That subtilely implies it’s a decision to view oneself as a different gender from what was assigned at birth, but it’s not entirely clear it’s a choice in every case. Edge cases in biology get wild and sex assigned at birth can be a near arbitrary decision. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)
Parents making major medical decisions has a huge precedent in a wide range of procedures with significant risks and consequences. Separating conjoined twins for example.
There is a logical flaw in suggesting that something that occurs with a small percentage of a population such as “detransitioning” implies anything about every member of a population.
Child abuse exists, but doesn’t imply anything about every parent.
I do not suggest that detransitioning can indeed extrapolate to the whole group.
I am saying that it exists, therefore at least some people regret their transition, therefore they should not be allowed to make that decision at 12, or for their parents to do so.
> There is a logical flaw in suggesting that something that occurs with a small percentage of a population such as “detransitioning” implies anything about every member of a population.
> Child abuse exists, but doesn’t imply anything about every parent.
This is funny because that's the exact argument that transphobic opponents say about trans people themselves and the argument as to why gender fluidity or gender outside of sex doesn't exist. "Just because an extremely small number of people believe they are a different gender than their biological sex doesn't mean that gender is different from biological sex" is almost exactly the argument that transphobes use.
I think you fundamentally fail to understand what I just said. Proper unbiased random sampling allows you to create sub populations that tend to reflect the characteristics of a larger group, biased populations don’t share that relationship.
“Because some animals hibernate, all animals hibernate” is just as flawed as saying “Because only a small percentage of hibernate, no animals hibernate.” Instead the relationship is “Because some animals exist that hibernate, there exist animals that hibernate.”
So-called "detransitions" represent way less than 1% of the trans population. In particular, the proportion of people regretting their transitions is much smaller than that of mothers regretting having their kids. They receive massively inflated media attention because their stories are picked up and turned into propaganda in service of bigoted narratives.
So-called "trans" represent way less than 1% of the world population. ... They receive massively inflated media attention because their stories are picked up and turned into propaganda in service of [self-serving] narratives.
The vast majority of trans people wish their demographics received much less media attention... The issue is with right-wing bigots who feel it is their life missions to make their lives as miserable as possible, when they just want to be left alone.
It is quite common for babies to come out of the womb with blonde hair, only for it to darken to brown later in life. The baby isn't blonde, it just looks blonde right now.
Same with gender. Doctors observe a flavor of genitals, make a reasonable assumption, and legally assign the gender which seems appropriate.
Only in theory is it so easy to separate clerical errors from other issues.
So in practice clerical errors cause all kinds of long term havoc. Once declared dead it can be a monstrous effort to prove to various systems you are in fact alive.
Sometimes people use something called analogies or similar examples to help explain a foreign concept. In this case, the poster was trying to explain that our traits are birth do not always reflect who we are as adults. Gender is one such trait. Hair color is another.
There’s this phenomenon in this thread where commenters are taking something that’s superficially similar and then making an extreme claim that, upon inspection, does not hold up at all or is completely irrelevant to the argument being made. That is what is happening here. “An adult’s hair color can be different than what it was at birth” is a true statement, but of course is not relevant at all to the claim that one’s gender is just as malleable as one’s hair color, which is what this so-called analogy attempts to do. Real analogies do not do this, and when people deploy the above formulae it’s easy to recognize as bad faith.
One cannot ask a baby what social role they would like to have. Typically, in approximately 97-99% of cases, that aligns with the genitalia. So no, no coin flip. It's typically done by looking at genitalia. You'll be right almost always.
Which is why puberty blockers are prescribed to transgender children, delaying puberty until later in life when a "good decision" can be made, usually closer to the mid to late teens.
Sadly, it's not possible to "delay puberty" until later in life without permanent consequences. Puberty cannot simply be resumed later. Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases. The changes can't be reversed later as if hormones were not altered during critical phases if the person changes their mind.
It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades.
> Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases.
Which is generally the goal. It is of course not possible to retroactively have allowed puberty to progress as though the blockers had never been taken, but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again, as is done for cisgender children who take them.
