Politics

[IrishLax]

If I believe that I'm a walrus, that does not make it so. A good Christian would help me realize that I'm not, in fact, a walrus; not celebrate my decision to take fur-generating supplements and have tusk-implant surgery.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Note 4 using Tapatalk.

Dolphinoplasty. South Park, as always, is ahead of its time.

 

[NDgradstudent]

As you get older, you will eventually find out that how likeable you are has a lot to do with whether people are receptive to you and/or respect your opinion. For instance, I do disagree with you on this point, but I am not going to listen to your argument, discuss the topic or debate anything with you simply because I don't like you.

So it really doesn't matter if it's "truth" or if you're right. Because you are that unlikeable that it renders your opinion useless to me. There's a life lesson here.

Right, because all successful lawyers or broadcasters or op-ed writers or academics are perfectly likeable people. Whatever, though, do what you want.

 

[Bishop2b5]

I'm curious as to the board's thoughts on gender procedures for children (17 and younger) in general...

A very bad idea in most cases. We generally don't let kids do certain things or make major life decisions until they've matured and gained a healthy dose of experience and understanding. Countless studies have shown that their brains haven't finished developing until their late teens or early twenties and that until they do, they simply aren't capable of consistently making good decisions in most cases. To allow a person to make such a major, permanent choice involving gender surgery before they've matured enough to be capable of making an informed decision would be a disaster.

There's one exception where I think it should not only be allowed, but is probably necessary in most cases: pseudo-hermaphroditism. This is a not-so-rare condition in which a person is born with the genitalia, primary sex characteristics, and general appearance of the opposite sex, but during puberty they begin to develop as their true gender. It's much more common in males than females. Basically, you have a little girl, she looks like a little girl, she thinks and acts like a little girl, everything seems normal and there's no reason to suspect otherwise until she hits puberty and begins to turn into a little boy.

You spend 12 years raising a daughter and she then starts turning into a son. Most of the time, she completely identifies as female and is straight, but is now sprouting a penis and beginning to develop a typical adolescent male appearance. It's confusing and traumatic for the patient and the family. Because her history is as a female, she feels and looks female, her family and friends see her as female, and she's fully socialized as female, the standard treatment is surgery to restore her feminine genitalia, remove any testicular tissue, and a lifetime of hormone treatment, leaving her as a normal looking and acting female who doesn't have a period and can't reproduce.

I actually treated a teenage girl with this disorder during my residency. She was just mortified that she was developing into a boy and absolutely thought of herself as 100% girl. She couldn't wait to have the surgery (rather minor actually, consisting of trimming an enlarged clitoris/small developing penis back down to normal size and removal of the testes imbedded in the abdominal cavity) and start hormone treatment to "make everything right again." Her big issues were coming to grips with the fact that she'd never be able to get pregnant and have a baby, and that her dad was struggling mightily with seeing her as his little girl again instead of some sort of aberration.

 

[woolybug25]

Right, because all successful lawyers or broadcasters or op-ed writers or academics are perfectly likeable people. Whatever, though, do what you want.

Ha! You think that your comments are in the same stratosphere of that? Grow up. Even lawyers, broadcasters, etc have to build credibility and respect before being relevant to broad audiences.

I'm sure that you've earned that though as a snot-nosed grad student. You sure have it all figured out.

Btw, you aren't just "not perfectly likeable"... You are highly dislikeable.

 

[connor_in]

 

[connor_in]

 

[Emcee77]

If I believe that I'm a walrus, that does not make it so. A good Christian would help me realize that I'm not, in fact, a walrus; not celebrate my decision to take fur-generating supplements and have tusk-implant surgery.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Note 4 using Tapatalk.

Would he? What if no matter what the good Christian did, you would always believe you were a walrus? Someone might argue that the compassionate thing to do would be to make you feel happy and comfortable in your walrus-ness, because there is virtually no chance of your being happy any other way.

Whiskey linked to that McHugh piece, but my recollection is the WSJ was roundly criticized for publishing that piece at all because these days McHugh is less a knowledge-producing psychiatrist than an advocate for traditional gender and sexuality, and his Hopkins study from the 70s is now dated and balanced by longer-term studies that lead to different conclusions.

I'm not saying I'm intimately familiar with what the data shows on whether transitioning helps people with gender dysmorphia feel happy, but I think the issue is more nuanced than the walrus example makes it seem.

 

[wizards8507]

I'm not saying I'm intimately familiar with what the data shows on whether transitioning helps people with gender dysmorphia feel happy, but I think the issue is more nuanced than the walrus example makes it seem.

I think the "issue" is pretty clear cut. If you have a penis you're a man. The end.

What we do about it is where the complexity comes in. Your statement implies that the summum bonum of human existence is happiness, even at the expense of truth. Engaging in someone's delusion in the name of happiness is no mercy.

 

[Emcee77]

I think the "issue" is pretty clear cut. If you have a penis you're a man. The end.

That wasn't the "issue" I was referring to. By "issue" I meant the issue of how to help people with gender dysmorphia.

