The Nehor

Yeah, and in case God is reading this I think Calm deserves the being able to sleep through the night thing now and not in some future state so it would be nice if you could take care of that.

I want my early to mid 20s twink form please.

Give it a few more decades. We might have been there or at least be much closer by now if the Nazis hadn’t destroyed most transgender research as one of their first acts in power. You are just wrong about the evidence. No you wouldn’t. You would dismiss it or pull a quote from the Cass Report and declare victory. I am operating on an abundance of evidence. You have to cherry-pick. But fine, her is a 40 year follow-up study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36149983/ Sweden reportedly made some conclusions based on this study which had to issue a correction: https://segm.org/ajp_correction_2020 And have a systematic review of all peer-reviewed studies in English to pull out a larger picture: https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/ I could post dozens more if I thought it would help but a simple Google search would get you a lot of the same data. And the data shows that it is. Wrong. Just wrong. Totally wrong. A simple Google search would verify that. Even most AI is smart enough to answer that. You don’t judge them by any standard of evidence. You have just decided it has a negative effect. None of those are known to be a cause of gender dysphoria. You’re just making things up. To what model? What are you even talking about? What nations have abandoned medical transition entirely in favor of talk therapy? You are taking mostly minor changes in how some nations deal with pediatric cases and generalizing to an absurd degree. I posted a bunch above. You can find more with a simple Google search. Go nuts. Fine, look at the studies. No, they didn’t and you asserting it isn’t making it so. No. Why is it that changes you like are automatically free of political bias while those you disagree with are monstrous perversions of the system? It is almost as if you make that decision based entirely on whether it agrees with you. Repeating the same thing over and over is so pathetic. Nope. But not enough to Google them? Vain repetitions. I am not saying most transphobia is religiously motivated in Europe. I said your transphobia is religiously motivated. I don’t think in general it is religiously motivated. I think people are just uncomfortable with transgender people so they find justifications to back up their bigotry. For some that will be religion. You are absolutely and utterly wrong. Segregation was rooted in biology and trying to find a fundamental difference in races to justify its existence. The reason segregation began to fall legally was not primarily due to any moral advances. Part of it was that judges couldn’t find a key element to definitively differentiate between white and black people. When the binary was found wanting to thread that divide it became unenforceable. Another part was legislation and a lot of that legislation came because the Civil Right Movement was making life intolerable for the segregationist and (more importantly) costing the elite a lot of money. You are a broken record. ROGD is junk science. It is a non-clinical diagnosis. It is not supported by evidence. Here is a good article examining why it is unproven, where it came from, why the initial data that led to the hypothesis doesn’t work as evidence (which I have shared with you multiple times but you ignore it): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11876199/ And a bunch more repetition of the same things over and over again because you do the line by line thing instead of discussing things holistically. So………boring.

I know and I admit that I dislike most of it. In it the prophets present God as a pretty horrible husband with lots of humiliating the wife and publicly scorning her until she comes back repentant and desperate and things of that nature. Reads way too much like an abuser’s handbook. I find it to be a bit horrifying that the Prophets considered this to be a good God implying that that was a good husband so that was their idea of a good husband. Just…….yuck. Quite honestly it often isn’t sweet. I have gotten emotionally tired of having to blame myself for everything in my relationship with God. I grow sympathetic to the old Jewish idea that the angels argued to God that making humanity was a big mistake. This is back when angels really didn’t like humanity. I kind of get the point. If you are going to make humans so flawed from the start and set goals so unattainable why bother? I know the standard answer (Spoilers: it is Jesus) but it is tiring. Also the “Not if He can help it” bit is confusing. If God wants to not punish then maybe just don’t? I like this aspiration.

