Time Inflation

they/them | transhumanist | longevist | bednetter | all original posts rebloggable | the moloch of queerness

[2centjubilee]

'Steven Universe' creator caught in the crossfire over alleged fanartist suicide attempt

Controversy surrounding a 'Steven Universe' fanartist has spread to the creative team that supported her.

Let’s all take a moment to remember, on this anniversary, that bullying is not social justice and that you still have the freedom to close the tab if you don’t like what you see.

Internet, it’s not your responsibility to make every parody news article true.

[2centjubilee]

This is a reminder, mostly to @socialjusticemunchkin, that the synthetic diva and #1 princess of the world Hatsune Miku was propelled to fame for her performance of a folded, spindled, and mutilated Finnish song.  Be... profoundly confused?

[2centjubilee]

Lepht’s presentation.  Keep in mind, this was 6 years ago.  "This is all stuff you’re going to need to do research on, if you’re going to follow me... which... maybe you shouldn’t?"  For some reason I have a great empathy for people who claw their way out of the trash heap, in the various senses that can be taken.  You rarely succeed without getting a bit creative and willing to experiment.

[prokopetz]

Speaking of representation in fantasy media, playing up underrepresented body types is well and good, but don’t always stick them with being mages or other non-physical roles. I wanna see a short, round elven warrior-princess, all ghosting silently through the treetops and unleashing barrages of arrows in mid-leap from a longbow that’s taller than she is.

[2centjubilee]

I thought the stereotype for nonstandard body types was the front-line, actually, because short round people (in particular) are kind of like dorfs, and therefore sturdy, and therefore their tank is more fite.

And like, fantasy media is actually highly representative on the body types front because we have squat dorfs, smol halflings, twig elfs, half-ogrctrolls for Big Guys, and humans are usually the “reasonably average and often well-fleshed” normative bodytypes which are more muscly/voluptuous but not exaggerated.  And any of those except elfs can wind up with Bonus Fatness from time to time, but Big Guys in particular are often played by BRIAN BLESSED and thus are large in all directions.

Could do for some more mixing up on some other factors (it would be nice if those did not neatly line up with Expected Stereotypes, and y’know, women being something other than humans and elfs would be nice -- but hey, sometimes they’re Shale!), but at least on those counts it’s pretty decent?

Variety’s good.

[porpentine-deactivated20201218]

these comments from the metafilter thread on hot allostatic load are really good

[2centjubilee]

Reblogging this again.  You should go read hot allostatic load if you haven’t already.

[sinesalvatorem]

NRx blog: The latest push for transgender activism is designed to inculcate trans acceptance in the most intellectually vulnerable among us and to undermine parental authority.

Me: Haha. Silly reactionaries, thinking that upbringing affects children’s long term behaviour.

[slatestarscratchpad]

I know this is a shitpost, but I still feel obliged to point out this is not how things work. Like, almost 100% of Saudi kids grow up Muslim, but almost 0% of Mexicans do, which suggests that unless Saudis have a “gene for” Islam and Mexicans a “gene for” Catholicism, upbringing can influence beliefs.

I think the things that upbringing doesn’t influence are very vague high-level personality characteristics. It’s possible that variance in who is most likely to embrace transgender rights is genetic. But that doesn’t preclude a civilization-wide shift from not embracing them to embracing them, just as we had a civilization-wide shift from not embracing women’s suffrage to embracing it.

[sinesalvatorem]

Can confirm: This is a shitpost, and social movements do affect societies. Being surrounded by people who support trans rights almost certainly increases your likelihood of supporting trans rights, and it’s not due to infection by trans rights genes.

(However, separately, I am sceptical of claims that children are the most “intellectually vulnerable”. If you teach a 10 year old something, how likely are they to still believe it at 20? What about teaching them at 20 and testing them at 30? Is there a significant difference? I would not be surprised by this going either way.)

[2centjubilee]

I dunno, I think things that are ingrained at age 5 or so do get a special claim on the person’s mind.  If you grow up inculcated in religion from age ~5 it’s probably going to be hard for you to extract whatever it is at age ~20, often requiring religion-extracting specialist assistance, based on what I’ve seen and experienced, and when you do, you might wind up with a religion-shaped hole in your brain that you feel a need to fill with something else.  Figuratively speaking.  Sure, at one point basically all the atheists we had around were from “religious backgrounds” but a lot of them had their religion alloyed with a strong skeptical tradition at an early age, which is a successful immunization factor, and many had been descendants of religious traditions that were increasingly tripped up and weakened by apathy towards the original dogma that sprang them, so it was more like a vaccine in the first place.