What we do about it is where the complexity comes in. Your statement implies that the summum bonum of human existence is happiness, even at the expense of truth. Engaging in someone's delusion in the name of happiness is no mercy.

I don't really want to have the debate because it's pointless because it's ideological and neither of us will budge, but it's far from self-evident that your shock-them-with-the-truth method is the way to go. Are you saying that in all the mental hospitals mental health professionals should treat people with schizophrenia by telling them, "NO! THERE ARE NO SPIDERS ON THE CEILING!!!" I'm not convinced that confronting people who hold a "delusion"* with the truth is the way to help them.

*Assuming for a moment that that's the proper way to characterize gender dysmorphia; I don't so concede.

 

[pkt77242]

I think the "issue" is pretty clear cut. If you have a penis you're a man. The end.

What we do about it is where the complexity comes in. Your statement implies that the summum bonum of human existence is happiness, even at the expense of truth. Engaging in someone's delusion in the name of happiness is no mercy.

While that is definitely one way to look at it, there is the mental side as well. Do you think it is possible to be born mentally a women, but physically a man?

What if it isn't a delusion? We know that their are distinct differences between a male and female's brain (grey matter vs white matter, chemical differences, structural differences, connections, etc.) so what if a male (in body) is born with a female brain?

 

[Bluto]

I worked with a transgender person back in the 90's. He was my supervisor at a youth sports program. Super nice person and one of the best supervisors/managers I've ever had. Definitely wasn't "delusional".

 

[NDgradstudent]

The entire thing is getting increasingly absurd. The ESPYs will be honoring Caitlyn rather than an amputated veteran with the "courage award" they hand out each year (third year in a row it is an "LGBT" person, by the way, which should tell you something about ESPN/Disney, as well as sports writers and media executives in general). The funny thing is, how courageous is it to do something that wins you a cover story on Vanity Fair, gets you mainly positive media attention, supportive tweets from the President, etc.? If this is the new definition of virtue in this country, we have serious problems.

Meanwhile, someone has rewritten Caitlyn's the Wikipedia page to reflect the transition. There is some confusion, however, as to whether the transition is retroactive or not. The English version:

Caitlyn Jenner
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Bruce Jenner)
Jenner came to international attention when, while identifying as a man, she won the gold medal in the decathlon at the 1976 Summer Olympics held in Montreal.

The German version is different, though:

“Mit dem Gewinn der Goldmedaille beendete Jenner die sportliche Laufbahn und begann eine Karriere als Filmschauspielerin, allerdings mit Männerrollen.”

After winning the gold medal, Jenner ended the sports career and started a career as an actress, although with male roles.

If it is retroactive, is the gold medal (awarded for a male event) still valid? Or should it be handed to the cisgender runner-up?

These updates are like reading the Great Soviet Encyclopedia: the USSR would send out updates Soviet citizens had to paste over the old entries, changing or removing them. The remarkable thing is, we only know this because some American universities received these updates: in the former Soviet Union it is extremely hard to find an original edition, because everyone did as they were told and pasted in the new version.

 

[pkt77242]

The entire thing is getting increasingly absurd. The ESPYs will be honoring Caitlyn rather than an amputated veteran with the "courage award" they hand out each year (third year in a row it is an "LGBT" person, by the way, which should tell you something about ESPN/Disney, as well as sports writers and media executives in general). The funny thing is, how courageous is it to do something that wins you a cover story on Vanity Fair, gets you mainly positive media attention, supportive tweets from the President, etc.? If this is the new definition of virtue in this country, we have serious problems.

Meanwhile, someone has rewritten Caitlyn's the Wikipedia page to reflect the transition. There is some confusion, however, as to whether the transition is retroactive or not. The English version:


The German version is different, though:


If it is retroactive, is the gold medal (awarded for a male event) still valid? Or should it be handed to the cisgendered runner-up?

These updates are like reading the Great Soviet Encyclopedia: the government would send out updates you pasted over the old entries, changing or removing them. The remarkable thing is, we only know this because some American universities received these updates: in the former Soviet Union it is extremely hard to find an original edition, because everyone did as they were told and pasted in the new version.

Just to be clear, you are bitching about Wikipedia? Seriously?


Also I think that Lauren Hill would have been a good pick for the award.

 

[NDgradstudent]

Just to be clear, you are bitching about Wikipedia? Seriously?

I am not bitching about it, I am laughing about it. My question is: is the transition retroactive? Does this depend on whether or not Caitlyn says it is retroactive?

 

[wizards8507]

I worked with a transgender person back in the 90's. He was my supervisor at a youth sports program. Super nice person and one of the best supervisors/managers I've ever had. Definitely wasn't "delusional".

Being super nice and super competent isn't proof that you're free of delusions. John Nash was a Nobel Laureate in economics. He was also crazy as hell.

To be clear, I'm not (and I don't think anybody is) advocating ridiculing or ostracizing these people. They deserve respect, compassion, and help.

