 Hey everybody, tonight we're debating whether or not we should affirm trans identities and we are starting right now. With Shawn's opening statement, thanks so much for being with us, Shawn. The floor is all yours. All right, so I'll just go into it. So the way I view this partly is just from the perspective of a more general question about which desires we should and should not pursue. You could characterize people who have gender dysphoria or transgendered people as people who have a certain desire to in some sense manifest a gender identity that is disconcordant with the one they were assigned at birth based on their sex. And we need a general criteria for deciding which desires we should and should not pursue. I think we also need, and it's a related criteria about which behaviors we should and should not socially stigmatize. There are a lot of values you could base that criteria on, but I think sort of the most universal one to base it on is the reduction of human suffering and the promotion of well-being and the like because it's just so universally held as a value. And it's tricky to look at the transgender issue because obviously we don't have sort of the gold standard of scientific evidence with respect to transgenderism. You can't randomly assign someone to do almost anything relevant to the trans question. You can't randomly assign them to have a gender reassignment type surgery. Obviously you can't randomly assign people to have gender dysphoria in the first place and the like. But nonetheless, the data to me anyway looks pretty consistent with a picture of saying that leaning into the desire is probably not a good thing that if you, and I say this because for instance you look at the rate of suicide attempts and they tend to be higher among those trans people who have socially transitioned, who have medically transitioned and the like, and so you might on that basis think that it's not a good thing for them to lean into, like I said. And that's probably the most important thing to say. There are other things to say as well because you might say, okay, even if it is a bad decision for them, why is it any of our business? Why should we particularly care? We're not just talking about whether our individuals should lean into that desire or try to find some way out of it. We're also more fundamentally talking about whether or not we should affirm their identities and their choices. And I think there are a few things to say about that. I mean the first place obviously, if you care about their well-being then you want to discourage choices that are contrary to their well-being. But then in the second place, there's the issue of whether or not the societal affirming of transgender identities has caused an increase in the number of people who are experiencing gender dysphoria or who identify as transgender. And once again, the scientific evidence here is not very rigorous, but the data certainly is not inconsistent with the view that that is occurring and if that's occurring and that's a condition which massively increases say the rate of suicide attempt among people then that's I think quite a good reason to not affirm them. And then the final thing to say, the final sort of point I'll make in this opening is that because the desire that transgender people have isn't just about themselves, it's also about other people. And what I mean by that is that for me to be a woman in the sense that transgender people want to be a woman involves other people interacting with me in certain ways as if they also consider me to be in some respect interchangeable with women generally. And that causes in certain contexts especially there's certain context which is not particularly true in certain contexts where we're kind of talking about something very small like the use of pronouns. But when we talked about something like the legitimacy of two people having a serious physical altercation with each other or mate selection or something like that. Those are the sorts of contexts where cisgendered people I think by and large would feel a significant degree of psychological discomfort in trying to treat trans people the way that many of them would want to be treated. And so that's yet another reason to well to not lean in it to not promote those sorts of identities. So those are sort of the basic three things I tend to think about when I think about this question. That wasn't like a pre-planned opening statements of that same kind of ranting off the top. That's because it literally was but yeah hopefully that's enough to get us started or something. You got it. Thank you very much for that opening statement and want to let you know folks. If it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate we are a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion and politics and we hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you are from. And with that we are going to kick it over to Xander Hall. Thanks so much for being with us. The floor is all yours for your opening as well. Hell yeah. Thank you. I hope you don't mind but I wrote down some of the main points that you talked about there just so we could kind of I could go after them individually as all on their own. So yeah the first thing that you brought up was that we need a criteria for desires we should and should not pursue and what we should and should not stigmatize based on broadly I think you said the reduction of human suffering. And to talk about that we do have a criteria I would argue for what desires we should or should not pursue what we think is okay and what we think isn't okay. We already have these standards I'd say generally as a society at least here in America we have a pretty shared system of morality even if there are a few differences there I think we mostly all hold the same general values and I think one of those values is generally that as long as you're not hurting anybody you should be allowed to do whatever you want as long as it's not really affecting others in a seriously impactful way that could actually harm them and it shouldn't really be an issue but I don't even want to take that route when it comes to defending the trans situation I don't think that this is the right way to even go about arguing against it especially because you then brought went on to bring up the suicide attempts are higher among those who have transitioned and this just isn't true this just categorically is uncompletely untrue if you want me to cite you any studies that you could take a look at and read over in order to affirm that I can absolutely link them but I mean the NHS and the I'm blanking on the other one but I know the NHS specifically has already classified gender dysphoria and the treatment for it as being transitioning as being allowed and to pursue the transition that you want to right that was the outcome of these studies and then you also brought up rapid onset gender dysphoria which I'm not sure if you've heard that exact phrase but basically to summarize it rapid onset gender dysphoria is the idea that like young people being around people who claim to be trans will make them want to mimic being trans in order to like get anything from attention or to feel special or to any variety of reasons people present the study that I imagine you are referencing when talking about rapid onset gender dysphoria is one that I have seen many many many many times in the past a lot of people have brought it up so I don't know if you've become aware of it I know you haven't brought it up specifically but I mean a lot of people with your position have so acknowledge it the study that you're referencing that argues that more people are becoming trans in order to sort of like blend in or whatever the rapid onset gender dysphoria thing I believe this is a study by it like I have the link here basically the argument is that young people are identifying as trans at a higher rate when they are around other trans like other people who claim to be trans or young people of their age that claim to be trans and this I believe was actually like like seriously debunked by the broader scientific community particularly because it was just a study of parents it was like an online poll on an already extremely biased like turf website for parents not the children so I don't know if like we can suggest this massive problem of children developing gender dysphoria because of some placebo is real because of a parent poll online like I don't trust that and and then finally the last thing that you brought up was that trans people's desires to interact with sorry trans people desire others to interact with them in a certain way on so yeah basically yeah if you're trans and you want to see your identity validated and you want people to recognize you that way then you're going to expect others to do that now does that mean that like they're that a trans person is the right to like beat someone to death because they refuse to use the right pronouns no but generally I think we have certain standards of politeness in our society in which as long as it's not going to literally kill you we agree that being polite to others and referring to them how they prefer is how we do it right like we do this with names if someone's got a nickname that isn't the name they were given when they were born that's not on their birth certificate usually if we know it we use it because it's it's polite gender is on a whole nother level Matt gender is way more way more important to people in their names I think this is more of an argument in favor of just kind of being impolite than an argument against an ideology or of a political thing but yeah that's my response to your points you got it with that we're going to jump into open conversation and couple of things first folks want to let you know our guests are linked in the description we really do appreciate our guests want to encourage you to as always attack the argument instead of the person and with that want to remind you as well we are very excited if you have not heard folks this is a big one if you haven't heard we're very excited that coming up in January we're going to for the first time have our first ever modern day debate conference called debate con that's going to be in person in dallas texas so stay tuned for more words on that and hit that subscribe button if you haven't already as we're going to have many more juicy debates both at that conference and remotely as usual so thanks so much gentlemen the floor is all yours for that open dialogue glad you're here okay cool so um yeah so obviously in my opening I sort of set a bunch of stuff and then you responded in a list like that should fashion to a bunch of those things but we should probably do right it's sort of do the first one first then move to this and just move down the list pressure through the conversations what seems like to me would make the most sense um so the first thing that you responded to it had to do with criterias for desires and you would say something like that as long as what someone's doing isn't hurting anyone else we should be okay with them doing it is that roughly um no broadly I think that as long as um if people have a preference for how they want to be treated or how they want to be referred to or how they want to live their lives I think as long as they're not really hurting themselves or others and I don't think that this is something that should have a moral panic started about it okay got you maybe I thought you would not set themselves before maybe I just misheard it that's fine okay so I don't think we actually I might have misspoken but yeah so we probably don't actually disagree with that on that point um so talking about the the suicide rate of people who have transitioned in various ways medically or socially um yeah I don't know if we want to like throw studies at each other I mean there've been a fair number of studies and it's a fairly consistent finding in the literature that transitioning both socially and medically leads leads to is not the right word but predicts a higher level of suicidal attempt in ideation do you know why that is do I know what will firstly before it seemed to me like you were saying that's not true you so you do agree that that is true well no it's it's true that objectively speaking the data suggests that trans people are more likely to engage in the palm have suicidal ideation or commits or attempts or commits suicide but that's not because they're trans it what it's has to do with other factors and I can we can talk about that right but so the point I'm making isn't just that trans people have elevated suicide attempts rates and among trans people those who have uh had various sorts of surgeries or those who have socially transitions of the people in their lives you don't know on visual contact that they are transgender that these trans people have higher suicide attempt rates they induce trans people who have not done this and that a plausible interpretation of that would be that you know furthering leaning into pursuing these desires seems to predict an even worse mental outcome than not pursuing you're uh you're talking about the pub med study right the one by pub med I mean there are lots there are lots of studies on pub med but this is also I'm not referring to you I mean well on on pub med there's a particular study and I think it's the one that you're referring to um I've come and I've seen it before it's uh it's for anybody who wants to know like what the argument made by the study and what the deal is basically it's a long-term follow-up of transsexual persons undergoing sex reassignment surgery and it's a cohort study in Sweden the reason why I bring this study in particular up is because it's the one that I've seen the overwhelming majority of the times from people who've made this argument and my main issue with it is I believe the author of the study themselves they're they're Swedish so the people the people who made it are it's a Swedish study so obviously language barrier was an issue for a while but I believe they've come out and they've clarified that um the control group for the post-transition trans individuals to be compared to were cis-gendered people it wasn't trans people being compared people who have transitioned that are trans being compared to trans people who haven't transitioned it was trans people have transitioned compared to non-trans people which I'd be willing to bet the overwhelming majority of the time trans people are going to have a higher suicide rate than cis people as long as trans people are treated the way that they are in society broadly right okay so I know that the study you're talking about that is definitely not the research I was having it might be exactly because of what you just said that what I was talking about was research that compares trans people who have transitioned to trans people who have not uh whereas what you're talking about is a famous study out of Sweden that compared trans people who had transitioned to just a batch in some respect matched group of cis-gendered people who I agree is not uh very informative for this question oh then in that case if you've got a another study that makes this like uh that posits this that you want to send to me like we don't even have to go over it on stream I'm just genuinely curious to see if you've got like another study that that that claims this because I'll look it over and I'll I'll I'll give it a look over absolutely yeah so this is a little dated but back in 2019 I tried to to figure this out I have a table that