). If your tic is light and annoys you, you could try that. Your subconscious is capable of picking up more than you think, and it is (somewhat) malleable.
I have SAD and this happens to me several times a day. Though it's not so much that it pops into my head, more that my train of thought leads me there by association.
In a lot of ways SAD feels like a form of PTSD where instead of a single extremely traumatic experience, or many extreme experiences(known as complex PTSD), it's a huge amount of slightly traumatic ones. So it's sort of like a flashback.
One of the things I've noticed is that when I'm on SSRIs and they're working(which has never been a long-lived state of affairs, unfortunately), this phenomenon is drastically reduced or even gone altogether.
I also do that from time to time, though less regularly, maybe once a month. But then I also sometimes talk to myself (not excessively, just occasionally when I take a walk or while at home, replaying some conversation or imagining a possible situation). I thought this was rather normal, or at least not too far from normal.
I too have issues with these kinds of thoughts that very nearly cause a whole-body shudder, followed by a kind of yell just to get it out of my system. It doesn't happen often, but hearing others talk about this gives me hope that I'm not a total weirdo... even though I know I am in many other ways LOL!
I've also wondered if my ADHD somehow factors into it, but that I don't know.
As a someone who recently realised/accepted that I have loads of adhd traits, I can see the connection. I personally think that the fact my mind is never really "calm" means I/we have more opportunities to play over these things when doing other tasks.
I get the impression those without adhd can just concentrate without a mind full of fluff - I can't imagine what that must be like!
This is me to a tee! I either get a neck spasm when my chin gets brought down (also happens spontaneously, but often with a cringe worthy thought from the past), or I'll 'almost' same something out loud while replaying something.
Assumed it wasn't just me who did this but glad to know there are others.
I am wondering if you've tried EMDR after the event happens? So you have the thought that triggers the tic and then you'd focus intensely on the event and do the EMDR stuff. That may reduce the intensity of the past event and reprogram your nervous system to not trigger so intensely on it.
I had a significant tic, and found profound relief through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). I strongly recommend "Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life".
Happens at least twice a day to me, sometimes a lot more. My wife finds it bewildering so I’m not sure it’s totally normal, but I know it’s not uncommon either.
"In sum, EMDR appears to be no more effective than other exposure techniques, and evidence suggests that the eye movements integral to the treatment, and to its name, are unnecessary."
Out of date does not necessarily mean wrong. If you want to challenge this result the burden is on you to cite some more recent work with different results.
> Learnt behaviour, copying, or physical tics that once learnt get stuck in the brain?
The article itself makes it clear. There's an obvious reward for these behaviors. This youtuber got exceptionally popular very quickly and was able to turn that into appearances on other shows. The other patients are also noted to have their "symptoms" express themselves during unpleasant tasks, but to be missing during pleasant ones. To the point it gets them out of doing the unpleasant work.
We've built a system that rewards this behavior because we built a system that also makes this behavior profitable. To me, these results shouldn't be a surprise, and I wonder if this "new illness" is really just an emergent lower level expression of something like Munchhausen syndrome; now given a wider and less sophisticated audience to play to.
It's the mere suggestion that they might have those tics, but the article says:
> Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
It also mentions other examples of MSI, where symptoms across the group would subside after a couple weeks or months. So yeah, in most cases all it needs is someone to say Stop That! You're imagining things
All behavior is total behavior, so it doesn’t really matter. Article makes the point that this is attention seeking behavior and often used as an excuse to avoid unpleasant tasks. Whether the teens are aware they are choosing the tic, eventually it becomes habitual and they “can’t stop”. Except they can after meeting with a trained phycologist. Get to the root of the behavior and usually the behavior goes away.
> First, all patients presented with nearly identical movements and vocalizations that not only resemble Jan Zimmermann’s symptoms, but are in part exactly the same, such as shouting the German words Pommes (English: potatoes), Bombe (English: bomb), Heil Hitler, Du bist häßlich (English: you are ugly) and Fliegende Haie (English: flying sharks) as well as bizarre and complex behaviours such as throwing pens at school and dishes at home, and crushing eggs in the kitchen.
> Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
To a first approximation, the kids are 'faking it'. The third point I didn't quote was that symptoms appear when it will preclude then from doing a tedious task, and then disappear when they are doing something they want to do.
Stuff like this makes me wonder if taboo and stigma "evolved" in societies as defense against the spread of behavior that could cause a breakdown of social order. For example, if something like dancing mania[0] got out of hand, then important jobs could be left undone and people starve or whatever. So if the notion that such behavior is bad is drilled into everyone's mind before being exposed, then they are more likely to avoid "catching" it.
There's no need for convoluted explanations. A good taboo, understood as a restriction on certain kinds of behavior or speech at least in certain circumstances, exists to protect some good. It's the same reason (or one of the reasons) we partition our houses into rooms by purpose. Human flourishing requires certain limits, not letting it all hang out. The latter is more akin to the liberal notion of freedom understood as "do what thou wilt" and limitless indulgence of the appetites and desires. The classical understanding of freedom is the ability to do what you ought. Guess which leads to happiness and which leads to misery.
"limitless indulgence of the appetites and desires" has a different word. That's not freedom, that's called debauchery and has absolutely nothing to do with "liberalism" in the political science meaning of the term.
right! I was struggling to translate "libertine" into the noun related to the act itself. ie, free -> freedom; hedonist -> hedonism; libertine -> ?
In romance languages there's a word "libertinaje", but the best translation I could find into english was debauchery which I agree has too many connotations of "partying." Wantonness perhaps?
> "limitless indulgence of the appetites and desires" has a different word. That's not freedom, that's called debauchery and has absolutely nothing to do with "liberalism" in the political science meaning of the term.
Could you explain more?
From what I can tell, there is no inherent separation between freedom and debauchery aside from someone's judgement about whether particular choices where good for the person who made them.
I enjoy some debauchery as much as or more than the next guy, but clearly the difference between freedom and debauchery is that people don't automatically go for debauchery just because they can, because we still have societal norms that most people follow most of the time. But we're free because we get to make that choice for ourselves.
"People don't automatically go for debauchery because they can" and "no people go for debauchery" are not the same statement. You're constructing a strawman.
I'm not the parent, but I assume it's along the lines of a pretty famous quote by pope JP2: "Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought."
I think I agree with this on a certain level, but also debauchery is fun and can be useful.
I don't see how it's at all convoluted. If anything, it's too reductive.
Taboos, traditions, etc., don't need to exist because of a reason that's explicit. Sometimes, they do, but that doesn't explain the taboos that don't make obvious sense. A taboo can be more or less a form of "cultural neuron" that doesn't have an explicit purpose but incidentally changes the balance of the system towards something that society at a given time may benefit from without even knowing it. A religion featuring more ornate hats than others may have more true believers, or perhaps the other way around for all we know. If that's at least plausible, if not true, that wouldn't necessarily mean a reverend at one point decided to declare a certain kind of hat wearing because of the "good of the church."
The inverse can also be true. Take for instance the taboo of sexism. Makes sense, right? Given modern western principles, why should culture allow for discrimination based on sex? On the other hand, there's evidence that many women, regardless of their political positions, actually appreciate men who are "benevolently sexist." It's a phenomenon compelling enough that even Psychology Today, a publication heavily biased against anything unflattering to women, has reported on it more than once. By making sexism a taboo, and far more taboo as of late, society has raised the bar for just how confident a man has to be to attract a woman. We really don't need a study to demonstrate that, on average, women are attracted to confidence. An effect of making sexism taboo is it changes the signal to noise ratio, allowing women to better identify which men they'll actually be attracted to. Maybe there were some people arguing against sexism with this in mind, but I imagine they are an extreme minority. Most anti-sexists probably weren't thinking along those lines.
At least that taboo makes some reasonable sense in isolation, and even the fashion of religious garb can be made sense of, but what about a taboo that makes no sense? What about merely making a mouth-noise that comes out sounding like "shit?"
It makes little explicit sense that saying the word "shit" be a faux pas. You can say poop, doodie, scat, dung, and even crap, but shit is considered a curse word. It's really pretty stupid.
Except I would argue that having any form of taboo can have a positive effect, even if it barely makes sense. By having cultural limits of any kind, it puts the society on the same page and creates a mindset where individuals try to at least maintain some level of basic class as a mindset. Personally, I like saying the word shit, but adding virtually any variable to a chaotic system can have effects that weren't explicitly predicted.
>don't need to exist because of a reason that's explicit
Why do men have nipples? Because there is no reason not to.
Evolution need not a reason, but unless things do have a purpose, all things have a cost, whether it is raw unnecessary complexity, inefficient energy expenditure, or a novel external selective pressure.
Taboos and traditions may not _seem_ to have purpose - but that ignorance is basically the inverse of our God of the (Knowledge) Gaps. Not being attracted to individuals you spent a large amount of time with - and shaming/shunning those who do - is a positive instinct that directly reduces the incidence of incest, which is an act that _literally_ degrades biodiversity.
Sexism and racism make sense too. Sexism gives an immediate rise to familial hierarchies, which have more benefit in a hunter-gatherer context. Racism/Xenophobia is a geat instinct when we were territorial primates - those with differing skin tones/significantly different facial structure were likely competitors for resources and carried diseases you wouldn't have defenses for.
Religions all stem from the upper castes of ALL developed civilizations. The priests/shamans/wizards/sorcerers/wise men were the ones with the celestial knowledge required to dictate when to plant crops.
We evolved from apes; taboos and traditions are just remnants of our collective unconscious, and are just unneeded artifacts we will grow out of as technology and modernity progress.
To some degree Chesterton's fence applies here: if you don't know why a fence was put up, don't demolish it until you find out.
Many taboos and instincts have their roots in completely outdated utility - racism and sexism both used to serve evolutionary purposes, but stuck around LONG after they became useless.
Other taboos and traditions are still useful for society today, but are somewhat under attack - like the taboo on divorce/single parenthood. Studies show that children of divorced parents have much worse outcomes than children of parents who are still together, controlling for most variables.
I think there is a large chunk of society that is afraid we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so they think it's better to keep the bathwater...
I don't see how you control for the fact that couples who stay together are happier on average. That's why they're still together(at least some of the time), whereas divorcees are by definition not happy together.
To have a proper comparison you need to compare divorced parents to married, but miserable parents. Growing up with the latter can be just as miserable or possibly even more if it's an abusive marriage.
You don't need to control for that. We're looking at total outcomes, not individual points; it doesn't matter how it reaches the effect.
Here's a proposition: Learning to make compromises and achieve partnership with your partner and growing into it is the behavior most associated with happiness of couples. Having removed the obvious necessity of it, we've created a society with much more focus on individual wants and needs that gains less from cooperation, resulting in lower average outcomes.
Absolutely, the stigma on divorce was once too high, resulting in people staying in abusive relationships too long. But people still stay in abusive relationships. We can recognize that committed partnerships are healthy and encourage them without saying that any one individual is at fault if a relationship didn't work out.
> We can recognize that committed partnerships are healthy and encourage them without saying that any one individual is at fault if a relationship didn't work out.
Do we really need to encourage happy, healthy, and successful committed partnerships? Don't most people desire that for themselves? We should probably avoid outright discouraging them, but I suspect that most people are wanting a good, happy, loving, relationship and that if they divorce it's because they didn't have one.
I really don't think that it's simply a matter of most people seeing divorce as being so easy and consequence free that there's no value in putting in the effort to work things out with their spouses either. Especially not when children are involved.
Not encourage in the "rah rah, you should want this" sense, but in the "here's how to achieve this" sense - not running away is kinda key.
And it's become impossible to call out bad advice in the current climate. You can call out good advice as much as you want, because it's common wisdom, but any criticism of things that have been historically looked down upon as terrible ideas because they are is "punching down".
Yes, and it's not a simple matter to estimate those costs, let alone any point where a cost reaches the threshold of evolutionary pressure. There are plenty of examples in nature of things that are inefficient and suboptimal but the pressure to remove them is lacking. Or, there is an unseen benefit to things that seem to be "bad" that 21st century humans haven't figured out yet.
In theory, everything has a cost, just as the First Law of thermodynamics suggests that energy is conserved, even though in the real world neither energy or mass are conserved, making it much more complicated if not impractical to make predictions from alone. On the flip side, all matter has the added factor (substituting cost) of gravitation, which one might assume to always matter to some degree, yet it's so inconsequential at the molecular level that it's basically not even factored into most chemistry. My point being that whether we are capable to actually determine whether anything is a meaningful cost on a system is dubious.
> Taboos and traditions may not _seem_ to have purpose
And that could be a result of them actually having no purpose, but consequently having an effect that manages to allow them to survive and propagate.
> We evolved from apes; taboos and traditions are just remnants of our collective unconscious, and are just unneeded artifacts we will grow out of as technology and modernity progress.
A bit off topic but it might be an idea to move away from men's nipples [1] as an example of redundant evolution. It's true to say often an evolution trait has no obvious reason, possibly the reason no longer exists.
Most every community have a tangle of a belief system outside of anything religious. Moving away from more obvious isms, I grew up surrounded by fierce ageism especially in regard to the dating set. As young adult I eventually realised it was another ism that was BS, but also realised its presence waxed and waned over a number of years - it's clearly a product of social interactions.
Men's nipples are probably useful for the same reason many electronic products have various things on their circuit boards that aren't used: on those products, it's cheaper to manufacture a single circuit board to cover multiple variations of the product, and just attach the components needed for that particular model, leaving the rest unused. Genetically, it's probably easier for men and women to just share the same genetic code that produces nipples.
Exactly, it would take a costly mutation with dubious benefit - and since there is no selective advantageous pressure (men without nippples arent that _more_ attractive, definitely not enough to warrant the mutation) they continue to exist.
I understand but it was less fun to go down the shared male / female development path of why men end up with nipples :) The fact that men can lactate under unusual conditions has made me rethink using the idiom "as useless at tits on a bull" ... but I'm fairly sure that a bull would not let a hungry baby calf nuzzle long enough for it to find the bulls nipples.
How exactly does sexism (or lack thereof) signal confidence?
And on the word shit, there is a long tradition in various world cultures of curse words being named on bodily functions. But you are missing the obvious in that "curse" words are such because they were originally thought to bring a curse on the speaker or recipients from whatever god-entity they believe in. I suspect this is a manifestation of (ancient?) society's methods of trying to control the fuck out of everyone and it is a meme burned in our consciousness quite deeply at this point. But all that makes the entire notion of curse-words invalid; if their meaning is that which we attribute to them then they are meaningless and therefore harmless. But with morality unable to escape the shadow of primitive, ignorant times, they continue to be "taboo"
>How exactly does sexism (or lack thereof) signal confidence?
I think the argument they're making is that in a sexist culture all men will present with more confidence due to the belief that women are lesser. So the average woman will find the average guy more attractive...
Not sure how you came away with that conclusion. It's the exact opposite.
In a culture where sexism is more common, casual sexism will not stand out at all. The average guy will not appear more attractive. In a culture where sexism is largely frowned upon, being sexist but not too sexist is an act that stands out. A man who is either not sufficiently sexist or is silently sexist (for fear of repercussion) will appear average, because that category describes the average man. The man who is only slightly sexist and is just charming and good looking enough will win out because being sexist in front of a woman is the polar opposite of lacking confidence or placing the woman on a pedestal. They reside in a cozy region between the silent/supplicant majority of men and the ones who are either disgustingly sexist or are too physically unattractive to make up for saying something sexist.
No one's saying you or anyone have to like sexism. Being offensive in spite of blowback is a confidence move whether any individual finds it toxic or not.
You are making a ton of assumptions about the nature of confidence, attraction, and sexism, which potentially reveal your own biases. For one thing, I don't think that confidence and placing someone on a pedestal are "polar opposites" of each other, rather they are entirely different and uncorrelated dimensions of personality that can exist in any combination.
There are models of behavior describing personality across cultures, like Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions, that speak more broadly on the way a group behaves as a whole. You might want to give them a read.
They did not claim that "confidence" and "placing women on a pedestal" are polar opposites.
They claimed that "being sexist in front of a woman" and "lacking confidence" are polar opposites.
They also claimed that "being sexist in front of a woman" and "placing women on a pedestal" are polar opposites.
Do you disagree with their actual claims?
Apologies for possible pedantry. I think their actual claims are actually compatible with "confidence" and "pedestal-placing" being different dimensions.
Oh yeah definitely. It's easier to just have a general learned feeling of a taboo than to have to explain to everyone the historical and societal consequences of it to every person. It's a learned behavior that helps perpetuate a higher survival rate not because the thing itself is bad if done a handful of times but because it can get out of hand and be done by the whole population.
I've been starting to think the bible and other religions have their place due to this. Plot people on a bell curve, that's a lot of people that can't grasp basic nuance and critical reasoning.
I always thought it's just that there are things that you, personally, find weird and there are things you don't, and that it's heavily based on your upbringing, and because your neighbor will have a similar upbringing, both of you find the same things weird. When you hang with your neighbor, you will naturally shit on weird things, as we all like to do. A group of people automatically make up a society and so your society finds the exact same things weird and shits on the same things.
And at no point in the process did you have any individuality or real thought in the matter -- usually at least. Society created your identity and you simply promote it. Over time, opinions change because things happen to society collectively, but it's a slow process.
Taboo and stigma are also what drive irrational prejudices, so I'm not sure about the rush to judgment about, ummm, "important jobs" which definitely were not how society was organized during the vast majority of our evolution.
It’s like how religions tend to be similar and yet at their core are mostly emphasizing some ways to act and ways not to act. Often those ways tend to be similar. The result of mass compliance is a civilization larger than small tribes.
There's a whole field studying how our cultural capacity to create culture is one of the key abilities of human beings as a species, and how the cultures that we create are themselves subject to evolutionary pressures.
One good introduction is "The secret of our success" by Joseph Heinrich. There's a good review here:
> Moreover, they can be viewed as the 21st century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man.
is rather peculiar. I didn't expect that this is how neurologists and neuroscientists would speak these days. "Our postmodern society", "permanent identity crisis of the modern man" - these sentiments sound like they've been transplanted from a humanities paper.
This language style is a bit more common in academic writing outside of the Anglo tradition that is most commonly reported in the English-speaking world. British and American university training emphasises more clinical language, for better and worse.
I agree. It is a bit weird to see such subjective takes and cultural pessimism in an article like this. Hadn't noticed it the first time around, probably due to my own biases. So thanks for pointing it out.
Isn’t this kind of a social and cultural phenomenon though? It can’t be explained by means of a physical infection right, so it makes sense they have to reach for potential social or cultural answers?
A freaky thing that this paper doesn’t mention is that in some cases these tics have gotten so extreme, that one patient began having almost constant seizures and became wheelchair-bound. Imagine being “infected” by watching a video on TikTok! It sounds like a horror movie.
From The Guardian:
“Over the next few weeks, Wacek noticed that she was having tics. “They were just little noises,” she says. “Nothing to write home about.” She would scrunch up her nose, or huff. The tics escalated from sounds into words and phrases. Then the motor tics kicked in. “I started punching walls and throwing myself at things,” she says. By July, Wacek was having seizures. She had to stop work. “Being a chef with seizures is not safe at all,” she says.
Her GP referred her to a neurologist, who diagnosed her with functional neurological syndrome (FND). People with FND have a neurological condition that cannot be medically explained, but can be extremely debilitating. “In a general neurological clinic, around 30% of the conditions we see are not fully explainable,” says Dr Jeremy Stern, a neurologist with the charity Tourettes Action. In Wacek’s case, FND manifested in verbal and motor tics, not dissimilar from how Tourette syndrome appears to lay people, although the two conditions are distinct.
Wacek has up to 20 seizures a day and currently has to use a wheelchair.”
Yeah, I'm surprised on a forum like this people are using it as an opportunity to be like "ugh kids these days in $current_year seeking attention" and not "holy shit this is fascinating." Social media turned "picking up an accent" up to 11 in a way that actually manifests in tangible problems.
IMO the problem is that complex systems is not a field that is taken seriously yet. It got off to a bad start years back with that shitty James Gleick Chaos book.
We just don't have enough people thinking about this as a SIR model on a social graph to spark the conversation. We literally lack the critical mass of people understanding the language. Without the language the thoughts don't exist.
I am sure a 100 years from now people will look back at us as completely insane to be letting social contagions spread around to children as random graphs on a network.
They write 'people with FND have a condition that cannot be medically explained' as though it's just insufficient research, not understood yet. 'FND' is just polite for 'all in your head'. This article reads like 'they're being treated with a drug called Placebo'.
'All in your head' is an expression; one I perhaps should have avoided, obviously there are ailments located in the head that have a 'real' cause.
Panic attacks I suppose may present in 'functional' patients, but there are physiological causes too.
Anyway, I didn't really make any sort of comment on FND itself or patients with that diagnosis, I didn't say 'they just need to pull themselves together' or whatever. I just commented on the way the article was written, that it didn't seem like the author understood.
When I was in high school, one of the "popular" kids used to talk a bit odd on purpose and sure, it generated a bit of a chuckle at first, but he kept doing it and a lot of kids also adopted a similar vocal tic to seem like they were part of the cool group as well. Monkey see, monkey do.
The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a consciously learned accent of English, fashionably used by the late 19th-century and early 20th-century American upper class and entertainment industry, which blended together features regarded as the most prestigious from both American and British English (specifically Received Pronunciation). It is not a native or regional accent; rather, according to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so". The accent was embraced in private independent preparatory schools, especially by members of the American Northeastern upper class, as well as in schools for film and stage acting, with its overall use sharply declining after the Second World War.
Not Mid-Atlantic, but I've heard that one way to acquire a "standard" Mid-Western US accent is to speak along with a trained speaker, such as a particular newscaster. And "You are supposed to stop before sounding just like that person."
I worked with a couple of college classmates, who when they were taking to each other would use this hurry up to stop type of speech pattern. A few really quick words, then a pause, and a few more words. For autistic people this is called cluttering, but they talked to clients and others and didn’t talk that way, so I always wondered where it came from.
it sounds similar to how catch-phrases like simpsons and other shows become common things for kids to adopt and (over)use. i'd say it's hard to break patterns developed when young and seems to be what others around you are doing... downward spiral?
"they can be viewed as the 21st century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man."
There is a tendency to reify aberrations and disorders and to identify with them because it gives you another way of attaining a feeling of (false) "uniqueness" and exceptionality, or a way of trying to manipulate people into showing you "compassion" or pity. It's a disease of our age. "The spectrum" seems to be a popular example. These are afflictions, not identities. They're nothing to be proud of when you have them, if you have them, nor are they things to be desired.
There may also be passive-aggressive motives. Personal autonomy and the absolute sovereignty of the individual and his desires are a superordinate value today. We chafe under any perceived constraint or restraint on our desires. What do some people do when they don't want to follow some rule they should, but fear opposing that rule overtly? They rebel through small, passive-aggressive ways. Imagine now you are faced with the internalized emotional compulsion or fear to behave or not behave a certain way that you don't want to submit to, but fear opposing or ignoring for whatever reason. Simulating tics could be an interior rebellion against that undesired compulsion. Repeat something often enough, and it becomes a habit.
(Curiously, I would attribute the very cause of this inner struggle to our disordered attitude toward desire and appetite in the first place where the tail is essentially wagging the dog. Putting reason before desire and submitting to the truth liberates a person from the capricious tyranny of appetite.)
this reads to me like a typical modern's response to an unfamiliarity with the feeling of actually being one of the alienated people who are attempting with varying degrees of success to find anything of substance.
but really I think that alienation is dealt with differently by each subject, with temporally near groups just chosing similar patterns based on environmental and cultural factors.
there isn't any "right" way to deal with it, just the ones were currently trying. maybe it's good, maybe it's unhealthy, maybe it's going to cause the death of society. either way, the earth still spins.