While that is definitely one way to look at it, there is the mental side as well. Do you think it is possible to be born mentally a women, but physically a man?

No, I don't believe that. Based on the very definition of "man" and "woman." I know this will be dismissed as ridiculous, but I really don't see it as any different than a man who sincerely believes he's a tree.

 

[phgreek]

The entire thing is getting increasingly absurd. The ESPYs will be honoring Caitlyn rather than an amputated veteran with the "courage award" they hand out each year (third year in a row it is an "LGBT" person, by the way, which should tell you something about ESPN/Disney, as well as sports writers and media executives in general). The funny thing is, how courageous is it to do something that wins you a cover story on Vanity Fair, gets you mainly positive media attention, supportive tweets from the President, etc.? If this is the new definition of virtue in this country, we have serious problems.

Meanwhile, someone has rewritten Caitlyn's the Wikipedia page to reflect the transition. There is some confusion, however, as to whether the transition is retroactive or not. The English version:


The German version is different, though:


If it is retroactive, is the gold medal (awarded for a male event) still valid? Or should it be handed to the cisgender runner-up?

These updates are like reading the Great Soviet Encyclopedia: the USSR would send out updates Soviet citizens had to paste over the old entries, changing or removing them. The remarkable thing is, we only know this because some American universities received these updates: in the former Soviet Union it is extremely hard to find an original edition, because everyone did as they were told and pasted in the new version.

Thats ridiculous...If Bruce wants to be called caitlyn, and have his Penis removed...whatever. How is that being more courageous than being blown up, surviving, and excelling beyond your disability...because libbies define everything in some social context, so its more socially embraced to get blown up, survive and excel, so therefore Bruce is more courageous...people are so self-absorbed and brain dead , I swear.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The question is why? The surgery won't help them if everyone still treats them as freaks and shuns them. I can't see the article as it keeps asking me to log in. Look at the article I just linked from the APA.

Those sorts of social factors can be accounted for in studies, but there's still no credible evidence that sex reassignment surgery ("SRS") reduces mortality and suicidal ideation in those suffering from gender dysphoria.

Whiskey linked to that McHugh piece, but my recollection is the WSJ was roundly criticized for publishing that piece at all because these days McHugh is less a knowledge-producing psychiatrist than an advocate for traditional gender and sexuality, and his Hopkins study from the 70s is now dated and balanced by longer-term studies that lead to different conclusions.

I know nothing about McHugh. I simply Googled "john hopkins gender reassignment surgery" and linked the first story I found that referenced its discontinuation of the procedure. Regardless, the following seem to be facts:

• SRS involves the mutilation of otherwise healthy human organs;
• John Hopkins pioneered SRS in the 1960s, but has since stopped offering the procedure because the empirical evidence available does not justify such an extreme and irreversible treatment;
• Neither the Asscheman and Dhejne studies, both published in 2011, found evidence that SRS reduces objective risks of mortality or suicide; and
• Most studies offering evidence in support of SRS include very small sample sizes and rely primarily on subjective data such as self-reported satisfaction (and there is tremendous pressure within the transgender community not to report dissatisfaction with SRS).

So, when one considers the empirical evidence objectively, it looks like the case for SRS is, at best, very questionable given its risk, expense and irreversible nature. And yet we're not only allocating public monies for such surgeries, but valorizing people who opt for them as heroes.

Which begs the question: what is the human body? Is it simply inert material upon which every (radically autonomous) individual is free to impose his or her own will? Or is it something more? We, as a society, have just resoundingly affirmed the former, which is going to produce very negative consequences down the road.

A doctor cannot help his patients unless he has an objective idea of what a healthy human body looks like. Praising the gender dyphoric for undergoing SRS is no less absurd than the Healthy at Every Size campaign. The gender dysphoric and the morbidly obese are both objectively unhealthy, and we do them no favors by pretending otherwise.

 

[wizards8507]

Which begs the question: what is the human body? Is it simply inert material upon which every (radically autonomous) individual is free to impose his or her own will? Or is it something more? We, as a society, have just resoundingly affirmed the former, which is going to produce very negative consequences down the road.

Not just "down the road." Today.

Becoming disabled by choice, not chance: ‘Transabled’ people feel like impostors in their fully working bodies | National Post

 

[pkt77242]

Those sorts of social factors can be accounted for in studies, but there's still no credible evidence that sex reassignment surgery ("SRS") reduces mortality and suicidal ideation in those suffering from gender dysphoria.



I know nothing about McHugh. I simply Googled "john hopkins gender reassignment surgery" and linked the first story I found that referenced its discontinuation of the procedure. Regardless, the following seem to be facts:

• SRS involves the mutilation of otherwise healthy human organs;
• John Hopkins pioneered SRS in the 1960s, but has since stopped offering the procedure because the empirical evidence available does not justify such an extreme and irreversible treatment;
• Neither the Asscheman and Dhejne studies, both published in 2011, found evidence that SRS reduces objective risks of mortality or suicide; and
• Most studies offering evidence in support of SRS include very small sample sizes and rely primarily on subjective data such as self-reported satisfaction.

