Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood

I apologize if what I shared sounded like a "scare quote". I was just responding to the question about whether this will be an available diagnosable drug anytime soon. It is really unlikely and there are some basic intuitive reasons why without going deep into any research.

Also, I didn't say I was unaware of anything in this field recently. I was replying to the specific individuals' research I mentioned earlier. I've seen plenty meta analyses and case studies but you need way more for this to be a viable medical prescription.

Finally, none of what I said is a statement on my opinion about whether this should be adopted or pursued more aggressively in medicine. You'd have a hard time finding anyone that wouldn't agree that prevention would be cheaper in the long run but that's not what you need to prove to a hospital system and the FDA. You need to have multiple phases of clinical trials and then convince a medical system that addition dedicated clinics are worth setting up for this.

There's so many people on earth that someone is going to be turned on from everything, but is getting turned on by your own hand actually common? I have never heard this one before.

the meme of "groomers" is just alt-right shorthand for anyone who holds the first viewpoint described by OP -- it's an epithet used against people they dislike, not an accurate criticism to be taken literally

for a good illustration of this, examine the politics of people who organize, attend, and participate in actual underage beauty pageants in the US -- the last US president, for example

it's not surprising, because the point of beauty pageants is to reinforce the conservative stereotype that a woman's job is to stand there and look pretty

you'll also note that, as mentioned above, conservatives don't apply the term to breastaurants when children are present there -- I didn't see a response to that, and it bears repeating

Calling gender affirming care "gay conversion therapy" is a disingenuous tactic deployed by anti-trans activists. One of the most common things that parents who disown their trans kids say is "why can't you just be gay" so pitching it as conversion therapy is very... odd.

You even illustrate this point yourself when you say:

> Very few conservatives in 2023 are riled up by homosexuality.

but also...

> the current trend of medicalizing gender as a form of gay conversion therapy

Kenneth Zucker's whole practice was geared, in fact, toward converting trans kids into gay kids. He says himself in his writing that being homosexual is preferable to being transsexual, since the latter requires medical intervention. The thing is, trans people and gay people have different needs and desires. They aren't the same group. So it's wrong to try to force gay kids to be trans or trans kids to be gay. But these days what you'll find is trans kids being pushed to be gay. A perfect inversion of the image you've painted.

The reason I "conflate" transsexuality (the word has two s's, also nobody uses it anymore, you should just say 'being transgender') with being gay is because the very same arguments and tactics used against gay people in the 80's - it's a mental illness, a social contagion, they're grooming kids, etc... - is being used again against trans people today. There was even a bathroom and women's sports panic in the 80's around lesbians in women's sports "preying" on straight girls.

Trans people had been considered merely a part of the gay community, along with other gender non-conforming people who may today identify as non-binary, until relatively recently. The fight for gay rights benefitted trans people, but we're at a point now where they have their own struggles, like the struggle for medical treatment.

It's a struggle that's been fought since the 70's when Janice Raymond wrote "The Transsexual Empire" and worked with the Reagan administration to make it more difficult for trans people to get medical treatment. Nothing about it is new, except for the alliance between conservative Christians and secular anti-trans activists - an unholy union if I've ever seen one.

The common thread between homophobia and transphobia is a dislike of gender non-conformity. Since the days of Ernst Rohm [0] there has been an element of the gay community convinced that gender non-conforming gays - femmes - were the real problem. There are plenty of straight conservatives who are willing to play along with this for a time too since a masculine man isn't hard to accept as long as you don't think about what he does in his bedroom.

What you call "gender ideology" - a dogwhistle similar to Trans Identified Male and Trans Identified Female, acronyms specifically chosen to aggravate trans people by spelling out stereotypically female and male names - is, in some ways, everything that conservative gays and conservative straights disliked about stereotypical homosexuals distilled into its purest form. It violates the taboo of males being overly feminine (queens) and females being overly masculine (d*kes). It's also why drag queens, who are not transgender, are being swept up into the current moral panic.

It's strange to watch anti-trans activists make a big fuss about trans people changing their physical appearance, then go out and support things like drag bans which are also being used to prevent trans people from appearing in public [1]. Those bans are 100% about forcing people to wear certain clothing. I feel like legislating people's wardrobes according to the sex they were assigned at birth really gives away what's really going on here.

Even if all trans people stopped getting any hormones or surgeries tomorrow and even if they stopped using the pronouns that they feel fit them, and even if they stopped using the restrooms that fit them they would still be hated and attacked. They would be attacked for the same reason that feminine gay men and masculine gay women have always taken the brunt of homophobia.

Because what people hate is gender non-conformity. They want males to be reasonably masculine and wear clothing that is considered stereotypically male, and vice versa for females. The talk about scary medical procedures and men and women being erased and even fairness in sports is just a way of making that impulse sound reasonable and justified.

[0] https://daily.jstor.org/ernst-rohm-the-highest-ranking-gay-n...

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/library-cancels-trans-sp...