There’s been a lot of public talk about “identity” lately, stimulated by high-profile cases of transsexuality (notably the athlete now named Caitlyn Jenner) and transracialism (Rachel Dolezal). It needs to be said: most of the talk, on all sides of these disputes, has been obvious nonsense – utter drivel that should not have survived five minutes of thought.
I thought we had reached the limit of absurdity with the flap over Rebecca Tuvel’s paper In Defense of Transracialism, about which it can only be said that while Tuvel seems marginally less insane than her attackers, everyone involved in that dispute has obviously been huffing unicorn farts for so long that oxygen no longer reaches their brains in appreciable quantities.
But that’s in a corner of academia where one rather expects postmodernism to have shut down rational thought. In its own way, the following statement in an exudation of mainstream journalism is much sillier, and has finally pushed me into writing on the topic. I quote it not because it’s a unique error but because it’s representative of a very common category mistake.
Thus should there be a weighty presumption against so blocking people, against subordinating them by substituting our judgments about their identity for their own.
This would seem to be a rather uncontroversial point, based on ordinary liberal arguments in favor of tolerance and respect for the dignity of others.
Ah, yes. So, what then would be amiss if I stood up in a public place and claimed to be the Queen of England? Who are you to substitute your judgment about my identity for my own?
There would actually be two different kinds of things wrong with this claim. One is that I can’t grant peerages – the people who administer the English honors system wouldn’t recognize my authority. The other is that the claim to be “Queen” (as opposed, to, say, “Prince-Consort”) implies an observably false claim that I am biologically female.
These criticisms imply a theory of “identity” that is actually coherent and useful. Here it is:
Your “identity” is a set of predictive claims you assert about yourself, mostly (though not entirely) about what kinds of transactions other people can expect to engage in with you.
As an example of an exception to “mostly”, the claim “I am white” implies that I sunburn easily. But usually, an “identity” claim implies the ability and willingness to meet behavioral expectations held by other people. For example, if I describe my “identity” as “male, American, computer programmer, libertarian” I am in effect making an offer that others can expect me to need to shave daily, salute the Stars and Stripes, sling code, and argue for the Non-Aggression Principle as an ethical fundamental.
Thus, identity claims can be false (not cashed out in observed behavior) or fraudulent (intended to deceive). You don’t get to choose your identity; you get to make an offer and it’s up to others whether or not to accept.
There was a very silly news story recently about “Claire”, a transsexual “girl” with a penis who complains that she is rejected by straight guys for ‘having male parts’. Er, how was “she” expecting anything different? By trying to get dates with heterosexual teenage boys using a female presentation, she was making an offer that there is about her person the sort of sexual parts said boys want to play with. Since “she” does not in fact have a vagina, this offer was fraudulent and there’s no wonder the boys rejected it.
More to the point, why is this “girl” treated as anything but a mental case? Leaving aside the entire question of how real transgenderism is as a neuropsychological phenomenon, “she” clearly suffers from a pretty serious disconnect with observable reality. In particular, those delusions about teenage boys…
I can anticipate several objections to this transactional account of identity. One is that is cruel and illiberal to reject an offer of “I claim identity X” if the person claiming feels that identity strongly enough. This is essentially the position of those journalists from The Hill.
To which I can only reply: you can feel an identity as a programmer as strongly as you want, but if you can’t either already sling code or are visibly working hard on repairing that deficiency, you simply don’t make the nut. Cruelty doesn’t enter into this; if I assent to your claim I assist your self-deceit, and if I repeat it I assist you in misleading or defrauding others.
It is pretty easy to see how this same analysis applies to “misgendering” people with the “wrong” pronouns. People who use the term “misgender” generally follow up with claims about the subject’s autonomy and feelings. Which is well enough, but such considerations do not justify being complicit in the deceit of others any more than they do with respect to “I am a programmer”.
A related objection is that I have stolen the concept of “identity” by transactionalizing it. That is, true “identity” is necessarily grounded not in public performance but private feelings – you are what you feel, and it’s somehow the responsibility of the rest of the world to keep up.
But…if I’m a delusional psychotic who feels I’m Napoleon, is it the world’s responsibility to keep up? If I, an overweight clumsy shortish white guy, feel that I’m a tall agile black guy under the skin, are you obligated to choose me to play basketball? Or, instead, are you justified in predicting that I can’t jump?
You can’t base “identity” on a person’s private self-beliefs and expect sane behavior to emerge any more than you can invite everyone to speak private languages and expect communication to happen.
Racial identity is fuzzier than gender identity becuse, leaving aside “white men can’t jump”, it’s at first sight more difficult to tie it to a performance claim. Also, people who are genetically interracial are far more common than physical intersexes. Although this may mean less than you think; it turns out that peoples’ self-ascribed race correlates very accurately with race-associated genetic markers.
Nevertheless, here’s a very simple performance claim that solves the problem: if you are a man or woman who claims racial identity X, and I do too, and we were to marry, can we expect our children to claim racial identity X and, without extraordinary attempts at deceit, be believed?
This test neatly disposes of Rachel Dolezal – it explains not just why most blacks think she’s a fraud but why she’s an actual fraud. To apply it, we don’t even have to adhere to an “essentialist” notion of what race is. But the test becomes stronger if we note that (see link above) a genetic essentialist notion of race is probably justified by the facts. Among other applications, genetic racial identity turns out to matter for medical diagnosticians in assessing vulnerability to various diseases – for example, if you are black but claim to be white, your doctor may seriously underweight the possibility that you have hypertension.
As a culture, we got to the crazy place we’re at now by privileging feelings over facts. The whole mess around “identity” is only one example of this. It’s time to say this plainly: people who privilege feelings over facts are not sane, and the facts always win in the end. Though, unfortunately, often not before the insanity has inflicted a great deal of unnecessary suffering.
Exactly my reasoning but better argued.
We should all agree that there is a line beyond which you are considered not sane. I propose that line be placed here: if what you believe is contrary to clear, demonstrable fact, you are not sane.
Therefore, “I am a man attracted to a man” is perfectly sane. Nothing in objective reality refutes that.
But “I am a person with XY chromosomes but I am a woman” is clearly not sane. It is provably, indisputably incorrect. Reality is not subject to opinion or the whim of misfiring neurons.
>But “I am a person with XY chromosomes but I am a woman” is clearly not sane.
Right principle, wrong fact basis. It is possible, due to failures in fetal morphogenesis, to be genetically XY but somatically female and/or have a non-masculinized brain due to early androgen deficiency. Rare, but it happens; there are real physical intersexes.
“I am somatically and neurologically male but I am a woman” is, however, a much more difficult proposition to defend.
Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) reaches a different conclusion on the issue:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
>Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) reaches a different conclusion on the issue:
On the contrary, I think it’s the almost the same conclusion reached from a slightly different angle.
What Scott correctly observes is that language is a tool with a function. If you try to change linguistic categories or usage so that they no longer assist prediction as well as they used to, people will resist your attempt because it damages the tool.
Application of this truth to “transgender-friendly” pronouns is left as an easy exercise for the reader.
Excellent post.
What do you think of this:?
different groups will make different predictions about a person (ex: a japanese person will be perceived differently by a group of german and a group of chinese); so that person has several identities depending on the groups perceiving them.
The claim part, while essential, might be answered with several answers. In that case, conceptually, is there a multi-dimensional identity? Or does only the original group of the person matter? Or something else entirely?
Second, does the identity needs a claim to exist? If the whole group of origin believes you are a hacker, and you competently answers of all the definition about a hacker, but don’t care to identify as a hacker, do you have the hacker identity?
Third, what about a gradual identity? I might be considered as a hacker by 90% of people considering themselves as hackers, but as the same time, lack some property (let’s says the ability to develop in C) to be considered a hacker by the remaining 10%. Would I be a 90% hacker?
Finally, if these remarks have some merit, don’t they muddy the essential logic you shown?
Shouldn’t they be mostly ignored so as to safely handle most of the cases?
I’m personally interested in the answers…
>that person has several identities depending on the groups perceiving them.
Yes. And this is a problem how?
There is a sensible question that can be asked in situations like this. I can grade other peoples’ perception of my identity by how well it aligns with my own self-concept – but that grading puts no obligation on them.
>Second, does the identity needs a claim to exist? If the whole group of origin believes you are a hacker, and you competently answers of all the definition about a hacker, but don’t care to identify as a hacker, do you have the hacker identity?
Depends. If you are denying the title because you don’t think you’ve earned it, then I see proper humility at work. On the other hand, when other people describe you as a hacker to each other despite your refusal to use the label, they may be conveying valid predictions that render your denial irrelevant – such as “He thinks RFC 1149 is hilarious and often laughs when it is mentioned.”
>Third, what about a gradual identity?
The universe doesn’t run on Aristotelian logic. There’s no problem of principle here either.
>Finally, if these remarks have some merit, don’t they muddy the essential logic you shown?
No. It still all cashes out to predictions. The theoretical apparatus you user to generate them is far less interesting than whether you predict accurately at all.
Leftists love to talk about the “internal contradictions” of capitalism and the ideologies of opponents, but they have now reached the point of disappearing up their own fundaments. I love it that they will simultaneously claim that 1) gender is a purely social construct, and 2) some people are “born gay” and cannot change, or are “in the wrong bodies” and require major surgery to correct this problem.
Wow, how horrifyingly oversimplified. As a trans woman, in fact, *I* do get to assert what my identity is, because you and the rest of the Neanderthals on the right are simply wrong. The biology of this is far, far more complicated than your poor understanding of the topic. Stick to writing code – you’re good at that.
>As a trans woman, in fact, *I* do get to assert what my identity is
Yes, you do, I agree. You get to “assert” anything you like. It doesn’t follow that anyone else has to accept that assertion.
That is the failure of reasoning I am arguing against. Your feelings are not an entitlement. Your demand that other people conform to your self-belief doesn’t create any obligation that they do so. You can offer any identity you like; it is up to other people whether they accept.
Notice that I didn’t offer any opinion about whether “Claire” is “really” a transsexual or not. I didn’t try to pass that judgment because it doesn’t matter.
Actually the biology of this is cut and dry. Its written as clear as day on each and every cell in your body. Period, the end. You cannot argue this without disregarding the rest of the populations very existence.
The psychology is what is at play here. Don’t drag subjects you clearly aren’t educated on into your argument. (Which wasnt really an argument at all, more like a foot stamping temper tantfum.)
> Yes. And this is a problem how? […]
None, it is the approach I use consciously daily: a composite gradual identity depending on the outside observers.
Internally, I’m me. And whatever I internally claim to do or have or know, I consciously fight against defining myself by it. No humility in my case, only a need for accuracy.
> Depends. […]
So, I understand that an identity doesn’t need a claim. Hmm… In UML parlance, I see 2 roles at work there: the identity subject, and the identity observers.
I wonder if the relation between the subject and its composite identity is conceptually different from the relation between the observers and that composite identity. It may be that the relation is conceptually the same, but the subject’s relation to their identity is special only in that they have a more detailed view (and probably biased), and some interest in the perception of the identity by others.
Which is linked to why there is a claim, really. In fact, what they say when saying “I am X” could be translated as “I claim I would experience some (detriment | harm | loss of potential gain) by not being considered a X”.
> The theoretical apparatus you use(r) to generate them is far less interesting than whether you predict accurately at all.
Let me argue that the theoretical pattern allowing to solve that very human problem may be very interesting in itself, in that it could be reused for similar human problems.
As I plan to have relatively soon some mixed-race children, I’m sure I’ll remember this pattern.
Thank you :)
This is great stuff and needed to be said. And I don’t see why those who actually intend to have (for instance) their sex hardware changed — once the hardware is changed, their real identity will be the same as their intended identity.
Hmm, if I fix my answer in more than the alloted time, the fixed answer is lost.
PS fix: the relations are the same, the “composite identity facts” are simply a vector in the vector space describing reality; and the “composite reality perception” is a projection of that vector onto the observer perception of reality through their perception functions.
It’s only the perception functions that are different in their content.
Summary: they’re all mad XD
There is often a derision of Theists by Atheists because they believe in something which cannot be proven via material evidence (The only analogy I can think of is try to prove Music – not sound or small pleasant noises but Mozart – so someone deaf from birth – he cannot experience it). Theists will be called ignorant, stupid, dangerous, crazy, insane, though they might be pleasant and don’t lie, cheat, steal, or do violence. But the entire intolerable complaint is they think something which is in conflict with reality, but not in a demonstrable way on either side.
Now we have “transgender” who are perfectly healthy males or females. The males have viable sperm, the females have periods and can bear and nurse children. But somewhere inside they think they OUGHT to be the other – the conflict is because they aren’t.
In the slatestarcodex above, the suggestion is just to let them go with the illusion, and he recounts a hair-dryer incident that didn’t fix the underlying OC, but neutralized it. And properly treating the OC would have been much harder.
The problem is we have no technology or magic that can turn a man into a woman or vice versa – replace testicles with ovaries and the rest of the anatomy. We can at best create a eunuch on estrogen with a facade, but he won’t have periods or be able to bear children. (I wonder if a man who wants to change had a sister who became brain-dead if a transplant could, but this is not a general case). Some transgenders who have had reassignment surgery have become much happier for having done it, but others actually get worse because they start out at 100% the wrong gender but all the surgery and hormones just makes them 60% the wrong gender. They have fake genitals. Their body is dependent on doses of foreign hormones. And for all that they only get a facade. And if you have brow ridges and an adam’s apple it looks creepy, but those are rarely addressed.
As to how they want to be addressed or things like rest-rooms, out of tolerance and politeness I can use the term they want, and if they look like their desired gender, I’m not going to ask or probe if they go into the restroom that corresponds to it. The problem comes with the insistence that a bearded baritone should be able to use the lady’s room because he identifies as a she. And that the usual SJW penalties and purges be done to anyone who refuses to use “Xe” or whatever pronoun and fails to accept the narrative. And they want me to pay for their reassignment surgery (I take the libertarian stand – it’s their money and body, and if they can find a doctor they should be allowed to)
And here I come back to Christians and Theists. I’ll add “creationism”. Or gay “Marriage” which should not involve the state. There is no limit on the intolerance for such beliefs (see Brendan Eich), and they must be purged and even persecuted – to the point of hunting them down. I know of no one who is hunting down transgender people to insult them and get them fired or such.
We have abandoned “live and let live” long ago, so it is now a civil war between the SJW left and the alt-Right (including the alt-lite). Transgenders are nothing new. Wendy Carlos (was Walter, “Switched on Bach”) did it many years ago with little fanfare or complaints. The problem is now because it is a SJW leftist cause celeb, people get famous or praised or protected for coming out of the closet as transgender, now with 57 varieties! That is the only reason for this post. The insistence that everyone has to accept their ideas about gender identity and (un) reality with a big “or else”. And while there would be objections to having taxpayer funded bible lessons for teenagers, they do want taxpayer funded (or subsidized – or my health insurance premiums) reassignment surgery and treatments. They have become militant about it.
The correct answer is four, but now if you don’t say five…
https://odetojoandkatniss.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/1984-star-trek-and-the-psychology-of-torture/
That doesn’t sound like identity is not a choice. That sounds like identity is very largely a choice, inasmuch as I have a substantial measure of control over the sort of transactions that others can expect to engage in with me.
>That doesn’t sound like identity is not a choice. That sounds like identity is very largely a choice, inasmuch as I have a substantial measure of control over the sort of transactions that others can expect to engage in with me.
Can I choose to be pregnant and bear children?
Can I choose to be 6’7″?
Your “identity” is indeed partly choice, but it’s constrained by facts. I can’t choose to be 6’7″ or become pregnant and bear children, so any identity assertions I make contrary to those facts will necessarily be rejected.
As you point out, if I make an identity claim about myself such as “I am X”, then that is equivalent to making a suite of predictive claims about my background and likely future behavior. This is basically how we usefully define words in general. And obviously in some cases these predictions can be wrong and harmful, e.g. racial bias that is either unwarranted by the facts, or misapplied to a particular individual.
But here’s the point of contention: the identity that others assign to me will then determine how others perceive me and interact with me. Depending on the context, I might prefer that others interact with me *as if* I possessed identity Y rather than X. In fact, on some dimensions this change in interaction might be warranted.
In other words, identity is both an objective fact, and what one might call a “social construct”, meaning that the identity I am assigned by society will affect my interaction with society. That the social construct is by and large the way it is for good reasons, because it tends to produce accurate predictions, doesn’t change the fact that I might wish I had a different identity.
Now one particular sin of the modern “identitarian” left is to load up these social constructs with more and more meaning, very much including concepts of moral guilt and superiority. And as we add to the meaning of these constructs, there is additional impetus to wish for the power to change them.
Thus I see a thoroughgoing individualist ethic as the ultimate solution to transidentitarianism. Who cares if Joe is a “boy” or a “girl”? From an information-theoretic perspective, if you know Joe as a person, then there’s no added information from learning which social label Joe is assigned. And then it should be seen as pretty silly to argue at length over which label is correct.
And if Joe wants to take hormones, undergo surgery, date men, wear dresses and makeup, or whatever else…so what?
And if you want to assign tremendous moral weight to the categories “man” and “woman” apart from the facts about Joe the individual…well, that’s your problem.
This goes hand in hand with the destruction of truth, of it being disparaged as a western, white, male thing. We may never achieve perfect understanding of truth, a perfect vision of the platonic ideal, but without a dedication to staying in the same ballpark, all the things we depend on, which in turn depend on objective consistency, crumble away, not to be replaced by a people no longer willing to acknowledge that a bridge is, and either stands, or doesn’t, no matter how you feel. That a tail, is indeed, not a leg.
enabling notifications…
As an aside – Godfrey Elfwick’s twitter feed is a wonderful example of poe-s law grade deliberate satire.
https://twitter.com/GodfreyElfwick
Well that certainly isn’t a bunch of airy nonsense. I had no idea that I could enslave someone by using a pronoun they didn’t like! Such power!
This puts me in a aphorogenic mood:
— Ian’s Law of Territorial Invulnerability
Perhaps a bit crude, but what these fools are attempting is far cruder.
>Defecating on the Map will not change the Territory, regardless of how many laxatives you took.
*snrk* Oh dear Goddess. I wish I’d thought of that!
@Wynona Stacy Lockwood:
You and your friends are free to decide that esr is shallow and dismiss all his logic, and agree that he is a Neanderthal. He has no say in the matter.
IOW, you are proving his point, and he’s absolutely fine with that.
>IOW, you are proving his point, and he’s absolutely fine with that.
True. But then again, I don’t generally expect incisive thought from anyone sufficiently ignorant or ahistorical to think “on the right” describes me accurately.
One thing that interests me is how the OP isn’t really so much about identity as it is about making useful predictions about other people, possibly when self-identity is offered, but not necessarily.
As I’ve heard Eric say before: individuals are not groups. I’ll add further: a group isn’t even necessarily its symptoms. If a group exhibits a bundle of symptoms, it’s my duty to figure out which symptoms are truly intrinsic to the group, and which are not; if I don’t, I run the risk of making misleading predictions, and holding myself back.
If, every time I encounter symptom X, I also encounter symptom Y, it will strengthen “X -> Y” in my mind, whether or not I can identify a causal chain.
At the same time, an individual has to manage their symptoms. If the symptom is intrinsic to a group, then that individual is going to get judged as that group (e.g. a fellow judged as being black due to skin color; another judged as trans by having certain combinations of male and female morphology). Again, some of those symptoms are intrinsic, and some aren’t. The former can’t be changed; the latter can.
Finally, current tech and epistemology play a role. If tech enables an identity criterion change, then we can expect more individuals with that change; but at the same time, many people won’t be aware of it, and will run into bad predictions, even if they try to avoid them.
If that change is chosen, rather than imposed, then it makes sense that the person changing will be in a much better position to establish by example what everyone can predict, than it is for everyone to spontaneously become aware of such changes and tease out which criteria are intrinsic, which are causal, etc.
Which is a very long-winded way of saying that, for example, citing your identity as transgendered and then proceeding directly into a very bigoted remark is very likely not going to do your fellow transgenders any favors.
I was going to link to Scott’s article, but I see someone already did, so that’s great.
> What Scott correctly observes is that language is a tool with a function. If you try to change linguistic categories or usage so that they no longer assist prediction as well as they used to, people will resist your attempt because it damages the tool.
What function do you want the words “man” and “woman” to perform that is complicated by the existence of transgender people?
Consider a set of typically female attributes. {long hair, wears makeup, wears dress, high voice, plays with dolls not trucks, likes boys, uses she/her pronouns, uses women’s bathroom, XX chromosomes} There has never been one attribute that perfectly determines the category. Lesbians, tomboys, deep-voiced women, XY chromosomes with congenital androgen insensitivity; they’ve always still been classified as women, and you’d make mostly-incorrect predictions by doing otherwise.
You also can’t rely on gender alone to determine whether to date a person. Maybe you go on a few dates with a woman and then she reveals that she’s into BDSM, or wants children, or won’t have penis-in-vagina sex, or lives in New Jersey. There are plenty of things that could make or break a relationship. Nobody’s going to list all their quirks on a first date, and it’s not “fraud” if you don’t match a stereotype.
All the article says is that Claire faces difficulty dating because most straight boys like {feminine presentation, vagina}, gay ones like {masculine presentation, penis}, and she has {feminine presentation, penis}. It’s not demanding that straight boys be attracted to her. It’s just asking for sympathy. And it doesn’t even talk about how some guys violently assault their dates when they learn they’re trans, which in inexcusable. (A woman could literally defraud you, like by stealing cash from your wallet on a date or something, and it wouldn’t be a license to murder them.)
So back to language as a tool with a function. If you call Claire a man, you’re saying that someone with makeup, women’s clothing, a female name, a typically female hormone balance, etc, is nevertheless a man, because of one physical attribute that almost certainly isn’t involved in your dealings with them. (And if they’re “post-op”, you’d be insisting on an attribute that *used* to be there.) That seems more damaging to the use of the word “man” than just calling someone a “woman” who has a penis but fits many other female attributes.
> you can feel an identity as a programmer as strongly as you want, but if you can’t either already sling code or are visibly working hard on repairing that deficiency, you simply don’t make the nut.
Trans people work pretty damn hard to meet expectations for the gender category they want to fit in. Clothing, voice training, posture, hormone therapy, various surgeries… If anything they have to overcompensate. A cis woman can have a deep voice, wear a shirt and pants, cut her hair short, and still confidently correct people who call her a man, and expect them to just go with it.
> It’s time to say this plainly: people who privilege feelings over facts are not sane, and the facts always win in the end. Though, unfortunately, often not before the insanity has inflicted a great deal of unnecessary suffering.
I quite agree.
>So back to language as a tool with a function. If you call Claire a man, you’re saying that someone with makeup, women’s clothing, a female name, a typically female hormone balance, etc, is nevertheless a man. That seems more damaging to the use of the word “man” than just calling someone a “woman” who has a penis but fits many other female attributes.
But my argument isn’t about what I want to call Claire, at all. It isn’t even about whether she’s “really” transsexual, in whatever sense that’s a meaningful claim. At most, it’s about whether I should repeat Claire’s identity claims to other people in a way that is likely to deceive them.
What I’m pointing out is that the combination of (a) presenting as female, to (b) heterosexual boys “she” wants to date, (c) while in possession of a penis, is fraudulent, and “she” has no warrant to be surprised or upset when the clothes come off and they reject “her”.
I can only feel sympathetic to such behavior in the rather detached way I feel sympathy for a delusional psychotic who hears voices – actually, less so, because the psychotic’s capacity to know better is probably severely impaired, while Claire’s may well not be.
Again, whether Claire is “really” transsexual, and whatever that means, is not really relevant. Neither are all the edge cases you cite. Nor is the possibility that Claire might be assaulted (which I think everyone can agree would be horribly wrong).
For some time now, I’ve claimed that I identify as “Mythical.” Now, how others take that is not subject to any claim I might make. Though there are times I witness some folks.. and well, I start looking for the way IN to the labyrinth.
“You are a Neanderthal” is not an argument. Are you sure it’s wise to dignify it with a logical response, as opposed to a rhetorical one? (Are we sure ‘neanderthal’ is an insult the way it’s intended to be?)
>utter drivel that should not have survived five minutes of thought.
And didn’t. Humans are liars. Today’s game is about pretending we’re taking the idea seriously and competing to see who can still defect without getting caught. It’s super fun this go-around, because we’ve got several jurisdictions to outlaw anyone who refuses to play the game.
We’re rich, right? We can afford some tricky games that erode the economy, right? Luckily, a life dedicated to playing arbitrary games isn’t pointless at all.
Bad ESR, bad! How are we supposed to assess your sportmanship if you refuse to play with us? Oh by the way, there’s an entry fee…
If it comes up I identify as a Kerbal. The fact that explosives and other high energy devices are considered “controlled substances / devices” is an oppressive affront against my sexuality and culture!
Let them chew on that one.
I forget the origin of the quote, but someone said something along the lines of, “Gender may not be binary, but it is certainly bimodal”. Claiming that we should “abolish gender” (and I have heard this claim) is absurd – as far as categories/clusters of human beings go it’s probably the most distinct category/cluster I can think of and has an enormous amount of predictive value.
At the same time, I think there’s a flipside to your definition of “identity” as “a set of predictive claims”. Namely, if medicine/biotech/engineering gets good enough, it will be entirely possible to change gender identity. Hell, maybe in the future, some people will do it as a matter of routine. (I doubt you would shy away from this conclusion, but I bet a lot of social conservatives would.) And, all things considered, I’m pretty sympathetic to the idea. Assuming that the technology exists, if you really feel like you should be a man/woman/other when your physical characteristics suggest otherwise, I’d say go for it. (I think this argument also applies to race and is why I find some of the neoreactionary talk I’ve heard so tedious – why are arguing about fake racial superiority when genetic engineering could give us the real thing?)
Of course, this doesn’t resolve what we should do now. I don’t remember the study, but I think I remember seeing data that showed that basically everyone with body integrity disorder who ended up disabling/amputating the limb regretted it later. It’s appropriate to call a desire to remove a perfectly functioning limb “mental illness” and, although I hate infringing on anyone’s freedom to do whatever they want with their own body, I think forcibly preventing them from mutilating themselves is the least bad option.
The question I have is whether or not this is true or not for transexuals and I’m betting there’s a lot of confounding factors. Plus, the highly politicized nature of the debate is going to make finding good studies difficult. But in a properly done series of studies, I can imagine a few possibilities:
– (100% – epsilon) of transsexuals regret transitioning; in this case, it’s just mental illness. Ban doctors from performing these kinds of procedures.
– A statistically significant percentage of transexuals are happier/have higher quality of life as measured via a suitable proxy (maybe, suicide rate goes down compared to those who are denied transitioning?) In this case, definitely don’t ban the procedures. “First, do no harm” and all that.
– Data is confounded/unclear. If I had to guess, this is where we actually are. And in this case, I think the best thing is to let people do what they want.
>(I doubt you would shy away from this conclusion, but I bet a lot of social conservatives would.)
That is correct. If we actually had Varley-equivalent technology for sex changes from the Ophiuchi Hotline, Claire could alter matters so that her presentation as female to the teenage boys she wants to date is not fraudulent. The whole issue of identity claims as deception would not arise unless there was some general notion abroad that a person who had once been male could never be female – an essentialist claim that I would reject.
>A statistically significant percentage of transexuals are happier/have higher quality of life
I think you have to change this to “a majority within 95% confidence” for your argument to work.
On the evidence I see, it is doubtful that reassignment surgery meets this test (some of its pioneers have so decided and will no longer do it). But the data is noisy and equivocal; I don’t feel enough confidence to make a judgment.
PapayaSF:
Indeed. If gender is a social construct, why should gender identity be any more natural, real, solid, or tangible? If anything, I’d say it’s even higher up the abstraction ladder.
esr:
*necessarily
I suppose you reject that label because in your country it’s associated with Christian fundamentalism or something like that; but from a Latin American – and possibly European – point of view, you do belong to the right wing. Fine by me, mind you; I’ll gleefully classify myself that way as well, for I oppose both statism and the leftist mindset that has produced such concepts as “gender identity” (which, incidentally, is state-sanctioned in my country) and forces us to recognize them.
> But my argument isn’t about what I want to call Claire, at all. It isn’t even about whether she’s “really” transsexual, in whatever sense that’s a meaningful claim. At most, it’s about whether I should repeat Claire’s identity claims to other people in a way that is likely to deceive them.
I think we agree that it’s not a meaningful claim, just like “Is Pluto a planet?” isn’t meaningful. There are just various attributes, and we define categories that conveniently group attributes.
> What I’m pointing out is that the combination of (a) presenting as female, to (b) heterosexual boys “she” wants to date, (c) while in possession of a penis, is fraudulent, and “she” has no warrant to be surprised or upset when the clothes come off and they reject “her”.
> I can only feel sympathetic to such behavior in the rather detached way I feel sympathy for a delusional psychotic who hears voices – actually, less so, because the psychotic’s capacity to know better is probably severely impaired, while Claire’s may well not be.
It is not fraud to defy stereotypes. I don’t think Claire’s surprised when she’s rejected—disappointed, but not surprised. It’s an unavoidable fact that most of the boys who are attracted by her public presentation are turned off by her penis. Not all, but most. She’s not denying that.
But she has no duty to act a certain way for the sake of others’ expectations. Flirting with a guy at a bar is not a contractual agreement to sex. Wearing a blue shirt in Wal-Mart is not a contractual agreement to help lost customers. And presenting as female is not a contractual agreement to have a penis.
Hell, dates aren’t transactions. They’re a way of getting to know each other. That Claire has a penis is one fact her dates learn about her, and either they’re okay with it or they’re not.
You keep putting quotes around “she”. Clearly you don’t think Claire qualifies as a woman. Why not? What would she have to do to qualify? If your answer is “get bottom surgery”, then do you ask people in public what’s under their clothes so you can refer to them correctly? And what about intersex people? If your answer is “be born with XY chromosomes”, how do you deal with androgen insensitives, or XXY, or XXX? You can’t dismiss them as edge cases, because gender is an attribute with effects on most aspects of life, not just dating, and it’s one that people infer right away from details like what you wear and how you speak. Why would you demand or expect people to signal their gender based on one biological attribute instead of all the other more important ones?
Like, if I refer to my friend in conversation as “she”, I’m implying various things by that. The listener can assume if they met this friend, she’d speak and dress and act and think a certain way. But any of those assumptions could end up not being true for this specific friend. And if the listener wants to interact with the friend, like by getting them a birthday gift, they’re better off asking about the individual instead of extrapolating from their gender. Trans women “are” women, and trans men “are” men, in the sense that they fit naturally into those categories using the relevant attributes.
And about pronouns. If you called Claire “she”, you’d be signaling that you expect her to wear bikinis; to have a female name; to use the girls’ bathroom; etc. Those would all be true beliefs. If you called Claire “he”, you’d be signaling a bunch of false ones, but at least you’d successfuly imply that she has a penis (which isn’t your business) and XY chromosomes (which, while probably true, is not actually known by anyone and totally irrelevant). Calling her “she” in quotes is just snide. You’re not adhering to what you think is true *or* what she thinks is true, you’re just clearly signaling “I don’t trust you to know your own gender”.
>And presenting as female is not a contractual agreement to have a penis.
It certainly isn’t. I think you meant that the other way around, sort of.
But presenting as female isn’t an “agreement” to anything – no meeting of the minds is implied. It is an offer to enter into a set of transactional scripts. Agreement only happens at the point when someone else accepts the offer.
>But she has no duty to act a certain way for the sake of others’ expectations.
In the most abstract sense, not. But if you want to be understood, you have to speak a public language. If you want to have a successful social interaction, you have to have the ability and the will to perform in a way that matches closely enough to other parties’ expectations for the script to continue. So while there is no duty in an absolute moral sense, you’ll be very lonely if you refuse to perform to any expectations at all.
>Hell, dates aren’t transactions.
You have too narrow a reading of the word “transaction”, then.
>You keep putting quotes around “she”. Clearly you don’t think Claire qualifies as a woman. Why not?
Because when the heterosexual teenage boy she’s trying to have sex with sees a penis, he’s not going to think “woman”. He’s going to think “Barf! Creepy pervert guy pretending!” Which is at least as valid as her ascription, if we’ve given up having objective criteria for gender.
All your talk of edge cases – all of which I acknowledge as having some truth to it – is going to be irrelevant to that boy. Probably irrelevant to Claire, too, as physical intersexes are so rare that even with the prior that she’s transsexual the odds that she’s an intersex in any detectable way are still low.
>You’re not adhering to what you think is true *or* what she thinks is true, you’re just clearly signaling “I don’t trust you to know your own gender”.
Accurately signaled, because in fact I don’t. Given her reported behavior, the likelihood that she is sufficiently confused or insane not to know seems quite high.
@Jorge Dujan
It might help to know that many Conservatives over here think Libertarians are just Leftists with a few good ideas. Neither of these maps is accurate. And both of them say far more about the speaker than the speakee (this is a word now).
The situation is complicated because historically Conservatives and Libertarians have been allies against Communists and their brethren, and come to similar conclusions on a number of issues. They are also close enough that people regularly cross the boundary between them, but they disagree on way too many deep issues to be considered anything more than medium distance allies, let alone the same.
> They are also close enough that people regularly cross the boundary between them
Jorge, there’s a ha-ha only-serious joke Libertarians tell about this. To wit:
Every once in a while a Libertarian gives up and defects to the Republicans. Whenever this happens, the average IQ of both groups increases.
> If we actually had Varley-equivalent technology for sex changes from the Ophiuchi Hotline, Claire could alter matters so that her presentation as female to the teenage boys she wants to date is not fraudulent.
Okay, that answers my question. But it just raises others. Her presentation is already close enough to a biologically XX woman that boys call her “beautiful”, so I’m guessing your objection is still that she has a penis? And that modern surgery is insufficient to change that?
First of all, surgery *is* good enough that a trans woman can have sex without seeming unusual at all. It’s not always that successful, but it can be.
Second of all, I think you’re mistaken about your own use of words. If you’re talking to me about our taxi driver, or your lawyer, or my friend of a friend, and you refer to them with pronouns, you are not trying to let me know what their genitals look like and whether I’d want to date them. You are letting me know the public aspects of their gender that were relevant in whatever context is being brought up. By those aspects, trans women are obviously women and trans men obviously men. (Attempting to scrutinize their bodies for signs of how testosterone/estrogen affected their development, and refer to them differently thereby, is highly prone to failure. Places with “bathroom laws” have thrown out more insufficiently feminine cis women from bathrooms than trans women, let alone the “men dressing as women to sneak in” that supposedly motivate such laws.)
>I’m guessing your objection is still that she has a penis?
No, it’s more her conspicuous non-possession of a vagina.
My real objection is that her identity claim implies the ability, and willingness, to do something she can’t do – that is, have mutually satisfying sex with a heterosexual boy who wants to put his dick in a pussy, not feel halfway conned into performing some sort of homosexual behavior that he probably finds disgusting.
>You are letting me know the public aspects of their gender that were relevant in whatever context is being brought up.
That is true. But gender is almost never irrelevant, even when the context is not sexual. One important reason for this is that male and female brains differ; the differences in organization are laid down relatively early in fetal morphogenesis and produce fairly dramatic differences in distribution of various important cognitive traits. As a well-known example, male-organized brains are superior at 3D kinematics; as a less-well-known one, female-organized brains are superior at recall of visual detail. These are not small differences in means but really dramatic ones, so much so that you need to be well over into the right tail of your sex’s distribution before you match the average for the other sex.
I’d be prepared to stipulate that for almost all purposes, the sex of your brain (that is, whether it was resculpted by androgen exposure during morphogenesis) is more important than the sex of your genitals. (Well, at least, unless a boy is looking at your penis when he expected a pussy.) But it is rare for those not to be congruent, and even more rare in men or women who present as heterosexual rather than gay.
I have a venn diagram of identities, which varies with the preceived transactions possible. “Joyce’s husband the scorekeeper” overlaps with “Uncle Dave”, overlaps with my work identity, “dcollierbrown”.
Some are even obolete: “fatso” no longer applies (;-))
Providential:
https://milo.yiannopoulos.net/2017/05/pee-privilege/
(There are probably others but this is the most sourced)
Now pee-privilege is a Kafka-trap.
Above I said “live and let live”. Let me put it more simply.
You want someone who is by most sane and scientific definitons a man or male to be able to call himself or identify himself as a woman or female.
But why don’t you extend to me the same privilege on the same basis?
Why can’t I call this man/male by using the pronouns I desire to use or FEEL should be used?
Neither of us are “gods” or kings and should be “equal” in our rights. If I’m offended by the inaccuracy of their self-description and use the anatomically correct pronouns, and they are offended, why is their feelings and being offended any more or less important than mine?
An earlier comment tried to use pettifoggery – what if the man wears a dress or uses make-up? Sorry, drag-queens are still men. Except for a tiny minority of intersex, everyone is either a man or a woman. Changing the appearance does NOT change the essence.
But take any common activity that is split by gender, e.g. sports. If a man wears a dress, can he compete as a woman? This is already creating problems. Women’s world records generally correspond to 15 year old boys. What will the olympics do (which also had to address intersex competitors). What about a Women in STEM scholarship? Or even race – can I “identify” as a Native American so get all the affirmative action goodies?
If we are to have a rule of law, based on science, it needs to be based on genetics, but appealable if there is a conflict (the XY but androgen resistant woman – one actually delivered a baby in the UK). But in this case we are trying to determine reality, not trying to supplant it with someone’s imagination.
This transactional interpretation of identity strikes me as reasonable if not necessarily correct, but what’s more interesting to me is that it also seems to overlap heavily with the only sensible way I know of to cash out the oft-repeated term “social construct”.
Amidst a hell of a lot of “educate yourself”, special pleading, buzzword soup and angry handwaving, “social construct” (in the context of personal identity, as opposed to, say, color names) has been defended to me by a reasonable person willing to pin down meanings in clear language exactly once that I can recall, where it meant that your identity is literally constructed by society – i.e. you are the thing other people take you to be, which will be based on how you interact and present, not what you’re thinking or feeling or wanting. This is about past experience rather than prediction, but otherwise strikingly similar.
In a great many science fiction stories, robots are gendered. Helen O’Loy is one of the classic examples. These robots rarely have anything resembling genitals, and certainly don’t have chromosomes. But I’ve rarely noticed anyone claiming this is some sort of scientific mistake. People who are willing to point out all sorts of scientific mistakes in science fiction stories claim that Lester del Rey made an error in referring to Helen as a “she.” The “Transformers” franchise is far from a model of good hard science fiction, but no one seems to think that it is a huge scientific error that Optimus Prime is referred to as a “he” instead of an “it.”
The way aliens are treated in science fiction is similar. Piccolo from the “Dragonball” franchise is referred to as a “he” even though he can give birth. So it seems like gender is something people assign to creatures that resemble cismen and ciswomen far less than transpeople do. Which suggests that it isn’t about biology.
What this suggests to me is that gender, like science fiction, is a radial category. The prototype for man and women are cismen and ciswomen who have penis/vaginas and can impregnate/get pregnant. However, people who resemble the prototype in some ways, but not in others, such as transpeople, intersex people, aliens, and robots, still fit in the category.
Under this model, the gender-identity discourse consists of transpeople insisting they resemble the prototype closely enough to be included in the radial category. They are opposed by people who stubbornly insist on treating gender as a classical category, even though it isn’t.
>Under this model, the gender-identity discourse consists of transpeople insisting they resemble the prototype closely enough to be included in the radial category. They are opposed by people who stubbornly insist on treating gender as a classical category, even though it isn’t.
OK. That’s reasonable. But…does it seem to you that I am treating gender as a classical category? If it does, how would my arguments have to change to avoid that error?
There is no ‘spectrum’ of sexes evidenced by the existence of XXX/XXY (or more) chromosomes. These are genetic defects, male and female. The greater the divergence from XX & XY, the greater the physical abnormalities, health problems, retardations, and shortened life expectancies.
As we currently do not have the medical ability to shift between XX and XY, the tern “transsexual” is utter nonsense. Hair, makeup & wardrobe do not a female make. If you throw in some cosmetic surgery, you are *still* not a female…but I do have concerns about your mental health if you would mutilate your body in the belief that you will accomplish the impossible.
Given an understanding of “gender” as a more role-based identity, I am comfortable with the term “transgender”, as one can outwardly appear to be ‘conventionally’ male or female. Most of the time, I see rather stereotypical affectations being applied, so the illusion doesn’t hold for very long.
That said….I have had a couple of “crying game” moments, where the male was utterly convincing as a woman (no, none of these experiences were in a bedroom ;) and, after talking for a long while, had a bucket-of-ice-water-in-face realization slam into me. I’ve never had that experience with females presenting themselves as men.
I will not endorse a scientifically incorrect delusion by using incorrect pronouns. Nor will I participate in childish babbling by using ‘alternate’ pronouns like “xe”, “zir” etc.
@Erik:
That’s a distinction without too much of a difference; past experience shows that past experience is one of the most powerful tools for making predictions.
The faux outrage over “misgendering” and “deadnaming” has other, far more accurate names:
Gaslighting. Brainwashing. It is psychological abuse. It is insisting that you say you see three lights when there are four.
The shibboleths of the Left are designed to break people’s minds. This is why we need “decodewords”, terms which accurately describe what the Left wishes to obfuscate and deprive them of their power.
My $.02 on identity: I worked for a few years at an educational institution that had English classes for immigrants. Many of them had left countries embroiled in civil strife. I learned a few things from them, one of them being this — when a civil war breaks out on ethnic/racial/religious lines, you don’t get to choose a side. The other side chooses it for you.
I am also a trans woman, but, unlike Wynona, I’m not about to berate you. I am troubled, however, by the conclusions you seem to be adopting.
While in public presenting as a woman, I look, speak, and act like a woman in all ways. What does it matter what set of genitals is under my skirt? If you’re not my lover, and you’re not my doctor, why do you care?
Unlike Claire, I am not seeking romantic relationships with heterosexual men. I am already in a relationship, thank you very much, and even wear an engagement ring to show this. If I interact with people on a non-romantic basis, am I somehow being “fraudulent” towards them if I assert my identity as a woman? If they’re not harboring expectations of being able to access my vagina, does it matter whether I have one or not for the purposes of our interaction?
It’s bitterly ironic that some of the same people who I agree with on so many other topics seem to be the ones that want to deny my very existence, and, in the worst cases, support those lawmakers that want to legislate me out of existence. I’m not saying you’re one of those, but what you’re writing is troubling to me in the same fashion.
>If I interact with people on a non-romantic basis, am I somehow being “fraudulent” towards them if I assert my identity as a woman?
I’m not concerned by you. I’m not even greatly concerned by Claire. She’s just one child, possibly confused, possibly insane.
What concerns me is people who, for political reasons, want to gaslight behavior like Claire’s out of existence – to insist that, at one and the same time, I am (a) required to accept Claire’s self-ascribed identity as a woman despite the fraud she purveys, but (b) I may never question anyone’s identity-politics dismissal of myself as a cis white male, and (c) as a white male I am required to accept someone else’s ideologically-driven decision about whether Rachel Dolezal is black.
If “identity” hadn’t become weaponized, the currency of ego and grievance and status claims, I wouldn’t need to point out that nobody actually gets to choose theirs – they can only make offers. You’re not special that way, and while I don’t judge you I reserve the right to do so – to either accept or reject your offer of a “female” identity – should we ever interact directly.
@Amy Tapie – You are not misrepresenting yourself from the angle of sexual relationships, sure….but what if a guy doesn’t realize you are male and starts getting ideas? At what point do you clue him in? Is your significant other male or female?
I would hope that you would not join a female sports team (claiming to be female), as your biological sex would likely give you an unfair advantage. How about presenting as female to gain advantage in STEM (or Women In Tech) academic entrance?
I won’t criticize you for taking advantage of cheap drinks on a Ladies’ Night, however….I hope your male liver bankrupts them ;)
There’s a principled consequentialist claim that the strict application of these labels has caused a great deal of harm, and as soon as we liberated people from them life got better for many, many people.
To put it another way, I think it is quite clear that people ascribe far more predictive power to these labels then they actually carry, ultimately to great harm, and we’re probably better off with looser definitions of them.
To put it yet another way, if you’re sad about the loss of predictive power that comes with a looser application of these labels, you were probably kidding yourself about how accurate those predictions were in the first place.
@Sean C. – What? When I see a guy and refer to him as “he”, the ‘predictive power’ is likely to be edging up around the thick end of 100%. What more can I do? What ‘harm’ are you referring to?
Personally, I am not troubled at all with ‘trans’ people. I feel compassion for them and their obvious disconnect from reality. It feels cruel to be ‘accepting’ of such delusions….and I suspect such ‘acceptance’ is promoted more out of narcissistic virtue-signalling desire, than concern for their well-being.
I think the argument can be simplified further, to remove the notion of “identity” entirely:
The statements “I am $gender” and “I am $race” are treated like any other factual claim, as a compressed set of predictions, dependent not only on the text of the statement but also on the context within which it was uttered. (Of course, this excludes epiphenomena. As it should.)
So, if you’re (say) genitally male but neurologically female, describing yourself as female to a potential sexual partner is inaccurate (even deceitful), whereas the same statement made to (say) a potential business partner is not. A gender claim, like any other claim, is true to the extent that it can reasonably be expected to give rise to accurate predictions on relevant questions by the hearer.
And while you have the right to make false statements*, I also have the right to not believe you, to decline from repeating those statements, and even to contradict them.
No specially-treated notions of “identity”, no worrying about “transaction”; just operationalist epistemology and contextual language processing.
* Of course this does not indemnify the speaker from any reliance or fraud cases which may be founded on those false statements… but the statement itself is not intrinsically unethical.
@Edward Cree:
But why does the statement even need to be made?
Unlike Claire, I am not seeking romantic relationships with heterosexual men. I am already in a relationship, thank you very much, and even wear an engagement ring to show this. If I interact with people on a non-romantic basis, am I somehow being “fraudulent” towards them if I assert my identity as a woman? If they’re not harboring expectations of being able to access my vagina, does it matter whether I have one or not for the purposes of our interaction?
Given the responses: no, I’d say you’re not being fraudulent. In fact, by the apparent standards of the crowd here, you’d be identified in good standing; advertising as engaged, not looking for romance elsewhere (the latter is actually more important by far), and to address Dan’s response, any guy who ever tried to hit on you and got sniffy when you reject deserves to be mocked. (If he can’t read “not interested” from body language, he’s a bit of a doof. (Confession: I could fall for this.) If he forgets to check for the ring, he’s a confirmed doof.) And if he found out you were trans and made a lot of hay over it, he’d get mocked again and we’d be on alert to watch for him trying anything violent, because enough of us have seen or heard how that can go.
…in the limit, I suppose it’s best if you advertise as trans-woman – that would afford the best predictions for others – but personally I don’t see myself making many predictions differently from “engaged woman” in that case, and there are reasons to withhold that information. That terrain is complicated in ways I find interesting.
>Given the responses: no, I’d say you’re not being fraudulent. In fact, by the apparent standards of the crowd here, you’d be identified in good standing;
In case it’s not clear, I agree with Paul. My previous reply to Amy Tapie may have read as hostile in a way it was not intended to be.
@Dan – I would hope any guy “getting ideas” would be deterred if I displayed my engagement ring and said, “Sorry, I’m taken.” That statement would be simple truth. (I had that happen to me a few weeks ago…a fellow stopped me as I was leaving a diner with friends and asked me where I’d gotten the pendant I was wearing, then said, “Can I ask you another question? Where’ve you been all my life?” I giggled, showed my ring, and said, “Sorry, I’m taken.” He laughed, too, and I left.)
My significant other is, in fact, female, and is highly accepting and supportive of me. We got together long before I came out to her, which was around 4-1/2 years ago. I can honestly say that, without her acceptance and support, I would not be the woman I am today.
I’m not interested in joining sports teams. As for a “women in tech” event…well, I’m a woman and I’m a software engineer, do I qualify? If such an event is intended to counter a perceived bias against women in technology, it may very well be that I have more bias against me because of being a trans woman in technology….
And you needn’t fear me bankrupting the bars on Ladies’ Night. I can’t drink. Gout, you know. ;)
@ESR – Quite frankly, I dislike the whole concept of “identity politics.” All I generally ask of people is that they treat me as they would any other woman. Otherwise, I prefer to mind my own business.
And I think Rachel Dolezal is a few gigs short of a terabyte, myself. There’s at least some basis for explaining transgender people in terms of biology; for instance, there have been analyses done on the brain structure of trans women that show they’re more like that of cis women than they are of cis men. (See this, as an example.) No similar basis exists for “transracial” people.
If we were to ever meet in person, I’ll let you judge for yourself what my appearance and demeanor is like. If you’re like almost all other people I know, though, you’ll come down firmly on the side of “female.” But you’re right, I can’t predict your reaction in advance.
>All I generally ask of people is that they treat me as they would any other woman.
Is that really a reasonable request, though? Sorry, this is not intended to be a hostile question – but if I’m interpreting your back story correctly you probably have an androgenized brain (see my previous remark about brain sex being more important in most circumstances than genital sex).
I thus wouldn’t expect your behavior to be female-typical, at all – and indeed it has not been in this very conversation. Would you actually expect me to ignore the difference in priors between “has an un-androgenized brain” and “has an androgenized brain”? If so, why? That is, why should I throw way information that increases my likelihood of correctly modeling your behavior, capabilities, and preferences?
@Paul Brinkley – I don’t hide the fact that I’m a trans woman; that’s what it says under “Gender” on my Facebook profile for instance. I just don’t mention the fact unless it’s important in the context I’m interacting in.
Now, I’m flattered when I attract male attention, but I definitely don’t want it turning too serious. That’s why I wear the engagement ring. (My significant other insists I wear it, in fact!) I’ve also gotten occasional attention from lesbian women, which is also flattering, but the same argument applies.
@ESR – I didn’t mean subtle things like that. Just the common courtesy of calling me by my name, referring to me as “she” and “her,” and things like that. I won’t even insist that you hold the door open for me, although I do appreciate that courtesy when I receive it. :)
I certainly act more feminine than my significant other, who is a self-described “redneck bitch from Hell” and proclaims, “I ain’t no lady!” She’d be the first to tell you that, in fact. Yet she was born female. (When she first saw me dressed as Amy, albeit without makeup, her first reaction was, “I’m jealous, you look more feminine than I do!”) Could you make predictions about her behavior based on the fact that her brain is un-androgenized?
Aside from just common social courtesy, you can think and predict as you like. As I said, I don’t hide the fact that I’m trans. I’m generally very open about discussing it with other people, because it’s my firm belief that the more people actually know us transgender people as people, and know about what makes us the way we are, the fewer people will hate and fear us.
>Could you make predictions about her behavior based on the fact that her brain is un-androgenized?
I admit, my first reaction would be to wonder about that premise.
>it’s my firm belief that the more people actually know us transgender people as people, and know about what makes us the way we are, the fewer people will hate and fear us.
I don’t think anyone in this discussion thread hates or fears you.
I’ve known a number of transgender people and haven’t hated or feared any of them. I have wondered how many are mislabeled mental cases; I admit to being perhaps too influenced by the first trans I knew, an SF fan back in the 1980s who was quite obviously (though harmlessly) bonkers. That is, in a way you are equally obviously not.
Mind you, I don’t have any values-driven desire to believe that trans people are crazy – given some of my friendships that would actually be a very inconvenient conclusion. But you should read what I previously wrote about this.
@Amy Tapie:
That’s more than reasonable, and given your statements about your appearance, should be fairly easy to remember, if not simply automatic for most people.
Frankly, if someone were to wave a magic wand and get everybody to agree on a third set of pronouns for people who don’t want to identify as male or female, I wouldn’t even find that a huge problem, and would probably manage to remember the correct thing to say most of the time.
But when I see things like this, well, sometimes I can’t even remember people’s names right, much less how they would like to be referred to in the third person.
Our species evolved complex language skill, and it persisted, because it “worked” in the sense that it aided our ability to survive and thrive in a world of extreme existential threat and hardship. We can deduce that accurate communication was an imperative in that ancient environment, and we are descended from the survivors that possessed that trait.
Today, we are squandering that heritage by the egregious abuse of language that is revealed in this post. That tragedy is far greater than the hurt feelings of the insane.
My direct experience with trans women is limited; I only personally know two, both of whom I consider friends, and have only met one IRL. (The other is a good friend on Second Life.) I don’t consider either one lacking in sanity. I’m willing to accept that they are mentally female; I have no reason to believe otherwise. The one I know on Second Life is scheduled to undergo the surgery in September.
I’m willing to agree with them when they tell me they’re women. I’m in no position to argue with them, even if they were to completely disrobe in front of me. I can’t crawl inside their heads and tell for myself what they feel they are. I’m unlikely to find myself in a position where the physical hardware makes any kind of a difference, anyway.
As far as I’m concerned, you can be whoever you want to be, as long as it doesn’t affect me. Claiming fake American Indian ancestry in order to get a preference in a faculty appointment, though? That’s where it starts to affect me.
Fundamentally, if it weren’t for the whole identity politics grievance industry, this would be a tempest in a test tube. As long as the Left insists on identifying people by irrelevancies, though, they’ll have to deal with crap like this.
And yes, Wynona, I’m a Republican who supported Donald Trump (reluctantly at first, but more and more as his administration goes along). I’ll point out, along with others, that Eric most assuredly is not, just as he will correct anyone who says I am a libertarian to him
@TomA:
I cannot imagine there was ever a time when language was not used as a weapon.
Discussions about identity politics, especially in this forum, always seem to get bogged down due to two reasons: an availability heuristic that suggests that rare but shocking stories (in this case someone complaining about issues in their sex life when they don’t have the honesty to openly discuss their gender / sexual identity mismatch) are par for the course; and the fact that the media likes to blow up outrageous statements by self important idiots into scandals that are bigger than Ben Hur. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of trans people are normal, nice people like all others and are totally aware that they need to be open about their identity to those will be encountering them in a sexual context. However, since we all have completely non sexual encounters with 99.9% of the people who feature in our daily lives, that means that virtually no one is on a need to know basis. Perhaps in the arena of professional sports an exception must be made, but that’s pretty much irrelevant.
Admittedly, some trans people are arseholes in the same way that some cis people are arseholes. And many gender theorists will defend the arseholes in their attempt to defy common sense and consideration for others. That is what this blog post is notionally responding to, but it makes no attempt to distinguish between its antagonists (gender theorists high on crack) and those it will be misinterpreted as referring to (ordinary people who just happen to dress, look and wish to be given basic customary treatment as if they were born with the opposite sex to what they originally had).
Eric, two things: be careful how you write because while people have no inherent right not to be offended, something like this seems guaranteed to cause a lot of upset that was totally unnecessary in making its point; and also try to get a better perspective on how common things are in real life. When the left comes out with a statement like “shut up and listen”, the valuable kernel in the mess of kafkatraps surrounding it is that you probably don’t have a good sense of what is common and uncommon when it comes to people’s lives which are quite different to your own and especially when the group is relatively small in the general population. It’s worth trying to gain an appreciation of what daily life is like for them so that you don’t waste time complaining about stories that only ever occur in the tabloid press.
Alternatively, maybe you do have a decent understanding of that, but then focus on the real issue here which is the way that the most juvenile sociological analysis from teenage tumblr accounts has monopolised discussions about social issues today.
Just to offer a rather serious and real world example of what ESR writes of … the following was posted some time ago on a “Military Wives” chat group in Twentynine Palms, California in regards to someone at MCAGCC …
“My husband and I can’t conceive children. He seems rather bothered by it. Do you think I should tell him I used to be a man?”
Amy Tapie wrote: Quite frankly, I dislike the whole concept of “identity politics.” All I generally ask of people is that they treat me as they would any other woman. Otherwise, I prefer to mind my own business.
…are you sure you’re not trying to get friendly attention from all the guys here? :-D
(Seriously, I’m kinda with Patrick: should be easy enough to remember. But if you don’t mind, I for one won’t think of you as just another woman, either. You say you’re trans; I would probably see you that way, for all the missteps that might also imply. But then, you’re also not just another trans. On that note, I’m kinda bummed about your gout…)
As for “androgenized brains”, I have to say, on a layman’s level, I’m honestly unsure about what I’d do with such a factoid. There’s simply too much variation within that, as Amy’s anecdote about her SO illustrates. I’d be much too occupied with object-level characteristics of a person. If “brain sex” is a thing, it’d be hard for me to treat it any more than an academic curiosity.
—
I ran across another case of unexpected racial identity aside from Dolezal, a year or so ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t bookmark it at the time. All I can remember for sure about him was that he’s male, dark hair, large build, claims he grew up in a black neighborhood to the point that culturally, he’s as black as any other fellow of color. He might be a journalist. I think he was adopted by black parents, which would explain the upbringing. He doesn’t seem bonkers; he’s quite aware he’s fair-skinned, but is making a cultural claim, and can apparently support it. I might have run across him while researching some gun issue. He’s not Michael Strickland or Shaun King.
Does this ring any bells for anyone else?
esr:
But last year you registered as a Republican in an attempt to stop Trump. That proves an intelligent libertarian can have legitimate reasons to join the GOP; you did it temporarily because you wanted to make a difference at a critical time, whereas others might do it permanently due to perceived limitations of the non-aggression principle (such as the paradox of tolerance). I’m not saying the latter has actually happened (I’m not acquainted with such socio-political mechanics), but it does seem possible.
Dan:
You might enjoy this piece by Walter Williams: “Transgenderism Can Be Helpful”.
@Paul Brinkley:
> Does this ring any bells for anyone else?
Steve Martin in The Jerk?
I think a confounding issue that causes problems in discussion of trans that is there are observationally at least two categories of trans-people, which I will label “conforming” and “snowflakes”. The conforming are generally trying as hard as is compatible with physical reality and their happiness to present as the appropriate standard gender in the context of the society they live in. The snowflakes generally are trying to present as some unique point either in between the standard categories or outside them completely. I’ll leave out the otherkin and such.
From my personal experience, the snowflakes are the real issue. Very few of the conforming I have met insist I use nonstandard awkward pronouns (personally, I insist snowflakes refer to me as Your Grace), expect I telepathically intuit their preferred social behaviors, or yell at me for anything other than behavior that would also be stupid towards non-trans examples of the gender.
I think this also fits nicely into Eric’s thesis. Certainly the conforming have differences, but once I account for that my expectations of their behavior based on their presentation is accurate, and usually within the normal variation. The snowflakes make this behavioral prediction (deliberately?) difficult and taxing of my time and effort. I have to remember the (sometimes large) list of individual issues, and remember it for each person. And that assumes they don’t change it again next week.