So, when one considers the empirical evidence objectively, it looks like the case for SRS is, at best, very questionable given its risk, expense and irreversible nature. And yet we're not only allocating public monies for such surgeries, but valorizing people who opt for them as heroes.

Which begs the question: what is the human body? Is it simply inert material upon which every (radically autonomous) individual is free to impose his or her own will? Or is it something more? We, as a society, have just resoundingly affirmed the former, which is going to produce very negative consequences down the road.

A doctor cannot help his patients unless he has an objective idea of what a healthy human body looks like. Praising the gender dyphoric for undergoing SRS is no less absurd than the Healthy at Every Size campaign. The gender dysphoric and the morbidly obese are both objectively unhealthy, and we do them no favors by pretending otherwise.

So a couple of things.

1. Yes those things can be accounted for but were they, as the study doesn't make any mention of it (at least in the abstract).

2. The study compares people who undergo surgery vs the standard population, wouldn't a better measure of success be measuring people who undergo surgery vs. people who have believe that they are transgendered but don't undergo surgery? Wouldn't that give us a better clue if the surgery was beneficial or not?

3. Finally the Ascheman study that you linked shows no significant increase in mortality for FtM, just for MtF.


edit: To expand on point number 2, if the surgery is viewed as a medical treatment we don't compare medical treatments against a healthy population. If we wanted to measure the effectiveness of a new heart medication we would not compare it against a healthy population we would compare it against people who had that heart condition and either took a different medication, had surgery, or had a placebo and then measure the effectiveness and side effects on that population.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

2. The study compares people who undergo surgery vs the standard population, wouldn't a better measure of success be measuring people who undergo surgery vs. people who have believe that they are transgendered but don't undergo surgery? Wouldn't that give us a better clue if the surgery was beneficial or not?

edit: To expand on point number 2, if the surgery is viewed as a medical treatment we don't compare medical treatments against a healthy population. If we wanted to measure the effectiveness of a new heart medication we would not compare it against a healthy population we would compare it against people who had that heart condition and either took a different medication, had surgery, or had a placebo and then measure the effectiveness and side effects on that population.

Yes, but there are intractable problems with producing such studies on the transgender community: (1) double blinds are virtually impossible because gender dysphoria is usually quite obvious; and (2) creating a control group of a statistically significant size would almost assuredly be unethical, because those suffering from gender dysphoria are at such a high risk of suicide. So right off the bat, the quality of the data we're analyzing is already severely compromised.

3. Finally the Ascheman study that you linked shows no significant increase in mortality for FtM, just for MtF.

True, though that wasn't my argument. The available data indicates that SRS does not reduce mortality and suicide among the gender dysphoric; and given the risk, expense and irreversible nature of SRS, there ought to be credible research showing strong objective benefits before such a procedure can be considered justified. But we don't have anything close to that; just a few Scandanavian studies relying on questionable methodology, small sample sizes, and subjective measures of satisfaction.

 

[pkt77242]

Yes, but there are intractable problems with producing such studies on the transgender community: (1) double blinds are virtually impossible because gender dysphoria is usually quite obvious; and (2) creating a control group of a statistically significant size would almost assuredly be unethical, because those suffering from gender dysphoria are at such a high risk of suicide. So right off the bat, the quality of the data we're analyzing is already severely compromised.

I agree that the data is compromised and that is my problem. My point is that the numbers really don't mean a whole bunch because they are measuring it against the general population which is not very helpful. The point is to see if it helps people who have the issue, not to see if it makes them equal to the general population.

True, though that wasn't my argument. The available data indicates that SRS does not reduce mortality and suicide among the gender dysphoric; and given the risk, expense and irreversible nature of SRS, there ought to be credible research showing strong objective benefits before such a procedure can be considered justified. But we don't have anything close to that; just a few Scandanavian studies relying on questionable methodology, small sample sizes, and subjective measures of satisfaction.

How are you coming to the conclusion that it doesn't reduce mortality and suicide for FtM? We know from many studies that transgendered have higher suicide rates and mortality then the general population. That study shows that FtM after the surgery have a similar mortality and suicide rate as the general population. So doesn't that show that FtM are helped by having the SRS when you use suicide and mortality as the measure of effectiveness?

 

[Whiskeyjack]

I agree that the data is compromised and that is my problem. My point is that the numbers really don't mean a whole bunch because they are measuring it against the general population which is not very helpful. The point is to see if it helps people who have the issue, not to see if it makes them equal to the general population.

I agree. But for various reasons it looks like we cannot get such data in an ethical manner.

How are you coming to the conclusion that it doesn't reduce mortality and suicide for FtM? We know from many studies that transgendered have higher suicide rates and mortality then the general population. That study shows that FtM after the surgery have a similar mortality and suicide rate as the general population. So doesn't that show that FtM are helped by having the SRS when you use suicide and mortality as the measure of effectiveness?

