People care about this issue because many of them have children and they are afraid it could happen to them. Kids are lying about being gay or about being bisexual, because being straight isn't cool, and it also doesn't give you victimhood points you can use for your benefit, it's similar to people lying about their ethnicity for AA benefits.
There is an explosion of lgbtq identifying teens. Children are the biggest investment of any person, and they don't want to see their children cripple themselves or castrate themselves for a dumb fad, and live with intense regret the rest of their lives.
Come on bro...how can you hold to naturalistic evolution and believe we have a "spare" kidney? It's not a vestigial organ.
Doesn't matter tho. You are conflating a utilitarian concern with one of morality and meaning (even if "treatment" for GD wasn't objectively barbaric). I don't know if you have kids or want them or whatever, but parents aren't sitting at home worried our children are going to need a kidney and wishing there was a market for them just in case. We are concerned about our children being swept up in gender ideology (even if they don't get drugs or surgery, LGBTQ+ identifying people still have higher rates of depression, suicidal ideation, etc.).
You may think morality is just a question of aesthetics. That's fine. I wouldn't expect you to understand why a parent would be more concerned about gender ideology than physical health, regardless of the statistical risk.
> People just find the whole thing icky, even if some might come up with sophisticated sounding phrases like “preventing commodification” to justify continuing this mass murder.
Maybe this is a bit above your intellectual pay grade, but yes, commodification is a basic concept in economics. Legalizing organ sales would rapidly lead us into a cyberpunk dystopia of people "choosing" to sell their organs just to make rent.
I fully support organ sales and I think they are are very good example of anti-market bias. I do think it's a real problem because it's coercively shortening people's lives, kind of like murder.
But I think the argument that we should focus on trans issues at least right now is potentially strong. I am against castration and genital cutting. It is also bad when it happens to adults, so the number is much higher as far as I'm concerned. Kids that do not undergo surgery but were socialized into the other gender role are going to be more likely to get surgery as well. The biggest issue is that this number is increaseing. Putting a stop to it early might be more politically effective before there is a huge lobby and special interest group and an established status quo. If the number stayed flat forever, then maybe you're right but if it keeps increasing at the rate, it could be a huge problem.
Even if you want to ignore the morality of inflicting lifetime harm on children in favor of cold math the OPs logic is not sound. Life years are the way to measure harm not just absolute numbers. Basically it's an estimate of years lost A child of 14 dying loses 65 life years. A kidney disease victim dying at age 64 loses 19. Most people with failed kidneys are older. This example is just for illustration not based on average longevities and various confounding factors. The point being long term damage to children, which may lead to depression, drug addtion etc, can easily reduce life years more than dialysis patients dying. For proof of this you can see how young people overdosing in the US reduces average lifespans in the US.
It's even trickier to measure the damage done by sterilizing entire swaths of the population While they may not lose a decade of life from overdosing, suicide, lifestyle, drugs the entire genetic line is ended. How do you measure the aggregate purpose and happiness erased by preventing them from reproducing and raising children? Happiness and purpose are tied to close family bonds more than anything else. Take away their capacity to have families and you rob them of much more life than a kidney patient dying after a full life.
At any rate this entire post is a black and white fallacy. You can't separate the medical lysenkoism of gender and race ideology from the care of other Americans. The cancer grows and infects all areas of care.
From a utilitarian standpoint, I think trans stuff is a very big deal. Kaufmann's CSPI report convinced me that there's a huge correlation between "acceptance of trans" and mental illness (and i believe it's a causation). Of the 49 million children in the US, probably 10-20 million have mental health issues that meaningfully decrease QOL.
Of course, stopping anti-capitalism would be a bigger triumph, but that's a difficult goal.
„ Let’s say you oppose the entire trans agenda. You think it’s all based on lies, and that every child undergoing gender-affirming care is a tragedy. How much should you prioritize the issue compared to everything else in the world? I would argue not that highly.“
This is wrong. It’s the biggest issue.
Gender affirming care isn’t a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, or not one made without pressure to affirm. It’s basically accepting the child’s word for it, which can lead to unneeded surgery. A medical profession that’s promoting unnecessary surgery isn’t going to be very popular.
„ In 2021, around 42,000 kids between 6 and 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a 75% increase from the previous year. “
This would indicate a social contagion, and some countries are trying to make it illegal for professionals or parents to even stop the process.