“But then again, I don’t generally expect incisive thought from anyone sufficiently ignorant or ahistorical to think “on the right” describes me accurately.”
As far as I can tell, you seem like you’re on the right because you take “right wing” sources of information much more seriously than you take “left-wing” sources of information. I kinda-sorta suspect this comes from your general worries about Stalinism, which aren’t very valid in post-Reagan America.
>I kinda-sorta suspect this comes from your general worries about Stalinism, which aren’t very valid in post-Reagan America.
*hollow laughter*
No, it comes from being able to see the fingerprint of Soviet memetic weapons. Even today, “left-wing” sources are rotten with that corruption. Soviet propaganda memes were internalized over generations by many people who genuinely had (and have) no idea they’re running a program designed by Active Measures and propagated by Willi Munzenberg’s apparat and its successors. Most of the few people who really understand the problem are former members of the apparat themselves, people like former General Ion Pacepa of the Securitate. And they can’t get enough Westerners to pay attention.
> > A statistically significant percentage of transexuals are happier/have higher quality of life
>
> I think you have to change this to “a majority within 95% confidence” for your argument to work.
This seems like a very difficult threshold to set. I’m comfortable giving upper and lower “bounds”: if, empirically, almost everyone regrets X later (where X is some behavior that is plausibly self-harm), then stop them. If a majority think it improved their life, despite the side-effects, then certainly allow it. But that leaves a lot of middle ground where I don’t trust any particular group of people to make that decision for other people. There’s a lot of things that are statistically bad for people that we don’t try to stop them from doing to themselves.
I can’t think of any answer to this question that I like.
> As far as I’m concerned, you can be whoever you want to be, as long as it doesn’t affect me.
What about insisting on using the women’s restroom? What about wanting to play on the women’s sports team?
Hint: you might want to think about why restrooms and sports teams are segregated by gender.
@ Patrick Maupin – “I cannot imagine there was ever a time when language was not used as a weapon.”
The evolutionary response when encountering someone who uses language inaccurately is to assume that they are a potential threat or otherwise dangerous. This is tied to Eric’s notion of predictability in interpersonal interactions. If a stranger presents as unpredictable, your guard should be up lest you fall victim to a lethal ruse.
So if I walk up to you and tell you I am Jesus Christ trapped in a fat white guy body and my preferred pronoun is Lord, universally you would think I am nuts and if taken to a psych facility would get an armful of Haldol or Trazadone. But today if you walk around in a dress with external genitalia and a bra, and I don’t call you by a female pronoun and treat you like a woman, I am called a hater and a transphobe. Sorry, buying into and reinforcing delusion is not kind or helpful but rather damaging to that individual. Transexuals are 10x more likely to attempt suicide as compared with the general population. This is the hallmark of untreated psychiatric disease.
Eric, I think you’re playing a dirty rhetorical trick by bringing in Rachel Dolezal and comparing her case to that of a trans-person. Rachel is clearly batshit nuts in the ugliest kind of way. If there are any genetic, hormonal, or chemical differences between Black brains and White brains, Rachel’s brain does not have the particular characteristics of a Black brain. She was raised in a White household (by parents who insist that she is crazy and seem somewhat embarrassed by their daughter) in Lincoln County, Montana, which is a long way from the nearest Black community. Among other things, she claims to have lived in a Teepee and in South Africa, both of which are apparently untrue.
In short, Rachel Dolezal is batshit nuts and probably somewhere on the schizophrenic spectrum, and she is despised by people on both the left and right, in large part because it’s obvious that her relationship with Black people and Black culture is a matter of exploitation rather than real cultural affiliation. Essentially, Rachel Dolezal appears to be both crazy AND fraudulent.
On the other hand, a trans-person has some real issues with brain development that result in a nasty problem, something along the lines of “My brain tells me I’m THIS sex, but when I look between my legs I see THAT sex, and I find it very distressing.” If I imagine that I look between my legs and see the opposite genitals than my brain expects it’s obvious why this is a problem and why I should be sympathetic.
In short, you’re taking a group of people who have a problem (sane or otherwise) that’s worthy of some sympathy and comparing them to a single person who’s behavior is both insane and exploitative.
BTW, I think the way you addressed this issue may tie into why people see you as being on the far-right. This kind of ugly comparison is typical of the way people on the far-right write about their opponents – and you could certainly have written something about trans-people and their views of reality, and whether we should respect those views without comparing trans-folk to a fucked-up fraud like Dolezal.
“Trans-folk are messed-up weirdos like that Dolezal bitch” probably isn’t what you’re trying to say, but it kinda came out that way. (The classy way to handle things might have been to address Dolezal’s issues in another post.)
>In short, you’re taking a group of people who have a problem (sane or otherwise) that’s worthy of some sympathy and comparing them to a single person who’s behavior is both insane and exploitative.
If you think “Claire’s” behavior is much less fucked up than Dolezal’s, you need to take a deep breath and re-evaluate. Frauds, both of them – claiming sympathy they don’t deserve after the fact.
Is that all trans people? No. But Dolezal isn’t all black people (or whatever the weird relevant class), either. What unifies these cases is that they’ve both been taken up as cudgels in the politicization of identity – this is precisely the reason there was a Tuvel flap at all.
No, it comes from being able to see the fingerprint of Soviet memetic weapons.
Sigh. And now that you’ve proved my point, ask yourself the following question: Where do the rhetorical tactics of the far-right come from? The racist dog-whistles, the implicit assumption that the U.S. is a Christian country, the sexism, the pejorative comparisons of anything not on the rightist agenda to communism, the ugly language… there’s a playbook there too, and you may be immune to one playbook but you’re susceptible to the other. This is why you come off as a right-winger – I imagine that a Libertarian should be skeptical of both playbooks!
(I’ll give you a place to start. When Newt Gingrich was speaker of the house, he wrote up guidelines about how the Republicans should talk about Democrats and Liberals… and Newt was a college history teacher before he ran for Congress!)
>immune to one playbook but you’re susceptible to the other.
Oh, bullshit. I know right-wing cant by its smell too and I don’t fall for it even a little. But even a stopped conservative clock is right occasionally and they got it right about Communist subversion. Go read the freaking Venona transcripts; it’s not even secret any more.
““My husband and I can’t conceive children. He seems rather bothered by it. Do you think I should tell him I used to be a man?””
The marriage was obviously fraudulent, and the man should be given an annulment without further ado. And damages. LARGE damages.
” As a trans woman, in fact, *I* do get to assert what my identity is, because you and the rest of the Neanderthals on the right are simply wrong. ”
Hmm… suppose Eric asserts that he is God Emperor of the Universe, and demands to be obeyed without question, addressed as “Your Imperial Majesty”, and so on.
Let’s stipulate, just for the sake of argument, that he *really* believes this. It’s how he honestly feels.
Are you, I, and everyone else then obliged to treat him as such, addressing him by his preferred style, obeying his commands, and so on?
If not, why not?
“Rachel is clearly batshit nuts in the ugliest kind of way. ”
I am reminded of an ancient Hustler cartoon. It depicts three shepherds, two of which are having vaginal sex with their sheep. The third shepherd is performing cunnilingus on his. One of the first two looks at the other and says “Man, that Bartholomew is sick.”
There are genuine intermediate cases, but these cases are extremely rare.
Partial androgen insensitivity produces a person with male physical advantages, somewhat reduced male physical advantages, and genuinely intermediate sexual organs, which organs are incapable of reproduction.
Full androgen insensitivity produces someone who looks and almost always acts like a hot woman, has sexual organs that can function (poorly) as female sexual organs and not at all as male sexual organs, cannot reproduce, and has considerably reduced male physical advantages, but is still typically bigger and considerably stronger on average than women are on average.
But these cases are very very rare. Further, people have never complained about those with complete androgen insensitivity passing as women, because they are born with the right equipment and inclination to perform the female role, apart from reproduction.
“Leaving aside the entire question of how real transgenderism is as a neuropsychological phenomenon, “she” clearly suffers from a pretty serious disconnect with observable reality.”
There is a condition called Body Dysmorphic Disorder. It is a condition that drives people to suicide:
https://www.adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/related-illnesses/other-related-conditions/body-dysmorphic-disorder-bdd
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/body-dysmorphic-disorder/home/ovc-20200935
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_dysmorphic_disorder
There are strong similarities with transgenders in that their “brains” are convinced that their body is not as it should be .There is also an alien limb syndrome where people perceive a limb as not belonging to them, the parallels with genitalia is obvious. The difference with transgenders is that in BDD, people are convinced their body is different from what others perceive. .
Transgenders very well know the actual sex of their body, but that is not the sex they feel it should have. Transgenders also know this well before puberty. Except for this single point, transgenders are mentally normal. No way is known that can bring a transgender to change their ideas. The only strategies that “work” on transgenders are the ones that “work” on homosexuals, get them to deny their feelings and hide them.
You can all run amok claiming other people are mentally ill, like was done with homosexuals, but that does not change the reality for these people. Getting their sex change operation gives these people a satisfactory life again. At least in countries where they are not fired or beaten up by random strangers for being different (btw., that seems to have been the aim of the bathroom laws, getting transgenders murdered). And transgenders can find a love just as everybody else.
And yes, your example sounds crazy. But I can find completely crazy libertarians too if I look for them.
@Eugine Nier
“Hint: you might want to think about why restrooms and sports teams are segregated by gender.”
Restrooms are segregated because men are pigs that foul up the stalls. There are too many men that also harass women. Women cannot stand that.
For the rest, there are always too few stalls for the women, so they sneak into the men’s rooms. Which does not seem to worry the men.
Sport teams are another matter. Sport lives by arbitrary rules, separating teams on age, weight and sex. Ass men are stronger than women, they play separately in most sports. And the rules have nothing to do with “identity”, but with your body.
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
I used to work part-time cleaning loos as a teenager, decades ago. I can tell you you’ve got that exactly backwards. It’s the “ladies'” rooms that cleaning staff dreads to enter.
Winter: “Getting their sex change operation gives these people a satisfactory life again.”
The suicide rates for transgendered people who have received the appropriate surgery are much higher, across countries and many different studies. See this article in The Federalist for discussion.
“At least in countries where they are not fired or beaten up by random strangers for being different (btw., that seems to have been the aim of the bathroom laws, getting transgenders murdered).”
Render unto me a fucking break. Nobody, but nobody, wants to “get transgenders murdered”. This is fully as offensive as JAD’s frothings.
Conservatives have a raging boner for policing people’s sexuality, and meting out harsh punishment for sexual deviance. The anti-abortion movement in the United States, for example, has as its primary goal to punish women with unplanned pregnancies for being sluts; any rhetoric about the life of the unborn child is concern trolling, nothing more. Hint: If they were really concerned about the life of the unborn, they’d put their money where their mouth is and set up charities to match expectant mothers with adoptive families who would assume responsibility for the unwanted child — and all of the mother’s medical expenses until that child comes to term.
The goal of the gender bathroom laws is to send the message that by law, gender identity is expressed between the legs and no deviance from this rule will be allowed; if transgendered people get hurt or killed in the process, no big deal. They didn’t listen to the message, and their example will help amplify and reinforce the message.
@Jay Maynard
“The suicide rates for transgendered people who have received the appropriate surgery are much higher, across countries and many different studies.”
Yes, being a transgender is tough, and makes your life much harder. Suicide is the leading cause of death in young people. But there is a lot that can be done beyond denying transgenders a sex change: Suicide is correlated to exclusion and discrimination:
http://www.newsweek.com/transgender-bathroom-law-study-suicide-454185
See this study:
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AFSP-Williams-Suicide-Report-Final.pdf
@Jay Maynard
“Nobody, but nobody, wants to “get transgenders murdered”.”
James Dobson
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2016/05/james-dobson-kill-transgender-people-using-public-bathrooms/
And then there is Kevin Swanson, who does not make a difference between LGBT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Swanson_(pastor)
And their following:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/03/16/seven-transgender-women-have-been-killed-this-year-democrats-want-jeff-sessions-to-investigate/
http://time.com/4575908/transgender-americans-killed-2016-rights-lgbtq/
With the expected results:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/what-its-like-to-use-a-public-bathroom-while-trans-20160331
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2016/%E2%80%98bathroom-bill%E2%80%99-debates-heat-transgender-people-die
@Jeff Read
Conservatives have a raging boner for policing people’s sexuality, and meting out harsh punishment for sexual deviance.
No. They don’t want sexual deviance forced onto them and their children.
The anti-abortion movement in the United States, for example, has as its primary goal to punish women with unplanned pregnancies for being sluts; any rhetoric about the life of the unborn child is concern trolling, nothing more.
False. The “punish” meme is a leftist invention. Human life is human life even if that life was unplanned.
Hint: If they were really concerned about the life of the unborn, they’d put their money where their mouth is and set up charities to match expectant mothers with adoptive families who would assume responsibility for the unwanted child — and all of the mother’s medical expenses until that child comes to term.
I know of countless churches and others on the right who’d love to do this, but the cost of such has made it essentially impossible. Between the expected legal fees for adoption ($25k+) and the medical expenses ($5k+) there is essentially no-one who can pay the bill. (Who’s to blame for this messed up situation is not easy to discern.)
Besides, when an abortionette is offered adoption they almost uniformly refuse.
The goal of the gender bathroom laws is to send the message that by law, gender identity is expressed between the legs and no deviance from this rule will be allowed;
So what’s the objectively verifiable alternative? Hint: what’s claimed to be rattling around in someone’s skull doesn’t help.
if transgendered people get hurt or killed in the process, no big deal.
Who said this? Citation please. And how often does this happen?
Jeff: “If they were really concerned about the life of the unborn, they’d put their money where their mouth is and set up charities to match expectant mothers with adoptive families who would assume responsibility for the unwanted child — and all of the mother’s medical expenses until that child comes to term.”
There are, or at least were, just such charities, set up by churches. When I was a kid, my family was a host family for one such charity. We took in pregnant teenagers, supported them until they gave birth, and generally kept them out of trouble. The child was adopted by others, and the charity paid the medical bills.
You were saying?
“if transgendered people get hurt or killed in the process, no big deal.”
You cannot reach that conclusion on the evidence available. You’re putting words into people’s mouths.
@Michael
> And how often does this happen?
“It found that 12 percent of transgender people were verbally harassed in public restrooms within the previous year, 1 percent were physically attacked and 1 percent were sexually assaulted. Nine percent said someone denied them access to a bathroom.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lgbt-survey-idUSKBN13X0BK
In addition, the murder rate of transgenders in the USA this year has been larger than in 2016
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/04/why-have-there-been-so-many-trans-murders-this-year.html
On the other hand, there have been NO reports of transgenders attacking people in bathrooms.
https://mic.com/articles/114066/statistics-show-exactly-how-many-times-trans-people-have-attacked-you-in-bathrooms#.taYTKbpDG
Things like this make me wonder if you are so locked in logical libertarian headspace that you don’t really get how LGBTQ people work, or even how people work. I’m bloody autistic, and even I can see what’s going on!
Everybody knows, including Claire, that Claire’s offer is “fraudulent”. (The unkind internet term for people like her, in fact, is “trap” — as in Admiral Ackbar’s “it’s a trap!”.) But humans are highly social creatures, and when your choices come down to committing this sort of fraud or enduring loneliness and social isolation, five-nines percent of humans will pick fraud every time. Consider how many fraudulent offers are made by ciswomen regarding their age, their level of reproductive fitness, etc. There are entire industries built around this sort of deception: fashion, make-up, cosmetic surgery.
No, no, wait, let me refer you to your own words:
In light of this, is the game Claire is playing really so different from the game everybody plays?
If gender is fluid enough to allow people like Claire to not only “pass” as women but even look cute in a bikini, it stands to reason that our categories of “straight” and “gay” are fluid as well. There is a significant contingent of LGBTQ persons who believe that if you like a person for who they are, “it shouldn’t matter” what their plumbing is. Obviously, it does matter for the straight men in the video, but maybe Claire is looking to hit paydirt and find a man who’s a little bit more flexible. Maybe — like a lot of women — she’s not looking for sex right away, but the foundation of a stable relationship that will turn sexual once she undergoes surgery?
The article said she was from Virginia, which means she has to grapple with the barbaric American health care system as well. Many countries in Europe recognize gender dysphoria as a valid psychiatric disorder and gender transition as standard-of-care treatment, and so would foot the entire bill for Claire’s surgery, hormone therapy, and psychiatric counseling. In America, no such luck. So there’s a good chance that Claire might be suffering through this part of her life with a dingle-dangle between her legs that she doesn’t want and that she would have, in ideal circumstances, gotten rid of by now but can’t because she lives in a country where physical and mental health outcome is tied to monetary income.
False. The “forced” meme is a rightist invention, used to justify denying fundamental human rights to the different.
>False. The “forced” meme is a rightist invention, used to justify denying fundamental human rights to the different.
Who are you to deny Michael’s lived experience? He feels oppressed, therefore he is oppressed. Only the feelz matter, and applying rational skepticism just shows that you don’t get it. Wake up!
(The preceding was, for the thickwitted, satire. Dolorously indistinguishable from stupid shit people really say.)
@Patrick Maupin
Steve Martin in The Jerk?
…nope; the guy I’m thinking of is real. And, I ran across him within the last 5-10 years.
More thoughts:
I do agree that there are way too many assertions of identity and demands that such identity be respected, without skin in the game to back it up. This is what distinguishes transgendered people from “transtrenders”. Transgendered people are so distraught by their body-mind gender mismatch that they put in time, work, pain, and (in countries with benighted health-care systems) considerable personal treasure to fixing it. Not many sane people in our society are willing to accept that this person is a woman (and yes, “she” has looked that way for years); indeed, some of the transpeople I knew have gotten angry when they see someone cop to the trans identity without putting in the effort.
Part of it is that transgenderedness is the new autism. It’s something that’s easy to claim but difficult to dispute, and makes you feel like you’re part of a special oppressed out-class with magical powers. If being “different” makes you an amazing magical unicorn, a lot of folks are going to want to hop on the “different” bandwagon.
As for the rest of it? I blame the internet. The internet has enabled people to spend quite a bit of their day in chat rooms pretending to be, say, a rainbow-winged nine-tailed faerie kitsune; and consequently, since they spend so much time pretending with like-minded folks who indulge them by playing along, to grow attached to that “identity” and believe that the faerie fox is the essence of who they are and that anyone who tells you otherwise is a Nazi.
Finally, when hearing talk of Rachel Dolezal, I can’t help but think of Iron Eyes Cody, the famous “crying Indian” from the don’t-litter advertisements of the 1970s. He wasn’t really a Native American but an Italian dude named Espera Oscar de Corti. He successfully played most of us — for decades.
> if we’ve given up having objective criteria for gender.
Have we? What if the criteria is “whatever brain thing, but neurology is hard so we’ll accept self-identification as a proxy” – Observing how someone self-identifies is an objective fact.
Rachel Dolezal is a sad case. Her parents adopted several Black children and apparently treated them better than their own offspring. Rachel may be reacting to the love and support that her adopted siblings received and she was denied, by trying to be more like them.
In that case at least, trans-racial adoption was child abuse against the natural children.
@Random832
“What if the criteria is “whatever brain thing, but neurology is hard so we’ll accept self-identification as a proxy” ”
Actually, why would anyone even care about the plumbing of the person in front of them?
It is universally considered rude to ask people about their genitalia. So, why bother? If the person wants to be treated as a man/woman, why even hesitate? It is not that I should feel obliged to have intercourse with every woman I meet and therefore have to be sure.
On the other hand, if you think women should be treated fundamentally different than men, then it matters. But I would be glad to make life difficult for such people.
I think Eric is correctly making the point that our society is changing rapidly in a direction in which language is frequently being used inaccurately. This is harmful to communication and human interaction on a macro-scale, and there are now institutional forces that promote this conduct rather than discourage it.
Trans people are a tiny fraction of the population, yet their plight is spawning a society-wide language dysfunction. And the destruction of language is no trivial matter.
>I think Eric is correctly making the point that our society is changing rapidly in a direction in which language is frequently being used inaccurately.
No, I wasn’t actually trying to make any point specifically about language at all. Reread the OP.
@TomA
“I think Eric is correctly making the point that our society is changing rapidly in a direction in which language is frequently being used inaccurately.”
As far I know, this claim has been made by every generation of pundits since at least the times of Plato. Somehow, language still exists.
“Everybody knows, including Claire, that Claire’s offer is “fraudulent”.. But humans are highly social creatures, and when your choices come down to committing this sort of fraud or enduring loneliness and social isolation, five-nines percent of humans will pick fraud every time.”
The decision to present as a female while having male parts was one Claire consciously made, and without having made this decision she would not (and predictably would not) be in a situation where she has to choose between fraud and social isolation.
@Winter
“As far I know, this claim has been made by every generation of pundits since at least the times of Plato. Somehow, language still exists.”
Some things do not scale correctly.
Example: the village hobbo in the past was known by everybody, and special behaviors were internalized by the villagers to manage him. He might have been mean-spirited, with bad inclinations, yet some villagers made him work, eat, clean, and have some “normal” social interaction. Better, they corrected his bad behaviors, so as to continue to include him in the village community, even on the fringes.
Now, in a big city, one thousand times bigger, a citizen might interact with 1000 hobbos, and not know what their special behaviors are. His only ways to protect himself is to avoid all interactions with all hobbos. Hobbos are now without “normal” interactions, and their degree of inclusion in the community is dramatically down.
This example might not be perfect, its only intended use is to display the fact that a community relations do not scale unchanged, and might even make emerge untractable problems.
Now, we currently have a huge scale magnification of the numbers of relations through the internet, particularly the aptly named social networks.
So, our communities relations won’t be unchanged, and some untractable problems might emerge.
It would only be natural that our languages reflect that.
Yet I think the change is quite different in nature from the previous social changes languages have handled. Increase in mutations frequency, and checks-to-fix frequency too.
A bit like coming from a world with some cvs repositories, to a world with some millions of git repositories cohabiting ^^
@ Winter – “As far I know, this claim has been made by every generation of pundits since at least the times of Plato. Somehow, language still exists.”
Sorry for the confusion. I wasn’t trying to suggest that language would cease to exist. Rather, my point was that clarity in communication is superior to distortion.
And sorry to Eric for misreading his central point in the OP. The practice of misleading behavior is indeed a dysfunction as well; albeit a more narrow problem.
This is pretty much exactly what I thought before I spent some serious time going through the available research in the field.
Humans are animals. We have instincts. We have instincts that tell us things like “how do humans reproduce”. Because we’re fairly complicated animals, we aren’t always very closely tied to those, but we have this strong innate sense that our species comes in two types and we need to be able to tell them apart. For most people, one type or the other will be attractive to us, based on some internal wiring somewhere. And most people have a strong sense of which type it is that they are.
The obvious default case is that you know yourself to be whichever sex your chromosomes or genitalia would suggest (these are not always the same), and are attracted to the opposite sex. But those are at least four different questions. There’s ways to be XY and obviously-female (androgen insensitivity). You can end up attracted to the same sex. And you can end up with a brain wired for the other sort of body.
You’re quite right: Identity of that sort *isn’t* a choice. But multiple sources have confirmed that, insofar as we have found statistical differences between male and female brains, trans people are generally right as to which sort they have. (We can’t use this as our primary test for whether or not they’re “real” because the tests known are currently destructive and only usable post-mortem.)
My experience has been that some people don’t have a strong sense of gender. (I’m one of them.) To us, people who strongly feel that they have a gender which isn’t what we’d have guessed look crazy. But! It turns out that also some people have a strong sense of gender which *is* what we’d have expected, and they look crazy to me too. The big reveal is: No, I’m the weird one. Most people have a strong sense of this.
Ultimately, the correct hacker approach should be “observe the data and react accordingly”. Denying people’s experience of their gender is about 50% lethal and reliably produces horrible outcomes. Counterexamples exist, but there are perhaps a few dozen of them recorded, against tens of thousands of cases where acknowledging people’s sense of themselves worked.
And you could, I suppose, argue that this should be viewed as a “brain defect”, but… You can’t easily change who people think they are, and even if you could, all you can really do is kill them and hand their body to a completely different person. We can, reasonably well, give people bodies they feel comfortable in. Doing so makes them happier, more productive, and less likely to kill themselves. This is probably the best choice available at this time.
If that requires me to grant that the naive view of human biology I had when I was a small child isn’t quite up to handling the complexities and fuzzy boundaries that biology produces, okay, I’ll grant that. It produces better results.
> We can, reasonably well, give people bodies they feel comfortable in.
If this is the case, why doesn’t gender reassignment surgery affect rates of attempted suicide?
I’m all for going where the data leads. That’s not what I see either side of the culture wars over transgenderism doing.
Conservatives’ reactions seem to be dominated by religion-derived taboos and visceral ick reactions – which, while disappointing, is no better than I really expect from them, either. The Left’s reaction is to mascotize the gender-dysmorphic as yet another ginned-up cause to be used in the wider Gramscian culture war. Towards that end they’ve created an elaborate theology of “gender identity”, expressed at nearly its most fatuous and content-free in the Tuvel paper and the attacks on it, that has no actual explanatory power for helping people with dysmorphia. Not overly surprising, since its real use is as a political cudgel.
The least hypothesis to explain the statistical failure of reassignment surgery to be effective treatment is that, like people with BIID, most transgenders are mentally ill before reassignment and remain mentally ill after it in way that reassignment surgery cannot change or affect. I say “most” because there is undoubtedly a small minority of physical intersexes who are not mentally ill and for which the intervention is helpful. (This is what the few positive indications in the data point at.)
What do I mean by “mentally ill”? I mean this to describe a person who not only has a belief system out of predictive congruence with reality (“I’m a male stuck with a pussy”/”I’m a female stuck with a penis”) but whose mechanisms for updating beliefs are damaged or blocked (see this previous post for discussion). Trying to fix this with surgery is doomed.
Anyone got a theory that fits the facts better than this? I don’t see one.
Wow, lots to respond to here! Thank you to everyone!
@ESR – I read through your earlier post. It seemed to me to be a little harsh towards trans individuals, classifying us with paranoid schizophrenics and people who want to amputate their healthy arms or legs. How am I supposed to feel when reading that? Admittedly, you’re not as harsh as many on the political Right, but what you wrote sounds way too much like a friend from college that I had to block on Facebook because her religious background rendered her unable to accept me as a woman. (She’s the only one I’ve had to do that to.)
@Patrick Maupin – I’m a big fan of the use of singular “they” as a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It’s a very old usage, dating back to at least the 15th Century, and only fell out of favor in the 19th Century. I’m pleased to see that revived. Do know that there are many people in the community that are confused by all these “new” pronouns as well; I was at a barbecue with a bunch of longtime drag queens just this past Sunday where this was brought up.
@Paul Brinkey – Don’t be too bummed about the gout; I’m not. As long as I take my allopurinol and stay away from alcohol, I’m fine. And I never was that much of a drinker anyway. :)
@John Dougan – I would definitely classify myself as “conforming.” But I dress and present as a woman to please myself first, not anyone else. (And no, that doesn’t mean I dress inappropriately…I’ve turned out to have a better fashion sense than I would have guessed!)
@Troutwaxer – “‘Trans-folk are messed-up weirdos like that Dolezal bitch’ probably isn’t what you’re trying to say, but it kinda came out that way.” EXACTLY! This is why I was troubled by what ESR wrote. I’m trying to follow the maxim of “assume goodwill,” but I was still troubled by it, admittedly to a milder extent than by some of the things I’ve read by people whose opinions I otherwise agree with.
@Jeff Read – “transgenderedness is the new autism” – It’s interesting you mention that, because there have been at least two recent studies showing a mild correlation between autism spectrum disorder and gender variance. Supposedly, someone with autism spectrum disorder is as much as seven times more likely to be gender variant than a neurotypical. This piqued my interest because I was diagnosed with ASD in high school, and saw a therapist while attending college, who had several of her grad students work with me as well. I’m friends with one of those grad students now on Facebook, and forwarded her the links to those studies. She found them interesting and compelling. (It doesn’t hurt that she has since come out as lesbian, and hence may be somewhat more understanding of my position.)
As for “the internet”…before coming out as trans, I actually did use a female avatar part of the time on Second Life. Some of my friends who saw me driving this avatar suspected I might be trans long before I told them.
@Winter – “It is universally considered rude to ask people about their genitalia. So, why bother? If the person wants to be treated as a man/woman, why even hesitate?” That’s exactly the kind of attitude I would like to see more of. (I think many people reading this do have this attitude, including ESR, despite my misgivings about his writings.) For my part, I will address anyone presenting as female as “she” and “her,” whether they’re a trans woman or even just a male-identifying crossdresser, unless they tell me different. In the support group meetings I facilitate, I do ask people to identify their preferred pronouns, and do my best to remember them.
>@ESR – I read through your earlier post. It seemed to me to be a little harsh towards trans individuals, classifying us with paranoid schizophrenics and people who want to amputate their healthy arms or legs. How am I supposed to feel when reading that?
Reality is what reality is. It’s not hostility to point out where the evidence leads; it’s hostility to go beyond what the evidence admits.
The difference between me and a tranny-hater is that I’m not happy about the fact that I can’t see any way to epistemologically distinguish between BIID, schizophrenic delusion, and reports of transsexualism in people who are somatically and chromosomally congruent. I would like for reality to be different, rather than viewing the facts as convenient for my emotional fixations.
That said…I may be in some attenuated sense be at fault here. I guess the way to put it is that I like the role of the one sane man willing to speak harsh and unfashionable truths without fear or favor, and dark humor is a natural mode for me. Perhaps I should give more weight to the possibility that this will make me seem hostile and uncaring even though I am not.
>Supposedly, someone with autism spectrum disorder is as much as seven times more likely to be gender variant than a neurotypical.
I would have been surprised if it were otherwise, though the exact 7:1 ratio wasn’t in my thinking. It’s consistent with a model in which autism and most transsexuality are both MBD (Minimal Brain Damage) syndromes. All MBDs are co-morbid; they cross the fuzzy boundary between “neurological” (like my spastic palsy) and “psychological”.
My problem with getting anywhere close to defining “transsexuality” as a disorder is that it is a sexuality thing; and sexuality does not have an “external” appearance.
Claire appears to be sexually interested in males who are sexually interested in females. That’s tough, but is it “crazy?” If Carl identifies as male and is sexually attracted to males who are sexually attracted to males, that’s no longer viewed as “self-dangerously crazy to the point of needing intervention”: any more (though it’s still less “safe” than being “cis/het” (for lack of a better term). And how many people would care if Carl was born JAmes and called himself Carl for some reason?
Claire has problems if Claire expects to find it “easy” to find someone who will be sexually attracted to Claire (that someone would need to be a male who is sexually attracted to women with penises, a pretty small chance); and if Claire is not being up-front about Claire’s “Sexuality” that’s shades into deliberate deception .
I don’t really have a conclusion to this, other than to note that I think that making someone deny and abjure their own personal sexual feelings is a capital-S Sin. (Subject to the usual disclaimers about willing and consenting adult partners – which necessarily includes full and frank disclosure to those partners. But it’s nobody else’s damn business who you want to screw or how you want to screw them, as long as they’re cool with that and are capable of being cool with that.) And to note that people can and should be able choose how they dress and how they ask people to name them. You can feel free to observe their wishes or not, but calling Carl “Mike” when he’s asked you not to is pretty rude.
“Rachel’s brain does not have the particular characteristics of a Black brain. ”
That’s an interesting peek behind the curtain.
I’ve been trying to figure out how ESR’s theory of identity would apply to the bathroom controversy:
The purpose of gendered bathrooms seems to be to reduce the level of voyeurism that occurs in bathrooms. Since the majority of people of people are heterosexual, segregating bathrooms by gender reduces the number of people who wish to engage in voyeurism to a minimum.
I’m having trouble translating this into ESR’s framework of “offers about what kind of transactions people will expect of you.” You generally don’t engage in transactions in a bathroom, you go in, do your business, and get out. I suppose you could argue that a transwoman, by appearing to be female, is creating the expectation that she will be heterosexual (since most women are), and is therefore uninterested in engaging in voyeurism. I don’t know what ratio of transwomen are heterosexual relative to the gender they identify as, so I don’t know how accurate that expectation is. But it doesn’t matter because no sane person is arguing that cis lesbians are engaging in deception by not being heterosexual while definitely being female. And “won’t spy on you while you poop” is a “transaction” most people expect everyone to engage in, regardless of sexual orientation or gender.
If we go from “transactions” to “interests” and we can make a little more progress. Assuming everyone has a strong interest in not being spied on in the bathroom, and also a strong desire not to be kicked out of the bathroom they intended to use, what is the optimal solution, from a utilitarian perspective? I think that a female-presenting transwoman who has to use the men’s room is far more likely to be voyeurized than ciswomen who allow transwomen to use their bathroom are going to be (and vice versa for men and transmen). Under the same principle we allow gay and lesbian people to continue to use their gender’s restrooms.
We also have to take false positives into account. Considering that transpeople only compose about 0.3% of the population, they are probably vastly outnumbered by cismen and ciswomen who look somewhat feminine or masculine. That means that the odds that a cisperson will get kicked out of the bathroom for looking like the wrong gender are probably vastly greater than the odds that they’ll get voyeurized by a transperson.
What this adds up to is that transpeople should probably be allowed use the bathroom they want to. Although really, I feel like throwing up my hands in disgust over all the ink that’s been shed over this. In 18th century Japan men and women regularly bathed together, and didn’t seem to have any problems with it. Why can’t we just have all unisex bathrooms and hold heterosexuals to the same standards that we hold gays and lesbians? Bathrooms have stalls, for god’s sake!
Really, I think that the fact that ESR chose dating as the transaction to focus on in his theory of identity makes it appear far more anti-trans than it actually is. For the vast majority of interactions we have in day to day life, transpeople presenting as their preferred gender are not doing anything dishonest, and it’s more efficient to treat them the way they’d prefer. If you’re trying to point someone out to someone else (which is at least 80% of the time gender comes up in casual conversation), referring to the person wearing a dress and long hair as a woman will point them out effectively regardless of what’s between their legs. If someone is trying to use your gender to figure out if you have common interests with them, a transwoman presenting female may be less deceptive than a tomboyish ciswoman wearing a skirt. And as I already established, letting people use the bathroom of their choice is probably best for everyone.
>Really, I think that the fact that ESR chose dating as the transaction to focus on in his theory of identity makes it appear far more anti-trans than it actually is.
It wasn’t actually intended to be “anti-trans” at all. Or pro-trans. To the extent I had a political agenda it was about opposing the use of “identity” as a political cudgel. But really I was just trying to show people how to think about “identity” in a way that doesn’t lead straight to crazy.
It always surprises me to find those people who would vote themselves rich actually expect to be subsidized.
If one is able to find any amount of self-satisfaction with one’s chosen identity, and find an appropriate audience, why then plead for broad social acceptance? The Allman Brothers play the music they are able to play whether anyone else on the planet calls them ‘Southern Rock’ or not. They are only going to get the revenues from the tickets they can sell, from those who appreciate the Allman Brothers for the music they actually do play.
So this is at root a fundamental question of assimilation, and that always denotes an exchange. You cannot have it both ways, although you can compromise at any point along the spectrum. You also cannot, *from either direction*, create a new arbitrary standard that all parties are bound to recognize.
What sickens me is that there is a particular section of the chatting classes who from their equivalent seats at the courts of the Sun Kings of American 1-percenters can “There outta be a law” their way into actual legislation. Or at least summon a category 5 tweetstorm of boycotts and political arm twisting aimed at any politician obstinate enough to defy their insinuations. None of this bodes well for liberty.
There are two kinds of people. Those who think America works best *without* regard for identity and those who think America works best with *special* regard for identity. We are mired in a war of negotiating weights and measures for special regard. Occam spins in his grave.
Read:
> Conservatives have a raging boner for policing people’s sexuality, and meting out
> harsh punishment for sexual deviance.
It’s really kind of humorous that what the Progressives did 30, 60 or 100 years ago get blamed on conservatives.
@ESR – “Perhaps I should give more weight to the possibility that this will make me seem hostile and uncaring even though I am not.”
There is that, although, were I in your place, I would give more weight to the probability that your words will be seized upon by the very “tranny-haters” you take pains to differentiate yourself from, and used to justify their hatred. To justify their attempts to exclude all of us from public life, sending us back into the closet to suffer in silence. To even justify murder. (We have the Transgender Day of Remembrance every November 20 for a reason, you know…)
Now, you can’t be charged with responsibility for the actions of others; even I know that. And I’m more than willing to believe that it is Hell Highway you’re trying to pave, i.e., that your intentions are good. (I’ve read your writings for a long time…you’ve always shown good intentions in what you do.) There just isn’t anything I can really do about the haters that will twist your words to their own ends. Except fret. So I’m fretting. :)
@Cobb – “If one is able to find any amount of self-satisfaction with one’s chosen identity, and find an appropriate audience, why then plead for broad social acceptance? The Allman Brothers play the music they are able to play whether anyone else on the planet calls them ‘Southern Rock’ or not. They are only going to get the revenues from the tickets they can sell, from those who appreciate the Allman Brothers for the music they actually do play.”
The Allman Brothers aren’t in danger of their lives if someone gets angry because they misinterpreted the genre of their music. The “trans panic” defense is still accepted in some courts here in the United States, even though, to my ears, it’s as unjustifiable as the Chewbacca Defense.
You can think what you want about me. As long as you treat me in a courteous fashion, I won’t gainsay your right to think what you think, In fact, how would I even know? But the minute you use your negative opinions about me to justify denying me the civil rights granted to every other human being (with “life” being the first and most important, but not the only one), you’re in the wrong.
> I would give more weight to the probability that your words will be seized upon by the very “tranny-haters” you take pains to differentiate yourself from, and used to justify their hatred.
Haters will always be with us. If we let ourselves be silenced for fear of how they might use hard truths, no truth would every be spoken and the haters would still find rationalizations in the lies. Therefore I choose truth-speaking over silence.
I don’t think I would be emotionally capable of doing otherwise, really.
@ESR: Agreed. Which I why I said “There just isn’t anything I can really do about [it]. Except fret.”
@ JimR: That’s an interesting peek behind the curtain.
I think we have a misunderstanding. As Eric observed, there are physical brain differences between trans people and non-trans people. I’m hypothetically extending that to Black people vs. White people so we can see how Rachel Dolezal’s claims stack up against the claims of transgender folk.
Assuming, for rhetorical purposes, that such differences existed, (and they don’t) Dolezal would not be a person who has those differences.
>I’m hypothetically extending that to Black people vs. White people
It doesn’t have to be hypothetical. See Racial Brain Differences.
I didn’t actually know before I went looking just now that patterns of cortical folding are almost like genetic fingerprints – so heritable, and with large enough variation across ancestral populations, that you can back-read ancestry by mapping them. There’s your Dolezal difference.
What I was looking for was something slightly different – confirmation of something I remember from my 1970s physical anthro classes at UPenn. That is, degree of cortical folding correlates with IQ (wrinklier brains are smarter – no prize for guessing this is a simple effect of cortical surface area) and that wrinkliness varies across racial groups in exactly the ways you would expect if you know about racial differences in mean IQ scores. There were even some drawings of brains in my anthro textbook that were there to show what “difference in degree of cortical folding” looks like.
(The way I would have applied this was by checking whether Dolezal’s cortical surface has a folding degree more like that of Europeans or sub-Saharan Africans. Cruder than folds-as-fingerprints, but probably effective.)
I didn’t find that confirmation online, and wasn’t really expecting to; that whole subject has since become so taboo that you can be run out of academia for speaking the most well-confirmed truths about it. And as for those drawings…they probably couldn’t be published today without causing an uproar that would get somebody burned at the stake.
@ esr “But really I was just trying to show people how to think about “identity” in a way that doesn’t lead straight to crazy.”
I can live with that, so let’s follow it up, without prejudice and see where it leads: We have a small population of gender dysphoric people who believe that they have the wrong genitals. How do we handle this in a way which doesn’t lead to some form of social derangement or general idiocy?
First, I would want the default to be that we treat such people kindly. Beating them up, accusing them of sin, or denying them the same rights as the rest of us is not acceptable. We might go further and discuss them in our health classes so that kids get educated in how to help them to the best outcome, and adolescent boys can know that a girl with a dick is not an attack on their masculinity, but instead a fellow human being with a problem, and that beating up on the “girl with a dick” will not help the situation. People who mistreat others do not make society saner.
In fact, I’d go a step further and postulate that identity politics is secondary to oppression. In other words, people think, “Hey, there are a lot of people like me, and we are all mistreated, so let’s gain some political power.” We don’t have a left-wing association of weird/crazy/angry Czechoslovakians because Czechoslovakians are not generally victims of hate crimes. So we keep things from getting crazy by not oppressing people.
Second, I would want to explore this phenomenon scientifically so we know why this is happening, and perhaps a multi-modal model is the most appropriate; there may be multiple reasons why someone believes that they are burdened with the wrong gender. In other words, Lynn has a female brain in a male body, Rhonda has minor brain damage secondary to a concussion while playing peewee football, Trevor has psychological issues, William has a problem with “his” brain chemistry, and Pat is schizophrenic. This requires further research, but it would allow us to categorize each subset of gender dysphoric people accurately and help them get the best outcome.
Third, we need simple words by which to categorize dysphoric people, something like “I’m a _________,” which translates to “I have brain-damage-based gender dysphoria, I am physically male and mentally female.”
Fouth, the U.S. needs to get over our general weirdness about sex before we hurt another generation of people who already have enough problems.
These four things would bring us fairly close to sanity.
Think of how you’d handle it if you were writing code and 0.3 percent of your data was not able to be parsed with your standard algorithms; you’d investigate the cause and write some special code to handle the special cases, and you wouldn’t be hostile afterwards.
>These four things would bring us fairly close to sanity.
I agree with you pretty completely about all of this. Which probably fails to surprise you.
Ain’t going to happen, though, as long as the Gramscians are getting political juice from mascotizing transsexuals. Sanity on this issue would be against their interests.
> Does this ring any bells for anyone else?
Reminds me of Carrot Ironfoundersson
http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/Carrot_Ironfoundersson
@Amy Tapie:
> I’m a big fan of the use of singular “they”
The singular “they” is sometimes useful. But the use of “him” or “her” is usefully disambiguating often enough (and provides useful redundancy often enough) that it is wishful thinking to believe this usage would disappear if everybody became enlightened, and most likely quite counterproductive to try to force this change.
But why would surface area of all things matter? Why isn’t volume the measure, or perhaps connection density variations?
>But why would surface area of all things matter? Why isn’t volume the measure, or perhaps connection density variations?
Because the logic associated with higher brain functions lives within 2-4mm of the cortical surface. The interior of the brain is mostly interconnects and older subsystems associated with functions like sensory processing, motor control, and autonomic regulation.
*blink* This is one of those things I thought everybody knew.
Haters will always be with us. If we let ourselves be silenced for fear of how they might use hard truths, no truth would every be spoken and the haters would still find rationalizations in the lies.
I guess one way to test this approach would be to try to find the most egregious example from history of a truth used to rationalize something abhorrent. Standard go-to example would probably be eugenics. What are some others? Bipolar people can be much more harmful with a gun? Voters are generally low-information? Korrellian death ray currently aimed at Earth means we may as well panic?
Alternately: are there truths that are sufficiently dangerous if not supplemented by other truths? Or do all truths naturally come with a protective wrapper of the form “the truth is: I also would rather this were not true”?
>Standard go-to example would probably be eugenics.
Yes, but to sharpen the point I’m going to step right onto the third rail behind eugenics; that racial/ethnic differences in IQ and time preference are readily measurable, significant, and heritable. Undoubtedly this is the most horribly abused Damned Truth in history – possibly there was some other contender before the Holocaust, but there certainly hasn’t been since.
It’s a dangerous thing to know unless you also hold in mind that the mass is not the individual – that, in fact, you don’t know where the singular human being in front of you falls on his ancestral population’s bell curve until you have measured him. Forgetting this leads to insanity and evil.
But I think if we suppress that Damned Truth, we risk more than by speaking it. Racists are going to racist anyway, because they’re emotionally fixated and stupid. I’ve said often that we should deny them the weapon of being the only people willing to speak the truth about population differences, and I still believe that.
>Or do all truths naturally come with a protective wrapper of the form “the truth is: I also would rather this were not true”?
I’ve had only mixed success pointing that out about myself. A lot of people, perhaps projecting from their own behavior, don’t seem to be able to grasp the concept that one might point at truth one is unhappy with simply because one believes not knowing the truth is more dangerous.
> Assuming, for rhetorical purposes, that such differences existed, (and they don’t) Dolezal would not be a person who has those differences.
To play devil’s advocate for a moment… there is a deep tendency for humans to believe in some form of dualism (sentiments like “all you can really do is kill them and hand their body to a completely different person” are an indication of this), and the presence or absence of non-physical differences of the “mind”/”soul” is not as easily measured.
Whether or not it is true or not in any particular case, this could be a hidden basis on which Dolezal and any supporters she may have believe that it is a reasonable thing to believe. (And an overenthusiastic rejection of dualism explains a tendency to dismiss trans people if someone is not familiar with the existence of a neurological basis or if they think that it might not apply to a specific person)
@Jay Maynard: “The suicide rates for transgendered people who have received the appropriate surgery are much higher” than who? Trans people who don’t get surgery? I doubt that. In fact, the number of trans people who haven’t had surgery who commit suicide because of gender dysphoria is probably unknowable. Many of them may not be out as trans to anyone so all anyone ever knows is that some depressed kid committed suicide.
It should be no surprise that people who get relentless criticism and rejection commit suicide at a higher rate than those who receive social acceptance.
> The “trans panic” defense is still accepted in some courts here in the United States
Cite? People have tried to use it, sure, but all the examples I’ve seen anytime in the past few decades were it being thoroughly shot down by the court.
> > “The suicide rates for transgendered people who have received the appropriate surgery are much higher”
> than who? Trans people who don’t get surgery? I doubt that
It seems intuitively obvious to you that it must be false, because you regard sex as a superficial accident, only skin deep, but it seems intuitively obvious to me that it must be true that transgendered people who undergo surgery have higher suicide rates than those that merely cross dress, because sex goes deeper than the surgeon’s knife can reach.
esr:It’s a dangerous thing to know unless you also hold in mind that the mass is not the individual – that, in fact, you don’t know where the singular human being in front of you falls on his ancestral population’s bell curve until you have measured him.
But the most important characteristics, those that you most desire to know, you cannot measure. You have to rely on proxies. And race, sex, etc, are among the best proxies, the ones we should weight most heavily.
At the center of the bell curve, race and sex etc are only weak predictors, but at the edges of the bell curve, very strong predictors. The edges of the bell curve do not overlap significantly.
Thus, for example, there is probably substantial overlap in propensity to repay a mortgage between a random black and a random white. But a person applying for a mortgage is not random. From the fact that he walked in the door, you are probably dealing with the best of the whites, and the best of the blacks. And the best of the whites does not overlap significantly with the best of the blacks.
Similarly Obama’s diverse website team did not overlap significantly with Obama’s undiverse website team.
@ esr “Is that all trans people? No. But Dolezal isn’t all black people…”
Doesn’t matter. That kind of comparison is still a right-wing tactic. We have one, single, odious person, and you’re comparing (just for the U.S.) a varied group of about a million people to the One Odious Person. If you people to stop treating you like a right-wingnut, stop acting like one. Your point about identity politics would have been just as valid without the ugly comparison. (And in fairness, you shouldn’t be using Rachel Dolezal to make points about anyone. As as crazy person she’s not a fair representation of anyone’s problems or ideologies.)
If you quack like a duck…
>That kind of comparison is still a right-wing tactic.
You know what? I officially don’t care.
I can’t trim my sails to avoid everything some fscking dumbshit thinks is a “right wing tactic”, and if I could I would refuse to be shut down by “Oh, no! If you say that you’ll sound like a Bad Person!”
Don’t try this shit again. It won’t work next time, either.
Suddenly everything JAD has ever said makes sense: This statement can only come from someone who lives in Crapistan or some other third world country (or Europe) where the average person is poor by American standards.
Unless he wants to argue that the majority population of the US is east asian or ashkenazi jew, but I think even JAD would balk at something that ludicrous.
> I think even JAD would balk at something that ludicrous.
To be scrupulously fair, there’s a germ of truth in his observation about small difference in distribution means being amplified at the right and left tails. Small differences in dispersion can have an almost indistinguishable effect.
Of course, JAD being JAD, he has piled a buttload of craptastic prejudice over and around that truth. But it’s still there.
“Assuming everyone has a strong interest in not being spied on in the bathroom, and also a strong desire not to be kicked out of the bathroom they intended to use, what is the optimal solution”
I think there’s a different problem here: it’s just that women have a terminal preference for not having people with penises in the bathroom. A lot of people like to phrase it in terms of being spied upon, but the real answer is that our ideas about privacy are intricately tied to gender (in the bodily sense) in a way which can’t be reduced to an objection about something else.
A lot of women, for instance, would object to being seen naked by a strange man more than by a strange woman, regardless of whether the man or woman is deliberately spying (and regardless of the sexual orientation of the man or woman); one of those two is just inherently more objectionable than the other.
>I think there’s a different problem here: it’s just that women have a terminal preference for not having people with penises in the bathroom.
I agree. The element of threat there is pretty much irreducible, given (a) a person with a penis in the ladies’ room is pre-sorted for some sort of sexual deviance, and (b) you can’t know what kind of deviance until it may be too late to avoid sexual assault. The prior probabilities are very different from random person-of-penis in a non-tabooed setting.
One of the many reasons the politics around transgender rights troubles me is that trans activists are so drunk on their victimology that they plain ignore considerations like this, or yell that raising them is prima facie proof of bigotry. This does not incline me to respect them.
jonathan on 2017-05-09 at 13:08:28 said:And if Joe wants to take hormones, undergo surgery, date men, wear dresses and makeup, or whatever else…so what?
In many cases, this is self-destructive behavior. While it can be said that it is Joe’s choice, social attitudes encourage or discourage choices. As individuals, we have a responsibility regarding what we encourage or discourage in others.
This is especially true regarding youngsters and children. The present fashion for transgenderism has caused some trendy adults to encourage apparent gender disorder in children, with potential disastrous consequences. (This includes children with atypical preferences in toys and play being told they are transgendered and encouraged to cross-dress.) There is evidence that many children have episodes of gender confusion which they just grow out of – but at present, they are in danger of misguided psychiatric intervention and irrevocable hormonal and surgical mutilation.
But (rock and hard place) for some children, the gender confusion is permanent, and the child would be better off if changed before puberty.
So this is not an issue that can be just so-whatted; there are too many dangers involved.
@esr: Somewhere upthread you mentioned Gramscian damage, Active Measures etc. I share your frustration at how few people are aware of it; you may be amused to see the reaction* I got recently when mentioning it on an otherwise sane and scholarly forum. tl;dr: to most people, it sounds like a conspiracy theory. (These people have apparently never heard of prospiracy.)
What would it take to get this information past the filters and into general knowledge? Or is that impossible as long as education systems are state-controlled? I suspect that if we could make the majority of people (especially my generation) aware of this, then the political centre would move several large strides in the direction of sanity. However, I also suspect that you know this already, and that if you had a solution you’d have mentioned it by now.
* To be scrupulously fair, the moderator action was (it turned out) not for the Gramsci part, but for having the temerity to quote Thomas Sowell. (I’m now wondering if I should leave that forum on principle.)
> However, I also suspect that you know this already, and that if you had a solution you’d have mentioned it by now.
Indeed.
There is some hope. I’ve been watching my essays on Gramscian damage and kafkatrapping slowly ripple outwards, tracking it by citations; they’re reaching people, and they’re providing language and conceptual tools for the fightback.
Amy,
Interesting, though not surprising. There is on average much more neural difference between any two random autistics than between any two random neurotypicals. Some other brain divergences are bound to fall outta that tree.
However — that is not what I was getting at. What I was getting at is that where “special snowflakes” looking for attention and special pleading once claimed to be on the spectrum, they are now increasingly claiming to be transgender, genderfluid, agender, etc. without putting much work in to manifest their chosen gender identity except maybe in Tumblr screeds. This may sound like right-wing bloviation, but I’ve seen enough people who were deeply disturbed to begin with — like “get off on manipulating people and forming mini-cults of personality” disturbed — suddenly wake up one morning and decide that they are trans or agender or nonbinary, but at any rate wish now to be known as “Joe” rather than Jessica. And then post more flirty, cleavage-showing cosplay selfies or whatever, like nothing happened. So I can’t dismiss such “transtrenderism” or pretend like it’s not a thing.
> This statement can only come from someone who lives in Crapistan or some other third world country
Apex fallacy. Most white people do not have mortgages. Probably all males on this list have or will have a mortgage, but we are not typical.
Further wealth does cause mortgages, and poverty does not prevent mortgages. What prevents mortgages is lack of trust.
The financial crisis was a result of the demand that low trust groups receive the same treatment as the better people of high trust groups. Which demand was met by using financial derivatives to unload the resulting dud mortgages on some other sucker.
I’d like to provide a few useful links specifically on the matter of transsexuality.
First, the Wikipedia article Causes of Transsexuality, which lists what’s known about the biological basis of transsexuality with links to the peer reviewed articles. To sum it up, transsexuals have brains areas morphologically similar to those of the opposite gender, therefore when they state they feel like the opposite gender they’re stating an objective, factually accurate, and clinically verifiable (although probably expensive at this point) fact about the physical structure brains, it isn’t a mere subjective preference.
Second, two currently official positions by the American Psychiatric Association, responsible for the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), on how to care, treat and deal with transsexuals both as individuals and as members of society:
a) Individually, from their Position Statement on Access to Care for Transgender and Gender Variant Individuals:
b) Socially, from their Position Statement on Discrimination Against Transgender and Gender Variant Individuals:
Together, these links offer the most recent scientific and medical information on the subject.
For your version of reality to be true the advertising frequency of mortgages and mortgage related services would have to be different from it’s observed rate. Alternatively your category of “best whites” is such a large chunk of the bell curve that it is meaningless.
I have observed people on GamerGate related fora referring to you as the guy who invented the word kafkatrap.
So yes, it is working.
Not to beat a dead horse, but the OP topic, political cudgel angle, and Gramscian utilization are symptomatic of a societal level pathology. In other words, we have bigger problems than just a few pissed off transexuals.
> I’ve been watching my essays on Gramscian damage and kafkatrapping slowly ripple outwards
I’ve been doing my part. For example, I plugged kafkatrapping without citation (why I didn’t do the cite will be patently obvious if you read the thread) here, and SHG spread the meme further here.
>Restrooms are segregated because men are pigs that foul up the stalls.
This is incorrect. Women’s rooms tend, as a rule, to be MUCH filthier than men’s rooms. Ask anyone who’s worked as a janitor.
troutwaxer: >That kind of comparison is still a right-wing tactic.
esr: > You know what? I officially don’t care.
Troutwaxer’s tactic is the same one used by evil control freaks since the beginning of time. Someone who thought that people shouldn’t be burned as witches got put under suspicion of witchcraft. Someone who suggested that constitutional rights applied to everyone got called a commie sympathizer. And so on.
We recently saw this tactic used when anyone who who pointed out the severe structural problems with Obamacare got characterized as “racist”.
Another widespread insane meme in this category is the on-going castigation of those who give advice that is intended to prevent victimization. Today’s example:
http://www.allure.com/story/dont-tell-women-not-to-take-nudes-tell-men-not-to-hack-them
> Conservatives’ reactions seem to be dominated by … visceral ick reactions – which, while disappointing, is no better than I really expect from them, either.
Why would people’s absolutely normal and evolutionarily-favored responses disappoint you? That’s as bad as Lysenko insisting that crop plants behave according to Soviet doctrine, not their evolutionary history.
Your cite of Gramsci should have clued you to this. Why not?
> First, I would want the default to be that we treat such people kindly. Beating them up, accusing them of sin, or denying them the same rights as the rest of us is not acceptable.
Insisting that we accept such delusions as fact is psychological abuse that should be rejected out of hand and punished if not ceased permanently on request.
Yes, this includes your social presentation. In a normal society, this is strongly linked to biological roles and capabilities. Demanding that your delusion be privileged over the biologically-driven judgement of normal people is oppression of the strongest and most offensive sort.
> People who mistreat others do not make society saner.
Insisting that delusions be accepted as truth has brought American society to the brink of war.
STOP. NOW.
>Why would people’s absolutely normal and evolutionarily-favored responses disappoint you?
Because it’s letting your hindbrain pre-empt the judgment that your forebrain ought to make. You’re a human being and presumably a full sophont. Act like one, and stop with the monkey screaming.
@Doctor Locketopus:
> Women’s rooms tend, as a rule, to be MUCH filthier than men’s rooms.
My own anecdotal evidence supports this, but I must confess my teen-age janitorial experience was in a location ( a cloth store) where the women’s room was used much more heavily.
Edward: “To be scrupulously fair, the moderator action was (it turned out) not for the Gramsci part, but for having the temerity to quote Thomas Sowell. (I’m now wondering if I should leave that forum on principle.)”
Run, do not walk, away. Thomas Sowell is one of conservatism’s great thinkers, and anywhere quoting him is objectionable enough to invoke moderator action is nowhere a thinking person should be.
Alexander: Quoting the DSM in a discussion of sexuality is as unreliable as quoting the IPCC reports in a discussion of climate change. Both are in no small part political documents not based in science but rather intended to advance a specific agenda.
The sad part of all this is that there are real problems there, and we have no good answers. Transition surgery for gender dysphoria is, at the moment, the least bad answer, but that does not make it good.
@Patrick Maupin – “The singular “they” is sometimes useful. But the use of “him” or “her” is usefully disambiguating often enough […]”
I’m not advocating that “they/them/theirs” completely replace “he/him/his” or “she/her/hers” for all uses, just that those pronouns be more of a “standard” usage when you want a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun for a person. I use “she/her/hers” myself.
@ThirteenthLetter – The “trans panic” defense has been used as recently as 2015 in this case. This isn’t a court citation, but the “trans panic” defense was mentioned in relation to the recent outing of Survivor contestant Zeke Smith as a trans man.
@Ken Arromdee – “it’s just that women have a terminal preference for not having people with penises in the bathroom.”