Uhhh no, the reason you develop those gametes is due to hormones when young. Also it is probably only a matter of time before we can change that as well. So it is more of a skill issue. Variations within a strict binary system means it is not a strict binary. You continue to deliberately ignore this. The difference is whether the treatment WORKS!!!!! The objective of medicine is to reduce suffering and increase human flourishing and all that. That is the question. You are trying to make it about everything sticking to your idea of a sexual binary. The fact that someone is happier can be sacrificed to the idea of you holding on to a strict binary shows that your approach isn’t ethical. The increased quality of life is the data. Except that medical (and other forms of transitioning) does often relieve the symptoms. You continue to ignore this. That is the point. When it relieves the symptoms it means the treatment is working. Starvation doesn’t help with anorexia. Transitioning works very well in most cases. It helps. Talk therapy has minimal benefits. You want to get rid of the treatment that seems to be the most successful in favor of the one that doesn’t. You are the joke in a lot of transgender memes that go along the lines of: ”Wow, I am happier now and more comfortable in my own skin. I hope this lasts forever.” ”But aren’t you worried this might be irreversible?” That is all nonsense. The relief is usually not short term and doesn’t introduce serious medical harms. Reality-based care is the care that works the best at treating the symptoms. You just don’t think it is real. You aren’t basing this on data. It is a religious dogma that the Church came up with a few decades ago. Yes, the distress is sustainably reduced. That is the overwhelming evidence. One heavily politicized review making recommendations on TERF island does not refute the consensus of the rest of the developed world. Oh for the Love of Zeus. You are arguing we shouldn’t use an effective treatment because we don’t use the same treatment in analogous situations and that this is somehow based on ethics? What? Ethics in medicine isn’t scripture where there is some divine imperative we have to be consistent about. It is decided based on a cost/benefit analysis of potential benefits and harms. It is contested because people hate transgender people. That is like arguing that segregation must be necessary because if getting rid of it was so good it wouldn’t be contested. Plus I have seen a lot of the stuff contesting it and it often comes down to nothing. I favor bodily autonomy in general. I also do not concede that identity is subjective. They aren’t performed lightly. The medicine behind it was built up slowly over decades. You are still trying to catch up because propagandists told you it was bad and you ignored it until they did. Yep, meets that criteria. Wrong. Rapid onset cases are pseudoscience. Stop pretending you are discussing medicine and then drag in discredited theories with no evidential backing. Nope. It is not rushed medicalization. Again, that you just recently found out about this does not mean there isn’t data about it. And yes, you are infantilizing them. And no, data on interventions is not weak no matter how regularly you hold to that evidenceless dogma. So we can’t do anything until we can “cure” autism. Yeah, no, that is not how anything works. You are just looking for any roadblock that sounds plausible. The evidence is that therapy DOES NOT provide more than a minimal benefit. Evidence-based care based on evidence that it doesn’t work. Smac Medicine: Using Leeches Since 861! Nope. Wrong. It is you meddling in things you don’t understand and showing a lack of compassion by doing so. You peddle pseudoscience and fringe theories. You are not good at this. That is exactly what it makes it. Otherwise why have the surgery. To conform to gender norms even though the person getting the surgery doesn’t care if they match those norms? That would be pretty horrific. It is not corrective in a way your religious views allow. Nope. It does actually. You have repeatedly insisted that there isn’t enough data on long-term harm (so sayeth the HOLY CASS REPORT). Now it is suddenly enough to draw conclusions from. You don’t have any consistent positions. You just throw everything at the wall in any combination you think might be plausible without any notion of consistency and just hope it sticks. One moment data on long term effect are insufficient so we shouldn’t act. In another moment it shows consistent long term harm. Which is it? You want to argue that you are compassionate but you want to reject a treatment that improves quality of life for one that provides minimal or no benefit. I’ve seen this before. During the days when conversion therapy for gay people consistently didn’t work but some groups wanted to keep trying because the alternative of accepting that it was largely immutable was abhorrent so instead of allowing them to exist and do their own thing they pushed for even more conversion therapy hoping it would eventually work or they could keep pretending it might because the alternative is unpleasant. The desperate attempts to find some fundamental and clear difference in race to justify segregation went down the same road with the endless repetition of pseudoscience and discredited theories to try to provide a rational basis for what was an emotionally driven distaste. That is the problem. You are defending an emotional position and not a rational one. All of this has happened before….and it will all happen again.