75% increase per year and pretty soon we are talking about big numbers. Every child has multiple relations, and friends and parents if friends.
Besides that the statement that trans women are women leads to all kinds of problems for „cis“ women. In extreme all female segregated sex spaces are vulnerable. Sports, which might be the most visible, is not exempted. If male athletes win competitions in the Olympics or Wimbledon then the general population will take the blue pill.
As yet we are at the beginning of that the craziness might entail. It might be that cultural factors will prohibit it getting any stronger, but as yet there’s little political pushback. In the U.K. theres some attempt at a pushback but the Labour Party are all in.
Really misguided. If some folks bring back Aztec human sacrifice but they only flay alive and cut the heart out of one person per year this same analysis would say “eh, don’t worry about it, it’s just one death per year”. But that’s not how moral atrocities work. ANY human sacrifice is too much. ANY children being mutilated for delusional transcult reasons is too many.
The main issue here is that you will lose your job for talking about these issues or not using correct pronouns. The other issue is that blue states have passed laws against "conversion therapy" which is actually defined as telling a boy he is a boy if he thinks he's a girl. Within ten years the school will decide that your kids are trans and inject them with hormones against your will.
If opponents of gender ideology instead focus all their energy on legalizing kidneys and gender ideology remains unopposed suppose the number of minors undergoing permanently irreversible medical procedures doubles every year. That’s a grim scenario indeed to contemplate, especially for parents.
Many--if not most--opponents of gender ideology want to nip it in the bud before it’s too late, and it’s understandable why.
"The risks to a kidney donor are very small, relative to the fact that they can help save a life. Apparently, most of us are walking around with a spare kidney we don’t really need". Humans don't have "spare kidneys" any more than they have spare eyes and spare ears.
You don’t seem to really understand the liberal perspective here. Supporting trans people generally, and kids specifically, isn’t about striking a blow against the patriarchy or subverting gender roles. That’s framing it how a conservative imagines it might be if liberals are a uniform block of scheming sneaksters. The reality is that liberals, and empathetic people generally, support trans people because trans people are human beings who should be free to express their gender however they wish to and pursue gender-affirming medical care if they choose. That freedom should be no more controversial than more traditional gender-affirming care like hair restoration, plastic surgery, and breast augmentation. If any of this threatens the patriarchy, that’s just an added bonus.
“If you have to choose between living under a government that doesn’t believe in gender roles and one that doesn’t believe in markets, you would have to be ignorant or a real crank to choose the socialist patriarchy.”
If I had to choose...yes. Unfortunately, the trans issue is symbolic of lots of crazy left stuff, so we get busing, affirmative action, woke totalitarianism and anti-market bias. It’s not all tied up neatly with a philosophically coherent bow but it’s the typical package.
Like with most "out-of-control Wokeness" issues, it's easy to write off trans kids as an outlier until it comes to YOUR door. And the "It Could be YOUR kids next" element plays on median parental anxieties.
That said, it's obnoxious to see people politically agitated about it who don't actually have any skin in the game and haven't been personally affected by it. I know a guy who's sister transitioned, and his attitude is sad resignation that she got mutilated by the 2010s equivalent of a lobotomy, the trendy new radical surgical cure-all that doesn't in fact cure anything.
I actually don’t think “diagnosed with gender dysphoria” comes close to capturing the scope of this issue. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of minors who adopt this lifestyle never step foot in a clinic. They just read some things online and decide one day that they’re a boy, or non-binary, or whatever. Even the parents who publicly proclaim their support for the woke politically project probably tread lightly once it’s THEIR kid who’s coming out at trans. I’d be willing to bet that only those near the very tail end of the “resistance to acceptance” spectrum would be willing to take their child for medical intervention, and thus “diagnosis”. Also, there is a huge community of DIY hormone treatments, so those numbers are understated as well.
I agree that people should probably be allowed to sell their kidney (one!), however it’s not quite so simple a process. It is not without risk for both the donor (surgical/perioperative risk, plus small increase in kidney failure later on, esp in AA men) and recipient, and while it usually provides some extra life years to the recipient, it’s definitely not a return to normal health or a guarantee of extra time because they will be on serious immunosuppression for the duration someone else’s organ is in their body. There is always the threat of graft rejection, graft vs host disease, serious infections from immunosuppression, etc. That kind of death often involves dying hard.
