Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Last Christmas I watched the film Wild (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_(2014_film)) with my family, based on the memoir of the same name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_(memoir)) by Cheryl Strayed. The film concerns Strayed's successful attempt to hike 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, solo. I didn't like the film for many reasons: its narrative structure (hiking interspersed with flashbacks) was monotonous; the dialogue was overwritten and stagey; the performances were of greatly varying quality; and what little CGI it used was unconvincing and distracting.
But the biggest reason I didn't like it was because I really disliked the protagonist. The death of Strayed's mother caused her to spiral into a deep depression, which she coped with by using heroin and having unprotected sex with strange men, despite being married. After one of these illicit trysts she gets pregnant, she decides to terminate the pregnancy, her husband (finally!) realises he's had enough and divorces her. At this point she realises she's hit rock bottom, prompting her to embark on her hike as a therapeutic exercise (explaining to an exasperated friend: "I'm going to walk myself back to the person my mother thought I was!").
And I just found her motivation and conception of herself so grandiose and narcissistic - the idea that her personal problems are of such profound import that the only way she can address them is by walking 1,100 miles, alone - that I couldn't stand her. Even when she correctly recognises that she's a piece of shit, she still thinks she's a piece of shit in a rather grand, exceptional way - a Mary Sue who's a villain is still a Mary Sue. Like, if you've (finally!) realised that it's wrong to cheat on your husband with strange men (and grief over your mother's death does absolutely nothing to exculpate you) - sure, you absolutely could try to address this by hiking 1,100 miles alone with little to no expertise, and potentially endangering other people who may have to come looking for you if you injure yourself.
Or you could, I dunno, not cheat on your husband, you stupid bitch.
Most of us go through our lives quietly toiling away at doing the right thing, not expecting or receiving any special praise for doing so. When we realise we've fucked up, we quietly toil away at trying to put things right. Most of us have the self-awareness to recognise that our personal problems are not huge, all-encompassing things which require extraordinary, dramatic efforts to rectify; for most people, their personal problems are ordinary and mundane, and can (must) be resolved or managed with ordinary, mundane graft. Cheryl Strayed can't even claim that the root of her personal problems is a traumatic event outside the realm of normal human experience (like being raped or horribly maimed; even having a miscarriage or a cot death would have been more sympathetic) - the death of one's mother is deeply upsetting, but unfortunately, it's something that the vast majority of people in the world will go through at one time or another. If everyone dealt with the death of their mother by abandoning their duties and embarking on a hike for three months - why, the Pacific Crest Trail would be clogged with people denser than Times Square and society would collapse. Strayed dealt with the grief over her mother's death by i) ruining her husband's life; ii) conceiving a child and then aborting it; iii) going on a long hike; iv) writing a book about her experience which made her millions (and she still had the nerve to complain that the film adaptation wasn't nominated for Best Picture and accusing the Academy of sexism). Most people take a few weeks off work and deal with their bereavement privately, with dignity. "But you don't understand, I had a really close bond with my mother!" - well, so did the Hispanic binman who collects your rubbish, Cheryl, who can't afford to take three months off work, because he has to put food on the table for his (un-aborted) children and (un-cuckqueaned) wife. It's the height of narcissism and self-absorption, perhaps even clinically significant delusions of grandeur.
I imagine you can guess where I'm going with this. You've been talking about this "hock" thing for at least a few weeks. You seem to expect us to be impressed by your plan to do this - well, I'm no more impressed by hearing about people's plans to complete punishing physical ordeals than I am by hearing about the idea someone has for a novel: the execution is the thing. ("Oh my God, you're thinking about running a marathon?! That's amazing! You're so disciplined and dedicated for thinking about doing one! And here I am actually running one like a sucker!") But more than anything I just find your motivation for doing it contemptible in exactly the same way as Strayed. You think you're the first guy in history to ever feel lonely or romantically frustrated? You think the only way you can deal with your personal problems is to embark on some punishing attention-seeking voyage? In your circumstances, most people just practise their people skills, improve their diet, go to the gym and perhaps attend a therapist if applicable - and they (we) do so quietly, with dignity, without any expectation of praise or commendation.
If you're lonely and romantically frustrated, I'm sorry to hear that, I've been there and it sucks. But whining about it on a forum is not going to help you, especially not when you rubbish all of the well-meaning and practical advice offered in reply (all of which that I've seen is more sensible and likely to help the issue than "go to Alaska alone"). If you want to do your "hock" thing, go for it, but don't delude yourself into thinking that it will magically resolve all of your personal problems in one fell swoop - wherever you go, there you are. And for God's sake, stop telling us about how you're going to do it and expecting us to be impressed in advance by your resolve and determination. Prepare for it in your own time, complete it, then you can feel proud of your accomplishment, and perhaps even write a postmortem about what you got out of the experience.
A leftist talking point between 2017 and 2019 was that if someone seems to deny someone else their rights, then they forfeit their own rights. Therefore, it is okay to "punch Nazis".
I think this is incomplete. The standard framing of this is "if a person in a position of power denies someone else their rights, then they forfeit their own rights, therefore it's okay to punch Nazis."
It's the same reasoning that underlines "you can't be racist against white people" - racism = prejudice + power, ergo it isn't racist for a black person to say "if it was up to me I'd send all those fuckin crackers to the gas chamber" in the way it would be if the boot was on the other foot. The debate about "punching up" vs. "punching down" in standup comedy may seem innocuous and trivial, but it leads directly to people defending Hamas for gang-raping Israeli women.
So we aren't entitled to punch Richard Spencer in the face because of the things he said: we're entitled to punch him in the face because of the things he said and because he has power.
"What do you mean Richard Spencer has power? He's never been elected to public office, the membership in the organisation he founded is vanishingly small, he was so broke he had to move back in with his parents." Well, who has "power" and who doesn't (who's punching up and who's punching down) are intentionally defined in a manner which is fuzzy, opaque and prone to being gamed. It's practically a defining characteristic of leftists/woke people that they see themselves as always and forever supporting the oppressed and downtrodden, which means that whenever a leftist/woke person supports Alice over Bob, they must find (or invent) a reason that Alice is disempowered relative to Bob.
Israel and Palestine is a relatively straightforward case, in that it's hard to deny that Israel is the stronger of the two belligerents - technologically, economically and militarily superior, backed by the US, nukes etc. - but you will often find murkier cases, wherein the claim that Alice is disempowered relative to Bob seems a lot more contrived than this. For example, I've seen woke people argue that wealthy black people making fun of homeless white people is "punching up", because the homeless people are still beneficiaries of "white privilege". The whole "punching up" vs. "punching down" framework has so many degrees of freedom that it will almost always be possible to find some reason why the person you like is actually disempowered relative to the person you don't.
If it was done in a systemic way, we would aggregate all of the relevant characteristics of the two individuals or parties ("Alice makes €50k, is myopic, is a lesbian, speaks English as a second language and is a recent migrant; Bob makes €40k, wears hearing aids, is straight and suffers from pronounced PTSD") and then make a determination of who is allowed to crack jokes at the other's expense/beat the other one up/steal the other's shit. (This was probably the idea behind "privilege walks", in which you take a group of people, a series of statements are read out, and each person moves one step forward if the statement applies to them and one step back if it doesn't. I haven't heard much about them for years, probably because the technique's objectivity meant that it could easily show that a female person is more privileged than a male, or a POC more privileged than a white person - and we can't have that, can we?) In practice, all you need to do is find one axis on which Alice is considered to be worse off than Bob, and then claim that her position on this axis negates whatever positions she might occupy on any other axes which might be relevant to the debate over who has more power in an interpersonal or political debate. (Hillary Clinton may be white, cis, straight, fabulously wealthy, well-educated and extremely powerful in the literal sense of having held numerous high-ranking government positions in a career spanning decades - but she is a WOMAN, therefore all criticism and jokes directed at her are unacceptable punching down.)
This is one reason woke people get so hostile and defensive when people bring up class, education and income as axes of privilege: on some level they are well aware that almost all woke people are well-educated middle-to-upper-class people whose salaries are well above the national average, and that many anti-woke people are none of those things. It must be profoundly discomforting to simultaneously think of yourself as someone who always sticks up for the little guy, while also being aware that you routinely express sneering contempt for people who are poorer and less educated than you. Their preferred strategy for defusing this cognitive dissonance is to insist that they don't hate poor white people because they're poor but rather because they're racist and sexist and etc.; that race matters more than class; that if you're white and poor in a white supremacist society then that means you must have squandered your white privilege ("why can't you just pull yourself up by your Klanstraps?").
As a person who thinks, fundamentally, that what's good for the goose is good for the gander, I was never going to feel at home in woke spaces. I've read tens of thousands of words trying to justify the claim that it's okay for black people to express seething hatred for white people but not vice versa (and by extension that it's okay for Palestinians to gang rape Israelis but not vice versa). Dozens of people have tried to explain to me in person why they believe it to be so, or treated it as so self-evident that they're honestly baffled why I don't accept it face value (like I didn't understand why 2+2=4). It's obviously an assertion that makes a great deal of intuitive sense for a large proportion of the population - I'm just not one of those people and I don't think I ever will be.
Folamh3
11mo ago
A senator has spoken out against the new hate speech bill.
I went to a protest today organised by the Irish Freedom Party. (I've never voted for one of their candidates in a general election before, but given that every major party, including the Greens for whom I usually vote, has backed this piece of legislation, I may have no choice come the next general election.)
The more I hear about this bill the more it draconian it sounds. Literally any police officer, regardless of rank, can tell a judge "I believe so-and-so possesses materials likely to promote violence or hatred against a person or group on the basis of their protected characteristics" and the judge can grant a search warrant. This search warrant gives the police license to search the person's home (using force if necessary), search the property of any person present in that person's home, force the person in question to hand over the passwords for any electronic devices in their possession, and seize anything they so choose from that person's home.
What I find most frustrating about this is that I'm quite confident that if I told an Irish person, in 2019, that Trump was trying to pass a piece of legislation intended to grant sweeping powers to the police to anyone suspected of collusion with Islamic terrorist groups, they'd say it was grotesquely Orwellian insanity. But because this legislation is being proposed with the ostensible goal of combatting racism and transphobia, the response has been a collective shrug (there were a mere ~500 people at the protest today). "Just don't be a cunt and you'll be fine" according to one denizen of /r/ireland.
This afternoon, an Algerian man who'd been resident in Ireland for years approached a crèche in the Dublin city centre and stabbed a teacher and several children, all of whom have been hospitalised. A man intervened and tackled him to the ground (I've heard unconfirmed reports that he was Brazilian, making this something of a wash from an anti-immigration perspective).
In a remarkable display of striking while the iron is hot, an anti-immigrant group organised a protest outside the Dáil (lower house of parliament) later this afternoon. Protesters clashed with police officers at the scene of the crime. Before long it escalated into a full-scale riot, the likes of which I've never seen before in Dublin. A bus was set on fire, as was at least one police car and a Luas (the light rail system serving Dublin). A Holiday Inn was set on fire. Shops have been smashed up and looted. I had to get a taxi home as the public transport has been suspended. Walking through the streets is eerie, they're largely empty aside from riot cops carrying riot shields very forcefully redirecting me. Helicopters are still circling overhead.
