>>Tove, I suppose you are among the people who would not consider suicide if they woke up one morning and found that they've somehow turned into a member of the opposite sex (this is the nightmare scenario that happens to a low number of teenagers every morning as I understand)?
Yes, you're entirely right. I wouldn't be very upset if I wo…
>>Tove, I suppose you are among the people who would not consider suicide if they woke up one morning and found that they've somehow turned into a member of the opposite sex (this is the nightmare scenario that happens to a low number of teenagers every morning as I understand)?
Yes, you're entirely right. I wouldn't be very upset if I woke up as a man, as long as I could be a fit and handsome man (ridiculous, I know, but that's how I imagine it).
I don't have a strong opinion on puberty blockers. I live in a jurisdiction where they are only supposed to be given "in exceptional cases" and most people seem to be fine with that (although I'm sure some transgender teenagers who are not deemed exceptional enough suffer). The only thing I'm arguing for is that altering one's body to look as the opposite sex is as superficial as altering one's body to look like an over-stereotypical member of one's own sex. I don't want to ban either of them - people do what they feel that they need to do. I just don't think it is a reason for pride.
I mean, being just an average woman and not an exceptionally pretty one might be as mild a nuisance as waking up in a man's body would be for you. Waking up as a man for me would be a hellish horror and this feeling is pretty common, the same for men who can't bare the thought of becoming female. So turning the badly dysmorphic teenagers into another sex seems unnecessary to you; for us it seems incomprehensible why we should leave a kid trapped into a nightmare if it's moderately easy to save him (if, of course, the said kid is like us and cannot bare it). It doesn't compare at all to the problem of average women who can't become rare beauties.
So: you don't have a visceral feeling of what it's like to lack badly needed sexual traits, just like many men can't really feel how bad rape is for women, and women cannot feel how awful it is for men to find they've been raising another man's kid, stuff like that. In such cases I suppose we should just believe the other side who claims that yes it is unbearable, even if we don't feel it.
Of course, if we take this too far, we get situations where students accuse professors of using wrong concepts in the lecture room, thereby making them horribly suffer inside... I don't know where to draw the line.
I admit that I don't share the feeling of belonging to a certain sex. That doesn't mean that I think that other people's feelings of doing so are unreal. Just like you, I think that believing what people say about their own feelings is a great concept.
If anything, I'm a bit desentisized to suffering in general. For several years I tried - and failed - to expose miscarriages of justice in the Swedish child protection system. I was confronted with story after story of children treated badly by the authorities because those who care the most, their family members, had been forced out of the picture. The whole exercise taught me one thing: People don't care much about individuals and their suffering, actually. They care about society as a whole. As long as cases of individual suffering doesn't fit into people's picture of how society is and is supposed to be, they will ignore that suffering and explain it away.
I don't mean that I think it is a ideal that society should ignore individual suffering. I mean that it inevitably does, as a law of nature, as long as that suffering isn't instrumental to the aims of the majority. For that reason I don't think that "individuals suffer" is a reason enough to defend a policy. That is just not what policy is about. It is entirely possible to acknowledge that people suffer and that their suffering could be preventable and still advocate a policy that upholds their suffering. For that reason I find the argument that gender transitioning must be good because it decreases suffering among some people very shallow - the amount of suffering for a minority just isn't that decisive factor that makes a policy good or bad.
I've vaguely heard that the child welfare services in Sweden are somewhat... overprotective, or something? Or strong but bureaucratized? Do you have a write-up about this? Would be good to know more; Sweden is otherwise known as a really well-functioning place that people would like to copy when designing their institutions.
My own experiences in a much lower-resources country are generally good; all the officials are constantly complaining about lack of professional social workers and other resources, yet when there's a child in need, they search around until they find a solution; it feels like talking to actual humans, not unyielding bureaucracy. (This is of course just one person's notes who hasn't had very serious problems to begin with, certainly there are others who are angry and disappointed, like everywhere).
The main problem could be summarized that the child protective services are human, all too human. Society, including the courts, simply trusts the individual social workers in almost every case. And the individual social workers trust their own feelings. That way, the system gets close to completely arbitrary: All families that give a couple of social workers a bad feeling are in danger of getting split up by the system. And I'm not exaggerating. Authorities really are making life-changing decision for tens of thousands of children every year based on feelings and the rest of society is going along with it.
