I'm not sure what the benefits are of comparing which attrocities were worse. At some point the difference aren't meaningful and I think slavery, whether you die quick or slow, it's one of them. It's also a bit of a tangent from the subject of this thread.

For instance, does anyone know to what extent Bolsonaro was involved? Did he rile up the mob?

How about I don't spit in your popcorn?

No snow in the Alps. Watch what that will do to the Rhine come spring and summer. This is fucking up groundwater levels because we're the goddamn stars in making water run the fuck off to the sea instead of living in the bog that was the river delta of the Maas, Waal and Rhine. Only way to save that is creating bogs again but oops it's built up to capacity (actually over if we take environmental measures).

But hey, at least I can have a beer on a terrace during winter!

Hand me some or close the thread.

I don't understand your apparent need to interpret my statement differently than as stated. I said:

I think you don't become an elected official in Brasil without being corrupt. — Benkei

That fantasy is all yours...

I think you don't become an elected official in Brasil without being corrupt.

https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-49847851

Plus, it's not as if it's the first time a corrupt politician is voted into office. It's not a disqualifiying trait unfortunately, as much as we would like it to be.

Thanks! So why aren't the Dems making a deal? Seems they benefit from a split GOP instead of letting them reach a deal where concessions are made on who campaigns where.

This is going to take while.

Ah, I think there are some tangential benefits so I'd mostly just leave it be. It raises awareness, creates more room for people struggling with these issues to open up about it. All in all, I don't think it's bad, just misplaced, as long as doctors stick to agreed ethical standards.

includes psychological and behavior differences. — Athena

There are cognitive differences. Behaviour is learned. So no.

So why doesn't Hakeem Jeffries get it if he consistently gets the most votes?

On what grounds? — Isaac

Personal freedom usually. My body, my choice, kind of thing.

Puberty blockers were, until very recently, alarmingly easy to get here in the UK, and the campaign groups are not saying "phew, that was a narrow escape, thanks for shutting Tavistock", they're saying they want more drugs, more easily available. — Isaac

Subsidiarity precludes it becoming more readily available in the Netherlands. They can campaign but it's not going to change the ethical rules doctors have to abide by. First stop is therapy, if that doesn't help then a second psychiatrist will do an assessment on whether it really is gender dysphoria and if there aren't other insufficiently treated or untreated mental illnesses. If that's yes and none (or if the latter are a consequence of the dysphoria), then I suspect puberty blockers are less problematic than other drugs (anti-depressants, if that would make sense) and therefore would be available.

I have to say the movement isn't really vocal in the Netherlands or I haven't been paying attention.

There is a difference, yes. But even within the 'offer' camp (into which I also fall) there are degrees of enthusiasm behind that offer which matter, I think, considering that, as I said, the mainstream position is not merely a reluctant offer. — Isaac

I think the mainstream position is concerned with that if a person has gender affirming surgery then people should accept it. About the question whether persons with gender dysphoria should have gender affirming surgery, I think opinions are much more qualified. But maybe things are simply different here than in the UK.

The Royal Dutch Association for the promotion of the Medical Arts, a.k.a. the Doctor's Association writes the ethical code for practitioners in the Netherlands. One of the ethical pillars is the subsidiarity principle that requires practitioners to employ the means that have the least impact to reach a specific goal. So a gender affirming operation is only on the table if other less impactful measures have failed.

That doesn't rise to the level of promotion in my view but, since it's the most impactful measure available, as an ultimum remedium.

I don't see how. — Isaac

Precisely for the reason I stated. We can be in favour of both social change and gender affirming surgery. The latter is therefore not antithetical to the former.

I'm not sure what you 'seem' to be capable of is a very good measure for appropriate public policy. I seem to be capable of owning a gun and not shooting anyone with it. Does that lead to the conclusion that we ought allow everyone to own a gun without restriction? — Isaac

I don't think that analogy works. If you want an analogy: It's better to teach people to cope with the underlying causes of potential criminal behaviour than to lock criminals up but I'm still in favour of locking up criminals.

