My best friend in college knew she was a woman when she was a small child (though her mom and her birth certificate disagreed.) Nobody was going to talk her out of it. She got kicked out of the Air Force Academy on account of it. The nation's loss was my gain because she was the most awesome engineering student and science fiction fan and after working in many military-industrial complex jobs she's working on a project to return a sample home from the moon.
My son has two friends. One fell under the spell of blackpill incels, thinks he is not tall enough even though he's an inch above the mean, wants to break his legs to extend them and get taller, hasn't talked to my son for two years because my son said what his real height was in an online chat. Rumor has it he's taken anabolic steroids (but hasn't done any weighlifting or athletic training.)
The other fell under the spell of a self-described "egg-hatcher" who "aggressively" (his friend's word) worked on him for a year and a half to convince him that his being out of sync with other people was a sign he was trans. I knew him pretty well as an elementary school student and he didn't give any sign of variant gender identity then, although like my son and myself he was always a little 'weird'. (He uses a different pronoun and name at his job but tells us it is OK for us call him 'he' and use his own name so we do.) He's taking a cocktail of drugs that gets prescribed via telemedicine and was telling us about the serious side effects he was suffering: one of these drugs, spironolactone, is primarily a drug that alters your mineral metabolism but has the effect of suppressing testosterone if you take 20x the normal dose. (My doc gives it to me for my blood pressure.) He has insatiable cravings for salt as a result.
I completely believe my transsexual friend from college is for real. I believe my son's transgender friend is making a mistake; I support him as an individual and feel I owe him a lot as a person I knew from a young age but I believe he's a victim of a cult-like movement, as is my son's first friend.
(Note a lot of Christian people are brought into it by their family before they're able to make a choice by their own judgement)
I'll say, being in some subreddits around these things, there really is a subculture which attributes nearly all abnormalities, disharmonies, regrets, or desires around gender to the person being trans. Like, they speak as if they already know what this person is going to do in the future, like they understand more from one message than this person knows about themselves from their entire life. It's mostly young kids doing this to other young kids, the same way social pressure has played out for millennia, i assume. But this is a new way it's being expressed, i think it's on the adults (as it always is) to explain to the kids that asserting facts about other people's genders or desires is exactly what we were trying to stop, and that it's very disrespectful, disenfranchising, dehumanizing to assert someone else's inner world is something you know better than them. I've said as much when I've come across it, no one's ever tried to fight me about it
> He's taking a cocktail of drugs that gets prescribed via telemedicine and was telling us about the serious side effects he was suffering: one of these drugs, spironolactone, is primarily a drug that alters your mineral metabolism but has the effect of suppressing testosterone if you take 20x the normal dose. (My doc gives it to me for my blood pressure.) He has insatiable cravings for salt as a result.
It's worth noting that while Spironolactone can be used to suppress testosterone, that's not really what it's used for. Rather it weakly blocks androgen receptors so it makes the body act like the testosterone isn't there or is lower than it actually is. And this is effective at a far lower dose than the testosterone "suppression".
This is why it's sometimes prescribed to women for hair loss, improper hair growth, and/or acne.
It's for that purpose that it's normally prescribed in trans healthcare and it's generally only temporarily (~3-9 months) prescribed while an estradiol regimen suppresses testosterone production. After that it can be dropped with the estradiol doing the rest of the work.
And outside the US it's far less commonly prescribed for this purpose with other androgen antagonists generally being preferred but US doctors tend to be more weary of those other medications and therefore prefer spironolactone.
So while said kid may be a bit "weird" in your eyes, nothing about this really seems unusual. At worst they probably just need to ask their doctor to prescribe a different androgen antagonist instead of spironolactone.
I don't think it's the spironolactone part that was concerning, but that the idea of the new gender identity came from someone else and lots of convincing was required.
It reminds me of a friend I have who is quite severely depressed and has gone through a wide range of sexual identities. Straight, to asexual, then gay, then polyamorously bisexual, and now back to monogamously straight. Each change she excitedly explained to me that she had unlocked some deep secret to her identity and now her whole life made sense. This happened well into her adult years, not adolescence.