As someone who deals with the misery of an “invisible” chronic illness, one of my great fears is that everyone (or the majority, anyway) thinks like GP.
For those who think this is "just" a fad, there are some descriptions of the emotional harm that that it can cause in this article from February: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/social-med... The semantics of "mass sociogenic illness" aside, there do seem to be damaging real-world consequences.
Imagine you start the same trend, but everyone tries for once to contribute something science wise original to society, so the problem is real, but the potential is greater.
Now comes the part, were advertisers try to create sociogenic illnesses that spread theire product/brands information.
We can also skip directly to the part, were we mourn the youtfull ideals of a idea, taken over by scammers.
Link this with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and receive prescribed brand candy/placebos for saying “Arr!” too much. Also prosthetics or an assistance bird.
> Imagine you start the same trend, but everyone tries for once to contribute something science wise original to society, so the problem is real, but the potential is greater.
I know you aren't totally serious, but this won't work, most likely. The "advantage" of having a tick like that is not just that it gives you attention, it's something absolutely low-effort and instant gratification. Contributing to science is anything but. Plus, even if individuals tried to do so, it's quite easy to miss newest research or fall for a fallacy, which will make for a net-negative contribution if you are not careful.
I wonder how similar this is to (sexy baby) valley girl upspeak & vocal fry.
Many young women picked this up from the Kardashians/Paris Hilton and now cannot "turn it off". We know this is not their 'natural' voice because if you ask them to make weird sounds and then a normal voice, then their normal voice sounds completely different than the sexy baby voice.
The weird thing is that the women themselves are surprised by this sound they're hearing and cannot easily reproduce it because the sexy baby voice is so deeply internalized.
I was friends with a nurse who told a story about a gay man who went into surgery. He had a heavy, stereotypical gay accent. But when he initially woke up after the surgery it was gone, and as the anesthesia faded, the accent slowly came back.
I'm sure it varies for each individual, but for at least some gay men, some portion of their accent might be an affectation (even if it's largely subconscious).
While a "gay accent" is subjective, let's stay on topic.
I don't know if I believe this story in full. An awake person is likely to showcase more linguistic characteristics vs a sedated person which would in turn sound less affectatious. It's hard to say, "Yes, Turntina slay!" when your groggier than a koala bear.
We don't know to what degree their voice "changed" but I find it more likely the story was slightly exaggerated to make the story appear more interesting.
I remember knowing a few people who had the stereotypical gay voice in high school or college, but did not talk about their sexuality, then lived as openly gay later on. So I don't think it always starts later in life, seems like it can even precede being out.
A college girlfriend even chewed me out for assuming one of those guys was gay based on the voice, and insisted he was straight. I think he is out now.
It would be interesting to see a linguistic or otherwise academic study on those vocal features. I'm sure people have looked at it. Here's a Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_male_speech
As a not so fem gay man myself I don't really hear this in my own voice.
I have heard it from some in the gay community and not from others. And in fact I have heard it in straight men, too - gaydar is a big mishmash of various observations - speaking in that voice can lead you to think someone might be gay but upon further examination, types of eye contact etc can show that they're not.
I think stereotyping everyone that speaks in a "gay" manner is a hurtful mistake.
You're right. It's not accurate all the time, it's a stereotype, it's misused to judge people, embracing it too much means losing sight of everyone's individuality.
Yet it has some cultural place and correlation. I think it's worthy of study by linguists or social scientists and so on.
I was finding it hard to talk about this without sounding offensive. As a straight guy I don't know how it reads to others.
Where I live it gets confusing as a lot of people put off those signals but are in instead just extra friendly straight people.
I thought a coworker was giving me signals previously and asked them if they use Grindr, and they said "I'm not gay", and I had to save face by saying "Oh sorry I meant Tinder, I said that because I'm gay haha, because I'm used to talking about the app I use haha, definitely not implying haha".
Actually the "gay voice" is subconcious feminisation, imo. Of which there are plenty of gay men who consciously or subconsciously style themselves with feminine traits.
But there are plenty of gay men such as myself who embrace more masculine traits; it's just that a long history of a homophobic society suppressed exposure of the public to "normal" gay dudes.
It doesn't help either that straight script writers wrote stereotype fem gay characters for laffs. But then in modern times a large portion gay men working in the industry are the fem type and therefore those are the characters they write or play.
I was in California for business a few years back, and she was visiting her best friend from high school in SFO.
So we all met up. My sister was all of a sudden talking in a sort-of valley girl accent. She said she just talked that way in California and had no idea why. At that time she was 34, but was visiting CA once or twice a year for the prior 10 years or so.
Lake Bell asks the person to speak in their highest note and then their lowest note and then yodel for a couple of times. Then to asks her to just speak, and the voice that comes out much closer to what we associate with a 'normal' woman's voice.
I guess having to manually change tone to such extremes resets the body's ability to recover this incredibly specific learnt behavior, and the person momentarily reverts to a clean sample of their own voice.
> resets the body's ability to recover this incredibly specific learnt behavior, and the person momentarily reverts to a clean sample of their own voice.
What is one's "own voice?"
Nearly all speech patterns, dialects, accents, patterns and phrasing is learned from one's social circle. Speech itself is "learnt behavior." It makes sense that those engaged in a subculture or online community may take up the way people talk in that sphere of social influence. Before hand, speech patterns evolved apart from one another due to geographic distance. In the modern era, it doesn't seem unreasonable that one would have greater influence from an online community than a local one.
I don't see any reason to privilege a specific, arbitrary way of speaking to be "normal" and one's "own voice" and others to be learnt behavior one "recovers" from.
The "normal" voice would probably be associated with clear diction, produced with the least physical effort based on the speakers physiology.
Think sighing loudly but neutrally, producing white noise. Then sigh loudly again, tightening the vocal cords just enough to add sound, with the least effort. Try talking like that or near that where it feels comfortable.
Wasted physical effort (in the sense of not adding clarity) in speaking is almost certainly culturally learned or due to the aesthetic/self-image of how one wants to hear oneself, attract and maintain listeners attention, differentiate oneself, etc.
Well... In my country there is a well known sociolect among well educated females. It also involves speaking in a low register. Doctors have found that this causes vocal chord scarring for some people. Not all learned behavior is favoured by the body, shall we say.
Ironically categorising this as an outbreak of illness legitimises the attention-seeking behaviour which is firmly predicated on being perceived as a sufferer of illness.
I don't think it does. I understand the implication here being the people affected are suffering from Tiktokitis, i.e. symptoms of a different disease, but caused by social media exposure. Suffering from that isn't going to earn you much compassion or street cred, particularly when the cure is to spend less time on social media.
> Over the past 2 years, a remarkably high number of young patients have been referred to our specialized Tourette outpatient clinic
> A large number of young people across different countries
How many exactly? Without numbers, calling it mass-anything is blowing this way out of proportion. So called fakeDisorderCringe has been a thing for a while, thanks to TikTok. But is there any sign that a) it is seriously widespread and b) doesn't "go away by itself", when the kids get bored of pretending?
This appears to be nothing more than a short lived cringy TikTok / YouTube trend that will be over sooner than later, no different from goth culture. God I am glad I will never have children that I need to keep from melting their brains with social media.
If it's an unconscious thing which transfers into "real life", that seems potentially important. It raises the question of what other unconscious behaviours (potentially harmful) are picked up in a similar way? Definitely an interesting starting point for further research.
You are saying, because you are uncomfortable discussing it, no one should discuss it? Feel free to correct me if I'm misreading you, it sounds like you're more or less saying, "things I don't like should go away and stop existing."
I always read flagged comments, and I vouch for them when I feel they've been unfairly flagged (or when they're from banned accounts that are automatically flagged, but the comment is unobjectionable).
This is however a tacit admission that what you have to say is against the guidelines of this site and that, were you to let it compete in the market place of ideas, it would be fail completely.
Not all scientific discussion is pleasant to hear, but it would be worth discussing, even if flagged and down voted, rather than "We were always at war with Eurasia".
If an idea goes against the guidelines of a website that doesn't mean it has a negative value, especially if users aren't allowed to interact with it at all.
I picked up a mental weirdness from the internet and now can't get rid of it: Trypophobia. I never experienced anything like it until Trypophobia was trending a few years back.
Awful doesn't even begin to describe those images. There's a another phobia transmitted by the internet, but I'm immune to it: Thalassophobia. There's even a reddit group dedicated to it:
There's a new Netflix series called Hot Skull around this theme. I haven't watched it yet but it looks like the premise is that a word virus infects people and they start talking gibberish.
This is alarmist BS. Facebook group fodder. “Humans have working mirror neurons” could have been the headline.
All of you futurists who have slipped down the slope are worried about media spreading “sociogenic illness”. Of course media is powerful. It always has been. There has been about 75 years of fears and schemes about using TV to mass hypnotize its watchers. The same with radio before it.
What is happening is mass unstructured clustering by social algos, specifically TikTok. Historically content and ad algorithms have focused on contextual relevance with structured categories. Graphs have extended that to included social context. TikTok has novel input parameters about user behavior. There have been many reports that this unstructured clustering is surfacing niche medical diagnoses regularly.
A lot of neurodivergent traits have historically been under diagnosed for the same goddamn ignorance as OP’s piece: “it’s just attention seeking”. This type of dismissal by parents, teachers, and doctors alike have lead to millions of people leading shorter, harder lives. ADHD, Autism, Tourette’s, Bipolar, schizophrenia, etc are present in larger numbers than are diagnosed. Often time these lifelong genetic differences lead to 10x+ higher suicide rates, inability to sustain work, and myriad health issues. It’s really common that mental health issues that don’t result in property damage just get ignored, downplayed, or under treated even if acknowledged.
I was diagnosed with ADHD at age 29. Having that information combined with medication, therapy, and exercise has changed my life for the better dramatically. If TikTok was the surface where I discovered that, I would have likely been dismissed or even openly mocked by my doctors, and continued with a life of suffering or worse.
By the way, it seems people cited in the article are experiencing a form of Tourette’s syndrome that is a typical neurological trait associated with other pathology. Echolalia has far less cultural awareness, but accurate describes the behavior: “Echolalia is not only associated with Autism, but also with several other conditions, including congenital blindness, intellectual disability, developmental delay, language delay, Tourette's syndrome, schizophrenia and others.” it’s not just swear words like on TV. My child does this. What happened to start as a YouTube ad for “Raid Shadow Legends” turned into a joke punchline, turned into a phrase that they cannot stop themselves from saying compulsively at odd times, after multiple years. It’s sub-clinical by itself, but is consistent with the diagnosis they do have.
This article is red meat, BS fear bait at best, dangerous at worst. To the extent content like this actually promotes diagnosis denial, it’s complicit in very literal harm of patients and those around them.
Exactly.
The car is just a better version of the horse and buggy. There are no massive sociological changes that came from the invention of the automobile.
Human social behavior is completely scale invariant.
Society is just the relationship I have with my brother, replicated millions of times with no higher order effects, weird feedback loops, weird non-linear effects.
I'm not aware of convincing evidence that bipolar and schizophrenia are of genetic origin (other than that schizophrenia sometimes runs in families). There are serious people that insist that they originate in childhood trauma. And since childhood trauma also sometimes runs in families, family histories of schizophrenia aren't that convincing either.
Wiki says "Genetic factors account for about 70–90% of the risk of developing bipolar disorder." https://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/resources-support/bipol... says 80%, and says "If one parent has bipolar disorder, there’s a 10% chance that their child will develop the illness. / If both parents have bipolar disorder, the likelihood of their child developing bipolar disorder rises to 40%."
I haven't dug into the paper yet, but there's a starting point.
Edit: The paper says "More recent (and rigorous) studies that have compared concordance rates specifically of bipolar disorder among MZ [monozygotic] and DZ [dizygotic] twin pairs are summarized in table 2." The table shows four studies that gave concordances of 0.00-0.08 for dizygotic twins, and 0.36-0.75 for monozygotic twins.
> If both parents have bipolar disorder, the likelihood of their child developing bipolar disorder rises to 40%
If both parents were traumatized as kids, and childhood trauma runs in families, then that adds no weight to claims that the disorder is genetic. To show a genetic origin, you have to point to a gene, not a pile of statistics.
Did you see the part about monozygotic vs dizygotic twins? Do you have any explanation other than genetics for it? For example, do you think parents are 4.5-9x more likely to traumatize both their twin children if the twins are identical instead of fraternal?
Is this different from any other learned behaviour? If a baby hangs around English speaking people they are going to learn to speak the language with the same accent. Then you see a group of kids where every sentence is peppered with the F-bomb, it's all the same right?
> Functional ‘Tourette-like’ symptoms can be regarded as the ‘modern’ form of the well-known motor variant of mass sociogenic illness.
> Moreover, they can be viewed as the 21st century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man.
I think this is why Orwell put the "two-minute hate" into Nineteen
Eighty Four. Chuck Palahniuk agrees. It is after all a quite strange
device within the story. Otherwise Emmanuel Goldstein is a standard
"outsider/other" hate figure to focus the alienated minds into war
ritual, but the chanting takes on a stronger meaning in Orwell's story
akin to something from Conrad's Heart of Darkness (Apocalypse Now).
Then there are the outbursts of Howard Beale in Chayefsky's 1976
Network.... "Open the window and scream - I'm as mad as hell and I'm
not going to take it any more".
There is a thing, "primal scream therapy" (Arthur Janov) known to have
outstanding effects for these kinds of neuroses, but it's somewhat
discredited, perhaps because it reveals socially uncomfortable truths.
I'm lucky enough to live in a place where one can yomp out a few miles
and shout at the hills and the sea.
EDIT: Forgot to address the point of how tics astem from blocked
affect, but I expect many of you will make that connection naturally.
It almost feels like gpt created literature when you start to read it, seemingly linking unrelated issues and concepts. But later in I became convinced it’s real and very interesting. Very meme-like, in the original definition of meme that is. A “virus” of the mind.
The last sentence of the abstract felt especially unnatural:
> since spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations such as local communities or school environments spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations such as schools or towns.
The whole sentence could use some more punctuation marks, like so:
A large number of young people across different countries are affected, with considerable impact on health care systems and society as a whole. Since spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations such as local communities or school environments, spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations such as schools or towns.
The second sentence both says the same thing twice and actually doesn't make any sense when you parse it.
> Since spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations such as local communities or school environments, spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations such as schools or towns.
The sequence "spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations" appears in exactly that sequence twice in that sentence. If you cut the redundancy down to "spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations", that doesn't make sense either since social media was never restricted to specific locations.
I'm not saying it's definitely written entirely by GPT, but mindlessly repeating sequences is very GPT-like behavior. Maybe academics are using GPT to pad their word count? Or maybe the authors and their editors just need more coffee?
They used the phrase "spread via social media" and pointed out that spread isn't locally restricted anymore twice for no reason. They're also using circular reasoning. A more concise way to phrase this would have been:
> since [the images and videos] are shared via social media, spread is no longer restricted to specific locations such as local communities or school environments.
>Olvera’s research has not gone down well in some quarters. “I’m frustrated,” she says. “I’ve tried to stop reading a lot of what is written out there.” She’s received “lots” of angry emails. “My colleagues have had a positive response to my research,” she says, “but I don’t know if it’s been perceived appropriately by the public. The last thing I would want is for my patients to walk away from this thinking that their disorder is fake or not worthwhile.”
>Much of the controversy arises from the misapprehension that doctors are accusing young people of faking Tourette’s for attention, or arguing that TikTok is giving people Tourette’s. Neither claim is true. “What the media has boiled it down to,” says Olvera, “is that if it’s not Tourette syndrome, it’s fake. But just because it’s not Tourette syndrome doesn’t mean it’s fake. This is a real condition. Even though it’s not typical Tourette’s, it’s very disruptive and stressful.”
If you can't voluntarily stop it and it's causing negative effects to your quality of life then why can't it be called an illness? These people aren't going to get professional help just for the fun of it
> Third, patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasant tasks because of their symptoms resulting in release from obligations at school and home, while symptoms temporarily completely disappear while conducting favourite activities.
That makes no comment about whether the symptoms are on purpose, or unconscious. Ask any ADHD or OCD person about "symptoms that arise around unpleasant tasks"
If social contagion can get people to develop serious ticks imagine how many things we automatically do or feel or think that are a mere result of random social pressures
"A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY." - A Brave New World
I have to wonder if mirror neurons play a part in this. Perhaps there’s something that’s fundamentally common to both ‘real’ tics and these types of non-Tourette’s tics. A person could already be predisposed to something like Tourette’s and seeing these videos could be the thing that ignites the kindling for them.
Somewhere I already read about that. It's a fad. A youtuber shows Tourette's symptoms and people copy them. Perhaps it's like stimming. And you can't stop fads and stimming. We see that some people are annoyed. (shrugs)
But when a fad becomes destructive to someone's life to the point where they can't voluntarily stop it and seek professional treatment for it, it becomes an illness and is worth investigating.
> (shrugs)
Those affected by it don't seem to be able to shrug it off. It's having a negative effect on their quality of life
But if they claim it's a disease, and it's clearly spreading through social media, then the obvious measure to stop it from spreading, is to block the channels through which it's spreading.
anecdotally, i had a professor (if you're reading this, hi) who would wink in conversation at exactly the right point to add a little "isn't the world a funny place" comedy to whatever he was saying... wasn't clear if intentional or a tic for when he thought he had said something clever. I noticed that habit to have transferred to me for a while after, though I think now it's faded.
I can think of another social contagion that’s exploded in the last 5 years. However, those that have it are above all criticism except in TERF spaces.
You are completely right that TERFism is an issue. It certainly has a rapid onset and has been shown to be a pathway to white supremacy.
Terfism is a phenomenon where individuals who have previously identified as feminists or LGBT allies to suddenly adopt trans-exclusionary beliefs and begin to oppose the rights and dignity of transgender people. It also describes individuals who have undergone a sudden and dramatic change in their beliefs about transgender people who aren't feminists, often as a result of exposure to extremist or hateful ideas.
It certainly has been seen as a manifestation of prejudice and bigotry and is one of the reasons this commenter is using an anonymous account.
> Third, patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasant tasks because of their symptoms resulting in release from obligations at school and home, while symptoms temporarily completely disappear while conducting favourite activities.
I think this here is enough to explain everything about this "mysterious illness".
> About half of Generation Z feels stressed or anxious with climate change being the top concern. Eco-anxiety is associated not only with fear, panic attacks, feelings of anger, guilt and helplessness, but also uncontrollability, unpredictability and uncertainty.
Yet, the politicians continue to do almost nothing. When does Gen Z start voting?
This may be speculation but I believe that part of the problem is that TikTok is very good at finding content which entertains you even when you shouldn't be entertained based on your current mental health/emotions. This means it targets more unhealthy pathways in order to elicit an emotional reaction.
While this article and many like it suggest a sudden rise in cases due to a 2021 Youtube influencer, this was already spreading in 2020. Girls in my daughter's social network were displaying tic behaviour in the months after the first major lockdowns.
The fact that NXIVM could successfully suppress crippling Tourette's in a number of cases has to at least mean that Tourette's itself (or some subset of what is grouped under Tourette's) isn't strictly biological.
It seems this was done through Nancy Salzman's application of the NLP voodoo she had used as a chronic pain therapist, and possibly boosted by immense pressure to not tic or else be seen as both a failure and a PR danger to the cult. However it was done, it was clearly successful. Are there any studies about "actual" (non-internet video related) Tourette's patients transmitting tics to each other?
This sucks as someone who has had movement disorders(essential tremor, tics) for decades. It also sucks because the covid booster, like a flu shot years ago(only one, I get them every year) caused a dramatic worsening of my tics for a few months.
I didn't realize the whole 'covid tic hysteria' was even a thing until I googled 'covid vaccine tics' after personally experiencing a dramatic worsening of symptoms.
It's not commonly discussed, but suicide seems to be a "sociogenic illness" in that reporting on suicides as such can cause more suicides. You may have noticed this in the reporting on celebrity deaths; a young person who "dies suddenly" may be suicide, but news reports will tend to avoid saying that out of concern for the sociogenic effects.
It absolutely is commonly discussed in mental health circles. Suicides cluster is a common theme among health experts. When you see one suicide among a target population (youth for example), you will commonly see multiples.
My university went 6 years without a suicide, and then had 3 highly publicized suicides over the year. They then put in a lot of effort to bury it as much as possible, students went home for the summer, and the university had a few suicide-free years right after
Unfortunately I knew 2/3, and it was well known to be due to the risk of failing a course. Now the university makes sure that no-one knows if there was suicide note and the details of they committed suicide.
The eerie thing was the fact that they all killed themselves in exactly the same way. (hanging off a the ceiling)
But ofc, the plural of anecdotes is not data. There I agree with you.
For the reason you discuss you should delete your comment. Airplanes crashes rise when the media discusses these topics: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1746810.
It's not clear to me that discussing the effect causes the effect. It's an effect that's been specifically documented in response to media coverage of suicide. The consensus from suicide prevention orgs seems to be that compassionate, interpersonal discussions about suicide prevention are probably helpful. Not sure if that's backed by research.
It is helpful because discussing a negative thing in society spreads it without need. Like if you find out everyone’s secrets and scandals, you become more uninhibited
So if I understand what you're saying correctly, you view talking about suicide as something that's going to potentially spread suicide/suicidal ideation and therefor if you're going to talk about it that's got to be balanced by a real need for that discussion?
Proprietary software that rewrites brains hum interesting
you dont need need science to tell you what going on you only need to meditate and ask the universe.
If you edit it, it will save without modification (auto-stripping of certain things happens only on first save) - though in this case it's probably better just to remove 'stop that' altogether?
I just experienced this today; I was walking down the street and a teenager walking by himself abruptly made this sharp random shrieking sound to no one in particular and then kept walking along.
Could he actually have Tourette's by traditional clinical definition? Certainly. But I'm inclined to beleive that it has much more to do with this article's definition and how f***d the youth are against the whole social media scene today.
Could be many reasons, who knows. Maybe they were looking at something on their phone that evoked their reaction, maybe they heard something in their earphones, maybe they suddenly saw a bird nearby that scared them, or maybe they just remembered something which ended up causing it.
The latter happens to me occasionally, and I am fairly certain it has nothing to do with Tourette's. Usually it is me walking somewhere, then remembering something I forgot that i needed to do or having some realization, and I just end up going "oh fuck" or "ooooh". Not loudly like a yell, but definitely audible to someone within a 5-10 feet range.
It could also be what you are suspecting as well, but without actually talking to the person, there is quite literally no way to know. So imo it is a rather pointless exercise.
Yes it is. The other examples you list have different etiologies and present differently. The people doing them are different, and so is the medium. The cause may be different, and so may the outcome. Anyway, we don't just stop thinking about new things because they can be analogized to existing things.
This paper is written by a German psychiatrist, describing the emergence of this phenomenon in Germany, and across the first world.
They advocate naming this illness as a new type of "mass sociogenic illness (MSI) (also known as ‘mass psychogenic illness’, MPI) that in contrast to all previously reported episodes of MSI is spread solely via social media and hence is not locally restricted." "...we therefore suggest the more specific term ‘mass social media-induced illness’ (MSMI)"
‘mass social media-induced illness’ (MSMI)
I think they could have left the "-induced" part out of this name 8-/
The psychological effects on a person, in their opinions, "happiness", sense of urgency, priority of issues, etc, based on what that person spends their waking hours viewing/reading/listening to, is still a vastly uncharted territory. No doubt the CIA/FBI/Military could shed some light if they would declassify their records of torture and mind control.