I think has like nine effect sizes for medical transitioning six for social transitioning so it's definitely not based on a single study um and that is my obviously I cannot sit I mean I could send you but you cannot read 15 studies oh yeah it's not exactly practical as you want to stream but legitimately though I'd actually like if you'd send it to me like uh for me to look at after the debate off stream because I if this study does claim what it claims that you're claiming I want to see it um but uh yeah um so you are of the opinion that okay why do you think that trans people have a higher suicide rate than cis people or why do you think trans people who have transitioned have a higher suicide rate than trans people who haven't right so I think there's a it's I mean it's a combination of many different reasons um so one of them and the one that probably I would guess you would want to talk the most about stereotypically what I just want to talk the most about is victimization from social ostracism increasing and physical ostracism for that matter physical violence uh increasing their suicide attempt rate and I think that plays a role in it but it's a fairly minor role that the majority of it cannot be explained by victimization from the sorts of discrimination often cited I mean I could talk more but I think that's probably a good place to stop your reaction with it um yeah um I mean there's like a collection of studies that I could bring up that have to do with like LGBT people especially LGBT youth in particular this is where it's like a particularly large problem because LGBT youth or youth in general children are more reliant on those in their lives they can't really just operate without any safety net or any other people in their lives to give them a boost their fucking children um but uh I believe it's something like nearly 70 percent of LGBT youth um or almost 80 percent if they're in the closet but uh nearly 70 percent of LGBTQ youth have said that their parents are completely open with like homophobic or anti-LGBT rhetoric around them and uh I believe there was also a study that that claim that like only if I believe it's um for trans people and their suicide rate I believe there's this it's a massive massive massive drop in uh suicidality with just a trans person's family approval not even like friends in the broader society just with family approval I believe the suicide rate of trans people on average just drops massively I can do a quick search to see if I can tell you exactly the number but um I remember reading it and being like wow that's a big number yes I guess I would there are a few things to say um so the first place the way that I've looked at this before is to look at um well so the first question we want to ask is how big of an effect on suicide does these kinds of victimizations how big of an effect is it that it has on these and most of the literature I've seen suggests that being the victim of various kinds of discrimination there are lots of sort of sub types of discrimination different studies on all of them but that while it does predict a higher rate of suicide might say suffering experiencing it quite a lot might double or even triple your rate of suicide attempt that just on its face this cannot explain something like trans people having something like nine times the suicide rate of cisgender people now another thing I want to bring up though is that it's very hard to interpret most research on how bullying and discrimination from parents from peers from workplace from police I don't want to be rude I don't want to like interrupt while you're mid like saying something but is it okay if I respond to a point you just made yeah sure so I don't I'm not arguing that specifically victimization or active um hatred for LGBT people or trans people broadly that um causes this rise in a suicide rate I think it has to do with a lack of support at least when it comes to most and I know this isn't something that can actually be tracked through data it's impossible to track the sentiment through data you have to go off of anecdotes about this but I feel like it's fairly safe to do so here um at least most trans people I've talked to where they just get like I've had these calls with people that will go on to like 2 a.m. and just getting really deep talking with people about how they feel and I'll just do this in private when I'm hanging out with people and I'm not streaming and I've talked to quite a few trans people about this and a big part of it just has to deal with a lack of support most people who are who are trans or most people broadly don't really know that much about trans people so when they start experiencing gender dysphoria and whatnot they don't really understand what it is right away at least most people who experience it don't especially if they're young and so that lack of support that lack of of knowledge and that support based to help them understand what they're feeling um that I think that probably plays a much larger part into it than um most people would account for and then of course there's the obvious there's the um the fact that like I think it's nearly 50 or 40 percent of homeless youth are LGBT of some kind due to the the epidemic of obviously parents disowning their LGBT children um I don't know I think it's trends like this that tend to lend more to LGBT people broadly not just trans people having higher suicide rates than non-LGBT people then some other innate thing we could point to because I haven't seen the evidence that there's another innate thing that causes their suicide rate and their suicidal ideation then they're getting a lot of shit probably as a demographic all the time sure so yeah it's definitely true that uh outright bullying and a lack of social support these are not the same thing but there's a lot of research specifically on um the relationship between social support uh whether that's defined as support from friends from families specifically from parents etc the effect that that kind of support has on the suicide rate of uh trans people um again I mean you can't uh I can't send this to you to read this live but I would say just that um okay when I looked at it across 22 effect sizes 78 weren't even statistically significant and the vast majority of them per gave very weak effect sizes so again and that's not to say necessarily that it has no effect but we're looking at something that normally isn't even statistically significant and when it is normally has a weak effect size that cannot make more than a small contribution to a group that has something like nine a nine-fold increase in suicide attempt rate wait do you mind do you mind if I ask um uh you don't have to send me like a link or anything I'm just curious if you could reiterate it um you mentioned a study a second ago that suggested that um uh uh what was it you just said again a second ago just just repeat that about social support or about the bullying um yeah social support oh that studies that ask the question um does social support whether that's again to find it's pure support or family support uh among a sample in a sample of just trans people is it true that those trans people who say that they have you know good family support good social support etc have lower suicide attempt rates looking at that association that most of these studies produce effects that aren't statistically significant and the effect sizes they're reporting generally very small okay so if that's the case then why do you think that lgbt people have a higher suicide rate than non-lgbt people well like I was saying it's a combination of different things so I do think that in the first place social support not as much but there's a certain kind of bullying which certainly does contribute to it I think no doubt uh just that that doesn't explain the majority of it another thing to mention is that a lot of people who have gender dysphoria had pre-existing psychological conditions before they had gender dysphoria like depression and anxiety are very common ones those obviously contribute to an elevated suicide rate but fundamentally I think we have a large unexplained gap in the suicide rate that we don't exactly know the cause of I can share my intuitive speculation about it but I'm not sure I mean that's what it is I should say from the outset this is just a speculation of mine about it and I've never had any kind of gender dysphoria so I'm not in the best place to speculate about it but if I had to speculate I would imagine it might have to do with them not being able to because the desire they're trying to satisfy I think anyway based on just talking to people and whatnot to fully satisfy it would be extremely difficult and require action on the part of them and many many other people and so for that reason it seems like inherently a kind of desire that especially the more you sort of get into it and think about it the more that's going to cause you to be unhappy but again that like that is very much speculation on my part the empirical nature of the data I think is just that there's an unexplained gap in suicide rates I don't think it's very well unexplained I think that LGBT people are a group that are extremely more likely to face bullying and I think that bullying probably plays a lot larger of a part than I think you're willing to admit it does but I have no doubt in my mind obviously you mentioned there are a lot of LGBT people already have pre-existing mental conditions that could be a part of the problem there or even the reason for the problem right like depression whatnot and I think I actually found I may be wrong on this but I swear I saw something like two months ago maybe that I think like acknowledges that and a study that sort of like debunks like oh it's just pre-existing like mental conditions but the main response I'd have to that is that doesn't make any sense how don't you think that maybe if LGBT people are at such a more likely rate to commit suicide that massive gap that you say isn't explained what else could possibly explain it I know you said that we had speculation but I'm really curious what else could possibly explain that massive gap of suicidality between LGBT and non-LGBT people it's like the is the gay lifestyle like inherently something that's going to cause you to be unhappy is there anything like what do you think it is okay well firstly I want to make a very clear distinction that I'm just talking about transgender people and not LGBT people um like the empirical data on on homosexuality is a totally separate question uh than the data and what it says about transgender people there's some similarities in what the data says but there's also some dissimilarities and so I wouldn't want to talk about those as a unified group well I mean well but but here's the thing though but here's the thing though because when it comes to the whole trans topic is there really not only two uh I guess technically three if you really want to stretch it but realistically like two uh paths that we can really go down either it's trans people are in some way misled about their identity and the validity thereof like they're they're in the wrong they may not mean to be in the wrong or whatever but they're they're clearly just something's wrong with them and we have to put them through some kind of therapy or something to make them get over it or or to get to a better place this is what I assume you would advocate for if not then feel free to interrupt me and tell me what you think would be the best option but when and that's usually the response that I hear or to accept trans people and allow them to live their lives and respect them and everything um but this doesn't sound that different to me than the arguments that homophobes back in the 90s and before would make um about gay people like back when when it was like gay people were the big sort of moral panic that everybody was talking about these arguments remind me a lot of the arguments that I heard back in those days or from back in those days I wasn't around during those days but um what I heard like the arguments I've heard from those days it just it sounds like blazing like glaringly similar to me sure um they might be similar at like the narrative level right but the interesting question is just what the data says in both cases and if the data doesn't say the same thing in both cases I mean that's what I care about and if that's dissimilar then they're just not I wouldn't treat them the same wait so if the data like like if you say it's sort of like oh well well actually I won't make that analogy because I never mind just go ahead say what you were gonna say well if the if the data suggested that being gay like being gay made you more likely to be suicidal like if the data just full on said yep having sex with other men when you're a man makes you more likely to kill yourself would you advocate for uh could like conversion therapy for gay people well there are a few things um if I definitely wouldn't encourage us to have any set of social norms that might increase either how gay people are and and that's a kind of weird thing to talk about I'll ask some people do view sexuality that way whatever I'll just say that increase how gay people are or the number of gay people while that was true yeah I think that would be a very irresponsible set of social norms to have uh that that's what you're asking interesting yeah because it seems like the only option with the whole trans thing is like either we advocate for the acceptance of trans people or we advocate for the I mean are you in favor of if you think somebody is doing something that's harmful to them and the government should seek them out and try to prevent them from doing that thing like do you believe if someone's suicidal they should be bake reacted for a few days to determine whether or not they're like a danger to themselves or others no certainly not although I do think we're kind of moving now to a very different I mean I feel like we will because the reason to the bullying question because that is just an empirical question sure you talk about this as well but this feels like two different things to me the reason why I bring it up is because it's very relevant um the argument about whether or not you would advocate for uh trans people to be put through essentially conversion therapy to make them not trans anymore not want to be trans anymore um it just like that's the only other solution it seems right like or to advocate for one of these options right either it's like trans people are valid and they ought to be let in society or trans people are hurting themselves by being trans or whatever like the the argument would be and um I would assume most people who are in favor of some sort of government action on the part of preventing people from doing things that could be self destructive or harmful to others you would think the natural step then if you believe that about trans people would be maybe it is time to start rounding up trans people and sending them to be like sort of to go through conversion therapy because that was a popular idea back when people believed essentially everything that I've heard transphobes argue about trans people say the exact same things about gay people back in the day the same talking points from the um they're a danger to our children and they're they're more likely to be pedophiles to the argument that they're suicidal and they're hurting themselves and this lifestyle is hurting them you know I just what worries me in particular is that there