FtttG
User ID: 1175
The last few weeks, I've been doing strength training on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. On each day, I do three of the five exercises, for which I do five sets of as many reps as I can before I have to stop. I vary it so I only repeat one of the exercises on consecutive sessions, and after five sessions I've done an equal amount of all five exercises. For example:
- Monday: deadlift (1), squat (1), bench (1)
- Wednesday: pullup (1), squat (2), overhead (1)
- Friday: pullup (2), overhead (2), bench (2)
- Monday: deadlift (2), bench (3), overhead (3)
- Wednesday: pullup (3), squat (3), deadlift (3)
Every Monday I increment all the free weight exercises by 2.5 kg.
I'm making steady progress on my deadlifts, and can now do ten reps of 152.5 kg without stopping (this website puts my 1RM at 203kg which would put me in the intermediate category for my age and mass – that being said, I've never actually lifted that much weight). Partly this is because I've started using lifting straps: I always found my grip strength was the limiting factor, and it's always the grip on my right hand which falters first, even though that's my dominant hand. I can do fifteen squats without stopping, although admittedly only 80kg (I gave up on squats probably two years ago and have only recently taken them up again). My current goal there is to squat my bodyweight at least ten times, which if I maintain this program I will achieve by January at the latest. I'm a bit frustrated to find that, while my reps and maximum weight are steadily increasing on these two exercises, when it comes to the bench press my maximum weight is increasing but not my reps: last week I could do ten reps at 70kg without stopping, but on Wednesday I could only do seven reps at 72.5kg. My pull-ups are shockingly poor, and with the overhead press I'm starting from literally nothing, having never done one before a month ago.
I think taking protein powder every day (immediately after working out, where possible) is improving my motivation: it doesn't feel like such a struggle to go to the gym before work as it used to.
FtttG
6hr ago
I can't help but thinking that Stoeffel bears a passing resemblance to Denny from The Room. And earlier this year I said the same thing about Ziz.
Is everyone Denny from The Room? Are you Denny from The Room? Am I Denny from The Room?
FtttG
8hr ago
I don't recall ever saying trans people aren't being discriminated against. What I've been consistently saying is that there's a big difference between discrimination and unjust discrimination. If you have gender dysphoria and people "treat you like a mentally ill person", that's "discrimination" – in the same way that it's "discrimination" to make accommodations for people with disabilities. Definitionally, you are treating people differently based on a trait. I literally don't know what the demand is here: "I have a mental illness (gender dysphoria), I am receiving treatment for that mental illness (hormones), it's obvious to everyone around me that I have a mental illness – but I don't want to be treated like I have a mental illness"? It just seems incoherent to me.
If you experience autogynephilia and people treat you like a sexual deviant, that's "discrimination" but, well, you are a sexual deviant. If you dress in a knowingly unconventional manner for your sex and people look at you funny, that's discrimination – but I also just think that's part of the game when you dress unconventionally. No one would care if a goth complained that he stopped being a goth because everyone was looking at him funny, so why should we care here?
I also think the practical effects of the discrimination being experienced matter here a great deal. I don't want trans people to be murdered, beaten up or harassed because of how they identify, nor to be unable to secure accommodation or employment. As trans people are so fond of telling us, they just want to be left alone to live their lives in peace. Over the last ~decade I've had an increasingly hard time believing that's all they want – but if the worst discrimination you can claim to personally experience is that people sometimes look at you funny but otherwise leave you alone to do your own thing, that sounds as close to their stated goal as makes no difference.
FtttG
10hr ago
An AI covered Eminem's "Without Me" in a soul/R&B style and it works incredibly well.
FtttG
10hr ago
If Scott read this, he'd be kicking himself that he didn't think to include it in Unsong.
FtttG
12hr ago
And if they are tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, and they decide to transition, but half-way through, pre-op, they feel the society treat them as a freak, or a sexual deviant, or mentally ill, or just an extremely ugly woman, and they decide to not go through with it.
I'm having a hard time parsing this. I'm sure it must suck for people to think you're mentally ill when you aren't. I'm sure it must suck for people to treat you as if you're mentally ill when you aren't.
