I’m going to focus most of the post on the theme of trans people, I think it exemplifies the first of the two main problems behind a “social conservativism” approach.
Conservatives generally don’t provide good arguments for their worries.
The model they’ll present will rarely stand as a coherent reasoning or have moving parts you can examine. “Gay marriage → loss of societal cohesion”, with a not really explained “loss of validity for traditional marriage” in between.
When there are detailed models, usually scientific literature will prove most of the concerns wrong. Progressives are usually the ones that seem to be aligned with the science, at least in the recent struggles (if one can provide counterexamples they are free to do so. Currently the strongest one I could think of is transgender athletes in sport, where both sides are misaligned with the studies—transgender athletes seem to regain an advantage with the current guidelines, but it’s not enough to make women sport a one-sided battle that are dominated by trans athletes or to be reasonably certain it’s there, and treating all sports as being influenced in the same way it’s nonsense).
2. The current situation might well be running at full speed toward a crash.
A cautionary approach that says “don’t change anything, you don’t know what you could break in our society” would be considerable only if it seems we are at a really good and stable points.
But broken stuff in our society can carry costs and problems that compound, which seem to be pretty much the situation we are in at the moment given the number of crisis our society is facing, up to extinction risks, so stasis doesn’t seems an option.
I should add that none of this is hypothetical. Right now, as we speak, young people are being actively encouraged by progressive parents, teachers and activists to ask themselves the question if maybe they’ve been born in the wrong body. And while progressives insist that this can’t possibly do any harm because all sex-related matters are unique in being the only human traits that are fully genetic and on which environment has zero effect, my counterargument is that that’s horseshit.
People are being actively encouraged in knowing that there are some people born in the wrong body, not to ask if they are really cis. I’ve yet to see an activist write something that would encourage random persons to question their gender identity, save in the kind of internet places you go look if you are questioning your gender identity, and they generally say stuff like “if you think that these experiences match your own, you might want to keep questioning your gender identity, here are other experiences that aren’t related to that to help you differentiate”.
There is very strong evidence that people can’t change their sexual orientation or their gender identity on command, such as the staggering, complete rate of failures of every sort of therapy that ever tried to obtain that.
My (more or less informed) guess is that a lot of people have a sexual orientation that’s more or on less on the bisexual spectrum, and so could their environment would influence if they acknowledge and/or follow on it or not. But the environment can only work on cases where the innate preference isn’t too marked. If you’re bisexual with a 50⁄50 preference you’d have a hard time not noticing it. If you have a 90⁄10 preference, you might believe you are straight (or gay if the preference is same sex) if you grow up in an environment, or notice that 10% if you grow up in another.
Similarly, gender identity also seems to follow a continuous scale. Some people might go either way, since transitioning isn’t exactly easy environment would likely influence their decisions on the matter. A lot of people who will “pop out” as trans depending on the environment will likely be people who are very much trans, and that will notice they are because they are informed on the subject.
I do agree that some harm might come of it. The number of people who transition and then de-transition will rise as the social stigma, huge hassles, and other problems associated with transitioning will also increase.
But, given that the numbers seem to be hundreds of de-transitioners who would suffer from it and millions of trans people who would greatly reduce their sufferings, it seems that for now we should floor it on the “more education on transgenderism” and check on what follows. Being trans and not noticing/not being able to act on it is a real harm.
Even if you insist that the number of trans people is kept constant across time and space by some kind of universal law, their suicide rates are still some factor ~18 higher than the rest of society, and you cannot possibly expect me to believe that this has nothing to do with them being constantly told by trans activists that the world hates them and that there is nothing they can do about it (by the way, I don’t hate you.) So from my point of view, progressives are only making impressionable young people more miserable by convincing them that their current reality is intolerable and evil.
As a trans person this is not my experience at all. Trans activists usually provide more support to trans people than depressing content. My worries about how the world would treat me if I were trans decreased as trans activism became more prevalent, because you get a sense that a growing number of people would just accept you.
Transphobia is, by far, the most likely suspect in the suicide rates of trans people who have transitioned. Trans people are still shown to be heavily discriminated and at a much higher risk of assault or unemployment, discrimination correlates a lot with these increased suicide rates.
Locker room talk you hear in high school, transphobic medias of all kind, stuff like that will convince you that the current reality is intolerable and evil, even if you don’t hear about aggressions and discrimination about trans people in the news. In high school I went straight “nope, not worth even considering the question” because of these things, and trans visibility was basically zero (and by the way, thank you for expressing support!).
