Instigator / Pro
8
1597
rating
22
debates
65.91%
won
Topic
#3426

THBT: SOCIETY would be BETTER OFF if LGBTQ people did not EXIST

Status
Finished

The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.

Winner & statistics
Better arguments
0
6
Better sources
4
4
Better legibility
2
2
Better conduct
2
2

After 2 votes and with 6 points ahead, the winner is...

RationalMadman
Parameters
Publication date
Last updated date
Type
Standard
Number of rounds
3
Time for argument
Three days
Max argument characters
8,000
Voting period
Two weeks
Point system
Multiple criterions
Voting system
Open
Contender / Con
14
1702
rating
574
debates
67.86%
won
Description

THBT: On balance, SOCIETY would be BETTER OFF if LGBTQ people did not EXIST

DEFINITIONS

Society: the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.

Better off: In a more desirable or advantageous position

LGBTQ: People who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer

Exist: have objective reality or being.

All terms should be used in their commonplace understandings

THE DEBATE

~~BOP is shared~~
PRO: Must uphold the resolution and make an argument as to why society would be better off if LGBTQ people did not exist

CON: Shares the burden. CON must provide evidence as to why the resolution is false and prove why society would not be better off, or even (but not required) worse off.

Round 1
Pro
#1
RESOLVED: THBT: SOCIETY would be BETTER OFF if LGBTQ people did not EXIST

FRAMEWORK
  • As the description states:
  • Society: the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.
  • Better off: In a more desirable or advantageous position
  • LGBTQ: People who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer
  • Exist: have objective reality or being

OVERVIEW
  • The question proposed within this debate is, would society be better of without LGBTQ people? I am convinced the answer is yes to any degree of analysis. 
  • Even if it's just by a little, society would be better off without LGBTQ people in almost every rationalization one can male. 
  • What is being proposed here is a hypothetical concurrent world where lesbian, gay, bisexual, and people do not exist, and I think no matter how we view it, that world will always be somewhat better without LGBTQ people. 

SUFFERING
  • This argument operates on a pretty basic syllogism:
P1) Society is better off with less suffering
P2) Society with LGBTQ people introduces more suffering
C) Therefore society with LGBTQ people is worse off
  • LGBTQ people create more suffering in the world and if they did not exist society would be improved on the account of less physical and mental struggle.
  • As the UCLA Williams Institute states, "LGBT people are nearly four times more likely than non-LGBT people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault, according to a new study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. In addition, LGBT people are more likely to experience violence both by someone well-known to the victim and at the hands of a stranger" [4].
  • Even Healthline reports that "The True Colors Fund states that 4.2 million youth experience homelessness every year and that 40 percent of these homeless youth are LGBTQ. This number is even more astounding considering that LGBT people make up only 7 percent of the youth population" [5].
  • LGBTQ people have significant issues with suicidal ideation and the rates at which they take their own lives. We can conclude that this is largely a result of underlying mental conditions such as gender dysphoria that torture the minds and emotional states of trans people every day. The condition is coupled with severe emotional and psychological distress [6] and should not be suffered by anyone. 
  • According to Suicidality Among Transgender Youth: Elucidating the Role of Interpersonal Risk Factors "82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth." [7].
  • Ultimately it is cruel to have a world where these people exist with such significant mental trauma and suffering that comes about with their predicaments. A world without them is a world with less of the most EXTREMELY torturous, mentally scarring, emotionally scarring, suffering.  

PERSECUTION
  • 71 countries criminalize homosexuality or same-sex activity [1] and a significant amount of them even employ the DEATH PENALTY for it. This leads us to believe that gay and bisexual people endure a significant degree of persecution globally. Even my suffering contention shows that they are physically attacked and abused all the time. If they didn't exist and none of this would happen. 

DISEASES
  • Gay and bisexual people are literally the MOST SIGNIFICANT spreaders of AIDS, SYPHILIS, and other dangerous STDs that affect people. 
  • According to the CDC, "In 2018, men accounted for 30,691 (81%) of the 37,968 new HIV diagnoses in the United States and dependent areas.d Most (86%) new diagnoses among men were attributed to gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men" [3]. 
  • Further stated by the CDC "In 2014, gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men accounted for 83% of primary and secondary syphilis cases" [9]. It's most reasonable to say that a world with fewer cases and infections and dangerous diseases is better off. 

SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS
  • 47% of Americans are uncomfortable using gender-neutral pronouns [2not even talking about the nonsensical quantity of neo pronouns. The nonexistence of these people would make everyone more comfortable. 
  • LGBTQ people themselves force cultural changes that most people don't even accept. Most Americans don't even believe that trans women are women and trans men are men [8]. 
  • If LGBTQ people didn't exist, religious polarization over same-sex marriage would also cease to exist because it simply would ot be the case that two men or two women would marry each other. It explicitly entails a world with marginally less conflict. Cultural polarization is greatly reduced. 
  • As a result of this, political parties and the general political climate will focus more on POLICIES because the significant degree of cultural issues brought about by LGBTQs would be gone. 

It's pretty self evident that the existence of LGBTQ people makes society worse. 

SOURCES
  1. https://www.humandignitytrust.org/lgbt-the-law/map-of-criminalisation/
  2. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/05/gender-neutral-pronouns/
  3. https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/group/gender/men/index.html
  4. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/ncvs-lgbt-violence-press-release/
  5. https://www.healthline.com/health/depression/gay
  6. https://psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/what-is-gender-dysphoria
  7. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32345113/
  8. https://today.yougov.com/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2021/09/23/americans-transgender-survey
  9. https://www.cdc.gov/msmhealth/STD.htm



Con
#2
Abusively Flexible Framework for Pro must be challenged when it comes to the Mechanics!

The framework in the debate, presented by Pro, states absolutely nothing about the mechanics of converting our world into a world without LGBTQ people. Pro will be inclined to say that it's unfair to me to demand as it could be done 'by the most convenient means whichever they may be' but I preemptively rebuke it with the fact that there is absolutely no way to analyse the costs vs benefits of this world without LGBTQ people if we do not factor in the means by which it is done.

I am pretty sure it will be done by 1 of 3 ways:

  1. Psychopathically slaughtering all openly LGTBQ people today (flawed because it fails to target those in the closet, plus... you know... Morals).
  2. Going back in time and rerunning a simulated equivalent to our Earth where all the LGBTQ people didn't exist.
  3. Magically turning absolutely all LGBTQ people completely heteronormative in gender identity and heterosexual in sexual identity (100% impossible, which I will get to).
Currently I have the completely unfair burden of not only having to tell you the ways it could be done, which Pro should have selected one of, but have to attack all three at once, whereby Pro can pick the one I attack least well and go 'haha I win'. I want you voters to appreciate how much is stacked against me and how unfair the dynamics of this debate are since Pro left the mechanical framework totally ambiguous when you go to vote. I have to fight 3 angle sufficiently in an 8k-character Round of debate.

Psychopathically slaughter method

So... I don't know if I have to go into the morals of this and why it's wrong, I'll see if Pro picks this one as well as the closet angle.

To cover the closet angle, I'd like to point certain things out. 


Depending on where they’re headed, gay travelers can face great risks. In April 2019, the country of Brunei enacted an Islamic law making it legal to flog and stone LGBTQ people to death. And it’s not the only country to have the death penalty on the books: A few others include Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iran. According to Equaldex, a range of gay activities are illegal in 71 countries.

“We have seen LGBTQ+ people dear to our hearts be discriminated against and our deepest desire for writing this article was to bring awareness to these issues and hopefully catalyze change,” says Fergusson. “As travel journalists, we wanted to help the LGBTQ+ community educate themselves on the very complex and layered world of staying safe during international travel.”

The journalists looked at the top 150 most-visited countries in the world by the number of incoming tourists, then ranked them using eight factors, including laws against gay relationships, legal protection against discrimination and more. According to the report, a few factors—such as adoption recognition and worker protections—may not affect travelers directly but are a good indication of overall attitudes within the culture.

“These issues can affect everything, from your ability to show public displays of affection to being able to share a hotel room bed to the capacity at which you can use dating apps without being caught by the local police,” reads the report.

