Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
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User ID: 290
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
23hr ago
Is it not correct to use that marker?
That is the question at hand! The Red Tribe says it is; the Blue Tribe says it isn't.
please give me a specific case where something like this has happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_killed_for_being_transgender#2020s
Note the 2022 murder of Luo, a trans-woman in Wuhan who was murdered while using the men's restroom.
What standards? That you have to be honest about what you were born as?
That 'what you were born as' is anyone else's business.
I thought we did away with gender standards entirely.
Many people are still attempting to maintain them.
Has this ever actually happened?
See above.
normal people are not allowed to groom children into living an alternative sexual lifestyle, so trans people should not be allowed to do that either.
There's a difference between 'groom children into living an alternative sexual lifestyle' and 'make it harder for parents to groom children into being homophobic bigots'.
Which standards do you think are stricter than the ones normal people are held to?
The standard where someone existing as gay or trans gets equated to 'grooming'.
First, what externalities do conservative pundits even cause?
Making society less friendly to people who don't fulfill 100.00% of a certain narrow concept of 'normality'.
Second, the alternative to murder is speech. If anyone had an issue with Charlie Kirk, they could just talk to him.
Yes! We are in agreement on this! I am merely extending that maxim to make a general rule!
I'm not sure what difference this makes.
(I'm guessing that you are a cis-man; if you are a cis-woman, transpose the genders in the following.)
I'm asking how you would feel if you had been assigned female at birth, and they put an 'F' marker on your documents, as that is closer to what a trans-woman goes through when her documents carry an 'M' marker.
Police regularly use identification to catch criminals. If identification is not accurate, that makes their job harder. I benefit from police being able to quickly and accurately identify people.
Hence the photograph. Also, there do exist trans individuals who absent close examination would be more accurately identified by their post-transition gender.
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
1d ago
Their capacity for violence is so low as to be a non-issue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_bombing_and_arson_campaign
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
1d ago
When are we going to start re-diagnosing Nymphomania and Satryomania?
I believe the current term is 'hypersexuality'.
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
1d ago
Because we don't want women to engage in political violence any more than we want men to do so, and we stand on much firmer ground in condemning such if women have the same avenues to pursue peaceable change.
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
1d ago
trans people must use the correct gender marking (i.e. gender assigned at birth)
Kiiiind of begging the question here....
I am going to assert that there are vanishingly few cases where a trans person has faced violence simply on the basis of being trans and nothing else.
Only in the sense that would define most victims of anti-Black violence in the Jim Crow era as not 'simply on the basis of being Black and nothing else'. The modal case of anti-Black violence in that time and place was something along the lines of 'white person Big Mad because black person insufficiently obsequious', or 'black person expects to be paid previously-agreed-upon wages rather than whatever pittance white employer feels like after-the-fact'. These aren't technically, in the narrowest sense, a Black person facing violence simply on the basis of being Black and nothing else; however, they were precipitated by a Black person 'thinking he's as good as a white man', something he has every moral right to be able to do without risk to life or limb, and thus, practically, they round off to that description.
Anti-trans violence follows a similar pattern: some victims are targeted on the basis of 'being trans while thinking of oneself as an equally valid human being rather than a horrifying, disgusting freak'; some are targeted on the basis of 'not performing one's assigned gender to the satisfaction of the Community'.
I don't believe that mere speech is violence.
Speech isn't violence per se, but some speech can carry the implication of impending violence, or can serve the function of coördinating violence; the targets of said speech can't always tell the difference.
I just haven't seen a case yet that could support the assertion that there are people who want trans people dead or genocided
No, their first preference would be terrifying them into living by the standards of their assigned gender (which are younger than the New York Times crossword puzzle) no matter how miserable it makes them.