Activism will tell you “it’s bad, but it’s getting better, there are people and places that will accept you right now, and we can make this even better”. So, in this sense, it will make more trans people be out, and make more trans people realise I’m trans, which is not a bad thing because gender dysphoria and all that follows from it take the lion share in the suicide rates before transitioning. Even despite transphobia and discriminations, trans people are much more at risk of suicide before transitioning, gender dysphoria it’s just that bad.
The trans problem wouldn’t get worse if society tried to go the stasis route, but it would still mean paying a huge amount of sufferings and deaths with no good reason.
I’m going to focus most of the post on the theme of trans people, I think it exemplifies the first of the two main problems behind a “social conservativism” approach.
Conservatives generally don’t provide good arguments for their worries.
The model they’ll present will rarely stand as a coherent reasoning or have moving parts you can examine. “Gay marriage → loss of societal cohesion”, with a not really explained “loss of validity for traditional marriage” in between.
When there are detailed models, usually scientific literature will prove most of the concerns wrong. Progressives are usually the ones that seem to be aligned with the science, at least in the recent struggles (if one can provide counterexamples they are free to do so. Currently the strongest one I could think of is transgender athletes in sport, where both sides are misaligned with the studies—transgender athletes seem to regain an advantage with the current guidelines, but it’s not enough to make women sport a one-sided battle that are dominated by trans athletes or to be reasonably certain it’s there, and treating all sports as being influenced in the same way it’s nonsense).
2. The current situation might well be running at full speed toward a crash.
A cautionary approach that says “don’t change anything, you don’t know what you could break in our society” would be considerable only if it seems we are at a really good and stable points.
But broken stuff in our society can carry costs and problems that compound, which seem to be pretty much the situation we are in at the moment given the number of crisis our society is facing, up to extinction risks, so stasis doesn’t seems an option.
People are being actively encouraged in knowing that there are some people born in the wrong body, not to ask if they are really cis. I’ve yet to see an activist write something that would encourage random persons to question their gender identity, save in the kind of internet places you go look if you are questioning your gender identity, and they generally say stuff like “if you think that these experiences match your own, you might want to keep questioning your gender identity, here are other experiences that aren’t related to that to help you differentiate”.
There is very strong evidence that people can’t change their sexual orientation or their gender identity on command, such as the staggering, complete rate of failures of every sort of therapy that ever tried to obtain that.
My (more or less informed) guess is that a lot of people have a sexual orientation that’s more or on less on the bisexual spectrum, and so could their environment would influence if they acknowledge and/or follow on it or not. But the environment can only work on cases where the innate preference isn’t too marked. If you’re bisexual with a 50⁄50 preference you’d have a hard time not noticing it. If you have a 90⁄10 preference, you might believe you are straight (or gay if the preference is same sex) if you grow up in an environment, or notice that 10% if you grow up in another.
Similarly, gender identity also seems to follow a continuous scale. Some people might go either way, since transitioning isn’t exactly easy environment would likely influence their decisions on the matter. A lot of people who will “pop out” as trans depending on the environment will likely be people who are very much trans, and that will notice they are because they are informed on the subject.
I do agree that some harm might come of it. The number of people who transition and then de-transition will rise as the social stigma, huge hassles, and other problems associated with transitioning will also increase.
But, given that the numbers seem to be hundreds of de-transitioners who would suffer from it and millions of trans people who would greatly reduce their sufferings, it seems that for now we should floor it on the “more education on transgenderism” and check on what follows. Being trans and not noticing/not being able to act on it is a real harm.
As a trans person this is not my experience at all. Trans activists usually provide more support to trans people than depressing content. My worries about how the world would treat me if I were trans decreased as trans activism became more prevalent, because you get a sense that a growing number of people would just accept you.
Transphobia is, by far, the most likely suspect in the suicide rates of trans people who have transitioned. Trans people are still shown to be heavily discriminated and at a much higher risk of assault or unemployment, discrimination correlates a lot with these increased suicide rates.
Locker room talk you hear in high school, transphobic medias of all kind, stuff like that will convince you that the current reality is intolerable and evil, even if you don’t hear about aggressions and discrimination about trans people in the news. In high school I went straight “nope, not worth even considering the question” because of these things, and trans visibility was basically zero (and by the way, thank you for expressing support!).
Activism will tell you “it’s bad, but it’s getting better, there are people and places that will accept you right now, and we can make this even better”. So, in this sense, it will make more trans people be out, and make more trans people realise I’m trans, which is not a bad thing because gender dysphoria and all that follows from it take the lion share in the suicide rates before transitioning. Even despite transphobia and discriminations, trans people are much more at risk of suicide before transitioning, gender dysphoria it’s just that bad.
The trans problem wouldn’t get worse if society tried to go the stasis route, but it would still mean paying a huge amount of sufferings and deaths with no good reason.