People care about this issue because many of them have children and they are afraid it could happen to them. Kids are lying about being gay or about being bisexual, because being straight isn't cool, and it also doesn't give you victimhood points you can use for your benefit, it's similar to people lying about their ethnicity for AA benefits.
There is an explosion of lgbtq identifying teens. Children are the biggest investment of any person, and they don't want to see their children cripple themselves or castrate themselves for a dumb fad, and live with intense regret the rest of their lives.
It's entirely rational to be concerned about an extreme negative event even if the risk of it occurring is relatively low. Consider telling a woman that when she goes out on a first date with a man, there is a 1 in 100 chance that he will turn out to be a rapist, or will otherwise sexually assault her in some manner. How likely would most women be to take that chance, even at 1%? How low would the chance have to go before it was no longer a concern?
This is why women are wary of "creeps" and "nice guys," and have good reason to be. Even if the odds of that outcome are very low, if it does happen, it's so devastating that the consequences are difficult to imagine. For a parent, having their child choose self-castration and genital mutilation, not to mention all the emotional, mental and political hangups that come with the whole "trans" process, I believe would be a comparable concern. It doesn't matter if the odds are low, the outcome is so horrifying that it can't simply be brushed off as inconsequential.
That's not to even get into the other angles to this (the fact that transing the kids is just the tip of the iceberg, the most overtly grotesque manifestation of an ideology that is far broader than the classroom, the fact that rates of transgender identification have grown exponentially, where the slippery slope might go next if people let it, etc.).
It's not irrational. This is just part of the left's takeover of education. It is teaching a whole raft of things that most people don't want their kids to be taught. And most importantly, the kids are not being taught basic stuff like how to read and write. While our kids get lectured on oppression, Asian kids are learning calculus.
Asian kids are learning Xi Jinping Thought, but outdated fearmongering aside, don’t argue against the basic fact that transgender people are rare.
It is absolutely irrational to worry more about transgender ideology than nearly any other issue. You can’t even make a serious argument for it without pivoting to the fact that the US underperforms in teaching math.
That's exactly my argument. Why are we teaching ideology and gender identity and oppression politics but not math? The USA badly underperforms our global counterparts. I don't care if you are trans or not. My own child is trans. I really don't care one way or the other. But It doesn't belong in the classroom
I think the fight wastes energy that would be better spent simply pointing out thag US underperforms on education.
I spend most of my time explaining to liberals why their attempts to convince conservatives are demeaning or stupid.
But this is a case of the opposite. You are fighting an unnecessary battle if your ultimate goal is to focus on math education. Transgender issues do not take up significant classroom time and are not the reason for poor American math performance, which predates the woke left and has been improving in recent years (to play Devil’s Advocate, there is almost certainly a positive correlation between transgender acceptance and US math scores on PISA tests).
Simply focus on the issue that actually bothers you, and has serious ramifications, rather than the culture war distraction.
This is a fair comment and I appreciate your point of view. I do have one nit to pick regarding transgender acceptance and US math scores on PISA tests. Correlation does not equal causation. If we mandated transgender acceptance in the classroom it is highly unlikely to improve math scores
critial race theory. oppression politics. racial justice. the 1619 project. diversity and inclusion. Yes, please don't teach about the sons of the confederacy.
Sex ed is good, needed even. By all means teach contraception.
For me it's more simple to say that the education system is failing our kids, who are not performing at grade level. Any time spent on superfluous subjects that don't contribute to being a functional adult not helping the cause. My own kids brought home homework that was beyond ridiculous and just served to confuse the kids.
Maybe. All I can say is, how is that working out for us? Whatever they are doing is clearly not helping. Good citizens should be able to compete with the children of other developed and undeveloped nations
Everyone's someone's child, and Richard's point is that a lot more people die from lack of donor kidneys (and, I would add, even more in traffic accidents) than are affected by transgender-related surgeries.
The issue with this logic is that, if we were to truly follow it to its conclusion, we should all be sitting here trying to figure out what specific issue or problem in the world kills or harms the greatest number of people, and only talking about that one thing and nothing else. If "bigger problems exist so ignore it" were the way to go, Richard's article here has already failed the test, as he has spent time and energy writing about two things other than whatever the literal biggest problem in the world is (unless the actual biggest killer in the world is kidney failure, somehow), when he could have been writing about whatever that is instead.
This is not a reasonable way to expect people to engage with politics.
It's not reasonable to ask people to care more about things that are more important, all else being equal? There is probably literally no more reasonable way to expect people to engage with politics, as with everything else in life: you worry more about getting run over by a car than being killed by a puffer fish, even though the latter is much more interesting.
I think it's perfectly fair that people have their own interests, which don't necessarily correspond to what's most important; I wouldn't begrudge someone who writes tirelessly on net neutrality while ignoring malaria. But yeah, all else being equal, when considering the effort to invest in an issue, how actually harmful it is should be a major factor.
Telling people to shut up because other problems exist besides the ones they are concerned about, is unreasonable, yes. And unlikely to be well-taken.
Another concern with your viewpoint is the idea of measuring harm, which of course is impossible, as this is hopelessly subjective. Leftists are of course going to feel that the harm caused by transgender ideology is minimal and vice versa.
I think your sense of proportion is completely wrong. The only thing you named that *might* compare is getting hit by a car, which differs in that no one is out there actively telling my child to jump in front of cars. The others are either not a serious possibility for my child (getting addicted to meth) or comically tame by comparison to self-inflicted castration and mutilation (all the rest). Even meth addiction is quite arguable as preferable to "trans"--you can recover from addiction, after all. Once you start chopping off body parts, they never grow back.
A lot of youth are claiming to be "bi," or "gender fluid," or etc., while displaying only heterosexuality in their actual choice of partners. Notably, this practice seems most common by far among white females.
Young women identifying as bi/gender fluid/etc. has NOT been going on for decades, certainly not at the rates that we see today. Are you really claiming that a bunch of women back in the 1920s, or even the 1970s, were going around claiming to be "gender fluid?"
Eh, the 1920s is maybe not the best example, as it had a similar surge in open sexuality and homosexuality, especially in the upper middle class female-dominated “flapper” subculture, but overall I agree with your point.
Come on bro...how can you hold to naturalistic evolution and believe we have a "spare" kidney? It's not a vestigial organ.
Doesn't matter tho. You are conflating a utilitarian concern with one of morality and meaning (even if "treatment" for GD wasn't objectively barbaric). I don't know if you have kids or want them or whatever, but parents aren't sitting at home worried our children are going to need a kidney and wishing there was a market for them just in case. We are concerned about our children being swept up in gender ideology (even if they don't get drugs or surgery, LGBTQ+ identifying people still have higher rates of depression, suicidal ideation, etc.).
You may think morality is just a question of aesthetics. That's fine. I wouldn't expect you to understand why a parent would be more concerned about gender ideology than physical health, regardless of the statistical risk.
> how can you hold to naturalistic evolution and believe we have a "spare" kidney? It's not a vestigial organ.
Nothing special is required; the facts are what they are. Your second kidney is not vestigial, but it is redundant, serving mostly to protect you against the risk that something goes wrong with the first one.
If you really believe that evolution predicts that redundant organs cannot occur, I invite you to consider that a standard way to prevent incipient amblyopia is to spend an extended period wearing an eyepatch. Doing so does not even rise to the level of being a minor inconvenience; your second eye, like your second kidney, is fully functional but redundant.
No: there is a balance to be struck between energy expenditure and necessity. Your example requires 3,000 failures. Mine requires one. The latter is more likely than the former therefore the latter has energy spent mitigating against it.
No it won't: the stomach is responsible for partial digestion not absorption. It is also less likely to fail due to a more complex blood supply and a simpler structure. The kidneys have a single source (renal artery) and are delicate: the nephrons are easily damaged due to their structure. It is less likely to fail and I refer you back to my first point of a balance being struck.
>> Losing function in your stomach will kill you just as surely as losing function in your only kidney.
