Oh totally. In my case I decided transitioning was unethical so I spent over 13 years willfully avoiding the "am I trans?" question. I convinced myself my dysphoria was just regular depression combined with sexual perversity. Some take it to the grave.
Based on:
if you decide "maybe I am trans" you will be more likely to undergo such medical procedures than you would ever be if you decided "maybe I like cosplay" and hung out with that community.
I got the impression you maybe had a stronger opinion on "social contagion". I.e. society should downplay/discourage the social aspects of transition to reduce the risk that cis people who just want community end up transitioning medically. I would really like to talk to a cis person who has a sincere steelman for the social contagion hypothesis.
yeah, so we're totally agreed on the logical structure here! Like you said, it's a tautology that asking "am I trans?" is a necessary condition for medical transition.
When I say causative I mean "you/me predicts we could show statistically significant "causation" using a study like the one I described above".
I don't mean logically causative (Hume's problem of induction and all that). I'm an anti-realist.
So yeah, the real question here is, how strong as the "causation"? At the margin, does a nominally cis person joining the trans community become significantly more likely to medically transition?
I am fascinated by this question, and I almost never get to talk about it, let alone with thoughtful cis people. So thank you for indulging me. I would love to hear more of your thoughts on the issue. Like could you put a number on it? How much of the variation in medical transition status can be explained by social factors?
I'm happy to share my answer as well. But being trans myself I'm probably working off very different data, and I have strong beliefs on this (I've thought about it a lot) so I think there is more risk of an anchoring effect if I go first.
The crux of my question is this:
To what degree do you think simply asking "am I trans?" actually causes someone to be more likely to medically transition?
Clearly the two are correlated. But there may not be a causal relationship here. I'm not saying this is 100% true, but for the sake of argument, imagine that having gender dysphoria (A) causes both:
B. asking oneself "am I trans?"
C. medically transitioning
But that B statistically does not "cause" C because the full strength of the correlation is explained by the dysphoria variable, A (cf The Book of Why).
If this were true, you could do an experiment where you take 1000 people from the general population, measure their dysphoria in a way that minimizes priming effects, have them write about whether they're trans or not, and after longitudinal follow up, controlling for dysphoria, the people in the "am I trans?" group would be no more likely to medically transition than controls.
hey thanks for the reply :)
virtually any kind of medical intervention at all seems too much if all your goal is is "find a group within which you can fit and feel loved". Most groups don't require that. Not saying being trans requires it as some kind of ritual - in fact afaict people in this sphere tend to be very accepting of all degrees of transitioning, including only social
I agree.
if you decide "maybe I am trans" you will be more likely to undergo such medical procedures
If you're willing, could you elaborate on this argument? It sounds like you think there is a causal connection (not just a correlation) between "maybe I'm trans" and medical transition. Is that right? If yes, I would be really interested to hear how quantitatively strong you think the causal relationship/evidence is.
I'm attempting to be careful writing this..
Thanks for saying this! Do you mind if I push back on a few points? I think I don't find your post threatening for identity reasons, but I think the data you are drawing from may be a bit miscalibrated.
drastic, permanent, alterations to their biology
I see phrasing like this a lot, I don't mean to pick on you in particular, but in general I think there is a level of rhetorical alarmism with language like this that isn't justified by the medical reality, and IME people using phrasing like this rarely have a gears-level understanding of trans medicine (I don't know if that's true for you or not). I'm trying not to say stuff that sounds like nitpicking, but I realize it will probably read like that.
Nothing is trans care is altering our genetic physiology at a deep level AFAIK. Basically there is hormones and surgery. In most places including the US we only use bioidentical hormones and in particular the effects of estrogen on a male are a lot less drastic and permanent than I think many people understand. I can go into more detail if you're interested. Surgery is more complicated so I don't think I can get into that here without this comment becoming painfully long. The irreversible surgeries for MtFs aren't terribly common (<20%). The anime girl phenomenon the author describes seems to be exclusive to MtFs. If you're interested in the latest research on detransition (skewed towards the FtM side), see https://www.thedarestudy.com/
to try to incentivize people, on the margin, to follow life paths that entail having kids, in the context of stable marriages and families...
But if many of those transwomen are following a life path that disproportionately entails not having kids, not because that's a better fit for their essential being, but because it's a life path that functions as a coping strategy, which is more cognitively and socially available than (possibly more effective or more functional) alternatives, then I think something has gone badly wrong.
