FtttG
User ID: 1175
I expect that quite a lot of people, in the long run, will find that they prefer to interact with the (virtual?) world as glowing obelisks, anthropomorphic cats, anime girls complete with Roger Rabbit black outlines
I have a hard time accepting your apparent claim that wanting to live your life as an embodied anime girl and not being able to constitutes some kind of unspeakable tragedy, on a par with (or in the same ballpark as) the reality of sickness, aging and mortality. I don't believe that "being able to live your life as an embodied anime girl" is a project that any public monies should be invested into achieving. If, a result of the overreaches and poor message discipline of the trans activist movement, there is less of an appetite for investing public monies into making this desire a reality, that strikes me as an unequivocal good.
FtttG
2mo ago
Several months ago I complained about how the word "empowering" has become completely drained of meaning by generations of overly broad application in any vaguely germane context.
I learned today (courtesy of a pretty good article by Freddie deBoer) that this is not a recent phenomenon, and The Onion was mocking it a full twenty years ago.
FtttG
2mo ago
If we crack sentient A.I.s, what will that do to our understanding of gender, do you think?
Nothing much. However AIs copy themselves or iterate upon themselves, it will bear little relationship to sexual reproduction and sexual dimorphism as we currently understand it.
FtttG
2mo ago
I thought it was Tennant's? Although a Christopher Nolan tie-in lager was a missed opportunity.
FtttG
2mo ago
The marriage may still fall apart in the long run
Sounds like it already has bro.
One thing I think you're glossing over here is the possibility that some of the things some trans people want really are incoherent and bad.
In the transhumanist future in which anyone who wants to undergo a body transplant and transfer their brain into a body of their desired sex, I'm confident some significant number of trans people would take the deal. But I'm equally confident that some significant number of trans people wouldn't take the deal, would keep their bodies more or less as-is, and would demand to be "treated like a woman" anyway.
My evidence for this prediction is the current state of the evidence in our world. For such a seemingly straightforward concept ("a trans woman is a man who wants to be a woman"), it's surprisingly difficult to pin down a workable definition. One of our resident trans posters proposed "a woman is someone who prefers to have a vagina rather than a penis, and vice-versa. But of course "prefers" is really hard to confirm, so let us instead say: a woman is someone with a vagina". But in response, I noted that such a definition excludes almost everyone who calls themselves a trans woman:
only 5-13% of trans women have undergone genital surgery. Even if we allow that for every trans woman who has undergone genital surgery, there's another trans woman who has applied for it but is stuck on a waiting list (or even two such women), your definition still excludes anywhere from 61% to 90% of males who consider themselves trans women.
I'm sure it will not surprise you that the resident trans poster in question refused to bite the bullet, and stated that she would still consider a trans woman a woman even if she knew for a fact that the person in question had a penis which they had no intention of giving up.
Now, granted, the current state of the art in bottom surgery produces a very crude facsimile of a real vagina which has to be dilated indefinitely, isn't self-lubricating and is useless from the point of view of becoming pregnant (and all related auxiliary functions). I'm sure there are some trans women right now who would really like a vagina instead of a penis, but are holding out until the state of the art improves significantly. Or perhaps they can't afford it or it isn't covered under their insurance etc. This is all perfectly understandable. (Even if you're only on a waiting list to undergo bottom surgery, I'm going to take your claim to identifying as a woman a lot more seriously than if you aren't.) In the transhumanist future in which undergoing a cross-sex body transplant was as quick, cheap and painless as getting a vaccination, I'm sure significantly more than 9% of trans women would avail of it. Especially if it was reversible.
But I'm also confident that if I surveyed the ~90% of trans women who haven't undergone bottom surgery about what they would do in the hypothetical future where body transplants are cheap and painless, a significant proportion of them would say "I wouldn't avail of it. I like having a penis." A "girldick" is the preferred term, I understand.