But likely the worlds wealthiest people, via their corporations based on manipulating peoples mental state for the purpose of maximizing resource extraction, are already breaking new ground well beyond the now primitive efforts of "MK Ultra" etc.
The simplest way to minimize the effects of ‘mass social media illness’, is not to participate. Not only in what's typically labeled "social media', but in any form of internet media, especially video formatted, that is allegedly seeking to communicate information, or present an opinion/position.
READ if you want to learn, WATCH if you want to be manipulated!
With text, information is taken in at the speed and cadence chosen by the reader. When watching, a person is a passive subject to the presenter. Images and especially moving video manipulate each individuals psychology in ways that are largely not well understood, and certainly massively under appreciated by the overwhelming majority of this type of media's viewers.
To try to express how broad of a subject this is, one could compare this article on Twerk Tik Tourette's with the mechanizations of "surveillance consumerism", as well as the overwhelming variety of modern neurotic behaviors and anxieties experienced by those in continuous media immersion, thus primarily young people in the first world.
The most straight forward "cure"? GO OUTSIDE! Bathe your senses in organic images, sounds, and the ultimate high resolution, 3D integrated sensory experience!
In short, get up and walk out!
Best of luck in the new year and the ongoing disaster of the new millennium...
So, these people are trying to convince us that SnowCrash is basically a realistic story, and no, modern society is not fed up with what happened in the recent years. I believe neither. "Outbreak" your a*!
There's no heroes and no villains here, but if someone has got something bigoted to say, then they should dispose of their waste or surrender the restroom. It doesn't make it any more or less bigoted to be circumspect, it only makes it difficulty to have a proper discussion. If they believe what they have to say isn't bigoted, they should take courage in their convictions and speak their mind. If they're punished in a way that's unfair, then that's something with bringing to the community's attention. If they don't actually have confidence in their convictions, maybe their ideas need some more time to develop before they're comfortable sharing them (and maybe the reason they're uncomfortable is that there's a problem).
I'm not trying to silence anyone, when people vaguepost, clearly there's something on their mind, and I'm inviting them to express it.
Do you think that's an unfair position for me to take? What I see is that they did say what was on their mind, we had a substantive discussion, no one got flagged, no one got banned, their comment isn't even gray. The reports of HN being hostile to this discussion are greatly overstated.
Fuck it, I'll take the karma hit. I am of course referring to young girls identifying as male/non-binary.
I'm sure some of the cases are genuine, but not all. And I'm not saying these girls aren't troubled or have other things going on that they need help with.
I appreciate your being willing to speak your mind without hiding behind vaguery. We can risk a karma hit together.
You are referring to a myth called "Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria," which has been debunked. Gender identity is not a socially transmitted pathology. I don't believe you meant this in a hateful way, but let me explain what the problem is with this idea. This is sophistry about how LGBTQ people should remain in the closet, or they'll "infect" people, and the evidence is that as we tolerate LGBTQ people more, more of them come out of the closet. It's a reversal of cause and effect, from the same school as "discussing the history of racism is racist".
Let's first be clear that gender dysphoria is a real thing, and transitioning has been a very real solution for many people, and has helped people from depression, possibly suicidal, to a much happier state, and that's great. It's vital we don't lose that.
At the same time, it's been politicised; there's a lot of conservative pushback claiming this isn't real, leading to resistance against this pushback, where I wonder if some people may sympathise with transgender people to the point that they also identify as transgender despite a lack of gender dysphoria, and that might create a fad that might cause more people to transition and later regret it.
Gender dysphoria is a serious medical issue, and should not be a fad or a cultural or political issue. Transitioning is effective treatment, and not some fun thing to do like getting a tattoo, nor should it be considered an assault on anyone's cultural, religious or political beliefs.
And if it really is happening more to girls than boys, maybe consider if cultural sexism might cause some women to not want to identify as such anymore. Especially in the face of issues like rape, bodily autonomy, but also acceptable jobs and behaviours. Maybe we should be more tolerant of cross-dressing.
> Let's first be clear that gender dysphoria is a real thing
To be clear, the pain someone is feeling is real but the "reality" of a condition is a bit of an unclear concept. We can't really address this until we try to control for the gendered expectations of the sufferer, their surroundings, and any observers. Suzie Green of Mermaids has said that some of their motivation in transing their son as a toddler was his father's discomfort with some of the toys he was playing with and the homosexual connotations. Likely if the boy had tolerant and unbiased parents he'd be happy as a man, and thus it's unlikely he truly had "gender dysphoria" unless you count whatever his parents conditioned into him.
> and transitioning has been a very real solution for many people
Again, hard to say given that the decision probably was not made in isolation from heavily gendered expectations. There's reason to think that removing those expectations would have made them at least as happy, if not more.
> Transitioning is [...] treatment, and not [...] an assault on anyone's cultural, religious or political beliefs.
For an adult it's a personal choice and we should have pretty wide latitude in things that only impact us. It becomes a societal and political issue when it's brought into schools, or when males are given access to women's spaces and opportunities.
> And if it really is happening more to girls than boys, maybe consider if cultural sexism might cause some women to not want to identify as such anymore. Especially in the face of issues like rape, bodily autonomy, but also acceptable jobs and behaviours. Maybe we should be more tolerant of cross-dressing.
Errr, that's the wrong takeaway. If a woman wasn't going to get promoted then her putting on pants won't help, and if she was going to get abused it wouldn't trick her attacker. We should work to remove or mitigate those problems so she doesn't feel the need to hide her true self.
If a woman is thought to be able to avoid rape by dressing like a man and/or having surgeries to reduce her sexual attractiveness then women will be thought to be asking for it ("How was she dressed? Did she still have her breasts?") for not doing those things.
> Suzie Green of Mermaids has said that some of their motivation in transing their son as a toddler was his father's discomfort with some of the toys he was playing with and the homosexual connotations.
Excuse me, a toddler? A toddler and any kind of sexual connotations? I have no idea what you're talking about, but you're packing a lot of red flags in that sentence.
> > and transitioning has been a very real solution for many people
> Again, hard to say
No, this part isn't hard to say. Whether in some cases strict gender expectations might cause gender dysphoria might be hard to say, but I know too many people for whom transitioning has been a very real solution to think it might be "hard to say" if it really did.
We should definitely reduce restrictive gender expectations, but I don't think that's going to completely eliminate gender dysphoria.
> Excuse me, a toddler? A toddler and any kind of sexual connotations?
Her words: “As a toddler, Jackie always headed for the dolls in toy shops.”
In her Tedx talk, Green says that as soon as her baby boy “got mobile” “he was gravitating to things that you would think are stereotypically female”. [...] “the Polly Pocket and My Little Pony”, she says, and then quickly adds “that was fine – but not for Dad”. Green’s then husband disapproved of his son playing with My Little Pony toys and therefore banned them from the house.
> I have no idea what you're talking about, but you're packing a lot of red flags in that sentence.
Adults projecting their gender insecurities and stereotypes onto children should raise red flags.
> I know too many people for whom transitioning has been a very real solution to think it might be "hard to say" if it really did.
What do you mean by transition? Sex-change operations or "social transition"?
Because if you mean the latter then a main part of it is to act in a way your internalized gender stereotypes wouldn't have let you, so of course kind of by definition you'll feel better. But it's hard to say the transition caused the improvement because they're also changing their expectations for themself at the same time. Could they have simply dropped the regressive stereotypes they were inflicting on themselves without declaring a new identity?
I would save the phrase "it works" for something that we know works better than a null intervention and doesn't introduce any new problems.
Has ROGD been absolutely debunked? Last I checked it was still pretty debated, I see discussions about it all the time still. When I search for papers I see the original [1], criticisms [2], and a correction issued by the original authors [3] which holds to most of their starting claims.
Obviously being cis and childless I don't have a horse in this race, but it seems to me that there's still a fair amount of disagreement in the field, and the ROGD's existence or non-existence isn't really settled. The result found by the original paper may be unpopular, but it's bad science to hide it away solely for that reason.
That is, unfortunately, not an argument. To apply your line of thinking to the OP, would you say that "children displaying Tourette's symptoms from watching a YouTuber is a reversal of cause and effect"? The OP does not make that conclusion, and most of this comment section accepts that as well. I, like GP, would be interested to hear how this would be reconciled.
This is a valid criticism. What you have highlighted is a shortcoming in my ability to elucidate this topic.
My comment is more an invitation to explore the argument yourself. This isn't a formal debate where I've shown up prepared with notes, I didn't know I'd be speaking about this topic today. If I tell you what I know, you can think about whether it makes sense to you, and you can use extract search terms to research and learn more. You don't have to take my word for anything, but I don't have to remember how I learned something to participate in a casual forum conversation either.
That being said, I am starting to make an effort to catalog resources and be able to share them, because I do think it makes my comments better, but this is a work in progress. C'est la vie.
As to how this argument relates to the Tourettes-like symptoms discussed in the article, these are simply different phenomena. It's reasonable to observe this phenomenon and ask, "Does this apply to other phenomena?", and in the case of the increasing number of open trans people in our society, I'm telling you the answer is "no" and doing my best to explain why.
I don't think at all that LGBTQ people "infect" people - that is your choice of words, not mine.
But it seems strange to think that tourettes, anorexia, self-harming and even suicide can be socially transmitted but for this one specific condition (for which there is no medical test) it's impossible and has never happened.
I understand these are not the words you used, or necessarily ideas you hold; what I am describing is the role it plays in the wider rhetorical space. I should have made that more clear, it does look like I was calling you out for that. I'll see if I can edit it in a better way.
Recommending literature is a skill I am still working on; I know things about this or that, but I didn't keep a record of how I learned them, and it's been months or years now. The Wikipedia article has discussion of criticism which may be a good place to start. If you're interested in YouTube videos, there is a large community of trans people who discuss their experiences in the form of video essays. ContraPoints and Philosophy Tube are some of the best known; you may or may not appreciate their politics, that's not what I'm suggesting, but they have a lot of content about what it's like to be a trans person, why they're trans, how they became trans, etc. that's just very difficult information to come by any other way.
I appreciate your good faith and curious engagement with me.
It's honestly enough to remember and point out the whole concept is based on a study that only polled parents who aren't supportive of their trans kids. Anyone with a shred of genuine interest in being fair and accurate should be able to see right through the study. It's so bad that even prominent transphobes don't seem to talk about it anymore.
ROGD is the term given to the phenomenon of teenagers with no history of gender dysphoria suddenly announcing a transgender identity, typically after spending massive amounts of time online, and often after a friend has announced that they are trans. Who would be better placed to notice this set of circumstances than their parents?
>> "The term "rapid-onset gender dysphoria", coined by Littman, first appeared in a July 2016 notice that was posted on four websites, recruiting parents to respond to a research survey that Littman described as "Rapid onset gender dysphoria, social media, and peer groups".[27] In the title of Littman's poster abstract for the study, published in February 2017, the phrase appeared as "Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria".[28]"
It's not a thing. What is a thing is kids finding language to describe what they experience. Expanding vocabulary and ability to communicate is normally lauded and praised.
Littman's study hasn't been discredited though. It's been robustly critiqued, as one would expect for any research that advances a novel hypothesis.
The main issue that people have with her study is that it challenges the often deeply held belief that a person's gender identity is innate; it hypothesises that there is a population of trans-identifying people who have adopted this identity via sociogenic means. By doing so, it calls into question the affirmation-only clinical approach that has been so ascendant in recent years.
Challenging people's fundamental beliefs and practices on a topic is never going to be popular amongst those who hold such beliefs. This is why her research received such an intense backlash, and why activists are so keen to claim that it's been debunked and discredited, even when it hasn't.
Can confirm - ContraPoints and Philosophy Tube both are excellent resources on the topic, who discuss at length their motivations and experiences.
They're also very entertaining to watch, and extremely well read, particularly in Psychology and Philosophy. 2 of the more educational YT channels, even if you subtract all their material dealing with LGBTQ+ issues.
It is mass psychosis at this stage. Friend is a teacher in a very wealthy suburban area and 50%+ of the class identifies as non-binary (apparently). We're supposed to believe this is organic and totally normal?
It's pretty easily explained, they think it's cool to say they are nonbinary, or pansexual, or genderfluid, or something along those lines. One popular/alpha kid says it and soon their entire clique gloms on. Adding to the allure for teens is that some adults find this shocking. They are not really committing to anything, and they know it. They're doing it for social karma. Teens have done this kind of thing forever.
Non-binary simply mean that you do not identify with the two currently accepted gender identity or that you do not perceive gender as a binary system but as a spectrum. That's it. It does not mean that the person suffers from gender dysphoria or that they want to transition. For many, it's simply a way to describe their existing social behavior. It is also an umbrella word that houses many other identies.
I'd also challenge the "50%" number you advance.
Canada asked the question in last year's census and it was under 1%. 50% would be enormous.
"Younger generations had larger shares of those who were transgender or non-binary. The proportions of transgender and non-binary people were three to seven times higher for Generation Z (0.79%) and millennials (0.51%) than for Generation X (0.19%), baby boomers (0.15%) and the Interwar and Greatest Generations (0.12%).
Together, over 1 in 6 non-binary people described their gender as "fluid" (7.3%), "agender" (5.1%) or "queer" (4.1%). Other responses included "gender neutral" (2.9%), "Two-Spirit" (2.2%), "neither man nor woman" (1.3%) and "gender-nonconforming" (1.1%)."
"Non-binary" is commonly described as a trans identity, and the word "trans" is etymologically related to "transition". If there really was nothing else to it than the truism that "gender is not merely a binary system but a spectrum", no one would be talking about non-binary as an identity of its own - since this has been a consensus POV for decades.
It is not tran[sition]gender. It is the "trans-" Latin prefix meaning "across", "beyond" or "on the other side of" + gender.
In other words, people who moved on from the gender assigned to them at birth.
Some non-binary people identify as transgender but not all of them do. Just like non-binary is both an umbrella term and a spicific gender identity, transgender is both an umbrella term and a specific gender identity. You'll often see the shorthand "trans*" to describe the umbrella term and the shorthand "enby" to describe the specific gender identity.
Examples of clear gender identities that are not used as umbrella terms are: trans women, trans men, genderfluid, agender, demigirl, etc.
> In other words, people who moved on from the gender assigned to them at birth.
Yes, and the Latin word trānseō (nominal form trānsitiō → English: transition) means exactly to "go on across", "go beyond". Trāns ("across, beyond") + eō, it ("I go, he/she/it goes") + tiō (→ English: "-tion"). It's a distinction without a difference.
My point is that they share a source and are siblings, but one is not the parent of the other. Being transgender is not about the medical or social transition, it is about how the person identifies.
What does it mean to "identify" with a claim about what society is like - namely that "binary" gender might be more of a spectrum, with weird liminal stages in-between? You've said that this is what "non-binary" is about. How does this even begin to square with all those other notions about gender identity being something exceedingly clearcut, that someone can base major life decisions on?
That 50% number is anecdotal, from a friend whose a teacher in a middle school (norther Virginia) ... My guess is 100% of these children are on Tiktok/Snapchat, ingesting whatever content is being fed to their impressionable minds. Its certainly an internet driven phenomenon.
Then it is meaningless and hazardous to build an opinion upon it.
> My guess is 100% of these children are on Tiktok/Snapchat
TikTok usage is at 32.2% for children aged 10-19. Snapchat usage is at 59% for children aged 13-24. That would be unlikely. Those two platforms also share little in term of features and functionality. How are they relevant here and why single them out?
I’m sorry, but if you think TikTok and Snapchat have little overlap in their user base and feature set, you shouldn’t be speaking so confidently about teens issues because your perspective is woefully outdated.
I worked at Snapchat. Nearly every new feature we made was to compete with TikTok and drag eye ball time back from them into Snap. It sounds like you just googled “TikTok usage teens” and are using that to advance your (very shaky) argument about gender ideology.
I have teenage sisters and we talk frequently about how different discourse has become in their classrooms than it was 10 years ago when I was in high school. The 50% anecdote claimed doesn’t surprise me at all, after what I’ve heard.
Yes, just as Facebook and Instagram are also chasing a piece of the TikTok pie.
But they are not the same, they just share some features that have been added as updates. They are used by the same demographic, which is why I provided the stats for both. I wrote them in response to the claim that 100%, not 50%, of the class uses them which is unlikely. The 50% figure refers to the claim that 50% of the class identifies as non-binary, which is even more unlikely.
Ultimately, we are debating anecdotal exaggerations. Your response to that? You add another anecdote from a third party. Again, this has little value before actual polls and censuses.
You're also confusing two parts of this conversation: one is about gender identities, the other is about app usage. The two topics were brought into the picture with bogus statistics, so I brought them both up. However, they have little to do with each other.
What's interesting to me is that if we're able to accept the idea that mass social media-induced illness can be developed just by virtue of video watching TikTok or YouTube, then this opens new doors to examining the behaviour of other illnesses such as gender dysphoria that are statistically over represented. This is probably going to get downvoted to oblivion, because nobody wants to confront the idea that we can _learn_ to want to be another gender. But I think there's some interesting parallels to be observed here, and discounting that based on "moral virtue" or "denying hate speech" or whatever i'll be attacked with is just moving the target.
This is exactly what I thought of when I saw "social media-induced illness": MSMI
I saw this in the school I led, especially in young girls. One of them starts cutting, suddenly we have multiple girls cutting. One of them struggles with bulimia, suddenly the guidance counselor is reporting that she has an inordinate number of girls coming in for counselling about bulimia.
I dont think its any different with claiming to be transgender. And my current school counselor contact confirms that - for every one child she sees that she believes may actually struggle with body dysmorphia and she believes may be trans, there are 10 more coming in because its the 'thing' to be. These are usually kids who are troubled and are desperately seeking attention and care, legit needs, but going about it the only way they see that's acceptable. They gain attention, they gain power, and in an odd way, status among their peers for 'being who they are.'
> I saw this in the school I led, especially in young girls. One of them starts cutting, suddenly we have multiple girls cutting. One of them struggles with bulimia, suddenly the guidance counselor is reporting that she has an inordinate number of girls coming in for counselling about bulimia.
When you showcase suicides on TV you also have upticks in suicides. Same goes for mass shootings, copycat murderers, and even political protests.
When the 101 dalmatians movie was released, there was also an uptick in demand for dalmatians.
I fail to see how this means it's ok to fabricate diseases to downplay the effect that mass media has on people.
Disclaimer: I am transgender and i have done actual research on transgenderism a couple years back.
I have seen this firsthand on some acquaintances. Social media has a massive influence on people and there are some persons specifically that have a weaker sense of identity (usually associated with poor development or some mental disorder like schizophrenia, STPD, or BPD), and those persons can be influenced to the point of actually, legit molding their own identity by their own media consumption.
This consumption in most people only plants seeds that will lead to questioning or trying stuff, but won't have a long-lasting impact on their core identity. So for most people this kind of exposition will be something either transitory or will just provide awareness. People grow out of it and it actually it's "just a phase" for many.
So yes people can learn to have a new identity if they don't have a strong core identity formed yet or if it is weak or broken enough.
OTOH, i am unsure what do you mean by a statistical over-representation of GD. There are no bounds set for deviation of the norm for the general population (i.e. normalized rate of growth of % of population that is transgender is not an outlier vs the rate of growth of other emergent behaviors afforded by greater overall inclusion and reduction of discrimination). The places where it is statistically over-represented, like on people within the Autism Spectrum, are under investigation.
In any case the risks of social media brainwashing are not restricted to stuff like disorders but go way beyond and i think the solution to this stuff is, like for many other things, more education and awareness of risks, tradeoffs, what is gender, what is identity, and how they work both intrinsically and within the bounds of social interactions.
> OTOH, i am unsure what do you mean by a statistical over-representation of GD.
This is quite clear to me and I do not think gender dysphoria - which is a DSM-5 diagnosis [1] - is the correct term to use. Compared to previous years or decades (or centuries) there is a markedly higher percentage of children/young adults who "self-identify as 'trans'", often clustered and in waves. This did not use to be so but that does not mean similar phenomena did not occur, they just did not get a diagnosis attached to them. It is highly probable (and feed for a dissertation if there is a university which would accept such a politically charged project) that the same character types who now "self-identify as 'trans'" were those who would style themselves as "goth" or "emo" or (in the late 80's and 90's) "metrosexual" or any other androgynous style. The difference is that these earlier style figures did not come with a diagnosis nor were they adopted by any mainstream political movement and as such were taken less seriously. You could be a goth just like you could be a metalhead or a prep and be part of your in-crowd by just wearing the right clothes (and, for some crowds, make-up) and listening to the right bands. It was accepted as a way for children and young adults to "belong" without coming with much baggage.
> Compared to previous years or decades (or centuries) there is a markedly higher percentage of children/young adults who "self-identify as 'trans'", often clustered and in waves.
I don't see how you could usefully extrapolate a "real" baseline rate based on what prior generations did. Atypical sexual/gender identities have been taboo for almost the entirety of human civilization, and only as these taboos are now being lifted are people able to express these traits without fear of horrific repercussions.
The current wave of "self-identification" was markedly absent in the wake of the '68 revolts and the ensuing "free love generation" which casts doubt upon your thesis. It is far more likely that these current "self-identification" trends are emergent properties of the availability of direct one-to-many communications media - social media and the like - which make it possible for these identity groups to emerge and grow rapidly.
Parent might be falsely inferring an over-representation of GD from the statistical discrepancy between younger and older age groups of those who identify as LGTBQ+.
IIRC, research also shows that those who identify as trans in middle age are much more likely to be happy when they do choose to transition, compared to the younger folks.
I don't see anything to support this in the literature. The overwhelming majority (94-98%) of youth who transition maintain their gender identity many years later as adults. [1][2] It's hard to imagine they would continue treatment if it was making them miserable.
AIUI, another user ITT has mentioned https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33883438 that this is merely statistics of how many transitioners formally pursue detransition, and that the numbers of those who practically desist from treatment are a lot higher than that.
The number of individuals failing to follow up on a study or even treatment for any disease at the same medical office is high, for example it's approximately 50% for _cancer_. [1] You're welcome to extrapolate to your own taste, but it's still simply an unknown -- unlike the people you _do_ have data for.
But the whole question is why people are desisting from treatment that's supposed to help them reaffirm their gender. Everyone knows that cancer treatment has very uncomfortable side effects; it's not surprising that people might neglect that. Gender treatment is literally supposed to make you feel good, by treating disphoria.
Lost to follow up is not necessarily discontinuation of treatment is the issue. The person may have moved out of state or out of country, or simply have moved to be treated by a different physician. Consider also the perspective of the detransitioning person: in trying to reconcile their experience, they project that there must be more people out there like themselves and point to a known unknown to justify it.
Is there any statistical significance to that. Have the emotional baggage and social complexity younger people are dealing with and the share of middle aged people who did or could not transition been accounted for?
What boggles my mind is that people who adamantly claim that all gender behavior is socially constructed are the ones who are the first to denounce the idea that you can learn to want to be another gender.
I don't think that happens too often. The problem is that there are at least two different and often opposing currents in pro-trans movements.
One is from the "gender is a social construct" post-modernist side, which views the very idea that people are either men or women with some suspicion, and leads to concepts such as gender fluidity, non-binary identities, and the idea that maybe young kids should not be gendered at all unless and until they chose to assume some gender.
