[chlodwig]

You are conflating social trends among young people to identify as gender non-confirming for social clout, with adults who have intractable gender dysphoria.

It's not just me who is conflating them, the official medical establishment doesn't treat children much differently these days. Zucker was canceled, "watchful waiting" or "reparative therapy" is officially condemned by the APA. "Intractable gender dysphoria" is not something that can be reliably or objectively diagnosed a priori. A relative of mine who has transitioned their son, partly based on medical advice, partly on the advice of adult trans friends, seems to repeating arguments about it being a fixed property and affirmative care being the only approach. Now, I personally do not think this boy has dysphoria at all, he sees a perfectly normal boy to me, he just liked Elsa and princess dresses as a kid because Elsa is a super-stimuli character. But that's not what the medical people say.

You can't separate the kids and adults issue because the most powerful activists who are making policy and getting people canceled are not making a proper distinction themselves.

You can't separate the kids and adults issue because there was a direct road from redefining the words "man" and "woman" to the medical "experts" like Diane Ehrensaft, cited by NPR and NY Times telling parents to not tell their four-year-old things like: "you have a penis, you can never grow up to be a woman or get pregnant, you will grow up to be a man, you are a boy."

It's not the sensationalist headlines that is making me freak about this, it's seeing my own relatives sending a little boy down the path where "continuity of care" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0V0PXrezHM ) will lead to having his penis cut off like Jazz Jennings -- https://malcolmrichardclark.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-j... https://x.com/SJWilliams123/status/1654534161015635973

I don't know the best way to accomplish that - maybe do some research and read some stories of transgender people published prior to 2015 before it became the political fight du jour.

I have, but you need to re-calibrate your understand for the recent situation. The people who transitioning now are not exhibiting the same types of life stories as those who did thirty years ago. It seems like a different phenomena, and I am much more concerned with the phenomena now, when if afflicts so many people, including parents I know who are transitioning their kids, than I am about the phenomena 30 years ago.

You've gone from demanding randomized controlled trials to referring to random comments from anonymous users on Reddit about how lifting weights cures gender dysphoria?

Yes, once you have anecdotal evidence of something working on a n=1 approach, the thing to do is expand it to an n=many RCT. That hasn't been done. It should have been done. Also, comments on niche subreddits inhabited by relatively normal people are some of the best anecdotal evidence you can find. Anecdotes from friend groups are limited in their own way. Popular memoirs and newspaper stories are both highly selected and filtered by publishers for preferred narratives, and the person writing them understands that a lot is at stake and they have to be careful about how they narrate their story. Random commenters on niche forums have much less incentive to lie (this doesn't apply to big forums where people will lie to get rise out of people, and the comments that reach visibility are selected).