There are no roaming death squads of extremists hunting down trans people
No, just individual bad apples and a barrelful of bystanders who would never personally do anything so vulgar as beat up a todger-bearer-at-birth for being insufficiently masculine, but who don't see it as being as bad as a 'normal' person suffering the same fate. (With their definition of 'normal' being less 'people on the bus' and more 'people at the church sponsored ice cream social'.)
they are interested in making sure that trans people don't inflict negative externalities on society
...and just happen to have much stricter standards for 'externalities inflicted by trans people or other non-conformers' than they have for 'people they consider Normal'.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, we have the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
...whom they were interested in making sure didn't inflict negative externalities on society. That did not justify his being killed, because there are worse things than someone causing negative externalities and getting away with it. We expect the people-of-hair-colour, if the only alternative is the murder of people for their political opinions, to absorb the externalities caused by conservative pundits; the same applies to church-ladies being expected, if the only alternative is a combination of State repression and vigilantism making people terrified to put a single toe outside the closet, to absorb the externalities caused by non-heteronormative identities and/or lifestyles.
Why the quotes around biological reproductive system?
I'm guessing it was a direct quote from the statute in question.
If I was trans, I would shrug and just accept the "M" designation on my license.
What if you were trans in the other direction, identifying as male, but assigned female at birth?
To the extent that I would have a problem with the current state of affairs, I would find that the entire licensing regime that the government imposes on the people -- forcing them to register and pay fees in order to drive and participate in society -- is the actual problem here, not merely an unpreferred gender marker. But my stance is that it's not worth it to fight the licensing regime and it's better to comply. Hence, too, I wouldn't care about having the "M" on my license. It seems rather silly to me to question and reject one social construct (gender) while being completely subservient to another (driver's licenses).
And my biggest point is that this shouldn't even be worthy of discussion. If you're going to accept that the government has the right to force you to get licensed, who cares what kind of silly labels they give you?
The difference is that there is, at least theoretically, a legitimate government purpose in issuing and requiring driver's licences; I benefit from bad drivers not being allowed to operate multi-ton machinery on the same roads I use, whereas I do not benefit from requiring said licences to list what kind of gametes the operator of said machinery produces (very few motor vehicles are operated using the gonads), or for that matter, anything other than the licence-holder's name, date of birth, and photograph.
I will concede that there is an argument to be had as to whether the licencing regime accomplishes this purpose, especially in Miami, where per Dave Barry, "everyone follows the traffic laws of his or her own country or planet of origin".
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
2d ago
the same people who celebrate displays of pride by every country but their own.
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
6d ago
Spelling/grammar corrections and puns; two things of which I will never tire!
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
8d ago
Whether, as a result of the difference in identified gender, you do anything to them that they don't want. (E. g. the matter of Carlita Rodríguez.)
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
8d ago
Where does "No, but one can get arbitrarily close." fit in your schema?
(The road to wisdom?/Well, it's plain/and simple to express./Err, and err,/and err again,/but less, and less, and less.) --Piet Hein
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
8d ago
That was written in a very different time, when food was a lot less abundant, and there was always room for more people to contribute to its production even if they were what economists call 'unskilled'.
When Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes to feed the five thousand, he didn't make any attempt to deny them to 'men who did not work'. It took nearly twenty centuries, but we have multiplied our loaves and fishes, and much else besides, to where we can feed not five thousand, but eight billion. (Is this one of the "greater things than these" alluded to in John 14:12?)
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
8d ago
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
8d ago
It's not an analogy for anything so much as an answer to your question "What is the difference between "discriminating" against people[...] and drawing a "social distinction" between people[...]?"
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
9d ago
a relatively recent tradition at that
All traditions were recent once....
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
9d ago
Modus ponens, modus tollens.
But only one of them leads to rains of fire and pillars of salt. (Ezekiel 16:49)
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
9d ago
· Edited 2d ago
What is the difference between "discriminating" against people based on an inherent trait they have no control over, and drawing a "social distinction" between people based on an inherent trait they have no control over? I choose to give drunken male people a wider berth than drunken female people. No one forced me to do this, so it's not mandatory. Couldn't you therefore say that I'm not discriminating against male people, I'm just drawing a social distinction between male and female people?
