Politics and Porn

[Bramblethorn]

The continuum thing doesn't work for me. If we're talking about that innate sense of which sex a person feels that they are, well that is not a social construct and that's plainly identifiable. The reinforcement of gender roles starts pretty much as soon as somebody is born, so if there wasn't a fixed neurological setup for a person's gender identity and it was simply the product of culturally conditioning an arbitrary model into people then transgender people most likely just wouldn't exist and if they did then they would only exist in a few western countries and electrocuting them into psychologically aligning with their sex would actually work.

Hm. If I understand correctly, you're saying that without a hardwired neurological component, there's no reason why people wouldn't just accept the gender roles that society expects them to take - is that an accurate reading?

I'm open to the idea that there is a hardwired neurological component involved there, but I don't find that a persuasive argument. Human minds are complex things and they don't always move in the direction that society tries to push them. Theocracies occasionally produce atheists, communist states produce capitalists, etc. etc.

If being transgender was completely determined by genetics, we'd expect that monozygotic ("identical") twins would always have the same outcome: if somebody is transgender, their twin should be too.

According to this recent study, this happens about 28% of the time*. That's much higher than the rate for dizygotic (non-identical) twins, which suggests that there is a genetic component, but it's also much less than 100%.

(TV example: Laverne Cox is a well-known trans woman who plays Sophia Burset on 'Orange Is The New Black'. Pre-transition Sophia is played by M. Lamar, her monozygotic twin.)

The conclusion I'd draw from that is that genetic factors do influence transgender identities, but they're not the whole story or even half of it.

(As a rule, any time somebody asks "is X a product of genetics, environment, or 'chance'/free will" the answer is almost certainly "bit of everything". These things don't work individually, they interact to produce the outcomes we observe.)

*Abstract says 33% for males, 23% for females, 20% overall, but that doesn't make sense; looking at the data further down, the "20%" is actually for pooled data for monozygotic and dizygotic twins. I'd take the exact numbers with a grain of salt due to the difficulties in conducting this kind of survey, but the general conclusion seems pretty clear.

Transgender people obviously aren't just a simple variation in human gender identity, contrasted with gays and bisexuals, since they by-and-large experience an innately lower life satisfaction as a result of their abnormality (independent of how people treat them or what they tell them)

What is your basis for that "independent of..."?

I take an interest in this sort of thing. Transgender people certainly do experience high levels of psychological distress, but I've never seen any credible research that would suggest this is anything other than the obvious consequence of having to interact with a society that treats trans people like shit. As Kim has suggested, I'm not aware of any work that shows distress among trans people who've spent their lives in societies that respect their identities.

 

[KimGordon67]

Hm. If I understand correctly, you're saying that without a hardwired neurological component, there's no reason why people wouldn't just accept the gender roles that society expects them to take - is that an accurate reading?

I'm open to the idea that there is a hardwired neurological component involved there, but I don't find that a persuasive argument. Human minds are complex things and they don't always move in the direction that society tries to push them. Theocracies occasionally produce atheists, communist states produce capitalists, etc. etc.

If being transgender was completely determined by genetics, we'd expect that monozygotic ("identical") twins would always have the same outcome: if somebody is transgender, their twin should be too.

According to this recent study, this happens about 28% of the time*. That's much higher than the rate for dizygotic (non-identical) twins, which suggests that there is a genetic component, but it's also much less than 100%.

(TV example: Laverne Cox is a well-known trans woman who plays Sophia Burset on 'Orange Is The New Black'. Pre-transition Sophia is played by M. Lamar, her monozygotic twin.)

The conclusion I'd draw from that is that genetic factors do influence transgender identities, but they're not the whole story or even half of it.

(As a rule, any time somebody asks "is X a product of genetics, environment, or 'chance'/free will" the answer is almost certainly "bit of everything". These things don't work individually, they interact to produce the outcomes we observe.)