No one is talking about not treating those with gender dysphoria. — Isaac

Then I'm having trouble placing your comments when you call it "antithetical". That sounds to me like you disapprove. Or is there a difference between offering the option (which I'm advocating) and your idea of "promoting" gender affirming surgery, which you claim is currently happening?

The point is that it's currently actively antithetical to that progress ever being made. Promoting an intervention which continues to treat intolerance as a fault of some individual's biology just further embeds the intolerance, it doesn't just fail to tackle it, it actively makes it worse. — Isaac

That's a false dichotomy though. And we started out with a theory anyway so let's not get carried away with the qualifications shall we?

It doesn't actively make it worse at all. I seem to be quite capable of holding both views simultaneously because I theorise some reasons for gender dysphoria have to do with one's surroundings. If surgery helps them, then by all means let them have it. A lot of depression and anxiety in younger people is due to worry about climate change, shall we not treat that depression (hopefully through cognitive therapy only) because it's not their fault? That doesn't sit right with me.

https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance in my country to consider social impacts. It already considers economic impacts. I accept it'll never cover everything, but I don't accept it's thereby under no obligation to even try. — Isaac

Can you share a guidance where you think they're doing this because I just tried to randomly and after spending 30 minutes reading, I couldn't find what you're referring to.

Not that it much matters for the point your making and the one I'm trying to make. I don't know about the UK but in our healthcare landscape we're currently spending over 1,5 billion EUR on healthcare policy with a multitude of advisory organs at various levels, continuously pouring out advice and reinforcing each other's opinions (but they never advise getting rid of the overhead they're a part of, how surprising!). That's definitely compartementalisation taken too far and with ridiculous (and expensive) consequences.

As a result, I'm not so optimistic given this is often the state of "modern" government. I do think we could have afforable healthcare not through policy but healthcare worker autonomy - they decide what care their patient should get. I'd suspect a significant 1 billion EUR saving in not dictating policy and an uptick in people actually helped because their care becomes central instead of following policy and procedures. But then, this leads to maximum compartimentalisation because every patient becomes unique and the socio-economic issues cannot be taken onboard (because healthcare workers are working one-on-one with their patients). And to change social issues, we need to aggregate, so we need policy and procedures again. And we're back at square one. :-)

Meanwhile, what to do with people with gender dysphoria? "Yeah, it really sucks you're depressed but it only took us over 50 years to get gay people accepted and then maybe in 50 years you'll feel comfortable with your gender expression and the dysphoria will change, so have a bit of patience, ok?" Except of course, identity is already formed by then and the social change won't resolve the problem for them. So yes, allow gender affirming operations, it will save lives while society tries to catch up with not being dicks about other people's gender expressions.

I find this hard to accept. I would take issue with it on its face - junk food, for example, is as much a social issue as a medical one and public health policy acknowledges that. But I would also take issue with it from the position of a citizen. If it is, as I believe, our duty as citizens to hold our authorities to account, then we needn't (nor ought to) limit our assessments to artificially narrow concerns.

If the social impact of a public health policy is negative, then the personal benefits to individuals need not outweigh that as far as we're concerned. The authority itself might have a narrow remit, but we don't. — Isaac

I think we should differentiate with the ideal world and the complex, large nation states we live in. In an ideal world, we have a holistic approach and public health policy is embedded in other socio-economic policy and they move and change in tandem and a cross-specialist interaction leads to (far more) optimal solutions. The reality is they are only tenuously related. It's public health policy to highlight the problem of junk food but individual choice trumps prohibitions in this area. And this is an issue; food safety doesn't deal with whether it's healthy. So we see small changes, where nutritional values and scores are given to food so people can make more informed choices. And we see people don't care. Well, actually, that's not fair. People with enough money to worry about their health do care, for too many people it's just a matter of what they can pay for and with the need for both persons in most relationships to work to even make ends meet, who has time to cook? So really, economic circumstances are making it much harder to have a healthy lifestyle. In the Netherlands that's mostly driven by stagnant wages and insane increases in house prices. Which in turn is driven by macro-economic policy choices, foreign direct investments and market liberalisation.