I was referring more to the choices made by the people between whom the distinction is drawn, and whether they have the ability to opt out of it if they personally choose to. It is the distinction between an Englishman choosing to attend a Protestant church and an Irishman choosing to attend a Catholic church, either being able to diverge from this if he so chooses, versus a charity giving food unquestioningly to a hungry Englishman while giving a hungry Irishman the third degree over whether he might fall short of perfect virtue in some way which would allow the charity matron to leave him to starve while thinking her own hands clean.
That seems to be exactly what you're threatening, even if you're doing it on behalf of another group of which you are not a member.
No, I am merely observing that, when one racial/ethnic group keeps its collective boot on the neck of another, karma has a tendency to bite the first group in the derrière.
This is no more the same thing as one group demanding that another group bare their neck to its boot, than 'Kyiv threatens to bomb Russia unless Russia stops invading them' is the same thing as 'Moscow threatens to bomb Ukraine unless Ukraine resigns itself to being Belarus writ large', or than the Easter Rising is the same thing as Bloody Sunday.
Oh, so you mean that in reality you would come up with some pretext to preferentially hire a female babysitter over a male, but insist that it's just because the girl is more "experienced" than the boy and their sex has nothing to do with it.
No, I mean that I would judge on the same characteristics as were I choosing between two applicants of the same sex.
I just happen to disagree with what seems to be your assertion that "allow rapists and sex pests free reign to rape and sexually assault to their heart's content" and "keep half the planet on a de facto sex offender registry from womb to tomb" are mutually exhaustive. (If this is not your assertion, what precisely do you acknowledge as being between those?)
nine times out of ten, your child would feel safer being left alone with a female babysitter than a male
I doubt that it would be that often, but I acknowledge the possibility that my child might agree more with you than with me, thus "I think it's wrong to discriminate on the basis of sex – but my child disagrees with me, and I believe that attempting to force the issue risks undermining both my efforts to teach them the things previous generations had to learn the hard way and my strategy for protecting them from abusers, sexual or otherwise, and regardless of any definition of the would-be perpetrators' sex or gender.".
Also, "my child might very well have opinions of their own" was referring to a broader category, which could include other, less one-sided, subcategories, e. g. the often-depicted-in-media 'opposite sex has cooties' phase. (I'm not sure whether this actually happens, and doubt that it is anywhere near as common, but if it happens, it could tilt the decision either way depending on whether I have a son or a daughter.)
(In my response to the artificially constrained Gedankenexperiment posited earlier, note that, following the coin toss, I specified that I would take measures to prevent abuse by a male babysitter; they just happen to be the same measures I would take to prevent abuse by a female or intersex babysitter, both due to the fact that, even conceding your statistics arguendo I do not want to be the one individual in thirty-seven who loses everything betting at the roulette wheel on 'Albania' only to see it come up 'Ghadaffist Libya', and due to the fact that what I believe to be the most effective way of protecting a child from nonces can't be applied selectively. To the best of my knowledge, a sexual predator does not go from zero to Epstein in a single day. Like a tiger¹ unto Cervidae, they seek the most vulnerable; instead of a sambar with a broken leg, they seek a child who has been taught that (1.) they have no rights that their parents, or anyone given in loco parentis authority by their parents, are bound to respect, and that any word of complaint will be met with a total dismissal of the substance thereof in favour of a laser-focus on the sheer temerity of a child having any response to anything decreed by their owners parents other than a joyous acceptance² that makes an LLM chatbot seem like the enfant d'amour of R. Lee Ermey and Oscar the Grouch³, and (2.) anything involving certain parts of their body is (a.) deeply inherently shameful, and (b.) somehow their fault (even if they were praying the whole time that they would wake up and realise that it had been a nightmare).)
Trans activists sometimes accuse TERFs of being perverts who want to subject everyone to mandatory genital inspections before they're allowed to get changed. Interesting to see the shoe on the other foot. Note that such a rule would prevent ~95% of trans-identified males from using female changing facilities: advocating for it might get you tarred as a TERF by your erstwhile fellow-travellers.
I'm not advocating for it, per se; the operative word there is 'if'.