My gut feeling is that this is primarily the work of opportunistic scumbags rioting for the fun of it, for which a fairly small protest which got out of hand was merely the catalyst. On the other hand, I have heard a lot about the alleged "rise of the far right" in Ireland over the course of the last few years, and the fact that it happened so soon after Geert Wilders' election is certainly odd timing.
EDIT: See also @Tollund_Man4's more detailed write-up in the transnational thread.
What I found really conspicious was that in virtually all the articles there was absolutely no description of the perpetrator of the stabbing other than 'man' or at best ' older man', which was the spark that cause the protest/riot (depending on your political persuasion). You'd be forgiven for thinking that the crime was committed by an Irish native.
The same here, only the tabloids and alternative media specified that the attacker was Algerian; "respectable" outlets like The Journal, the Times and the Independent don't consider his nationality or ethnicity worth mentioning at all. Whenever there's a horrible unprovoked crime like this, you can practically smell the "please let the assailant be Irish" energy emanating from broadsheet journalists and the PMC types on X and Reddit. I saw a comment about the stabbing on the /r/ireland subreddit, some dude said something to the effect of "Imagine hearing about a horrible crime like this and your first instinct is to wonder what colour the attacker's skin is. Despicable." You mean, exactly like you're doing right now?
Some years ago (probably on the old subreddit) I pointed out that this journalistic approach has a limited shelf life. Sooner or later, every reader will cotton on to the fact that whenever the MSM report on a violent crime committed by a white native man, his skin colour will be mentioned prominently (either in the headline or the lede); ergo, if you see an article about a violent crime which doesn't mention the assailant's skin colour or nationality, the only reasonable assumption is that he is black or Arab or Eastern European (optionally Muslim). (See also Scott's post, section IV, about how banning employers from asking interviewees about their criminal record actually decreased the rate at which employers hired black candidates.) They're going to have to come up with a different method for routing around this problem sooner or later. Perhaps five years from now, news articles will read "an assailant stabbed a victim" without mentioning any identity characteristics about either person at all.
Do they think by merely mentioning the background of the stabbing perpetrator they will give creedance to the 'hateful far-right riot', like invoking a spirit?
Well this is the thing: for modern broadsheet journalists, contempt for the common man is built into their psyche. If you've fully internalised the idea that any uneducated person can become radicalised overnight by exposure to far-right disinformation and "fake news" - well, imagine how much more potent an effect information and real news might have. The average journalist no longer sees their job as one of informing the public but educating it, and if that means selectively leaving the reader in the dark about certain pertinent facts, so be it. (Perhaps I'm being rather rose-tinted about journalistic standards in the past and this is all one big "always has been" meme.) Many journalists seem to think that even informing their readers what the Bad People believe is tantamount to signal-boosting their opinions, so they resort to this circuitous approach of informing the reader that Alice has transphobic™ opinions (or quoting a woke person who thinks Alice has transphobic opinions i.e. "delegated defamation") without actually telling the reader what those opinions are and allowing them to draw their own conclusions as to whether "transphobic" is an accurate characterisation.
Folamh3
7mo ago
I'm so sick of the word "violence" being used in this figurative manner. Pestering someone with messages when they've made it abundantly clear that they're not interested - call it "harassment" if you like, or even "cyberstalking" if you must. It's certainly not "violence".
It was bad enough when it was just woke academics and activists (but I repeat myself) describing the act of someone disagreeing with you or calling you by the wrong pronouns as "violent" - now it's making its way into legislation too.
Look at this meme.
It was made in the 2000s, an era in which it was totally legit for liberal people to make fun of fat people and their motivated reasoning and mental (certainly not physical!) gymnastics. Nowadays body positivity is the order of the day and liberals can only make fun of fat people if they're wearing MAGA hats.
The point of the joke, obviously, is that the fat woman in the photo claims that the shape of her body is entirely genetic in origin while ignoring the obvious dietary choices she makes which contribute to her body shape.
Perhaps the defining characteristic of modern progressivism is a wide-ranging assertion that social influences shape people's identities and desires. Men aren't naturally more interested in STEM than women, they've just been socialised to want to pursue careers in STEM, and were it not for this we'd see them going into childcare and education at the same rates as women. Men aren't naturally stronger and faster than women, it's just that women are systematically discouraged from playing sports. Most people aren't straight because that's their natural inclination, they've just been brainwashed by the heteropatriarchy and in the state of nature we'd all be bisexual. Stereotype threat, power posing, "internalised" Xism etc. etc. The apparent goal of many progressives is to undo the cultural conditioning (borrowing here from Marxist "false consciousness") which causes women to believe that they're more interested in childcare than computers. This false consciousness is unidirectional: a man can mistakenly believe that he's more interested in computers than childcare, but not vice versa; a repressed gay man can be in denial about his sexuality, but no straight man can mistakenly believe he's gay.*
This is the worldview underpinning the fury and rage surrounding the ROGD/social contagion model of transgender identity. I used to (by which I mean, at the time I started writing this comment) think that the tenets of gender ideology made for odd bedfellows with the rest of woke ideology. When I first heard about it, I was like "why are you guys so mad that social influences affect one's gender identity? You think social influences affect everything!" I thought that woke people had made a weird little carve-out for trans people, whose gender identity is assumed to be unresponsive to social influence in the way that their career aspirations or physical fitness might be.
But now that I think about it further, it makes sense from the false consciousness perspective. A trans person who mistakenly believes that they're cis until the moment their "egg hatches" is like a factory worker in Victorian England who, in a horrifying epiphany, realises the extent to which he is the victim of exploitation and alienation at the hands of his boss: they are to be commended, praised, welcomed with open arms. But a cis person who mistakenly believes they're trans: that's like being a strike-breaker. It's no accident that trans activists have nothing but contempt for detransitioners: they're traitors to the cause, scabs. This is one reason they resent the term "groomer", as that's not what they see themselves doing. If you're in a trans subreddit and you find yourself thinking that the list of "possible signs you might be trans" is so exhaustive that everyone alive must have at least one - that's a feature, not a bug. They don't think they're persuading children to be trans - they think that every child is already trans (and queer, and interested in topics associated with the opposite sex, and feminist etc.) and has simply been brainwashed into believing otherwise - if they lived in the state of nature then no "grooming" or education would be required.** Just like Marx thought that every proletariat already supported communism and had simply been tricked into thinking otherwise.***
So no, gender ideology and sexuality aren't carve-outs from the general woke assumption that social influences affect who you are (but only in one direction), they're central examples. But such a carve-out does exist within the woke framework. For whom, you ask? Look up top! Fat acceptance activists, as a group, do not acknowledge any social influences on their condition whatsoever. Hence all the hysterical caterwauling about how diets don't work and teasing fat people just makes them sad and I'm just big-boned and so on and so forth. I suspect quite a lot of fat acceptance activists wouldn't even recognise the joke in the meme above, they literally believe that diet and nutrition have zero impact, none, on how much you weigh. In the woke framework, genes may not determine how smart you are, or strong, or fast, or your career goals, or who you like to have sex with - but they damn sure determine whether you're a size 16 or an 8.
*People talk a lot about how Friends "aged poorly" and so on, but more than anything I think the B-plot here from which the episode derives its title would make woke people furious if it came out today, not least because it's still funny and more relevant now than at the time of release.
**Hence the historically tenuous claims that the gender binary is a recent artifact of Western capitalism and ancient civilizations had a more fluid conception of gender - "two-spirit" etc.
***This can get kind of Gnostic the more you think about it. It's not revisionist of the Wachowskis to claim that The Matrix was always intended as a trans metaphor - the reason this interpretation doesn't jump out at most people is because they're approaching gender ideology from the perspective of "most people are cis, but some people are trans and that's okay and they deserve respect and compassion" as opposed to the perspective of "everyone is trans, but most have been brainwashed into believing they're cis - freethinkers whose eggs have hatched see the truth". Cypher is a detransitioner and also a cowardly traitorous villain: not a coincidence.
The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money, and, like, ok Elon, I think you deserve less money and if you don't care about that opinion, why should they?
Wikipedia receives money via fundraising campaigns which appeal to end users to donate. The copy these campaigns use is notorious for being misleading or deceptive about the company's financial position, something that people (even seasoned members of the Wikipedia community) have been complaining about for years. As others below me have noted, only a tiny fraction of Wikipedia's operating expenses go towards keeping the site online, and most of the editing done on the website is done pro bono rather than by its hired staff. I, personally, think it's dishonest for a nonprofit to misrepresent itself as being on the precipice of going under without an immediate influx of charitable donations, and to imply that said charitable donations are going directly towards keeping the site online (when in truth, for every dollar you donate, something like 6 cents are going towards server costs).
Elon's companies receive money either by selling products or by soliciting investments. If you think his products are shoddy or overpriced, say so (I can't comment, having never sat in a Tesla and barely using Twitter, before or since Musk's takeover). If you think he's only securing investments by knowingly misleading investors, say so. Otherwise I'm not even sure what "Elon, I think you deserve less money" really means.
To what extent should it be presumed that sexless men will become rapists? Certainly we can look at some statistics proving rape exists, that some subset of men will eventually become rapists,
Some subset of men will, but not the men you're thinking of:
Perhaps more surprisingly, research indicates that high-status men are particularly likely to commit sexual assault. Buss writes, “men with money, status, popularity, and power are more likely to be sexual predators.” These results parallel the disconcerting finding that men who use sexual coercion have more partners than men who do not. A popular idea is that men who are desperate or deprived of chances for sex will be more likely to use coercion. This is known as the “mate deprivation hypothesis.” However, studies suggest the opposite is the case. Men who have more partners report higher levels of sexual aggression compared to men with fewer partners. Furthermore, men who predict that their future earnings will be high also report greater levels of sexual aggression relative to men who predict that their future earnings will be low.
One contributing factor may be an empathy deficit—the book reports that high status is linked to lower levels of empathy. Men high on Dark Triad traits are viewed as more attractive by women, are more likely to have consensual sexual partners, and are more likely to engage in sexual coercion.
Your hypothesis that the jock beats up the nerd because the nerd is eyeballing his woman, the jock feels threatened by him, and therefore engages in "mate guarding" behaviour - all of this rests on the assumption that the jock sees the nerd as a credible threat, a plausible sexual rival. Even you don't seem to believe the nerd represents this, so I suggest a more parsimonious representation: the jock bullies the nerd as it's a cheap way to demonstrate where the jock sits on the totem pole, particularly relative to the nerd.
Mere mention of an idea, even if surrounded by denunciation, can implant it in the minds of readers.
Isn't this the whole reasoning behind "journalistic balance"? You present one side of the debate, the other side of the debate, then allow the readers/viewers to draw their own conclusions.
A healthy journalistic approach to the debate around trans women in prisons would look something like this:
Alice: Given the minimal risk that trans women pose to female inmates (as evidenced by studies A, B and C) and the elevated risk of sexual assault they face in male prisons (as evidenced by studies X, Y and Z), I believe it is appropriate to house trans women inmates in female prisons rather than male.