The other current is much more conservative, and starts with the simple observation that some people experience extreme gender dysphoria that has only successfully been cured (or at least alleviated) by gender-affirming care (from gender expression to hormone treatments to top/bottom surgery to facial feminization/masculinization surgery and beyond). This current considers it much more clear that humans are generally either men or women, with relatively clear associated characteristics, and simply considers that some people happen to have the "wrong" characteristics. Rather than investigating the philosophical reasoning of why this might be happening and what it means for the concepts woman/man, it is much more concerned with the practical problem of how to make life better for people who feel like this.
My impression is that the second group is much much more prevalent, but also seen as problematic by the first group. The first group is much more extreme, and has much more "interesting" talking points, so it is significantly over-represented in online discussions and media.
Then there's the third one that sees that there probably is some biological aspect, but the way it's expressed depends on the culture's concept of gender. I favor this one since it provides an explanation for the existence of trans people of some sort in every society throughout history without discounting nature or nurture.
The question of how many people happen to genuinely be in the liminal space between male and female gender expression is very much an empirical matter, not about philosophy. In the real world, seemingly clear-cut binary distinctions and fuzzy, mysterious liminal phenomena are not opposed to one another; they can very much coexist.
I would suggest that empirically it's pretty much everybody. Almost nobody is entirely masculine or feminine. And it seems to me that the world would be a better place if we recognised that for everybody not just those who especially struggle with a world that places us into binary categories.
> My impression is that the second group is much much more prevalent, but also seen as problematic by the first group. The first group is much more extreme, and has much more "interesting" talking points, so it is significantly over-represented in online discussions and media.
My impression is that extreme opinions are mostly from two subgroups of the second group:
- Those who believe that gender is essentially defined by physical characteristics
- Those who believe that gender is essentially defined by social characteristics.
Their inability (or unwillingness) to more deeply consider the concepts of "men"/"women" place them in conflict with each other because each of them want to use a different concept, and neither of them are open to exploring different ones.
The only way I can see this being resolved is by taking an attitude more similar to first group.
True, a little bit of philosophy can be a dangerous thing, since it can lead to a shallow kind of idealism that can easily fall into extremism at all.
However, I believe that the general attitude of the trans community is relatively moderate and easy to accept:
1. Trans people should be able to get the kinds of treatment they need (from therapy all the way to aesthetic surgery), in cooperation with their doctors. Children should be allowed to get some treatment, and their parents should be involved (with some complexity when the parents' bigotry may interfere with the best interest of the child).
2. Other people shouldn't be allowed to ostracize one for being trans, and should seek to accommodate them (such as not referring to them with the wrong pronouns or name); accidental use is easily forgiven, but intentional misgendering is clearly malicious; the problem of "non-passing" trans people complicates this somewhat
3. Trans people should be allowed to use the amenities that correspond to their gender, which will, in the vast majority of circumstances, correspond to their gender presentation; "non-passing" trans people complicate this, as does participation in competitive sports
However, I believe trying to modify society to dispense with the concepts man & woman, or to avoid inoculating them in children - as would be natural if we take the position of the first group too seriously - is way beyond what most people would agree with.
Of course, extreme positions such as trans-medicalists/truscum or people insisting everyone "shares their pronouns" and such are somewhat significant sub-groups, as are people who insist that children should be able to just take hormones without any supervision from doctors or parents if they really think it's right for them (I've seen this exact position on HN before). But while they exist, I think they are still loud minorities, even within the relatively small trans community.
You’ve nicely explained why trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) exist. Absolute belief that gender is purely a social construct (a core tenet of second-wave feminism) is strictly incompatible with gender dysphoria existing at all, since gender dysphoria necessarily means that our brains are inherently wired to be male or female.
The reality is more nuanced—while certain gender roles are purely social constructs, other aspects of gender are hardwired.
> Absolute belief that gender is purely a social construct (a core tenet of second-wave feminism) is strictly incompatible with gender dysphoria existing at all, since gender dysphoria necessarily means that our brains are inherently wired to be male or female.
That's not true. It would just indicate that the gender dysphoria is socially caused (perhaps by the imposition of strong gender norms) rather than being an unavoidable part of someone's nature.
It does lead to very different policy proposals though: if gender dysphoria is socially caused then it makes sense to prioritise minimising the cause (by widening the scope of acceptable gender expression for each gender) rather than treating the symptom (by allowing people to change their recognised gender).
>It would just indicate that the gender dysphoria is socially caused (perhaps by the imposition of strong gender norms) rather than being an unavoidable part of someone's nature.
It seems unlikely to me that social norms alone could cause gender dysphoric people to believe so strongly that their gender identity mismatches their biological sex (i.e. physical body) that they are willing to undergo dramatic, irreversible medical procedures like gender reassignment surgery and other transitioning procedures to rectify the mismatch.
There are plenty of people who strongly defy gender norms yet still strongly identify their gender as being concordant with their biological sex. Gender dysphoria goes far beyond mere nonconformity to gender norms; many trans people explicitly say that they feel like they were born into the wrong body.
> It seems unlikely to me that social norms alone could cause gender dysphoric people to believe so strongly that their gender identity mismatches their biological sex
I think it's quite likely.
As an analogy, it seems relatively common for people to become so convinced that they are so unattractive that they undergo highly invasive cosmetic surgery. It's also very much the case that there are social groups where this is normalised (and many people in those social groups will choose to have this surgery) and social groups where it is not (and people in those groups are unlikely to opt for cosmetic surgery).
The difference seems to be that the people in one social group are telling each other that the appropriate solution to feeling unattractive means that one is unattractive and that surgery to change one's body is an appropriate response to that, whereas in the other social group people might either convince each other that they're attractive as they are, or seek alternative remedies such as changes in clothing, grooming, make-up, etc. Or even therapy, self-esteem coaching or similar.
Similarly, if one is an environment where one is constantly told that men (or women) are or should act/be a certain way, then it is hardly surprising that one might develop the notion that one isn't a man/woman. Such an environment is commonly created by people with traditional notions of gender. But it's reinforced by people suggesting that transitioning might be the solution to not fitting one's gender norms.
Which isn't to say that there aren't people for whom physically transitioning is the right answer (the best solution for them), or that do have an inherent dislike of their body that isn't externally influenced. Likewise, there are people for whom cosmetic surgery is absolutely the right solution (e.g. people with a cleft palate or who have suffered from severe burns). But I question the way it currently seems to being positioned (by some people) as the default response to not fitting in with the norms of one's existing gender, and I also question the idea that it is innate and not socially influenced.
People will do practically anything in order to be socially accepted. The followers of the ancient goddess Cybele famously underwent ritual gender transition, as related most effectively in Catullus 63.
And they are absolutely sure that you need a physical modification to adapt to a socially constructed norm. And at the same time they demand medical procedures while denying that it is a medical condition, whose treatment needs to be studied with scientific rigor. Instead they say the affected persons know their best treatment.
Just imagine applying that same approach to addicts.
Is it? Transmedicalists (those who belive sex reassignment is a required goal) are a minority in trans communities and "truscum" was created as a derogatory term for this attitude indicating its unpopularity.
If you mean puberty blockers for trans youth rather than sex reassignment, they have much more support because of their non-permanent nature. We let many teenagers make decisions about things like tattoos and piercings too
There's still a significant ave gap between these two populations, though. Tattoos and piercings can be obtained by 16-18yos without parental consent, but to be effective, puberty blockers need to start near or before the beginning of puberty, when children are usually 10-14 years old.
We may not be talking about many years by raw count, but as a percentage of the total lifespan of those involved, the first group is ~50% older than the second.
I find it very concerning that anyone would attempt to present puberty blockers as "non-permanent". Extraordinary claims like that require extraordinary evidence.
The use of puberty blockers to delay the normal onset of puberty is experimental and there is plenty of evidence that it has irreversible and serious, often tragic, effects:
The trouble is, the Internet is bathroom stall graffiti.
If I say "For me it's a choice" then it undermines the people for whom it is not a choice. Because most of the audience in the bathroom stall aren't doing research to put together a comprehensive understanding of gender, they're just reading what in front of them for that day, and then leaving.
If I say gender can be learned, we can spend days bickering about what "learned" really means.
It's not fun. And I'm sorry that someone else said something you think is contradictory.
People have been saying "it's just the Internet" since 2007 or whenever Tumblr appeared. It's a tired defense. Such treatment of gender that makes people feel good but only makes sense on the superficial level permeates modern discourse and invades institutional structures deeper each day.
You cannot keep the society well-functioning by treating the law and social norms as a bathroom stall or as something that you should mindlessly follow without comprehensive understanding.
It's less "learning to be another gender" but more being in a society that allows an individual to express their gender as something other than their sex.
Counter hypothesis. For the last several decades society put massive pressure on kids to conform to heteronormativity. With these pressures lessening more and more people are feeling empowered to explore their sexuality.
Social media is absolutely involved, but we really don't know what the base rate would be in a society devoid of this kind of pressure.
As a parent I have no idea what you are trying to say with this idea of pushing "heteronormativity" - I don't and don't know any parents that push anything sexual let alone encouraging kids to explore sexuality .. they are kids and will be kids until they mature and begin to feel the urge to explore. This normalising of sexualising of children is abhorrent.
Edit: the voting on this comment is crazy.. the number of HN users that feel sexualisation of children isn't bad is utterly shameful.
Gender identity and sexual orientation are different concepts. Exploring gender identity is not the same as exploring sexuality. Children are constantly exploring identity, as I'm sure you have observed. For instance, I am a straight man, but when I was a child I sometimes stole my mother's lipstick and tried to put it on, or I would play with Barbie dolls. I saw that other people incorporated these activities in their identities, and I wanted to try it. This was no more sexual than when I play acted as a soldier or decided I liked to wear cargo pants; I was experimenting with who I was or could become, because that is what children do.
This is a convenient segue to heteronormativity. Heteronormativity is the societal pressure to conform to the traditional gender roles of men and women who pursue heterosexual relationships. My parents didn't like me playing with Barbie dolls; they explicitly told me that it wasn't something boys did. This transmits a set of expectations about how I should behave, based on my gender. Notice that their telling me it was wrong to play with dolls was no more sexual than if they had allowed me to play with the dolls.
If your dad has acetylene torches around and your mom has axes around the house you’re going to play with them.
It does not mean or imply or predict that you want to burn the house down or you want to become a butcher or axe murderer. You’re not exploring being a pyromaniac or a murderer. You’re just playing, that’s it.
Same with high heels, smoking pipes, hunting rifles or lipstick. Kids don’t know their meaning yet (context of usage).
> Gender identity and sexual orientation are different concepts. Exploring gender identity is not the same as exploring sexuality.
While true, to be fair GP was responding to this:
>>> "For the last several decades society put massive pressure on kids to conform to *heteronormativity*. With these pressures lessening more and more people are feeling empowered to explore their *sexuality*." [emphasis mine]
To muddy the distinction further, there is a small minority of men whose sexual kink is to be perceived as women. These seem to be the people who are making the most trouble for trans women who just want to quietly go about living as women without fuss.
Kinks are impossible to pin down or fence in, people can get turned on by literally anything. https://xkcd.com/468/ This doesn't really muddy the waters; the concepts remain distinct, and people making it a kink to conflate them is kinda like how a joke isn't true but is only funny if you know the truth it refers to.
Heteronormativity conflates gender and sexuality; I'd guess (while acknowledging I don't know the content of anyone else's mind) that is what is responsible for their confusion, because they have been raised in a heteronormative society, the distinction doesn't exist in their mind.
> Kinks are impossible to pin down or fence in, people can get turned on by literally anything.
While a true statement it's also a non-sequitur. Anglosphere society is roiled with social turmoil about trans-gender identity. One faction would like society to recognize that some people's gender does not fit their sex, and to normalize accommodating these people's gender expression without intrusive and oppressive questioning. Another faction, perhaps motivated by genuine concern, or perhaps by simple hatred of difference and change, throw a spanner into the works by asking hard questions about bathrooms and prisons and athletics and such. If the only people interested in entering women's bathrooms and prisons were genuinely only women who happened to be born in a male body, then everything would be clear and unmuddied. However, the existence of some fraction of men who would happily identify as women in order to gain easier sexual access to women does complicate the simple distinction. Is a trans woman lesbian with a penis really trans, or a predatory man with a kink? Ignoring or dismissing the muddy implications of the question will not make the second faction go away.
This narrative of predatory trans people does not bare out, trans people are not assaulting people in bathrooms, and what you're describing is really using the way our society is built to be hostile to people who do not fit into gender norms as a way to justify further hostility. It's saying, oh look, we built bathrooms and prisons in a way that reinforces these norms, well, I guess we're stuck with them.
> This narrative of predatory trans people does not bare out...
I didn't say predatory trans people. I said predatory men. Have you met men? Some men will put on a dress, call themselves trans, and fondle themselves in a women's locker room.
Again, pretending this is about trans people is disingenuous. This is about (some) men.
And, again, whether you genuinely dismiss the concern because you genuinely disbelieve that any man ever would take advantage of the situation, the faction that bring it up do genuinely believe that some men will take advantage of it. This faction will not go away. So, probably best to at least acknowledge their concerns so that trans people can get on with the business of doing their business.
I have heard some men say things about women when they weren't around that I find appalling; I've had to work on eliminating misogyny from my own thinking, and it is a work in progress; I'm well aware of men and the toxicity that often goes along with them.
The narrative you have presented is frequently weaponized, specifically by the adherents to the ideology of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism, to argue that trans women are "men in dresses" who's real goal is to infiltrate women's spaces in order to assault them (or, in the example you gave, violate their privacy and dignity). In practice this a widespread phenomenon. TERF activists use this narrative to attempt to enact legislation barring trans people from the bathroom of their gender - forcing trans women into men's bathrooms, and I'm sure that, as someone concerned about problematic men and bathrooms, that won't sound like a good prospect to you. I take you at your word this was context you weren't aware of; now that I've brought it to your attention, I hope you'll consider it and see if it alters your thinking.
> The narrative you have presented is frequently weaponized...
Indeed. This is both true, and a non-sequitur. Bad-faith arguers exist. Let us acknowledge the fact that some people will reprehensibly refer to every trans woman as a "man in a dress". Let's assume the best about each other.
If you're trying to say that everyone is a TERF who points out that some men (again, not trans women) will take advantage, or that only bad people point this out, then you're not addressing the concern, but dismissing it. Addressing and empathizing with the actual concern will get trans people into their preferred bathrooms and keep bad men out.
Anyway, you and I won't litigate this here, so if you have more to add, know that I'll read whatever you have to say but might not reply. Be well.
> [Y]ou're not addressing the concern, but dismissing it.
You're right, I should have done better there. To me, until this comment where you described this as "reprehensible", it sounded like you were employing "just asking questions" rhetoric, because you were asking all the same questions as TERFs, and to me it appeared you were only holding back the transphobic conclusions. However, that I should have done a better job assuming good faith on your part, and I apologize.
> This is both true, and a non-sequitur.
It isn't a non-sequitur though, I'm explaining to you what my issue is. If you were aware of the context around this narrative the whole time, you could addressed it instead of implying I was being disingenuous; the best-faith interpretation I could see was that you didn't understand my objection, so I added more detail. I would like to engage with you presuming the best, but can you see how saying I'm being disingenuous and that my points are non-sequitur (when it seems like you do understand what TERFs are, what bathroom bills are, and what it was I was getting at and how it relates to our discussion) made that difficult for me?
> Addressing and empathizing with the actual concern will get trans people into their preferred bathrooms and keep bad men out.
Happy to listen to what you may propose, but I don't have any thoughts. I certainly empathize with women's feeling of unsafety and the desire to create spaces without men, to the extent I can as a man. But I understand if you are done with this conversation, I myself need to log off for a few hours to attend to things, and of course you don't owe me any of your time.
Most people are like me: sincerely caring, well-disposed to trans people, understand that trans rights are human rights, bear absolutely zero ill-will and will happily use preferred pronouns. Would be terribly frightened for a trans-woman to be placed in a man's prison, for instance. And, nevertheless, would simply like straight-forward policy proposals to answer those specific concerns.
So far, the only policy proposals that address those concerns have been from conservatives, which are not ideal to say the least, either. From liberals, sadly, have come answers along the lines of "Asking questions like that is TERF territory. You don't want to be a TERF, do you?" Which is clearly not an answer, and concedes the entire policy platform to conservatives.
I mean, it could be that the liberal response is, essentially "Times are changing and the exceedingly minuscule chance of creepy men in womens' locker rooms and women's prisons is a small price to pay for human rights" but that's unconvincing, to be honest. Creepy men who have a right to be in womens' locker rooms and prisons will become a problem unless it's actually addressed in advance. That's nothing to do with trans women. It is, unfortunately, a problem with men.
But no, I don't have answers, here. Before, it seemed to be "Be discreet and make good-faith efforts to pass as your preferred gender and people will generally leave you alone." The "passing" part is not ideal, but at least serves as some kind of costly social signal that this person is really trying to blend in and not make waves. Without that, not sure.
This is a meaningless concern. Any man who would put on a dress to come assault you in the bathroom could skip the dress part and just come in the bathroom and assault you. It's like saying some rapists have red hair. It's true but its not meaningful because no fruitful thing can be derived from the fact nor strategy obtained.
There are millions of trans people in the world but presumably few rapists in dresses. The spurious focus on pointless concerns suggests we ought to harm the dignity of millions for a fictional advantage.
Unfortunately, this is not an answer, and so, you are conceding public policy to people who do have answers that you will not like.
What do you propose to do about a creepy man who hears that all he has to do is self-identify as a woman and now has a right to expose his penis to women? This is not a trans woman, but a man who just will not leave his penis alone in a women's locker room. Women avert their eyes, but he shakes it around, puts tassels on it, gets excited by the turmoil. "This is not a thing that will ever happen" is an answer, sure, but when it does happen, your conservative opposition will use the exceedingly rare incident to exclude trans women from locker rooms. So, what is a better answer that actually addresses the concern?
We shouldn't make actual rules based on fictional situations. In a situation like this it would be trivial to exclude the obvious troublemaker for disruptive harassing behavior. You act as if managers,cops, and judges aren't capable of exercising basic judgement. If you did this tomorrow you would find out that this isn't true. It's a waste of my time and yours.
> My parents didn't like me playing with Barbie dolls; they explicitly told me that it wasn't something boys did.
Same with me, but let me ask you a question. Were you the sort of kid that actually listens to their parents? Because i didn't, and most of my peers didn't, either.
No, I was stubborn like mule. I wore my parents down until they caved. That doesn't mean it didn't have an impact though, I certainly picked up what they were putting down.
Now, the reaction of my friends when they came over and looked at me funny when I tried to show them my awesome Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders doll (it had wings and could fly if you pulled a ripcord! That's objectively cool. Also, dangerous, especially to taller adults in the area.), that was painful.
If it's your parents and your peers and virtually all popular media, it's massively naive to think that isn't going to have a normalizing effect on people.
To be clear, I'm making a descriptive and not a prescriptive statement. I'm not saying that people should conform to societal norms, just that right now they do (and that doesn't seem like a trivial thing to change).
For instance, I am a straight man, but when I was a child I sometimes stole my mother's lipstick and tried to put it on, or I would play with Barbie dolls.
I wouldn't see trying on lipstick or playing with Barbie dolls as "exploring a gender identity" as neither of those are exclusive to one gender, even in a heteronormative world.
I think you might be missing the forest for the trees. Barbies and lipstick are not exclusive to one gender, but they are associated with one gender. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that people in general will respond differently to a little boy who likes playing with lipstick and barbie dolls compared to a little girl.
I'm not saying you are wrong, but in the culture of my household, my school, and the people I had contact with as a child, this was seen as strange and something to be discouraged, because these things were seen as gendered.
I think these things were much more gendered at the time, as well. It is crazy for me to look back and remember how there was a time when I hadn't made up my mind about whether gay marriage was okay or not. Things have changed a lot over the past 20 years or so.
I dunno. My social set would never discourage a child from this at all. However, of those of us who had children, only one (out of, like 50+ children in our extended set) was gender non-conforming boy at 3 and liked to wear girl's clothes and play with dolls.
1. This is not a good faith representation of what trans people are arguing for; no one is saying that playing with dolls makes you trans.
2. Trans healthcare for kids does not involve surgery. Surgeries are not performed for people under the age of 18. Trans healthcare for kids largely involves letting them choose what clothes they wear, pronouns they use, perhaps changing their name. The most that might happen is that they take puberty blockers, a reversible and safe treatment.
3. I can see why people would be upset by your straw man, were it the reality, but trans people are not an abomination, and directing dehumanizing language towards a group of people who are frequently targeted for violence is profoundly not okay. It's been less than 3 weeks since a terrorist entered an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs and opened fire, and this has happened more times than anyone can count; don't contribute to this. And your straw man is just that.
That's a rather extreme claim, don't you think? There's been a significant shift in recent years from "gender fluid" behavior being considered a matter of expression, to it being regarded as an almost mandatory matter of identity - either as a sign of identifying with the opposite gender, or as being "non binary".
> Trans healthcare for kids does not involve surgery.
The heavy medicalization of "trans healthcare" creates a rigid path from "affirmation" of the supposedly expressed gender, to puberty blockers/hormones, to surgical reassignment. There are significant social drawbacks for those who choose to stray, since 'community' support is conditional on picking the "right" choices at any given step.
> I can see why people would be upset by your straw man, were it the reality, but trans people are not an abomination
The latter is not something I ever said, of course. You might be pattern-matching my comment with things that are just not there. I agree that most trans people just want to live their lives and not be at risk for violence, but this much is obvious. In general, the most extreme "activism" on either side gets a lot of visibility while being unrepresentative of what real people think.
> There's been a significant shift in recent years from "gender fluid" behavior being considered a matter of expression, to it being regarded as an almost mandatory
Who exactly is arguing that it is mandatory to be gender fluid? I've never heard such a thing.
What I do hear trans people arguing for is that they have a right to exist, that they are under threat of violence, and that the require awareness of their condition and protection under the law as a matter of survival.
> The heavy medicalization of "trans healthcare" creates a rigid path from "affirmation" of the supposedly expressed gender, to puberty blockers/hormones, to surgical reassignment. There are significant social drawbacks for those who choose to stray, since 'community' support is conditional on picking the "right" choices at any given step.
You're just kinda putting quotes on things to make them sound scary. Do you object to surgery, or surgery being performed on children? If teenagers go on puberty blockers, and they decide they don't want to pursue surgery when they become adults - no worries, no surgery was performed. If they become adults, having considered the decision for a long time at this point - by what you were saying before now, that would seem to be okay; you were saying it was an unacceptable to impose a surgery on children, are you now saying that this isn't a choice you're ever okay with? I'm starting to get the feeling maybe you just feel trans people are unacceptable in general and that, whatever they did, you would disapprove of it.
I'm not deeply involved with the LGBTQ community, but I'm confident none of the people I know would bully someone who decided against transitioning. And none of the LGBTQ communities I've ever intersected with have been stingy or withholding of their support; they're happy to discuss my feelings about gender with me, for example, though I'm a straight man with a "by the book" gender presentation (and I have my frustrations with my gender and the expectations that come with it all the same, which I'm sure many men can relate to).
I'm sure there are toxic personalities within these communities, but it is certainly not the norm or generally tolerated, as bullying exists in virtually all communities but generally is not tolerated.
If I can responsibly say to "object" to anything it's people being rushed on a path to gender transition, given the heavy costs that this involves in practice and the fact that some steps are irreversible (including male hormones for those AFAB - though admittedly this might also make it more justifiably salient for someone AMAB to seek to delay their puberty).
