TSN Open Mic for the week of 4/24/2023

DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

The translation for cishet people: An egg is a trans person who has not figured it out. Usually it’s someone who wandering around ‘wishing’ they were the opposite gender, or often even wishing they were trans, and doesn’t quite realize that actually just makes them trans to start with. Them figuring it out is called ‘their egg cracking’.

And…this is sort of the same thing as gaydar…it’s fine when it’s not important, people in communities just…talk sometimes. It’s hard not to see it, to see people going through exactly the same sort of thing as a huge chunk of people who already figured it out, and people to resist commenting on it.

But a lot of times, that sort of thing is used to attack people, and…no.Report

DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

Wait, what are you asking? Are you asking if someone being an egg exists, or if someone else _knowing_ they are egg exists?

The second exists in the same way ‘gaydar’ does…in that people sometimes can successfully guess things about other people, and sometimes can’t. Asking if those exists is like asking if ‘good guesses’ exist. Uh, sure?

Now, the egg guess is often based on the ‘very suspicious’ things people say that they don’t seem to know they are saying, so it’s often more reliable than ‘gaydar’. Seriously, trans eggs are often at the level that would be like if a straight man constantly talked about how he wanted to have sex with men and hates that with women, and didn’t seem to realize what that meant, and all the gay men are just sorta looking at each other in disbelief that he hasn’t figure out the ‘gay’ thing yet. It’s less ‘gaydar’ than ‘You probably need to sit down and piece some things together.’

As for the first…the term ‘egg’ just means ‘a person who has not figured out they are trans’, and if you believe trans people exist at all, you sorta have to believe ‘eggs’ exist. I mean, what’s the alternative, that trans people instantly magically become trans when their thought ‘I am trans’ completes the first time? No, they were presumably were trans before that point, and, thus, an egg.Report

DavidTC in reply to InMD says:

But that aside the question really boils down to whether being trans arises from a diagnosable medical or psychological condition or whether it is merely a kind of self expression.

Someone’s identity of self is not ‘self-expression’, it is who a person _is_, at a psychological level. The fact that people often aren’t great at determining or stating that, and labeling themselves requires poorly-fitting social constructions that sometimes are vague and change around, does not change that fact.

You’re all in on self expression here, but there are other times in these debates it’s described as a condition requiring major psychological and medical interventions. Either way is fine by me, but it really can’t be both.

And just to get it on the record, your idea of ‘major psychological intervention’ is, in fact, _therapy_, aka, someone talking about how they feel with someone else who listens to what they say. Because that’s the ‘psychological’ thing you’ve repeated objected to providing trans kids. You don’t seem to _know_ it’s just therapy, but I’m not actually sure why.

In the real world, using the term ‘major psychological intervention’ would probably be things like specific very specific drug regiments to affect their mind, which is…which is not generally a thing that has anything to do with being trans.

And I don’t actually know how to explain this, but psychological harming someone by deliberately disrespecting them every time you and literally everyone else talk to them until they are suicidal is not actually a psychological problem caused by what they are being bullied for. It’s a psychological problem caused by the bullying.

This is clear when you swap in literally anyone but trans people. For example, suicides among Black youth have been increasing for two decades, pretty much entirely due to what is euphemistically called ‘political polarization’ and is actually ‘white kids of newly-empowered racists don’t know how to be subtlety racist in public and often blatantly bully Black kids in very racist ways’. (And schools stopped providing any sort of ‘Let’s not be racist’ education that they had in the 80s and 90s, which is probably now all classified as DEI or something.) Being Black, weirdly, is not a mental disorder and does not require major psychological intervention, and doesn’t cause suicide…what causes suicide is how Black children are treated by their peers.

What _can_ require medical intervention is gender dysphoria, which is not the same being trans. (And technically speaking it doesn’t even require being trans, just being treated as the wrong gender or having traits of the wrong gender. Chloe Sevigny, a cis woman, managed to get it when filming as a trans woman due to a prosthetic penis.)

But I don’t even care to explain that, but this is where you are fundamentally broken in your concept of this: What is ‘required’ is not actually meaningful here. It applies to children, sure, we want to limit any sort of medical changes while they are growing to what is absolutely necessary (and we do) but adults actually have bodily autonomy and can do things that are not ‘required’, and perhaps more to the point, don’t have to actually be able to explain why they _are_ required to your satisfaction.