Topping the LGBTQ+ Danger Index is Nigeria, which is considered the worst country for violence against gay travelers. There, people can be put in prison for up to 14 years just for being gay, and some states even have the death penalty under Sharia law. 
Sweden is the safest country in the world for LGBTQ travelers. Same-sex marriage has been legal there since 2009, and the country has more Pride festivals per capita than anywhere else in the world.

One shocking statistic: “A whopping 47 of the 70 countries that have illegal same-sex relationships were part of the British Empire. That is 67%!” says Fergusson. “This isn’t a coincidence. In almost all cases, the laws outlawing consensual gay sex were put into place under British rule and were left in place following independence.”
^ This is just laws

The vast majority of the world’s sexual minority population — an estimated 83 percent of those who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual — keep their orientation hidden from all or most of the people in their lives, according to a new study by the Yale School of Public Health that could have major implications for global public health.

How exactly would the culling work? You can't even DNA-test to 'catch the hiders out':

It’s effectively impossible to predict an individual’s sexual behavior from their genome.
— Ben Neale, geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute
And even this new study has a big limitation, one that has been inherent to major genomic studies for the last two decades: GWAS studies are too white.
“There’s many politically correct ways of saying this, but basically the study is mostly a Caucasian sample of European ancestry. So, it does not include peoples from Latin America, Asia and Africa,” said Dr. Eric Vilain, director of the Center for Genetic Medicine Research at Children’s National Health System. “The second limitation is that the way they lumped together what they call ‘nonheterosexuals’”

The researchers had members of the same-sex community review the study’s design and language, and they admit that their terminology and definitions for gay, lesbian and heterosexual do not reflect the full nature of the sexuality continuum.

They did attempt to examine some elements of this continuum by conducting GWAS analysis on three smaller DNA databases wherein the participants had been surveyed using the Kinsey Scale. The Kinsey Scale is a somewhat infamous test for determining the strength of a person’s feelings toward members of the same- and opposite-sexes. In other words, it tries to judge if a person leans gay, straight or bisexual.

The team found genetics cannot explain people’s scores on the Kinsey Scale.
“We discovered that the Kinsey Scale … is really an oversimplification of the diversity of sexual behavior in humans,” Neale said. Bailey disagrees, arguing that people’s feelings of sexual interest and arousal — and therefore, their readouts on the Kinsey Scale — may be too complicated to validate through genetics.

He did agree with Neale that the debate is now closed on whether any single gene is responsible for sexual orientation.
“[Our study] underscores an important role for the environment in shaping human sexual behavior and perhaps most importantly there is no single gay gene but rather the contribution of many small genetic effects scattered across the genome,” Neale said.

==

Simulated rerun method

There's major issues with this. Alan Turing is nearly singlehandedly responsible for the breakthrough that not only led to Germany losing World War II (decryption devices) but modern computers. Freddie Mercury influenced music massively, not just by Queen's songs but the fact he made it much easier for Gays and such to come out. We don't even know how many butterfly effect campaigns and minority-defences (such as of the disabled) have ended up much more successful thanks to the sensitivity towards LGBTQ people that came with their campaigning for equal rights and the successes involved.

On top of that, this rerun simulation could remove plenty of people from history, even Jesus himself or George Washington if they were closeted slightly bi-leaning individuals. We can literally not know how much and how severe this rerun would be.

==
Magically turning absolutely all LGBTQ people completely heteronormative...

This is just straight up impossible. You can't even do this. How are you going to redo their genes and life events so they don't end up gay, bi, trans or genderqueer?

I doubt it's plausible at all.
Round 2
Pro
#3
FRAMEWORK
  • CON does not challenge or dispute the definitions of my framework so we must conclude he accepts them in their entirety. 

