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Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

(ellsberg.substack.com)
693 points macawfish | 11 comments | 12 Jul 25 18:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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al_borland ◴[12 Jul 25 18:53 UTC] No.44544145[source]▶
All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?

If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should), there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18 without sending picture of your ID off to random 3rd parties, or giving actual personal details. I don’t want to give this data, and websites shouldn’t want to shoulder the responsibility for it.

It seems like this could work much like Apple Pay, just without the payment. A prompt comes up, I use some biometric authentication on my phone, and it sends a signal to the browser that I’m 18+. Apple has been adding state IDs into the Wallet, this seems like it could fall right in line. The same thing could be used for buying alcohol at U-Scan checkout.

People should also be able to set their browser/computer to auto-send this for single-user devices, where it is all transparent to the user. I don’t have kids and no one else’s uses my devices. Why should I need to jump through hoops?

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VBprogrammer ◴[12 Jul 25 21:26 UTC] No.44545322[source]▶
The slippery slope from here to banning under 18s looking at websites discussing suicidal thoughts, transgender issues, homosexually and onto anything some group of middle age mothers decide isn't appropriate seems dangerously anti-fallacitical.
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cmilton ◴[12 Jul 25 22:13 UTC] No.44545647[source]▶
While I completely understand the slippery slope concept, we ban all kinds of things for under 18s based on morals. Why couldn't these be any different? How else does a society decide as a whole what they are for or against. Obviously, there should be limits.
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afavour ◴[12 Jul 25 22:40 UTC] No.44545805[source]▶
The question is always “whose morals”. I think society as a whole is in agreement that minors are better off without access to pornography, for example. But the arrangement OP is outlining is one where a minority are able to force their morality on a broader population that doesn’t agree with it.
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lelanthran ◴[12 Jul 25 22:55 UTC] No.44545909[source]▶
You might be wrong there. While the majority does not oppose homosexual relationships they are against affirmative transgender treatments for minors.
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kennywinker ◴[12 Jul 25 23:08 UTC] No.44545985[source]▶
Yes, but since when do we allow the majority to dictate what healthcare options are available?

The mode for treating trans kids is puberty blockers until they’re 18 and then they can choose their own treatment - but that pathway is being blocked by more and more laws and fear mongering about kids being transitioned against their will

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Manuel_D ◴[13 Jul 25 00:23 UTC] No.44546402[source]▶
"Transitioned against their will" is a very crude way of articulating the tradeoffs of prescribing puberty blockers. The core issue at hand is that absent puberty blockers, somewhere between 60-80% do not persist with a cross-sex gender identity after going through their natal puberty. Psychologists attempted to predict which patients would persist in a cross sex gender identity and which would not, but they were never able to do so.

When patients are given puberty blockers, desistence rates are miniscule, in the single digits. Proponents of hormonal intervention insist that this is proof that doctors are selecting kids that would persist in a cross sex gender absent blockers. But that's hard to reconcile with psychologists previous failures to predict persistence. While they're billed as giving "time to think", it's pretty much impossible to deny that blockers are causing patients who would have desisted in their cross sex gender identity if they went through their natal puberty.

It's not just conservative American States that are changing course on blockers for children: Finland, Sweden, the UK, Italy, Denmark, and Norway have all stopped prescription of blockers in children. Plenty of other countries never allowed it in the first place.

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heavyset_go ◴[13 Jul 25 02:37 UTC] No.44547037{7}[source]▶
The effects of puberty prevent people who are trans from living as their gender identities. Why bother when you'll need $400k in surgery post-puberty just for a chance to maybe look your gender?

If you ask trans people, "it's too late to live as my gender" is a common sentiment. You even see it in the gay community, where gay/bi people who come to acceptance of their sexualities late in life, feel like it's "too late" to live with that identity, and choose to continue to live and identify as straight people.

Hence the option for puberty blockers.

Turns out trans people will opt to go through the puberty that matches their gender if the opportunity arises, just as more people come out gay/bi/etc at an earlier age now that the opportunity arose.