*Abstract says 33% for males, 23% for females, 20% overall, but that doesn't make sense; looking at the data further down, the "20%" is actually for pooled data for monozygotic and dizygotic twins. I'd take the exact numbers with a grain of salt due to the difficulties in conducting this kind of survey, but the general conclusion seems pretty clear.



What is your basis for that "independent of..."?

I take an interest in this sort of thing. Transgender people certainly do experience high levels of psychological distress, but I've never seen any credible research that would suggest this is anything other than the obvious consequence of having to interact with a society that treats trans people like shit. As Kim has suggested, I'm not aware of any work that shows distress among trans people who've spent their lives in societies that respect their identities.

That's interesting about the twin research - I did not know that.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Neither I nor anyone else really knows why gender exists ... and the same with trans people, really. Although I understand your argument regarding neural pathways, I'm not sure I'm convinced by it ... and ultimately, I just don't really think it's relevant. There just are some people who are happy with the gender they're assigned at birth, and others who aren't. The point is what we do about that, not 'why' it happens ... the 'why' arguments too readily lend themselves to then being used to (attempt to) eliminate whatever contradiction to the norm is being discussed - see those born intersex as a salutory and immediately pertinent example.

Yup. I come from a scientific background so I pretty much always want to know why things happen the way they do. But in this context, questions of "why" become weaponised by both sides.

A lot of well-intentioned folk lean heavily on genetic/neurological explanations for transgender (and homosexuality too) because that offers a "born this way" counterargument to the idea that these things are just human sin. I think that rather misses the point - which boils down to "it's nobody else's business if people are LGBTI, they're not hurting you" and framing it as an involuntary medical condition is short-sighted; it invites a "well, let's figure out what made you LGBTI and cure it!" response.

So my general rule is that I don't get into intellectual discussions about "why" unless everybody involved in this discussion takes it as a starting point that LGBTI people have a right to exist and to make our own decisions about how best to handle that, no matter what the "why" might be.

There's a surprising number of exceptions to the 'rules' of binary physical sex. The speed with which the medical establishment seeks to 'correct' them (without the permission of the person concerned, and historically often with their parents' knowledge) is clear evidence of how much anxiety this causes and our commitment to the 'rightness' of the binary system. There's quite a vocal intersex movement now of people who are saying they really wouldn't have preferred to not have had their genitals operated on in infancy. It's a tricky area, but I prefer to follow the voice of those concerned, rather than ... I don't know ... science, religion, social norms, whatever.

(I think you have an accidental extra negative there?)

One area where understanding is still developing is in DNA. The high-school version goes "boys have XY chromosomes and girls have XX" but as DNA testing becomes more widespread, we're discovering that conditions like mosaicism/chimerism are far more common than anybody realised.

There are many women who've never been thought of as anything but women, who've born children... and who have XY cells in their body as well as XX. That can happen as a congenital thing (mother gets pregnant with twins, one XX, one XY, but the twins merge in utero so the body's cells are a mix of XX and XY.)

It can also happen later in life due to microchimerism; when somebody gets pregnant, fetal cells can end up migrating into the parental bloodstream and eventually making themselves at home. A Canadian post-mortem study found that more than half of the women they tested had some XY cells in their brain, apparently due to this cause.

Such conditions are very hard to detect because even when somebody does have a DNA test, that only tells you about the cells that were used for the test. They come to light occasionally when comparison of multiple tests on one person, or on close relatives, produces incongruous results (cf e.g. the Lydia Fairchild case).

Even aside from chimerism, the "XX female, XY male" thing is inaccurate; sometimes genes like SRY migrate off the Y chromosome, or something else unexpected happens, so you can end up with somebody who has a 46XX karyotype but develops as male.

As a rule of thumb, when somebody falls back on "genetic sex" in debate, what they're actually saying is: "my parents told me that boys is boys and girls is girls and that's Just How It Is, but I want to make my prejudices sound more science-like".

 

[KimGordon67]

Yup. I come from a scientific background so I pretty much always want to know why things happen the way they do. But in this context, questions of "why" become weaponised by both sides.