But for most of its history, the concept of being transgender was seen as synonymous with suffering from gender dysphoria (or, as previously known, "gender identity disorder"). I have it on good authority (including from people in this very thread) that medics don't just hand out HRT to anyone who requests it, but rather that these medications are rigorously gatekept and people who want to take them subjected to a painstaking screening process, weeding out the malingerers from those legitimately suffering from gender dysphoria. So when I see a clearly male person walking down the street wearing clothes cut for a woman's body, and with visibly budding breasts because he's recently commenced a course of HRT — like, statistically, it's reasonable for me to assume that he's been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and hence mentally ill, right? Are you suggesting that it's a form of "discrimination" for people to correctly identify that mentally ill people are, in fact, mentally ill, and treat them accordingly? In a different context we would call that "accommodation".
"I suffer from a mental illness that made me want to do X, but it made me sad when people started treating like I have a mental illness, so I decided to stop doing X." I don't understand any part of this.
And if they are tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, and they decide to transition, but half-way through, pre-op, they feel the society treat them as a freak, or a sexual deviant, or mentally ill, or just an extremely ugly woman, and they decide to not go through with it.
I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but if you start your transition, people treat you like an ugly woman, and you decide to detransition specifically for that reason, it sounds like you don't want to be a woman so much as you want to be a hot woman. In other words, you're not exactly beating the autogynephilia allegations.
And if you consider autogynephilia a real thing (I certainly do) and think that someone who experiences it is a sexual deviant (certainly that's true in the statistical sense that it's a rare condition; your mileage may vary on the "moral disgust" definition of "deviance"), it's a statistical probability that a given trans woman experiences autogynephilia, with estimates ranging from 60-75% of trans women.
And if they are tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, and they decide to transition, but half-way through, pre-op, they feel the society treat them as a freak, or a sexual deviant, or mentally ill, or just an extremely ugly woman, and they decide to not go through with it.
This sort of reminds me of a column I read years ago in the heavy metal magazine Terrorizer. They had a monthly column written by a standup comedian (whose name escapes me) who was a big metalhead and looked the part: long hair, piercings, tattoos etc. He was discussing a piece of legislation currently being debated in the House of Commons which would essentially make facial piercings and tattoos protected characteristics, and it would be illegal to discriminate against people with these features. In this column, he said that this was ridiculous: by getting facial tattoos or piercings you are making a conscious decision to deviate from the beauty standards and social expectations of your community, and you can't have your cake and eat it. If you want to work in a customer-facing job, don't get face tats. No one forced you to. If you really want a face tat, you must accept the trade-offs that come with that decision.
Like it or not, this is also true of anyone who chooses in an unconventional manner, which includes all obviously male people wearing clothes cut for women's bodies. If you're interviewing for a role as an account manager (for which you are well-qualified) and you walk into the interview wearing a clown suit, I suppose strictly speaking you have been "discriminated against" if the interview panel immediately thinks "freak" and decide not to proceed with your application. We're expected to make a special carve-out for any male person who purports to "identify as" a woman and dresses accordingly, but I'm not entirely sure why. It's not like they're compelled to wear clothes cut for women's bodies, and many of them aren't even the least bit discreet about the fact that they're doing so to satisfy an erotic urge.
FtttG
16hr ago
The concept being referred to for anyone unfamiliar. The tl;dr is that a "scissor statement" is an assertion (or, more nebulously, an event) which is optimised to provoke disagreement and controversy within a particular community. It sounds obviously true/good to one half of the community, and equally obviously false/bad to the other half.
FtttG
19hr ago
I'm forced to conclude it's very unlikely the Rotherham girls were coerced either.
The Rotherham girls were a lot younger than the women/girls on Epstein's island. The official report states that the majority were between the ages of 10 and 16.
FtttG
19hr ago
I don't think it's controversial to imply or state that some Trump voters are self-identified white nationalists. I don't think they represent a majority of people who voted for Trump, and would hazard a guess that there might be fewer than 1 million self-identified white nationalists in the entire US. But if I were to meet an American who described himself as a white nationalist, I would put money on him having voted for Trump over any competing candidate.
Circling back to this: I think what I find so infuriating about this framing is how the claimed purpose of gender-affirming care as life-saving healthcare is being more and more openly discarded, and yet the people who characterised it as such are refusing to acknowledge this, or in some cases (not necessarily yours) denying that they ever so characterised it to begin with.
Medical care is meant to exceed some floor of safety and efficacy, in accordance with primum non nocere. If the government pays for treatments for cancer, they should not also pay for treatments which cause cancer. If the government pays for antidepressants, they should not also pay for things which make people more depressed.