How are they going to know? Cis women do not run around exposing their genitals to other people in the ladies’ room. Neither do I. There are stalls in there, you know. I only undo my clothes when I’m in the stall with the door latched, and make sure everything’s back in place before I unlatch that door. If someone is peeking into the stall in an attempt to see what kind of genitals I have attached to my body, then I’d say they’re the pervert here, not me. (Not to mention that trans women who still have penises often can’t use them to commit sexual assault. HRT will do that to you.)
@Jeff Read – “What I was getting at is that where ‘special snowflakes’ looking for attention and special pleading once claimed to be on the spectrum, they are now increasingly claiming to be transgender, genderfluid, agender, etc. without putting much work in to manifest their chosen gender identity except maybe in Tumblr screeds.”
I can’t say that that appeals to me much, either. Most trans people I know really had to work to get themselves in a position where they can express their true selves. My own appearance represents the culmination of years of work developing makeup skills, a proper wardrobe, the behavior patterns associated with women, and so forth. To a certain extent, I’m not sure these kids you describe understand what they’re playing with.
@Russ Cage – It’s rhetoric like yours that makes me want to make my next project, after completing my legal transition, getting firearms training and a concealed-carry permit. Your words are the kind that are going to be used as justification for the murder of trans women, and I refuse to become a statistic simply because my existence “offends” you or anyone else. I’ve seen too many candles lit on Transgender Day of Remembrance in memory of murdered trans women and men. I’ll be damned if anyone’s going to light such a candle for me.
>@Russ Cage – It’s rhetoric like yours that makes me want to make my next project, after completing my legal transition, getting firearms training and a concealed-carry permit.
While I’m generally in favor of that, I think you’re overinterpreting what Russ Cage actually wrote.
I didn’t see a threat of violence specifically against transsexuals there, or a justification for such violence. When Russ said “brink of war” it was clear that he was referring to war not against transsexuals but the activists of the PC left, which Russ views as attempting to impose multiple insanities on him. In that view of the world, you are not a cause but a sort of symptom; shooting you wouldn’t help, though shunning you and refusing your claim to be anything but a mentally ill person would be a reassertion of sanity.
I think people like Russ have let their fear and anger get the better of them and are not reasoning about the details of the threat very well – but I also think their anger is not baseless at all, and the threat they perceive is real. I’ve had to fight it myself – SJWs are attempting to colonize and wreck the hacker culture under the banner of “diversity”…
Russ needs to chill and reconsider carefully whether instinctive revulsion is really any basis for making normative claims. But you could stand to be a bit less twitchy, too. It’s not all about you, nor about transsexuals in general.
@Doctor Locketopus
“This is incorrect.”
Not having personal knowledge of the matter of women’s rooms, I went on reports of women. That might be wrong, or the women might focus on other types of filth. I could not say either way.
esr:
I’ve had two posts that didn’t take, one last night, one tonight. Have they ended up in the mod queue? If so, the second replaces the first, so the first can be squelched.
>Have they ended up in the mod queue?
Apparently not. Mod queue is currently empty.
Last time I saw this argument, it turned out to be equivocation on “accepted”. Some courts in the United States have banned that line of argument out of hand; you can’t even raise it without getting sanctioned immediately. Other courts still “accept” it in the sense that the court permits you to put forward the argument, then shoots it down.
@Jay MAynard
“The suicide rates for transgendered people who have received the appropriate surgery are much higher” than who? Trans people who don’t get surgery?”
Page 8, table 5
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AFSP-Williams-Suicide-Report-Final.pdf
There is no difference in suicide risk between those who want surgery and those who have had it. However, the risk is lower for those who do not want it than those who do want it/have had it. Also, trans who are not visibly different have a somewhat lower suicide risk than those who are visibly different. The same increase was found for those who get out of the closet.
Tables on page 9
The biggest risk increase is not seen after surgery, but seems to be associated with coming out as a transgender. In other words, it all looks as if it is the coming out as a transgender that is the dangerous part. Which points to the reactions of society as possibly a part of the problem.
Maybe, because transgenders then run into the likes of JAD? Or worse (that should be possible)?
@Ian Brueno
“This statement can only come from someone who lives in Crapistan or some other third world country (or Europe) where the average person is poor by American standards.”
There is a major difference between the USA and the rest of the world wrt mortgages.
In the US, a home owner who cannot keep up with his payments leaves his house and his debts behind. In most of the world you can lose your house, but not your debts. Your remaining mortgage debts stays with you after the bank sold your house. That changes the calculations of those who take out a mortgage (page 32 in the link).
Actually, deficiency rates after the 2008 crisis were almost everywhere lower than in the USA.
(figure 7)
https://cbaweb.sdsu.edu/assets/files/research/Lea/10122_Research_RIHA_Lea_Report.pdf
@Ian Argent
“Anyway, US “exceptionalism” in treatment of failed debtors is IMHO a benefit of residency/citizenship. You can screw up and get your slate wiped.”
I am all for it. Lenders should be forced to evaluate risks before they lend. But it is not the law of the world outside the USA. I think this is one reason there are more startups in the US. In Europe, your first bankruptcy tends to be your last.
@Russ Cage:
> Why would people’s absolutely normal and evolutionarily-favored responses disappoint you?
If there’s one thing science has been consistently showing, for the last 400 years at least, it’s that “absolutely normal and evolutionarily-favored responses” are wrong in almost 100% of the cases. Take literally any knowledge domain and confront what your intuitions and instincts say about it, from the shape of the Earth and the movement of the Sun and the stars, the nature of biological processes, with what we now know about it, and in almost all of the cases, with very few exceptions, science will not only tell but show you that your intuitions and instincts are wrong.
“Evolutionarily-favored responses” have one single purpose and usefulness: they help you survive time enough in the savanna, while living in a tribe of up to 150 members, while lacking any deep knowledge of how the world works, for you to have offspring. That’s it. And attributing any higher purpose or any general applicability outside those bounds to them is also an incorrect instinctual/intuitive response.
—
@Jay Maynard:
> Quoting the DSM in a discussion of sexuality is as unreliable as quoting the IPCC reports in a discussion of climate change. Both are in no small part political documents not based in science but rather intended to advance a specific agenda.
The main link in my answer was the first, to the Wikipedia article and all the peer reviewed publications it links to. The two other links show practical attitudes that agree with the state of the art scientific research on the matter. Therefore, I suggest you at least read the Wikipedia article in full, as it’s not only informative but also well written.
I should also point out that disregarding the APA’s position because it’s the APA’s position isn’t a proper intellectual behavior. The two documents link to the sources on which the two official positions are based. Those, plus the links in the Wikipedia article, should offer enough basis for a proper judgment of the scientific merit of both positions by themselves.
> A lot of people, perhaps projecting from their own behavior, don’t seem to be able to grasp the concept that one might point at truth one is unhappy with simply because one believes not knowing the truth is more dangerous.
A person not grasping this, or advocating implicitly that that position is wrong, goes instantly on my list of persons to avoid.
Now, I recognize this might be a childish behavior of mine. Lots of politicians promote that this position is dangerous for the people they defend. And in the strange new world with lots of apes screaming at everything they don’t like we’re living in, promoting an unpopular idea may destroy all one’s chances of doing a right deed that need promoting another idea.
Thus the logical politicians position.
There is a lot of unappreciated good into a silent position. Yet, it may mean one may only support one cause in their life.
Disclaimer: of course, we are all apes.
@esr:
I think you’re being a bit too charitable to Russ and that Amy has every reason to be twitchy, if not about what he said, then certainly about how it could be interpreted.
The remedy to bad speech is apparently punishment. What form should the punishment take? What form has punishment typically taken when the government refuses to provide it and people reach for self-help?
>The remedy to bad speech is apparently punishment.
Yes, but punishment of who? Russ can correct me on this, but I’m seeing a desire to punish PC enforcers here – people trying to gaslight him.
“Insisting that we accept ” is not mere bad speech.
Hmmm, do blockquotes work here?
Things sexual are much of what the hindbrain is about. The people who convince their forebrains to override such basic things are how you get deadly disorders like anorexia nervosa. Doing so is well over on the scale of stupid.
Doubly so in the case of overriding judgements about what is female. The only mass epidemic of an incurable, deadly STD in the USA was driven by MSM.
Others have written that a major difference between liberals and conservatives it that the latter have a far more highly developed and sensitive disgust reaction. Disgust is one of the first emotions to develop in infants. What you’re demanding is something that’s guaranteed to set up neuroses at the very best. I didn’t dump Christianity to infect myself with another pathological meme-set of guilt complexes.
If you think that “gayness” is inborn and not curable, you must accept disgust also. Even Ed Brayton has found himself feeling it strongly enough to write about it.
Got mine years ago. The BLM kerfuffle in Fergadishu made me very glad I had.
Frankly, bullshit. You want to FORCE your delusion on me. Now you want to escalate to holding a gun to my head… LITERALLY.
IOW, you’re fake and try very hard not to be spotted as one. At least I can console myself with the thought that you’re probably a much bigger danger to yourself than you are to me. Given the documented suicide risks, transexuals should probably be categorized as mentally ill enough to be forbidden firearms.
Like preferring to eat steak rather than shit? Like 90+ percent of men refusing to have sex with other men, preferring women?
“Well, no, not that, but….”
No “buts”. You pick examples of things outside of basic society and far beyond human scales of space and time and then pronounce all of the finely-tuned, survival-critical reactions that got us to the point of being sophonts “wrong”. They’re “wrong” in the same way that Newtonian mechanics is “wrong”. It’s a superbly accurate model for cases of low spatial curvature and speeds << c. Basic human reactions are literally built for human survival in our natural environments, and especially among humans. The massive differences in those environments is why we have HBD; the various human populations have been subject to divergent selection and evolution.
Go ahead and try making the New Soviet Man where others have failed so dismally. I’ll even withhold objections to you killing another 66 million in the effort, so long as they’re all volunteers (the victims of the Cheka sure weren’t). But do it somewhere else.
@JimR:
I insist that you accept that you’re wrong about this.
@esr:
> Yes, but punishment of who?
That is as unknown as the form of punishment at this point. But with SJWs going to war with Ross and JAD and JimR and friends, Amy’s instinct that she may be collateral damage cannot be dismissed out of hand.
>Amy’s instinct that she may be collateral damage cannot be dismissed out of hand.
If transsexuals like Amy want out of the line of fire in the culture war, the most effective thing they can do is insist that the Left stop mascotizing them. A good analogy would be the #notyourshield faction in GamerGate.
“I insist that you accept that you’re wrong about this.”
Cute. Brendan Eich would like a word with you.
@JimR:
Your reference to Eich is even cuter. “Insisting” is verbal. Conflating that with the action of firing is moronic, no matter how much I insist you understand that my insistence that Hillary be prosecuted or that Trump be fired is meaningless.
Are y’all deliberately being obtuse?
No amount to badgering someone to accept something (whether a delusion or not) rises to the level of return violence: if you beat them up then you are the aggressor, but you can yell back at them all you want.
And on the flip side; once someone tries to use actual force they are fair game for what force is necessary to make them no longer a threat.
Bro do you even NAP?
Verbal assault is assault. It is a crime. It’s often the harbinger of worse crimes.
Don’t raise angry voices unless you want people to prepare themselves to receive and repel a physical assault. And above all, DO NOT assemble in numbers to do it. Look up “disparate force”. Anyone subject to it has legitimate fear for their life.
> No amount to badgering someone to accept something (whether a delusion or not) rises to the level of return violence: if you beat them up then you are the aggressor, but you can yell back at them all you want.
The line between badgering and violence is not so binary as you’re implying.
To make an obvious example, one foundational operation in the modern iteration of the culture wars is the calling down of the Internet Lynch Mob, with expressed intent to cost people jobs and other economic opportunities. Is denying someone any possible livelihood “violence”? It can certainly thoroughly ruin someone’s life.
More generally, the history of actual mass violence shows a pattern of sequential escalation through more and more hostile actions, transitioning mostly smoothly between “fiery eliminationist rhetoric” and “deniably incited violence” (and then further). If someone is exhibiting behavior that in the past has reliably warned of future violence toward you, what’s the reaction?
@Russ Cage:
> (…) and then pronounce all of the finely-tuned, survival-critical reactions (…)
Do you use condoms? Do you approve of women who use the pill, DIU and other such methods? Then you already overcame your “survival-critical” reactions and are forfeiting the survivability of your genetic code.
The difference isn’t one of essence, it’s one of gradation. Being polite and kind towards people with differing brain structures doesn’t reduce your survivability unless and except the person’s differing structure includes attributes such as psychopathy and/or random violence. Refusing medical science, on the other hand, well might actually reduce your survivability.
Tell me: what will you do once CRISPR advances enough so as to be able to switch the Y chromosome in every single cell of a male-born human body into an X chromosome, and surgery advances enough to give a male-to-female transsexual a body that matches the physical structure of her brain in every detail, up to and including a fertile uterus? It’s the same tech that will provide for, among other things, perpetual life to your own body. Will you demand the technology be outlawed? Will you demand that strict rules be put in place so that some/most of their potential uses be outlawed? Given your slippery-slope argument invoking the deaths of Communism, let me return the favor with: Will you demand that, if outlawing those uses doesn’t prosper, every female you met have at hand a “genetic birth certificate” stating whether they were actually born with a double pair of X chromosomes? Will you demand Google Glass-like devices pop up details about all individuals you’re looking so that the “GBC” is immediately visible to all, with legal obligation to provide it and criminal penalties in case of lying about it to the authorities?
As I said, your instincts are good for the savanna. We’re 10,000 years removed from that and, barring a world-ending event that wipes humanity, with billions of years in front of us. Our standard biological framework will become a small chapter in the story of humanity. The “origins” chapter, referring to the first 0.1% of it, back before things became actually interesting.
Quite a dangerous weapon for the short transitional period while it lasted. But that time is passed: its effectiveness ended with LambdaConf, if not before. It is still a scary club, but every time it fails or outright backfires it becomes less scary and people are more willing to ignore it.
Preparation. Running your own meme war at full speed (you are running your own memetics, right? …..riiiight?). Making it very clear that the moment they cross the line you will retaliate. Essentially the same steps someone takes if they live in a high crime neighborhood and carry. What did you think the response should be? Tacnukes?
Witness the Battle of Berkley. The pro-free speech people involved in it showed remarkable and mostly proper restraint considering the lunatics they were faced with. More humiliation would have been beneficial, but whatever. Now the antifa fools think they need to arm up, but the good guys have already demonstrated that they aren’t afraid anymore. So when antifa does escalate they will do some (more) damage, and be promptly bitch-slapped back to the crib they slithered out of.
Who’d a thunk Russ Cage would spout SJW “word are actual violence” nonsense? Hey, Russ, your words here have been an assault on Amy. Turn yourself in at the nearest police station for arrest and prosecution.
> > First, I would want the default to be that we treat such people kindly. Beating them up,
> > accusing them of sin, or denying them the same rights as the rest of us is not acceptable.
> Insisting that we accept such delusions as fact is psychological abuse that should be
> rejected out of hand and punished if not ceased permanently on request.
Tolerance, acceptance and advocacy are three different things.
A modern pluralistic society requires that we *tolerate* a certain degree of things we personally may deem distasteful, unwise, illogical, at odds with the observable universe, or just plain stupid.
But this doesn’t mean we need to *accept* these things, and we should actively punch back when required to add our voices to the advocacy.
I have and do, but regulation of reproduction is part and parcel of K-selection. We only got where we are by escaping the Malthusian trap that all r-selected societies wind up in sooner or later.
The solution for K-selected societies being out-bred by r-selected invaders is to send the invaders back.
Bullshit. Insisting that I accept someone else’s delusion that my absolutely normal brain structures and scientific fact both say is WRONG is naked aggression. They start by being far worse than merely impolite, and that terminates any obligations I might have had toward them.
Then I will say that the advertising is no longer false, and one major piece of “Steel Beach” is no longer fiction.
Of course, the more likely outcome is that errors in brain development which cause such mis-matches are simply not allowed to occur any more.
> If transsexuals like Amy want out of the line of fire in the culture war, the most effective thing they can do is insist that the Left stop mascotizing them.
It’s possible it could be useful. But maybe not — look what happened to Rebecca Tuvel. These people eat their own for breakfast.
Honestly, if someone just wants to be left alone, it’s not their job to tell one set of dangerously crazy people to stop tweaking another set of dangerously crazy people. That’s more like a job for the rest of us.
>But maybe not — look what happened to Rebecca Tuvel. These people eat their own for breakfast.
That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. We should encourage that sort of autophagy.
@Russ Cage:
> Verbal assault is assault. It is a crime.
Sure, but you’re conflating verbal assault with words on the internet. As Rob K points out, that’s bullshit of the highest calibre, right out of the SJW playbook.
@Patrick Maupin – I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here. When Russ says:
“Insisting that we accept such delusions as fact is psychological abuse that should be rejected out of hand and punished if not ceased permanently on request.”
Who “insist[s] that we accept such delusions as fact”? Is it the “PC enforcers,” as ESR claims? Or is it trans people in general, as his later quote (“You want to FORCE your delusion on me”) would seem to indicate? If the latter, then you’re darned right I’ve got every reason to be “twitchy.” (And then he tops it off with insults direct, implying that I’m suicidal. Nothing of the sort! I’m a lot happier as Amy, and people who’ve seen me have noticed.)
@ESR – “If transsexuals like Amy want out of the line of fire in the culture war, the most effective thing they can do is insist that the Left stop mascotizing them.”
That would be nice. I’m no more someone’s mascot than I am their punching bag. What I really, really want is that people would treat me with the courtesy normally extended to those of my gender, but otherwise leave me be and let me live my own life, just as I have no interest in interfering in theirs! The only thing that motivates me to speak up is either against a clear and present threat–and Russ’ comments seem to me to qualify–or to help educate other people, as in, “See, we aren’t really that much unlike you!” Most of the work I do in the community is either focused on helping fellow trans women and men, as with my work with the Gender Identity Center of Colorado, or on fundraising for various worthy causes, some LGBT-related, some not.
Transgender is not contagious, for $DEITY’s sake. I won’t even try to verbally persuade someone into crossdressing. You’ve got to feel the need to express the other gender, deep down, or else it’s just not going to work for you. Either you do or you don’t, basically, and, if you don’t, there’s not only no point trying to convince you any different, it would be immoral and possibly hazardous.
>Who “insist[s] that we accept such delusions as fact”? Is it the “PC enforcers,” as ESR claims? Or is it trans people in general, as his later quote (“You want to FORCE your delusion on me”) would seem to indicate?
It could be either. But let’s talk about what’s meant by “force” here.
Lately I’ve several times come near writing a blog post titled “Why I Now Regret Supporting Gay Marriage.” One-sentence version: gay activists lost me when they scalped Brendan Eich and began using the force of law to persecute bakers and pizza shops.
The entirely reasonable fear of people like Russ Cage is that, soon, they may be punished by force of law for refusing to endorse transgenderism in their speech and behavior. Transgender people “insisting” is not threatening; there are too few of you. PC enforcers who have co-opted the force of law are, on the other hand, very threatening.
I sympathize with this fear. There is a creeping meta-level totalitarianism about all these object-level demands for “tolerance”; it builds on the original corruption of “public-accommodation” laws that progressively shrink the private sphere in which individual choice and private property are not interfered with. It’s “tolerance or we’ll jail you for hatecrime”, with the definition of hatecrime becoming ever more malleable and expansive and ever more abused as a political cudgel.
In my view not much fault for this attaches to transsexuals per se. You’ve been mascotized as part of a continuing attack on liberty and its sustaining institutions; you’ll be discarded as soon as your interests conflict with a later phase of the attack, as gays are now being discarded in favor of Muslims. I don’t actually blame gays, either; the real villains are the Gramscians using sexual and racial minorities to totalitarianize our society, to make everything political.
Left to themselves, conservatives like Russ would probably settle for a truce: if you keep your laws off my private life and my business and my speech, I will shun transsexuals and other people I think are icky but not do actual violence to them. More and more people speak of “culture war” now because it is clearer by the month that the Gramscians don’t mean to leave anyone that live-and-let-live option. Me, I figured that out during the Eich flap; since then, the only real question has been who the mascots for the next turn of the repressive screw were going to be.
Congratulations, transsexuals. It’s your turn. Anybody want to open a pool on who the next mascot group will be? Before they became inconvenient during the attack on Milo Yiannopolous, I was getting some strong hints from SJW-land that it might be pedophiles. Now? Who knows – bestialists, maybe? Necrophiles?
> We should encourage that sort of autophagy.
Yeah, I’m all for that, but it’s also a sign to start asking seriously what Martin Niemöller would suggest we do.
Eric, there’s another advantage to the Left when they take up the “transsexual” cause. (I use sneer quotes, because in fact “Claire” is no more a transsexual than I am. He is a transvestite). Specifically, it enables leftist males to hide behind their faux femininity when they use violence.
For my own part, I intend to kill–you read that right–any Leftist who attacks me. If it appears to be a woman, I will assume it to be a transsexual male.
>Specifically, it enables leftist males to hide behind their faux femininity when they use violence.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that they’re actually attempting this. The Black Bloc certainly isn’t very femme.
Witness the Battle of Berkley. The pro-free speech people involved in it showed remarkable and mostly proper restraint considering the lunatics they were faced with.
Actually, I thought that they missed an opportunity. Like Gen. George Meade at Gettysburg, they won a crucial battle that may very well turn out to be seen as decisive when the war is over; but also like Gen. Meade, they failed to pursue and wipe out the enemy.
> I don’t think there’s any evidence that they’re actually attempting this. The Black Bloc certainly isn’t very femme.
If anything, those leftist women who get involved with antifa violence seem to look conspicuously less feminine than usual.
If anything, those leftist women who get involved with antifa violence seem to look conspicuously less feminine than usual.
Which would make perfect sense if they were actually men.
>Which would make perfect sense if they were actually men.
You’re being silly. It’s quite a bit more likely that they’re lesbians with androgenized brains. Recruiting women for street thuggery would select for this.
Anyway, the distribution means for upper body strength in males and females are so wildly different that Olympic-grade adult female athletes recently got schooled by 15-year-old boys and nobody with a clue was surprised. See also “Moldylock’s” pathetic fail against the dude from Evropa at the Battle of Berkeley. Thus, posing as female would collapse pretty fast in a streetfight.
I had read “Insisting that we accept” as “or else they’ll team with their allies and create law that forces us to accept”, but I can see how it could have been interpreted as “asking very firmly and pointedly”.
I’ll point out that Google says “insist” means “demand something forcefully, not accepting refusal”. I’m no language prescriptivist, but if one side gets one definition and another side gets another…
Ambiguity in written language is causing a lot of the problems throughout these types of issues, for me at least.
Okay, ESR, I can understand your sentiment. I’ve long believed that the solution to bakers, pizza shops, etc. that don’t want to serve LGBT people is to go and find someone else that will, and tell people why you did so. If enough people do that, the businesses expressing bigotry will founder, and the ones that don’t will prosper.
(Which in turn strongly implies that any business refusing service to a paying customer just because their lifestyle offends the owners is shooting itself in the foot by doing so. Most small businesses can’t afford to turn away business.)
If Russ were to treat me in a proper fashion for a lady, I’d have no problem with him no matter what he may think about me. On his own time, in private, he can snarl at me all he likes. He can stick pins into a voodoo doll of me if he wants. He can get together with all his conservative buddies and gripe about “those damn trannies” all he wants.
But if he starts giving me the side-eye, I certainly won’t want to have anything to do with him. If he starts being rude to me, he shouldn’t be surprised if I lob it right back into his teeth by calling him a “Bible-thumping Neanderthal” or similar. And, if he moves to attack me physically, I will use whatever force is necessary to stop him from doing so…up to and including deadly force, because the sheer number of trans women that have been murdered for no other “crime” than being who and what they are gives me ample reason to fear for my life in any physical confrontation.
But I’m not going to go after him for “wrongthink.” Too many of my sisters would be inclined to go after me for “wrongthink,” given that I believe things like:
– Socialized medicine is never a good idea.
– People seeking to come to this country should do so legally. Those that have entered this country in violation of its laws have to go back. If you have no borders, you have no nation.
– The science is far from “settled” on global climate change. Certainly nowhere near “settled” enough to essentially gamble the entire economy of the planet that we can “solve” it.
– Islam is fundamentally incompatible with modern civilization. It must be either reformed, quarantined, or destroyed.
And this summarizes the horns of the dilemma I find myself upon. I might actually agree with Russ on many issues…but, if he wants to see me essentially removed from existence because he can’t stand the fact that I’m trans, then we have a problem. Likewise, the “other side” wants me to swallow their entire agenda along with the fact of accepting me for who and what i am…but I can’t force myself to choke it all down.
If you, ESR, think I’m “icky,” I won’t force you to spend time around me. I’d rather be with people that appreciate me for what I am anyway…a set that includes almost all of the people that actually surround me in my daily life.
>If you, ESR, think I’m “icky,” I won’t force you to spend time around me.
I didn’t say that. I’m trying to argue in a mode that keeps my ick feelings, or lack of them, irrelevant.
The point I’m trying to get across to you is that Russ is only your enemy to the extent that he feels cornered by the Gramscians. I think. He might correct me.
Gramscians
Who even are the actual Gramscians these days? I admit, it does all sound like a conspiracy theory, but supposing it’s true: if so, who are they? Who’s still operating the war machine? Is it intentional? Or do you mean that it doesn’t have to be? And if that’s true, do they even deserve blame? Are you just fighting a fire with no arsonist around anymore?
(Btw, another ambiguity: the definition of “prospiracy” being used here is still not the first one that pops up in a search. I know yours, and it’s been buried. Neither is in extremely wide use.)
>Are you just fighting a fire with no arsonist around anymore?
I think that’s actually a good metaphor. Most of the Gramscians are not even conscious Marxists anymore, though they remain easily manipulable by conscious Marxists and consscious Marxists find it easy to gain leadership in their networks.
The Soviets constructed a kind of mind virus that survived their empire, a thing like a religion. You can tell it’s contiguous with their propaganda because it has the same tropes sticking out of it – a big one, for example, is the obsession with power dynamics as an explanatory mechanism to the exclusion of any other generative theory about even literature or art.
Once you know to look, you can spot all kinds of features of Soviet Marxism/Leninism that have been stripped of their original context but remain part of the virus. Here’s another one: there is never any enemy to the left. And another: the U.S. never has any legitimate national interests at all, can act rightly under when there is some kind of “humanitarian” justification, and the rightness is judged ex post facto by how much blood and treasure it sacrifices for how little gain.
Look up the Baran-Wallerstein “world system” thesis. Once you understand what it is and how it was a response to the original, failed Marxian theory of the immiseration of the proletariat – look around you. It’s utterly contradicted by facts – far from being immiserated, J. Random Thirld Worlder is wealthier and less immiserated than at any time in history. Yet recognizable variants of Baran-Wallerstein haunt every thought the Gramscian infectee has about global politics.
I think I need to write a long blog post about this.
“I don’t think there’s any evidence that they’re actually attempting this. The Black Bloc certainly isn’t very femme.”
maybe not, but moldylocks and her supporters certainly tried to play the “he hit back at a girl!” card.
@Ken
I should have been more clear: the restraint I was praising was that of the good guys to not break every bone in the body of every antifa they could catch. A tempting option after seeing how antifa would drag people into their side of the crowd and whale on them.
For what you said I agree, see my previous statement: ” More humiliation would have been beneficial, but whatever.”
@Amy Tapie
Are…. you Milo’s trans sister?
Ian Bruene:
I don’t see restraint as praiseworthy. Granted, there are times when you need to restrain yourself; but every time you do, it takes a little out of you. When a Leftist sucker punches you, no one says, “This proves Leftists are thugs.” They say, “Look, the conservative pussy got his ass kicked.”
This is one thing that has been sticking in my craw for a while. We on the Right (and sorry, ESR, I am including you as Right–yeah, I know it’s not technically accurate) need to start WINNING these conflagrations. Winning elections does no good if the enemy controls the street.
And that, for most people means being emotionally ready not to “win”–winning is for baseball players–but to KILL. You need to see the enemy as not having a life worth sparing.
Nothing irritates me more on the Right than the “mopey old men” who are just so HORRIFIED that the Left would use VIOLENCE!!!! Thank God we Civilized Men (TM) don’t do something like that! An example is Ben Stein, from the American Spectator, who back during the 2000 election, was saying that the Bush brothers were such nice boys, and that it saddened him that they would almost certainly lose to the tough guys in the Democrat Party. Another example was James Pinkerton, who after the 1998 midterms–in which the GOP lost seats in the House–said that, well, the Democrats would always have an edge because they were the rebels against their parents, and the GOP were the good little boys (my words, not his) who did what their parents told them to do.
The fact is: if we are to defeat them, there will have to be blood shed. Their blood.
And note: I did acknowledge the need OCCASIONALLY for restraint. Just like a military force needs not to rush into a trap. But if a military force is ALWAYS retreating, it will become demoralized.
@esr: “I agree. The element of threat there is pretty much irreducible, given (a) a person with a penis in the ladies’ room is pre-sorted for some sort of sexual deviance, and (b) you can’t know what kind of deviance until it may be too late to avoid sexual assault.”
I think you don’t actually agree. It’s a *terminal preference*. It isn’t based upon something else, such as chance for deviance. It may be associated with deviance in people’s minds, but that association is not a full explanation of why women don’t like it.
@at: “How are they going to know? Cis women do not run around exposing their genitals to other people in the ladies’ room.”
People have preferences about things that they can’t observe, so women prefer not having people with penises in the women’s room regardless of whether they know that the penis is there. If you are a certain type of utilitarian, you might not, but most people are not those.
>I think you don’t actually agree. It’s a *terminal preference*
Terminal preferences have explanations too. We’re evolved survival machines; we don’t have preferences hanging in midair without any connection to reproductive fitness. I’m just analyzing a level deeper, is all.
Maupin:
Heckler’s veto by proxy? Their behavior is not MY responsibility.
Projection (and bullshit). The word “yell” was quite deliberately used here. Yelling is done with one’s voice, not one’s keyboard, and here in my own house I can yell to my heart’s content and nobody but my nearest neighbor would ever know. (Maybe they’d think it was just attempted rap.)
If someone says “bullshit, now get lost” and your response is to yell at them (has to be in person, of course), that is assault. If you assemble a mob to yell at an individual or even just glare, that is assault, intimidation and disparate force. It also appears to meet the definition of stalking under my state law.
(Note: some comments are going to moderation and may make their first appearance other than at the bottom of the thread.)
And I need to hit this again:
But you’re not applying this to the feels-like-a-woman-in-a-man’s-body, who ought to be able to just “pre-empt” that hindbrain judgement too, right? Who would definitely be happier and more functional if they “simply” did that, right?
You’re giving Amy a pussy-less pass.
>But you’re not applying this to the feels-like-a-woman-in-a-man’s-body, who ought to be able to just “pre-empt” that hindbrain judgement too, right?
Pay attention. I’ve actually said in this thread, and a previous post, that I hold open the possibility that Amy and others like her are epistemically indistinguishable from BIID sufferers – that is, mislabeled mental cases. You could be right that she’s plain nuts and her feelings don’t correspond to reality.
But I don’t know that with high enough confidence to treat Amy like shit. She might be a non-crazy intersex. She might be something I don’t understand etiologically at all. So I behave with civility and gather data. It’s not like that choice is costing me anything.
That’s just it. You’re demanding treatment accorded to a gender that isn’t truly yours (no matter what your feelz are), and interfering in other people’s lives to the extent that you do it against their own better (normal) judgement.
It isn’t? What, then, is causing this flood of “transgender children”, some of whom aren’t even verbal yet?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/21/boy-7-removed-from-mothers-care-following-concerns-she-was-forci/
https://spectator.org/transgenderism-and-the-power-of-a-parent/
Yes, yes, I know, it’s child abuse, Munschausen syndrome by proxy, AND offensive and disgusting. And it would not be possible without the demands for “acceptance” by and on behalf of people like you. The Gramscians behind it don’t care, you’re just tools to destroy civilization.
For the record, I carry. I’ve never dropped the hammer on anyone, but I’ve had to draw once and have been ready to on two other occasions. You fuck with me at risk of your life.
Oh, that’s hilarious. I’ve been an atheist for 4 decades and counting now, and the only humanoids WITHOUT Neanderthal DNA are sub-saharan Africans… who are, with the exception of Australian abos, literally the dumbest people on earth.
http://www.npiamerica.org/research/category/racial-differences-in-intelligence-personality-and-behavior
Wish-fulfillment fantasy? I have never said I want ANYTHING to do with you. I’ve known several “transgender” people. So far they’ve mostly been somewhere between harmless and pathetic (one was a psychopath, who I won’t name). But Eric has it right: the same people who put Christian bakers and florists out of business are after me (a pro-choice atheist! just because I’m a heterosexual White male) too, and you’re a convenient cats-paw. I’ve just decided that I’m not going to be quiet about it.
Eric:
You got that right.
Oh, dear, it’s a totally unexpected tragedy of our technological revolution. Humans are being trans-sisterized!
@Russ Cage:
You clearly don’t know the science you proclaim as sustaining your assertions. Follow the link I’ve provided before and read it: Causes of transsexuality.
By the way: after several similar debates on the subject, I’m by now used to conservatives usually refusing to read that link. They keep debating, and debating, and debating, and debating, all the while outright avoiding to gain any knowledge on the matter that might compromise whatever their gut instincts tell them. This, I confess, is odd, because on all other areas of knowledge it’s usual for conservatives to know more about the subject matter than their progressive counterparts, not less. Sex however, and everything related to it, tends to be the glaring exception.
Maybe, but I’d bet on people using these tools to increase their fitness by expanding their range of possibilities rather than to reduce it by reducing them. Having such a strong attachment to one’s baseline bodily structure in a future space-faring civilization would hinder individuals rather than empower them.
My own expectation is that people will select for full adaptability insofar as bodily shape, function and features are concerned: higher IQ; higher Dunbar number; higher Kohlbergian and Fowlerian stages accessibility; less cognitive biases etc. I most definitely don’t expect them to opt for a stricter adherence to much less flexible alternatives.
In that regards, therefore, I think transsexuality will be overcome as much as cissexuality, ditto for the heterosexuality vs. homosexuality duality. All of those are restrictive. If anything, future human beings will be pansexual. It’s the optimal configuration for a state of affairs in which individuals, rather than species, are the focus.
@Ian Bruene – “Are…. you Milo’s trans sister?”
Milo who? Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22? Milo from Monster Hunter International?
@Russ Cage – Sorry, I was using “you” as a stand-in for “all the right-wingers who hate trans people,” just because of your rhetoric here. You yourself may have no ill will towards me. I’m willing to grant that. You might be off my list of people I’d want to have dinner with, but meh.
@ESR – “Russ is only your enemy to the extent that he feels cornered by the Gramscians.”
Well, I’m not sure of what “Gramscians” means in this context, but I don’t think I’m one of them. He doesn’t have to believe I’m a “real woman”; I know what I am, and his beliefs aren’t going to change that.
@Alexander Gieg – I’m not an expert on why people are trans or not. I’ve sometimes wondered if I should have had my chromosomes analyzed, or my hormone levels (pre-HRT) checked, or something else that might identify why I’m the way I am. But then I remember the words I read from an older trans woman to a younger one that had these same questions: “Why? Are you looking for something to blame?”
>Milo who? Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22? Milo from Monster Hunter International?
LOL. Milo Yiannopulous. Anti-PC provocateur. Has a lot of fans among my regulars.
>Well, I’m not sure of what “Gramscians” means in this context, but I don’t think I’m one of them.
No, you rather obviously are not, and that fact has been surprising the hell out of my regulars.
Go read this: Gramscian Damage. The “Gramscians” as referred to here are are memebots running a psyops program that outlasted its Soviet masters – which is to say, every SJW and almost all of the self-identified “Left”. Russ understands this and confirms that he finds you threatening only to the degree he feels cornered by the Gramscians – his exact words were “You got that right”.
Get out of your cave and meet some others with complicated identities. You use Rachel Dolezal as an example because it is clearly a black and white issue, and Rachel is so easy to diss. Meet a 75% black woman who looks 90% white and see her suffering as she witnesses what other members of her family suffer from. Who are you to tell her that she can’t identify black?
Btw, genotype != phenotype and whites can tan too.
>Meet a 75% black woman who looks 90% white and see her suffering as she witnesses what other members of her family suffer from. Who are you to tell her that she can’t identify black?
It’s rather funny when people make assumptions this stupid at me.
One of the ex-girlfriends I remember most fondly is an interracial woman – Afro-American mother, Irish father. Identified as black. I’d make a bet she knows more about having a complicated identity than you do.
She was bright as hell, and quite self-aware. We talked a lot.
Out of the absurd number of women I’ve been with, she was one of the small handful I might have married, knowing that if we had kids their racial identity would be…even more complicated.
Don’t presume to tell me what I do or don’t know,
@esr:
It’s more than that. They built a culture.
You can think about it as the difference between “the West” vs. “the Church”. The former was built around the later, either positively by its direct influence, or negatively by means of all the kinds of opposition directed towards it that emerged from within the cultural landscape shaped by it.
When one joins “the left”, be it either consciously or by means of imitation from their peers and authority figures, one assumes for oneself tons of things that are culturally “leftwing-y” without necessarily knowing where they come from or why they happen to be the way they are. This ranges from concepts and ideas to modes of speech, ways to signal their pertaining, what they find humorous or not, a basic implicit shared worldview, and so on and so fort. So, for them it’s just “how everyone else acts”.
As for Marxism, it’d be the “the Church” aspect of the thing. A few progressives are full on Marxists (or any of the differing “branches” that were born from it), similarly to how a few Westerners are Priests (or high level member of diverging branches, including Atheist preachers, who culturally share many basic agreements with Priests while saying the exact opposite they say). The majority however live way outside that level of knowledge on the inner workings of their cultural landscape.
This is why “the left” can be so pervasive. It isn’t merely a set of ideas. It isn’t merely a set of organic intellectuals in the Gramscian “branch” actively trying to embed Marxist twists into everything they touch. It’s wider and deeper than that. For those in left, it’s simply “reality”.
Please do. :-)
>It’s more than that. They built a culture.
That’s an inadequate description. Cultures are not usually weapons designed for specific objectives. Eh. I need to write that blog post.
Here in the USA, we are now in our fourth generation of extraordinary affluence and it has wrought a rapid anti-evolutionary decline in our overall fitness and robustness. Whereas our ancestors once fought to stay alive and reproduce in a world of extreme hardship and daily mortal threat; we now manufacture a desperate struggle over hurt feelings in the transgender community. We sorely miss that primordial gauntlet and opportunity to test and measure ourselves. Surely we can find better challenges that befit our heritage.
@Amy Tapie:
It’d be more expensive than a blood test could tell. Currently it requires a brain scan to look at areas that diverge between cis men and women. Heterosexual transgender individuals have those areas with characteristics very similar to those of the cis gender they identify with, which suggests their brains are, literally, of the opposite gender. Such scans are done in academic studies, but not, as far as I know at least, for individuals that aren’t part of such studies. Maybe in the future such scans will be available for the general public. IMHO that’d be particularly useful for parents to know whether their children are transgendered or not an thus as a means for them to better fulfill the children needs.
As for homossexual transgender individuals, their scans imply a more complicated case, or maybe lack of resolution in the current scans (or lack of enough areas scanned). Their brain scans tend to fall somewhere in the middle of the different scales.
No, not blame. It provides for a strong assurance that there is nothing delusional about being transgendered, but quite the opposite, a transgender individual is simply someone who has a good self-perception about their own body, specifically, about their own brains.
Also, it provides a good counter-argument for naturalistic ideas about how it’s a “choice”, how a transexual should “learn to accept their body” etc.
And finally, because more information is as a rule a good thing. It opens possibilities, while lack of knowledge always closes them.
>Heterosexual transgender individuals have those areas with characteristics very similar to those of the cis gender they identify with, which suggests their brains are, literally, of the opposite gender.
I have personal reason to think this is underdetermined, though.
I have strong reason to believe that my brain has at least two major female-typical features: weak lateralization and a corpus callosum functional into adulthood (in most men it shrinks and becomes almost inactive; in women it doesn’t). This is from a neuropsychologist in the 1970s after he ran a test battery on me; the technology for direct imaging to confirm it didn’t then exist.
But I am gendersolid like a rock. Never had even the slightest sense of not being fully male and happy with it.
This makes me skeptical about the female-brain-in-male-body thing, at least as far as gross morphology that you can capture on an MRI goes. Of course I get it about fetal androgenization or lack thereof, but the important parts of that are probably neural-network pruning that we can’t see.
@Russ Cage:
> Heckler’s veto by proxy? Their behavior is not MY responsibility.
Quite the opposite of a hecker’s veto. I was explaining that they’re not Amy’s responsibility, either. OTOH, if their behavior is so problematic you might have to eventually kill them, it might behoove you to help the rest of us figure out how to defang them instead.
> The word “yell” was quite deliberately used here.
Yes, and if you look at it in context, it wasn’t necessarily about the kind of yelling that rises to the level of a physical threat.
@esr:
I know several transsexuals. Not enough to derive a statistics from this, but even though it’s at best anecdotal, only a third of them buy the SJW mindset. Another third are your standard moderate liberal. And the remaining third adamantly dislike SJWs, a few of these being libertarian, a few not caring about politics.
From this last group, an interesting case was a close friend of mine, a 60-years-old male-to-female transsexual (in a 30-years-old stable polyamorous marriage, no less), who didn’t know what a SJW was. Someone called her that, and she was confused and asked around what it meant. When people explained it to her she was horrified, and felt actually offended someone would think that of her.
I suspect that’s more common than we think. The problem is, as always, that SJWs are a loud bunch, and since they coopted the transsexual “cause” that gives the incorrect impression all transsexuals are SJWs, what most definitely isn’t the case.
By the way, an example of a powerful libertarian transsexual is Mara Pérez, diversity coordinator in the also libertarian Argentinian government. If you read Spanish here’s an article on her. If not, the paragraph below I translated provides some useful details:
Needless to say, SJW Argentinians weren’t happy with her then, and aren’t happy with her now, calling her a “traitor” of the transsexual “cause” etc. So, yeah. :-)
—
Maybe, but given the older example of Islam in its original form, as practiced by Muhammad himself, I’d say sometimes they are. Also, consider that if a culture has “Revolution” as a prime value, the one around which and from which its founding myths are constructed — just see how all their heroes have the “Revolutionary” title attached to them implicitly and many times explicitly –, and it isn’t so much that it was build as a weapon, but that doing things that from an external perspective look like weaponization acquires the aspect of a social duty. In other words, as a Marxist you prove your “conservatism” among your peers by how much you fight for the cause, and as a non-fighter you do the same by how much you “support our troops” etc. So the parallels are most definitely there.
@esr:
As with most everything in nature, this works in a Bell or Bell-like curve. The thing however is, there are very strong correlations between the brain areas currently scanned in details and transgenderism, so while a few features aren’t predictive of transgenderism, others are. Also, the technology to locate these differences has advanced a lot since the 1970’s. Current technology can measure details that back then would amount to less than rounding errors.
>Before they became inconvenient during the attack on Milo Yiannopolous, I was getting some strong hints from SJW-land that it might be pedophiles.
You are assuming a logical consistency on the part of the left that is not actually in evidence. They’re perfectly capable of demonizing an individual or group on one day, then worshiping that same person or group the next.
Notice how James Comey has suddenly become a hero to the same people who were calling for his head a few short days ago.
Their thought leaders sometimes even use it as a loyalty test. If you can persuade your followers to assent to something completely absurd, you know your power over them is absolute.
The “We have always been at war with Eastasia” bit came from Orwell’s own experience dealing with Communists, after all.
>Tell me: what will you do once CRISPR advances enough so as to be able to switch the Y chromosome in every single cell of a male-born human body into an X chromosome, and surgery advances enough to give a male-to-female transsexual a body that matches the physical structure of her brain in every detail, up to and including a fertile uterus?
In that situation, the transexual will still be ethically obligated to tell the prospective partner about it well before any actual sex occurs. It’s only common courtesy, even in situations considerably less squick-prone than gender-swapping. For example, when I was dating a somewhat-religious Jewish woman, I made sure to let her know that I a) wasn’t circumcised and b) was not going to become circumcised under any…um…circumstances (barring cancer or something of that nature). As it turned out, it didn’t bother her, but it might have, so I told her.
>[SJW] thought leaders sometimes even use it as a loyalty test. If you can persuade your followers to assent to something completely absurd, you know your power over them is absolute.
Of course this is true. It is, in fact, one of the clearest tells that the Gramscians are components of a machine designed to replicate Soviet-style totalitarianism. It gives away their meta-level objectives.
*sigh* More people should read Orwell.
Amy Tapie:
I suspect a misunderstanding has taken place. Eric wrote:
My interpretation is that what comes after “truce:” is what our host believes “conservatives like Russ” would say if “left to themselves”, rather than something he was saying as himself. So – if I’m right – it was metalanguage, but he failed to indicate that by putting the passage between quotation marks. Thus, the “icky” part wasn’t an expression of his own feelings.
While we’re at it: I apologize if my earlier remarks offended you. Your libertarian stances prove that the concept of gender identity isn’t inextricably bound to postmodernism or totalitarian political correctness. I should have known better, since I already believed that certain causes associated with the Left (such as animal rights) are compatible with a libertarian, or even conservative, worldview.
Thank you for broadening my perspective.
>Thus, the “icky” part wasn’t an expression of his own feelings.
That is correct.
One of the important respects in which I am not like conservatives is that my “ick” reaction does not couple strongly to my value judgments. So even supposing that I had an “ick” reaction to Amy, it wouldn’t disturb my thought processes much.
@ Winter “I am all for it. Lenders should be forced to evaluate risks before they lend. But it is not the law of the world outside the USA. I think this is one reason there are more startups in the US. In Europe, your first bankruptcy tends to be your last.”
Which is interesting, when I view the various attempts at implementing a “right to be forgotten” on the other side of the Pond; that it is a form without function, whereas the robust bankruptcy protections in the US give you a practical right to have your financial misdeeds legally forgotten.
The bit in Monty Python’s Holy Grail about how the ruler of the Castle in the Swamp built however many castles (that fell down, or burned, then fell down), it’s a bit of a giggle to American audiences, because it’s a bit over the top, but only a bit. That archetype? He’s an American memetic folk hero, because he didn’t give up in the face of adversity, but persevered to the point of providing an inheritance. (For a wastrel offspring, which is also an american folk meme). But it feels like to me that in the context of the movie, he’s supposed to be an utter fool. Always seemed a bit odd to me, until I started writing this.
@ ESR: Even if you are right, and the mass of “transgendered people” are unsafely delusional, how can we apply that to an individual (Amy, in these comments, you apparently grudgingly admit is not unsafely delusional)? Where does it end? Do we go back to trying to “cure” homosexuality?
>(Amy, in these comments, you apparently grudgingly admit is not unsafely delusional)?
I haven’t expressed a final judgment about that. Not enough information, and I’m not sure I’ll get enough.
@Doctor Locketopus:
Agreed.
But note I was referring to another layer of the discussion, the one about transgender individuals having brains of the opposite gender. As in, the usual position among those who don’t know the studies about brain structure and assume there’s no such thing at play, is that transgenderism is a matter of will, or a mental disease, and this that if there’s a dichotomy between mind (not brain, mind) and body, the mind must bow before the body, paralleling the notion of subjectivity submitting to objectivity.
When one does know about those structural differences and thus how the “subjectivity” in a transgender individual’s self perception isn’t, it’s actually objective, the discourse changes subtly but meaningfully to one of having to chose between which bodily organ is the most important, the one that should ultimately determine what you essentially are: your brain (not mind, brain), or your genitals?
Looked from that perspective, the conservative position then becomes an odd one: your genitals are the most important aspect of you. Your brain, all of its complexity, is secondary and should be made to fit your genitals, the end all, be all of personal identity.
That position is what asking about CRISPR and related technologies put into question. If one’s genitals are what matters most, and those genitals are now fully converted to the opposite gender, then that person now is of the opposite gender, right?
A self-consistent intellectual, conservative or not, would have to answer yes to that. Or, if his answer is still no, to find out what, precisely, is the actual key factor that determines his answer.
Dating and having sex is a related topic, but not exactly the same.
>Looked from that perspective, the conservative position then becomes an odd one: your genitals are the most important aspect of you. Your brain, all of its complexity, is secondary and should be made to fit your genitals, the end all, be all of personal identity.
By contrast, I have already stipulated that I think brain sex is in most circumstances more important than genital sex.
Where I still demur from your position is that I am far less confident of our ability to actually audit the sex differentation of a brain. The “trans have opposite-sex brains” model smells just a bit of facile oversimplification and political fad science to me.
@esr:
Well, I’d like to suggest, once more, the Wikipedia article on the matter. Several of the peer reviewed articles linked there are open access or can be found in their preprint versions and can be easily read. Some have been repeated with their findings confirmed. And new studies have built upon previous ones by scanning the same areas over the years in higher resolution and checking for additional details. The results seem to me to be pretty conclusive, although I’m not a neurologist and thus cannot vow for that with certainty.
The same goes for your position, in reverse. Here there be snarks and boojums, and we’ve no handy railway shares. Yes, there are people who are causing harm under cover of “transsexual liberation.” Why should that matter any more than that there are firearms owners who cause harm with their firearms, to the vast majority of law-abiding firearms owners. (Or, for that matter, that the bare majority of firearms deaths are suicides, another point alleged against transgenders, that their suicide risk is higher. Suicide is a tragedy, sure. But is it enough of a tragedy to interfere with liberty?)
And it seems to me that your distaste of the mascotism of the gramscian left is bleeding over to one set of mascots (and more, if your repudiation of support of gay marriage, above, is an indication). It’s all very well and good to say “well, you shouldn’t let yourself be mascotted.” But, how can they do that, and still maintain a quiet life? Especially when there are quite genuine bigots out there. Not everyone is suited for the activist lifestyle, even of the “climbing down from the flagstaff” variety.
There are Bad Eggs in every group of humans. Let’s not judge Amy by Claire’s actions?
>And it seems to me that your distaste of the mascotism of the gramscian left is bleeding over to one set of mascots (and more, if your repudiation of support of gay marriage, above, is an indication)
Did you miss the part where I said “In my view not much fault for this attaches to transsexuals per se.” and “. I don’t actually blame gays, either”?
>>Milo who? Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22? Milo from Monster Hunter International?
>LOL. Milo Yiannopulous. Anti-PC provocateur. Has a lot of fans among my regulars.
I prefer Milo, the protagonist of The Phantom Tollbooth, a kid who finds everything boring. I feel like him sometimes.
@esr: a corpus callosum functional into adulthood (in most men it shrinks and becomes almost inactive; in women it doesn’t)
Do you have a reference for this? I have read that there is some shrinkage (but without loss of activity) in elderly males, but what you are saying is a lot more drastic than that.
>Do you have a reference for this?
No. It was the neuropsychologist, sometime around 1978. If your information is more recent, it might be better.
I suspect that society would become a very uniform (not to mention boring) place after the SJWs and Gramscians get done converting (or driving off) all the bigots, racists, and non-conformists. In the extremis, it would, in fact, mean the end of thought diversity. Orwell’s fiction is becoming today’s reality; and sadly, I am not well suited to be a member of the hive. When will my tribe (The Individualists) get our turn in the victimology spotlight?
@Alexander Geig:
What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t you read? It doesn’t matter what the causes are, or if there’s no cause. The disgust reactions of the vast majority of healthy males are equally real if not more so; understanding is irrelevant. Demanding that the majority suppress their natural reactions or be punished to favor a tiny minority ought to be abhorrent even to you.
I’m not a utopian. I may be the closest thing there is to a Calvinist atheist. The world is “fallen”; it will never sit down together and sing kumbaya. That’s why we need separate spaces for different types of people: to prevent them from killing each other over their incompatibilities.
So a fat corpus collosum is good for some sets of traits, and a minimal one is good for a bunch of others. You can develop the brain one way or the other. You can’t change it once it’s complete.
Uploading makes that a moot point.
@JBD:
I have problems of my own, and your insistence that normals take on the burdens of others that they had nothing to do with creating is something that is going to explode sooner rather than later.
You’re putting yourself in other people’s sights as a source of nuisance, oppression and misery. Do you want to be there when their fucks-left-to-give meter hits “E”? McVeigh holds the record with Breivik the runner-up, but even a Dylann Roof can ruin your whole day.
This is why the left is going to drive mainstream America into a blind rage that will not end before the left is crushed. They have no brakes, no way to step outside their insane paradigm and see its flaws, limits and side effects. All is subjugated to the purity spiral.
Stuff is just vanishing tonight.
@ESR:
Is it cruel to tell them “do your thing somewhere else, because you make me want to gag”? Asking for a friend.
@Patrick Maupin:
If they’re running a mental program which creates pathological behavior and is epistemologically closed so there is no cure via reason, they’re as close to zombies as we’re going to find in reality. And you know what has to be done with zombies.
>Is it cruel to tell them “do your thing somewhere else, because you make me want to gag”?
Cruel? Probably. But that doesn’t concern me as much as, for example, whether you are trying to jawbone them off land that they own. Or whether, if they refuse your demand to “go elsewhere” in a public space, you plan to enforce it with violence. Even BIID cases have a right not to be coerced.
> I suspect that society would become a very uniform (not to mention boring) place after the SJWs and Gramscians get done converting (or driving off) all the bigots, racists, and non-conformists.
Oh, I think it will get plenty exciting when they start loading the unpersons on cattle cars. Just not in a good way.
And that is exactly what they will do if they’re not stopped. It’s what they always do.
What most of them don’t understand is that they are as likely as not to find themselves on the first load.
@Ken Arromdee:
Except the women I know claim they don’t care, and a lot of the guys I know claim the women care. Anyway, look at all the women in the men’s room at sporting events.
But, to the extent that women do care, some of the women -> men transgenders are very masculine, and laws that force them into women’s bathrooms aren’t good for anybody.
In any case, locker rooms aren’t much further down the slippery slope, and I can well believe there might be a different story about who cares when the penises aren’t hidden.
So I have no idea whose ox is being gored, but I suspect the right answer is to let business owners and local management decide who they want where, if it becomes a problem.
Moderation filter doesn’t gonadal references?
@Russ Cage:
> And you know what has to be done with zombies.
Until you have a lot of agreement they are really zombies, you’ll still wind up incarcerated.
Apropos of this discussion, there’s a series of stories, known as the Erinyes stories, from authors working in the Whateley Academy universe. The premise is that the British tried to create a genetic engineering technology that would make supersoldiers. It did, but with a rather drastic side effect: those women it didn’t kill outright were driven insane, while men were transformed into women – fully, genetically female, right down to the DNA, able to conceive and bear children. Obviously, the SAS had no use for such a thing, but one private police company did: they took men with gender dysphoria and turned them into some of the most badass women on the planet, putting them to work as cops.
There are no secrets here. The Erinyes, as they are known (the police company, THEMIS, names its divisions from Greek mythology), are well known as being transgendered. Obviously, there’s some squick factor there, but there are plenty of contenders for the Erinyes’ affections anyway, and no shortage of applicants. One story, Chain of Custody, revolves around one guy’s reaction to the whole transgender thing…and how he gets his comeuppance. It’s also funny as hell.
Now, assume that that process is possible in the real world: the perfect solution to gender dysphoria. How does that change the calculus?
“Insisting that we accept such delusions as fact is psychological abuse that should be rejected out of hand and punished if not ceased permanently on request.”
Are you one of these people who tell parents that their children are ugly and stupid? That their wife/girlfriend is ugly and their husband/boyfriend is a loser?
Because transgenders are not asking for more than the curtesy of letting them live in their “illusion” that they are who they want to be. Just like you live in the shared illusion that all you need to be treated as a real man is a penis. An illusion that is, I have been told, not shared by quite a number of women.
@esr:
“a corpus callosum functional into adulthood (in most men it shrinks and becomes almost inactive; in women it doesn’t)”
Sounds bizarre. That would be a case where the left hand really does not know what the right hand is doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
Everytime I see another argument over identity I think of adoption and re-marriage.
To quote a recent movie:
“He may have been your father boy, but he wasn’t your daddy.” [stepfather says to son]
@esr:
> I have strong reason to believe that my brain has at least two major female-typical features: weak lateralization and a corpus callosum functional into adulthood (in most men it shrinks and becomes almost inactive; in women it doesn’t).
*snip*
>But I am gendersolid like a rock.
Interestingly enough, I’m almost the opposite. I show signs of a hyper-male brain at the hardware/firmware level (great directional sense, always running with pretty much all interrupts masked, with the attendant dismal multitasking skills, etc), but at the software level, I’m much less stereotypically male than you are (I’m much more timid and less aggressive, for one thing), and while I’m plenty gender-solid now, I was marginal in my early teens, and I think that for most possible upbringings I could have had other than my actual upbringing, there’s a high likelihood I would have turned out transgendered.
In many men I’d say it’s more a case of the big head doesn’t know what the little head is doing.
“Did you miss the part where I said “In my view not much fault for this attaches to transsexuals per se.” and “. I don’t actually blame gays, either”?
You don’t blame them, but you don’t wish to support their personal freedoms either?
“Lately I’ve several times come near writing a blog post titled “Why I Now Regret Supporting Gay Marriage.” One-sentence version: gay activists lost me when they scalped Brendan Eich and began using the force of law to persecute bakers and pizza shops.”
The second part is fine and dandy – go right ahead and shun the kind of activists who persecute. But if you’re not going to blame the average gay person for that, why don’t you want to see them have legal protections that straight people take for granted?
The whole “Gay/Trans rights” kerfuffle really puts me in mind of the gun control argument, that because of the actions of a highly-visible anti-social subgroup, we need to restrict behavior “for the good of all.” The argument of “I don’t blame gays/trans, but” reminds me way too much of “I don’t blame firearms owners, but.”
The causes both have people who are metaphorically waving things that don’t need to be waved in other people faces. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t ever dream of writing a blog post where the central premise was that “Carry Activists lost me when they used the force of law to persecute businesses that post No Guns Allowed. I regret supporting the Shall Issue Movement.”
>But if you’re not going to blame the average gay person for that, why don’t you want to see them have legal protections that straight people take for granted?
You put your finger on why I hadn’t actually written the post. I don’t have an ethical resolution for a situation in which opposing gay marriage seemed wrong on principle, but supporting it turned out to be consequentially bad in practice.
>I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t ever dream of writing a blog post where the central premise was that “Carry Activists lost me when they used the force of law to persecute businesses that post No Guns Allowed. I regret supporting the Shall Issue Movement.”
Actually, I can readily imagine writing that minus the last sentence.
