We are living in the post-truth, post-modernist era, and I am very happy that more and more people are realising where it is taking us.
I feel genuine relief reading again things like:
<<<We cannot have differing rules based on the speaker’s skin color, gender, or political affiliation. No one has a higher claim to the truth because of their group identity. “Who you are does not count;” Rauch says, “the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable.”>>>
Something that over the last few years has been heavily contested and went from being one of the most obvious values to one that triggers the most vitriol.
The "truth era" wasn't the era when everything was true, but when we actually believed that there is such a thing as "the truth". I would argue that up until the time when "Applied Postmodernism" took hold in some of our most important institution we could say that we lived in the "truth" era.
Postmodernism is the reckoning with the problem, not the problem itself. It recognizes epistemological difficulties and how different power interests or ideological preferences are often tied up with claims of "the truth."
The people who dislike it the most tend to be either those who've been effectively manipulated by power interests, or those who find reckoning with the difficulty of finding the truth inconvenient.
> Postmodernism is the reckoning with the problem, not the problem itself. It recognizes epistemological difficulties and how different power interests or ideological preferences are often tied up with claims of "the truth."
Which is fine for "claims to truth", but it's not fine when people think this entails that there is no such thing as truth, or sometimes that all claims to truth are equally valid.
> The people who dislike it the most tend to be either those who've been effectively manipulated by power interests, or those who find reckoning with the difficulty of finding the truth inconvenient.
Excellent way to avoid engaging with an idea you might find disagreeable, a tip of a straw hat to you
> It recognizes epistemological difficulties and how different power interests or ideological preferences are often tied up with claims of "the truth."
Down the nihilistic rabbit hole we go!
That's this layman's understanding of where postmodernism almost invariably ends up.
I mean, I guess your pithy comeback is a sentence someone could say if they were all in on posture and casual in their nihilistic contempt for semantics and substance.
Maybe from the Enlightenment to the early 20th century. Back then, science was still understood as the pursuit of truth.
The big idea in 20th century science, philosophy of science, and mathematics was that the truth is fundamentally unreachable. We got quantum mechanics as the foundation of reality. We got the idea that experiments can only rule out explanations but not establish the truth. We got used to probabilistic estimates based on data. We got all those uncomfortable results about the incompleteness and undecidability of formal systems.
Science became a social construct. We got evidence instead of facts; we got explanations, predictions, and interpretations instead of the truth. Science became a system of best practices for building and updating consensus based on empirical evidence.
> The big idea in 20th century science, philosophy of science, and mathematics was that the truth is fundamentally unreachable. We got quantum mechanics as the foundation of reality. We got the idea that experiments can only rule out explanations but not establish the truth. We got used to probabilistic estimates based on data. We got all those uncomfortable results about the incompleteness and undecidability of formal systems.
I am not an experimental scientist or philosopher, but I am a mathematician, and I thoroughly reject the claim that the big idea of 20th-century mathematics is that the truth is fundamentally unreachable. To be sure, we found that one can speak meaningfully, and rigorously, of the limits of decidability; but only an algorithmic view of mathematics will lead one to conclude that this makes the truth unreachable. Perhaps one could advance the claim that certain truths are unreachable (I do not, and find the claim woolly), but that is quite different from saying that truth itself is unreachable.
I'm an experimental scientist. My take would be that truth is reachable, but the Truth with a capital T is a potentially meaningless throwback to a past age of certainty.
What I mean is that some theories have been corroborated to the point that they can be regarded as "truth" for all intents and purposes, and despite known limitations in some cases. Examples might include electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, gravitation, and biological evolution.
Regarding those theories, we can still say that we accept them on a tentative basis, but it would not be irrational to assign a vanishingly low likelihood that any of them will be radically overturned.
Radically overturned is an overstatement I think. The theories you've listed are all tautologically valid in the domains in which we've tested them. What will happen is that either they will continue to hold in new domains where they haven't yet been tested, or we will discover a more general theory that will reduce to these theories in the limit.
Indeed, to illustrate; Einstein and Planck doesn't mean that for most of our lived experience and work, classical mechanics offers a far more useful model of the world.
I was referring to the crisis in the early 20th century, when the paradoxes and inconsistencies in the foundations of mathematics became too troublesome to ignore. The crisis was eventually resolved, but the mathematics that arose from it was more limited in scope than what earlier mathematicians had hoped. That is usually not a major concern if you work in mathematics, but it was a significant change in the understanding of the nature of truth.
>Maybe from the Enlightenment to the early 20th century. Back then, science was still understood as the pursuit of truth.
But, that was a period of material scarcity. Only a relatively small wealthy upper class had access to that kind of education. That was a period of time still rife with superstition... literal witch-hunts.
> Science became a social construct. We got evidence instead of facts; we got explanations, predictions, and interpretations instead of the truth. Science became a system of best practices for building and updating consensus based on empirical evidence.
What is the utility of empirical evidence to building consensus if it does not reflect some underlying truth?
I disagree with your characterization of science and math of the 20th century. To start, quantum mechanics does not entail lack of realism. The 20th century also saw two deterministic interpretations of QM emerge (many worlds and Bohmian mechanics).
The fact that experiments can only rule out explanations can be used to establish a process that provably converges on truth (Solomonoff Induction).
Incompleteness and undecidability are provably true propositions. Cold, hard truth.
In other words, there are counterparts to all of your points that supposedly undermine the concept of truth.
Truth is an anti-scientific concept. When you say something is the truth, you are saying no evidence can change your mind. Maybe there is some underlying truth, but it seems to be out of our reach. And it's irrelevant anyway. The utility does not come from some metaphysical ponderings but from models that can explain phenomena and make reliable predictions.
There is no epistemic value to empirical evidence if the empirical evidence were not proxy to some truth.
> When you say something is the truth, you are saying no evidence can change your mind
No, "truth" is the proposition that will agree with all conceivable robust evidence.
> Maybe there is some underlying truth, but it seems to be out of our reach.
I disagree, and I already mentioned Solomonoff Induction that I think disproves this.
> The utility does not come from some metaphysical ponderings but from models that can explain phenomena and make reliable predictions.
I disagree as well. Plenty of empirical evidence is useful without a model. For instance, taxonomy in biology was very useful before we knew of genes or even evolution.
The actual utility here is clearly truth, whether that be individual facts or whole theories.
No, it does not. A post-truth era may be one in which truth & falsity are not absolute & the only choices. Relativity brings about the realization that two people can witness the same event, obtain different measurements (usual example is in "empty" space where both start at the same velocity & distance to the event location, but one is in an accelerating reference frame relative to the other leading to different photon counts & "time" passage) & both be correct.
I think it would be erroneous to try to apply concepts of micro-level phenomena to macro-level societal events. The levels of abstraction between the two likely turns that low-level ambiguity into background noise.
For example, someone could never logically claim the photons they perceived indicted someone wasn't in front of their gun when they pulled the trigger, while everyone else in the vicinity states they clearly saw the person in front of the gun. There is not enough uncertainty around the behavior of photons for us to consider their explanation as truth.
If you've got an experiment (either relativistic or quantum, or both) where two individuals can obtain different photon counts, I'd like to hear about it.
> If you've got an experiment (either relativistic or quantum, or both) where two individuals can obtain different photon counts, I'd like to hear about it.
The experiment could simply be measuring photon counts at a pre-agreed location after a pre-agreed duration, where the elapsed time is measured by a local clock. (Probably it is reasonable to argue that this is not a "reasonable" experiment, but it's beyond me to make rigorous the sense in which it should be excluded.)
Maybe I was just young and naive back then, but when I was at uni 20 years ago the truth still seemed to hold some sway. In my subjective experience there’s been a massive change since then, but it’s hard to say how much of that is me changing and how much is actual change in the world.
The age of enlightenment was a time of new emphasis on, among a great many other things, obtaining knowledge through reason and structured logic. Even seeing "science" as a discreet concept (i.e. the scientific process) came to be in this time period.
Modernism was a shakeup and rejection of "realism"; post-modernism took it a step further by rejecting the notion of a universal truth entirely; the replacement idea is that what is true can only be discerned based on an individual's experience as we can only gain knowledge through imperfect means.
Post-truth is a result of the truth no longer really being knowable. You can't know if science was bought and paid for, you can't know whether Russia actually did this or that, you can't really know if X or Y is good for you, or you're just being sold something or someone is trying to control you, whether an image or video is a deep fake. That's the real post-truth. A reality where any one "fact" could be true depending on what you believe. In this reality, who you are does matter. If you're someone who actually believes in the virtues of truth and honesty then I'm more inclined to believe you, whether or not you're actually truthful. This is the real origin of post-truth. If one cannot really know the truth without experiencing it first hand, one must delegate their belief to someone who they feel has values aligned to their own.
I think one aspect that is a challenge to understand what people thought about that is that it was a big trigger online. But for my experience less IRL. I think the academic / intellectual-ish (well the folks who think of them as that way) types bought into it. I'm really not sure many other folks did.
I think part of the reason why this is so much more visible online is the fact that the whole online world is the world of words.
For example, the idea that you can "be violent" toward someone by not affirming them is a profoundly online idea, because everybody here is only as real as they can convince us they are. If I told you I am an 80 y/o woman from Iceland there is not much you can do to verify that. Thus we end up in a culture where you HAVE to believe me, otherwise you are "literally erasing" me from existence.
Sounds good, except that the critical theory, and other traditions that ascribe "violence" to written communication, had their first huge flare up with Situationalist International and those protests in france in the 60s. Well before the internet.
They did, and then they went away. For a long time it looked like postmodernism is dead. The reason we talk about it right now is because of the rise of the online culture, where suddenly a philosophy of fluidity and lack of physical boundaries can be finally applied.
The truth sucks. The truth is that you're going to die and probably nothing you did mattered at all and there's no god to judge you for any of it and you're not going onto an afterlife. I see why people want no part of that truth and I'll accept my downvotes as the messenger of that sad reality.
To get to the truth, you have to be open-minded. Many modern secularists claim to be open-minded, even the left leaning liberals claim to be open-minded, but they're more closed minded than their ancestors. Everyone wants the great claim of being open-minded without the cost of actually being open-minded. There's an element of sacrifice when it comes to getting to the truth.
To actually be open-minded, you have to sacrifice your idealism, which is a lot harder than it seems. Especially since many of our prejudices are hidden to us, and we could spend a lifetime preoccupied with identifying what's true and what's prejudice.
Perhaps it is just me, but I view idealism as a state of mind and ideals as what one values. It would be truly sad to sacrifice the former, yet the latter can evolve to reflect the truth.
I dunno, I'm in my 50s and all the ancestors I ever knew tended to be much more incredibly close minded. Shockingly so, in hindsight. If you were plopped into the early 20th century or earlier, I'll happily bet you would find yourself largely surrounded by close minded cultures on a level you haven't really experienced.