A lot of well-intentioned folk lean heavily on genetic/neurological explanations for transgender (and homosexuality too) because that offers a "born this way" counterargument to the idea that these things are just human sin. I think that rather misses the point - which boils down to "it's nobody else's business if people are LGBTI, they're not hurting you" and framing it as an involuntary medical condition is short-sighted; it invites a "well, let's figure out what made you LGBTI and cure it!" response.

So my general rule is that I don't get into intellectual discussions about "why" unless everybody involved in this discussion takes it as a starting point that LGBTI people have a right to exist and to make our own decisions about how best to handle that, no matter what the "why" might be.



(I think you have an accidental extra negative there?)

Indeed I did. Sigh. I do that all the time - usually not including necessary negatives, but sometimes adding them where they don't belong.

One area where understanding is still developing is in DNA. The high-school version goes "boys have XY chromosomes and girls have XX" but as DNA testing becomes more widespread, we're discovering that conditions like mosaicism/chimerism are far more common than anybody realised.

There are many women who've never been thought of as anything but women, who've born children... and who have XY cells in their body as well as XX. That can happen as a congenital thing (mother gets pregnant with twins, one XX, one XY, but the twins merge in utero so the body's cells are a mix of XX and XY.)

It can also happen later in life due to microchimerism; when somebody gets pregnant, fetal cells can end up migrating into the parental bloodstream and eventually making themselves at home. A Canadian post-mortem study found that more than half of the women they tested had some XY cells in their brain, apparently due to this cause.

Such conditions are very hard to detect because even when somebody does have a DNA test, that only tells you about the cells that were used for the test. They come to light occasionally when comparison of multiple tests on one person, or on close relatives, produces incongruous results (cf e.g. the Lydia Fairchild case).

Even aside from chimerism, the "XX female, XY male" thing is inaccurate; sometimes genes like SRY migrate off the Y chromosome, or something else unexpected happens, so you can end up with somebody who has a 46XX karyotype but develops as male.

All of which demonstrates that humans are far more complex creatures than we realise.

I totally get the desire for a 'born this way' argument, but completely concur with you that it's ultimately no one's else's business or problem (provided they just learnt to stay away from the parades!). Even with naturally occurring chromosomal etc variability, somehow theoretically neutral science manages to cast this as 'abnormality' ... which obviously nicely leads into the 'we can FIX that' response.

 

[Ishmael]

A lot of folks aren't going to like this comparison but it's truly how I feel.

As goes the Second Amendment, so go all the rest.

If we allow "them" to fiddle with and continually erode one right, "they" are going to feel like "they" have free reign to fiddle with and erode the others.

There will always be something that someone likes that others don't (paddles, scary looking style rifles, booze). And no one seems to notice the baby steps. A whole sale move to abolish the Second would be met with backlash but baby steps all seem 'reasonable'. Same thing with porn, a full scale abolition wont work, it will be baby steps.

The major stumbling block with porn is - no one wants to be outed, so no one speaks up pro-actively. Gun owners don't care about being outed so we can take an overtly-outspoken-all-for-one-and-one-for-all-fuck-you style approach to defending the Second. Whereas, with porn we have to adopt a wait and see stance before we speak up, lest anyone find out that we like *that* kind of thing.

Alll that to say: No matter which version of First They Came you subscribe to, the sentiment in Niemöller's words rings true. I don't know what's going to happen but if we don't stick up for each other then who will stick up for us?

Divide et Imperum. It is the age old formula used by politicians from time immemorial to gain control of the lives of the populace (victims?).

What anyone does in the privacy of their own home with consenting adults is no bodies business but their own (you nasty girl you). But when you take your kinks to the street, turn it into street theater, don't expect there not to be some push back. You, we, have made our business their business. The Carrie Nations will stride forth with their hatchets and laws will be passed.

Does that sound like a "keep it in the closet" speech? You bet it is. It is because it's nobodies business but your own. And if you need a mob to justify what your doing or what you like, you probably shouldn't be doing it to begin with.