Some people seem to have a strong sense of a "missing piece" in their lives, and might be susceptible to latching on to almost any identity or community if it can explain that feeling.
EDIT: Because of the current barrage that trans people are under, I should clarify that I know trans people who have a deep and abiding certainty that their gender is different from what it says on their birth certificate; my above comment is not meant to include those people.
So far as the "media barrage" my experience is that I got a lot more negative about the trans movement when I joined Mastodon a few years ago and got exposed to their own words.
My trans friend in college suffered terribly because her mother disowned her. I can say as a parent though, if I saw my child was involved with people who were as hateful and negative as the trans people I see on Mastodon, I'd think "I'd do anything at all to spare my child from that suffering."
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I think "asexual", as a fashionable label, is particularly harmful. I've met a lot of people who are definitely sexual who went on a phase of glomming on to it and it certainly contributed to their misunderstanding of themselves.
The proliferation of labels about sexuality seems harmful to me (polyamorous is another, BDSM people introduce 10s of them, like you couldn't possible be articulate about your desires but you imagine there is some place where you can pick them off a menu)
My recent experience is that when something squicky goes down or a paraphilia rears its ugly head the people you can trust the least are the ones who talk about sex as if they were liberated or who claim to have some subaltern identity. I think people like this are dangerous not just as direct social connections but even if they are 2, 3 or 4 steps removed.
I don’t assume that I can know anything about another person’s experience of the world. But from the outside, I agree that some communities seem full of deeply aggrieved and unhappy people who seem intent on dragging others into their miserable worldview.
But lots of non-gender-related online communities also look like that to me: some political groups, antiwork, etc.
I see some people, especially young people, treat depression as a kind of virtue. Like “the world is shit and if you aren’t miserable it’s because you just haven’t woken up to reality”. And then they find groups online to reinforce that, and the depression meme spreads. I would want to protect my kids from that too.
To be honest I don't think that's really concerning. It's not unusual for people even into their late 20s to experiment and figure themselves out. And sometimes that experimentation is influenced by the people we surround ourselves with.
People have done this all the way back time eternal, the only thing that's different today is that people are allowed to be more open about it and that there are many discrete labels that allow people to easily describe what they are specifically feeling.
Another factor is the media outrage machine. Being a part of a conflict is appealing to some, for the same reasons that some people join the military. I could see this appetite for conflict leading some people to falsely claim to be trans. Whereas they wouldn't if people were more accepting of it, and the media didn't frame every story in a way that showcases outrage.
This person's 'weirdness' is, I think, a neurodivergence which I won't offer a diagnosis of.
I don't think a gender transition will make this person whole, this person will just be a weird person who is also trans. The old problem will persist but now he (maybe she or something else later) will have additional side effects and other baggage not to mention lost opportunities such as not being able to be a father.
The goal is not to make yourself whole and even if it didn't work out, they could de-transition (and should be supported in doing so). Stopping HRT (as long as you at least temporarily take HRT in the opposite direction to kickstart things again) has little in the way of long term effects.
> not to mention lost opportunities such as not being able to be a father.
This isn't true. Even if you stay trans the entire rest of your life you can still often have kids. This goes for trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people. Generally at worst you'd just need to supplement with some hormones to support fertility but often even that isn't necessary.
But supposing someone de-transitioned, fertility generally returns completely or near completely within 6 months to a year.
The only case where you can't "undo" any degree of loss of fertility is with an orchiectomy (testicle removal) but even then the standard procedure is to preserve sufficient semen in cold storage for future use.
I think it is more complex than that. Some people, they've been raised in a religion, it's been part of their life since they've been a small child. They never sought it out and actively chose it for themselves, they inherited it from their parents and their ancestors. It can be a very deep part of their identity.
Also, try replacing the word "Christian" there with "Muslim" or "Jew", and see how it sounds.
> No-one choses to be trans.