[2centjubilee]

Towards Political Transhumanism: Body Modification

Cyborgification is a special concern for transhumanists.  Basically, if you want to transcend your current physical status, a lot of the possible upgrades involve removing parts of your body that are inadequate or failing, and replacing them with new parts, or adding new parts on, which involves a lot of what is called elective and semi-elective surgery.  What I want to look at is how various kinds of body mods are treated right this second, in order to evaluate what striving towards bodily autonomy could possibly mean right now.

I am going to talk about the availability of these things but I am also going to talk a fair amount about the legalities of performing body modifications on yourself or another person because they are of limited availability.  Since there are a few transhumanists who have already taken some of the first steps, I'm obviously going to talk a hell of a lot about them and how the world has reacted to them.  This will include some discussion of "normal" prosthetics and their mainstream acceptance. (1189 words)

Eventually if you start talking about transhumanists who are serious about actually going forward and doing the transhumanist thing, right here, right now, you wind up talking about Lepht Anonym.  You will also wind up bumping into the fact that Lepht Anonym prefers "it" as a pronoun.  So that's how it is going to go.  Lepht is the person who did all the things you are not supposed to do at home, at home, and it will tell you about the various infections and hospital visits that has resulted in.  So, Lepht did the "putting magnets into one's body" and "putting RFID chips into one's body" thing.  It wasn't the first,  but a rather lot of the people doing body modification today were inspired by someone who was inspired by Lepht.

"Biohackers" as they are sometimes called are people who generally must skirt around the law at best.  Ideally, surgery is performed with sterile tools in a sterile environment and with anaesthetic to prevent all sorts of flailing about, by one person on another. Lepht decided to do what it did because all of the local doctors refused it's requests, and in doing so gave up basically every last element of ideal surgery.  It uses inadequately sterilized tools, in a you-tried environment, with no meaningful anaesthetic because it cannot legally obtain such, and operates on itself because in the United Kingdom it is illegal to cut into someone else's flesh like that, even at their request. That is, you cannot consent to "assault occasioning actual bodily harm" according to the law over there, which means as far as the law is concerned, Good Samaritans cannot conduct minor surgery, BDSM enthusiasts cannot play, and biohackers cannot make their experiments any safer for each other.

Obviously, it's hypothetically better to get the backing of a medical team if you're going to break the skin, no matter how trivial, but technically a lot of things are "surgery" and even more can qualify as ABAO, and if you can't travel because you don't have the money, and you can't get the consent of any local doctors... well, as we've seen, what happens next is people perform risky experiments on themselves. This also can affect people who perform other kinds of cosmetic body modifications, and this concern is not entirely unique to the United Kingdom.

Fortunately in other places you will find the doctors are more likely to agree to bizarre proposals like performing experimental bodily surgery on oneself.  Right?  Well... sort of.  Neil Harbisson has regaled people in many interviews about how he had to visit with a bioethics committee, and then was refused because they said that adding his eyeborg implant was unethical.  When he finally got someone to help him, they did so only on the condition of anonymity.  Some people like Kevin Warwick have no problem getting assistance, but he was a 44 year old, prestigious researcher and Doctor of Science at the beginning of his Project Cyborg, “maverick” status notwithstanding.  I find it likely that he would have been turned away if he was of a less prestigious status.

After the hospital visits, additional consequences do follow.  You can imagine the kind of social censure that someone who jams seemingly-random pieces of electronics into their body will face from people who are more inclined to interpret it as a self-harming behavior.  And then there's the fact that it's simply seen as weird to wind up getting LEDs under the skin. In particular, Neil Harbisson says he has faced assault from police officers who believed he was filming them, as well as all sorts of legal nonsense where people think his osseointegrated implant is a hat or something.

You can advance the argument that this is all the case because this kind of elective surgery, with the modifications that they're asking for, is very new.  In light of that, I would like to consider the flipside, of fairly well-known modifications.  Ones that are perhaps seen as necessary.  Prosthetics. Surely, these are well-respected as necessary elements of the new, restored human body, right?

