Is it like treating mental illness like other dysphorias, or like conversion therapy, or neither? That should be a question.
I think we need to avoid jumping to an emotionally driven quick conclusion. I'm tired of the arguments which proceed like "this has to me a whiff of (something bad that once happened) so we should shut down all cr…
Is it like treating mental illness like other dysphorias, or like conversion therapy, or neither? That should be a question.
I think we need to avoid jumping to an emotionally driven quick conclusion. I'm tired of the arguments which proceed like "this has to me a whiff of (something bad that once happened) so we should shut down all critical thinking and run away". Instead study it and see if it really IS like that bad thing or not. Otherwise we'd also reject psychological treatment of body dysmorphia because it's sorta maybe similar to gay conversion therapy (but only if one looks at it very superficially or with an ideological bias).
Just for the record, if we allow people to get gender reassignment surgery or cosmetic surgeries to make them look like a cat, I think we should allow adults to voluntarily seek certified professional therapy to modify their sexual orientation. The abuse was in coercively forcing people (especially children) to undergo often wildly unscientific processes to supposedly change their orientation. This is another of those cases of expanding from "avoid a specific abuse" to "avoid anything which can be construed to have any similarity to it" - politically driven overshoot, not well considered abatement of abusive situations.
Other examples are citing the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to justify Black people avoiding Covid vaccination, based on a tremendously tenuous asserted connection., or avoiding modern professional genetic counseling because some eugenicists a century ago went dark places with forcible sterilization.
We need to engage the cortex too, not just the amygdala.
Is it like treating mental illness like other dysphorias, or like conversion therapy, or neither? That should be a question.
I think we need to avoid jumping to an emotionally driven quick conclusion. I'm tired of the arguments which proceed like "this has to me a whiff of (something bad that once happened) so we should shut down all critical thinking and run away". Instead study it and see if it really IS like that bad thing or not. Otherwise we'd also reject psychological treatment of body dysmorphia because it's sorta maybe similar to gay conversion therapy (but only if one looks at it very superficially or with an ideological bias).
Just for the record, if we allow people to get gender reassignment surgery or cosmetic surgeries to make them look like a cat, I think we should allow adults to voluntarily seek certified professional therapy to modify their sexual orientation. The abuse was in coercively forcing people (especially children) to undergo often wildly unscientific processes to supposedly change their orientation. This is another of those cases of expanding from "avoid a specific abuse" to "avoid anything which can be construed to have any similarity to it" - politically driven overshoot, not well considered abatement of abusive situations.
Other examples are citing the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to justify Black people avoiding Covid vaccination, based on a tremendously tenuous asserted connection., or avoiding modern professional genetic counseling because some eugenicists a century ago went dark places with forcible sterilization.
We need to engage the cortex too, not just the amygdala.