We have forums such as this to share our interests and desires. Why in the hell would anyone want to shove their particular kinks down anyone elses throats? That notion transcends the concept of consensual.

To put it another way, do you really care what the little old ladies and men down at the Baptist church on the corner are saying about you and your practices? Did you ever consider that it might be out of envy? And even if not, fuck'em. They don't know what we do, where we do it, how, when, or even why (well, because it feels good )

Point being that being an 'evangelist' only draws attention to yourself. BDSM is NOT a religion. Hell, we can't even agree among ourselves what the singular definition is. So if you're having fun, don't stress over those that you THINK are not.

Ishmael

 

[Nezhul]

About the twins thing: how large was the test group? It should be at least a few hundred (for both mono- and bi-zygotic twins separately) to talk about any relevance of results, because otherwise the error is too high.


Also my original point was completely lot in this transgender discussion. I don't think movies affect your opinion THAT much. Conserning transgenders, movies are one of the last things (next to my personal experience) that affect my judgment. The way they (some of them) behave is what affects it.

 

[Blue]

What is your basis for that "independent of..."?

I take an interest in this sort of thing. Transgender people certainly do experience high levels of psychological distress, but I've never seen any credible research that would suggest this is anything other than the obvious consequence of having to interact with a society that treats trans people like shit. As Kim has suggested, I'm not aware of any work that shows distress among trans people who've spent their lives in societies that respect their identities.

I can distinctly recall reading somewhere that gender dysphoria can be distressing, especially during puberty. Maybe I'm extrapolating that a bit too far though.

~ ~ ~

Alternate topic:
Did anybody else hear about the Trump administration repealing a piece of legislation called the Stream Protection Act (Or something worded similarly). Literally the entire point of the bill was purely and solely to stop mining companies dumping chemical and material debris in rivers to avoid the costs of proper disposal.

Not much of a point for discussion, I just find it amazing.

 

[Nezhul]

Alternate topic:
Did anybody else hear about the Trump administration repealing a piece of legislation called the Stream Protection Act (Or something worded similarly). Literally the entire point of the bill was purely and solely to stop mining companies dumping chemical and material debris in rivers to avoid the costs of proper disposal.

Not much of a point for discussion, I just find it amazing.

I'll just tell you what I tell everyone.
Be careful with such news.

You are not a scientist and not an economist (or at least not the one who studied the problem closely). You don't know how much money it would cost and how great the positive influence will actually be.

Bills get declined all the time, because a lot of initiatives, while they sound heavenly, in fact are unimplementable or have serious drawbacks that are ignored in such news publications. Or maybe they would yield such miniscule results that it's much better to spend those hundreds of millions of dollars elsewhere.

You would be told only the stuff that you need to know - that Trump's administration are evil jerks who declined a great bill because they enjoy making the nature dirty and dead.
The real reasons are often much more complicated and logical.

 

[Blue]

I'll just tell you what I tell everyone.
Be careful with such news.

You are not a scientist and not an economist (or at least not the one who studied the problem closely). You don't know how much money it would cost and how great the positive influence will actually be.

Bills get declined all the time, because a lot of initiatives, while they sound heavenly, in fact are unimplementable or have serious drawbacks that are ignored in such news publications. Or maybe they would yield such miniscule results that it's much better to spend those hundreds of millions of dollars elsewhere.

You would be told only the stuff that you need to know - that Trump's administration are evil jerks who declined a great bill because they enjoy making the nature dirty and dead.
The real reasons are often much more complicated and logical.

The regulation.

Quite literally, all this rule does is stop them dumping waste in rivers to cut costs and to not irreparably destroy the landscape that they're mining in. Not asking for much, just that any given mining company isn't going to dump metallic particulates and machine coolant into somebody's (or something's) drinking water.

 

[Nezhul]

yea but they are doing that illegally now, right? Or is this legal?

In either case, there's still a ton of money to be spent, both by the factories themselves and by the government to arrange proper monitoring and enforcement of this new law.