Bob: I disagree - I believe the risk that trans women pose to female inmates has been vastly understated (as evidenced by studies D, E and F). Furthermore...
Instead what we so often get is:
"Bob has become notorious in recent years for his outspoken views on trans issues, which have been widely criticised as transphobic and demeaning to trans people."
Me: "Wow, that sounds really bad. Shame that the article doesn't tell me what these views are." half an hour of Googling later "Oh. He thinks it's inappropriate to house trans women in female prisons if they haven't transitioned. This is a totally normal opinion that the majority of people believe, which doesn't remotely imply that you hate trans people or wish them harm."
As I said in the linked article, if a journalist tells you that Bob has Bad Opinions but refuses to tell you what those opinions are, that suggests that the journalist has remarkably little faith in their own opinions to win in the marketplace of ideas - on some level, the journalist thinks their own ideas are so weak and unintuitive that even mentioning an opposing view will make a convert of the average reader. Indeed, we already know this is the standard attitude of trans activists everywhere, given that their whole modus operandi is to smuggle in unpopular pro-trans legislation under the guise of gay rights legislation which the average voter actually does endorse.
Lies, damned lies and the Washington Post
Substituting a common-sense statistical metric for a less obvious and intuitive one is almost always a red flag for deceit and obfuscation
With the introduction of its Notes feature, Substack appears to be making a pivot towards being a Twitter X competitor, the management perhaps having detected a gap in the market following the Elon Musk takeover. While one can question the wisdom of that decision, I commend them wholeheartedly for differentiating themselves from X in one key respect, namely avoiding the echo chamber dynamics which plague it and essentially every other major social media platform. Given how social media algorithms usually work, one would expect my Notes feed to be a nonstop deluge of gender-critical posts and anti-woke one-liners. On the contrary: in addition to plenty of nature photos and boomer dad jokes, I see the full spectrum of political opinions represented, from beliefs I wholeheartedly endorse to ones I would never consider in a lifetime. This is good, because being exposed to contrary opinions is healthy (“he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that” and all that), but also because I'm an argumentative, pedantic “to play devil's advocate” type by disposition, and find it hard to resist the opportunity to pull someone up on a weak argument or erroneous factual statement. (In a previous post when I described leftists as “ornery, confrontational types”, I meant it as a sincere compliment. It's possible, even common, to get so good at “reading the room” that you forget how to write.)
One such Note shared the graphic below, which claims that there has been a sharp increase in hate crimes targeting the LGBTQ community in schools across the United States, and that states with “anti-LGBTQ” laws have seen larger spikes than states without. The graphic was accompanied by a couple of paragraphs expounding that such an increase was both foreseen and intended by the homophobic, transphobic lawmakers behind the legislation.
The graphic itself is based on an article in the Washington Post from a few weeks ago. It features interviews with LGBTQ teenagers and their parents, describing the bullying and harassment they’ve experienced at their hands of their heteronormative peers, and contrasting these anecdotes with public statements from conservative politicians and lawmakers. The journalists more or less explicitly claim that LGBTQ people living in states with these kinds of legislation are at greater risk of being victimised because of their identity than LGBTQ people living elsewhere in the US.
I have a lot of thoughts on this article. The number of column inches dedicated to implying that Dagny “Nex” Benedict died as a direct result of transphobic bullying is unseemly (even if the article begrudgingly acknowledge that Benedict’s death was ultimately ruled a suicide).1 Some of the laws the journalists characterise as “anti-LGBTQ” are farcical. The most common type are those which “restrict trans student access to sports”, which is just a roundabout way of saying “forbids male students from competing in female sporting events”.2 Given that male athletes competing in female sporting events is manifestly, transparently unfair to anyone with even the most passing familiarity with sexual dimorphism, I support such laws without qualification. Oklahoma passed legislation in 2020 requiring that schools “teach that ‘a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait’ that cannot be changed”: given that this statement is unambigously true, I find the law no more objectionable than bans on public schools teaching creationism or geocentrism. The journalists clearly expect me to be horrified about a Virginia law requiring schools to notify parents whenever the school uses sexually explicit instructional material. Guys, seriously: if you want people to stop throwing the “groomer” accusation around left and right, you’re going to have to meet them halfway.
But my biggest problem with the article is its core thesis, as represented by the graphic above. I’m always deeply suspicious of statistical claims about “fastest growing” or “biggest increase”. Of all commonly quoted statistical observations, it seems like the most susceptible to random noise: if you’re measuring a value that started at a low baseline, some noise within normal variation can be truthfully (but misleadingly) claimed to represent a massive increase when it may be indicative of no such thing.
It also strikes me as a uniquely bad metric for the specific task of comparing which of two regions is the more dangerous. Imagine two neighbouring countries A and B, each with a population of 5 million. Last year, there were 100 murders in Country A and 5 in Country B. This year, there were 110 in Country A and 10 in Country B. It's unambiguously true that Country B’s murder rate increased by 100% year-on-year, while Country A’s “only” increased by 10%. It's also plainly true that you're 11 times more likely to get murdered in Country A than in Country B. If you were planning to book a holiday in either Country A or Country B and you were wondering which was safer, “murders per capita” will tell you far more than “rate of increase of the murder rate year-on-year”: there’s a very good reason that the term “the murder rate” refers to the former metric rather than the latter. In light of the above, if I read an article which tried to make Country B look bad by pointing out that its murder rate had increased by 10 times as much as Country A’s, I’d immediately wonder if the journalist had any undisclosed financial ties to Country A’s tourism board.
My suspicions thus raised, I decided to carry out a deep dive to check how accurate the narrative presented by the journalists was. Conveniently, the journalists based their statistical claims on FBI hate crimes data, which is a publicly available dataset. I downloaded the data and filtered it to only include hate crimes targeting the LGBT community and which occurred in the years 2015-22 (excluding 2020, as the journalists did). I then sorted these hate crimes based on whether they took place in a school or elsewhere, and whether or not they took place in a state with restrictive legislation concerning LGBTQ issues.3 Armed with the necessary data, I was ready to jump in and test the article’s key claims and suggestions.
It will come as no surprise that what I found departs from the narrative presented by the article rather sharply.
Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools
To back up its claims, the article divides the fifty states of the union into those which have restrictive legislation concerning LGBTQ issues and those which don’t, which I shall hereafter refer to as Restrictive States and Non-Restrictive States, respectively. While you could be forgiven for assuming that all the Restrictive States are Republican strongholds (a misconception the journalists do little to discourage), the category includes a number of states with Democratic governors, including North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota and Arizona, the latter two of which voted for Biden in 2020.
The article then sorts anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools (hereafter referred to as School Anti-LGBTQ Hate Crimes or SALHCs) based on whether they took place in Restrictive States or Non-Restrictive States. This is where they derive their headline claim that Restrictive States have seen a larger increase in SALHCs than Non-Restrictive States since 2015
That specific claim appears to be true. But at a glance, you’ll notice that Restrictive States report significantly fewer SALHCs than Non-Restrictive States in absolute terms, in both 2015-19 and 2021-22. (The authors are honest enough to acknowledge this, with caveats, which we’ll come back to later.)
I presumed that the higher rate in Non-Restrictive States was an artifact of the differing population sizes between the two regions, and that the two regions would have similar rates of SALHCs once you controlled for population; I even thought that Restrictive States might have more SALHCs per capita. But apparently not: according to the 2020 census, the two regions have a conveniently symmetric share of the total US population, with a difference of less than three million people. When taking this into account, not only are there more SALHCs in Non-Restrictive States than Restrictive States in absolute terms, but Non-Restrictive States have significantly more SALHCs per capita as well: 0.052/100k versus 0.037/100k, or about 40% higher in the former than the latter.
But maybe this is a population artifact of a different kind. Intuitively, I would expect that a higher proportion of the population openly identifies as LGBTQ in Non-Restrictive States when compared to Restrictive States. If anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are only reported as such if the victim openly identifies as LGBTQ, it stands to reason that regions with a large LGBTQ population will see higher rates of such hate crimes than regions with a smaller LGBTQ population, all things being equal. The journalists themselves gesture at this interpretation: “In addition, it’s possible more kids are public about their identities in more liberal states, creating more targets for bullies, said Lanae Erickson…”.
To check this, I looked at this report from UCLA’s Williams Institute, which estimates the number of LGBT young adults (aged 13-17) living in each state. This is an imperfect metric, as SALHCs includes anti-LGBTQ hate crimes which were committed in kindergarten all the way up to 12th grade, and therefore most likely includes some number of hate crimes in which the victim was under 13. It’s also likely that that some of the people who were victims of hate crimes in a school were not themselves children or young adults (e.g. an openly gay schoolteacher’s car gets vandalised by homophobic students). The report is also from September 2020, and I imagine the number of young adults openly identifying as LGBT has changed significantly since then. These caveats aside, I think the estimate is good enough for our purposes.
Unfortunately for the journalists, not only do more LGBT young adults reside in Restrictive States than in Non-Restrictive States (a difference of about 50,000 individuals), but Non-Restrictive States still report more SALHCs per capita than Restrictive States. The gap is even wider than in our previous table: 8.866/100k versus 5.969/100k, a difference of 49%.
I really don’t know that I’m saying anything terribly controversial here. Put yourself in the shoes of the parent of an LGBTQ child. Obviously you’re going to be concerned about your child getting bullied in school, and would prefer to send them to a school where they won’t be bullied on account of their sexuality or gender identity (or at all, for that matter). When assessing which school to send your child to, which of these two metrics would be most important to you: the rate of homophobic or transphobic bullying at the school per capita, or how big an increase the school has seen in the rate of homophobic or transphobic bullying over the last few years? I find it hard to imagine any circumstance in which a sensible, caring parent would prefer, all things being equal, to send their child to a school which had a high rate of homophobic bullying over a school which had a dramatically lower rate of homophobic bullying, but which had recently seen a significant increase.
In fairness to the journalists, the article isn’t quite as one-sided as I’m making out, and they were balanced enough to include one interview with a California teenager who’s been bullied because of their gender identity. But there’s something so dishonest about including this anecdote alongside paragraph after paragraph of editorialising about how cruel the legislation is in Virginia, Oklahoma and Mississippi - without even acknowledging that California reports about three times as many SALHCs per capita than Virginia, Oklahoma or Mississippi.
Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes more generally
Zooming out from SALHCs to hate crimes against the LGBTQ community generally is no more favourable to the journalists’ position, and here we veer sharply from the realm of “claims which are technically true, but misleading” to “claims which are outright false”. The journalists write “The FBI data shows serious incidents against LGBTQ+ people are on the rise, particularly in the more than two dozen states that have passed laws targeting LGBTQ+ students or education.” The word “particularly” implies that the states which have enacted legislation saw steeper increases in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes than the states which did not. Note that, unlike the section above, this sentence refers to serious incidents against LGBTQ people in general, not just incidents in K-12 schools.