> It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades
Precocious puberty is a condition in which puberty happens earlier than it's supposed to.
The goal of puberty blockers in precocious puberty is to delay puberty until the correct age and physiological growth window.
Puberty blocker in precocious puberty are also not used to induce hormonal profiles that are different than the body's eventual genetic set point, just to delay them until typical puberty ages.
Delaying puberty until it aligns with the body's expected pubertal ages is completely different. You cannot extrapolate and claim this as evidence that we can safely delay puberty until adulthood, well beyond pubertal age.
> but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again
I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.
You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim. The usual approach with puberty blockers is prescribing them around the onset of natural puberty and one way or another stopping them around the age of 16. While there are sadly some cases of people who started hormone therapies and later regretted it, I'm aware of no cases of long term health impacts that are attributed to delaying puberty until 16. If you do know of some reports please let me know.
I asked Claude to see if it could find anything and the only reports it could find was some long term bone density issues, but only in trans women and it seemed potentially related to estrogen dosing
> You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim.
> I asked Claude...
There are no double-blind studies, RCTs, or otherwise on this topic because it's not a situation that lends itself to that type of study. Please don't try to ask AI to summarize the situation because its training set is guaranteed to have far more discussion about it from Reddit and news articles than the limited scientific research
Of the papers out there, many are either case reports or they're studies that look into the case where people go from puberty blocker therapy into gender-affirming care, not the cases where they change their mind and discontinue with hope of returning to their baseline state.
Above I was addressing the implication that puberty blockers are a safe way to press pause on puberty until much later without consequence. That's simply not true.
Those studies you found about bone density also note that they can reduce height, and along with it other growth changes that occur during those ages in conjunction with puberty. Someone who takes puberty blockers until 16-18 will have a different physical anatomy than someone who does not. You cannot resume growth in adulthood after discontinuing the medications.
So the studies you found are consistent with what I'm saying: You cannot delay puberty without also impacting the growth that happens during that phase. That's one of the main reasons why people take the puberty blockers! As someone gets older, the window for that growth does not stay open forever.
I'm not asking for a double blind study. I'm asking for examples of someone who took puberty blockers, regretted it and stopped, and then went on to not be able to live the life they wanted to live. I'm not aware of any such stories and I'm pretty familiarly with the population of people who regret taking hormones. When I double checked with Claude it also failed to find anything accept the issue around bone density I mentioned.
There are plenty of studies that point to strong evidence that this protocol results in better mental health outcomes because for whatever potential consequence there is for delaying natural puberty, there are plenty of known irreversible impacts of allowing it to progress.
If you have other evidence, even just observational studies it would be good to share that.
And again the recommendation is to continue until 15 or 16, not until 18
It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years. If the "correct" age is what we see today, then there's thousands of generations of humans who had puberty naturally occur "too late" yet we're all still here to talk about it. If the "correct" age instead is when it used to occur, then everyone should go on puberty blockers for a few years to avoid this unnatural surge of precocious puberty.
> I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.
Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes. For young trans people, access to blockers can save them from a lifetime of dealing with the consequences of a puberty they did not want. Likewise, blockers can save a cisgender child from unwanted consequences of a puberty happening too early.
That doesn't mean "until adulthood", it could just be a few years. But even then, I think blockers are a compromise to appease people who doubt the ability of trans kids to make their own decisions about their bodily autonomy. I think trans people should be able to go on cross-sex hormones basically at will, but certainly after no more than a cursory chat with a therapist.
> It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years.
The change over the past couple hundred years is measured on the order of a couple years at most.
This has nothing at all to do with hormonal intervention until adult ages. Once someone reaches adulthood the window for a lot of changes has closed.
> Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes.
You're either not understanding, or trying to avoid an inconvenient point: Once blocked during critical periods, many of those changes simply cannot happen at a later date.
Puberty cannot be delayed until adulthood and then resumed as if nothing happened.
Puberty only lasts a couple of years. First menstruation usually happens between ages 9 and 18 - that's a spread longer than the duration of puberty! Look at any puberty-age high school class and you'll find one kid who has basically finished puberty, while another has barely started.
