Why are posters on /lgbt/ so desperate to refute the scientific

>>8429973
Because of a lifetime of /pol/ poisoning. Self-hate is a hell of a drug.

>>8429973
>despite it having the most evidence and explanatory power?
???

>>8429973
It doesn't actually have that much evidence right now, but it will be probably be proven later, when we have a better understanding of the brain and its mechanisms.

>>8429973
why does bill nye seem like such a scumbag? I know he is a le epic man of science but I don't get a lot of great vibes from him. I wouldn't be surprised if he has a midget sex slaved tied up in his basement for example.

>>8429984
>but it will be probably be proven later
:^)

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but bill nye contextualizes himself as male?

For fuck's sake are we literally having the same thread again read the fucking wikipedia page you mongs

>>8429973
A consensus should be challenged and refutable. Actually that's only a good thing in real science. If nobody refuted hypotheses then there would be no progress. Evidence doesn't have much diagnostic value in science either. Like the LHC that needs unbelievable amounts of confirming evidence and repeated experiments to give a plausible maybe for alternatives to a hypothesis not being the case. The desire for explanatory power is something scientists have to deal with constantly, like many other biases their merits are often judged in how well they can keep themselves and their colleagues in check.

The problem here seems to be that you fundamentally misunderstand the scientific method but the same tactic is used by trans posters too. You have to wonder what's the point of talking to the scientifically illiterate if you don't have a desire to educate.

>>8430005
Not them.
A consensus should be challenged and debatable, but you can't challenge it with trivial /pol/-tier shit. It's okay to question things but when it comes to trans shit we're having the "hey guys I'm a first year physics student and I think I invented a perpetual motion machine!" discussion every day.

>>8430012
The unspoken implication here is that the work of professional scientists who have worked with trans people for decades and one of whom even is trans is "trivial /pol/-tier shit" and the result of a political lobbying and harassment campaign and craven career gatekeepers who bend to their demands are "the scientific consensus, backed by evidence and explanatory power."

>>8430012
Like I've said it's on both sides. Both sides present something for which there may be evidence, because there's evidence the preferable interpretation must be irrefutable truth, according to them. That just isn't how science works, that might be how the media and society work but not science.

People aren't discussing or refuting axioms either. There isn't hardly enough work done to even consider anything in this field so established as the laws of physics.

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>mfw people are taking the bait
Can't wait until someone creates bots and unleashes them onto 4chan, soon it'll just be bots arguing with retards all day long and we'll all get to laugh at them.

>>8430018
Are you hearing what you're saying? What you're implying is that the vast majority of equally professional scientists who have likewise "worked with trans people for decades" state that they believe what they do due to political pressure while the minority that supports your views alone is immune to such pressure and says what it does because that is what it believes to be true.

>>8430021
We don't understand the exact mechanisms involved but we're at the point where there is evidence that transsexuals of all orientations have abnormal brain structures, that many of those structures are sexually dimorphic and that the difference in the dimorphic structures is a shift toward sizes more common in the other sex (leaving them in an intermediate position). Twin studies show that, even when the twins are reared apart, if one twin is trans the other has a very high chance of being trans as well.

There are genetic factors and probably natal-environmental ones. We don't understand just what is going on but we do know quite factually that it is rooted in biology.

>>8430040
There's a higher chance that the bots achieve artificial intelligence than a human posting something intelligent on 4chan.

>>8430052
So what you're saying is we should actually judge the theories themselves and not argue over which has the highest arbitrary authority instead?

What a radical idea! Maybe it's worth a try!

Perhaps not.

>>8430065
You're free to judge theories by themselves but if you're not an expert adhering to the scientific consensus has value.

>>8430052
Evidence doesn't matter much. You can stockpile evidence for any number of beliefs that range the entire gamut between true and false.

The field is still fully in the early phases of exploration, observation, and making assumptions based on observations. If you understood science you would already know all this, you would know you can pull all the specimens you like out your ass and it wont mean shit.

>>8430068
That's what I thought.

The scientific consensus as determined by the political body of my choice.

>>8430073
Evidence can be of varying strength. In this case the evidence are empiric, physical and directly observable.
They matter when they're strong and when alternative viewpoints can't explain them. They're not just evidence for - they're evidence against.

>>8430076
Can you name major (as in large and influential) scientific organizations that oppose this view? Naming the position of all of the largest organizations which together make the bulk of such organizations as evidence for scientific consensus is hardly handpicking "a political body of my choice".

>>8430091
Since when is scientific consensus a matter for practitioners' (not scientific) organizations?

>>8430091
That isn't how it works and I would advise you to read a book before commenting further.

You're deluded if you think evidence is exclusive to a single proposition like this. The sun goes up and the sun goes down but that's still very far from heliocentrism.