But by allotting everyone a set pot of money which can be used for gender-affirming care or reversing the effects of gender-affirming care so far as is practicable, the government would essentially be abdicating the responsibility of expressing an opinion on whether these treatments are effective medical treatments or not. "You can do this, and if you change your mind you can undo it later, and we'll foot the bill either way" sounds pretty far removed from evidence-based medicine as I understand it. The government might pay to remove someone's malignant tumour, but I can't imagine they'd ever pay to put a malignant tumour back inside; they might pay for treatment for PTSD, but they'd be unlikely to pay to retraumatise someone whose PTSD has been cured. If gender-affirming care is lifesaving treatment, it stands to reason that the government footing the bill for reversing a successful gender-affirming care procedure would be as unthinkable as their paying to reverse a successful course of chemotherapy. But framing it like this (in which you can spend money on the thing itself or the thing to undo the first thing) sounds tantamount to an admission that "gender-affirming care" never had anything to do with relieving trans people of their psychic distress (and thereby preventing them from committing suicide), and was only ever about a desire to modify the body for aesthetic reasons.
But I know you also think it's perfectly legitimate for doctors to lie to the parents of trans-identifying children and knowingly misrepresent the state of the evidence in this field provided the medics in question have a principled attitude to bodily autonomy, so I don't even know what to say to you. When I say "gender-affirming care isn't lifesaving treatment", you reply "yes, and?"; when I say "but lots of advocates for access to gender-affirming care consistently characterised it as life-saving treatment for years", you reply "yes, and?"; when I say "it's not reasonable to assume these advocates were honestly mistaken about the evidentiary basis for their claim that gender-affirming care is life-saving treatment, so the only reasonable conclusion is that they were consistently, knowingly lying, for years", you reply "yes, and?" I keep hoping that at some point you'll either deny my accusations, or own up to them and acknowledge that they were wrong: instead you just keep copping to them, but deny that anyone involved did anything wrong by so doing.
I would've thought it a no-brainer, the idea that a medic's personal philosophical attitude towards bodily autonomy should not override his duty of care to his patients or his responsibility to be informed about the medical state of the art – but apparently not. I would've thought "I support the right of individuals to pharmaceutically and surgically modify one's body as they see fit because of a principled attitude towards bodily autonomy, but acknowledge that aesthetic modification of one's body may not be an effective treatment for grave psychic distress and that it is dishonest and unprofessional for medics or activists to assert that it is" would be a no-brainer – but apparently not. Trans activists just seem to have a wholly different conception of the standards of behaviour they expect medical practitioners to adhere to than I do.
If trans activists were upfront and said "some people want to surgically modify their bodies for aesthetic reasons, and they should be allowed to" – I mean, I appreciate it's a harder sell, but at least it's honest. "... and the taxpayer should pick up the bill" is a harder sell still, but it remains honest. But instead they adopted this approach wherein they decided to knowingly mislead the public in general (and confused, scared parents of deeply distressed children in particular) with false claims about the efficacy of gender-affirming care in preventing suicide, urged and coerced medics to parrot these false claims – and then they have the gall to wonder why people are suspicious of them and think they might have ulterior motives?
For years, Chase Strangio of the ACLU characterised gender-affirming care as lifesaving medical treatment. Before the Supreme Court, under oath, Strangio admitted that there's no persuasive evidence that gender-affirming care has any impact on the rates of suicide among gender dysphoric children. Do you see how it's only logical for me to assume that everything Strangio says going forward is a barefaced lie? Do you see how Strangio has completely undermined public trust, not just in themself, but in the ACLU and the broader trans activist coalition?
FtttG
1d ago
I forgot:
FtttG
1d ago
Any wolf crying on the part of Trump's opponents is a relatively recent phenomenon.
About him being a paedophile and child sex trafficker, maybe. They were crying wolf about his genocidal ambitions, alleged Hitler parallels, aspirations to transform the US into Gilead etc. throughout the 2016 election and the entirety of his first term.
FtttG
1d ago
I think being told "because you are tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, it will be exceptionally difficult for you to convincingly pass as female no matter what medical interventions you undergo" might strictly speaking qualify as "discrimination" (in the same way that a short, unfit person not getting picked for the basketball team is "discrimination") – and yet it's so far removed from what ordinary people think of when they hear a scary word like "discrimination" that "fantasy discrimination" seems like a reasonable gloss.