In other words: the "window" isn't as crucial as you make it seem.
I read it, but you keep moving the goalposts around so much and introducing irrelevant detours that I can't respond to everything you write, sorry.
I've been consistent about my point, but you've introduced so many other topics including the "maybe it's only for a year or two" point that this is just one big gish gallop
Your point about puberty happening earlier and earlier also contradicts your arguments about how it might only be for a year or two
I had a brain injury when I was 12 that knocked my testosterone levels way down.
In my 20s this was discovered and I went on testosterone replacement. My hands are still the same size as my mom’s. My feet didn’t get back to the size they were before the accident. I didn’t regain the height I lost. God only knows what it did to my brain.
Maybe if you’re only on them a little bit you’d be fine, but the whole concept is bad. My wife fainted when she got her first period. Why? She didn’t want to be a woman. She was a tomboy. It turns out that the flood of sex hormones during puberty can actually make you feel like a woman/man, which should surprise no one. To block that from happening and potentially effectively treating the dysphoria is madness.
Your anecdote is a bit of a tangent. Trans kids wouldn't be on blockers as long as your hormone levels were out of balance, and they generally want to avoid the changes which you bemoan the loss of.
But do you even find your life to be significantly harmed by your smallish stature? There are short people who never had brain injuries, and it's generally not such a concern that we feel the need to make them larger. Lots of them even wish they were taller.
And it's a pretty frequent straw-man to compare tomboys to kids with persistent gender dysphoria. They only seem superficially similar to people who really haven't engaged with the huge breadth of research on trans people over the past century. It also ignores the fact that there are feminine presenting trans masculine people (those born female, who medically transitioned, but still present femininely), or tomboy trans feminine people (born male, medically transitioned, still present masculinely).
But surely puberty, not just maturity, is necessary to fully understand the sexual experience and whether your feelings about yourself crystalise differently in the presence of sexual drive. Not to mention, the idea of delaying puberty seems like an invitation for unrelated and/or unforeseen downstream consequences on biological health.
It is not. Precocious sexual drive is possibly amongst the worst things there is for gaining sexual maturity. Also known as 'thinking with your dick'. CSA aside, you can do a ton of damage to your life by just going along with your sexual drive.
I am a virgin at 27 years old. What am I missing about the sexual experience? Is it somehow locked out to me? Or… can I access it intellectually, and reason about it with its ups and downs?
There's a reason the consent age does not start at puberty.
Sexual identity is an important component of gender identity. Encouraging people to make conclusions about their gender identity before they understand their sexual identity seems risky to me, especially when a child is being asked to make decisions with potentially life-altering medical consequences.
To be clear, a person does not need to have had sex to understand their sexual identity. They need to know what they find attractive and how their sexual identity relates to their own body. Even if someone feels like the opposite gender, that does not necessarily mean their sexual identity will automatically align with that.
It may be true that the transgender experience is something more fundamental to the self than “mere” sex. But when the choice is between one set of trade-offs and another, such as intervention versus non-intervention, I would contend that understanding one’s sexual identity is a critical piece of information.
The obvious solution is to prescribe puberty blockers to 100% of children. After all, how can a 12-year-old decide that they are cis - they don't have the capacity for that yet. They can undergo the right puberty, whatever that may be, once their brain has matured.
That suddenly looks like a very silly argument, doesn't it?
So what about the kids who already get all of that and still say they are transgender? Should they perhaps be treated like they actually are transgender, or do you propose forced conversion therapy - like we tried in the past with gay people and left-handed people?
Puberty blockers aren't being handed out like candy. There's a rather intense psychological diagnostic process before it.
Have you considered that due to their education and research those people may know more on the subject than you do?
Regret rates for transition remain notoriously low (within 2%) with main reasons for regret stated to be transitioning too late or environmental lack of acceptance or support.
Besides, despite some orgs claiming there is a "transgender trend", we are just not seeing this in the data.
After reading the above I don't believe they concluded stress of living in a non-accepting world is the primary reason.
