Can we compromise? No trans people in sports and trans people have their own unique prison or cell block and young teens can take puberty blockers and estrogen so they don’t need to try to pay 150,000 in facial feminization plastic surgery at 18 or 19, money of which they can only get quickly from sex work and not going to school? Sound like a good compromise?
Trigger warning: this is a very graphic response. In a bad frame of mind? Emotionally upset easily? Just don’t read it.
The thing that conservatives don’t understand is that if someone is clearly trans at 14 and they start taking puberty blockers and estrogen, they sometimes wind up looking like Kim Petras. Kim Petras sort of looks slightly trans, but mostly, she just looks like a hot chick. She will not have the same easy life a naturally born hot chick would, but it’s going to be much much easier because of what happened when she was an early teenager.
Now let’s say you wait until 18, because kids shouldn’t be pushed into things. Now you have adams apples, larger brow ridges, and worst of all, there are different midface ratios you can’t really correct even with surgery. At a certain point, even will all the estrogen and feminizing surgeries in the world, you will still look like a dude taking estrogen wearing makeup. A person in this situation will have a much harder life. The respectable and admirable Kaitlen Jenner is an example of someone who had tons of money and even then, the facial feminization with all the money in the world can’t change certain ratios when someone transitions at a certain age.
Neither person “passes.” Kim Petras from certain angles occasionally looks Trans. But if she wore conservative makeup and a conservative outfit, she could go somewhere and do something without getting mean dirty looks.
Do you know what it’s like to get mean stares and glares all the time? If you are conservative, you don’t. Any mean look inherently makes a person with any normal limbic system feel bad. Do you know how many dirty looks conservatives gives to different looking people every single day? All these conservatives talk about Bible this and Jesus that and protecting children this and that. A lot of children who feel trans blow their brains out, hang themselves, or jump of tall things once they are adults because they didn’t get puberty blockers and estrogen before their face looked manly and it would require hundreds of thousands of dollars of plastic surgery to correct and the dirty looks and meanness wear them down and eventually, they are just done.
This is not about protecting children, it’s about protecting conservative religious beliefs.
The conservative fear that some woke snowflake mom is going to push her confused depressed kid into chopping of his genitals and pretending to be a woman doesn’t line up with reality and it’s a flawed argument. Being trans is a hard and miserable road and no parent or kid wants it, it’s something that happens, like cancer, that people deal with, but at least with cancer, you get sympathy from everyone, instead of your family disowning you if you are conservative.
I understand the “moderate” perspective on this, but you are totally wrong.
Except for the part about sports. Transgendered people just shouldn’t be able to compete in sports or should have their own league. And liberals arguing otherwise detracts credibility from the much more important issue, which is trans kids should be able to get medical care before they get huge adams apples and brow ridges and longer midfaces and sharper cheekbones and wind up much more likely to commit suicide.
The more important part of the equation is being able to use puberty blockers and take estrogen prior to developing even more manly characteristics. Genital surgery could be done as an adult, but that’s not actually what conservatives want, they want no medication intervention before 18.
If there are concerns about making young teens who are confused infertile, then conservative religitards can subsidize these people freezing their eggs or sperm, but the reality is not that many people change their minds on this. For every random YouTube special filmed by a hardcore catholic showing a schizophrenic female who regrets lopping off her breasts, you have thousands of women who are now trans men who are less likely to die, but the Catholic documentary filmmakers don’t add that in, do they?
Conservatives often point to the horrors of the surgeries. They are horrific. Sometimes if someone reverses their penis and scrotum, hair can grow on the inside of their constructed “vagina” and the whole thing is horrific. But the math is evident: the trans people who do these surgeries are less likely to blow their heads off.
People act like this is an ivory tower debate, but really it’s often there are 2 outcomes: outcome 1 is that Billy with a large browridge, adam’s apple, and manly cheeks, who doesn’t have 150,000 for facial feminization surgery, lays down in front of train tracks at 19 and splat, OR Billy takes puberty blockers and estrogen at 13, becomes Billie, and ends up marrying a mathmatician who doesn’t want to have children for some reason and they live happily ever after despite being an unusual couple.