If you must have changing rooms divided by biological sex,
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Dividing by natal anatomy is more intrusive than by current anatomy, as the former involves digging into other people's medical charts as well as their genitals. If a woman walks into the women's changing room, takes off her clothes, and lo and behold! that individual has a vagina, than no woman had to see a penis in the designated penis-free zone; mutatis mutandis for the men's room.
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They should not be the only facilities available, compelling pre-operative trans people to use the facilities of their assigned-sex-at-birth, or the majority of them, making the use of the neutral facilities marked⁵ as indicative of transnessosity. Either would, in addition to exacerbating dysphoria and outing trans individuals, also demand that they endorse the anti-trans position; compare a Protestant schoolteacher demanding that the 80% Catholic student body recite the version of the 'Our Father' with 'trespasses' instead of 'debts'.
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Of the 87-95% (your link gave a range, 95% being only one end of which), how many have no intention or desire to undergo that part of transition, and how many have been denied the opportunity?
You realise what will happen, don't you? All of the male inmates who suddenly "realised" they had a female gender identity immediately after being convicted will be transferred to this shiny, comfortable facility. For a few months, all will be well in this facility. But eventually the number of "trans women" being transferred to this facility will reach the point at which the population density in this facility is the same as any other male prison
Perhaps I should have said 'one or more'; my point was that, if you cannot protect trans-women in the same facility as cis-men, and you cannot protect cis-women in the same facility as trans-women, then I don't know what else you can do but to treat trans-women as their own category in this instance.
What is not morally acceptable is to, whether it be motivated by personal animus or purely by bureaucratic indifference, decide that it is too inconvenient to fulfill the duty, inseparable from the practise of incarceration, of protecting all of the people one has deprived, even for the most solidly founded of causes, of the capacity to defend themselves⁴; this is the kind of thing that calls for people to end up in the dock at the Hague.
¹My comparison is solely in terms of tactics; I do not intend to insult the character of these magnificent animals, whom I do not begrudge for their need to eat, any more than a military historian comparing the battle doctrine of an Allied general to his Axis counterpart is (at least prior to c. 2015) claiming any moral equivalency between them. Wildlife people, please do not send me angry letters again.
²If the sole determinant of entry into heaven is one's indirect effect on the prevalence of the sexual abuse of children, Aella will have had time to have an affair with every mutually consenting adult in the afterlife long before her mother's sperm donor (for he does not deserve any title a myriadth as respectable as 'father')⁶ has a snowball's chance in hell of coming within sight of the Pearly Gates. (And that's before considering the violent abuse.)
³Yes, I know they are both male; that is not in any way more than the most trivial obstacle, compared to the fact that one of them is a puppet.
⁴The same principle applies to the Ludovico Technique; if we posit an alternate universe, call it A Wind-Up Tangerine, in which Mr DeLarge either is never afflicted with or is cured of the part of the conditioning gives him an aversion to classical music, but is still incapable of violence, even if you think this is a improvement over the status quo, they shouldn't just abandon him to be victimised by everyone else.
⁵"Marked Absent", Outlandish Claims, July 2024
⁶"The Joy Is Not Optional", Knowingless, May 2025
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
10d ago
Another possibility is that you could desalinate a small fraction of the literal ocean of water sitting next to California; however, this requires a lot of energy, the methods of obtaining which are unpopular.
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
10d ago
simply executing anyone suspected of assisting the Taliban in any capacity and the entire immediate family or tribe
If 'not assisting the Taliban' doesn't protect you from being murdered by coalition forces for assisting the Taliban, I'm not sure that that would have the desired effect. (cf. how Chen Sheng realised that 'not trying to overthrow the government' wouldn't protect him.)
The Taliban might have had less support if Allied commanders hadn't ordered their troops to ignore the rape of children by Afghan warlords with the 'it's part of their culture' excuse. ("In this house, General Napier is a hero. End of story.")
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
10d ago
· Edited 2d ago
In short, mild discrimination and clear explanations of why that discrimination exists is the only thing that can make multiethnic societies work long-term.
No, the only thing that can make multiethnic societies work long-term is treating people as individuals rather than avatars of a racial collective.
Yes, I expect you to do something with this information because protecting the public is your job.
