FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
4mo ago
Ahhhh, I have read Unsong, completely forgot about that plot point. I was planning to re-read it this year anyway.
I'm up to 75,000 words on my NaNoWriMo project.
During November, I wrote that I found myself feeling legitimately guilty about the fate which was soon to befall one of the characters in my book. Last week I was writing the chapter in which the fate in question befalls them, and it was a punishing experience. For a solid hour my heart was pounding in nervous anticipation, as the dreaded event drew closer and closer. Once I got to the end of the chapter I had to get up and pace around my apartment for a bit to calm down.
I've repeatedly argued in this space that you shouldn't use an artist's degree of passion and personal investment in their art as a proxy for how good it is, or assume that an artist being personally invested in their art is a prerequisite for it being good. Many of the best novels, films etc. ever made were tossed off by their creators for a paycheck, while probably no one is more emotionally invested in their art than a shut-in composing Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic. But for whatever it's worth, it is indisputable that I've become intensely emotionally invested in this novel. In the event that I get it published, if an artist having a personal stake in their art is important to you, I hope I can count on you picking up a copy.
FtttG
4mo ago
1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20. Very curious to know what the others mean.
FtttG
4mo ago
Yeah, I've heard the term "woke right" bandied about in the last few months and I'm only starting to get it now.
FtttG
4mo ago
I wouldn't say so. The only reason I read it was to gain an insight into Catharism, but that only takes up a very small portion of the book. The rest of it is dedicated to describing life in the titular fourteenth-century French village in minute, exhaustive detail: how the villagers worked, ate, formed relationships etc. Some of this was interesting, but it wasn't really relevant to the purpose I was reading the book for and hence felt like a bit of a waste of my time.
FtttG
4mo ago
Last week I finally finished Montaillou. Took me the guts of a month to get through, what a chore.
Onto Orbán: Europe's New Strongman by Paul Lendvai, as reviewed by Scott. Another book I'm reading for research purposes. About a hundred pages in and it's a very easy read, I'm learning some interesting tidbits about the man himself I can use.
I'm sorry to hear that bro. The only advice I can give is that there is absolutely zero point trying to have a platonic relationship with her. All you'll be doing is torturing yourself by wondering what might have been. Best thing for everyone is to make a clean break of it, never interact with her again and try to forget about her as quickly as possible. If you can move to another city so you won't run the risk of bumping into her and her husband, even better.
It is these hypothetical posthumans who I imagine cringing at the thought that "she" is inherently wrong/a lie if applied to a person whose body has a penis, when it will routinely be applied to people who have no genitalia or chromosomes at all.
I also see the sleight of hand you're attempting here. "In the future there'll be sentient individuals who have no genitalia or chromosomes who everyone considers it unremarkable to call 'she'; therefore there should be nothing objectionable about calling penised individuals 'she' in our world (in which every sentient individual has chromosomes and only a negligibly small portion don't have genitalia)".
I will reiterate that my grandmother has no wheels.
I'm arguing that the trans-inclusive policies you're endorsing have a demonstrably negative impact on women and children's safeguarding. You're dismissing this criticism by saying none of it will matter in the post-Singularity transhumanist future. Fair enough - but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter now.
Frankly, this line of reasoning proves too much. I presume, as a self-identified progressive, you are a staunch opponent of racism and think that colour-blind policies which don't take historical oppression into account make the lives of people of colour worse. Why couldn't I retort "pfft - after the Singularity, the idea of discriminating against someone on the basis of their skin tone will be as alien to humans as the idea of discriminating against someone on the basis of their preferred flavour of ice cream"? Even if this is true, so what? What would it have to do with your criticism? Fucking nothing, is what.
Since this time last week I've written just under 4,000 words of my NaNoWriMo project, 71,000 in total. Dying to finish the first draft (now projected to run to 95-100,000 words) as soon as possible so I can have my evenings back, then come back to the second draft with fresh eyes. I know there's loads of stuff I'll be able to cut out, but I don't want to start cutting until the first draft is finished.
FtttG
5mo ago
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.
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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo ago
I thought it was Tennant's? Although a Christopher Nolan tie-in lager was a missed opportunity.
FtttG
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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?
Lucky you.
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