>Where you lose me is when you imply that because of certain individual outliers behaving badly (Claire and Rachael Dolza) and by a deliberate reduction ad absurdium (claim to be the “Queen of England”) that any/every claim of “Transsexuality” is both absurd and illegitimate in the majority of contexts.
Nope. Didn’t make that claim in the OP, haven’t in the comments either. In fact I have said things that specifically contradict it.
I didn’t mean to imply that you would support Carry Activists using the force of law to persecute businesses; I’ve read enough of your writing to know better. The point I was trying to make (perhaps poorly) was that you wouldn’t think to juxtapose the Activists with the Activity in a firearms rights context, even as far as needing to reject the juxtaposition on ethical grounds. You would simply and directly take the activists on directly and with care in targeting.
I agree with the title of your post, that Identity is not the sole choice of the identifies. Where you lose me is when you imply that because of certain individual outliers behaving badly (Claire and Rachael Dolza) and by a deliberate reduction ad absurdium (claim to be the “Queen of England”) that any/every claim of “Transsexuality” is both absurd and illegitimate in the majority of contexts. To me, that’s rhetorically equivalent to saying “because the Sandy Hook Shooter was mentally ill, all firearm owners should be persecuted and made to conform to non-firearms-owning norms of conduct.” (At the extreme, firearms ownership is considered to be on its own evidence of paranoia, “compensation, etc, after all).
@ESR – “She might be a non-crazy intersex. She might be something I don’t understand etiologically at all.”
Well, I can explain a few of the things that I am, and maybe that might give you more data.
I am a professional software engineer, who makes less than six figures, albeit not much less. I am in a stable relationship with a (cis) woman; we have a registered domestic partnership that I may convert to a marriage license after I’ve legally changed my name and gender marker. I run a support group for crossdressers and transgender people at the Gender Identity Center of Colorado, and I also serve on its Board of Trustees. I am also a drag performance entertainer (not really a traditional “drag queen,” although I get along well with more classical queens) who raises money for charity, and, in fact, I am a past crowned pageant titleholder. As far as being transgender is, I’m one of those who came to the realization late, although I was crossdressing from the time I was a teenager; for the longest time, I thought it was “just a fetish” until I started learning differently about ten years or so ago. I was also diagnosed with mild autism when I was in high school (what would have been called “Asperger’s” or “ASD” if those terms had existed at the time), and worked with therapists in college to help me deal with it. I have a therapist now, in addition to my HRT doctor, and I’ve done well with both thusfar. As Amy, I am accepted by my family members and most of my friends that know so far; I can think of only one significant exception. Many of my coworkers know and are accepting as well, and our head of HR has appointed one of her team to be my liaison for the transition process.
As for my presentation…I offer the opinion of one of my close friends, who runs a local transformation studio where she makes up men as women. She contrasts me with one of my other friends (and please understand that I love this other friend to death, but I think the assessment here is accurate), who she says, no matter how many hormones she takes, will always be “a boy in a dress.” Whereas she saw that I was a lady practically from the first time we met, long before I applied my first estradiol patch or swallowed my first spironolactone tablet. Now, this woman has seen many, many examples of men presenting as women over the years, so I can be confident of her opinion.
Hopefully this gives you some more data to figure into your estimate. It still might not be enough for you to judge whether I’m “unsafely delusional” or not, but at least I’m being forthcoming.
I looked at your list of memes in the post you linked to, and I disagree with all of them. I guess that does make me a non-Gramscian. I certainly don’t feel like anyone’s idea of a “victim.” (If I lived in North Carolina or some other trans-hostile state, I might, but, in those cases, the “victims” are only “victims” through the deliberate actions of government to make them so.) I am routinely treated with respect in public places, and referred to as “ma’am” or “Miss,” even over drive-through speakers (my Amy-voice is that good). Yes, there are some areas of the city I won’t go as a woman, but, by and large, I wouldn’t go there as a male, either. I feel like I am losing very little in making the transition…and I am gaining a good deal of personal happiness, as well as the ability to fit into society better than I did before. (Honestly, my story is so atypically drama-free for a trans woman, I may wind up writing a book about my experiences…it might have to be titled Transition Without Tears.)
And I don’t know too much about Milo Y…other than he seems to have worn out his welcome to a certain extent. Not the kind of person I’d care to emulate…
@Alexander Gieg – “I know several transsexuals. Not enough to derive a statistics from this, but even though it’s at best anecdotal, only a third of them buy the SJW mindset. Another third are your standard moderate liberal. And the remaining third adamantly dislike SJWs, a few of these being libertarian, a few not caring about politics.”
I’m actually a member of a Facebook group, “Trans on the Right,” for trans people with more conservative views. It has 70-some odd members at this point. There are more of us out there than one might think at first glance, and a lot of us feel cowed into silence by our more SJW-leaning sisters and brothers. (@Jorge Dujan, you may also be pleased to see the above.)
@Russ Cage – “Is it cruel to tell them ‘do your thing somewhere else, because you make me want to gag’?”
What I hear when you say that is “Can you please exclude yourself from society, because I can’t stand to even see you walking down the street?” To my mind, that’s unacceptable under any circumstances.
@Patrick Maupin – “In any case, locker rooms aren’t much further down the slippery slope, and I can well believe there might be a different story about who cares when the penises aren’t hidden.”
For me, locker rooms are a different story. I’d be rather embarrassed to have to change in front of a bunch of strange women in a locker room. Having GCS might change that, as at least there’d be fewer obvious physiological differences between me and the other women. (I’m presently undecided about GCS…the prospect of it makes me a bit squeamish, but, then again, so does the prospect of having LASIK performed on my eyes.)
Argh! “Cowed into silence.” Yes, I speak Typonese. :)
>Argh! “Cowed into silence.” Yes, I speak Typonese. :)
I fixed your typo so it won’t distract any reader from your post content, but I’m leaving this here because it’s funny.
@ESR: “Nope. Didn’t make that claim in the OP, haven’t in the comments either. In fact I have said things that specifically contradict it.”
Then why open with “high-profile cases of transsexuality (notably the athlete now named Caitlyn Jenner)” and then not discuss Caitlyn Jenner further, and take several more paragraphs to get to the actual identity presentation mismatch (Claire), which has little to do with the “mainstream” trans community as a whole, and a lot to do with one individual’s personal issues.
Also: “Can I choose to be pregnant and bear children?
Can I choose to be 6’7??
Your “identity” is indeed partly choice, but it’s constrained by facts. I can’t choose to be 6’7? or become pregnant and bear children, so any identity assertions I make contrary to those facts will necessarily be rejected.”
There are genetically and morphologically XX women who cannot choose to become pregnant and bear children. And while adding 9 inches to my own height would be problematic, almost anyone can add a couple of inches to their height-as-presented with the right shoes. Or are high heels or a non-functional set of reproductive organs a “deceit” worthy of being intentionally rude (as using a name or pronoun for someone against their wishes)?
Being transgendered matters for reproduction, and, if pre-op, likely matters for sexual matters. (Which is why Claire’s shenanigans matter). But I’m still not entirely sure why it is not intentionally rude to not accept someone’s presentation as their identity in ordinary life interactions; on the level of rudely continuing to call someone “Dick” after they’ve asked you to call them “Richard,” and their nametag says “Hello, I am: Richard.”
People remake themselves all the time, deliberately and not – as long as they are not claiming a capability they can not or will not provide, or doing so for some kind of “unfair” advantage (and, yes, I know that’s pretty weasel-worded), why not let them? Presenting as a woman is not necessarily a claim to being able to “become pregnant and bear children,” or even to “be willing to engage in vaginal sex.” There’s a pretty clear dividing line and a wide distance between Claire’s behavior and Amy’s.
At one level, I agree with you in the OP; but I think you’re taking it way too far by reducing social identity to biology. And why bring up a community to castigate the behavior of one member?
>At one level, I agree with you in the OP; but I think you’re taking it way too far by reducing social identity to biology. And why bring up a community to castigate the behavior of one member?
You seem to have gotten my priorities reversed. I didn’t propose a theory of identity in order to utter a critique of transgenderism or transracialism. I brought up recent high-profile cases of those in order to provide context and motivation for a transactional analysis of identity. Beyond that was a goal of undercutting the toxic assumptions of identity politics.
Since one of the examples I proposed was “computer programmer”, I think we can pretty much dismiss any idea that I’m intent on reducing social identity to biology.
>And why bring up a community to castigate the behavior of one member?
If you’re speaking of Claire, it’s because she exemplifies the kind of person who needs to learn that an “identity” is only an offer, and you have no right to require that other people accept it.
@esr
Would you know if you did, if you, at some deep level, believe that it’s not possible?
I suspect something that is going unexamined here is that you may also take the legal protections that straight people have for granted. Not many people seem to want to discriminate against people for being (straight) married, or to deny straight couples the privileges* that come with it. If someone is coerced to do something they would have done anyway, it’s like a tree falling in a forest with no-one around. And you don’t, in general, see people who are opposed to marriage in general, or to extending any of those benefits to straight people’s partners, so you don’t see them being coerced to do so.
But “I don’t support any marriage [in the sense of a legal relationship that coerces other people to recognize it], but gay marriage is the only one I can get anyone else to stand with me to oppose” is probably a very uncomfortable position to be in.
It also puts a hole in one of the underpinnings of Libertarian ideology, which rests on the assumption that there can’t be any group that a significant section of society wishes harm to as a terminal preference, and that the market therefore cannot protect. Acknowledging what would happen to gay people if there were no anti-discrimination laws opens the door to all the carefully constructed arguments about why we don’t really need them for race/gender/etc to fall apart.
*I don’t mean this in the SJW-theory sense, but rather in terms of specific things like hospital visitation rights, coverage on employer-provided insurance, etc.
>It also puts a hole in one of the underpinnings of Libertarian ideology, which rests on the assumption that there can’t be any group that a significant section of society wishes harm to as a terminal preference, and that the market therefore cannot protect.
You’re off into the weeds, now. In historical cases that approximate such a terminal preference – like Jews or Gypsies in Eastern Europe – governments are worse than markets. They not only in general fail to protect the despised minority, they usually amplify the amount of coercion directed at them in a way markets do not. The same is true even now of homosexuals in the Islamic world and sub-Saharan Africa.
One thing that worries me about the transgender movement is that I’m not sure that a lot of people that feel that they are a male/female in a female/male body don’t feel that way because they are normal beta male/female types that were raised in an alpha-heavy environment and are uncomfortable with, and unable to compete in, the monkey-brain/reptile-brain status and mating games of their biological gender, but have bought into the alpha image of what a “real” man/woman is. I will further speculate that this is why being on the autism spectrum correlates with gender variance, as mentioned upthread: the social deficits of autism handicap one’s ability to play their gender’s alpha status games.
This is why I believe I likely would have ended up transgendered with a different upbringing: I am very much a beta, but given my actual upbringing, in which I was in a heavily beta environment and taught that a lot of alpha mating behaviors are flat-out wrong, I never bought into the idea that I had to be an alpha male to be a male at all. I think that most other ways I could have been brought up would have caused me to buy into that to a greater degree.
And that’s why the transgender movement makes me nervous, it’s telling people “since you can’t pay the alpha male/female status games, you need to flip genders to fit in”, when what I think they really need to hear is “Screw the alphas! Who are they to tell you what a man/woman is?”
@AG: “This is why ‘the left’ can be so pervasive. It isn’t merely a set of ideas. It isn’t merely a set of organic intellectuals in the Gramscian ‘branch’ actively trying to embed Marxist twists into everything they touch. It’s wider and deeper than that. For those in left, it’s simply ‘reality’.”
For a Christian, reality is defined through one’s relationship with Jesus Christ, His Father, the Holy Spirit, and their Creation. (Aside: for many centuries, this worldview was highly adaptive. Belief in a single triune God whose perfect character was expressed in Nature underlies much of what we today call the scientific method. Without the underlying belief that Creation is consistent over space and time, I don’t understand how we get to an epistemology where observational data always trumps theory.)
Marxists/Leftists/Gramscians (MLGs) offer an alternative reality, in which theory trumps observational data. And they’re quite intentional about forcing people into line. Just as criminal organizations require recruits to commit felonies before induction, MLGs require explicit, vocal consent to assertions diametrically opposed to the axiom that Creation is consistent over space and time.
It’s almost as if the MLG reality was designed by and for malignant narcissists to gaslight, brainwash, control, victimize and exploit as many “normals” as possible.
@Jon Brase – I can kind of see your point. I certainly wasn’t very comfortable in the male role when growing up; the two relationships I’ve had, it was because the women in question approached me, rather than the other way round. I wasn’t particularly raised in an “alpha-heavy” environment, though; my father wasn’t the “jock” sort, he was in city government.
But there are two things that don’t seem to apply here. First, the formative years of which I speak were in the late 1970’s through early 1990’s, when there wasn’t a real “transgender movement.” Yes, Christine Jorgensen and Renee Richards existed, but there was no real movement associated with them. Second, even assuming that I was little more than an uncomfortable male, what would account for me going into my mother’s closet and putting on her dresses, without it ever being suggested that I should do so? Curiosity, I suppose, might account for the first time, but what kept me coming back? (Maybe sexual feelings…which would account for me being sidetracked into thinking this was all “just a fetish” for many years.)
And if your idea on the correlation between ASD and gender variance is correct, what accounts for the fact that I seem to cope with the feminine role better? If ASD had that kind of effect, it should handicap my ability to play the female gender status game as much as the male, I would think.
Just thinking out loud here…
Jon Brase:
I have often wondered the same thing. In my case, I seem to be strongly alpha by nature, but with an extremely beta upbringing. Specifically, I was brought up in a very religious Protestant household, and if you have the idea that those are alpha, you obviously have never been in one.
I have often wondered why I didn’t end up gay. In my childhood there were years when I would literally get beaten up every single day. Women would ask me out as a prank just to humiliate me. If I had declared myself gay, I wouldn’t have been treated any worse–particularly if I had just decided it on my own and not told anyone else. I wouldn’t have hated myself so much if I had just convinced myself that I wasn’t really a man at all.
But as I eventually realized, it was my guilt-based upbringing that put me at a disadvantage. IMHO, shame-based cultures tend to produce stronger men. Thus the military, to give one example, doesn’t emphasise the theoretical morality of one’s action, but it comes down hard on those who have disgraced their unit.
Honestly, I think that I was far more “male” in my brain than my parents intended me to be.
@ ESR: “Since one of re examples I proposed was “computer programmer”, I think we can pretty much dismiss any idea that I’m intent on reducing social identity to biology.”
I apologize – I should have said “capability” or “functionality.” Which Claire was misrepresenting, inasmuch as she was offering the capability of having heterosexual sex without having the functionality. And upon re-reading I appear to have misinterpreted at least some of what you were getting at in comments (though I still stand by my comments in re your “pregnant or 6’7″” comments – one is not a necessary property of femalehood, and the other is to a certain extent alterable in presentation). If someone is not offering functionality or capability as part of the transaction, it’s rude to not take them at their word for their identity.
I would submit that using someone claiming to be a Nigerian Price in need of aid laundering money, or a Spanish Prisoner, or even Emperor Norton I, might have brought less baggage to the conversation.
@esr: “Terminal preferences have explanations too. We’re evolved survival machines; we don’t have preferences hanging in midair without any connection to reproductive fitness. I’m just analyzing a level deeper, is all.”
http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessmaximizers/
Terminal preferences may have explanations, but these explanations are historical. You might explain an aversion to penises in terms of X, but it would be a mistake to think that if you can prevent X, people will stop having those preferences. Despite the origin of the preferences, they are now standalone.
@ian: “But it feels like to me that in the context of the movie, he’s supposed to be an utter fool. ”
Because building a castle this way is extremely inefficient compared to 1) building one someplace other than a swamp, or 2) building it in a swamp, but filling the swamp in with three loads of dirt and rocks rather than three previously collapsed castles. So inefficient that it becomes foolish.
@ESR “Anybody want to open a pool on who the next mascot group will be? Before they became inconvenient during the attack on Milo Yiannopolous, I was getting some strong hints from SJW-land that it might be pedophiles.”
When has inconsistency ever gotten in the way of SJWs? How else could they condemn homophobia and Islamophobia in the same breath?
@Amy
If you don’t mind, I’ve had this question for a while and since you seem open to answering some questions, figured I might ask you. Given you seem to be of the “use the facility of your preference” with respect to bathrooms (but perhaps not locker rooms), have you found that the recent (last couple years) increase in trans rights discussion and particularly the attention focused on bathrooms (e.g. the NC bathroom law) has made things better or worse for you? That is, have you found that overall there is more acceptance and welcoming to your presence and position and the current strife unfortunate but necessary. Or do you find that this was more often than not solved with a general DADT policy when one is able to pass, and that the increased attention has actually made it more difficult because people who previously wouldn’t have noticed are now hyper vigilant? Is this more a case of “please stop helping me?”
My own experiences with out groups and their sudden rises in the popular consciousness generally fall under the “please stop helping me” side of things, and I’ve wondered if trans people are finding the same thing now that it’s become something of a cause célèbre.
Jon Brase on 2017-05-12 at 04:22:16 said: …that for most possible upbringings I could have had other than my actual upbringing, there’s a high likelihood I would have turned out transgendered.
That’s not how it works, AIUI. If your brain gender is miswired, you’re transgender and you know it. If you don’t, you’re not. A great deal of damage is done to children by trendy parents who mistake gender-atypical preferences in toys or play for actual gender confusion, because it allows them to signal virtue by embracing the child’s presumed transgenderness. The parents push the child to cross-dress, and otherwise mess with the kid’s head; some cases include destructive psychiatric, hormonal, and surgical interventions.
@TM – That’s a polite question, so I’ll do what I can to give you an answer.
Being in Colorado, where our rights as trans people to use the gender-segregated facilities consistent with how we present ourselves are protected (under the rules set by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission), the conversation about bathrooms hasn’t affected me as much as it has sisters elsewhere. (One girl I know from Dallas has spent a couple of weeks at the state capitol there in Texas protesting certain anti-LGBT mesures currently under consideration there, including, yes, a “bathroom bill.”) Most of the focus here has been on liberalizing laws about changing birth certificates, but that’s another topic entirely.
For me, personally, I have never encountered problems when using ladies’ rooms here, and I’ve used them in bars, restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, shopping malls (which were rather crowded!), a concert theater, hospitals, and a convention center where a jewelry show was being held. On the other hand, I have what many of us call “passing privilege” (a term I don’t exactly like, as “privilege” has become such a politically-loaded word), in that I present in a very convincing fashion. I don’t have the personal experience of being less-passing and trying to do the same thing, because I was already quite presentable the first time I stepped through the door marked “LADIES.”
Does the attention from all the news about “bathroom bills” in other states help or hinder me? On the whole, it doesn’t affect me personally, since I would likely be OK under the “general DADT policy” you mention. However, some of my sisters might not be, and I try to be mindful of them. I’m pleased by such things as the #I’llGoWithYou movement (in which cis women pledge to accompany trans women to the restroom to keep from being hassled while in there), but that’s not particularly necessary for me, personally. I suspect my experience might be similar to those other of my sisters who are on the path to transition, or have already gotten there. While it’s possible that certain people might be more hyper-vigilant, and maybe more likely to tag me in a game of “spot the tranny” in the restroom, in practice, it hasn’t happened.
(Also note: My comments with respect to locker rooms reflect my personal feelings only, and shouldn’t be used to draw conclusions about what other trans women should or shouldn’t do. It’s possible that I might be more OK with the idea if I were forced to use one by circumstances, but you may take it as read that I would do my best to keep my “differences” from being noticed, including the fact that I wear breast forms since my natural breasts have not yet grown enough.)
I hope that answers your question; sorry, I tend to ramble sometimes. :)
@Rich Rostrom – You have the understanding pretty correct. The diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria in children state that the child should be “persistent, consistent, and insistent” in their belief that their gender does not match that of their body. Mere gender-atypical preferences for toys or play wouldn’t make the nut here. In any event, the usual treatment for gender-dysphoric pre-pubescent children would be to allow them to transition socially and administer puberty blocking drugs, which keeps them from going through the “wrong” puberty and buys time for further observation to make sure that this is the right choice. If the child turns out not to have been transgender, the puberty blockers can be ceased and normal puberty will then follow. Only in the teenage years would cross-gender HRT be administered, and any surgical intervention would wait until they turn 18 at least.
A question. Do you get documentaries or TV programs like this on USA television nationally?
Sweet Sixteen: A Transgender Story
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08qh5v7
On Dutch TV, we have a series like this practically every season. Mayby it helps in understanding.
>Anybody want to open a pool on who the next mascot group will be? Before they became inconvenient during the attack on Milo Yiannopolous, I was getting some strong hints from SJW-land that it might be pedophiles. Now? Who knows – bestialists, maybe? Necrophiles?
Rapists.
It gets out in front of a lot of problems the Gramscians are going to run into regarding certain important future mascot groups.
And feminists, oddly, have already shown they can roll with that, both here 20-some years back, and in Europe now.
And in Europe it’s working great already. It’s a classic, marvelous tool of subjugation.
>A lot of people, perhaps projecting from their own behavior, don’t seem to be able to grasp the concept that one might point at truth one is unhappy with simply because one believes not knowing the truth is more dangerous.
Or that the truth is more important than feelings.
When did our entire culture reenter toddlerhood?
Just like people are reacting to SJWs, SJWs are a reaction as well. I do agree that the language games are broadly out of wack, but so what? It happens. Gaining freedom is different from maintaining it. Are we really at the redline of required mass self-criticism?
I do notice that the most radical elements of the “identity” crew were birthed in response to actual violence against said group. Of course, physically assaulting anyone should be deemed wrong, but when these groups organized and radicalized (to varying degrees admittedly and at varying times) there was a hysteria about the mainstream indifference.
Show me someone that was playing by the rules, sought justice for an egregious violation of their rights but met indifference and I’ll show you someone that wants to see things burn.
Does it make them right? No it doesn’t. Are they irrational. Yes! They are radicalized and it is infectious. That’s why there are members or sympathizers that have never experienced the violence and indifference first hand but are just as entrenched.
Is there someone to blame? Who knows and I am not sure how that would help. We are so far down the rabbit hole at this point. The proselytizing and language policing is ALL bad in my view. Make no mistake. Given that, it does look like most of the anti-SJW movement is becoming what they seem to detest most. Around and around we go. [mutters something about fixing a problem at the same level it was created]
So while the OP is a well reasoned and reasonable argument, what does it accomplish? Taking time to announce to hysterical people you don’t care about their hysteria must be a form of entertainment, no?
Huh, just noticed that with a few find-replaces this could easily almost be about terrorism. Funny that.
> Given that, it does look like most of the anti-SJW movement is becoming what they seem to detest most.
No. It it is easy for me to tell this isn’t so, because the anti-SJWs do not try to police my speech.
Inoculating the general population against hysteria is always a useful service.
Greg:
I blame the Internet. And the return of swing music.
@Russ Cage:
Slightly reordering your points for ease of answer:
It is, but nowhere I defended either thing. I have the impression you’re projecting upon me opinions I don’t have.
On the other hand, demanding politeness is actually valid, if for no other reason than that politeness is an actual conservative value. But never to the point of making it legally obligatory, otherwise it just becomes PC speech with an inverted signal.
As for disgusts, I think it’s advisable for individuals to overcome the ones they have that have no actual effect on their survivability. And that too is a conservative value. Show me an army that allows its troops to refuse doing something that needs done because they feel oh so disgusted by doing such an icky thing, and I’ll show you a losing army.
By the way, this reminds me of an anecdote I heard about, I don’t know whether true or not but at the very least verisimilar, of a guy who, when in jail, learned the jail’s cook was gay. They guy was so extremely disgusted by homosexuals that, whenever he tried to eat the food that cook had touched, he puked it all out. In the end the jailers had to begin bringing him food cooked elsewhere lest he died from an involuntary hunger strike. So, yeah, it can indeed be a very serious weakness.
That’s a very American outlook on the matter. I mean, the habit you indirectly refer to of, when in disagreement with one’s birthplace’s practices, taking up one’s belongings, moving West and founding a new community, rinse, repeat, until the whole country was inhabited and all early disagreements geographically isolated.
That indeed works, provided, evidently, there is an empty West to move to and through while building new settlements. When there isn’t, resolutions to superimposed incompatibilities tends to look a lot more like how the Old World did it, meaning, at its worst moments, war, but also, at its best moments, highly skilled diplomacy.
War it won’t be, as there aren’t enough teens for that. If conservatives and libertarians were having enough children, then maybe it might be, but they aren’t, so it won’t. Hence the solution will have to be a diplomatic one.
That’s what Republics are for. They are predicated on the notion that small groups do matter and must hold enough power so as to not be easily ignored by the majority. That’s been the case in the Roman Republic, in all the small Republics that existed since its fall, and it’s also been the case in the American Republic.
IMHO, it’s odd to see conservatives disliking Republican principles so much as to prefer, in its place, the bane of all reasonable political thinkers: democracy, the rule by majority.
I’d appreciate it if it were possible. I don’t think it’ll be though, as it’s possible QM effects are somehow involved. Time will tell though. Be as it may, before we get there we’ll pass through the “designer bodies” phase, and thus also through the “adapting brains so as to make them suitable to such new bodies” one. That’ll be an interesting middle game on its own, even if uploading comes afterwards. Or end game, if uploading never happens.
Interesting times ahead.
> If conservatives and libertarians were having enough children, then maybe it might be, but they aren’t, so it won’t
Don’t be too sure of that. Demographically, every faction of the left other than nonwhite immigrant groups is doing itself in faster – and those immigrants are not very attached. Historically immigrants tended to shift conservative as they assimilated more.
Remember the Democratic “coalition of the ascendant”? It was pretty much a bust in the 2016 elections outside bicoastal enclaves. Learn from this…
@ Doctor Locketopus: “Troutwaxer’s tactic is the same one used by evil control freaks since the beginning of time.”
Actually, I was bringing it up because Eric seemed interested in why people saw him as a right-winger when in fact he is not, but I’ve dropped it since he seems to be taking it adversariously. I’m always happy to argue with Eric, but for “why do people see me as right wing” I was simply trying to provide information.
I think in this case he made the top post because he hadn’t really figured out what he wanted to talk about, which I think was “The way gender and racial concerns tie in with the Gramscian problems that interest him.”
In bluer areas liberals maybe have one designer kid, maybe not. Two is shocking. Closeted conservatives and libertarians have 2. Maybe a third if they’re feeling ambitious.
Come to the Midwest, or at least my slice if it, and 3 is a small family.
The *only* non-immigrant population still breeding sufficient for growth is religious conservatives.
And the President’s approval numbers among Hispanics continues to *improve* as time goes on.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/hispanics-give-trump-higher-approval-rating-than-rest-of-us/article/2622041
esr> Demographically, every faction of the left other than nonwhite immigrant groups is doing itself in faster
Yes. Mormons, in particular, are well-known for their fecundity. SJWs, not so much.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_fertility_rate
Compare the map at the top with the outcome of the 2016 election.
Every state with a total fertility rate > 2.0 is a red state. Every state but one (New Mexico) with a total fertility rate between 1.9 and 2.0 is a red state.
As they say, the future belongs to those who show up for it.
> Defecating on the Map will not change the Territory, regardless of how many laxatives you took.
This is not always completely true: defecating on the map does put shit on one small speck of of the territory (assuming the map covers that territory).
Even if the spot shat upon is not on that particular map, it is still on other maps, and the result is still foul.
@ Russ Cage: “If you think that “gayness” is inborn and not curable, you must accept disgust also. Even Ed Brayton has found himself feeling it strongly enough to write about it.”
“Disgust” at the thought of homosexuality doesn’t prove you’re right. It proves you’re heterosexual. (Gay men have frequently reported feelings of disgust towards vaginas. That merely proves that they are Gay.)
@ esr: “…the real villains are the Gramscians using sexual and racial minorities to totalitarianize our society, to make everything political.”
I think you have to go one level further down. The real villains are those who treat minorities unjustly, making our society vulnerable to those who wish to exploit our society’s fractures. The Gramscian attack gains no traction in a just society.
Gramscian features in identity politics are the symptom, not the disease.
> The real villains are those who treat minorities unjustly,
No, Troutwaxer, that’s wrong. The bigots are scum, to be sure. But their scumminess pales in comparison to the radical evil for which the the Gramscians are greasing the skids. A boot stamping on a human face, forever, with “diversity” and “tolerance” spelled out in the studs on the boot sole.
@ Amy Tapie: “I’ve long believed that the solution to bakers, pizza shops, etc. that don’t want to serve LGBT people is to go and find someone else that will, and tell people why you did so.”
This is going to seem a little strange, but I would argue that the bakery owners did not get sued for their anti-Gay beliefs. Instead they got sued for their poor social skills. The right small-business answer when you don’t want to serve a ________ client is “I’m afraid I’m really busy that week, there’s a bakery on 5th and Main and they’re great and they’ll be happy to take care of you. Have a nice day.”
@ esr: “…that I hold open the possibility that Amy and others like her are epistemically indistinguishable from BIID sufferers – that is, mislabeled mental cases.”
Or we all can go up a level, understand that people like Amy have some differences in brain structure which affect their view of their own bodies and that there are solutions to this problem. That none of those solutions require that we accuse such people of sin or threaten to shoot them, or compare them to Rachel Dolezal. But that would mean getting over ourselves and our worries about Stalinist plots, and actually being nice to other people who have not done anything to hurt us, and I don’t think that’s a river the right can cross.
>Or we all can go up a level, understand that people like Amy have some differences in brain structure which affect their view of their own bodies and that there are solutions to this problem.
Troutwaxer, you are virtue-signaling so busily that you have slid right past the real problem here. Forget Russ Cage’s visceral ick reaction; I don’t share it. The real problem is that I could write this:
“Or we all can go up a level, understand that people with BIID have some differences in brain structure which affect their view of their own bodies and that there are solutions to this problem.”
We treat a BIID sufferer’s desire to lop off his limbs as pathological, but fashionable opinions wants to treat a gender dysmoprphic’s decision to mutilate his or her genitals as a form of self-realization.
I have a lot of trouble with this, not on a moral level but on an epistemological one. Because the body’s kinesic maps correspond to identifiable structures in the brain it is just about certain you could tell a differences in brain structure” story about BIID, too. If we consider the BIID case’s desire pathological, why do we not make the same judgment about the gender dysphoric? Why do we treat these differently in any way at all?
I’m still trying to suspend judgment waiting for more facts, but is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that the answer is “politics and fashion”, and that a lot of people who are having bits lopped off should be getting therapy instead. “Brain structures” or no.
@ Russ Cage: “The disgust reactions of the vast majority of healthy males are equally real if not more so; understanding is irrelevant.”
So our world should be ruled by the disgust reactions of males? I find you completely appalling, and I’d make a joke about how the Gramiscans are right, but somebody might misunderstand and a right winger would come after me with a gun. Because he was disgusted by a joke he didn’t even notice.
Please Russ, crawl back under your rock!
@ Full Tilt: “When has inconsistency ever gotten in the way of SJWs? How else could they condemn homophobia and Islamophobia in the same breath?”
That’s easy. There’s an unspoken thing happening here which you’re not decoding.
We on the left (I’m not an SJW) are happy to condemn Islamists who are religious fanatics and actually kill people. But casual Islamophobia isn’t about Osama bin Laden or ISIS. It’s about people who don’t understand that there is an actual theological and attitudinal difference between the Muslim down the street and Osama bin Laden. By the same token, I’m happy to condemn Gay people who kill others even though I have close Gay and Trans relatives.
The issue really isn’t homo-or-Islamophobia, but the failure mode in believing that all Gays are AIDs-spreading child molesters is the same as the failure mode of believing that all Muslims want to kill Westerners. We’re really condemning the failure mode as much as we’re condemning anything else. We don’t need the unspoken part because that understanding is part of the Leftist culture. I suppose that it’s poor communications, probably because talking about “intellectual failure modes” doesn’t get you a sound bite. (Too many syllables.)
@Troutwaxer “…being nice to other people who have not done anything to hurt us, and I don’t think that’s a river the right can cross.”
If “being nice” == lying in public about what we believe to be right, wrong, and best for society, then damn skippy you’re correct.
If “being nice” == teaching you to use tools of self defense, capable of killing anyone who tries to beat you up for being different, then you’re insultingly wrong.
@ esr: “…their scumminess pales in comparison to the radical evil for which the the Gramscians are greasing the skids.”
Once again, people who aren’t being oppressed don’t get involved with identity politics. The identity politics creates a weakness the Gramscians can exploit. Czechoslovakians aren’t oppressed in the U.S. Therefore there is no Czechoslovakian Liberation Front. Therefore there is no Gramscian activity involving Czechoslovakians. This should be obvious.
Of course, from my point of view you might as well be ranting about your “precious bodily fluids.”
@ esr “Or we all can go up a level, understand that people with BIID have some differences in brain structure which affect their view of their own bodies and that there are solutions to this problem.”
Ah, I understand your problem. I probably should have written “Or we all can go up a level, understand that people like Amy have some differences in brain structure which affect their view of their own bodies and that there are solutions to this problem, but they don’t come close to being perfect.”
And that’s where the whole thing crashes. There are no perfect solutions. Essentially, it comes down to either fixing the brain or fixing the body. Fixing the brain is an ethical nightmare – who gets to define how a masculine or feminine brain functions? (Would you let a right-wing fundamentalist doctor “fix” the masculinity/feminity issues with your brain even if you considered yourself insane?) Worse, given the issues with testosterone uptake mentioned in the Wikipedia article fixing the brain may not be enough to solve the problem if the body has done a poor job of testosterone uptake during fetal development. We’re really talking about a requirement for singularity-level nano-medicine.
Fixing the body is similarly imperfect, which is why some trans-people don’t do bottom surgery. (Your concerns with hacking bits off are shared.) The problem of giving someone genitals which work and are connected to all the right bits, wherein all the nerves function properly, orgasm is possible, aesthetics are satisfied, etc., is not remotely close to being solved. Someone who insists that “fixing” a trans person must include bottom surgery is at about the same ethical level as someone who insists the females be “fixed” through clitorectomy, (at least until we have Varley-level body modification.)
So how do you handle a situation which can’t be made perfect? Even if I accept an essentially negative model for the problem being transgendered is not nearly so horrible a thing as being sociopathic, schizophrenic, or paranoid. It doesn’t require hospitalization unless other psych issues are involved, and it is easily manageable as long as the people around the trans person are capable of being decent human beings. Essentially, it is a non-issue for anyone except the trans-person involved, particularly if we can get the Claires of this world to grow up a little. (I suspect she’s an outlier.)
(On the other hand, I have a lot less ethical trouble “fixing” the brain of a BIID sufferer. I suspect that there are far fewer issues of identity at stake.)
>And that’s where the whole thing crashes. There are no perfect solutions.
It’s worse than that. Reassignment surgery does not significantly change the rate of attempted suicides. It doesn’t actually seem to be a “solution” at all.
Yes, trannsexuals sometime report that they feel like it was a solution. But BIID cases express tremendous relief when they can get their offending limps lopped off, too. Again: why pathologize one and valorize the other?
@Troutwaxer
It is tough to be reasonable.
@Others
The illusion that one subculture can outgrow “their enemy” by fecundity has been harbored by strategists at least since the days of Galton in the 19th century.
It never worked, because the offspring never fought for the case of their ancestors. They often even switched sides.
> and I’d make a joke about how the Gramiscans are right, but somebody might misunderstand and a right winger would come after me with a gun.
Your cartoon stereotype of purges committed by “right-wingers with guns” is wildly at variance with the actual history of mass political murder, which throughout the last hundred years has been exclusively the province of one type of socialist or another.
But sure, let’s all worry about “right-wingers”, whatever that means. You and yours appear to lump anyone who isn’t a card-carrying Marxist under that label. Libertarians, monarchists, distributists… doesn’t matter. They’re all “right-wingers”.
I do wish you guys would stop calling Nazis “right-wingers”, though. From their party platform, they were quite clearly socialists. Besides, it’s right there in their name.
@ Parallel “If “being nice” == lying in public about what we believe to be right, wrong, and best for society, then damn skippy you’re correct.”
This is part of the problem. The right is nowhere close to having a clear, scientific understanding of any problem and this negatively affects your ability to behave decently. If the right followed real evidence and believed that transgendered people had physical brain issues instead of being mired in sin (or whatever it is you guys think) the problem would pretty much solve itself.
Unfortunately, the modern right is a fear-parasite, essentially peddling the idea that someone is out to get you, and the only way to safety is gun-ownership and correct doctrine. (Eric’s worries about Gramscians is laughable in the face of just how awful the modern right’s tactics, behaviors, and concerns really are. Fear parasitism and grifting don’t begin to cover it!)
> It never worked, because the offspring never fought for the case of their ancestors. They often even switched sides.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/LDSChurchMembership2015.png
Yep. It never works. Ever.
>The right is nowhere close to having a clear, scientific understanding of any problem and this negatively affects your ability to behave decently.
Marxists have murdered 100 million people in the past century. That’s an odd definition of “behaving decently”, to be sure.
> No. It it is easy for me to tell this isn’t so, because the anti-SJWs do not try to police my speech.
Ok. Hopefully your sample proves out. I’ll happily be wrong.
@Locktopusy
” the last hundred years has been exclusively the province of one type of socialist or another.”
If you conveniently forget the mass murders in Indonesia (1960s, general Suharto murders a million communists), the various South American military juntas killing tens of thousand communists, the thousands of indigenous people murdered in the Amazon by right winf militias, and the various muslim extremist massacres by the Taliban and IS. Oh, and the massacres by war lords and Japanese in East Asia in the first half of the 20th century.
Oh, and the fact that you label any mass murdering regime as communist the moment it comes up.
> If we consider the BIID case’s desire pathological, why do we not make the same judgment about the gender dysphoric? Why do we treat these differently in any way at all?
Being born a woman isn’t considered an unfortunate and pathological condition, at least not in the same way as being born without arms.
In the case of people born without arms, why do we not consider it pathological if they desire to obtain arms, whether via prosthetics, surgical grafting, or some sort of futuristic regeneration therapy?
@Troutwaxer “The right is nowhere close to having a clear, scientific understanding of any problem and this negatively affects your ability to behave decently. If the right followed real evidence and believed that transgendered people had physical brain issues instead of being mired in sin (or whatever it is you guys think) the problem would pretty much solve itself.”
Check your privilege, you sophomoric asshole. You’re the sort of arrogant ideologue that Thomas Sowell writes about in _Intellectuals and Society_. A wanna-be thought police hypocrite, intolerant of dissent, lusting to thuggishly silence any who would dare challenge your arrogant self-righteous self image. You simultaneously insist that others not say anything that might hurt your feelings, while claiming your position is based solely on flawless evidence and reason.
Begone with your contemptible self, and don’t come back until you truly understand and accept the natural human rights of freedom of thought, religion, speech, association, and peaceable assembly.
Eric: “a lot of people who are having bits lopped off should be getting therapy instead.”
The problem is that psychiatric intervention has as much success at “curing” transsexuals as it does at curing gay men and women: zero.
Come up with an intervention that works, and we have a different conversation. As things currently stand, though, to tell the transgendered that they cannot transition to their perceived gender, with all that that implies, is to tell them they must remain permanently, profoundly broken.
Troutwaxer: “Unfortunately, the modern right is a fear-parasite, essentially peddling the idea that someone is out to get you,”
You’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you…and the Left wants to get rid of people like me.
Winter: The mass murders of communists and other leftists you cite don’t rise above the level of noise. They’re not within two orders of magnitude of the number of people killed in the name of socialism.
>The problem is that psychiatric intervention has as much success at “curing” transsexuals as it does at curing gay men and women: zero.
But, as I keep having to point out, reassignment surgery doesn’t “cure” either, not if we trust the evidence about suicide rates. When I spoke of therapy I was attempting to imply palliative care, not a cure.
I suspect the day is going to come when reassignment surgery will be regarded as a nightmare fad born of medical arrogance, like the 20-century vogue for lobotomies.
@Doctor Locketopus
How well it works is partially a function of whether the parents are decent people or not; one of the sources of SJW footsoldiers (I don’t know how large this source is) is people who were raised to be evangelical footsoldiers by hyper-authoritarian parents. Then the children “escaped”, and changed the curtains on their power fantasies.
@Whoever expressed concern that all of Them Damn Kids were crazy (thought it was Jorge, but I can’t find it)
Don’t be too sure: while the millennials (which I technically am) have a lot of crazy in them, what you are hearing are the most vocal nutters. Just like most young people were not hippies in the 60s. And the generation immediately after the millennials is growing up to be extremely anti-SJW.
@esr: “We treat a BIID sufferer’s desire to lop off his limbs as pathological, but fashionable opinions wants to treat a gender dysmoprphic’s decision to mutilate his or her genitals as a form of self-realization.”
The difference is a BIID sufferer wants to make himself abnormal. Normal people have 2 hands, 2 feet, etc. The gender dysmorphic doesn’t want to “mutilate” his/her genitals, the gender dysmorphic wants cosmetic surgery to make his/her genitals look normal. Nobody thinks a woman with abnormally small breasts is crazy to want augmentation to be a B or C cup, nor for a woman with EEE breasts to get a reduction. Nobody thinks it odd for someone born with an abnormally large nose to get rhinoplasty to make it more normal.
>As things currently stand, though, to tell the transgendered that they cannot transition to their perceived gender, with all that that implies, is to tell them they must remain permanently, profoundly broken.
They remain profoundly broken even after transitioning. Well if suicide rates reflect brokenness.
Which suggests something to me. They’re just inherently profoundly broken.
Good people should be kind to the profoundly broken, as much as possible. But that doesn’t make the broken normal or healthy, and especially doesn’t make them especially virtuous, or role models to be imitated, or mascots.
Ian Bruene:
I didn’t. Greg said “When did our entire culture reenter toddlerhood?” and I lightheartedly replied by quoting Mel Gibson’s penultimate line from the Simpsons episode in which he guest-starred as himself.
As a belated reply to your earlier comment (the one that begins with “It might help to know that many Conservatives…”): I didn’t claim that Eric is a conservative; I just pointed out that he’d be classified as a right-winger in Latin America, where the “right wing” label is associated not only with social conservatism, but also with economic liberalism (in the original, laissez-faire sense). Furthermore, he advocates widespread ownership of firearms as a means of self-defense, which goes against the leftist views on crime. And he opposes postmodernism to boot. :-)
>It never worked, because the offspring never fought for the case of their ancestors. They often even switched sides.
It has a very good history of working, with all of history as one giant proof.
>We on the left (I’m not an SJW) are happy to condemn Islamists who are religious fanatics and actually kill people.
I won’t say you’re *lying* exactly, because you may be truthful speaking about yourself.
But this is visibly false regarding the rest of the left. ‘Workplace violence’. LOL.
@esr:
I guess I should be used to people not clicking the links I provide, then by not having read those interpreting either metaphorically when I’m being literal, or literally when I’m being metaphorical. :-)
Okay, to sum it up, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about war. Real war, not metaphorical war. Literal, honest to goodness civil war.
The link I provided is to an answer by an army big data analyst on the data-driven preconditions for a revolution/civil war to happen. Figuring this out was part os his assignment in Iraq as his superiors wanted an objective metric for when to consider the level of violence in Iraq had decreased to “normal”, and hence for when they’d be able to declare the war won and Iraq ready for the withdrawal of US troops. After months of analysis his team’s conclusion was that, I quote: “(…) the most significant factor was the number of individuals aged 13–19 relative to the number of individuals aged over 35. If the teenage group ever exceeded the over 35 group, violence increased to the point there was a very high chance of civil war. Furthermore, the opposite was true. If the 35+ yr olds outnumbered the teenagers, there was no chance of civil war.”
He then goes on to show this isn’t the case in the US and to conclude that no, civil war isn’t in sight in the US, nor will it ever be. Hence my comment. As long as no one in the US starts breeding so much that the 13-19 yo bracket exceeds the huge 35+ yo bracket across the entire population, there’ll be at most a few riots here, angry speeches there, a few minor street confrontations, maybe even a few homemade terrorist attacks, and that’ll be it. But no war.
Sure, it may happen for one side to grow enough to outdo the other in elections, but that’s all there will ever be. Angry elections. Nothing else. There aren’t enough teens for anything else to happen.
I think the comparison to BIID sufferers exaggerates the issue. Transsexuals who want to go through sex reassignment surgery don’t want to cut parts of their bodies out, they want to keep all or most of those parts, only changing their appearance and relative positions.
Seriously, look on Google how a SRS is made. It’s a cosmetic surgery, not an amputation. Most of the parts remain, only in slightly different places. For a male-to-female transsexual for example, the penis isn’t removed, it’s turned into a clitoris, with the scrotum becoming the walls of the vagina, other parts becoming the labia etc. The only parts that are actually removed are the testicles, but that isn’t very different in practice from a cis man going through a vasectomy.
Also, and, this is an interesting aspect, many, maybe most, MtF SRS patients become able to experience the female orgasm. All men have the ability to experience it, it’s difficult under normal conditions but doable. So by doing the surgery they really aren’t losing anything significant as far as bodily capabilities go.
In contrast, BIID sufferers who actually go through an amputation lose a ton of functionality. They might become happy afterwards, but they are then objectively, physically damaged. SRS patients aren’t.
The two situations are thus not directly comparable. There are a few superficial similarities that provide for analogies, sure, but it stops there.
@Jorge
As I said, I couldn’t find it. I may even be misremembering the entire post.
Didn’t think you did, but you are from Europe so the political categories can be difficult to understand across that barrier.
@Greg
“But this is visibly false regarding the rest of the left. ‘Workplace violence’. LOL.”
In Europe, every left wing party and politician will condemn violence from any religious side.
@Jay
“Winter: The mass murders of communists and other leftists you cite don’t rise above the level of noise. They’re not within two orders of magnitude of the number of people killed in the name of socialism.”
Which is based on the stupid myth that Hitler was a socialist. See for extensive debunking in the links below.
In short, when you asked the original Nazis, their victims, their sympathisers, be it the Catholic church, American industrialists like Henry Ford, the alied forces, or anyone else in contemporary Europe, the answer would be laughter and unbelieve. If you ask modern day neo-nazis and historians, the respone would be the same. The only people who claim this are USA right wing politicians who want to whitewash the right from all misdeeds and blame them on the left. Along the lines that Obama is a mass murdering genocideal dictator because he is on the same side as Hitler.
But why would I rely on badly informed Americans when I have talked to people who actually experienced the Nazis first hand and have studied what happened?
More in depth debunking:
Why is Nazism considered far-right in political terms?
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Nazism-considered-far-right-in-political-terms?redirected_qid=1122068
Hitler, Nazis, Socialism, and Rightwing Propaganda
http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/NazismSocialism.html
Myth: Hitler was a leftist.
Fact: Nearly all of Hitler’s beliefs placed him on the far right.
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-hitler.htm
>Which is based on the stupid myth that Hitler was a socialist.
Myth? Let’s see:
Virulent hostility against free markets and capitalism? Check.
Doctrine of the inevitability of world transformation derived from Hegelian idealism? Check.
Elaborate marches with uniformed workers calling one another “comrade”? Check.
Systematic Jew-hatred and propaganda against “rootless cosmopolitans”? Check.
“Socialism” in the name? Check.
Squabbling with other socialists over power? Check.
Indeed, if you were an American Communist during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, you were required to believe that Naziism was socialism and that Hitler and Stalin were marching arm-in-arm towards the glorious future. This only changed when Operation Barbarossa launched, at which point the Soviet propaganda machine began broadcasting the most successful Big Lie in its history.
@esr:
This depends on what, exactly, are your expectations. SRS is an effective solution for the specific illness of gender dysphoria, with very expressive successes in that:
SRS isn’t a cure for suicidal ideation, which is a symptom of several mental illnesses, many of which also carried by gender dysphoric individuals. Those require specific treatments of their own.
SRS, as currently practiced, helps reduce the intensity of these specific symptoms from “marked/strong/significant” to “weak/none”, and nothing else:
That said, there are isolated cases in which a SRS helps reduce suicide attempts, one of which, anecdotally, is that 60 yo friend of mine I mentioned before, who had attempted suicide before her SRS but not afterwards. There are other cases in which it might increase it though, so there’s no direct correlation.
Therefore, while it is true that SRS per se doesn’t have a noticeable statistical effect in terms of reduction in suicide ideation, suicide attempts and actual suicides, I don’t see how this is relevant. It’d be relevant if SRS was being proposed as a cure for suicide ideation, but I’m not aware of this being the case, and if it has been the case on occasion, that was done either in error, or as an earlier hope that didn’t materialize.
Expecting SRS do more than to reduce the specific symptoms of gender dysphoria is therefore unwarranted, and criticizing it for not achieving a goal it doesn’t have is incurring in a straw man fallacy.
You left out the part where the meta-study’s abstract says “Very low quality evidence”. Even without that admission, I wouldn’t have trusted it much. Meta-studies like that are notoriously susceptible to incommensurability of categories in the component studies. Often your “conclusions” are just sampling noise.
>Therefore, while it is true that SRS per se doesn’t have a noticeable statistical effect in terms of reduction in suicide ideation, suicide attempts and actual suicides, I don’t see how this is relevant.
It’s certainly relevant if gender dysmorphia symptoms are supposed to be a cause of suicide. Do I really need to write out the Bayesian formula for this?
I’m disappointed. You’ve given me the form of a rational argument, but only very weak substance. I was expecting better before I chased your links.
>In Europe, every left wing party and politician will condemn violence from any religious side.
But will they condemn it as *religious violence*?
Which is rather the point you choose to miss.
Did you understand my reference? I was referring to the rather well known case of Nidal Hasan the perpetrator of the Ft Hood shooting in 2009.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Fort_Hood_shooting
Which was, truly, condemned by the left here, but as, wait for it, *workplace violence*.
This is not unusual. Religious violence in the form of Islamist jihad is always described as something else. Anything else. Domestic violence. Workplace violence. Or just ‘we’ll never know’.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/2017/04/18/police-chief-man-yelled-allahu-akbar-at-end-of-shooting-rampage/
That last has become kind of a darkly humorous joke on the right…. After some act of murderous jihad, “we’ll never know their real motivation”.
>The only parts that are actually removed are the testicles, but that isn’t very different in practice from a cis man going through a vasectomy.
Sorry, I’m having a little trouble controlling my laughter here.
@esr
“Reassignment surgery does not significantly change the rate of attempted suicides. It doesn’t actually seem to be a “solution” at all.”
But no surgery has no effect either. See my earlier link. Surgery has also no effect on discrimination and harrassment.
This whole discussion about suicide is just used as an excuse for discrimination and exclusion.
>But no surgery has no effect either.
Sophistry. If a medical procedure is ineffective at improving outcomes, the correct ethical choice is to not do it.
>This whole discussion about suicide is just used as an excuse for discrimination and exclusion.
This is lazy, sloppy thinking. It doesn’t explain why some of the surgeons and institutions that pioneered SRS have made an outcomes-based decision to stop doing it.
@esr
“Myth? Let’s see”
Murdering everyone mentioning Marx or Lenin? Check.
Against internationalisation of workers? Check.
Capitalist ownership of industry? Check.
Against class struggle? Check.
Racist? Check.
Popular with the Vatican? Check.
Popular with American industry? Check.
Indeed, no communism.
About the name, the German Democratic Republic was neither. Pro life is mostly pro death penalty, etc… You are called Eric, but not a ruler, so what?
>Indeed, no communism.
Heresies often deny their origins. There is no more difference between Naziism and Communism than, say, the Roman and Aryan versions of Catholicism.
“Oh, and the fact that you label any mass murdering regime as communist the moment it comes up.”
I’m not “labeling” them anything. I’m using their own labels.
National SOCIALIST German WORKER’S Party
COMMUNIST Party of the Soviet Union
COMMUNIST Party of China
COMMUNIST Party of North Korea
Khmer ROUGE
All of the ones you mentioned are basically rounding errors compared to the megamurders perpetrated by these regimes.
“Which is based on the stupid myth that Hitler was a socialist.”
National. SOCIALIST. German. Workers. Party.
Twit.
“Myth: Hitler was a leftist.
Fact: Nearly all of Hitler’s beliefs placed him on the far right.”
Fact: Hitler was a socialist in word and deed. Take out the Jew-hatred and the Nazi Party platform is indistinguishable from a Bernie Sanders speech.
You just won’t admit it because you’ve been indoctrinated by Soviet propaganda that “socialism = good” and “Hitler = bad” .
Fact #2: neither you, nor anyone else, who uses the idiotic term “far-right” has any coherent definition of that term. At all. In fact, using that term at all is a reliable marker that the person has no clue what he’s talking about.
Troutwaxer and Winter:
Please give us a coherent definition of the term “far-right”, clear enough that a person can reliably be placed in that category or excluded from it.
Please make sure that your definition a) includes Nazis, libertarians, and traditional European monarchists and b) isn’t just a thinly-veiled way of saying “not Marxist”.
I’ll be awaiting your response with interest.
>I’ll be awaiting your response with interest.
I’m calling a halt to this now. The thread has been high-quality and mostly on topic; wer’re going to keep it that way. Attempts to jack it will be deleted.
@Greg
“But will they condemn it as *religious violence*?”
The word is “sectarial violence”. That is used often.
“I suspect the day is going to come when reassignment surgery will be regarded as a nightmare fad born of medical arrogance, like the 20-century vogue for lobotomies.”
See also: allegedly prophylactic tonsillectomies, appendectomies, etc. There was even a short-lived vogue for unnecessary total colectomy.
@esr
“You left out the part where the meta-study’s abstract says “Very low quality evidence”. Even without that admission, I wouldn’t have trusted it much. Meta-studies like that are notoriously susceptible to incommensurability of categories in the component studies. Often your “conclusions” are just sampling noise.”
Is this a way to say that you do not have a clue but will not admit it?
@Troutwaxer
There’s an unspoken thing being missed, alright, but not by me. The point of my post was regarding opinions toward gays held by average Muslims worldwide. Terrorism had nothing to do with it.
If liberals actually gave a shit about the principles they claim to hold dear, they would be screeching from rooftops to halt any and all Muslim immigration.
>The word is “sectarial violence”. That is used often.
That’s not only the wrong term, you’re using it wrong.
It’s sectarian violence, which would be violence between sects of the same religion.
Sunni on Shia violence is sectarian.
Sunnis murdering Copts is not.
And in any case it’s part of the family of weasel words that has come into vogue to downplay things you’re not supposed to pay much attention to.
Please excuse me if this counts as additional hijacking.
@Alexander Gieg “He then goes on to show this isn’t the case in the US and to conclude that no, civil war isn’t in sight in the US, nor will it ever be.”
I read that piece a while back and thought it made some interesting observations, but a couple things gave me pause:
First, he seemed to overfit the data. He used the American Civil War as an example of a civil war with a corresponding youth bulge. But that was a war between states, with publicly-funded professional armies on both sides. It was not the endemic neighbor-against-neighbor violence that the term “civil war” usually denotes, exceptions in the western theater notwithstanding. This is a relatively minor point, but that kind of sloppy analysis raises my hackles when it come from the big-data-and-grand-claims types.
Second, he only looks at national demographics. Factions in civil wars tend to be extremely localized in their origins, only forming larger coalitions as the conflict becomes general (just look at all the one-block brigades in Syria). Overall balance of demographics might not matter if their are sufficient youth bulges at specific flashpoints.
Nevertheless, I think the author is on to something interesting that points to a useful line of inquiry. My next question would be how internet networking affects the significance of the youth bulge, perhaps raising the effective concentration of youth.
Ian Bruene:
Argentina, actually. Never been to Europe, alas.
esr:
Did you mean “Arian”?
>Did you mean “Arian”
I did. Though perhaps my typo will be more pardonable if you realise that Arianism was adopted enthusiastically by the Goths… :-)
@esr:
There is a good quantity of studies on Google Scholar if you search for “sex reassignment surgery” coupled with other terms. These individual studies, some of which long term, show improvements in several categories; neither improvement nor deterioration in other categories; and a few deterioration in some other categories. This meta-study seems consistent with that.
If you take the standard Bayesian practice of beginning with an odds ratio of 50% for two unknown hypothesis, isn’t it evident that, even though you haven’t slided to multiple nines, you still slided to >50% on the evidence that SRS is positive to those who go through it? If not, what are your priors?
There’s certainly a correlation between suffering from gender dysphoria and suffering from comorbidities which in turn include as symptoms suicide ideation. There are however gender dysphoric individuals that don’t suffer from those comorbidities, so the causality isn’t evident. And there are other factors correlated with all of the these. For example, while transsexuals are the group with most suicide ideation within LGBTs, the LGB slice also has higher suicide rates than heterossexuals. Is the conclusion one should derive from this that non-heterossexuality as such is the problem, with transsexuality the worst of the set? Or is there something that affects non-heterossexuals more than it affects heterossexuals, and that drives their suicide rates up, with transsexuals being affected the most, hence their suicide rates being the highest?
This all becomes very simple IIF we oversimplify the whole thing. That’s not however how one should proceed with complex phenomena.
If you’d like to write the full Bayesian formula that takes all of those possibilities in account I’d like to see it. I’m not so well versed in Bayesian calculation so as to be able to do it myself. Seeing it spelled out in full by someone with more skill would be quite instructive.
One explanation for that is that they were expecting different outcomes than the ones they got. It doesn’t mean the outcomes they got weren’t positive under a more limited scope. For example, if they wanted to reduce suicide rates, but instead got “only” improved quality of life, that might prompt them to stop.
Something similar to that seems to be the indeed the case. As Paul McHugh from Johns Hopkins University explains in this well known article on the reasons he stopped supporting SRSs (emphasis mine):
He doesn’t say whether his Christian faith and general opposition to homosexuality as an incorrect desire influenced him in this conclusion. I suppose it did, as his affiliation with the Christian-based ACPeds instead of the APA later on, as well as some other positions he holds, suggest. Be as it may, it fits within my model of “the result I hoped for wasn’t achieved, therefore the result I actually got doesn’t count”.
>If you’d like to write the full Bayesian formula that takes all of those possibilities in account I’d like to see it
You broadened the scope a lot, there; I’d have to go back to the books to write one with that complex a structure of antecedents. I might try it as an exercise later, but there’s a much simpler argument that will do for now.
Given: SRS does not affect the rate of attempted suicides. Then, it must be the case that either (a) SRS doesn’t help, or (b) getting SRS is anti-correlated with other factors affecting attempted in a way that to within measurement error cancels the effect of SRS alone.
This way of analyzing higher wakes the higher base rate for the LBG/LGBT population irrelevant. Note that it applies no matter which way SRS might be moving the needle.