> No it won't: the stomach is responsible for partial digestion not absorption.
You don't know anything about the functions of the stomach, apparently. I personally know someone whose stomach doesn't function correctly, and she's alive because she can excrete through an artificial tube that had to be surgically inserted into it. She is not expected to reach old age.
Furthermore, one of the most important functions of the stomach is to contain the powerful acid it uses to digest food. That function can fail ("ulceration"), and if it fails badly enough, you will die.
Of course you're correct that there is a balance to be struck between redundancy and efficiency. What's the relevance? Your second kidney is an example of redundancy, and we know empirically that it provides far more redundancy than you would expect to be necessary; the risk of your first kidney failing is not even among what we consider the major risks of kidney donation.
> when one kidney is removed, the single normal kidney will increase in capacity to compensate. This is called “compensatory growth.” Studies show that your total kidney function returns to roughly 70% within 10 to 11 days, and about 70 to 80% at long term follow-up.
In other words, the redundancy value of a second kidney isn't worth the cost, and the second kidney has to justify itself by doing work the first one wasn't doing.
It's possible to both emphasize with a concern, and to point out that it is irrational and not a good basis for allocating resources, including political capital.
> People just find the whole thing icky, even if some might come up with sophisticated sounding phrases like “preventing commodification” to justify continuing this mass murder.
Maybe this is a bit above your intellectual pay grade, but yes, commodification is a basic concept in economics. Legalizing organ sales would rapidly lead us into a cyberpunk dystopia of people "choosing" to sell their organs just to make rent.
“Legalizing organ sales would rapidly lead us into a cyberpunk dystopia of people "choosing" to sell their organs just to make rent.”
This isn’t the slam dunk you think it is, and your explanatiom of “commodification” in economics is woefully inadequate.
Under the current reality, people who cannot sell their organs go homeless. Any person who needs to sell an organ to make rent, by the assumptions of the thought experiment you have thought up, is worse off in a world without organ selling. They are poorer, but with both kidneys.
Poor people have the right to make choices about their own bodies. They can choose to make the same decision available to them today: go homeless. Or, they can sell an organ and not be homeless.
Why are you so confident in making that choice on their behalf?
I honestly don't know if comments like this are satire.
Here's a thought: work toward building a society where people don't need to choose between selling their kidneys or being homeless. Radical, I know. But pretty much common sense to anyone who doesn't worship at the altar of abstract ideas like the "market."
Well you're both wrong because people aren't homeless in this society because they can't make rent. Sure there is transient homelessness, but 99% of long term homelessness has nothing to do with the capability of someone to "make rent" but their ability to function as an adult in a society.
And what's wrong with that? If it improves economic efficiency, it's by definition beneficial. The whole point of money is to allocate scarce resources to those who have earned them through their contributions to society - why should that not include life-saving medical care?
> If it improves economic efficiency, it's by definition beneficial.
Is this a serious statement?
> The whole point of money is to allocate scarce resources to those who have earned them through their contributions to society
Another human being's kidney isn't a "scarce resource." And it's laughable to think that the majority of people buying kidneys would have the wealth from "contributions to society."
Yes, it is, per the definition of a "scarce resource". And if people who have the most wealth didn't get it through contributions to society, that's a problem with tax and regulatory policy, not market-driven allocation in general.
Even if you want to ignore the morality of inflicting lifetime harm on children in favor of cold math the OPs logic is not sound. Life years are the way to measure harm not just absolute numbers. Basically it's an estimate of years lost A child of 14 dying loses 65 life years. A kidney disease victim dying at age 64 loses 19. Most people with failed kidneys are older. This example is just for illustration not based on average longevities and various confounding factors. The point being long term damage to children, which may lead to depression, drug addtion etc, can easily reduce life years more than dialysis patients dying. For proof of this you can see how young people overdosing in the US reduces average lifespans in the US.
It's even trickier to measure the damage done by sterilizing entire swaths of the population While they may not lose a decade of life from overdosing, suicide, lifestyle, drugs the entire genetic line is ended. How do you measure the aggregate purpose and happiness erased by preventing them from reproducing and raising children? Happiness and purpose are tied to close family bonds more than anything else. Take away their capacity to have families and you rob them of much more life than a kidney patient dying after a full life.
At any rate this entire post is a black and white fallacy. You can't separate the medical lysenkoism of gender and race ideology from the care of other Americans. The cancer grows and infects all areas of care.
From a utilitarian standpoint, I think trans stuff is a very big deal. Kaufmann's CSPI report convinced me that there's a huge correlation between "acceptance of trans" and mental illness (and i believe it's a causation). Of the 49 million children in the US, probably 10-20 million have mental health issues that meaningfully decrease QOL.
Of course, stopping anti-capitalism would be a bigger triumph, but that's a difficult goal.
Yes. With respect to anti-capitalist sentiment, the cat's been out of the bag for the past 200 years so all we can do at this point is damage control. The whole point of opposing gender ideology at its inception is making sure the toothpaste never leaves the tube to begin with.
„ Let’s say you oppose the entire trans agenda. You think it’s all based on lies, and that every child undergoing gender-affirming care is a tragedy. How much should you prioritize the issue compared to everything else in the world? I would argue not that highly.“
This is wrong. It’s the biggest issue.
Gender affirming care isn’t a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, or not one made without pressure to affirm. It’s basically accepting the child’s word for it, which can lead to unneeded surgery. A medical profession that’s promoting unnecessary surgery isn’t going to be very popular.
„ In 2021, around 42,000 kids between 6 and 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a 75% increase from the previous year. “
This would indicate a social contagion, and some countries are trying to make it illegal for professionals or parents to even stop the process.
75% increase per year and pretty soon we are talking about big numbers. Every child has multiple relations, and friends and parents if friends.
Besides that the statement that trans women are women leads to all kinds of problems for „cis“ women. In extreme all female segregated sex spaces are vulnerable. Sports, which might be the most visible, is not exempted. If male athletes win competitions in the Olympics or Wimbledon then the general population will take the blue pill.
As yet we are at the beginning of that the craziness might entail. It might be that cultural factors will prohibit it getting any stronger, but as yet there’s little political pushback. In the U.K. theres some attempt at a pushback but the Labour Party are all in.
"Imagine it increases exponentially forever" I don't think is a good argument. Already the media coverage has changed, even the Reuters article says there's no evidence for puberty blockers for minors. And if you look at the data in the article, the increases in top surgery and hormone blockers in 2021 was very small over 2020. There's a natural limit to this stuff.
The natural limit comes from people loudly and vocally opposing it and criticizing it, but at the same time, you're arguing in this article that people shouldn't care about it. If critics were silent on transgenderism and spent their time advocating for legalized kidney sales instead, perhaps the trans phenomenon would have much more room to grow.
I would guess there’s a good chance the opposite is true. Conservatives focusing on the issue makes liberals and the medical community more absolutist. That would be why it’s gone furthest in America, where the culture war dominates everything. The limit is human nature, not the conservative movement.
Wouldn't this suggest that opposing socialism and defending free markets is a bad idea, because it will make the socialists more absolutist in response?
You believe that socialists are more open to persuasion on their economic ideology than proponents of gender ideology are on their cultural one? Not necessarily saying I disagree, just curious why this would be the case.
It isn't just conservatives. Over 80% of parents object to the child transitioning and over 75% agreed with Desantis on the gender ideology in schools. The elections will show a huge % of liberal Americans, still terrified of the gender ideologues on the left, will cross over and vote for conservatives/Republicans. You can see even the comments section of the NYT is against the radical gender stuff and they all know families who had kids transitioned at school without the parents even knowing. If a critical mass of liberals votes Dems, or even temporarily allies with Matt Walsh in his campaigns against child mutilation the captured institutions will be able to question the gender the ideology. It's already happening in Europe and it will happen in the US.