>>8430099
The implication here is that these organizations are not manned by scientists, nor do they consult the scientific community and strive to reflect the latest findings. They don't publish what they do because they feel like it, you know. Even if you look at journals the only major journal that more or less opposes this view is Archives of Sexual Behavior, which, granted, is prestigious but even it is not entirely in favor of this line of thought. For example ex IASR president Milton Diamond has argued for the intersex view quite extensively.

>>8430055
Maybe you're a bot.
Are you a bot?

>>8430110
>You're deluded if you think evidence is exclusive to a single proposition like this.
That depends on the proposition. One side argues that transsexuality is not biological in nature.

>>8430132
I was pretty explicit actually.

>>8430145
Okay, so you don't count professional organizations, research institutions or journals. What do you count?

There's a joke among scientists about neuroscience. If you buy a new book on the subject today you can throw it in the trash in five years.

>>8430165
At least neuroscience is a science, unlike psychology.

>>8430148
Would you mind if I used an analogy here?

>>8430136
which side would that be, friend?
>>8429973
because 'gender dysphoria is caused by gender identity' is a non-theory. it means nothing by itself unless you talk about why the dysphoria and the identity (because they don't even always exist alongside each other or develop at the same time) exist in the first place. it provides no explanation for the extreme heterogenity observed in transsexualism, and especially not for how on further observation this heterogenity turns into clusters that appear to have different etiological explanations. it miserably fails people who have gender dysphoria that predates or is in the absence of any stated cross-sex gender identity, as well as people who transition and have good outcomes but do not experience clinically significant gender dysphoria (e.g. bailey jay). it inherently requires labelling large numbers of people whose lives would be improved by transition as 'non-trans' no matter where you decide to carve reality. it ignores the lived experience of people whose experience of transsexualism is different from the majority or the accepted narrative (this can be hstses *or* a*ps depending on the time and place you live in). it's a circular non-answer that's endlessly mocked by our opponents because the logical gaps are large enough to drive a truck through. it misses the fact that most cis people *don't have conscious gender identities* and creates a larger number of opponents in the first place -- it's pretty easy to consider trans people delusional if you *don't* have a strongly felt sense of your gender. gender identity and gender dysphoria are extremely significant in transsexualism and transition, but you can't turn research on transsexualism's etiology into a migi-based just so story -- that's not going to get you any closer to the answer.

>>8430136
There are many different propositions and you can extrapolate and apply evidence based assumptions to many of them using the exact same piece of evidence. The assumption of needing a lot of evidence is also wrong, you just need one refutation to make any supporting evidence of a hypothesis invalid.

>>8430170
They're really the same thing but different scales. Neuroscience is the microscopic scale that focuses on single neurons and psychology is the macroscopic scale that focuses on brain scans and behavior.

>>8430175
Different anon, what's your take on Blanchard and all that?

>>8430199
Anyone can make observations including Blanchard. His interpretation is just one of many.

>>8430173
I'm your ancient frenemy so you know the answer to that.
I've been meaning to ask you what you think of the links I've been spamming over the last few days.

http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2015to2019/2016-transsexualism.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4699258/

>it means nothing by itself unless you talk about why the dysphoria and the identity (because they don't even always exist alongside each other or develop at the same time) exist in the first place.
Traditionally intersexed individuals are significantly more likely to transition, but not all of them do. That dysphoria is rooted in biology doesn't mean that whether an individual develops dysphoria or not does not depend on psychological factors in some cases. Intersexuality always comes in degrees. Some people might do poorly until they transition because they're severely neurologically intersexed while others are only slightly so and thus can do well as their natal sex in the right social conditions.

>it provides no explanation for the extreme heterogenity observed in transsexualism, and especially not for how on further observation this heterogenity turns into clusters that appear to have different etiological explanations
So, about that.. why do non-natal-sex-attracted transsexuals do in fact have sex-shifted brains?

>it miserably fails people who have gender dysphoria that predates or is in the absence of any stated cross-sex gender identity
Can't one suffer for a reason they don't understand?

>as well as people who transition and have good outcomes but do not experience clinically significant gender dysphoria (e.g. bailey jay)
>it inherently requires labelling large numbers of people whose lives would be improved by transition as 'non-trans' no matter where you decide to carve reality.
Whether it is a medical necessity for someone to transition due to a condition they have or not is immaterial to whether someone should be able to transition if they want to or not

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>>8430173
But WPATH said!

>>8430216
How would you work out which interpretation to believe yourself, using your line of reasoning?

Not asking you to say which, just the logical process you would go through?

>>8430173
>it ignores the lived experience of people whose experience of transsexualism is different from the majority or the accepted narrative (this can be hstses *or* a*ps depending on the time and place you live in)
How so?