are so so many lines of similarity between the trans acceptance movement and the gay acceptance movement you know as it's been for the last few decades so so so similar and the rhetoric on the opposite side the opposing side of these movements sounds almost identical as well just replace a few words and and you basically have it sure I mean that's again like yeah there's narrative similarity and that's whatever I mean I'm fine with it if I sound like you could also make similar arguments against gay people that's not going to deeply bother me or something like that there's some rhetorical similarity also with respect like the state doing things I mean I'll just to be clear my actual political position here is that people who have sort of transgender feelings should be encouraged to a fight that desire that they have and b try to live with the desire in a way that minimizes it but that's very much a social encouraging and obviously the government should not force them to do that or to not transition or something like that uh just to be clear because it's you were saying some some weird things that might lead people to think I have a political position that I very much don't okay I just because I don't know how authoritarian you are with your politics for all I know you could just be like more libertarian with things and you're just making an argument about how people ought to behave socially but you could also be making an argument I mean very easily if you were more authoritarian that this is the case and I think that the government should enact power in order to act on what I believe is true and that's more so what what I was concerned about I didn't know how authoritarian you are but um yeah even if that doesn't apply to you it applies to people that I've talked to before so that's why I brought it up um but uh yeah I guess I'll let you take the lead of the combo and and talk about because I don't have anything else to go from there I'll let you go sure so returning to the the bullying thing um I guess I just want to I mean there are two things I guess to say about the bullying firstly um keep in mind this is empirically distinct from studies on social support that most of the effect you normally see uh where you see the people who are bullied have elevated suicide rates just in the general population that this is mostly due to a whole suite of confounding factors and that if you uh control for especially things having to do with the within family environment and genes that if you control for these things that the effect size ends up being about 40 percent of what it's normally reported to be um but the even without doing those and I know to my knowledge trans studies on trans people that uh take into account those sorts of confounding variables but even not doing that the effect sizes for bullying again I mean they're real but they're just not anywhere big enough and it's not like an opinion it's just the numbers are what they are that they're not big enough to get you anywhere near the rate of a suicide attempt among trans people and so I don't see how you're going to get around calling that an unexplained gap and to me that looks like a decent reason to prefer if there's a way out of it to not go into some behavior if you have for reasons you aren't sure of massively elevated suicide rates among people who do that I mean it just seems like the thing that makes the suicide rates massively de-elevate has to do particularly when it comes with like trans people has to do with the more accepted they are and the more they're allowed to transition right um I mean I'm looking at a study right now that suggests 80 percent of individuals reported significant improvement in their dysphoria after uh sexual reassignment surgery 78 percent of individuals reported significant improvement in their psychological symptoms while 72 percent of individuals reported significant improvement in sexual function granted this is a question of actual like patients receiving uh treatment but I mean it the only way you collect that kind of data on mental health is by asking those people questions ask them do you feel better do you feel like things are getting better and and that's how you collect that data I mean like every time I see studies about this I mean like um right here is a um giant Cornell uh dot edu meta meta analysis like a collection of like a super meta analysis a collection of so many studies they had to add meta twice um that that that affirms that 56 of the 56 studies that were looked at 52 indicated transitioning has a positive effect on the mental health of transgender people and four indicate it had mixed or no results well zero studies indicated that trans people transitioning has negative results and this is from Cornell edu like these are not like I don't know if you would argue they're like corrupted institutions that that are pushing out bad data that's influenced by certain political ideologies but I mean it just seems like there's this overwhelming wave of evidence on the protrans side of things and that overwhelming wave of evidence has also coincided with a broader societal acceptance of trans people as well so it just it seems really bizarre to me when people say no it's not bullying and lack of support that's causing lgbt people to have such high suicide rates it's actually unaccounted four factors that we can't know it's a gap that we can't really put a label on even though these studies suggest it's bullying and lack of support okay so I mean there are a few things to say uh firstly a lot of the research all the research that I've talked about so far has been based on suicide suicidal ideation or preferably suicide attempts as the uh dependent variable the outcome um and there's a good reason for that that because we can't do randomized control trials on things like transitioning uh I mean there's a deep problem with going to someone who voluntarily chose to do a thing and asking them hey since you did that thing do you feel happier uh outside of the trans context I mean this is just something in general uh sort of behavioral psychology that people have a bias for saying yeah the thing I did was good once they did it um and so for that reason now if it was the case that that's all the data we had that would be one thing but it's not and so if you look at the data and you say oh well that's interesting these people who transition they say that they have uh are happier because of it or sense them um but the people who have transitioned have higher rates of suicide attempts than those who have not that to me the most reasonable interpretation of that data uh is that the self-reported emotional states uh lack a certain degree of validity but the problem is the only study I've seen that suggests that trans people who've been able to transition have a higher suicide rate than trans people who haven't been able to is actually a study that compares trans people who've transitioned to cis people who aren't trans that's the only study I've anybody I've debated listen I've been doing this for two and a half years I've debated like a hundred people on this topic and every single one of them that that has made that argument put forward that specific study so I mean if you please like on on Twitter if you want to DM me that study that you're referring to I'll check it all out off stream I want to see that study if if it suggests what you're saying it does but I haven't seen I mean I I do scour the internet for for sources that tried to debunk this position like I've looked around um I haven't seen any such study as the one you're describing um but right now I'm providing you with named well recognized well respected large academic associations and organizations that have not only collected this data and done studies on these topics that have had the desired conclusions but I've referenced meta analyses of dozens of studies that have taken into account all this all this data and had still had the same conclusion zero of these studies were found to have negative impacts for transitioning on trans people you could argue that maybe that sounds fishy or it could literally just be just like with gay people being able to live their best lives and do as they wish and being accepted by society just makes them happier could literally just be that simple so I feel like I'm just going to repeat myself I have a specific methodological critique of the sort of research that's being cited um obviously like we said you can't read a bunch of studies alive but I'm also literally referencing dozens of studies uh but I feel like this is man we've already covered and we're kind of going in a circle um I guess I should add like I don't care about the authority of like Yale or whatever but that's a totally different topic but I should just for the record state that I kind of discount the kind of credentialism well as for like the the appeals to authority I don't believe that I as a random dude on the internet have the authority or the the qualifications to look at data or conduct a study or an experiment and collect that data and synthesize and figure out what that data means as it does take a pretty good education to look at data and actually make that into something right like data on its own is pretty useless you need people that that have fairly good understandings of what's going on with a particular subject that's being studied in order to make that data even mean anything um to for me to like suggest like here is Cornell University like Cornell EDU drop an enormous meta-analysis with like 56 trans studies and here's the conclusion and I just I don't trust myself to question these sources because these sources have people with way better educations and way more experience and way more knowledge than I ever could is just some rando on the internet so I kind of have to trust them because for me being just some rando trying to poke holes in their studies and their data I don't even have close to the amount of information as they have it would be folly for me to try to do something like that it would be stupid of me okay sure so I guess that there are a few different things to say firstly well you may have some a priori suspicion about your own ability to understand what's going on if you read the study and uh or the paper and it's talking about self-reported emotional states and you can easily think of a problem with that I think then it just turns out that you actually can think of a critique of it uh and that that's not really a problem in the second place I guess we can just talk about this directly um I mean I have I have no respect for these people you're right that it takes a certain level of knowledge in order to accurately interpret and assess data there's a huge literature in the social science most PhD social scientists do not have this understanding if you give them quizzes on the exact meaning of things like key value confidence interval this sort of very very basic freshman statistical things that the majority of them can't even correctly define these terms let alone I'm so sorry I can't believe that the majority of social scientists can't even defined basic terms when it comes to collecting data social science that is the field that's all about collecting data to make inferences about society and how people work that's what that's all about like the whole study of social sciences that's all about alright we collect data about people we gather it we interpret it and we come to conclusions about people from that right like that's literally the whole field I cannot like our I feel like our society would crumble if that was true like I feel like our bridges and our houses would be literally crumbling into rubble right now if that was true so um I mean what I would say is just that uh within social science this has been talked about for a long time there are many studies showing this going back decades um among the within every social science there's a sub field of it normally that focuses on research methodology and within that community this I don't think so far as I know there's not even controversy about this uh there aren't studies going both ways or something there's just a long list of studies showing uh to lots of different professions uh psychologists are the ones most commonly looked at but you also have ones on epidemiologists on other sorts of social scientists private sector people with social science degrees uh that even ones teaching statistical classes classes in statistics that they would get you know basically F's on tests uh trying to understand again very basic things that are in virtually all the data that they report um and I agree that it's like surprising in some sense that this is true but it just is true uh and the other thing I should say about like they talk about the meta-analysis and whatnot and we should also remember that a meta-analysis uh well we shouldn't put too much stock in it if you compare the results of a meta-analysis the results of a uh pre-registered uh replication study the effect size of the meta-analysis tends to be about three times larger even when you do most of the normal ways that meta-analysis try to adjust for publication bias suggesting that this sort of methodology actually tends us tends to lead to a quite significant degree of error um but anyway yeah I feel like we're kind of moving into a different topic now about trusted experts but it is I mean it's a fine topic so I guess I can't do the trusted experts topic because you're making the argument that the entire like so sociological sphere uh here in America at least I don't know if this what you said applies to other countries or whatever but um or like all like the whole field is apparently a sham I guess like there's been no actual you know like are they all cheating is the is the study of social sciences and statistics like I'm pretty sure so like to get a sociology degree I'm pretty sure you have to take a statistics class or I think statistics is a big part of it like are they all cheating like is the class are all the sociology classes are almost all of them not sufficient because I'm trying to imagine how what you're saying right now could possibly be true and like the the circumstances that would have to occur for this to actually be true would actually be like this would be one of the biggest conspiracies in this nation's history if you could prove this true so I mean there in terms of how it happens there are a few things to say uh one a lot of people go into social sciences and they have the research methodology classes and those are the classes that they kind of barely get by in two a lot of research classes are taught by people who themselves don't really understand uh what's going on again there are specifically studies giving quizzes to people that teach statistics and they tend to find uh especially in social science departments they tend to find similar results and certainly a lot of the people in social science I my suspicion is don't deeply care about the quantitative side and because of this for yet the meaning of the numbers that they're using which is quite shameful uh but I don't know a better explanation for how it is um I mean it is a random one so just a classic paper in this literature from 1993 given to about 500 psychologists uh given a quiz concerning common statistical issues dealt with in psychological research specifically the psychologists answered on average 55 percent of the question is correct which is an F right uh and there's a long list of studies like this a different profession I