Yes, it's all connected but no we're not capable of untangling that web and I don't think anybody is. So we have to compartimentalise out of necessity.

I agree, but there are solutions to gender dysphoria which do not involve promoting the idea that it's the individual who needs 'fixing'. As unenlightened has alluded to, there are mental health approaches which focus on acceptance (society's, not the client's), and strategies to deal with the lack of it. Therapies which focus the blame where it belongs and provide mechanisms for change on both sides of the individual's relationship with their community. — Isaac

I don't consider this realistic though and I don't find it helpful to build hypothetical solutions to actual problems. Maybe in relation to family members yes but the wider community is not in therapy - it doesn't resolve bigotry in every day life and on social media, it doesn't get you a job because people don't hire you because they think you're offputting or they don't want to create a scene with the high performing alpha male Jake they don't want to lose.

Basically, I don't disagree with anything you say, I just don't think it's in any way practical.

As such, your argument, applied to public health policy, could be used equally to design policies which place barriers (or further barriers) in the way of pharmaceutical and surgical responses to gender dysphoria using exactly the same argument as is being used to design policies which remove or lessen those barriers. — Isaac

I don't think so because public health policy isn't in the business of resolving social issues. It has to work with the constraints it has and that's societies with gender stereotypes that are so stringently prescriptive @Andrew4Handel can't even imagine how a man can act feminine.

That said, even from a holistic point of view, doing away with gender stereotypes will not resolve all gender dysphoria (although I guess that won't be gender dysphoria anymore but something else, body dysphoria?) and I'd advocate the option because more choice is more freedom.

Edit: wait, I might be misunderstanding, are you saying currently policy promotes having gender affirming surgery?

If we have two options (simplistically - promote gender altering surgery or don't), and each has it's potential flaws, but we accept suboptimal solutions all the time... does that lead us to either option? It reads to me as an argument for either. — Isaac

I'm not promoting either. I'm promoting having the choice and respecting such choice when it's been made one way or the other. What I don't accept, not that that is what you're doing but what I consider other posters to be guilty of, is trying to rile up disgust and deciding once and for all for everybody in every situation what that choice should be. It's not as if people are picking out a dress when they decide to have gender affirming surgery. At least in the Netherlands it takes years and surgeons are reluctant to perform these operations because they take their hypocratic oath seriously. Patients really should have a high likelihood to be better off with the surgery than without. Especially since comorbidity of other mental health issues are common.

I don't see why we need to escape gender stereotypes. — Andrew4Handel

Because they're harmful.



Love how you are now confusing lesbians with gender dysphoria.

I hate your parents for fucking up your upbringing.

I agree and at the same time don't. :smile: I do think it is a fix, given the constraints of social circumstances. Not having the option would lead to other mental health issues, in particular depression with significant increased risk in suicide. I don't think that's a problem though. We deal with suboptimal solutions all the time. We incarcerate people instead of resolving the underlying causes for instance.

Even in this thread we see people cannot escape gender stereotypes and put horses behind carriages to justify their own biases. And I like to think I have a decent rational grasp on these sort of biases and I still reinforce them without thinking through jokes, expressions, how I treat women as opposed to men etc. in everyday life. It's not something we're likely to escape any time soon.

If transsexual regret is a measure for how bad transitioning would be, then the opposite should be true. Since only 8% regret transitioning, transitioning is a good thing. From those 8% the majority regret it because of parents, social reactions and inability to get a job. It's not transsexuals that are the problem, it's the societies they live in.

That said, I have a theory that societies that are less hung up on gender stereotypes, will see a significant decrease in transitioning because there's a wider gamut available for gender expression so the dysphoria will probably lessen because gender roles will be less pronounced. For starters, men should be able to wear dresses instead of boring suits.