I misunderstood your earlier post, and that's a good question. But men are far more likely to commit suicide than women across all demographics. Do we have data on how much more likely than the general population gender dysphoric females are prone to suicide prior to SRS? Keep in mind that suicide is just one among many objective factors that can be measured here (psychopathy, criminality, mortality, etc.) I've not yet encountered a credible study that shows objectively measurable benefits to SRS.

 

[IrishinSyria]

We allow a lot of purely aesthetic surgeries without any regard for their impact on suicide, psycopathy, etc... why should we be especially concerned about gender reassignment? It's something we have the scientific know-how to do, and it's a choice adults make for themselves, so why should the burden be on people in favor to show that it's beneficial as opposed to placing the burden on people who are against it to show that there's a strong reason to defeat free choice?

 

[Whiskeyjack]

We allow a lot of purely aesthetic surgeries without any regard for their impact on suicide, psycopathy, etc... why should we be especially concerned about gender reassignment? It's something we have the scientific know-how to do, and it's a choice adults make for themselves, so why should the burden be on people in favor to show that it's beneficial as opposed to placing the burden on people who are against it to show that there's a strong reason to defeat free choice?

Because the only adults who want to undergo such a procedure are mentally ill. Thus, this a question of how best to treat a disordered mind. But the liberal obsession with choice and individual autonomy is making it increasingly difficult for us to even maintain a concept of mental health, because it's "discriminatory" and it might prevent such people from "self-actualization".

Effective treatment for anorexia, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders does not involve indulging the delusion. Those suffering from such disorders deserve compassion and support, of course, but saying, "Who am I to judge" is an abdication of moral duty toward that person. Ignoring reality in favor of a relativistic "tolerance" is no way to heal the sick.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The NYT's Ross Douthat just published an article titled "The Liberalism of Adult Autonomy":

Reflecting both on Caitlyn né Bruce Jenner and the Gallup data that inspired my own sojourn into polygamy, Damon Linker argues that social conservatives (in particular, his friend and mine Rod Dreher) are wrong to portray the rise of social liberalism as a matter of individualism unbound from all moral restraint. Rather, it represents the triumph of one distinctive moral code, the morality of rights, over another, the morality of ends:

Consider that [Gallup] poll … Same-sex relationships, sex between an unmarried man and woman, having a baby outside of marriage, and divorce — many more Americans are morally accepting of these behaviors now than they were in 2001. But note that all of them can plausibly be said to harm no one, as long as the parties involved have consented. (Divorce is tricky when kids are in the picture. Though it’s also the case that many now believe it’s worse for children to grow up in a household with parents who are trapped in an unhappy marriage.)

As we move down the list, we come to actions that haven’t budged at all — perhaps most surprisingly extramarital affairs, which were approved of by a mere 7 percent of respondents in 2001 and a statistically indistinguishable 8 percent today. If we were well on our way to becoming Autonomous Eroticized Individuals, wouldn’t our negative judgments about adultery be receding as well? After all, what’s wrong with cheating on your spouse if that’s where you’re led by eros and individualism?

But of course we’re not becoming Autonomous Eroticized Individuals — or at least not simply. We might like to think of ourselves as autonomous individuals, but we’re also devoted to a strict morality that treats inflicting harm as a bad thing. That very much includes the emotional harm suffered by someone whose spouse has betrayed a promise of marital fidelity.

This is true but not entirely sufficient. Clearly, contemporary liberal individualism is not an ethic of nihilism or pure relativism. (If it were such it would be hard to mobilize so much righteous zeal on its behalf.) It’s a morality of rights, as Linker says, with an important list of harms organized around an ethic of consent, and though many taboos have fallen before its unfolding logic liberalism is still perfectly capable of generating taboos and maintaining prohibitions of its own (as well as finding sinners and crimethinkers to condemn, of course). And the rights/ends distinction he makes does indeed explain not only some the current division between traditionalists and progressives, but also why a few issues, where competing rights are in play, have not shifted to the “left” in quite the way that others have.

At the same time, however, rights-based morality has been around for quite a while, while our contemporary social liberalism is a more recent, post-1960s flowering. It is a very particular and context-bound theory of rights, in other words, with particular definitions of what those rights cover and what counts as harm and victimhood. And in its specific vision of who has rights, how they can be exercised, and which harms violate them, today’s liberalism does tend to push for widening adult autonomy (eroticized and otherwise) in ways that an alternative vision might not.

For example, a moral theory can be rights-based while denying, on grounds of harm, a right to kill or otherwise inflict damage on oneself. As, indeed, our own society’s moral consensus still does, as evidenced by the still-stark (though, as with polygamy, diminishing) disapproval of suicide in the Gallup data. But in today’s controversies social liberalism is pressing for (and public opinion increasingly supports) a widening, physician-assisted exception to this rule, on the grounds that where end-of-life issues are concerned the importance of, yes, autonomy trumps any possible rule against self-harm.