This applies to kids the most (they of course aren't at risk for surgery, but the usual notion of a fixed "gender identity" is also least sensibly applied to them), but people in young adulthood should also be a bit concerned. Research seems to show that, by and large, those who transition in middle-age are the happiest post-transition. I'm not sure how that squares with your feeling that someone with my views might just find "trans people unacceptable in general"; my concerns are derived from real-world practicality.
There's no rush, but they're also under no obligation to respect your timetable. People make up their own minds about these things, there isn't a conspiracy to trans the kids as fast as possible, as you make it sound.
I'm not setting a fixed timetable, but the medical establishment sure has their own opinions as to how fast people should transition. The "conspiracy" is out in the open - and these opinions aren't always comprehensively informed by research about good outcomes.
> Trans healthcare for kids does not involve surgery. Surgeries are not performed for people under the age of 18.
Unfortunately that is not true.
There are surgeons who perform 'gender affirming' double mastectomies on girls as young as 13. This is documented in the medical literature.
The former CEO of Mermaids, a UK-based charity for children who identify as transgender, had her child castrated and given a penile inversion at the age of 16, by a surgeon who specializes in constructing 'neovaginas'.
I get it that this stuff is confusing and can be hard to make sense of at first, but gender identity and sexuality are completely different things.
Also I'm not accusing anyone of pushing this on their kids, rather, our society does it in massive doses. Watch most children's TV shows or movies and heteronormativity is abundant.
For a pretty clean example of this check out the movie Up by Pixar. The first 10 minutes of the movie are devoted to Carl & Ellie's relationship and the loss of that relationship serves as a major driver for the movie.
Also there's nothing wrong with showing children this kind of content. It helps them make sense of the world. However, there is an issue with representation. When it's all they see then it constrains their minds as to what is possible.
> With these pressures lessening more and more people are feeling empowered to explore their sexuality.
Emphasis mine. The comment is not, in fact, about letting children explore their sexuality, but people. (When you consider the parent of that comment, that still does not add context implying that we're talking about kids.)
The only part of the comment which discusses children is this:
> For the last several decades society put massive pressure on kids to conform to heteronormativity.
To read this as sexualizing children is misunderstanding the term heteronormativity, but regardless, this is the behavior that is being criticized, not championed.
You chopped the one statement into different "parts". Here is the comment in question:
> For the last several decades society put massive pressure on kids to conform to heteronormativity. With these pressures lessening more and more people are feeling empowered to explore their sexuality.
In a maximally generous interpretation, you could say that the "kids" in the first half and the "people" in the second half of the statement are completely different subjects. I think that is a bit of a stretch, though.
"For years I have been pruning the tomato plants in my garden. Now, I just let the _plants_ grow".
Anyone reading that would assume "plants" refers to the aforementioned tomato plants, not cucumbers.
They are different subjects, or if you prefer, the same subject at different times in their life. They're asserting that societal pressure experienced during childhood has an effect on how sexuality is expressed during adulthood. I chopped it into different parts in order to dissect and analyze it; I ultimately included the entire comment (except a sentence neither of us found relevant and you yourself didn't include), and I was not hiding anything; the entire comment was always available to be inspected, the structure and content of the comment was not in dispute, only it's interpretation.
Consider that, in the example sentence you came up with, you are referring to the same subject, at different times.
Terms like “heteronormativity” and “cisgender” are just ways they attempt to marginalize normal people and their normal sexual development. These people who use these terms are objectively and statistically outliers in society. And since they can’t convince anyone to accept their abnormality, they instead try to change language to remove the idea of there being a standard/normal baseline.
They think that because you’re not trying to make them “explore their gender identity” while teaching them ABCs that you are pushing something. It’s absolute projection. I support all people to live their lives how they see fit, but I refuse to use their newspeak or pretend like there is not a natural normal.
Interestingly, newspeak was about removing words from language so that certain ideas couldn't be expressed. It was explicitly not about adding words to the language, and certainly not about adding words to convey additional nuance and precision where there was previously none.
It seems to me like you're actually arguing to try and remove words that people have introduced to the language, and to erase the nuances they convey, because you don't find it to be "normal" or "natural". What is normal or natural is entirely subjective, and varies across cultures and across time, and in any case we don't generally yoke ourselves to what is natural (we are, after all, speaking through an artificial medium because we find it advantageous, and though we weren't born with wings we often find it advantageous to fly.)
It might be interesting to give 1984 another read.
I know it’s from 1984, but it’s considered a word itself as far as I can tell. I was using it as “Deliberately ambiguous and contradictory language used to mislead and manipulate the public.” Heterosexuality is the norm, it is the default. Heteronormativity is some nonsense phrase that is used in place of “normal” to try and draw a false equivalency between normal and abnormal. It is intended to muddy the waters and mislead like most contemporary “woke” language.
There's nothing ambiguous or misleading, what you're actually objecting to is the concrete and specific use of language to describe ideas you don't like and which you don't want to see proliferate. You aren't objecting to people being mislead, you're objecting to people understanding. Do give 1984 a read, I think you'll find the irony that you are appropriating a term used in that book in order to invert it's meaning and to take the very actions that the book is criticizing quite amusing, and then we can be in on the joke together.
Heterosexuality doesn't have to be the default, and indeed, that era is ending. The evidence for it is right here; you feel compelled to go to bat for the notion, not something you'd need to do if it really were mystically natural and inextricably true. Heterosexuality is promulgated as a default because it is key to a power structure called the patriarchy. The patriarchy works by assigning certain gender roles to men and women; these roles allow men to subjugate women, and also allow men to be subjugated by other men. The patriarchy's strength lies in the rigidity of those gender roles, and as the gender roles are loosened the patriarchy gets weaker. Lots of power within our society is expressed through patriarchy, for instance, the idea that men express their agency through violence instead of through emotion and that they should readily throw their lives away in service of a cause is useful for recruiting men as soldiers and police, and soldiers and police are useful in upholding many other power structures (like state power or the power of the rich). So over the last few millenia, many different power structures have come to rely on the existence of patriarchy, and it's been woven into our mythology and the fabric of our society. The fluidity of gender roles is a direct challenge to patriarchy, and people with nonconforming identities have been forced into the closet through violence and social reprisal.
This was a natural series of events in the sense that all of history took place in the context of the natural world, sure. But cancer is natural, we don't have to accept it. In the same way, I reject your heteronormativity. I think it sucks. I don't think people are "naturally" any particular gender, it's a role we learn to play as we're socialized. That doesn't make it bad, there's nothing wrong with being a man or a woman, there's nothing wrong with embracing very traditional views of what that means if that's what makes you happy. I live my life as a pretty traditional man. But that isn't all there is to life, and that's not all it should mean to be human.
Heterosexuality being prevalent within the population (note that I purposefully avoid idioms like "X is the norm" as ambiguous, especially in this context) is merely the flip side of LGBTQIA+ folks being a minority. Now, a minority can have a robust subculture - and one can certainly make that claim about LGBTQ identity today - but that doesn't somehow make it into not-a-minority.
Social and cultural norms are beside the point here; in fact, the most traditional societies are those that tend to feature the most salient spaces for same-sex quasi-romantic affection and emotionality, with such things as compadrazgo and sworn brotherhood/sisterhood. So it's just not clear how "heteronormativity" is supposed to be an internally coherent concept.
You're conflating heterosexuality and heteronormativity. You could have a society where heterosexuality is prevalent, without having heteronormativity. Heteronormativity encompasses both heterosexuality and a specific set of gender roles for men and women; so it is not enough for heterosexuality to be prevalent. You need to conflate these genders with heterosexuality, prescribe them, and marginalize sexual and gender identities that do not conform to this.
Heteronormativity isn't an epistemology, there's no burden for it to be consistent. It's a set of beliefs and attitudes, and a label that allows you to critique them. Why would we expect that to be any more consistent than the human behavior it describes (which is to say, only somewhat)? Will this label break down and stop making sense as society changes? Yes, I imagine it will. Will it become unwieldy and eventually fail altogether if we employ it in an analysis spanning cultures with very different conceptions of gender? Absolutely. But you might as well ask whether the concept of pop music is consistent and relate it to the works of Beethoven, if you think that's useful in your analysis than go for it, but if it doesn't work in that circumstance it isn't a condemnation of the idea. The only burden on heteronormativity is to be useful in describing real world behavior, which it clearly is.
If you want to know whether heteronormativity is a real phenomenon, you need look no further than the comment I criticized. It doesn't say, heterosexuality is prevalent; it says, heterosexuality is total, that it is "natural" and "normal", that it is inseparable from gender, and that people living as (or even describing) other gender and sexual identities are doing it to trick you.
> you need look no further than the comment I criticized. It doesn't say, heterosexuality is prevalent; it says, heterosexuality is total
That comment actually said "heterosexuality is normal", which is of course ambiguous - it could mean either of "prevalent" or "not merely prevalent but standard, with deviations from it being seen as undesirable". Heteronormativity might be a description of the latter claim, but to deny that heterosexuality is especially common would be mere wishful thinking.
The claim that gender and sexual orientation are linked would've been quite recognizable to ancient cultures including classical Greece and Rome, where heterosexual behavior was not normative and other sexual arrangements were often celebrated (though their dark, exploitive side, linked to the ubiquity of rape culture as purposeful male domination, was not unrecognized either; and this later fed into Christian condemnation of such practices). So it makes little sense to view that as "heteronormative" either.
It isn't ambiguous if you consider the entire comment, where they go on to clarify what they mean by invoking a naturalism fallacy and contrasting it with other identities (which they clearly describe in pejorative terms as "abnormal" and "misleading" with an overall tone of derision). Of course I acknowledge that most people are heterosexual, that's such misrepresentation of what I'm saying (including that I've directly acknowledged this point already) I can't suspend my disbelief it isn't willful. I've provided definitions for all of this, you're choosing not to engage with them.
I make no claims about heteronormativity in Greece or Rome (I do say that the patriarchy is several millennia old, so this could be read as an implicit claim that patriarchy existed in Greece and Rome [and I wouldn't take issue with that claim], but I don't think you'd find this disagreeable, given the "rape culture as purposeful male domination" you reference, and that the definition of patiarchy I provided specifically calls out the domination of men), and gender and sexual identities certainly are linked in the sense that certain combinations are more common than others - they just aren't synonyms. As I noted, there is no burden for this concept to translate to other cultures and time periods in order for us to accept it as a useful model for the purposes of our discussion; I've not seen a counterargument from you on this, so I don't see why I would accept these observations of Greece and Rome as being deleterious to my point, anyway.
But what I'm taking issue with is merely your claim of heteronormativity as a "set of beliefs and attitudes" that one can ascertain in anything like a consistent way. If compadrazgo and sworn brotherhood are too exotic for you, consider contemporary "bro" subculture; is it heteronormative? Some people might certainly claim as much, calling it especially misogynistic. Yet it also reportedly involves a lot of emotional affection and bonding among males. By and large, it just doesn't square with what you've been supposing in your earlier comments.
If you'd like to explain why we should demand that a label describing a set of human behaviors be entirely consistent in order to be considered, when the human behaviors we're describing are frequently inconsistent and contradictory (but still real and worth discussing), then I'm happy to respond. I don't see anything wrong with your examples, I'm not familiar with compadrazgo or sworn brotherhood but I'd be willing to learn more (and until such a time as I read up on them am willing to take what you say about them on face value), I think bro culture is a super interesting thread to tug on and an incisive choice on your part, but if you repeat your argument without engaging with mine, I don't see what you expect me to do other than repeat myself (which I respectfully decline to do).
I've seen that I expressed myself in a confusing way when I said "heterosexuality doesn't have to be the default, and that era is ending", I don't mean, LGBTQ identities will become the majority, what I meant was, the assumption of heterosexuality will no longer be made. In the same way you shouldn't assume people's handedness because, though you know most people are right-hand dominant, you also expect that any group of people of a significant size will contain many left handed people.
> Heteronormativity encompasses both heterosexuality and a specific set of gender roles for men and women
Heteronormativity is just heterosexuality as a normative element of social structures (not merely prevalent in society, but where deviation from it is viewed as transgressive.) In modern societies, it is typically tied to patriarchy (a particular normatige structure of gender roles, in which social power is attached to male roles), cisnormativity, and, in particular societies, it may be attached to things like White supremacy that are superficially farther from sex/gender dynamics, but these are nevertheless distinct if linked elements of the cultures they appear in.
> where deviation from it is viewed as transgressive
Note that by this standard, much of LGBTQ+ culture might well be described as heteronormative, since glorifying social transgression as such (not merely inasmuch as it might inevitably follow from having a non-majority gender or sexual orientation) has long been a staple of that particular identity.
Hmm, pardon, where is it we differ? The word "just" makes me think this is a correction, but I agree with all of that, and I feel like if you that if you take all of that to be true, you get the sentence of mine you've quoted.
I don’t see it as a strong disagreement, but there is a slight but sometimes important difference between heteronormativity including, e.g., cisnormativity and patriarchy, versus heteronormativity being distinct from them but frequently co-occurring with them.
But we certainly agree that heteronormativity is different than society having a majority heterosexual orientation.
For sure, I can see how I elided some concepts there; I think my definition was appropriate to the context of this conversation, but I appreciate you keeping me honest.
It’s pretty simple. I grew up with the social expectation I would be some special attraction to girls beyond friendship. There were some people shamefully attracted to boys.
I’m neither of these. I’ve never experienced sexual attraction to anyone. Every relationship I have is happily platonic. I have several good, close friends, so I capable of deep emotional bonds to people of any gender.
This would have been fine if I didn’t have a high sex drive. But I do. You’re not supposed to have a high sex drive while being completely uninterested.
I’ve wondered most of my life why I was broken. It was extremely isolating to be constantly surrounded by messages telling me there is something wrong with me.
Then I found out what asexuality is. That’s what I am. Romantic attraction can be completely devoid of sexual attraction. Someone’s sex drive can be independent of a person’s sexuality.
It hasn’t been any less isolating, but at least I know there is nothing wrong with me as a person.
I have no skin in the overall debate but it's clear that a prince and princess running off together in a Disney film is heteronormative, while most people wouldn't consider it to be abhorrently sexualising for children to watch those films.
I mean, heterosexuality is the predominant form of sexuality in humans?
Humans come in all forms. Most humans have two legs, but not all. Some are born missing a leg and some lose them from injuries. If we only show two legged characters in Disney films does that mean it's some sinister message of "bipedalnormativity"?
I never said it was sinister. I just made a statement of fact that it shows a heterosexual relationship, but doesn't significantly sexualise children. If anything, my comment could be construed as defending that sort of film rather than attacking it.
The assumption that this is inherently sex related is where the issue starts. This is why the discussion shifted from talking about sexuality to talking about gender nearly 20 years ago. Ideas like boys cannot wear skirts or play with barbies are present from a young age, yet we don't accuse people opposed to boys with skirts/barbies of thinking about said boys future sexuality.
> The assumption that this is inherently sex related is where the issue starts. This is why the discussion shifted from talking about sexuality to talking about gender nearly 20 years ago.
Well it was the parent comment that was linking this to sexuality - Hetronormativity is inherently about sexuality (i.e. Hetro-Normativity - Hetro -> Heterosexual: of, pertaining to, or being a heterosexual person).
I think "pushing heteronormativity" doesn't need to be a conscious, deliberate act and it doesn't need to be anything related to sex. It can be as simple as a parent buying their son a toy truck for their birthday while buying a barbie doll for their daughter: a reinforcement of socially acceptable gender roles
It ties into a larger concept of gender roles (which is probably more applicable to discussion of trans folks than sexuality, "heteronormativity" was probably not the best word choice)
It's not sinister in the slightest, but people should understand the larger picture.
Where do those preferences come from? I've seen first hand the impact that media, advertising, and social pressures at school have had on my children's preferences.
> Where do those preferences come from? I've seen first hand the impact that media, advertising, and social pressures at school have had on my children's preferences.
Sure, but why is that a problem? Our preferences are of course sculpted by our environment, and that's not a problem as long the people who fall outside of those norms aren't punished for it. Assuming those norms aren't harmful of course, eg. not good to normalize psychopathy.
It's basically inevitable that children are going to exposed to some normative behaviour, particularly around gender. I think the important part is that we're not so quick to denounce and suppress any messaging that exposes children to the existence of behaviour outside of those gender norms, that's when it goes from just existing in a society where gender norms exist to maintaining and enforcing those gender norms.
I don't and don't know any parents that push anything sexual let alone encouraging kids to explore sexuality
I definitely learned before age 13 that being gay/lesbian was bad (I'm bisexual and in my mid 40s). I definitely learned that I was expected to grow up and get married and have kids and if I worked, it was really to help the spouse. I remember my parents suddenly getting upset that I had male friends and didn't want me spending time with them the same way (this was around age 10). No one talked to me about attraction and if they did, never explained that I might feel that way about women as well as men. This is what heteronormativity is. This is pushing sexual preferences on youth.
Exploring sexuality isn't about actual sex acts, but more about learning who you are and who you are attracted to. You know, the sorts of folks you'd like to date and eventually, the sorts of folks you want to spend your life with. This sort of thing is most definitely encouraged, but sometimes the only acceptable option presented is the hetronormativity - you know, "biblical" monogamous relationships that produce children, and if you are female and don't want children, you are broken.
Have you never asked or seen others ask your boy(s) what girl(s) they prefer at school, or vice versa?
Have you never seen anyone upset if their boys are playing with dolls or their girls are playing with toy swords?
How do you think most parents would react if someone bought a pink dress as a present for for their 6 month old boy, or blue pants for their 6 month old girl?
How would most parents react even today to a children's cartoon featuring two little boys holding hands and kissing on the cheek, or a story about prince charming saving and marrying another prince charming?
Pretending heteronormativity is just some sex related thing that no one actually talks about is absurd.
How many Disney movies has your child watched? Heteronormativity is 100% prevalent in nearly all media.
You don't even have to single out Disney, 99% of popular media will present heterosexual relationships as the norm, and children's media that shows something as benign as a same sex couple holding hands or hugging is viewed as mildly transgressive or at least newsworthy.
Gender non-comforming behaviour is 100% absent outside of maybe a "tomboy" female character (and even that seems less present than it used to be).
it's not the parents, it's everyone around us. i can buy gender neutral toys, clothing and encourage the children to explore everything and not just gender conform activities as much as i want.
but when almost every other friend, relative, other kindergarten/school parents teachers push their own ideas of what is appropriate for girls or boys, my influence ends up being rather small.
i can't push my own ideas here. i can only encourage and protect the diverse interests that my kids develop on their own.
That distinction goes back to decisions made by a few department store managers around WWII. It’s nothing but a cultural norm reinforced everywhere so pervasively most of us aren’t even aware of the pressure.
Yes and me and my wife laugh about it but there is an obvious distinctive preference for kids male and female which will play into sales .. no one is forcing anyone to buy anything and even back in the 80s growing up I knew kids that would buy toys you'd associate with the other gender.
A societal pressure doesn't mean it's forced. Most societal pressures aren't. Instead, they are strong expectations and in occasions, frowning upon behavior that deviates from the expectation. This creates tremendous pressure. Just look at teenager social dynamics, lots of "unenforced" expectations become critical for them.
And before that color was too expensive. But one wouldn’t say that gender roles did not exist. Color is nothing but an added expression like lipstick or horsehair wigs.
For some today black is the macho color, for others it’s the artistic color.
My only point is that because of the color switch we can see that certain concepts of gender identity preference, "color", are social constructs that influence society.
That just says that gender norms are malleable, not that they don't exist. Both in the 1800s and today there were strong expectations in terms of "expected" roles for different genders.
heteronormativity include sexual behavior, but mostly contains other behavior. Like the way you dress, talk or present yourself, the activities or kind of play you do or like.
Parent comment is mostly talking about non-sexual heteronormativity, which is often presented as the norm. An obvious example would be an adult insisting that pink is for girl and blue for boys, and shaming a kid for liking what's not the (hetero-)norm.
They literally do not say "kids are empowered to explore their sexuality."
Kids grow up into adults.
xd is the one that brought up sexualizing children. No reasonable person here would assume anyone is talking about sexualizing children unless they explicitly said as much.
Somehow you and xd are thinking "people are feeling empowered to explore their sexuality" explicitly means "kids" in this context. Why you are thinking that, I don't know.
"For the last several decades society put massive pressure on kids to conform to heteronormativity. With these pressures lessening more and more people are feeling empowered to explore their sexuality."
He talks about society putting pressure on kids to be straight and then talks about people and sexuality in the same damn paragraph; are you being purposefully obtuse?
I think the downvotes are coming because you’re insisting on treating this as a question of sexualization. Gender is distinct and it’s reinforced early on - my son is 5 and most of his classmates have had things like “pink and skirts and dolls are for girls”, “trucks and blue and guns are for boys” established as the norm for years. That’s not perfectly reliable - we know more sparkly princesses who climb trees and drive race cars than I did at his age - but it’s _everywhere_, and the religious conservatives who call any acknowledgment of LGBTQ people “grooming” would 100% be locking and loading if even 10% of that reinforcement energy was going into LGBTQ acceptance.
Also note that none of this is about having sex: it’s about telling kids which archetypes are available for them as grownups. If we want to talk about sex, however, look at the degree to which girl’s clothing mimics the styles of adult women even at the expense of practicality for the things kids actually do and how many stories even for young children revolve around the major life goal being an exclusive relationship with a man. Again, the stuff people are complaining about now is an order of magnitude less than what kids are already getting to reinforce traditional gender norms.
>For the last several decades society put massive pressure on kids to conform to heteronormativity.
Only decades? You mean for all of history, where there are distinct roles mostly because of anatomy.
In fact, it was only in recent decades with birth control that was there even an option for most women to take a different role for extended periods.
I'll say the opposite is true, the last several decades did a great job and removed the notion of heterogenomativity. We are just going so far past that into the illogical now.
As far as "all of history" goes, ancient Greece for example tolerated a particular kind of "homosexuality", but not one we should try and emulate - it matched neither of two conditions in "consenting adults", for example.
While it's true that few if any societies other than "modern Western" would score as high as ours on Stonewall's diversity index, there were definitely ups and downs if you plotted things over time.
Go back several generations in the USA or Western Europe and it's absolutely normal for straight men to have close and emotional friendships for life; when photography was first invented, it was a thing that male BFFs had photos of themselves taken that I bet anyone today, if shown without context, would immediately pattern-match to "gay couple". I'm going to quote the "art of manliness" site, of all places, on this: https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/relationships/bosom-bu... (warning: images may be considered NSFW at your place of work, despite being absolutely non-pornographic as far as I can tell)
Some of these men were undoubtedly gay in the sense we understand the term, but the idea of having a close emotional bond with another man was certainly open to straight men too (and to some extent, also expected).
But then, to quote "The History of Male Friendships" linked on that page,
> First, men were free to have affectionate man relationships with each other without fear of being called a “queer” because the concept of homosexuality as we know it today didn’t exist then. America didn’t have the strict straight/gay dichotomy that currently exists. Affectionate feelings weren’t strictly labeled as sexual or platonic. There wasn’t even a name for homosexual sex; instead, it was referred to as “the crime that cannot be spoken.” It wasn’t until the turn of the 19th century that psychologists started analyzing homosexuality. When that happened, men in America started to become much more self-conscious about their relationships with their buds and traded the close embraces for a stiff pat on the back.
> [...]
> The man friendship underwent some serious transformations during the 20th century. Men went from lavishing endearing words on each other and holding hands to avoiding too much emotional bonding or any sort of physical affections whatsoever. Fear of being called gay drove much of the transformation. Ministers and politicians decried homosexuality as being incompatible with true manhood. And like most deviant behavior in the 1950s, homosexuality was associated with Communism.