Yes, I understand that pollution is bad. Everyone understands that. Trump understands that.
The question is - do you have the MONEY to pursue the clean nature to that extent? That's what the government evaluates when it turns down a bill like that.
They clearly thought that these money are better spent elsewhere. And without knowing WHERE - you can't even argue properly, because that thing may be even more important than pollution.

 

[Blue]

yea but they are doing that illegally now, right? Or is this legal?

In either case, there's still a ton of money to be spent, both by the factories themselves and by the government to arrange proper monitoring and enforcement of this new law.

Yes, I understand that pollution is bad. Everyone understands that. Trump understands that.
The question is - do you have the MONEY to pursue the clean nature to that extent? That's what the government evaluates when it turns down a bill like that.
They clearly thought that these money are better spent elsewhere. And without knowing WHERE - you can't even argue properly, because that thing may be even more important than pollution.

How much taxpayer money do you think goes into removing thousands of metric tonnes of liquid waste from water so that millions of people downstream don't have decades shaved off of their lifespan from drinking flammable water and so that arable lands don't become permanently infertile wastelands?

I would be willing to place a large sum of money betting that the clean up is an order of magnitude more expensive than enforcing compliance. The big deciding factor though, and the reason why it was repealed by the Trump administration, is because the mining companies won't be the ones paying for the cleaning.

 

[Nezhul]

Yea right. And they basically don't do that because they are stupid and can't do math.
Hundreds of specialists and economists also can't see a simple solution that is obvious to you.

I'm not betting on anything. But this "government is stupid, they could have done ____ and everyone would be happy" is an old delusion of the masses which more often than not proves to be rooting in ignorance rather than wisdom.

 

[Bramblethorn]

All you can do is twist words in your favor and tell me that "I'm wrong"...

I'm done with you.

NARRATOR: (He was not, in fact, done with responding to Bramble.)

About the twins thing: how large was the test group?

In my post I included a link to the study, so you could easily have answered that question for yourself. Had you done so, you could have saved yourself some embarrassment...

It should be at least a few hundred (for both mono- and bi-zygotic twins separately) to talk about any relevance of results, because otherwise the error is too high.

For somebody who doesn't like being told "you're wrong", you have a bad habit of posting incorrect things in public. Yet again: you are wrong.

The sample size you need in order to show a significant effect depends very much on the details of the problem. Some problems would indeed need a sample size of "at least a few hundred" to demonstrate a significant difference between sample groups. This is not one of those problems.

Table 5 in the paper you didn't read reports:

13 out of 39 monozygous male twin pairs were concordant by trans status (i.e. the trans person had a twin who was also trans)
1 of 21 dizygotous male pairs concordant
8 of 35 MZ female pairs concordant
0 of 15 DZ female pairs concordant.
Combining those gives:
21 of 74 MZ pairs concordant (28%).
1/36 DZ pairs concordant (2.8%). (Elsewhere the paper says 1/38 but I'm taking this to be a typo, since the tables are consistent with a count of 36 DZ pairs; it doesn't substantially affect the conclusions below.)

So in the sample, MZ twins are 10x as likely to be concordant. Does that represent a real difference in the overall population, or is it just a fluke caused by sampling effects?

To answer that, we need to conduct a two-sample test for equality of binomial proportions. We'll use a one-sided confidence interval (H0: MZ and DZ twin pairs have the same rate of concordance; H1: MZ pairs have a higher rate of concordance) because it's pretty hard to imagine a reason why MZ twins would have a lower rate of concordance.

Applying that to the combined male & female data, we get a p-value of 0.0019.

The p-value is the answer to the question "if there was no real difference in the two rates in the population, how likely is it that we'd get a difference this extreme just by random sampling effects?"

Common scientific practice is to set a cutoff of p=0.05: if the p-value is higher than that threshold, we do not reject the null hypothesis (i.e. we haven't found any strong evidence for a difference between MZ and DZ rates). If it's lower, we do reject the null hypothesis (i.e. the effect is strong enough that it's highly unlikely to result just from chance.)

