Given how life impacting gender dysphoria is and how often it leads to suicidal thoughts, I'd think twice about making statements like that.

I'm trans and I've struggled so much with gender dysphoria, but this doesn't bother me at all.

I don't get why there's this stereotype of trans people being so fragile. All the trans people I know are stronger because of what they've been through.

I meant the comment not as "you're going to offend someone experiencing it", but rather "this is a weird phrase, a bigger issue, and has consequences you're ignoring". Recently the idea of trivially switching someone's gender somehow appeared in my home country so I feel it's worth calling out.

It is a complex issue, but I also think the issue is different for everybody. Not everybody has a strong gender identity, and thus isn't equally vulnerable to gender dysphoria.

Maybe there’s a survival bias in your circle of friends?

Nothing special to trans here: by passing through the same hardships, different people might not get all stronger, some might just give up life all together. So only those who went stronger will meet.

There absolutely is a survival bias. I should have phrased my comment better because my point wasn't that all trans people get stronger by what they go through.

I was trying to say that the comment isn't transphobic at all, and if people think stuff like this is the reason why trans people kill themselves then they're probably blind to the actual transphobia that happens in the world.

Also, I strongly believe that we shouldn't be restricting language out of fear of being offensive, because then people become too afraid to talk about important issues.

Not to be insensitive, but we obviously don't know the ones that have killed themselves when they were teenagers or hide their identity and suffer silently.

Transgender people face many issues, sadly with debilitating psychological consequences for many individuals. This isn't because any of them are more fragile, everyone else would struggle just as much in their shoes. But the 'suffering breeds strength' narrative is a very romantic one.

I don't care who you are. I care what you overcome so I wished there were more people like you the community.

Given how overrated it is to be the smartest person in the room, on the team, etc., I would say the same!

If you are the smartest person on the room or the team it usually means you are in the wrong room/team.

Not every transgender person suffers dysphoria, though.

Are genders countable? If you take enough you could mitigate the sides and end up where you started with much higher IQ.

I think nicotine has some properties that actually increases performance very slightly compared to other drugs, which conventionally are always a detriment. Cannot find the study anymore though. It also has side effects of course.

I’m sure for many this would be an absolute win.

Those things are so unrelated, maybe you should just meditate on why your mind went there? They do make pills to change your gender, you know.

That pill is amphetamine, in its various forms (minus the gender switch). Sadly it's only legally available to ADHD and eating disorder patients.

I never heard that it can actually increase IQ. I thought ADHD drugs just improved focus?

If any devs have experience, do you find that the effects of ADHD meds still allows you to get into “fuzzy” undirected thought? For example, I’ve found that a lot of my supposed mental prowess is predicated on me daydreaming and mulling a problem and suddenly intuiting some possible solution. I’m afraid ADHD meds might curb that part of my personality.

I take 30mg Vyvanse daily. There's two points to be made:

First, stimulants have a release schedule and are generally not a 24-hour thing. You wouldn't be able to sleep if they were. The effect depends on plasma concentration and varies during that interval. You might feel extremely focused at first, then energized but not especially focused, then a total drop in energy and focus when you hit the "down" part of the curve. Everyone's response is slightly different, however. I definitely think differently in the morning (after taking the pill) vs. at night. Sometimes I have an insight while relaxing in the evening that I write down and becomes my focus in the morning, when I'm better able to work.

Second, it's not easy to put into words but the focusing effect is different from the cross-topic creativity you're talking about. Amphetamine is like a really strong, long-lasting coffee without the negative side effects that would come from drinking pots of coffee at a time. Plenty of creative people drink regular portions of coffee. It lets you focus on your work without unwanted distractions. But by increasing working memory, stimulants actually increase the incidence of cross-domain insight, in my experience, because you're able to keep more concepts in mind while you're working.

Hey, this helps a lot. Thanks for the detailed response.

I use a lot of caffeine, so if it’s comparable in terms of the “mental lane”, then I think it could put for me. The increased working memory leading to more connections sounds perfect.

Vyvanse, for me, is basically a 10-hour cup of coffee.

Minus the jittery hands, racing heart, headache, and other issues even moderate coffee consumption causes for me.

But with the loss of appetite, constipation, and difficulty sleeping that coffee does to me too.

Definitely worth it on the balance. Being on medication is life changing, mostly for how capable it has made me in my personal life. I’m not the hot mess I used to be.

Awesome! Someone downvoted us, just wanted to note it wasn’t me. I appreciate you taking the time to respond.

What is IQ in the end, except performance on IQ tests? Or more general problem solving ability. Stimulants definitely improve problem-solving capability:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3880463/

This would be true even if the mechanism was "merely" an increase in focus. It turns out ADHD meds do more than that though, as they also improve working memory and mental stamina.

Amphetamines and methylphenidate (Ritalin) don't improve your ability to reason or thing logically, but they do improve working memory, which is evaluated in a lot of IQ tests.