In the absence of actual data on anticorrelations and a generative theory of them, what is the way to bet? Me, I think any supposition that those other factors are randomly varying in exactly the right way to mask an effect from SRS needs a serious shave with Occam’s Razor.
>Be as it may, it fits within my model of “the result I hoped for wasn’t achieved, therefore the result I actually got doesn’t count”.
You’re dancing pretty hard, there. I think that McHugh quote means what it says: that post-SRS cases generally reported non-regret but the objective indicators of psychological dysfunction (including the attempted-suicide rate) didn’t change. MchHugh’s expectations are not really relevant to the second observation.
“I’m calling a halt to this now. The thread has been high-quality and mostly on topic”
Your blog, your rules. Apologies.
It does seem to me, though, that this is all of a piece. Insisting that Nazis were not socialists (when they quite clearly were) is pretty similar to insisting that someone is black who quite clearly is not black, or insisting that someone with a penis is a woman, or…
@Troutwaxer – “The right small-business answer when you don’t want to serve a ________ client is ‘I’m afraid I’m really busy that week, there’s a bakery on 5th and Main and they’re great and they’ll be happy to take care of you. Have a nice day.'”
True. However, I still think that a small-business owner that deliberately turns away valuable business, for any reason or none, won’t be in business long. No ideology implied here, just practical economics.
@ESR – “[…] a lot of people who are having bits lopped off should be getting therapy instead.”
Leelah Alcorn’s parents tried that, with the best of intentions. The result was that Leelah walked out onto a freeway and let a truck run over her.
@Alexander Gieg – One thing I’ve read that might account for the issues seen by post-operative transsexuals is that, for the longest time, they as individuals have been focused on their transition, as many of them have had to be for it to happen at all. After the surgery, they say to themselves, “OK. I’m now as fully transitioned as I’m ever going to be. What do I do now?” They’ve been so hyper-focused on the transition process that they don’t give any thought to what comes after that. A loss of focus in their lives may account for the lack of decrease in suicide rates. This can be countered by transitioning individuals understanding that the end of their transition is just the beginning of their life in their true gender. For my part, I believe that I will still be learning the nuances of being a woman from now until the day I die, whether I undergo GCS or not.
>Leelah Alcorn’s parents tried that, with the best of intentions. The result was that Leelah walked out onto a freeway and let a truck run over her.
This is going to sound unfeeling, I’m sure – but what’s your evidence of causation?
Hey, I’m still learning the nuances of being a man — and I’m not trans.
esr wrote, “You put your finger on why I hadn’t actually written the post. I don’t have an ethical resolution for a situation in which opposing gay marriage seemed wrong on principle, but supporting it turned out to be consequentially bad in practice.”
Is this a case of “law” being used in an inappropriate situation, i.e. marriage? Marriage laws have grown far beyond merely governing who has visitation access to comatose spouses and have been used as mentioned in-thread to dictate who private businesses are FORCED to associate with at gunpoint via the force of law.
There appear to be areas of society which are not fit for law, such as non-violent interaction between Russ Cage and Amy Tapie. If Russ does not want to interact with Amy, then any law FORCING Russ to do so would itself be illegal/void if Russ and Amy both have a self-evident right to life.
Taxation seems near to the heart of the matter of marriage laws and the clamor for the Sexuality Alphabet to be included within the definition of marriage. There is (or was) a tax benefit to filing as married, there are tax-sheltered benefits available to the officially-married spouse of a worker, and so on.
Thus, would it be accurate to claim that by supporting “gay marriage” when marriage has been appropriated by a violent state, you ultimately supported the growth of an entity which routinely initiates violence against others, even though your intentions were pure?
@ESR – “what’s your evidence of causation?”
How about Leelah Alcorn’s final words themselves?
She wrote this in a Tumblr post that she had scheduled to go live in the event of her death. It was later deleted from Tumblr, but not before it was captured and preserved. Yes, she might have been mistaken about not being able to successfully transition if she started later, but, when you’re that age, waiting that long can seem like an eternity.
Ipse dixit and Q.E.D.
>Ipse dixit and Q.E.D.
Interesting. I notice a couple of things particularly.
1. Leelah writes “I never actually got the therapy I needed to cure me of my depression.” as though she believed such a cure was possible and it as the specific incompetence of Christian therapists that was the problem.
2. I see no signs that Leelah was bullied or rejected by her peer group for presenting as gay or trans. This increases the skepticism I already held about “trans people are mentally-ill/suicidal because society is oppressive towards them”. Leelah didn’t have a problem with “society”; she had a religion-induced problem with her parents and incompetent counselors.
(From her account, I’m guessing I caught more crap for having visible spastic palsy as a child than she did for her problems. I actually was bullied mercilessly for being the pink monkey. This is a reason I have less patience than most for call-the-waaahmbulance cries of oppression. It happens to lots of people. You cope.)
The part you really won’t like is that I’m not actually sure Leelah’s report of her mental state tells me anything I can trust. Suppose a report like this included this sentence:
“When I was 14, the voices in my head told me what I had to do and I cried with happiness.”
It’s the epistemic problem again. If I am to believe someone’s report that they feel like their body has the wrong genitals, on what grounds do I reject a report about voices in the head, or that a BIID case has limbs that don’t belong on him and should be chopped off?
I’ve been presented with a lot of theory, most notably by Alexander Gleig. My problem is that the evidence of this theory cashing out to an objective improvement in clinical outcomes seems equivocal at best. Until that changes, my skepticism won’t either.
“Leelah Alcorn’s parents tried that, with the best of intentions. The result was that Leelah walked out onto a freeway and let a truck run over her.”
The singular of data, is not anecdote.
Troutwaxer on 2017-05-14 at 00:23:28 said:
> @ Russ Cage: “The disgust reactions of the vast majority of healthy males are equally real if not more so; understanding is irrelevant.”
> So our world should be ruled by the disgust reactions of males? I find you completely
> appalling, and I’d make a joke about how the Gramiscans are right, but somebody might
So it is a MORAL IMPERATIVE that we make massive and rapid changes to our social structure because of the *feelings* (e.g. “internal mental states”) of about .1 percent (1 out of 1000) of the people, but taking into account the feelings of roughly 30 to 50 percent of the population (males who feel “disgust” at homosexuality or think it’s icky[1]) is wrong?
Really?
I would argue that seriously oppressive laws (and prohibiting them from getting a piece of paper from the county court house is NOT seriously oppressive) would be wrong, but if it’s “right” to leverage the force of law and medical science to help one the .1 percent, one should at least not shit on the 30 to 50% from a great height.
> misunderstand and a right winger would come after me with a gun. Because he was
> disgusted by a joke he didn’t even notice.
There are fewer conservatives who’ve gone after people with guns for this sort of thing than there are the number of pages filled with left wingers who’ve resorted to violence over political issues THIS DECADE.
Alexander Gieg on 2017-05-14 at 10:51:22 said:
> Okay, to sum it up, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about war. Real war,
> not metaphorical war. Literal, honest to goodness civil war.
> The link I provided is to an answer by an army big data analyst on the data-driven
> preconditions for a revolution/civil war to happen. Figuring this out was part os his
> assignment in Iraq as his superiors wanted an objective metric for when to consider the level of […]
> conclusion was that, I quote: “(…) the most significant factor was the number of
> individuals aged 13–19 relative to the number of individuals aged over 35. If the teenage
> group ever exceeded the over 35 group, violence increased to the point there was a very
> high chance of civil war. Furthermore, the opposite was true. If the 35+ yr olds
> outnumbered the teenagers, there was no chance of civil war.”
I suspect that while his data may have been good for that part of the world, it’s validity when applied to our culture is questionable (and yes, I read the link. I’ve also *been* to Iraq and worked with US army data analysts. They aren’t bad at their job, but I bet they didn’t predict Trump would win either.).
We have a very youth oriented culture in this country–we (as a culture) don’t WANT to grow the f*k up and behave like adults.
The flip side of that is that in the US we are pretty much ‘post scarcity’, and getting shot in a revolution is about the WORST way to not get the next iPhone.
@Amy Tapie – I went ahead and looked up that case. A), it was in the Phillippines, under Phillippines law, so not relevant in any way to American jurisprudence. B), the perp was convicted of homicide anyway. (Although the six to twelve he got is lower than the average sentence from the Phillippines judge, which I would agree is not a compliment to the legal system in the Phillippines.)
> I don’t generally expect incisive thought from anyone sufficiently ignorant or ahistorical to think “on the right” describes me accurately.
This is interesting because grouping you with the right correctly predicts your opinion on every topic you take a public stand on: gun control, Obamacare, voter fraud, the mainstream media, third-wave feminism, social justice movements, “cultural Marxism”, the left in general, the academic humanities, Trayvon Martin, “Islamofascism”, meritocracy, “hate speech”, prejudice in the open-source community, codes of conduct, Adria Richards, Brendan Eich, the GPL, mainstream empiricist economics, climate change, race and intelligence, etc..
Imagine you walked up to a hundred or so random Americans and asked them how they would label the political identity of a person who hated Obamacare, didn’t believe in climate change, strongly distrusted gender studies types and the social science orthodoxy, passionately argued for less restrictive gun laws, defended the idea that black people are genetically predisposed to low IQ with great confidence and vigor, and referred to transgender persons using the word “tranny”. The modal answer would be either “right” or “hard right”.
Countercheck, if you walked up to a few hundred random Americans and asked them to list some positions they considered “right” or “hard right”, they would, between them, offer every single position you forcefully argue for, and little else. There would be zero ambiguity. Could be that nobody brings up the Contributor Covenant if there aren’t enough coders in your sample, but on the other hand *nobody* is going to assert that your position on the Contributor Covenant is characteristic of *leftists*.
You argue that identity labels should be treated like scientific theses: they are meaningful and valid if they have predictive power. By this proposition, calling you “on the right” is justified. Barring extreme epistemological contortions, it is a true statement of empirical fact.
It follows that describing you as “not on the right” would simply be false.
Trying to work around this by redefining what “on the right” means would be, to use your turn of phrase, “damaging the tool”. It would have no aim other than muddying the waters; obstructing debate by concealing valid conclusions.
Would you be willing to explain why being seen as “on the right” would bother you?
>Would you be willing to explain why being seen as “on the right” would bother you?
Sure. Superficially, because I have a lot of non-Right positions you’re not noticing. I’m extremely hostile to claims of religious authority and have nothing but contempt for creationists. I’m pro-choice and pro-drug-legalization. I hang with Wiccans and polyamorists and all kinds of other marginaux. I was pro-gay-marriage before the gay activists strapped on their jackboots. I could go on like that for a while, but I’d rather get to substructure.
I don’t think like a conservative or have conservative instincts. I’m novelty-seeking rather than novelty-avoiding. My moral sentiments are not heavily tied into disgust reactions, and I naturally push against authority rather than wanting to identify with and valorize it. I never appeal to tradition in political arguments.
I don’t generally like being around conservatives because they are too often narrow, canalized people who are not only bad at questioning their assumptions but don’t see why they ought to get any better at it.
Mountain Goat: As Eric points out, there are plenty of things where his stances disagree with mine. (I have no problem being considered a conservative, though my own opinions do not always align with the right, especially not the far right or alt-right whatever other epithet you choose to apply.) He’s highlighted several, but I’m going to point out one other: You are incorrect that being considered “on the right” predicts his stance on the GPL. It does predict that he is opposed to it, but his reasoning is far from what you would expect from a conservative. A conservative would oppose it because of its politics and its naive take on what being in business is about; Eric’s opposition to it is on its being based in politics in the first place and its being unnecessary to prevent the actions it tries to stop. (Eric, feel free to correct me.)
Eric: Not all conservatives are novelty-avoiding; indeed, there are plenty of conservative hackers, a group you’re pointed out in the past is highly novelty-seeking. Not all conservatives’ morals are tied to disgust reactions, either. And I hope your last paragraph doesn’t apply to me.
>Eric’s opposition to it is on its being based in politics in the first place and its being unnecessary to prevent the actions it tries to stop. (Eric, feel free to correct me.)
No, that’s correct.
>Eric: Not all conservatives are novelty-avoiding [etc.]
The brightest ones, no. Tough to find a hacker who doesn’t qualify as one of that right-tail cohort.
@esr “Superficially, because I have a lot of non-Right positions you’re not noticing. ”
Why are those positions relevant to the right-left axis?
I think this is where distilling everything into a single-axis political spectrum falls apart. I think a lot of people model politics as at least a two-dimensional graph, with both libertarian positions and authoritarian-conservative positions on the “right”, on opposite ends of the other axis. The Nolan chart is more or less such a chart tipped up 45 degrees to put libertarianism at the top, transparent propaganda to present it as the ‘most enlightened’ position.
“Leelah didn’t have a problem with “society”; she had a religion-induced problem with her parents and incompetent counselors.”
I have to wonder what definition of “problem with society” you could be using that doesn’t assign a high weight to the actions of the ‘legitimate’ authority figures in someone’s life as representatives of “society”.
>Why are those positions relevant to the right-left axis?
Because they map to “left” in the way people usually think about it.
>The Nolan chart is more or less such a chart tipped up 45 degrees to put libertarianism at the top, transparent propaganda to present it as the ‘most enlightened’ position.
Yes, but there’s another purpose: to suggest that if you *do* collapse it onto the naive left-right axis it libertarianism maps to centrism, not the “right”. This is true of my own history; I moved from being pretty much at the center of the chart in the 1970s to the upper vertex.
>I think this is where distilling everything into a single-axis political spectrum falls apart.
I completely agree. This is one of thereasons I don’t like being described as “right”.
>I have to wonder what definition of “problem with society” you could be using that doesn’t assign a high weight to the actions of the ‘legitimate’ authority figures in someone’s life as representatives of “society”.
Oh, come on. There can be lots of ways for that equivalence to fail. An obvious one that applies in this case is that the authority figures are themselves in opposition to what they know is a secularist social norm. That is, you can god-shout all you want but when your kid has depression you send the kid to a doctor, not a “Christian counselor”.
When “society” is against you, you get much worse shit than this. You get regularly beaten up and abused and authority figures look the other way. You don’t just get told your problems aren’t real by some jerkass “Christian counselor”, you have problems for there isn’t even precise language because they don’t fit the dominant world-view.
As a narrative of oppression, Leelah’s is pretty weak tea. I’ve known worse. It is possible (though difficult to tell, bad stuff might have been left out) that I’ve lived worse.
@Mountain Goat: “Trying to work around this by redefining what ‘on the right’ means would be, to use your turn of phrase, ‘damaging the tool’. It would have no aim other than muddying the waters; obstructing debate by concealing valid conclusions.”
Sorry, I refuse to accept the rhetorical framing of my political opponents. Specifically, I reject their defamatory rhetoric alleging the only reason I oppose the “progressive”, statist agenda is because I’m too stupid/evil/reactionary/racist/bigoted to accept wholesale the “vision of the anointed” (c.f. Thomas Sowell).
Yes, there was a time when many Christians in the United States wanted to enforce biblical morality via the coercive machinery of government. Those days are long gone; the rhetoric from leading religious thinkers today is much more defensive in nature. “Leave us alone to live our lives by our own freely chosen principles” has replaced “God will curse this unrepentant country.”
I’m coming in late, but does anyone else have an identity that might be getting changed for them?
I’ve spent my conscious life identifying as white and Jewish, and assuming that anyone who said I wasn’t white was my enemy.
Lately, I’ve had people tell me forcifully that I’m not white, I’m poc. (Person of color, and most of you can see where this is heading.) These aren’t anti-semites, they’re saying that I don’t have white privilege.They are trying to let me off the hook.`Some of them are Jewish.
I can agree with an SJW who describes Jews as provisionally white.
Anyway, I think of people who tell me I’m wrong about my identity as really presumptuous. On the other hand, Eric is correct that group identities are in other people’s heads more than in one’s own. Perhaps I will be like one of those Europeans who find themselves citizens of different countries because borders shifted even though they personally didn’t move.
>Perhaps I will be like one of those Europeans who find themselves citizens of different countries because borders shifted even though they personally didn’t move.
You don’t have to go back very far in history to find a time when Jews were considered “non-white” by a lot of people who weren’t crazed Nazi racial theorists. About a hundred years ago, a good-guy character in one of John Buchan’s novels described a friend of his – someone he really liked – as “the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul”.
I’ve been fascinated by that line since I first learned of it. It harmonizes with my observation in Reading Racism into Pulp Fiction that in the early 20th century “white” was a culturist label rather than a racist one. I think it reflects a transitional time in which Jews were becoming “white”.
Nancy, I think it’s pretty obvious that you’ve lived your life in a society where Jews were considered white because they are culturally recognizable as being like the gentile majority – and indeed producers of a lot of “white” culture. The attempt to re-identify you as a POC is a move in re-racializing politics.
One of the consequences of living through a long term interval of extraordinary affluence is that we have the luxury of elevating minor problems into artificial existential crises. We do this because we lack real existential trials in our everyday life, and this leaves us with an innate sense of unease. We perceive a need to exercise our hereditary survival muscles and build up our robustness, but our civilized environment offers us precious few opportunities to do so.
It is a poor substitute for this training to battle over feelings versus tangible danger. As regards the OP, ideally evolution would make transsexuals tougher over time, not whinier for more power exercised through government force.
I’ve seen people argue that Rachel Dolezal’s claim to be black should be taken more seriously if she turned out to have black ancestry. And other people claim that it shouldn’t, but a lot of people do take genetic ancestry very seriously.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/us/cleon-brown-black-lawsuit.html
A white police officer found out he;s 18% black. He’s filed a lawsuit because he’s getting teased/harassed about it. He’s also become more sympathetic to black people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/us/dna-ancestry-race-identity.html?_r=0
`
@esr: “2. I see no signs that Leelah was bullied or rejected by her peer group for presenting as gay or trans.”
Leelah: “After a summer of having almost no friends…”
She experienced intense rejection and hectoring by her family (the most important social interaction there is) and isolation from peers. From what studies I’ve seen, gay and trans people with supportive families and close friends commit suicide no more often than “normals”, and like “normal people”, are more likely to commit suicide if they are socially isolated and lonely.
>Leelah: “After a summer of having almost no friends…”
No, reread carefully. Leelah also says she was not rejected by her peers for for her sexual presentation.
That is one of the most interesting things about the account. Leelah could have claimed that her peers were hostile and this drove her to suicide. She doesn’t do this; she’s more specific about who crapped on her, and even seems to be inviting the reader to the theory that “having no friends” was a consequence of her depression as much as a cause.
I think my being considered white is at least as much about my light skin color as it is about expectations of behavior.
Speaking vaguely of, who here has random strangers ask you where you’re from? This does happen to me fairly often and I wrote it off as mundanes being weird and boring, but having been somewhat marinated in SJW, I now wonder if I’m being tagged as a stranger.
>I think my being considered white is at least as much about my light skin color as it is about expectations of behavior.
Well, sure. The way I would analyze that is it lowers the barrier to being perceive as culturally white.
“Perhaps I will be like one of those Europeans who find themselves citizens of different countries because borders shifted even though they personally didn’t move.”
As Jerry Pournelle once said (roughly, this isn’t an exact quote): “When I was young, they called me a commie for thinking the law should be color-blind. Now I get called a fascist for thinking the same way.”
@ESR
>other people
Your approach is, don’t know what is the right word to use here, non-selfish? No, that is not accurate, there are plenty of very good reason to advertise the kinds of transactions you want to engage in, in fact, pretty much ALL of the reasons I can think of are selfish. So how do you call this clever kind of selfishness when one is actually willing to to invest time doing things for other people because he knows it pays off? Non-solipsistic? Small ego? Selfish but not egocentric? Not self-adsorbed? I mean, it is the literal opposite of the type who decides to identify as a xe, xur, xerself and then demands that other should respect this.
Anyway, it should be clear what you describe is a form of psychological health and basically the wrongly formed identities aren’t simply mistakes but come from some kind of self-adsorped solipsism, that borders on perhaps mental illness.
I am sure psychological science has a lot to say about this but I just cannot find that sort of information. I actually picked up the idea from buddhists who kept telling people “things don’t always happen with you, without you, against you or for you, you are not that important ,you are mostly an extra character in the movies of the lives of most other people, dial down that self importance and be glad – not mattering also means most people don’t even bother to judge you so do what you want really”.
Then I heard he concept again that it has something to do with development from childhood to adulthood. And now I get to see this in practice, our 3 year old still kind of thinks “I want” is an ultimate argument, and it is right about this age that she is slowly learning that it is not because other people matter too. Maybe it is a development issue, a newborn is 100% solipsistic and it is supposed to steadily reduce every year.
Question. About what age did you figure out that markets tend to make people sort of less self absorped, less solipsistic, better at being “empathically selfish” i.e. “I care about what you want because giving you that you will give me what I want”, developing this “transactional empathy”? Was this a major reason you converted to libertarianism? I guess you picked up this anti-solipsism mentality from Zen, was there a point when you figured transactions tend to train this, and political lootery tends not to?
The issue is there is not even a clear terminology about this stuff, I am using vague words. “Transactional empathy” is a good term though, IMHO, it sort of summarizes “if you want to get what you want from others start thinking really hard about what they can want from you in return”.
>So how do you call this clever kind of selfishness when one is actually willing to to invest time doing things for other people because he knows it pays off?
I call it “ethics”.
>the wrongly formed identities aren’t simply mistakes but come from some kind of self-adsorped solipsism, that borders on perhaps mental illness.
Indeed, with “Claire” as a conspicuous example.
>Question. About what age did you figure out that markets tend to make people sort of less self absorped, less solipsistic, better at being “empathically selfish” i.e. “I care about what you want because giving you that you will give me what I want”, developing this “transactional empathy”?
In the late 1970s; I was in my early twenties.
>Was this a major reason you converted to libertarianism
I’m not sure which way the causality ran. That is, it might be that libertarians showed me how ethics actually works (self-interest and long planning horizons combining to produce pseudo-altruistic behavior) and I joined them because I got the point.
>I guess you picked up this anti-solipsism mentality from Zen, was there a point when you figured transactions tend to train this, and political lootery tends not to?
No. I was aware of Zen but considered it as a method for awareness and getting epistemologically clean. I didn’t pay much attention to Buddhist ethics at all, and for that matter still don’t (though I’m more aware of it now).
My antipathy for political lootery came from a different place. I studied the Nazi revolution early, read Socialist and Communist theory, and paid attention to what was going on around me. One of the questions that puzzled me most in my late childhood and teens was how this massive evil could be hanging over the world threatening to wipe out everything good in it and yet be almost ignored by everybody around me. I plain could not understand why the few people willing to speak obvious truths about that evil were dismissed as fringy paranoids.
>Transactional empathy” is a good term though, IMHO, it sort of summarizes “if you want to get what you want from others start thinking really hard about what they can want from you in return”.
I agree, it’s a good term.
@parallel:
“Leave us alone to live our lives by our own freely chosen principles”
I call bullshit. The elephant in the room is, as always, abortion politics.
The original Nolan Chart was a straight square similar to all those memeified four-quadrant charts that are all over Tumblr. The 45-degree tilt to put libertarians on top was a later innovation (I think by the Advocates for Self-Government).
@esr: “No, reread carefully.”
I did. I’m going to guess you’ve never felt intense, long-term social isolation and loneliness. Holidays are the time of year with the highest suicide rate for a reason. My contention wasn’t really about her friends rejecting her for being trans, it was that she was socially isolated.
>’Leelah could have claimed that her peers were hostile and this drove her to suicide.’
No, she instead claims that her friends really weren’t her friends at all, which may even be worse.
“They were extremely excited to see me and talk to me, but only at first. Eventually they realized they didn’t actually give a shit about me, _and_ _I_ _felt_ _even_ _lonelier_ _than_ _I_ _did_ _before_. The only friends I thought I had only liked me because they saw me five times a week.” (from the complete text at Amy’s link)
When she was able to re-establish connection with peers after 5 months of parentally enforced isolation, her peers rejected her. Their motivation is essentially irrelevant. What’s relevant is that she was socially isolated, and the only people she interacted with regularly gave her nothing but harsh, unloving condemnation.
Her gender dysphoria may have been the root cause for her social isolation, but it was the social isolation that killed her.
>”The only friends I thought I had only liked me because they saw me five times a week”
Right. And this has exactly what to do with gender dysphoria?
I see very little reason to believe the dysphoria was the root of Leelah’s social isolation. The suicide note was written as though she was just not good at maintaining peer relationships – didn’t understand the brown-monkey scripts. Early in this thread the co-morbidity of gender dysphoria an autism was noted; I would be completely unsurprised if Leelah were an undiagnosed case of mild autism.
@Nancy Lebovitz
This used to happen all the time when I was a child. In this case the “stranger tag” was caused by a lot of listening to audiobooks read by a Shakespearian actor, as well as old British TV. Also minimal contact with the usual sources of “socialization”.
@Doctor Locketopus
Due to the pose I keep seeing your avatar as a gangster with tommy gun. I find the image of Churchill as an old time gangster unreasonably amusing.
@TheDividualist
It is also called “enlightened self-interest”.
@Any
A good example of the difference between Conservative and Libertarian thought processes that doesn’t end up in the moralism weeds is Snowden (don’t get triggered Jay, I’m only bringing him up as an example):
A libertarian is nearly guaranteed to be in favor of Snowden, weighing the security breach as of trivial importance relative to the embarrassment received by the government and the confirmation of their spying.
A Conservative is likely (it varies quite a bit) to consider Snowden a traitor, after all he broke security and then ran when the sledgehammer came down.
TL;DR: Conservatives really like their Lawful Good, Libertarians their Chaotic Good.
@TomA
We get it. You Vape.
> Right. And this has exactly what to do with gender dysphoria?
Trans people don’t commit suicide because of gender dysphoria. They commit suicide because of social isolation. SRS has little to do with the suicide rate because SRS does little, if anything, about the social isolation, nor is it intended to. So why do you keep linking the two? You, and others, have time and again throughout this thread, linked the rate of suicide among trans people with SRS.
>Trans people don’t commit suicide because of gender dysphoria. They commit suicide because of social isolation.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
We know, in this case, that Leelah was depressive. Depressives are quite suicide-prone even when not isolated and not gender-dysphoric.
>You, and others, have time and again throughout this thread, linked the rate of suicide among trans people with SRS.
This is exactly what I have not done. I have repeatedly pointed out that SRS does not seem to appreciably change attempted-suicide rates. Try again.
Snowden broke his contract with the company that employed him AND his contract with the government. His actions in breaking this contract went *way* beyond what was necessary to demonstrate the issue he was allegedly pissed off about (USG spying on Citizens). In doing so he put *many* lives at risk and cost the organization with whom he was contracted a *considerable* amount of money.
The only reason a Libertarian would “like” this result is that it gave an enemy (the government) a black eye. Those that do not consider him a traitor are either (a) “left libertarians” who are ontologically so inverted that they are chewing on yesterday’s lunch or they’re the post-nationalism types who have other problems.
Many conservatives (though nowhere near enough) are ALSO upset about the NSA spying issue. They are less likely than libertarians to give him a pass because they still believe in the nation-state as their tribe. Also their models about the actions of nation states tend to produce more accurate predictions than the Libertarians.
Rob K on 2017-05-15 at 13:33:33 said:
> > Right. And this has exactly what to do with gender dysphoria?
> Trans people don’t commit suicide because of gender dysphoria. They commit suicide
> because of social isolation. SRS has little to do with the suicide rate because SRS does little,
> if anything, about the social isolation, nor is it intended to. So why do you keep linking the two?
It has been established that there is an overlap between “Autism” and “Gender Dysphoria”. Given that the operating assumption is that *both* are due to anomalous brain structure of some sort, what is the possibility that the sort of mis-wiring that leads to biochemical depression are *also* present?
>Given that the operating assumption is that *both* are due to anomalous brain structure of some sort, what is the possibility that the sort of mis-wiring that leads to biochemical depression are *also* present?
Very high, I think.
The alternate theory is that LGBT is highly co-morbid with depression and suicide because bigots. I’ve always been skeptical about this because there’s no evidence that co-morbidity lessens in gay meccas like San Francisco where gay men can walk down the street naked without even censure.
Really there’s a kind of kafkatrap often deployed here. “LGBTs are fucked up because bigots, and if you question this you are automatically a bigot and part of the problem”. Related: “Urban black culture is fucked up because bigots, and if you question this you are automatically a bigot and part of the problem”. I’m getting less patient with thought-stoppers like this as I get older.
>This is exactly what I have not done. I have repeatedly pointed out that SRS does not seem to appreciably change attempted-suicide rates. Try again.
It seems implicit because “SRS increases suicide rates” (which is something others have certainly claimed even if you have not) is a lot stronger argument against it than “SRS has no effect on suicide rates and I will not bother considering other ways in which it might produce positive outcomes for the population that don’t end up committing suicide” (which seems to be your actual argument), and your overall position seems to be against it.
It is fair to say you are “linking” them because you appear to consider a reduction in suicide rates (which does not materialize, therefore your overall position is against it) to be the only possible thing in favor of allowing/encouraging people to have SRS.
> The way I would analyze that is it lowers the barrier to being perceive as culturally white.
And insisting on calling the phenomenon “culturally white” rather than, say, “culturally American”, raises that barrier for people whose skin is darker (or have other ethnic markers – given the same skin tone near the margins of the category, someone with curly hair is seen as less “white” than someone with straight hair) for no particularly good reason.
>And insisting on calling the phenomenon “culturally white” rather than, say, “culturally American”
Sorry, I was using the terms of my old post on pulp fiction. It’s not a phrase I would use outside of that context today without qualification.
“Culturally American” doesn’t cover it, though. The early 20th-century loading of “white” as a cultural thing definitely included most Europeans.
“Culturally Angevin,” I suppose I might call it. The union of the sets of the Anglosphere (including the New World elements thereof) and the French Empire/Republic. Germany and Scandinavia were close kin, and the northern Mediterranean further cousins.
“The alternate theory is that LGBT is highly co-morbid with depression and suicide because bigots. I’ve always been skeptical about this because there’s no evidence that co-morbidity lessens in gay meccas like San Francisco where gay men can walk down the street naked without even censure.”
Has anyone checked on the geographical distribution?
What proportion of the LGBT people in San Franciso moved there from somewhere else where they *were* stigmatized?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBT_youth
@esr: This is exactly what I have not done. I have repeatedly pointed out that SRS does not seem to appreciably change attempted-suicide rates. Try again.
But that’s exactly what I mean by “linked”. I mean that you have implied there /should/ be some correlation (as here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7524&cpage=1#comment-1826800), that you have implied “gender dysphorics commit suicide because of the gender dysphoria and thus SRS should be a solution but isn’t.”
It’s as though you’re arguing that cancer patients with the flu shouldn’t be given flu medicine because it won’t cure the cancer. (“Obviously the flu medicine doesn’t work; the patient still died!”)
Gender dysphorics DO NOT commit suicide because of the gender dysphoria thus, SRS will have no effect either way and you should have no expectation that it would.
>But that’s exactly what I mean by “linked”.
Sorry, I can’t even follow your argument any more, it’s become so tortured. Nothing you’re claiming about my position is even making internal logical sense, let alone describing what I think.
The thing is, I don’t know who decides which research gets done.
I do believe that Social Justice wants to keep its people frightened and angry all the time, so they don’t support collecting information which says that some places are better and other places are worse.
Here’s my read on Leelah’s situation.
Her social isolation was ultimately caused by her parents forcibly isolating her from her peers. Prior to that, she had come out as gay to her peers, which she probably figured was safer than coming out as trans. Her friends were generally supportive of this; her parents, however, were “pissed. They felt like I was attacking their image, and that I was an embarrassment to them. They wanted me to be their perfect little straight Christian boy, and that’s obviously not what I wanted.”
After five months of isolation, she had dropped off her friends’ radar, pretty much. “The only friends I thought I had only liked me because they saw me five times a week.” They probably figured that she would soon “go away” again, because her parents would find out and crack down on her even harder.
So: five months of being isolated from everyone except people telling you that you are wrong and you are going “against God.” I doubt there are many grown adults that could stand up under that strain, let alone a 16-year-old kid.
I lay the blame for Leelah’s death squarely at the feet of her bigoted, narrow-minded parents. If she had gotten help when she first tried to come out to them–real help, not the fundamentalist Christian horse manure she was subjected to–she might be a living, breathing, young woman today. Instead, she is dead, and her parents continue to misgender her even in death!
If there is a Hell at all, her parents belong there, and they deserve to fry for a million years, and die every second of it.
Rest In Power, Leelah.
>I lay the blame for Leelah’s death squarely at the feet of her bigoted, narrow-minded parents.
So do I. Regardless of any judgment about whether Leelah was delusional or not, what her parents did was cruel and horrible and wrong.
>I don’t generally like being around conservatives because they are too often narrow, canalized people who are not only bad at questioning their assumptions but don’t see why they ought to get any better at it.
Are you sure you’re talking about conservatives here?
Not a conservative either, but in my experience you are much more accurately describing the left. Conservatives are much more self-aware, self-critical, and open to inquiry. Which is really saying a great deal, because conservatives are not very strong in those areas, the ‘much more’ is strictly by comparison, not absolute.
One of the primary benefits of leftism is to escape the need for self-awareness.
>Are you sure you’re talking about conservatives here?
Yes. Lefties may be equally bad at actually updating their beliefs, but they have more tendency to at least pay lip service to the idea that they ought to.
Contrast the Leelah Alcorn story with the experience of “gendermom”/”Marlo Mack,” as chronicled on her blog and in this video. She had a child who was assigned male at birth, but then:
M. was able to articulate her true gender identity at age three. She’s now eight, and still happy being who she really is. And notice that “gendermom,” too, was a holdout in accepting her daughter’s gender identity, until she finally came around. But come around she did. And that makes all the difference.
(My own parents are still alive, and they are just as supportive of my own decision to transition. I was welcomed at my younger brother’s wedding last September as a daughter and a sister. This is what “acceptance” looks like.)
> I find the image of Churchill as an old time gangster unreasonably amusing.
Winnie loved guns. There are several other pictures of him with the Tommy gun besides the one I use. I’ve also seen pictures of him firing a STEN gun.
>Winnie loved guns. There are several other pictures of him with the Tommy gun besides the one I use. I’ve also seen pictures of him firing a STEN gun.
I recall reading stories of him as a younger man, having adventures and employing a broom handle Mauser to great effect.
His positive experiences with the nuts and bolts of war in his youth, tended to lead him astray later on. Times and tools had changed, and he had a terrible tendency to think of himself as more of a tactician than he was. That certainly didn’t *help* with his tendency to micromanage events in the field.
So no, not even Churchill got to choose his identity, at least w.r.t. him self-identifying as a tactician. ;)
Amy: “If she had gotten help when she first tried to come out to them–real help, not the fundamentalist Christian horse manure she was subjected to–she might be a living, breathing, young woman today. Instead, she is dead, and her parents continue to misgender her even in death!”
I won’t disagree for a moment that the blame for Leela’s death can be laid at her parents’ feet. They failed to get her effective help, and cut her off from her support structure. I have little doubt those materially contributed, if not led outright, to her depression, and her suicide.
And while I must condemn their actions, they have a right as parents to raise their child in accordance with their religious beliefs. My real hope is that one day they will see how those beliefs led to their actions, and what those actions led to. Only then will they understand, and begin to atone – and, perhaps, help others to see the damage they do by acting in the same way.
As for “misgendering her even in death!”, there are three comments I have to make: 1) “Misgendering” is yet another SJW neologism and yet another SJW atrocity on the language, and should be eradicated. 2) For her parents, this is almost certainly a coping mechanism, and a harmless one, because – and most importantly – 3) Leelah is beyond caring. To borrow a tired line: At this point, what difference does it make?
@Jay Maynard – Admittedly, the fact that Leelah’s parents still refer to her as “their son” and use her “boy name” to refer to her is kind of along the lines of “adding insult to injury.”
It would cost them nothing at this point to acknowledge their daughter for who she truly was, and, at the same time, admit they made a terrible, horrible mistake, and their daughter is now dead because of it. As it stands, it appears as if they’d rather have a dead son than a live daughter. And that is and has been the problem all along.
I made another comment that discussed another case that offers a contrast to Leelah and her parents, but it appears to be held up in moderation.
>It would cost them nothing at this point to acknowledge their daughter for who she truly was
But they think they already know what she truly was. From their point of view, doing what you want would be complicity in perversion.
I’m not excusing their cruel, stupid behavior. But the above is also a fact.
Regardless of what happened afterwards there is already clear evidence that Leelah was fucked in the head, and to the extent that they were the cause of this the parents utterly failed in their duty.
At 16 Leelah knows there is something…. amiss. There is absolutely no gorram way he/she couldn’t have known that it would be a serious problem with the parents. And yet decides to come out while still under their control anyway.
Smart. Really fucking smart. And to the extent that the parents could influence this they utterly failed by raising a child who apparently couldn’t think through the situation and figure it out.
Sorry, Foo, but that really is blaming the victim. You can do better than that. Whatever Leelah did, she did not deserve what her parents did to her.
And, Amy, as I said: for the parents, it’s likely a coping mechanism that serves to save them from having to confront their actions. Throwing away that coping mechanism would not be free of cost; indeed, it may cost them everything they are. That is not a price anyone can demand they pay, no matter how offended they get.
@Doctor Locketopus
On closer examination he is holding a gun…. *facepalm*
@Jay
Lumping 16 year olds in with toddlers is part of the reason our society is having problems. They are hardly full adults, but keeping people out of the real world prevents them from ever really growing up to be adults even decades later.
As an aside, I wonder what kind of logic made the parents think this would work? Even from within their own system there is no way in hell that would work…. Given that they took that path, and the way these things typically play out, the chances of them ever regretting their actions is slim to none.
@Foo
Yikes! Triggered much?
So, Christianity deserves a lot of the blame.
>Yes. Lefties may be equally bad at actually updating their beliefs, but they have more tendency to at least pay lip service to the idea that they ought to.
That belief requires updating. ;)
esr on 2017-05-15 at 18:29:58 said:
I think Rob K. is trying to argue that no-one ever said SRS was supposed to stop them offing themselves, just to make them slightly happier until they get round to doing so; and that the gender dysphoria is such a dominant driver of suicide rates that it screens off any effect from the ‘other psychological factors’ that SRS is supposed to improve. Evaluating the plausibility of these claims is left as an exercise for the reader.
On another front, is there a way I can weaponize this for my own purposes without any effort? Declare an identity of “traditionally-attrictive male” and use a claim of discrimination to get laid by hot co-eds?
@ Ian Bruene – “We get it. You Vape.”
Actually, I model. I’m guessing that you’re new here and unaware of my prior comments.
H. sapiens social evolution is being actively modeled using a variant of Game Theory principles, a self-learning AI engine, and real-time data harvesting. I love coming here because Eric seems to intuit a lot of what the model trends reveal.
@ esr: “She doesn’t do this; she’s more specific about who crapped on her….”
Having your parents crap on you is about as bad as it gets, when this happens in combination with your religion crapping on you, that’s really ugly. If the “therapists” involved had licenses from the state we’re also talking about some very, very serious malpractice here – permanent loss of licensing, multi-million-dollar settlements, etc., not to mention that therapists can’t bill insurance companies for anti-LGBT services, so I wouldn’t be surprised if her parents spent her college money on “saving her from sin.”
This is not nearly so minor as you imagine it to be, and about as fucked up as a life can get without actual violence.
>This is not nearly so minor as you imagine it to be, and about as fucked up as a life can get without actual violence.
I didn’t think it was “minor” at all. I was pushing against the notion that “society” at some sort amorphous large was to blame here.
Completely O/T — I had to defecate on a co-worker’s inaccurate map today to get him to look up and actually focus on the territory.
Some previous products had been internally big-endian. We are switching to a little-endian processor, and changing things around to make them work — well, let’s just say that consensus on how reality works was a lot harder to achieve than I expected.
It turns out that the root of the problem was that from the POV of this co-worker, 32 bits was a basic unit of data — simply because the processor has a 32 bit bus. According to his map, a little-endian processor reading 32 bits at address ‘x’ would see the same 32 bits as a big-endian processor reading those same 32 bits at address ‘x’, and endianness problems were what happened when you decomposed 32 bits into 16 or 8, rather than what happened when you compose multiple 8 bit values together to get 16 or 32 bits.
It took hours today to make him understand that, if we hypothetically connected a little-endian processor and a big-endian processor to the same bus, and the big-endian processor wrote 0xAA to address 0x1000, the little-endian processor would see 0xAA at address 0x1000 rather than address 0x1003.
This craziness has been going on for weeks and has cost me days.
@esr: “I see very little reason to believe the dysphoria was the root of Leelah’s social isolation.”
I agree. Poorly treated dysphoria was the root of Leelah’s social isolation. Depression did the rest, because one of the really horrible things about depression is that you lie to yourself and tell yourself that the good things about your life don’t really exist.
@esr: “Related: “Urban black culture is fucked up because bigots, and if you question this you are automatically a bigot and part of the problem”.”
And what would black culture be like without bigots? There are enough bigots around that finding a black person who has not been adversely affected by a bigot is very difficult, and this goes back to well-before the Civil War.
@Troutwaxer:
Funnily enough, the two times I was beat up in junior high school was by blacks. They were bussed in, obviously didn’t really want to be there, and I was a convenient target. So if I, as a child, was made into a bigot, arguably it was done by your most liberal friends.
In any case, people who are continuously offended for, and apologizing on behalf of, others, are tiresome.
@TomA
Actually I’ve lurked for a very long time, that is how I know that you have been making the same post with a few words changed according to topic over and over again for several years. In fact the other day I read a post from several years ago and you had one of the comments on it.
That doesn’t mean you are wrong, merely that each repeated post is less interesting than the last.
@ Foo Quuxman: “There is absolutely no gorram way he/she couldn’t have known that it would be a serious problem with the parents.”
And how do the parents know that their behavior is a serious problem for the child unless the child tells them? There are plenty of parents who can get over that particular obstacle, just as there are plenty of churches which are more relaxed about homosexuality.
“And what would black culture be like without bigots? ”
I don’t know. What would Jewish, Korean, Japanese, or Chinese culture be like without bigots?
If you try to pretend that those cultures haven’t experienced bigotry, I’m going to have to laugh in your face.
> If you try to pretend that those cultures haven’t experienced bigotry
Cue No True Scotsman in 3, 2, 1…
@ Ian Bruene
Sorry, I didn’t assume that you were just being ad hominem in your prior comment.
@TomA
I actually wrote that more harshly than I intended, please accept my apology.
Garrett on 2017-05-15 at 22:38:41 said:
Doesn’t work unless you ARE traditionally attractive. The sort of “hot co-eds” that would bed someone because of traditional attractiveness are not deep enough to grok the whole declared identity thing.
OTOH, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OMAQiMOJ68
Eric:
I was aware of these positions; I don’t think they change anything.
First, they aren’t salient on the amplitude level. You spend a lot of time writing about SJWs, race relations, and HBD science. You used to spend a lot of time writing about Islam and the wisdom of invading Iraq. These are your stakes in the ground. These are the opinions you tell us you want to be known for. This is where you deliberately expend social capital and financial opportunity. Drugs and abortion? Not really.
Second, they don’t predict very much. “ESR hangs with Wiccans.” OK, would that be feminist goddess-worshippers or völkisch white supremacists? “ESR advocates for unrepressed sex lives without any neurotic Victorian shit.” Great, does that make him a free-love hippie or a PUA redpiller? “ESR is pro gay marriage.” Good for him; is he friends with the Y Combinator set or with Queer Theory snowflakes who hate The Corporations?
None of the positions you cite tell me anything about how you think, where your loyalties lie, how you react to people who look and sound like me, how comfortable we would be with each other e.g. as neighbors or coworkers.
Contrast the points I cited in my previous post. Most of them predict most others, and therefore everything: nobody who hates Islam doesn’t also hate SJWs; nobody who hates SJWs trusts any sociologists farther than he can throw them; very few people who think the social sciences are worthless don’t think that so are climatology and the NYT; nobody who hates the NYT wants to work on a Github project with diversity boilerplate in the readme; and so on; and so forth.
It’s a tightly connected graph of near-infallibly concomitant attitudes and signals. In other words, an identity.
The evidence for a link between novelty seeking and ideology is extremely weak. Settle et al. (2010) find that, among people with the 7R variant of the dopamine receptor D4 gene, having many friends correlates with being liberal. They hypothesize that this could be evidence of a link between novelty seeking and liberalism because DRD4-7R has been linked to novelty seeking and one might surmise that novelty seekers should tend to have more friends. Cool, only two problems: (1) even if they’re right, there is no such correlation among people without DRD4-7R; (2) it’s literally one single paper, never replicated, in a polsci journal. (Ebstein et al. (2015) report that having two copies of the 4R allele makes you more conservative, but only if you’re an Asian female who grew up in an authoritarian environment, and correlation with novelty seeking was not tested for.)
Seven years later, the link between 7R and novelty seeking remains tenuous. Munafo et al. (2008) and Rousses et al. (2009) deny the link exists. Also see for example Sheese et al. (2012); to paraphrase: “we can’t tell because the subscales disagree but don’t overthink it because our sample size is a joke anyway.”
There is a better-than-even chance the whole thing is bullshit.
I assume you’re referring to Ahn et al. (2014). Again, a single paper, never replicated. More importantly, even if they are right, you’re reading them wrong. “Disgusting images [] generate neural responses that are highly predictive of political orientation even though these neural predictors do not agree with participants’ conscious rating of the stimuli.” In other words, you cannot draw any conclusions from how you feel about your disgust reactions. The correlation only shows up on the MRI, not in your conscious mind.
Everybody thinks they “naturally push against authority”, even hard leftists. Wait, especially hard leftists. It’s really just another way of saying you believe you’re an independent, critical thinker. Seriously, who doesn’t.
And the fact that you don’t appeal to tradition doesn’t make you not right, at best it makes you not tradcon. The alt right doesn’t appeal to tradition either, they invoke HBD science, Mises, and Hayek. Their heroes are Evola, a revolutionary and esotericist who hated reactionaries, and Houellebecq, who is basically what 4chan would look like if it was a French paperback. The iron pill guy is a Neopagan, not a Southern Baptist.
>I was aware of these positions; I don’t think they change anything.
Of course if you choose to dismiss all data contrary to your hypothesis nothing is going to disconfirm it. That’s not my problem.
>OK, would that be feminist goddess-worshippers or völkisch white supremacists?
Dear Goddess you are ignorant. There aren’t any “volkisch” Wiccans – that nastiness is over in the Asatru corner. (The few Asatru I used to know wanted nothing to do with it.)
I chose this to pick on because it nearly illustrates how poorly I fit any of the binary categories you want to stuff me into. I’m not a feminist Wiccan either – we call them “Dianics”. The category for the kind of Wiccan I am am doesn’t exist on your map.
>Everybody thinks they “naturally push against authority”, even hard leftists.
This suggests that you don’t know any actual conservatives, which would neatly explain a lot of the bilge you’re spouting. Conservatives as as a group are emotionally prone to cop-worship (even the ones who intellectually think of themselves as having libertarian tendencies). That reflects a lizard-brain love of hierarchy and order that I don’t share.
Here is what I don’t get about being trans, and it is not a poetical question, I am really curious about an answer if there is one. Feminists and other progressives are telling us female gender roles are nothing but bullshit constructed socially to oppress women. Why do then trans women want to imitate (or implement, or live, whatever is the term) perfectly? There is something weird about the the idea that the feminist – and yet cis – woman sees the female gender roles as a prison to break out from, and the trans woman wants to break *in* that prison. What gives? Does anyone have any idea?
The best approximate answer I can find is that feminity and masculinity can be interpreted and submissive and dominant characteristics in a quasi-BDSM sense, this by no means does exhaust these gender roles (for example motherhood is hugely important and absolutely not a submissive thing), but it is an important aspect of them. Likely this is one aspect of testosterone. The “red pilled in the PUA sense” stuff tends to mean “assume the average sexually aroused woman is somewhat masochistic”. Once I realized that things “clicked” for me, like when my girlfriends wanted more passionate sex it meant generally more dominant sex. So from that on I saw BDSM not as a special subculture but something more akin to the exaggeration and fetishization of something that exists in entirely normal, vanilla, non-fetish relationships as well in a moderate way!
So in this model the trans woman is a submissive, masochistic man, who would like to serve sexually a stronger partner. Clearly this is not exhaustive, there are plenty of masochistic men who are full cis (that is why so many prostitutes offer domina services and the funny part is their clients tend to be highly succesful, powerful men). But there is probably some element of this.
This would suggest the feminist woman who wants to break out from gender roles she feels as prisons, is probably not entirely cis as she lacks that bit of masochism that is an important part of the female experience. Perhaps, the growing number of feminist, leftist women identifying as nonbinary or genderqueer is a good thing. That sounds like honest advertising in ESR’s model, they are telling people to not expect them to enjoy being submissive. Which somewhat curiously does reinforce the traditional model that women who 100% identify as women do have a submissive streak. I actually like this solution. Very often I look at obese feminists with short hair and they don’t even look like what I expect women to look like. So if they choose to identify as non-binary gender that sounds like a seriously good thing as instead of stretching the category “woman” they simply leave it and thus that category can be defined yet again a bit tighter.
I really wish all the pajama-boy nu-males would also identify as non-binary instead of as men, because then we could plain simply exclude them from the concept of masculinity without any drama and thus define masculinity yet again a bit more narrowly and traditionally.
I think this solution would suit all.
@TheDividualist
In my experience, “feminists” are servile, weak people. It’s all talk.
Mountain Goat: “Everybody thinks they “naturally push against authority”, even hard leftists.”
Of course hard leftists think they naturally push against authority. Stick it to the man! They see no incongruity at all in their desire to replace the eeeeevil corporatist right-wing state with their own. And have you looked at the actual positions Black Lives Matter takes? They may not have started out this way, but now they’re just another bunch of left-wing radicals spouting the same old tired Communist propaganda.
Eric: “Conservatives as as a group are emotionally prone to cop-worship (even the ones who intellectually think of themselves as having libertarian tendencies). That reflects a lizard-brain love of hierarchy and order that I don’t share.”
I think this overstates the case. There’s a long way between thinking of the police as the thin blue line between civilization and savagery and worshipping them. To me, cops do a tough, dangerous job among people who fundamentally don’t want them to be there. I’ve known plenty of them in 17 years working on the street as an active volunteer paramedic. Yes, there are bad ones, but the overwhelming majority of them are good men and women who genuinely want to help their fellow citizens. They deserve not to be second-guessed by folks who weren’t there, don’t have all of the facts, hate their guts, and take months to parse out decisions they had to make in fractions of a second.
Even David Friedman, as I understand The Machinery of Freedom, acknowledges the need for police (though he argues that they need not – and should not be – agents of the state).
Are there bad cops? Of course there are, just as there are in all of life’s endeavors. They should be dealt with as harshly as any other citizen, and there’s a case to be made that they deserve even more for abusing the public’s trust. But the identity-politics Left assumes that all cops are bad and works forward from that false premise.
I don’t think this is cop-worshipping, and I don’t think conservatives in general engage in it.
@ESR
I’m assuming that the different “tribes” of Wiccans name themselves after the diety gelstat they try to embody?
@Mountain Goat
>This suggests that you don’t know any actual conservatives
Another window into the differing psychologies: Conservatives can easily slip into Founder worship. Not to the literal degree of bowing and praying to statues of the Founders like in Bioshock Infinite, but in the sense that they will often (the degree of course varies from person to person) accept the thought chain “The Founders said / did X” > “The Founders were Wise” > “Anyone who disagrees with X is a commie mutant traitor”.
Liberals are of course more than happy to fill the other side of the scale and consider the Founders as Literally Hitler (old white males y’know). And Libertarians are all over the map, but the view that seems to be the most common and isn’t just the left-libertarians being noisy seems to be some variant of “The Founders meant well and did what they could to secure freedom, but ultimately underestimated how easy it is to route around checks and balances”.
Side note: Isn’t it funny how people who claim that The Ancestors N generations removed were perfect perfectness, never seem to catch on to one tiny detail:
The Ancestors couldn’t have been that amazingly awesome if they gave rise to their inferior descendants.
>I’m assuming that the different “tribes” of Wiccans name themselves after the diety gelstat they try to embody?
No, it’s nowhere near that neat, Or well-defined. And i’s way off topic for this thread.
>This suggests that you don’t know any actual conservatives, which would neatly explain a lot of the bilge you’re spouting. Conservatives as as a group are emotionally prone to cop-worship (even the ones who intellectually think of themselves as having libertarian tendencies). That reflects a lizard-brain love of hierarchy and order that I don’t share.
OK, I’ll stop hinting and come out and say it.
Your outdated stereotypes directly conflict with my real world experience.
The bootlickers I see are progs. They are obsessed with hierarchy and status, are fawning up and bullies down, and *never* contradict the will of the herd.
Conservatives are difficult and contrary, always contentious, and lack power mainly because you can’t get them all pointed in the same direction. They are always willing to disagree with any group that is wrong, especially if it’s their own.
Placing value on order is a quality of life issue, tied in with property rights and the deeply intuitive understanding of and importance they place on, social trust.
Actual successful middle class liberals are very much the same way, *in their own personal lives*.
@Greg: It’s all about your lived experience, then?
Jay, “And while I must condemn their actions, they have a right as parents to raise their child in accordance with their religious beliefs.”
In the US, parents have a limited right to raise their children in accordance with their religious beliefs– clear cases of abuse can be stopped and/or punished. Did you mean that the right should be unlimited?
I’m bemused at the discussion of whether Leelah’s parents can repent of the mistake they made. It’s not an unreasonable question, but I’m more interested in whether this story will discourage other parents from going down the same road.
>It’s all about your lived experience, then?
And careful observation.
I mean, what am I supposed to believe, you or my lying eyes? :)
Eric, do you think it would make sense to have the occasional open thread?
@Patrick Maupin – your co-worker’s model is not impossible, though it was probably factually untrue of the specific situation you were working with. It’s called “word-invariant” endianness [or BE32 in an ARM context], and is true of ARMv4-5, and memory pages can be mapped in this way on SPARC64 (according to Wikipedia, this is sometimes done for PCI bus devices) – whereas “address invariant” / “byte-invariant” / BE8 endianness, which basically matches your model, is used in ARMv6 and, as far as I can find, PPC (I did find some confusing Apple documentation about PCI buses on PPC macs, which I think suggests that PCI itself is word-invariant, and extra work is done inside the PCI bridge to make it appear byte-invariant little-endian to the big-endian CPU)
Of course, other things like disks and network protocols tend to be byte-invariant anyway, with whatever needs to be done to make this happen layered somewhere between the medium and the CPU. But you did bring up “two processors on the same bus”, and switching the mode of an ARM or PPC processor is probably the closest real-world equivalent.
Jay Maynard wrote: (I have no problem being considered a conservative, though my own opinions do not always align with the right, especially not the far right or alt-right whatever other epithet you choose to apply.)
Pfft. Over the years, what I’ve seen of Jay’s views parts ways with conservatives on pretty much every point where the libertarians do, with the one exception of collective defense – for which I think there exists a defensible libertarian argument.
Making Jay a CINO, but more importantly, a LIMO (Libertarian In Meaning Only). Which, I guess, makes him ultimately a LIMONCINO. To the cheesecake with you!
>The Ancestors couldn’t have been that amazingly awesome if they gave rise to their inferior descendants.
I will wager that you are childless.
> Of course if you choose to dismiss all data contrary to your hypothesis nothing is going to disconfirm it. That’s not my problem.
The fact that you apparently don’t actually care nearly as much about your non-“rightish” positions, to spill nearly as much metaphorical ink for them, as for the “rightish” ones, is not a dismissal, it is an observable fact that the quantity of data for one side is much less than the quantity of data for the other side.
At best, it shows that find it more important (or more achievable) to argue with progressives than conservatives about the particular issues you disagree with them on. I think it’s at least forgivable to assume this means you care more about the issues themselves, even if it’s incorrect.
This can all be boiled down to a paraphrasing of your very own position in this article: Your identity (as a non-rightist) is not your choice.
@Random832:
Yes, I know that a lot of people have done a lot of work to get around these problems in different contexts, and 32 or 64 bit registers are a big driving force in this (e.g. exactly what we are facing). And, yes, ARM has a lot of the market. And most of ARM’s problems were caused by their own response to their own problems in initially choosing the wrong endianness. (A problem which, for legacy reasons, my company shares.)
But they don’t get to rename the ordinary meaning of “big endian” and AFAIK, didn’t actually try, except to the extent they abbreviated the normal big-endian as BE-8.
Yeah, in my case, that was done as a hypothetical. In the real world cases you describe, that is done for a peripheral bus, e.g. for registers. It’s not something you would want to do for in-memory strings, for example.
If a general purpose memory is byte-addressable, and you have two devices that can access that memory, you’re just asking for long-term trouble if a C program that is bumping through memory parsing a byte string on one of them needs to be coded differently than a C program bumping through memory on the other one.
If there is no shared byte-addressable memory, then you don’t have this problem.
When some things are byte addressable and others aren’t — that’s where people go off in the weeds looking for compromises that will kill them later. This really hurts when registers are 16 or 32 bits, but can also be addressed a byte at a time. If you use BE-32, and access a subset of the register, the two different hypothetical processors need to use DIFFERENT addresses for the same data.
Fortunately, we are in a position where we don’t need to support mixed endianness, so I am pushing hard for doing the opposite of ARM — we need to lance the boil now. If we need special workarounds (e.g. instructions or whatever) for performance reasons, that’s one thing, but those will, by definition, be marked as doing something special.
@Jay Maynard
But they’re not. Why aren’t they? Is it really so indefensible to believe that the answer may be “because all/most other cops are, at least, guilty of protecting the ‘really’ bad ones”?
Eric wrote: No, [Wiccan identity is] nowhere near that neat, Or well-defined. And it’s way off topic for this thread.
Shoot. …you sure? The OT is about how identity works, after all. (I’d long considered trying to map Wiccan subgroups to be largely useless – so few of them relative to everyone else, and intent enough on being individualistic that they’d all shift by the time I got anywhere with it. A primer would be interesting, including some of the basic terms, but I won’t push hard for one.)
Conservatives as as a group are emotionally prone to cop-worship (even the ones who intellectually think of themselves as having libertarian tendencies). That reflects a lizard-brain love of hierarchy and order that I don’t share.