I think transgender feelings exist on a spectrum. Some people don't have any. Some people have a tiny inkling of it that they know is never going to go anywhere. Other people, they are very strong, and they are convinced they'll never be happy unless they live life true to them. But, there are people in the middle, for whom it is more of a choice whether to cultivate these feelings or suppress them – and they might be able to find happiness going down either path. For them, being "trans" is a choice – it wasn't a choice to have those feelings to begin with, but they have a real choice about what to do with them – and if they choose to suppress them, and manage to find happiness in doing so – aren't they in a sense choosing not to be trans? But conversely, if they make the opposite choice – are they not choosing to be trans? From which I think it follows, some people really do choose to be or not to be trans – which isn't to say there aren't other people for whom there isn't anywhere near as much choice involved in it.
I have no idea how big a group of people this "people in the middle" is, but I suspect it may be bigger than you think. It isn't the kind of thing one goes around telling everyone about.
I was raised Catholic but no longer practice. Many Christians don't believe they choose Christianity. They believe they are 'called by Christ' to serve.
So, I think the analogy, at least for those people, holds.
As a former christian, I don’t agree with that at all. I consider my ability to stop believing to be an opportunity that I was lucky enough to receive based on being exposed to the right ideas at the right time in my life. I wouldn’t for a moment look down on anyone who kept believing because they had a different life experience.
You choose to be a Christian and the idea that a God exists makes sense to you? It's not that the arguments for it are strong, you just choose to believe them.
Then atheism becomes fashionable and your old thoughts stop making sense to you? Not because of any new evidence, refutation or anything of the sort, but simply because you make a choice.
Are your politics the same?
Do you believe in the existence of truth? If you do, are your professed beliefs just a facade?
> No one chooses to be anything. There is no free will and there never has been.
I think this is a very confused remark. You are mixing up the existence of choices with the philosophical question of the nature and existence of "free will".
I had a real choice as to what to eat for breakfast this morning. There were several live options and I chose one of them and discarded the others. Was that choice of mine "free"? Was it "predetermined"? That's a vexed philosophical question. But however we answer it – it was still a "choice". An unfree choice, a predetermined choice, is still a choice. Choice is a process in the mind/brain, the subjective experiences associated with those processes, an externally observable behaviour – and whether or not it is free, whether or not it is determined, it obviously exists.
By contrast, I did not have any choice at all as to the circumstances of my birth–the day and month and year in which I was born, the place and country, who my parents are, what chromosomes I have, etc. And that, likewise, is true completely independently of how we answer philosophical debates over free will
Sapolsky's book Determined is really the counter to your post.
I don't want to believe what that book says but it is quite a strong argument. It is really too sweeping and complicated to discuss in this format though. It really would need an entire counter book to it that dissects each point.
The point of my comment was not whether free will exists or not – it was whether choices exist or not.
I haven't read Salopsky's book myself, but I don't believe it argues that choices don't exist, only that they aren't free. And the comment to which you are replying wasn't expressing any stance on the question of whether our choices are "free" or not, only distinguishing it from the separate question of whether they exist at all.
That said, the impression I've gathered of his book – e.g. the review in The Atlantic by Kieran Setiya (a professor of philosophy at MIT) – doesn't impress me – Sapolsky largely ignores the philosophical literature on the topic, despite its essentially philosophical nature. "Free will" is more fundamentally a question of philosophy than neuroscience, because a big part of the debate is how the phrase "free will" should even be defined – and that kind of definitional question is one in which neuroscientists have no special competence, but for philosophers it is their bread and butter.
Thank you for referring to that review [0]. I think it is a pretty standard compatibilist argument, which accepts that everything about a person, including the degree of "willpower" one has, is determined by prior causes, and yet still attempts to salvage a notion of free will out of it.
This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief, and also intricately tied to moral responsibility. So compatibilists might be better served by tabooing the phrase—which some do, replacing it with "free choice" or similar.
There's also this bit:
> Still, when you act with indifference to the rights and needs of others, we can blame you for what you do—unless you have a good excuse. What counts as an excuse is a question of morality, not metaphysics.
When developers write code with security bugs, there are sometimes "good" excuses for it and sometimes not. We tried apportioning blame for many years, and it never worked. What worked is large-scale tooling and environment changes. I believe this generalizes quote broadly.