This is so condescending, as if the religious and right leaning conservatives are the only brave truth seekers.
Many on the left have painful experiences of accepting truths that cause them to cast aside deeply held traditions and cultures, or that tear apart relationships with friends and family.
Social conservatives are all about rejecting any truth that might disrupt old traditions or social hierarchies.
The Internet has the same incentive landscape as bathroom stall graffiti. That's why you're so mad, Robyn.
This isn't a back-and-forth between two real people who mutually respect each other. If I was talking to Robyn in real life, over coffee, for 2 or 3 hours, we'd probably get something productive done.
But online, it's a hit-and-run dumpster where the truth matters a little, and humor and presentation matter _much more._
Robyn writes their wounded-gazelle piece whining about the woke cancel mob, and I try to 'clap back' without 'seething'. Wittgenstein would roll in his grave to see the level of MLG language gamers we have online these days.
Nuance gets buried online. I am not gonna sit here and write a boring screen-long essay expressing my nuanced thoughts on the rights of trans adults and trans children, to an audience that might literally be reading this on the shitter.
It works fine for less-controversial topics like Rust vs C. It just doesn't work for gender.
They who write on shit-house walls...
P.S. - If you have 2 hours to spare for nuance, I highly recommend the Contrapoints video about J. K. Rowling. This is a good, calm, nuanced discussion about why LGBTQ people and our allies don't like Rowling as much as we used to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gDKbT_l2us
If you don't have 2 hours to spare, then you aren't gonna get nuance, sorry to tell you.
I'd be curious as to what your views are, since you so eloquently wrote your previous lines, but then basically refused to share your own views.
I wouldn't necessary recomment ContraPoints as a "calm, nuanced discussion" when it comes to these issues when Natalie Wynn (who portrays various characters as Contrapoints) takes issue with gender-neutral language (invalidating non-binary people), entertains and employs transphobic views, and fails to even understand gender properly[1].
The nuance involved takes a lot more than a ContraPoints video to go through, and would be better served with both a different source and topic than the video you linked.
I've made this argument to many progressive friends, and nearly all of them replied with a variant of "you're 'bothsides'ing this" which apparently is supposed to mean your argument is invalid. That then leads to me pointing out that world isn't a clear binary and "both (major) sides" can be wrong or have problems. For some reason though, that seems to be the end of the conversation and no progress toward reaching agreement is made.
The conclusion in that thread, as I recall, and apparently coming from people in NZ, seemed to be that he was mostly misrepresnting it to generate rage bait, similar to Critical Race Theory discussions.
I know several science teachers in NZ and there is a very real problem. They are very angry.
In the last week my friend who is a physics teacher told me that the most recent offence of the ministry of education is that they will be removing the “data gathering” and “data analysis” parts of the science curriculum.
This hasn’t hit the news yet because it’s very fresh and they haven’t actually published the new curriculum yet.
It’s also getting a lot of push back from teachers, and so it’s possible that it gets walked back, but the fact that people in control there even think that such a thing is on the table tells you something about the current views of people in charge at the ministry.
Many experienced and excellent teachers are resigning because they have had enough.
Isamov has this great "Relativity of wrong" piece that counters post-modernism. It's often the case that one of us is closer to the truth, even if both of us are wrong.
> We needed more than ancient books and the near universal buy-in by everyone else to convince us that supernaturalism is real. We needed empirical evidence.
I wish people were more honest about the inherent contradiction in that assertion. Isn’t the point of “supernatural” that it will exist outside of empiricism (depending on how you define that)?
The way we colloquially use words often contradicts their more precise definitions because one often inherits from the other in messy and unpredictable ways. For example, in botany the "fruit" of a plant is a ripened ovary containing the seeds but in everyday culinary usage, a "fruit" is generally something that has more sugar relative to nutritional value than a vegetable, which puts a lot of tomatoes, eggplants, and cucumbers in a position very vulnerable to faux-edgy semantic arguments.
In this case most people use the word "supernatural" as some vague stand in for ideas found outside of the scientific consensus [1]. Meanwhile, scientists and philosophers use it as a precise category that lets them wash their hands of the topic completely.
[1] Or whatever the speaker believes the consensus to be, which is its own messy topic
> Isn’t the point of “supernatural” that it will exist outside of empiricism (depending on how you define that)?
Um, no? "Supernatural" just implies that there's something outside the "natural". To the NPCs in World of Warcraft, you are supernatural, since you exist outside the rules of their system.
There are certainly some Christians who say that faith requires the absence of evidence; "Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believed." But if you actually read the New Testament, that's not what the early Christians taught; on the contrary, they were all about evidence. None of the original disciples had the blessedness of believing without seeing, so it clearly cannot be a requirement for a genuine faith.
How do you define empirical evidence? I’m seeing it as “information acquired by observation or experimentation”.
Either observation can include stuff that was observed and recorded a long time ago, and we therefore have evidence of the supernatural, or it’s meaning something more like observation in a more “scientific method” sense, which automatically excludes certain categories of potential reality.
> Um, no? "Supernatural" just implies that there's something outside the "natural". To the NPCs in World of Warcraft, you are supernatural, since you exist outside the rules of their system.
I suppose so, but I don’t think that’s how most people define supernatural. Regardless, this is a great illustration! I don’t think the WoW characters know anything about C++, yet it is the basis of their reality…
> How do you define empirical evidence? I’m seeing it as “information acquired by observation or experimentation”.
Consider the story of Gideon. He has a spiritual experience, where he's told to go do something very dangerous. So he prays, "I'm going to put this wool out overnight; if that was really you talking to me, make the wool wet and the ground dry." Next morning, the wool is wet and the ground is dry. So he prays, "I'm going to put this wool out; if that was really you talking to me, make the ground wet and the wool dry." Next morning, the ground is wet and the wool is dry. So, he goes ahead and does the dangerous thing.
Assuming for the sake of argument that Gideon's experience was as described, does that count as empirical evidence (from Gideon's perspective anyway)?
I mean yeah, it's not something you can replicate 100 times, and then someone else can independently replicate, for the same reason "Will my brother pass me the salt when I ask him" isn't something you can replicate 100 times: people can choose to behave differently, and typically do when you start to treat them like a law of nature rather than a person. (Which, as you say, excludes this potential reality from that kind of empirical verification.)
And yet earlier in the very same work, that author says:
"This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him. God also testified to it by signs, wonders and various miracles, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will." (Hebrews 2:3b-4)
Here he presents three types of evidence which are meant to corroborate Jesus' words:
1. The eyewitness testimony of the original disciples
2. Testimony from God, in the form of signs, wonders, and various miracles
3. Evidence of the Holy Spirit in the early Christians.
I don't personally see that the world is round; or that microbes and viruses exist and make me sick; or any number of other things which modern science tells us. Yet I have assurance that they are true. That's the kind of faith the authors of the New Testament are recommending (including the author which you quote).
Just to make sure: are you really saying that the original Christians were kind of empiricists? And that mainstream Christianity isn't about "belief in the unseen"?
So I misunderstood the person I was replying to. I thought he was saying that supernatural was outside of evidence; but he meant more specifically empiricism; which literally means sensory data, but probably he means to extend to the sorts of repeatable physical tests.
[EDIT] Christianity is certainly about belief in the unseen. My claim was simply that it was belief in the unseen based on sufficient evidence, as opposed to belief in the unseen specifically without evidence.
I wouldn't expect a self-aware NPC from within World of Warcraft to be able to prove the existence of humans by doing repeated tests; by definition whatever tests he does will be mostly following the rules of the system that he's in. Such an NPC could ask for specific things to be done by an "alleged" human, which would provide evidence. Whether that sort of non-repeatable evidence counts as "empirical" in the philosophy of science, I don't know.
Not a contradiction - but a decision. The author is asserting that their threshold of what they'll accept as truth is something that is subject to repeatable testing.
Unfortunately that leaves quite a bit of reality up in the air that isn't subject to being empirically tested...
I define "the scientific method" as a process with four steps. 1: Systematic observation. 2: Looking for regularities in the observations. 3: Forming hypotheses to explain the regularities. 4: Experimentally testing the hypotheses.
(This isn't just me. Wikipedia describes the scientific method very similarly. This isn't me trying to cook the definition to make a point.)
Now assume, for purposes of argument, that God exists. And since lots of people use the word "God" to mean lots of different things, I'm going to define what I mean. By "God" I mean a being with personality - someone, not just something. Someone who existed before the physical universe, and exists independently of it - "outside" it in some sense, though I don't mean in a geometric way. Someone who created the physical universe, and who can, at his sole discretion, reach into the physical universe and change things. (You can think of this kind of like using a debugger - you can stop the program and change the value of a variable, with no antecedent in the flow of execution of the program.) And if and when he does, things actually change - it's not just a change in our perception; things actually physically change.
All this I ask you to assume for the sake of this argument. You don't have to believe it, but it's there for the argument to make sense.
And one more assumption: Assume that this God actually does change something, and that science observes it at step 1. The question is, what's science going to do with it?
They're going to throw it out at step 2, because there is no regularity. There's no pattern, unless God does this a lot.
But if they don't throw it out at step 2, the next problem comes at step 3 - forming a hypothesis. The way science currently is, "God" is very much out of favor as a hypothesis. But in our thought experiment, God actually is the explanation. Science is never going to propose the correct explanation for such an event.
But even if science proposes God as the hypothesis at step 3, the next problem comes at step 4: how are you going to test it? "Um, God, could you do that again? And, um, sign it this time?" You can't run the experiment. I don't see how you could run the experiment even in principle.
So in that sense, the supernatural exists outside of empiricism. This doesn't tell us anything about the supernatural; it only tells us that science is the wrong tool for investigating that.
But if God actually did reach in from outside and change things, even if we can't see it with science, we might see it with history. We might find historical record of God doing something. And when I mention that, one of the things that should come to mind is the resurrection of Jesus. It's like a giant flashing neon sign that says "Look over here. God did something."
You may say that the resurrection is impossible, and you'd be right. But therefore... what? What is your next statement? "Therefore it didn't happen"? I think that's the wrong position. It's impossible, but did it happen? Because the impossible happening is exactly the signature that we'd be looking for, if God actually did something.
And I think that, once you stop saying "impossible, therefore it didn't happen" and start actually, objectively looking at the data, the evidence is quite good. Not bulletproof, but quite good.
So in that sense, I think you can say that there is empirical evidence.
> But even if science proposes God as the hypothesis at step 3, the next problem comes at step 4: how are you going to test it? "Um, God, could you do that again? And, um, sign it this time?" You can't run the experiment. I don't see how you could run the experiment even in principle.