>it's a circular non-answer that's endlessly mocked by our opponents because the logical gaps are large enough to drive a truck through. it misses the fact that most cis people *don't have conscious gender identities* and creates a larger number of opponents in the first place -- it's pretty easy to consider trans people delusional if you *don't* have a strongly felt sense of your gender.
That normies don't understand something is not an argument in favor of that thing being untrue.

> gender identity and gender dysphoria are extremely significant in transsexualism and transition, but you can't turn research on transsexualism's etiology into a migi-based just so story -- that's not going to get you any closer to the answer.
How about relying on empiric means instead of abstract ideas you can't prove or disprove?

Don't feel like you have to argue with me to answer the first question though. I'd very much like to hear what you think of those links.

>>8430175
We're not disagreeing? I've been arguing that we don't know what the exact mechanisms behind dysphoria and transsexuality are, but that the evidence we have pretty much refutes that they're not biological, or at the very least biological in origin (i.e. an interaction between biology and the way people react to it causing a mental shift).

>>8430224
A good scientist is impartial as best they can be. They don't commit to any single belief and instead opt to assign a certain amount of confidence in a hypothesis or theory. Rather than having answers it's about learning to become comfortable with a lot of open and unanswered questions.

You wont make any friends like that though if the topic is controversial. Both sides will vilify you because they rather have something to believe in than to find things out about the world. That might not be a satisfying answer but that's an outline of the mindset.

>>8430251
Not them.
Yet there are still things that scientists in certain fields accept to be true and things they accept to be false.

>>8430251
Them.
How does the assigning confidence work? Considering what you said about a single refutation making any supporting evidence invalid?

>>8430238
A more accurate way of saying that is that some evidence points to biological correlations to transsexualism. It doesn't give any information to what degree of influence biological factors have on transsexual behavior, nor does it rule out other environmental influences such as society.

>>8430272
It hurts me to write this but you're right. I will argue, however, that the prevalence of the biological factors in transsexuals is a strong indication that transsexuality is not typically caused *solely* by social factors.

>>8430292
>that the prevalence of the biological factors in transsexuals is a strong indication
Different anon, can you explain what a "strong indication" means? Since it's shot of proof but has some significant, what is that significance?

>>8430259
We call those things axioms and they're usually heavily tested and fundamental to many other things. If you can disprove an axiom you will call everything into question so that it's unreasonable to do that.

Gender dysphoria is not at all that kind of thing not even close. It's closer to scientists guessing what intelligent alien life might look like.

>>8430271
Generally you know that the laws of physics work and they will work tomorrow as they do today. You expect that they will continue working this way and that any experiments you conduct based on those laws will turn out a certain way. Sometimes experiments are repeated over and over and results are parsed for years like those done with the LHC. You can say that confidence in the result is the sigma in those experiments. This is tried and true science and you can put quite a lot of confidence in this kind of science. Engineering applications are another sign of confidence, the technology is based on science, and it works exactly as expected.

>>8430292
It looks like that could be the case but there's nothing conclusive either way. We can't grow people in labs and run endless experiments on them so we're stuck doing things the hard way.

>>8430317
>Sometimes experiments are repeated over and over and results are parsed for years like those done with the LHC. You can say that confidence in the result is the sigma in those experiments. This is tried and true science and you can put quite a lot of confidence in this kind of science.
So, other differences between the situations notwithstanding, the more AGPs we observe, the more confidence we can have that the theories regarding them are correct?

>>8430323
No, the more AGP that you observe the more confidence you can assign to AGP existing. If you also observe the same pattern of behavior in all of them but absent in controls then you can assign confidence to that pattern of behavior being related to AGP.

Assumptions based upon other assumptions just turns into unshackled speculation.

>>8430339
I get it! So when it's not an assumption but has been assigned confidence, you multiply the confidence of each pattern together for the final confidence in the whole theory?

>>8430299
Strictly speaking, we've only observed that just about every member of a certain population we've studied exhibits a certain set of traits. We have yet to show that some of the traits cause the others to develop. It is possible but incredibly unlikely that all of the cases we've studied so far just happened to share the traits due to a cosmic coincidence.

>>8430317
>It looks like that could be the case but there's nothing conclusive either way.
I wouldn't go as far as that. The evidence is non-conclusive, but it is overwhelmingly in favor of one hypothesis.

>>8430323
(Obviously) not them but you need to keep directionality in mind. If you see a certain bundle of traits together you can't assume A causes B rather than the other way around without proof. This is less of an issue for the biological argument because environmental factors don't exactly affect neural structures in such a way, head trauma in the like excluded.

>>8430352
>If you see a certain bundle of traits together you can't assume A causes B rather than the other way around without proof.
How could it be shown which causes the other? And what are we to think in the absence of it having been shown either way?

>environmental factors don't exactly affect neural structures in such a way
They don't affect it in what way precisely, since there are many ways in which they do affect it?

>>8430364
First thing first: I'm clearly biased in favor of the opposing theory so I'm not a good advocate for this one.