mean this is this is just a thing it's been talked about for decades it's a problem that in social science it's just a minority of people that actually know what the numbers mean and most of them don't that sounds really bizarre to me are you sure you're not like referring to peer review and the scientific method where the whole argument is when you have a theory you put it through the ringer and you get it peer reviewed and you have other people like that might disagree or who's who might not be able to repeat the evidence like you I'm not sure no no no I'm the discourse in the scientific community is what you're talking about here because like what you're describing to me right now sounds crazy like I don't want to sound rude but it sounds crazy to me no uh I mean we could there's lots of research on the problematic nature of the peer review process but that's a distinct thing I'm talking about like I said research is not understanding exactly what fundamental metrics and statistics even me saying stupid shit like that a p-value if you're finding there's a p-value of 0.03 that means that there's a 3% chance that it's wrong or something like that so do you believe that when it comes to statistics that you are more you are more qualified to look at statistics raw stats numbers etc and come to a conclusion from them than like sociologists are or most in the sociological field are oh yeah definitely okay just curious all right but then I want to reiterate though that that's just because I can see the quizzes that they're getting and it's not because I'm a genius it's just because for whatever reason they I don't have sufficient caring to actually remember what these things mean because it's not super complicated to know exactly what a p-value means but like a dozen studies have shown us the lots of academics don't that's just the state of affairs I didn't make it that way the paper saying this aren't like from some weird think tank they're just in normal peer review journals like I said this has been talked about for decades it's not even like a secret it's not a right wing thing I've never even heard this talked about particularly on like a right wing source or something this is just something that uh people in research communities talk about it's just a fact I don't know what to say they don't they don't know probably because they don't care okay um all right I guess um do you want to like move on to the next point all right yeah sure uh I don't even know what that is uh I mean I you wrote it down at some point so yeah yeah I I mean I wrote them so I guess we we can we can talk about it I mean the next thing on the list is rapid onset gender dysphoria we can talk about that for a minute if you want oh sure and you were upset because there's a there's a paper that used that that I think popularized that phrase yeah that is based on the reports of parents and it's from a form and you were saying it was like a term form I've heard people say that there was like a a political quiz on the form and most of the people were like pro some kind of LGBT liberal thing but I don't know exactly what the political orientation of the people the the form in particular that that uh data comes from I believe has like it's it's one of those forms that like you can hear the name of it and you're like oh okay it's like protect women or like women's fight against gender activism it had a name like that like a name that mom's net it was mom was it mom's net really yeah it was mom's net which is pretty well known like a turf website I uh gram linahan recently like they hate men there that's a huge part of it there's I'm not sure if you're super aware of the turf thing basically in the trans community there's a disdain for a group of people who I would argue appropriate the label of feminist called terfs trans exclusionary radical feminists these terfs have a seething hatred for men I mean I'm not even kidding like if you think you've seen man hating feminists on any video or forum or twitter you will have your mind absolutely blown these fucking terfs genuinely believe that every man wants to like rape them or whatever there it is bizarre so basically um these turf forms such as mom's net which is the one I'm talking about specifically this is where the rapid onset gender dysphoria thing came from and this is the form where I believe that particular poll was done yeah sure um and at my opening statement I don't I didn't like reference that specific paper uh to my knowledge there's not a lot of data on this I'm actually only aware of two papers directly trying to look at this and they're both of quite low quality and then that's one of them um so what I would say though is that we're seeing a rise in the number of people identifying as transgender with time seems to be concentrated in particular demographic groups and that it would not be shocking if there was some degree of peer influence on that psychological state there's peer influence on lots of psychological states and desires but my position is definitely not that the data has come in and we just know that this is true my position is that the data has not come in that we don't know but that nothing about the trends we're seeing makes it implausible that that would be so and that if that's so that's a serious cause for concern given the elevated rates of suffering we see among trans people so I'd suggest that um I mean I've this is what the studies tend to suggest as an explanation whether or not you agree with that I mean could be up in the air but this is my understanding of why this is the case um I think it's the same reason or it is the same reason why uh we've actually seen a rise in in people coming out as gay or bisexual right I assume you're of the opinion that sexuality isn't a choice it's like you're born that way uh I mean it that's a very generally you could say that okay um yeah so basically um we've seen a rise in people who are gay or bi coming out and frankly I don't think you can I don't think being gay is a choice like I could not I could not make myself gay okay I could not I can't imagine looking at a dude and think that's attractive so that's why I believe there's no way it could be a choice because I can't even imagine just like being straight and then deciding to find other men attractive it's just I the whole choice thing doesn't really make sense to me because of that um anyway though uh I think it's for the same reason we've seen more gay and bi people come out I think society broadly has gotten far more accepting of gay and trans people etc and so you've seen a lot more people come out as gay we heard very I know I'm drawing the same comparison but there are many comparisons to be drawn I think um obviously the same argument was made back in the day that you know if your kid hung out with kids who were gay then they were more likely to be gay and that was a talking point that would come out more I think it's a very simple explanation I think it just has more to do with society getting more accepting and um obviously if you are closeted trans or you are closeted gay the friends are going to be making at school or the friends are going to be making any social space that's given is probably going to be other people with that identity so there's probably maybe a little bit of selection bias there but yeah that seems to be what the what the data I've seen suggests as the reason but you go ahead well I think it would be very hard to tell that um I'm not aware of any sort of methodology by which you could really discern whether or not that explained like what percentage of the trend say that explained or something like that um like I said we don't have very strong data I would be surprised though if it wasn't the case that having that option socially available in the sense that it's something that you think of it's a frame by which you are open to interpreting your psychological phenomena through that sort of thing I will say just this is just an intuitive thing which intuitively it would be very surprising to me if it is the case that actually there are no people who had a set of desires that in the past they would have interpreted one way but now due to no availability in the mind of other options aren't inclined to interpret that in terms of gender dysphoria just based on how the human mind sort of works generally that would seem surprising to me yeah I guess I'll just stop there okay um yeah I mean the rapid onset gender dysphoria thing or whatever anyone wants to call it the ROGD thing specifically comes from that study I talked about or that poll actually that online survey that I talked about but that's generally the term that's used for it what I I can't like I imagine maybe some kids or some young people or some people down the road like maybe have been sort of convinced into thinking that they had gender dysphoria because they hung out with people who are don't get me wrong okay listen I'm gonna be honest here I'm gonna be complete this is me seating a point completely over to you okay I admit there are a lot of people in the trans community that can be a little bit weird about like other people and whether or not they're trans there are a lot of people in my community got a lot of trans people in my community like to call me an egg all the time and say that I'm like trans and in the closet or whatever and it's a little disconcerting and I understand that that probably isn't something that just happens in my community I'm sure that happens a lot there are a lot of trans people that joke or even suggest that certain people are trans and don't know it yet and I think that's a little bit weird because it can lead to sort of muddying people's perception of their of their sexuality and whatnot and it kind of maybe isn't good for people to have that sort of wrench thrown into the gears but um well I think maybe there's been some cases where people have been misled about their identity in the past I think generally speaking I just don't think there's any reason to disingenuously claim to be trans that's my main concern I have with this argument from a lot of people on your side of things because there's an implication that okay so if it's not being done sincerely and genuinely through a completely sincere and genuine desire to change your gender and to live differently in that um there's this isn't like a valid identity then the flip to that is that we shouldn't accept them and that they're causing some type of harm and I don't agree with that or that they're causing harm to themselves and I don't agree with that they don't seem to think that either well I definitely well so there's probably a some subset of people who are literally just lying about the gender identity but that's probably there's gotta be some amount uh yeah but that's not primarily what I'm talking about uh I would I would be thinking of people who have a set of like for instance say you're a male right and you're attracted to a set of in some sense feminine behaviors or something like that and there's a million ways there's a million ways you could interpret those sorts of feelings and desires probably not a million but there's more than one let's say uh and that a social context that primes you to interpret them in terms of gender dysphoria it would seem super unsurprising to me if that increased the number of people who are interpreting them in that way whereas if it was in 1920 I bet a lot of people had those same feelings it's not that they would be thinking oh man I want to be they wouldn't be thinking about it in the exact same way like in terms of how trans people today think about like I'm the real identity as a woman or whatever uh it would be a much well different I mean surely it would be a very different frame I don't even see how it would be possible the the thing that they think about the the way that trans people do today yeah I don't know it just it it doesn't seem like um we so what I'm curious about is do you believe that gender dysphoria as it's been described by like the the medical like the the scientific community and like the the medical field do you believe that gender dysphoria is real um I assume so I mean I'm not familiar off the top of my head with their description but I just the idea that uh you have a desire to be treated in a way that matches how people of a certain gender are normally treated that is not the way that you would be treated if you were treated as someone who has the average gender of the person of your sex and something like that roughly uh I mean that's certainly a thing if they're assuming that's what they mean by it okay so at the end of the day our goal is to find essentially a treatment or a cure for gender dysphoria because we've we've seen gender dysphoria we've witnessed it in the world we've observed it we've seen that it is a thing that people experience so the argument is the end of the day everything we're talking about about here really doesn't matter at the end of the day what really matters the real question that we're trying to answer is whether or not we allow trans people to pursue their transition or we build roadblocks to prevent it because if they're hurting themselves then naturally we want to make it harder for them to do so and if they're helping themselves then naturally we should want to make it easier for them to do so and I just have not been convinced that there's enough evidence that trans people are hurting themselves by transitioning as opposed to helping themselves and that the studies and the data are all you know for the most part seem to have their shit together and seem to suggest that this is what's best for them and I want what's best for them I want what's best for everybody just like you mentioned before how we need to have a set of categories for things that we consider to be societally acceptable and not based on maximizing human happiness I mean it seems like if we're trying to maximize human happiness at least from my perspective it seems like letting trans people do what they you know want in regards to their identity is the best way to do that right and obviously I've already explained why I don't think it's good for them we talk about the suicide attempt and then the Yale and the trust in experts and we could we could do that whole thing again but let's not do that whole thing again um okay so the the other thing I guess would be uh to talk about I think the final thing would be at least the final thing I have if you have something else then obviously that's fine um but that uh cisgender people right when you talk about and this is most profound in the case of mate selection um right that there's that seemingly a lot of trans people would want the following to not be true and not all trans people of course but a significant number that they would say that there's something problematic about the fact that if there was a person who so far as I could tell was a female down to the you know I think you gotta analyze the genitals in detail so far as I can tell there's no way physically for me to tell tell that this person was uh born uh male sex wise um that the knowledge that he that person had been born a male would make me extremely you know have no sexual interest in them whatsoever even though visually even if and this is not you know not only the case of trans people even though it was the case they were visually completely indistinct from an actual female and that's great and seemingly to me anyway right you have to change that if you want to take people seriously when they say I want to be treated