I didn’t say exponentially forever, however I’m fairly sure it’s not going to slow down much either despite that blip. This idea is one that hasn’t gone away, despite the absurdities. Just last year there was a huge campaign to ban trans conversion therapy (aka gender dysphoria therapy) across Europe. I think France voted the law in. Britain pushed back but labour and the SNP are pushing it.
In fact gender woo woo is part of US foreign policy worldwide and this will continue absent a Revolution in progressive thinking.
Biden was barely in the door when he published the “Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World”
I mean that’s even the alphabet soup right there. So the US, under Democratic regimes at least, is committed to this philosophy. It is all in on this. Even European nations will get lectured, from Hungary to the U.K.
I didn’t say or imply that it would increase exponentially *forever*, rather that the risk of not caring about it is allowing the number to increase to a potentially worryingly high figure.
What exactly do you think the natural limit is and do you think reaching it would be acceptable or tolerable?
It potentially could increase to a worryingly high figure, but you could make this argument for a lot of things. Anti-capitalist sentiment is growing at a worrying rate, and history teaches that the upper limit on that is extremely high. Of all the things that have the potential to keep increasing at a high rate, gender-affirming care seems to be one of the least likely. I just don’t think there’s a lot of people these treatments can appeal to.
Call me paranoid if you must, but I don’t think it’s farfetched to imagine a near future in which at least 25% of kids are diagnosed as suffering from gender dysphoria and are prescribed puberty blockers, hormones and/or surgery by medical professionals who financially stand to benefit from the procedures and have ideologically “taken the blue pill” as another commenter put it.
If you think that sounds crazy look at the tens of millions of children put on “medication” for ADD because they are bored in school, much to the benefit of child psychiatrists and big pharma.
Not sure how to interpret that, plenty of kids I knew growing up told me that they didn't find taking Ritalin or Adderall "fun". Likewise, there are more and more detransitioners who certainly don't find detransitioning fun but thought transitioning was a great idea at the time.
If you actually have ADD, Ritalin isn't "fun", it really does allow you to focus. Now testosterone, that is fun! Women taking T often get this aggressive euphoria, this new physical confidence. I'm reminded of when my father was prescribed testosterone. My mother quickly insisted he quit because he got kind of manic and really obnoxious on it--so arrogant and aggressive that she basically said, "T or me". Testosterone is illegal for weightlifters because of its danger, but it's fine for little girls because they like it? No.
I'm too lazy to look up the figures again for a random substack comment, but if I recall, LGBT identification has roughly doubled in each generation since the 60's, and has now reached 20% among zoomers. So, there does appear to be potential for exponential increase in this stuff over generations. Transgenderism seems to follow an even more alarming trend if viewed in these terms, as it has much more than doubled in the past 20 years.
The numbers might seem small now, but if allowed to proceed unchecked for another 50 years? Maybe Hanania is right and it would fizzle out even with no opposition, but we don't actually have any historical precedent to look at for this, so who knows.
This is because people are not utilitarians, and shouldn't be. Morality requires first principles, whether you believe those are derived from evolutionary psychology, religion, some combination of both, whatever. Utilitarianism lacks a first principle.
Kidney sales violate some deep unspoken first principle--there's just something that is too wrong about it for people to accept. If this sounds silly, consider behaviors such as necrophilia and non-reproductive incest. From a pure utilitarian perspective, these behaviors harm no one, and should therefore be allowed. But if you say you wouldn't be irked by them, and would freely associate with people who engage in these practices with no concerns about them, you're probably lying.
Really misguided. If some folks bring back Aztec human sacrifice but they only flay alive and cut the heart out of one person per year this same analysis would say “eh, don’t worry about it, it’s just one death per year”. But that’s not how moral atrocities work. ANY human sacrifice is too much. ANY children being mutilated for delusional transcult reasons is too many.
The main issue here is that you will lose your job for talking about these issues or not using correct pronouns. The other issue is that blue states have passed laws against "conversion therapy" which is actually defined as telling a boy he is a boy if he thinks he's a girl. Within ten years the school will decide that your kids are trans and inject them with hormones against your will.
Exactly. This extends well beyond the individual families or children making these decisions. The political cult that is the LGBTQ movement is more akin to a fascist political takeover than being dangerous to our kids because a few hundred cut their genitalia off.
You don’t seem to really understand the liberal perspective here. Supporting trans people generally, and kids specifically, isn’t about striking a blow against the patriarchy or subverting gender roles. That’s framing it how a conservative imagines it might be if liberals are a uniform block of scheming sneaksters. The reality is that liberals, and empathetic people generally, support trans people because trans people are human beings who should be free to express their gender however they wish to and pursue gender-affirming medical care if they choose. That freedom should be no more controversial than more traditional gender-affirming care like hair restoration, plastic surgery, and breast augmentation. If any of this threatens the patriarchy, that’s just an added bonus.
Note that this is about *children.* The standard libertarian arguments are no longer so simple - including when it comes to other forms of body modification - when it's about minors.
If opponents of gender ideology instead focus all their energy on legalizing kidneys and gender ideology remains unopposed suppose the number of minors undergoing permanently irreversible medical procedures doubles every year. That’s a grim scenario indeed to contemplate, especially for parents.
Many--if not most--opponents of gender ideology want to nip it in the bud before it’s too late, and it’s understandable why.
Matt, when has there ever been a lack of criticism even animosity to gender divergent individuals? When has it ever been "great" for trans folk? To the person who proposed "contagion" theory I'm reminded of the graph of left handedness after we stopped beating the "sinister" out of people.
Further, it's totally possible it is "contagious" but not in a social sense. Perhaps there is endocrinal issues from micro-plastics in like ever human's body and found in placenta and foetal tissue.
What's most interesting to me is that there isn't a stronger critique of gender theory on it's own premises. And maybe that shows some of the critique made now is misinformed. If the goal is something actually "post-gender" why are surgeries being preformed that suggest "gender" and "genitalia" are linked?
Because the actual goal is to just destroy traditional morality. Being self-contradictory assists in this endeavor. An ideology that refuses to make sense in the first place precludes any possibility of dialogue or debate.
There's no actual goal. Or rather there's a bunch of different goals. The medical establishment wants to make money. Leftists want to be 'on the right side of history' and support people they see as unfortunate. Adult trans activists want to make it more common and accepted so they are not seen as freaks; perhaps some really do believe all these teen girls have the same condition as them. Teen girls - and to a lesser extent boys - want to stand out and at the same time fit in, and increase their status within their subculture.
The fact gender dysphoria seems to have switched to affecting more girls than boys is an argument against the endocrine disruptors theory, as the effects of micro-plastics we know about/suspect seem to be feminising rather than masculinising.
All of these people may have these different individual goals, yes. But if we look at the Woke religion as a whole, its only true unifying principle seems to be "whatever harms/inverts traditional moral standards." This fits to a large extent with Hanania's theory that a lot of this is driven by status-seeking, as many of these are people who perceive, correctly or not, that they would be denied status under the "old" standards society operated by.
As far as the theory that the trans phenomenon is somehow caused by micro-plastics..... I don't even know what to say. That's literally Alex Jones tier conspiracy theorizing. "They're putting chemicals in the water that make everyone gay!"
I think it's also the logic of progressivism. For people who desire to fight injustice, some new injustice must always be found. If there are no significant issues to deal with, they tear society apart instead.
There's nothing implausible or conspiracyish about the microplastics theory. No one is putting chemicals in the water to make people gay, chemicals just end up there and have unpredictable effects. But if that was the case, we should see a rise in people being gay/lesbian as well, and what we are seeing instead is a rise in social identities like bi and non-binary, which don't necessarily indicate any actual difference in people, just in how they see/describe themselves.
"The risks to a kidney donor are very small, relative to the fact that they can help save a life. Apparently, most of us are walking around with a spare kidney we don’t really need". Humans don't have "spare kidneys" any more than they have spare eyes and spare ears.
Exactly. That's why donating a kidney is viewed as such an extreme demonstration of altruism, especially, when donated to a stranger. Everyone knows that person has put themselves at risk of future health concerns.