>How could it be shown which causes the other?
That's the central challenge we face here. As far as I'm aware there is no modern tool which could let us figure out directionality short of a very long term study on a large population of children as they grow up to young adulthood. If we could identify the brain patterns associated with gender identity and with the proposed idea of ETLEs we could see which ones appear first. To do that we'd first have to identify these patterns, and we haven't been able to do this as of yet (presuming ETLEs exist).

>And what are we to think in the absence of it having been shown either way?
Given the lack of evidence for what I think is a fairly cumbersome hypothesis that requires a great deal of things to be true I think that it is reasonable to consider it as probably untrue until we learn something that changes that, but that further research into it is worthwhile.

>They don't affect it in what way precisely, since there are many ways in which they do affect it?
Your life experiences, physical trauma and abnormal chemical exposure excluded, are not known to affect the parts we're talking about in a manner as drastic as the one seen in trans people.

>>8430173
OP here
By gender identity, I more meant which set of hormones you are most comfortable operating in.

Having multiple different etiologies leading to one result is of a lower explanatory power than having one etiology that expresses an array of different personality traits based on differing non-gender neurodimorphism.

>>8430430
>non-gender neurodimorphism.
Uh.. mind elaborating? Isn't dimorphism as used here implied to be about gender? What would the two poles be otherwise?

>>8430414
>To do that we'd first have to identify these patterns, and we haven't been able to do this as of yet (presuming ETLEs exist).
There's no telling if we'll ever be able to identify either if either ETLEs or gender identity exist.

>Given the lack of evidence for what I think is a fairly cumbersome hypothesis that requires a great deal of things to be true
In what way is it more cumbersome than the alternative directionality?

>are not known to affect the parts we're talking about in a manner as drastic as the one seen in trans people.
If you have links at hand, what are the parts of the brain involved what are the limits to which they are known to be affected by normal life experiences?

>>8430173
OP again btw its pretty rich that you'd accuse me of denying lived experiences when your pet theory is rejected by almost every transbian out there specifically because their lived experience is that they did NOT transition for a fetish or to fulfill some kind of ETLE. You also tacitly misgender trans people all the time. So fuck off.

>>8430434
Masculinity and femininity vs maleness and femaleness

>>8430456
>almost every transbian out there
>their lived experience is that they did NOT transition for a fetish or to fulfill some kind of ETLE
:/

>>8430438
>There's no telling if we'll ever be able to identify either if either ETLEs or gender identity exist.
In the end everything we are has to be encoded in the brain in some fashion. I believe that we will be able to do so eventually.

>In what way is it more cumbersome than the alternative directionality?
I think the typology is more cumbersome because it relies on a lot of abstract hypotheticals such as ETLEs.

>If you have links at hand, what are the parts of the brain involved what are the limits to which they are known to be affected by normal life experiences?
Sorry, I don't recall reading anything focused on that issue. It is just that, across groups, men exhibit neural patterns that fall within the male range and vice versa for women. If life experiences changed these things significantly you'd expect the tranny-unrelated research focused on brain sex dimorphism (a field for which it is far easier and cheaper to find large sample sizes) to make note of that.

>>8430348
No, each part is treated separately. If the preceding part doesn't support the following part then obviously the following part(s) can't be valid as they hinge on the preceding part. It's like heliocentrism vs geocentrism. We scrap ideas about silver boxes enclosing the world with moving parts and holes which light shines through when we accept heliocentrism and understand the implication of parallax measurements.

>>8430352
What is the hypothesis? I don't see any research making a wide sweeping hypothesis on the nature of transsexualism. It's not there yet, it's still searching with the microscope for each microscopic piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

It is however advisable to not wait until you're over 90 years old for a guy in a white lab coat to tell you the answer before you live your life as you feel you should. It's also quite evident there is some phenomenon but we already knew that without science, It's like the way psychologists have breakthroughs about self evident things like memory or stereotypes.

>>8430466
What we are isn't just the brain not even the nervous system. Look up on the microbiome and behavior. You might also find some interesting things about the immune system and how it affects us and offspring.

It's a very complicated piece of machinery and it's no joke when people say that we're the most complicated thing we know about.

>>8430580
I actually debated between mentioning other bodily factors that might affect the brain or not and opted for the tl;dr haha. Clearly a mistake.

>>8430561
>What is the hypothesis? I don't see any research making a wide sweeping hypothesis on the nature of transsexualism.
Transsexuality as a sort of intersexuality. The claims are rather cautious at this point.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/840538
http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2015to2019/2016-transsexualism.html

The second paper is by the preeminent but now formally retired researcher Milton Diamond. It is important to emphasize that to the best of my knowledge it has not been peer-reviewed or published in a journal, and its tone is altogether more informal. However it still cites its sources exhaustively so I think it is fair to treat it seriously.