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It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

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261–270 of 704 posts

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#261
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you edit it, it will save without modification (auto-stripping of certain things happens only on first save) - though in this case it's probably better just to remove 'stop that' altogether?

The "Stop that!" is part of the paper's title

Yes.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#262
post #33

What's interesting to me is that if we're able to accept the idea that mass social media-induced illness can be developed just by virtue of video watching TikTok or YouTube, then this opens new doors to examining the behaviour of other illnesses such as gender dysphoria that are statistically over represented. This is probably going to get downvoted to oblivion, because nobody wants to confront the idea that we can _…

Disclaimer: I am transgender and i have done actual research on transgenderism a couple years back. I have seen this firsthand on some acquaintances. Social media has a massive influence on people and there are some persons specifically that have a weaker sense of identity (usually associated with poor development or some mental disorder like schizophrenia, STPD, or BPD), and those persons can be influenced to the po…

Parent might be falsely inferring an over-representation of GD from the statistical discrepancy between younger and older age groups of those who identify as LGTBQ+.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#263
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter hypothesis. For the last several decades society put massive pressure on kids to conform to heteronormativity. With these pressures lessening more and more people are feeling empowered to explore their sexuality. Social media is absolutely involved, but we really don't know what the base rate would be in a society devoid of this kind of pressure.

As a parent I have no idea what you are trying to say with this idea of pushing "heteronormativity" - I don't and don't know any parents that push anything sexual let alone encouraging kids to explore sexuality .. they are kids and will be kids until they mature and begin to feel the urge to explore. This normalising of sexualising of children is abhorrent. Edit: the voting on this comment is crazy.. the number of HN…

I think the downvotes are coming because you’re insisting on treating this as a question of sexualization. Gender is distinct and it’s reinforced early on - my son is 5 and most of his classmates have had things like “pink and skirts and dolls are for girls”, “trucks and blue and guns are for boys” established as the norm for years. That’s not perfectly reliable - we know more sparkly princesses who climb trees and drive race cars than I did at his age - but it’s _everywhere_, and the religious conservatives who call any acknowledgment of LGBTQ people “grooming” would 100% be locking and loading if even 10% of that reinforcement energy was going into LGBTQ acceptance.

Also note that none of this is about having sex: it’s about telling kids which archetypes are available for them as grownups. If we want to talk about sex, however, look at the degree to which girl’s clothing mimics the styles of adult women even at the expense of practicality for the things kids actually do and how many stories even for young children revolve around the major life goal being an exclusive relationship with a man. Again, the stuff people are complaining about now is an order of magnitude less than what kids are already getting to reinforce traditional gender norms.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#264
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a parent I have no idea what you are trying to say with this idea of pushing "heteronormativity" - I don't and don't know any parents that push anything sexual let alone encouraging kids to explore sexuality .. they are kids and will be kids until they mature and begin to feel the urge to explore. This normalising of sexualising of children is abhorrent. Edit: the voting on this comment is crazy.. the number of HN…

Gender identity and sexual orientation are different concepts. Exploring gender identity is not the same as exploring sexuality. Children are constantly exploring identity, as I'm sure you have observed. For instance, I am a straight man, but when I was a child I sometimes stole my mother's lipstick and tried to put it on, or I would play with Barbie dolls. I saw that other people incorporated these activities in the…

No post body was provided.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#265
post #33

What's interesting to me is that if we're able to accept the idea that mass social media-induced illness can be developed just by virtue of video watching TikTok or YouTube, then this opens new doors to examining the behaviour of other illnesses such as gender dysphoria that are statistically over represented. This is probably going to get downvoted to oblivion, because nobody wants to confront the idea that we can _…

This is a dangerous rhetorical maneuver, though, because it:

1. Accepts the existence and influence of social-media-induced illness:

2. Does not rigorously define the condition, it's symptoms, scope or mechanism:

3. Therefore, leaving us free to apply it to gender identity or really, anything at all.

Trumpism? SMII. Wokeness? SMII. Pro-union sentiment? You're not gonna believe this, also a SMII.

And once you call something a "disease" the implication is that it should be "cured" which gets scary quick.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get it that this stuff is confusing and can be hard to make sense of at first, but gender identity and sexuality are completely different things. Yeah, but the comment OP is responding to was explicitly about letting kids " explore their sexuality ".

> With these pressures lessening more and more people are feeling empowered to explore their sexuality. Emphasis mine. The comment is not, in fact, about letting children explore their sexuality, but people . (When you consider the parent of that comment, that still does not add context implying that we're talking about kids.) The only part of the comment which discusses children is this: > For the last several decad…

You chopped the one statement into different "parts". Here is the comment in question:

> For the last several decades society put massive pressure on kids to conform to heteronormativity. With these pressures lessening more and more people are feeling empowered to explore their sexuality.