You say this without any apparent knowledge of kidney donation. It's not risk free, and it's not quite a "spare kidney", but it's a small downside relative to how much of a difference it makes for the recipient.
The evolutionary reason for having two kidneys is not the same as having two ears or two eyes. This is an incorrect comparison. You have parallel sets of sensory organs so that you can use the different signals sent to them to establish depth. That is, to enable depth perception in vision and judge the distance away of a particular sound.
The evolutionary reason for doubling kidneys is because one occasionally fails. A single kidney is just as capable of performing the job as two kidneys. It’s a spare in the exact sense of having a spare tire. You carry a spare not because it is always necessary, but because it is occasionally invaluable.
In the modern age, where dialysis is available for temporary life-saving care, and under a medical regime where kidney donors are automatically put at the top of the kidney donation waitlist should they need it, that value is clearly best served saving other’s lives.
A good market would allow the altruistic and enterprising to sieze some of that value for themselves, while generating net positive benefits.
You could theoretically donate/sell your cornea as well (although I think we have plenty from cadavers). You would have mildly decreased peripheral vision, decreased depth perception (your brain could still use monocular cues to perceive depth to some degree), and be at higher risk of blindness. But it wouldn't affect your systemic health at all. There are some real potential health problems from having one kidney, like ckd and hypertension.
But who cares? Let's allow organ sales idgaf. Not my biggest problem with RH's essay. But u may want to look up potential health issues before u donate a kidney. You would still be a hero in my book if u did it anyway :).
I’ve actually already been through the pre-screening process, which I why I feel quite comfortable claiming that the long-term health risks for healthy individuals are negligible.
It’s much safer than drinking, smoking, driving fast, professional boxing, American football, radiation exposure to astronauts, scuba diving, etc.
Nothing has zero risk, but kidney donation is has much lower risk than many activities people are perfectly fine with.
I agree that people should probably be allowed to sell their kidney (one!), however it’s not quite so simple a process. It is not without risk for both the donor (surgical/perioperative risk, plus small increase in kidney failure later on, esp in AA men) and recipient, and while it usually provides some extra life years to the recipient, it’s definitely not a return to normal health or a guarantee of extra time because they will be on serious immunosuppression for the duration someone else’s organ is in their body. There is always the threat of graft rejection, graft vs host disease, serious infections from immunosuppression, etc. That kind of death often involves dying hard.
I think it’s a bit morally unsound to have old rich people getting preferred access to kidneys (or maybe even access at all, once you’ve progressed to kidney failure it’s usually because you have a host of other costly major medical issues or one very serious one- add age to that and it seems silly/futile bc their other problems will probably significantly shorten their lifespan- but I think as long as the recipient can pay for all their own medical care plus any costs the donor may incur if they have complications, including later costly complications like kidney failure, then so be it), but I don’t think it would really affect younger people waiting on transplant lists because the people selling their kidneys would be unlikely to offer them up for free donation.
I suppose the best way would be a website or app that matches buyers/sellers by ABO/RH/HLA and price, in sort of a Tinder-type fashion. The donors need full medical work ups and antibody profiles for matching, and I guess along the way clinicians could screen for all the stuff you don’t want in a donor (drugs/EtOH addiction, intellectual or psychiatric issues that make informed consent dubious, other disqualifying medical issues, etc).
Similarly complicated is the idea that major surgery should be offered to kids suffering from gender dysphoria. There definitely is a small portion of (more boys) that do truly have the disorder, and may (mentally, definitely not physically bc an enormous amount of potential risk exists that hasn’t been studied bc this is all pretty new) benefit from blocking puberty and later gender reassignment surgery. Otherwise they will (almost) never look like women, and I can imagine that’s pretty difficult when you really feel like a woman.
However, genital surgery in particular has major risks (it’s a complex surgery in an inherently contaminated area with higher infection risk), and effects on things like bone density/osteoporosis, cardiovascular health are unknown. Infertility however, is a known. As is difficult or impossible orgasm achievement. How do you adequately explain that to a child/tween? -there’s no context for them. Seems like an ethical gray zone, no clear correct answer, so should the market be allowed to work itself out? Morally I think the answer is no, the medical community should err on the conservative side unless there’s good data showing benefit from risky interventions (Scandinavia changing policy is pretty good indicator there isn’t). Also politicians getting involved is a major problem. The politicization of Covid led to prolonged school closures, ineffective lockdowns that disproportionately harmed the poor, vaccine mandates and discrimination, and further tribalism and unrest. Couldn’t have been managed more poorly if actively trying to screw it all up, esp bc major medical institutions ceded to politicians (AAP and CDC come to the top of my mind).
I'm not sure conservatives are all that pro-market anymore. The trend seems to be, among the NatCons and others, to value tradition more highly, libertarianism's on the decline, and I doubt kidney markets are going to make it anytime soon. There's too much revulsion at the thought of poor people selling their kidneys for food, and if you believe Jonathan Haidt conservatives have extra-strong 'ick' factors.
I admire your willingness to say things that (judging by the other comments here) are so clearly unpopular with your readership. (I would say that, though, since in this case I happen to mostly agree with you.)
“If you have to choose between living under a government that doesn’t believe in gender roles and one that doesn’t believe in markets, you would have to be ignorant or a real crank to choose the socialist patriarchy.”
If I had to choose...yes. Unfortunately, the trans issue is symbolic of lots of crazy left stuff, so we get busing, affirmative action, woke totalitarianism and anti-market bias. It’s not all tied up neatly with a philosophically coherent bow but it’s the typical package.
Like with most "out-of-control Wokeness" issues, it's easy to write off trans kids as an outlier until it comes to YOUR door. And the "It Could be YOUR kids next" element plays on median parental anxieties.
That said, it's obnoxious to see people politically agitated about it who don't actually have any skin in the game and haven't been personally affected by it. I know a guy who's sister transitioned, and his attitude is sad resignation that she got mutilated by the 2010s equivalent of a lobotomy, the trendy new radical surgical cure-all that doesn't in fact cure anything.
People care about this issue because many of them have children and they are afraid it could happen to them. Kids are lying about being gay or about being bisexual, because being straight isn't cool, and it also doesn't give you victimhood points you can use for your benefit, it's similar to people lying about their ethnicity for AA benefits.
There is an explosion of lgbtq identifying teens. Children are the biggest investment of any person, and they don't want to see their children cripple themselves or castrate themselves for a dumb fad, and live with intense regret the rest of their lives.
“People care about this issue because many of them have children and they are afraid it could happen to them.”
The entire point of this essay is that the fear is irrational, much like the left’s fear of school shootings or the right’s fear of Islamic terrorism.
These are events with extremely high media coverage but extremely low stochastic risk.
It's entirely rational to be concerned about an extreme negative event even if the risk of it occurring is relatively low. Consider telling a woman that when she goes out on a first date with a man, there is a 1 in 100 chance that he will turn out to be a rapist, or will otherwise sexually assault her in some manner. How likely would most women be to take that chance, even at 1%? How low would the chance have to go before it was no longer a concern?
This is why women are wary of "creeps" and "nice guys," and have good reason to be. Even if the odds of that outcome are very low, if it does happen, it's so devastating that the consequences are difficult to imagine. For a parent, having their child choose self-castration and genital mutilation, not to mention all the emotional, mental and political hangups that come with the whole "trans" process, I believe would be a comparable concern. It doesn't matter if the odds are low, the outcome is so horrifying that it can't simply be brushed off as inconsequential.
That's not to even get into the other angles to this (the fact that transing the kids is just the tip of the iceberg, the most overtly grotesque manifestation of an ideology that is far broader than the classroom, the fact that rates of transgender identification have grown exponentially, where the slippery slope might go next if people let it, etc.).
It's not irrational. This is just part of the left's takeover of education. It is teaching a whole raft of things that most people don't want their kids to be taught. And most importantly, the kids are not being taught basic stuff like how to read and write. While our kids get lectured on oppression, Asian kids are learning calculus.