Similarly, there is still a general (though not universal) consensus that people who wish to amputate or otherwise re-forge part of their body are doing something dangerous and harmful, not just expressing their right to self-determination. But in the specific case of gender reassignment surgery, what once might have been seen as a harm, an act akin to mutilation, even within a rights-based moral framework is now accepted or extolled because it represents what the deepest, truest version of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner wants. And that shift, like the shift on suicide, suggests that the defining characteristic of the advancing progressive view is not just a broad frame of rights and harms, but a particular stress on autonomy, the truth of the self, as the test for what constitutes a harm and when a right can legitimately be exercised.

Or to take another example, which Linker waves at but doesn’t really grapple with: The question of public vows and their permanence and meaning. A moral theory could be rights-based while also allowing for genuinely binding personal commitments, which would allow others to make a permanent rights-based or harm-based claim on you. A wife would be said to have a permanent right to her husband’s affections and support, for instance, because he had so vowed upon their wedding day. But while today’s liberal moral consensus does allow for a limited version of such claims, as Linker notes, around the specific question of adultery, that claim is emphatically not permanent or binding: Instead, it is strictly limited (and is still widely accepted, arguably, precisely because it is strictly limited) to sexual liaisons, presumably undertaken secretly (I’d actually be very curious to see a Gallup poll on open marriages), by a spouse who intends to remain within the marriage. If that same spouse wishes to simply leave outright, to be unbound again, to break her vow entirely, then the judgment diminishes and the only really “tricky” issue is the kids (about which more below). If you feel driven to cheat, a moral code that condemns adultery but not divorce implies, it’s better to just leave. The individual’s self-actualization can be constrained by vows and promises, but only provisionally; in the end, autonomy is still the trump.

And then on that issue that Linker calls “tricky,” the issue of children: There too a rights-based moral worldview could explicitly privilege the rights of the child over the self-determination of her parents, treating to act of conceiving a child as a commitment that inherently limits one’s personal liberties thereafter. As, again, our society still does in many ways, especially where financial support and physical safety are concerned. (Which is part of why we remain so conflicted about the issue of abortion, where the physical harm is undeniable even if the victim’s full personhood is in dispute.)

But again, with the advance of social liberalism the balance between the rights of the child and the freedom of the parent has tipped in important ways toward adult autonomy, toward a view that children cannot reasonably make certain claims at the expense of their parents’ self-actualization and personal happiness. (With, of course, the self-justifying corollary that the kids will ultimately be better off if their parents have their own way.) Like the spouse who wants to stay the course in a struggling marriage, the child under our particular form of liberalism has no real claim, rights-based or harm-based or both, to any particular kind of familial situation, any particular form of association with his biological mother and father, any particular living arrangement during infancy or youth, or any particular relationship across the life cycle. (The adult children of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, for instance, would be immediately cast as transphobic if they countered his/her right to transition by claiming an enduring right to his continuing fatherhood and paternity.) Consenting adults need not feel constrained by the possibility of conception when they decide to have sex; if they do conceive a child they need not feel obligated to marry for the child’s sake; if they are married they need not feel obligated to remain together; and so on. Indeed, consenting adults may now explicitly sell their own parental stake and obligation to their biological child (a step radically different in its implications from adoption), and the idea that the child might in such cases might have been deprived of something, might have a right that’s been traduced or a claim of harm to make, is regarded as strange, irrelevant, offensive, antique.

So once again, the common thread across these issues is not simply a broad morality of rights and harms and consent. It’s a particular definition of which rights matter most, which harms are meaningful and which are trumps, and whose consent is required to justify a particular decision. The current definitions advanced by social liberalism do not make individual autonomy the measure of all things; they do not simply instantiate a will to power or self-fulfillment. But they do treat adult autonomy as a morally-elevated good, and rate other possible rights and harm claims considerably lower as a consequence. Linker is right that today’s social liberalism does not simply preach an individualism unbound. But it preaches an individualism in which many bonds and rules and constraints are thinned to filaments, and waiting for the knife.

This neatly ties together the recent controversy surrounding Jenner with my earlier argument that liberal philosophy (including libertarianism, wizards) is toxic to community.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The NYT's Ross Douthat just published an article titled "The Liberalism of Adult Autonomy":

Reflecting both on Caitlyn né Bruce Jenner and the Gallup data that inspired my own sojourn into polygamy, Damon Linker argues that social conservatives (in particular, his friend and mine Rod Dreher) are wrong to portray the rise of social liberalism as a matter of individualism unbound from all moral restraint. Rather, it represents the triumph of one distinctive moral code, the morality of rights, over another, the morality of ends:

Consider that [Gallup] poll … Same-sex relationships, sex between an unmarried man and woman, having a baby outside of marriage, and divorce — many more Americans are morally accepting of these behaviors now than they were in 2001. But note that all of them can plausibly be said to harm no one, as long as the parties involved have consented. (Divorce is tricky when kids are in the picture. Though it’s also the case that many now believe it’s worse for children to grow up in a household with parents who are trapped in an unhappy marriage.)

