The biggest elephant in the room of course is overpopulation and the resulting ecological overshoot. James Lovelock would have a field day. It's almost like Gaia is trying to tell us something. And we know, Mother Nature always bats last.
I’ve been hearing lately that the Mouse Utopia may be a case of academic fraud, or at least is far from what normally happens when mice have abundance and security.
"We in the developed world live in abundance" -- I wouldn't say that. Globalization, where the workers of nations are pitted against each other, makes this more of an economically-insecure world than the one I knew growing up in 1960s-70s, when unions were stronger. There is certainly no abundance of time. Two parents now have to have paying jobs in most families to make ends meet. Families are having fewer children. In my estimation, it is an impoverished era. As for the notion that we "require stressors and challenges," yes, maybe the physiological stressors of the past are fewer. (I for one, think that people should try to tolerate heat rather than use energy-intensive air conditioning). But the pace of contemporary life brings about huge stressors.
E.O. Wilson is just math. In large familles which consume a lot of resources to raise the children to reproductive age, non-reproductive adults are quite valuable indeed. In an extreme version, bees, ants, termites, you will find that almost all the colony are dedicated to survival of the shared genome. I don’t think you’d debate that bees, ants or termites are maladaptive. It’s a function of family size. Non-reproduction is not maladaptive in all circumstances. In humans I suspect gays and lesbians in families are a type of biological social security.
The size of response of “trans” is so vanishingly small relative to the total population of the earth, and almost exclusively a western phenomenon that currently I think it’s irrelevant to reproduction of populations. Surgical trans is 0.008% of the US. That’s probably a fraction of the variance in immigration into the US.
I had a remarkably similar version to your ideas about 40 years ago when I was curious about my own sexuality in a biological sense, and I came to a conclusion that homosexual sex has several origins. One is large families, another is genetic, there may be other mechanisms. I suspect we will also see that reproduction facilitates becoming exclusively gay later in life which is likely as common as AGP.
In humans since the dawn of time, large families have been social security. As financial social security evolved, the pressure to have a large family changed drastically.
There’s a similar effect to the current change in reproduction, which is male/female balance. In China, male children were prized and for decades there has been selective suppression of female children (involving abortion, and infanticide) and likely in India.
Such effects are self-balancing. When the imbalance hits a certain tipping point, females will be prized and there will be suppression of male children. It oscillates.
When children are seen as a resource drain, then we will have fewer children. When children are seen as an asset or security (past), then we will have more kids again. It oscillates.
What has changed drastically is the internet. Maladaptive behaviors can be entrained very rapidly even in the most remote areas, with virtually no social contact, no overcrowding, just internet. I find that is the most significant reason for all the maladaptive behaviors which have been erupting. There is no reason for a child in remote Utah to self-sterilize because of social crowding or lack of access to ressource. That’s a big reason why I find the mouse experiment doesn’t translate well.
Again, the maladaptive behaviors aren't conscious population control, so can't be evaluated by that metric. That number for surgical trans is outdated.
Several problems with the thought, but the outcome may be similar.
The percentage of the population which engages in gay or lesbian sex is apparently quite stable.
Self-reported “queer” is meaningless, it is not a term
Which describes sexual activity.
Homosexuals in a family actually enhance the survival of the familial genome, if you do the math behind it - E.O. Wilson had a bit to say. That contradicts the concept that it reduces children. It enhances passing on the genome of your brothers, sisters, and parents through additional resources they contribute to raise the children.
Likewise sexual apotomnophiliacs are a stable .008% of the population for decades.
Humans are monogamous. That creates a radically different context for sex than colonies of rodents with a single dominant male with a brood. Humans females are sexually receptive when not in an estrous cycle. Humans don’t have a vomeronasal organ - we aren’t wired to detect estrous cycles through smell.
What may be changing is that the aging of population, unrelated to population density but positively related to hygiene, medicine, and wealth, creates fathers who are quite old at conception.
Fathers older than 50 have a changce of transmitting altered genes for neurotransmitters causing incidence of autism and psychosis (or both) to rise threefold to fivefold in children.