Regarding your point about moral responsibility: while I agree it is a major motivator for human belief in free will, it isn’t the only one. Added to that, while belief in free will and belief in moral responsibility are strongly correlated, neither is a necessary logical consequence of the other - believing in either but not the other is a facially logically coherent, even if somewhat rare, position
> This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief,
I disagree. I don’t think the average person’s belief in “free will” is “fundamentally supernatural”. Most people say they believe in “free will”, but (unless they’ve had some exposure to philosophy) they are pretty vague about what it actually is.
If by “supernatural” you mean “religious”, I think you might be overestimating how much influence religion has on the average person’s views on the topic. While it is true the majority of Christian denominations will endorse some version of metaphysical libertarianism in theory, it is a rather secondary doctrine - the Bible never explicitly discusses the topic, and opinions differ on whether or not it presumes it implicitly. [0] The Nicene Creed, which most Christians accept as a statement of the most important points of Christian teaching, never explicitly mentions it either. In many denominations, services will rarely or never address it. Hence, for many Christians, Christianity doesn’t contribute a lot to their understanding of “free will”, because it just isn’t the focus of a great deal of Christian teaching
Now, of course, there are exceptions: for example, there are the Free Will Baptists, for whom the concept of “free will” is so important, they even put it in their name-but they are minuscule in comparison to Christianity as a whole
In fact, some Christians are compatibilist determinists. There are actually two main forms of determinism - physical determinism (all our choices are predetermined by physical processes) and theological determinism (all our choices are predetermined by God’s will)-and the compatibilist versus incompatibilist distinction exists for both. Most Calvinists reject metaphysical libertarianism in favour of compatibilist theological determinism, although a minority (primarily the so-called “hyper-Calvinists”) are incompatibilist theological determinists instead.
[0] I’ll limit the discussion to Christianity, in part for reasons of space, but I think if you look at Judaism or Islam you will find it is a similar situation - most Jews and Muslims will affirm belief in “free will”, but both religions tend to spend relatively little time on this topic in comparison to others, especially if one is talking about the experiences of the average follower, as opposed to the arcane theological debates covered in advanced study
Compatibilists: free will is a term for something real that we do.
Incompatibilists: no, that thing is trivial and should have a different name. Free will is a term for something impossible. But despite being impossible it's a meaningful concept. And it's somehow hugely important and deserves a name.
I'm unclear about the motivation for this, especially the last part.
My specific issue is with moral responsibility, which I believe is out of one's control. (So for example I don't think developers are to morally blame for writing bad code.)
Blame is a messy idea. I'm big on morality, it's how we know what to do next - what we should do, and "should" is a word indicating that a moral idea follows. Without morality I'd be (even more) like a sessile sponge, incapable of action. "Why bother?" is a moral question.
So one can say "I should do XYZ", but this soon descends into blame: "hey you, why didn't you do XYZ?", and that can be mean-spirited recrimination to do with bullying and social pressure, coercion and guilt and labelling people as no good, and main function of the question might not be to seek an answer.
Or, more rarely, it might be an honest enquiry into philosophical differences, or practical problems. Developers shouldn't write bad code. But they do, so we can "blame" them for it. That doesn't mean we should hurl rotten vegetables at most of them. On Wikipedia, I routinely blame people for fucking up an article, but the objective isn't to make them feel bad, it's to fix the article (and to check their reasons, to make sure that I'm not the one with the bad idea). Blame is one thing, but what to do with blame is a separate question.
It's definitely about the way people function, though, about enquiring into their mistakes and motivations. They have "responsibility" in the sense of being expected to respond to "why did you do XYZ?", and even if the answer is "it was inevitable because of the way I am", there's still more practical aspects of the answer ("because I was sleepy, because I was trying to avoid PQR, because I like XYZ") in which to seek knowledge. If we're all autonoma, so what: these autonoma want to solve moral problems.
Historically, ideas of "moral responsibility" are strongly linked with retributive punishment.
If you did something wrong, and you are morally responsible for it, then we are morally permitted (or even obliged) to make you suffer for it (where "suffer" can mean potentially anything from mild social opprobrium up to torture and execution). If you did something wrong, but (for whatever reason) lack moral responsibility for it, then it is morally wrong for us to make you suffer for it. If your moral responsibility is impaired but not completely absent, then it is wrong for us to make you suffer to the normal degree, but it might be justifiable for us to do so to a more limited degree.