As we move down the list, we come to actions that haven’t budged at all — perhaps most surprisingly extramarital affairs, which were approved of by a mere 7 percent of respondents in 2001 and a statistically indistinguishable 8 percent today. If we were well on our way to becoming Autonomous Eroticized Individuals, wouldn’t our negative judgments about adultery be receding as well? After all, what’s wrong with cheating on your spouse if that’s where you’re led by eros and individualism?

But of course we’re not becoming Autonomous Eroticized Individuals — or at least not simply. We might like to think of ourselves as autonomous individuals, but we’re also devoted to a strict morality that treats inflicting harm as a bad thing. That very much includes the emotional harm suffered by someone whose spouse has betrayed a promise of marital fidelity.

This is true but not entirely sufficient. Clearly, contemporary liberal individualism is not an ethic of nihilism or pure relativism. (If it were such it would be hard to mobilize so much righteous zeal on its behalf.) It’s a morality of rights, as Linker says, with an important list of harms organized around an ethic of consent, and though many taboos have fallen before its unfolding logic liberalism is still perfectly capable of generating taboos and maintaining prohibitions of its own (as well as finding sinners and crimethinkers to condemn, of course). And the rights/ends distinction he makes does indeed explain not only some the current division between traditionalists and progressives, but also why a few issues, where competing rights are in play, have not shifted to the “left” in quite the way that others have.

At the same time, however, rights-based morality has been around for quite a while, while our contemporary social liberalism is a more recent, post-1960s flowering. It is a very particular and context-bound theory of rights, in other words, with particular definitions of what those rights cover and what counts as harm and victimhood. And in its specific vision of who has rights, how they can be exercised, and which harms violate them, today’s liberalism does tend to push for widening adult autonomy (eroticized and otherwise) in ways that an alternative vision might not.

For example, a moral theory can be rights-based while denying, on grounds of harm, a right to kill or otherwise inflict damage on oneself. As, indeed, our own society’s moral consensus still does, as evidenced by the still-stark (though, as with polygamy, diminishing) disapproval of suicide in the Gallup data. But in today’s controversies social liberalism is pressing for (and public opinion increasingly supports) a widening, physician-assisted exception to this rule, on the grounds that where end-of-life issues are concerned the importance of, yes, autonomy trumps any possible rule against self-harm.

Similarly, there is still a general (though not universal) consensus that people who wish to amputate or otherwise re-forge part of their body are doing something dangerous and harmful, not just expressing their right to self-determination. But in the specific case of gender reassignment surgery, what once might have been seen as a harm, an act akin to mutilation, even within a rights-based moral framework is now accepted or extolled because it represents what the deepest, truest version of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner wants. And that shift, like the shift on suicide, suggests that the defining characteristic of the advancing progressive view is not just a broad frame of rights and harms, but a particular stress on autonomy, the truth of the self, as the test for what constitutes a harm and when a right can legitimately be exercised.

Or to take another example, which Linker waves at but doesn’t really grapple with: The question of public vows and their permanence and meaning. A moral theory could be rights-based while also allowing for genuinely binding personal commitments, which would allow others to make a permanent rights-based or harm-based claim on you. A wife would be said to have a permanent right to her husband’s affections and support, for instance, because he had so vowed upon their wedding day. But while today’s liberal moral consensus does allow for a limited version of such claims, as Linker notes, around the specific question of adultery, that claim is emphatically not permanent or binding: Instead, it is strictly limited (and is still widely accepted, arguably, precisely because it is strictly limited) to sexual liaisons, presumably undertaken secretly (I’d actually be very curious to see a Gallup poll on open marriages), by a spouse who intends to remain within the marriage. If that same spouse wishes to simply leave outright, to be unbound again, to break her vow entirely, then the judgment diminishes and the only really “tricky” issue is the kids (about which more below). If you feel driven to cheat, a moral code that condemns adultery but not divorce implies, it’s better to just leave. The individual’s self-actualization can be constrained by vows and promises, but only provisionally; in the end, autonomy is still the trump.

And then on that issue that Linker calls “tricky,” the issue of children: There too a rights-based moral worldview could explicitly privilege the rights of the child over the self-determination of her parents, treating to act of conceiving a child as a commitment that inherently limits one’s personal liberties thereafter. As, again, our society still does in many ways, especially where financial support and physical safety are concerned. (Which is part of why we remain so conflicted about the issue of abortion, where the physical harm is undeniable even if the victim’s full personhood is in dispute.)

But again, with the advance of social liberalism the balance between the rights of the child and the freedom of the parent has tipped in important ways toward adult autonomy, toward a view that children cannot reasonably make certain claims at the expense of their parents’ self-actualization and personal happiness. (With, of course, the self-justifying corollary that the kids will ultimately be better off if their parents have their own way.) Like the spouse who wants to stay the course in a struggling marriage, the child under our particular form of liberalism has no real claim, rights-based or harm-based or both, to any particular kind of familial situation, any particular form of association with his biological mother and father, any particular living arrangement during infancy or youth, or any particular relationship across the life cycle. (The adult children of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, for instance, would be immediately cast as transphobic if they countered his/her right to transition by claiming an enduring right to his continuing fatherhood and paternity.) Consenting adults need not feel constrained by the possibility of conception when they decide to have sex; if they do conceive a child they need not feel obligated to marry for the child’s sake; if they are married they need not feel obligated to remain together; and so on. Indeed, consenting adults may now explicitly sell their own parental stake and obligation to their biological child (a step radically different in its implications from adoption), and the idea that the child might in such cases might have been deprived of something, might have a right that’s been traduced or a claim of harm to make, is regarded as strange, irrelevant, offensive, antique.