High heels, stockings and a wig:



And more of this please:

Disgust is sometimes an appropriate emotion. It can be a sign of rationality, ethical sense and confronting dysfunction and injustice. — Andrew4Handel

I'm disgusted with your bigotry. Happy? It's tiresome to read posts from someone who doesn't grasp the concepts of proof and evidence. When you're confronted with the fact the studies you cite don't say what you think they say, you ignore it and post anecdotal evidence. When you're confronted with evidence contrary to your position, your go to reaction is to ignore it. And then we get even more anecdotal evidence, which, in case you've missed that note, isn't evidence. If you don't understand what evidence is or logical proof, then you should begin with a course in logic.

Are you going to spam anecdotal evidence because you realise your arguments are crap?

I see your ability to read hasn't improved. You misrepresent your own research and when I point out biological positivism has been waylaid and that socialisation and psychological theories point to other reasons, I get "but men commit 95% of crime" as if you're explaining anything. Maybe stop starting threads about issues you can't wrap your tiny brain around.

There's people actually studying this, called "criminology" and they've debunked biological positivism a long time ago.The most accepted theories currently all focus on socialisation and psychology, namely:

1. social learning theory
2. the theory key life experiences shape criminal behaviour
3. strain theory
4. edgework theory
5. gender role theory

Reality doesn't care about your outdated, ill-informed, bigoted feelings and hypotheses indeed.

No, it wouldn't because it distracts from the point that this is an irrelevancy.

They're also 4 times more likely to experience violence so perhaps that's related. The correlation of male-to-female transsexual crime rates and male crime rates was only significant for the period prior to 1989; the time before they received mental care during and after the transition. And female-to-male transsexuals actually show male pattern crime behaviour (look at that, women with masculine traits). But with n=60 in a 30 year period these conclusions are all bullshit anyway.

Can you read? Who did I reply to?

Nice false analogy there. Traits are behaviour not biologically given. You ignore the fact the traits you qualify as feminine or masculine are exhibited by the other gender as well. A black person cannot act as if he's a white man by changing his behaviour. A man can act "feminine" by changing his behaviour and vice versa. Your "traits" are therefore gender stereotypes and not informed by biology (alone). Behaviour is in any case relational: caring for others, submitting to others, aggressive towards another, etc. You cannot ignore the sociology which is rive with the confirmation bias and people's average need to belong (and therefor fit) to one of these categories. The statistics don't prove traits, they prove bias. If both sexes are capable of the same behaviour, you'd expect a normal distribution of them among the populace.

That doesn't follow at all and what you think isn't a fact so we can ignore that. It's rather well known stereotypical gender traits are expressed by the other gender, so it's not as if they are incapable. And it certainly isn't as if men are biologically hardwired not to care about others. So no, it's not biology.

I thought you liked Spinoza. That's one guy. And I know you positively love me and I pretend to be a guy online.

Neither. Why waste the resources?

Those aren't male or female traits but gender stereotypes. You shouldn't confuse the two. That said, it is correct that male gender stereotypes are valued more than female ones. It reinforces biases as people try to conform their behaviour to what's expected and the end result is a lot of sexism even from people who don't intend it.

It's proved crap when it logically doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Or are you now suggesting logical rules are also subjective?

Right, no deductive argument is stronger than it's premises (assumptions); but I think it is likely that only those among the religious who don't understand that believe that the arguments for the existence of God constitute absolute proofs. The arguments can be thought to "work" without the requirement that they be absolute proofs; like any valid argument the requirement is that the conclusion follows from the premises. — Janus

God is a pathetically persistent fairy tale people keep wanting to rationalise and when it's pointed out it's all crap, because none of those arguments work, some complain about manners. I wasn't even talking to Clarky. If anybody would start a thread about proof that unicorns existed he'd be summarily banned for low quality. Such is the immersion in Christian culture we can't even admit it's crap and then I'm the one being "provocative" and "disrespectful" for pointing it out. It's so sad that it's funny again. Anything worthwhile that can be found in religion, is easily subsumed under ethics and metaphysics. Plenty of good thinkers wasted their lives working on Christian dogma and it has resulted in some decent insights.

Yes, exactly. And assumptions aren't proof so they don't work.