Like, at what point am I allowed to say "what you want is incoherent and bad"? Demanding to be treated like a woman despite possessing a penis and wanting to hang on to it seems incoherent and bad. Demanding to be allowed to participate in female sporting events without having made even most the token effort to reduce your T levels seems bad and unfair. Demanding that lesbians let you put your dick in them and calling them bigots if they don't want to seems bad. I feel zero qualms about saying my idea of utopia includes zero creepy male people who use trendy identity politics to emotionally manipulate women into fucking them, or to secure an unfair competitive advantage in sporting events.*
Likewise, in our hypothetical future in which undergoing a body transplant was quick and painless, certain male people refused to undergo one, but demanded that they receive all the social and legal privileges** associated with being a woman anyway - I feel like I'd be well within my rights to say "you're a bad actor and a malingerer, knock it off". A male person who wants a female body, but cannot yet achieve this because of the current state of medical technology - that's an engineering problem. A male person who wants a female body, but cannot yet achieve this because they lack the financial resoures to make it happen - that's a scarcity problem. A male person who wants to keep his male body but wants to be "treated like a woman" anyway - that's just someone taking the piss, and we both know it.
If your idea of utopia includes some amount of these people, then I have to ask - why? Is there any point at which you say "what this person is demanding is incoherent, bad and unreasonable"? Or is every demand a trans person makes de facto a reasonable demand to make, by virtue of their being trans?
*Two particular kinds of bad behaviour which, needless to say, are not peculiar to trans women.
**Assuming that any such privileges still exist in the world in which female sex is literally an elective category.
FtttG
2mo ago
I was just saying if you're going to be a little unprincipled in category construction, you don't have as much room to prevent someone saying you should be even more unprincipled.
There are degrees of "unprincipled", and I think it's abundantly obvious that my "unprincipled exceptions" result in a category system with vastly greater predictive power than simply making all categories elective.
There's a ton of differences between Turner syndrome women and the modal woman. People with Turner syndrome have physical differences (low set ears, short stature, lymphodema of the hands and feet), they don't normally undergo puberty, often have issues with spatial visualization and mathematics, and are prone to certain diseases (heart defects, Type II diabetes, hypothyroidism, and conductive hearing loss)
Thank you for the clarification, I wasn't aware.
To me, it just seems intuitive that "this person possesses all of the traits we associate with members of category A but suffers from a medical condition which prevents them from producing large gametes, but for convenience's sake we'll include them in category A even though one could strictly argue they really belong in category C."
I mean, placing women with Turner syndrome in the category "women" makes the most pragmatic sense: virtually of the medical, psychological, criminological, physiognomy, sporting, sexual etc. predictions we would make about a "conventional" woman apply just as well to a woman with Turner syndrome (open to correction on this if women with Turner syndrome have some huge advantage in long-distance running or something). If literally the only predictive difference between members of category A and members of category C is that the former can get pregnant and the latter can't, but they are otherwise identical, it just seems inefficient to create a whole separate category. A rube with a battered corner is strictly speaking a separate shape from a conventional rube, but it's close enough that if rubes with battered corners only appear in 1 out of every 3,500 rubes, it would be inefficient to create a separate category.
Meanwhile, what you're proposing is "this person possesses none of the traits associated with members of category A (except claiming to experience a "subjectively felt sense of category A membership", which the vast majority of category A members in time and space do not claim to experience) and all of the traits associated with members of category B - but being placed in category B makes them sad, so we'll place them in category A to spare their feelings." Even though 100% of the predictions we would make about a typical member of category B would predict this person's body and behaviour with greater accuracy. Personally, I don't think a completely typical blegg threatening to kill itself unless you put it in the rube box is actually a good reason to place it in the rube box, if you've been instructed to dispassionately sort bleggs and rubes into the appropriate boxes. "Rube with a battered corner" is a legitimate edge case; "emotionally manipulative blegg" is not.