We aren’t partially living more densely, we are living older.
Human reproduction can also be accelerated through wartime stress. The biggest baby boom have been at times of most cultural stresss.
I think the experiment is useful to show that populations collapse as poisons in the environment collect. I’m not sure where ours are
If a species is doing maladaptive things in response to environmental stress, that's not the same as consciously acting to reduce the population (even if it has the same effect). Thus, it doesn't matter (to the point being made about self destruction) if the maladaptive behaviors are "working" or not, just that they're occurring. The venn diagram of people sabotaging themselves and their species isn't going to be a perfect circle with the results of those behaviors.
That said, "queerness" does reduce the population, not necessarily because of gay sex (though that could be disputed), but because of puberty blockers, new castrations and hysterectomies, young people removing themselves from the dating/sex pool, and if all that fails, becoming pregnant with compromised/drugged bodies and inadequate resources to raise children.
If by "sexual apotemnophiliacs" you mean people who go through with castrations and hysterectomies, those have observably increased and the data support that as well. Even many of those who don't intend to go through with that will do so because of organ atrophy from HRT (see Buck Angel's story). Add to that the kids who wouldn't have become sexual apotemnophiliacs if their parents hadn't put them on puberty blockers, but now have a 99% chance of doing so.
The E.O. Wilson theory strikes me as rationalizing a reality after the fact, kind of an evo-psych that may or may not have any truth in it. I think a better theory (with the same result) is that kink or sexual deviance (for lack of better words) increases the population because it increases interest sex on the whole. Because of that some with deviances will individually fail to reproduce (homosexuals, practitioners of BDSM who've come to prefer submission to sex), but all the other kinksters will more than make up for it (especially historically, as preferences evolved). Please note that I'm calling homosexuality deviant in the deviation-from-norm sense and not in a moral sense (as a practitioner myself).
Baby booms tend happen after wars, not during. In any case, sure, people are going to miscarry etc. more under some conditions of stress than others. That could depend on how close to the crossfire mothers actually are and all sorts of other specifics.
Density of a population isn't necessary for overpopulation stress. There's a study of sitka deer that I couldn't find who capped themselves at a certain number despite it appearing to humans that they had plenty of space and food. Needs may not be obvious, and we're clearly a population in need if deaths of despair are rising. Poisons and older fathers may well be factors. I'm sure there are many factors.
Hi Shannon, fascinating article. However, I would agree w pp. The stats for gay sex have not gone up. Musa al-Gharbi, J Michael Bailey, Bryan Caplan & Kat Rosenfeld have all done some interesting articles on how stata show the rise in LGBT identification is mostly bi women, and most are just saying that to be cool and aim to settle w men. I am bi & when trying to date women, bi women were overwhelmingly not interested in settling w a woman. This is the experience of friends & all over chat rooms too. Thus, while I know you didn't mean the article this way, I wish you could maybe add this info as this kind of article tends to feed the attitudes of people who think gay acceptance will cause population extinction.
Also, again I know it wasn't meant this way, but putting lgb in the same paragraph as narcissism and not wanting kids or a relationship has the potential to confirm people's prejudices. Was reading an article on the birth conrol issue today & so many comments saying that Western urban liberal women today are different from African & Asian women bc they're not bi or lesbian and care for their families & communities. As if lesbians haven't been working for communities since Jane Addams, and so many lesbians now want kids. Not to mention that homophobia in society & laws probs affects what African & Asian women can do openly.
All statistical genetics is “after the fact” as is biology. You observe nature, develop hypotheses, work to falsify them, what survives are predictive theories. I could easily make the case that reproductive failure is due to lack of gays and lesbian family members, who provide more resources to raise kids.
It’s an established fact that children in zero parent families (foster) have the worst outcomes, next are children in single-parent families, possibly the best are in extended families who have more abundant resources. Recall that families found it very useful for centuries to have non-reproductive members to work and provide political support. It’s called the Catholic Priesthood and Nunneries.
