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Gunnar_Zarncke comments on Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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In the spirit of admitting when I am wrong, I would like to say that when /u/Azathoth123/ said that schools were encouraging children to be gay and transsexual, I thought he was being paranoid. I thought that schools were preaching tolerance, and this had been misinterpreted.
I was wrong, and he was right
Also, the strategy of asking children whether any of their friends are trans is bizarre, because (a) if about 0.1% of adults are trans, then you really wouldn't expect any children to be trans unless the population of the school is gigantic, regardless of the school's attitude to tolerance and (b) children should not be discussing their friend's private secrets with strangers.
I have nothing against transexuals, and in fact they seem like obvious allies of transhumanists. But, unlike homosexuality, 'being trapped in the wrong body' clearly causes a lot of psychological distress - otherwise people wouldn't undergo serious surgery to correct it (although this is not necessarly true of people who don't identify as either gender). As long as there is a possibility that it has partially psychological roots (apparently twin studies show 62% heritability), priming people at a young age (10) to induce gender identity disorder is insane.
Edit & clarification:
I think gender identity disorder (of the 'trapped in a body' form, not of the 'not identifying as either gender' form) is a mental disease because it causes suffering. This doesn't mean that transgender people need to feel bad about being trans, because that will just make matters worse. I've met people who are trans and I know people who suffering from other mental illnesses and I hope I'm not coming across as insensitive but I just don't see the point in mincing my words.
Edit 2:
Its been pointed out to me that these claims are allegations made by biased people who can't be trusted, and that even if the allegations are true, I still overstated the case.
Also, I'm defending a statement Azeroth123 made (schools are encouraging kids to be gay - although I'm not so sure about this now) while not endorsing his conclusions, which also might make what I have written seem confusing or even contradictory.
If inducing trans and gay were that easy it would be as easy to cure it. It isn't.. Trans is so incurable that despite the side-effects it is considered much easier to change the body than the mind.
But I agree with your second paragraph. I'd say that there is such a thing as information hazard. You need anti-memes for such. And best before being exposed to the info-hazard. Kind like an innoculation. At least as a minor when you don't have a sufficiently general mindset to dispose with such ideas easily (stronger immune system).
That depends on the motivations and rationality of those doing the considering.
I don't think this follows. While it is true that one expects that something like that should be true in general, we know that as far as sex and gender issues, weird things can happen. In particular, sexual fetishes can apparently arise from fairly innocuous stimuli and once in place are extremely difficult to remove.
Agreed. Seligman actually discusses fetishes and gives a convincing account. The problem being that the innocuous stimulus triggers a chain of repeated self-inforcement.
My model is that there's a sliding scale of how you'd identify your gender, and there's strong social pressure to conform it with your sex. As a result, only people who strongly want to identify their gender otherwise will. Another way to think of it is that the reason it's so incurable is that society automatically cures all the easy and medium cases.
There's instructions on LessWrong for how to become bisexual. If it's that easy for a heterosexual person to become bisexual, shouldn't it be easy for a homosexual person to become bisexual? It's the same issue here.