The thing to do with the information is to arrest and prosecute the individual black people who commit murder under the same standards as one does when a white person commits murder, and mutatis mutandis for other crimes.
Maybe it would be easier in the short term to haul the 'Black Race' before a magistrate and sentence them to a police regime that makes North Korea look like the Wild West, but that's why there's a Stairway To Heaven and a Highway To Hell.
recognise or guard against the increased threat that you potentially represent
shun you in any way they can possibly get away with
"They're the same picture."
Both of these come from a random Black person being judged not by his own actions but by the actions of people who resemble him. One may be state action while the other is un-coördinated private action, but to the Black man, day after day, being treated as guilty until proven innocent, watching his white neighbours enjoy the presumption of innocence he is denied through no fault of his own, the two are much of a muchness.
The mealy-mouthed apologetics given by these same people to excuse straightforward racism when it's aimed at whites.
I oppose that also; it just doesn't get defended here as much.
I am against it for the following reasons:
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It is wrong in itself.
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It undermines the credibility of those opposing racism aimed at other groups.
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Did I mention that racism, against white people as against any other group, is wrong?
(those that favour the 'prejudice plus power' definition of 'racism': you can substitute 'racial discrimination' if you would prefer, but don't think I haven't Noticed your attempts to amass the kind of structural power you attribute to white people)
It could all have been avoided if the Scottish government and the trans movement had just been willing to say 'no, the tattooed rapist who decided to be trans five seconds before his court case doesn't get to go to a women's prison'.
...and then a week later she gets assaulted/raped/murdered by the cis-male inmates, people send Strongly Worded Letters asking "what were you thinking‽", and they have a much more principled case:
If you as a government take up the habit of confining people somewhere where they can neither defend themselves nor avoid potential violence, you have the responsibility to protect all of them. Not 'the ones that aren't scary', not 'the ones that have or had uteruses', not 'the ones that fit into your idea of how men and women ought to present themselves', not 'most of them', all of them.
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
10d ago
What exactly is the difference between "discrimination" and "social distinction"?
One is imposed on people to deny them opportunities, the other emerges from what people choose and is not mandatory.
I can't help but notice how parochial your dire warning is. [...] I note that this dire warning is only applicable in societies which contain a critical mass of black men. In Ireland, they represent about 0.65% of the population.
Then, for 'Black' substitute whatever subaltern group is closest to hand. (There were times when Irish people fell, or were shoved by Englishmen, into this category.)
Darkly reminiscent of the old joke about critics of Islam, but that's neither here nor there.
It is 'neither here nor there' because the demands in question differ in one crucial aspect; the Muslim extremists are demanding superiority, that you follow the rules of their religion, under threat of violence, while they are not similarly obligated to follow the rules of yours; racial/ethnic minorities are seeking equality, and a redress of the far more legitimate grievance that no person ought to spend their entire life on probation because of the circumstances of their birth. The same applies to the notion of expecting half of humanity to accept being treated as sex-offenders-in-waiting.
Are you implying that I'm some kind of weird outlier because I think it's legitimate to preferentially hire a female babysitter over a male? I actually think I'm the normal one in this regard....
No, it is entirely possible that you might be the normal one and I might be the weird outlier; however, sometimes the weird outliers are right and the normal ones are wrong.
would choose whether to hire a male or female babysitter by flipping a coin.
...in the thought experiment you gave. "You aren't allowed to learn anything else about the applicants other than their age and sex." In actual reality-based reality, I would be allowed to learn other things about the applicants, interview them, ask for references, &c. Furthermore, my child might very well have opinions of their own; these could also be a factor.
I think the overwhelming majority of people are actually in favour of sex segregation in certain key areas
One, the phrase 'certain key areas' miiiight be doing a lot of the work there. (see below)
Two, there is no shortage of historical examples of times when the overwhelming majority of people were in favour of something which wasn't right. How many stood against the Laundries?
then I think the latter half of that claim is simply ahistorical.
I do not claim that the conclusions were universally adopted so much as that they have been put forth and I find them credible.