Asian kids are learning Xi Jinping Thought, but outdated fearmongering aside, don’t argue against the basic fact that transgender people are rare.
It is absolutely irrational to worry more about transgender ideology than nearly any other issue. You can’t even make a serious argument for it without pivoting to the fact that the US underperforms in teaching math.
That's exactly my argument. Why are we teaching ideology and gender identity and oppression politics but not math? The USA badly underperforms our global counterparts. I don't care if you are trans or not. My own child is trans. I really don't care one way or the other. But It doesn't belong in the classroom
I think the fight wastes energy that would be better spent simply pointing out thag US underperforms on education.
I spend most of my time explaining to liberals why their attempts to convince conservatives are demeaning or stupid.
But this is a case of the opposite. You are fighting an unnecessary battle if your ultimate goal is to focus on math education. Transgender issues do not take up significant classroom time and are not the reason for poor American math performance, which predates the woke left and has been improving in recent years (to play Devil’s Advocate, there is almost certainly a positive correlation between transgender acceptance and US math scores on PISA tests).
Simply focus on the issue that actually bothers you, and has serious ramifications, rather than the culture war distraction.
This is a fair comment and I appreciate your point of view. I do have one nit to pick regarding transgender acceptance and US math scores on PISA tests. Correlation does not equal causation. If we mandated transgender acceptance in the classroom it is highly unlikely to improve math scores
Culture war distractions are fun, though. You don't need to learn anything to have a strong opinion, and the stakes are low.
The US doesn't underperform in teaching math; our Chinese kids are competitive with other Chinese kids, usually better.
critial race theory. oppression politics. racial justice. the 1619 project. diversity and inclusion. Yes, please don't teach about the sons of the confederacy.
Sex ed is good, needed even. By all means teach contraception.
For me it's more simple to say that the education system is failing our kids, who are not performing at grade level. Any time spent on superfluous subjects that don't contribute to being a functional adult not helping the cause. My own kids brought home homework that was beyond ridiculous and just served to confuse the kids.
Maybe. All I can say is, how is that working out for us? Whatever they are doing is clearly not helping. Good citizens should be able to compete with the children of other developed and undeveloped nations
Everyone's someone's child, and Richard's point is that a lot more people die from lack of donor kidneys (and, I would add, even more in traffic accidents) than are affected by transgender-related surgeries.
The issue with this logic is that, if we were to truly follow it to its conclusion, we should all be sitting here trying to figure out what specific issue or problem in the world kills or harms the greatest number of people, and only talking about that one thing and nothing else. If "bigger problems exist so ignore it" were the way to go, Richard's article here has already failed the test, as he has spent time and energy writing about two things other than whatever the literal biggest problem in the world is (unless the actual biggest killer in the world is kidney failure, somehow), when he could have been writing about whatever that is instead.
This is not a reasonable way to expect people to engage with politics.
It's not reasonable to ask people to care more about things that are more important, all else being equal? There is probably literally no more reasonable way to expect people to engage with politics, as with everything else in life: you worry more about getting run over by a car than being killed by a puffer fish, even though the latter is much more interesting.
I think it's perfectly fair that people have their own interests, which don't necessarily correspond to what's most important; I wouldn't begrudge someone who writes tirelessly on net neutrality while ignoring malaria. But yeah, all else being equal, when considering the effort to invest in an issue, how actually harmful it is should be a major factor.
Telling people to shut up because other problems exist besides the ones they are concerned about, is unreasonable, yes. And unlikely to be well-taken.
Another concern with your viewpoint is the idea of measuring harm, which of course is impossible, as this is hopelessly subjective. Leftists are of course going to feel that the harm caused by transgender ideology is minimal and vice versa.
Effective Altruists would say yes, you should care the most about the biggest problem, combined with the effort needed to solve it.
But even if you aren't going to go that far, some sense of scale should come into play. Trans issues are sooooooooo low on the list.
Low on what list? On the list of threats to children and teenagers within my demographic, it seems pretty high to me!
But it isn't, as Richard's statistics show. Worry about kids spending too much time on social media if you must worry about something.
Other options: getting bad grades, getting pregnant, getting addicted to meth, getting arrested, getting hit by a car.
I think your sense of proportion is completely wrong. The only thing you named that *might* compare is getting hit by a car, which differs in that no one is out there actively telling my child to jump in front of cars. The others are either not a serious possibility for my child (getting addicted to meth) or comically tame by comparison to self-inflicted castration and mutilation (all the rest). Even meth addiction is quite arguable as preferable to "trans"--you can recover from addiction, after all. Once you start chopping off body parts, they never grow back.
We should, in fact, be trying to figure out what problem is the biggest. Effective altruists like the folks at GiveWell try to do that.
Do you think people should be allowed to care about anything else?
A lot of youth are claiming to be "bi," or "gender fluid," or etc., while displaying only heterosexuality in their actual choice of partners. Notably, this practice seems most common by far among white females.
That's because boys/men find that attractive. That's been going on for decades and has nothing to do with "gender ideology".
Young women identifying as bi/gender fluid/etc. has NOT been going on for decades, certainly not at the rates that we see today. Are you really claiming that a bunch of women back in the 1920s, or even the 1970s, were going around claiming to be "gender fluid?"
Eh, the 1920s is maybe not the best example, as it had a similar surge in open sexuality and homosexuality, especially in the upper middle class female-dominated “flapper” subculture, but overall I agree with your point.
Come on bro...how can you hold to naturalistic evolution and believe we have a "spare" kidney? It's not a vestigial organ.
Doesn't matter tho. You are conflating a utilitarian concern with one of morality and meaning (even if "treatment" for GD wasn't objectively barbaric). I don't know if you have kids or want them or whatever, but parents aren't sitting at home worried our children are going to need a kidney and wishing there was a market for them just in case. We are concerned about our children being swept up in gender ideology (even if they don't get drugs or surgery, LGBTQ+ identifying people still have higher rates of depression, suicidal ideation, etc.).
You may think morality is just a question of aesthetics. That's fine. I wouldn't expect you to understand why a parent would be more concerned about gender ideology than physical health, regardless of the statistical risk.
> how can you hold to naturalistic evolution and believe we have a "spare" kidney? It's not a vestigial organ.
Nothing special is required; the facts are what they are. Your second kidney is not vestigial, but it is redundant, serving mostly to protect you against the risk that something goes wrong with the first one.
If you really believe that evolution predicts that redundant organs cannot occur, I invite you to consider that a standard way to prevent incipient amblyopia is to spend an extended period wearing an eyepatch. Doing so does not even rise to the level of being a minor inconvenience; your second eye, like your second kidney, is fully functional but redundant.
Redundancy in this case is essential, losing kidney function means death pretty shortly afterwards. In that sense it is not 'spare'.
Nonsense. That same argument will tell you that, if you have 3,000 kidneys, none of them are spare. The others might fail.
In reality, the second one is a spare, on hand to become important if, and only if, the first one fails.
Losing function in your stomach will kill you just as surely as losing function in your only kidney. Why is redundancy less essential there?
No: there is a balance to be struck between energy expenditure and necessity. Your example requires 3,000 failures. Mine requires one. The latter is more likely than the former therefore the latter has energy spent mitigating against it.
No it won't: the stomach is responsible for partial digestion not absorption. It is also less likely to fail due to a more complex blood supply and a simpler structure. The kidneys have a single source (renal artery) and are delicate: the nephrons are easily damaged due to their structure. It is less likely to fail and I refer you back to my first point of a balance being struck.
>> Losing function in your stomach will kill you just as surely as losing function in your only kidney.
> No it won't: the stomach is responsible for partial digestion not absorption.
You don't know anything about the functions of the stomach, apparently. I personally know someone whose stomach doesn't function correctly, and she's alive because she can excrete through an artificial tube that had to be surgically inserted into it. She is not expected to reach old age.