So once again, the common thread across these issues is not simply a broad morality of rights and harms and consent. It’s a particular definition of which rights matter most, which harms are meaningful and which are trumps, and whose consent is required to justify a particular decision. The current definitions advanced by social liberalism do not make individual autonomy the measure of all things; they do not simply instantiate a will to power or self-fulfillment. But they do treat adult autonomy as a morally-elevated good, and rate other possible rights and harm claims considerably lower as a consequence. Linker is right that today’s social liberalism does not simply preach an individualism unbound. But it preaches an individualism in which many bonds and rules and constraints are thinned to filaments, and waiting for the knife.

This neatly ties together the recent controversy surrounding Jenner with my earlier argument that liberal philosophy (including libertarianism, wizards) is toxic to community.

 

[IrishinSyria]

Because the only adults who want to undergo such a procedure are mentally ill. Thus, this a question of how best to treat a disordered mind. But the liberal obsession with choice and individual autonomy is making it increasingly difficult for us to even maintain a concept of mental health, because it's "discriminatory" and it might prevent such people from "self-actualization".

Effective treatment for anorexia, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders does not involve indulging the delusion. Those suffering from such disorders deserve compassion and support, of course, but saying, "Who am I to judge" is an abdication of moral duty toward that person. Ignoring reality in favor of a relativistic "tolerance" is no way to heal the sick.

That seems like it kind of just begs the question and doesn't address the burden issue. Are they mentally ill or does their body not conform to their mental state? Seems impossible to answer to me. In the absence of compelling proof that the surgery does real harm, I don't see any reason not to indulge individual preferences. There's a clear harm associated with anorexia. Seems way less clear in the case of trans folk.

 

[wizards8507]

The NYT's Ross Douthat just published an article titled "The Liberalism of Adult Autonomy":

This neatly ties together the recent controversy surrounding Jenner with my earlier argument that liberal philosophy (including libertarianism, wizards) is toxic to community.

You're conflating two separate ideologies again. I agree with the author vis a vis social liberalism but social liberalism is not the same as libertarianism. Libertarianism is not a "morality of rights" because it's not a morality at all. I am both a social conservative and a libertarian. Libertarianism is a political philosophy, not an ethical or metaphysical one. I am deeply concerned about the impact that same-sex marriage, divorce, pornography, and adultery have on our society, but that doesn't mean those things should be combated by the force of state.

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

It is for this reason that to the liberal neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits. I sometimes feel that the most conspicuous attribute of liberalism that distinguishes it as much from conservatism as from socialism is the view that moral beliefs concerning matters of conduct which do not directly interfere with the protected sphere of other persons do not justify coercion.

 

[IrishinSyria]

Or to take another example, which Linker waves at but doesn’t really grapple with: The question of public vows and their permanence and meaning. A moral theory could be rights-based while also allowing for genuinely binding personal commitments, which would allow others to make a permanent rights-based or harm-based claim on you. A wife would be said to have a permanent right to her husband’s affections and support, for instance, because he had so vowed upon their wedding day. But while today’s liberal moral consensus does allow for a limited version of such claims, as Linker notes, around the specific question of adultery, that claim is emphatically not permanent or binding: Instead, it is strictly limited (and is still widely accepted, arguably, precisely because it is strictly limited) to sexual liaisons, presumably undertaken secretly (I’d actually be very curious to see a Gallup poll on open marriages), by a spouse who intends to remain within the marriage. If that same spouse wishes to simply leave outright, to be unbound again, to break her vow entirely, then the judgment diminishes and the only really “tricky” issue is the kids (about which more below). If you feel driven to cheat, a moral code that condemns adultery but not divorce implies, it’s better to just leave. The individual’s self-actualization can be constrained by vows and promises, but only provisionally; in the end, autonomy is still the trump.

Is the argument that it's better to cheat and not get divorced? Or is he implying that before divorce was accepted, marriages were perfect and people didn't cheat? I mean, rape laws used to be written with wife-exceptions, because why bother with individual autonomy when you have the institution of marriage to uphold? Is that really the world Brooks is arguing for?

 

[wizards8507]

That seems like it kind of just begs the question and doesn't address the burden issue. Are they mentally ill or does their body not conform to their mental state?

Their physical state is precisely what defines their gender. If their body is male, they are male. That's what "male" means. By the very definition of the word, "gender" and "physical state" are one in the same. Thus, if the mind doesn't conform to the body, it's the mind, not the body, that's disordered.