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[Rolan7]

Oh for sure!!  I always wanted to do that, and I hoped that immersive VR would let me try out different body types.  I was pretty sure that would happen "in a couple years" for a long time 

I'm sure it's part of the reason that cyberpunk settings are so popular with trans people.  Either extensive bodymodding or "just" immersive VR (CP2077 Brain Dances).  Which reminds me that I still want to get my ears pierced soon   A friend enthuses about hir piercings a lot (and robotics work) and I love seeing someone assert ownership of hir body like that.

I'm still very lowkey in my presentation, but I've always thought earrings looked nice...  Lots of subtle options too!

[Egan_BW]

Heh. I've never really felt like my body needed more through-holes. But they can be pretty for sure.

[Horizon]

I'm sure it's part of the reason that cyberpunk settings are so popular with trans people.  Either extensive bodymodding or "just" immersive VR (CP2077 Brain Dances).  Which reminds me that I still want to get my ears pierced soon   A friend enthuses about hir piercings a lot (and robotics work) and I love seeing someone assert ownership of hir body like that.

Man it woulda been cool if they'd done more with Brain Dance.

[McTraveller]

Eh, I always thought part of maturity is being able to handle "not getting what you want."

The "unnecessary" qualifier is an interesting one, and I feel like it relates to the word choice in "the wrong puberty"*. Strictly speaking, puberty is only necessary (though not sufficient) for procreation (yes yes, in humans, anyway).

Spoiler: * (click to show/hide)

There's an argument that "wrong" isn't the appropriate word: "if your body has these organs and produces these biochemical results, how is that 'wrong'" - similar to the oddity of saying something like "we got the wrong weather today" - how do you get "wrong" weather? You just get the inevitable result of thermodynamics and chemistry.  It can't be right or wrong, it just is.

Thus I prefer the more concrete "unwanted puberty" or "unpreferred puberty" or even "mismatched puberty" - even in the case of dysphoria, the brain isn't "right" and the sex organs/hormones aren't "wrong" - the only invariably (that is, doesn't depend on opinion) valid statement is that there is a mismatch.  Thus the argument between worldviews: do we as a society favor manipulating physical reality to our mental will, or do we prefer adjusting our mental will to accept physical reality without manipulation? Or some combination of both?

History shows humans are pretty inconsistent - some things we expect people to change their behavior ("change their mind") to limit impact on physical systems (primarily this is ecological/resource utilization), some things we let people manipulate the physical to match their desires (sure you can plant a garden if you want, or cut your hair or paint your house whatever color).

Sure we make arbitrary lines about "well this thing impacts other people to a larger extent than others" (which I theorize just means the impacts on other people are more obvious, since any human interaction impacts other humans, by definition) and there is good room for discussion there.

At the end of the day, I stand by the philosophy that much of the particular detail of any side on this debate is secondary to the idea that we should just be nice to everyone, treat everyone as we'd want to be treated, and stop just trying to destroy or limit everything that is different from what we prefer or what scares us.

[Frumple]

I mean, by that spoilered mess, you'd be berating people for calling cancer something going wrong with their body, too. Considering the amount that the "wrong" puberties in question increase suicide rates at a minimum, the amount of malfunction involved is only one of degrees.

Now, if that's actually your position, you do you -- just be aware no one's going to be surprised if someone metaphorically or literally decks you for trying to correct them about what cancer's doing to a loved one or whatever. There's times and subjects "close enough" terminology isn't worth worrying about.

[McTraveller]

I do stand by my argument: cancer (for example) isn't "wrong" - it's definitely painful and unwanted.  So cancer and dysphoria and depression are awful and terrible but they aren't "incorrect."

EDIT: Ok actually I think cancer is both wrong and terrible; there is a clearly identifiable malfunction in cellular behavior. For something like dysphoria there is no clear malfunction - all processes are working "normally" but they are just in conflict.  So the entire situation is wrong, but the hormones / organs / neurochemistry / mental thought processes in isolation are not "wrong".

While I appreciate that "wrong" in some contexts means "terrible/awful/reprehensible" and in other contexts means "incorrect", there is danger in assuming the incorrect meaning for a given context.

So I call for disambiguation, and out of engineering habit I prefer "wrong" to mean "incorrect" and use the other more specific words for thing that are terrible/awful/reprehensible.

Good example:  It is awful that someone is injured in an accident, but it is not "incorrect" that they are injured in an accident; the latter is borderline nonsensical.

[Rolan7]

I'm having trouble following some of that so I'm going to roll back to specifics a little!

I agree that "unwanted"/"undesired" isn't always "bad", if it's necessary or useful.  I help a lot with my cousins' children, heh.  But as Frumple points out, "natural" isn't "good".

If we are going to force people to experience a puberty then we must first justify doing so (both because we must justify using force, and especially using force to curtail liberty).  In a world where everyone was eventually happier living without hormone therapy, it might be moral to deny HRT to minors.  Possibly even to adults, weighed against their personal liberty to make harmful decisions.

We would have to prove that we live in such a world, and the data strongly indicates otherwise.  I think we all know the data I'm talking about.  People with access to gender-affirming healthcare are much more likely to live    happier lives.  Simple social acceptance is also a huge factor there.

That's why my response to "there are many 'unwanted' things to which we subject people all the time" was to pretend to argue for something that nobody wants.  "Unwanted" rules must be justified over allowing liberty.  That justification could be training obedience in a child, but even then a harmless rule would seem safer than a rule against gender freedom or affirming health care.

[Thorfinn]

Quick question here.