My analysis of the data shows the exact opposite: between 2015-22, states without restrictive anti-LGBTQ laws have seen a steeper increase in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes than states with such legislation. This isn’t just a statistical fudge, this is an unambigous falsehood.
For completeness’s sake, I will also calculate anti-LGBTQ hate crimes per capita in the two regions. In 2021-22, Non-Restrictive States reported more than 4 times as many anti-LGBTQ hate crimes per capita than Restrictive States.
… and per capita LGBTQ.4
To sum up:
When comparing states with legislation governing bathrooms, sports and sex education with states without such legislation:
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, in absolute terms
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, per capita
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, per capita that identifies as LGBTQ
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, in absolute terms
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, per capita
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, per capita that identifies as LGBTQ
- Hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people have significantly increased in both regions of the US from 2015 to 2022, but have increased far faster in the latter region than the former
- However, hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people which took place in schools have increased faster in the former region than the latter
And what is the reader intended to take away from all of the above? That it’s uniquely difficult to be a young LGBTQ person living in a state with legislation governing bathrooms, sports and sex education.
Conclusion
I feel more than a little resentful for having to go to the trouble of carrying out all this statistical analysis, because I know I’m double-jobbing. I’m extremely confident that the journalists who wrote this story have already carried most or all of the calculations listed above. They pitched this great story to their editor about a surge in hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people following the passing of anti-trans legislation. They went into this dataset with high hopes, confident that it would back up their thesis, plain as day. Then they dug into it and found, to their horror, that the data painted precisely the opposite story. I can almost see their brows furrowing in confusion and panic as they go down their wishlist of statistical metrics in order of preference, discovering that none of them paint the desired picture. Hate crimes more common in Restrictive States - nope. Hate crimes in schools more common in Restrictive States - nope. Hate crimes rising faster in Restrictive States - nope.
But they can’t just kill the story, not when they’ve already written hundreds of words and secured interviews with an impressive collection of intelligent, articulate teenagers. Without hard data to back up the testimony of the interviewees, the story is relegated to mere anecdote - it’s not serious political journalism, it’s just a culture piece, a human interest story. So instead, they spent ages digging through this dataset, twisting it, contorting it, pleading with it to give them any relevant-ish metric which would back up their narrative. And this was the best metric they could find. Stories like this don’t exist because of honest mistakes: they only come into being through deceit and manipulation.
As I mentioned above, the journalists were honest enough to acknowledge that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools are more common in Non-Restrictive States than Restrictive States, in absolute terms. They’re quick to explain away this inconvenient finding by claiming that it’s a reporting artifact. Hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people are more common in Restrictive States, they argue, but are more likely to go unreported because of a culture of silence, whereas LGBTQ people who’ve been victimised because of their identity in Non-Restrictive States are more likely to report it to the relevant authorities.
I’m sure this is a contributing factor to the differing rates of hate crimes reported in the two regions (although I very much doubt it’s sufficient to explain the disparity on its own). At the same time - come on. Does anyone really doubt that if the data had told the story that the journalists wanted it to tell - that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are more common in Restrictive States than Non-Restrictive States - they wouldn’t be shouting that from the rooftops? No way in hell would they be claiming that a higher rate of reported hate crimes in a region is good, actually, if the shoe had been on the other foot. But the data didn’t give them the answer they wanted, so they’re forced to play this tiresome game of “Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are higher in blue states than in red states - and that’s a good thing.”
Why does this article exist? Personally, I very much doubt that any would-be criminal hears a story on the radio about his state congress banning male students from competing in female sporting events, and immediately thinks to himself “Boy howdy, time to beat up some queers!” I doubt that even the journalists really think that any kind of causal relationship exists between legislation like this and the incidence of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, so why use such a weak argument when the data don’t support your conclusions? I suspect that they’re practising what Scott Alexander calls fake consequentialism. The journalists obviously think that trans girls should be allowed to compete in female sporting events, but this is a very difficult policy to defend: doing so requires one to deny the very concept of sexual dimorphism and differences in strength and speed between males and females (something which is obvious to toddlers) - the denial of which makes you look like a crazy person. Instead, rather than getting into a debate over whether males competing in female sporting events is fair (which they’re sure to lose, because it isn’t), they shift the conversation to the consequentialist claim that banning male students from competing in female sporting events causes a spike in hate crimes against the LGBTQ community. But as I hope I’ve made abundantly clear, even this argument doesn’t check out.
Maybe I’m mind-reading, maybe this isn’t what the journalists are doing at all. But regardless of their motivations, they made at least one provably false assertion and a batch of true-but-misleading ones. This article is an insult to their readers’ intelligence, it’s bad, and they should feel bad.
1 A police officer interviewed Benedict in the hospital after the bathroom fight which was initially cited (erroneously) as the cause of death. The bodycam footage reveals that a) Benedict admits to having started the fight; b) Benedict freely responds to the name “Dagny” and seems entirely at ease being referred to with female pronouns; and c) Benedict never requests to be addressed as “Nex”, or referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. This bodycam footage was released several weeks prior to the Post’s article, making the journalists’ decision to use Benedict’s death as an example of the harms wrought by transphobic bullying all the more distasteful (particularly given that certain journalists working for the Post almost certainly knew that Benedict’s father is currently serving time for repeatedly raping her as a prepubescent child).
2 The journalists know full well that their readers will hear about laws which “restrict trans student access to sports” and will think “oh my god, trans high schoolers in Mississippi are actually banned from playing sports!” as opposed to “male students in Mississippi may not compete in female sporting events, regardless of how they identify”. No matter how many times I encounter “respectable” journalists brazenly attempting to hoodwink their readers like this, I never feel any less insulted or disgusted. Truly, have they no shame?
3 To ensure I was looking at the same basic dataset as that on which the journalist based their findings, I performed a quick sense-check by comparing the total number of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes which were committed in schools according to my dataset and according to the figure cited in the article: the two figures were almost identical. Why “almost”? Well, the Post article asserts that 251 anti-LGBTQ hate crimes were committed in schools or colleges in 2022. According to my dataset, the figure was 245. I don’t think the discrepancy is an error on the part of the journalists, and assume the figure of 251 was accurate at the time of writing. I think what happened is that the FBI’s database is constantly being updated, and some crimes are either removed from the dataset (e.g. the victim withdraws their complaint) or reclassified as something other than a hate crime (e.g. further investigation determines that the perpetrator of the crime was not motivated by homophobia). In other cases the figure in my dataset matches the figure cited in the article exactly e.g. I found 114 anti-LGBTQ hate crimes were committed in schools or colleges in 2018, just as the journalists did.
4 The figures in the third column are the sum of the number of LGBT young adults (aged 13-17) in each state, and the number of LGBT adults in each state. The latter figures are drawn from a separate report by the Williams Institute, which was published in December 2023 and is hence likely more up-to-date than their report on LGBT young adults. This report contained some surprising findings, particularly that, as a share of the population, more adults in the South identify as LGBT than in any other region of the US. Not surprisingly, California has the largest adult LGBT population of any state, so we don’t need to retire those jokes about San Francisco just yet.
In the trans debate, I encountered an argument the other day which to me reads like a textbook example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis. I would like to run it by you good people to see if there's something I'm missing.
My woke, far-left sister was complaining about a male person she knows who claims to be non-binary, and yet behaves in a manner entirely consistent with certain negative stereotypes about masculinity, specifically "mansplaining", the tendency of certain men to condescendingly talk down to women, even if the women in question are more knowledgeable about the topic in question than the man himself is. She said it was abundantly obvious from his demeanour that this person was a man, not something intermediate between male and female.
I thought to myself "wow, my sister's gotten redpilled somewhere along the way" and enthusiastically agreed with her, arguing that I think the concept of "gender identity" has essentially zero predictive power, and that self-declared trans people almost invariably behave in a manner more consistent with their natal sex then their claimed gender identity. The specific example I gave was that trans women are 6 times more likely than cis women to be convicted of a crime, and 18 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime. Which is exactly what you'd expect on the basis of their sex, not their gender identity. If trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, why do they commit crimes at the same rates as men?
My sister's rebuttal was that, even though trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, they were still socialised to be male prior to their coming out as trans, which compels them to behave in a manner consistent with the masculine norm.
This strikes me as a perfect example of the adage "if a theory explains everything, it explains nothing". If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a female person to behave, that demonstrates that she's really a woman. If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a male person to behave, that demonstrates that she was socialised into behaving like a male person against her will. Under this framing, there is literally nothing a trans woman can do which can ever point away from her "really" being a woman.
What would it take to falsify this hypothesis? Is there some piece of the puzzle that I'm missing here? I'm sincerely looking for a steelman.
When discussing pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in the treatment of gender dysphoria, the gender-critical among us often draw parallels with bodily integrity identity disorder. This is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person experiences profound distress because of the presence of one or more of their limbs, and requests to have these limbs amputated to alleviate said distress (or tries to amputate them themselves). Colloquially, one might say that people with this condition are able-bodied but identify as disabled.
Given that no one thinks that surgical amputation is the correct treatment for this psychiatric disorder, we gender-criticals argued, it follows that surgical intervention is the wrong approach for people with gender dysphoria. If it's wrong to amputate a mentally ill's person's arm just because they say it's causing them distress, how can it be right to do the same for a penis or breast?
Sadly, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, the medical establishment has noted the parallels, and it is coming to a rather different conclusion:
Sensational news from late last week, that doctors amputated two fingers for a 20-year-old patient to alleviate the young man’s mental distress over being able-bodied, contained a buried clue: “He related his condition to gender dysphoria.”
... A 2018 ethics analysis in a Cambridge University Press publication concludes that there is “no logical difference between the conceptual status of BIID and transsexualism”. It goes on to say that, “given that individuals with transsexualism are offered gender reassignment surgery it seems to us that individuals with BIID ought at least to be considered for treatment, including elective amputation in some cases.”
... But what would it mean to accept the amputee identity at scale, the way we have accepted trans rights as a universal humanitarian movement? Drawing exact parallels, we would likely see a total saturation of amputee culture, from amputee story hour to centring amputee voices in DEI training, and doctors warning parents of the very real suicide risks for amputee-identifying children whose parents refuse to accept them as surgically modified cripples or invalids. Advocates would talk of being “assigned able-bodied at birth” to persuade activist teachers and medical associations to adopt the absolutist position that any attempt to talk kids out of amputee surgery amounts to “conversion therapy”.
The journalist Mia Hughes recently asked readers to imagine a society in which amputee advocates enjoyed the same cultural and political victories as trans advocates.
“Imagine there were a sudden 4000% increase in teens identifying as amputees, but we were all forbidden from being concerned. Instead we were supposed to celebrate it,” she posted on X. “Imagine schools teaching children as young as kindergarten that some people have amputee identities, that they get to choose how many limbs they have. Posters promoting body mutilation adorned the walls of many classrooms.”
Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured. It doesn't matter if the Tavistock is shuttered and there's a rash of lawsuits directed at youth gender clinics in the US: if you're a medic who's internalised (or been made to internalise) the gender ideology worldview, the implications of that worldview and the role of the medical establishment it affirms have far-reaching implications in medical domains unrelated to gender medicine itself. At this point I honestly can't rule out psychiatrists prescribing anorexics appetite suppressants to aid them in achieving their "bodily attainment goals".