like a woman that's a big part of what it is to be treated like a woman um and that to change that would require cis people doing something which is very which would be very psychologically I don't even know if it'd be possible but if it was possible very psychologically uncomfortable for them so I'm curious what you think about that yeah so I assume this falls in like the wanting some amount of sexual to be viewed sexually speaking in the in the sexual marketplace as a woman as well by like cis or straight people whatever um I assume that falls into trans people desire others to interact with them in a certain way that point yeah yeah okay yeah so the trans movement outside of and I've run into some of these people and they exist but they're few and far between believe me um besides a few people in the trans like activism community that do and ironically argue that you're like a horrible transphobic piece of shit if you have what I would refer to as genital preferences um uh then then yeah you would like there are people who would say that kind of thing but they are few and far between broadly speaking and I imagine you already know that but um there are people that act like that but broadly speaking the trans community isn't trying to push cis people to have sex with them I believe that like statistically most trans women tend to end up with other trans women rather than cis women or cis men anyway so it's not like there's really this massive group of trans people demanding to have had sex with and even like if we draw the line to cis people not every cis woman on the street expects you have sex with them right like that's not the expectation they have when they go outside and they're a woman they don't expect you to be like all right I want to have sex with they don't expect every guy they encounter to want to have sex with them they hope that doesn't happen even men most of the time um I don't know I don't think a huge part of the trans movement is saying that if you don't think if you wouldn't fuck me like you would any other woman like in the case of a trans woman then you're a trans I don't think that's all that comment of a talking point as for like broadly trans people desiring others to interact with them in a certain way every single marginalized group expects that from people once they achieve some amount of social acceptance and respect right like we had a general kind of social consensus more recently in the last few decades that if you're not racist and you accept that like black people are human and all that then you probably shouldn't say the n-word not at least at least not around them they don't like it when you say it around them for sure um that like with gay people as they've gotten more accepted we sort of determined as a society that you shouldn't call them the f-slur anymore like that's a thing that we shouldn't really do anymore we should maybe let them get married like yeah we do kind of accept once these groups have sort of reached a certain level of broader societal acceptance that yeah we do extend certain things to them that could be considered different behavior because of their identity right like we maybe we stop calling black people the n-word we've changed the way we act we've stopped calling gay people the f-slur and hopefully we do the same thing with trans people we stop like you know denying their identity or referring to them by the t-slur insert whatever uh you know discriminatory behavior you could imagine sure so firstly what I was talking about before um um was not a genital preference right because I didn't specify that and maybe well when I say genital preference that like so they're obviously there's bottom surgery for trans women so they can have like a it's called a neo vagina is what it's called after the surgery um obviously a neo vagina that was made through a surgery isn't going to be exactly the same as a cis women's vagina so if you are like well I mean sure like so for example if I saw a trans woman and she'd gotten bottom surgery and she had a neo vagina I would not get canceled for saying to this if this let's say this hypothetical trans woman walked up to me and propositioned me for for a date or some you know fling or whatever and I turned them down because I was like yeah I'm just not really into like I got genital preferences and all of that I would maybe get canceled by like one percent of the online left maybe less right like this is broadly speaking not a huge issue like there's not that many people calling for you or anybody else to have sex with trans women even after they've had their their surgery and especially trans men aren't aren't expecting cis women to fuck them or or trans men having to that aren't expecting cis men to fuck them or vice versa cis women to fuck them like this is just isn't a thing that's like a huge issue so it's not a huge issue right now but I think that that's well I think that's for a few reasons one of which is that as I think you even said the surgeries that are available now typically do not make people physically indistinct from cis gendered versions of the same gender the point that I was trying to make was that even if they did a lot of cis people would have a problem they had nothing to do with how they looked right it was just having to do with the fact that they knew that they were transgender and the way that I've heard trans people talk about this normally is that if that is the core whole reason for the bias I mean that I mean a it just objectively is an anti trans bias sexually speaking and that be they find that problematic and to the degree that they're not demanding that now I think you have to make a distinction between what people demand and what they want because if if you take it seriously that they want to be treated as a woman right then what that to be treated as a woman among many other things would mean that males would consider you a potential straight males a potential sexual partner of course maybe they don't consider you sexual partner because they don't find you attractive for some reason other than being trans but to be excluded from the get go because your trans is to not be treated like a woman I mean that just that seems to me just to be the case and I think that is I mean I guess there's no there's no like survey of this but I think the trend that is some of the trans people generally see as well yeah so the trans movement actually is more so trying to like to give a more I'll give like an example of how a very similar interaction could happen with like a cis woman in you I assume you're straight and you're into women maybe maybe not yeah okay yeah so let's here's like a comparison that might happen here right so let's say you're out of the bar with the boys okay you're out of the bar with the boys you see hot lady sitting in a stool like two seats down and you lean over to your man your guy your brother your boy your best friend and you're like hey man is that girl down there she's hot dude like god look at that ass you know I'm also assuming you're single here if you're married or anything like that then hopefully Sean's wife or partner or whatever do not take any any offense to this anyway you see this woman at the bar you're like damn she's hot do you know anything do you know her and your friends like yeah I know her but like listen between you and me bro she got like this weird giant birthmark right on her leg it's like the size of a dinner plate it is not appealing all right it's like you just don't go for it do you think that like making that decision based on aesthetic problems to not have sex the woman means you're no longer treating this woman like a woman like if I send you a picture look up on your browser if you can right now Nikita dragon very well known trans woman model very attractive woman like you're going to look at her and you're going to be like that's a trans woman that's probably going to be your response if you see a picture of her if you saw her walking down the street you'd be like damn she's hot and you definitely treat her like a woman you'd have no way of knowing she's trans unless you're already familiar with her believe me you would treat her just as any woman you saw on the street do you think whether or not the vagina that or whatever genitals this person has being whether it be a penis and balls or a vagina made through a surgery do you really think that like it would be good to change the way you treat this person in question because now you've seen their genitals and that's what told you that actually they were assigned a different gender at birth so now you you think it's appropriate to like flip your entire way you've treated them the pronouns you use for them the name you use for them all of that do you this like does that really make sense okay I mean two things one I mean with the example the girl with the wart or whatever surely that would not be the big birthmark yeah yeah surely not having sex with her because or not trying to proposition her because uh she had that would not be to treat her like she wasn't a woman but if the reason that I wasn't going to try to have sex with her was because I didn't consider her a woman then surely that would be I mean these things well no the trans community is trying to get it to be on that level right like the argument the scenario that you're describing the the goal of the trans community is to make it so it's as casual as that like your decision just be like I'm not really into like trans women it's just not my thing you know they want that like the trans community wants that decision on your part to be as inconsequential and like just on the same tears thinking I'm not really going to hook up with that girl because insert feature that she has is an appealing to me even if every other feature she has or the rest of her is you know something you would find completely attractive and appealing maybe that one feature isn't something that's cool for you so that's a deal breaker that's the point that the trans community wants to bring it to they don't want our society to be at a point where it's huge discourse that everyone's talking about or someone's getting canceled for when someone announces that like they wouldn't have a sexual relationship with a trans person most trans people want this out of the discourse most a lot of trans people when they saw I was having this debate didn't want the debate to happen because they hate when debates happen between cis people over the validity of trans people's bodies they hate it they just want to be left alone to live their own life they hate this whole discourse and culture war and moral panic and everything around it it feels like the id poll the onus of defending their own identity has been shoved upon them by the right rather than the perception of them stepping up and engaging in this activism in a way that's meant to sort of annoy the general populace that doesn't really care about politics no the trans community engages in the rhetoric and the behavior that it does because it identity politics oppression and and sort of a being forced to fight for social acceptance has been thrusted on them not because they're trying to force you and anything this is more of a retaliatory movement than a than one that's just coming out of the woodwork to fuck things up as some might say okay well i think this is going to just come down to us saying that we have seen trans people say different things and we probably can't get past that yeah i mean there's only so many barriers in our disagreement that we can really like talk through in a debate but i mean if there's a point where you feel like it's just not going to be productive then feel free to like move it on or hell i mean we can we can wrap up pretty soon if we're running out of time because i don't know if there's much more to go through but it's up to you you can you can lead it from here because i don't really have much else to talk about um yeah did you want i mean we were supposed to like a q and a weren't we yeah i guess there's the q and a yeah we can jump right into it and what reminds you folks our guests are linked in the description we really do appreciate these guys and also want to remind you want to encourage you to attack the arguments instead of the person and we are very excited to let you know our guests are not only linked here in the description on youtube but if you're listening via podcast we link our guests both shawn and zander hall in the podcast episode as well so you can find their links there too this first question coming in from nxc five says zander hall do you consider biological facts when you talk or think about these things like xx and xy chromosome pairs or neuroscience or oh i don't know what this pronounces fizzy fizzy aname fizzy help me out here fizzy fizzy oh no me very very fancy science word i'm sure um yeah uh i mean i consider all of these things when it comes to the argument that i'm making of course yeah especially when it comes to the um the argument of like psychology yeah that's a big part of it that's the psychology is the bread and butter of the whole like trans argument really that's where all of it's coming from you got it this one from mango tea says let's see thanks for your kind words and appreciate your support of these debates so i want to mention as i already said our guests are linked in the description and we really do appreciate these guys nicky says thank you zander hall you're hitting the nails right on the head you got a fan out there zander hall this one coming in from mango tea says zan do you believe that your identity is a test from the almighty creator and do you think you should overcome those feelings do i think that my identity is a test from a create no i don't think so i'd uh i'd say my i'm pretty happy with my identity i'm pretty happy where i'm at right now i need to go to the gym more got two things i'm working on right now waking up earlier and getting to bed earlier and going to the gym more that's my that's the current thing i'm trying to overcome in my life you've got it and mango tea also asks zan do you believe your identity is a result of isolation and abuse or is it from societal programming god it's impossible to tell right like this is a question i think about so much how much of our personalities and how much of the way that we are is a product of nurture and how much of it is a product of nature it's such an interesting thing to think about for a while like if you get the opportunity take a few puffs from the old the old kush and just really give it a thought for a while it will send you on quite the trip i'm inclined to believe that nurture has a bigger effect on your personality your identity and who you end up being then then like nature how you're born i think it's more so your environment personally you got it and this question coming in from the craw daddy 029 now some of these are comments as well they said as a society we discourage deception affirmation of transsexual is a deception the trans quote unquote ally is dodging this by name calling it gender when sex is the key word um yeah so sex and gender aren't the same thing this is overwhelmingly agreed upon we didn't even get into this during the debate but yeah there's just no like there's no foundation for an argument on that whatsoever sex and gender just aren't same thing this one coming in from ozzie and says keep your government out of my pants my choice true next up from volt 14 says given that shan finds entire social science fields illegitimate what standard