“Biological reality” is determined by the presence of hormones. We can change that. The reality is much more malleable than you want it to be. I don’t think you have a good grasp of the ethics behind all of this. You are putting the ethical line where your religion sets it, not based on medical ethics. Also someone starving themselves doesn’t relieve the symptoms of anorexia. It doesn’t help with the problem. Gender affirming treatments DO help with body dysphoria. BIID is much more complicated than you are making it sound and some people who have an affiliation with another animal DO pursue elective cosmetic surgeries to alleviate their symptoms. A lot of treatments are irreversible. You are drawing a really weird ethical line. So people who experience trauma or suffer from autism need to be infantilized and don’t deserve bodily autonomy? Yikes. Exploratory therapy? LOL. Do you think this hasn’t been tried over and over again? If therapy could cure or heavily alleviate gender dysphoria the transphobes would be screaming this from the mountaintops. They don’t because it doesn’t work. Therapy helps with transitioning or determining the extent of a transition or whether the person wants to medically transition and lots of nuances and some therapy is sometimes required to get a prescription for hormones but it doesn’t help with the underlying issue. You are suggesting people stop pursuing a treatment that works in favor of a treatment that doesn’t actually work and has been shown not to work. That is not compassion. You think it is icky and transgressive and sinful in one case and not in the other…despite scripture being silent about it. The distinction you are trying to make is an ad hoc justification for a religious conviction, not a serious distinction.

I don’t think you know what a caricature is.

So talking about how cisgendered men abuse women at over ten times the rate that tranwomen do is a deflection. Well, okay, as long as this standard of what is a deflection is consistent I guess it is okay if we…… So you are deflecting from a discussion of cisgendered men being the most common abusers of women by a huge margin by saying that an athlete got peeved about something minor? So you are okay with deflections? Pick a lane! They tied and gave the fifth and sixth place trophies to both women and had them hold those trophies (which looked identical from a distance) in the photo. They were going to have a trophy made up that was engraved with the correct 5th place but they only had one so gave it to one of the women with the promise they would send her an identical trophy. So the horrific injustice she suffered was……getting the exact same thing she would have gotten if Ila hadn’t tied her. That’s it. That’s the story. It could have easily been that they gave Riley the 5th place trophy and Ila had had to wait a week to get an identical trophy. This is your suffering martyr? This is just pathetic. That she is the poster child for cis women suffering due to transgender women existing just shows how desperate transphobes are for heroes. You pivoted from talk about sexual assault to this and think it is somehow equivalent? Doesn’t that appear at all insane to you? Your hero is someone who had to wait a week or two for a trophy? What is wrong with you? This is a pitiful hero. It says more about those lionizing her than it does about her. There are people doing amazing things out there worthy of acclaim but this trophy thing is heroism? What the hell? Also Riley Gaines spends a lot of time on social media calling out and targeting transgender athletes in Middle School and High School. She is outing and bullying literal children and that is somehow heroic? That is monstrous. It was egging on transphobes to harass and humiliate children. This is your hero? That is disgusting. And this is not something Riley Gaines complained about. At least not on the day itself where she said: “I am in full support of her and full support of her transition and her swimming career and everything like that because there’s no doubt that she works hard too, but she’s just abiding by the rules that the NCAA put in place, and that’s the issue.” The issue being that her trophy was delayed….I guess. Gaines changed her tune a bit once she realized that there was money to be made as a conservative icon and somehow her support of transition and swimming career vanished when there was a grift to get in on. Oh, and worth noting that Lia was well along in her transition. For several years she was required to compete on the men’s swimming team until she had been on hormone therapy long enough to comply with the NCAA guidelines. Her swimming times were substanitally worse than her times before she began the transition. Fun Fact: The five athletes that beat both Lia and Riley included four cisgender women and one transman. The transgender man did not pursue hormone therapy as part of his transition so was unable to participate on the men’s team. That never happened. There were changes in the records when the Trump administration bullied the athletic organization to change some of their records retroactively and the “Riley Gaines Act” was passed but Lia’s times are still recorded and are official. Also Riley never obtained any settlements. She and others sued the organization but almost all the charges were dismissed and the one small sliver of the lawsuit that has trudged on like a zombie has to do with Defense Department funding. So no, there were no million dollar settlements. Well, sort of. There is a news report of Riley Gaines winning $1.2 million dollars in a settlement. It was published in the Dunning-Krueger Times which is a satire website that only the very credulous could believe. Right wing morons believed it and heralded it as a great victory because they are idiots or they realized it was false and just figured their followers were stupid enough to believe it and ran with it. In summary, your hero is a terrible person, comparing sexual assault to having to wait a week for a trophy at a college swim meet is reprehensible, and you are deeply weird for complaining about deflecting and then immediately launching an obvious deflection. Might want to work on the self-awareness a bit there.