Unfortunately these past eleven years, many people have been crawling out of the woodwork who don't acknowledge that racial discrimination is wrong. As their policy proposals carry with them an alarming possibility of some very ugly outcomes, I can only conclude that, if we set precedents which have the potential to be used in an attempt to justify said actions, we are playing with fire, and risk being very badly burned.
sports, changing rooms, women's prisons, hospital wards
My proposals:
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Each sport decides for itself (trans-activists and TERVes can direct their advocacy to the sporting bodies and hopefully turn down the temperature knowing that the other side gaining the upper hand won't be for all the marbles), defaulting to a definition based on hormone levels.
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If you must have changing rooms divided by sex, use the 'currently possessed anatomy' or 'hormone levels' definition, the former of which would shield people from having to be exposed to the other genitals; also have a sufficient quantity and quality of one-person gender-neutral changing rooms that they are regularly used by both cis-men and cis-women.
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Designate one facility specifically for trans-women; if you cannot protect a trans-man among cis-men, designate one for trans-men.
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I was unaware that there were sex-specific hospital wards, other than for sex-specific conditions; there will still be male and female doctors even in a single-sex ward, and the patients are unlikely to be in a condition to cause much if any harm.
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
12d ago
In the UK among other jurisdictions, rape is defined as forcible penetration with a penis.
And it used to be defined as to not apply within marriage; we changed that, and we can change the other.
No one has ever been impregnated via digital penetration alone. I imagine the number of people who have contracted STDs via digital penetration is vanishingly small.
If Alan rapes Barb with his penis, and he wears a condom, Barb is unlikely to be impregnated or contract a social disease; he is nevertheless prosecuted no less vigorously.
Do you have young children? If so, have you really just multiplied their risk of being sexually assaulted by 9x purely to prove how progressive you are?
No, I take measures to protect them even from a cis-woman.
"if the babysitter has sexually interfered with them, don't hire the babysitter again"
I was more referring to the prodromal phase; what would have been referred to twenty years ago as 'grooming'; don't hire that baby-sitter again if he/she/they start laying the groundwork for the worst offences.
you are demanding we stop discriminating on the basis of one trait we have no control over (sex) in favour of another (gender identity).
No, I am also opposed to discrimination on that basis.
you claim that some males feel "humiliated" by people correctly inferring that they are male, and that they might lash out in consequence.
I truthfully don't get what the threat is here.
I am attempting to illustrate possible nth-order effects.
Society treats people-born-with-male-anatomy as suspicious-by-default --> a precedent is set that people may rightly be judged by the behavior of their demographic rather than innocent-until-proven-guilty --> the 13/52 crowd ignores your distinctions and uses that precedent to treat Black people as suspicious-by-default --> years and decades of being followed in stores/avoided on the street/not picked up by taxicabs/&c. build up until Black people (and their white allies) decide that they have Had Enough, as we saw in 1968 and 2020. If it doesn't boil over, it can still lead to Bad Things done to Black people, such as Emmitt Till; the same can be said of judging individual Jews, such as Anne Frank, by the alleged acts of the Jewish people as a whole.
After the revelation of the horrors of the Third Reich, combined with the cruelties in the Unitedstatesian South, progressives, and in subsequent generations moderates, came to the conclusion that judging individuals by their race/ethnicity is dangerous, and ought to be treated as radioactive. (I don't mean realistic radioactivity, e. g. a glove 1% more radioactive than the 80%-lower-than-global-average local background, or spent fuel pellets that, had they powered Kublai Khan's stately pleasure dome, would have cooled off to the point where one could pick them up bare-handed and, as long as one doesn't eat them, be none the worse for wear. I'm referring to the Hollywood/Simpsons image of three-quarters rusted yellow barrels full of glowing Avada-Kedavra-green sludge that, had they existed in the hoary days when first were laid the foundation-stones of the Great Sphinx, would still cause cancer and monstrous birth defects at 100 metres.)
Subsequently, the same logic was extended to sex/gender, which, even if one does not believe it obligatory per se, nevertheless functions in a manner akin to the Jewish practise of gader saviv HaTorah, a fence around the Law.