*Other than why the fuck are Canadian doctors so keen to help their fellow citizens maim or destroy their bodies??!!
Folamh3
5mo ago
It was crazy how up in arms all of the women on my Instagram were about Aisling Murphy and how her murder was a huge indictment of Irish culture and how Irish men are socialised and how we need to #stopblamingwomen - up until the exact moment it turned out the killer was Slovak, and then they immediately shut up about it.
Trans communities encourage trans people to cut loved ones out of their lives entirely if the loved one in question doesn't uncritically affirm the trans person's gender identity, push for legislation which would ban any forms of therapy which don't uncritically affirm a trans person's gender identity (on the grounds that a failure to affirm it is tantamount to "conversion therapy") and push for legislation which would make a parent's failure to affirm their child's professed gender identity a factor in determining custody in divorce cases. The idea that this only resembles Scientology's suppressive persons doctrine "if you squint" is absurd.
To struggle sessions?
The phrase "death before detransition" returns 600k results on Google. Jehovah's Witnesses have a policy of shunning former members who leave the faith. I really don't think it's a reach to notice the parallels here.
Cui bono? Who is the Jeff Divine, the Marshall Applewhite, the Jim Jones? That’s not to say a cult has to have a charismatic leader.
I know Scientology was founded by L. Ron Hubbard, but I don't know who its current charismatic leader is, is or if it even has one. I still have zero qualms about calling it a cult.
And even if gender ideology lacks a charismatic leader, there are still many people who bono from it: mediocre male athletes who'd never win anything if they weren't allowed to compete in women's sporting events, convicted perverts who'd rather serve their sentences in a women's prison, and pharmaceutical and medical professionals making a killing in the provision of "gender-affirming care" (surgeries in the US alone were valued at $2.1 billion, while hormones are worth $1.6 billion). I'm not going to go quite so far as to claim that "gender ideology is a conspiracy by Big Pharma to sell more T", but I do find it weird what a huge blind spot so many leftists seem to have: critics of capitalism who correctly recognise that pharmaceutical companies have a financial incentive to encourage pathologisation and medicalisation of as many conditions as possible, but surely they'd never stoop so low as to persuade teens and young children to believe that they're really members of the opposite sex, perish the thought.
Folamh3
10mo ago
This precise example occurred to me awhile back, but with stepfathers rather than stepmothers.
"Father" has two meanings, biological and social. A father is the male person who impregnated the child's mother (biological). It is usually expected that this individual will also be the child's primary male role model and jointly responsible for raising and/or providing for them (social). In certain cases the child's primary male role model and the male person who impregnated the child's mother may be different people, in which case we disambiguate them (stepfather, biological father).
In some instances, the stepfather has been so present in the child's life and has formed such a strong bond with them that we refer to them as the child's father. This is a social fiction done in the interests of convenience or courtesy, and nobody really finds this objectionable. There may be a few instances in which we must defer to the child's biological father, but for most intents and purposes the stepfather is the child's father.
But this polite social fiction can be stretched too far. If the stepfather came to literally believe that he was responsible for conceiving the child, and pointedly asked us if he could see the resemblance between him and the child, we would have to push back and say, no, I'm sorry, you are not literally the child's father. Claiming that there is a familial resemblance between you and the child when you have no DNA in common is pseudoscience. If the stepfather were then to become distraught, lash out and accuse us of "invalidating his lived experience as a father", that would surely bring his mental state into question.
The rational part of me believed I was dooming my career by writing this novel. Though I had to write the book anyway. We do not have a choice in such matters.”
sobrave.jpeg Reminds me of John Boyega saying that he expected his acting career to be over as a consequence of his heroic decision to speak at a - Black Lives Matter protest, in London. Okay buddy.
I heard about the central stylistic gimmick of this novel (the entire book is told in one unbroken paragraph) before I heard about the premise, and based on that alone I knew I'd never read it. I've read some books which experimented with the form and presentation of the text in interesting ways (e.g. House of Leaves), but I find it impossible to imagine any way in which this gimmick would be anything other than an annoyance. Upon hearing the premise I'm even less inclined to read it than previously.
You're entirely right to point out that concerns about a far-right authoritarian takeover of Ireland are about as unfounded as it being taken over by pixies and unicorns. Even the idea that such a scenario is implausible in Ireland, but would be plausible in the US or Canada, is fanciful - just as in Ireland, it's the parties who present themselves as woke centrist neoliberals who pose the greatest threat of initiating democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. As @KulakRevolt will remind us, it wasn't a far-right Canadian prime minister who froze the bank accounts of anyone even tangentially connected to an oppositional political movement (the kind of thing we'd expect from Erdoğan or Putin) - it was Justin Trudeau, Mr. "Because it's 2015" himself, on whom Leo Varadkar unabashedly models himself.
To be slightly more charitable to Lynch, I wonder if he's fallen victim to some kind of The Last Psychiatrist-esque "telling yourself one story as a protection against what's really bothering you" psychological defense mechanism.
Any remotely politically aware person living in Ireland in the last five years would have good cause to be concerned about Ireland falling victim to democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. The lockdowns instated in response to Covid-19 represented an unprecedented seizing of control by the state and an incursion into the private lives of Irish citizens, and were some of the longest in the world. Likewise, nobody ever expected the introduction of vaccine passes to get into bars and restaurants: the denizens of /r/ireland scoffed at me when I said I was worried about them being brought in, and assured me they never would - then they did, and the same people scoffed at me for being concerned about this unprecedented invasion of privacy. Earlier this year, a piece of "hate speech" legislation (which, among other things, would make it an offense punishable with jail time to have a racist meme stored on your phone, even if it was sent to you by your annoying uncle in a family WhatsApp group chat) passed in the lower house of parliament, despite only 27% of the public supporting it. It has not yet passed the upper house, but of course the architects of the bill are using last month's race riot as a pretext for pushing for it to be passed (even though it would have done nothing to prevent the riot). All of these policies or pieces of legislation were introduced by a coalition government which presents itself as woke, centrist and neoliberal. Meanwhile, the far-right politicians in the country are so marginalised that they might as well not exist for how involved they are in the democratic process - no politician who could be characterised as far-right under even the most generous interpretation of that term has ever held public office.
Now, you can scoff and roll your eyes at anti-lockdowners and accuse them all of being anti-5G nutters who'd step over their own grandmothers' corpses for a pint in a pub with their mates, but on some level, any thinking person must experience some measure of concern about these developments, if only on a subconscious level, no matter how much they might try to deny it. Perhaps Lynch reacted to the political developments of the past five years with the same alarm I felt about Ireland's future. The problem for him is, he can't imagine a world in which a socially progressive government could also be authoritarian. I don't mean the possibility of such a thing coming to pass has occurred to him, but he's dismissed the possibility as too remote to merit serious consideration - I mean that he can no more conceive of such a thing than he can a triangle with four sides. For most educated Irish people, "right-wing" and "authoritarian" go hand-in-hand, and the concept of a "left-wing authoritarian state" is an empty set, a term without a referent. They've never heard of the Holodomor, or the Khmer Rouge - they think of Cuba as "that place with great healthcare" and nothing else. I've even had a Trinity graduate patiently explain to me on Facebook that Josef Stalin was actually far-right, and accused me of doing a disservice to real socialists by inaccurately characterising Stalin as far-left.
So, Lynch notices he's concerned about the possibility of Ireland becoming an authoritarian state in the near future. He can't bring himself to confront the possibility that Fine Gael could ever be the instigators of such a state (how could they? They have their pronouns in their bios on Twitter!). So the only way he can express his concerns in a way that feels psychologically safe for him is by contriving this absurd scenario in which the far-right seizes power and instates all of the policies he's worried about Fine Gael bringing in (presumably along with some token anti-LGBTQIAA2S+ and anti-immigrant legislation, to improve Lynch's plausible deniability). I don't think Lynch is lying to the readers about what his book is about - I think he's lying to himself.
Folamh3
10mo ago
I once got into an argument with a feminist, and when I brought up the homelessness thing, she countered that female homelessness tends to be less "visible" as it more often takes the form of couchsurfing than actual rough sleeping.
In other words: if you're a woman and you become homeless, friends and family will let you stay with them temporarily. If you're a man, you're on your own.
Folamh3
11mo ago
I can't tell if this is completely ridiculous or not.
"Coloured people" - outdated and offensive.
"People of colour" - woke and progressive.
I will never be persuaded that rearranging the order of the constituent words of a phrase is the difference between "racist" and "not racist". Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
I've been meaning to write a blog post which touches on this topic for months. Here's the bullet points:
- Being morally good and being likeable on an interpersonal level are orthogonal traits. Many people are both, many people are neither, but it isn't hard to find examples of people who are likeable but unvirtuous (e.g. charming con artists), or who are morally upstanding but hard to like (e.g. socially awkward and arrogant nerds who join EA and donate vast sums of their own money to charitable causes).
- The assumption that people who are likeable are also morally upstanding (and vice versa) is so widespread that it might as well be instinctual (for evolutionary reasons). How often do you hear people say "I like him, he's a really nice guy", as if the former by definition implies the latter? It takes immense courage to assert, without a trace of irony, that you like someone even though he's an actively nasty dickhead.
- We assume that our friends and lovers are decent people who only occasionally behave badly under unusually stressful circumstances (i.e. the fundamental attribution error), whereas people we don't like are assumed to be actively nasty (even if we've forgiven our friends for worse crimes than our enemies have ever committed).
- Many people are extremely poor judges of why they find someone attractive (either platonically, sexually or romantically). Asking people to enumerate the kind of friend or husband they want is a task extremely susceptible to being confounded by social desirability bias. Most people (especially those lacking in self-awareness) will list off a bunch of socially commendable traits and fail to notice that none of the people they've been involved with historically have ever met that description.
- If you've internalised the idea that anyone you like is good and that anyone you dislike is bad, if you're approached by a person who's obviously attracted to you or wants to be your friend, but you don't feel the same way, the only way to resolve the cognitive dissonance will be to decide that that person is a bad person.
- Sometimes the person will, by coincidence, be a genuinely bad person (because interpersonal likeability and personal virtue are orthogonal), but sometimes they'll be a morally upstanding person guilty only of being physically unattractive or somewhat lacking in social graces. For this eventuality, there's the all-encompassing cop-out that "he just gave me creepy vibes". If a woman says that a guy is "creepy" or "gave off creepy vibes" but is unable, when pressed, to provide a single specific example of a creepy thing that guy said or did (e.g. groping her, being pushy, making inappropriately sexual conversation on a first date etc.), you can reasonably assume he did nothing wrong besides not being the kind of guy to whom she's attracted. I don't care if it's been memed to death, this comic is a 100% accurate depiction of the behaviour of modern Western feminists in particular and the human species in general.