So, once "gay" appeared on people's radar, heteronormativity shot through the roof and men were expected to be performatively straight, to prove themselves that they were not "tainted" by this new "affliction". That's where a lot of this pressure came from, it was definitely not constant throughout all of even relatively modern history.
Indeed. But my argument is specifically that the norms around acceptable behaviour for a straight male have significantly narrowed from roughly the end of the 19th century to the 1960s.
I'd argue that the trend continued past the 1960s. While yes, there is certainly more acceptance of homosexual men, there is also a continuing trend towards an exaggerated extreme masculinity that would have felt out of place in the 1960s.
Maybe it's more accurate to say Western (and in particular American) culture has fragmented, and one of those cultures has increasingly put stricter and stricter norms around acceptable heterosexual male behaviour to the point where it's nearly parody.
> For the last several decades society put massive pressure on kids to conform to heteronormativity
This is patently untrue. Since the 60s, western society has been increasingly accomodating to the non-gender-conforming. Especially with the rise of the internet, people who once felt isolated with whatever made them different were able to find others like themselves.
I wouldn’t say it’s untrue, just incomplete. Kids who present as the “wrong” gender are still much more likely to be bullied by kids and emotionally abused by parents.
But that isn’t a new thing in the past few decades, and indeed it does seem to be getting better.
Yes. Outright bans and persecution of homosexuality is relatively new. Effeminate gays were practically eradicated, Europe had the Nazis do it, the US had the lavender scare (because gay=communist), the Soviets under Stalin did much like the Nazis. This is why gays reinvented themselves into the hypermasculine leather culture starting in the 50s. It's why older gay men have negative attitudes towards younger effeminate gays and the reason why the same parts of the gay community look down on bottoms who aren't vers.
> Outright bans and persecution of homosexuality is relatively new.
In most of Europe at least, homosexuality could not be openly practiced for most of the middle ages. There were certain exceptions, but it was not generally considered acceptable, and it was persecuted by the church or other moral authorities, at the very least as ostracism if not outright legal punishments - usually seen as a deviant sexual act, which were also routinely punished. Since the states were far weaker than modern states, it wasn't as systematic and universal as the Nazis attempted, but it was still happening.
Even in societies we perceive as more open such as ancient Rome, homosexual acts were often not explicitly accepted as normal, except for some we today would (rightly) consider abhorrent - adult men having sex with teenagers, but never the other way around.
Ancient acceptance of MSM generally depended on who did the penetrating, because in a nutshell penetrating was manly and A-OK while being penetrated (orally / anally / vaginally) was womanly and hence bad. MSM was an exercise of social power.
This brings to mind one of my rules about conservative panics:
If laws against witchcraft are removed and/or witchcraft is destigmatized and then all the sudden there appears to be an explosion of witches, the explanation is probably not that hordes of people are adopting witchcraft.
I'll leave it to the reader to guess the simplest and most likely explanation.
I understand your point but I think witchcraft might not be the best example. If witchcraft started going viral, I would absolutely be tempted to give it a shot lol. Would not surprise me if I was not in the minority there
Sure. Adventurous or curious people might give something a try just for the hell of it. For some it will stick. For many it won't.
This is what I find so exhausting about those who try to drum up some kind of controversy around gender identity. Assuming it is all just a fad, who cares? Where's the issue when people decide to switch their gender on a whim? It's their lives. People do all kinds of things on a whim. Adults, teens and children too. Especially children, in fact. Sometimes people regret the things they did, sometimes they don't. Oh well, it's part of life.
I could understand being concerned about a social trend if it was causing violent behavior that negatively affected other people's lives, but this isn't that. Who is it hurting if someone decides to identify as another gender? Even if they pursue medical intervention, it's only going to affect them at worst. If anything the small government/pro-freedom position should be to defend the right of those people to live how they want.
> Even if they pursue medical intervention, it's only going to affect them at worst.
People are worried about their kids. People are scared and the media amplifies the most extreme voices. Establishing scientifically the effectiveness of medical interventions is difficult in the best of circumstances and most psychology is non-reproducible, so it's hard to know what to believe is best.
> the explanation is probably not that hordes of people are adopting witchcraft.
I don't know how you can a priori gauge this probability. If something illegal suddenly becomes legal but is still somewhat taboo, that obviously attracts experimentation, at least from rebellious youth.
Rule implies that it applies to past conservative moral panics. Is there a past moral panic in which lots of formerly suppressed identities suddenly expressed themselves once the moral panic was over?
A bit of an obscure example, but: Capoeira was forbidden in Brazil for a very long time, mostly because of a moral panic(for brevity I'll leave the complexities of this situation out of this comment), then when it was legalised, and the stigma around it began to disappear, it quickly became very popular, both in Brazil and internationally!
This seems to be to opposite of the example GP was seeking. Unless you mean to say that a great many people (both in Brazil and internationally) were already practicing Capoeira before it was legalized...
I bring this one up every time someone brings up Chesterton's Fence arguments about stuff like this.
Why was left handedness considered taboo and evil? Do we need to figure out a legitimate reason for this before we can remove the fence? Could there possibly be a legitimate reason for something that clearly absurd?
I mean the point of the argument is to try to find out if there is possibly a legitimate reason, not to assume there was and not explore removing the fence. Sometimes no there was no good reason. Sometimes there was but it’s no longer applicable.For example lots of religious dietary restrictions have reasonable health benefits, especially in a society before modern refrigeration and food safety standards. So while there was a legitimate reason, it’s not nearly as applicable anymore. Discouraging sexual freedom and promiscuity makes a lot more sense in a society without birth control and where every additional mouth to feed means someone isn’t making it through the winter. Less so in a modern society. And sometimes there are absolutely legitimate reasons that have just been lost to time (most commonly captured in the idea that most safety rules and regulations are written in blood)
There could be, but I think the presumption should be that it is normal social evolution to stigmatize minorities. Red-headed people, Jewish/Semitic people, people with cleft palates, on and on.
There seems to be a representation threshold below which any observable minority is considered undesirable. To the extent there is a “legitimate reason” it is probably rooted in evolutionary psychology for avoiding too much genetic variation in small tribes. I submit those fences are the opposite of Chesterton’s fence and can happily be ignored in today’s society.
> evolutionary psychology for avoiding too much genetic variation in small tribes
Hmm. I suspect it's just "other tribes". We humans will make tribes out of literally any distinction, even athletic team preferences. It's kind of our thing.
No comment about Chesterton's Fence but I have heard (but never confirmed!) one reason for left-handed stigma is to do with hygiene. The idea is that before modern hygienic standards (e.g. sinks with soap in every bathroom/kitchen), the left hand was reserved for "dirty work" (we are also considering a time before toilet paper...). So for example when you reach out to shake someone's hand, it would be rude to use the left.
For me, the Chesterton’s Fence principle doesn’t insist that there’s a good reason for everything that needs to be discovered. It says, don’t remove the thing until you understand why it was put there. If you’re sure there’s no good reason, go ahead. But find out first.
The Satanic panic is a moral panic consisting of over 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of Satanic ritual abuse (SRA, sometimes known as ritual abuse, ritualistic abuse, organized abuse, or sadistic ritual abuse) starting in the United States in the 1980s, spreading throughout many parts of the world by the late 1990s, and persisting today.
Well, there were actual cases of it, but it was exaggerated in the media.
Just as the media makes it out like the next stop by a cop could end up in an execution if you’re not the same ethnicity as the cop. It’s still rather rare, or at least not happening at the rate the media portrays it.
Why not? If something illegal/destigmatized which has some advantages becomes legal I would absolutely expect there to be an explosion of people who now start adopting that thing.
Since there is a school of thought that gender to a great extent is socially learned behaviour the idea that you by learning more about gender transgression would "create" a desire that "I would be more comfortable in 'that gender' over there" is not far-fetched although I'm not aware of any research. The issue is mostly by those who pathologize that state of not being comfortable in ones "gender assigned at birth", like saying "...other illnesses such as gender dysphoria" and then wanting to "cure" this dysphoria in other ways than enabling a safe and informed transition. Like for instance banning people talking about their experiences, good and bad, in transitioning.
You can practice presenting differently in safe social situations, that's reversible. (e.g. crossdressing)
Trans fem people can remove their facial hair without doing other medical transition steps.
The effects of hormone replacement are so slow that you can safely "try them out" for a month or two and not have a huge permanent burden.
You talk to people and think about it real hard and sleep on it for years. It looks sudden from the outside because there's such a stigma over saying "Hey I'm thinking about trying on a new gender, do you think it would work?"
It's not too different from other body modification like tattoos or vasectomies. You can't fully know for sure, but there is a point where you decide that the risk is worth it, because the potential payoff seems worth it. Then it usually turns out it is. Most "de-transition" cases are people who couldn't afford the monetary cost or social cost of presenting as transgender. It's un-common to transition and then find out you're actually cis.
This makes sense except the part about the slow acting hormones. If they are slow acting then one wouldn’t know their effects until later. How much later? And is it guaranteed that they will be reversible at that point?
Modulo what is above, in summary: you are saying there can be informed decisions because the teenagers can:
- try out cross dressing
- try out the hormone therapy to some point before it has non-reversible long term consequences
If you suppose that understanding this well is not possible, that would imply you also do not understand it well, so perhaps you should leave other people alone to do what they will, unless some good reason is revealed not to.
Your comment reminds me of a very interesting interview with Dr Az Hakeem, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist who set up group therapy sessions for gender dysphoric patients: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5ycqNoareUT6Y6s85LrJSF
He would include in these groups people at all stages in their transitions, so those considering transitioning further could be informed and challenged by those who had gone the whole way with surgery and all.
Hakeem [...] describes himself as a “gender critical psychiatrist”
Then the "sell"
Hakeem offers “specialist psychotherapy for gender dysphoria”, and says that he “does not try and persuade or dissuade anyone from pursuing physical sex interventions such as hormones or surgery but his role is to provide a neutral exploration space to think about sex and gender”.
Then the reality
“He made it clear from the very start that he was sceptical of my gender and expressed doubt that it could differ to [my] sex,”
So a great example of someone pathologizing trans people and not taking them seriously. I hope that was what you wanted to shed light on! Thanks!
Sounds like he asked some mildly probing questions that challenged the patient's self-beliefs, and Pink News have decided to spin this as being "conversion therapy".
Note also that Pink News' general editorial stance is that unconditional affirmation is the only valid approach, so it's not much surprise they jumped on this story.
I would still recommend giving that podcast a listen, it gives a much richer insight into Dr Hakeem's work than that article.
A therapist that knows how to ask mildly probing questions:
"I hear and validate your feelings and you have a lot of options in front of you, I'm here to help you to minimize the risk of regret with the irreversible options and that might lead me to ask uncomfortable questions, is that ok?"
Az probably:
"What on earth are you going about love? There's no such thing as gender! Gender is just sex. So you just go into the lavatory and check down your trousers, you see a willy down there? Yeees, then you are unfortunately a female, but a Johnson? Hooray! You are a man, then you can man the fuck up and skip out of here! NEEEEEEXT"
>then this opens new doors to examining the behaviour of other illnesses such as gender dysphoria that are statistically over represented.
Don't fall into the trap of assuming that 1950's Western norms are a 'baseline.'
History shows us that almost all expressions of gender are fluid. The idea of "men and women need to be segregated in certain places (particularly when nude) and must dress differently' is likely the cause of how prevalent transgender people have become. It was always an unsustainable system that was only allowed to flourish because a powerful minority wanted it to. Like are you a boy that relates primarily to women? Well you either endure being separated from them for a ton of meaningful developmental activities or you become transgender.
I think there are plenty of people who would be fine with their biological sex if it didn't come with so much societal baggage.
> ...if it didn't come with so much societal baggage.
Isn't societal baggage also a perception issue? Take 10 people with all the same physical traits and the same social situation and you will get 10 different perspectives.
Why should I accept there is _any_ baggage as a fact? It may just appear so for a massive amount of people, and _that_ could be fluid.
> Is it 'subjective' that many activities are segregated by gender in the West?
You're conflating sex and gender. If you used the two terms as others do there's no surprise.
Washrooms, in almost the entire world, are sex segregated. They aren't gender-segregated in the sense of transgender because they forbid all males and allow all females, or vice versa.
> If a person doesn't like that, how is it not a logical response to try to change their gender?
The washroom isn't actually gender segregated, it's sex segregated and you can't change sex. The words you're using are chosen to subtly obscure the situation.
> So you're telling me that a boy who identifies as a boy is fine to change with the girls at PE and do their activities? OR is there 'baggage' to being a boy in this scenario?
It sure feels like there's baggage to being a girl - being an object for you to shower next to, not a person with their own privacy rights.
> The idea of "men and women need to be segregated in certain places (particularly when nude) and must dress differently' is likely the cause of how prevalent transgender people have become.
Have you ever been a parent? Because males and females are different, and the sexual pressures on them are immensely different too, for both social and physical reasons. Similarly, sexual risk (to anyone, but especially children) is incredibly lopsided and comes almost entirely from males.
If you ignore sexual differences in other children you will let your children be mistreated, if you ignore sexual differences in adults you will get them molested.
> It was always an unsustainable system that was only allowed to flourish because a powerful minority wanted it to.
Pretty much all women know and are cautious, if not fearful, of male violence. They fought for women's sex-based rights because of obvious need. This isn't men putting women in purdah, these are protections they've achieved for themselves. Most men can see the extra work women have to do for safety reasons. The need for women's spaces is far from a minority opinion.
> Like are you a boy that relates primarily to women? Well you either endure being separated from them for a ton of meaningful developmental activities or you become transgender.
If you truly empathized with women you'd realized that your size and strength and biology makes you a risk that another woman wouldn't be and you'd socialize with women in mixed-sex areas and activities where your presence wasn't an undue burden.
> I think there are plenty of people who would be fine with their biological sex if it didn't come with so much societal baggage.
It's the physical baggage people are wrongly trying to ignore.
> You're making an argument to make better men, but your method is victimize weak boys instead.
Unfortunately, even weak males are a physical threat to females. The difference in upper body strength is that stark. So if you're trying to split society along some line to reduce the problem of physical aggression, gender is not a bad place to do it.
(Add more lines, and you'd end up with a system more akin to boxing weight classes, which would be more than a bit ridiculous. It's way better to invest in enforcement of very rigid norms against physical abuse.)
> Have you heard of being gay? I'm guessing you have, but you choose not to care
Being gay has nothing to do with child abuse. You're gay-baiting, conflating transgenderism with homosexuality. This is one of the issues the LGB Alliance was founded to address.
> the insane amount of male-on-male sexual violence that occurs among children in the current system.
Yes, from men. That's my point. As a parent you need to know the sex of those who are interacting with your children.
> Again, then why do we let young boys change in the same room as grown men? Is the problem really just about biological sex?
We let them change with either parent because presumably their parent can keep them safe with active supervision. Generally though, other parents would recommend that young children use the womens' facility with another woman if neither parent is available.
> Wait until you find out how gay men feel!
Men are men, straight or gay. Women are smaller and not as strong.
> Sure, and what exactly is the reason behind why a vagina is the definition of who is a woman deserving of protection?
Having a vagina is not the definition of a female, but they do strongly correlate.
Everyone deserves protection but women's protection is largely achieved by providing sexually segregated spaces.
> There are plenty of weak men who empathize with women who are very at risk for physical and sexual violence.
Hopefully most males empathize with women but even if the risks were justification for a man to leave male spaces they aren't a justification to invade female spaces.
> IS the only solution to say who cares you were born with a penis?
Why is your solution to take away all women and children's safety to provide questionable safety to some males?
If you can't stop abusive men in the men's room how do you plan to stop them from following you into the women's washroom using the same legal exception written for you?
> Buddy, would you be willing to believe I have less than zero interest in women?
Would you believe that this isn't relevant? It's not "Women's spaces, and anyone else who swears they don't like vaj".
Women's spaces don't work if there are exceptions, they only work if they can be used to instantly exclude any male who tries to enter. You being there lessens the effectiveness of the system even if you are pure of heart.
Operating based on a sampling of women I know - Im going to perform an experiment - I have some clothes of mine that I (Male with a capital M) no longer wear and Im going to give them to some Female friends for their own use.
We'll see what happens but I bet Im going to be met with confusing expressions and laughed at - at best.
Men and women do not dress differently on the count of societal pressures but rather express themselves differently on the count of different imperatives. You can slice it 6 different ways but outside of a small minority of people with non-standard gender ideals, the vast majority of women want to "be pretty" in whatever way that means to them and the vast majority of men want to "look like a man" for their various reasons and in whatever way that means to them.
I realize this is a terribly "incorrect" thing to say these days but at the same time its among the most pervasive ideals I can think of - right up there with the understanding that water is wet. Out side of groups where the word "Patriarchy" is thrown around, men are men and women are women and neither would have it any other way. This isn't due to societal pressure to conform either. This is prevailing behavior of both genders at work.
I personally do not understand why a minority of people choosing alternative, non-birth gender roles needs to be cast into some movement where everyones gender is in question. Im not sure I know anyone who has ever so much as questioned the "baggage" their bio-gender is supposedly saddled with. According to modern psychiatry (which for the purposes of this conversation we'll assume is valid since we all agree Sociopathy and Eating Disorders are real things too), the DSM-5 includes Gender Dysphoria. Psychiatry considers that a real thing right next to some other things I think we can all agree are real.
> History shows us that almost all expressions of gender are fluid.
>You can slice it 6 different ways but outside of a small minority
How small is that minority?
>the vast majority of women want to "be pretty"
Are you implying that there's an objective idea of 'pretty' as it relates to fashion? That a woman in pants can't be 'pretty'? Can I point you to powerful men in high-heeled shoes in the 10th Century? Lots of women were attracted to that back then, because of what it meant from a societal standpoint.
Or are you implying that it's fine for men to dress in women's clothes? Because if so then why are we here?
>I realize this is a terribly "incorrect" thing to say
It's not 'incorrect,' it's intellectually lazy.
>I personally do not understand why a minority of people choosing alternative, non-birth gender roles needs to be cast into some movement where everyones gender is in question.
Luckily, that's a strawman so you can stop being confused by it.
> History shows us that almost all expressions of gender are fluid
Again, are high heels for boys or girls? History's opinion will surprise you!
Now listen, outside of snark, I understand its hard to see outside of the environment you've lived for your entire life, but this is a forum for hackers so maybe be a little bit more open to people questioning and challenging things you hold dear?
EDIT: You know what, here's one of many phenomenon that you seem to be unaware of:
Although Europeans were first attracted to heels because the Persian connection gave them a macho air, a craze in women's fashion for adopting elements of men's dress meant their use soon spread to women and children.
"In the 1630s you had women cutting their hair, adding epaulettes to their outfits," says Semmelhack.
"They would smoke pipes, they would wear hats that were very masculine. And this is why women adopted the heel - it was in an effort to masculinise their outfits."
From that time, Europe's upper classes followed a unisex shoe fashion until the end of the 17th Century, when things began to change again.
"You start seeing a change in the heel at this point," says Helen Persson, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. "Men started to have a squarer, more robust, lower, stacky heel, while women's heels became more slender, more curvaceous."
> > History shows us that almost all expressions of gender are fluid
> Again, are high heels for boys or girls? History's opinion will surprise you!
If transgenderism were only changing fashion trends it wouldn't involve psychiatric or surgical interventions and transition wouldn't be called life-saving, etc.
> Or are you implying that it's fine for men to dress in women's clothes? Because if so then why are we here?
Are you implying that men in women's clothes are just men in women's clothes? Because then yeah, why are we here?
Recently read the story of a detransitioner and the statistic that about a third falls of the radar (and due missing their hormones, almost certainly are unhappy about the treatment). Social media are implicated in the spread of these ideas (all ideas), and the detransitioner pleaded for better info from professionals and an end to doctor neutrality for underage trans people.
It's a tradeoff. At least we can all agree that adults have the right to transition under an Informed Consent model. Countries like the UK, without IC, are hellholes for trans medical care. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1eWIshUzr8
This is in the NL. Yes, they got a pile of folders, but in retrospect they would have wanted psychiatric care, because these issues were not treated and instead channelled into gender disphoria.
The state of affairs around transsexuality is horrifying. Critical discussion is basically not allowed on moral grounds and most people who "study" the topic (eg gender studies), care for said patients (eg gender clinics), etc are the same people who already adhere to that no-criticism-allowed agenda.
Less than 1%. That's the number of people who detransition simply because they didn't feel it was the right thing for them.
Of the less than 2% of detransitioners overall, the vast majority names reasons like social pressure, transitioning being too difficult, etc.
Dunno what numbers you are talking about, but the ones I know certainly underline gender dysphoria being a very real thing and not some sort of "social contagion", and my personal experience definitely aligns with this as well: I don't know a single trans person who seems to regret transitioning, but a whole number of trans people who are struggling with the constant hate they get, fuelled in part by this sort of rhetoric.
And since the article in one of the replies mentioned puberty blockers: They are 1. entirely reversible, 2. routinely prescribed to cis children for other medical reasons and 3. unlike these blockers, puberty is not reversible.
Can I change your mind, even if just a little bit? I don't know; but if you really want to change your mind, start looking closely into the "statistics" of the right. Their misrepresentations are often absurdly superficial. It's all a lie, and the parts that aren't, usually aren't that bad.
> Less than 1%. That's the number of people who detransition simply because they didn't feel it was the right thing for them.
About 1% who do so through the hospital procrdures. About a third just stops showing up for followups and hormones. According to the detransitioner, who falls into that category, and has found a small community of similar people, this is what's wrong with the statistic: it's extremely important to not exclude the group that falls of the radar. Since they're not getting hormones anymore, the safest assumption is that they are stopping their transition (because they are) or detransitioning.
Please share where you got those numbers from, I'm sure there's a good laugh to be had about how anybody got that "one third" figure.
A minor side note: Stopping hormones does not mean someone has stopped transitioning or is detransitioning. It just means they've stopped taking hormones.
Second side note: Detransitioning doesn't mean the person isn't trans either, it just means they've stopped transitioning.
Third side note: Just stopping hormones without talking to your doctor about it is a reeeeally bad idea. I'd be surprised if the number of these "under the radar" people was even on the same level as known detransitioners.
These numbers are published by Dutch health authorities, and confirmed in the article at [1].
Nobody argues trans people should be stopped, but it is argued that mental healthcare preceding such a proces must be significantly improved. A lot of teens are transitioning, and their bad self image and self hate, inflamed by heavy social media use and the extremely well documented adverse effects on mental health of social media, are, it seems, too often channelled into this solution leading to regret later.
I'm not spending money on some pay-walled article in another language; and to be honest, I've seen enough """articles""" on this topic that I wouldn't trust them anyway and jump right to their actual sources.
Of course if gender non-normativity can be learned, so too can gender normativity (e.g. bro culture is arguably a form of men learning to do what their local culture considers male things). I don't think all trans people would disagree with that part as much as you think (see the "I never knew that could be an option" thoughts from some late transitioners reflecting back), the bit they'd disagree with is the idea that there is an aberration or problem to those who opt to identify with a gender other than their identified at birth sex.
> "I never knew that could be an option" thoughts from some late transitioners
Anedotally, the three people I knew before transition who later transitioned have all expressed some form of process "I was depressed and didn't understand why" -> "I had these thoughts but suppressed them because I felt they were weird / unacceptable" -> "I learned what transition is and the pieces fell into place".
Edit: over a period of many years, that's why they were late transitioners!
Normativity by definition is related to actions/outcomes that society deems good/desirable/permissible; non-normativity, the opposite. Societal goals are always a moving target, so it follows that normativity is as well.