As for the number of self-sterilizers, my numbers are not really off - but multiply it by 10 - 100 - it’s still a tiny blip. Most trans don’t self-sterilize, in fact intact trans it is by far the largest majority (AGP). The ~20% who sterilize of The ~0.6% of “trans” is fairly stable and how I get a very low number.
Transvestites, AGP, and other specialties have been absorbed into the trans Borg but are quite distinct groups.
AGPs desire transition very much, more so than their HSTS counterparts, according to Blanchard and those working closely with those populations. The idea that they don't want to transition is a myth unsupported by any medical literature. They have just been gatekept from transition in the past, and are not now. So their past transition numbers do not mirror current and future ones.
Again, whether or not the sabotage "works" is irrelevant to the point that sick species sabotage themselves; sans someone's "intelligent design" results of that sabotage will be scattershot. Healthy species enjoy sex and procreation; healthy species do not crave extreme fixes for non-existent problems.
1) Non-reproductive members of a an animal population can often serve to enhance the survival of a population group. In one of the least dense period of European history, the Priests and Nuns helped conserve culture and help populations survive. No overcrowding, no stress yet significant groups of non-reproductive groups.
In the golden ages of various countries without anything close to recent population levels, there were always powerful sought-after non-reproductive roles - and in multiple cultures. It can be quite adaptive.
2) For Trans, the statistics are the vast majority of self-declared trans have no surgery. That’s the measure I use. If you have something different happy to read it. Whether they claim it’s money or other reasons blocking them - gatekeeping - the fact remains they don’t.
A simple statistic is for instance in the military or other institutions which fund trans surgery freely. Most who have trans-related medical care for any reason don’t have surgery. Sweden. Denmark. Holland. They may have hormones but not surgery; many halt hormones because of the debilitating side-effects.
Blanchard speaks of gender as something real. For that I find his science dubious. He also has an unnecessarily complex typology of trans, mostly based on subjective reporting. I tend to consider what men do, not what they say.
The first is not a disagreement. I haven't said that non-reproductive members harm a species. Harm harms a species though. Harm that happens not to harm a significant portion of the species is also a notable sign of stress in a species.
As for surgery, we literally don't know those numbers anymore. Several new populations have exploded in the last eight years. It's too early to claim they're all insignificant. I'm also not sure why you're more interested in surgery than of hormones and all the rest. The species is behaving dysfunctionally. There is a big difference between someone who forsakes sex to study and pursue spirituality, and someone who does it because they're addicted to social media, terrified of personal interaction and have decided they're neither male nor female.
I haven't seen "Blanchard speak of gender as something real." Nonetheless, you're the one who brought up AGPs. If you don't believe Blanchard's characterizations of this population, perhaps you need another word.
You’re correct. I prefer the term female impersonator, it’s obvious and applies to women too. Mae West and Cher are female types of female impersonators. I hate to use private language in public it’s confusing for others. What most people may call an AGP I just shift to “oh, female impersonator”.
I don’t think our society is particularly unhealthy on the whole, compared to the past. People aren’t dropping dead the street (my husband has stories of the hunger winter of Amsterdam), lifespans are around historic highs, crime is down compared with decades past, vigilantes are not killing minorities. Categories change - we used to use the word hobo or bum or beggar, and now we use “unhoused” and the like but everyone knows the meaning. Nobody drops dead of contaminated water, and a simple infection doesn’t kill people. Mentally, who knows. We have virtually no data on states of mind hundreds of years back. Or even decades back. I view large families as insurance, as many biologies have realized, and lack of large (or any) families tends to mean less worry about end of life than in the past.
We are so far away a “natural” state via-vis reproduction - a natural state would imply that women would be pregnant roughly every 18 months… I’m not sure a “natural healthy” society is an aspiration.
You cited a date in 2020 a covid period; a report you cited has a title "all time high", false; you can cite sub-segments that went up; many went down; we are in the longest period in 150 years of low suidie 2021 is a covid perid. Suicide went down just before COVID.