of evidence would change his mind what kind of evidence does he need or such scenario can't be imagined give you a chance to respond shan yeah so given that the question was given that i consider social science to be trash what kind of evidence do i need um roughly speaking up right so so firstly i should say it's not that all of social science is trash it's just that social science is regularly done by people who again don't really understand what the numbers mean and can't discern for themselves whether or not it's trash particularly well i mean i can give you like basic guidelines for determining you know uh if research is trustworthy it is the statistical power of the research high or the p values of the findings hanging around point zero five if so that's a major red flag i mean there's a bunch of things you can look at if you want to um but they're not like novel it's not like my ideas but it's just the like way to do it it's not sort of it's not like my opinion um and then about the trans stuff specifically um well for one i'm just the most obvious thing right would be that if people if it just was not the case the people who have gone further with these desires tend to have higher rates of suicide attempt uh the people who have not i mean that obviously would cause a change in my view i just the reverse of the evidence i cited i don't know how to say it seems like kind of an obvious answer but i'm not sure what else to say this one coming in from turbo says zander do you truly believe that the difference between a real and fake vagina is quote purely aesthetic unquote i mean if you're having sex with it yeah probably i mean i don't think that most people when they have sex are doing it to procreate so that's not really a matter of the question i think most of the time but yeah i'd say probably if you're just having sex with a surgically created vagina and like biologically created vagina then they're probably going to feel and look mostly the same probably you got it and thank you very much do you mind if i had one extra little detail about that this is actually really interesting um and i i learned about this about a year ago uh watching a Blair white video um Blair white had claimed that uh trans women couldn't get uh uh cervical cancer which sounds makes sense right like okay well all right trans women probably can't get cervical cancer and i ended up looking into it as it turns out trans women who've gotten bottom surgery um can get cervical cancer in the neo cervix the new cervix created by the surgery so if you're a trans person out there and you if you're a trans woman and you've gotten bottom surgery um definitely get checked uh just like you would uh assist women get get checked for cancer in in that area because it can happen just like it could do assist women you got it and this one coming in from zap rising says is Sean aware of Alden's fallacy on trans issues linds fallacy i think that's a meme i think it's a Bosch meme if i remember anything anything with Alden in it is a Bosch meme right that's what i've seen when the kid was asked about like Alden's number that's right yes yeah i'm very i'm familiar with this this one coming in from saint saint beloved appreciate it says x do you believe a large part of the trans suicide rate is because not many are attracted to trans people and of those who are they are not the best uh not really no that would be insane to me like the idea that like just a lack of attraction would be like the like i don't know that sounds like a little bit too incel for me i think probably bullying in societal acceptance is is probably a stronger explanation for that but um i mean i don't even agree with the premise there i think uh i mean there's no date on this for sure but if you go on twitter i see those trans women thirst posting for each other like crazy and there are some also some really like you know pretty good looking trans people out there there's some handsome trans men some beautiful trans women out there that i've seen so i don't know i don't necessarily agree with the premise you got it this one coming in from ben dover says sex is an immutable biological reality gender is a social construct built upon biological realities to create social cohesion and cooperation social constructs exist because they work and they ought to be enforced social constructs exist because we created them uh they're just the existence of social constructs and the fact that we have them isn't in it in it in it of itself as this person said evidence that's a good thing racism is a social construct the concept of like black and white people asian etc like these are concepts that we've categorized ourselves there's no like stone tablets deep in some ancient magical ruins that we dug up that said oh yeah by the way this is where all the races are the races and ethnicities and this is like the boundaries of what nations and what geographical areas they exist in that's just not how it works we socially constructed these ideas because at the time we thought they served either some uh service or they made things simpler maybe at the time they did but just because we had those social constructs doesn't make them good i would hope most people watching don't think race in this good that's a social construct we're trying to get rid of that that's just i don't think just because we made a thing means that it's good and we ought to keep it around you got it this one coming in from temp account says can you ask shawn to maybe clarify his argument why does trans people being suicidal for biological reasons support not affirming trans identities seems there are missing steps sure so the reason is that it seems to be the case that i mean there are two things one that among trans people there's a continuum of suicidality and it seems to be higher among those people who have most pursued the desire in various respects and so hopefully that like you can say you don't think that's true because x y and z but if that was true hopefully you can see why then you would want to discourage people from leaning into that desire and then in the second place as we talked about before there's not a lot of good data telling us one way or the other but it i think is certainly a plausible possibility that transgenderism being affirmed socially increases the number of people who are transgender and that in turn spreads human suffering as well so uh hopefully that clears it up a bit you got it in this one from temp account as well this one for you zander says during the can you ask zander hall during the am a what it means to be a man slash woman in the sense trans people use it can he define those terms in a non recursive way sure so if you ask a progressive person or somebody who's part of the trans community what uh their gender is or what their identity means what's it mean to be a man what's it mean to be a woman what's it mean to be non-binary you're going to get a lot of very different answers because it means something different to frankly everybody um but broadly speaking i think you'd find a very common answer of it's some a man someone who identifies as a man a woman is someone who identifies as a woman and while categorically that is in fact true sex is the sex like sex is has to do with your biology gender has to do with when the doctor takes you out and sees what kind of genitalia you have they assign you a gender based on your sex right um these are you're just kind of raised with it that's what you end up with by societal standards we've got plenty of different things that we consider to decide what is a man what is a woman but from someone on the left you would try to break down those standards to have a more libertarian free society without the bonds of social expectations and everybody forcing them to live their lives in a certain way it's sort of you get to make your own life you get to make your own identity you get to make who you decide who you are not society that's generally the left wing goal behind breaking down our conceptions of gender you got it and i mean there's one last question i just want to i think i might have lost it give me two two seconds ryan c chord i think partly meant to be trolling but we'll give you a chance if you want to address it in terms of whether or not they literally are raising this objection they say for zander hall can shawn identify as the win winner of the debate and this might be a chance for you to if uh what your position would be in terms of the differences in terms of identifying as a person won a debate versus identifying as a man or a woman if they are serious i don't know yeah absolutely um so identity and gender identities depending on who you ask you'll get very different answers as i mentioned before um from if we really want to get radical with it and this is a very radical perception though i do tend to agree with it more the argument made by those that are a bit more radical on the left is usually that gender is entirely entirely social socially constructed that we've just noticed that there's a a general um sort of bimodal distribution in sexual characteristics and we've sort of assigned a social like label to that that we use in our society and that social label has sort of grown a certain amount of expectations went along with it when it comes to new genders new identities which identifying as the winner of x debate would qualify as if it was done so in sincerity um i mean technically that could be a new gender identity if it was if it was accepted by a certain social space that that's all our gender identities are after all the only reason why we use boy girl man woman is because we've normalized it otherwise we might be using just male or female or some other distinction for categorization of people's sexual identity right or sexual um identity how they were assigned at birth whatever um it i think it has to do with the sincerity i don't like setting a precedent for trying to analyze the reasons for why a trans person identifies the way that they do i think whether or not we accept that person and whether or not that person is like acting in good faith is something we can just kind of determine based on their other actions and if there's some crazy pedophile who's pretending to be trans or whatever to try to touch kids at some book event i think we should condemn that person for being a pedophile not for being trans and i know that's been something that people will bring up um i think it has to do with the sincerity of it if if shon legitimately identified their sexual identity or their gender identity as the winner of the debate then i i guess i'd i'd say i'd accept it i'd accept it if it was genuine you got it and this question coming in hot from st beloved says zander what age should kids be introduced into a trans lifestyle what age is appropriate for the trans talk trans talk and being introduced to a trans lifestyle you doing all right you all right shon i don't get the joke but we'll give you a chance to respond zander yeah i i didn't i didn't i didn't pick up anything funny from that question um so i'm gonna leave that smarter minds than me but from this the research that i've done it seems like um when it comes to social transitioning uh as long as like it's to the discretion of like whatever medical professional has done the discussions and the uh psychological analysis of the child in question this just isn't up to me i don't have the experience or the knowledge to be able to make that decision seems like around the age of speaking is around when doctors are able to like get a decent gauge on the mindset of whatever they're talking to and that's usually when it's recommended for a gender experiencing minor to start dressing differently or calling themselves something different maybe around the age of 10 or 11 that's when medical professionals will advise the introduction of hormone blockers assuming that so far the long-term analysis of this individual has resulted in like you know just socially transitioning has worked out for them then they can upgrade to hormone blockers which are not hormones they just sort of delay puberty uh for a while and that's done to ensure that the person in question doesn't experience the wrong puberty uh if they explain like let's say we have a trans woman on our hands and they're like this trans girl is like 10 years old now it's possible that when they end up being 13 14 15 16 they realize nope it was all a phase i'm not actually trans i'm a boy it was just i like playing with dresses i like wearing dresses i like playing with dolls that's just what i like never mind never mind false alarm um the hormone blockers basically allow for a bit more time without the downside of during that time uh experiencing a more hard to reverse puberty incorrect puberty right um and so obviously in most cases the um the vast majority of cases i should clarify hormone blockers can be reversed we put kids on hormone blockers for other things all the time such as um uh um uh they're like uh uh just any issues having to do with hormones one of them being a pituitary gland issues i had a friend in school who was on hormone blockers for that um and then of course uh down the road uh once adulthood has reached i believe in the uk specifically you have to live a year uh like a few years maybe uh identifying as the gender that like as trans and being out as trans in society then i believe doctors in the uk and i think that that step that step is skipped in the us um once like the age of adulthood or like 16 17 around there is reached then hormones can be introduced so that seems to be the process now and i mostly agree with i don't see any issues that process you've got it now before we wrap up shawn i don't know maybe you're looking at something in chat and maybe so i don't want to assume too much in case you're laughing about something else and maybe you didn't know that you're not muted so if you have something to say though i'm willing to explore it before we wrap up because we we're at yeah we've got a good amount of time yet do you do you have thoughts on this shawn and then of course we'll give you a chance to respond xander hall in in case shawn does have anything can you hear me right now now we yes we can okay yeah no i thought i was muted before i apologize for that uh all of that laughter um uh no to be honest i that i wasn't even listening that hard to what he was answering after i realized that i wasn't muted and i was just laughing to the end of the mic especially people could hear me obviously i don't agree with like encouraging kids to do the trans thing this is like way down the road because there's so many layers i know right like just like if we're going to agree on like kids being able to transition then there's so many like fundamental layers beneath that before we like we'd have to agree on we'd have to start by agreeing on like the data like whether or not the data uh that's out there right now that affirms trans people or not doesn't affirm trans people we'd have to agree on whether or not that is conclusive then we'd have to agree on whether or not trans people like philosophically ought to be recognized by whatever identity and then way up that tower of agreement we can get to okay now should we let kids transition there's just so many like we'd have to have so many like uh let's discourage adults from doing it but it's cool if kids do that would be a very strange position yeah there's there's a few too many layers of disagreement we have there for for that discussion i think you got it this last