It turns out cops treat them as if they're just something else to be suspicious of.  Got to shake down all those veterans who might be smuggling drugs or explosives in their limbs, after all.  And the government that promises medical treatment to the elderly does not necessarily think of it as a promise they need to keep when it comes to reconstructing your limbs. That and every improvement in prosthetic aesthetics keeps getting positive comments about how it makes the new limbs seem less weird and so they get less stares, suggesting that amputees get a lot of unpleasant attention socially.

The good news is that  some of the issue is tractable if you have a few thousand voices backing you, in spite of the incentive to try to find a space for trimming the Medicare budget.  Efforts to encourage police and security officials to stop treating people terribly are... well, mixed, seemingly worldwide.  So, while this is just a glance at the issue, the fact that the dignity of prosthetics keeps getting violated suggests to me that perhaps it needs a bit more scrutiny.  The costs of prosthetics being really high doesn’t help, but as technology goes on that has been improving.

So no.  I don't think that transhumanist concerns and the concerns of amputees are so far off from each other.  You’re getting a lot of weird and sometimes hostile social reactions either way, and our legal arrangements can be obstructive either way.  Obviously, being Good Allies to those who don't have a choice as to whether they are discriminated against is a bit tricky, when most young 20-something transhumanists have a lot of choice (now... 40 years later, well, accidents happen).  But here I think actually pursuing a legislative advancement would be workable... if the prosthetic limb was considered more "part of you" than an accessory, from a legal perspective, then it might make it easier to pursue suits against whoever injures your new limb... such as the police.

Well, we can try, anyways.

Cyborg Legal Defense Fund, maybe?

[2centjubilee]

For what it is worth, I am in a habit of referring to people as “they.”  I do try to fill in a gender if I remember, but I forget people’s genders sometimes, or forget that gender is a thing, or I try to parse their gender but parse wrong, or otherwise misfire, and having “they” be the blank-filler that tends to occupy my tongue in that moment is usually better in my experience than he or she or it.

I’ve been fucking up my own gender since I was a wee child, no one is safe from the inexpertise of my tongue on this point unless I just keep my mouth shut.  And, well, that’s not very productive, now is it?

[2centjubilee]

Business Nepotism

A common critique of government is that it is corrupt because politicans are allowed to hand out contracts to its friends and those friends get lots of money.  This is, y’know, nepotism -- not just for family, but also friends!

But business does this too?  All the time?  It goes from a micro to a macro level, basically anywhere “a single person” has significant influence, and so any company that has a strong CEO or managers who are not strictly overseen often has this kind of corruption.  Hell, I have my current job from that.  I played games with someone and so they knew me, so they hired me.  I know a friend who got his job the same way.

Every time a company hires someone, they’re taking a risk that this person is a total fuckup.  A lot of people, for various reasons, want that risk to go to someone who they care about.  Maybe they think their friends won’t disappoint them, or maybe they think that if their friends do disappoint them, at least it’s their friends still getting the money?  Maybe they think they know their friends better than a stranger, and so have better knowledge of that friend’s abilities.

Of course, the common followup complaint here is that there’s no meaningful negative feedback mechanism, the market doesn’t punish government for when things go wrong because taxes are unrelated to performance.  And yes.  But this is one of those catch-22 scenarios.  In a lot of cases, there’s no meaningful market punishment for inefficiently providing e.g. disability services, social welfare, and socialized medicine in the first place.

Which is a long way of saying that I don’t love the state per se, but as someone who currently still breathes because of the state’s interventions (and is now actually productively working -- soon to pay taxes!  the government investment pays off, maybe???) that I find it hard to completely condemn it.  Which is a really awkward feeling when I also want to burn the FDA down, let me tell you.

[e-sadg]

The way poly people talk about polyamory and monogamy like they’re intrinsic qualities of a person and not deliberate choices about how to have relationships is… weird.

[heirloomparasite]

yeah a lot of people act like it’s the same as an orientation when it’s a preference at most. there are maybe certain personality types or traits that would lead someone to want poly relationships and/or be good at navigating them, but that’s it.

[academicianzex]

I think @sinesalvatorem would disagree, and if all the poly people you know are saying that… Maybe listen to them? I mean, you can think of it as something like a Kinsey scale with proclivities to monogamous and polyamorous stuff on a spectrum, and probably there are more people on the middle parts of that scale than the standard Kinsey one. But there are absolutely people for whom one or the other just isn’t going to work.

[dagny-hashtaggart-deactivated20]

OP and first commenter: can I see some peer reviewed studies on that? People love to say that sexual orientation is “a preference at most,” after all, so you’ll forgive me if I’m disinclined to take this point on faith.