None of these convince me.
We do have more guns than ever in history, yet we still have the lowest suidide rate of last 150 year.
We are at almost the same rate as 1989. The variation keeps going up and down.
I would suididea to be much higher frankly for one reason - the group with the highest suicide rate is the elderly and we are getting very old very fast.
I constantly read:
"Suicide particularly affects younger people – it remains one of the top three causes of death for those between ages 10-34."
It doesnt particularly affect the young, it particularly affects the old. Like 2x the young.
I won't claim it hasn't risen, it has and of course is concerning. But historically it's still low.
We are not as "sick" as we were last century, that's the question.
If suicide is the measure; we are twice as healthy as a century ago. It's just numbera.
Let me see if I can summarize your point: "Suicides among comfortable suburban 10-year-olds have spiked, but that's no big deal, because they killed themselves more when they were losing their families to genocide and black plague."
All the periods you cite are during or immediately after COVID. How does that compare to the 1918 Flu epidemic or the Black Death? I don’t buy any statistics 2020-2023 as being trending. I study many business functions and data from 2020-2023 are not used for statistical planning. All behaviors were disturbed and have not entirely reached equilibrium again.
For the period 1981 2016 suicide went up then down then up. In fact we are in a long period of the lowest rates, since 1900. Around 1930 the suidide rate was more than twice that of 2000. We aren't even remotely close to the average from 1900-1940.
If suicide is a proxy foe mental health, the period from 1940 to current is one of the healthiest in US history, particularly 1980 - 2010.
Prior to 1900, estimates based on newspaper mentions would, if correlated with vital statistics 1900 forwardx, the period 1870 - 1910 implies that high suicise rates are the turn of the century were part of a trend of suicide over a 70 year period was the worst recorded.
Mental health today using suicide as a proxy is the best it's been for around 140 years.
Going far back to another period, the plague in Europe, that was a period where Jewish suicides peaked, due to the pogroms taking place in Europe destroying hundreds of Jewish communities with buning alive, burning on stakes, and sometimes put into casks and thrown into Rivera.
Probably a pretty bad mental health period.
I can't find much evidence that our current period has worse mental health than other periods. I can find substantial proxy's that today is one of the healthiest periods in at least 140 years. I can also find proxy's that even during covid proxy rates of suicide and violent death were better (anecdotal and measured) than the Flu epidemic of 1918 or the black death.
Hi Shannon, I really like this article & agree w most. However, I do feel a bit uneasy by the way you put homosexuality in the same paragraph as narcissism, and anti-courtship, fertility, etc behaviours. I know you support gay rights and aren't trying to imply that gay people are anti-children or narcissistic by definition. I've been hearing a lot of that kind of discourse from conservative authors recently & it makes me wish you could stress in this article that many lesbians DO want children, that while their libido & courtship are nor reproductive, they still want to participate in reproduction. And that many participate a lot in community etc, are not simply focused on narcissism. I know you don't think that way but There's too many people who might take that away from an article like this!
Hi Damaris. I am traveling and don’t have time to respond properly, but wanted to say a couple of things. First, I came out as same-sex attracted at age 11 and am currently in a LTR with a woman, so I’m a part of the communities you’re worried about.
Second, evolutionary imprints don’t consider current societal conditions. They don’t work that way. Women are more distracted during sex than men are, for example, because they bear the larger burden of childrearing and needed to stay alert for baby worries. Now we have childfree women by choice, birth control, babysitters, baby monitors, and all the rest, but women as a group didn’t suddenly lose their innate sexual tendencies.
Re: the article illustration: you have to appreciate AI's added touch of a five-legged juvenile mouse playing with a hand grenade.
Ah, that's something I do appreciate AI for! The mice would look sweet if they weren't so grumpy looking.
wow
The biggest elephant in the room of course is overpopulation and the resulting ecological overshoot. James Lovelock would have a field day. It's almost like Gaia is trying to tell us something. And we know, Mother Nature always bats last.
Gnosticism. Modern gnosticism, anyway.