I think it’s a bit morally unsound to have old rich people getting preferred access to kidneys (or maybe even access at all, once you’ve progressed to kidney failure it’s usually because you have a host of other costly major medical issues or one very serious one- add age to that and it seems silly/futile bc their other problems will probably significantly shorten their lifespan- but I think as long as the recipient can pay for all their own medical care plus any costs the donor may incur if they have complications, including later costly complications like kidney failure, then so be it), but I don’t think it would really affect younger people waiting on transplant lists because the people selling their kidneys would be unlikely to offer them up for free donation.
I suppose the best way would be a website or app that matches buyers/sellers by ABO/RH/HLA and price, in sort of a Tinder-type fashion. The donors need full medical work ups and antibody profiles for matching, and I guess along the way clinicians could screen for all the stuff you don’t want in a donor (drugs/EtOH addiction, intellectual or psychiatric issues that make informed consent dubious, other disqualifying medical issues, etc).
Similarly complicated is the idea that major surgery should be offered to kids suffering from gender dysphoria. There definitely is a small portion of (more boys) that do truly have the disorder, and may (mentally, definitely not physically bc an enormous amount of potential risk exists that hasn’t been studied bc this is all pretty new) benefit from blocking puberty and later gender reassignment surgery. Otherwise they will (almost) never look like women, and I can imagine that’s pretty difficult when you really feel like a woman.
However, genital surgery in particular has major risks (it’s a complex surgery in an inherently contaminated area with higher infection risk), and effects on things like bone density/osteoporosis, cardiovascular health are unknown. Infertility however, is a known. As is difficult or impossible orgasm achievement. How do you adequately explain that to a child/tween? -there’s no context for them. Seems like an ethical gray zone, no clear correct answer, so should the market be allowed to work itself out? Morally I think the answer is no, the medical community should err on the conservative side unless there’s good data showing benefit from risky interventions (Scandinavia changing policy is pretty good indicator there isn’t). Also politicians getting involved is a major problem. The politicization of Covid led to prolonged school closures, ineffective lockdowns that disproportionately harmed the poor, vaccine mandates and discrimination, and further tribalism and unrest. Couldn’t have been managed more poorly if actively trying to screw it all up, esp bc major medical institutions ceded to politicians (AAP and CDC come to the top of my mind).
People care about this issue because many of them have children and they are afraid it could happen to them. Kids are lying about being gay or about being bisexual, because being straight isn't cool, and it also doesn't give you victimhood points you can use for your benefit, it's similar to people lying about their ethnicity for AA benefits.
There is an explosion of lgbtq identifying teens. Children are the biggest investment of any person, and they don't want to see their children cripple themselves or castrate themselves for a dumb fad, and live with intense regret the rest of their lives.
Come on bro...how can you hold to naturalistic evolution and believe we have a "spare" kidney? It's not a vestigial organ.
Doesn't matter tho. You are conflating a utilitarian concern with one of morality and meaning (even if "treatment" for GD wasn't objectively barbaric). I don't know if you have kids or want them or whatever, but parents aren't sitting at home worried our children are going to need a kidney and wishing there was a market for them just in case. We are concerned about our children being swept up in gender ideology (even if they don't get drugs or surgery, LGBTQ+ identifying people still have higher rates of depression, suicidal ideation, etc.).
You may think morality is just a question of aesthetics. That's fine. I wouldn't expect you to understand why a parent would be more concerned about gender ideology than physical health, regardless of the statistical risk.
> People just find the whole thing icky, even if some might come up with sophisticated sounding phrases like “preventing commodification” to justify continuing this mass murder.
Maybe this is a bit above your intellectual pay grade, but yes, commodification is a basic concept in economics. Legalizing organ sales would rapidly lead us into a cyberpunk dystopia of people "choosing" to sell their organs just to make rent.
I fully support organ sales and I think they are are very good example of anti-market bias. I do think it's a real problem because it's coercively shortening people's lives, kind of like murder.
But I think the argument that we should focus on trans issues at least right now is potentially strong. I am against castration and genital cutting. It is also bad when it happens to adults, so the number is much higher as far as I'm concerned. Kids that do not undergo surgery but were socialized into the other gender role are going to be more likely to get surgery as well. The biggest issue is that this number is increaseing. Putting a stop to it early might be more politically effective before there is a huge lobby and special interest group and an established status quo. If the number stayed flat forever, then maybe you're right but if it keeps increasing at the rate, it could be a huge problem.