Because you are trying to do satire but don’t have or aren’t using the humor or sense of the absurd needed to pull it off. It just comes across as clumsy and as you being really fixated on young brides. It is monomania. If you want to satirize prophetic marriage practices you should also be more holistic. There is plenty of material there to play with.

I would trust it more if the writer of Revelation had focused more on how the happy afterlife worked and less on his extended and elaborate revenge fantasy that makes up way too much of the text. Also brought us the gift of hell which wasn’t a thing in very early Christianity.

You are deeply weird.

When something confirms or threatens a belief that is tied to someone’s identity they tend to get really stupid about what they can accept or reject. It is very hard (though possible) to overcome this knee-jerk reaction but few bother to even try. You can have a great discussion with someone and think they are really bright but then if something touches on their religion or politics or cultural beliefs (assuming those are tied up in their identity) and they suddenly become credulous or denialists. It is a well-known and often studied bug in human rationality.

They demand evidence for new ideas. That can take time to put together and developbut suggesting they don’t like exciting new ideas in the field they almost all nerd out over? Yeah, no. Religious people love to argue that academics are slow to change and are trapped in old ideas because it is convenient as it implies if they were more open they would obviously agree with me. That, or the religious people are just projecting their own inflexibility onto others.

Don’t worry, women are assured that in order to inherit one of those world men have to marry a woman so you are vital in order for a man to get to rule the world. You get to come along. HOORAY!!!!!

I haven’t read it but know a little about utilitarianism. I think a bit is obscured by the use of the word pleasure. This pleasure also includes what we would often call happiness. Bentham and Mills argued about whether pleasure/happiness were all equal or whether there were higher and lower versions and the higher are to be sought after. Regarding conjugal relations I would argue that a focus on the pleasure/happiness of your partner as well as your own amplifies both so a kind of modified utilitarianism is at work there. There is a reason erotic imagery is brought in to describe ecstasy with the divine. Part of me wants to quote Paul about marital partners leaving the other ‘discouraged’ for long periods being wrong and hurtful to the bond but I don’t know how you can analogize that to God’s relationship to us. Does God feel that pleasure as well? I don’t know. I have a harder time applying this to God. It is very hard to approach God disinterestedly. You can approach without directly seeking pleasure or happiness from the communication or interaction but the approach usually comes from a want for God or, in some cases, a fear of God or some other impulse. While an appreciative love of God is often desired the need love that is more like a child imploring a parent is usually present and that is usually seeking some kind of pleasure or happiness or the ending of a pain or some strength to deal with pain or whatever. I am not sure if approaching God out of a sense of duty is somehow better. So….in short, interesting thoughts, no solid ideas I can come up with though.

I just wanted a pet T-Rex.

Joseph Smith was not an academic. The mainstream academic historians. Most of them don’t care one way or the other about Joseph Smith and it is weird that you are comparing an academic point of history with faith based religious truth claims as if they are somehow analogous or equivalent. They aren’t laughing at Margaret Barker’s theories. They are waiting for evidence to back up the conclusions. That is how academia works. Margaret Baker is generally respected for her knowledge. This specific conclusion isn’t accepted because there isn’t enough backing it up. Trying to turn it into a brave revolutionary fighting the smug entrenched naysayers fearful of change is ridiculous. This isn’t an equivalent of the caricature many make of Galileo. Academics generally LOVE seismic changes. It means a lot of new stuff to investigate and write about.

Dr. Margaret Barker’s work is fringe at best and is more guesswork than substantiated. The alternative to her radical and largely rejected model is not an “outdated, cynical evolutionary model”.

I think you might have missed the joke.

He did it himself by injecting himself with that sweet testosterone boyjuice. Some are pushed around by destiny. Others seize control of their own lives.

Which is an incredibly rare occurrence while brutality from cisgender men against women is an ongoing crisis impacting most women’s lives. We’re the problem buddy. Not transwomen. Making up boogeymen is pointless and just encourages more bigotry and violence against an already marginalized group.