I’ve been hearing lately that the Mouse Utopia may be a case of academic fraud, or at least is far from what normally happens when mice have abundance and security.
https://www.jollyheretic.com/p/the-great-mouse-mutant-meltdown-fraud
And let's not forget the sort of opposite study, Rat Park.
Thank you!
"We in the developed world live in abundance" -- I wouldn't say that. Globalization, where the workers of nations are pitted against each other, makes this more of an economically-insecure world than the one I knew growing up in 1960s-70s, when unions were stronger. There is certainly no abundance of time. Two parents now have to have paying jobs in most families to make ends meet. Families are having fewer children. In my estimation, it is an impoverished era. As for the notion that we "require stressors and challenges," yes, maybe the physiological stressors of the past are fewer. (I for one, think that people should try to tolerate heat rather than use energy-intensive air conditioning). But the pace of contemporary life brings about huge stressors.
E.O. Wilson is just math. In large familles which consume a lot of resources to raise the children to reproductive age, non-reproductive adults are quite valuable indeed. In an extreme version, bees, ants, termites, you will find that almost all the colony are dedicated to survival of the shared genome. I don’t think you’d debate that bees, ants or termites are maladaptive. It’s a function of family size. Non-reproduction is not maladaptive in all circumstances. In humans I suspect gays and lesbians in families are a type of biological social security.
The size of response of “trans” is so vanishingly small relative to the total population of the earth, and almost exclusively a western phenomenon that currently I think it’s irrelevant to reproduction of populations. Surgical trans is 0.008% of the US. That’s probably a fraction of the variance in immigration into the US.
I had a remarkably similar version to your ideas about 40 years ago when I was curious about my own sexuality in a biological sense, and I came to a conclusion that homosexual sex has several origins. One is large families, another is genetic, there may be other mechanisms. I suspect we will also see that reproduction facilitates becoming exclusively gay later in life which is likely as common as AGP.
In humans since the dawn of time, large families have been social security. As financial social security evolved, the pressure to have a large family changed drastically.
There’s a similar effect to the current change in reproduction, which is male/female balance. In China, male children were prized and for decades there has been selective suppression of female children (involving abortion, and infanticide) and likely in India.
Such effects are self-balancing. When the imbalance hits a certain tipping point, females will be prized and there will be suppression of male children. It oscillates.
When children are seen as a resource drain, then we will have fewer children. When children are seen as an asset or security (past), then we will have more kids again. It oscillates.
What has changed drastically is the internet. Maladaptive behaviors can be entrained very rapidly even in the most remote areas, with virtually no social contact, no overcrowding, just internet. I find that is the most significant reason for all the maladaptive behaviors which have been erupting. There is no reason for a child in remote Utah to self-sterilize because of social crowding or lack of access to ressource. That’s a big reason why I find the mouse experiment doesn’t translate well.
Again, the maladaptive behaviors aren't conscious population control, so can't be evaluated by that metric. That number for surgical trans is outdated.
Several problems with the thought, but the outcome may be similar.
The percentage of the population which engages in gay or lesbian sex is apparently quite stable.
Self-reported “queer” is meaningless, it is not a term
Which describes sexual activity.
Homosexuals in a family actually enhance the survival of the familial genome, if you do the math behind it - E.O. Wilson had a bit to say. That contradicts the concept that it reduces children. It enhances passing on the genome of your brothers, sisters, and parents through additional resources they contribute to raise the children.
Likewise sexual apotomnophiliacs are a stable .008% of the population for decades.
Humans are monogamous. That creates a radically different context for sex than colonies of rodents with a single dominant male with a brood. Humans females are sexually receptive when not in an estrous cycle. Humans don’t have a vomeronasal organ - we aren’t wired to detect estrous cycles through smell.
What may be changing is that the aging of population, unrelated to population density but positively related to hygiene, medicine, and wealth, creates fathers who are quite old at conception.
Fathers older than 50 have a changce of transmitting altered genes for neurotransmitters causing incidence of autism and psychosis (or both) to rise threefold to fivefold in children.