Even if you want to ignore the morality of inflicting lifetime harm on children in favor of cold math the OPs logic is not sound. Life years are the way to measure harm not just absolute numbers. Basically it's an estimate of years lost A child of 14 dying loses 65 life years. A kidney disease victim dying at age 64 loses 19. Most people with failed kidneys are older. This example is just for illustration not based on average longevities and various confounding factors. The point being long term damage to children, which may lead to depression, drug addtion etc, can easily reduce life years more than dialysis patients dying. For proof of this you can see how young people overdosing in the US reduces average lifespans in the US.
It's even trickier to measure the damage done by sterilizing entire swaths of the population While they may not lose a decade of life from overdosing, suicide, lifestyle, drugs the entire genetic line is ended. How do you measure the aggregate purpose and happiness erased by preventing them from reproducing and raising children? Happiness and purpose are tied to close family bonds more than anything else. Take away their capacity to have families and you rob them of much more life than a kidney patient dying after a full life.
At any rate this entire post is a black and white fallacy. You can't separate the medical lysenkoism of gender and race ideology from the care of other Americans. The cancer grows and infects all areas of care.
From a utilitarian standpoint, I think trans stuff is a very big deal. Kaufmann's CSPI report convinced me that there's a huge correlation between "acceptance of trans" and mental illness (and i believe it's a causation). Of the 49 million children in the US, probably 10-20 million have mental health issues that meaningfully decrease QOL.
Of course, stopping anti-capitalism would be a bigger triumph, but that's a difficult goal.
„ Let’s say you oppose the entire trans agenda. You think it’s all based on lies, and that every child undergoing gender-affirming care is a tragedy. How much should you prioritize the issue compared to everything else in the world? I would argue not that highly.“
This is wrong. It’s the biggest issue.
Gender affirming care isn’t a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, or not one made without pressure to affirm. It’s basically accepting the child’s word for it, which can lead to unneeded surgery. A medical profession that’s promoting unnecessary surgery isn’t going to be very popular.
„ In 2021, around 42,000 kids between 6 and 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a 75% increase from the previous year. “
This would indicate a social contagion, and some countries are trying to make it illegal for professionals or parents to even stop the process.
75% increase per year and pretty soon we are talking about big numbers. Every child has multiple relations, and friends and parents if friends.
Besides that the statement that trans women are women leads to all kinds of problems for „cis“ women. In extreme all female segregated sex spaces are vulnerable. Sports, which might be the most visible, is not exempted. If male athletes win competitions in the Olympics or Wimbledon then the general population will take the blue pill.
As yet we are at the beginning of that the craziness might entail. It might be that cultural factors will prohibit it getting any stronger, but as yet there’s little political pushback. In the U.K. theres some attempt at a pushback but the Labour Party are all in.
Really misguided. If some folks bring back Aztec human sacrifice but they only flay alive and cut the heart out of one person per year this same analysis would say “eh, don’t worry about it, it’s just one death per year”. But that’s not how moral atrocities work. ANY human sacrifice is too much. ANY children being mutilated for delusional transcult reasons is too many.
The main issue here is that you will lose your job for talking about these issues or not using correct pronouns. The other issue is that blue states have passed laws against "conversion therapy" which is actually defined as telling a boy he is a boy if he thinks he's a girl. Within ten years the school will decide that your kids are trans and inject them with hormones against your will.
You’re ignoring the slippery slope argument.
If opponents of gender ideology instead focus all their energy on legalizing kidneys and gender ideology remains unopposed suppose the number of minors undergoing permanently irreversible medical procedures doubles every year. That’s a grim scenario indeed to contemplate, especially for parents.
Many--if not most--opponents of gender ideology want to nip it in the bud before it’s too late, and it’s understandable why.
"The risks to a kidney donor are very small, relative to the fact that they can help save a life. Apparently, most of us are walking around with a spare kidney we don’t really need". Humans don't have "spare kidneys" any more than they have spare eyes and spare ears.
You don’t seem to really understand the liberal perspective here. Supporting trans people generally, and kids specifically, isn’t about striking a blow against the patriarchy or subverting gender roles. That’s framing it how a conservative imagines it might be if liberals are a uniform block of scheming sneaksters. The reality is that liberals, and empathetic people generally, support trans people because trans people are human beings who should be free to express their gender however they wish to and pursue gender-affirming medical care if they choose. That freedom should be no more controversial than more traditional gender-affirming care like hair restoration, plastic surgery, and breast augmentation. If any of this threatens the patriarchy, that’s just an added bonus.