  • CON however does take one issue, as he says: 
"The framework in the debate, presented by Pro, states absolutely nothing about the mechanics of converting our world into a world without LGBTQ people"
  • However, this point is completely irrelevant to the debate as what is resolved is over a hypothetical concurrent world in which LGBTQ simply do not exist. The resolution obviously never says society would be better if we murdered all LGBTQ people. But it would be, simply put, better if LGBTQ people did not exist, (did: specifically made "past tense" of do though not required to convey this idea) which could result in less suffering, less mental illness, and less dangerous diseases spread by them, etc. Frankly speaking, his is a pretty standard and commonplace form of thought experiment. 
  • One may think this is a mistake, however, CON self-admitted that he deliberately did this in the comments section of this debate [1] even showing a lack of concern for doing so. 
  • As a result of this CON's entire constructive case can be majorly dismissed or discarded. Since my argument is composed of four contention-level pillars, and CON addressed none of them, I extend them all. 

ANALYSIS
  • While CON's case is entirely irrelevant some of his sources highlight some facts that support my side of the resolution so they might as well be used against him. 

PERSECUTION + SUFFERING 
  • CON's own source admits that "Depending on where they’re headed, gay travelers can face great risks. In April 2019, the country of Brunei enacted an Islamic law making it legal to flog and stone LGBTQ people to death."
  • LGBTQ people are flogged and stoned to death and they live in areas that take no ethical issue to this. This is by definition a living hell. Now imagine if LGBTQ people simply did not exist. This would result in a world of significantly less suffering. In my syllogism:
P1) Society is better off with less suffering
P2) Society with LGBTQ people introduces more suffering
C) Therefore society with LGBTQ people is worse off
  • CON drops both premises meaning he has either conceded them or simply failed to dispute that more suffering of people makes society worse off. Therefore CON"s own points explicitly disagree with his side of the resolution this is an apparent contradiction.  
  • Another one of CON's sources also specifically states that "The vast majority of the world’s sexual minority population — an estimated 83 percent of those who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual — keep their orientation hidden from all or most of the people in their lives, according to a new study by the Yale School of Public Health that could have major implications for global public health
  • Given that one of the most prestigious schools of public health in the world has identified this as a significant implication to public health, it evokes a sense a number of negative internal emotional, and psychological impacts and as another form of emotional suffering, this again shows that the mere existence of LGBTQ people creates more suffering in the world. 

CONCLUSION
  • It remains pretty self-evident that the existence of LGBTQ people makes society worse. 
  • CON's sources have been used against him quite significantly. 

SOURCES
  1. https://www.debateart.com/debates/3426-thbt-society-would-be-better-off-if-lgbtq-people-did-not-exist
  2. My opponent's references used against him [A][B]


Con
#4
R = Round 

The Comments section in a debate is inadmissible as a debater's in-debate actual argumentation. I will, however, admit that I had read this from Pro:

  • Even if it's just by a little, society would be better off without LGBTQ people in almost every rationalization one can male. 
  • What is being proposed here is a hypothetical concurrent world where lesbian, gay, bisexual, and people do not exist, and I think no matter how we view it, that world will always be somewhat better without LGBTQ people. 
R1, Pro

Which are 2 completely contradictory versions of events that entail entirely independent tradeoffs to consider whether or not we deem the original society better off in the post-transition era.

If you'd notice what I did in my 3 scenarios, I actually listed these 2 as my latter 2 (under different version) but disqualified the 'little by little' aspect and instead that would be entailed in the genocide first-method.

You cannot magically 'cure' the LGBTQ people nor can you run a simulation with LGBTQ people missing. Both are entirely unrealistic and instead the only way this happens in any way that is active in its nature is killing them off one by one, not passively letting them dying. If Pro did mean letting them naturally die one by one, that is still magical as no LGBTQ people are in the future generations and that had to be made clearer.

In Round 1 and 2, Pro keeps telling you the 'benefits' Pro foresees without allowing Con to have any specifics of the means of elimination to compare the trade-off to. This means that the biggest and most important factor of the debate (whether the costs outweigh the benefits for society or not) is completely incapable of being a clashing point. Since it was the responsibility of Pro to lay down the framework that would enable cost vs benefit analysis, you must hold Pro entirely responsible here since I dedicated my Round 1 to helping Pro with specific suggestions, all Pro had to do was pick one of them and defend the costs vs benefits.