We aren’t partially living more densely, we are living older.
Human reproduction can also be accelerated through wartime stress. The biggest baby boom have been at times of most cultural stresss.
I think the experiment is useful to show that populations collapse as poisons in the environment collect. I’m not sure where ours are
Yet.
If a species is doing maladaptive things in response to environmental stress, that's not the same as consciously acting to reduce the population (even if it has the same effect). Thus, it doesn't matter (to the point being made about self destruction) if the maladaptive behaviors are "working" or not, just that they're occurring. The venn diagram of people sabotaging themselves and their species isn't going to be a perfect circle with the results of those behaviors.
That said, "queerness" does reduce the population, not necessarily because of gay sex (though that could be disputed), but because of puberty blockers, new castrations and hysterectomies, young people removing themselves from the dating/sex pool, and if all that fails, becoming pregnant with compromised/drugged bodies and inadequate resources to raise children.
If by "sexual apotemnophiliacs" you mean people who go through with castrations and hysterectomies, those have observably increased and the data support that as well. Even many of those who don't intend to go through with that will do so because of organ atrophy from HRT (see Buck Angel's story). Add to that the kids who wouldn't have become sexual apotemnophiliacs if their parents hadn't put them on puberty blockers, but now have a 99% chance of doing so.
The E.O. Wilson theory strikes me as rationalizing a reality after the fact, kind of an evo-psych that may or may not have any truth in it. I think a better theory (with the same result) is that kink or sexual deviance (for lack of better words) increases the population because it increases interest sex on the whole. Because of that some with deviances will individually fail to reproduce (homosexuals, practitioners of BDSM who've come to prefer submission to sex), but all the other kinksters will more than make up for it (especially historically, as preferences evolved). Please note that I'm calling homosexuality deviant in the deviation-from-norm sense and not in a moral sense (as a practitioner myself).
Baby booms tend happen after wars, not during. In any case, sure, people are going to miscarry etc. more under some conditions of stress than others. That could depend on how close to the crossfire mothers actually are and all sorts of other specifics.
Density of a population isn't necessary for overpopulation stress. There's a study of sitka deer that I couldn't find who capped themselves at a certain number despite it appearing to humans that they had plenty of space and food. Needs may not be obvious, and we're clearly a population in need if deaths of despair are rising. Poisons and older fathers may well be factors. I'm sure there are many factors.
Hi Shannon, fascinating article. However, I would agree w pp. The stats for gay sex have not gone up. Musa al-Gharbi, J Michael Bailey, Bryan Caplan & Kat Rosenfeld have all done some interesting articles on how stata show the rise in LGBT identification is mostly bi women, and most are just saying that to be cool and aim to settle w men. I am bi & when trying to date women, bi women were overwhelmingly not interested in settling w a woman. This is the experience of friends & all over chat rooms too. Thus, while I know you didn't mean the article this way, I wish you could maybe add this info as this kind of article tends to feed the attitudes of people who think gay acceptance will cause population extinction.
Also, again I know it wasn't meant this way, but putting lgb in the same paragraph as narcissism and not wanting kids or a relationship has the potential to confirm people's prejudices. Was reading an article on the birth conrol issue today & so many comments saying that Western urban liberal women today are different from African & Asian women bc they're not bi or lesbian and care for their families & communities. As if lesbians haven't been working for communities since Jane Addams, and so many lesbians now want kids. Not to mention that homophobia in society & laws probs affects what African & Asian women can do openly.
Moreover,
All statistical genetics is “after the fact” as is biology. You observe nature, develop hypotheses, work to falsify them, what survives are predictive theories. I could easily make the case that reproductive failure is due to lack of gays and lesbian family members, who provide more resources to raise kids.
It’s an established fact that children in zero parent families (foster) have the worst outcomes, next are children in single-parent families, possibly the best are in extended families who have more abundant resources. Recall that families found it very useful for centuries to have non-reproductive members to work and provide political support. It’s called the Catholic Priesthood and Nunneries.
