TheRtRevKaiser

TheRtRevKaiser, 2 months ago

To quote Julia Serrano’s excellent writeup on GAC for adolescents:

The “experimental” label is most regularly levied against puberty blockers, probably because the average person isn’t familiar with them. However, they’ve been used to treat precocious puberty since the 1980s (Comite et al., 1981; Mancuso et al., 1989) and to stave off unwanted endogenous puberties in trans youth since the mid-to-late-1990s (Cohen-Kettenis & van Goozen, 1998; van der Loos et al., 2023). For anyone interested in learning more about them, I’d recommend Giordano & Holm’s 2020 accessibly written scientific review “Is puberty delaying treatment ‘experimental treatment’?” as it answers the most commonly asked questions about the method, its efficacy, potential side effects, and so on.

Giordano & Holm’s review also addresses another common claim levied against gender-affirming care, namely, that there aren’t any “high quality studies.” In actuality, there are many high-quality studies: sound methodologies, significant sample sizes, published in well-respected journals, etcetera. When trans-skeptical people argue this, what they really mean is that there aren’t any randomized controlled studies — where neither the doctor nor patient know whether they’ve received the medicine in question or whether they’ve received a placebo. While this certainly is the “gold standard” for medical trials, it is not logistically possible in cases such as this, as both doctors and patients would quickly surmise which group they were assigned to based upon the changes (or lack thereof) in their bodies. The review also delves into ethical issues regarding withholding this treatment that make controlled studies impossible.

The second paragraph delves into the claim that there are no quality studies on the effects of delayed puberty. We actually have a good number of high quality studies, what we don’t have are double blind, randomized controlled studies because of the practical and ethical difficulties of doing so. This, of course, gets twisted into labeling puberty blockers as having no evidence or for being “experimental”.

TheRtRevKaiser, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Hi skeptomatic, Beehaw Technology mod here. To be clear, this community is not only for the uncritical admiration technological development or the tech sector. It is a community for discussion of Technology in general, which will likely include discussion of the effects of technology on society. Those topics very well may include discussions of how and when those technologies, the environment they are developed in, or the systems they enable are harmful to human flourishing.

You are absolutely welcome to defend generative AI as a useful or positive development - I personally think it’s a really interesting technology with some major potential (although I think we’re probably in a hype cycle and it’s being applied in all kinds of ways that don’t really make sense), but I also recognize that there are potential social pitfalls in it’s development and deployment. Those ideas are worth discussing in a kind, civil manner.

Lastly, when you comment here on Beehaw, please remember our rule: Be(e) Nice.

TheRtRevKaiser, 4 months ago

Honestly it’s kind of hard to know how to respond to this.

We recognize that “I was just joking” isn’t a universal defense, otherwise people wouldn’t have had an issue with minstrel shows. But as a society we’ve come to recognize that humor can be persuasive and can inform people’s beliefs about what others are like. It’s similar to how sites like 4chan that started out with cultures that were drenched in ironic racism eventually were just actually racist.

TheRtRevKaiser, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

I don’t know why you’re trying to start drama.

The Vice article was a news article that was reporting on this leak, but it didn’t name any names and didn’t link to the leaked database. The post in question also wasn’t a beehaw post, it was a federated post from lemmy.ml. Maybe I’m misunderstanding how federation works, but I would expect lemmy.ml’s mods to handle moderating those posts.

And, frankly, I’m not sure I disagree with the screenshot you posted elsewhere in this thread. I don’t think it was wrong for a person to leak the IronMarch forum database a few years ago, which exposed a bunch of Atomwaffen members in the US and neo-nazis elsewhere, and I’m not sure I think it’s wrong for someone to have leaked this db either.

This isn’t “it’s okay to dox people you disagree with” or calling people with different political opinions nazis. These are actual nazis.

TheRtRevKaiser, 9 months ago

Just a reminder to everyone in the comments to be kind. Folks feel very strongly about this subject, and for very good reasons, but we can have empathy and compassion for one another even while disagreeing. Please remember that you are interacting with other humans here.

TheRtRevKaiser, 9 months ago

Hey folks - Just want to note that the !Technology mod team is aware of the reports on this post. After some discussion we decided to leave the thread up, since it had already generated a decent amount of good discussion despite the problems with the article itself. However, I do want to make it clear that we do not condone intentionally misgendering people.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reply here or DM me.

TheRtRevKaiser, 9 months ago

Hi @LexiconBexicon, can you explain what you are seeing here that is troubling to you or seems racially motivated? One of the core principles that we try to operate by here at Beehaw is to assume good faith in others. If you have questions about a user’s motivations, ask them (kindly) to clarify rather than assuming bad faith and responding in an accusatory way. We ask that users give other users the benefit of the doubt “unless they are unequivocally advocating for hate or intolerance of fellow humans”, which I’m not seeing in these comments.

TheRtRevKaiser, 9 months ago

I’m sorry if it’s frustrating to you to have megathreads like this. I’m not enthused about the extra effort in redirecting posts to the Megathread, either, but I’m not aware of a better way to handle topics that are flooding a community other than gathering them up in a thread like this. It annoys users (and mods) when dozens of articles about the same topic are dominating a community, so we’d like to do something to alleviate that when possible. I’ve seen similar concepts used in a number of different places (old-school forums, reddit alternatives like Tildes) because, as far as I’ve seen, there’s not a better alternative for wrangling topics that might otherwise clutter the feed.

If you have any ideas about better ways to handle this type of thing in the future, I’d love to hear them (and I genuinely mean that - I think we’re open to suggestions if a better way exists).

TheRtRevKaiser, 10 months ago

You can't reduce all of society's problems to one source. We need to improve the lives of everyone, and we don't do that by ignoring the plight of minority groups. We can accomplish more than one good at a time.

TheRtRevKaiser, 10 months ago

Is there some reason that we can't work to have a more equitable society racially and economically? It's not a zero sum game, we can care about and accomplish more than one thing at a time...

TheRtRevKaiser, 10 months ago

Do these people have any dignity?

Hey, I don't know if you mean it that way but this is a pretty unkind thing to say. I suspect that a lot of these mods are folks that have spent a good bit of time and effort trying to build up communities that they care about.

You may think that the platform that they've chosen to do that on is working against them (and I agree), but I don't think that what they are feeling is contemptible in any way.