I will repeat the issues with the three without sources now, though it is clear that despite Pro saying 'little by little' Pro is not backing the psychothic murder/genocide method... So, I guess I can let that be.

Attacking the 'even by a little'

Pro says the even if the reduction is by 'a little' the society is better off but that doesn't explain which part of the LGBTQ have been eliminated nor is that withint he scope of the resolution which blatantly is regarding entire annihilation leading to elimination of all LGBTQ people.

Re-exploring flaws with concurrent simulation.

It seems that my flaws of the simulation are different (but actually still relevant) to the ones present in Pro's concurrent world. Pro is not speaking of rewriting history without any LGBTQ people and is saying we run it here and now from today but the point I led into is 100% essential to consider:
We don't even know how many butterfly effect campaigns and minority-defences (such as of the disabled) have ended up much more successful thanks to the sensitivity towards LGBTQ people that came with their campaigning for equal rights and the successes involved.

On top of that, this rerun simulation could remove plenty of people from history, even Jesus himself or George Washington if they were closeted slightly bi-leaning individuals. We can literally not know how much and how severe this rerun would be.
Con, R2

The fact is that no matter how much Pro tells you that 'less suffering' is occuring, we don't know how much less alleviation of suffering or great invention is being starved. For instance, had the LGBTQ movement not been around at all as there were no gays and queers etc, would there have been enough people in modern-day social democracies to back the civil rights movement for making things properly equal and fair on minorities and women? Even if it is taken from today there are a plethora of nations (some of which Pro proudly tells you the dark side of) and societies even in 'officially not homophobic' places where if there are no LGBTQ people, other minorities and women will simply never gain proper equality most likely as there's not the LGBTQ majority-race non-disabled males to revert the patriarchy within.

In fact, that's only a known difference that would be lacking. To be clear, I am aware the black civil rights movement existed first, my point is that the movement of LGBTQ rights helped alter what would have been a lesser movement into a significant population that opposed the establishment at a certain time later to push further left-wing, progressive policies that benefitted the neglected minorities within society.

Who will be the next Alan Turing? Who will be the next Freddie Mercury? We will never know in that society because that society never has them happen. They don't realise how much worse off they are as they never get to see, experience and/or appreciate the LGBTQ people. This is also why I insisted Pro specify if it's a 'magic cure' or not. Since no such thing was specified, I am absolutely entitled to say they don't exist in the other world, not just that they're rewired heteronormative (this doesn't work, there's no specific gay gene at all and life events would need to be tweaked in so many ways that it just couldn't be concurrent and predictable or comparable at all).

Furthermore, this 'concurrent world' wouldn't be our world so, I am confused mechanically how the resolution even works. Since the society that Pro is saying is better off is a society that isn't our society yet that's the society being compared to.

I do not agree it's better off, my stance is very clear; I don't believe we can measure the tradeoff, the butterfly effect and sheer fact of closet people even here, today, means we have truly got no clue whatsoever whether the world would or wouldn't be better off.

Pro's stance is that adversity and strife are inherently bad for people in a society to ever experience but all good things require strife, including the civil rights movments that the LGBTQ communities in progressive nations pushed forward and joined in with. The suffering of anyone that bullied and bigots abuse, isolate, neglect and/or oppress is indeed undesirable but it is that very struggle that led to (and still needs to lead to) countries that were still developing to be kind and caring to their vulnerable and minorities, to have the push and need to do so. 

Suffering is a part of life, in fact. We cannot even know what would happen if we took LGTBQ people out of the equation. It is easy to assume that the most aggressively abusive homophobes only have an issue with LGBTQ people but if we dig deeper they are clearly sociopathic people with a tendency to abuse, the LGBTQ aspect is just their excuse.

Pro's stance is that society would be less mean to LGBTQ people if they weren't there. That's axiomatic. The fact we cannot weight any costs against these asserted benefits means we literally cannot deem it better off or not, that would require us analysing specifics of the means and knowing the specific LGBTQ people being removed to weigh whether all good and contributive things they do in their life are things society is better off without having been done.
Round 3
Pro
#5
MINOR POINT REBUTTALS
You cannot magically 'cure' the LGBTQ people.... 
  • Which is why were are debating whether or not it would be better if they didn't exist. 