As for the number of self-sterilizers, my numbers are not really off - but multiply it by 10 - 100 - it’s still a tiny blip. Most trans don’t self-sterilize, in fact intact trans it is by far the largest majority (AGP). The ~20% who sterilize of The ~0.6% of “trans” is fairly stable and how I get a very low number.
Transvestites, AGP, and other specialties have been absorbed into the trans Borg but are quite distinct groups.
AGPs desire transition very much, more so than their HSTS counterparts, according to Blanchard and those working closely with those populations. The idea that they don't want to transition is a myth unsupported by any medical literature. They have just been gatekept from transition in the past, and are not now. So their past transition numbers do not mirror current and future ones.
Again, whether or not the sabotage "works" is irrelevant to the point that sick species sabotage themselves; sans someone's "intelligent design" results of that sabotage will be scattershot. Healthy species enjoy sex and procreation; healthy species do not crave extreme fixes for non-existent problems.
You and I have a simple disagreements.
1) Non-reproductive members of a an animal population can often serve to enhance the survival of a population group. In one of the least dense period of European history, the Priests and Nuns helped conserve culture and help populations survive. No overcrowding, no stress yet significant groups of non-reproductive groups.
In the golden ages of various countries without anything close to recent population levels, there were always powerful sought-after non-reproductive roles - and in multiple cultures. It can be quite adaptive.
2) For Trans, the statistics are the vast majority of self-declared trans have no surgery. That’s the measure I use. If you have something different happy to read it. Whether they claim it’s money or other reasons blocking them - gatekeeping - the fact remains they don’t.
A simple statistic is for instance in the military or other institutions which fund trans surgery freely. Most who have trans-related medical care for any reason don’t have surgery. Sweden. Denmark. Holland. They may have hormones but not surgery; many halt hormones because of the debilitating side-effects.
Blanchard speaks of gender as something real. For that I find his science dubious. He also has an unnecessarily complex typology of trans, mostly based on subjective reporting. I tend to consider what men do, not what they say.
The first is not a disagreement. I haven't said that non-reproductive members harm a species. Harm harms a species though. Harm that happens not to harm a significant portion of the species is also a notable sign of stress in a species.
As for surgery, we literally don't know those numbers anymore. Several new populations have exploded in the last eight years. It's too early to claim they're all insignificant. I'm also not sure why you're more interested in surgery than of hormones and all the rest. The species is behaving dysfunctionally. There is a big difference between someone who forsakes sex to study and pursue spirituality, and someone who does it because they're addicted to social media, terrified of personal interaction and have decided they're neither male nor female.
I haven't seen "Blanchard speak of gender as something real." Nonetheless, you're the one who brought up AGPs. If you don't believe Blanchard's characterizations of this population, perhaps you need another word.
You’re correct. I prefer the term female impersonator, it’s obvious and applies to women too. Mae West and Cher are female types of female impersonators. I hate to use private language in public it’s confusing for others. What most people may call an AGP I just shift to “oh, female impersonator”.
I don’t think our society is particularly unhealthy on the whole, compared to the past. People aren’t dropping dead the street (my husband has stories of the hunger winter of Amsterdam), lifespans are around historic highs, crime is down compared with decades past, vigilantes are not killing minorities. Categories change - we used to use the word hobo or bum or beggar, and now we use “unhoused” and the like but everyone knows the meaning. Nobody drops dead of contaminated water, and a simple infection doesn’t kill people. Mentally, who knows. We have virtually no data on states of mind hundreds of years back. Or even decades back. I view large families as insurance, as many biologies have realized, and lack of large (or any) families tends to mean less worry about end of life than in the past.
We are so far away a “natural” state via-vis reproduction - a natural state would imply that women would be pregnant roughly every 18 months… I’m not sure a “natural healthy” society is an aspiration.
You cited a date in 2020 a covid period; a report you cited has a title "all time high", false; you can cite sub-segments that went up; many went down; we are in the longest period in 150 years of low suidie 2021 is a covid perid. Suicide went down just before COVID.