- As I said, sometimes you might find that a person you don't like is a genuinely bad guy, but don't think the cart is before the horse - likeability comes first, then assessment of personal virtue. If a person says "I don't like him because he did XYZ", you may well later find him or her explaining away the XYZ committed by someone they like (platonically, sexually or romantically). XYZ isn't the reason you dislike so-and-so: you dislike him because he's boring or has an irritating laugh, then you tell yourself a story that the real reason you dislike him is because he did XYZ (even if you'd be perfectly happy to excuse XYZ if committed by someone interesting with a normal laugh).
- This is most pronounced in the case of sexual/romantic relationships, but all of the above applies just as much in platonic relationships too. If someone wants to be our friend and we don't like them or enjoy their company, the human default is to insist that they are morally bad, not just boring or lacking in social graces. Many socially maladroit people end up with the erroneous belief that they are morally bankrupt on the basis of not having many (or any) friends, because they've fully internalised the "likeable = morally good" framework and all it implies.
And before anyone starts urging me to secure a mail-order bride, I'm in a happy relationship with a conventionally attractive woman. You don't have to be an incel to empathise with them.
My subjective observation would be that that attitude - women are liars, women are picky, etc. - about women leaks out into interactions with them, and, understandably, they, or I supposed “we”, do not want to get romantically or sexually involved with someone who thinks so poorly of “us”.
I hope you don't feel like you're being dogpiled, but this hypothesis of yours is not new (in fact, it's at least a decade old), greatly lacks for predictive power, and I'm tired of seeing this half-baked hypothesis being trotted out every time the topic comes up.
For most of the last 10+ years, this theory has taken the form of "Nice Guys™/incels don't realise that their misogyny is the very thing preventing them from getting laid. If they just stopped hating women and became feminist, they would have no trouble getting girls to go out with them." Sounds intuitively plausible. I can understand why Alice wouldn't want to date Bob if she gets the impression that he hates her because of her sex.
But on the other hand, the people making this argument tend to argue that the following people are also misogynists: Donald Trump (married 3 times, five children), Ben Shapiro (happily married, three children), every PUA, every man who beats his wife/girlfriend.
I'm not claiming that these characterisations are inaccurate, and I pretty much endorse the idea that a man who beats his wife probably doesn't respect women as a group. My point is, the hypothesis "incels are incels because they're misogynistic" is incompatible with the hypothesis "Donald Trump is a misogynist who has no trouble attracting women" or the hypothesis "men who beat their wives are misogynistic". Misogyny alone cannot explain both "men who are pathologically lonely, who no woman wants to date" and "men who marry a woman in a non-arranged marriage, and go on to beat her": this is a panchreston. Either one of the groups in question isn't misogynistic, or there must be some other factor(s) influencing the outcomes.
Are incels misogynists? Some of them, sure. Are the people on this site misogynists? Some of them, sure, maybe. But don't give me the pat answer "if you just started respecting women then women would be falling over themselves to date you" when this argument has been hashed out a thousand times in the last ten years, and we both know full well that there are innumerable men who have far less enlightened views on women than the average poster on this site who have absolutely no trouble attracting women.
Probably unnecessary clarification: I don't consider myself a feminist, and the typical Western feminist would probably accuse me of being misogynistic. In spite of this, I haven't had any trouble attracting women at any point in the last ~five years, have had an unusually high number of female sexual partners (including several women who explicitly told me that they disagreed with many of my opinions on gender politics), and I'm currently in a relationship with a woman I respect.
My anecdotal experience would tend towards men who are feminist having a harder time getting women to date them than men who aren't. Consider a group of four male friends. The first is me; the second is quite conservative and paid money to see Jordan Peterson live; the third admits that he finds Andrew Tate's content amusing; the fourth is rabidly feminist, who has argued with me at length that female underrepresentation in STEM is principally caused by misogyny among the men who work in those fields, and that any appeals to biological sex differences to explain differing career outcomes is sexist pseudoscience. Three of these men are in relationships with attractive women; one of them had a dry spell lasting at least two and a half years - no prizes for guessing which is which. I know I refer to it a lot, but Tony Tulathimutte's short story "The Feminist" rang incredibly true for me.
I think the artistic innovations of the 1960s are largely attributable to the technological innovations of the era. There was a huge amount of low-hanging technological fruit which was first picked in the 1960s, and it's much easier to create a fresh and exciting record when you're the first person to use a particular musical instrument or recording technique. The 1960s saw the introduction of:
- The Moog synth (the first commercially available synth)
- The Mellotron
- The wah-wah pedal
- The whammy bar
- The fuzz box
- Direct input of guitars
- The cassette tape
- The 8-track tape
- Drum machines (the first pop song to use a drum machine was in 1969)
- Multi-mic'd drum kits
Practically every time the Beatles entered the studio, there was a new game-changing invention waiting for them to play with. I've spent far more of the last ten years than I care to mention in recording studios, and the process for recording and mixing a rock song has not significantly changed in the last ten years. Whatever innovations there are tend to be incremental.
Folamh3
7mo ago
My read on all this is that it is a human psychological tragedy, Ballard got lost in his own masculine heroic fantasy. Good men nearly all carry the fantasy of, as they say, wishin' a nigga would. We want a reason to give our World of Cardboard Speech. We have the urge to engage in violence and adventure, but we want justified violence, righteous adventure. We want to fight, but fight for the right.
I'm not proud to admit how often I'm on public transport with some scumbags in their late teens/early twenties being generally obnoxious loudmouths (playing music through their shitty Bluetooth speakers, vaping, yelling at each other etc.) and find myself thinking "man, I wish one of these fuckers would start some shit so I could punch his lights out with impunity".
But I don't think we have any good reason, right now, to believe that this was part of Ballard's motivation/rationalisation. I suspect that he was both sincere in his desire to rescue children from sex trafficking, and also a horndog. Maybe he believed that his "heroism" entitled him to some strange - he'd earned it, hadn't he?
In 2022 there was a horrific case in Ireland where a young teacher in her twenties named Aisling Murphy was murdered by a complete stranger while out jogging. It dominated news headlines for weeks, and all the usual bromides made the rounds on Irish social media: demands to "stop victim blaming" (I don't recall seeing anyone, ever, suggesting that Murphy was in any way to blame for her murder); accusing all Irish men for being complicit in her death, either for making jokes about sexual assault, or for not calling out their male friends when they did so.
Then they arrested and charged a recent Slovakian immigrant with her murder, and the feminists got real quiet about it, of course.
A few months later, there was an even more horrific story in which a mother set her car on fire with her and her two young children inside: she survived, they didn't. This didn't get half the attention as the previous case. I couldn't help but wondering - why is it that I would be castigated if I said "if you're a mother and you've ever said 'ugh, my boys are driving me up the wall, I could just kill them', you're complicit in the deaths of these two children"? Oh no, it's really a mental health issue, actually the system failed her and she felt she had no choice but to attempt a murder-suicide, someone else should have noticed the warning signs beforehand. It's all so tiresome.
Edit: misremembered the perpetrator as Romanian, he was actually Slovakian. Misremembered the sexes of the two children. Amended.
Contra deBoer on transgender issues
I don't think you're merely asking us to be "kind"
I’ve long been a great fan of Freddie deBoer. He’s a consistently thought-provoking and engaging writer, courageous in his willingness to step on toes and slaughter sacred cows, worth reading even when I (often) disagree with him.
One of many areas on which I disagree with Freddie is in our respective stances on trans issues. Some years back, he posted that he was sick of people in the comments of his articles bringing up trans issues even though the article itself had nothing to do with the topic, and announced a blanket ban on this specific behaviour.1 He subsequently posted about the subject in more detail, explaining why (in contrast to his more iconoclastic opinions on progressive issues like racism, policing and mental health) he supports the standard “trans-inclusive” paradigm more or less uncritically. In March of last year, he posted an article titled “And Now I Will Again Ponderously Explain Why I Am Trans-Affirming”.
To be frank, I found the article staggeringly shoddy and poorly argued, especially for such a typically perceptive writer: it was a profound shame to see him fall victim to exactly the same errors in reasoning and appeals to emotion he so loudly decries when progressives use them in other political contexts. I intended to write a response to that article but never got around to it, and then the moment had passed. Last week he published not one but two new articles on the topic, so now I have a second chance to strike while the iron is hot. In some cases I will respond to Freddie’s arguments directly; in other cases I think it will be illuminating to contrast what Freddie wrote on this topic with what he has written on other controversial political issues in the past, to illustrate how flagrantly he is failing to live up to his own standards and committing precisely the same infractions he has complained about at length in other contexts.
“No one is saying” and what a strawman is
Freddie repeatedly asserts that various complaints that gender-critical people might have about trans activists are completely unfounded and invented from whole cloth, that no trans activists are saying what gender-critical people accuse them of having said, and that if any trans activists are saying these things then they’re only a small radical fringe and they don’t matter.
In 2021, Freddie wrote an article titled "NO ONE SAYS" & What a Strawman Is", describing a rhetorical trick in which a person opposing him on some political issue will insist that “NO ONE SAYS” a thing Freddie disagrees with, Freddie will cite examples of people saying that exact thing - but rather than concede the point, the person will simply move the goalposts:
Freddie might claim that no one is trying to obliterate the distinction between men and women; no less than a once-august publication like Scientific American argues that sex is a “spectrum” and that the idea of there being “only” two sexes is “simplistic”. Freddie might claim that no one in his experience has ever scolded him for saying “birthing person”, but that is the official language advocated for by the UK’s National Health Service. Freddie might insist that no one wants you to stop calling your kids boys or girls, but here’s a fawning article in the New York Times about parents doing exactly that, and another from the BBC.
Note also Freddie’s claim that linguistic prescriptions like “birthing person” and “chestfeeder” are largely confined to “the parts of our culture that have aggressive HR departments”. This might come as a surprise to Freddie, but some of us actually have to work in companies with aggressive HR departments - we aren’t all lucky enough to be self-employed freelancers pulling down six figures a year, beholden to no one but ourselves. It’s very strange for a self-identified Marxist who expresses such profound outrage about the capitalist exploitation of the proletariat to be so blasé about the obnoxious ideological hoops that ordinary working people are made to jump through as a condition of continued employment in a precarious economy.
For emphasis: Freddie, someone is in fact saying! And in many cases these “someones” are far more powerful and have far more influence on our culture than you or anyone in your circle of like-minded Brooklyn activists. When the fifth-largest employer in the entire world is demanding that its staff exclusively use “birthing person” in place of “mother”, what some Brooklyn activist believes is beside the point.
Female sporting events
I also find it hard to square Freddie’s claim that “no one” is trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female altogether with his apparent belief that trans women competing in female sporting events is entirely fair and legitimate. How can such a policy possibly be justified without ignoring the indisputable biological reality, consistent across time and space, that the average male person is stronger, faster and more resilient than 99% of female people? No less of a once-respectable institution than the American Civil Liberties Union describes the claim that “Trans athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes” as a “myth”. When a respected organisation like the ACLU, with an annual budget exceeding $300 million, asserts that male people are collectively no stronger than female people - the only way I can describe the claim that “no one” is trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female people is that it is a shameless insult to the reader’s intelligence.