[femmeprince]

My polyamoury is nothing close to “a preference at most.” I am, as far as I can tell (and before you ask, I have tried) incapable of being happily monogamous. So yes, being poly is an intrinsic part of my sexual orientation.

[2centjubilee]

Hm.  My default mode of interaction seems to be flirtatious, I know I’m a huge novelty seeker, and my desire for intimacy often outstrips that of my partner’s.  Unless I undergo a massive modification of my personality, a monogamous person is going to probably be pretty unhappy with my behavior if we got into a relationship, even if I made a promise to act in accord with monogamy, and I will probably feel unhappy and underserved too.

So it’s like, I can see how it is not technically hardwired, I can see me potentially modifying everything about me hypothetically, but at the same time, it’s not the sort of easy choice that people like to mean when they say “choice.”  Saying “a preference at most” is weird.

[2centjubilee]

MitoSENS Progress 2016 05 18

Hi Everyone, it’s been an amazing few months. In short, we have been tremendously successful in our efforts to rescue a mutation in the mitochondrial genome!

Essentially we’ve shown that we can relocate both ATP6 and ATP8 to the nucleus and target the proteins to the mitochondria. We can show that the proteins incorporate into the correct protein complex (the ATPase) and that they improve function resulting in more ATP production. Finally, we show that the rescued cells can survive and grow under conditions which require mitochondrial energy production while the mutant cells all die.

We have finished writing up our results and submitted them for review and publication. It may take a while for our results to be published (the peer review process can be lengthy) but as soon as it is I’ll post an update here so you can see the full paper.

(x)

[2centjubilee]

I'm guessing you were trying to say "I will become the god of the new world", but if you were then you want "神" for god, and not "紙", which means 'paper'. Unless I'm missing something relevant about paper, in which case sorry ^^'

?

You’re right, I didn’t doublecheck the kanji while I was outputting it.  I rewrote it a few times (checking the entire rest of the sentence) and I’m pretty sure it was correct on one of those tries!

I will also become a glorious paper though.

[2centjubilee]

A Warning

For the record -- do not give me the One Ring.  Do not give me the Death Note.  Do not give me the Left Hand of God.

Because I will be as beautiful and terrible as the Morning and Night, 私は新世界の 神 となる, and the hand of Providence shall deliver the weak from their suffering.

[inquisitivefeminist]

A PSA!

I will be living in a convent with no Internet access for the next five days.

If you are trying to contact me and not responding, that is why.

[2centjubilee]

Get thee to a nunnery, go!

[2centjubilee]

Stop Using “Deathists”

A while back, I was on a train going home, and the old lady seated next to me struck up a conversation with me, or perhaps I started talking with her and she just continued.  We wound up talking for at least an hour -- certainly a large portion of the three hour train ride -- and as you might imagine with any conversation that lasts that long, it wound up with us talking about a little bit of everything from politics to our lives.  While having this conversation, I realized that some of the ways that transhumanists describe our opposition are really unhelpful... and the people it might serve least, are us. (~1019 words)

You see, she was an apparently religious woman, and in her 60s, when everyone starts to die around you, starting with your parents.  So naturally we talked about death a lot, and health, and continuing life, and so on.  She was convinced that death “comes whenever God wants to take you.”  I didn’t feel it was my place to persuade her out of her religion or try to undermine her apparent tenet of faith directly, but I didn’t feel I could pass without remark when she talked about specifics in science and medicine.  Specifics like organ failure and limb replacement and Alzheimer’s treatments and so on.

So, over the course of our conversation, I talked about how people have learned to rebuild what she thought was apparently broken, and explained that some of the organs that had failed in some of her family members are those we are closest to technological replication, and some of the things she thought untreatable were in fact proving quite tractable to 21st Century medicine.  I tried to keep to things that might be very soon relevant to her -- things I believed would be available in the next 5 or 10 years, and which are already predicted by early successes, like bioprinting and neuronal prostheses.  I restrained myself to the most factual of claims.

She seemed quite surprised every time I mentioned these things.  I tried, with my quiet and few words, to paint a picture of self-determination of human biological fate.  It made her hesitate, in the end.  But that took an entire conversation...  over the course of our chat, she expressed so much sadness at how much of her family had already died, had already torn itself to pieces arguing over the money and possessions of their ancestors.  Whether she intended to or not, she painted an image of human futility and inability before the laws of Nature.