But, many people today reject the idea of retributive punishment. And if you do so, it isn't clear how important the concept of "moral responsibility" still is. It is a logically coherent position to accept the evaluative/axiological aspects of morality (the labelling of states of affairs as "good" or "evil" or "neutral", their ranking as greater or lesser goods/evils), and its prescriptive aspects (you ought to do this, you ought not do that, you may do this but you aren't obliged to), while rejecting the concept of "moral responsibility" as misconceived, useless, harmful and/or erroneous.
Yes, but there again you are conflating three separate questions:
(1) Do we have choices?
(2) Are our choices "free"?
(3) Should we be held morally responsible for our choices?
How we answer (1) and (2) doesn't necessarily determine how we answer (3). And if (3) is your real point, maybe you should focus on that, rather than confusing things by conflating it with (1) and (2).
I don't identify as an incompatibilist, but to try to steelman their position:
Some incompatiblist determinists might view metaphysical libertarianism as a logically coherent possibility, albeit a false one. They might then view "free will" as useful in naming a way the universe coherently could have been, but turned out to actually not be – much like they might view Ptolemaic epicycles, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, and steady state theory. And, much as a person might object to the position "the luminiferous aether is actually true, if we redefine all the terms involved to refer to concepts from special and general relativity" as a form of unhelpful obscurantism, they might view compatibilist determinism as doing the same kind of thing to metaphysically libertarian free will.
There's also the other kind of incompatibilism: metaphysical libertarianism is itself a form of incompatibilism. Both incompatibilist determinists and metaphysical libertarians agree that determinism and free will are incompatible. They just disagree on whether that means we should junk free will or junk determinism.
Although I think here "determinism" is a bit of a misnomer. Most physical determinists don't actually have a problem with the idea that there might be irreducible quantum indeterminism (whether or not they believe there actually is). An incompatibilist determinist would say "a clock doesn't have free will, and a roulette wheel doesn't either, so neither can some hybrid between the two". A compatibilist determinist will say that whether it is a clock or a roulette wheel or a hybrid of them, if it gets sufficiently complicated in the right ways, then it will have free will. For both, the real objection is to metaphysically libertarian ideas that human choice involves some irreducible "third thing" which is neither deterministic causation nor impersonal chance, nor any mere combination of the two. There are also claims (e.g. by Roger Penrose) that quantum indeterminism operates in some special way within the human brain, different from how it operates normally, and that human free will is somehow rooted in that. Many "determinists" (whether compatibilist or incompatibilist) would view that as uncomfortably close to metaphysical libertarianism, even if it does attempt to partly replace the transcendental metaphysics with something closer to the realm of the empirically testable (even if not quite there). But, while "quantum indeterminism operates in a very special way in the human brain" makes them uncomfortable, I don't think most of them view in the same way "quantum indeterminism is real and irreducible, but it doesn't operate in the human brain in any way differently from how it operates anywhere else"–again, whether or not they actually believe it. Some will prefer purely deterministic interpretations of quantum theory instead, such as many worlds or de Broglie–Bohm theory–but that debate has no inherent connection to the topic of human free will.
But that's my point – the standard philosophical definition separates the existence of choice from the question of whether it is free or unfree – but you aren't using the standard philosophical definition, because you are conflating those two issues.
And you aren't using the standard common sense definition either – for, surely per the common sense definition, this is true: "I can choose what I eat for breakfast, but I can't choose what Donald Trump eats for breakfast" (because the first is clearly within the scope of my own personal causal power and influence, the second is well outside it) – yet by your own definitions you'd have to reject that statement, and say "no, you're wrong, you can't choose what you eat for breakfast" – whereas most incompatiblists would instead say "yes, you can choose what you can eat for breakfast, and you can't choose what Donald Trump eats for breakfast – but your choice of what to eat for breakfast isn't free"
So I'm using the word "choice" in the standard way, and you're using it in your own personal idiosyncratic way