Scepticism for me, but not for thee
A recurrent problem throughout the article is Freddie assuming that any criticism of trans-inclusive policies is a criticism of trans people themselves. No matter how many times a gender-critical person might assert “I’m not worried about trans people using this policy to hurt people - I’m worried about bad actors who are not themselves trans or suffering from gender dysphoria taking advantage of this policy to hurt people”, Freddie continually insists that criticising policies intended to be trans-inclusive is functionally the same as criticising trans people as a group. This is precisely the same kind of facile reasoning he’s so elegantly skewered in other political domains - the notion that opposition to this or that policy necessarily implies hatred of black people, or the mentally ill, or what have you. But he’s guilty of it himself, admitting elsewhere in the article that certain trans-inclusive policies pursued by the radical fringe of the trans activist lobby are short-sighted and counterproductive. So we find ourselves in the curious position in which Freddie can criticise this trans-inclusive policy without that bringing his support for trans rights into question - but if gender-critical people are sceptical or uneasy about that trans-inclusive policy, the only reasonable explanation is that they’re crypto-conservative fundamentalist Christians motivated solely by disgust and hatred of trans people.
For example, Freddie admits to scepticism about outré neogenders (“I suspect a lot of those people will probably adopt a more conventional gender identity as they age”), that a lot of the linguistic prescriptions trans activists make are preposterous and counterproductive (“I think making people believe that you want to get rid of the term “mother” is about as politically wise as punching a baby on camera”), that it’s wrong to act like medically transitioning will solve all of a trans person’s problems (“And I worry, for young trans people, that they’ll find transitioning to be just another of these human disappointments - things will be better, no doubt, but as we all tend to do they’ll have idealized the next stage of their lives and then may experience that sudden comedown when they realize that they’re still just humans with human problems”) and even that some medical practitioners are being overly aggressive about pushing minors to transition (“Can I see understand [sic] some concerns with overly-aggressive medical providers pushing care on trans-identifying minors too quickly? I guess so.”) These topics, apparently, reside within the Overton window: one is entitled to raise concerns about them without being accused of being motivated by malicious hatred of trans people as a group. Why are these concerns legitimate to express, and not: the unintended consequences of abolishing single-sex bathrooms and changing rooms; male rapists with intact genitalia being incarcerated in female prisons; convicted sex offenders coming out as trans and changing their names in order to evade child safeguarding policies - or any other of the litany of reasonable-sounding objections gender-critical people have raised over the last decade or so? No idea.
The bathroom question
A large chunk of both articles is dedicated to the question of whether it is appropriate to allow trans women to use women’s bathrooms:
I personally am not a diehard advocate for sex-segregated bathrooms, and can see the merit in making all bathrooms gender-neutral. Of all the components of trans activism going, gender-neutral bathrooms is perhaps the one I find least objectionable. That being said, I find the argument for sex-segregated bathrooms easy to understand (even if I don’t necessarily share it), and admit to being surprised that Freddie doesn’t get it, so I will try to aid him in understanding it.
A blanket policy of sex-segregated bathrooms is intended to minimise the risk of female people being raped or sexually assaulted by male people in bathrooms. While a policy of sex-segregated bathrooms is enforced, a person who sees an obviously male person enter a women’s public bathroom could reasonably assume that that person was up to no good, and take appropriate steps to rectify the situation (such as notifying a security guard). Under a trans-inclusive bathroom policy, one is no longer supposed to assume that a male person entering a women’s bathroom is up to no good, because they might identify as a trans woman.
While Freddie is correct that, under a policy of sex-segregated bathrooms, there is nothing stopping a male rapist from simply walking into a women’s bathroom, a trans-inclusive bathroom policy makes it dramatically easier for such people to get away with committing an opportunistic rape, as bystanders will be less likely to intervene if they see a male person entering a women’s bathroom for fear of being accused of being transphobic. The reasoning is similar to regulations in which adults are not permitted to enter public playgrounds unless they are the parent or guardian of a child: obviously a child molester can simply ignore the regulation, but the regulation is designed to make bad actors more obvious to bystanders.
If a woman is in a public bathroom and an obviously male person walks in, there is no reliable way for her to tell if that person is a harmless trans woman just minding her own business, or a rapist exploiting well-meaning inclusive policies for malicious ends. The fact that the person has a penis is not dispositive in one direction or the other (as Freddie acknowledges not all trans people may wish to medically transition); nor that they are bearded and wearing jeans and a T-shirt (because “trans women don’t owe you femininity”, and a trans woman presenting as male does not in any way undermine her trans identity).
[image in original post]
For the reasons outlined above, there is no way to reliably distinguish between trans women and cis men on sight2. Hence, there is functionally no difference between “bathrooms intended for women and trans women” and “gender-neutral bathrooms”. Like Freddie, I am not aware of any hard evidence that making bathrooms gender-neutral in a particular area resulted in an increase in the rate of rape or sexual assault. I understand the gender-critical opposition to gender-neutral bathrooms without necessarily sharing or endorsing it. Even if the concerns about how this policy might be exploited by bad actors are in fact unfounded, I don’t think it’s fair to accuse everyone expressing those concerns of being transphobic. I think it’s especially unfair to accuse a gender-critical person of saying they think all trans women are rapists when, in my experience, gender-critical people go to great lengths to emphasise that they are concerned about bad actors who aren’t trans taking advantage of these policies for malicious ends, rather than trans women doing so.
Overstating the importance of the issue
In his second article from last week, Freddie complains that gender-critical people have vastly overstated the significance of the trans issue, elevating it to the status of “the most important social divide of our time, apparently beating out crime and education and the collapse of the family etc” when trans/NB people make up at most 2-3% of the American population. I agree that, in the scheme of things, trans issues receive a vastly disproportionate share of column inches relative to their import. Where I differ from Freddie is placing the blame for this state of affairs solely at the feet of gender-critical people.
As noted by Wesley Yang, there are 39 separate days3 in the American political calendar specifically dedicated to celebrating trans people (and an additional 77 days dedicated to celebrating trans people as a subset of LGBTQ+) - in contrast to Black History Month, which famously falls on the shortest month in the Gregorian calendar, despite black Americans making up 13-14% of the US population. President Joe Biden gave a statement on Transgender Day of Remembrance, while Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren made the frankly bizarre campaign promise that her pick for education secretary would have to be personally vetted by a transgender child. There has hardly been a single political issue in the last ten years that hasn’t been framed as “how might this affect trans people?” or “what does this mean for the struggle for trans rights?” in the popular media, no matter how tangential the connection - everything from Black Lives Matter to the war in the Ukraine to gun violence in schools to the cost-of-living crisis to Covid to AI to the Israel-Palestine conflict to Brexit and even climate change (“[exposure to secondhand smoke] can exacerbate the respiratory stress that LGBTQI+ populations may experience from air pollution and chest binding, which is a common practice among transgender men to achieve a flat chest”)
It’s a bit rich to demand that Americans spend more than one-tenth of the calendar year celebrating trans people, “centring their voices” and putting their trials and tribulations at the forefront of their consciousness - only to then turn around and say “umm why do you even care about this, it’s such a tiny issue lol” when some of them offer even the mildest pushback. You brought it up.
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Medical transition of minors
Social contagion via social media
On the controversy over underage trans people discovering a transgender identity and/or undergoing medical transition, Freddie writes:
It’s fascinating contrasting the passage above with an article Freddie published in 2022 about the recent phenomenon of social media-addicted teenagers suddenly “discovering” that they suffer from dissociative identity disorder (“DID” for short, popularly known as “multiple personality disorder”), an exceptionally rare condition in which a person has multiple distinct personalities (called “alters”). Freddie unequivocally asserted that most or all of these teenagers are either mistaken (honestly confusing the symptoms of some relatively banal personality trait or mental illness for an exotic psychosis) or actively lying; that this is bad for the teenagers themselves; and that the adults who ought to know better but indulge these teenagers anyway should be ashamed of themselves. He even went so far as to argue that dissociative identity disorder may not even exist, citing as evidence (among other things) that certain people only “discovered” they had it after being charged with a crime. How this observation ties into the transgender debate is left as an exercise to the reader (but here are a few hints).
I really cannot fathom how Freddie can reconcile his position in the DID article with his position on trans teenagers: the cognitive dissonance is simply astounding. Freddie insists that gender-critical people need not be concerned about teenagers receiving hormones or surgical interventions, as the rates at which these are occurring are “low” and “vanishingly rare” respectively - but I would be very surprised if the number of teenagers claiming to suffer from DID (even if they aren’t receiving any medical treatment for same) is greater than the number coming out as trans, which does not in any way alter Freddie’s opinion that the former is a concerning trend. He talks about “a notoriously controversial and historically extremely rare disorder… suddenly bloom[ing] into epidemic proportions among teenagers with smartphones and a burning need to differentiate themselves” and does not accept for a moment the explanation that “expanding public consciousness about such illnesses reduces stigma and empowers more people to get diagnosed with conditions they already had” - but simply refuses to connect the dots with the other thing that awkward teenagers with smartphones and burning need to differentiate themselves started “discovering” about themselves en masse all over the Western world about ten years ago (which resulted in an over 5,000% increase in referrals among female minors to the UK’s centre for transgender children - in the space of less than ten years). And the standard explanation offered for why so many female teenagers are coming out as trans is word-for-word the same as the standard explanation for why so many teenagers are claiming to suffer from DID!
Imagine, if you will, two female teenagers:
Alice is a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with some autistic tendencies. Having trouble fitting in at school, she retreats into social media, becoming immersed in communities of like-minded individuals on Tumblr and TikTok. Six months later, she announces to her parents that she has dissociative identity disorder and multiple “alters” (having given no indication that she experienced like this at any point prior), and demands to be brought to a therapist, and perhaps later to a psychiatrist who will prescribe her powerful antipsychotic medication which comes with a host of side effects.
Barbara is a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with some autistic tendencies. Having trouble fitting in at school, she retreats into social media, becoming immersed in communities of like-minded individuals on Tumblr and TikTok. Six months later, she announces to her parents that she is a trans boy called Brandon (having given no indication that she was dissatisfied with her gender identity at any point prior), and demands to be brought to a physician who specialises in gender issues who will prescribe her hormones (which come with a host of side effects) and recommend that she undergo top and/or bottom surgery.
Freddie looks at Alice and says: this is concerning, and Alice will suffer as a result - I don’t care that I’m not Alice’s parent or healthcare provider, I still think it’s concerning and I’m entitled to say so. Freddie looks at Barbara/Brandon and says: nothing to see here - it’s a private matter for Brandon, Brandon’s parents and Brandon’s healthcare providers, “I don’t understand why this element of medical science has become everyone’s business to a degree that is simply not true in other fields”, and if you think this is concerning then you’re a bigot. No matter how much a gender-critical person might insist that they are motivated by concern for Barbara/Brandon’s welfare which is just as authentic as Freddie’s for Alice - no, they’re really just a closeted conservative Christian consumed with hatred and disgust for trans people. I truly do not understand why Freddie is entitled to his opinion on Alice (despite not knowing her personally), but no gender-critical person is entitled to their opinion on Barbara/Brandon.
