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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • Gonna have to disagree here. The social aspect of it all is just as important of the medical aspect. While there are trans issues that are mostly medical in nature, there are equally trans issues that are more social in nature.

    I’m not sure what contexts you’ve seen truscum being used in, but from what I know it’s a term used for people who insist on a medical diagnosis in order to be trans. The problem with this, imo, is twofold. There’s a long history of medical gatekeeping that enforced cisheteronormativity in order to get a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, leaving out all other forms of self-identity (among a whole host of philosophical issues). And the second is just the lack of understanding and research of the broader medical community. Treatment guidelines are all over the place, often misguided, and usually inadequate to achieve the goals of the patient.

    Truscum rhetoric often reinforces cisheteronormativity which is mostly antithetical to what being trans is about in the first place. That’s not to say that the trans community doesn’t struggle with medical diagnoses or that that’s not important, but to use a diagnosis as the benchmark of what being trans is, is usually needlessly exclusionary.


  • Hbomberguy makes long videos yes, but he doesn’t make six hours long videos. He still makes his points concise and presents them in interesting and entertaining ways. Only in his last video does he cross the threshold into 3 hours long videos, and in that one he even says, in the video, that there was an entire section that he wrote and edited and then cut out because it muddied the point of his video.

    Maybe it’s a question of where to draw the line, but I think hbomberguy is very much not the norm for long-form content creators. And I do not appreciate having long videos for the sake of having a video be long.


  • Maybe it’s because I’m risk averse or maybe I’m just not as well read on it, but I do personally think it’s generally riskier than other transition surgeries.

    For vaginoplasty, even if the job is botched, you’ll still be able to walk normally. FFS, you’ll still be able to talk and eat and smell normally. Breast augmentation, you can still lift your arms normally. Plus since these three are the “main” options available, there’s more people doing it and more people experienced in handling the complications.

    For vocal surgery, if the job is botched, you can permanently damage your voice and not be able to shout. And even then it still takes a degree of voice training to get a good result (althought it does lower the bar). The relative rarity of the procedure also does not inspire me to take that kind of risk.

    I’m open to being convinced that it’s not as risky as I think it is, but I do think that it’s a pretty risky option. Especially when you compare it to voice training on its own, which is way harder to fuck up. And voice training will get most people across the line.


  • This study seems to me to be a retreading of old ground by cis people. Like I can appreciate getting more data that yes, trans people aren’t freaks, but the study just seems like a massive “duh”.

    Why did they think hrt changed vocal chords in trans women in the first place? It’s pretty well known that hrt cannot take away the things that first puberty already changed. I also don’t like how the article presents voice feminization surgery as if it’s a common and normal choice for most trans women. Even beyond the implication that trans people need surgery to be successful in their transition, voice feminization surgery is extremely risky and is only ever recommended in extreme cases. If they couldn’t even do that amount of research, it doesn’t make me feel confident that the study is all that worthwhile to think about.

    Secondly, why only focus on trans women? It’d be more interesting if they included trans men in the picture since on their side of the fence, hrt actually does affect their voice. It would be interesting if the study compared their trans participants with cis benchmarks at all, actually. Maybe the study itself does that where the article does not, but for reason #1 I don’t feel like it’s worth my time to check.

    Lastly, the actual results of the study are pretty “duh”. Just by the physics of how the human voice works, it’s pretty easy to see that yes, having a breathier and higher pitched voice will lead to having thinner vocal folds. Because having thinner vocal folds is what causes those effects on the voice in the first place. The study mixes up the cause and effect here, so it isn’t exactly groundbreaking research. What would’ve been more appropriate to examine is the vocal chords at rest compared to either cis benchmarks or the speaking voice average. Since the conventional wisdom is that voice training can’t really change your voice at rest, that would be more interesting to look at.

    Overally I appreciate having more data about trans people, but didn’t find the study or article to be particularly knowledgeable about trans people in the first place.



  • Not sure how old you are or how jaded by society you are just yet, but conservatives don’t come to their positions from facts and logic. They hold their positions because conservative media has fanned their fear of the unknown. Conservatives are deeply emotional, and aren’t going to be convinced by any kind of studies or data to renounce their positions.

    To provide an example, the infamous 41% statistic was referenced in this study. 41% referring to the stat that 41% of trans people have contemplated suicide ever. Conservatives don’t take this stat as an indicator that “hey things are kinda fucked up. we should be nicer to trans people!”, they take it to mean that “all trans people are mentally ill psychos and shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions for themselves or exist. You can’t be mentally ill if you’re not trans and this stat proves it!”

    OP, your heart might have been in the right place, but my opinion is that it’s pointless to try to convince conservatives that they’re wrong.


  • Well, that’s the thing. I didn’t jump to that conclusion. I can see how the way I worded it may make it seem that way though.

    And that passage is part of my point. The title makes it seem like being poor will make you more likely to be trans, while the study itself in fact says the opposite. That there are a number of different explanations for their observations, and that one shouldn’t draw the conclusion that being poor makes you trans. The title of the article is clickbait at best, and intentionally misleading at worst.


  • title is some crazy unsubstantiated clickbait, and the article itself is a massive nothing burger. Basically, there are more trans people recorded in the poorer parts of the UK, and they generally have poorer mental health than cis people. Which is entirely unsurprising and unhelpful at this broad of an analysis.

    To be clearer, the distinction I’m drawing is that the title implies causation when all the study is is a correlation. “There are more trans people in poorer areas” is not the same statement as “poor people are more likely to be trans.”






  • Okay that makes more sense. I do think that “online dating is awful” is a very different statement from “well it used to be good but now it sucks” and the two phrases come with very different qualifications and conclusions.

    The former phrase is a pretty blanket judgement on this aspect of society in relation to the whole. But the latter statement has more to do with the enshittification of the internet and the capitalist systems woven inbetween. The latter statement is a historical comparison while the former is a value judgment of society.

    As for your opinion itself, I don’t have any strong feelings one way or another. The nature of the internet has paradoxically connected more people than ever before while simultaneously isolating us more than ever before. I personally don’t think that online dating really differs from that mold. I think that this is one small part of a larger problem where capitalism has commodified almost every aspect of humanity, which is accelerated by the internet.