one coming in from mango tea last second question says zaner do you believe that your sexual identity is a test should you overcome it i could have sworn someone else asked that too yeah i don't know i'm assuming that might be a meme maybe from sean's community or something um no i don't i don't think it's a test i don't think i don't really think that how you're born is a test that you need to overcome even if you're trans i don't think how you're born is a test that you're overcoming um i think when you're trans and you're transitioning both socially and physically and and maybe surgically and whatnot um uh you're not overcoming a test that was put forward towards you or whatever you're just that's your journey okay everybody has a journey in their life everybody's life journey is different everybody has their own experience and everything and in your particular life journey you are going to experience a uh a cavalcade of change to yourself and you're going to come out of it almost a different person and that's a good thing if that's what you want you got it and with that want to say folks we really appreciate you hanging out with us thanks so much for all of your questions as that makes the q and a fun and especially though thanks to our guests it's been a true pleasure to have you shawn and xander hall thanks so much for being with us tonight yeah i really appreciate you having me on and i had a really fun conversation thank you for talking to me shawn yeah appreciate it as well 100 and want to remind you guys folks listening out there our guests are linked in the description and that includes if you're listening via the modern day debate podcast and with that we'll be back in just a moment with upcoming debates to talk about as well as i am very excited i had already mentioned it before my dear friends we are thrilled for the first ever debate con modern day debate is hosting our first conference this january we'll talk about that during the post credit scene in just a moment as well thanks so much to our guests and we'll be right back in just a moment and want to say thanks so much for hanging out with us as always and also want to say thanks so much to xander and shawn it has been a true pleasure and i got to tell you the debaters are the lifeblood of the channel they make this channel fun and they are linked in the description because if you're listening and you're like mmm i like that i want to hear more will you certainly can hear more by clicking on those links what are you waiting for but i want to say hello to you in the chat my dear friends thanks so much for hanging out with us macabre storytelling am i pronouncing that right i know it's like macabre if i am saying it right like old kind of like horror kind of like stories right but anyway we're glad you're here and hacks good to see you again steven michael thanks for coming by rock band records good to see you there in the little chat as well as sammage and in hacks thanks for coming by and i gotta tell you let's farm thanks so much for being with us and that reminds me folks we have our discord linked in the description box in addition to the debates you could say the debate urs links so that if you want to join the modern day debate discord we highly encourage you what are you waiting for that link is in the description as well but let me tell you about this absolutely epic conference we have done in person debates before we have done them in los angeles texas let's see dallas and austin and this time though it's not just a one day type of thing it is a three day conference we are so pumped for debate con number one this is going to be big this is solely hosted by modern day debate as our first ever conference modern day debates debate con and we want to say thanks for that super chat sigma any says missed many ham grenades good to see you james and chat fam thanks so much sigma any for your support of the channel and thanks for saying hello we are pumped that you made it and my dear friends i've got to tell you we hope you make it as well to this in person debate conference it'll be three days starting on saturday january 15th through monday january 17th it is going to be bonkers we are excited we're we've got a lot of work to do but i do want to tell you we have already for example asked destiny destiny has agreed to come we have basically a number of debaters and we want to make sure that everybody's you could say position is well represented so we politically speaking want to make sure that we have everybody from across the political spectrum so people who are more politically left people who are more politically right you name it we are absolutely excited for that and i got to tell you it is going to be a gigantic one as we are going to have one day devoted solely to political debates another day devoted solely to religion debates for example is islam true and is islam dangerous those types of debates as well as a single day completely devoted to science debates so it is going to be a blast my dear friends you don't want to miss this i'm telling you all of or almost all of the streams will be live streamed during the conference so if you're like oh man i can't make it that's in dallas that's too far amazing well don't worry you'll be able to watch most of the streams live they are free and open to the public we are absolutely pumped for it and i'm telling you this is going to be groundbreaking it will shake the foundations of the online debate world we are confident of that and the reason is we're excited that a number of high level speakers like i said i just got an email back from destiny today we're excited about that as well as like i said different speakers across the different genres who have already agreed and so believe me you don't want to miss it and it is going to rock the house cosmic breach thanks for coming by we're glad you were here and james 119 thanks for being with us perpetually annoyed says hello james we're glad you're here perpetually annoyed good to see you there again as well as in hacks says hi james ooh twice that's right three times now Loch Ness monster good to see you says macob oh you're right okay so macob no macob right no ray at the end good to know thanks for the reminder and steven michael i am glad to see you there as well as ryan secort says i want to get involved with the debate con i am located in dallas debating would be cool but getting involved in general would be cool as well well ryan i am at modern day debate at gmail.com so it's really easy to remember if you're like what was the email that james told me he was at is like uh is you're trying to remember it's just modern day debate at gmail very easy to remember and so if you do want to be involved i've got to tell you we've already got kind of the debate card in terms of the speakers that we're planning on inviting and the topics as well are almost set but i'm open like let me know there's a way in which we might be able to get you involved and so i am pumped though it is going to be a lot of fun is i love meeting people and so i've got to meet some of you in dallas and this is during i think it was just during just at the start of covid and i'm so thankful that our gas followed through because that was like just when covid started people didn't know exactly what it was but i don't know if you guys remember it was like the media had not yet i hadn't even heard about social distancing yet the they weren't even talking about that and so at that point we were hosting a debate with oh me matt dilla hunty and david wood all crammed into this small table and i'm so thankful that they didn't nobody got sick uh but yeah we like i said i hadn't even heard that people were like social distancing and i was like what are you what is social distancing that's it was so it was like right it was maybe like a few days after the you could say the the word uh everything really set in in terms of the covid but that's why obviously we didn't have a huge audience for that we tried to limit the audience but i do want to tell you my dear friends we are actually going to have an audience for this upcoming conference oh yeah it's going to be gigantic my dear friends and then arcade outpost good to see you says i am based and rad just like interest species are you still out there interest species interest species has just been pushing me around so much and i it's so embarrassing it really is you wouldn't believe it but macabre storytelling oh Oliver catwell says do you know the venue yet we're not yet sure of the venue that's still being nailed down and that's an important part i agree but we we are definitely going to find that out so don't worry about it but it is something that's like a high priority i'm waiting for a particular hotel to get back to me it's going to be at a hotel so for those of you who are like i don't care where it is i will i will fly there i will come if you are absolutely determined or and maybe you're in houston and that's the trick the nice thing about dallas is huge hub in terms of austin houston san antonio obviously fort worth right next door to dallas love it maybe a quarter of a million people so there are so many giant cities well love it's not giant but you get the idea like houston and austin and san antonio are juggernaut type cities so large populations where hey make the drive i mean especially houston at the moment i was like maybe like four hours and so want to encourage you my dear friends it's going to be a juicy one and it will be at a hotel though so in case somebody is like hey well like i don't know where to stay you could stay at the hotel that we're hosting you that the details on that are still being confirmed though but steven michael says hey i'm on the right but destiny is good fun and then mark reid good to see there in the old chat and then two seconds the chat's moving on on me i'm catching up but squeeze a diesel pumped you made it says hey i missed it well better late than never squeeze a diesel brook chavis thanks so much for your support of the channel i see you're based and red pilled based and or red pilled membership status with those sweet emoticons amazing as well as soy boy and juicy as well as nasty guy that's right we are excited about the memberships though so i do want to encourage you if you uh if you do dig memberships on youtube we do have that available now and it is fun because you can use our favorite emoticons using key catchphrases from the modern day debate channel including nasty because we frequently have old steven steam you haven't seen steven in a while when i used to call him a nasty guy but we do love steven i seriously i i really appreciate steven and cosmic breeches james i'm usually on a vpn and can't comment you keep me alive while i process credit card fraud and bs stories all day long well i'm so glad to hear that that is encouraging i really do appreciate that and then steven michael says ben with you for quite a while now james love you brother thank you i love you steven and i am pumped that you have been with us for so long it means a lot because we've been through a lot together my dear friends some of you are like oh yeah i remember you remember when you used to have like all the audio issues like oh my it was it was really bad for like a year it was so bad we were all of a sudden like the audio would just go out and people would be like we can't hear anybody so want to say thank you for being with us this whole time and then cosmic reach says yeah who doesn't want to be involved i'll moderate i'll email you buddy cosmic reach thanks for letting us know and we are pumped about it arcade outpost says james throw a roman on stream i don't know what a roman is is that some sort of sexual innuendo throwing a roman like the tokyo sand blaster you want to know what that is as well as taking grandma apple bees all these nasty six sexual innuendos that you guys have i just nasty guys all right let's see uh perpetually annoyed we're pumped that you're back perfect one thanks so much for being with us again says the word macabre may be pronounced macabre or macab macabre but it's correctly or originally pronounced macabre like cob of corn that is so good to know and i am pumped devious dago is back says am i late or did we just start you are late but nonetheless don't worry the debate will be here on the channel for the future and steven michael says oh that's right got that one you have been here with us for a while and brook chavis says let's see mark reid wouldn't that be awesome i don't know what would be awesome what are you guys talking about and then hannah support says yes you can also support the channel and by joining the channel channel membership we we do appreciate thanks for that support brook and hey if you haven't yet hit that like button you guys you might as well and you guys might be looking at you might be looking at the dislikes and depending on whether or not soy tube has hidden the dislike count for you yet because some people still can see the dislike number and some people are not able to see it i think it's that youtube may even be doing it based on location i'm not sure how they're doing it but if you can't see or if you can see the dislike button or the number in particular you might be thinking oh james oh 15 dislikes that's discouraging those are just our 15 supporters from australia who hit like so don't worry and we were going to say thanks so much for all your support from australia sunday warship good to see you as well as steven michael says you deserve a way bigger sub base thanks for that steven michael and we are excited about the future as i've got to tell you we anticipate some major growth in 2022 we have already told you we are determined we are on a march to 60 000 subscribers by the end of this year so that means in one month and one week we are going to surpass that 60 000 mark believe me it's going to happen we are going to get beyond it and we're pumped about that we are also pumped that without a shadow of a doubt we are determined and we are on a march to 100 000 subscribers by the end of 2022 and i think even by fall of 2022 i think it's a very realistic possibility that we hit that mark believe me we are excited about that my dear friends we have a lot of big plans for modern day debate and for us i've got to tell you we are absolutely thankful for everybody who's become a subscriber thank you for supporting the channel so much seriously it really does mean more than you know thanks for your likes thanks for your subscribing thanks for sharing the video all sorts of ways that you support the channel seriously it makes a big difference and i've got to tell you the biggest thing for us is impact and i've got to tell you i'm encouraged that i am very encouraged that when you look at channels that are sometimes twice as big as us they don't even have as many views as us in many cases and you're like oh it's because it's like some sort of old channel that like rarely puts out content anymore huh no no i'm talking about some channels that are about twice the size of us and that are active maybe even putting out more videos than we do because we only do about three debates a week but some channels that have got double the subscribers nonetheless their view count is significantly smaller and so what we really are encouraged by is that modern day debate is having a huge impact and we are excited that we have so many subscribers but we're also excited my dear friends that modern day debates you could say impact via people who actually watch