Let’s take it a step further:
What reasonable person would look at the scenario described above and not immediately conclude “Alice has erroneously come to believe both that she is trans and suffers from DID because of her social media consumption”? But Freddie would have us believe that the two phenomena are entirely unrelated. The fact that Alice discovered that she was transgender and had DID at exactly the same time, that she did so immediately after spending far too much time in online communities in which both DID and being trans are glamorised - this is all just a big coincidence. Freddie absolutely reserves the right to say that Alice will suffer as a result of her erroneous belief that she has DID, but anyone (outside of Alice’s parents and healthcare providers) who does the same of her belief that she is a trans boy has outed themselves as a cruel, malicious bigot.
Some of the passages from Freddie’s DID article are almost painfully on-the-nose:
Incidentally, the scenario described above (in which Alice comes to believe that she is both trans and has DID) is not an armchair hypothetical. I took a quick scan of the #dissociativeidentitydisorder tag on TikTok and noticed that many of the individuals posting content under that tag describe themselves as transgender in addition to claiming to have multiple alters. Transgender patients who also claim to suffer from DID is apparently a sufficiently common scenario that it was discussed at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in September 2022. What to do in the event that there is disagreement among the “alters” about whether or not to undergo medical transition? WPATH’s elegant solution: use a smartphone app to allow the alters to vote in turn and come to a collective decision.
Self-regulation of medical bodies
Stories like the above are precisely why so many gender-critical people don’t share Freddie’s optimism in the ability or willingness of the “medical community to change their standard of care as new data comes available”. By asserting that “I am certain… that I don’t want the government getting involved in these medical decisions. Ron Desantis does not get a say, sorry”, Freddie is committing himself to a position in which the medical bodies governing transition for minors will always be able to effectively self-regulate and will never require outside interference from governmental bodies.
That’s a remarkably high level of confidence to have in any medical body governing any kind of medical treatment. Of course we would all love to live in a world in which medical bodies can self-regulate and no outside interference is necessary, but - well, medical scandals happen, and sometimes the government getting involved is an act of last resort after self-regulation fails. I’m not saying that the bodies governing healthcare for trans minors are any worse at self-regulation and course-correction than the average medical body (whether in oncology or orthopaedics or whatever); but I’m definitely saying I don’t think I have any good reason to believe that these medical bodies are better than average, and certainly not so much better that Freddie’s unshakeable confidence in them can be rationally justified.
To use an example of how medical bodies’ self-regulation can and does fail, the Irish surgeon Michael Neary conducted unnecessary hysterectomies and other surgical procedures on over a hundred women over a thirty-year period. Several nurses blew the whistle at various points in his career, to no avail; an internal investigation conducted by three consultants found no evidence of wrongdoing and recommended that Neary continue working in the Lourdes Hospital. It was only after a judicial inquiry brought by the ministry for health and children (i.e. the government) that Neary was finally struck off the register, five years after the internal investigation found he’d done nothing wrong. If the government hadn’t gotten involved (as a measure of last resort, the ability of the medical bodies in question having demonstrably failed to self-regulate and course-correct), it’s entirely possible that Neary would have ruined dozens of additional women’s lives before retiring on a tidy pension. Or consider the more recent example of Lucy Letby, a serial killer working as a nurse who murdered at least 7 newborn babies: the NHS Foundation Trust attempted to handle the matter internally (even forcing doctors who’d raised the alarm about Letby to personally apologise to her) and were extremely resistant to involving the police. It was only after alerting the police (i.e. the government) - nearly two full years after members of staff had raised the alarm following Letby’s first confirmed victim - that Letby was finally removed from her position and later arrested, charged and convicted.
To clarify: I’m not saying that governmental intervention into transition for minors is currently necessary. However, the suggestion that we can confidently assert that no such intervention will ever be necessary is preposterous. I don’t think we have any good reason to believe that the medical bodies governing medical transition for minors are invulnerable to the kinds of social dynamics and institutional failures that have afflicted every other kind of medical body,4 and doctors as a profession (as the examples above illustrate) are notorious for closing ranks and circling the wagons at the first whiff of a potential scandal. To simply declare by fiat “the medical bodies governing transition for minors will always be able to self-regulate and course-correct, governmental oversight or intervention is not necessary and never will be” is shockingly naïve. He touched on a similar point in his article from March of last year:
All true. The difference being that, in my experience, whistleblowers who call attention to substandard practices at dialysis centres, radiology labs and pharmacies are not generally accused of lying, being right-wing agitators or being bigoted against marginalised members of society - all accusations hurled at Jamie Reed, even well after her claims of misconduct were largely substantiated by no less than the New York Times.
This unqualified confidence in a class of medical practitioners is all the more baffling coming from Freddie, considering he himself found it entirely credible when one of his readers described how her therapist used their sessions as an opportunity to hector and guilt-trip her about her white female privilege in the style of racial grievance politics popularised by Robin diAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. If therapists are vulnerable to allowing their faddish political opinions override their duty of care to their patients, why not endocrinologists, surgeons and so on?
But I suppose the mere suggestion that endocrinologists who work with trans teenagers are just as fallible and prone to ordinary human error as anyone else makes me a cruel, malicious bigot who hates trans people.
Parental input into their children’s transition is more controversial than Freddie seems to think
As an aside, do you know who besides gender-critical people is a cruel, malicious bigot? If we were to be even a little bit consistent about this, Freddie himself. I’m not the first person to note that perfectly reasonable and level-headed individuals with impeccable progressive bona fides (such as Jesse Singal) have been smeared as bigots by no less an insitution than GLAAD simply for arguing, as Freddie does, that the parents of trans children should have some input into what medical treatments their children do or don’t undergo. The official stance of many pro-trans organisations is that “trans kids know who they are” and that any attempts to gatekeep their access to “gender-affirming care” (including by their parents) is denying them lifesaving medical treatment, no different from denying insulin to a diabetic.
If you think I’m exaggerating, consider this bill in the state of California which would make a parent’s decision to “affirm” their child’s gender identity (or not) a factor in custody disputes (at the time of writing, it has passed both houses but not yet been signed into law). In the eyes of the state of California, all other things being equal, a parent who expresses misgivings about their child’s desire to medically transition is a strictly worse parent than a parent who uncritically and enthusiastically endorses that child’s desire. See also the publicly-funded British charity Mermaids, who were caught sending a chest binder to a journalist posing a 14-year-old teenager, even after being explicitly told that the girl’s mother had forbidden her from wearing one.
Obviously, Freddie, you would be very insulted if you were to be smeared as a bigot for expressing the “standard, not-particularly-interesting progressive” opinion that parents should have some say in what medical treatments their children undergo. Please recognise that this “not-particularly interesting” opinion of yours is in fact very controversial in the trans activist space. Please try to understand how gender-critical people feel when you smear them as bigots for expressing what seem to them “standard, not-particularly interesting progressive” opinions, such as “it’s bad when sex offenders falsely claim to be trans women so as to serve their sentences in women’s prisons”.
Detransition
In his article from March, Freddie had this to say about detransitioners:
For the record, the existence of detransitioners does not undermine my respect for trans people. I have trans friends who I respect. If they decided that they wanted to revert to being cis, I would support them in that decision absolutely. The existence of people who transition and then come to regret their decision does not challenge my belief that adults are entitled to transition in the first place, any more than (to use a banal example) the existence of people who undergo tattoo removal challenges my belief that adults can get tattoos if they want to.
The detransition phenomenon is important to highlight in the interests of informed consent. If an adult is considering undergoing an elective medical procedure (or series of medical procedures), their healthcare practitioner should proactively make them informed about the statistical outcomes of that medical procedure, which includes the proportion of people who undergo that procedure and later come to regret it. This goes double for surgical procedures which have a high risk of complications. It goes double-double for highly invasive procedures which will irreversibly change large parts of a person’s body and permanently sterilise them. And it goes double-double-double when you’re proposing to do the above on minors.
If our collective attitude towards medical transition was sensible and depoliticised, the paragraph above would be a complete no-brainer. Instead we find ourselves in a culture in which medical transition is routinely presented as a silver bullet which will erase a trans person’s problems in one fell swoop; in which even the expected downsides of successful transition are downplayed and minimised by healthcare practitioners; and in which distressed parents are browbeaten with emotionally manipulative slogans like “Would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?” In this environment, it’s perfectly reasonable to push back on the soft-pedalling of medical transition by pointing out that a significant proportion of those who transition later regret their decision, and that prospective transitioners ought to take that fact (among others) into account when making their decision.
If anything, the term “detransition” downplays the severity of the situation. A “detransitioner” has not simply pressed Ctrl-Z and reverted their body to factory settings - the changes they have made to their body are generally irreversible and will completely change the course of their life. Michael Neary’s victims were furious upon realising that they were denied the ability to have further children for no good reason at all - the idea that medical professionals would downplay the magnitude of the decision to transition is unconscionable.
The “Fox News Fallacy”
In his article about multiple personality disorder, Freddie described what he called the “Fox News Fallacy”. I will quote from it at length:
And what does Freddie have to say about gender-critical people who are (among other things) concerned about trans teenagers for many of the same reasons that Freddie is concerned about teenagers claiming to have DID? Well, he
One might think the breadth of criticisms directed towards trans activism and the range of people expressing them might give Freddie pause - surely not all of these people are just bigoted lapsed Christians motivated by animalistic revulsion of trans people? But no - no matter how many people express reservations about this or that component of transgender activism; no matter how measured, restrained and thoroughly researched their criticisms might be; no matter what point on the political spectrum they may reside on (including no less than the Communist Party of Great Britain, who in another world Freddie might consider fellow travellers); even if they are atheist materialists who object to gender ideology specifically because they consider its quasi-mystical dualistic character something of a cultural regression - everyone who is even a little bit more sceptical on the trans issue than Freddie must in fact be a closeted Christian who thinks that trans people are “wicked” and “against God’s plan”. There’s no other possible explanation that merits serious consideration, apparently.
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1 For the record, I don’t blame him for finding this behaviour tiresome, I think the people melodramatically accusing him of hypocrisy for “censoring” them should chill out, and as it’s his Substack, the moderation decisions he enforces on it are entirely his prerogative. To anyone who says that my only beef with Freddie is that he won’t let me talk about this stuff in the comments of his articles about something unrelated, I would like here to reiterate: I have never complained about him forbidding people from bringing up trans issues in the comments of his articles, and completely respect his decision to ban people from doing so.
2 To better disambiguate between genuine trans women and cis bad actors was the root of my proposal to make incarcerating trans women in women’s prisons conditional on their being first assessed by a psychiatrist experienced in gender issues. Freddie doesn’t even touch on the prison issue at all, I suspect because he recognises a losing battle when he sees one.
3 Not including the unofficial “Trans Day of Vengeance”, which coincides with April Fool’s Day.
4 To bring it back to another of Freddie’s older posts: medical bodies are institutions, which means they are exactly as subject to the Iron Law of Institutions as any other institution.
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