Are we sure we want to start discussing brain development? If we are to acknowledge that the trans brain is different, doesn't that inherently mean that for some tasks, one might prefer a male brain, for others, a female, and for a third, trans? Plus at least another for the opposite trans, and whatever other genders come to the fore.

And if some brains are just better suited for certain tasks, why would it be wrong to discriminate against someone with am objectively less qualified brain? We do that all the time, right? People with test scores below a certain point are not eligible to be doctors or lawyers or engineers or rocket scientists, for example.

Is it really a good idea to stake out the position that it's perfectly reasonable and scientifically accurate to say, "The best person for this job is a man"? Or even, "Statisically, we should hire a man for this job as his brain is more likely the best for this purpose."

[Great Order]

Don't we (theoretically) do that anyway? Companies, governments, cooperatives, charities and the like try to hire the best suited person which, if there's any differences in male and female brains that affect that (I'm not convinced they do. There are developmental differences but from my understanding there's no real difference in processing) then they'll get hired at a more frequent rate.

Good example, although not neurological, is the military. Men are on average stronger than women, which is a desirable trait in the military. In part the discrepancy is also due to historical prejudices still affecting it, but it's also in part because it's easier for men to pass the physicals.

Of course in reality there's more emphasis on stuff like nepotism. You're related to the owner, or your friend works there, or you both were in the same year at university...

[EuchreJack]

Point of Order: It was the alleged inferiority of the female brain that was used to deny women the right to vote and the right to own property. So fuck that shit.

2nd Point of Order: We should generally refrain from forcing people to do anything in a free society.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As for medical decisions, I think it's about time we as a society stop trying to dictate terms to the medical community. Let the Doctors be Doctors, so they don't become tempted to become Politicians (the horror).

[Rolan7]

Quick question here.

Are we sure we want to start discussing brain development? If we are to acknowledge that the trans brain is different, doesn't that inherently mean that for some tasks, one might prefer a male brain, for others, a female, and for a third, trans? Plus at least another for the opposite trans, and whatever other genders come to the fore.

And if some brains are just better suited for certain tasks, why would it be wrong to discriminate against someone with am objectively less qualified brain? We do that all the time, right? People with test scores below a certain point are not eligible to be doctors or lawyers or engineers or rocket scientists, for example.

Is it really a good idea to stake out the position that it's perfectly reasonable and scientifically accurate to say, "The best person for this job is a man"? Or even, "Statisically, we should hire a man for this job as his brain is more likely the best for this purpose."

There are other reasons that potential signifiers of transness and homosexuality are concerning: eugenics.

As someone with little faith in modern society, and as a lowkey gender-abolitionist who would be *proven fundamentally wrong* by gender having a biological basis, I still stand by whatever science finds.  Things are true even when they're dangerous, and especially when they change minds.

I'm ready to change my mind.  How else could I have used scientific data for so long in good conscience?  It's both scary and exciting.  There is something intensely relieving about finding out one is wrong:  It indicates that one is still growing and rational.

And if new information is abused by the people executing their campaign of indirect extermination, well, that doesn't change the underlying truth. 
Besides: It will always remain a true fact that I deserve to live, and that I'm happier this way.  I know that from personal experience.  I could be forced to remember things otherwise, and that's why conversion camps delende est

[McTraveller]

That bit about the "rationale" for why women were denied that right sounds apocryphal. I think it started back when literally rule of law was "the beings that used physical force to get their way, got their way" coupled with the reality of sexual dimorphism.

Given that now coercive effort is used for the "powerful" to get their way in addition to physical force, I think we're actually worse off, in that those doing the forcing now often no longer have to risk their own physical well-being to impose their will.

[Rolan7]

Women's suffrage was a violent process, but it wasn't the suffragettes "using force to get their way"...

Not to get all intersectional but if the 1910's were a lawless society based on individual pugilism then I think we would have seen a rebalance of wealth disparity.

[Thorfinn]

Don't we (theoretically) do that anyway?

Sure, but we (theoretically) do it through evaluating the person rather than generalize by sex/race/whatever.

There are developmental differences but from my understanding there's no real difference in processing)

That's the question. Whatever hypothetically happens in the brain development must have persistent effects, or that would not explain why trans is persistent. Without knowing what the development differences are, how could one say what else might be affected?

Like @Rolan7 says, eugenics is a serious consideration. Which is why I think its a bad idea to argue for genetic or developmental ties to trans. By definition, that would make trans more like a birth defect, something to be "cured". At least until contradictory evidence is in, it makes more sense to think of it as a choice, because at least in this respect, who is to say one choice is any better or worse than any other?

[Frumple]

Good example, although not neurological, is the military. Men are on average stronger than women, which is a desirable trait in the military.

Pain resistance and cooperation are also desirable traits in the military, often moreso than physical strength in a modern army, and women on average have the advantage there.

Part of the myriad issues with that kind of reasoning is that people, in general, are often remarkably bad at actually identifying what heuristic is going to produce the best outcomes of a particular organization. You see it with all sorts of qualifying practices, from SATs and such, to physicals, to basic resume shit. There's ways to at-least-be-better at that sort of thing (that involves a lot of effort and second guessing and we're still not super good at it but still), but in general when the processes involved are applied to any sort of hiring/recruitment practice, they end up looking roughly fuck-all like the previous "best" practices, which are often enough found to have actually been shite :V

... anyway, tl;dr, we try to do that but like with driving and standing straight and all sorts of things we're generally not good at it, like actively bad holy shit how do we not die more kinda' dealio. Theoretically is a good way of putting it, very "understatement chic", heh.