FtttG
User ID: 1175
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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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.
FtttG
5mo ago
FtttG
5mo ago
keep working, treating their firing as illegal and asserting they still have jobs?
The "I'm out of work, but I identify as an employee of the federal government" jokes write themselves.
FtttG
5mo ago
Plus, this is Bayesian reassurance that you’re reasonably well endowed, or else she would had called your dick small (more easily disproved to any potential third parties in text-screenshot court) instead of mid in bed (less easily disproved to any potential third parties in text-screenshot court).
Bro you've got me cracking up laughing in work.
I wasn't too concerned about it: no sexual partner (and I've had more than my fair share) has ever even suggested that I have a small penis. But still nice to know.
I don't, of course. IIRC the first one bled a little, consistent with a broken hymen (although that's not the only thing that can cause one to bleed during sex, obviously). The second claimed I was her first kiss in addition to first sex, and her behaviour certainly seemed consistent with that claim. But you're right: I don't know for sure and I never will.
FtttG
5mo ago
Sorry about that, it was meant more as a joke. Happy to delete if necessary.
FtttG
5mo ago
The fact that Wikipedia is treating the concept of a "queerplatonic relationship" (i.e. a friendship) with deadly seriousness, without even a one-paragraph "criticism" section saying something to the effect of "The concept has been criticised by conservative commentators on the grounds that it is functionally indistinguishable from ordinary platonic friendship in all particulars."
FtttG
5mo ago
FtttG
5mo ago
It was certainly hip to hate on Infinite Jest on Twitter at the time of writing (pre-Elon takeover).
FtttG
5mo ago
In that case, I think the term "porn-brained" is misleading, as it implies that men behave a certain way because of excessive porn consumption.
There is a related trend in pop music made by female Zoomers (or at least performed by them) wherein there’s this surprisingly huge corpus of songs about how bad guys are at sex and how women are better off pleasuring themselves.
Four years ago, I was going out with this girl for a few weeks. It was a fairly casual relationship on both ends, and I was already considering breaking it off with her, as I was starting to notice some red flags not wholly dissimilar from certain of the ones that Mr. Greene in the OP would have been wiser to heed. One night we were at a party, we'd both taken ecstasy (although I don't believe we'd come up yet) and she abruptly asked me if I wanted to be her boyfriend. I did my best to let her down gently and told her that I didn't, but she became extremely upset and burst into tears. I tried to calm her down, but she was inconsolable and stormed off in a rage. Later that night she sent me a nasty message concluding with "I rated our sex 6/10 it's barely a pass."
I didn't rise to the bait - what could be gained from it? Obviously I didn't believe it was true (I mean, I would say that, wouldn't I): if I'm so crap in bed, why were you throwing yourself at me, why did you ask me to be your boyfriend? But even if it was true, the fact that she was bringing it up all of a sudden like this was such a transparently childish, spiteful thing to do that it immediately vindicated my decision not to pursue a serious committed relationship with her.
Frankly, I think this thing of "oh whatever, he was crap in bed anyway" is just the distaff counterpart to that thing where a guy asks a girl out via text, she turns him down, and he immediately replies "lol whatever bitch you ugly anyway". If she's ugly anyway, why did you ask her out, you dork? The sour grapes are particularly ripe at this time of year.
FtttG
5mo ago
if you're orgasmmaxxing, why would you bother with an inexperienced partner?
Before the start of my current relationship, I deflowered two women in 2022 in casual relationships. I won't lie - it was quite the turn-on.
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?
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/princess-mom
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