Amanda

I think it sure can enhance the bad things that are already there. Money usually gives you power and influence and often (if you have enough) brings with it a bunch of sycophants that concern whatever you’re saying which would tend to enhance your worst impulses.

It also enhances any existing tendencies to view other people as instrumental to your own goals, because in some sense they are.

What Musk is clearly doing here is seeing his children as extensions and in some sense property of himself, and that means he needs to control them. Their autonomy is a direct threat to what he sees as his existence. That’s not the kind of delusion you’re born with, that’s taught.

Congratulations on having one of the worst takes I’ve ever seen (the one about narcissus).

My gut feeling is that most of the anti trans crusading is actively harmful for the growth of these people. Not because people in general care about trans people put because they don’t. It’s possible to drum up some moral panic about children being mutilated, but that also requires a quite large departure from consensus reality that’s expensive to maintain given that gender-affirming surgery on trans children pretty much isn’t a thing. On top of that, it’s difficult to go around yelling about other people’s genitals without being seen as weird and off-putting.

Sleepwear is definitely a hack, I used that a lot early in my transition too as a low stakes method of affirmation.

With respect to dysphoria I’ve frankly reached a point where it’s not so prevalent in my day to day life, ca 5 years into my social transition. It crops up of course but it’s much less pronounced, to the point where I was technically misgendered by a colleague (who did the right thing and immediately and discretely corrected himself), and that didn’t even feel bad at all.

This also applies to euphoria though.