30% think about killing themselves and 4%+ try each year is shocking. I think whatever side of the debate you are on we can agree things aren't working out for too many people who go through this process. If this was a drug or vaccine or hair shampoo it would have been pulled off the market.
Through what process? This was a study about trans and nonbinary people, not specifically about people who have “transitioned”
I would imagine the rate of depression and similar disorders in trans people is extremely high. To be so unsatisfied with one’s own body that you consider (or go through) major treatment and surgery to change something so fundamental.
> Genspect, which is also a biased source on the subject:
Organization that supports position <x> supports position <x>.
If Genspect can be discarded as being a biased source, then so can WPATH and every other org supporting gender ideology.
Given the fraught nature of the debate, Wikipedia seems like a poor source for determining the bias of players in the debate - the most passionate debaters have plenty of time to just edit Wikipedia.
Can you explain what „gender ideology” is supposed to mean?
The primary issue with Genspect is poor scientific rigour applied to their publications, as I have shown above. Pretty much „if it fits our platform, we will spread it”.
> *70%-80% of children who expressed transgender feelings, overtime, lost those feelings.
This number most likely comes from a study that classified girls as transgender based on behaviors like preference to wear their hair short of wear pants instead of dresses or skirt:
Media research points to transgender topic being spun primarily by traditional media and social media as a political wedge issue to mobilize right-leaning voters, akin to abortion rights before:
it's only a fallacy in purely logical arguments. Appeal to authority makes sense in medical, scientific, engineering, and other contexts when the arguments necessarily depend on ambiguous data and subjective conclusions.
And yet we cannot stop time, and a decision has to be made. It seems natural to involve the child in this decision.
Of course, the next best thing (if a decision can't be made now) after stopping time are puberty blockers. Which are not completely without risks, but this applies to the other two options just as well (if not more so).
You can't not make decisions, and to claim so is to frame choosing one particular option as not-a-decision.
We periodically see posts on HN about the 'loneliness epidemic' and simultaneously the solution for home prices is to live in a rural area where you have maybe two neighbors and it's a 30-minute drive to see your friends or colleagues.
As someone who grew up in a rural area I don't miss it and I think people who call it a good standard of living have interesting criteria. That cheaper rural home also comes with secondary costs, like a longer commute.
I'm personally a WebUSB, WebBT etc hater but I totally get why PWA developers want those features. For example, let's say you're manufacturing some sort of USB device and you need a way to flash drivers. The idea of being able to just make a webpage that can update your drivers is so appealing compared to having to ship apps on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.
Similarly, if my bank website could do NFC tap-to-pay securely, that would be pretty cool. I can imagine lots of interesting opt-in uses for NFC in a webapp.
Arguments that these features are held back by Apple specifically in order to keep apps on the app store where they can control things and take 30% at least hold water, I think, even if that reasoning doesn't apply to Mozilla rejecting features.
> The idea of being able to just make a webpage that can update your drivers is so appealing compared to having to ship apps on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.
I suspect like many here, at $work we use a shit-ton of Flexoptix SFPs.
Flexoptix are not a $megacorp, they are a (very) small German company.
They manage to ship cross-platform apps to flash the SFPs. So its really not that difficult.
I would think a web app would be more of a pain the the butt to maintain because you have to deal with CSS reactive UI etc.
For little utility apps where you don’t care to deviate from UI default appearance and behavior (and, as a user, it’s much better if you don’t anyway, though it’s very trendy to make UX worse by customizing everything) iOS and Android both are dead simple, very easy to write and maintain a utility app for either of them.
An enormous amount of the cost of developing a lot of native apps is customizing the appearance and behavior, to match some slide deck mockup or to make it “on-brand” or whatever. It’s better for the user, and way cheaper, if you just… don’t do that. Hell a lot of common UI elements are easier in native than web if you just don’t try to customize them a ton (data-backed tables and list views and such are sooooo nice)
I like WebUSB in Chrome to update my Meshtastic radios. I also like that I have to go out of my way to launch Chrome for that, and other websites can’t request permission to access local hardware in my normal browser.