And yet, it struck me, that this was “deathist” thought.  She spoke as if we must die, and that it is just as well that we must.  She had not considered the alternatives to death.  She had not considered a world where Man, not God, decided how long he must live or when he should die.  She spoke of how people have to work to accept death, to accept that their fate was bounded by her notion of God -- a force that will take you at any moment from this mortal world -- but it was with words of resignation.  Of despair.  This was the world she knew... but perhaps not the world she would have chosen to make.

I didn’t probe every last aspect of her mind on this matter.  I had to spend a fair amount of time just digesting that, and she seemed to want to talk a great deal.  I let her, I engaged with her.  Y’know.  Human things.  But I left with an incomplete picture.

And yet, I knew the fragment I saw disagreed a lot with what the image on the internet of someone who earnestly wills for all to die.  True, there are some bioethicists who think everything through and decide, “yes, we all ought to die, more than 120 years is a crime.”  But I’ve encountered just as many transhumanists who use the “deathist” term to refer to anyone who expresses the sentiment that humanity has a finite lifespan of a few dozen years and this is the natural way of things and so on and so forth.

The problem is, a lot of people will express that sentiment, but out of habit.  It is not necessarily a true reflection of their feelings.  They have not considered... perhaps in brief, but not in full... the enormity of responsibility that being able to choose thrusts upon the mind.  Or perhaps they considered that choice, and rejected an actual conclusion, instead imagining that life extension must be one of the many of horrible things people call it, instead of potentially any number of positive things.

It is easy to take the path, when someone disagrees with you, of condemnation, rejection, and alienation.  To demonize your opposition as incompatible.  But increasingly the term “deathist” is used to describe the “me” that you would have spoken to a few years ago, who had not really grasped the enormity of death, who did not believe there was a choice, who continued on... out of habit... to accept the evils of war, disease, famine, and death as a “natural part” of being alive.  And yet here I am, arguing that all of these are preventable.  All it took was a real confrontation with the possibility, instead of a simple brushing-aside of it.

Do not use “deathist.”  If you must, do not use it trivially to describe people who seem opposed because they express a conservative “it won’t happen” viewpoint, for these are largely the people we ought to have compassion with.  They are not the woman who stares at the cancer on her deathbed and rejects dying.  They are not the man who wishes to be with his family for another year, and another year, and another year after that.  They are not the person who has faced what annihilation is truly like, and made a decision.  Not all will join the cause against needless death, and yes, some will even oppose, but we should not make foes of those who have simply not yet been persuaded.

[lakefatherlakeson]

i don’t think straight people will ever truly understand why many of us gay people LOVE being gay and why we would not change ourselves for the world. even the most progressive straight people, deep down, they pity us. they think we’d probably rather be straight if we could. “progressive” people always make the argument that “being gay isn’t a choice, because who would ever choose to be gay??” guess what: i didn’t choose to be gay, but i would. they’ll never understand that once we’re able to accept ourselves and find a safe community, being gay feels amazing. i love being a woman who loves women. and it’s only because of them that i’ve ever had to even think about questioning that. 

[abilitiesconsideredunnatural]

*blinks* You mean the argument I dislike is disproportionately spread by straight people? That… does make as much sense as it being our own favored argument.

Queer people generally believe it’s okay to be queer and everyone else should be okay with it because… people just want equal treatment. We support it with verbal arguments, but it’s not our true reason, for all that some of us seem to believe it. But the straight people don’t accept it automatically and if they do they need an argument to convince people who don’t. This is complicated by people who think they’re straight being allies who know no one chooses to be gay, turning out to not be straight.

Also naturalistic fallacy or one of its relatives, sigh.

[metagorgon-deactivated20181211]

it gets even weirder when this moves down to trans people. being trans does not feel amazing. i hate it. but i would still choose being a trans woman over being a cis man.

perhaps this is connected to my wireheading aversion. i still don’t understand it. trans friends, please let me know whether you would take a pill that relieves all gender dysphoria from your asab permanently, or continue as you are.

[sigmaleph]

I would definitely not take a pill making me a cis man.

[oktavia-von-gwwcendorff-deactiv]

No. No no nope not ever never. At least being trans would have to become way more uncomfortable for me to even consider taking the magical cis pill that would wipe away all of that. Cis man/cis woman I don’t care. Still way waaay nope all the way. The only thing I could imagine accepting is adding so many qualifiers on top of “cis woman” that I basically end up with “this exact kind of transfeminine enbie, except afab” which is totally cheating by any spirit of the rules.

