this actually raises an important question. It's obviously ridiculous to think a bear poses less danger to a woman than a random man. But would you rather encounter a bear in the forest... or a troon?
Whether a woman is mauled to death by a bear or raped and then killed by a man, she's still just as dead, but a bear doesn't have the possibility of a human brain that actively wants to do harm and the desire to pursue the woman. Despite the stupidity of the discourse around it, I think the thought experiment is not a bad one, because it cuts to the core of why trans "women" need to be scrutinized. Women don't have to worry about bears wanting to kill them so they can skinwalk them, basically. The dangerous part of a man is not necessarily his physical strength, it's that coupled with his intelligence. Drop a woman and a bear in a random square kilometer of forest, or drop a woman and a man in the same setup. It's only the second scenario where there's a possibility that the woman's going to be pursued actively
Many people do actually forget; aside from the one fellow spreading LOBOTOMIES FOR ALL, it was usually saved for very specific circumstances.
It's a little like electroshock in that the demonisation has lead to people looking past the benefits it did (and does in some cases) have.
The history of lobotomies is much more of people being made more manageable than it is people being able to return to functional life. The huge number of lobotomies done in the 40s and 50s were done because the most obvious effect on most people who received it was a marked reduction in their initiative and emotional responses. I've seen it described as emotional torpor. This was a negative change to the quality of life for most patients. Again, this made them much easier to control but it was not good for them.
I've seen this kind of revisionism pop up a lot but the reason why the medical industry moved away from lobotomies in the 70s-ish is analogous to the troon phenomenon. Whatever marginal benefits the surgery gave a limited number of people was far outweighed by the enormous damage it caused to many people when the medical establishment adopted it as a cure-all solution to the complex problem of mental illness.
This is to say nothing of the ethical implications of doing surgeries that profoundly changed the emotional life of the patients, most of the time without their consent, to the point where they would often seem to be different people to their close relations.
Lobotomies are also no longer done. There are other types of psychiatric surgeries done to the brain, but there is no equivalent procedure to what people meants with lobotomy, which was the severing of the white matter connections between the thalamus and the prefrontal cortext. The type of much more limited neurosurgeries done today are far less invasive and don't come from the same theory or technique. Lobotomies had as a premise that since the cells of mentally ill brains didn't seem to show abnormalities, the issue had to be in the connective tissue, which did not have any basis in reality. Stereotactic neurosurgery procedures are based on precise neuroimaging to make small changes in structure and should not, IMO, be considered a descendant of lobotomies.
Edit: how do I always miss words when I'm typing
