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Re: Politics is downstream from culture

Posted by Errant on 2023-October-19 07:37:28, Thursday
In reply to Re: Politics is downstream from culture posted by Pharmakon on 2023-October-18 01:25:08, Wednesday

"I think my proposal would be helpful in that regard by promoting a discourse around puberty that goes beyond the trans issue."

I can see where you're coming from, but my point is that puberty is simply not a pertinent issue outside of trans. There is no other group (besides pedos) for whom puberty is actually seen as a problem in of itself. It can be a problem to get through (typically for girls rather than for boys), but not a problem to permanently avoid. How many kids who struggled through puberty are still struggling with the end results as adults?

Putting it another way, there was a study in the Netherlands that showed that 98% of kids put on blockers go on to continue transitioning with cross-sex hormones (others in the remaining 2% may have done so as well, but their outcome data simply could not be found). You may already be aware of this study since it's been touted by pro-trans as proof that trans isn't just a phase. And yet if the purpose of blockers is simply to give the child time to choose, then the number of kids on blockers who choose to transition should strike one as suspiciously high. An alternate explanation is that, though the mechanism is unknown, puberty is something you must go through for your body/identity issues to resolve themselves and that putting kids on blockers prevents that resolution from happening.

Personally, I would be very happy to get ahold of some UFO technology and start secretly abducting and sterilizing the most masculine 5% of the population and gradually breed humanity into a more boyish elfin species. And if boyishness were a feature kids could simply choose to maintain, even better. But at this point there's a lot we don't know about what's really going on with puberty and blockers and I truly wonder how much of this is a false problem analogous to treating anorexics with liposuction. Mental issues are supposed to be ruled out before engaging in medical intervention, but adolescence is such a complicated time that I find it hard to believe that they're being ruled out very well (if at all).

"We may have been through this before, but I am not grasping the insight behind "politics is downstream from culture.""

Simply that if the culture mistakenly sees something as a problem, political solutions may very well exacerbate that mistake rather than flowing upstream and fostering a better culture. And socially liberal people in particular should be acutely aware of how much society has mistakenly problematized human nature in the past. If it turns out that gender nonconformity is not a problem that needs to be corrected (whether through psychological conversion or medical conversion), then maybe politics should not be employed to propound that narrative which problematizes it. Same goes for anxiety about going through puberty. Why treat the puberty instead of treating the anxiety? It would seem that preferring the more invasive procedure over the less invasive should require a higher standard of proof and yet that sort of reasoning seems to have no place in the present dialogue as far as puberty for trans-kids goes.

As for Tocqueville and Dewey, they have both written broadly on the subject of political culture.

Errant

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