"avoid hiring a babysitter who is a member of the demographic most likely to sexually interfere with them in the first place". Being progressive and not discriminating against male people is so important to you that you are completely fine with a male person sexually interfering with your child as many times as is necessary for your child to come to you and tell you that the babysitter has touched them inappropriately – as opposed to just taking the commonsense approach of not hiring a male babysitter in the first place.
My argument is isomorphic to the late Charlie Kirk's 2023 remarks on gun control.
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In both cases, there is a horrifying-to-contemplate problem threatening the most vulnerable members of our society (rape/mass shootings of the sort of which Columbine is the type specimen).
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In both cases, a seemingly simple solution is proposed (treat half the population as guilty until proven innocent/abolish private ownership of firearms).
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In both cases, many innocent people are held responsible for the actions of a few.
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In both cases, proponents of the suggested policy frame the drawbacks as meaningless, and their opponents' objections as petulant whinging and/or evidence that they deserve to be so held responsible.
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In both cases, the proposed policy is criticised for potential nth-order failure states (less credibility in opposing the more fanatical thirteen-fiftiers leading to either a racist dystopia or mass civil unrest/Iran in 2026)
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In both cases, the argument is made that the proposed policy is both:
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a cure worse than the disease, and
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not necessary as there are better solutions (Mr Kirk's proposal to have armed guards at schools/teach children that certain parts of their body are private and if the baby-sitter shows too much interest in those parts they should tell an adult whom they trust; listen to them if they do so. [Note that if my young child thought as you do and did not wish to be left with an assigned-male-at-birth baby-sitter, I would not attempt to force the issue; this will also show that he/she/they can trust me if the assigned-female-at-birth baby-sitter behaves inappropriately with her fingers/an object, or brings in another person, assigned-male-at-birth or otherwise, who does so.])
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
13d ago
civil liability that requires Knuth's Up-Arrow Notation to write down
That might run into eighth-amendment issues....
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
13d ago
When you are walking down the street late at night, and you pass a drunk person acting aggressively, I'm going to hazard a guess that the size of the berth you give them depends heavily on whether they're male or female. You do this not on the basis of what they, personally, have done (you don't know if they have a criminal record, they're a complete stranger to you). You do this on the basis of: if they're a male person who gets in your face and tries to hit you, if they succeed, they will do a lot more damage than if they're a female person.
Another example. If you're not the parent of a small child, imagine that you are. You need to leave your child alone for an evening, your child is too young to be left alone, and none of your friends or family are available to look after the child. You put up an ad saying you're looking for a babysitter, and receive two applications: a fifteen-year-old female, and a fifteen-year-old male. (If you like, the fifteen-year-old male can claim to "identify as" a girl, but still has fully intact and function male genitalia.) You aren't allowed to learn anything else about the applicants other than their age and sex. Who do you hire?
Am I wrong about any of the above?
Yes, you are wrong about both of the above.
WRT the baby-sitter, I flip a coin, and take the same protective measures for 15F as I would for 15M, 15tF, 15tM, or 15X.
only demographic capable of penetratively raping others with anatomy alone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger
although most of them are mature and empathetic enough* that they can eventually learn to understand why parents are more willing to leave their child alone with a female stranger than a male
Agreeing with you is not a sine qua non of maturity.
without throwing a tantrum
Disagreeing with you does not necessarily constitute a 'tantrum'.
I just think that the amount of mental distress caused is infinitesimal compared to the amount of mental distress caused by a child being sexually assaulted or penetratively raped by an adult male. It's a trade-off I am perfectly willing to make
But if you consider second-/third-/umpteenth-order effects, people being treated as suspicious by default on the basis of natal anatomy and its physical sequelae creates a precedent, which will be seized upon by the 13/50 crowd to support similar suspicion-by-default on the basis of skin colour.
This will lead to escalating tensions in society, until it boils over. If we're lucky, we get a rerun of 1968 or 2020; if the dice come up snake-eyes, society collapses and we end up less able to prosecute rapes by strangers, and much less able to prosecute rapes within families.
you're invoking the historical example of marital rape
To make the point that, even if your sole goal is to minimise the rape of people-born-with-female-genitals, your strategy might be less than optimal.
the policy you're advocating is a rapist's credo
Less of this, please.
