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by glimshe 1077 days ago
Agreed. We've created societal structures and cultural norms that have survived thousands of years to deal with teenagers, which have existed and behaved like teenagers since the dawn of humankind. Our civilization exists because of the systems that we put in place, good or bad, and they allowed us to not only survive, but also thrive. Our thriving included getting rid of many bad ideas and norms along the way.

Whenever we want to experiment with radical changes in our systems, we need to be very careful. New radical approaches lack the test of time, and should be introduced carefully when there is potential for widespread negative impact.

Today we're saying that a large number of teenagers actually would be better off with a permanent change in gender. This extraordinary claim, which goes against biology and our established cultural norms, could be true but we have to recognize it as extraordinary and approach with extreme care. Maybe one day we'll figure out how many teenagers actually would benefit from this, but right now it's clear to me that we're just going all-in on an untested paradigm with great potential for irreversible pain and suffering.