Uh, nope. The Books of Enoch have all kinds of Platonic flavor and do not go back beyond the first few centuries BCE. The Book of Enoch is almost certainly not a much more ancient tradition that was suddenly rediscovered.

When I find myself bored at Church I used to push through it thinking it was good experience for me. Then I started to ponder about why the ability to endure boredom will be a useful skill and start to worry about this whole heaven thing.

One of my favorite historians did a four-part blog series on how polytheism works in very general terms. https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/ The problem a lot of people have when looking back on polytheist religion is that they often import the idea that it is like Abrahamic monotheism except there are more gods which isn’t really how it works. Abrahamic monotheists are expected to be devoted to God and to love God and to obey God and the like. Polytheism has a more moderated view. The gods don’t much care if you like them or not. They expect to be respected and for mortals to placate them and to “keep square” with them in terms of debts owed. Piety is respecting the gods. They don’t expect a kind of lifelong devotion that our form of monotheism does. I suspect many polytheists would find modern Christians and Muslims and Jews to be fanatical and dangerous. They certainly thought that of the Christians when they appeared originally.

I said gender-affirming surgeries. Incorrect, the breast tissue removed when a trans man or a cis man have breast tissue removed is almost always removing healthy tissue so that the person can match a “perceived gender identity” That definition is incomplete because it comes from a clinic that specializes in procedures for transgender and other queer people. I don’t care what most people think. They have been fed propaganda and view the term as applying primarily to transgender people because propagandists like to simplify the concept to avoid ambiguity and to focus bigotry. I don’t see any need to cater to it. And by some twisted rationale you are arguing that cosmetic surgery designed to make someone match their gender isn’t gender affirming? I could probably stop here. It is from boy to make him look more like a boy. Also it is implants to help a girl look more like a girl. No, they are both elective cosmetic/psychological interventions. There is usually no reason beyond cosmetic appearance and dysphoria to do gynecomastia. Dysphoria is psychological. Which are rarely done on minors and virtually never on anyone under the age of 17 so this is more of a bodily autonomy issue so this really isn’t that relevant. I am well aware you would ban these procedures for adults as well if you could. Also, the “idealogical model” is not “contested” by experts. The overwhelming majority agree. Also, the statistic you are trying to pull in that says dysphoria fades is not saying what you think it says but we have been over this before and you keep repeating this so there is no point in writing up the correction again as you will be back to trot it out again soon enough no matter what I say. If I believed the concern was genuinely motivated by questions of consent I would suggest that a discussion of what treatments minors should have access to and when would be something to figure out relying on the experience of experts to guid us. I don’t believe this about you or pretty much anyone opposing them. The opposition is motivated by the ignorant regularly repeating falsehoods for idealogical reasons, not medical or psychological ones. What is the point of having a good faith discussion with people who aren’t operating in good faith? And you immediately prove my point that this is not about the children who make up a tiny minority of gender affirming surgeries and most of those minors are cis-gendered and you seem to find no problem with those ones despite them being equally “irreversible”. You want gender-affirming treatments to be difficult or impossible to access even for adults because you don’t like them. Not fo medical reasons. I also love how you repeat the old “social contagion” pseudoscience again and talk about how they are somehow going to be a “burden on society”. What are you even talking about? Gender-affirming treatments are all over the place and easily accessible for cis-gendered people. You have just arbitrarily decided that some are “corrections” and others are “irreversible” based on a disproven idealogical model. You want to throw out transgender people having access because a minority contest the model they operate under while your model is contested by the majority but should somehow be allowed to draw lines on when care is allowed? Testosterone for cis-men and estrogen for cis-women are both gender-affirming treatments. I have a friend who is on estrogen blockers because he has more estrogen than women (cis and trans) are supposed to have. Hell, viagra and the other drugs along that line are gender-affirming treatments. So no, you are wrong about what gender-affirming care means and trying to redefine terms is silly. You might be able to argue that transgender treatments are different if sex could be shown to be a strict binary but it isn’t. Even if it were nature declaring something to be the case isn’t a reason to say we can’t change it. No, the reason you oppose this is religious. You think it is an affront to God because God belatedly declared it to be wrong a few years ago despite transgender people existing for all of recorded history and transgender treatments of various kinds going back to ancient Egypt at least.