Too invested in fiction

On the northwest Belgian coast, there is a little known tradition: shrimp fishing on horseback. The activity consists of what its name describes: fishing shrimp on a horse. In the 15th century, shrimp fishing on horseback was still practised on the North Sea coasts in France, the Netherlands and even the South of England. This activity represented an extra revenue needed for the household. Nowadays there is only one place in which it is still ongoing: Oostduinkerke, a sub-municipality of the municipality of Koksijde.

the thing happening right now (at the very least in the US and UK) is that trans youth are actively and systemically losing access to healthcare. this has been gradually escalating since the start of the pandemic, and more young people lose healthcare every single year.

when I talk about this I tend to get two responses

"why do trans adults want to expand these experimental treatments to children who can't consent"

"providers offering care to trans adults is a step in the right direction, even if they aren't offering it to trans youth. the perfect is the enemy of the good. we can't fight our allies."

do you see how both the overtly transphobic version and the nominally "pro-trans" version replicate the same misinformation?

this is not a question of "should we expand access to trans youth?" trans youth have had access to medical transition care for a long time. what is happening is the care they already had access to is being made inaccessible and then criminalized systematically.

am I making sense? places refusing to offer care to trans youth are not "a step in the right direction" because that implies that the trend is expanding access that "begins" with trans adults and innately will gradually encompass young people. that is not the case. this is not a hypothetical thing that we can all have different theoretical opinions on. what is happening is the systematic revoking of healthcare.

the further this progresses, the more healthcare is restricted for more demographics. that's how this works. healthcare is being restricted across the board as part of the broader eugenics project. abortion is being restricted. vaccines are becoming more expensive. insurance companies are denying more treatments to disabled people. anti-fatness is surging. ableism is surging. there are active campaigns to get people to mistrust the very idea of healthcare in favor of "wellness" grifts. no one wears N-95 masks. this is the trend. it's been the trend.

This podcast demonstrates that ability really well because sex scandals tend to be used as propaganda, so it's difficult to tell if they are true or not. The host will ask the historian guest, "Did he have sex with men?" and the guest will say something like, "Well four sources say so, but three were written after his death and the one from his lifetime was from a dude who REALLY hated him, so I'm going to conclude no."

That is what an expert can do, that we've perhaps forgotten about because we have so much information at our fingertips, an expert can tell which information is good & valid vs. bad & unreliable. An expert can sort much faster than a layman because they've been doing it for years.

It's the same for my field. Some things I am absolutely sure are wrong, like if someone says "We only use 10% of our brains." No, we use all of it and I can even tell you what every part does. But other claims, if I see a news article claiming something that sounds fishy, I can read the research article behind it and judge the validity of the source. I can sort. I know which parameters to sort on. That was the entire point of my education and it was pounded into my head.