Ultimately it sounds like you're doing a marginally more sophisticated version of the style of argument that trans activists seem to love so much: "the existence of a few marginal edge cases in your categorisation system proves that it's COMPLETELY useless, so we might as well just throw our hands up and make both categories elective". But unlike you, I am not willing to throw out babies with bathwater. A categorisation system which is more accurate than literally every medical test ever devised is worth hanging onto, a handful of complicated edge cases notwithstanding. And the "complicated edge cases" I'm referring to are intersex people, not uncontroversially male people who claim to be women nonetheless. The categories were made for man to make predictions, and "this person with Turner syndrome is a woman" conveys predictive power in a way that "this person with a penis, testicles and a prostate is a woman" does not. If you want to sort a person into category A, but for all predictive intents and purposes (medical, criminological, psychological etc.) you'll be treating them as a member of category B anyway, it invites the question of why you even bothered to pretend to sort them into category A in the first place. (And I hope you'd have a better answer to hand then "because I fell victim to emotional manipulation".)
FtttG
2mo ago
Given that "trans women don't owe you femininity", "man in a dress" is a standard even many self-proclaimed trans women conspicuously fail to meet. Even my very trans-affirming brother and sister will cop to being a bit exasperated when one of their friends "comes out" as trans and refuses to change their wardrobe or even to shave their beard.
Gender-criticals use the term "trans-identified male/female" (TIM, TIF).
I have read Scott's post several times.
Of course, post-Singularity, all of these petty squabbles about sex, gender, crime, safeguarding etc. will be completely irrelevant.
But, you know, the Singularity hasn't actually happened yet, if you haven't noticed. I find it deeply strange that you're trying to enact policies which would make the world better in a post-Singularity world, while fully cognizant of the fact that they make our pre-Singularity world demonstrably worse, and that the Singularity is unlikely to happen in your lifetime. It's like someone spending all their money on frivolities today because they're certain that they'll win the lottery tomorrow. Actually, it's worse than that - it's like someone spending all their money on frivolities today because they're certain that their great-great-grandson will win the lottery long after they're dead. Even if you knew for a fact that your great-great-grandson would win the lottery long after you're dead, shouldn't you plan your finances a bit more sensibly while you're still alive?
Why do debates with trans activists invariably devolve into nonsensical circular reasoning ("a woman is a person who identifies as a woman", "a woman is a person who experiences misogynistic sexism"), bizarre outré navel-gazing about our transhumanist future, or both? "In the future we'll be able to implant uteri in trans women's bellies and they'll be functionally indistinguishable from female people in every way that counts - therefore we should treat trans women as women now." (paraphrased) And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bike! What on earth could this far-off hypothetical scenario possibly have to do with the world in which we currently live, in which nothing resembling a Singularity seems likely to happen and in which no trans woman will ever bear a child in either of our lifetimes?
FtttG
2mo ago
if hundreds of thousands of oppressed trans people's lives
Genuine question - in what way(s) are trans people in the United States (and other Anglophone nations) "oppressed"?
FtttG
2mo ago
Like, seriously, please try to read this story (and the screenshots) with an open mind, without letting the positive associations the word "trans" holds for you blinding you to the information being presented in black and white. Truly - what part of this story doesn't sound like the behaviour of a deranged fetishist?
Her biological sex isn't any of Joe Public's business either way.
I just want to circle back to this point. Please consider the implications of your claim. "This person is a violent murderer who is experiencing confusion about their sexual/gender identity, and who led a cult which employed abusive tactics and coercive control to keep members in line. But it's none of the public's business to know whether or not this person is physically capable of committing penetrative rape, or is a member of the sex which is responsible for a vastly disproportionate share of sex crimes." With all due respect, do you hear yourself?
It just seems to me that you're transparently elevating one group's concerns and preferences over another. You seem to be essentially saying "it is so important that trans women feel safe and happy and 'affirmed', that I'm perfectly willing to deny women useful information that would help them to navigate an unsafe world. In fact, trans women feeling safe and 'affirmed' is so important to me that I have no problem if the policies I enact in pursuit of that goal carry the unavoidable side effect of enabling bad actors to effectively hide in plain sight."
I mean, I've long suspected that certain trans activists literally thought that trans women's emotional comfort was more important than female people's physical safety: I'm kind of surprised that you more or less came right out and said so.
Which world Current Year most resembles, and in what direction we're moving, are always going to be in the eye of the beholder.