My dad still uses language like "C'mon! Be a man and do {this thing}."
Personally, I believe when I'm old and crotchety the winds of society will leave my language at something like "C'mon! You should do {this thing}." and leave the gender out of it entirely.
Yeah the reason that the "social contagion" stuff makes my blood pressure spike is because it's almost always a prelude to some kind of "And they're trying to force-feminize everyone and then they're gonna take our children" stuff.
You know like, Quentin Tarantino isn't racist even though he said the N word, but if I'm walking down the street and a total stranger comes up to me and starts throwing the N word around, safe bet they're saying something dumb.
See my comment a few days ago about "The Internet is graffiti in a bathroom stall". I could probably have a calm good-faith conversation with any of you in real life about gender. But not on a web forum.
This is the direct outcome of "political correctness", and of silencing people that disagree with you.
Even suggesting the fact that mass sociogenic illnesses (formerly called mass hysteria) primarily affect girls [1] goes against the new religion and is vilified immediately.
Most objections of claims about mass sociogenic illnesses that I've seen have to do with people using it to dismiss behaviour they don't like, often without any real evidence that this is "mass sociogenic illness".
Even this article doesn't really make any attempt to disprove a null hypothesis and we basically are required to take these people at their word that a) the behaviour expressed is not consistent with Tourette's and the patients don't actually have it, and b) the source of this is due to the YouTuber mentioned. There's no control group or anything to prove these two facts beyond the author's opinion.
> then this opens new doors to examining the behaviour of other illnesses such as gender dysphoria that are statistically over represented
I don't think this is necessarily new. Anorexia seems to increase proportionally to public awareness of anorexia. It's not just that diagnosis actually improves, it literally appears to be a causal connection, as in, hospitalizations for health problems due to undereating increase dramatically after public awareness about anorexia increases in response to media coverage or public awareness campaigns. Pretty wild.
This was discussed in the book "Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche".
I am wondering how they differentiate this specific extreme behaviour moving "socially," to other subtle behaviours which are copied and mirrored within small tight knit social groups - especially kids / teenagers? I found the 9:1 ratio of girls to boys intriguing, given the same or very similar mechanism might been a huge benefit to females in past ages where they might be married into a strange culture.
Over represented compared to what? The incidence of these disorders back when admitting them would get you bullied / raped / killed?
An alternative explanation is that reducing the social straitjackets that enforced conformity is leading to greater diversity of human behavior. Maybe yes, maybe no, but it’s at least a hypothesis worth considering.
BTW your point would be stronger without the persecution complex. And stronger yet with an acknowledgement that, while tic-like behavior and multi-year cognitive identity issues may have correlations, also they may not.
In the case of gender dysphoria, the obvious comparison would be, compared to a society where one can subvert gender norms and be accepted without changing one's identity. The emergence of trans movement has created a space where gender-nonconforming people can find more acceptance, but it comes with own set of norms and requirements.
One of which is that one must change their identity and, in many cases, conform to the norms of your newly chosen identity (certainly not everyone in the trans community enforces identity-based gender norms, but that's also true of general society when it comes to sex-based norms. In my experience, they're both about as bad as each other. I've lost count of the number of times people have told me that I must be a certain way or have had certain experiences because of my gender identity).
The "real" thing would be the gender dysphoria present if people weren't subject to a society telling them that if they don't conform to the norms of <gender> then they can't be <gender>, they must be <other gender>. A society that conflates wanting to live and present in a certain way with wanting a certain body type (these are both valid things to want, but they ought to be treated as independent phenomena rather than as being linked by an abstract concept of gender).
Having such an escape is better than not having it, but it's far from an ideal gender free society (where we effectively treat everyone as having a non-binary gender), in which I suspect we would see a lot less gender dysphoria. Allowing people to choose which set of gender norms they want to follow is still enforcing gender norms if you expect people to choose a single identity and don't allow people to freely mix and match.
Tough call since it is also possible a certain number of people have always felt this way but only by others "coming out" do they now feel comfortable expressing themselves as well.
> This is probably going to get downvoted to oblivion, because nobody wants to confront the idea that we can _learn_ to want to be another gender. But I think there's some interesting parallels to be observed here, and discounting that based on "moral virtue" or "denying hate speech" or whatever i'll be attacked with is just moving the target.
I feel you're grossly misrepresenting the issue. It means nothing if you believe people can be re-educated to cease to identify as a specific gender or repress their sexuality throughout their whole lives. That's completely irrelevant. You can also argue that you can re-educated men to be ok with being impotent or be bald or not need glasses, but somehow the conservative side of society is perfectly ok with having whole industries devoted to pumping out erectile disfuncion pills to circumvent natural health issues.
So you have to ask yourself why do you feel it's ok to repress whole segments of society because they don't feel comfortable with who they are, while you are perfectly ok with other segments pulling nature's cheat codes to achieve the exact same thing.
This is exactly the point: the authoritarian motivation behind repressing minorities, and the hate speech that goes along with it.
> It means nothing if you believe people can be re-educated to cease to identify as a specific gender or repress their sexuality throughout their whole lives. That's completely irrelevant. You can also argue that you can re-educated men to be ok with being impotent or be bald or not need glasses, but somehow the conservative side of society is perfectly ok with having whole industries devoted to pumping out erectile disfuncion pills to circumvent natural health issues.
I don't understand this. The core problem with gender dysphoria is that you feel significant discomfort with your biological sex. If it were possible to legitimately "re-educate" oneself to not feel this discomfort, that would be considerably cheaper, less invasive and less problematic overall than trying to change one's sex. All surgery carries risk of death after all, and lifetime of hormone therapy is annoying to say the least.
Being bald is not just a feeling of discomfort with having no hair, it has real consequences. Baldness is generally considered to be less attractive, and attractiveness impacts career and dating prospects, for instance.
Being impotent also has real-world consequences. It impacts dating and also impacts your ability to conceive.
Arguably, being trans also has real-world consequences as well, so if a solution became available that could eliminate the gender dysphoria without changing your sex, I would be very surprised if plenty of trans people wouldn't choose that option, and not just because of social stigma.
The resistance to such a solution comes from two understandable directions: a) terrible gay conversion therapy that doesn't actually work, and b) the (mistaken) notion of mind-body dualism that many people internalize over their lives, that their identity, their mind, is separate from their body and has more primacy.
> I don't understand this. The core problem with gender dysphoria is that you feel significant discomfort with your biological sex.
Indeed, and that's why you see people undergoing medical treatments to address that problem.
Why anyone in their right mind would be against people seeking medical treatments to address their health issues is beyond me.
> If it were possible to legitimately "re-educate" oneself to not feel this discomfort, that would be considerably cheaper, less invasive and less problematic overall than trying to change one's sex.
You're desperately trying to avoid the point.
I repeat. You can reeducate an impotent man to stop worrying about his erectile dysfunction. You can reeducate a man to stop bothering with being bald.
Why is that somehow not targeted by this authoritarian belief that you're entitled to force upon others to undergo reeducation camps to accept an outcome they don't want nor feel comfortable with?
Why is that only minorities vilified by certain religious conservative pressure groups should have no say in what they can and cannot do regarding their health and personal well-being?
I downvoted you because I knew that your comment would prevent any discussion about the actual article, and that was in fact what occurred.
This whole "I'm going to say [something offtopic and offensive to a lot of people]. This is probably going to get downvoted to oblivion, because nobody [ridiculous generalization about humans]" is feckless and intellectually dishonest. You do this because it will be downvoted.
According to Gallup's poll in early 2022, which they present as estimates, 0.7% of the US population is trans. In India, 0.6% people self-identified as hijra (Sahastrabuddhe et al., 2012). In the 2011 census in India, 0.04% answered with "Other" when asked to choose between "Male", "Female" and "Other".
Canada included the question in their latest census and the result was 0.2%. In my opinion, a mandatory government census provides data that is more accurate than Gallup's phone poll.
"The proportions of transgender and non-binary people were three to seven times higher for Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2006, 0.79%) and millennials (born between 1981 and 1996, 0.51%) than for Generation X (born between 1966 and 1980, 0.19%), baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1965, 0.15%) and the Interwar and Greatest Generations (born in 1945 or earlier, 0.12%)."
Canada's government also adds this under their data comparability section: "Belgium (0.5% among people aged 18 to 75 in 2021) and New Zealand (0.5% among people aged 18 and older in 2020) have also published representative survey-based data on their transgender populations.
Other countries have published 2021 data on transgender people using crowdsourcing and non-representative surveys, including Ireland (0.6% among people aged 18 and older), England and Wales (0.6% among people aged 16 and older), and the United States (0.8% among people aged 18 and older)."
Being transgender is not a mental disorder or illness, but rather a natural variation of human diversity. Everyone has the right to express their gender identity in a way that is authentic and comfortable for them. I fail to see how the topic of a mass social media-induced illness applies here.
I think this generation is forced into gender essentialism, gender non-conformity used to be much more normal, now it's redefined as if really a conformity to another gender ... very totalitarian
Decades ago, a woman had to do the cleaning chores... nowadays you are the women because you do the cleaning chores. Its the same sexism thinking, but the path is walked the other way.
Always be wary of persons who sort your behavior into 'male' and 'female' categories.
Indeed. It seems pretty obvious to anyone that has ever witnessed a high school hall that teenagers mimic far more than just clothes. Fashion goes way beyond that.
“nobody wants to confront the idea that we can _learn_ to want to be another gender.”
It’s impossible to have the idea that you want to be another “gender” unless you have learned to want it. The ideas of “gender” and that you can switch yours have to come from somewhere; you have to learn them. Just as: you can’t want to be a doctor unless you’ve learned that there is such a thing as a doctor and that it’s something you can be.
Very confident to assert that this act of imagination is impossible, that nobody in history has ever spontaneously had the idea of trying on another gender's gender-marker clothing and worked from there.
I have gender dysphoria myself, and you get an upvote from me because I think you are speaking the truth in a way that would lead to better outcomes for many of the affected people, if one properly thought through the implications.
I understand gender dysphoria (as opposed to body dysphoria/dysmorphia in a stricter sense) to be a mismatch between someone's own preferences, interests etc. inasfar as they touch on categories that society has declared to be gendered, and society's expectations of the same - at least those of your local bubble of society.
This means there are two non-mutually-exclusive ways to make the lives of gender dysphoric people better: (1) let them change themselves (many options from pronouns to hormones and surgery), or (2) change society's expectations. Out of sympathy for people suffering from gender dysphoria, I wish for a bit more of (2) in the world.
Even in a vastly improved society, there will be people who decide that medical changes such as hormones/surgery are right for them, and as far as possible we should support them. These people existed, in small numbers, before "trans" was cool, and they will still exist when the media interest has picked up some new favourite category. (By analogy, Tourette's syndrome is also a real thing that existed before the internet, and will still exist when this particular media spike has died down.)
The "trans/gay/lesbian is cool now" explanation doesn't hold a lot of water to me. If I had the choice to not be gay, I wouldn't be. Life would be so much easier, emotionally and otherwise. Sex would be lower risk and it would be much easier to find a romantic partner. I spent a long time - two decades - suppressing it, as hard as I could, and it did not go away. Instead I was anxious and depressed. After I started to accept myself, those things became a lot better. I look forward to the day I come out.
Transitioning is 100x harder. The nonconformity is obvious. The antagonism directed at transitioning people is unavoidable, strong and potentially deadly - violent and lethal attacks on trans people are becoming much more common every year. Compulsory sterilization for people legally transitioning is still mandated in many countries and was only abolished in progressive countries in the last few years.
No, nobody is doing any of this because it's "cool".
It is "cool" inside a very small, but very powerful, stratum of society. You are right that there are still a lot of places where being queer (whether of the LGB or T variety) is a huge disadvantage.
Even within that stratum, I'd argue that it's more "acceptable" than specifically "cool". Or if it is "cool", it's in a superficial sort of way that doesn't relay any real benefits or privilege.
I guess one could argue whether getting upvotes, likes, views and such on social media counts as "real benefits", but that seems to be exactly what's going on with some of the Tourettes-on-TikTok people. You get lots of validation coming your way, you get to be part of a community, and you get +1 armor against trolls who claim it's ok to punch as long as you're only punching up.
Could people feel dismissive towards your opinion because it sounds like confabulation, rather than a carefully reasoned argument based on data that could spawn a good faith discussion?
> What's interesting to me
Shower thought, then
> This is probably going to get downvoted to oblivion, because nobody wants to confront the idea that...
Our neural networks have learned that people tend to say "I'm sure I'll get downvoted" right before or after saying some nasty racist or sexist shit. So, maybe avoid the phrase if you aren't doing that.
The way we have leapt from one societal belief to the other end of the spectrum is, I believe, interfering with objective healthcare. We started at "people who believe and behave outside of gender norms are perverted freaks" and we jumped straight to "you are whatever you think you are." Between those two paradigms there are questions it has become very difficult to research. Questions like "is it possible we are categorizing more than one mental state as being transgender" as an explanation for why some people greatly benefit from transitioning while others are destroyed by it. Questions like "is modifying the body a better treatment than modifying the mind at our current level of medical capability?"
You should do some reading on how gender affirming therapy and treatment works, because it is absolutely not standard to pursue treatment immediately without any process or consultation.
Whether transition is the right option is absolutely explored, it's just explored in a way that allows the patient to come to a decision rather than a doctor making the gatekeeping whether this person is "really transgendered".
I said that's the societal paradigm, not the healthcare professional opinion. Doctors recognized the legitimacy of gender dysphoria long before society at large did. There are large numbers of self-diagnosed people and not an insignificant number of them are taking improvised or illicit hormone medications. In addition, many jurisdictions such as the UK are moving to make hormone therapy medications available over the counter or after a brief consultation.
very very good point. and anecdotally, i think it's indeed the case for gender dysphoria...
btw, not long ago there was a sociologist from columbia, working on the autism epidemics, pointing out how autism is "contagious" among parents https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122411399389 - so it's not for the first time that we point out at the sociogenesis of mental illness
Hell no it's not. Gender non-conforming people have been a staple throughout human history, with examples dating back to at least the 2nd century AD [1], and not just in Europe but in South Asia as well [2].
The thing is, many societies didn't care for a long time, and only in the 20th century repression really took off with the rise of ultra-fundamentalist religions. Now we're seeing the backlash against that and people obviously are way more free to be who they are once again - so neither a surprise nor an epidemic.
i know it has been a staple throughout human history, and i'm not contesting that. i just posit that the proportion of it, nowadays, might be inflated by social media and mimetic behaviors. edit, a very enlightening comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33879136
> then this opens new doors to examining the behaviour of other illnesses such as gender dysphoria that are statistically over represented. This is probably going to get downvoted to oblivion, because nobody wants to confront the idea that we can _learn_ to want to be another gender.
It's very, very simple. There always have been about 10% of people who are left-handed - but for a time in history, teachers and society (sometimes brutally) repressed that and forced left-handed children to use their right hand. Once that relaxed and children were left to freely be who they were, the left-handed ratio went back to its historic norm [1].
Obviously, it's been the same for gay, trans and other sexuality/gender-nonmainstream people. They have always been part of human history - from the old Greeks [2] to early Islamic and Hindu ages [3], but as long as there was an heir available for a long time many simply didn't bother to care or looked away in historic Catholic regions. The repression only went really bad with the Nazis, who destroyed the Institute for Sexology [4] and later on with anti-LGBT laws still remaining on the books for decades, then the anti-gay panic with AIDS, and only nowadays public opinion is beginning to relax.
The problem is that Conservatives not just don't get that simple historic fact, they actively deny it based on their morals, and as a result young LGBT people have shockingly high suicide rates (in thoughts, attempts and success [5]).
There's no denying that gender dysphoria exists and has always existed. OP made the claim that it might be statistically over-represented.
Looking at the Hijra example, it looks like the Hijra demographics are around 0.5-1% of the population.
In the latest polls [0], the proportion of Gen Z that identify as transgender is over 2%.
Is there repression/stigma in South Asia keeping some people in the closet? Is the culture difference having an effect on gender dysphoria? Is there a gender dysphoria "contagious" effect? I don't know, but those are interesting questions.
And what the fuck would be the problem if GenZ had an "over-representation" of LGBT?!
We don't live in the dark ages, almost all Western constitutions have some sort of "freedom of expression" on their books. Just let people live their lifes however they want to do it, as long as they don't harm anybody. Trans people or kissing gays on the street don't harm anyone but the feelings of some poor Conservatives who are secretly in the closet and envious about the freedom today's youth has.
Just look how many of the loud pearl clutching Conservatives turned out to be gay or adulterous. It's nothing but projection and pure envy.
One potential danger is that some of the more extreme therapies for gender transition are permanent and work best when used early. If a person's trans orientation is the result of a poorly formed sense of identity, as alleged by the article, there's a stronger chance they may change their mind later, after irreversible harm has been wrought.
In other words, there's a chance that some kids may not be "really" trans, but rather attention-seeking or mentally ill. And for those kids, transitioning would, in fact, be harmful in the long run.
Do we, as a society, have an obligation to prevent these children and young adults from harming themselves in this way?
I don't have a firm answer because it's a difficult and emotional subject, but I think it's extreme to pretend this is not an issue, and equally extreme to encourage kids for whom it might not be safe to transition.
Perhaps the informal controls we have in place prior to gender reassignment surgery are already adequate to filter out these vulnerable kids. Perhaps there are other interventions I'm not aware of that are already in use. But I don't see the harm in discussing and exploring whether there is a proportion of the trans population that is, in fact, suffering from social or mental illness and not actually a more innate form of gender dysphoria.
> One potential danger is that some of the more extreme therapies for gender transition are permanent and work best when used early.
There is virtually only one, and that's puberty blockers, stuff that has been used for decades to treat precocious puberty. We know these medicines are safe and we also know that nature will run its course again all by itself after the medicines are left out.
Genital surgery, the second option, is extremely rare in people under 18, and most of it is done on inter-gender children shortly after birth which is a grave mistake anyway and some countries have banned that as a result [1].
And in any case: Puberty blockers are reversible - puberty itself is not. Some things (e.g. the growth of breast tissue) can be reversed but at a high cost, some like the vocal cords changing for hormonal males cannot be reversed at all. It is way, way better for trans children to not force them through puberty.
According to Gallup's poll, which they present as estimates, it is 0.7% in the US. In India, 0.6% people self-identified as hijra (Sahastrabuddhe et al., 2012). In the 2011 census in India, 0.04% answered with "Other" when asked to choose between "Male", "Female" and "Other".
Canada included the question in their latest census. In my opinion, a mandatory government census provides data that is more accurate than Gallup's phone poll.
"In Canada, 0.2% of the population aged 18 and older was transgender in 2021. Belgium (0.5% among people aged 18 to 75 in 2021) and New Zealand (0.5% among people aged 18 and older in 2020) have also published representative survey-based data on their transgender populations."
"The proportions of transgender and non-binary people were three to seven times higher for Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2006, 0.79%) and millennials (born between 1981 and 1996, 0.51%) than for Generation X (born between 1966 and 1980, 0.19%), baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1965, 0.15%) and the Interwar and Greatest Generations (born in 1945 or earlier, 0.12%)."
"Other countries have published 2021 data on transgender people using crowdsourcing and non-representative surveys, including Ireland (0.6% among people aged 18 and older), England and Wales (0.6% among people aged 16 and older), and the United States (0.8% among people aged 18 and older)."
> because nobody wants to confront the idea that we can _learn_ to want to be another gender.
Because we can't. And trust me, I have tried. Trans people are neither "over represented" nor a contagion.
And it's not about "hate speech"; it's about stopping the spread of lies and extremist propaganda. The lie that "being trans is a choice" is just one little moving part in the massive machinery of oppressing, persecuting and killing trans people. You don't need actual hate speech to cause harm.
My partner of the last six years is trans. Your post doesn't strike me as hate speech, but what Hacker News commenters seem not to understand is that making overly general statements about entire groups of people can often lead to an oversimplified view of the situation (see what I did there).
Let's start with the assumption that people can and do learn to "want" to be a particular gender. I am not an anthropologist, but I feel like this is a pretty uncontroversial take, and is the mechanism for how cis-gendered people learn to follow the gender norms of the culture they find themselves in. This is the key difference between gender and sex. Gender norms seem to be a cultural universal, but the form those norms take is dependent on time and place.
What this means is that in any society there are two sets of behavioral norms, one for perceived men, and one for perceived women. If a person in this society has a strong preference about which set of norms they prefer, and if the set of norms they prefer doesn't line up with their sex, you have the potential for that person to identify with the other gender. The term "transgender" is new, but behaviors associated with the term go back as far as you care to look.
So you have this potential tension where a person might prefer the gender norms of the other sex, but you also have the fact that questioning norms of any kind in a society is always somewhat taboo. A few very dedicated people would live their lives as the other gender. Many more probably would have liked to if they were aware that it was an option, but were not (in other words, even questioning a social norm can be difficult if there isn't already public discussion about it).
So if the sudden perceived increase in trans people seems like a sociogenic disease to you, I can see how you might think that. I can also see how hurtful it is to many people to frame it in those terms. If we take a closer look at the linked paper, they hypothesize that one of the drivers of the tourettes-like disease is attention seeking behavior. Are there people who decide to transition ultimately because they believe they will get more attention? I'm sure some do. But thinking that is the motivation for most trans people is a very hurtful overgeneralization and is unhelpful because it is just wrong. The trans people that I am personally acquainted with don't want more attention. They want less of it. If you even glance at common discussion topics in trans discussion forums, you will see that there is a lot of discussion about "passing". Passing doesn't seem like attention-seeking behavior to me, it seems like the exact opposite.
Does social media have no role to play in explaining the increase in people who identify as trans? It probably does have some role there. But its only accelerating and amplifying trends that already existed. LGBT+ issues in general have been getting less and less taboo to talk about for the last several decades. The internet and communications technology more generally is exposing people to more cultures and norms. My hypothesis is that there were many preexisting people who were unsatisfied with the gender roles that they were expected to fulfill, and that growing acceptance and discussion of LGBT+ issues made them realize that there was no reason to keep putting up with them anymore.
It could be my own bias, but I don't see HN as a particularly progressive place, at least as compared to, say, Reddit. Granted, it can be a good or a bad thing, but HN has a far wider spectrum of opinions that get upvoted; IME trans issues in particular dominate comment threads when it comes to LGBT issues.
That would be the "rapid onset gender dysphoria" controversy, which is so politically charged that lay observers (/me waves) will have a very hard time separating science from ideology.
> illnesses such as gender dysphoria that are statistically over represented
Can you explain what it means for an illness to be "statistically over-represented"?
I can parse it several ways, but not so it makes sense. E.g.
- Gender dysphoria is more common than influenza
- Gender dysphoria is more common in human societies than in gendered alien communities
- Gender dysphoria is discussed by a greater proportion of Youtube posters than you'd expect from it's rate in the population
I'm guessing you mean the last; but I have no idea how mmuch it's discussed on Youtube, and I doubt there are reliable figures for its occurrence in the population.
High performance people have been saying this for generations.
Surround yourself with positive, talented people to keep your mind clean.
Hell even vogue and trash mags call out 'energy vampires' (lol) but it's all the same thing.
I legit decided to not listen to gangster rap in the 90s because a dude said to me 'that shit will warp your mind ' but I realized all music and influences do that.
So books it was...god I was a nerd!
I cut the cord on much of it early on, mostly because the value was terrible (aka music industry in the 90s was just bad value).
Now it's the odd anime that had a deep story that pulls me in...and lectures..Holy fug I love watching smart people talk :)
I still listen to "gangster rap" and I'm doing well enough. It's entirely possible to listen to Trap and not drink lean. There are plenty of dorks (I use the word affectionately) watching anime whose fandom has subsumed their ability to be successful. I do think that a person's life trajectory is affected by their closest friends, especially in high school.