There have also been things like experiments on the efficacy of healing prayers whose negative results lend credence to the idea that a god who answers prayers does not exist. https://www.noctua.org.uk/blog/2010/07/08/healing-prayer-exp... discusses that (the links to the Premier Radio forums are dead, alas).
> even if we can't see it with science, we might see it with history. We might find historical record of God doing something.
"It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never happen in our days. But it is nothing strange, I hope, that men should lie in all ages."
A short story: I once was recruited by an acquaintance to work on the social media campaign of a local politician contesting for the governorship election. Mind you, this isn't the US or any western country but a third-world nation. I was a college student on break, so it was an easy way to make some money...nothing wrong I thought.
Well, time to start work, and it turns out it isn't as straightforward as I thought. This social media campaign involved creating fake Twitter accounts with AI-generated photos as profile pictures and pushing stories supporting the politician. I've always hated social media and wasn't too familiar, so I thought, does this even work?
Well, yeah, it worked. We pushed frankly bogus stories and overtly biased posts and many of them got to the Twitter front page for users in my country. Even I was shocked how those posts had a considerable impact, and the politician ended up winning the election.
This work thought me a great lesson; quit social media because you're being manipulated everywhere. Mind you, this was a small operation with less than two dozen persons. Imagine what someone with a massive budget, let's say Putin or MBS, could achieve by building a propaganda farm employing thousands...It's definitely hard to discern truth when everyone is being fed a large stream of propaganda at every second.
As for me, I quit social media or any type of news...I'm not confident in my abilities to discern truth when there are dedicated teams of psy-op operators trying to manipulate me. If you think you're smart enough to counter such efforts, good luck to you, but as for me, I think the human brain did not evolve to handle mass media positively.
In "Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America" Christopher Wylie described how Cambridge Analytica (CA) did the same thing on a large scale.
CA was active in both the Brexit campaign and the American presidential campaign. They set up fake websites, interviews, social media posts and even fake coffee shop meetings so people could see that they are working with "real" others who shared their beliefs. Astounding!
Dead internet theory becomes more true every day. It's morphed into the mountains of madness where if described 100 years ago we would consider it an eldritch horror.
That only works on some people. Others respond better to loud angry messages. Or funny ones. Or reverent ones, or whatever.
As a self-described secular humanist, I think part of the reason the philosophy has remained so cloistered is BECAUSE it only tries to be "calm and rational" -- which the overwhelming majority of humans don't respond to on an emotional level. Evolution didn't give us the tools to readily make value judgments from careful analysis.
It's its own kind of echo chamber, heavily intellectual but not very charismatic or viral and limited to its own tiny bubble. Truth in a snowglobe.
"It was relatively easy for most of us to condemn the allergic-to-truth rantings of former President Donald Trump. His lies were so transparent and prodigious that anyone outside the MAGA-verse could easily see through them. Many of us collectively recoiled at the reality-distortions he spun and how they were lapped up with religious-like zeal by his followers."
This is "calmly and rationally" to you? To immediately start a persuasive article by launching into a political rant? Your "rationality" is demonstrated by emotional rantings of somehow who's obviously pretty much as hard to one end of the political spectrum as one can be? Who defines their political beliefs as "the truth", and anyone who believes anything different than them as a evil moronic heathen?
To which views are you referring, exactly? TFA switches from a specific political hit (arguably irrelevant to secularism), to teaching creationism in science classes in the US (actually relevant), to a politically-charged and ignorance-fuelled hit piece on so-called "social justice police" and transgender people.
Humanist secularism is supposed to be about decrying and dismantling religious dogma, and keeping church and state separate -- and only one of the points above is relevant -- the others are simply personal views of the author, and not actually relevant to secularism or humanism at all.
I have arguments about exactly that with friends who are otherwise very smart, and though they don't come out and say directly that the truth doesn't matter, they say equivalent things, like, "Well that's your truth, but who's to say it's my truth? We can't know for certain what the truth is, so why should we be able to force our version of the truth on someone else?"
“The atomic number of helium is 2” is an objective truth. “The best flavor of ice cream is chocolate” is a subjective truth. It might be my truth, but not yours. Maybe your truth is that strawberry is best.
For a more relevant example (not saying you are disagreeing, just that it’s a topic of the article), the fact that someone experiences gender dysphoria may be, in this sense, their truth. It is a question of the individual’s subjective experience.
Everyone acknowledges that people have different subjective experiences, but for some reason, when it comes to this specific issue, acknowledging subjective experience is treated as tantamount to declaring that everybody gets to pick their own atomic number for helium.
We may need a better definition of this "truth" we are discussing.
> The best flavor of ice cream is chocolate
This is not a subjective truth. It is an opinion. And an opinion is not testable because it is subjective. Thus it cannot be judged on its truthfulness => ergo it is not a truth. Putting subjective in front of truth is making the truth part invalid.
A subjective truth is an opinion.
Now you want to make that a bit more testable, you need to add something that can be tested:
> The best ice cream for people with Alzheimer is chocolate ice cream
This is the trick that actually makes us debate. It wants to sound like the truth, but it is still a type of opinion: until this gets tested, this has a name - it is a hypothesis. That is kinda like a testable opinion. Still, opinion until tested.
But observe that the phrase has changed: from "best flavor," which is subjective, to "best for <group X>" which now can be tested.
I think we let ourselves too easy to talk about opinions as facts or having a truthy-like value.
Well, we’re kind of getting into word-games that I’m not sure are that meaningful, but I was thinking of the statement “the best flavor of ice cream is chocolate” where “best” means something like “the one that brings the most joy/utility/hedonic units/whatever.” I say it’s a truth rather than an opinion because it might well be testable in some way, such as by monitoring pleasure centers in my brain—but I say it’s subjective because that truth only has me-scope, not global scope. We’ve all met that person who stubbornly insists that the best flavor of ice cream (or whatever) for them must be the best for everyone, and somehow doesn’t grasp that others’ subjective experiences are different. That’s what I mean by subjective vs. objective truth.
I wish we'd move away from "truth" and uses "facts" and "conclusions" instead.
Most really bad ideas take incorrect facts, and use them to draw tenuous conclusions. The examples in the blog are precisely that, the puberty blockers and the Maori traditional knowledge.
The elegance of stating "truths" is that the definition of "truth" has always been wishy-washy, to the point it is the vast majority of most philosophy 101 classes.
You can have whatever "truth" you like, but you can't choose your facts, and if your conclusions are predicated on bad or simply false facts, your conclusion can be ignored.
I think that is confusing many different things and specifying them as 'truth'. This gets complicated in social situations where opinions firm feedback loops and due to complexity of the causality tree people don't understand if what they are talking about is an opinion or a truth.
This gets more complex when you start talking about local maxima versus global maxima, and even comparing local maxima from different locations.
Truth is not simplicity and this leads to a lot of social problems between different groups.
Somewhere in Hell, Nietzsche is laughing his ass off at the contemporary socio-political landscape. Everything he had to say about 'Nihilism' (which is quite the opposite of 'lack of belief in anything') and 'The Last Man' (who, to paraphrase, "has figured out happiness... and blinks") came true.
“ Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed. “
Secular humanism in its more radical and moderate forms since the French revolution has always been subject to the direct and straightforward criticism that as a philosophy it will eventually lead to an erosion of a shared reference frame and eventually an erosion of sanity itself.
What if this societal rejection of Truth that we are witnessing (and is summarized well by the article) is the direct result of the success of secular humanism?
Pious lies work much better, most people aren't interested in truth. The enlightment is completely dead, why try to resurrect these old, white, male driven ideas?
Does them being “old”, “white”, and “male” make these ideas inherently bad.
You’re asking why we ought to value truth and why we ought to not judge by the color of one’s skin. Don’t those things have obvious value over their alternative. That’s why I prefer them.
I've heard people genuinely say such things, there's nothing about the statement to indicate sarcasm to me (not doubting that it is, only that it didn't translate well).
> [Trump always lied and everyone but the MAGA zealots could see it!!!]
Yea... I almost tuned out right then.
It would have been a FAR stronger article if it took some actual stance on truth, like "If truth actually matters, here are all the times Trump was right and the media lied or kneejerked the other way, so did we go along with it?". I don't like Trump, but that article would have convinced me the author actually cared about objective truth.
Instead, it was "You need to follow the truth I agree with!" which is just more post-modernism in the name of something else.
>Instead, it was "You need to follow the truth I agree with!" which is just more post-modernism in the name of something else.
Are you advocating for a world where no one is allowed to be opinionated, hold contrasting views or even have some cognitive dissonance?
If one won't entertain other ideas or include additional facts/data into their world view, discussion about the universe, our place in it and compromise become impossible.
But that's not to say there's no such thing as objective facts (note I said "facts" not truth). There absolutely are. Truth is (often) something else altogether.
But many ideas aren't fact-based. Rather they are based on religious/philosophical/social doctrines which are often reduced to a sentence or a soundbite. Which is a ridiculous thing to do as most ideas are more nuanced and complicated than a single statement can elucidate.
E.g., "BLM members are Marxists" or "all Republicans are racists", etc. are all just tropes used to signal membership in a tribe.
But reality is much more nuanced. I wish more folks would look at the world through the lens that a variety of view are critical to the human condition -- as long as those views can be investigated/discussed/addressed in a reasoned way.
Holding beliefs that differ from that of others is the human condition. That you disagree with the author's stance doesn't mean that they need to change their stance, rather it means that there are discussions to be had to arrive at both understanding (which doesn't imply agreement) and, hopefully, the ability to either agree or agree to disagree.
That's not always possible, but the humanity is in making the effort to do so.
If one is unwilling to modify their beliefs based on new information and synthesis of that information with their own knowledge/understanding, that's sad.
Who cares if Trump was right about one or two things? Everything that came out of his mouth was bullshit (in the academic sense of the word [1]). But he said a lot of things, so obviously he’s going to come close to the truth once in a while. These accidents are no cause for celebration.
When you care about truth, bullshit is the opposite of what you celebrate, regardless of whether it’s accidentally true or not.
[1] The difference between bullshit and lies is that the person who lies tries to cover up of fabricate truth, but the bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth-value of the statements that are made.
I suggested a different path for the exactly the reason you are coming off as as an ideologue now.
No one had to bring up Trump, but the author chose to. It makes his argument weaker by saying "WE NEED THE TRUTH!!" but then just talks like someone who spent years with their screen saying "IT'S ALL LIES, HE IS HITLER".
As much as I don't like him, it's plain as day that it wasn't "all lies" or "academic bullshit". I work in an industry that was drastically albeit temporarily changed for the better by a couple policy decisions the last admin made, they were shit on endless by the media that was dead-wrong. Seeing it first hand was a noticeable moment for me.
Both you and the author can't even take a moment to see past yourself, but that's what the point of the article is about. How bizarre.
