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Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[-] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

CW: barely disguised transphobia

"friendly neighborhood transhumanist liberal" asks why bans on "conversion therapy" for trans folks are being enacted without looking at the science, which they're surprised is non-existent

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/J4Lnxi3uJhR8GiGsm/how-are-there-0-studies-maybe-1-on-sex-concordant-hormone

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Why do these people always want to give trans people the wrong hormones? It keeps coming up.

I think this is particularly important for the hormonal treatment of dysphoria in adolescents, where the evidence for gender-affirming care seems mixed. [...] Given all this, I was shocked that when I ran GPT Deep Research I wasn't able to find a single study that would evaluate the use of birth-sex-affirming hormones to decrease dysphoria.

The "evidence" he has provided up to this point:

  1. A snippet from a Chat-GPT transcript. We can't see the prompt, but the output starts with "You’re right."
  2. Two reddit comments about doubling down on (cis) gender roles. One of which uses the cursed words "nofap" and "autogynophilic"
  3. A case study from Poland about someone who (possibly?) wasn't transgender but had schizophrenic symptoms that mimicked it. The case study ends by saying WPATH guidelines would have handled things appropriately.
  4. A tweet from a woman who mentions getting mild dysphoria after taking hormonal birth control.

Quite the nerve holding actual science to an impossible standard while his position is just vibes. None of his(?) evidence even mentions taking cross-gender hormones. If anything the tweet is weak evidence against his position.

I'd expect to find these sort of studies in the UN or UK reports that recommend banning "conversion therapy" for gender identity.

Imagine writing so many words about transgender healthcare while being this oblivious to how politicized the UK policy documents are.

Anyway after making it to the end that was a lot of words to say he couldn't find any evidence for the position he wanted to be true holy smokes. His weird hang up on "crystallized" gender identity is bizarre. He seems to be hoping that there are people toying with changing gender and it's not too late to "save" them via conversion therapy before it's too late. We

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago

“Hey listen, I’ve been listening to these gender critical feminists and I think they might have a point. Check this out, what if we used psychiatry and hormone therapy to enforce traditional gender roles and normatively gendered bodies, but without creating trans people?”

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 4 days ago

The poster deftly doesn't address the real moral question: what if conversion therapy (either for homosexuality or trans identification) worked ? Would it be ethical to allow it?

This is the difference between politics/ethics and science. As the old saying goes, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 5 points 4 days ago

Gender-affirming care? Why of course! I am all for forcefully affirming your assigned gender!

this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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