Furthermore, one of the most important functions of the stomach is to contain the powerful acid it uses to digest food. That function can fail ("ulceration"), and if it fails badly enough, you will die.
Of course you're correct that there is a balance to be struck between redundancy and efficiency. What's the relevance? Your second kidney is an example of redundancy, and we know empirically that it provides far more redundancy than you would expect to be necessary; the risk of your first kidney failing is not even among what we consider the major risks of kidney donation.
https://weillcornell.org/services/kidney-and-pancreas-transplantation/living-donor-kidney-center/about-the-program/risks-and-benefits-of-living-donation helpfully informs us that "worldwide mortality rate for living kidney donors is 0.03% to 0.06%". That is so low that it suggests redundancy is not the primary evolutionary reason for your second kidney, and the National Kidney Foundation provides information suggesting that in fact it isn't:
> when one kidney is removed, the single normal kidney will increase in capacity to compensate. This is called “compensatory growth.” Studies show that your total kidney function returns to roughly 70% within 10 to 11 days, and about 70 to 80% at long term follow-up.
( https://www.kidney.org/transplantation/livingdonors/long-term-risks )
In other words, the redundancy value of a second kidney isn't worth the cost, and the second kidney has to justify itself by doing work the first one wasn't doing.
It's possible to both emphasize with a concern, and to point out that it is irrational and not a good basis for allocating resources, including political capital.
> People just find the whole thing icky, even if some might come up with sophisticated sounding phrases like “preventing commodification” to justify continuing this mass murder.
Maybe this is a bit above your intellectual pay grade, but yes, commodification is a basic concept in economics. Legalizing organ sales would rapidly lead us into a cyberpunk dystopia of people "choosing" to sell their organs just to make rent.
“Legalizing organ sales would rapidly lead us into a cyberpunk dystopia of people "choosing" to sell their organs just to make rent.”
This isn’t the slam dunk you think it is, and your explanatiom of “commodification” in economics is woefully inadequate.
Under the current reality, people who cannot sell their organs go homeless. Any person who needs to sell an organ to make rent, by the assumptions of the thought experiment you have thought up, is worse off in a world without organ selling. They are poorer, but with both kidneys.
Poor people have the right to make choices about their own bodies. They can choose to make the same decision available to them today: go homeless. Or, they can sell an organ and not be homeless.
Why are you so confident in making that choice on their behalf?
I honestly don't know if comments like this are satire.
Here's a thought: work toward building a society where people don't need to choose between selling their kidneys or being homeless. Radical, I know. But pretty much common sense to anyone who doesn't worship at the altar of abstract ideas like the "market."
Well you're both wrong because people aren't homeless in this society because they can't make rent. Sure there is transient homelessness, but 99% of long term homelessness has nothing to do with the capability of someone to "make rent" but their ability to function as an adult in a society.
And what's wrong with that? If it improves economic efficiency, it's by definition beneficial. The whole point of money is to allocate scarce resources to those who have earned them through their contributions to society - why should that not include life-saving medical care?
> If it improves economic efficiency, it's by definition beneficial.
Is this a serious statement?
> The whole point of money is to allocate scarce resources to those who have earned them through their contributions to society
Another human being's kidney isn't a "scarce resource." And it's laughable to think that the majority of people buying kidneys would have the wealth from "contributions to society."
Yes, it is, per the definition of a "scarce resource". And if people who have the most wealth didn't get it through contributions to society, that's a problem with tax and regulatory policy, not market-driven allocation in general.
The same way people choose to abort someone's baby to do the same thing?
So we let women kill a man's unborn child, while preventing the man from selling his kidney.
Even if you want to ignore the morality of inflicting lifetime harm on children in favor of cold math the OPs logic is not sound. Life years are the way to measure harm not just absolute numbers. Basically it's an estimate of years lost A child of 14 dying loses 65 life years. A kidney disease victim dying at age 64 loses 19. Most people with failed kidneys are older. This example is just for illustration not based on average longevities and various confounding factors. The point being long term damage to children, which may lead to depression, drug addtion etc, can easily reduce life years more than dialysis patients dying. For proof of this you can see how young people overdosing in the US reduces average lifespans in the US.
It's even trickier to measure the damage done by sterilizing entire swaths of the population While they may not lose a decade of life from overdosing, suicide, lifestyle, drugs the entire genetic line is ended. How do you measure the aggregate purpose and happiness erased by preventing them from reproducing and raising children? Happiness and purpose are tied to close family bonds more than anything else. Take away their capacity to have families and you rob them of much more life than a kidney patient dying after a full life.
At any rate this entire post is a black and white fallacy. You can't separate the medical lysenkoism of gender and race ideology from the care of other Americans. The cancer grows and infects all areas of care.
From a utilitarian standpoint, I think trans stuff is a very big deal. Kaufmann's CSPI report convinced me that there's a huge correlation between "acceptance of trans" and mental illness (and i believe it's a causation). Of the 49 million children in the US, probably 10-20 million have mental health issues that meaningfully decrease QOL.
Of course, stopping anti-capitalism would be a bigger triumph, but that's a difficult goal.
Yes. With respect to anti-capitalist sentiment, the cat's been out of the bag for the past 200 years so all we can do at this point is damage control. The whole point of opposing gender ideology at its inception is making sure the toothpaste never leaves the tube to begin with.
„ Let’s say you oppose the entire trans agenda. You think it’s all based on lies, and that every child undergoing gender-affirming care is a tragedy. How much should you prioritize the issue compared to everything else in the world? I would argue not that highly.“
This is wrong. It’s the biggest issue.
Gender affirming care isn’t a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, or not one made without pressure to affirm. It’s basically accepting the child’s word for it, which can lead to unneeded surgery. A medical profession that’s promoting unnecessary surgery isn’t going to be very popular.
„ In 2021, around 42,000 kids between 6 and 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a 75% increase from the previous year. “
This would indicate a social contagion, and some countries are trying to make it illegal for professionals or parents to even stop the process.
75% increase per year and pretty soon we are talking about big numbers. Every child has multiple relations, and friends and parents if friends.
Besides that the statement that trans women are women leads to all kinds of problems for „cis“ women. In extreme all female segregated sex spaces are vulnerable. Sports, which might be the most visible, is not exempted. If male athletes win competitions in the Olympics or Wimbledon then the general population will take the blue pill.
As yet we are at the beginning of that the craziness might entail. It might be that cultural factors will prohibit it getting any stronger, but as yet there’s little political pushback. In the U.K. theres some attempt at a pushback but the Labour Party are all in.
"Imagine it increases exponentially forever" I don't think is a good argument. Already the media coverage has changed, even the Reuters article says there's no evidence for puberty blockers for minors. And if you look at the data in the article, the increases in top surgery and hormone blockers in 2021 was very small over 2020. There's a natural limit to this stuff.
The natural limit comes from people loudly and vocally opposing it and criticizing it, but at the same time, you're arguing in this article that people shouldn't care about it. If critics were silent on transgenderism and spent their time advocating for legalized kidney sales instead, perhaps the trans phenomenon would have much more room to grow.
I would guess there’s a good chance the opposite is true. Conservatives focusing on the issue makes liberals and the medical community more absolutist. That would be why it’s gone furthest in America, where the culture war dominates everything. The limit is human nature, not the conservative movement.
Wouldn't this suggest that opposing socialism and defending free markets is a bad idea, because it will make the socialists more absolutist in response?
No, I think culture war dynamics are different than economic issues.
You believe that socialists are more open to persuasion on their economic ideology than proponents of gender ideology are on their cultural one? Not necessarily saying I disagree, just curious why this would be the case.
It isn't just conservatives. Over 80% of parents object to the child transitioning and over 75% agreed with Desantis on the gender ideology in schools. The elections will show a huge % of liberal Americans, still terrified of the gender ideologues on the left, will cross over and vote for conservatives/Republicans. You can see even the comments section of the NYT is against the radical gender stuff and they all know families who had kids transitioned at school without the parents even knowing. If a critical mass of liberals votes Dems, or even temporarily allies with Matt Walsh in his campaigns against child mutilation the captured institutions will be able to question the gender the ideology. It's already happening in Europe and it will happen in the US.