The fake empathy and outrage Christians have neglects to look at the statistics and the actual outcomes and relies on the availability heuristic/bias to make assumptions. It’s all fine and well to do such ivory tower debates, unless you’re the transgender teen who ends up dead because of it.
Remove the bottom 75% of IQs in the bell curve, then take that group and choose the top 1/3 of the most technologically literate, then you have lemmy
It’s just that extremely high intelligence and extreme knowledge about tech happen to correlate with certain views that aren’t based on mythological bullshit. But yeah, I guess you could call that an echo chamber?
thanks, i’ll probably need it at the current trajectory that the US is on. if i am wrong and being executed by a hoard of Nazis/neo-conservatives in the future, i’ll think of you and realize you were right and i was wrong.
Because there are only 2 possibilities:
or
They are in fact mutually exclusive. So what do you think the moron cult members will choose, the option that requires deprogramming… or the option that aligns with their stupid bullshit cult beliefs?
i’m jewish and gay… and more scared of totalitarian “benevolent” governments than nazis. at least nazis let you die. benevolent governments think your thoughts and existence are property of the state.
I think it’s incorrect to link all the January 6th protestors with actual Neo-Nazis and that sort of hyperbole was part of the reason Democrats were out of touch with how regular people felt. Neo-Nazis are partly increasing because of the memification of racism, giving racism a more viral quality, combined with how fast society is changing and people incorrectly making sense of it through racism.
It’s horrible and racist but at least there is free speech. It’s too bad we can’t have free speech without this sort of thing. Perhaps one day people will become kinder and less racist. It scares me but the alternative of no free speech scares me more.
There is an Alibaba LLM that won’t respond to questions about Tienanmen Square at all, just saying it can’t reply.
I hate censored LLMs that don’t allow an answer to follow political norms of what is acceptable. It’s such a slippery slope towards technological thought-police Orwellian restrictions on topics. I don’t like it when China does it or when the US does it and when US companies do it, they imply that this is ethically acceptable.
Fortunately, there are many LLMs that aren’t censored.
I would rather have an Alibaba LLM just say “Tienanmen Square resulted in fatalities but capitalism is extremely mean to people so the cruelty was justified” and get some sort of brutal but at least honest opinion, or outright deny it if that’s their position. I suppose the reality is any answer on the topic by the LLM would result in problems from Chinese censors.
I used to be a somewhat extreme capitalist, but capitalism somewhat lost me when they started putting up the anti-homeless architecture. Spikes on the ground to keep people from sleeping? If this is the outcome of capitalism, I need to either adopt a different political position or more misanthropy.
Gemini is such a bad LLM from everything I’ve seen and read that it’s hard to know if this sort of censorship is an error or a feature.
i’m so sorry to the people of lemmy who earlier said this was a genocide and whom i second-guessed
it’s just blatant what it is at this point
i am poor, but is there any organization i can donate to a small token amount to show my support? I feel bad for doing nothing, I’m like the people in America who watched Hitler do horrible things in Europe and shrugged. There’s not much I can do, and I don’t have the stomach nor good character for a self-immolation protest, but I should do something. is there anything to do?
I just don’t think it’s as much of a random fad for kids as conservatives worry.
the analogy of “oh i want a cool new weird haircut/strange tattoo” = same as getting hormones and genital altering surgery seems incorrect to me
kids are not that stupid at that age and gender is mostly hardwired. i just don’t think kids of that age would take it trivially
many trans kids exhibit extreme opposite gender behavior from very early ages. I am not talking about boys liking pink or not liking trucks, i am talking about boys crying because they can’t wear dresses and hating the male parts of their body. There is something that happens to some XY or XX brains in utero that causes the default brain wiring that causes certain behavior to be the opposite of what it normally is. This shouldn’t be that unfathomable. There are animals that contain DNA from before certain evolutions (like tailless animals having tail DNA) and it’s just turned off. The idea that epigenetics, prenatal hormone levels, and endocrine disruptors can’t alter sexual identity development isn’t really supported by data, and even though the exact way transgenderism occurs isn’t fully understood, it’s not caused by some evil Satanic vodoo or a liberal Hollywood plot.
The only reason why this isn’t accepted as true is an anti-science mentality caused by religion, and your response is biased by religion or conformity whether you realize it or not.