And I don't think it's fair to call my proposed policy "nonsensical" even as you grant that it might be net-positive and that you might like to take advantage of it yourself if it was on the table!
Well, the point I was making was that I think a positive side effect of such a policy might be that it encourages more people to become fit and healthy, which would pay down dividends in terms of public health expenditure and improved fertility rates. A policy which enables mentally ill people to chop perfectly healthy tissue and organs off of themselves at the taxpayers' expense (and then attempt to reverse the damage as much as possible several years down the line, likewise at the taxpayers' expense) does strike me as nonsensical, even if such a policy was sufficiently broadly-worded as to also include paying for members of the public to become more fit and healthy.
Put simply: would I support a policy of publicly subsidised gender-affirming care and detransition procedures at the taxpayers' expense (option 1)? No, I think that's silly and dumb, in much the same way as publicly subsidised boob jobs and lip fillers would be (in fact, much of the time we would be talking about literally the same procedures). Would I support such a policy if it also included publicly subsidised gym memberships (option 2)? Again, no, but it would be silly not to take advantage of it if it was already in place. Would I support a policy of publicly subsidised gym membership (perhaps under the use-it-or-lose-it model you describe)? Yes, I could be persuaded that such a policy passes a cost-benefit analysis, in a way I simply couldn't with option 1.
"The government will pay for you to chop off pieces of your own body, and will then pay for you to restore them years later after you've decided it was a bad idea" sounds like a conservative parody of wasteful public expenditure, analogous to a self-licking ice cream cone or paying people to dig holes in the ground then fill them up again. It would be exactly as nonsensical as paying people to get fit and healthy and also paying for them to sit on their couches eating ice cream.
FtttG
1d ago
And I know they hate it, but most trans-individuals I've met fit in much better with their biological sex in both interpersonal interaction and general choice of occupation/hobbies.
I discussed this here and here. Virtually all the trans women I've met in my life either have perfectly conventional male interests, or interests common to that subset of men who are nerdy and/or autistic. I genuinely can't recall ever meeting a trans woman who was heavily interested in knitting, crochet, astrology or murder podcasts.
Persecution does not need to be baseless.
In common parlance, persecution is understood to mean being harassed etc. for no good reason. Per Wiktionary:
To pursue in a manner to do harm or cruelty to; especially, because of the victim's race, sexual identity, or adherence to a particular belief.
If there's a nationwide manhunt for a convicted murderer who escaped from prison, no one says that the murderer is being "persecuted", even though the people hunting for him obviously want to do harm to him (in the form of arresting him and returning him to prison).
The paper quoted in the original post says "This type of experience is often mediated by external barriers such as discrimination" and then the response that you are here defending is calling it "fantasy discrimination". And yet, you proceed to say yourself, "This is a perfectly reasonable set of criteria to discriminate against."
"To discriminate" simply means "to tell two different things apart" e.g. a discriminating taste in fashion. In common parlance, it's often used to mean "unfairly discriminated against". I presume the paper was using the word "discrimination" in the latter sense of the term, but perhaps @crushedoranges was arguing that, while certain trans people may have been discriminated against, they have not been unjustly discriminated against as they claim. (To illustrate: if you don't get picked for a basketball team because you're short and unfit, in a very real sense you have been discriminated against — but outside of the Harrison Bergeron universe, few would argue that you have been unjustly discriminated against.)
In my experience, trans activists tend to characterise a lot of perfectly banal behaviours as "transphobic", such as describing trans women as "biologically male" or similar. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that a trans-identifed male reported that he was stopping his transition because of "discrimination" on the part of his family members, but if you were to dig into this "discrimination", you would find that it amounted to the person's family members saying something along the lines of "I love you and I am deeply sympathetic to your situation, but it's a simple statement of fact that, given your physiognomy, you are unlikely to ever convincingly pass as female, and if you medically transition you will probably regret it a few years down the line". This is "discrimination" in the sense that it's true that tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed men have a much harder time passing as female than men with none of these characteristics; but I don't consider it unjust discrimination, any more than not picking the short unfit person to play on your basketball team.