The ones I see tend to see cops as citizens who’ve chosen to specialize in civic defense. Think “thin blue line”. Also, think “sheepdog”. Supplementing this is the small-town effect – conservatives like the cops they know personally. If they don’t know the cop, trust drops, but conservatives will often assume someone knows and trusts that cop, so they’ll interpret that cop in that light. They’ll side with the cop in a threat situation, but be more aloof in a peace situation. They’re less trustful of cops who look like they’re far from the blue line (clerks, detectives, chiefs of forces large enough that the chief himself doesn’t have to go on patrol, etc.). Again, they’re like specialized citizens.
> A primer would be interesting, including some of the basic terms, but I won’t push hard for one.)
OK, I’ll bend that far. But please everybody don’t turn this into a huge distracting subthread.
Wiccans don’t divvy up into tribes. They divvy up by traditions – lineages, basically, tracing practices and ideas to a founder. The largest lineage calls itself “Gardnerian” after Gerald Gardner, who launched the Wiccan revival in the 1930s. I myself was initiated into the Alexandrian lineage, but that was pro forma because I had in effect founded my own lineage a few years earlier after having primary mystical experiences. (This is unusual, but expected to happen occasionally.)
There are a few supra-lineage terms that are generally recognized as classifiers. One is “religious” vs.”magical”. Religious Wiccans have belief systems resembling conventional theism; for magical ones like me it’s all depth psychology and neuroprogramming – it is not uncommon for us to be materialist atheists in conventional terms. The reason the religious and magical Wiccans don’t fight like cats in a sack is because Wicca is orthopractic rather than orthodox – what you do and experience matters, not what you believe. We all work the Craft together.
Also, Wiccans to some extent identify with whatever recovered mythology they use as the symbology in their rituals. Thus there are Celtic Wiccans, Italo-Hellenic Wiccans, and would be Norse Wiccans except that niche is taken up by people who call themselves Asatru rather than witches. Asatru ritual form only differ from Wiccan ones in minor ways, though. Same goes for Druids (but care is called for here as there are self-identified Druids of completely different kinds.)
Then there’s “Dianic”. Leaning to or exclusively Goddess worshiping. This term doesn’t really have an opposite as there aren’t any exclusive worshipers of the Horned God as far as I know. However, the Dianics are probably a minority – all the Wiccan trads I’ve run into have both priess and priestesses and worship both central dieties.
Finally, “fluffy bunny”. This one, though common, is pejorative and the people it describes usually don’t know it. Think “flake case”,”woo-woo”, and “absurdly large pentagrams”. Sometimes they grow out of it.
The fact that you apparently don’t actually care nearly as much about your non-“rightish” positions, to spill nearly as much metaphorical ink for them, as for the “rightish” ones, is not a dismissal, it is an observable fact that the quantity of data for one side is much less than the quantity of data for the other side.
This is actually pretty explainable as Eric hanging around the blue tribe more than around red. It explains why I tend to argue with the left more than the right. Case in point: I was talking to my arch-conservative mother last weekend, and the conversation turned to politics. I had an immediate urge to raise all sorts of counterpoints to her views. (I elected not to; it was Mother’s Day, after all.)
I’ve hung around my old neighborhood in Texas long enough to know that if I started expressing my political views, I’d start to sound like a “city boy”.
It also explains why the left would see Eric as being on the right. They don’t see him when he’s interacting with the right, because the left and right rarely hang around together (much to both’s detriment, IMCO).
This can all be boiled down to a paraphrasing of your very own position in this article: Your identity (as a non-rightist) is not your choice.
An astute point. Suppose what I hypothesized above were true, and the left were made aware of their blind spot. What would they conclude then about Eric’s identity?
>This is actually pretty explainable as Eric hanging around the blue tribe more than around red.
That’s exactly it. My audience, and people in general, don’t need to hear “Yay for you for having correct beliefs!” Much more important to challenge the incorrect ones. Especially if you think you’re one of the relative few with the standing to be taken seriously though even though saying unpopular things.
I perceive a common ground in this thread. There is real sympathy for the tragic circumstances that led to Leelah’s death, and the archetype of gender dysmorphia does not diminish that sad outcome. None of us get to pick our parents, our genetics, or the inherent mental functioning that derives from our earliest formative years. We all have to play the hand that we’ve been dealt, whether that’s aces or a shit sandwich.
I think we are all better off when we expend our energy trying to improve ourselves rather than attempt to “fix” those around us.
Yet another Scott Alexander post is relevant to the issue of how various seemingly unrelated views tend to cluster as “left” or “right” wing: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/10/16/five-case-studies-on-politicization/
@Greg
You would win that bet, but it doesn’t get you what you think. I got the observation from my dad who, unless something really weird happened, has had a child.
@esr
tl;dr: Why do you think it is important/relevant that SRS does not have an impact on suicide rates?
>tl;dr: Why do you think it is important/relevant that SRS does not have an impact on suicide rates?
Because that fact casts serious doubt on (a) the effectiveness of SRS as a means of improving outcomes, an (b) by implication, on the diagnostic doctrine and theory behind SRS.
>You would win that bet, but it doesn’t get you what you think. I got the observation from my dad who, unless something really weird happened, has had a child.
I like that. :) Interesting. Because there is nothing like having children to give you a deep down, visceral understanding of *entropy*.
And the awareness that each new generation is a wonderful thing and a blessing (that’s coming from a very skeptical agnostic), but also a barbarian invasion. And those little barbarians aren’t going to civilize themselves.
Having the idea that wise enlightened men can breed, some generations down, debased decadent morons is quite reasonable to anyone aware of the perils, difficulties and risks of parenting. (Or who has an extended family. Heh.)
It’s the ‘lost Golden Age’ crowd with their automatic ‘older means better’ mental programming who are delusional, who I mock at any opportunity. (Microcosm of the interplay between conservative-leaning and libertarian-leaning folks is Garand threads on gun forums.)
@Paul Brinkley
> An astute point. Suppose what I hypothesized above were true, and the left were made aware of their blind spot. What would they conclude then about Eric’s identity?
How do you differentiate an attempt to “make someone aware of their blind spot” from “Gaslighting. Brainwashing. […] psychological abuse. […] insisting that you say you see three lights when there are four.”?
Maybe the reaction wouldn’t be that extreme, since most people of any political position are not like Russ Cage, but I think we just found a non-kafkatrapping place for epithets like “concern troll” to come from.
>Pfft. Over the years, what I’ve seen of Jay’s views parts ways with conservatives on pretty much every point where the libertarians do, with the one exception of collective defense – for which I think there exists a defensible libertarian argument.
Are you conflating ‘ancap’ and ‘libertarian’?
@TheDividualist – I’m trying to wrap my head around what you’re saying. I’m not sure I completely understand, and I’m one of the people affected by what you’re saying.
The best I can tell you is that I seem to fit in better in society as a woman than I ever did trying to be a “man.” I’ll give just one example. I was never comfortable being the initiator in relationships. The two women I have been involved with in my life–my ex-wife and now my present partner–both approached me, a decided reversal of the ordinary pattern. If they hadn’t, it’s doubtful I would have ever had a relationship.
As for any connection to D/S patterns…I have never personally been very sexually adventurous, so you’re out of luck there. I’m not unfamiliar with that scene, working as closely as I do with the gay community, but it’s never held any appeal for me. (I even get along with “pups,” gay men who pretend to be dogs. It’s bizarre by any rational standards, yes, but seems fairly harmless, and may even be doing people some good…)
@ESR – ” Regardless of any judgment about whether Leelah was delusional or not, what her parents did was cruel and horrible and wrong.”
We can agree on something. There is hope. (I’ll mention briefly that I’ve exchanged correspondence with another “right wing” blogger who originally started out believing much as you do, but his experience with me and another trans woman has “forced [him] to admit that the phenomenon might not be hallucinatory in its entirety.” I quote from the afterword of one of the stories he’s written recently that feature trans women characters.)
> Because that fact casts serious doubt on (a) the effectiveness of SRS as a means of improving outcomes, an (b) by implication, on the diagnostic doctrine and theory behind SRS.
I don’t understand why, particularly under the hypothesis that it’s not gender dysphoria per se that is causing the suicides (which hypothesis you seemed to accept in your comment dated 5-15 14:40:28), why you think this is the case – why you think that it means no positive outcome has been produced for those who report being happier but statistically would not have committed suicide anyway.
>I don’t understand why
It’s not really complicated. If somebody came up with an elaborate theory and a set of claims about helping LGBTs by, say, sacrificing a chicken while invoking Baal, and a lot of these sacrifices got performed, and suicide rates didn’t budge, what would you conclude about the theory?
@TheDividualist:
That’s easy to explain. There are three main moments in feminist thought, they’re called “waves”.
The first wave was original feminism, the one about equality of opportunity etc. This is what nowadays everyone takes, most conservatives included, as the way things should be: women with the right to vote, to work and follow a career without needing first authorization from their husbands, to be able to walk down the street without an accompanying man etc. This is so entrenched that when conservative women say they don’t need feminism they rarely mean they want to go back to how women were treated in the 19th century. What they do mean is that the first wave conquests are enough.
The second wave began when, so to speak, feminism met Marxism hard. The first wave had been so successful that there was almost no further need of (original) feminist activity, so a new generation of feminists arose full of novel ideas such as genders absolutely not existing at all and being nothing but social constructs, the “Patriarchy” as an enemy modeled after the bourgeoise vs. proletarian class struggle theory, and other similar nonsense.
Years later, a new variation called the third wave began. This one kept some elements of the second wave, threw some others away, and merged the result with Postmodernism, also hard. Postmodernism is characterized by a disbelief in any big overarching narrative so they aren’t exactly marxists given how Marxism as such also counts as a big narrative, but they do carry some elements from it. Third wave feminists question absolutes such as the one that genders are fixed (as conservatives tend to think) and the one that genders absolutely don’t exist being pure social constructs (as second wave feminists think), so they accept the existence of genders themselves, while also thinking those genders are kind of fluid, hence that it’s perfectly fine for a man or a woman to have one gender, the other, a 3rd gender, to be in between genders etc.
Second and third wave are both active currently, and they fight each other all the time.
Second wavers think third wavers are betrayers of “true” feminism by “accepting” the Patriarchal discourse that genders exist. The most radical second wavers, called TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) by their critics, are strongly anti-transsexuality, believing it’s all about men “infiltrating” feminism so as to weaken it from inside, as a kind of 5th column, and so they ally with radical anti-transsexuality conservatives in, for example, “denouncing” and “exposing” male-to-female transsexuals wherever they find them so that everyone will know who they “really” are. Interestingly though, they see themselves as defenders of female-to-male transsexuals, not while transsexuals, but because for them FtM have vaginas, and hence are worthy of being defended.
Third wavers think second wavers, particularly TERFs, are orthodox fanatics Hell bent on imposing a “narrative” that is no better than the conservative/religious one. They tend to defend transsexuals from both second wavers as well as from conservatives, denouncing second wavers as bigots and defending legislation recognizing equal rights for all genders. They also tend to ask for positive rights in addition to negative ones, so that’s a big no-no from a libertarian perspective.
Most if not all SJWs are third wavers in addition to any other movement they defend. Third wavers themselves aren’t necessarily SJWs though, as one can be a third waver and a libertarian. As for second wavers, they don’t tend to fit the SJW label much. Second wavers are more in line with older forms of revolutionary rethorics.
That’s more or less the gist of it. I evidently simplified the whole thing a lot, and I have clearly taken sides on some of these points, so I wouldn’t be surprised if members of any of the 3 waves were able to criticize me for innacuracies.
How do you differentiate an attempt to “make someone aware of their blind spot” from “Gaslighting. Brainwashing. […] psychological abuse. […] insisting that you say you see three lights when there are four.”?
I dunno – how much hanging around with the blue tribe does Eric need to do before being understood as being blue enough? How much programming does he have to do? How Wiccan does he need to be? How much does he have to talk about science fiction, folk music, language evolution, higher mathematics, Achaemenid Persian history, Hume, Moliere, Russell, Ricardo, Buddha, and dozens of other intellectuals before he stops fitting the blue triber’s model of a red?
Regarding the red/blue dichotomy, I have found it to be broadly true of libertarians – even left-libertarians – that bluish folks tend to read them as red and reddish folks tend to read them as blue. I certainly find that comes up for me rather frequently.
me: Pfft. Over the years, what I’ve seen of Jay’s views parts ways with conservatives on pretty much every point where the libertarians do, with the one exception of collective defense – for which I think there exists a defensible libertarian argument.
Greg: Are you conflating ‘ancap’ and ‘libertarian’?
I don’t think so – mainline Libertarian rhetoric tends to say “pull up the drawbridge! no foreign entanglements!” In other words, stop projecting so much force abroad. Jay favors force abroad, last I checked. I think there’s a libertarian argument for it, too. And there are libertarians who will argue it, and it’s really hard to see any daylight between them and Jay.
>it’s really hard to see any daylight between [strong-defense libertarians] and Jay.
The difference is in underlying moral sentiments – which conclusions are emotionally easy and which are difficult.
For a conservative, tribal feeling focused on the nation state – and the result that sometime you need to just bomb the shit outa them furriners – is emotionally natural. A conservative who thinks will discover principled reasons to limit that sort of behavior to a prudent minimum.
A libertarian, on the other hand, starts from the moral sentiment that aggression is so thoroughly bad that the existence of good reasons to send your military overseas is barely even thinkable. Not being a tribalist by nature he finds appeals to national greatness unconvincing. But enough immersion in history and realpolitik may convince him that (a) when you have no defensive weapon except the State, the State is what you must use, and (b) defensive wars are better fought on the other guy’s real estate than your own.
The libertarian may arrive at a grand strategy difficult to distinguish from the conservative’s but if so it’s because that’s what the realpolitik demands. The libertarian will be far more reluctant to actually implement it.
> It’s not really complicated. If somebody came up with an elaborate theory and a set of claims about helping LGBTs by, say, sacrificing a chicken while invoking Baal, and a lot of these sacrifices got performed, and suicide rates didn’t budge, what would you conclude about the theory?
I would conclude that it doesn’t affect suicide rates. If I had already conceded that the suicide rates likely weren’t caused directly by their LGBT status (as your comment 5-15 14:40:28), and the claims don’t in fact start and end at “will reduce suicide rates” (they do not), that would not particularly predispose me to dismiss the overall claims.
>A libertarian, on the other hand, starts from the moral sentiment that aggression is so thoroughly bad that the existence of good reasons to send your military overseas is barely even thinkable. Not being a tribalist by nature he finds appeals to national greatness unconvincing. But enough immersion in history and realpolitik may convince him that (a) when you have no defensive weapon except the State, the State is what you must use, and (b) defensive wars are better fought on the other guy’s real estate than your own.
It’s a pity this isn’t obvious to more libertarians.
I find it ironic near to the point of physical pain that libertarians seem to inherently understand the value of being armed to safeguard one’s interests on a personal level, but not on a national level where they transform into soft headed utopian idealists.
>but not on a national level where they transform into soft headed utopian idealists.
Part of the reason is purely historical. The story I’ve heard is that Libertarian Party was founded by a series of compromises; one of the results was that left-wingers among the party’s founders got to write the foreign-policy plank of the platform. If true, organized libertarianism has never quite recovered from that mistake.
>I would conclude that it doesn’t affect suicide rates. If I had already conceded that the suicide rates likely weren’t caused directly by their LGBT status (as your comment 5-15 14:40:28), and the claims don’t in fact start and end at “will reduce suicide rates” (they do not), that would not particularly predispose me to dismiss the overall claims.
You’ve now made any claims about the benefits of SRS unfalsifiable, I.e. fantasy.
>[Random832 has] now made any claims about the benefits of SRS unfalsifiable, I.e. fantasy.
Quite. “My mind is made up; don’t confuse me with pesky consequential arguments.”
>Part of the reason is purely historical. The story I’ve heard is that Libertarian Party was founded by a series of compromises; one of the results was that left-wingers among the party’s founders got to write the foreign-policy plank of the platform. If true, organized libertarianism has never quite recovered from that mistake.
I wouldn’t think libertarianism would be that top-down.
I’ve encountered enough individuals with that tendency that there has to be some other source of that particular mental defect.
Absolutely true, but unfortunately may not be perceived by the other side as winning any points, because people forget all the emotional arguments they made to suck you in to the discussion. You haven’t circled back to explain that what got your attention was essentially “This problem is so bad that people are committing suicide over it! We need to fix it now!”
It may be that there are legitimate reasons to move the goal posts and reexamine the utility of SRS, but it certainly seems unlikely, because — why weren’t those the first reasons broached?
>You haven’t circled back to explain that what got your attention was essentially “This problem is so bad that people are committing suicide over it! We need to fix it now!”
Good point. So, yes. That’s the appeal that’s being made: “Fix your society before another Leelah Alcorn commits suicide!” Since SRS doesn’t affect rates of attempted suicide, it’s not actually helping and the whole theory of transgenderism behind it needs a good shave with Occam’s Razor.
Taking The world of null-A too seriously?
Anyway, this is a conflation of two orthogonal things. A libertarian doesn’t feel like he has to do business with anybody he doesn’t want to, so if you scale that up, it means fewer foreign entanglements.
If we’re less entangled, then it seems to stand to reason you don’t need quite as big a military. Unfortunately, to project power and make sure any battles fought are abroad, you need serious military capability, and that capability always comes with a big temptation to use it.
The “reduce foreign entanglements by necessity, by reducing the military first” is the libertarian equivalent of the Republican “reduce the size of government by reducing the revenue intake so that it cannot even handle its current obligations” starve-the-beast tactic.
ISTM that if you starve the beast, what you have (at least for awhile) is a starving beast. Best to do some liposuction or something else first.
>A libertarian doesn’t feel like he has to do business with anybody he doesn’t want to, so if you scale that up, it means fewer foreign entanglements.
There is an answer to that: Trotsky’s observation – “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. Takes two to make deal, but only one to commit aggression.
>Anyway, this is a conflation of two orthogonal things. A libertarian doesn’t feel like he has to do business with anybody he doesn’t want to, so if you scale that up, it means fewer foreign entanglements.
There’s something fishy about the persistent overuse of ‘foreign entanglements’.
A libertarian carries a gun because robbers exist. But maintaining a navy because pirates exist is somehow verboten because ‘foreign entanglements’?
No, that’s a phrase that’s being used to shut down thought.
>There is an answer to that: Trotsky’s observation – “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. Takes two to make deal, but only one to commit aggression.
I didn’t post this because it’s so bleeding *obvious*.
And again, it is something libertarians understand on a personal level. They carry guns, instead of simply feeling like they have no need of doing business with a mugger.
The idiom ‘it takes two to tango’ is only a few decades old. Its usage as a folk nostrum meaning ‘it takes two to make a quarrel’….. That reeks of Gramscian damage. (It only takes one to inflict a beating or a murder.)
Similarly, the libertarian insistence on ‘it takes two to tango’ as a basis for foreign policy also reeks of Gramscian damage.
> Since SRS doesn’t affect rates of attempted suicide
Of course, the “no true scotsman” coming up here (which has already been tangentially broached by a couple of commenters here, yet arguably plausibly refuted by Amy’s observation that puberty can be delayed if necessary) is that the surgeries are coming too late to do any good, so naturally we need to be more invasive sooner.
“left-wingers among the party’s founders got to write the foreign-policy plank of the platform. If true, organized libertarianism has never quite recovered from that mistake.”
It is directly responsible, along with Ron and Rand Paul’s defense of that plank, for permanently turning me off of the Libertarian Party.
“That’s the appeal that’s being made: “Fix your society before another Leelah Alcorn commits suicide!” Since SRS doesn’t affect rates of attempted suicide, it’s not actually helping and the whole theory of transgenderism behind it needs a good shave with Occam’s Razor.”
I had a discussion with a friend who’s a MtF transsexual, with SRS scheduled for this fall. She thinks, not to put too fine a point on it, that you’re full of prunes. In her experience, the gender dysphoria isn’t the cause of the suicides, but all of the hate speech and laws and bigotry that lead to depression. She says that research shows that SRS helps with the gender dysphoria, and since that’s not the cause of suicide, saying that it should be discontinued because it doesn’t help suicide rates is concentrating on the wrong thing.
I know you better than to think you’re capable of hate speech. Nevertheless, that’s what she called this post, which is why she did not write this answer herself.
>I know you better than to think you’re capable of hate speech. Nevertheless, that’s what she called this post, which is why she did not write this answer herself.
Part of today’s degradation of political language is the equation of “any speech that suggests unwelcome conclusions” with “hate speech”. I can’t say you’re reporting anything that inclines me to care about the person’s opinion.
Weaponized empathy is a thing.
This is global warming. Same exact pattern.
@Jay:
Maybe I’m still misunderstanding, but at a gross level it looks like you’re saying:
gender dysphoria -> hate speech -> depression -> suicide
If not, please elucidate. If so, then why wouldn’t a successful SRS either (a) render the subject better able to pass off as the new gender, thus reducing the hate speech; or (b) feel better about themselves, thus reducing the negative effects of the hate speech; or (c), both of the above?
>If so, then why wouldn’t a successful SRS either (a) render the subject better able to pass off as the new gender, thus reducing the hate speech; or (b) feel better about themselves, thus reducing the negative effects of the hate speech; or (c), both of the above?
You’re being rational. This is clearly unwelcome, and probably qualifies you as a hate-speaker too.
FWIW, I don’t give a flying flip about how people view themselves, or what sorts of extreme body piercings they want. But when I’m told in no uncertain terms that I have to care because severe injustices are done, I want to understand about those injustices.
By a rational interpretation of any of the accounts I’ve seen, Leelah’s parents did her a terrible disservice. I’ve met people like that, and it’s a shame, but there’s nothing legal you can do to fix them.
The flip side is the people who are ready to mutilate their kids at a very early age. As JAD pointed out, and googling confirmed, those people do exist, and there are doctors standing by to take their money. I would think those doctors, and perhaps even parents, could be legally “fixed”, but the academy seems to lean far too far in that direction for that to happen.
To the extent we don’t know when, if ever, SRS is a good thing, Amy’s explanation about how puberty can be delayed certainly seems like it could be a reasonable thing to do for kids (assuming expected side effects aren’t too bad) — if Leelah’s parents had done that, perhaps she’d still be here, and if extreme SJWs were forced to do that instead of more immediate SRS, then some bad and irreversible decisions might be avoided.
Greg, “The idiom ‘it takes two to tango’ is only a few decades old. Its usage as a folk nostrum meaning ‘it takes two to make a quarrel’”
I’ve literally never seen “it takes two to tango” to refer to anything other than a claim that rape was actually consensual. On the other hand, I think what I’ve seen has been complaints about people saying “it takes two to tango”.
Has anyone actually seen the phrase being used sincerely?
****
Anyone have a source for the claim that SRS doesn’t affect suicide rates?
>Anyone have a source for the claim that SRS doesn’t affect suicide rates?
There’s a link to it in the comments of Questioning Transsexuality. I’d dig it up, but I need to sleep.
@Greg>You’ve now made any claims about the benefits of SRS unfalsifiable, I.e. fantasy.
“Subjective psychological quality of life is unfalsifiable” is at least a more principled argument than just ignoring it and continuing harping on suicide rates for no apparent reason.
@Patrick Maupin > yet arguably plausibly refuted by Amy’s observation that puberty can be delayed if necessary
Something that the anti-SRS faction has been seen to argue just as strenuously against doing.
—-
@Nancy Lebovitz > I’ve literally never seen “it takes two to tango” to refer to anything other than a claim that rape was actually consensual. On the other hand, I think what I’ve seen has been complaints about people saying “it takes two to tango”.
> Has anyone actually seen the phrase being used sincerely?
I’ve never seen it used to refer to anything other than schoolyard bullying being something the victim deserves to be punished for (maybe only if they dare to fight back, maybe just for being seen at all since they must have been part the problem if it came to the attention of the authorities), the existence of any connection to rape is news to me.
@Jay Maynard > She says that research shows that SRS helps with the gender dysphoria, and since that’s not the cause of suicide, saying that it should be discontinued because it doesn’t help suicide rates is concentrating on the wrong thing.
Greg in his infinite wisdom has clearly stated that “helps with gender dysphoria” is unfalsifiable. There’s clearly no way to measure anything other than by body count.
I seem to be unable to comment long responses. Here is the short version.
>Anyone have a source for the claim that SRS doesn’t affect suicide rates?
The best data up to today seem to be:
https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/bitstream/2134/18985/3/Marshall%20et%20al%20NSSI%20Review%202015docx.pdf
Another try for a longer response:
@Nancy Lebovitz
“Anyone have a source for the claim that SRS doesn’t affect suicide rates?”
Then there is this (not so) curious result:
Individual- and Structural-Level Risk Factors for Suicide Attempts among Transgender Adults
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4707041/
There is also this Survey that found no effect of SRS on suicide attempts:
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AFSP-Williams-Suicide-Report-Final.pdf
Yet another attempt to a complete comment, maybe I found the offending word(s):
@Nancy Lebovitz
“Anyone have a source for the claim that SRS doesn’t affect suicide rates?”
I found no evidence that the suicide rates are lower after SRS. It is not clear whether they rise after SRS. It depends on the subset of transgenders that is used as a control. Those that contemplate SRS seem to have the same suicide risk as those that have actually done SRS (see last link below). But transgenders that do not contemplate SRS seem to have a lower suicide risk. The suicide risk is also only higher in trans males, much less so in trans females. I have no idea why this would be so.
The best data up to today seem to be:
https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/bitstream/2134/18985/3/Marshall%20et%20al%20NSSI%20Review%202015docx.pdf
Then there is this (not so) curious result:
Individual- and Structural-Level Risk Factors for Suicide Attempts among Transgender Adults
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4707041/
There is also this Survey that found no effect of SRS on suicide attempts:
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AFSP-Williams-Suicide-Report-Final.pdf
Sorry for the duplicate (partial) posts.
(some in moderation)
@ESR
>A libertarian, on the other hand, starts from the moral sentiment that aggression is so thoroughly bad that the existence of good reasons to send your military overseas is barely even thinkable. Not being a tribalist by nature he finds appeals to national greatness unconvincing
That may neatly explain why there are nearly no libertarians in weaker (i.e. basically most other with a few exceptions) countries. Replace “sending military overseas” with “having a history of invaded by neighbors, or from overseas”, and “national greatness” with “national survival and keeping our identity and culture alive” and it becomes a whole lot harder to be libertarian and a whole lot easier to be conservative. And this is the type of situation that creates the conservative who leans on many economic issues kind of leftward: the populist.
A good example you are familiar with is Italy. Well aware of their absolute failure at any bid to win greatness the military way, being something sort of a joke on the battlefield, and feeling a constant threat of the traditional trattoria-world outcompeted by McDonalds and so on, it is simply not a situation where libertarianism comes easily. They have basically three obvious choices. One is to basically suck it up, accept the loserdom and adapt to the global “overlords”. This can easily look a lot like libertarianism in some matters – free trade, few business regulations, a cooperative, transactional mindset – but this is a also the type of guy who never thinks of owning a gun, his mindset is deep not that of the free man, but that of the subject, except that he does not feel like a subject of his own government but that of stronger global forces, corporations, or even the US gov. This type is commonly found in international projects, and they are well liked because they are friendly, but not really respected as the lack of balls is visible. He cucks out far too often to the left on things like immigration as he finds it hard to disagree with the New York Times.
The second, opposite example is of course the bitter nationalist, but he deserves some slack cut, it is not the nationalism of the imperialist winner bully, it is the nationalism of the loser who wants to survive mostly intact. Very often, their nationalism is regional, like Lega Nord.
The third type is the Marxist. That is an weird type. Think Umberto Eco. Outwardly, he talks that kind of talk and often supports that kind of policy. But weirdly, he actually shares a little bit with the nostalgy and the traditionalism of the nationalist. He sort of thinks if communism would defeat McDonalds the trattoria would somehow come back. So you sometimes catch him doing things that are a bit out of character for a Marxist, like, protesting against the city planning to demolish a church to build a mall.
I often thing libertarianism is something sort of a luxury but I may be mistaken. But it strikes me so that if your community is strong and basically non-threatable, you can afford to focus on individualism. But if your community is weak and threatened, you close the ranks. Hence conservative nationalism. Of course it is entirely possible that too closed ranks prevent becoming rich and strong in the first place. The issue is, it is hard to control for institutions vs. genetics. North and South Korea demonstrates the institutions part. The difference between the Baltics and Russia seems more genetics, a Baltic-type more libertarian policy in Russia would probably just lead to more maffia-type behavior.
Eric:
You’re not refuting my point, you’re admitting it: your hanging with Wiccas is predictively useless to the 98% of us who can’t tell the difference. I know you associate with some kind of pagans. I’m aware of the Bayesian correlation between professing paganism and loathing my tribe: I see skinheads wearing Mjölnir pendants and triple horns; I rarely see anyone else wearing that; I never see skinheads with turbans or ichthys pins; the iron pill guy has an Odal button and a triskele on his hoodie. I worry there might be hostility if I don’t keep my distance.
Ignorant? Don’t care; I’m a short middle-aged fatso with four dependents.
They’re not my categories. The left-right spectrum is the scale used by an overwhelming majority of humans currently alive. Which is no accident. It has been stubbornly useful throughout the ages, predicting coalitions, street fights, sartorial tastes, tactical voting decisions, aspirational spending patterns, and plenty else since literally the French Revolution. It is the only scale that has been linked to biology. You can make favorable bets about left-right orientation based on brain morphometry and based on genomes; left-right orientation is heritable to roughly the same degree as intelligence.
No other proposed scale or map or compass has this amount of experimental support, and none comes even remotely close in terms of popular currency.
Your post argues that someone’s identity is the conclusions they lead others to draw, and the conclusions they lead others to draw are their identity. Perfect logical equivalence, you say. By your logic, if the sum total of the signals someone sends make virtually everybody read them as right of center, then they are right of center. You have vehemently avowed that their personal feelzies on how people should read them are utterly immaterial.
I don’t understand why you get pissed off by a trivial consequent of your own premises.
You’re arguing against your own point again. Twice.
(1) People who think they have libertarian tendencies are people who think they’re anti-authoritarian, pretty much by definition. If even people who think they have libertarian tendencies can be cop-worshippers, then a self-diagnosed anti-authoritarian temperament can’t really mean very much. If you don’t want to take it from me, take it from Jay Maynard or from your own lying eyes: every BLMer on earth is absolutely certain they are bravely punching up.
(2) A random test subject who is told that you are “on the right” will correctly predict which side you take on every police shooting controversy you have ever written about. A random test subject who is merely told about your self-image as someone who hates “cop-worship” will somehow mysteriously fail.
—
Jay:
I’ve been meaning to reply to you but it appears I can only put one comment in the mod queue at a time. If I post a second comment it just disappears. So only one reply a day from me. No offense intended, I will get there.
Do you want me to dig up the post? Because you are flat wrong.
And yes, ESR and Jay had a significant disagreement on the matter.
EDIT: here it is http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6557
And of course this is hardly the *only* time.
>The left-right spectrum is the scale used by an overwhelming majority of humans currently alive.
The overwhelming majority of humans currently alive are idiots, who have been force-fed their political ideas by mass media.
I see no reason that I should afford any respect to their delusions.
> It is the only scale that has been linked to biology.
Oh, please. I’ve seen some of this research. It’s about as “scientific” as phrenology was.
>The left-right spectrum is the scale used by an overwhelming majority of humans currently alive.
Could you give us citations? Because I would love to know more about how people in Asia and Africa see this spectrum.
@Doctor Locketopus
“Oh, please. I’ve seen some of this research. It’s about as “scientific” as phrenology was.”
But it is logical. All people use a “Good” vs “Bad” scale, as well as a “Us” and “Them” scale. Left vs Right just merges these two.
@Winter
>Because I would love to know more about how people in Asia and Africa see this spectrum.
I have something cool for you: https://www.opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/chenchen-zhang/curious-rise-of-white-left-as-chinese-internet-insult
@everybody seriously interesting article, absolutely worths it
BTW if you want to know why random Chinese people are so interested in the migrant crisis in Europe, read this: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37720780 and then this: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5128/france-no-go-zones and you will learn two things there, first is that Chinese immigrants in Europe are disproportionately victimized by North African immigrants and they are pissed at the left (in the broad sense, including “conservative” Merkel) for allowing it, and the scary realization that the “independent” BBC swooped so down as to try to pain the North African attacks on Chinese people in Europe as if the perpetrators were white racists.
This is actually the scariest part – I remember when there used to be such a thing as a respectable media and thus a commonly accepted factual basis for left-right debates. Here you see one of the many evidences of even BBC having the ethics of a lying harlot. So we are rapidly approaching a world where the formerly laughable tin-foil hat conspiracy theories are looking actually true. There is no way to not see an obviously organized effort to distort and hide the truth behind that article. This is scary becasue it will surely radicalize people, there is no debate possible without agreed facts and essentially when we on the right cannot even trust the BBC (truth be told even intelligent leftists stopped that, too) I just don’t see how it can be kept civilized.
The biggest news of the last few years is how rapidly the mainstream press went beyond mere bias and became a full on liar propaganda organ hardly better than the Pravda. I don’t know how can that end well.
@TheDividualist
“Chinese immigrants in Europe are disproportionately victimized by North African immigrants”
I know only of such attacks from France. I am interested in links to such attacks from the rest of Europe. As the Muslim community in France is already pretty pissed off from the lawless behavior of the French police against Muslims under the state of emergency, violence is rive in France. It is unlikely that even more oppression by law enforcement would help.
(nor would torture help, as the French police already applies torture and it did not help)
@ Mountain Goat
I think you need to go deeper if you really want to understand what “identity” is.
For most of our evolutionary history (and indeed for most of the animal kingdom), identity was tied to the perceptive cues that allowed our ancestors to make a friend-versus-foe determination at a distance. This was a vital survival trait, and it typically was based upon visual, auditory, and scent based stimuli that fed directly into the hind-brain and triggered the fight-or-flight reaction.
It is only recently (in evolutionary time) that our species has adapted this instinct to modern use via our higher order cognitive functioning. Regardless of this change, accuracy and predictability are necessary features for this trait to continue to be beneficial for us.
Doctor Locketopus on 2017-05-17 at 08:27:24 said:
> Oh, please. I’ve seen some of this research. It’s about as “scientific” as phrenology was.
I’m a big fan of retro-phrenology.
Am I the only one that finds it amusing that ESR is fighting back against being identified as a Conservative based on the positions he publicly takes because HE doesn’t self-identify as one, given the original topic?
@Mountain Goat: [Emphasis in original]
There are two claims wrapped together here: that the uni-dimensional left-right spectrum adequately captures a meaningful map of political belief, and that popular currency validates this map. I find the latter claim to be ridiculous [Gedankenexperiment: apply the same argument to religious claims on the origin of the universe], but that’s better left for another post. Instead, let’s put just the former claim to the test.
If the left-right dichotomy captures the entire spectrum of political thought, then the following three examples should suffice to predict my (as-yet unstated) opinions on the topic of identity. [To be clear: these are my best attempt to muster a clear, direct expression of my personal thoughts. I am neither playing “devil’s advocate” by insincerity nor trying to obscure the basis for these conclusions. The examples were chosen as being most topical toward the specific question of identity.]
(1) Any organization which shares benefits to all members (be that a worker co-op, an all-access private gym, or a government without “second class citizens”) is morally superior to one which segregates members and provides differentiated benefits. However, a law which would mandate the former is equally unjust to one which would forbid the same; human organizations, as an expression of human activity, are subject to the same moral judgments as individuals. In enacting a law which privileges certain modes of organization, we would commit the same sin that we claim to be fighting against.
(2) There exist a set of laws regarding human behavior which are as iron as those which govern physics or chemistry. Whether a social organization or movement is viable (i.e. will be successful in their aims—be that happiness, prosperity, equality, etc.) is as beholden to these laws as the viability of a bridge. Neither ignorance of the underlying laws, nor a “false” (counterfactual) formulation thereof, will change this viability.
(3) If one desires to challenge a identity-forming belief, it is both insufficient and morally repellent to simply challenge the belief directly with facts. Doing so inspires an existential dread which will blockade the potential for learning. Instead, present the target with a situation in which their former belief initially appears adequate and slowly transform the situation into one which strains the framework to the breaking point. This way, when the first twinges of doubt appear, not only should they produce the minimum existential dread, but any further learning process is driven by the target’s willingness to change, not your personal feelings on the matter.
I await with eager anticipation your prediction.
>I’ve never seen it used to refer to anything other than schoolyard bullying being something the victim deserves to be punished for (maybe only if they dare to fight back, maybe just for being seen at all since they must have been part the problem if it came to the attention of the authorities), the existence of any connection to rape is news to me.
Yes, this is exactly right. I first saw this late 70’s/early 80’s in NYC public schools. Always on the cutting edge of liberalism, possibly more so then.
The simplified logic goes something like, we want to address the ‘problem of violence’, and we define it (exclusively!) as taking the form of ‘fighting’. We define ‘fighting’ (exclusively!) as ‘two people trying to hurt each other’.
So, if you teach people to take their beatings quietly without protest, there is no fighting, thus no violence, problem solved! Self-defense, under these conditions, actually CREATES violence, where there was none before. Which means self-defense is an evil to be punished.
It’s pretty much what you see as ‘zero tolerance’ policies wannabe blue bureaucrats have been putting in place in the hinterlands for the past decade or two. Things take time to trickle out there.
Coincidentally it is exactly the same logic as what was behind the ‘peace through unilateral disarmament’ movement, (it takes two to make a war, if you won’t fight there can’t be war) just writ small, that started popping up right about that same time.
So recent, so absurdly illogical, so at odds with everything previously known about interpersonal conflict to that point – it screams ‘artificial’. And we know what the unilateral disarmament anti-war types were….
That sort of ‘make the world safe for bullies at the expense of the innocent’ policy is one of many things that turned me off on liberalism early. Anything so perverse can only be motivated by delusion or malice. Who can tell the difference? Why would you bother? (Sufficiently advanced fantasy is indistinguishable from malice?)
Anyway, congrats on being one of the few able to recognize the problem for what it was. You lose a lot of points due to the fact that it apparently didn’t *bother* you, which implies a few things none of them good.
>Greg in his infinite wisdom has clearly stated that “helps with gender dysphoria” is unfalsifiable. There’s clearly no way to measure anything other than by body count.
The transgender types made claims that the suicides were how we knew there was a problem. They used those suicides to drape their side in absolute moral authority. (Rather like the anti-war protesters when W was president, who had kids die in Iraq and so had absolute moral authority. Which is evil all on its own, but a tangent right now.)
What can we do to stop the suicides? Aside from allow proxies acting on transgenders’ behalf the power to remake society? That seems a little much right now…. SRS? OK we’ll try that. No change in suicide rate? So how do we *know* there’s a problem again, you’re asking an awful lot? Trust you?
No.
Liberals miss no opportunity to bathe in the blood of the innocent as some emotional talisman to wield over the rest of us. We’re tired of it.
“It takes two to tango” is almost literally the basis for a lot of the “zero-tolerance” anti-violence nonsense in pre-adult public-educational institutions. For the ease of the administration, it doesn’t matter who threw the first punch, just that punches were thrown (or, in some extreme instances, that a punch landed – the common-law caveat that a duty to retreat exists only if the agressee may do so “in perfect safety” is ignored). The “de facto” laws and customs concerning self-defense in certain jurisdictions in this country tend to assume this as well, the common law on duty to retreat notwithstanding. (Hence all the brouhaha about “Stand Your Ground” laws, even in cases where they are not applicable – the Gramscian damage to the common law of self defense is so profound).
The Libertarian View of military force is encoded in the US Constitution’s limits on a standing army, incidentally; whereby it was assumed that the mass of personally-armed citizens and the states’ militias (what we might see as not the National and State Guards, but the police) would be sufficient to defend the country locally, and that a National Army would only be raised for a short period and be based on the state militias, which is why Congress may meddle in the affairs of the states concerning their militias. A standing Navy was reluctantly permitted, but it was also assumed that the Navy would be expanded by privateers; and while a standing Navy was permitted, that permission was not always acted on.
@William O. B’Livion:
Well, Mountain Goat himself noted the disconnect. Reality is complicated, and esr may have views that some on the far right would use to classify him as a leftie, but he certainly has views that many far left lefties would say put him squarely in the far right camp.
Start with this post itself — not the generic implication, but the specific example. Then move to global warming. Add in the second amendment. Oh, and he’s not right; he’s libertarian, but he recognizes the utility of a strong military.
The cherry on top, of course, is his nuanced view about groups vs. individuals — you’re not allowed to discuss averages at all, and any individual differences are, of course, due to privilege or lack thereof.
esr actually noted a long time ago that he might be accused of being a conservative. Things haven’t changed.
Patrick Maupin on 2017-05-17 at 15:00:24 said:
@William O. B’Livion:
[…]
You misunderstand the statement–I am mostly a Conservative of the Russel Kirk type (minus the God part) personally, but a Libertarian/AnCap politically, and I know that Our Host is not part of that tribe, because I understand it in ways most people don’t.
I just find it funny that he posts about “Your identity is not your choice”, and then has to defend *his* identity of choice. I don’t disagree with it, it’s just funny.
>I just find it funny that he posts about “Your identity is not your choice”, and then has to defend *his* identity of choice.
How is everybody missing the obvious here?
The problem with labeling me as a conservative is that I’ve never offered the identity of a conservative. I have never, ever said in my entire life, even by implication, that anyone can expect me to have conservative views or conservative reflexes.
@William O. B’Livion
“I am mostly a Conservative”
I am on the left, politically, of almost all here. At least according to what I understand about the definitions used. I am convinced that our host will be positioned on the “right” side of the spectrum in almost every country on earth, the US included.
That said, I doubt whether our host is conservative or reactionairy. The fact is that conservatives are almost always right wing, but the reverse is not true in my experience.
To be conservative in the Burke sense, you need to believe that society cannot be modified, or rebuild, but only grown. However, many on the right are convinced that politics can be used to remodel society to their ideas. Which I think is not “conservative” in a meaningful sense.
This also shows that left-right is not the only, or even most, meaningful distinction in politics.
Am I the only one that finds it amusing that ESR is fighting back against being identified as a Conservative based on the positions he publicly takes because HE doesn’t self-identify as one, given the original topic?
Not so much amusing as curious. And Random832 alluded to this point as well. My response, also above: “how much hanging around with the blue tribe does Eric need to do before being understood as being blue enough? How much programming does he have to do? How Wiccan does he need to be? How much does he have to talk about science fiction, folk music, language evolution, higher mathematics, Achaemenid Persian history, Hume, Moliere, Russell, Ricardo, Buddha, and dozens of other intellectuals before he stops fitting the blue triber’s model of a red?”
Carrying this further: Eric claims he doesn’t identify as a conservative. (Does a negative claim count?) Some of the public isn’t accepting the claim. Is Eric wrong?
I also mentioned another fellow I can’t find anymore that claimed to be black, despite him looking like a standard Caucasian. He made some interesting supporting points – from memory, adoption by black parents, married a black woman, immediate family definitely looks black, they’re pretty clearly his tribe. Some reject the claim. Is he wrong?
Eric claimed an objective test: “if you are a man or woman who claims racial identity X, and I do too, and we were to marry, can we expect our children to claim racial identity X and, without extraordinary attempts at deceit, be believed?” This might work for that fellow I can’t find, but Eric’s identity claim is political, not racial. What’s the test for that?
I provided evidence that Eric’s views don’t fit the model of a conservative, even by the standards of the individuals rejecting his claim. I think it’s fair for them to not have been aware of such evidence before. What if they reject it afterward?
This claiming of identity business could consequently go back and forth a few rounds. If the aforementioned people claim to identify as rational…
…but then we could look at the prior case, too (qua politics). Rachel claims to be centrist. Steve rejects. She rejects the claim that Steve is rational. Who’s right?
“fellow I can’t find anymore that claimed to be black, despite him looking like a standard Caucasian. ”
A neighbor in my youth was from a mixed Dutch Indonesian marriage, married to an Indonesian woman.. All his siblings and his children looked definitely Indonesian. He was as “caucasian” looking as the most white dutchman from the rural provinces. But everything but his looks were Indonesian.
There is a white skinned minority in otherwise “black” Surinam (South America), the Burus. They are like the other people from Surinam in everything but their skin color.
In both cases, white skinned caucasian people will claim a birth right into an ethnic, non-white group. A claim that is not contested by these groups.
Skin color is a useless label. And, indeed, you do not chose your identity, it choses you.
> I don’t disagree with it, it’s just funny.
I found it funny as well, but as I noted — his accuser also found it funny, as he was trying to pin him down.
I suppose my attempt at a serious counterpoint, not made very well, is that labeling is obviously a weapon; letting your opponents mislabel you can’t be much better than letting them mislabel themselves.
@Patrick Maupin:
> If so, then why wouldn’t a successful SRS either (a) render the subject better able to
>pass off as the new gender, thus reducing the hate speech; or (b) feel better about
>themselves, thus reducing the negative effects of the hate speech; or (c), both of the above?
Because it doesn’t change how your parents, siblings, cousins, friends, co-workers, etc. ad nauseum relate to you. It doesn’t matter how well you pass after SRS if all of the people in your life still consider you a sinful abomination and hector you relentlessly. Poor social skills leading to an inability to build new relationships certainly play a major part in staying in the destructive relationships.
It’s certainly a far more complex issue than “SRS doesn’t cut suicide rates so SRS isn’t any part of the solution”.
@Rob K:
> It’s certainly a far more complex issue than…
The no true scotsman took longer than I thought. OK, these people have sucky relationships, like fat, ugly, or poor people. But none of that makes them suicidal; they’re just suicidal for completely orthogonal reasons.
Patrick Maupin on 2017-05-17 at 16:52:11 said:
> I suppose my attempt at a serious counterpoint, not made very well, is that labeling is
> obviously a weapon; letting your opponents mislabel you can’t be much better than
> letting them mislabel themselves.
Maxim 16. Your name is in the mouth of others: be sure it has teeth.
@esr:
But you just said you *weren’t* a conservative, and unless we go a long way off in the weeds, “not a conservative” is, in fact, a component of an identity — an identity which, obviously, some people disagree with.
>But you just said you *weren’t* a conservative, and unless we go a long way off in the weeds, “not a conservative” is, in fact, a component of an identity — an identity which, obviously, some people disagree with.
I am going crosseyed trying to figure out how this makes any sense at all.
People who think gender is nonbinary can’t wrap their minds around political identity being nonbinary? The stupid, it burns.
> The stupid, it burns.
Well, yeah, but OTOH, let’s simplify this: You gotta remember that the meme is that conservative == asshole, so try this on for size:
“I am not an asshole.”
Not something you get to decide; it gets decided for you.
The other thing about Identity? You didn’t decide it, but you used to be able to abandon it with only modest effort. Not so any more. You can’t move away and start a new life across the continent or across the sea.
@Ian Argent –
> You can’t move away and start a new life across the continent or across the sea.
Depends. If you are willing to give up your entire online history as well, you might have a fighting chance.
I’m talking a new burner phone, new nicks, new credit card, not visiting any of your old websites, etc.
Two strangers encounter each other in a isolated neutral setting and each sizes up the other based initially upon perceptive cues and then perhaps also communication cues should they engage in some amount of dialogue. Each infers and assigns, in effect, an identity classification to the other party based upon their own personal experience, biases, and judgments.
These assessments may tend toward accuracy or error depending upon the circumstances. If the encounter is benign, there is little penalty for error. If the other party happens to be a covert threat, then it could be the last error you ever make. This is an extreme example not often encountered in our affluent and civil everyday experience, but it represents the essence of the trait that our heritage has bestowed upon us.
When unscrupulous actors in society abuse this process in service to destructive goals (such as deliberate distortion and the misuse of language), it is systemically harmful in the same way that cancer kills. Eric is correct, this is not a trivial matter.
@ JD Bell: “Depends. If you are willing to give up your entire online history as well, you might have a fighting chance.
I’m talking a new burner phone, new nicks, new credit card, not visiting any of your old websites, etc.”
You snipped my qualifier about modest effort. Among othe rthings, it would be almost impossible to obtain a legal job under your identity, regardless of your infosec
@Argent
Not sure where you are getting “modest effort” for someone to relocate not just 50-100 miles, but across a continent or ocean under primitive conditions.
I suppose I should have said “one time,” I guess. Or gone with my original though of “a couple of counties/states over.”
>Among other things, it would be almost impossible to obtain a legal job under your identity
Illegal ones, however, are easily had, with zero to minimal effort (zero being the casual labor jobs, paid in cash, which are available in every city, minimal being the trivial exercise of learning someone else’s social security number and using it).
One suspects that a fairly high percentage of those who moved away and assumed new identities in the past weren’t exactly aboveboard, either, legally speaking.
@Greg > Anyway, congrats on being one of the few able to recognize the problem for what it was. You lose a lot of points due to the fact that it apparently didn’t *bother* you, which implies a few things none of them good.
Please recalibrate your sarcasm detector.
@Paul Brinkley > Carrying this further: Eric claims he doesn’t identify as a conservative. (Does a negative claim count?) Some of the public isn’t accepting the claim. Is Eric wrong?
I think that it doesn’t particularly matter that he’s not a conservative, if there is a commonality between “conservative” and “libertarian”, which he undisputedly fits, and if one considers it reasonable to name that supercategory “right”.
I really wish the edit window was longer than five minutes… I think we’ve lost track of the fact that the description he objected to was not “conservative”, it was “on the right” (And, I suppose, “neanderthal”, though none of the regulars jumped to stand by that one)
@Winter
>The fact is that conservatives are almost always right wing, but the reverse is not true in my experience.
>To be conservative in the Burke sense, you need to believe that society cannot be modified, or rebuild, but only grown. However, many on the right are convinced that politics can be used to remodel society to their ideas. Which I think is not “conservative” in a meaningful sense.
This is a bit of a misunderstanding of conservatism. Consider making a zoo for elephants. Of course you can redesign or rebuild it any way you want. What you cannot change is the elephants themselves. So basically your design will be suitable for them, or not. The fixed variable is NOT the zoo. It is the elephant. The zoo can be varied, and some will be more suitable, some less. If you also fix a value variable, that you want a GOOD zoo, then yes, there is probably a roughly ideal design, not ideal in the philosophically pure sense but in the sense of matching the “nature” of elephants i.e. their traits, behavior, needs, idiosyncrasies etc. If you already have it good, and want to keep it good, you will probably not change it radically. Small improvements are always possible, of course. But you probably hit diminishing marginal utility at some point.
Interestingly, we face something similar in technology. Once we have true retina displays, there is simply no point in making better as our eyes would not pick up the difference anyway. So technology should not be seen as everything always improving, but more like everything always getting closer the interface limitations of the unaugmented human body until we decide to do the cyberpunk leap and until that mostly just camping there and display designers waiting for the rest of us to get better retinas implanted.
Anyhow back to politics. So the essential idea is to design a human zoo, or to put it better, social-political technology that ideally interfaces with human minds and motivations and all that.
The difference between the conservative and non-conservative right is that the conservative tends to think we already figured that out in premodern times by trial, error and experience stored in tradition and we still have enough of that worthy of conserving. The non-conservative right thinks we lost that already and need to regain, not conserve, basically van den Bruck’s “create values worth conserving”: https://archive.org/stream/ArthurMoellerVanDenBruck-LifeAndTheory/MoellerVanDenBruck-LifeAndTheory_djvu.txt and the more interesting aspect of the non-conservative right – and this is how this Nick Land type techno-futurist neoreaction came about – is the realization that social engineering sucks only because it was always done in a leftist way i.e. come up with a philosophical ideal, make it happen and expect human nature to adapt. But it should be possible to do social engineering better, by a scientific study of human nature and basing social engineering around it. Ideal zoo for the human elephant. This indeed a break with Burkean conservatism that tends to dislike ANY social engineering.
Currently the two most relevant traits of human nature seem to be tribalism and social status competition. Tribalism had a perfect solution in your country: that society of columns thing between Caths and Prots. Segregation, in a good way. Social status is harder. For example, capitalism mostly reduces to social status competition through wealth. It works for the economy, because it makes people productive. But we are a bit less narrowly focusing on that than libertarians. We realize if we also want some other values, we need to assign status to those and that means to reduce wealth-status a bit and that means to control capitalism a bit. We are not in favor of peacetime socialism as it means people will be disinterested in work and compete for status in other means, likely ugly or violent means. I wonder what you guys on the left want to do about that. Either you think you can get this status itch out of humans, or you can channel it into something cool like making art. Not gonna happen, I think. However in situations like the world wars, war socialism was ideal. We wanted soldiers to compete for status through bravery, not flaunting wealth. Everybody wore the same, ate the same in trenches, at home, civilians competed in patriotism, not wealth. It worked. Unfortunately it was the experience of frontline war socialism that later on created fascism showing socialism is a dangerous tool even in situations it seems to make sense…
@TheDividualist
“the more interesting aspect of the non-conservative right … is the realization that social engineering sucks only because it was always done in a leftist way i.e. come up with a philosophical ideal, make it happen and expect human nature to adapt.”
I think social engineering sucks either way, left or right. I follow Popper in this one. As you write, human “nature” cannot easily be changed, if at all. On the other hand, no one knows how to build societies from the ground up. Trying to (re-)build some ideal society, new or old, has rarely, if ever, ended well.
But if you look at contemporary politics, the argument is mostly about how slow or fast changes should be implemented, not what brave new or old world to build.
@TheDividualist
“Currently the two most relevant traits of human nature seem to be tribalism and social status competition.”
Except that humans have been very well able to live in multi-tribe societies and to switch tribal memberships. Every city or company is such a multi-/super-tribe.
To the extend that tribalism is a problem, the problem is that people are starting to re-form tribes out of an unmet need. That need seems to be feeling an utter lack of (economic) security. The most visible aspect of this is the feeling of having been abandoned by their own “people”. Those who feel they are deserted to fend for their own tend to regroup.
Status competition is such a fundamental feature of human society that any attempt to fight it is doomed from the start.
@Jay Maynard – I think your MtF TS friend is correct. That’s the aspect of society that Leelah Alcorn pleaded to be fixed: the hate speech, hate laws, and bigotry, such as the bigotry shown by her own parents. (When you are your child’s first oppressor, you’ve pretty much failed as a parent.)
@Patrick Maupin – “The flip side is the people who are ready to mutilate their kids at a very early age. As JAD pointed out, and googling confirmed, those people do exist, and there are doctors standing by to take their money.”
Any doctor who performed actual GCS on a child under 18 would be in violation of WPATH guidelines for treatment of trans individuals. (The latest version of the Standards of Care is here. Refer to that document.) As I mentioned earlier, the treatment for a pre-pubescent child expressing gender dysphoria is to let them socially transition, and administer puberty-blocking drugs at the appropriate time to prevent what would be the “wrong” puberty. Only later on, after it’s apparent they are better adjusted in the gender they now present as, would HRT be administered to help them develop in a gender-appropriate fashion. Surgery, if indicated, would not be performed until they turn 18. (I know of a young man in New Zealand who’s FtM and is being administered blockers right now. He’s doing fine on them, but there’s no talk of any surgery or HRT in his immediate future.)
The only circumstance in which I could even imagine surgery being performed on someone under 18 would be a really special case. A fictional case was described in one book I recently read: a boy in middle school who’s been experiencing gender-identity issues is placed on the back of a rodeo bull by bullies. After the bull throws him, it pins him to the ground with its horns, crushing his genitals beyond hope of repair. The only options are to either make him a eunuch, or perform reconstructive surgery to make her female. Due to the existing gender-identity issues, the latter course is chosen, and proves to be the right one. But I must emphasize that this is fiction, and I’ve never heard of such a case in real life.
@Rob K – “[GCS] doesn’t change how your parents, siblings, cousins, friends, co-workers, etc. ad nauseum relate to you. It doesn’t matter how well you pass after SRS if all of the people in your life still consider you a sinful abomination and hector you relentlessly.”
Bingo. I believe the most important factor in preventing suicide among trans people is the support they get from those around them. I have a great deal of support from those around me, including family, friends, and colleagues, therefore I am unlikely to commit suicide whether I eventually undergo GCS or not. (I recognize that I am very fortunate in that respect.) Leelah Alcorn, however, had zero support, and, in fact, had complete antipathy from those closest to her, her parents. GCS wouldn’t have changed that.
Random thought that occurred to me in the car this AM:
Claire’s identity is writing checks her nethers can’t cash. (Present as female, unable to engage in PIV sex). In this case, if she had successful surgery, she would be able to engage in PIV sex. It doesn’t deal with the squick factor, but the actual physical capability promised would be able to be followed up on.
@ Amy Tapia
I think you may be able to make your point more effectively by addressing the edge case of someone born as a hermaphrodite. These cases almost always involve a surgical solution (even at a young age) and all parties frequently seem to be focused on making the best of things. No negativity or blame game. I think the actress Jamie Lee Curtis may be a famous example of this.
>I think the actress Jamie Lee Curtis may be a famous example of [hermaphrodite].
That is interesting. Because I noticed years ago that Curtis has a very mannish skeleton and conjectured she might have one of the sex-chromosome abnormalities I can never quite keep straight. True gonadal hermaphroditism didn’t occur to me because it’s so freaking rare.
@TheDividualist & Winter:
TheDividualist: “Currently the two most relevant traits of human nature seem to be tribalism and social status competition.”
Winter: “(…) human ‘nature’ cannot easily be changed, if at all. (…) Except that humans have been very well able to live in multi-tribe societies and to switch tribal memberships.”
There’s a 3rd path. Human nature cannot be changed in the sense that you cannot take a human and give them non-human psychological traits without that producing a monster. However, and in a quite transhumanist fashion, human nature can be enhanced by furthering it along paths already present and already open. One typical example of how that’d be desirable is in increasing IQ. If a method were developed for doing that, a method that didn’t violate other human traits and negative rights, I think most would opt for improving. A few might refuse under reasons such as “God made me so and He knows better”, but those wouldn’t, I hope, be a majority.
Similarly, people in general are favorable to having their mental issues fixed. To link this to the post, transsexuals aren’t trying to become more broken when they seek surgery and related treatments, they’re trying to get to live better, less suffering-prone lives.
So, when it comes to tribalism, there is also an enhancement path already available. I refer to Kohlberg’s scale of moral reasoning, which isn’t a scale of morality but rather a scale of the ability to reason in more or less complex ways about moral and ethical decisions, hence closed related to IQ.