That threshold of p=0.05 isn't a panacea; statisticians argue a lot about how exactly p-values should be used. But in anybody's book, a p-value of 0.0019 is very strong evidence for an effect, i.e. a higher rate of concordance in MZ compared to DZ twins.

If we look only at the male data, we get a p-value of 0.015; it's not quite as conclusive, since we're working from a smaller sample with a higher margin of error, but that's still pretty good evidence for a significant difference.

If we look only at the female data (which has smaller sample numbers, we get a p-value of 0.055, just above the standard threshold of 0.05. On its own, you wouldn't want to use that data as evidence for claiming an effect, but the pooled data tells that there's pretty strong evidence for a difference between MZ and DZ concordance rates overall.

Which is to say: yup, very strong evidence for a genetic component.

The paper did in fact report p-values for the M+F and M comparisons of MZ vs DZ pairs. They're slightly different to the ones I calculated (possibly due to using different approximations or a two-tailed confidence interval) but nothing that changes the conclusions.

In other words: if you'd read the paper that I linked to, you would have found that the data analysis already factored in sample size issues and had found the effect was strong enough to be significant despite the relatively small sample group. Which would have saved you the embarrassment of posting incorrect stuff in subject.

I'll also point out the dissonance between your insistence that a professional researcher's findings are meaningless unless they're based on a sample of "at least a few hundred", and the confidence with which you assert your own amateur ideas about transgender people... ideas based on much less evidence than is reported in that paper.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Yea right. And they basically don't do that because they are stupid and can't do math.
Hundreds of specialists and economists also can't see a simple solution that is obvious to you.

Who are these "hundreds of specialists and economists" you're talking about here?

 

[Bramblethorn]

I can distinctly recall reading somewhere that gender dysphoria can be distressing, especially during puberty. Maybe I'm extrapolating that a bit too far though.

It certainly can be, but I'm not sure that can be separated from society effects. We teach kids early on that boys have penises and girls have vaginas and that's that; absent that teaching, I don't know if trans kids would experience dysphoria the same way.

(And, yeah, saw that law. Along with a trial balloon about eliminating the EPA altogether. Bleah.)

 

[Bramblethorn]

I'll just tell you what I tell everyone.
Be careful with such news.

You are not a scientist and not an economist (or at least not the one who studied the problem closely).

Dude, you're not a statistician or a woman, but that hasn't stopped you making assertions about statistics and explaining how women feel when guys approach them in the street. This place would be a whole lot nicer if you made an effort to live by the same standards you set for others.

 

[Nezhul]

Who are these "hundreds of specialists and economists" you're talking about here?

People working for the government, providing intelligence on many levels.

Or do you think that politicians make decisions themselves? No. There are large committees of specialists, scientists and even more of the other staff that are involved in a decision making.

Do you think when a senator votes he does it based on his own judgment? To a point, yes. But he receives a lot of reports and notes before that, studies them and maked his decision.

A President is even more involved, because he has ministers, each of those has a HUGE ministry that studies a question from all sides, and then provide a report on how a certain initiative will affect this ministry's sphere of interest.
Then either the President reads those reports himself, or his team compiles all of this into a singular report that he reads.
And only then the decision is made.

But people are often susceptible to just thinking that some random dude in the office (named Trump) who is not very bright heard about pollution problem and the bill to stop it, and thought: "Fuck nature, my lawn is green enough. Nature can take more, it's all some bullshit the greens are making up..."
And declines the bill

It doesn't work nearly as simple as that.

 

[Nezhul]

Dude, you're not a statistician or a woman, but that hasn't stopped you making assertions about statistics and explaining how women feel when guys approach them in the street. This place would be a whole lot nicer if you made an effort to live by the same standards you set for others.

I have a lot of live experience?
Excuse me, but I don't really think that it is constructive to talk about women with a man, who thinks he will frighten the girl and creep her out if he approaches her.
That's just a sad life you have there.

 

[Blue]

People working for the government, providing intelligence on many levels.
...

This would be a decently made point under normal presidential circumstances. But since you live in an apolitical bubble I guess you're unaware that Trump has:

*Outright rejected to show up for daily briefings.