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1. Manuel_D ◴[13 Jul 25 02:49 UTC] No.44547102{8}[source]▶
People can, and do, transition as adults. Natal puberty clearly does not prevent all people from transitioning. Effectively 100% of trans people prior to about 2010 transitioned as adults.

Same thing with gay people, as per your example. I'm sure some do remain closeted their entire lives. But plenty of them come out as gay later in life.

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2. Dylan16807 ◴[13 Jul 25 02:58 UTC] No.44547128[source]▶
> Same thing with gay people, as per your example. I'm sure some do remain closeted their entire lives. But plenty of them come out as gay later in life.

Plenty do, but the ones that don't give credence to the idea that forced closeting as a teenager makes it harder to follow your heart later. And that's in a situation where it doesn't get more difficult to come out later (if you're not married). Transitioning pre- and post- puberty is very different with current medical technology, so a lot more people will get "stuck".

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3. heavyset_go ◴[13 Jul 25 03:01 UTC] No.44547138[source]▶
I never said that they don't, just that the opportunities to do so diminish post-puberty and with age, and many people give up on the dream of being themselves.

> But plenty of them come out as gay later in life.

Some do, but statistics show that the majority don't. At some point it stops making sense to identify as a gay/bi person if you've been married for 20 years and have no intention of leaving. That ship has sailed, so to speak. The same thing happens with trans people for very practical and biological reasons post-puberty.

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4. Manuel_D ◴[13 Jul 25 03:17 UTC] No.44547200[source]▶
As per the linked study, the desisters tend to no longer experience gender dysphoria. It's not just that they don't transition later in life. The scenario you're describing - people struggling with gender dysphoria but reluctant to transition on account of having undergone natal puberty - does not describe the bulk of the sample.
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5. KittenInABox ◴[13 Jul 25 04:49 UTC] No.44547604{3}[source]▶
I don;t see a linked study...
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6. Manuel_D ◴[13 Jul 25 04:49 UTC] No.44547610{4}[source]▶
In the child comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44546443
7. Manuel_D ◴[13 Jul 25 05:57 UTC] No.44547859[source]▶
The majority of patients stop experiencing gender dysphoria. The analogy to a married person "stuck in the closet" is not correct: in that scenario this person is still same-sex attracted but suppresses that desire. In the case of ~80% of gender dysphoric youth, they stop desiring to be the cross-sex gender altogether. They are not refraining from transition on account of doubting their ability to pass after having gone through natal puberty.
8. lelanthran ◴[13 Jul 25 07:50 UTC] No.44548365[source]▶
> Some do, but statistics show that the majority don't.

Well, yeah. That's because it literally was a passing phase that the child experienced. That's why there's so many studies (some of them linked in this thread) showing that if you simply defer the decision until the minor is a major , the majority of gender dysphoria desists.

IOW, once the child has actually matured a little, their identity confusion goes away.

Deferring is the path of least harm; is it any wonder then that most of the people in the world, including highly secular countries, go that route?

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9. heavyset_go ◴[13 Jul 25 08:53 UTC] No.44548684{3}[source]▶
The statistics I am talking about are the rates of gay/bi identification by generation.

There's a reason there's nearly 10x as many gay identifying people in recent generations compared to past, and you can't generalize it as being a "phase". The true rates are likely the same, but people who identify that way dip off as you go back generations.

You notice the same pattern with left-handedness and those who identify as left-handed over time.

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10. Manuel_D ◴[13 Jul 25 15:30 UTC] No.44551105{4}[source]▶
About 3% of people 50-65 identify as gay. 4% of 18-29 year old identify as gay. 1% of 65+ identify as gay. At most, the rate increased 4x over the span of half a century: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/23/5-key-fin...

Left handedness increased from about 5% to 12% over the span of more than 60 years: https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/history-of-left-handedness

By comparison rates of transgender identification among minors has increased by a factor of a hundred over the span of just 10 years: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rates-of-newly-recorded-...

We're talking about an increases that are multiple orders of magnitude greater, over a fraction of the time span.

11. ◴[13 Jul 25 15:35 UTC] No.44551151[source]▶