To simplify a lot the topic, according Kohlberg’s research tribalism is a cognitive developmental stage, the third one can develop, and usually developed during one’s teenage years. In that stage one receives one’s moral sense of right and wrong from one’s peers, according one’s self-identification as a member of this or that group, so that whatever the group think is right, the stage 3 individual thinks is right, and whatever the group thinks is wrong, the individual thinks is wrong. In teens we can see it easily: there are “the jocks”, “the nerds”, “the material girls” etc. In adults it’s usually identification with “the church”, “the place”, “the party”, “the sports team” etc.
Stage 4 is usually developed by the early to mid 20s. In it one overgrows strict tribalistic groupthink to recognize society is composed of several groups, each one of which has in principle a right to exist provided they don’t negatively affect the others, even if one dislikes them. So the person still identifies themselves with a specific group or set of groups, but her moral reasoning advances into thinking there’s a need for laws and rules governing the relationship between groups so that society as a whole is peaceful.
Now, Kohlberg not only identified the stages (there are six, with a theoretical seventh), but he also noticed not everyone goes through all of them. About 35% or so (if I remember the numbers right) of the population stop in their “moral reasoning” cognitive development at stage 3 and went with it to their deathbeds. Another 40% manage to advance to stage 4 and stay on it. So that’s about 75% of the population thinking in terms of group identities, which is why either intra-group thinking or inter-group thinking rule the day.
However, some people, about 6% of the population, manage to advance beyond stage 4.
In stage 5, which covers about 5% of the population, and is usually achieved by the mid 30s (for those who can achieve it), group identities dissolve and one reason morally exclusively in terms of individuals. A stage 5 individual certainly recognizes other individuals (those below stage 5) as being in many cases self-identified with their peer groups, and can clearly think of them also in terms of their group’s own standards, but before and beyond that a stage 5 individual sees other individuals qua individuals, their strict individuality never getting lost in the background of their group identity.
A stage 6, which covers at most 1% of the population, probably less, and is achieved (when achievable) when one’s in their 40s to 50s, the perspective switches to the big picture. Basically, all those individuals one perceives as such in stage 5 become nodes in an interlinked web of relationships, and one’s moral reasoning turns towards how acting over one node affects the web both locally and globally.
Now, the 3rd path I envision is one in which lots of work is put into unlocking the achievability of all stages by all individuals, coupled with life extension. If all human brains were to become able to reach stage 6, instead of being locked into achieving at most stages 3 or 4, and the majority of the human population were to become of people above their 60s, hence having achieved stages 5 or 6, the social landscape would change for the better in tremendous ways, none of which requiring social engineering or the State imposing this or that. New social mores would follow naturally and organically from the mere fact of most people being more morally intelligent. And all of that would be achieved from within human nature itself, as the six stages are natural, not contrary to it.
My hope is that transhumanism, after achieving IQ enhancement, moves in that direction. IMHO that’d provide for the best social outcome, at least compared to the current stage 3 and 4-based proposals (which are indeed the ones suitable for the current state of the world).
> I refer to Kohlberg’s scale of moral reasoning
You might want to be careful about citing Kohlberg. I found his 6-step model plausible, but apparently Kohlberg himself has renounced it. I don’t know what his theory is now,
@Ian Argent:
… but as discussed upstream, marrying someone who expects children is still fraud.
@ Patrick Maupin: “… but as discussed upstream, marrying someone who expects children is still fraud.”
But, fertility isn’t the claim of her presentation. Not all cis women are fertile, not all are willing to become pregnant, etc. For that matter, is either participant looking for marriage and kids? Facts are not in evidence on that point.
(the counterpart to that is a joke I see on FB every so often, about a man who is “assisting” a lesbian couple in obtaining a child “the old-fashioned” way, where the punchline is “I haven’t told them I had a vasectomy.”)
@TomA – “I think you may be able to make your point more effectively by addressing the edge case of someone born as a hermaphrodite. These cases almost always involve a surgical solution (even at a young age) and all parties frequently seem to be focused on making the best of things.”
Intersex people present a whole different can of worms. Many times, an intersex child is born with ambiguous genitalia, and this is surgically corrected at or near birth and the child is assigned a sex, then, later on, that person discovers that their gender identity doesn’t match the sex they were assigned as a result of the surgery. This case (from my therapist’s blog) is an example, where the person in question didn’t find out the truth about their birth until age 53.
Apparently, current practice for these cases in Europe is to delay any surgical correction until the child can articulate a gender identity, around age 3-4. Which is similar to the case of gendermom’s daughter M. So we’re not too far apart on this.
>Many times, an intersex child is born with ambiguous genitalia, and this is surgically corrected at or near birth and the child is assigned a sex, then, later on, that person discovers that their gender identity doesn’t match the sex they were assigned as a result of the surgery.
Amy, in case you’ve gotten the idea that I dismiss all transsexuality as delusional, this is the class of cases in which I am most sure that it is not. You probably had this figured out already; I’m just confirming.
@esr:
I don’t think that’s the case. There have been criticisms of his work specially in regards to the higher (5+) moral reasoning levels, as those are difficult to gauge without the researchers themselves being at a high enough level to distinguish nuances in their subjects highly complex answers. But Kohlberg himself, as far as I know, kept to his scale until his death, while at most accepting and integrating some of the criticisms as complementary.
The beauty of his scale though is in how well supported it is supported, both in terms of its rigorous psychometric features as well as in field research all around the world. It’s basically the or at least one of the gold standards in evidence-based psychological theories, psychology being an area that most definitely lacks a lot in terms of actual, scientific support for its many claims. Even if he himself had renounced it, the evidence that was and still is collected for would have kept supporting it, or at a minimum close variations of it.
Hence my usage of it as a metric for future transhumanist, individualistic-based social development possibilities. It offers a good ruler.
@TomA –
> I think the actress Jamie Lee Curtis may be a famous example of [being born hermaphrodite].
Both her Wikipedia page and Snopes.com call this a legend or rumor.
@ESR – “Amy, in case you’ve gotten the idea that I dismiss all transsexuality as delusional, this is the class of cases in which I am most sure that it is not. You probably had this figured out already; I’m just confirming.”
Indeed, I think you made that clear. My comments were directed at @TomA who brought the matter up just now.
Intersex people do get overlooked a lot in the debate over transgender and transsexuality, and their cases are similar but not identical. This is why the “LGBTQ” acronym sometimes gets extended to “LGBTQIA” (with the two additional letters standing for “intersex” and “allies”), and why, when I was in charge of the transgender hospitality suite at the National LGBTQ Task Force’s Creating Change 2015 conference, I made sure it was named the “Trans, Intersex, and Non-Binary” hospitality suite.
(One of my chief “lieutenants” in that suite’s operation, Dana Zzyym, who is an intersex person, has been in the news recently; they are suing the State Department for the right to have a passport with no gender marker, or an “X” where normally there would be a “M” or “F.” Australia already allows this on their passports, and Oregon has started allowing it on state driver’s licenses and IDs.)
@Amy
“LGBTQIA”
I think it is time to think of something better than an unpronouncable 7 letter acronym.
There is “QUILTBAG”, but I’ve heard folks object to it on the grounds that it sounds vaguely pejorative. It’s not intended to be, but perception is everything in these sorts of things, that it is.
I would get rid of the acronyms and simply include everyone. “Lovely” or “Adorable” people would do it for me. But I am the last one to ask, being a non-native speaker and not in any of the groups.
A little like atheists calling themselves “bright”.
@Winter – “I think it is time to think of something better than an unpronouncable 7 letter acronym.”
Especially since it gets parodied as “LGBTQQIAOMGWTFBBQ” and such.
I’ve heard the term “gender and sexuality variant” or “gender and sexuality diverse” bandied about, but those may still be a little stilted. But if you want a one-word descriptor…how about “Fabulous”? (giggle) :D
@Amy Tapie:
Since it’s about the four long tails of both the sexuality and gender identity Gaussian distributions, I’d go for “long-tailers”. But I guess it might not sound good? I’m no native speaker either.
PS.: I’ve been wanting for a while to answer your previous replies addressed to me. Alas, I’ve been lacking the time, witness all the typos in my last answer above. Oh, well…
@Amy
“Fabulous”
Why not? Sounds good.
Short anecdote. A high scholer who read a Jane Austen novel came with a question. Does “gay” have other meanings? The problem was the sentence “She entered a room full of gay people.”
So, why not fabulous?
>So, why not fabulous?
Good, but misleads about the proper pronunciation. For this use, you want “faaabulous”. Darling.
/me ducks and runs.
@Greg >> Anyway, congrats on being one of the few able to recognize the problem for what it was. You lose a lot of points due to the fact that it apparently didn’t *bother* you, which implies a few things none of them good.
@Random832 > Please recalibrate your sarcasm detector.
Maybe.
But looking at the larger picture, that kind of nonsense helped put me off on the ideology (that I was raised in, mind) that you appear (at least in this venue) to practice. So it seems to not have bothered you that much.
I’d love to be wrong.
@ESR –
“Good, but misleads about the proper pronunciation. For this use, you want “faaabulous”. Darling.
/me ducks and runs.”
(Amy giggles uncontrollably) I agree! :D
After all, the term is already known to be in widespread use in the community. It might as well be a group identifier at this point!
Anyone who wishes to discuss this topic, who hasn’t heard Jordan B. Peterson’s take (this is but one of many videos in which he discusses it), do so before going further. If you’re not aware, he’s the principal public opponent of a Canadian proposal that would make it a crime to fail to use someone’s “preferred” pronouns. He considers this a horrific assault on free speech, which in turn is an essential tool for our very survival.
You may disagree with Dr. Peterson, but you’d damned better work at it, or you’ll look as foolish as the protesters who repeatedly screamed “Transphobic piece of shit!” in his ears at a recent talk he was to give.
PS, ESR can’t be the Queen of England because there is no such thing (and hasn’t been since the Unification of the Crowns under Anne). Elizabeth II is Queen of the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as well as many other Commonwealth realms such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and is no more “Queen of England” than Donald Trump is “President of New York”.
I’m surpised that no one seems to have even read the studies posted here that allegedly show that SRS doesn’t improve suicide attempt rates.
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AFSP-Williams-Suicide-Report-Final.pdf is completely irrelevant, since it only deals with *lifetime* suicide attempt rates. Someone who had SRS could have attempted suicide before undergoing that surgery. I would venture that in almost every case, they either did so (possibly with further suicide attempts afterwards, but the data provides no way of determining this), or else never attempted suicide, before or after surgery.
The studies in the review at https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/bitstream/2134/18985/3/Marshall%20et%20al%20NSSI%20Review%202015docx.pdf seem to refer to elevated suicide rates relative to the general (i.e., almost all cisgender) population, and not to compare pre-transition to post-transition mental health, suicide attempts, or anything else. The best-known study referred to is http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885 — it got a lot of reposts for right-wing bloggers after Breitbart mentioned it to claim that trans people committed suicide a lot and SRS didn’t help “even in trans-friendly Sweden”. In fact, it shows that while those who transitioned between 1973-1989 in Sweden had a very elevated suicide attempt rate (adjusted hazard ratio of 7.9) relative to the general population, those who transitioned between 1989-2003 had a much less elevated one, which elevation wasn’t statistically significant (AHR of 2.0, 95% confidence interval of 0.7-5.3). Further, it’s obvious that Sweden, or any country, in the 1970s and 1980s is not trans-friendly by the standards of the present day. In fact, this data supports the claim that a society which is better to trans people will result in better mental health for them.
So it is simply not supported by any evidence shown here that “SRS doesn’t lower suicide rates”.
Quoting Doctor Locketopus:
“I do wish you guys would stop calling Nazis “right-wingers”, though. From their party platform, they were quite clearly socialists. Besides, it’s right there in their name.”
ESR:
“Socialism” in the name? Check.”
Doctor Locketopus:
“National SOCIALIST German WORKER’S Party”
I never understood this reasoning.
“Classical liberals” are opposite from “liberals.” “Creation scientists” are opposite from “scientists.” “People’s democracy” is opposite from “democracy.” A sea lion is not a lion and a red panda is not a panda. A witch doctor is not a doctor and a jailhouse lawyer is not a lawyer.
What is special about the word “socialist”? Why do the standard rules on distinguishing *lexemes* from *terms* not a apply to it? What other words in English have this property?
>“Classical liberals” are opposite from “liberals.” “Creation scientists” are opposite from “scientists.” [etc.]
Every one of your exception cases happened because the exceptions wanted to associate themselves with asource of what they regarded as legitimacy and prestige. The extension to “National Socialist” is obvious.
People who think the Nazis weren’t socialists have never read the Nazi party platform. I, on the other hand, have.
@Alexandrine:
People need labels. People need pigeonholes. Sure, you often get to live in multiple pigeonholes, but the whole post was about how you don’t get to define which pigeonholes you live in. The same is true of words such as “socialist” — if enough people view them as a useful shorthand for a set of conditions, that’s the pigeonhole the word falls into.
Which is actually a good thing. Having words mean things is awesome. Your example of “classical liberal” vs. “liberal” shows the flip-side of this — the word “liberal” has been co-opted in a fairly successful attempt to change its meaning.
Still, it’s useful to reexamine our sets of pigeonholes occasionally.
Coincidentally, I have been pondering this sort of definitional problem from a different direction, because a guy I know keeps writing religious papers and sending them to me, trying to convince me of the existence of his God.
Why is there a struggle over this proof? Why does he push so hard? He’s not a holy-roller; pretty easy-going guy, actually.
Why am I baited into responding? Day-to-day, his insanity doesn’t particularly affect me (other than this particular compulsion).
I would be happy to simply reject his arguments and let him keep his God, but I have a reason to push back. To paraphrase the Trotsky quote esr used upstream, “You may not be interested in authoritarian religion, but authoritarian religion is interested in you!”
Lame arguments purporting to prove the existence of God are one of the tools that help keep authoritarian religious figures in power. In this country, religious authorities use the claim of being persecuted to coalesce and wield enormous power that shows they are, actually, anything but persecuted, and to dictate to their flock how to vote in the secular elections.
This undermines democracy.
It is true that the Communists denounced God and were also evil; but evil does not require atheism — the Nazis did a fine job of evil with God purportedly on their side. And, of course, although Communists have killed more people than the church, if you tally it up per-capita at the time of the offenses, it looks a bit different.
Religion, Nazism, Communism — as practiced in their most evil forms — all require all of society to conform to a hierarchy. The ideologies that demand this hierarchical social organization have proven to be the most brutal. As Rudolph Rummel and Steven Pinker point out, true democracy is the only system that has been proven to reduce violence, essentially (imo) by helping to de-fang all the little hierarchies and keeping them at loggerheads with each other.
The guy who sends me these papers seems to believe that the existence of God is required to keep us moral. This belief would certainly explain an aching need to prove that God exists.
I do not share the belief that God is required for morality (quite the opposite!), so I don’t have an aching need to prove God exists. In fact, I could care less whether he exists or not, except for the terrible consequences that history has shown can come from the wholesale abuse of the belief of his existence by amoral political and religious leaders.
Any monotheistic hierarchical religion with a single infallible figurehead is an open invitation for charlatans, deviants, psychopaths, and other immoral people to wreak havoc on the general population, and it doesn’t matter whether the figurehead is called Yahweh, Lenin, Hitler, or Mao.
So I am moved to explain that, no, he still hasn’t convinced me — it would take quite a strong proof to show that the false God of these people actually exists, or even that a better God exists but doesn’t care to show himself.
And this leads directly to my next conclusion: If he somehow does manage to prove that God really exists, we need to kill God. But it has to be in the open with a lot of unimpeachable witnesses.
To bring it back to the word “socialist” — “socialist” is a valuable signifier that collectivist practices are going to be promulgated, and that requires an overarching power hierarchy, and always comes at the detriment of the individual.
@Patrick Maupin
““socialist” is a valuable signifier that collectivist practices are going to be promulgated, ”
You are now using the word in a way that has no relation wth Social Democrat or Communist politics.
What you describe is collectivism. This is rive at every corner of the political spectrum.
I’ve spoken to a Nazi and he was quite socialist. Short version: “Welfare for whites, purges for blacks.”
@The Monster – I think that not using someone’s preferred pronouns is rude, but I don’t think you should be able to be prosecuted for being rude.
I just deleted several off-topic political comments.
I will continue to do this as required. This thread has been pretty high-quality so far; I want to keep it that way.
@ ESR – “I just deleted several off-topic political comments.”
Eric, I thought mine was pertinent to the OP in that the institutionalized misuse of language can lead to great harm in the extremis. Even Amy Tapie recognizes that government overreach on behalf of her community is a bad thing. I think her advocacy for common courtesy is justifiable, as is your caution against allowing their to community to be made into a mascot for political ends.
Amy,
The term “queer”, originally used as a slur against gay men, has in more recent times been used to mean “gender and sexuality variant”, as in “queer studies”.
But I like “fabulous” more. Much more.
@Jeff Read – “Queer” is one possible interpretation for the “Q” in “LGBTQ.” It can also mean “questioning,” which is why you sometimes see the “Q” doubled, to cover both possibilities, as in “LGBTQQIA.”
@TomA – You are certainly correct! I don’t care what you may think of me, as long as you treat me as you would any other woman (and that includes according me the same basic rights of employment, housing, public accommodation, etc., as any other woman). Of course, if you were to treat me poorly, I’d consider you rude and ill-mannered, but that doesn’t mean I’d sic the cops on you just for that. Threats or actual aggression are something else again.
I actually experienced this last Wednesday, when I visited Google’s Boulder office for the Google I/O Extended event. I attended as Amy, and my badge was in that name. I was treated with courtesy by everyone present, and used the ladies’ room without incident. (One Googler said I was the best-dressed person there; I’d chosen a business professional look for the visit.)
@ESR:
> @Alexanderine:
> > “Classical liberals” are opposite from “liberals.” “Creation scientists” are opposite from “scientists.” [etc.]
> Every one of your exception cases happened because the exceptions wanted to
> associate themselves with asource of what they regarded as legitimacy and prestige.
> The extension to “National Socialist” is obvious.
Let’s do be clear about the history here though–Progressives started calling themselves “Liberals” because their politics were odious (racist, blatantly re-distributive etc.) and the label “progressive” was becoming a detriment. So they took over “liberal” and the language of rights, then distorted it, corrupted it and turned it back on itself.
“Classical Liberalism” is an attempt to reach back prior to the proglodyte corruption.
Mr. Maupin:
> but evil does not require atheism — the Nazis did a fine job of evil with God purportedly on their side
Again to add clarity here if the Nazi Party pushed a “God” it was a State God, and was not in any way what we in the US would consider a Christian God. It was, at *best* a cynical play to the proles.
Such that you can trust anything on the web about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_aspects_of_Nazism
The deeper and deeper you dig into primary and secondary sources the more the fight between Nazis and Communists is like twins fighting over their parents estate.
Stalin and Hitler, brothers from different mothers.
@Amy T:
Being the best dressed person in an IT company, especially in Colorado is sort of like being the fastest runner at a wheel chair race.
If you know what color wheel is, and trip and fall in a Jos A. Bank you’re ahead of the game.
The Monster on 2017-05-18 at 17:17:39 said:
> Anyone who wishes to discuss this topic, who hasn’t heard Jordan B. Peterson’s take (this
> is but one of many videos in which he discusses it), do so before going further. If you’re
> not aware, he’s the principal public opponent of a Canadian proposal that would make it a
I’ve gone through several of Dr. Peterson’s videos–his opposition to this is a LOT deeper than just the free speech issue.
He is a thoughtful and intelligent person, and while he *may* be wrong, he’s passionately concerned about the welfare of people and of doing the right thing.
If you’re at all open minded by this give *several* of his videos a watch, both on this issue and on others to see where he comes from.
> I don’t think anyone in this discussion thread hates or fears you.
Uncanny valley.
Everyone instinctively hates and fears people in uncanny valley, and that is why it is a bad idea to go into uncanny valley.
Maybe in the future we will be able to remake people all the way through, with nanobots reshaping them on the cellular level, but at present sex change technology is disturbingly imperfect, and produces disturbingly creepy results. You can reshape someone so that they look pretty good in a still photo, but as soon as they move or speak, it is as weird, creepy, and disturbing as hell.
An effeminate asian who has been sex changed at a young age will sometimes look pretty OK to a white male, but most of them are not effeminate enough to make it past uncanny valley, and few of them are effeminate enough to look OK to an asian male.
>Uncanny valley.
Oh dear Goddess. The world might be about to end, I have actually learned something from one of JAD’s rants.
Everybody please go read Preventing visceral racism. It’s relevant.
I have in fact noticed that some trans people creep me out. I don’t let that reaction affect me much or screw with my judgment, but it is a fact.
Until just now, I hadn’t connected that to my experience of minority X; but JAD is dead right, it’s an uncanny-valley effect. I feel like I should have noticed this sooner.
Knowing this is good. It will help my forebrain resist the emotional pressure.
> Trans people work pretty damn hard to meet expectations for the gender category they want to fit in. Clothing, voice training, posture, hormone therapy, various surgeries…
They work hard because they don’t succeed very well. No one really cares about how hard trans people work. Really, they only care about whether they succeed. And with the exception of some very effeminate males, they don’t succeed. Hence the high suicide rate.
> Getting their sex change operation gives these people a satisfactory life again
The sex change operation produces creatures that look creepy and act weird.
In a still photo, they can make it all the way through uncanny valley to the other side, but as soon as they move or speak, stuck in uncanny valley.
So I am pretty sure their life is not in fact satisfactory. Maybe if we had far better sex change technology than we now do, a sex change operation would give these people a satisfactory life again.
Re: uncanny valley behavioral response
Most primates, and some other animal species, have been to shown to experience the uncanny valley behavioral effect. It likely has a common evolutionary genesis, and perhaps represents a fundamental mechanism in support of reproductive fitness and species survival. If so, it may be unreasonable to presume that this behavioral response can be persistently over-ridden by simple force of will.
@William O. B’Livion – I didn’t know Jos. A. Bank sold women’s clothing?
My ensemble for the day was a black blazer by Only Necessities over a Jessica London knee-length ponte knit dress in a medium pink, with slightly wedged flats I found on eBay, I forget the brand, and goldtone jewelry that originally came from Walmart. I wasn’t the only woman there in a dress; there were two or three others.
@James A. Donald – I acknowledge that I will never be a perfect-looking woman, but I don’t do badly, in terms of appearance, behavior, or even voice. A friend of mine is an expert at making men up to look like women, and she has had nothing but praise for the way I present. That profile picture to the upper left of my post is me, taken just about a week ago as of this writing. I’ve only been on HRT for about three months, so it’ll only improve from here, although I know that HRT can’t do miracles, either. My voice has been known to get me called “ma’am” over drive-through speakers; it doesn’t have the vocal range of a cis woman, but I can sing female vocal lines if I choose my repertoire carefully. (I do pretty well on Peggy Lee’s “Fever”!)
> I didn’t know Jos. A. Bank sold women’s clothing?
They don’t, but that wasn’t the point.
The point was that in the modern “IT” workspace, including Google, being the best dressed in the room is on par with being the most sober guy in the strip bar at closing time, being the the darkest skinned person at the red-head convention etc.
Denver is even worse than Silicon Valley because at least in Silicon Valley all the little Indian Boys will wear dockers and sport shirts, which at least sets the bar.
@esr:
> I have actually learned something…
I learned this a few years ago. It might even have been from a comment in your blog, although I can’t remember exactly when the learning took. Something to do with one of those Japanese robots, maybe, too.
William, is your quip about how people dress in IT shops based on observations or stereotypes? Because Google has a VERY diverse workforce and some of them dress very smartly.
@esr:
Now that you mention it, I remember the first few times I had contact with trans women it felt very odd. I tend to overcome this kind of reaction pretty quickly though, so it took me only a few more interactions with them for my perception to become one of normalcy, and then for me to begin perceiving trans women as simply women, since their modes of speech, gestures, body language, vocabulary etc. are so clearly feminine that it’d be difficult for me to think of them as “not-women”.
Interestingly, I’m so used to it by now that when I first talk with an LGBT person without knowing beforehand whether that person is a (very effeminate) G or a (non-transitioned) T, I can pinpoint it after a few seconds of talk, or even by mere observation, without the need to ask.
I guess the key to overcoming this uncanny valley effect is thus familiarity. The more one interacts with LGBT people, the less valley-y it becomes. Although, admittedly, it might take a lot more time for most people than it took me, as I’ve had evidence over the years that my “disgust subsystem” (?) doesn’t work quite the same as it does for most other people.
It feels like this debate is composed, more than anything, of confusion between a bunch of different debates.
1) Is a post-operative transgendered person biologically a member of their chosen gender?
2) Should we treat a sufficiently determined transgendered person as being a member of their chosen gender?
3) Should we be legally required to treat a sufficiently determined transgendered person as being a member of their chosen gender?
4) Is a transgendered person mentally ill?
4a) If yes, do the transgendered need treatment for their mental illness?
and probably a couple others.
Some of these we agree on. We both agree that the answer to #1 is “no” – they cannot procreate, they still have their birth chromosomes(and any sex-linked traits that result), and so on. We agree that the answer to #3 is no, because that’s gross governmental overreach and a clear abridgement of freedom of conscience.
We disagree on the others, I think. #2 is one where I’d generally go along with it in most cases. I wouldn’t hook up with a trans-girl who still had her boy parts, as is typical of straight males. But if this person wanted to be called “she” in casual conversation, I’d do so. This actually came up for me IRL recently – a close friend of my fiancee recently decided that she’d rather be a “they” due to not feeling much connection with the female gender, complete with a name change from her obviously-female birth name to a much more androgynous choice. She’s being polite about it – they’ll still answer to their birth name and “she”, but even without my arm being twisted, I’m trying to go along with it. It’s a tough transition, and I forget half the time, but it’s worth the effort. It just feels incredibly rude to do anything else. I don’t base this much on social justice arguments, it seems like it’s mostly about decency to me.
#4 is more about your definition of “mentally ill” than it is about transgender. It’s like asking if viruses are alive, which really boils down to “Does your definition of ‘life’ include viruses?”. As such, I don’t think that one is really much of a debate per se.
#4a, we can even assume “yes” for sake of argument. We have a perfectly good treatment for this particular mental illness, as it happens – surgery, hormones, and not treating these people like shit. Even if you call it mental illness, I’d say the end result is the same.
“they cannot procreate, ”
Not entirely true. Thansgenders can store eggs ans sperm to be used later for IVF and even implant it in a surrogate.
This way, even a trans male and trans female can sire their biological child.
I meant doing so the old-fashioned way, or in general as a member of the new gender, but fair point.
@Random832
>Why do you think it is important/relevant that SRS does not have an impact on suicide rates?
Because the high incidence of suicide among the trans population is cited as the reason why it’s appropriate to compel us by force to use the preferred pronouns of the alternatively-gendered. If you refuse to use “she/her/hers” to describe “Leelah”, then you’re guilty of “her” death ex post facto.
So once one side brings up suicide rates, it’s hypocritical for them to demand the other side not discuss suicide rates.
Why in the hell did that go into mod queue?
Eric: By a fitting coincidence with this blog post of yours, one Peter Boghossian, writing for Skeptic Magazine, has just pulled an Alan-Sokal-like hoax on gender studies. Boghossian wrote an article that was a deliberate sham and full of impenetrable gender-studies jargon. Then he submitted it to one of the field’s peer-reviewed journals, and, sure enough, got it published. Its title: “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct”.
Have you seen it yet? If not, Here is the link to the Skeptic article. I have a feeling you might like it.
>I dunno – how much hanging around with the blue tribe does Eric need to do before being understood as being blue enough?
To the Left, if one is not fully in compliance with The Party Line, one is an Enemy of the Revolution, aka “far-right”. That we can conceive of at least two (I can get to four by breaking out foreign policy and abortion from the strictly-domestic components of “personal” and “economic” liberty) dimensions on which to map political beliefs is irrelevant to them.
@Alsadius – I don’t think you and I are very far apart here.
1) Is a post-operative transgendered person biologically a member of their chosen gender?
No, they’re not, and never really can be. But they can be “close enough” for most purposes. There are places online where you can see pictures of the vaginas of post-operative trans women. In many cases, only a professional would be able to tell the difference. Trans women can have intercourse and even orgasm. They cannot, however, bear children themselves.
2) Should we treat a sufficiently determined transgendered person as being a member of their chosen gender?
Aside from wondering what you mean by “sufficiently determined” here, the answer is yes, out of sheer politeness if nothing else. Not to do so would be rude, demeaning, and might very well be considered dehumanizing. I quote Queen Clarice Renaldi of Genovia: “Manners matter.”
3) Should we be legally required to treat a sufficiently determined transgendered person as being a member of their chosen gender?
Well, it depends, again, what you mean by “legally required.” Soon, I will be changing my identity with Social Security, the state driver’s license agency, and so forth, which will involve the necessary documentation for listing my gender as “female.” Once I am legally registered as “female,” am I then required to be treated as such in all legal matters?
(The standard for Social Security is that I have to have undergone “appropriate clinical treatment” to support a gender change from male to female. SSA policy does not dictate what that treatment must be, as people’s medical needs vary and that question is best left to the health care professionals that treat them. My letter to that effect is forthcoming from the doctor that supplies my HRT medication.)
4) Is a transgendered person mentally ill?
Well, I have a recognized diagnosis of a mental disorder: “Gender Dysphoria in Adult.” It says so right on my chart. Once I have transitioned, though, and no longer suffer from the effects of gender dysphoria, am I still “mentally ill”? This sounds like a philosophical question on the order of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one can hear it, does it make a sound?”
4a) If yes, do the transgendered need treatment for their mental illness?
Well, that treatment is what I’m getting, in the form of therapy, HRT, and legal transition…and maybe ultimately surgery, though that is still up in the air. And, believe me, I am being careful about how I do it; my main objective in seeing a therapist was to convince myself that I wasn’t just fooling myself about my need to live as a woman. I started, under my therapist’s guidance, by making a list of reasons why I shouldn’t transition, and then going through and using actual observations I made to refute all of them. My experience of actually being on HRT, which I only started after I had completed that process, just confirmed that I was doing the right thing.
@The Monster – ” If you refuse to use ‘she/her/hers’ to describe ‘Leelah’, then you’re guilty of ‘her’ death ex post facto.”
Not in my view. You’re just guilty of being rude and disrespectful to her memory. And why do you put her name and pronoun in quotes?
@William O. B’Livion
I’ve watched a lot of Peterson’s videos on many subjects, although with an emphasis on the C16 abomination. His classes have literally changed lives. His “Maps of Meaning” is nothing short of amazing, and I’m not even very far though it. I chose that clip for its relative brevity, because I doubt most people would spend as much time as we have watching him.
@Das Levithan
That wasn’t just for you.
That was for everyone.
@ esr on 2017-05-20 at 10:18:43 said:
> > Uncanny valley.
> Oh dear Goddess. The world might be about to end, I have actually learned something
> from one of JAD’s rants.
The thing about *modern* (LED/LCD etc.) clocks is that when broken in particular ways they are almost *NEVER* right. Still, if it’s changing at random it’ll line up once and a while.
> Everybody please go read Preventing visceral racism. It’s relevant.
I’ve only had visceral issues with one race. Mostly it’s cultural confusion. Then again I have that going into honky-tonks and discos. And Vegas.
“The link I provided is to an answer by an army big data analyst on the data-driven preconditions for a revolution/civil war to happen.”
While I am rather fascinated by big data analysis, I’m also a little nervous about it. I can’t help but get the sense that big data can sniff out patterns, but it can’t give us the reasons why those patterns exist. Thus, such analysis can be blind-sided by outliers that could otherwise be explainable if we could understand the underlying assumptions that underlie the data.
So, sure, the data seems to suggest that the United States will never break out into another civil war, nor ever have a revolution…but who knows what will change, that might cause the data analysis that was linked to, to suddenly become completely invalid?
> So, sure, the data seems to suggest that the United States will never break out into
> another civil war, nor ever have a revolution…but who knows what will change, that
> might cause the data analysis that was linked to, to suddenly become completely invalid?
That, or maybe we’ve re-defined “teenager” to be “between 16 and 35”.
Yeah, about that Conceptual Penis paper…
Bwahahaha. NORMA, the journal those hoaxters submitted to originally, rejected their paper because it was obvious BS, but did recommend a pleb-tier open-access vanity journal to publish in. Said vanity journal eagerly accepted their “research” (read: their publishing fee), and now the hoaxters think they’ve shown that the emperor has no clothes when, in reality, they were counter-trolled by the scholars they tried to troll.
Social scientists are a lot smarter than you think. They are scholars, after all.
>Social scientists are a lot smarter than you think.
Social scientists could be light-years smarter than I think they are and still be stupider than flatworms.
“Can I choose to be 6’7??”
Sure, but the surgery would be expensive, time consuming and probably quite painful. Stilts are an option as well, but most people wouldn’t agree with such an assertion of height unless the means of your elevation were more or less permanent.
On a related note, I often encounter children in their 20s and 30s who get themselves tatted up like circus attractions and festoon their faces with various bits of metal, who angrily denounce anyone who finds this off-putting, particularly when applying for employment.
What I tell them is that they of course have every right to present themselves to the world in any manner they choose, but they have NO right to decide how anyone else responds to their presentation. Those steel boogers and the words “fuck the pope” tattooed on your cheek may get the bad boys’ attention when you’re trying to get laid on a Saturday night, but sorry: I’m not going to hire you to represent my business to the public looking like that. Don’t like it? Tough shit.
@esr
“Social scientists could be light-years smarter than I think they are and still be stupider than flatworms.”
Still your whole ideological life seems to revolve around social science, but then the science of a century or so old. What is Libertarianism other than the extrapolation of some social theories of markets? It’s whole idea of social organisation is based on (outdated) economics, a social science.
But I think your ideas about social science are just as caricature as those of other sciences. Here is an explanation from a real social scientist:
Social sciences: Between theory and intuition
https://www.mpg.de/208630/social_sciences
And examples of current research (at MPI Germany):
http://www.mpifg.de/pu/discpapers_en.php
On another tangent, I will point out that what we now refer to as “identity politics” is the age-old tactic of Divide and Conquer. It was handy for sorting people into slaves and non-slaves, for sowing discord in the ranks of anti-colonial movements in India and Ireland, and apportioning political power and influence amongst various groups in societies reaching back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
When anyone trots this shit out today, I consider it incumbent on any rational individual to reject it emphatically.
“What is Libertarianism other than the extrapolation of some social theories of markets?”
What’s your next guess?
Libertarianism is a political philosophy based on the non-aggression principle. Don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff, and we’ll get along fine. If you decide that you’re entitled to initiate aggression against those around you, and you act upon this mistaken belief, then you should expect to be corrected forcibly.
@Random
“Libertarianism is a political philosophy based on the non-aggression principle. ”
And then some. All talk is based on free markets as a basis of society. Which again is based on social science theories.
>Which again is based on social science theories.
In English, economics and its subfield of political economics are not generally included under “social sciences”. The reasons for this are primarily historical, but there is a principled distinction: “social science”, as the term is normally used, relies on the tabula rasa assumption about human nature.
>To the Left, if one is not fully in compliance with The Party Line, one is an Enemy of the Revolution, aka “far-right”.
It’s worse than that. All this ‘how blue I am, how blue I am, nobody knows…. how blue I am’ talk about someone famous for his deliberate rejection of orthodoxy and history of siding with enemies of The Mother….
No, no, ESR is much worse than an unbeliever. He’s an apostate.
All talk is based on free markets as a basis of society.
Free markets are a consequence of the non-aggression principle. When you refrain from taking what you want by putting a gun to your neighbor’s head, you’re left with voluntary exchanges of goods and services as the only way to obtain things you can’t produce by yourself.
@esr
““social science”, as the term is normally used, relies on the tabula rasa assumption about human nature.”
That is not a science at all.
>That is not a science at all.
Are you expecting me to disagree?
“Social sciences”, as presently constructed around the tabula rasa assumption, are bullshit. The people working under that assumption suffer from extreme self-induced stupidity. There are efforts to rescue the social sciences going on, launched from within economics and evolutionary biology, but those attempts have been met with fierce political opposition. I do not expect this to change in the near future.
If the social sciences would embrace research into the field of memetics, it might actually achieve some level of legitimacy and credibility. Every child born in this modern era gets their firmware written by the dominant (and transient) PC tropes permeating society at any given time. What used to be passed on as “ancient wisdom” is now frequently a mish-mash of trendy new age parenting guidance and political indoctrination memes. And all of this nonsense runs contrary to our innate genetic programming that was derived from surviving the gauntlet of evolutionary trials. Our ancient psyche is now at war with the modern pansy version.
@esr
Are you saying sociology and social psychology are not social sciences. Or are they not practiced in the USA?
Strange.
>Are you saying sociology and social psychology are not social sciences. Or are they not practiced in the USA?
They are practiced here, and they’re full of shit. Often intensely politicized shit.
Not just going from secondary sources here; I read journal articles occasionally. Hard to avoid it due to my interest in the scientific evidence pertaining to firearms policy. Most of what I see is rife with tendentious assumptions, shoddy statistics, and glaring errors of reasoning.
I suppose it’s possible that the gun-policy stuff is exceptionally bad, but by what I hear secondhand about other subfields it’s probably no worse than slightly below average for the “social sciences” as a whole. Your “social psychology” seems to be among the worst offenders; criminology seems to be among the least damaged.
@esr
I have no idea about gun policy stuff. But I have seen some writings from you that do not set a high bar on empirical evidence. Or any bar.
But here is some research from the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR)
http://aissr.uva.nl/research/publications/spotlight/publications.html
Only one about guns it seems (second page). And then it is about social norms. Not something you will like.
> >Are you saying sociology and social psychology are not social sciences. Or are they not practiced in the USA?
> They are practiced here, and they’re full of shit. Often intensely politicized shit.
The worst are the Colleges of Education. Take a look at one of them some time.
*SHUDDERS*
Or don’t, and save your sanity.
>The worst are the Colleges of Education.
No, they’re only the second worst. As abysmal as the Colleges of Education undoubtedly are, any victim-studies department – the sort of people readily taken in by the “Conceptual Penis” hoax, or catfighting over that Tuvel paper drawing parallels between transgenderism and transracialism – is far, far worse.
>Until just now, I hadn’t connected that to my experience of minority X; but JAD is dead right, it’s an uncanny-valley effect. I feel like I should have noticed this sooner.
Which is kind of why I posted in that thread asking about reactions to people with extreme body modifications, mutations, and birth defects, as well as amputees.
It behooves me, at this point, to remind you and Winter that — as observed by another Dutchman, Edsger Dijkstra — the Atlantic Ocean has two sides.
Dijkstra goes on to observe that on one side of the Atlantic, scientists are, in the main, trusted and left to do their work in peace; where as on the other they are much more likely to be treated with suspicion and scorn.
I submit that on the side where scientists are treated with suspicion and scorn, there is considerably more grant money available for “politicized bullshit” (PBS), i.e., results that benefit or cater to the biases of an establishment, than there is for conclusions derived from data in good faith; and that the “softer” the discipline, i.e., the closer it is to policymaking, the greater the disparity in funds available for PBS vs. funds available for honest research.
Verifying or refuting this hypothesis sounds like an interesting problem for the University of Amsterdam’s social sciences department.
>I submit that on the side where scientists are treated with suspicion and scorn, there is considerably more grant money available for “politicized bullshit” (PBS),
Earlier today I happened across an article arguing that the problem is more fundamental and has brought on a crisis in the discipline of psychology:
http://redux.slate.com/cover-stories/2017/05/daryl-bem-proved-esp-is-real-showed-science-is-broken.html
Which only further supports my hypothesis: the other side of the Atlantic doesn’t have anywhere near the problems educating its young that this side has.
@TomA:
That makes no sense. Everything humans do and are, including both the ancient and modern psyches, come straight from “our innate genetic programming that was derived from surviving the gauntlet of evolutionary trials” for the simple reason that the person possessing either kind of psyche is a successful result of that very survival process, something that can be proved by the simple fact they all reached an age to be able to do and express those things, as well as to reproduce, hence to be able to spread them both memetically as well as genetically.
Look at Larry Arnhart’s list of natural human desires and you’ll notice both psyches simply give different weights to the individual desires, all the while being both equally bounded by them:
The difference then is much smaller than it seems at first glance.
Besides, having this flexibility to attribute different weights to each one of those desires is actually a good evolutionary trait in itself, as it allows individual humans, and societies as a whole, to move beyond the strict set of weights needed for survival in the savanna, thus providing for survival in agrarian societies, survival in an industrial context, survival in massively artificial urban centers, and eventually survival in post-scarcity and entirely alien contexts, including maybe even an uploaded one.
Which suggests this question: what is the modern psyche, meaning the set of weights people who can be thus classified apply to those 20 desires, evolutionarily optimal for? Because for something it must be optimal, otherwise it wouldn’t have arisen and thrived as it did in Western societies to the point of becoming threatening to the ancient one.
And, similarly, this related question: what is the ancient psyche badly optimized for, or even utterly detrimental for, that there were and are contexts in which it not only doesn’t thrive, but actually shrinks?
Paul Brinkley on 2017-05-09 at 22:34:34 said:
Are you thinking of Talcum X?
http://media.breitbart.com/media/2015/08/shaun-king-screencap-640×480.jpg
>Are you thinking of Talcum X?
I’ll have you know that when I successfully parsed “Talcum X” I laughed so hard I almost pissed myself. How did I not know of this tag before?
@ Alexander Gieg
A dissertation is not feasible on a blog post, so I will try to be brief.
Our evolutionary lineage traces back a few million years, during which time most of our genetic heritage was formed (slow process over a very long duration). About 200,000 years ago, we evolved complex language skill and (uniquely among all other species) adapted it’s functionality to pass wisdom from generation-to-generation via postpartum reprogramming of our youth during their early developmental years (in essence, biasing brain wiring through repetitive messaging and ritual).
During the last few millennia, this process (memetics) has grown to become a parallel evolutionary channel in addition to the ancient and universal genetic archetype. But memetics is characteristically different; it has a very fast cycle interval and has only been in existence for a very short time (in genetic evolutionary terms). It is also somewhat malleable vis-a-vis DNA encoding.
It is irresponsible, if not literally insane, to presume firm knowledge of this new process based upon a few thousand years of recorded history and a few centuries of cognitive awareness and associated research into this aspect of human nature. When I was a young man, humility was a desirable attribute in the hard sciences. Sadly, the soft sciences seem to emphasize arrogance and dogmatism.
@Jeff Read
“Dijkstra goes on to observe that on one side of the Atlantic, scientists are, in the main, trusted and left to do their work in peace; where as on the other they are much more likely to be treated with suspicion and scorn.”
I have observed that the suspicion and scorn is almost exclusively reserved for science that does not support the prejudices if the scorner. It is as if Americans loath the idea of learning something new.
If what Shaun King (“Talcum X”) claims about his parentage is true, then no matter what he looks like, he is — according to the historical criteria used to determine race in the USA — black.
“One drop of blood” and all that.
@TomA
“About 200,000 years ago, we evolved complex language skill and (uniquely among all other species) adapted it’s functionality to pass wisdom from generation-to-generation via postpartum reprogramming of our youth during their early developmental years (in essence, biasing brain wiring through repetitive messaging and ritual).”
You display a level of certainty that has no basis in evidence. If you are really interested in these matters, I would suggest to read up a few articles from here:
Special Issue on the Biology and Evolution of Language
https://link.springer.com/journal/13423/24/1/page/1
The whole idea of RE-programming of children is utterly misdirected. Children adapt to their surroundings and learn to live among other people. And describing human learning as “biasing brain wiring” is not insightful, as it also describes learning in nematodes. Human learning has higher order aspects that distinguish it from nematode learning.
Memetics might be a very fruitful direction of research in human cognition, but there are rather complex problems studying it.
https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-85047453/the-problem-and-potential-of-memetics
I have not followed the field since the early 2000’s,. If you know of studies that have resolved these problems, please share them with us.
@ Winter – “You display a level of certainty that has no basis in evidence.”
The entire recorded history of religious traditions (all across the planet and in every niche of human habitation) is evidence of the efficacy of repetitive messaging and ritual to reprogram our young by instilling wisdom gleaned from prior experience. If you doubt the power of this technique, you may want to read up on how suicide bombers are brainwashed into overriding their innate bias against self-destruction. Hint – it starts at an early age, and Islam is nothing if not repetitive when it comes to dogmatic messaging.
The evidence is there. You choose not to see it.
@TomA
“Hint – it starts at an early age, and Islam is nothing if not repetitive when it comes to dogmatic messaging.”
Sorry, but most suicide bombers are recent converts. Most often petty criminals who were total losers even in that career. Young men running amok is a staple in human history.
>Sorry, but most suicide bombers are recent converts. Most often petty criminals who were total losers even in that career. Young men running amok is a staple in human history.
Most? No. Don’t forget the retarded/developmentally disabled. Those are popular recruits. Which, combined with what we know of common criminals, means when you need to groom suicide bombers quickly you need stupid people. People, dare I say, unusually susceptible to brainwashing.
On a longer time frame, you have Palestinians. Oh my but those poor degraded tools are just a treasure trove of cautionary tales walking upright.
Data, please.
@ Winter
So you are arguing that religious practices do not imprint knowledge or alter behaviors of developmental children subjected to routine messaging (e.g. verse memorization, prayers, hymns, proverbs) or rituals practices (e.g. rhythmic vocalizations, conforming hand gestures & body postures, deference to visual iconography, peer reinforcement); and that the persistence of these traditions is what . . . accidental or metaphysical?
And you are wrong to characterize suicide bombers as mostly recent converts, nut jobs, or the exceptionally stupid (see 9/11). And Japanese kamikazie were none of those things. Their ability to override the self-preservation instinct was enabled by a cultural devotion that began in their youth and systematically altered this fundamental behavior. Even during the Pacific Island campaigns of WWII, many Japanese soldiers chose suicide over surrender.
Memetics exists because it works, not because it’s a conspiracy against PC notions of the blank slate.
@TomA
“And Japanese kamikazie were none of those things.”
Young men giving their lives to defend their families or group? I do not think we need memes to explain that, or even language. There are animals who do that.
@TomA
“So you are arguing that religious practices do not imprint knowledge or alter behaviors of developmental children subjected to routine messaging …”
No, but this is a description of growing up itself. Schools and education just use these methods for particular purposes. Children are no tabula rasa, but they need to learn and practice for 20 years to become fully functional and productive members of society. Memes might be (I stress “might”) a useful description of how some of this knowledge and know-how spread.
“If what Shaun King (“Talcum X”) claims about his parentage is true”
If what a proven liar says is true? That’s an interesting hypothetical. But no.
“according to the historical criteria used to determine race in the USA”
By “historical” and “in the USA” you mean “has had no legal effect anywhere in the U.S. for fifty years, and never had any legal effect in the first place in the majority of the states, or at the federal level”?
Again, that’s a rather… idiosyncratic… definition.
@Doctor
I specially like the concept of invisible blackness.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule
>Today there are no enforceable laws in the U.S. in which the one-drop rule is applicable. Sociologically, however, the concept remains somewhat pervasive, embraced mostly by people of Sub-Saharan African descent, and research has shown that some white people associate bi-racial children with the non-white race of the individual.
As usual, the longer you continue an argument the more incoherent you become, due to the twists turns and goalpost moving required to continue “winning”.
Nobody cares about your one drop rule. Nobody has, in a long time. Apparently your wiki article claims some people do still care, but only black people. Crabs in a bucket. Fail to see how that even says anything about the other vast majority of the population, which you claimed (with the implied racism slur).
And the extremely vague as to be meaningless claims about bi-racial children associated with their non-white race…. You haven’t spent much time actually living with actual Americans in actual America, have you?
Bi- or multi-racial children have to actively and aggressively assert the non-white portion of their identity if they want anyone to pay attention to it. Otherwise it tends to fall by the wayside. This seems to be especially true of East Asian mixes.
@Greg
“Apparently your wiki article claims some people do still care, but only black people. ”
Which is the group of people Shaun King wants to be a member of. So him having one drop of real African blood in his arteries seems to matter. Or am I wrong?
Personally, I would find all this “true race” stuff hillarious if it wasn’t so sad.
@Greg:
I don’t think that you’re arguing against winter in this particular instance.
@ Winter – “No, but this is a description of growing up itself. Schools and education”
Do you understand that public educational institutions have only been around for a few hundred years, and that most children have only been exposed to this type of influence for the past century or so (in First World countries), and that formal schooling is still rare for much of the planet’s population? Whereas, paleo-archeologists believe that the earliest evidence of human settlement was for religious purposes (see Gobeki Tepe ruins), which predate Stonehenge by about 6,000 years.
I think what bothers you about this argument is that religions historically taught ancient wisdom and modern schools (at least in this era of Liberal PC control) are now principally used for political indoctrination (read socialism), and you do not want anyone to see behind that curtain.
>Which is the group of people Shaun King wants to be a member of. So him having one drop of real African blood in his arteries seems to matter. Or am I wrong?
Even accepting without evidence the claims of a known liar….
You’re wrong in who you imply it matters *to*. Which in itself, matters.
Why are you in such a hurry to insist that American blacks are terribly racist?
>I don’t think that you’re arguing against winter in this particular instance.
I don’t care all that much about Shaun King. He’s a joke. Though his identity claims are based on such a horrific admission against interest (if true) you almost are inclined to be sympathetic.
I do object to his use and characterization of the one drop rule, which he’s already partly walked back from, taking goalposts with him.
I gotta say, Talcum X and Racael Dolzeal inspire in me the same (near zero) level of caring as someone who dyes their hair red and drinks green beer for St. Paddy’s Day. If it weren’t for the legacy of racists and counter-racists, it wouldn’t matter any more for most people.
@TomA
“Do you understand that public educational institutions have only been around for a few hundred years, ”
“Public”, yes, but the “academy” was the name of the school of Plato and “Lyceum” that of Aristotle. Schools have been around for thousands of years and the teacher pupil relation is older than any current religion. It might even be baked into our genes.
@TomA
“I think what bothers you about this argument is that religions historically taught ancient wisdom and modern schools (at least in this era of Liberal PC control) are now principally used for political indoctrination (read socialism), and you do not want anyone to see behind that curtain.”
The aim of education is to make children grow up as functional and productive members of society. This is not always in the best interest of the pupils, and it is not always (or very often) executed well. But a community that teaches their children to be maladjusted, unproductive members of society has only a short future ahead.
That you consider that “socialist” is your private problem. Other parents will not be bothered by your disapproval.
@Greg
“Why are you in such a hurry to insist that American blacks are terribly racist?”
I think African Americans can take up new members in their ranks based on any principle, or no principle at all. I most certainly think they will ignore the oppinions of non members like you and me. I have not followed this particular story, but I do remember? it were not black people who complained about Shaun King’s ancestry. But that was brought about by “white” media who want to silence the black lives matter movement.
Hey, you can become a member of a Scottish clan if you fight for their cause. Why not become an African?
@Doctor Locketopus
@Greg
Er… have I missed something important here? With regards to what statement, other than the one that is in dispute here (and therefore not “proven” or “known”), has he been established to be a liar?
@ Winter
So, now your are arguing that Plato, Aristotle, and their ilk educated the masses of children born all over planet for thousands of years, and even preceded religious practices and traditions.
And your noble prescription for educational aims, how does that mesh with the demonstrated conduct of students at places like Berkeley and Middlebury, where they actively and violently advocated for censorship and repression of speech? And some of the most violent of these offenders where members of faculty.
Winter, I agree.
If you moved to Japan, after years of living in the culture and speaking the language you could obtain citizenship and be legally recognized as “a Japanese person”. And this was in some way true at least since William Adams/Miura Anjin.
(Racism is much more prevalent and overt in Japan. Japanese not of Asian descent frequently are still kicked out of “Japanese-only” shops, despite how wrong this is from a legal and moral perspective.)
So as far as I’m concerned, even Rachel Dolezal’s blonde white ass could claim to be black, if she were immersed in black culture and were willing to accept the random police stops and the moms pulling their kids to the other side of the street to avoid crossing paths with her. The problem is she’s the worst sort of opportunist. She clains to be white when it suits her to be white and black when it suits her to be black.
>>I don’t think that you’re arguing against winter in this particular instance.
>I don’t care all that much about Shaun King. He’s a joke. Though his identity claims are based on such a horrific admission against interest (if true) you almost are inclined to be sympathetic.
>I do object to his use and characterization of the one drop rule, which he’s already partly walked back from, taking goalposts with him.
Patrick, now I get it. I reread the entire thread.
I apologize to Winter. He didn’t initially bring up the one-drop thing as a slur, Jeff Read did.
>Er… have I missed something important here? With regards to what statement, other than the one that is in dispute here (and therefore not “proven” or “known”), has he been established to be a liar?
You’ve missed a lot of somethings.
As an activist, he’s actually more of a grifter. He has a history of starting groups, fundraising for them, then shutting them down under mysterious circumstances and not ever explaining where the money went. Here’s a taste:
http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/16/charities-touted-by-black-lives-matter-activist-shaun-king-appear-to-have-never-existed/
As a reporter, he’s actually more of a fabulist. Try this one:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/feb/23/c-bo-calls-shaun-kings-shootout-story-a-lie-i-dont/
Or a plagiarist. Hard to say on this one, seems a little odd that an editor would repeatedly and persistently make the same mistakes on only King’s pieces. Make of it what you will.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/19/media/shaun-king-daily-news-plagiarism-accusations/
>it were not black people who complained about Shaun King’s ancestry. But that was brought about by “white” media who want to silence the black lives matter movement.
Relations between King and the rest of BLM have not always been rosy. Possibly because he’s a toxic clown. See previous post. Also:
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/13/black-lives-matter-leaders-just-excommunicated-shaun-king/
He is still often identified with BLM, but some of that is rather harsh. Purging own ranks to remove a vulnerability level harsh.
BLM’s racist-tinged Marxism is self-refuting enough, and without support from a sitting President they seem to be fading from view.
Apologies to ESR for this digression.
Is letting this veer into arguments over identity politics in general considered harmful?
>Is letting this veer into arguments over identity politics in general considered harmful?
I’m not sure yet. I shall speak sternly if it becomes unconstructive.
@TomA
“So, now your are arguing that Plato, Aristotle, and their ilk educated the masses of children born all over planet for thousands of years, and even preceded religious practices and traditions.”
For obvious reasons, schools have existed at least since the invention of writing. Also obvious, these schools were for those who needed to learn to write. Other children were taught what they needed to learn as apprentices. Only when all needed to learn to read and write was every child send to school.
@TomA
“And your noble prescription for educational aims, how does that mesh with the demonstrated conduct of students ”
Parents want successful children. Students want to have a career, nations want a productive population. Schools have to deliver. They are often not up to the task.
@TomA
“where they actively and violently advocated for censorship and repression of speech?”
I vaguely remember reports of US students who did not want to learn disturbing facts or reading disturbing books. But I cannot find a link anymore.
The PBS series “Frontline”, which is usually outstanding, had an episode last year that made me sick. Just sick. It’s called “Growing Up Trans” and it’s about children whose parents retard their puberty with drugs and get them mutilated. And the general tone of the program was one to normalize that. You have psychologists and doctors advocating it. It’s sick.
If my 12 year old daughter had a fit and demanded to be transitioned, that I call her a boy’s name, etc, well I’d treat that the same way I’d treat an eating disorder. Honey you are not fat, you’re too skinny, so I’m going to force you to eat. I am not going to let you destroy yourself because as a parent it’s my job to protect you from your own instincts.
Besides, how white and rich and bored do you have to be able to contemplate such a thing?
@Baron…
“If my 12 year old daughter had a fit and demanded to be transitioned, that I call her a boy’s name, etc, well I’d treat that the same way I’d treat an eating disorder.”
It is not a fit and it will not go away. It can be as dangerous as an eating disorder. For the rest, see above. Such decisions are never taken lightly, and nothing definitive is done until the child has become an adult.
@Winter (2017-05-28 at 16:46:32)
If anyone is wondering where the backlash against trans is coming from, I direct your attention right here. Very nearly everyone is sympathetic to the tiny, tiny fraction of the population with medical issues. But not every confused or attention-seeking child has a medical condition. For example, see here:
https://archive.is/PqQyQ/e67f1a663deac10d72b608dae458f1d330f70505.png
You can’t accept that a child, even an imaginary hypothetical child, might be confused or attention-seeking. And that says a lot about you, and the Marxist left that you are typical of.
@kjj you are making an unreasonable straw man of Winter’s position. He did say clearly “Such decisions are never taken lightly, and nothing definitive is done until the child has become an adult.” – however, your (EDIT: Er, BaronHarkonnen’s, but I see no reason to think you would be any different) decision, to perform no evaluation that even considers the possibility that the hypothetical child may not be confused, sounds like it would be taken lightly, with no effort to ascertain the truth beyond your prejudices.
@kjj:
A relevant comment by a friend of mine about similar reactions:
@Random832
Thanks for confirming my point. Anyone who doesn’t automatically assume that a child is fit and capable of making a permanently life altering decision is a bigot.
@Alexander Gieg
I use Marxist very intentionally. Winter is clearly not a conservative or a libertarian, so there is no inversion. And I didn’t go to extremes by calling him a Communist, though I could probably back that charge up with quotes from him if I cared to. No, Winter is a Marxist – he wants to tear western civilization down and is automatically and reflexively opposed to any western traditions, institutions or values. “Gramscian robot” might be a more apt term, but I tend to think of those as useful idiots, while Winter seems more like a true believer.
How long have you been reading here? Has a presumption of good faith from Winter ever worked out?
At any rate, my point wasn’t about him, beyond illustrating the harm he and his kind are doing to the cause they claim to support.
@kjj
“No, Winter is a Marxist – he wants to tear western civilization down and is automatically and reflexively opposed to any western traditions, institutions or values.”
It is such a long time since I have met a Marxist, I would not even know what that means nowadays. Did Marx or Engels write about gender identity? Not that I know of. Those Marxists I have seen in my life were just as sexist and homophobic as the rest of the population, if not worse. So I do not see how “Marxism” could be relevant here.
But you call me a Marxist like you call me a “devil-worshipper”. Just a catch-all phrase for people whose words should be ignored, even must be ignored. The rest of this sentence supports this interpretation. I should be treated as the anti-christ, a Satanist who sacrifices newborns etc..
But in the end, you are just calling me names to distract the readers from realizing you have no rational arguments. You seem to be against gender change for religious or ideological reasons that have nothing at all to do with concern for the health and well being of trans people. And you have no rational arguments left.
Schools often get named for their founders, even after their founders have moved on. Kenyes didn’t personally argue for most of what we call Keynesianism, but we still call it Keynesian. Marx was long dead by the time the Frankfurt school got busy translating his ideas from economics to culture. But please, do carry on with your silly game of No True Marxist.