*Staff in his campaign who have resigned tell us that he only listens to one or two people and everybody else he's surrounded himself with are yes-men and that he dislikes working.

*He's gagged government scientists and departments from publicly speaking about their work and gone on witch hunts apparently seeking to locate and remove staff from public science institutions who are involved in studying climate change.

*Loaded his administration up with corporate CEO's, his debtors, corporate lobbyists/representatives and other such politically inexperienced people who by-default have international conflicts of interest.

*The person he has put in charge of the EPA has sued the EPA >10 times (won once) trying to get them to remove EP regulations, calls carbon taxes "unconstitutional" and wants to eliminate environmental protection zones and the endangered species list to "expand property rights".

The people Trump and his top lackeys are listening to absolutely do not have yours or America's best interests in mind.

 

[Nezhul]

I'm living in a different country, to start with.

From here it looks like Trump is an idiot, yes. But not the biggest idiot of US Presidents, by far.

And it also looks like whatever he does the press reports it as bad automatically. Which makes me question how bad his orders really are. Take it or leave it.

All I'm trying to tell you is to always think critically about what you hear on the news. The people who report those news have their own agenda, and telling the truth is rarely anywhere near the top priorities.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I have a lot of live experience?
Excuse me, but I don't really think that it is constructive to talk about women with a man, who thinks he will frighten the girl and creep her out if he approaches her.
That's just a sad life you have there.

Anybody else notice how when somebody presents multiple points against Nezhul's arguments, he'll pick one or two to respond to - whichever seems easiest - and ignore the rest?

(And yet again, you're misrepresenting what I actually said, which was specifically about strange men approaching women on the street and asking for a phone number. I never said that all approaches are creepy.)

This would be a decently made point under normal presidential circumstances. But since you live in an apolitical bubble I guess you're unaware that Trump has:

*Outright rejected to show up for daily briefings.

*Staff in his campaign who have resigned tell us that he only listens to one or two people and everybody else he's surrounded himself with are yes-men and that he dislikes working.

*He's gagged government scientists and departments from publicly speaking about their work and gone on witch hunts apparently seeking to locate and remove staff from public science institutions who are involved in studying climate change.

Add to all this: Trump has no relevant experience. Most presidents have had considerable experience in state and/or federal politics as Reps, Senators, Governors, Vice-Presidents, and/or other government offices. You have to go back to Eisenhower to find one who had no experience working in government, and he at least had plenty of experience working for government, as a general. There has never before been a US President with no experience in public office or government service whatsoever.

There is simply no reason to expect competence from him, any more than you would say "well this man has never been on an airplane before, but give him a chance, maybe he's just a natural born pilot".

Case in point: recently Trump had a phone conversation with the Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull. Leaks from both offices have indicated that Trump ended up shouting at Turnbull and hanging up on him about 25 minutes into what's supposed to be an hour-long call. Trump followed this up with a tweet that was politically humiliating to Turnbull.

For context: Australia is a long-term close ally of the USA and Turnbull is a conservative politician who has been trying to suck up to Trump (his position here is very weak). I don't like him, but I will acknowledge that he's a diplomatic and well-mannered type; it would take an extraordinarily unstable person to behave as Trump did on that call.

The most popular theory as to what might have happened is that Trump read somewhere that Turnbull was from the "Liberal Party" without understanding that "Liberal" in Australian politics doesn't mean the same thing that it does in the US.

Subsequently Trump's press secretary gave a briefing in which he tried to do some damage control. Except he repeatedly referred to "Prime Minister Trumble". Getting a world leader's name wrong just when you're trying to sweep up a mess? Not the hallmark of a competent, well-briefed administration.

The next day Spicer spoke about the incident again. This time he finally got Turnbull's name right.

Lol, no, only kidding. He fucked it up again.

After that they issued a list of Trump's recent conversations with world leaders. This time they didn't include Turnbull's name at all (unlike for all the other leaders on that list, who were named). Instead they just listed him as "President of Australia"... there is no such office.