What’s ideological about not liking people strictly on the basis that they bullshit a lot? It’s a basic, basic, trust thing. You can pass this judgment completely outside any consideration of politics (and I am not even an American).
No. The truth doesn't matter. The fact does. The ruth is the majority people's view of a certain fact, and it is still subjective. What really matters is to allow people speak out their truth.
To add to the comment by Oct4via, if you're worried about younger people putting off puberty so that they can make the choice as an adult, hopefully you'll be cheered by the finding that 98% are happy, when they reach adulthood, they made the right choice and go on to take hormones for the gender they identify as:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4...
Data in another study [1] shows that 50.5% percent of patients who have been treated with these hormones reported suicidal ideation in the last 12 months, and 37% have reported severe psychological distress in the past month.
The same study later concludes that "This study strengthens recommendations by the Endocrine Society and WPATH for this treatment to be made available for transgender adolescents who want it." (!)
The abstract doesn't use the word happy. It says "(98%) people who had started gender-affirming medical treatment in adolescence continued to use gender-affirming hormones at follow-up."
Perhaps they continued to hormone treatment because they were happy, or perhaps they continued because they had been set on a social and clinical pathway with no off-ramp.
The conclusion of the paper that you've misunderstood and are misrepresenting:
"This is the first study in which associations between access to pubertal suppression and suicidality are examined. There is a significant inverse association between treatment with pubertal suppression during adolescence and lifetime suicidal ideation among transgender adults who ever wanted this treatment. These results align with past literature, suggesting that pubertal suppression for transgender adolescents who want this treatment is associated with favorable mental health outcomes."
I did not misunderstand the conclusion of the paper. The paper was cited because it has data about objective reports of well being.
The parent cited a report that claims 98% of people are "happy" after receiving hormonal treatment. I thought it was an interesting claim, and someone might have a reason to be very encouraged by that.
Another paper that I cited has data that shows that large percentages of people who have had hormonal treatment are experiencing psychological suffering. It also shows that large percentages of people who have NOT had hormonal treatment are experiencing psychological suffering.
I'm not making any conclusions. I'm just bringing some data.
"50.5% percent of patients who have been treated with these hormones reported suicidal ideation in the last 12 months"
Have you considered whether that's prior to treatment, or early on, when the treatment had only just begun? It's relevant to know that trans people often have depression and suicidality-related comorbidities, commonly caused by their inability to transition, or access treatments that will help them do so.
The study you linked also said, "those who received treatment with pubertal suppression, when compared with those who wanted pubertal suppression but did not receive it, had lower odds of lifetime suicidal ideation"
I'd say being less suicidal is a definition of happy, never mind the evidence of pretty much any trans person saying how literally life-changing access to HRT and affirming medical care has been for them.
OK, let's go by your definition: "being less suicidal is a definition of happy"
Preface: I believe gender dysphoria is real suffering.
From the paper: [1]
Have You Ever Had [Pubertal Suppression] for Your Gender Identity or Gender Transition?
Yes, n=89, of which reported suicidal ideation in the last 12 months: 45 (50.6%)
No, n=3405, of which reported suicidal ideation in the last 12 months: 2204 (64.8%)
The paper [1] concludes "Among transgender adults in the United States who have wanted pubertal suppression, access to this treatment is associated with lower odds of lifetime suicidal ideation. This study strengthens recommendations by the Endocrine Society and WPATH for this treatment to be made available for transgender adolescents who want it."
I think the only conclusion we can make, is that we have some sick puppies on our hands, and they need our love and compassion. I do not the data gives us cause for celebration. I do not think the data makes a strong connection between hormonal treatment of children and long-term positive outcomes. I understand there is a chicken and egg problem here.
Is there no room for referring to trans children with a modicum of respect?
"Sick puppies" is condescension and mockery, not levity -- but as you continue to not engage in good faith, it seems you're clearly aware of that. The fact that you are unwilling or unable to engage with serious discussions with even basic respect shows how disingenuous you are.
So no, when it comes to children's lives, there is no "levity" when it comes to referring to them as "sick puppies." Grow up.
This study is often cited in the trans activists online communities but it has been debunked. If 98% sounds too good to be true (breast augmentation doesn't even get that) then it's because it is.
Read the abstract. The "included" the people they wanted to include, not at random, not compared to other groups who chose not to go through the procedure. Considering that these researchers receive funding for their chair from a growing multi-billion industry this is even more reasons to be skeptical of the way they "included" their sample.
And that's not even addressing that they did not check if they were "happy", only that they continued to take hormone therapy when they were about 20, that's way too early in adulthood considering that the pre-frontal cortex finishes developing in the late 20s.
And the there's the sunk-cost fallacy that of people not admitting of making a bad and irreversible decision.
And researchers in academia are afraid of opposing the trans actvists.
Firstly, why would the relevance of those who don't wish to have a procedure, be relevant to the happiness of those who undergo it? -- that makes the non-op group as irrelevant as J Random Person in the street, and it falls outside the focus of the study.
Secondly, plenty research is funded by "multi-billion industry," or government, or defence. What's your point? You're just finger-pointing without evidence of reason to be "skeptical."
Given how unhappy trans people can be prior to transitioning, if someone did somehow go through the significant hoops needed to transition, and eventually feel the need to destransition -- which is exceedingly rare -- they detransition, they don't just live miserably and accept a "sunk-cost fallacy." That's ridiculous.
As for the hand wavy "the trans activists" boogeyman, please cite sources of researchers in academia being "afraid of opposing" them -- and evidence of who "the trans activists" you're referring to, actually are.
The only issue in academia is so-called "gender critical" academics invalidating the existence of trans people, often violating academic policy in refusing to respect their existence, then shouting loudly when they get called out on it.
Nobody is refusing to research or publish because of fear of "opposing the trans activists" at all -- there isn't some cabal of trans people trying to silence academia, that's ridiculous, and flies in the face of what academia is all about.
In particular: "It is important that every aspect of the experimental environment be as alike as possible for all subjects in the experiment. If conditions are different for the experimental and control groups, it is impossible to know whether differences between groups are actually due to the difference in treatments or to the difference in environment."
> Secondly, plenty research is funded by "multi-billion industry," or government, or defense.
Yes and it has created the "publish or perish" culture which then caused the reproducibility crisis. But that's not the issue here. The real issue is when the funders have a vested financial (and political) interest in one result over the other. The pharmaceutical industry is getting successfully sued years after years for billions of dollars over this kind of stuff. Conflict of interest is a real concern for scientific studies especially in the non-exact sciences.
> Given how unhappy trans people can be prior to transitioning, if someone did somehow go through the significant hoops needed to transition, and eventually feel the need to detransition -- which is exceedingly rare -- they detransition, they don't just live miserably and accept a "sunk-cost fallacy." That's ridiculous.
"If X then surely Y"... You make a lot of statements without backing it up. AFAIK there are no proper studies that has been done on a significant long term lowering of suicide-rates after medical transitioning before adulthood. And you mix up de-transitioning (which is actually impossible to achieve considering the irreversible effects) with the comparison of not transitioning because study (and others) didn't have a control group.
> As for the hand wavy "the trans activists" boogeyman, please cite sources of researchers in academia being "afraid of opposing" them -- and evidence of who "the trans activists" you're referring to, actually are.
It's not "hand waving". There are many examples of when researcher's results portray medical transitioning as a net negative then they face backlash, forced retraction and loss of funding or face character assassination from news articles and social media.
And if you've been around academia in the recent years then you know this is the case. Being on the bad side of the trans-activists means no funding, no chair and worse.
> The only issue in academia is so-called "gender critical" academics invalidating the existence of trans people, often violating academic policy in refusing to respect their existence,
You prove my previous point... They are "an issue" to be skeptical of gender theory and its applications. If they do not agree, they are "invalidating their existence".
> then shouting loudly when they get called out on it.
> Nobody is refusing to research or publish because of fear
Fear is a strong force when the threat is obviously real. Notice how you have to claim that the suppression of academics doesn't exist because you know it's wrong and then flag them as "an issue" and "denying of their existence" by "violating academic policy" at the same time.
> there isn't some cabal of trans people trying to silence academia
If I showed you cabals of people chasing down professors off campus for their views regarding gender would you change your mind?
My reading of this was that the author doesn't accept that this is child abuse, but is skeptical that some gender-affirming interventions in children are as safe and effective as are being claimed.
The irony is that this question (and lots of others related to it) is, in fact, amenable to scientific, truth-finding query. But you stop with "what if" and jump directly to "should".
That's exactly the attitude the linked article is trying to correct.
Precisely. The commenter, and indeed the supposedly secular author of TFA, are pushing their own views and whataboutism over the empirical evidence of trans people existing throughout history, and how they thrive when given a safe and supportive opportunity to explore themselves.
I thought secular humanism was supposed to be against religious dogma and woo anyway, not pushing conservative bigotry?
This is how it works in many, many cases. For example, look up Susie Green, former CEO of trans charity Mermaids. She's talked about how, as a toddler, her son wanted to wear dresses, play with dolls, and so on.
She initially took this to be a revelation that her son was gay, and, according to her, her husband was very homophobically against this, so they confiscated his toys and told him they're for girls only. So he started telling them that he wants to be a girl, and later became insistent that he is a girl.
This led to him being put on puberty blockers, then cross-sex hormones at 13, and then Green taking him to Thailand at 16 (as such surgery at this age was and is illegal in the UK) to be castrated and have his penis and scrotum made into something that sort of looks like a vulva and vagina.
Which, all in all, is quite an extreme intervention for a boy who just wanted to play with dolls. I think this is child abuse - don't you?
A classic example of transphobic whataboutism. Clearly you have no knowledge of what is actually necessary for minors to receive puberty blockers, which are by no means "sterilising medical interventions".
Nobody is performing bottom surgery on minors. Even for adults, it doesn't happen without a great deal of psychological analysis, lived experience, multiple concurring psychological reviews, and informed consent.
As for the "embodiment of sexist stereotypes" schtick, what are you referring to? The "play with dolls and wear a dress" stereotype is what you said -- nobody else is claiming that definitively makes a woman.
That aside, try looking at how successful transitioning has been for children who have been allowed to explore it in a safe and supportive way, versus the damage done to trans people having to hide who they feel they are for years and years.
Nobody "imposes" this on their children. The childrens' thoughts, feelings, and actions are key to even discussing the matter, never mind taking any physical or social actions on it -- you're just making another boogeyman argument that doesn't stand up to reality.
Interesting that you're one of a handful of transphobic accounts that have recently appeared, registering only to immediately spout conspiracy theories and anti-trans rhetoric that has no basis in reality.
That aside, TFA is an American article pushing its own rhetoric, and certainly isn't qualified to speak about the NHS the way it does -- but keep waving that "child abuse" banner without actually engaging with trans youth and their families.
>Even for adults, it doesn't happen without a great deal of psychological analysis, lived experience, multiple concurring psychological reviews, and informed consent.