None of these convince me.
We do have more guns than ever in history, yet we still have the lowest suidide rate of last 150 year.
We are at almost the same rate as 1989. The variation keeps going up and down.
I would suididea to be much higher frankly for one reason - the group with the highest suicide rate is the elderly and we are getting very old very fast.
I constantly read:
"Suicide particularly affects younger people – it remains one of the top three causes of death for those between ages 10-34."
It doesnt particularly affect the young, it particularly affects the old. Like 2x the young.
I won't claim it hasn't risen, it has and of course is concerning. But historically it's still low.
We are not as "sick" as we were last century, that's the question.
If suicide is the measure; we are twice as healthy as a century ago. It's just numbera.
Let me see if I can summarize your point: "Suicides among comfortable suburban 10-year-olds have spiked, but that's no big deal, because they killed themselves more when they were losing their families to genocide and black plague."
All the periods you cite are during or immediately after COVID. How does that compare to the 1918 Flu epidemic or the Black Death? I don’t buy any statistics 2020-2023 as being trending. I study many business functions and data from 2020-2023 are not used for statistical planning. All behaviors were disturbed and have not entirely reached equilibrium again.
For the period 1981 2016 suicide went up then down then up. In fact we are in a long period of the lowest rates, since 1900. Around 1930 the suidide rate was more than twice that of 2000. We aren't even remotely close to the average from 1900-1940.
If suicide is a proxy foe mental health, the period from 1940 to current is one of the healthiest in US history, particularly 1980 - 2010.
Prior to 1900, estimates based on newspaper mentions would, if correlated with vital statistics 1900 forwardx, the period 1870 - 1910 implies that high suicise rates are the turn of the century were part of a trend of suicide over a 70 year period was the worst recorded.
Mental health today using suicide as a proxy is the best it's been for around 140 years.
Going far back to another period, the plague in Europe, that was a period where Jewish suicides peaked, due to the pogroms taking place in Europe destroying hundreds of Jewish communities with buning alive, burning on stakes, and sometimes put into casks and thrown into Rivera.
Probably a pretty bad mental health period.
I can't find much evidence that our current period has worse mental health than other periods. I can find substantial proxy's that today is one of the healthiest periods in at least 140 years. I can also find proxy's that even during covid proxy rates of suicide and violent death were better (anecdotal and measured) than the Flu epidemic of 1918 or the black death.
No, they are all not during or after Covid; not even close. Look closer.
Our Covid response was pathological, too, though.
Hi Shannon, I really like this article & agree w most. However, I do feel a bit uneasy by the way you put homosexuality in the same paragraph as narcissism, and anti-courtship, fertility, etc behaviours. I know you support gay rights and aren't trying to imply that gay people are anti-children or narcissistic by definition. I've been hearing a lot of that kind of discourse from conservative authors recently & it makes me wish you could stress in this article that many lesbians DO want children, that while their libido & courtship are nor reproductive, they still want to participate in reproduction. And that many participate a lot in community etc, are not simply focused on narcissism. I know you don't think that way but There's too many people who might take that away from an article like this!
Hi Damaris. I am traveling and don’t have time to respond properly, but wanted to say a couple of things. First, I came out as same-sex attracted at age 11 and am currently in a LTR with a woman, so I’m a part of the communities you’re worried about.
Second, evolutionary imprints don’t consider current societal conditions. They don’t work that way. Women are more distracted during sex than men are, for example, because they bear the larger burden of childrearing and needed to stay alert for baby worries. Now we have childfree women by choice, birth control, babysitters, baby monitors, and all the rest, but women as a group didn’t suddenly lose their innate sexual tendencies.
Ah thank you. I didn't realise you were bi, I'm sorry.. I def agree about the imprints' effects.
The best lesson learned from the Universe 25 study is NOT that abundance is a bad thing. Rather, it's that a gilded cage is ultimately still a cage.
I have not. Now I'm not sure if I should try lol
Aww thank you!