This is all darkly ironic to me, because outside of the terminally-online-anime-LW memeplex, getting married and having kids is a common coping strategy. To your credit, you're aware that this is something that can happen. But I think you're underrating the frequency and the harms, especially if you care about happy stable families, vs just getting the birth rate up. In particular, it can be really horrible and unfair for the wives. I personally tried to do this when I was young (unconsciously, long story), and I know several others who got further along and had kids. Our brains are shifted female so some of us can end up much more predisposed to childrearing monogamy than the median cishet man. I just worry that people reading this post are overindexing on a particular kind of MtF.
I can't give you a full accounting of the internal/external factors affecting fertility among trans people. I can say that people generally aren't aware it's possible to restore the production of viable sperm in most MtFs:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9873819/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12456576/
I believe very strongly that-- if you care about happy, stable families-- at the margin, having a default attitude in society that pushes questioning trans people to get married and have kids is bad-- it's not fair to the spouses and kids. Spouses deserve to be married to people who are happily and fully embodied and sexually present with them, and kids deserve to grow up with parents who aren't fighting each other over a divorce, because one parent got to a point where they couldn't repress any more, and needed to transition.
Last-- and this is kinda separate-- I felt surprised reading your post, given you said in the 2nd paragraph you're a libertarian and a transhumanist.
I wouldn't expect someone who identifies with either of those labels to endorse some of the things you said, including about voluntary amputation (implied) of a trans person's gonads being tragic in almost all contexts. Can you help me understand that? Am I miscalibrated about what libertarian/transhumanist means?
My assumption was that a LW libertarian would basically say it's fine for people to do whatever they want, and if it affects fertility, well, there is an equilibrium process at work, and eventually changing allele frequencies will right the ship.
2- This post is well-written, thoughtful, genuinely interesting, and articulates a theory that may be very helpful to some trans or questioning people.
- I strongly disagree with some of the main peri-factual claims. In particular, I think there is confounding of ASD and being trans.
- It likely perpetuates epistemically shallow attitudes of suspicion towards trans peoples' cognitive health, ability to function rationally, and introspect accurately.
- The author is clearly going through a hard time emotionally.
The attitudes of (3) had a negative effect on me personally (I'm trans). So (2) and (3) make we want to post criticisms, but I also feel a lot of warmth and compassion towards the author (i hope that comes through and i REALLY hope this doesn't sound patronizing), and I don't want to hurt her. So I feel pretty torn.
Mainly I just want to say that this post underrates medical theories of transness. I'm deeply into this, and I think the frontier here is significantly further along than most people realize. But the political situation is so bad, it's not safe to share our knowledge openly.
I would bet with 80% confidence that current knowledge (iykyk) is already enough to develop a genomic screen for gender dysphoria with enough significance to be medically useful.
1rationalist social circle? To me, that is pretty unusual behavior. I read it as if you meant to point out a general phenomenon perpetrated by specific trans women online that the reader might know about.
I know a lot of trans women online and off and I've honestly never seen this behavior, except in spaces like 4chan, where it's piled under at least 4 layers of self-hate, irony, and sadism. One of the "gender ideology" (i.e. mainstream trans) platitudes you hear over and over again is that gender identity ≠ gendered behavior ≠ sex and people should only transition if they want to, to better match their gender identity. The whole point is that acting masculine doesn't disqualify you from being a woman, nor does acting feminine make you one (whether you agree with that or not).
Pressuring an effeminate boy into transitioning if he doesn't experience gender dysphoria is immoral. If you or anyone else reading this comment has examples of people doing this online, please link them in reply to this comment, I would be interested to see how this is happening.
certain trans women's rather insistent attempt to normalize the idea of effeminate boys transitioning for social acceptance
sincere question, do you have a source for this?
I don't know of any good studies on this, but from reading lots of anecdotes on reddit, yeah, some trans people do have quite atypical reactions to starting HRT. Unfortunately these can sometimes be negative changes to energy and mood, though 'no change' or 'positive change' is more common. Among those who have negative changes, some stay on HRT anyway because the psychological benefits from the physical changes (less dysphoria) are more significant than the negative energy/mood impacts.
ok based. yes, this is why we need to accept people who just want to change their pronouns. I don't personally understand with why someone would want to join the trans community if they're not dysphoric, but these people clearly exist.
Trying to exclude them from the trans community for not medically transitioning probably increases the likelihood that they do, simply as a means to gain entry. Nor should we push anyone to go on HRT after they've joined the community. HRT is the single best thing I've ever done for myself but I try not to project that onto others.