To play the devil's advocate: A minor child cannot provide consent, and that's kind of the problem.
---------------
Edit: To give the idea a little more flesh:
It's the duty of the of the State to represent the well-being of a child, if the children's parents are unable or unwilling to do so.
Let's be hypothetical here and imagine a place where a majority of the People of a State believe "gender affirming care" is not in a child's best interest, then you could have a situation where the State is compelled to do what was done in Texas.
Are the majority of people in Texas of the belief that "gender affirming care" is not in a child's best interest? I don't know, but it seems plausible.
Is "gender affirming care", in truth, the best thing for a child? I don't know. I don't know how to even start to approach that question in an acceptable way.
That's a good devil's advocate, but it's worth pointing out minor children consent (with parental consent, too) to surgeries all the time. Whether that's cancer treatments, surgeries to repair bone fractures, plastic surgeries, etc.
I believe bottom surgeries are all but unheard of for under 18, but there were 203 top surgeries performed on minors in 2021 (safe to assume vast majority of these were either 16 or 17). In comparison, more than 8,000 minors had breast augmentation in 2019. 4,700 girls had breast reduction surgery in 2010 (apologies, these were the newest numbers I could find, clearly after more than a decade it's reasonable to believe there are more reductions than implants). In 2015, there were 7,021 breast reductions for boys.
It seems to me like if the genuine concern was over minors making decisions about their body that aren't reversible, we would be seeing equal and proportional outrage for these other surgeries, right?
Edit for your edit :) Gender affirming care appears to be what's best for kids according to the majority of research and the major medical associations in the US. The experts certainly could be wrong, but generally speaking I prefer having doctors treating me in a hospital and pilots flying my planes.
>That's a good devil's advocate, but it's worth pointing out minor children consent (with parental consent, too) to surgeries all the time. Whether that's cancer treatments, surgeries to repair bone fractures, plastic surgeries, etc.
Minor children CANNOT CONSENT. Bottom Line. Minor children cannot consent because they are not given the faculty of consent in common law. A parent's consent is ALWAYS required, and the parent is culpable for that decision.
>Gender affirming care appears to be what's best for kids according to the majority of research and the major medical associations in the US. The experts certainly could be wrong, but generally speaking I prefer having doctors treating me in a hospital and pilots flying my planes.
Our society is not technocratic. "Right and wrong" are decided by the People. Medical experts are not the arbiters of social acceptability or law.
What do you achieve by making that argument? I was literally referring to adults and bottom surgery, because *bottom surgery isn't being performed on children*.
The problem is that you missed the point entirely.
Drop the "Skippy" condescension, and read my original comment properly -- I bought up informed consent amount adults, I didn't say anything about children, because children aren't getting bottom surgery -- and for a third time (just so you don't miss it) ... *children aren't getting bottom surgery* :)
Your "problem" is a fictitious one. Surgical consent for minors is irrelevant when it comes to transgender healthcare, because nobody is performing trans-related surgeries on minors. That aside, from a legal and medical standpoint, consent works the same way as it does for any surgeries, with legal authority of the parents/guardians, or physician as appropriate. Once again though, since they aren't operating on children in this area, your "problem" is both non-existent, and totally irrelevant.
So a minority of cases with a pre-existing DX, that'll be happening with both child and parental consent. What's your point?
The commenter was disingenuously implying that surgeries were being performed on children without consent, which is absolutely not true.
Additionally, a claim of numbers on an insurance system doesn't necessarily mean they've all happened -- and again, it misses the point entirely that even if a negligible amount of minors have tried to claim for surgery, it wouldn't be happening without consent, and wouldn't be happening without stringent psychological and empirical analysis and observation beforehand. It also doesn't say how many of those surgeries were corrective in the event of intersex children experiencing dysphoria, which is an entirely separate matter -- so the statistic is moot without further information.
The discussion was about it being done without consent. Context matters.
Going "for whatever reasons" is entirely dismissive and totally reductive -- the reasons are extremely relevant. Case in point, how do you know those weren't primarily intersex children having operations to correct operations forced upon them (without their consent) after birth? How do you know the 17 year old wasn't getting surgery shortly before their 18th birthday, having had therapy and hormone blockers for years prior?
Reasons matter. Nitpicking then dismissing context and relevance is just pointless whataboutism.
The sentence of yours I replied to omits mention of consent, which conveniently makes your point sound much stronger than it is. Feel free to go back and edit it to clarify that children do occasionally receive trans-related surgeries, but only with consent. I can then edit my post to link to some stories from detransitioners which will cast doubt on whether their consent was informed.
No, my original point is there, you picking and choosing what you respond to is on you, sweetie.
Unlike @engineer_22 above, I don't edit or delete.
His push was surgeries happening on kids without consent, including lacklustre attempts to paste law without context or comprehension, which fails to give him any credit.
The fact that you resort to personal attacks and puerile "you edit then I'll edit" nonsense shows how disingenuous you're being.
Detransitioners are in the extreme minority, and there are no known cases of detransitioners who had surgery as a minor, regardless of consent.
Stop creating boogeymen to try and further your baseless argument.
Stepping back from this minutiae and back to the main article, your main issue is that you are pushing a position of far greater certainty and moral clarity than the facts warrant, and this is the general issue with trans activism. There is a huge middle-ground majority that would be so willing to support T as an adjunct to LGB - people you could rally so easily if you just dialled back from some of the more extreme demands. The dogmatic and polarized discourse that pushes out the sympathetic-but-insufficiently-compliant, smearing them as transphobes, is driving them into the arms of the right-wing genuine transphobes. This is also creating a chilling effect on research into gender dysphoria and its chemical and surgical treatments, all of which remain woefully understudied and poorly evidenced. Dysphoric individuals are of course the ones who are most harmed by this. As they say, do better.
I can, but given you've gone off half-cocked making various ridiculous claims, eventually admitting once you were wrong, and making personal attacks and accusations you delete, I'm not sure I should be wasting time trying to educate someone who isn't arguing in good faith or being honest to begin with.
"When a person stops taking puberty blockers, their body will resume puberty exactly as it would have had they never taken the medication, says Jennifer Osipoff, MD, a pediatric endocrinologist at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital in New York." [1]
"There are no known irreversible effects of puberty blockers. If you decide to stop taking them, your body will go through puberty just the way it would have if you had not taken puberty blockers at all." [2]
"Puberty's physical changes can cause intense distress for many gender-nonconforming adolescents. When taken regularly, GnRH analogues suppress the body's release of sex hormones, including testosterone and estrogen, during puberty.
[...]
Use of GnRH analogues pauses puberty, providing time to determine if a child's gender identity is long lasting. It also gives children and their families time to think about or plan for the psychological, medical, developmental, social and legal issues ahead.
If an adolescent child decides to stop taking GnRH analogues, puberty will resume and the normal progression of the physical and emotional changes of puberty will continue." [3]
"Only reversible treatments to delay puberty are recommended for younger adolescents after they have entered puberty, according to our Clinical Practice Guideline and joint policy perspective issued with the Pediatric Endocrine Society." [4]
Well said. Additional to your point, obviously certain consent is required (in legal and medical frameworks) from parents, or physicians in certain situations -- @engineer_22 doesn't seem to want to acknowledge this, however.
Indeed, sadly, parents deciding to force a binary choice on intersex children isn't great, but there is some more progressive work where families are raising their children without being on either side of the binary -- but the medical profession does tend to push for one way or the other when intersex children are born.
Here's the law from Texas. These are the only conditions for which a minor may consent:
TEX.FAM.CODE ANN.§32.003(2012).CONSENT TO TREATMENT BY CHILD(a) A child may consent to medical, dental, psychological, and surgical treatment for the child by a licensed physician or dentist if the child:(1) is on active duty with the armed services of the United States of America;
114(2) is: (A) 16 years of age or older and resides separate and apart from the child's parents, managing conservator, or guardian, with or without the consent of the parents, managing conservator, or guardian and regardless of the duration of the residence; and (B) managing the child's own financial affairs, regardless of the source of the income; (3) consents to the diagnosis and treatment of an infectious, contagious, or communicable disease that is required by law or a rule to be reported by the licensed physician or dentist to a local health officer or the Texas Department of Health, including all diseases within the scope of Section 81.041, Health and Safety Code; (4) is unmarried and pregnant and consents to hospital, medical, or surgical treatment, other than abortion, related to the pregnancy; (5) consents to examination and treatment for drug or chemical addiction, drug or chemical dependency, or any other condition directly related to drug or chemical use; (6) is unmarried, is the parent of a child, and has actual custody of his or her child and consents to medical, dental, psychological,or surgical treatment for the child; or (7) is serving a term of confinement in a facility operated by or under contract with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, unless the treatment would constitute a prohibited practice under Section 164.052(a)(19), Occupations Code. (b) Consent by a child to medical, dental, psychological, and surgical treatment under this section is not subject to disaffirmance because of minority.(c) Consent of the parents, managing conservator, or guardian of a child is not necessary in order to authorize hospital, medical, surgical, or dental care under this section.(d) A licensed physician, dentist, or psychologist may, with or without the consent of a child who is a patient, advise the parents, managing conservator, or guardian of the child of the treatment given to or needed by the child.(e) A physician, dentist, psychologist, hospital, or medical facility is not liable for the examination and treatment of a child under this section except for the provider's or the facility's own acts of negligence.
115(f) A physician, dentist, psychologist, hospital, or medical facility may rely on the written statement of the child containing the grounds on which the child has capacity to consent to the child's medical treatment.
You've broken the site guidelines egregiously and repeatedly in this thread. That's not ok, regardless of how wrong other commenters are or you feel they are, or how right you are or feel you are.
You're not using that word properly. The comments are easily readable, and -- unlike you -- I don't delete or edit comments... so if anyone is gaslighting here, it's you.
Oh no, a hypocritically hostile bigot on the internet is starting to not like me... whatever will I do?! /s
Children do not consent to treatment. Children cannot consent. A child might say "yes, you can do the surgery", but that is not consent because a child cannot consent.
Maybe this is extreme, but I think you need it to be more explicit before you understand: A child can say to an adult, "yes you can have sex with me", but that is not consent because a child cannot consent.
Edit: I dont want to talk about intersex children. That's a red herring.
Intersex children isn't a "red herring" at all, they fall under the trans umbrella.
They're given a binary gender identity at birth, based on genital configuration. If their genitals aren't "standard" innie-or-outie, they are often encouraged to pick an option, and have surgical intervention and potential followup care to raise the child in the parents' "chosen" binary gender, purely because of what's in their pants.
Quelle surprise, this often becomes an issue when puberty comes around, and intersex kids find however they've been altered / raised to be, doesn't necessarily match up with themselves. It's VERY relevant.
