Somebody in the comments said that many of the people reporting abuse are trans, and “trans people suffer from mental illness more”, so maybe they’re just crazy and everything was actually pretty OK.
Hopefully this reasoning looks as crazy to you as it does to me; in the 1970s people would have said the same about gay people, but now we realize that a lot of that was due to homophobia (etc), and a lot of it was due to the fact that gay people, being marginalized, made soft targets for manipulation, blackmail, etc.
So, I think this is not a fair reading of the comment in question. Not a million miles away from, but far enough that I wanted to point it out.
But also, you seem to be saying something like: “consider that maybe trans people’s rates of mental illness are downstream of them being trans and society being transphobic, not that their transness is downstream of mental illness”.
And, okay, but...
Consider a hypothetical trans support forum. If rationalistthrowaway is right, you’d expect the members of that forum to have higher than average rates of mental illness, possibly leading to high profile events like psychotic breaks and suicides. And it sounds like you don’t disagree with this?
(Like, it sounds like you might want to add “some of what gets diagnosed in mental illness in trans people is just the diagnostic machinery being transphobic, and that accounts for some of the increase”. Sure, stipulated. But it doesn’t sound like you’d say that accounts for all of the increase.)
Then someone sees these high profile events, and wonders what’s going on here? Is it something about the forum that’s triggering them? And someone else points out that trans people have a high baseline rate of mental illness, and that seems highly relevant.
It seems to me that your reply would be just as fitting there. Which is to say, I think it misunderstands the point being made; and also (through social punishment) makes it less likely that people will be able to figure out what’s going on and be able to make things better.
So, I think this is not a fair reading of the comment in question. Not a million miles away from, but far enough that I wanted to point it out.
But also, you seem to be saying something like: “consider that maybe trans people’s rates of mental illness are downstream of them being trans and society being transphobic, not that their transness is downstream of mental illness”.
And, okay, but...
Consider a hypothetical trans support forum. If rationalistthrowaway is right, you’d expect the members of that forum to have higher than average rates of mental illness, possibly leading to high profile events like psychotic breaks and suicides. And it sounds like you don’t disagree with this?
(Like, it sounds like you might want to add “some of what gets diagnosed in mental illness in trans people is just the diagnostic machinery being transphobic, and that accounts for some of the increase”. Sure, stipulated. But it doesn’t sound like you’d say that accounts for all of the increase.)
Then someone sees these high profile events, and wonders what’s going on here? Is it something about the forum that’s triggering them? And someone else points out that trans people have a high baseline rate of mental illness, and that seems highly relevant.
It seems to me that your reply would be just as fitting there. Which is to say, I think it misunderstands the point being made; and also (through social punishment) makes it less likely that people will be able to figure out what’s going on and be able to make things better.