No one needs your permission to be trans, which fundamentally is the actual dispute here, and has pretty much always been.

If it’s the former, that means reasonsble accommodations are required but it also means there’s gatekeeping and close scrutiny for certainty, repeatability, etc. If it’s self expression that’s fine too. The great thing about America and the 1st Amendment is that we can freely express ourselves. But it also means it isn’t owed any particular deference or accomodation that any other form of self expression isn’t. The state can’t stop it in the realm of private life but no one else is under any obligation to feel or act any particular way with regard to the self expression of others.

Fun experiment: Pretend that entire paragraph is talking about someone’s religion, something that everyone agrees is 100% a choice. (And also, incidentally, often part of someone’s identity.)

Which I guess means they not only should have no accommodations whatsoever, but also that a bunch of people are wandering baffled as to why their constant attacks on a specific religion generates social pushback, and why people in position of authority who repeatedly express religious bigotry towards the people they are in charge of tend to get fired. Surely they have the right to say those things!

Oh, but wait, maybe religion _is_ the former, we have decided we want accommodations for it, after all. I’m not sure that really works under your logic, because religion doesn’t appear to be a ‘diagnosable medical or psychological condition’, but let’s pretend. So…we should…have a bunch of people gatekeeping it, apparently. Deciding who and who isn’t members not only of their own religion, but _other_ religions? And only _then_ do they get rights with regard to it?

…which way are you going there? Are we gatekeeping people’s religious identities to make sure they are somehow truly that religion, or are we asserting that is just how people _think_ about themselves and don’t get any accommodations from it? (And at some point we probably need to address the fact that religious belief _also_ isn’t neatly categorized and people can move around and identify in different ways.)

Now, here’s a question: Can you admit that gender is at least as important to people as their religion?Report

DavidTC in reply to Pinky says:

Are there any other conditions in the DSM for which surgery is considered treatment?

Um, pretty much any condition that is caused by problems that can be solved by surgery has doctor’s considering surgery as a possible treatment.

For example, depression and schizophrenia can be caused by brain tumors pushing on parts of the brain. And the treatment for that, believe it or not, is just ‘get rid of the brain tumors so they stop doing that’.

Sleep apnea is also there, and also is often treated with surgery. Various forms of erectile disorder can be treated with surgery. That’s just me looking down the general list, I’m not a doctor, I have no idea what other conditions on this list can indicate surgery.

Your question really just indicates you don’t know what’s in the DSM. _Homelessness_ is in the DSM…which admittedly is not fixable with surgery, but probably not fixable with medication or therapy either. _Physical abuse_ is in the DSM.Report

DavidTC in reply to Pinky says:

Pssst: Trans adult women have just as much right to call themselves ‘girl’ as cis adult women do, without people pretending they mean they’re actually children. It’s pretty common slang. This is a stupid thing for me to even _try_ to explain…you know we have a superhero named ‘Supergirl’, right? Who’s an adult woman, and has always been?

In fact, there’s this whole other discussion about the level this is done, much more with woman than men being ‘boys’, and how it’s used to infantile them. (And certain men, Black men, being called ‘boys’ for exactly the same reason.) But that’s talking about other people, not how you refer to themselves or your own group.

And is your premise here is that she was pretending to be a child _while holding a beer_? Or, in fact, when she made a joke about celebrating March Madness with a Bud Light, which was the actual reason that Bud Light sent her that can.Report

DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

Wait, a second, are you referring to Dylan Mulvaney as prepubescent because _’he’ came out while ‘he’ didn’t have breasts_? This video:

https://www.tiktok.com/@dylanmulvaney/video/7073982716328283434?is_from_webapp=1&web_id=7178899073012958762

Is that how it works in your brain?

Let me guess: If ‘he’ had used fake breasts, we’d be talking about how ‘he’ is ‘fake’ and ‘thinks looking like a woman makes him a woman’. If ‘he’ hadn’t talked about how ‘he’ had know this since ‘he’ was a kid, we’d be talking about how ‘he’ _suddenly_ decided that he was trans…oh, wait, we’re somehow talking about that anyway.

Yeah, I’m about to say some stuff that would get me banned from this site permanently, so I’m going to leave for today.Report