My morph is modded and customized, I don’t want to switch it for a stock OEM model.

[bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190]

If you make me a different gender you make me a different person. I would very much prefer not to be killed and replaced with another person, even if they are happier.

[victoriabutterfree-blog]

I mean I get why people would want to be gay but why on earth would you want to be trans. It’s the worst. Instead of being unhappy that you can’t be X gender, you could not be unhappy. Not being unhappy is good. Like, maybe you can make the case that it’s better for you to be a cis woman than a cis man but I don’t get what could possibly be better about being a trans woman in particular. Queer cred can’t be worth THAT much.

@ozymandias271 @socialjusticemunchkin @sigmaleph if there was a pill that could turn someone into a cis enbie,, would you take it?

[sigmaleph]

If by cis enbie you mean ‘someone with my same gender identity but having been born with the body I actually want’ then yes. No question.

My only objection to the pill that relieves gender dysphoria is that I find it very very very hard to identify with a cis man version of myself. Like Ozy says, that’s killing me and replacing me with another person. So, um. Don’t do that.

I don’t want to be trans. I want to be alive as myself, and given the body I was born with that implies transness. If I’d been born in a different body it might not.

(that being said, someone who values being trans qua being trans is not impossible. People value all sorts of things)

[2centjubilee]

I value being trans qua trans, actually!

I set myself out to do The Work a long time ago, and The Work happens to be benefited by the perspective of being someone who is trans.  It’s hard to explain further -- I will start sounding mystical if I do.  But I realized a while back ago, that it doesn’t matter if I was born AFAB or AMAB, I would wind up transitioning in some manner.

Being “cis enby” is really hard to turn down, mind.  And I definitely don’t value “continuation of my mental state” quite the way others do.  If I was living a different life, with different goals but a similar mind, I might take the “trans cure” pill in any of its forms.

[2centjubilee]

Question: assuming that one of the results of more readily-available transition medicine is a greater number of people who try it for a while (say, a couple years) and really regret it and detransition... is this a bullet you're willing to bite? My instincts personally are "yes" partly b/c I don't think there should be any *shame* in this happening (and destigmatizing detransition would destigmatize transition), but I might be underestimating the distress it'd cause due to being nb-ish myself.

Yes, I am quite willing to bite this bullet.  You see, detransition is not something we understand as much as we ought to in the first place.  We know some of the basic physical effects, but we don’t really properly know life outcomes.  The only way we can gather more information on who will detransition is by allowing it to happen, and then once we have that information then everyone in the future will benefit from that, and in most cases the outcome doesn’t seem to be absolutely awful so there seems to be little reason to get in the way of this happening.

Now, obviously if you decide to detransition after doing some form of GRS, you’re in a bit of a pinch as the surgery is already really hard and expensive, and reversing it is going to also be really hard and expensive if at all, though we’re getting better at things like uterus and penis(!) transplants so maybe not that hard.  But a lot of trans people don’t do GRS, or spend quite a while saving up to it, so I’m not too worried about people detransitioning after that.

Most people that I’ve heard of who detransition do so after a course of hormones, and people are largely counseled to do HRT first instead of surgery.  The first few months of hormone therapy come with a significant “bump” when people experience mood swings and the like.  This can even be emotionally disturbing.  I expect people who aren’t terribly committed to quickly drop it at this point.  And then afterwards comes a leveling-off point after that couple of months, so by the 3rd month most people know what transition is going to be like for them, and I expect everyone who assesses at that point will be able to make a fully aware decision and prooobably not suffer major long term consequences from a brief course of hormones if they decide to go back on their decision.  And greater availability of hormones will help with them re-correcting any chemical imbalances they now experience.

Of course, if a bunch of people run that experiment on themselves and report back to us that it was a fucking terrible decision, then maybe we’ll change our minds!  I will be happy to do the cost-benefit analysis after that actually becomes possible, and then future generations of humanity can benefit from our mistakes, even if it is just by laughing at our foolishness.  But as-is, it’s a fairly reversible procedure, not perfectly so, but most people don’t transition without a fairly strong perceived benefit, so I think it is worth allowing people to screw it up for themselves.  They chose to risk something, and we should allow them to do that.