I didn’t say exponentially forever, however I’m fairly sure it’s not going to slow down much either despite that blip. This idea is one that hasn’t gone away, despite the absurdities. Just last year there was a huge campaign to ban trans conversion therapy (aka gender dysphoria therapy) across Europe. I think France voted the law in. Britain pushed back but labour and the SNP are pushing it.
In fact gender woo woo is part of US foreign policy worldwide and this will continue absent a Revolution in progressive thinking.
Biden was barely in the door when he published the “Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World”
I mean that’s even the alphabet soup right there. So the US, under Democratic regimes at least, is committed to this philosophy. It is all in on this. Even European nations will get lectured, from Hungary to the U.K.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/02/04/memorandum-advancing-the-human-rights-of-lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer-and-intersex-persons-around-the-world/
This is the brand new thing US cultural imperialism is promoting, ahead of democracy and capitalism. Way ahead of free speech.
For that reason it’s hardly going to be extinguished back in its homeland.
I didn’t say or imply that it would increase exponentially *forever*, rather that the risk of not caring about it is allowing the number to increase to a potentially worryingly high figure.
What exactly do you think the natural limit is and do you think reaching it would be acceptable or tolerable?
It potentially could increase to a worryingly high figure, but you could make this argument for a lot of things. Anti-capitalist sentiment is growing at a worrying rate, and history teaches that the upper limit on that is extremely high. Of all the things that have the potential to keep increasing at a high rate, gender-affirming care seems to be one of the least likely. I just don’t think there’s a lot of people these treatments can appeal to.
Call me paranoid if you must, but I don’t think it’s farfetched to imagine a near future in which at least 25% of kids are diagnosed as suffering from gender dysphoria and are prescribed puberty blockers, hormones and/or surgery by medical professionals who financially stand to benefit from the procedures and have ideologically “taken the blue pill” as another commenter put it.
If you think that sounds crazy look at the tens of millions of children put on “medication” for ADD because they are bored in school, much to the benefit of child psychiatrists and big pharma.
ADD medication is fun, this stuff is not.
Not sure how to interpret that, plenty of kids I knew growing up told me that they didn't find taking Ritalin or Adderall "fun". Likewise, there are more and more detransitioners who certainly don't find detransitioning fun but thought transitioning was a great idea at the time.
If you actually have ADD, Ritalin isn't "fun", it really does allow you to focus. Now testosterone, that is fun! Women taking T often get this aggressive euphoria, this new physical confidence. I'm reminded of when my father was prescribed testosterone. My mother quickly insisted he quit because he got kind of manic and really obnoxious on it--so arrogant and aggressive that she basically said, "T or me". Testosterone is illegal for weightlifters because of its danger, but it's fine for little girls because they like it? No.
I'm too lazy to look up the figures again for a random substack comment, but if I recall, LGBT identification has roughly doubled in each generation since the 60's, and has now reached 20% among zoomers. So, there does appear to be potential for exponential increase in this stuff over generations. Transgenderism seems to follow an even more alarming trend if viewed in these terms, as it has much more than doubled in the past 20 years.
The numbers might seem small now, but if allowed to proceed unchecked for another 50 years? Maybe Hanania is right and it would fizzle out even with no opposition, but we don't actually have any historical precedent to look at for this, so who knows.
>There's a natural limit to this stuff.
Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man.
Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.
Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.
Your assumption that marriage is necessary to reproduction of productive citizens is fallacious.
What he said. That’s why it’s so important to nip this in the bud while we still can.
Fwiw you can simultaneously argue/campaign for legalizing kidney markets and opposing gender ideology on the front lines.
To be fair, kidney transplants are not on most people's RADAR.
How do you get people to care about numbers? Only nerds seem to care.
This is because people are not utilitarians, and shouldn't be. Morality requires first principles, whether you believe those are derived from evolutionary psychology, religion, some combination of both, whatever. Utilitarianism lacks a first principle.
Kidney sales violate some deep unspoken first principle--there's just something that is too wrong about it for people to accept. If this sounds silly, consider behaviors such as necrophilia and non-reproductive incest. From a pure utilitarian perspective, these behaviors harm no one, and should therefore be allowed. But if you say you wouldn't be irked by them, and would freely associate with people who engage in these practices with no concerns about them, you're probably lying.
But we allow people to sell their plasma, and most people support surrogacy.
Matt Yglesias supports a kidney market, and he outlined some guidelines that made me more comfortable with the idea.
> A medical profession that’s promoting unnecessary surgery isn’t going to be very popular.
The facts aren't with you on this. Look into prophylactic removal of wisdom teeth.
Really misguided. If some folks bring back Aztec human sacrifice but they only flay alive and cut the heart out of one person per year this same analysis would say “eh, don’t worry about it, it’s just one death per year”. But that’s not how moral atrocities work. ANY human sacrifice is too much. ANY children being mutilated for delusional transcult reasons is too many.
That's irrational thinking. Dead people are dead, with all the effects that has, regardless of who or what killed them.
That's irrational thinking. Who or what killed a dead person should have an enormous amount of influence over how much we worry about it.
The main issue here is that you will lose your job for talking about these issues or not using correct pronouns. The other issue is that blue states have passed laws against "conversion therapy" which is actually defined as telling a boy he is a boy if he thinks he's a girl. Within ten years the school will decide that your kids are trans and inject them with hormones against your will.
Exactly. This extends well beyond the individual families or children making these decisions. The political cult that is the LGBTQ movement is more akin to a fascist political takeover than being dangerous to our kids because a few hundred cut their genitalia off.
You don’t seem to really understand the liberal perspective here. Supporting trans people generally, and kids specifically, isn’t about striking a blow against the patriarchy or subverting gender roles. That’s framing it how a conservative imagines it might be if liberals are a uniform block of scheming sneaksters. The reality is that liberals, and empathetic people generally, support trans people because trans people are human beings who should be free to express their gender however they wish to and pursue gender-affirming medical care if they choose. That freedom should be no more controversial than more traditional gender-affirming care like hair restoration, plastic surgery, and breast augmentation. If any of this threatens the patriarchy, that’s just an added bonus.
Note that this is about *children.* The standard libertarian arguments are no longer so simple - including when it comes to other forms of body modification - when it's about minors.
You’re ignoring the slippery slope argument.
If opponents of gender ideology instead focus all their energy on legalizing kidneys and gender ideology remains unopposed suppose the number of minors undergoing permanently irreversible medical procedures doubles every year. That’s a grim scenario indeed to contemplate, especially for parents.
Many--if not most--opponents of gender ideology want to nip it in the bud before it’s too late, and it’s understandable why.
Plus we have to stop it while we still are allowed to criticize it
Matt, when has there ever been a lack of criticism even animosity to gender divergent individuals? When has it ever been "great" for trans folk? To the person who proposed "contagion" theory I'm reminded of the graph of left handedness after we stopped beating the "sinister" out of people.
Further, it's totally possible it is "contagious" but not in a social sense. Perhaps there is endocrinal issues from micro-plastics in like ever human's body and found in placenta and foetal tissue.
What's most interesting to me is that there isn't a stronger critique of gender theory on it's own premises. And maybe that shows some of the critique made now is misinformed. If the goal is something actually "post-gender" why are surgeries being preformed that suggest "gender" and "genitalia" are linked?
Because the actual goal is to just destroy traditional morality. Being self-contradictory assists in this endeavor. An ideology that refuses to make sense in the first place precludes any possibility of dialogue or debate.
There's no actual goal. Or rather there's a bunch of different goals. The medical establishment wants to make money. Leftists want to be 'on the right side of history' and support people they see as unfortunate. Adult trans activists want to make it more common and accepted so they are not seen as freaks; perhaps some really do believe all these teen girls have the same condition as them. Teen girls - and to a lesser extent boys - want to stand out and at the same time fit in, and increase their status within their subculture.