This is basic, BASIC government stuff. World leader's meeting with another leader, you get background info, you read the info, you make sure you know people's names and where they're coming from, you don't go out of your way to publicly humiliate your allies. Trump and his administration have fucked up this simple task four times running. They're not competent to run a school fete, let alone the US government.

 

[Blue]

They also got Theresa May's name wrong when she met Trump.

 

[Bramblethorn]

They also got Theresa May's name wrong when she met Trump.

I missed that one. Too many screwups to keep track of them all!

 

[KimGordon67]

People working for the government, providing intelligence on many levels.

Or do you think that politicians make decisions themselves? No. There are large committees of specialists, scientists and even more of the other staff that are involved in a decision making.

Do you think when a senator votes he does it based on his own judgment? To a point, yes. But he receives a lot of reports and notes before that, studies them and maked his decision.

A President is even more involved, because he has ministers, each of those has a HUGE ministry that studies a question from all sides, and then provide a report on how a certain initiative will affect this ministry's sphere of interest.
Then either the President reads those reports himself, or his team compiles all of this into a singular report that he reads.
And only then the decision is made.

But people are often susceptible to just thinking that some random dude in the office (named Trump) who is not very bright heard about pollution problem and the bill to stop it, and thought: "Fuck nature, my lawn is green enough. Nature can take more, it's all some bullshit the greens are making up..."
And declines the bill

It doesn't work nearly as simple as that.

Actually, I hate to burst your bubble, but politicians often to make policy based on no evidence or expert advice at all. I have read background documents that were the basis of quite substantive changes in policy here, actually looking for the evidence I assume must be in there (because I used to think like you), and was appalled to find that either the evidence that was used was basically misused (e.g. using very general stats to make assumption about one small proportion of the people represented in those stats) or otherwise there just wasn't any. My favourite was with the 'minister' (although I know it wasn't actually her who wrote the document, even though she signed it) said 'It seems likely that XYZ, thus ABC policy will be created'. I am 100% sure this document isn't an isolated case.

Politicians make policy on the basis of a number of things - evidence, sure, but also what the electorate seems to want (both because they're representatives of the electorate, and because they want to be re-elected), economic factors, and their own specific political position to name a few. The latter will have a huge influence on what seems like a 'good outcome'.

Also, science isn't neutral. Good science is neutral, but not all science is good science. I've seen stats about health risks that are presented as the truth ... and indeed, they are the truth, in that A behaviour reduced the risk of B by X% (X always = a very impressive number). But they neglect to mention that the initial risk of B is actually only 3% anyway. So the minister goes 'Yay - let's make policy to ensure people conform to A behaviour, because the benefits are clearly awesome' without knowing how much the risk of B has really been reduced, and often without being informed of the various negatives associating with A behaviour.

 

[KimGordon67]

I can distinctly recall reading somewhere that gender dysphoria can be distressing, especially during puberty. Maybe I'm extrapolating that a bit too far though.

~ ~ ~

Alternate topic:
Did anybody else hear about the Trump administration repealing a piece of legislation called the Stream Protection Act (Or something worded similarly). Literally the entire point of the bill was purely and solely to stop mining companies dumping chemical and material debris in rivers to avoid the costs of proper disposal.

Not much of a point for discussion, I just find it amazing.

Con - this may be of interest. Unfortunately the full paper isn't open access, but hopefully the abstract is enough to prove the point. Basically, the authors say that in Samoa, where 'feminine men' have a socially recognised identity, there is little-to-evidence of distress among those who identify as fa'afafine simply because they are fa'afafine. So the implication here is that actual 'gender identity disorder' (a phrase so amazingly problematic that it beggars belief) or what you've referred to as 'gender dysphoria' doesn't in and of itself cause distress.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17951883

There's ample other evidence to support this - it's just the only paper I'm aware of that (a) takes a quantitative approach to the question and (b) actually asks this specific question. The other research rather presents endless evidence of fa'afafine being raised pretty happily as fa'afafine.