FtttG
1d ago
This is one of my biggest epistemic problems with the Trans people and the Woke people; they posit to understand everyone's true, latent motivations better than the individuals do. They're saying the can read the 'true' mind inside my mind and, furthermore, that their generalizations in this recursive mind reading are broadly applicable to society. "Everyone has, to some extent, internalized racism. They may not know it, however."
This goes right back to Marx and "false consciousness" i.e. working-class people already support communism, they've just been tricked by the bourgeoisie into thinking they don't.
FtttG
1d ago
News from Ireland: Trans woman to bring High Court challenge after State doesn't recognise her as child's birth mother.
A UK TRANS WOMAN, who used her frozen sperm to have a baby with her wife, has been granted permission to bring a High Court challenge against a refusal by the State to grant Irish citizenship to the child on the basis that she is not the biological mother.
The woman – who has Irish citizenship while her wife does not – submits that if she has to claim to be the “father” of the child as part of the application, it would be an “offensive, discriminatory and unjust attack” on her person, gender identity and legal status.
I despair.
FtttG
1d ago
One of the more facile arguments made by trans activists is that lots of banal things cis people do all the time technically fall under the domain of "gender-affirming": building muscle mass, getting hair transplants, whatever. The cost of a single penectomy or vaginoplasty would probably cover a lifetime's gym membership and a return trip to Turkey.
The reason it's a facile argument is because the reason I do strength training is because I want to be stronger, more attractive and to make sad head voice quiet, not because I want to more "fully embody my masculine gender identity" or whatever. But it's not like I'd object if my gym membership was subsidised by the taxpayer. I could even imagine a hypothetical world in which such a policy represented a public saving in the long run, if paying for people's gym memberships made them more likely to exercise and in turn less likely to suffer from cardiac disease and obesity-related illnesses. Maybe the lower BMIs, improved muscle tones and higher sex drives that would result from a higher proportion of the population exercising regularly would even improve fertility rates. But my gym membership costs me less than €40 a month, which according to ChatGPT is pretty typical: I find it hard to imagine the monetary expense is a leading factor in why so many people are sedentary.
It's funny to imagine a world in which @WandererintheWilderness's nonsensical policy is put into practice and used to pay for penectomies, phalloplasties and gym memberships. Improving the inclusive genetic fitness of one large demographic while sterilising another, under the exact same policy.
FtttG
2d ago
it can hardly be simultaneously true, as right-wingers typically believe, that trans women naturally evoke revulsion, and that any adverse social consequences that they experience are imaginary.
I don't think all the adverse social consequences trans women experience are imaginary. No doubt they attract a lot of funny looks, as does anyone who deliberately dresses in an unusual way (e.g. goths with loads of facial piercings and/or tattoos). But when trans activists complain about a genocide of trans people which is either imminent or currently ongoing — yes, that is imaginary.
Impossible to talk about this without spoilers.
Additionally, there's the opening of the film in which a squad of white LA police officers viciously beat up a group of Mexicans in their prison cell, which was directly based on a real event and which has obvious parallels to the beating of Rodney King.
FtttG
3d ago
A good article highlighting the deficiencies identified in the BBC's coverage of the war in Gaza. Choice quotes:
The Telegraph has since reported that BBC Arabic had to make 215 corrections in two years to its coverage of Israel and Gaza - that’s two per week. [emphasis mine]
One issue that was already well known involves BBC Arabic using journalists who had made viciously antisemitic comments... In one example, Samer Alzaenen, who had suggested that Jews should be burned “as Hitler did”, was used 244 times by BBC Arabic between November 2023 and April 2025. He was “consistently introduced as a journalist”, according to the report, as was Ahmed Alagha, who appeared 522 times on the BBC during a similar time period despite having called Jews “devils” and saying Israelis are less than human. When these cases were reported in the media, the BBC disingenuously called them “eyewitnesses”. But normally the same eyewitnesses don’t appear on TV over 500 times in less than two years.
The BBC News homepage has a series of news tabs in the red strip at the top that begins with Home News and In Depth, and then the first specific news topic is ‘Israel Gaza War’ - before Ukraine, UK, World, Business, Politics or anything else. Needless to say, the war and famine in Sudan, on a scale far worse than Gaza, doesn’t get a tab of its own at all.
I don't doubt that some self-identified white nationalists have voted for candidates other than Trump. But I think it's reasonable to assume the majority of such people have voted for Trump in every election they've been able to.
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