our content because that's the thing ask yourself this because a lot of people think that like subscribers like the subscriber number is the biggest deal and i'd say think of it this way if you could have a hundred thousand subscribers but only about a thousand views per video would you rather have that or would you rather have 50 at all 58 thousand subscribers and have an average of maybe 10 thousand views per video that's like probably close to our average if you if you include the big ones that get like 20 to 40 thousand like our average is probably 20 or about 10 thousand so i've got to tell you we are pumped for that my dear friends as we are thrilled for the future as we strive to pursue the vision of providing a neutral platform so that everybody can make their case on a level playing field while discussing the big questions of life we want to say thanks so much for being with us though my dear friends in the old twitch chat pardon my delay first time chat from viewer got deleted i don't know who said sent it there but whoever that is the first timer in the old twitch chat i guess your comment got deleted i'm so sorry surrender zero zero if you're a real person and not a bot we are so glad to have you with us and you know even if you're a bot we're glad to have you here but i've got to tell you we actually don't like spam of course and we always want to follow the terms of service so if you ever wonder you're like oh man like i feel like there's like rules here man like too many rules and we want to like buck the trend and like rage against the machine well the trick is youtube actually recommends our videos a ton i think like i said didn't i tell you that like one of our videos i think it had like four million impressions what does that mean that means that youtube for one of our videos our most popular video has been shown to four million people that's nuts you guys that is a huge help imagine if we were just like yeah we're on a platform like and don't get me wrong i'm not trying to throw any other platforms under the the bus but like let's say you're on a tiny platform like bit shoot you're not going to get that many free impressions from bit shoot recommending your video you just won't if you want to grow your channel i would highly recommend the the way to start as you start on youtube but want to say we are thankful that youtube has helped us grow a lot by recommending our videos to people and that's how we've gotten many many new subscribers and so we are excited about that growth and so yeah we do follow the rules the terms of service because we don't want to cut off the growth branch in terms of how fast the channel grows that we are sitting on why would we break the terms of service if youtube's helping us grow at a significant rate that doesn't make sense so yeah we do follow the terms of service but let's see here i'm going to wrap up in just a moment but i do want to say thank you so much for your support seriously you guys you make this fun and brook chavis says smash that like button i couldn't agree more my dear friends we are at 117 we can totally get to 120 likes by the end of this stream we only need three more so if you're listening you're like oh yeah i forgot i mean i forgot to hit like go ahead and hit that based and or red pilled like button my dear friends want to say thanks for your support sunday worship says modern day debate got that good dope keeps them coming back thanks for your kind words sunday worship we really do focus on providing the most addictive dope on youtube so we don't really sell any drugs youtube obviously or toys we don't we don't sell any drugs this is a joke but let's see in hacks says all the bigger channels have fakes up not well i don't know if all of them do but i do suspect sometimes i look at channel i'm on a level with you guys i'm going to tell you guys some of the inside details of my experience on youtube so sometimes i will see channels where you can once you go through the growth process and you like i remember like roughly not super well but i remember like roughly how many views we got when we were at like 10 000 subscribers or 30 000 subscribers and so i can just by eyeballing it i think i can actually identify some channels i'll never name them but sometimes when people will say james i this person wants to debate me here's their channel they have a huge sub count so can you can you host us and i'm like well let me look at the video like their channel first and i look at the channel and sometimes i realize 123 likes we just passed the goal of 120 by 3 thanks so much we can totally get to 125 we only two more now i'm going to tell you let me tell you about the juice here is that i can tell sometimes people will say hey uh james check out this channel they've got you know 10 000 subs and i'll look at their videos and i'm like something doesn't add up here 10 000 subs and only 200 views per video maybe they're not bought but i i start to suspect something's funky now it doesn't have to be that they bought subs it can be a lot of things it could be that they changed their main form of content so like let's say all of a sudden i turned this video this youtube channel if i was like it's going to be james's vlog well then you would see like we would probably like lose thousands of subscribers within a day but you would also see though that a lot of subscribers they just haven't tuned in for a while so they're not gonna unsubscribe and then some you know maybe like yeah it's like i'm not gonna unsubscribe yet you know i'll consider it but you would see that our view count would be tiny and you'd be like wow it's like they're 50 000 subscribers but they only have like 200 views per video and so that could be one cause is that you know that's something we will never do i've already told everybody here we will never do that we will always be a debate channel this will never turn into like my personal channel and so want to let you know that we will always have both sides represented and in the fairest way possible but yeah i do want to let you know my dear friends is you might be thinking like huh are there people out there that buy subs i suspect so another way you can tell us that the comments may be really low i personally and maybe it's just because modern day debate we get a lot of people are fired up and they're pissed off because of the debate so they we get a ton of comments like our our comment to view ratio is really good like i'm amazed that like a lot of times we will have like within 24 hours a thousand comments on a video that has like 4 000 views which that's really good and i see other channels with some reason like they got 13 000 views and they got like like less than 100 comments that's a little weird it doesn't mean that it's fake in that case there are some people it's just that they got people who tune in and they just aren't they don't feel compelled to you know comment or engage that much so it's like it's always kind of like a you know you have to weigh different factors and kind of look into it but that's a way in which if it was something like they've got 10 000 views and they've got like 14 comments i'm like that there's something off there and let's see i'm trying to think of what else it might be but yeah it could be a huge content change it could be i've always wondered if people if there's ever people who are like try to buy comments for a channel and not realize that one it can be pretty obvious like like i said i'm telling you i really notice it especially if they've got like 2000 subs and they've got like 30 views per video i'm like that doesn't make sense unless maybe it's like here's another thing you could have the same content maybe you have an old youtube channel where you put out like you know debates and then you took two years off and you come back and you start putting debates on again and you're like yep yep we're still a debate channel and and it's like well you killed yourself in the algorithm like youtube noticed you were inactive for two years so they're probably not going to recommend your new videos for a while that's the rumor is how youtube works allegedly the other thing though is a lot of your people who subscribed two years ago they may not even be regular users on youtube so that might be reason you know a reason so i i see sometimes channels that are like super old they've got a hundred thousand views or uh subscribers but they have like really tiny amounts of views and it's like eh yeah it's probably just because they're really old that a lot of their subscribers uh some of them just don't hang out on youtube anymore it could be uh maybe they are on youtube but they don't uh youtube doesn't recommend that particular channels videos of them anymore because they just stopped watching them but they're still subscribed without notifications but anyway i don't know if that was boring but i i always think it's interesting to try to figure out the inner workings of youtube and stuff like that sunday worships says war my modern day bait shirt to the doctor today and ended up and ended up in a 20 minute discussion about the ethics of veganism and my own cognitive dissonance about it oh that's super interesting that's funny that's so cool you got the modern day debate t-shirt that you're sporting that's rad man and i am pumped we are working on we are slow we're behind on it but we're working on coming out with modern day debate shirts for the new logo because we haven't done that yet it's been really busy that i've got to put that on my list of things to do but 128 likes we only need two more and we'll be at 130 we are we totally blew past the 120 goal but thanks james 119 says huge so happy you guys are doing this james thanks for that that means a lot and mohammed 316 we are glad you were here we hope you're doing well as well as let's see here and hax says i was joking well i wasn't i'm telling you i think a lot of channels actually do buy subs and maybe even views that's another thing too is if you see that they have a lot of views and very few comments that's where i start to get suspicious and it's because people think that it's like a social like credit thing you know like they think of it as like well if i have a lot of subscribers people will like take my channel more still they'll notice that it's desired that my content is desired they're more likely to subscribe and that's probably true but i still wouldn't buy subs i've never bought subs i've never bought views i'll be honest i've i've been tempted or i was like i was like it's true it's like well you know if it looks like you have a lot of subscribers like you know it doesn't hurt you know maybe people are more compelled to subscribe if they see that you've got a lot of subscribers already but it never did it and i'm glad i haven't no offense to anybody out there who's done it i'm not trying to put anybody down but thanks for your kind words hannah anderson says i've says have a great rest of your night james and all the people who came to comment and view the debate and awkward thank you for that hannah anderson and awkward saint senior thanks for coming by hope you're doing well adam elbilia says hey oh what's good my man adam thanks for coming by we're glad you made it it must be late there in israel thanks for being a huge late nighter and in stopping in potatoes as james's vlog sounds like my kind of channel you don't want to know about the second weird things i'd talk about but three fractures glad you were with us and let's see here brook chavis says thanks for your support and hacks indeed thank you and hacks and collin retig am i saying it right collin let me know we're glad you're here collin thanks for coming by and then adam elbilia says it also depended on how many vid vids uploaded a day i think notifications are limited also older subs don't have the notification bell turned on by default oh that's a good point that's a great point that is so interesting that makes sense yeah i hadn't thought of that that probably could be like i would think that you're right that youtube would when they make it they would when they brought in the notification bell they didn't they probably just like let people decide and it was probably the default i think for them was probably like set so that youtube only recommends what they think you'll like so they won't recommend all the videos that's for sure and it might not even be that like maybe it was just maybe it was set so that when they did implement the notification bell maybe the default was actually just no notification notifications because that's the way it was before the bell so i don't know it's a good point to shea and then let's see here gimme waffles good to see you again says did the debate happen already it did indeed and it was a juicy one to say the least but yeah i want to say thanks so much to our guests it was a fun one and i got to tell you you guys maybe didn't know this you're like james what are you talking about modernity debate has a podcast are you serious my dear friends let me show you this we are absolutely pumped you don't want to miss this modernity debate has a podcast you've got to see this if you haven't pull out your phone right now just like i've got my phone out right now you see that bad boy is pull out your phone find modernity debate via your favorite podcast so for example i use podcast addict i'm hip i'm still with it you can open up podcast addict or spotify or apple music whatever it is that you like and you can find modern day debate on there it's amazing so you guys i am pumped about that it is seriously legit you don't want to miss out on the modernity debate podcast i've been told people said i use it while i'm listening or while i'm cleaning the house i use it while i'm working out i use it bob says uses it while he goes down to the beach to get some sunshine believe me we are absolutely excited that people have actually found good use out of the podcast so that's really cool we're excited about that but did you know in the chat let me know did you know that we have a podcast maybe you did and you're like oh yeah duh james adam lb says it also depends on how many videos oh he got that one and then but yeah that's interesting and so i do want to say i love you guys thanks for all of your support and james119 says i got notifications on so i try not to miss any debate and that's true i had forgotten folks yeah if you want notifications remember that you gotta tell youtube how often you want those notifications but i do want to say thanks everybody i hope you have a great rest of your night keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable and we'll see you next time in the old twitch chat want to say thanks so much appreciate you hanging out with us there brooks sparrow thanks for taking the lead in the old twitch and holy squirrel 777 good to see you says i'm a squirrel indeed you are and we are excited though let's farm has done a fantastic job with the discord as well which is linked in the description so i want to encourage you if you haven't joined the moderated debate discord yet i highly encourage you to do that as a lot of people have found that is a really fun community to be a part of and so i want to encourage you we are glad you were here no matter what walk of life you were from and we are excited for the future so stick around for more juicy debates i love you guys thanks so much for hanging out it's always fun have a great night and keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable we'll see you next time amazing