To me, it sounds like "how many trans women per 100k population killed themselves as a result of being persistently 'misgendered'" vs. "how many female people per 100k population were attacked, raped and/or murdered by male strangers" are empirical questions which shouldn't be that difficult to answer. We might well look at the facts on the ground and decide trans women's emotional comfort comes at such a high price that the juice simply isn't worth the squeeze. Or we might not! But systematically elevating the emotional comfort of one demographic over the physical safety of another demographic is not, in my view, compatible with a pluralistic democracy.
First figure out what we ought, ideally, to have; then carve out what's practical right now, keeping the rest on the back burner until the time is right.
As long as you and I are both alive, male people will be far more aggressive and prone to murder and sexual assault than female people (along with being more prone to crime in general, although the delta isn't nearly as large as it is when we limit our analysis to violent crimes). The murder rate might plummet to a fraction of its current level, but male people will always commit the vast majority of murders. Likewise for assault and rape. As long as this is the case (which it will be forever), male bad actors will always have something to gain by passing themselves off as female if the option is open to them. Thus if your radical self-ID policy is controversial in this time and place, there's good reason to believe that it always will be.
FtttG
2mo ago
If I'm telling you to call me "ze", there is no sense in which I am telling you to lie about what my junk looks like. "Ze" implies no factual statement about that whatsoever.
You are telling me to pretend to believe that you are neither man nor woman, when in fact you are obviously one or the other.
If a white person said that they didn't want to be described as "white" but rather "devoid of race", people who indulged them in this would be lying.
'My side aren't lying, they're just terminally out of touch' isn't a very glowing defense, but in this case, it's the honest truth as best I can figure it.
I'll note that the goalposts seemed to shift very quickly from "the way journalists are phrasing this isn't obscuring the facts" to "okay, the way journalists are phrasing this is obscuring the facts, but it came from a place of ignorance rather than from a conscious intention to mislead their readers".
I disagree, however: I think trans activists and progressive journalists know exactly how unpopular their preferred policies are with the general public, and are fully aware that they can only get them into legislation under cover of darkness. This explains their annoying habit of labelling their opponents as "transphobic", "TERF" etc. without explicitly stating what their opponents' opinions are.
I'm not just offended by this approach on behalf of trans women, I'm offended by it for myself as a cis man.
The fact that there's so much overlap between the grievances aired by "trans women" and the grievances aired by sophomoric MRAs is further evidence for my conclusion that I'm looking at the same picture.
Are men more muscular and more aggressive on average? Yes. But those are fringes. The furthest edges of trend lines.
What? Are you seriously arguing that only the strongest men are more muscular than women, on average?
Ziz's transness, so far as I can tell, is not relevant to her crimes.
I agree, Ziz's transness is not relevant to their crimes (except insofar as having their delusions reinforced and encouraged by all and sundry in their vicinity may have contributed to their cultish megalomania). The fact that Ziz is male is relevant to their crimes, given male people's greater propensity and capability for violence.
No one is out there thinking 'well, I was going to have a nice chat with this escaped murderer I ran into, when I thought she had a vagina, but if you're saying (s)he's got balls, that's a whole different story', or if they exist now, I'm sure one of our many-if-statistically-less-prevalent biologically female murders will fix that in a hurry.
On the contrary - I think there are a great many people who think (not unreasonably, given the massive strength differentials between the sexes) that if they were threatened by a female escaped murderer, they would be capable of subduing her with relative ease. Thus, referring to Ziz using language which strongly implies that they are female is misleading and not in the public interest.
There's also the very real possibility that, depending on the jurisdiction, Ziz will be recorded as a female murderer and cult leader, as is already policy in many parts of the West. This will obviously hamper criminologists' ability to understand crime offending patterns in the future, if the data is contaminated by the presence of male offenders in the female dataset. Claim that you aren't in favour of that all you want - it's the logical endpoint of the worldview you're espousing.
Her biological sex isn't any of Joe Public's business either way. Maybe it makes her fractionally more likely to commit a completely different violent crime than if she was a biological female - so what? Do you want to go around wearing labels for every demographic bin you fall into that's vaguely correlated with bad behavior at the edges?