Can you honestly say that your lived experience hasn't changed you?
It's clear "gangster rap" doesn't ruin anyone's lives like the parents of the 90's thought it might. That doesn't absolve it from affecting you in more subtle ways (good and bad).
Maybe I don't understand the question but of course a persons lived experience affects them. It seems like you've moved the goal posts.
What I'm pointing out is that OPs moralizing on good media "Anime, Books" vs bad media "Rap, Trash Magazines" is likely focusing on the wrong things. A person's friends are ultimately what matter in prioritizing values (as far as values can be shaped by environment).
But the claim about "gangster rap" (a term I don't like) was "that shit will warp your mind." is false. Moreover, Anime has tons of content that's way darker than anything you'll find in rap. But again, I don't think it really matters.
Lol I'm not moralizing at all, I stated it applies to all information regardless and so I cut the cord.
24 hour news is worse for this than gangster rap and turned off both so the same reason, I didn't like the messaging coming from it. NWO and Ghetto boys pushed me out of the genre, that doesn't the music is bad just something I choose to not engage with based off their content.
You got super defensive over what should be obvious, the content and people you engage with will define your character.
Amen. In 2011 I watched a really good anime, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and it helped me realize I'm transgender, and now that I've transitioned I love my body and myself more.
This is the next big area of research in social sciences. You must research this for national security reasons. Early research came in with the idea of mirror neurons but it went further.
Statistically you're always going to have 'hot spots' for suicide. # per capita etc. So governments trying to help setup suicide hotlines. Not much uptake on this. So they advertised the suicide hotline and suddenly has mass suicide problems.
Been replicated/reported many times, even on Canadian reserves. Cultural, racial doesnt seem to change anything.
Then you have the general crisis in mental health where suddenly lots of people think they have some sort of disorder. Lots of OCD, when really they dont have anything. But it came from advertising and awareness campaigns.
Do the flipside, how about all the motivational speakers who abuse this same mechanism but in a good way? Same with mentalists.
How about people who are being radicalized into violence? How about all the kids suddenly becoming trans? All the same umbrella which social sciences is working on.
Please do not repeat this right-wing talking point. It is a moral panic, and it causes real harm to kids who need genuine mental health support who are instead being dismissed as being part of a trend.
"all the kids" are not suddenly becoming trans - the incident rates in society are still extremely small.
All rises in incidents of transgenderism are easily explained by a more tolerant society accepting it. The same appeared when we stopped pathologizing left-handedness - all the kids didn't suddenly become left-handed, but the ones that were felt comfortable no longer hiding it.
And by and large, with some exceptions that get consistently magnified by those with an agenda, it is not something you can just do on a whim, and generally requires a lot of counselling and a lot of effort to pursue hormonal or surgical changes.
There are incidents of detransitioning and those that regret it. Those rates are lower than those that regret knee replacements.
> All rises in incidents of transgenderism are easily explained by a more tolerant society accepting it.
This doesn't explain the disproportionate rise in teenage girls seeking treatment at gender clinics though.
Here's a fascinating essay by a detransitioner on how she began thinking of herself first as 'non-binary' and later as male, and ended up being prescribed testosterone medication for this: https://lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name. She goes into quite some detail about how being exposed to gender identity ideology on Tumblr over a period of years was what influenced her to transition.
Other detransitioners have described similar online influences. It seems likely that this is at least one of the factors causing such an increase, and may well explain why the rise in referrals to gender clinics are so skewed toward female teenagers, who are the primary demographic of sites like Tumblr, and who are particularly vulnerable to social contagions.
> All rises in incidents of transgenderism are easily explained by a more tolerant society accepting it. The same appeared when we stopped.
Explained (aka semi-solid empirical experiments - where are those?) or imagined (aka ideological beliefs, much like the right)?
> And by and large, with some exceptions that get consistently magnified by those with an agenda, it is not something you can just do on a whim, and generally requires a lot of counselling and a lot of effort to pursue hormonal or surgical changes.
And yet every other week I see a talkshow on public TV discussing this. Prominently hosting a person that thinks the rules in place are faaaar to rigid, while most sane people would agree they are fine and problems lie in other areas. For example, while I agree that in many cases physiological "modifications" might be the most economic solution putting this solely to the purview of the individual might a) incur follow-up costs on society (here, these things are not self-paid) and b) raises the question why we don't amputate the legs of those who think they have one too many. The latter thing is something, which I would really like explained once by someone.
I assume you're American, because as someone European-born and Canadian-raised, I have no qualms about there being costs in my society to help the well being of others. That's what my taxes are for. I'm happy to have them pay for emergency care of others, for cancer treatments, for birth control, for anti-depressants, and for gender confirmation hormones or procedures.
Your comparison to a leg amputation suggests someone who's a self-made burden on society - which is dubious because I'm not sure if prosthetics and crutches are that expensive - but mostly because the comparison doesn't make sense. How is someone who is transgender a burden on society at all once they complete transition? The medicine?
Please do not learn about transgender people's life experiences from Public TV. You've got the most powerful tools in front of you - talk to people on the internet. Find them on twitter and read their life experiences. Better yet, look around your workplace. The STEM industry is FILLED with trans folks. Meet them, learn from them.
>All rises in incidents of transgenderism are easily explained by a more tolerant society accepting it. The same appeared when we stopped pathologizing left-handedness - all the kids didn't suddenly become left-handed, but the ones that were felt comfortable no longer hiding it.
I think you are repeating talking points from John Oliver. If trans identifying people were evenly distributed among the population then it would appear a natural phenomenon. Unfortunately in some cases this is not true. Groups of young girls are coming out as trans together. Trans youth are clustered by social circle, not randomly distributed. Being trans is a legitimate identity but it is false to say that every single person who announces that they are trans is in fact trans.
>Please do not repeat this right-wing talking point. It is a moral panic, and it causes real harm to kids who need genuine mental health support who are instead being dismissed as being part of a trend.
This was from 2015, the actual numbers are now over 25% today. Hence why the first article from days ago is so concerned with the huge increase.
>"all the kids" are not suddenly becoming trans - the incident rates in society are still extremely small.
Perhaps nothing is wrong. LGBT rates pre world war 2 was a fraction of a percent. Perhaps society has always been >25% but socially people couldnt admit to it?
>Happy to answer any other questions if needed.
What's the association between LGBT and "Commie"? There is one.
> Please do not repeat this right-wing talking point.
Please do not make this a partisan issue. Some of us have been following the sexually regressive trend of calling our children's bodies defective and broken because they don't match the viewers' sexual stereotypes for quite a while now, and there was pretty widespread consensus across political and religious ideologies that our kids didn't need surgery to be okay.
> It is a moral panic, and it causes real harm to kids who need genuine mental health support who are instead being dismissed as being part of a trend.
That's circular. They need help because they're caught in a trend which ignores the actual issues in their lives (bullying, divorce, academics, etc) and provides a one-size-fits-all solution of body modification.
> All rises in incidents of transgenderism are easily explained by a more tolerant society accepting it. The same appeared when we stopped pathologizing left-handedness - all the kids didn't suddenly become left-handed, but the ones that were felt comfortable no longer hiding it.
This sounds compelling but is not accurate. Left-handedness is a testable "condition" whereas transgender is some adults' interpretation of how people and their genitals should look based on how they act, especially with regard to things the observer thinks of as sexualized, such as who plays with dolls. Society was getting more tolerant, back in the 00s you'd never have a teacher scold a child for using wrong-sex toys because we'd largely gotten rid of the concept. Now it's back and we're telling children their actions and desires are wrong, BUT we've got a surgical solution!
Fifteen years ago a boy could have worn a dress to elementary and wouldn't have socially risked anything worse than if they wore the wrong brand. Now they risk their teachers "helping" them make huge life decisions they can't even comprehend, and telling them to keep the discussions secret from their parents. That's a lot less accepting than it used to be.
> with some exceptions that get consistently magnified by those with an agenda, it is not something you can just do on a whim, and generally requires a lot of counselling and a lot of effort to pursue hormonal or surgical changes.
This isn't true, the fast track (affirmative care) is the only one allowed in most schools and clinics and by WPATH guidelines. Very rarely do teachers, counsellors, therapists, or health care providers pause to help children with preexisting issues before literally telling them that they're born incorrectly and offering solutions - even if those solutions (drugs and surgery) aren't always immediate.
> There are incidents of detransitioning and those that regret it. Those rates are lower than those that regret knee replacements.
This is not correct. There are no proper studies that follow medical transitioners long enough to usefully make that claim. The studies that exist have egregious failures such as not accounting for dropouts or controlling for comorbidities. And knee surgery is widely known to be almost ineffective for many people, making it an exceptionally misleading comparison.
I appreciated this thoughtful response (rebuttal) to OP. I agree with your concept of "back in the 00s you'd never have a teacher scold a child for using wrong-sex clothes/toys because we'd largely gotten rid of the concept". This dovetails into one of the paradox's of the trans-adjacent ideology that I haven't been able to square in my own head, which is that transitioning genders is predicated on strong gender norms existing in a society. In other words, it seems less accepting to be a male and exhibit feminine traits (and by the way, we are in fact acknowledging traditional societal ideas of gender roles now, rather than moving beyond them).
Even weirder is how those who don't acknowledge traditional societal ideas of gender roles are being directed to adopt an identity of their own: "non-binary" or "genderfluid". So the strong gender norms have now become a thoroughly self-reinforcing cycle: even if you disagree with them, you're just treated and reassigned in accordance with these same norms.
There is a lot of debate and disagreement between those that are Transgender and those that are NonBinary.
NB people will absolutely agree that rigorous gender norms are harmful, and Trans people are likely embracing and perpetuating an unnecessary binary. Meanwhile, Trans people will claim that the binary is real to them.
Both are likely valid to some degree. There are multiple axis to this conversation.
Someday people will learn about the difference between "bimodal" and "binary", and the critical importance of liminal spaces in real-world "binary" phenomena of all kinds.
To your point, though, there is an explanation there too.
The word is complex and full of many intersecting axis of considerations. For example - it can be logically consistent to be both pro renewable energy investment of all kinds, but also be wary of nuclear power, and the long-term consequences to our world if we expand investment into it. It's not a simple solution. Turning off nuclear power plants to burn coal or gas is clearly terrible. Not investing in solar/wind/etc because nuclear plants seem better in teh short term is also not great.
Likewise, the reality is that our society DOES contain strong gender norms. You might think we don't because women make up >50% of colleges, are in the professional world, and might believe other concepts like the wage gap are exaggerated. And those can be all true. But our world is definitely still deeply GENDERED.
There are people who believe it shouldn't be, and are working to buck those trends (and those people, generally, receive equally as much backlash as those transgender).
There are people who are working on "dismantling the patriarchy" and associated systems of capitalist economic systems, and other things that may or may not be reasonable, may or may not be possible, and may or may not make things worse.
But the point is that some of those people are transgender. And some are not. It's an independent axis. Transgender people - by and large - like most people - aren't looking to tear down the binary gender norms in our society - they're just seeking to exist in society as the other gender.
Now, if you claim that a society should be more tolerant of being male and exhibiting feminine traits (and vice versa), I would agree with you. If you claimed that IF our society became that, there would likely be fewer transgender people, I would also theorize that is true.
And if you believe that is a virtuous thing to pursue, let's both do so. But it's not a process that we can achieve overnight, and requires the support and progress of many others. Things have been progressing, but very slowly.
Meanwhile, we have people who are suffering today, and who we have statistical evidence that there is a solution for what ails them. Why deny them this?
> our world is definitely still deeply GENDERED. There are people who believe it shouldn't be, and are working to buck those trends (and those people, generally, receive equally as much backlash as those transgender).
Some things are pointlessly gendered, like pink/blue, or puffy sleeves, but others absolutely have a purpose, like single-sex spaces.
> Transgender people - by and large - like most people - aren't looking to tear down the binary gender norms in our society - they're just seeking to exist in society as the other gender.
The problem is that trying to tear down GENDER norms by living as the other SEX. You're interfering with other people's spaces to culture-jam the patriarchy and they need those spaces for safety, but you're also conflating the stereotypes of a sex with the sex itself.
> we have people who are suffering today, and who we have statistical evidence that there is a solution for what ails them.
Most or all of that evidence is as flawed as the detransitioners study. Everyone is afraid to do any actual research in this area. That said there's ample evidence in every other area of mental health that says you should not affirm falsehood.
> Why deny them this?
They're denied nothing up until their gender presentation interferes with someone else's sex-based rights. Dress how you will, live how you will.
What about intersex individuals? What about gay or lesbian individuals? What about masculine-presenting individuals?
All have always challenged the clean separation of single-sex spaces, and are mostly unnecessary.
To put an example, I agree that there should be rape counselling that are exclusive for women. Women should feel comfortable in that space without men present. But those women also need to understand that even if trans people didn't exist, they need to share that space with 1) non-femme presenting women, 2) non-straight women, 3) intersex individuals.
Adding transgender women to the list does not meaningfully destroy the validity of these spaces or ruin them for CIS women. They were never as black-and-white-biology-based as the hateful anti-trans bigots claim they are today.
Are there men attempting to infiltrate these spaces? Sure. They are bad faith actors, and they are exceptions.
Anecdotally, cis, hetero, butch women now report more harassment in bathrooms since the rise of anti-trans hate than they faced before.
> clean separation of single-sex spaces, and are mostly unnecessary
Sexual assaults are vastly more often committed by males than females, and vastly more often on females and children. Until you replace single-sex spaces with something equally easy and effective you can't claim they aren't needed.
> single-sex spaces are problematic AF
Sexual attacks are problematic AF, single-sex spaces are the best way (cost vs effectiveness) we've come up with to prevent them.
What other single, easily inspectable, and enforceable rule would you replace it with? If you have only one bit of data to predict someone's sexual criminality you'd want to know their sex. If you have only one bit of data to predict someone's likelihood of being sexually attacked you'd want to know their sex. We know this from thousands of years of human history and from simply thinking about the male biological imperative versus the female.
> They were never as black-and-white-biology-based
There's no biology more black and white than male vs female, birth giver vs impregnator.
> What about intersex individuals?
Despite all the chromosome combinations and mobile genes there are only two gametes, sperm and egg. All intersex people are male or female. DSDs are disorders of sexual development, not whole new sexes.
> What about gay or lesbian individuals? What about masculine-presenting individuals?
They use the washroom that matches their sex.
> Anecdotally, [...] butch women now report more harassment in bathrooms
Yeah, since males started trying to use female spaces people have been on guard. Not only is their suffering not yours to use for emotional weight but you are part of the group which caused this.
> Women should feel comfortable in [rape counseling] without men present.
Magnanimous, to give them that. How about prisons?
> But those women also need to understand that even if trans people didn't exist, they need to share that space [...] lesbians
Do you feel that straight women weren't sharing with lesbians and that lesbians needed you, a male, to point this out?
> Adding transgender women to the list does not meaningfully destroy the validity of these spaces
As soon as a single male enters a female space it stops being a single-sex space.
> or ruin them for CIS women.
It destroys the value for all females.
> Are there men attempting to infiltrate these spaces? Sure. They are bad faith actors,
Bad faith rapists, go figure.
Is there a test that want us to perform to tell one of them from a justified male?
> and they are exceptions.
They're likely vastly more common than males who think they have gender dysphoria.
> as the hateful anti-trans bigots claim they are today.
How does a woman earn the right to declare herself different and politically distinct from you, and deserving of physical separation, without you calling her hateful?
We can't have a reasonable discussion if you insist on calling all trans women men.
There might be a chance if you acknowledge the basic facts which is that the vast majority of trans women are as even MORE at risk of sexual assault than cis women. And that the "rapists" who are attempting to infiltrate female spaces are an extreme minority, and are a danger to all women - cis and trans.
There may be a version of an argument we could have about the difficulties have with banishing those people without banishing genuine trans women. But if you can't understand how trans women are victims in this too, and brandish them all as men, we're finished.
There is no point discussing your desire to reduce men and women to sperm and eggs either.
I said male. And that's the issue. If trans women were female there wouldn't be a discussion, but they're male and want to be treated as female. This requires women to trust males who say they're women.
Why won't you just acknowledge that this is a huge request and that it'll require you to explain yourself, ask not tell, etc.
> reduce men and women to sperm and eggs either.
You were trying to work intersex people into a defense of bathroom colonization by saying we can't tell who's who and thus categories don't matter. That's incorrect and rude. Intersex people aren't a third sex and don't deserve to be used as a prop in a trans-rights debate anyways.
> And that the "rapists" who are attempting to infiltrate female spaces are an extreme minority,
The number of men testing the boundaries of women's boundaries and spaces is huge and would only go up if they suspected they had a chance.
> and are a danger to all women - cis and trans.
Maybe from passing violence during an intrusion, but trans women are not the target of these rapists. Also, trans women have the benefits of male biology which makes them a much tougher target if they were threatened.
> without banishing genuine trans women
I asked what kind of test you'd have us perform on the males, to see which ones are genuine trans women and which weren't.
How do you propose people do this without compromising their safety, like when a large male wants to enter a female rape shelter at night?
> if you can't understand how trans women are victims in this too
Let's just stipulate to that for now.
How does that imply that women's spaces are what they need to be safe, especially given the problems I've mentioned for the women who are already there? Why not Jewish spaces? Why not new third spaces? Why not arm yourselves and use the original spaces? There are a lot of possibilities here before we agree to take someone else's human rights and give them away.
> and [banish] them all as men, we're finished.
As males. If you don't acknowledge that most trans women have functional penises then you are intentionally not engaging with the problem.
> There is no point discussing your desire to
You're asking for too much to be uninterested in people's concerns.
This is a gishgallop of modern pedophilia-associating talking points from the first sentence onward. ("sexually regressive trend of calling our children's bodies defective and broken because they don't match the viewers' sexual stereotypes" WHAT??)
There's just so much that is horrifically wrong and sounds like a FOX News watcher's sweaty fantasy of what they think transgenderism is.
It absolutely is a partisan issue, only insofar as the "classic liberals" on HackerNews who are promoting this transphobia haven't understood yet that they are not as centrist as they'd like to believe.
I don't know where an of these facts come from, but let's just knock out some bulletpoints:
* Transgenderism is testable, evaluatable, and has little to do with gender stereotypes like a boy playing with dolls
* A boy can absolutely wear a dress to elementary school without a teacher starting talk of transition.
* But you're also dreaming if you think at any point - 30 years ago, 15 years ago, or now - a boy can wear a dress to school and not get bullied by a meaningful percentage of his male peers.
* All transgender counselling starts with pre-existing condition consideration. As a trans friend of mine said "The first thing my transition counsellor asked me to do was quit my job. We needed to make sure I wasn't just depressed because I hated my job so much"
* Is my claim about low rates of transition regret incorrect, or is it that my comparison is exceptionally misleading because it IS correct? Which is it?
>There's just so much that is horrifically wrong and sounds like a FOX News watcher's sweaty fantasy of what they think transgenderism is.
I'm the original poster you had originally replied to. I rarely see any Fox news content. I bet you see more fox news content than I do. Trying to associate a viewpoint with some news agency in the USA seems quite odd to me.
>It absolutely is a partisan issue, only insofar as the "classic liberals" on HackerNews who are promoting this transphobia haven't understood yet that they are not as centrist as they'd like to believe.
Or there is legitimate cause for concern and there's no transphobia at all. This isn't a partisan problem.
>* Transgenderism is testable, evaluatable, and has little to do with gender stereotypes like a boy playing with dolls
So you would agree we don't approve any surgeries or medication until there is a testable evaluatable test results confirming diagnosis with 0% detransition risk?
>* A boy can absolutely wear a dress to elementary school without a teacher starting talk of transition.
Videos on tiktok show quite the opposite. Dress wearing not even necessary.
>* But you're also dreaming if you think at any point - 30 years ago, 15 years ago, or now - a boy can wear a dress to school and not get bullied by a meaningful percentage of his male peers.
Was explicitly not allowed in my high school.
>* All transgender counselling starts with pre-existing condition consideration. As a trans friend of mine said "The first thing my transition counsellor asked me to do was quit my job. We needed to make sure I wasn't just depressed because I hated my job so much"
This story is older than perhaps about 7 years or so. wpath rules changed, the counsellors dont work this way anymore. It's considered a crime in Canada for a counsellor to do this.
There is nothing inherently partisan about disagreeing with the ideology of gender identity and its effects on law and policy.
In particular, opposition to this in the UK has been spearheaded by left-wing, grassroots feminist groups. This was in reaction to the right-wing Conservative government's proposals to allow people to change their legal sex by self-declaration, rather than the current system of requiring a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and approval from a panel of people with legal and medical qualifications.
As a culture war topic on twitter, maybe. But as a parenting issue, no.
> this transphobia
Facts aren't phobia.
> Transgenderism is testable, evaluatable, and has little to do with gender stereotypes like a boy playing with dolls
Which test? Is it medical and objective or based on self-reported feelings? Would you accept the answer if your government wanted to test and label you with it? Should Iran use it?
The trans community can't even decide if trans is a medical or mental condition or lifestyle choice. There certainly isn't a test for it or we'd have answers to those questions. If you insist there's a test that means you think trans is a condition which would make you a transmedicalist, or 'truscum' as they're called.
> A boy can absolutely wear a dress to elementary school without a teacher starting talk of transition.
No, counsellors and teachers speak of recognizing "cross-sex behaviors" in students. You can hear them in their own words in their tiktok videos.
Recently a friend's daughter has been "socially transitioned" at school. The teachers noticed she wasn't being feminine enough (our and her words, as we discuss it) and suggested she may be happier as a male so they gave her a new name and access to clothes while at school and most critically, told her not to tell her parents. Thankfully she had been told this is a red flag and did not comply.
> All transgender counselling starts with pre-existing condition consideration. As a trans friend of mine said "The first thing my transition counsellor asked me to do was quit my job. We needed to make sure I wasn't just depressed because I hated my job so much"
Ouch, that's bad counseling. Asking patients to make major upheavals just sets them up for failure. The proper aim is to give them tools to achieve their goals without disruption and a therapist should only recommend immediate large changes if a patient is in imminent risk.
Also, I know more personally that proper counseling is not always applied. My friend's daughter had legitimate reasons to be depressed but says that the counsellor they had her see did not examine any of them or ask about abuse and only discussed gender.
> Is my claim about low rates of transition regret incorrect, or is it that my comparison is exceptionally misleading? Which is it?
It's both. The studies you refer to do not actually show that the numbers are low because they fail to properly follow the transitioners, AND your comparison to knee surgery was misleading because you've cherrypicked one of the most regretted surgeries.
hot take: the definition of tourette's will soon be changed to include this "sociogenic illness" to avoid offending those who develop tics from watching online videos. Otherwise you'll be implicitly offending those with it as being less legitimate (which they are, but that's besides the point)
Pre-internet, one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird. It would still happen but in moderation, for which I'll use the stereotype "village idiot". A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root.
Now it's as if all the village idiots of the world had a meeting and started to run society, at least culturally. The bad ideas and behaviors are not kept in check, they're rewarded, leading to the normalization of things deeply questionable.
Imagine being a youngster right now. You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input. Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points. Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you. Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity. The normalization of the hating of the other sex. Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you. The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
Comparing social media to smoking is a comparison that needs re-evaluating. It's frankly shocking how this untold harm goes unchecked. Then again, intervening can lead to creepy authoritarian legislation. As seen in China, but let's at least credit them for recognizing the harm.