If parents legally could not take "candidate's sex" into account when hiring a babysitter, [emphasis added]
Legally, I do not support non-discrimination law intruding into that particular case; I do not think you should end up in the dock on suspicion of favouring a woman over a man, a white woman over a black woman, or any other such distinction, in hiring, in your personal capacity, an individual for services in your personal residence, even if I disagree with your reasoning.
can you envision any scenario in which this wouldn't result in tens of thousands of additional child rape victims every year? If so, how?
Teach children that certain parts of their bodies are private, that they have the right to not have them touched is a way that feels wrong, that this right supersedes parental or parentally-delegated authority; or at least don't ban books that teach this.
If their baby-sitter makes them feel uncomfortable in some un-nameable manner, listen to them and possibly find another baby-sitter rather than telling them to shut up and not be 'disrespectful'.
You still, still, still have not answered my question on whether "gender identity" is innate or not.
I believe it most likely is, per the reported experiences of transgender individuals; as I do not personally identify with gender any more than any other aspect of the meat-puppet I inhabit, I do not have the ability to say for certain.
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
13d ago
What "purposes" are these?
The ones that, if you don't know her very well, and aren't being hired for purposes involving her body, are any of your business.
An individual is responsible for what they, personally have done; they are not responsible for what they are capable of doing but haven't done, or what people who share characteristics with them have done. Therefore, the decision about how much, if any, of an individual's body is relevant to you belongs to that individual alone, unless and until that particular individual commits a wrongful act.
Admittedly, this is dependent on the axiom that the well-being of individuals is the measurement of ethics, with one's duties being derived from the effects on other individuals; however, the contrary world-view, of the subordination of the individual to the family/community/other collective abstraction, has been known to lead to many Bad Things, including, as part of many societies' traditional marital practises, the forcible rape of women-as-in-people-born-with-vulvae (when they first landed on the moon, it would be another seven years before it became a crime for a husband to rape his wife).
Celestial-body-NOS
Social Dominance Orientation is the root of all kinds of evil.
13d ago
So you think a male person can flip back and forth between being a woman and being a man, purely depending on what clothes he's wearing at any particular moment?
No, I believe that whether a person is a man or a woman depends on why you are asking, just as with the difference between a 'blegg' and a 'rube'.
A male person does not become a woman just because he's wearing a dress and makeup.
No, if she identifies as a woman, she is a woman for most purposes. Things which involve the genitals are, assuming she has not had the relevant chirurgery, one of the exceptions; medical concerns are another, in which biological sex must be broken down into multiple aspects, such as hormones, current anatomy, natal anatomy, and chromosomes. (cf. Neural Categories, E. Yudkowsky, February 2008; How An Algorithm Feels From Inside, ibid.)
That would be how one would back up the assertion that
If a trans person is murdered, and a cis person would not have been murdered ceterus paribus, that counts in my book as 'murdered for being trans', just as a black person who is murdered, if a white person in the otherwise exact same circumstances would not have been murdered, was killed for being black.
No, they try to shame and bully him into not playing with dolls.
Yes. People aren't born with the desire to victimise gay people, just as they aren't born with the desire to victimise any of the other categories of people their families teach them to hate. (Readers of a certain age might remember a Public Service Announcement that said "Hate is a four-letter word. So is love. Which one will you teach your children?)
Extending it to "A person hypothetically causing negative externalities does not give you unlimited licence to persecute them, even if not doing so means that the externalities will continue."
The hypothetical at which I was aiming was one in which you, with your current mind, had been born with female parts. Would you, in that case, feel that the 'F' marker was viscerally wrong? (Or would you look between your legs and conclude yourself to be a woman? In that case, you would be what Ozy Brennan calls 'cis-by-default'. [Thing of Things, January 2015])
But 'what do you have in your pants' isn't very useful outside a very narrow set of circumstances; 'what did you have between your legs when you were born' isn't useful even then!
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