"Fractionally", "vaguely correlated", as if we're just talking about 105 male murderers for every 100 female. Meanwhile, back in Planet Reality, male people are responsible for just shy of 90% of murders in the US. Most men are not murderers, but most murderers are men. Trans activists (including the minority on this very website) sometimes like to act like they're so noble and heroic like "why on earth would I care about the genitals of a stranger?", thereby implying that anyone who expresses any desire to know about a stranger's sex is some kind of pervert (because they themselves are so pornsick that they can't conceive of wanting to know this information for reasons other than sexual gratification). Actually, it's perfectly simple: if a woman is walking home alone and she notices a stranger walking a hundred yards behind her, if she knows that that stranger is male (regardless of how they "identify", because violent crime rates track sex and not gender identity), she thereby knows, right off the bat, that the stranger in question is 9 times more likely to murder her than if the stranger is female. This is extremely useful information for a woman to have to carry out her risk calculus - but women making generalisations about male people hurts your feelings, so you think a murderer and cult leader's sex is none of the public's business. Okay.
As @zackmdavis argues, The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions. We have a category called "man" and a category called "woman". Before gender ideology was a thing, we knew that the members of the category "man" were vastly more likely to commit violence than members of the category "woman". Then someone invented gender ideology and argued that some of the people who would have once been included in the category "man" ought really to have been included in the category "woman". We investigated this, and determined that there was no difference in propensity to commit violence when comparing "men" with the minority of people who would traditionally have been categorised as "men" but now wanted to be categorised as "women" (and the members of the latter group were exactly as strong as any other person who would traditionally have been categorised as a man). So, from the narrow perspective of "violence-avoiding risk calculus", isn't it just abundantly obvious that the "new" definitions are just worse at this goal than the old definitions? Isn't it obvious we've substituted a fairly accurate and extremely intuitive categorisation system for a vastly less accurate and vastly less intuitive one? Isn't this just obviously bad?
(You post on anonymous right-wing political forums. That's a hell of a risk factor right there.) Would a journalist be lying if they wrote a story about you, but failed to mention one of them?
I wasn't complaining about journalists failing to mention certain traits of Ziz's which would make them more prone to criminality. If journalists published articles about the Zizians which used they/them or ze or xe etc. for every named individual, that'd be one thing. I'm complaining about journalists using language which directly implies that the individual in question is a member of a different group which has an extremely low propensity and capability for violence, when the individual in question is not a member of that group, but is rather a member of a group which has a vastly higher propensity and capability for violence.
To return to your example: supposing I was arrested for a crime, and some journalist published an article which contained the sentence "FtttG was a frequent poster on the website The Motte". In our counterfactual universe, themotte dot ORG is an extremely obscure website, whereas there's a much more popular website called themotte dot COM which is very pro-trans. If a journalist included this sentence in their article without disambiguating the domain name, wouldn't you think that most readers would assume the journalist was referring to themotte.com? Wouldn't you think the journalist probably knew how the sentence would be taken by most of their readers, and included it anyway? I don't really see much difference between
- "I knew this sentence was likely to be misinterpreted by most of my readers, disambiguating it would have been a trivial matter, but I decided not to bother";
- obfuscating the facts; and
- lying.
FtttG
2mo ago
They don't seem to be trying to deceive anyone about just who and what they are; as you say, the leader is non-passing. Calling her a "her" isn't a lie, it doesn't obfuscate the facts; no one's walking away thinking she's got a uterus here.
Bad actors, including violent people, have a vested interest in deceiving people that they are not bad actors. Male people are vastly more likely to be violent than female people. Hence, when a violent male person demands that everyone refers to them using female pronouns, people who don't know them personally will not unreasonably assume that they are female, and adjust their risk calculuses accordingly. Behaviours which would rise to the level of "red flag for violent or threatening behaviour" if committed by a male person will not result in a batted eyelid if committed by a female person. You can say "we've redrawn the category boundaries such that the word 'woman' now includes certain male people (with all the propensity for violence that that implies): adjust your expectations accordingly, and it's not our fault if you erroneously assumed that this person referred to as 'she' was female and didn't think she posed a threat as a result". But let's be real: 90% of people (99% of non-extremely online people) hear "she" and think "female person", and assume that said person is exactly as prone to committing an act of violence as any other female person (which is to say, not very). Even if the person is familiar with the tenets of gender ideology and knows that the category "woman" includes some tiny proportion of male people, they will assume that any person referred to as "she" is a female person unless they have good reason to believe otherwise. The fact that one tiny corner of human society has redrawn category boundaries in order to use the word "woman" in a nonstandard way doesn't change the expectations 90% of people have about people who are referred to using the pronoun "she", and no one is more aware of this than bad actors looking to get away with bad behaviour.