“If you have to choose between living under a government that doesn’t believe in gender roles and one that doesn’t believe in markets, you would have to be ignorant or a real crank to choose the socialist patriarchy.”
If I had to choose...yes. Unfortunately, the trans issue is symbolic of lots of crazy left stuff, so we get busing, affirmative action, woke totalitarianism and anti-market bias. It’s not all tied up neatly with a philosophically coherent bow but it’s the typical package.
Like with most "out-of-control Wokeness" issues, it's easy to write off trans kids as an outlier until it comes to YOUR door. And the "It Could be YOUR kids next" element plays on median parental anxieties.
That said, it's obnoxious to see people politically agitated about it who don't actually have any skin in the game and haven't been personally affected by it. I know a guy who's sister transitioned, and his attitude is sad resignation that she got mutilated by the 2010s equivalent of a lobotomy, the trendy new radical surgical cure-all that doesn't in fact cure anything.
I actually don’t think “diagnosed with gender dysphoria” comes close to capturing the scope of this issue. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of minors who adopt this lifestyle never step foot in a clinic. They just read some things online and decide one day that they’re a boy, or non-binary, or whatever. Even the parents who publicly proclaim their support for the woke politically project probably tread lightly once it’s THEIR kid who’s coming out at trans. I’d be willing to bet that only those near the very tail end of the “resistance to acceptance” spectrum would be willing to take their child for medical intervention, and thus “diagnosis”. Also, there is a huge community of DIY hormone treatments, so those numbers are understated as well.
I agree that people should probably be allowed to sell their kidney (one!), however it’s not quite so simple a process. It is not without risk for both the donor (surgical/perioperative risk, plus small increase in kidney failure later on, esp in AA men) and recipient, and while it usually provides some extra life years to the recipient, it’s definitely not a return to normal health or a guarantee of extra time because they will be on serious immunosuppression for the duration someone else’s organ is in their body. There is always the threat of graft rejection, graft vs host disease, serious infections from immunosuppression, etc. That kind of death often involves dying hard.
I think it’s a bit morally unsound to have old rich people getting preferred access to kidneys (or maybe even access at all, once you’ve progressed to kidney failure it’s usually because you have a host of other costly major medical issues or one very serious one- add age to that and it seems silly/futile bc their other problems will probably significantly shorten their lifespan- but I think as long as the recipient can pay for all their own medical care plus any costs the donor may incur if they have complications, including later costly complications like kidney failure, then so be it), but I don’t think it would really affect younger people waiting on transplant lists because the people selling their kidneys would be unlikely to offer them up for free donation.
I suppose the best way would be a website or app that matches buyers/sellers by ABO/RH/HLA and price, in sort of a Tinder-type fashion. The donors need full medical work ups and antibody profiles for matching, and I guess along the way clinicians could screen for all the stuff you don’t want in a donor (drugs/EtOH addiction, intellectual or psychiatric issues that make informed consent dubious, other disqualifying medical issues, etc).
Similarly complicated is the idea that major surgery should be offered to kids suffering from gender dysphoria. There definitely is a small portion of (more boys) that do truly have the disorder, and may (mentally, definitely not physically bc an enormous amount of potential risk exists that hasn’t been studied bc this is all pretty new) benefit from blocking puberty and later gender reassignment surgery. Otherwise they will (almost) never look like women, and I can imagine that’s pretty difficult when you really feel like a woman.
However, genital surgery in particular has major risks (it’s a complex surgery in an inherently contaminated area with higher infection risk), and effects on things like bone density/osteoporosis, cardiovascular health are unknown. Infertility however, is a known. As is difficult or impossible orgasm achievement. How do you adequately explain that to a child/tween? -there’s no context for them. Seems like an ethical gray zone, no clear correct answer, so should the market be allowed to work itself out? Morally I think the answer is no, the medical community should err on the conservative side unless there’s good data showing benefit from risky interventions (Scandinavia changing policy is pretty good indicator there isn’t). Also politicians getting involved is a major problem. The politicization of Covid led to prolonged school closures, ineffective lockdowns that disproportionately harmed the poor, vaccine mandates and discrimination, and further tribalism and unrest. Couldn’t have been managed more poorly if actively trying to screw it all up, esp bc major medical institutions ceded to politicians (AAP and CDC come to the top of my mind).