CON seems to take issue with these two of my statements: 
  • Even if it's just by a little, society would be better off without LGBTQ people in almost every rationalization one can male. 
  • What is being proposed here is a hypothetical concurrent world where lesbian, gay, bisexual, and people do not exist, and I think no matter how we view it, that world will always be somewhat better without LGBTQ people. 
  • It is slightly unclear as to where the issue of contention here is; I argue that society would be better off if LGBTQ people did not exist, even if society is just a little better off, however, I think my arguments are enough to reveal a larger degree of this therefore largely better off society. 
Pro says that even if the reduction is by 'a little' the society is better off but that doesn't explain which part of the LGBTQ have been eliminated nor is that within the scope of the resolution which blatantly is regarding the entire annihilation leading to the elimination of all LGBTQ people.
  • Not sure what my opponent is saying here, but even by a little refers to even if society was better off in a minimal or slight way, it would still prove the resolution that states: SOCIETY would be BETTER OFF if LGBTQ people did not EXIST.
  • Lastly, everything mentioned about methods of killing or "annihilation" (for whatever reason?) is irrelevant as the debate involves a hypothetical of LGBTQ people simply not existing. 

BROADER POINT REBUTTALS
"Pro's stance is that adversity and strife are inherently bad for people" 
  • A lot of suffering is inherently horrible. Conditions like depression and gender dysphoria (which creates extreme emotional torture) as medical sources described previously. These affect millions of LGBTQ people and if LGBTQ people never existed, there would be millions of fewer cases of this extreme suffering. This means less hospitalization, less crowding of mental hospitals, less strain on families, doctors, and most importantly less suffering. 
  • Adversity and strife aren't inherently bad in every case, but when considering the amount of physical and emotional suffering LGBTQ people endure, you must conclude that it would be better off if this suffering affected fewer people. 

Even if it is taken from today there are a plethora of nations (some of which Pro proudly tells you the dark side of) and societies even in 'officially not homophobic' places where if there are no LGBTQ people, other minorities and women will simply never gain proper equality most likely as there's not the LGBTQ majority-race non-disabled males to revert the patriarchy within.
  • There isn't any evidence given of this, so I literally can't attack this statement (I really do want to). This leads me to conclude that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence [1]. 

The suffering of anyone that bullied and bigots abuse, isolate, neglect and/or oppress is indeed undesirable but it is that very struggle that led to (and still needs to lead to) countries that were still developing to be kind and caring to their vulnerable and minorities, to have the push and need to do so. 
  • Currently, LGBTQ people still go through all the suffering from mental illness, depression, suicidality, and emotional pain in all countries regardless of development. They still account for overwhelming amounts of STD cases regardless. We are arguing that society would be better if they didn't exist: with the existence of LGBTQ all these abuses happen but if they did not exist they would not happen. 
  • Even the struggles for LGBTQ expression in these areas, often lead to them being tortured, flogged, and stoned to death would not be needed if the people simply did not exist. 

Society would be less mean to LGBTQ people if they weren't there. That's axiomatic.
  • I think to mean is an extreme understatement for as your own source showed us for example Brunei enacted an Islamic law making it legal to flog and stone LGBTQ people to death. But my opponent does acknowledge that the horrors experienced by LGBTQ people would not occur had they never existed. 

The fact we cannot weigh any costs against these asserted benefits means we literally cannot deem it better off or not
  • My opponent has shown any costs that I have not addressed or really anything that somehow outweighs all the pain and suffering, diseases, conflict, etc that would be alleviated. 

DISEASES
  • Extend, PRO drops this from round 1. 

SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS 
  • Extend likewise. It appears PRO drops this from round one as well. 

SOURCES
  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor#:~:text=Hitchens



Con
#6
I will finish with an extremely concise summary as I feel to state more would be time-wasting regurgitation by me.


You cannot deem a world or society better off if you have not calculated the true impact of removing all of something from it and denying the butterfly effects of said removal.