I get very concerned when countries that want to build up their welfare states are looking to Scandinavia, because there is no other way to interpret this than that our societies are rotten to the core.
>>Tove, I suppose you are among the people who would not consider suicide if they woke up one morning and found that they've somehow turned into a member of the opposite sex (this is the nightmare scenario that happens to a low number of teenagers every morning as I understand)?
Yes, you're entirely right. I wouldn't be very upset if I woke up as a man, as long as I could be a fit and handsome man (ridiculous, I know, but that's how I imagine it).
I don't have a strong opinion on puberty blockers. I live in a jurisdiction where they are only supposed to be given "in exceptional cases" and most people seem to be fine with that (although I'm sure some transgender teenagers who are not deemed exceptional enough suffer). The only thing I'm arguing for is that altering one's body to look as the opposite sex is as superficial as altering one's body to look like an over-stereotypical member of one's own sex. I don't want to ban either of them - people do what they feel that they need to do. I just don't think it is a reason for pride.
I mean, being just an average woman and not an exceptionally pretty one might be as mild a nuisance as waking up in a man's body would be for you. Waking up as a man for me would be a hellish horror and this feeling is pretty common, the same for men who can't bare the thought of becoming female. So turning the badly dysmorphic teenagers into another sex seems unnecessary to you; for us it seems incomprehensible why we should leave a kid trapped into a nightmare if it's moderately easy to save him (if, of course, the said kid is like us and cannot bare it). It doesn't compare at all to the problem of average women who can't become rare beauties.
So: you don't have a visceral feeling of what it's like to lack badly needed sexual traits, just like many men can't really feel how bad rape is for women, and women cannot feel how awful it is for men to find they've been raising another man's kid, stuff like that. In such cases I suppose we should just believe the other side who claims that yes it is unbearable, even if we don't feel it.
Of course, if we take this too far, we get situations where students accuse professors of using wrong concepts in the lecture room, thereby making them horribly suffer inside... I don't know where to draw the line.
I admit that I don't share the feeling of belonging to a certain sex. That doesn't mean that I think that other people's feelings of doing so are unreal. Just like you, I think that believing what people say about their own feelings is a great concept.
If anything, I'm a bit desentisized to suffering in general. For several years I tried - and failed - to expose miscarriages of justice in the Swedish child protection system. I was confronted with story after story of children treated badly by the authorities because those who care the most, their family members, had been forced out of the picture. The whole exercise taught me one thing: People don't care much about individuals and their suffering, actually. They care about society as a whole. As long as cases of individual suffering doesn't fit into people's picture of how society is and is supposed to be, they will ignore that suffering and explain it away.
I don't mean that I think it is a ideal that society should ignore individual suffering. I mean that it inevitably does, as a law of nature, as long as that suffering isn't instrumental to the aims of the majority. For that reason I don't think that "individuals suffer" is a reason enough to defend a policy. That is just not what policy is about. It is entirely possible to acknowledge that people suffer and that their suffering could be preventable and still advocate a policy that upholds their suffering. For that reason I find the argument that gender transitioning must be good because it decreases suffering among some people very shallow - the amount of suffering for a minority just isn't that decisive factor that makes a policy good or bad.
I've vaguely heard that the child welfare services in Sweden are somewhat... overprotective, or something? Or strong but bureaucratized? Do you have a write-up about this? Would be good to know more; Sweden is otherwise known as a really well-functioning place that people would like to copy when designing their institutions.
My own experiences in a much lower-resources country are generally good; all the officials are constantly complaining about lack of professional social workers and other resources, yet when there's a child in need, they search around until they find a solution; it feels like talking to actual humans, not unyielding bureaucracy. (This is of course just one person's notes who hasn't had very serious problems to begin with, certainly there are others who are angry and disappointed, like everywhere).
The main problem could be summarized that the child protective services are human, all too human. Society, including the courts, simply trusts the individual social workers in almost every case. And the individual social workers trust their own feelings. That way, the system gets close to completely arbitrary: All families that give a couple of social workers a bad feeling are in danger of getting split up by the system. And I'm not exaggerating. Authorities really are making life-changing decision for tens of thousands of children every year based on feelings and the rest of society is going along with it.
I have written too much in Swedish about. I know of only one text in English and it is about Norway, where things are at least as bad. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/norways_hidden_scandal
I get very concerned when countries that want to build up their welfare states are looking to Scandinavia, because there is no other way to interpret this than that our societies are rotten to the core.