The fact gender dysphoria seems to have switched to affecting more girls than boys is an argument against the endocrine disruptors theory, as the effects of micro-plastics we know about/suspect seem to be feminising rather than masculinising.
All of these people may have these different individual goals, yes. But if we look at the Woke religion as a whole, its only true unifying principle seems to be "whatever harms/inverts traditional moral standards." This fits to a large extent with Hanania's theory that a lot of this is driven by status-seeking, as many of these are people who perceive, correctly or not, that they would be denied status under the "old" standards society operated by.
As far as the theory that the trans phenomenon is somehow caused by micro-plastics..... I don't even know what to say. That's literally Alex Jones tier conspiracy theorizing. "They're putting chemicals in the water that make everyone gay!"
I think it's also the logic of progressivism. For people who desire to fight injustice, some new injustice must always be found. If there are no significant issues to deal with, they tear society apart instead.
There's nothing implausible or conspiracyish about the microplastics theory. No one is putting chemicals in the water to make people gay, chemicals just end up there and have unpredictable effects. But if that was the case, we should see a rise in people being gay/lesbian as well, and what we are seeing instead is a rise in social identities like bi and non-binary, which don't necessarily indicate any actual difference in people, just in how they see/describe themselves.
Slippery slope is acknowledged to be a bad argument.
"The risks to a kidney donor are very small, relative to the fact that they can help save a life. Apparently, most of us are walking around with a spare kidney we don’t really need". Humans don't have "spare kidneys" any more than they have spare eyes and spare ears.
Exactly. That's why donating a kidney is viewed as such an extreme demonstration of altruism, especially, when donated to a stranger. Everyone knows that person has put themselves at risk of future health concerns.
I wonder how close we are to growing kidneys in a lab.
You say this without any apparent knowledge of kidney donation. It's not risk free, and it's not quite a "spare kidney", but it's a small downside relative to how much of a difference it makes for the recipient.
Yes, you do have a “spare” kidney.
The evolutionary reason for having two kidneys is not the same as having two ears or two eyes. This is an incorrect comparison. You have parallel sets of sensory organs so that you can use the different signals sent to them to establish depth. That is, to enable depth perception in vision and judge the distance away of a particular sound.
The evolutionary reason for doubling kidneys is because one occasionally fails. A single kidney is just as capable of performing the job as two kidneys. It’s a spare in the exact sense of having a spare tire. You carry a spare not because it is always necessary, but because it is occasionally invaluable.
In the modern age, where dialysis is available for temporary life-saving care, and under a medical regime where kidney donors are automatically put at the top of the kidney donation waitlist should they need it, that value is clearly best served saving other’s lives.
A good market would allow the altruistic and enterprising to sieze some of that value for themselves, while generating net positive benefits.
You could theoretically donate/sell your cornea as well (although I think we have plenty from cadavers). You would have mildly decreased peripheral vision, decreased depth perception (your brain could still use monocular cues to perceive depth to some degree), and be at higher risk of blindness. But it wouldn't affect your systemic health at all. There are some real potential health problems from having one kidney, like ckd and hypertension.
But who cares? Let's allow organ sales idgaf. Not my biggest problem with RH's essay. But u may want to look up potential health issues before u donate a kidney. You would still be a hero in my book if u did it anyway :).
I’ve actually already been through the pre-screening process, which I why I feel quite comfortable claiming that the long-term health risks for healthy individuals are negligible.
It’s much safer than drinking, smoking, driving fast, professional boxing, American football, radiation exposure to astronauts, scuba diving, etc.
Nothing has zero risk, but kidney donation is has much lower risk than many activities people are perfectly fine with.
I agree that people should probably be allowed to sell their kidney (one!), however it’s not quite so simple a process. It is not without risk for both the donor (surgical/perioperative risk, plus small increase in kidney failure later on, esp in AA men) and recipient, and while it usually provides some extra life years to the recipient, it’s definitely not a return to normal health or a guarantee of extra time because they will be on serious immunosuppression for the duration someone else’s organ is in their body. There is always the threat of graft rejection, graft vs host disease, serious infections from immunosuppression, etc. That kind of death often involves dying hard.
I think it’s a bit morally unsound to have old rich people getting preferred access to kidneys (or maybe even access at all, once you’ve progressed to kidney failure it’s usually because you have a host of other costly major medical issues or one very serious one- add age to that and it seems silly/futile bc their other problems will probably significantly shorten their lifespan- but I think as long as the recipient can pay for all their own medical care plus any costs the donor may incur if they have complications, including later costly complications like kidney failure, then so be it), but I don’t think it would really affect younger people waiting on transplant lists because the people selling their kidneys would be unlikely to offer them up for free donation.
I suppose the best way would be a website or app that matches buyers/sellers by ABO/RH/HLA and price, in sort of a Tinder-type fashion. The donors need full medical work ups and antibody profiles for matching, and I guess along the way clinicians could screen for all the stuff you don’t want in a donor (drugs/EtOH addiction, intellectual or psychiatric issues that make informed consent dubious, other disqualifying medical issues, etc).
Similarly complicated is the idea that major surgery should be offered to kids suffering from gender dysphoria. There definitely is a small portion of (more boys) that do truly have the disorder, and may (mentally, definitely not physically bc an enormous amount of potential risk exists that hasn’t been studied bc this is all pretty new) benefit from blocking puberty and later gender reassignment surgery. Otherwise they will (almost) never look like women, and I can imagine that’s pretty difficult when you really feel like a woman.
However, genital surgery in particular has major risks (it’s a complex surgery in an inherently contaminated area with higher infection risk), and effects on things like bone density/osteoporosis, cardiovascular health are unknown. Infertility however, is a known. As is difficult or impossible orgasm achievement. How do you adequately explain that to a child/tween? -there’s no context for them. Seems like an ethical gray zone, no clear correct answer, so should the market be allowed to work itself out? Morally I think the answer is no, the medical community should err on the conservative side unless there’s good data showing benefit from risky interventions (Scandinavia changing policy is pretty good indicator there isn’t). Also politicians getting involved is a major problem. The politicization of Covid led to prolonged school closures, ineffective lockdowns that disproportionately harmed the poor, vaccine mandates and discrimination, and further tribalism and unrest. Couldn’t have been managed more poorly if actively trying to screw it all up, esp bc major medical institutions ceded to politicians (AAP and CDC come to the top of my mind).
I'm not sure conservatives are all that pro-market anymore. The trend seems to be, among the NatCons and others, to value tradition more highly, libertarianism's on the decline, and I doubt kidney markets are going to make it anytime soon. There's too much revulsion at the thought of poor people selling their kidneys for food, and if you believe Jonathan Haidt conservatives have extra-strong 'ick' factors.
I admire your willingness to say things that (judging by the other comments here) are so clearly unpopular with your readership. (I would say that, though, since in this case I happen to mostly agree with you.)
“If you have to choose between living under a government that doesn’t believe in gender roles and one that doesn’t believe in markets, you would have to be ignorant or a real crank to choose the socialist patriarchy.”
If I had to choose...yes. Unfortunately, the trans issue is symbolic of lots of crazy left stuff, so we get busing, affirmative action, woke totalitarianism and anti-market bias. It’s not all tied up neatly with a philosophically coherent bow but it’s the typical package.
Like with most "out-of-control Wokeness" issues, it's easy to write off trans kids as an outlier until it comes to YOUR door. And the "It Could be YOUR kids next" element plays on median parental anxieties.
That said, it's obnoxious to see people politically agitated about it who don't actually have any skin in the game and haven't been personally affected by it. I know a guy who's sister transitioned, and his attitude is sad resignation that she got mutilated by the 2010s equivalent of a lobotomy, the trendy new radical surgical cure-all that doesn't in fact cure anything.