The fact that you don't want to talk about them -- or seemingly trans men or non-binary trans people, since you're only focussing on trans women -- shows you're not being reasonable or intelligent about this.
Funny, the personal attacks and deleted comments seem to suggest you don't care about anyone else's feelings... and being demonstrably unintelligent is your choice. If you're hurt, you've been given more than enough material with which to educate yourself.
Unsure which "boundaries" you're talking about when it's a public forum and you're still making personal attacks and jibes where you can... if you're going to be dishonest, at least don't be hypocritical at the same time.
We're using the word consent because we're having to use massive simplifications. Bit weird that you're insisting on a US-only framing of concepts of competence, capacity, and consent.
> Edit: I dont want to talk about intersex children. That's a red herring.
No, it really isn't. You're talking about children not being able to consent, and about rates of regret of transition, and about forcing children onto a medical and surgical pathway of transition. We see all of these in intersex people. You don't want to talk about intersex people because they disprove the points you're making and they highlight the fact that anti-trans campaigners are, simply, against the existence of trans people.
Hacker News should just just ban politics-related discussions altogether. What you find "insane" and "monstrous" other people (which are not clinically "insane", just to make it clear) are regarding as being just the opposite.
Either way, neither of those two camps will find a "level-playing" discussion field on this forum, on any internet forum, for that matter, because I'm afraid we're long passed that point. Hence why I believe that the admins of this forum should ban all politics-related talk.
> Lacking any controversy, HN would be a very stale place
There's politics and then there's calling someone "insane" and "monstrous". Honestly, I don't see any way out of that. Yes, calling each other names in the name of politics would make any web forum less stale, I can definitely agree with that, but, again, I don't think that will solve anything.
There's plenty of controversy and discussion on HN without politics... it's far from stale, even with clickbait transphobic articles appearing recently.
The title is irrelevant, only one point in the article -- teaching creationism in science classes -- is relevant to secular humanism, which decries religious dogma, and supports separation of church and state.
The rest is purely loaded opines and bigotry. Speaking of which, any reason you accused me of being "hostile" by making a reasoned point, then delete it? Seems rather disingenuous...
Again, it is my strong opinion that the OP was using "insane" in its DSM-related form, i.e. its medical-related form. Yes, most probably today's medics (and today's DSM) has (have) become too prudish to have "insane" and "insanity" included in their official terms list, but that's another story.
This is a very disingenuous take. "If You Disagree With Me, You Want People To Die" is also not the best way to signal your openness to an honest debate.
> The truth is, hormone therapy saves lives. Some of those lives will be teenage lives.
The truth is - the current research about that is lacking, we know that there are serious (and good faith) arguments against claiming that puberty blockers are reversible, and we know that many clinics simply don't collect data about people post transition or distort whatever data they do collect:
"For those late to this: In April I published a very long post laying out the severe flaws in a study about puberty blockers and hormones University of Washington researchers published in JAMA Network Open, and how they exaggerated the results when describing them to the media and to UW’s own PR apparatus. The very short version is that the study has so many flaws that it does not provide us with any evidence whatsoever supporting the idea that kids who went on gender-affirming medicine (GAM) experienced beneficial outcomes relative to the kids who did not.
In fact, any genuine comparison between the GAM and no-GAM kids 12 months out is impossible, because 80% of the kids who didn’t go on GAM had dropped out of study by the final wave of data collection, leaving just six remaining. That is far too small a sample to draw any conclusions from. (The paper gave no explanation as to why some kids went on GAM and others didn’t, making it impossible to know whether this was an otherwise apples-to-apples comparison, so even in the absence of this attrition issue, the results would have been difficult to interpret.)"
One thing that sticks in my mind about this issue is the implicit blackmail. "Your kid will kill themselves if you don't do X!" is a jarring and terrifying framework for any parent to deal with, but I'm not aware of it existing anywhere in healthcare except in trans issues.
Consider for example if my teenager told me they'd kill themselves if they're not allowed to watch TV. MAYBE unlimited TV is the only way to ensure they don't carry out their threat, but if so this only reveals a deeply dysfunctional mindset that should be further investigated.
This inquiry seems to be completely missing from the trans discourse as far as I can tell. I find it genuinely alarming how little curiosity there is from the trans-affirming side as to what exactly causes someone to be feel dysphoria. The inquiry almost doesn't seem to matter, with the prognosis basically taking the form of "don't worry about why, just make sure they get cutting-edge plastic surgery and experimental hormonal treatments or else they'll kill themselves."
The current state of "gender affirming care" seems like a band-aid solution that papers over a much deeper problem, and I don't understand how we are helping trans people by turning a blind eye to the root cause of their suffering.
> 80% of the kids who didn’t go on GAM had dropped out of study
I know we literally don’t know the specific reasons why they dropped out, as they are lost to followup, but is it plausible that they dropped out while remaining dysphoric? The rate would be in-line with previous studies of desistance rates.
"The current state of "gender affirming care" seems like a band-aid solution that papers over a much deeper problem, and I don't understand how we are helping trans people by turning a blind eye to the root cause of their suffering."
Are you saying the cause of their suffering isn't being forced to live in a body/identity contrary to how they feel?
Your first point is disingenuous. HRT for trans people does save lives. Whether its blockers in minors, or HRT to help with fat redistribution, secondary sexual characteristics, etc. in informed and consenting adults, it goes a long way to helping trans people live as themselves -- indeed, many trans people report feeling significantly better just from taking it, describing it as if their bodies were running on the "wrong fuel" beforehand.
Have you considered that data isn't gathered post-transition because trans people are simply going about and living their lives successfully? Assuming they've transitioned and their HRT regiment (if they have one) is stable, there is no clinical need to continue "collecting data" afterwards -- especially when this is done by services which are chronically underfunded as it is.
As for the distorted data claim, please show evidence of deliberate distortion -- it's not the fault of those doing studies if subjects drop out of their own accord, and certainly doesn't mean they "distort whatever data they do collect."
Another boogeyman, doctors aren't running around telling parents their kids will kill themselves without puberty blockers. Certainly if a doctor were to bring up a feeling of suicidality within a child, it would be within the context of sufficient psychological assessment, which would have to have begun with the parents or child themselves either raising trans or suicidality issues previously. If that claim were made by a medical professional, it wouldn't be out of nowhere, and it wouldn't be without basis.
What's actually terrifying is the idea that your child is so uncomfortable and/or unhappy that they question their ability to live their live without the intervention they need, in a day where access to those services are both drastically underfunded, and being outlawed by Conservatives in the western world.
The fact that you try and equate hypothetical feelings of suicidality with a transgender child facing the inability to access appropriate medical care, with not being allowed to watch TV, is much more of a "deeply dysfunctional mindset" than your proposed hypothetical.
Your brash and baseless claims seem to show a lack of understanding or knowledge of the "trans discourse" as you put it, and seemingly you don't actually care or want to know, since your final sentence is claiming that gender-affirming care covers a "deeper problem," which is just ignorant and attempts to deny trans existence as being valid in itself, as opposed to being a symptom of some other "much deeper problem."
"Are you saying the cause of their suffering isn't being forced to live in a body/identity contrary to how they feel?"
That's literally pointing out the cause of suffering is being forced to live in a body/identity contrary to how they feel... which is literally the cause, rather than the "deep problems" the other commenter baselessly claimed.
I didn't mention the solution at all there, but it should be rather obvious :)
Why assume the feeling can be dealt with by discussion? This isn't a new concept, trans people have existed throughout history -- and a tremendous amount of gender-based research and history was destroyed by the Nazis when they burned the archives of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaf[1].
In a time where psychology was a relatively novel field[2], and homosexuality was illegal in many places, the IfS was groundbreaking, This of course ignores many historical examples of trans people[3][4] existing, who didn't have access to the same medical care (including psychological, endocrinological, and surgical) that we have today.
I'm not sure why you're confused -- you seem to be working of the basis that being transgender is some "feeling" that needs some intervention other than... allowing a trans person to exist?
The feeling is the target of intervention, and the intervention -- more frequently than not -- is transitioning. Frequently that has to begin without changes afforded by HRT or surgery, which tend to come substantially later on.
The feeling is the cause, the solution is often to exist how you feel -- so I'm unsure what you're confused about?
The confusion most likely stems from the fact that anorectic people have existed throughout history too, yet we still treat them by addressing "the feeling" and not by liposuction.
You appear to be confusing anorectic people (those with anorexia) with anorectic drugs (appetite suppressants.)
Anorectic people (those with anorexia) frequently are underweight, and are hyper-focussed on concerns regarding weight gain, so would generally absolutely not be candidates for liposuction.
If you're referring to those who /take/ anorectics, there are plenty people (for example, those deemed clinically obese, or those whose cormorbidities necessitate weight loss) who may be given anorexic drugs -- the prevalence of such medications and liposuction, etc. is much higher than "addressing "the feeling"" as you put it.
When a person with anorexia goes to the doctor and say: "Doctor, when I look in the mirror I can't stand my body, I feel too fat", the doctor doesn't say: "Here, take those pills to make your body leaner and come to me later I will remove some fat from you". He says: "Okay, let's treat the image of your body that you have in your head, as it is incorrect".
I just wonder how that differs from a person claiming to be of the opposite sex.
Nah, I read what you put. "Anorectic people" don't need liposuction. Trans people do need affirmative healthcare.
Don't make a false equivalence then. This isn't the proper forum to educate you on the psychological nuances between body dysmorphic elements of anorexia nervosa, and gender dysphoria -- suffice to say that (a) they are not remotely the same thing, and (b) trans people aren't saying they are "too fat."
They're entirely different feelings. One is concerned around the perceived appearance of one particular aspect, the other is centred in their inherent existence and integration within society and the social construct that is gender. They are not the same.
Your words, "a body/identity contrary to how they feel." Your assumption, among many, is to absolutize such a feeling as "existence." Such a person clearly exists, and suffers. It is again your assumption, and confusion, to jump to transitioning as the sole solution to that suffering.
Anyway, I only pointed out your own flawed reasoning, or, charitably, unproven assumptions. I gave you the opportunity to give evidence for your assumptions, and you gave none. You instead said many irrelevant things. Asking a question is not the same as promoting an alternative therapy. This should be understood by any rational person participating in a site promoting curious discourse and assuming good faith. If you want to point me to do my own research, that's your choice, although your own severe flaws still remain. Since you have up to now seemed unable to even understand what I am pointing out, let me know and I can explain them to the detail you would require to understand.
I've pointed out logical errors in your discourse, using your own words. I haven't offered any solutions, nor attempted to. You haven't provided any redress to the errors I pointed out.
Edit: and added further errors along the way, like ascribing all kinds of things to me I haven't said nor implied.
Edit 2: let me just call it out, you called me a bigot for pointing out a logical error. Addressing the error would have been a sufficient response.