For gradients it definitely isn't unless you have the ability to do FRC dithering where the dither pattern changes every frame. The banding is very noticeable on a large enough screen.
> Defer US taxes by reinvesting your taxable income into the economy as business expenses, depreciating assets, etc.
Be really careful when doing this. Make sure you have a great accountant - if you go more than a few years without turning a measurable profit, your risk of being audited apparently goes up. My accountant personally cautioned me about this since my business has been in an R&D phase for 5 years so we've been showing a small loss every year. The last thing you want is for the IRS to decide you've been cheating on your taxes.
This is true for most businesses (they will reclassify it as a "hobby" where expenses aren't deductible, though you can fight that in tax court or real court if you want to) - but for rental properties you can go for decades with no profits (because of depreciation).
Can you elaborate? As a business owner in the U.S. I can opt to reinvest all revenue back into the business, thus would show zero net profit but (presumably) increase my company’s value. (And remember there are other taxes and fees paid to various governments, not just tax on income/profit, so it’s not typically like nothing gets paid.)
>As a business owner in the U.S. I can opt to reinvest all revenue back into the business,
Not entirely, no. Any of those reinvestments that count as capital expenditures aren't immediately deductible, but only on a throttled schedule, which is why the concept of depreciation exists in tax law:
This is why I asked for elaboration: The poster was unclear about how, say, making capital improvements (and getting taxed on those over time) would somehow look suspicious to the IRS, as it seems like this is an extremely common practice. I assume it’s not that then, but something else which I’d love for the poster to share.
Your comment made it sound like any re-investment back into the business would count as a cost that then cancels the profits that would be taxed. Even with your clarification, it still sounds like that. This is orthogonal to taxes that would be levied on things other than profit.
You can't reclassify profit as reinvestment to show zero net profit. (If you could every business would have an internal hedge fund or private equity business and would show zero net profit).
This is why many people make minimun wage - they get a salary but they use the business profits to live on. See your accountant for all the fine print before doing this.
We should note, this is entirely a Nvidia software imposed limitation, as the hardware can easily handle more, the purpose is to upsell to non-gaming cards.
> Require Social Security Numbers to authenticate preventing fraud.
There's a ton of stuff piled into the agenda on this page but that one in particular stumped me. Is it proposing that people (who?) are required to use their SSN to authenticate (for what?) or that the SSN agency is supposed to authenticate... something before doing something?
> (i) Finance and high-risk identity proofing.—No person shall extend credit, originate a loan, open a high-risk financial account, or provide another high-risk financial service based solely on a Social Security number, static identity information, or an uploaded image or copy of a government-issued identity document. A person engaging in such activity shall use multi-factor identity verification reasonably designed to verify both record consistency and claimant control, using less intrusive reasonably reliable methods where available.
> (j) Social Security number not sufficient identity credential.—A Social Security number, taxpayer identifier, or similar identifier shall not by itself be treated as proof of identity for purposes of this Act.
So, to me at least, it sounds like they actually mean "Providers must not use SSN for authentication (including fraud)".
SDFs can be pretty fast if you do the work to optimize around them. Unreal Engine has lots of features based on SDFs that are used to great effect in games that run on consumer hardware.
You don't need bleeding edge hardware or software either. The game I'm working on generates a new SDF every frame for the scene (using the GPU's fragment units to rasterize the distance data for the objects in the scene into a scratch buffer) and then does cone traces through the generated SDF per-pixel to do realtime soft shadow casting and lighting, and that performs just fine even on an old laptop from 2015.
Isn't case insensitivity a Win32 thing only? I would not expect it to impact stuff in Hyper-V or the windows kernel. AFAIK for example NTFS is case-sensitive.
NTFS supports case-sensitivity, but if you have case-sensitive distinctions in a directory that's marked case-insensitive, bad things happen. (Those bad things are probably entirely deterministic, theoretically-predictable, and documented in one of Raymond Chen's big books of Windows sadness, but that doesn't mean I want to deal with them as a mere mortal.)
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