If an article about the Zizians includes a photo of LaSota, it will be obvious that LaSota is male, and people will update their expectations about LaSota's behaviour, threat level and risk calculus accordingly. But many articles about the Zizians do not include any photos of LaSota (I only found out what they looked like earlier this week). Likewise people talking about the story on the radio or on podcasts. So an article which says "LaSota says that she thinks so-and-so... she was last seen crossing the border into Mexico on [date]" will be interpreted by a significant proportion of its readerbase as an article about an uncontroversially female person who poses no more threat than any other uncontroversially female person. Even referring to LaSota as a "trans woman" doesn't get you out of this hole, as a significant proportion of the general public thinks the term "trans woman" refers to a female person who identifies as a man. (Never mind native Anglophones who are unfamiliar with the finer points of gender ideology; what about non-native English speakers to whom the term "trans woman" means nothing?) If "I'm using this common word using my nonstandard definition, I am fully cognizant of the fact that most people use it with its standard definition and know that most people will assume that I am using this word with its standard definition" isn't "obfuscating the facts" (or, less charitably, lying), then I don't know what is.
Bill Clinton may have been technically telling the truth when he said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" according to the stipulative definition of "sexual relations" which only refers to PiV intercourse. But I have zero qualms about saying he was lying when he said that: in common usage, sucking someone's dick or inserting a cigar into someone's pussy absolutely falls under "sexual relations", and Clinton knew this, and he knew (indeed, hoped) that people would interpret his statement as a denial of any kind of sexual interaction with Lewinsky at all even if he'd only technically denied having PiV sex with her. So when a significant proportion of the population is unfamiliar with gender ideology and assumes that anyone referred to with the pronoun "she" is female, if you refer to a person as "she" and neglect to specify that the person is male, you are obfuscating important facts about that person whether you like it or not. And if you retort "it's not my fault those people aren't woke enough to know that not every woman is female", I'll respond with about as much sympathy and understanding as if Clinton had said "it's not my fault people are so uneducated that they don't know the legal definition of the term 'sexual relations'." Truly honest communication necessitates taking your audience's level of education and ideological leaning into account.
FtttG
2mo ago
I find it very disconcerting that the line between "trans-friendly policies" and "policies which enable perverts to roleplay their creepy fantasies to their heart's content" is so razor-thin, if not indeed nonexistent. I mean, you say that what Darone did was "weird" - do you dispute that he was doing it to fulfil a sexual fantasy?
FtttG
2mo ago
If they said "Speaking as a woman who has actually had a miscarriage and found the experience intensely traumatic, your predilection for roleplaying as someone who has experienced a miscarriage in order to fulfil a perverse sexual fantasy is shockingly tasteless and disgusting, and has no place in a space like this - take it to a fetish site"?
I find it pretty hard to imagine any other "form" the objection might take.
FtttG
2mo ago
I literally covered my mouth in shock part way through the first paragraph. Oh my God, what a nightmare.
@FiveHourMarathon pointed out that, in Trump's first term, the Democrats kept hammering in the message that Hillary won the popular vote (something something electoral college reform etc.). This was electorally meaningless, but psychologically important to maintain the narrative that Democrats represented the real will of the country.
Losing the electoral college and the popular vote in 2024 (albeit only by a 1.5% margin) must have been profoundly psychologically disorienting.
A week ago, I asked why the word counts of novels aren't common knowledge, and why there's no equivalent of How Long to Beat? for books.
I stand corrected. I wish Goodreads would buy it out and merge it into their platform.
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