Your journey is is literally the epitome of self-governance, and yet the party that ostensibly advocates for more self-governance seems to fear you and others on that journey as the top threat to society today.
The only way that makes sense is when viewed with a cynical eye: people are spooked by "not normal", and spooked people are more easily manipulated.
You can both say that people should be able to self-govern themselves and at the same time have a cut-off age before which they should not. The trans debate would be much less heated if it did not involve other people's children.
I have to imagine it's got to be painful and challenging as a parent to go through that. Obviously this is not to be done lightly but it seems like it's ultimately the business of the child, their doctor, and their parents.
> The trans debate would be much less heated if it did not involve other people's children.
Oh really? What about bathrooms? I hear that trans people love to go to bathrooms and molest children.
Ignoring that the Sun is tabloid trash, nobody raises as many complaints when men sexually assault women or children, nor do they make the same complaints about the "risks" or "predators" when it comes to trans men -- this is specifically a boogeyman rhetoric designed to denigrate trans women.
If you're reading this, you've probably been in a bathroom with a trans person, or someone you know has, and they've been absolutely fine. Trans people by and large want to get in, pee, and get out, same as everyone else -- but perhaps moreso, given the risk of transphobic rhetoric and abuse if they were to be "clocked" (identified) as a trans person.
The primary abusers of women and children are men, followed by (cis) women. Trans women make up an exceedingly small portion of that particular criminal element, but they're vilified and used as boogeymen so much more, to attempt to deny trans women's existence under "think of the children" handwaving.
Plenty feminists are intersectional, TERFs are in the minority (and before someone claims it's a slur, a cis woman feminist came up with the term, to refer to the trans-exclusionary minority).
Trans is a descriptor, so "trans woman" is the appropriate usage, nor "transwoman" -- and those feminists aren't taking umbrage with non-binary trans people, or trans men -- only trans women... Hmm.
That aside, the link you provided is disingenuous -- the author may be trans, but they conflate sex and gender, and have often been transphobic, as have the CCJS themselves.
You don't seem to be engaging in good faith -- ignoring the "whataboutism" and ignorant terminology, you're also conflating sex with gender, and deciding that a minority justify excluding the vast majority.
Are you next going to say that only women who can bleed and bear children are women? -- because plenty of cis women can't, and that's the kind of exclusionary rhetoric that's used next.
I found Hayton's article a fascinating insight into someone who has gone through the whole process of transitioning, yet has much to critique about the modern activism on this topic, from the perspective of having lived experience and deep understanding.
Seems odd to write this off as "transphobic" given that Hayton is a transwoman. I think you just have a differing opinion, that's all.
Not really, people of color can still spout racist views, being trans doesn't preclude the ability to be transphobic.
Would you be so fascinated to read the insight of trans people who are capable of not conflating sex and gender? Hayton's whole schtick is appealing to the TERF crowd, and therefore escaping that particular line of transphobic abuse. You won't see her going into the men's room, though.
Living as a woman while claiming she's a man is her choice, but it's the hateful TERFy rhetoric that's espoused by the anti-trans organisations she surrounds herself with. Whether it's internalised transphobia or not I cannot say, but she certainly has campaigned hard against improving trans rights. The fact that she's proud of associations with right-wing, transphobic outlets like GBN and RT only serve to show how disingenuous she can be... but hey, it gets her clicks and applauds within the anti-trans crowd, which she seems to relish in.
It's not "odd" to describe something by the correct term, and claiming trans women are men is inherently transphobic, and unintelligently conflates sex with gender, when they are absolutely not the same thing. Maybe next time don't assume the thoughts or opinions of others.
Sorry but that's not a very convincing argument. Seems to me that you are painting Hayton as transphobic simply for having opinions on trans issues that you don't agree with, but that are more aligned with those of feminists.
I think Hayton's article provides a view that carefully and thoughtfully balances the needs of both women and transwomen. It's a refreshing change from the type of activism that demands all sex-segregated spaces be torn down and that sex-based rights no longer matter.
It's not my job to convince you of anything, random newcomer. Given intersectional feminism is much larger than TERFdom, you might want to consider it as "aligning with those of a minority of [so-called] feminists."
Where are those "feminists" when it comes to trans men? Oh wait, just claim they're confused lesbians, and focus on labelling every trans woman as a predator -- because that's what feminism is about, reducing women to genitals. /s
The fact that you say "both women and transwomen" shows your own disingenuousness and transphobia, both failing to recognise trans women as women, and failing to grasp the simple concept that "trans" is a descriptor, and "transwomen" isn't a thing.
Who's "demanding all sex-segregated spaced be torn down" exactly? Nobody here, and certainly not I. Neither is anyone here claiming that "sex-based rights no longer matter," but good job with the straw man and whataboutism yet again.
What's your interest in HN? You don't seem to be here with any interest in the regular topics, are you only here to espouse anti-trans views? Don't you have Mumsnet and Woman's Place for that?
Flamewar like this is completely against the rules and spirit of this site. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again—regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
Instead, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit from now on. If you can't do that or don't want to, please don't post until you can and do.
Flamewar like this is completely against the rules and spirit of this site. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again—regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
Instead, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit from now on. If you can't do that or don't want to, please don't post until you can and do.
So, you've used a recently resurrected account to engage on this specific issue, mostly by calling people disingenuous, transphobic bigots, in a series of long and rambling comments that meander from one poorly-argued point to another, while being condescending or otherwise abrasive.
It's not a very effective method of expressing disagreement, is it?
I can assure you that any discussion that involves other people's children is on another level of heat when compared to even the most heated debate about bathrooms.
Secular humanism is and has been on the way out and as a philosophy it's sort of impoverished. The big issue is in the title, namely the simplistic relationship to truth. There's a dinstinction between fact, which is the business of science, and truth which is always contextual. Take the claim from the article:
"Truths about the universe don’t depend on which country you are in"
Facts about the universe don't care where you're at. Truth which imposes meaning and perspective on facts very much does. By neglecting culture, myth and narrative which are central to how humans make sense of the world this secular perspective becomes completely unappealing, and that's not the fault of the non-enlightened masses but because that worldview is superficial. It also has the tendency to end up with a scientific fatalism that conflates what is and what ought to be.
This is usually where secular humanism suddenly turns a little bit dark, and not-so-very-humanist. Also on display in the article when "behavioral genetics" is elevated from something that ought to provide us with tools to increase human agency to something that apparently "determines life outcomes" ("genetic lottery"). That's the point where it's obvious that really the belief system is something closer to scientism, that is to say using science to impose values on people.
A belief system that ignored human cultural and religious experience and reduces individuals to a collection of genes is many things, but certainly not humanistic.
This blogpost is not fairly representing the current state of the conversation about care for transgender kids. That is dishonest behavior and as a secular humanist I feel obligated to call in and present a fuller picture.
"Our findings from a national sample of adolescents across 16 states reveal that the sex assigned at birth ratio of transgender adolescents does not favor transgender adolescents assigned female sex at birth."
The claims of social contagion and so on have been examined and they just aren't true. It is also wrong to represent that level of uncertainty about puberty blockers, which have been and continue to be used by cis children for years without a peep or a poop from those currently in a panic about trans kids on puberty blockers. It is also paternalistic and authoritarian to say that weighing risks and benefits of puberty blockers should be done by culture warrior politicians rather than a conversation between a patient and a doctor.
The data are in, the debate is settled: it's simply a moral panic and it harms real people to pretend there are enough open questions to merit further discussion. You're just being a bigot who refuses to acknowledge empirical reality at that point, not a secular humanist.
> In Europe, some medical groups have discouraged or limited the use of puberty blockers.[17] Following the Bell v Tavistock decision by the High Court of Justice for England and Wales, in which the High Court ruled children under 16 were not competent to give informed consent to puberty blockers — overturned by the Court of Appeal in September 2021 — Sweden's Karolinska Institute, administrator of the second-largest hospital system in the country, announced in March 2021 that it would discontinue providing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to children under 16. Additionally, the Karolinska Institute changed its policy to cease providing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to teenagers 16–18, outside of approved clinical trials.[82] On 22 February 2022, Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare said that puberty blockers should only be used in "exceptional cases" and said that their use is backed by "uncertain science".[19] However, other providers in Sweden continue to provide puberty blockers and in Sweden, a clinician's professional judgment determines what treatments are recommended or not recommended. Youth are able to access gender-affirming care when doctors deem it medically necessary. The treatment is not banned in Sweden, unlike in Alabama and Arkansas, and is offered as part of its national healthcare service.[19][83][84]
Puberty blockers are not a settled matter in the medical community.
> It is also wrong to represent that level of uncertainty about puberty blockers, which have been and continue to be used by cis children for years without a peep or a poop from those currently in a panic about trans kids on puberty blockers.
the effects of blocking early puberty might be very different that those of blocking "in time" puberty
I wonder if it was me... If I was trans, would I be desperate, and pissed about people trying to dispassionately discuss issues that would greatly affect my life. Maybe... But it seems like a general rule: to get to a good decision, we always need dispassionate discussion. Usually for much a greater time than the passionate people would give us.
Yes, the current debate rests on denying the autonomy of teenagers to make decisions about their healthcare. So here we are having a conversation about it, and politicians are whipping up hatred using the topic. According to all other normal standards of care the doctor's duty is to the patient themselves. Not the patient's parents, not the patient's mayor, not the patient's high court. The doctor's duties are to the teenage patients and excluding them from the conversation about their own bodies should strike us all as suspect.
I appreciate your reply very much, it was incredibly thought-out and informative, especially for those unaware of the issues.
As I continued reading the article, it seemed less "secular humanist" and more "religious Conservative pearl-clutching," with all the ignorant bigoted claims of "think of the children!" Christians decrying the existence of trans people.
I have no dog in the trans debate, but I think you’re exhibiting the exact type of behavior the author is talking about. Because a self-professed secular humanist talked about an issue in a way you don’t agree, you’ve already branded her a “religious conservative” even though she’s definitely not that (I mean, she’s a director at the Richard Dawkins foundation!)..
Nah, I didn't brand the author anything of the sort -- I merely raised the point that the type to spout the anti-trans rhetoric in TFA, is often done by religious conservative types.
Perhaps you should read more carefully, and not be so quick to make baseless assumptions and accusations? You could also go look at the secular humanists in the comments who are decrying this as actually being secular humanism to begin with.
Well you literally said that the article is 'less "secular humanist" and more "religious Conservative pearl-clutching,"'
Perhaps that's not strictly branding the author as a religious conservative, but I might go so far as to say that your comment is less "merely raising a point" and more "making baseless assumptions and accusations"
I will refrain from smugly assigning a star-based rating
I said seems, not was. Reading it as appearing in a similar way to the "religious Conservative pearl-clutching" rhetoric is drawing a similarity, not making an absolute declaration. It's neither assuming nor accusing when there's empirical evidence to draw the similarity, and no formal accusation was made.