And for the record, I consider myself to be included in the “very nearly everyone” I mentioned earlier. I have, in fact, so much sympathy for those with genuine medical problems that I desire to shield them from people who, like you or the mother quoted in the headline I posted earlier, seek to use them.
But note that all careful readers will by now have noticed that yours is the second confirmation of my point. Anyone who doesn’t automatically assume that a child is fit and capable of making a permanently life altering decision is a bigot. More generally: Anyone who doesn’t automatically assume that any and all cases of gender confusion are the result of legitimate non-psychological medical problems is a bigot.
>Anyone who doesn’t automatically assume that a child is fit and capable of making a permanently life altering decision is a bigot.
This is not just contingently wrong, it’s a category mistake. “Bigot” is properly applied not to the content of beliefs but to a pathology of belief formation, a particular kind of unsanity.
That is, it is possible for either a bigot or a non-bigot to hold the belief “A child is not fit and capable of making a permanently life altering decision.” The difference is that while a bigot has an emotional need to believe surrounded by a thin rationalization, the non-bigot is actually rational about the belief; if he is wrong it is because he is ignorant or has trusted bad evidence.
The behavioral test is that a non-bigot is willing to update his beliefs when presented with better evidence and arguments; a bigot is not.
@kjj:
Only if you assume the totality of political thought is encompassed by these three categories. I myself, for instance, am neither of those, I’m a Distributist. Using solely those categories, I’d be “classified” as a conservative-marxist-libertarian, even though Distributism predates all of them. So, not very useful.
I could say that of Classical Liberalism, Libertarianism, American Conservatism and pretty much everything I, as a non-American, know of the US right now, up to and including everything taught and preached in the Bible belt. On the flip side, actual Marxists believe they’re defending the actual Western values as originally identified by Hegel by advancing the dialectical historical process, whatever that might mean. Which is why talking in this way is more akin to using weasel words than to objectively addressing concrete issues.
Try to taboo the words “Marxist”, “Conservative”, “Libertarian”, “Western Civilization”, “Western Traditions”, “Western Institutions”, “Western Values” and their synonymous, and to express your points by referring to the specific concrete realities hidden behind them. That alone is an excellent way to avoid being sidetracked by, among other things, signaling and groupthink.
A few years. And yes. I know people from all over the political, philosophical and religious spectrums, from one extreme all the way to the other in all of them, and talking with them has always been quite constructive. Now and then I find someone who is truly intellectually dishonest and acting out of some agenda, but it’s a rare event.
Except that hasn’t been the case. All along this thread the need for careful psychological evaluation of children cases has been defended by all parties. The case you pointed to is an exception to the rule professionally followed, as well as to the position of all here.
If you’re actually interested in the subject, the APA lists the requirements for the diagnose of transsexualism in children. None of them involve the children “deciding” anything (emphasis are mine):
Those in your linked article were forcing the child to do things the child didn’t want to. That has absolutely nothing to do with the above criteria. So taking that article as an example of anything other than bad medical practice is to incur in a straw man.
Early in our specie’s evolutionary development, our ancient brain functioning was largely quick and reactive, driven by impulse response from the hindbrain region. For example, if our perceptive senses indicated that imminent danger was present, this triggered an immediate fight-or-flight reaction. This mental trait kept our ancestors alive long enough to reproduce and hence is a non-trivial (and innate) feature of our current DNA.
Because we no longer live in a world dominated by extreme hardship and existential threat, our modern brain functioning has evolved to emphasize cognitive reasoning and slower response; e.g. when we repose in relative safety, we have time to think and analyze and judge and plan. This latter development is relatively recent, and has both an ancient DNA component and (within the last few millennia) a more variable memetic component.
Perhaps when we encounter an uncanny valley stimulus, this triggers a re-emergence of our ancient hindbrain reaction, which may then be misconstrued as irrational bigotry.
@TomA
“Early in our specie’s evolutionary development, our ancient brain functioning was largely quick and reactive, driven by impulse response from the hindbrain region. ”
I think this descripton does not fit any of the great apes, least of all Homo Sapiens. The great apes have a big cortex because they use and need it.
@TomA
“This latter development is relatively recent, and has both an ancient DNA component and (within the last few millennia) a more variable memetic component.”
It is the defining aspect of humans at least since they became homo sapiens if not longer (ie, our ancestors).
@ Winter
It is because many of the higher order ape species have evolved a larger cerebral cortex (and hence exert some override control on hindbrain function) that these primordial hindbrain responses appear to be diminished when compared to other mammals. But they are still present and function. Observe any ape species (or human for that matter) upon being startled or frighten unexpectedly.
@TomA
Of course do humans use all areas of their brains. That is why they are there in the first place. But all apes plan, they even have politics (Frans de Waal, Chimpansee politics and many other works).
I am completely confused about what you are trying to say. All humans are complex, speaking, planning and scheming individuals. Always have been. So what is the problem?
@kjj > Thanks for confirming my point. Anyone who doesn’t automatically assume that a child is fit and capable of making a permanently life altering decision is a bigot.
That is not in any way what I said. Do you really believe there is no difference between “automatically assume that a child is right”, vs using what they are saying as a starting point to prompt you to investigate the possibility that what they are saying might be true?
Not bothering to investigate because you a priori do not consider it to be a thing that can be true is what makes you a bigot.
It’s not the child’s decision – it is yours, and you have a responsibility to make the right one.
(Also, taking puberty blocking drugs is not obviously a “permanently life altering decision”, whereas going through puberty obviously is a permanently life-altering process. It being the ‘normal’ course of someone’s life doesn’t make it not permanent and doesn’t make it not a change.)
>But you call me a Marxist like you call me a “devil-worshipper”.
Marxists are far worse than devil-worshipers. While people are occasionally murdered by dark occultists (or those who believe themselves to be such) those numbers are measured in tens (maybe hundreds).
Marxists have murdered >100 million people in the last century.
“All humans are complex, speaking, planning and scheming individuals.”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2132748-monkey-mafia-steal-your-stuff-then-sell-it-back-for-a-cracker/
@esr
Apparently, I should have written “BadPerson” instead of “bigot”. In actual usage, the words “bigot”, “racist”, “sexist”, etc. almost always mean something like “I want you to shut up” or “I want other people to ignore your words and shun you”. I thought it was clear from context that I was using the conversational, rather than technical, meaning. This place is a bit more posh than where I usually hang out, and I should have known better.
—
@Random832
You are stuffing words into my mouth, at least if you are using the word “you” to refer to me, and not as an impersonal (like “one”).
Now, BaronHarkonnen gave no indication that he’d investigate further in his hypothetical. If he meant that as a permanent condition, I’d call his position as contemptible as Winter’s. He hasn’t been back to clarify, but I’ll note that he used an eating disorder as an analogy, and forced feeding as treatment. Unless you believe that he is ready to imprison his daughter until the day he dies of old age, leaving her alone to starve in a fit of irony, I think we all might be able to agree that professional help might not be totally excluded should the two imaginary problems exhaust his patience.
—
On a related note, I think we are now up to 4 or 5 examples of my argument in action. And that is just counting from when I posted it. (If you find a smaller number – look again. Some are subtle.)
What do we find in the past? Let me direct everyone way, way back to May 14th, when Winter said “This whole discussion about suicide is just used as an excuse for discrimination and exclusion.”
Catch that? If you noticed that surgery doesn’t improve the one objective sign of helpfulness, it is because you are a BadPerson. It can’t possibly be because you think we should try to figure out why we are unable to distinguish between those who can be helped by surgery and those who cannot. It is because you are a BadPerson.
I think it is safe to say that I haven’t misrepresented Winter. I might be wrong about his motivations (I don’t think I am), but I have perfectly captured his public statements of opinion here. If this is not what he really believes, why has he said it twice? And why hasn’t he said anything here to the contrary? (Go look.)
Everyone who cares about people with physical sex issues, mental sex issues, confusion, uncertainty or doubt needs to stop treating them like a single thing, needs to stop accusing of hatred those who seek to disambiguate the subgroups so that appropriate treatment can be provided, and most of all, needs to stop letting people like Winter speak for them.
@kjj
“It can’t possibly be because you think we should try to figure out why we are unable to distinguish between those who can be helped by surgery and those who cannot. It is because you are a BadPerson.”
That has and is being studied. No solution found yet. What is clear is that I think we should give those afflicted the right to decide over their bodies and lives. You seem to deny them that right.
@Doctor
“Marxists are far worse than devil-worshipers. ”
Anything to silence free-thinking and different oppinions, don’t you?
More people have been murdered for being accused of devil worship than for being accused of communusm. Although, fascists did murder a lot of people for being communist.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-communist_mass_killings
>Anything to silence free-thinking and different oppinions, don’t you?
Pointing out the facts is “silencing”? Oooo-kay.
> More people have been murdered for being accused of devil worship than for being accused of communusm.
Dead wrong. Not even close. Not even the same order of magnitude. The death toll from the Spanish Inquisition was somewhere around 5,000, and many of those were Jews and Muslims, not people accused of devil worship.
>Although, fascists did murder a lot of people for being communist.
So? How does one group of socialists murdering another change anything? Even if it did, the death toll from Marxist socialism far exceeds that from fascism and Naziism.
@Doctor…
“Pointing out the facts is “silencing”? Oooo-kay.”
This post is about the rights of trans people to NOT be ostracized for their choices. I support the rights of trans people to decide over their own bodies and life. Now people who want to ostracize trans people are trying to ostracize me by accusing me of being a Marxist. The irony does not escape me.
Where in any of my years of commenting did I condone or support the killing of people? Where did I advocate to censor voices or incarcerate political opponents?
And how about yourself? What is your position about the rights of those you do not agree with? About incarcerating or killing those you do not like? What about the rights of Communists?
@Doctor…
“Dead wrong.”
Sorry, but the Spanish Inquisition did not believe in witches and devil worship. However, in the rest of Europe, tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people were murdered for witchcraft. Especially when compared to the population sizes, much less people were murdered for being a communist (which is NOT murdered by communists).
@Winter:
Neither did Karl Marx. Therefore, being a Marxist does not require supporting the killing, incarceration, or silencing of political opponents.
@Winter
What have I said that gives you that idea? Please copy and paste the exact quote and provide a link to the original.
@Alex K
“Therefore, being a Marxist does not require supporting the killing, incarceration, or silencing of political opponents.”
Actually, I have known real Marxists (they have become extremely rare), and none of them supported any of those things. But in the (alt-)right of the USA the actual ideas of Marx in the context of his time are irrelevant, Marxists == Mass Murdering Maniacs == Demonic Devil Worshipers/Witches
Btw, I do not know why they think I am a Marxist. Probably, it is the equation: Non-Libertarian == Bad == Left == Communist == Marxist. Just as Hitler is considered a Marxist here.
@kjj
“What have I said that gives you that idea?”
Maybe I mis-interpreted your words. Above, you wrote:
You write here about the wish of transgenders as a medical issue. I cannot look into your head, but in general, trans people do not feel they have “medical issues”, they have issues that can only be resolved by medical intervention. Just like cosmetic surgery is often not a solution to a medical issue, but an emotional one.
The point here is that “medical issues” are not decided by the “patient”, but by the doctor. This is all strengthened by your focus on suicide risks. Trans people do not want a gender change because it reduces their suicide risk.
You also write:
“It can’t possibly be because you think we should try to figure out why we are unable to distinguish between those who can be helped by surgery and those who cannot.”
Helped by whom? Who is to decide? The trans people, or some authority?
Currently, the medical profession only investigates whether the the person is certain about the procedure and mentally sane. Other than that, it is the person who decides what will happen.
Maybe that is also what you think? But your attacks on me seem to indicate that you think my ideas that it is the trans people that decide about their bodies are wrong.
@kjj
” Please copy and paste the exact quote and provide a link to the original.”
I wonder whether you can supply the quotes where I supported Marxism, mass executions, censorship, tyranny, or any of the other horrors of the WWII era? I am very curious what I have written there that makes me a Marxist.
@Winter:
I have know some who did. Marxism has several subdivisions, and members of some of them do defend those things. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, or MLM, is particularly adamant about the validity and necessity of those things. Dialoguing with MLMers can be quite stressful, but it’s possible provided one knows Marx well enough to refute their arguments from within their own frame of reference. They dislike this deeply, but cannot go too heavily against whatever you’re saying lest they accuse themselves of unorthodoxy and “reformism”.
Be as it may, the point is that those things exist, and are actively defended. Sure, MLM and similar positions may be a minority, but sometimes a minority can still be extremely damaging…
Winter:
I don’t think so. Eric and others have claimed that Nazis are socialists, not specifically Marxists; remember that there are non-Marxist socialists, such as the utopian ones (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen).
(This is just nitpicking; I’m staying out of the debate for the time being.)
>I don’t think so. Eric and others have claimed that Nazis are socialists, not specifically Marxists
Right. Fascism rejected some important elements of Marxism (mostly around class warfare, immiseration, and the dialectic) but kept Leninist political economics, vanguardism, and revolutionary terror. It’s best understood not as straight Marxism but as a Marxist heresy. Indeed, this was actually the intention of Georges Sorel, the theorist Mussolini (and later Hitler) followed.
@Winter
Are you certain that your best move here is to pretend that you are too stupid to tell the difference between your claim that I gave a specific opinion vs my general assessment of your apparent worldview?
And for the record, my “attacks on you” have nothing to do with “trans people” or any people but you.
Winter simply believes that his advocacy for socialist principles is both appropriate and benign. He cannot conceive of a scenario where the implementation of enforced collectivism leads to any great harm. The current example of Venezuela would be excused as an imperfect execution of the socialist ideal (no pun intended).
Are you thinking of Talcum X?
Still nope (but great find, btw). The guy I’m thinking of has a heavier build.
“One drop of blood” and all that.
By that argument, all of us are black. (Yayyy!…?)
@esr
” Fascism rejected some important elements of Marxism (mostly around class warfare, immiseration, and the dialectic) but kept Leninist political economics, vanguardism, and revolutionary terror. It’s best understood not as straight Marxism but as a Marxist heresy. ”
Then Islamists, e.g., IS, are socialist too. Actually, almost anyone not a USA Republican or Libertarian is a socialist by this view.
@TomA
“The current example of Venezuela would be excused as an imperfect execution of the socialist ideal (no pun intended).”
Personally, I was thinking of Scandinavia and Germany as examples. Or Belgium and the Netherlands. Or the UK, or France. Social-Democracy in action.
@TomA
“He cannot conceive of a scenario where the implementation of enforced collectivism leads to any great harm. ”
Any totalitarian regime leads to great harm, irrespective of the ideology. That seems to be very difficult to understand, I gather. But the particular ideology is rather irrelevant.
Well of course a totalitarian regime is bad regardless of what words they use to justify it.
But the 64 million dollar questions are: What is the probability of a given ideology leading to totalitarianism? And how bad can it be expected to get if it does?
On that measure the the entire family tree that includes Communism, Socialism, and Fascism leaves everyone else in the dust.
>However, in the rest of Europe, tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people were murdered for witchcraft.
1) Nonsense. About a thousand people were executed for witchcraft in Germany, and it was by far the worst example of the witch hunt craze.
2) Even if it weren’t nonsense, tens or hundreds of thousands is a lot less than a hundred million.
> Actually, almost anyone not a USA Republican or Libertarian is a socialist by this view.
Also nonsense. There are any number of economic models that don’t match US Republicans, US Libertarians, or Marxist/Leninist socialists.
Feudalists. Distributists. Mercantilists. Many others.
Your problem is that you’re so deeply immersed in the Marxist/Leninist cult that you can’t imagine any other models.
@Ian
“What is the probability of a given ideology leading to totalitarianism? ”
Pick up a history book and tally totaritarian emperors, kings, and other assorted rulers from Classical Greece, Rome, and China by ideology. Do not forget pharaos and mongol rulers and the likes of Peter the Great.
I doubt that many were Marxist.
” Even if it weren’t nonsense, tens or hundreds of thousands is a lot less than a hundred million.”
Who ever claimed that hundred million people were murdered on the accusation of being a communist? I think you should read more carefully.
Btw, your estimation about the witch craze are rather low.
@Doctor…
“Feudalists. Distributists. Mercantilists. Many others.”
Which, combined, make up what fraction of a percent of the current human population?
> Btw, your estimation about the witch craze are rather low.
You, of course, have solid evidence to back your claim that ~100,000 were killed as devil worshipers (or witches, whatever)?
Hint: no, you don’t.
>Which, combined, make up what fraction of a percent of the current human population?
Don’t give yourself a hernia moving those goalposts, dude.
But, given that Trump got elected based on a fundamentally mercantilist position, and that China is currently operating a de facto mercantilist economic policy, the answer would be “a pretty high percentage, actually”.
>Pick up a history book and tally totaritarian emperors, kings, and other assorted rulers from Classical Greece, Rome, and China by ideology.
A peasant in the Roman Empire had essentially zero interaction with the Emperor. Someone came by once in a while to collect taxes, and soldiers would come if there was an invasion. That’s about it. The local magistrate (if any) might or might not be autocratic, but he certainly didn’t get any day to day direction from Rome.
Micromanaging every aspect of a person’s life requires the apparatus of a modern socialist state, the essential technology for which did not exist in Classical times.
“You, of course, have solid evidence to back your claim that ~100,000 were killed as devil worshipers (or witches, whatever)?”
~50,000 is the consevative estimate.
“~50,000 is the consevative estimate.”
And your solid evidence to back this claim up is?
We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not want—but not to obey. Society must thus be secured against the intrusions of the Good, or of God, so that its citizens may determine their own lives by the choices they make from a universe of morally indifferent but variably desirable ends, unencumbered by any prior grammar of obligation or value (in America, we call this the “wall of separation”). Hence the liberties that permit one to purchase lavender bed clothes, to gaze fervently at pornography, to become a Unitarian, to market popular celebrations of brutal violence, or to destroy one’s unborn child are all equally intrinsically “good” because all are expressions of an inalienable freedom of choice. But, of course, if the will determines itself only in and through such choices, free from any prevenient natural order, then it too is in itself nothing. And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2003/10/christ-and-nothing
Winter on 2017-05-30 at 05:09:35 said:
@Doctor L says:
Winter, misunderstanding, or misinterpreting (deliberately or otherwise) responds:
Note that in the first statement Doctor L is saying that *Marxists*, which is an umbrella term that to most people who haven’t spent way to much time reading that nonsense is effectively synonymous with Communism.
Remember most people wouldn’t know Trotsky from Mao if you showed them pictures.
That said, Marxists, and their inheritors (Communism, Leninism, Maoism etc.) killed somewhere between 85 and 100 million people in the 20th century, either by shooting them outright, or by deliberately starving them to death.
“Satanists” have killed maybe (maybe) 1 percent of that in the same period? Totally guessing because there’s no data that Google can find.
Unless you want to count the folks working for the Austrian Corporal as “Satanists”, but that’s stretching the term far enough that you could, by the same rules, stretch “marxist’ to fit.
To elaborate on my point about treating my 12 year old’s (hypothetical) struggles with feeling like she is the wrong gender the same way I would treat an eating disorder: (btw by “force to eat” I don’t mean force feed. I mean sit at the kitchen table until she finishes her turkey bacon sandwich and pasta and then not allowing her to leave my sight for a few hours (movie time!). Every day. And of course really work on persuading her that she is, in fact, not fat and that she needs to eat, with help of child psychologist if needed. Likewise if she’s gotten too big for her own good, I would cut her calorie count. That is not fat shaming, that’s being a parent. A child is not competent to make decisions about their own health. Left to their own devices kids would eat frosted flakes for dinner, brush their teeth with soda, and never touch a vegetable. Unacceptable.)
Moving back to the gender struggle. The problem would be what if I had exhausted all my options wrt going to psychologists and after a few years she’s still fixated and longing to be a boy, is not outgrowing it. What then?
Well there is absolutely nothing that could compel me to have her mutilated, nothing. And I’m surely not dropping 30 grand (which I don’t have, who does?) for drugs to destroy her natural development. I guess I’d treat it like I would her having a mental illness she needs to overcome. I don’t use that term in derision, I mean it literally, the same way I would describe a heart problem that needs to treated and compensated for. The example of people who are convinced they should not have one of their limbs is a good analogy. Obviously something is wrong in that person’s brain. It’s nothing personal, not mocking, it’s tragic, the person is suffering, and needs help. The damaging action proposed must to be stopped and coped with – not indulged in the name of not being a bigot!!
Here’s the scenario which concerns me that I observed in the Frontline episode I mentioned that is godsmackingly not seen by the documentary makers, in their zeal to be open-minded and not bigoted:
This kid in the show, who is all of 8 or so when this begins, well his mother latches on to it with a passion and goes on a crusade. Kid participates in pride marches, the works. Can the child really change his mind in the face of that? At that point he can’t really say “uhhh you know I wanted to be a pony last year, didn’t really mean it, now you know, next, I’d like to be a jedi” because that would disappoint mom and having raised a huge fuss with the school and everything, this kid has no choice but to continue to go along with it, long past the point of having outgrown it. That is what made me sick. The parents actually driving it.
Another scenario: say a girl, for instance, is very awkward and bullied and derided by the mean girls and ignored by the boys and just left to flail by her parents. Well doesn’t that kid have every incentive to pull out the “I’m a boy!” card? Suddenly everything changes. Parents become super involved, the school bends over backward for her, and none of the kids can mess with her anymore. And I’m not saying the child would be doing this as a cynical plot to relieve her suffering, no, it would be a psychological defense mechanism. Like thinking “what’s wrong with me?! why does everybody hate me?!” and then “a-ha! it’s because I’m a boy!!” but in reality it’s because she’s just a kid like every other who’ll grow out of it. As many geeks can attest to! Being unhappy and miserable in your own skin as a kid is NORMAL.
Parenthood is hard. You have to say no sometimes. Giving your child everything he/she wants is not love, it’s laziness, and it’s harmful.
@BaronHarkonnen:
In regards to the first point, you wouldn’t be able to even if you wanted, because the surgery isn’t done on minors unless something extraordinary happened, such as an accidental mutilation or whatever that required surgery “right now”. Besides, it isn’t mutilation, it’s a plastic surgery.
About the second point, that’s akin to refusing your child any other kind of recommended medical treatment, preferring to keep them ill. Sure, you can refuse it for any reason whatsoever. If “natural development” is how you chose to justify going against the by then scientific knowledge, so be it, others use other plausibly or implausibly sounding reasonings for the same result. What would happen then would be that your child would grow, become an adult, and then, with high probability, decide to begin taking the medication and going through the by that point additionally required plastic surgeries so as to arrive at their real, mind-matching body, thus finally getting healed from their gender dysphoria.
And in regards to the “what if” scenarios you mentioned, they don’t fit the medical criteria for diagnosis of transsexuality in children. The criteria are quite strict, and serious psychiatrists take them, very, very seriously before diagnosing something as equally serious as gender dysphoria. I listed the criteria a few replies above.
@Alexander Gieg
The data I’ve seen say that 75% of confused children resolve naturally during puberty. Do you have better data on that, or are we calling 1-in-4 “high probability” now?
—-
Speaking of data, if data, perhaps from a twin study, suggested that GD was caused by a post-natal experience, rather than being an innate condition, would everyone agree that prevention is the most humane way to proceed? Or am I going to be called a BadPerson again just for bringing it up?
That is actually interesting as it relates to the original topic. I suspect that most people will give a discordant identity-claim more slack if that discord is genetic, and less if it is chosen later. But what if a child is traumatized, and then reinforces that trauma daily for years and years?
@….
“That said, Marxists, and their inheritors (Communism, Leninism, Maoism etc.) killed somewhere between 85 and 100 million people in the 20th century, either by shooting them outright, or by deliberately starving them to death.”
This is funny. You are all so monomanic and ideolgically blinded that you cannot even read anymore.
I was comparing the numbers of people killed for being devil worshipers or communists. To stress the obvious, this is about devil worshipers and communists being the victims. Note that most of these victims were not even worshiping the devil or communist.
I must admit that I was rash. Looking at the numbers again, there were more people killed for being a communist than a witch. In Indonesia alone, a million people were murdered for being, alledgedly, a communist. The upper number of death toll from the witch hunts are generally put at a few hundreds of thousands at the most. Documented cases go only to ~50,000.
@JimR
“And your solid evidence to back this claim up is?”
None, as I am not a historian. I have used the marvels of search engines. I would like to recomend “Google.com” and Google Scholar” (for primary publications), but there are many more. If that is too difficult, you could try a site called “Wikipedia.org”. That site is comprehensive, but does not have primary sources.
For instance, you will easily find this page:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_executed_for_witchcraft
Which quotes 40,000-50,000 deaths. Clicking on the citations, you see a list of references which quote numbers around 50k. Which is why I used that number.
@kjj
“Speaking of data, if data, perhaps from a twin study, suggested that GD was caused by a post-natal experience, rather than being an innate condition, would everyone agree that prevention is the most humane way to proceed? ”
I am afraid you are confusing “genetic” and “innate”. Innate is what you have when you leave the womb. That is your genetics, indeed, but also everything that happened in the womb, including epigenetic factors.
But for the rest, parents and the medical profession always want to prevent problems, rather than cure them. It is not that trans people want to have the wrong body for their mind. It is just that they ended up with a mismatch.
@BaronH
“And of course really work on persuading her that she is, in fact, not fat and that she needs to eat, with help of child psychologist if needed. ”
I am afraid you underestimate the seriousness of mental disorders. It is the very fact that they do not respond to reason that makes them a serious threat to life and limb.
Echoing back to (one of) the points which prompted this post, there appears to be another Sokal/Tuvel-like* paper that was published recently: Assembled Bodies: Reconfiguring Quantum Identities by Whitney Stark. Full text is behind a paywall, so I haven’t read more than the abstract, but all signs point to being a high-grade hoax….
[*: Sokal was a deliberate hoax; Tuvel wrote seriously, even if the paper is controversial or bad scholarship. As much as I may be presently convinced Stark is also hoaxing, there is certainly plenty of room for doubt….]
@Blake
“And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.”
But this has always been the case. Your conscience has always been yours. And you can always follow the moral rules set by other people. As most people do. And for inter human bussiness, we have the law.
The law of god(s) has never been clear and unambiguous, and morals always followed local customs. Nothing changes due to individualism.
@kjj:
I was being hyperbolic. But now that you mention it, that’s the reason why the surgery isn’t done to children and teens. Gender dysphoria is the illness. If it gets solved, that’s what matters. Surgery is for those cases in which the illness becomes so strong that nothing else did or will solve it.
I would agree. Gender dysphoria is a very hard illness for one to suffer from.
I also think most transgender individuals would agree that not having to go through it would have been orders of magnitude better than having gone through it, irrespective of transsexuality becoming fully socially accepted or not. Can you imagine what it’s like to look down, or into the mirror, and to be absolutely certain your body is wrong? Every single day, for years or even decades, many times since early childhood?
If it were possible to preserve people from going through this, doing so would be the morally proper choice. Not due to transsexuality being wrong, but due to the psychological suffering alone.
@AlexK –
> Full text is behind a paywall
I was able to find an open copy at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/654589/pdf (NOTE: this might be because I’m checking from my work address at the Uni. Someone else should check that URL.)
As for content – it’s at least pretentious bafflegab, more likely arrant nonsense, and very possibly a deliberate hoax. (This judgment based upon a quick skim of the first couple of pages; I very nearly drowned in the verbal sludge.)
> If it were possible to preserve people from going through this, doing so would be the
> morally proper choice. Not due to transsexuality being wrong, but due to the
> psychological suffering alone.
You mean like giving young deaf children Cholear implants?
https://www.startasl.com/cochlear-implants_html
John D. Bell on 2017-05-31 at 14:19:30 said:
> I was able to find an open copy at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/654589/pdf (NOTE: this
> might be because I’m checking from my work address at the Uni. Someone else should
> check that URL.)
I get a bar at the bottom if the page what says:
> As for content – it’s at least pretentious bafflegab, more likely arrant nonsense, and
> very possibly a deliberate hoax. (This judgment based upon a quick skim of the first
> couple of pages; I very nearly drowned in the verbal sludge.)
I don’t think it’s a deliberate hoax. I think it’s someone who is using lit crit definitions to try to apply physics concepts to identity studies.
@William O. B’Livion:
Oh! That’s cool! Thanks for letting me know such a thing exists!
But back to the topic: I’m in favor of everything that improves people’s lives. Sex Reassignment Surgery is such a thing, as are Cholear implants, designer babies and everything else along the same lines, up to and including, once they become available, designer bodies. My support of transgender rights comes not only from health considerations, but it’s also predicated from individualism and transhumanism.
Therefore yes, pretty much. :-)
“I was comparing the numbers of people killed for being devil worshipers or communists.”
Too bad that wasn’t what anyone else was talking about.
You tried to change the subject, and it didn’t work. My original statement was that being called a Marxist was much worse than being called a devil worshiper, because Marxists have killed far more people than devil worshipers have.
Apparently unable to refute this (or even respond to it in a substantive manner), you then tried to switch the topic to something completely different, in a manner reminiscent of a cat attempting to bury a turd on a hardwood floor.
I know that this is a classic Communist debating tactic, but it doesn’t work nearly as well when the original words are still there for all to read.
@doctor
“My original statement was that being called a Marxist was much worse than being called a devil worshiper, ”
Being called a devil worshiper could get you burned alive. Being called a communist was less dangerous, in most cases. But maybe not. Quite a number of eople have been murdered for being called a communist.
But my points were that
1) Being called a witch does not make you one. The same with being called a Marxist/Communist
2) The point of accusing people of being a communist is to silence them when you have no arguments left.
I think you and others have done everything to illustrate my points
@Doctor
“Too bad that wasn’t what anyone else was talking about.”
That is because you are dogmatic maniacs who are stuck in a single groove. And you are like anti-semitist in Poland. There are an order more anti-semitist in Poland than there are jews left. Just like there are orders of magnitude more communist hunters than real communist left.
And if we then focus on those communist still left, none of them were involved or responsible for the mass murders of Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. Blaming them for these murders is blaming every living anti-semitist for the holocaust. There are as many communist who want to repeat those horrors of Stalin and Mao as there are anti semitist who want to repeat the holocaust or white supremacist who want to reinstate slavery for blacks. (although I might have doubts about the last one).
But in the end, you call me a Marxist/Communist because you have no arguments left and want to silence my voice.
>But in the end, you call me a Marxist/Communist because you have no arguments left and want to silence my voice.
Don’t play the martyr. Way back when you first showed up here, you described yourself as a “good commie”. Nobody silenced you then, and nobody is silencing you now.
“You mean like giving young deaf children Cholear implants?”
Cochlear implants are great. When applied early (IIRC ~ 6 months), speech development of children will be almost normal.
@esr
“Don’t play the martyr. Way back when you first showed up here, you described yourself as a “good commie”.”
Humor was never the strongest point of this blog. And I asked for quotations that show I am a communist bend on world domination and mass murder (communist alone will do). Never got an answer. I also asked those accusers::
No answer yet, only more repititions of this global number of 100M murdered and starved people. According to this type of “calculation”, the British Empire “murdered” countless millions in Bengal, Ireland, Australia, and Southern Africa. However, no one considers these “the murderous exploits of the UK”.
Also, I am not a martyr. I just point out that such accusations are used to ostracize and silence unwanted opinions. I have seen nothing that contradicts this conclusion.
@ Winter
Calm down. No one wants to silence you, and no one expects you to change your beliefs. In addition, your consistency and commitment to socialism provides a good foil to many of us on the other end of the political spectrum.
And we understand that much of Western Europe is more socialistic in its governance than here in the USA, but most of us don’t want to follow you down that road. And our reasoning for this is quite rational. Were it not for our armed forces, you would likely be living under the totalitarian rule of either a Fascist or Communist dictatorship right now, and quite possibly could have become another statistic in that 100+ million death toll.
If you should succeed in bringing us down with you, who will bail you out the next time?
> No answer yet, only more repititions of this global number of 100M murdered and starved people. According to this type of “calculation”, the British Empire “murdered” countless millions in Bengal, Ireland, Australia, and Southern Africa.
The British Empire did murder a lot of people. Not anything like a hundred million, though.
If anyone here were advocating for the return of the British Empire, you might have a point. They aren’t, and you don’t. The British Empire no longer exists. It’s been defunct since WWII (arguably, WWI). The same is not true of Marxism. Marxist regimes still exist, and are still murdering people as we speak. The average “Nazi” or “KKK” group consists of about five rednecks meeting in someone’s garage. Marxists still control entire countries, with standing armies and nuclear weapons.
Marxism is also somehow still socially acceptable. That needs to change.
Also, the British were running a pragmatic empire for profit, and you can’t do that if everyone is dead.
Communists run empires based on a pseudo-religion, where killing unbelievers is not only unobjectionable, it is often viewed as a positive good.
> I just point out that such accusations are used to ostracize and silence unwanted opinions. I have seen nothing that contradicts this conclusion.
And yet here you are, still posting. How, pray tell, have you been “silenced”?
>But in the end, you call me a Marxist/Communist because you have no arguments left
No, I am calling you a Marxist socialist because you quite clearly are one, just the same as I would call someone a Nazi socialist who quite clearly was one. Unlike the SJW types, though, I don’t call people Nazis just because they disagree with me.
Sorry for the duplucate comment in moderation.
@Doctor
On second thought, I am less interested in me than in you.
So, how about telling us the answer to my question:
“What is your position about the rights of those you do not agree with? What about the rights of Communists?”
And demonstrably improved the quality of life for about half the world. The residents of the British Empire lived more peaceful and prosperous lives than the residents of the former Empire in the following years. India’s stagnation is a textbook case in the economic impact of institutions.
My comments remain stuck in the moderation queue.
>My comments remain stuck in the moderation queue.
Not permanently. Akismet (the shared WordPress spam filter) is being slow. I’m doing some manual filtering to speed things up.
There is a significant problem with your definition of identity, namely, the SCOTUS has expressly ruled otherwise.
Obergefell defined a right to “choice of intimate identity and beliefs” and based the new definition of the institution of marriage on that right.
On a different note, you describe identity as a performance claim. Some identities certainly are performance claims; to run with your own example, I would assert that anyone calling themselves a libertarian yet supporting invasion of foreign countries (at least with taxpayers forced to pay for it) actually isn’t a libertarian.
But is *all* identity it a performance claim? That is a far stronger statement. It would, for example, push names out of the realm of identities, since obviously having a name is not linked to performance. Also, one can change one’s name at will (being an adult) and it is generally expected that people will use the new name.
So then, is gender like a name, or is gender like being a programmer (or libertarian)? Is there any tangible benefit to treating gender as a performance claim? This is at least non-trivial.
Also, of all people, ESR, why would *you* object to people modifying their bodies and body-linked social appearance for whatever the F reason they want? Mental, shmental – the entire development of technology is, and always was since the wheel and since fire, *about* transcending biological borders. Yes, one can say “a man can not become a woman”, but one can also say “a man can’t fly”. The former is just taking a little more time to break through than the latter. But I trust the creative spirit of techies will win out again. “No can do” is, for all I know, abhorrent to any old-style hacker worthy of the name – so, really, why?
The more I think about the flight analogy the more I like it. People who wanted to fly were considered insane. (Or worse, witches). This was a long battle. It was won.
The battle for full transition will most likely be won, too, barring major war diverting resources. The artificial and implanted uterus will bring the performance argument around. (It will also kill the abortion debate by decoupling the rights of two persons – which could probably be done by now if those billionaire pro-lifers were to put their money where their mouth is).
And we’ll all have a good laugh then about the old attack helicopter memo. The attack helicopter transition will probably be here *before* full sex transition. Because big military-industrial complex money.
@Christopher
“And demonstrably improved the quality of life for about half the world. ”
I am sure you do not mean this to be a justification for starving a few million people to death. Are you?
>What is your position about the rights of those you do not agree with? What about the rights of Communists?
They should have exactly the same rights as Nazis, and be treated with exactly the same degree of social acceptance.
Next question.
@Doctor
“Next question”
That is an evasive answer. And how should both groups be treated?
Doctor: “They should have exactly the same rights as Nazis, and be treated with exactly the same degree of social acceptance.”
Exactly. I’ll go along with the “punching a Nazi is always a good thing” current leftist meme only if I’m allowed to say the same for Communists.
@ Mikhail Ramendik
Language arose in our species as a utilitarian aid to communication, and was instrumental in our eventual rise to the top of the biological pyramid. Before we acquired the higher order brain function of discretionary cognition, we used words accurately or likely perished. That benefit is still wired into our DNA, even if we now possess the antithetical ability to deceive others via the misuse of words.
The current controversy over transgender identity is fundamentally about the intentional and systematic distortion of language for political purposes. Once you codify the principle (on a society-wide basis) that words can mean whatever the fuck we want them to mean when it suites our political agenda, then you infect society with the disease of confusion; which is not a trivial matter. To do so is anti-evolutionary.
esr: “as a white male I am required to accept someone else’s ideologically-driven decision about whether Rachel Dolezal is black”.
This brings us to an interesting point. Why do you ever – like, EVER – need to accept, or reject, someone’s decision about whether Rachel Dolezal is black? What does “black” or “not black” mean to you practically, in absolutely any situation at all? You are very unlikely to administer affirmative action, nor to run a “racial rights” movement, and any other reason I can think of is outright unethical, let alone unlibertarian. (I am purposefully not engaging in the question of the merits of affirmative action and racial rights movements).
I could theoretically see you coding some sort of probability-based medical diagnostic system. But for medical/genetic evaluation, “ethnic origin” is a far more useful formula that encompasses the issues of “race” fully, and then some; for example, “Ashkenazi” or “Anglo-Saxon” is far more informative than “white”, and I suspect “Ethiopian” or “Bantu” would be similarly more informative than “black”.
And so you don’t actually seem to have a reason to care if she is “black”.
Next, I posit that for the vast majority of cases (anything outside reproduction or certain forms of sexual engagement) you have no valid reason to care if a person is male or female biologically.
@TomA: language itself changes with social evoluton, and transgender identity is by far not the first case when such changes were contentious and were linked to major social issues.
To take an example also related to gender, a century and a half ago it would be entirely normal to mention a married woman as “Mrs.” followed by her husband’s full name (as in “Mrs. Mikhail Ramendik”). This usage was linked to the doctrine of coverture, which became a major issue of debate as society progressed towards equal rights. People would boldly use language “incorrectly” to protest against this doctrine. And then, later, a new “incorrect” honorific, “Ms.”, was designed to signify a woman without linking her to her married status. And this “incorrectness” eventually pushed its way into the dictionaries.
I posit that, just as it was wrong to link women’s status mainly to their marriage (or lack of such), it is wrong to link a person’s status mainly to their biological sex. And the push for transgender-related changes to language is a polemic reaction to this injustice, just like refusal of the old full form and then the use of “Ms.” were polemic reactions to the other injustice.
Sweden is ahead of the game with official acceptance of a gender-neutral pronoun, “hen”. There are various proposals to this effect in English but none has established itself as the one prevailing option so far. (This has the side effect of all the proposals becoming forms of “preferred pronouns”, a situation that is unlikely to be resolved until the main English-speaking countries agree on an official gender-neural pronoun; I would personally support canonizing singular “they” just as singular “you” was canonized a few hundred years ago, but any one official solution will do).
This is just a normal case of social and linguistic evolution.
As an aside, there was another gender-related issue with the English language. The word “man” was both the word for a social category normally reserved for biological male humans and the only correct word for a single human being.
Thanks mainly to science fiction (Star Trek perhaps played the key role?), the word “human”, singular noun, entered the mainstream. It was outright incorrect 50 years ago. It is official now, see http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/human (meaning number 2). And we’re all better off for it, except the Bible translations, which, for all I know, did not catch up as yet. (They really need this new form to translate the Greek “anthropos” correctly).
“That is an evasive answer. And how should both groups be treated”
By the government? The same as anyone else.
By private individuals/institutions? Up to the individuals involved. I personally think that both groups deserve extreme social ostracism, but I’m not going to make that determination for others.
I am not sure why you consider that “evasive”, since it’s essentially just a restatement of the U.S. Bill of Rights.
How do *you* think they should be treated? Do you think that Marxists deserve better treatment than Nazis? If so, why?
@Alexander Gieg
If you heard a little voice in your head saying “Hey, wait a sec…” as you typed that, it is because you read this whole thread and your brain was busy connecting some dots.
Let me translate that into the opposite frame:
Sounds like the opposite of prevention, doesn’t it?
> And so you don’t actually seem to have a reason to care if she is “black”.
Sure he does. Using a (possibly) less politically charged example:
Let’s say my city has a program to (e.g.) subsidize local balloon animal vendors. I think this program is a bad idea, waste of money, violation of the city charter, whatever… I’m opposed to it altogether, root and branch.
Now, let’s say that I find out that balloon animal vendors from neighboring cities are collecting the subsidy by pretending to be local vendors.
You are apparently arguing that my opposition to the program as a whole does not permit me to be even *more* outraged when I observe the program being abused by fraud.
How does that work?
@ Mikhail Ramendik
I don’t know if you are unintelligent or just being obtuse in your argument, but you need to go back and reread my comment.
No one here would restrict the freedom of speech of another individual who elects to misuse language in service to a personal agenda (be it political or grammatical). Transsexuals are free to pursue an evolution of language via broad societal acceptance leading to new word formation. The objection here is to using the power of government to force such changes upon its citizenry regardless of whether there is broad acceptance or not. The accurate word for this type of act is tyranny, but many on the Left would prefer it be termed “social justice.”
And it is still stupid to codify language distortion as an everyday practice rather than a rare occurrence. We already have self-appointed SJW Nazis that will attempt to destroy you (via government force) if you resist the diktat to follow their rules.
@Doctor
“How do *you* think they should be treated? Do you think that Marxists deserve better treatment than Nazis? If so, why?”
Socially, I treat people on issues, not ideology. Advocating violence or discrimination are reasons for me to act, irrespective of ideology. For the law, everybody is equal, and only actions count, not thoughts or opinions.
How many were saved from starvation? Compare, for example, modern Zimbabwe to Rhodesia and South Africa of 1980 to that of 2020. You’re pretending there’s no trolley problem.
@TomA thankfully, whatever the SJWs may want to impose, the First Amendment stays where it is in the good old US of A.(*)
The only speech that government even *can* regulate is the kind used in commercial interaction and, to a degree, in government-run education. All of these areas are already already heavily regulated; there is no such thing as freedom of speech between employer and employees.
Also, government setting academic standards of language is actually a widespread practice, though it sometimes leads and sometimes follows public usage. Of the two examples I mentioned, Swedish “hen” was the government leading, while English “a human” was the government following. I guess you prefer “government following”. But even when government leads in setting a standard, outside of school examinations and licensed commercial activities it is in the US, and should be everywhere, powerless to prohibit people from using other options.
To take the language change which already IS mandated in the United States, “marriage” is now a union of any two willing adults. And the SCOTUS decision forces states to issue licenses on an equal basis. And it forces any employer offering marriage benefits to offer them equally. It can not, however, force ordinary people to call any couple they don’t consider married, whether same-sex or interethnic or interreligious or divorced-and-remarried, “married”.
In the same way you are not forced to call a trans woman a woman and to use feminine pronouns unless you are an employer or service provider in a commercial transaction. Whatever the SJWs might want. Misgender away. Free country.
(*)Things are murkier in Europe,where all sides are guilty of censorship, but this issue is FAR wider than transgender-specific language questions – up to the ridiculous censorship competition between Russia and Ukraine, where Ukrainian censorship is roundly ignored by those condemning the Russian version and vice versa.
“Socially, I treat people on issues, not ideology.”
Really? How many Nazis did you invite to your last party?
@Doctor
“How many Nazis did you invite to your last party?”
As many as Communists. I neither know any Nazis nor do I know any Communist.
Also, I pick my friends not on ideology. We have so many political parties that we never bother about a person’s party affiliation. But I do shun people advocating violence or discrimination. Again, that is independend of party ideology.
Winter: “I neither know any Nazis nor do I know any Communist.”
You Americans seem to live dull lives. I know some Communists, both from my earlier life in Russia and here in Ireland. Not only do I know them but I collaborate with them on some political things while having heated debates on others.
There are two political things I collaborate with them on:
– Syria. It turned out that the guy who organized a “hands off Syria” rally here in Ireland was, and is a Communist. I prefer the Communist to the Jihadi, because right now Communism is a theoretical threat but Jihadism is a very practical one. And whatever the crimes of Assad, the so-called rebels, excluding Kurds, are really Jihadis or their puppets, and always were. Here is some good evidence from New York Times, not exactly a Putin mouthpiece. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/magazine/theo-padnos-american-journalist-on-being-kidnapped-tortured-and-released-in-syria.html?_r=1 .
(Note in particular that Theo Padnos was held hostage in the building of the children’s hospital, where the so-called FSA, Jihadi puppets, had a command centre. When Aleppo was being liberated, yes liberated, Western media and twitter exploded in “the only children’s hospital of Aleppo was bombed!” – while it was known for two years what really was located there).
In my view, it is time for a massive anti-Jihadi alliance similar to the anti-Hitler alliance of 1941-45 (Stalin was even worse than Assad). Trump seemed to have this view too, until the massive U-turn after the (likely false flag) chemical attack. Now that Trump no longer holds the line, I gotta stick with the Reds on it, there’s nobody else in town.
(Also much of the rise of modern Jihadism is atributable to US and Pakistani support of Afghan Mujahideen in the 80s against the Communists. They “repaid the favor” with 9/11, but they always repay favors like that, what with the murder of the ambassador in Libya, etc.)
– Ukraine. After the violent coup of 2014, the new powers (which have serious neo-Nazi links) have instituted increasingly draconian censorship. Journalists and bloggers were imprisoned, and lately, they are trying to block large swathes of the Internet. A very visible target of the censorship were communists; there is an outright ban on symbols and texts of that party. So, despite their history of very different views, they are now suddenly forced to be defenders of freedom of speech.
As for the gender and language debate, my big point is that this is about more than just the transsexuals, just as the push for “Ms.” was not just about a handful of feminists.
This is about breaking the hard link between the status of EVERY person and their biological sex. In most cases it simply should not matter, just like other biological properties (hair color, skin color, etc). We “expect” far more differences between “a man” and “a woman” than just the genitals and the reproductive capabilities – and this expectation, while well grounded in history, is mostly as obsolete as, say, the horse-and-carriage. The horse-and-carriage was once ubiquitous and very useful, too; it is now the realm of specialist farmers and hobbyists. That’s where strict gender distinctions should go, too, and for much the same reason – development of technology.
Ultimately, even the bodily differences should be overtaken by technology. And that’s where transsexuals are among the pioneers, starting from the 30s, when Lily Elbe died from complications of an attempted uterus transplants.
But while the body remains one of those “final frontiers” along with space, in many other areas (even including many kinds of warfare, though not all of them, but certainly in nearly every civilian occupation imaginable) technology has long since overtaken any rational need for differentiation. And the differentiation should go. The line between “man” and “woman”, between the ubiquitous “he” and “she”, NEEDS to be blurred, not just for the sake of those individuals who are uncomfortable with their current designations, but for the sake of all of us who want to live in the 21st, not 19th, century.
>This is about breaking the hard link between the status of EVERY person and their biological sex.
That will never happen. Human beings are not beings of sexless pure light accidentally wrapped in meat shells; we are embodied intelligences in which mentation is entangled with our physicality (including our sexual biology) in complex and subtle ways. In particular, androgenized brains differ in important ways from non-androgenized ones. This is why biological sexual identity will continue to be important, and telling lies about it will continue to sow confusion and discord and unhappiness.
I find your point of view bizarre and disconnected from reality, reminiscent of mystical Gnosticism. We don’t have Varley-grade sex-change technology and it is not clear we will ever have it; it is specious to argue about how we should behave today as though it already existed.
The differences between brains exist on the level of averages, not individuals. On the level of averages they also exist between other biological groups too, like the ethnic clusters that are very clumsily thrown under the “race” category.
And your very logic was used by some 19th century politicians to say that the status of a person would always be linked to their “race”.
Well, it wasn’t. Apart from some fringe racists and some SJWs and some affirmative action aficionados, the status of a person is completely divorced from their “race” – DESPITE the difference in averages.
I posit this has to happen with sex too, outside the limited areas of medicine, reproduction, and certain sexual acts.
I also posit that requiring a person, other than in the aforementioned contexts, to divulge their biological sex, or to accuse them of “lying” when they prefer to use their gender identity not linked to biological sex, is disingenious. You do not have an intrinsic right to know a person’s “race”, why would you state such a right to know a person’s “sex”?
On the basis of linguistic tradition? As we know from the previously assumed right to know a woman’s marriage status, this is not a fixed measure.
Here’s a question from your core area of expertise: would you review a patch to code or text that you maintain differently depending on whether it was sighed John, Jane, or Sasha? (Sasha is a sex-neutral name, or name form, depending on what language we are talking about).
>Apart from some fringe racists and some SJWs and some affirmative action aficionados
That’s a pretty big hole in your argument. Get back to me when that breakage has been fixed, because while I would like to be indifferent to an individual person’s race, present political conditions could result in me being ostracized or even prosecuted by law if I actually behaved towards everyone as I do towards white males. Especially if I’m an employer.
>You do not have an intrinsic right to know a person’s “race”, why would you state such a right to know a person’s “sex”?
See above. If for no other reason, it’s dangerous to be unaware of when one is dealing with a member of what the law calls a “protected class”. Such a person could very likely destroy one with a false accusation of racism or sexual misconduct.
>Here’s a question from your core area of expertise: would you review a patch to code or text that you maintain differently depending on whether it was sighed John, Jane, or Sasha?
No, because evaluating a patch does not (yet) expose me to the risks of contact with “protected classes” in meatspace. The SJWs are trying to change this, of course, which is a horrible thing.
If you want to make what you consider accidents of biological identity non-critical identification, you need to abolish identity politics and “protected-class” status first.
Then you need to somehow modify humans so that 95% of their social interactions din’t spin on an axis either directly connected to finding mating partners or performing display- and status-seeking behaviors tied to sexual selection. Good luck with that.
And I think we should not be so quick to discount Gnosticism, anyway. I suggest that we are all to a degree running on Gnostic ideas right here. We’re having a debate that would be impossible in the “physical space”. The assertion of existence of information as a substance disconnected from the particular material carrier was Gnosticism before, now it is just “software” and “data”. Perhaps the Gnostics were simply too far ahead of their time.
“Gnosticism” as automatic condemnation works when a Catholic uses it. You know, heresy and all that. But I am not aware of you, ESR, paying much respect to the Seven Ecumenical Councils, let alone later jazz like Papal infallibility. So there’s actually no reason to say “Gnostic” = “bad”. (I could also mention the Albigensian Crusade but this thread is probably wide enough already).
(This is probably also a piece criticism I should direct to myself, as in, I need to pick up ancient Gnostic books and read them).
So you say the practical reason to know someone’s “race” and biological sex (when you’re not out to date the person) is because women and some “races” are a protected class.
However, anyone can be a member of a protected class. You might be engaging with a person presenting as white male who is actually a white male. But the person, unknown to you, is gay, and that is a protected class. Even if you happen to know the person’s current partner and she presents as a woman and is female, the person might actually be bisexual, which is a protected class too. You can’t seriously investigate everyone’s history, so basically, you have to assume everyone is a member of a protected class.
I am definitely not saying the system is good. In fact, I don’t know enough about that particular issue in your particular state to have any opinion on it, but I do know class-based protection is WAY overrated – especially when it is applied in a lopsided way. Here’s my tweet from the Brendan Eich saga: “End workplace discrimination on sexual orientation, gender identity, and political views. Support @BrendanEich” https://twitter.com/ramendik/status/451686965197676545 . There is a huge number of cases where non-discrimination is applied inappropriately. And in some cases where it should apply, it does not, because certain forces don’t like the person being discriminated against. But again – I can’t speak for your locality.
I am, anyway, saying that requiring correct information about “race” and biological sex in no way protects you against unknowingly encountering a member of some protected class, simply because some protected classes are not easy to detect.
Moreover, a trans woman holds exactly the same potential to ruin you by false accusation of sexual misconduct as a natal woman. In this case, the lack of information about biological sex in itself does you no harm, actual or potential.
It is trickier, perhaps, with a natal female who identifies and presents as a man. That person’s accusation might, in *some* jurisdictions, be believed more readily than a gay natal man’s.
But as for people playing out their monkey side when they should be conducting some kind of business – well, that’s simply their problem. Nobody can be required to give out information about themselves so that someone else can play a monkey game better. Life/liberty/pursuit of happiness (or even “property” if that floats your boat – does not float mine but anyway) does not include “perfect environment for being a chimp”. If we’re talking about monkey games, much “trans” behaviour in those is not trans at all – the ever-present fake online girl who wants free stuff in online games. Try outlawing that ;>
We do agree that anyone trying to force discrimination protection into open source code review should be told to, er… sod off in no uncertain terms. I was not aware of anyone trying. But that’s just me. I know, however, that after Admiral Grace Hopper we know any gender differences in the brain do not impair coding!
@Mikhail Ramendik
“You Americans seem to live dull lives.”
I am Dutch and live in the Netherlands. Both real Communists and Nazis have become rare here. I used to know communists, but that is decades ago. But I do know a lot of Greens and Animal Rights activists as well as Islamophobes. But I do not consider these to count.
@ Mikhail Ramendik
You may continue your crusade in support of muddled sexual biology and the associated distortion of language in order to confuse and deceive, and that is your right as an individual to behave irrationally if you so choose. You can even set up an island nation somewhere (perhaps in the South Pacific) and invite all like-minded others to join you there and live in blissful ambiguity. But for the rest of us, the big picture matters.
Politics has become a hot war and the incipient tyrants among us would use these various aggrieved parties as token mascots in the race to bribe a majority of voters. Promise them whatever they want (no matter how insane) because it’s all about getting to the top of the government power pyramid. You think you’re fighting over some hurt feelings in a few aberrant but persecuted individuals. The reality is that they are just a stepping stone for the rise of the next great tyranny. And when the blood begins to flow, it will be too late for you to say . . . oops, I made a mistake.
@Winter ah yes, for what I know, Geert Wilders seems to have done a good job taking over much of the Nazi constituency with a programme much more liberal than the traditional Nazis. A similar situation exists in Ireland where various IRA types play the role.
I bumped into real Communists (Stalinists!) called the Connolly Youth Movement because I wanted to support the Syrian Arab Army after the Trump U-turn and they were the ones doing the rally. You guys in the Netherlands appear to have the New Communist Party but I don’t know if they actually do anything. The old one merged into the Greens(?)and here’s all I could find from the new one: http://www.solidnet.org/netherlands-new-communist-party-of-the-netherlands
@Mikhail Ramendik
“Geert Wilders seems to have done a good job taking over much of the Nazi constituency with a programme much more liberal than the traditional Nazis.”
His party borders on the fascist, but does stay at the right side of the dividing line. Just as Marie Le Pen, he wants to stay “respectable”. We do have real fascists and neo-Nazis, but they are rare.
@Mikhail Ramendik
“You guys in the Netherlands appear to have the New Communist Party but I don’t know if they actually do anything.”
When the classical communist parties transformed into the Greens and Socialist Party (who both are devoted to peace and freedom), new communist parties were founded. Again, this is fringe politics and I never run into them.
Way back when you first showed up here, you described yourself as a “good commie”.”
What? He presented himself as deceased? ;-)
@TomA this is not actually just about those few individuals. It is about removing entrenched borders, which tend to be cornerstones of tyrannies – for example, the borders of “race” were the cornerstone of Hitler’s. (Godwin’s Law applies, I know).
Most of my clashes on this issue are actually with radical feminists, who believe in a “sex class” theory. Both traditionalists and radical feminists want a world neatly divided into men and women, for different reasons but with exactly the same result. What I want: blurred lines that leave individuals much more space to be themselves, which includes, yes, defining themselves. I have repeatedly been called a libertarian for this position and I always answer I do not agree with economic libertarianism.
>Most of my clashes on this issue are actually with radical feminists, who believe in a “sex class” theory. Both traditionalists and radical feminists want a world neatly divided into men and women, for different reasons but with exactly the same result. What I want: blurred lines that leave individuals much more space to be themselves, which includes, yes, defining themselves. I have repeatedly been called a libertarian for this position and I always answer I do not agree with economic libertarianism.
I’ve been avoiding this subthread, but this seems somehow mistaken. Backwards.
Certain categories exist for a reason, they can provide insights and predictions that pay out. But because something can be abused in some way, you would destroy it to prevent the abuse, instead of addressing the abuse.
Baby with the bathwater?
Which is the grosser intellectual abuse?
In the end, attempts to deal with abuse by avoiding dealing with abuse, creates enormous blind spots, topics that cannot be talked about, that leave areas full of truths (as esr has pointed out on this blog many many times) that only bad people can say. Which makes those bad people look like brave, wise truth tellers, despite being horrible loons.
You can ASSERT your ‘identity’ all you want to, but that doesn’t change reality. If you have the important components of maleness or femaleness (outie or innie), you are what your genitalia say you are.
For those who go the ‘Full Monty’ and change the birth parts to a semi-functional opposite, what you have is: a person who LOOKS to all purposes other than reproduction like the sex they are not. However, we do generally agree that, if you commit to that extent, we’ll agree to pretend that you are of the opposite gender. It’s what is called a legal fiction – not true, but we all pretend that it is.
Interesting read on child gender reassignment:
http://dailysignal.com/2017/07/03/im-pediatrician-transgender-ideology-infiltrated-field-produced-large-scale-child-abuse/
My problem is with the term “identify”, as in “I identify with X”. Usually, a male (XY chromosome) “identifies with” female (XX chromosome). “Identify with” is quite a bit different than “am”. One can “identify with” a hippopotamus (as one clever academic did), but one is still defined (a much stronger term than “identify’) by his (or her) chromosomes. One who refuses to accept reality may well be advised to seek psychological guidance.
This whole discussion is weird to me, coming from a community with a lot of trans people.
Never met a trans woman who made what I’d consider an incorrect prediction about reality. They know perfectly well what their anatomy is like.
It’s also pretty clear that “trans woman” is a category distinct from cis women and cis men. Cultures that have a traditional form of crossdressing (Mongolian peoples are the ones I’m familiar with) usually have a special gender word for “men in women’s clothes.” There’s no real ambiguity there, nor is there any “failure to accept reality.” The reality is that a subset of people with XY chromosomes end up taking a female-typical social role, and it’s useful to have a word for them.