In a maximally generous interpretation, you could say that the "kids" in the first half and the "people" in the second half of the statement are completely different subjects. I think that is a bit of a stretch, though.

"For years I have been pruning the tomato plants in my garden. Now, I just let the _plants_ grow".

Anyone reading that would assume "plants" refers to the aforementioned tomato plants, not cucumbers.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gender identity and sexual orientation are different concepts. Exploring gender identity is not the same as exploring sexuality. Children are constantly exploring identity, as I'm sure you have observed. For instance, I am a straight man, but when I was a child I sometimes stole my mother's lipstick and tried to put it on, or I would play with Barbie dolls. I saw that other people incorporated these activities in the…

> My parents didn't like me playing with Barbie dolls; they explicitly told me that it wasn't something boys did. Same with me, but let me ask you a question. Were you the sort of kid that actually listens to their parents? Because i didn't, and most of my peers didn't, either.

If it's your parents and your peers and virtually all popular media, it's massively naive to think that isn't going to have a normalizing effect on people.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#268
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've not noticed the pink for girls/blue for boys distinction?

How is that “ massive pressure on kids to conform to heteronormativity”?

That distinction goes back to decisions made by a few department store managers around WWII. It’s nothing but a cultural norm reinforced everywhere so pervasively most of us aren’t even aware of the pressure.

https://www.thelist.com/32342/real-reasons-behind-blue-boys-...

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#269
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a parent I have no idea what you are trying to say with this idea of pushing "heteronormativity" - I don't and don't know any parents that push anything sexual let alone encouraging kids to explore sexuality .. they are kids and will be kids until they mature and begin to feel the urge to explore. This normalising of sexualising of children is abhorrent. Edit: the voting on this comment is crazy.. the number of HN…

Terms like “heteronormativity” and “cisgender” are just ways they attempt to marginalize normal people and their normal sexual development. These people who use these terms are objectively and statistically outliers in society. And since they can’t convince anyone to accept their abnormality, they instead try to change language to remove the idea of there being a standard/normal baseline. They think that because you’…

Interestingly, newspeak was about removing words from language so that certain ideas couldn't be expressed. It was explicitly not about adding words to the language, and certainly not about adding words to convey additional nuance and precision where there was previously none.

It seems to me like you're actually arguing to try and remove words that people have introduced to the language, and to erase the nuances they convey, because you don't find it to be "normal" or "natural". What is normal or natural is entirely subjective, and varies across cultures and across time, and in any case we don't generally yoke ourselves to what is natural (we are, after all, speaking through an artificial medium because we find it advantageous, and though we weren't born with wings we often find it advantageous to fly.)

It might be interesting to give 1984 another read.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#270
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no denying that gender dysphoria exists and has always existed. OP made the claim that it might be statistically over-represented. Looking at the Hijra example, it looks like the Hijra demographics are around 0.5-1% of the population. In the latest polls [0], the proportion of Gen Z that identify as transgender is over 2%. Is there repression/stigma in South Asia keeping some people in the closet? Is the cult…

And what the fuck would be the problem if GenZ had an "over-representation" of LGBT?! We don't live in the dark ages, almost all Western constitutions have some sort of "freedom of expression" on their books. Just let people live their lifes however they want to do it, as long as they don't harm anybody. Trans people or kissing gays on the street don't harm anyone but the feelings of some poor Conservatives who are s…

One potential danger is that some of the more extreme therapies for gender transition are permanent and work best when used early. If a person's trans orientation is the result of a poorly formed sense of identity, as alleged by the article, there's a stronger chance they may change their mind later, after irreversible harm has been wrought.

In other words, there's a chance that some kids may not be "really" trans, but rather attention-seeking or mentally ill. And for those kids, transitioning would, in fact, be harmful in the long run.

Do we, as a society, have an obligation to prevent these children and young adults from harming themselves in this way?

I don't have a firm answer because it's a difficult and emotional subject, but I think it's extreme to pretend this is not an issue, and equally extreme to encourage kids for whom it might not be safe to transition.

Perhaps the informal controls we have in place prior to gender reassignment surgery are already adequate to filter out these vulnerable kids. Perhaps there are other interventions I'm not aware of that are already in use. But I don't see the harm in discussing and exploring whether there is a proportion of the trans population that is, in fact, suffering from social or mental illness and not actually a more innate form of gender dysphoria.

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