Try sticking to facts, not assumptions and hypocrisy.
For the sake of peace, we probably should end this argument because it’s going nowhere…but I’ll end it saying that you’re truly a reflection of what you criticize :)
This is such a transparently silly concept. Human beings do not mate randomly or even remotely close to randomly. The genes that you inherit are a product of your parents’ choice of mate, not some lottery. Those choices are informed by both biological and cultural factors.
Man, I must have missed the spot on the form I could fill in to choose my parents pre-birth.
But seriously though, something that happens randomly to you (you don't get to choose your parents) seems similar-enough to a lottery to be used as a metaphor.
You also missed the fact that there was no you pre-birth. You can't be lucky about who you are... as there is no one to be lucky about that. You are who you are.
The child is the outcome, not the winner/loser. The child is more akin to the reward the lottery gives out than the person getting the lottery. Closest participant to that would be the parents who are getting a "lottery" child... as they (currently) have no deliberate control over the genetic expressions.
> The child is more akin to the reward the lottery gives out than the person getting the lottery.
You seem to be missing the point that we are stuck with who we are. Our mental and physical faculties are handed down to us. We receive them, even though they define us. We experience ourselves.
Eh, we completely receive them and as technology improves our makers will have increased options on which ones we receive, especially if we're wealthy.
Who is the "you"? Nothing more than the result of this process... unless you believe people exist metaphysically before having a corporeal presence? In which case you essentially believe in a soul, which is not a very secular belief at all.
Nothing about the parent's comment assumed a metaphysical identity.
It's unambiguously true that no one chose their genes or their childhood environment. That statement doesn't require a metaphysical chooser who might have made the choice.
As I said, to a very important extent it is true. Identical twins have a lot more in common than any other two people, even close siblings, often even when they are separated at birth. This gets us into semantics about what "identity" is, but that is indeed the issue that I'm trying to raise anyway.
> Modern twin studies have concluded that almost all traits are partly influenced by genetic differences.
To begin with, genes that I inherit are a product of chromosomal crossingover, which is a random process. What, do you think that a child is a deterministic average of his/hers parents' diploid genomes? How do you explain the existence of non-identical siblings then?
You have no understanding of basic genetics, why do you think you're in a position to speculate on silliness of metaphors for genetic outcomes?
But even if you did get to pick your parents there would still be a huge element of luck in that your genome is a random combination of those of your parents.
While I would love to see this happen, I'm no longer convinced that anything other than fear of eternal torment can prompt people to actually defend the truth. It may be cynical but it's where I've been for a few years now.
I don't think there's any evidence of humans ever having actually stood up for any idea in large numbers, other than in religious settings. So to use the articles own insistence against them... What time evidence do they have that their philosophy is motivating enough to make anyone actually do what they want?
> I don't think there's any evidence of humans ever having actually stood up for any idea in large numbers, other than in religious settings. So to use the articles own insistence against them... What time evidence do they have that their philosophy is motivating enough to make anyone actually do what they want?
That is an insightful comment and I agree with you - for the proof, just look at all our successful political leaders around the world. Rarely does a politician who advocates for atheism while disparaging all religion win. On the contrary, there are great politicians, like Moses, Muhammad and Gandhi, who really become leaders because of how they embrace religious as part and parcel of their very identity, in a very spiritual manner that earns them respect of many.
The problem is not with religion or religious people, but with fundamentalism. To accept any new truth, you need to be able to let go of the earlier truths. And that's not really easy to do as we age. That is why it often takes a generational shift for new ideas, and new truths, to emerge.
I think all you've proven is that to become a political figure that you must hold some beliefs of the governed. As the world becomes less religious this trend will disappear.
Considering the number of people who have beliefs and voting patterns that differ drastically from what their religion espouses as ethical and moral, the fear of eternal torment isn't the motivator you think it should be.
May I ask what your beliefs are? Some of the strongest seekers-of-truth I know are atheist, or so agnostic they might as well be atheists. The biggest liars I know of are deeply religious.
Not sure you think I've already made up my mind on this. I'm in no way saying that all, nor even close to a majority of religious folk are big liars. But the ones who commit the biggest, farthest reaching lies tend have largely been openly religious. They largely wouldn't be able to be in their positions otherwise, since they wouldn't be able to get the votes to make their affecting lies.
To offer a contrary perspective - some of the staunchest woke people I know are former (or "born again") atheists and the "new atheism" community was among the first to become captured by that movement.
Anyone who is familiar with this type of person immediately knows what Evangelical Atheism means.
Their religion is to eschew yours. They worship, just differently. They see no hypocrisy in being critical of your beliefs, but demand you fall in line with theirs.
Its inside humans to contain something that is commonly satiated with religion. We can fill it with something else, just can't pretend to be a better person for doing so. It's the same flaw.
What does "woke" mean in this context? I'm not being snarky here, I'm just curious how you're defining the term.
Especially since I've heard so many conflicting definitions that It's not clear what someone means by "woke" in most contexts except as a counterpoint to "asleep."
Does it mean a belief in equal rights/treatment/opportunities for all sentient beings?
Does it mean a belief that all those of European extraction are racist, slave-mongering monsters?
Does it mean a belief that Marxism is the only acceptable political ideology?
I've heard all of the above (and more) as "definitions" of "woke," with so much variation as to make the term useless.
So if you wouldn't mind, please provide your definition of the term so I actually have some idea what the hell you're going on about. Thanks!
I go by the initial Webster's definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woke -- "aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)"
By that definition I consider myself to be woke. Aware and care. Easy peasy.
I've seen this game played before, and it was called "politically correct": take well intended movement, find egregious examples of it being applied, and then make those examples the definition of the movement.
It looks like you're doing exactly that (the word soup of your wiki link at least implies that).
> take well intended movement, find egregious examples of it being applied, and then make those examples the definition of the movement.
This is basically what people do to the Christian religion. Find egregious preachers who buy luxury yachts and sportscars; ignore all the good work; and use the worst examples as emblematic of the whole thing.
Or what happened with Islam and the terrorism stuff in the 2000s.
I've encountered plenty of "good Christians" (and other faiths).
That said, there's plenty of not so nice versions out there -- enough to matter. I'd buy you a tee shirt that said "I hate Jesus" and have you walk around some small town in Idaho and see how well that plays out for you.
> Thought experiment: imagine if the Muslims took power in the US. And they wanted us to live as "God intended". How chill would you be about that?
Realistically, it would depend. There are a large varieties of muslim states. Historically, some have been quite nice to live in. If by 'muslim state' and as 'God intended', they mean a good social safety net, minimal interference in religious liberty, open celebrations of non-muslim worship, but also a return to a more traditional social structure (re-emphasis on married parents, which is in the minority today; stricter rules on divorce; stricter rules on working hours; public acknowledgement that God exists; etc). I would actually think that's fine. Realistically, I don't see how it's substantially different than the civil authority today, which holds plenty of beliefs I disagree with and forces me to pay for them / go along with them.
I honestly don't understand the attempt to scare Christians about Islam. While I am not a Muslim and think it's wrong-headed, the muslims are substantially closer to Christian beliefs (esp when only considering moraolity) than the majority of atheists. I don't see why that's even controversial.
Precisely that. While it has a clear definition, by and large anyone using the term "woke" these days is dogwhistling, and using it as a slur.
The fact that accusing you of caring about society and intersectional justice is supposedly insulting to some people, is really quite remarkable. It's not insulting to be "woke," but it's certainly telling with folk like the commenter above use it as a slur.
Looks like you got downvoted too. The fact that they dance around the core concept without acknowledging that the problem exists is something that still makes me SMDH.
It's one thing to be ignorant by virtue of an absence of information, but to remain willingly so in the face of obvious evidence is shameful.
What’s interesting to me is how much of atheism, rationalism, and the various fellow travelers is dominated by people who are clearly well onto the autism spectrum.
Atheism is basically the result of an inability to read spiritual cues just as typical autistic behavior stems from an inability to read social cues. I feel for people who are spiritually blind, but I’m really not interested in their opinions on religion anymore than I am in a tone deaf person’s opinions on music.
I'm genuinely curious: as an autistic atheist, what spiritual cues do you think I'm missing? What even is a spiritual cue?
I can conceptualize what a social cue is even if i miss them sometimes, but you seem to be describing an entirely new thing that doesn't map onto that concept in any obvious way.
> I'm an atheist because I believe in one less god than you do.
That’s not a reason, it’s just the definition of atheism. Why are you an atheist?
> I'm spiritual as fuck, and while I may have my issues, autism is not one of them.
I’m not sure we mean the same thing by spiritual. For example I believe, as St Augustine explains so marvelously in his Confessions, that God is a purely spiritual being.
Do you believe that a spiritual reality exists independently of the material one and that human beings are both material and spiritual creatures? If not then you aren’t as spiritual as any vulgarity because you don’t actually believe yourself to be spiritual at all.
I don’t want to impute beliefs to you that aren’t truly yours though, so unless you choose to clarify I’ll just consider that one possibility.
Because every single religion I'm aware of so far has seemed like made up stories meant to control people. I've seen no evidence of a God who is as actively engaged as those stories purport.
My definition of spirituality is "one's connection with the universe; seeing the magic in our creation". I don't need a holy tract for that.
Are you citing my comment: "seeing the magic in our creation"?
Let me try speaking more slowly so you get it. An example might be taking in a sunset and the scenery therein and feeling happy to be present for it, and to feel like one is part of that picture.
If you read The Egg and think that I literally believe its true then you are projecting yourself and any further conversation is pointless.
The Egg is a wonderful story and if I was forced to choose one and "believe it", I'd take it over any of the official offerings.
Gandhi was a self-proclaimed seeker of truth (his autobiography is titled, "The Story of My Experiments with Truth") and a religious and very spiritual man. Do you believe he was liar too?
No, this just makes our language a failure in explaining complexity. If you believe something is true and profess that to others, it does not make you a liar, it just makes you wrong.
My comment is actually not about truth seeking. It's about truth defending. I know some atheists who surpass me in terms of being interested in truth. Few will stick up to defend what they think is true unfortunately. They'll privately confess their reservations about being complicit to lies, but they won't actually do anything public. Thus their truth seeking is fruitless, and a waste of time. Knowing something and not having it change your behavior is just wasting time. If you're the same person after having discovered the truth as you were before, what was the point?
I feel genuine relief reading again things like:
<<<We cannot have differing rules based on the speaker’s skin color, gender, or political affiliation. No one has a higher claim to the truth because of their group identity. “Who you are does not count;” Rauch says, “the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable.”>>>
Something that over the last few years has been heavily contested and went from being one of the most obvious values to one that triggers the most vitriol.