ShariaHeap
3mo ago
Great post, much appreciate your summary which I wholeheartedly agree with. The funny thing is I originally found the Motte when I was infuriated with Freddie for one of those earlier posts, whereby I googled if anyone had commented on the web, and actually found a place I could rant where I wasn't immediately kicked off. And here we are today, with the same games being played!
I hold no particular animus or deep feelings against Freddie, but he is a fraud in my view. It's obviously fine to have whatever blog policy you want, but to block people from talking about an issue and then proceed to talk about it 'alot' is insulting to his subscribers and just plain tyrannical.
The only saving grace he might have with it is cognitive dissonance - the post you dug up in DID speaks to this as well ( I didn't know about that one) - he all but lays out the case that trans is a culture bound syndrome and now because of his tribal and familial roots is realising he can't square what he knows to be true with the orthodoxy he's supposed to subscribe to. Reading his latest made me feel like I was watching someone wet themselves in public, so poor and fumbling was the argumentation in places.
I get annoyed with the fragmentation technique which actually hides what is going on. First posit the 'trans person' and then smear categories and argue on a rights basis. In between anything will do-sand in the face. It's just like heads of a hydra - I mean, can you count all the spurious stuff that is been brought up around this shit: endless queerying of biological sex, made up ideas of third genders or historic trans people, adolescent identity badges and flags, the extreme sensitivity to... third person pronouns, gender identity theory justification, rights issues and medical treatment model at the same time, social constructivism, gender performance, gender souls/essences, etc. If you collate what people have said to justify trans you will understand that is an 'empty' term. The arguments shift over time, and different individuals use conflicting and incoherent explanations to argue for it.
But it's pretty simple what is going on. A new group of people has been created in society and activists are having the rights of this group supercede those of others, by making a nonsense category, gender identity, supercede biological sex. Activists, progressive zealots, money makers, politician, handmaid women, and a lot of (mainly male) weirdos have been setting this up behind our backs but some people have realised what is going on and have something to say about it.
It's still finely poised but I predict the trans lobby will start to lose ground. This is because there is no coherence, no meaning to be found in trans. On the other hand, if you gain a perspective, you can actually understand, and even admire, the emergent systems at play. If enough people in society value reality we will have to act in concert to defend it. Otherwise, what lies ahead after abandoning reality?
ShariaHeap
2mo ago
Very compelling and cogent read. Thanks for the post. I agree, seems obvious to me now that we are in a dynamical system where we need to push and release to get balance. Child care, criminology, whatever it just seems basic that you cant just slide over to one end of the scale and expect good results...
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
The refusal to connect with the trans issue when it's staring you in the face is also something you see with research. Like this article looking at the rapid spread of psychiatric illnesses in teen girls on social media, that somehow fails to even mention trans.
Or the endless line graphs of rising mental illness that Jonathan Haidt and co produce, corresponding also with social media use, but not showing the one on gender dysphoria, which shows the same trend.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
The gender ideology movement sort of feels out of the news cycle where I live, but remains very top of mind for me.
As I see it, the whole umbrella is actually multiple, almost unrelated strands, queerying category activists, social engineering progressives, AGPs, internet cults, all underpinned by unthinking legal activism and of course corporate profiteering. Did I mention an overtly political and enabling media environment bereft of any journalistic values?
I am fascinated by all these things but mainly I want to talk about the social mania aspect. I'm very interested in how smart people, who would inevitably class themselves as above-average in rationality and morality, are able to brush off child-safeguarding concerns, discarding the previous medical ethics consensus (first do no harm, evidence based medicine) in favour of ideas that barely existed even 15-20 years ago.
I have been looking into previous social manias such as the satanic panic and the child care workers given wrongful convictions and it's shocking how difficult it is to reverse the tide of mania once it's begun. Parents, police, the justice system, and media all fall into lockstep and condemn innocent people to terrible fates they and their families bear in almost total isolation, with only a few supporters able to parse the information in front of them and figure out what is going on.
I mean this is just human behaviour - we make movies about the Salem witch trials, we are modern people and have access to perspectives of humans across evolutionary time. Is it really true that people still don't know who we are, how we behave in herds?
I understand apathy, I understand things moving out of the news cycles, but I can't understand how people can maintain a neutral view on unnecessary surgeries on minors. When institutions such as medical bodies fail in their basic safeguarding responsibilities, suppressing dissent within their ranks, it is not hard to work out what is going on. How many manias does history need to present before people learn what we are?
A failure of courage I understand in any given context but the neutral middle doesn't even seem curious in private.
Can anybody enlighten me why people aren't more curious, why they're happy for children to be groomed into lifelong medicalisation, with their life choices pre-emptively narrowed before they even understand what consent means? The true-believers I understand, it's supposedly smart, moral people that aren't engaged that I'm confused about. Are they secretly true believers but just don't want to say?
Plain old cognitive dissonance?
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
I didn't see it necessarily as trans ideology meeting every aspect of a cult just that there are obvious parallels.
The cult dynamics are most apparent perhaps in social media groups, where there is love-bombing, sanctioning and social games to influence vulnerable new members by the group and older figures, moderators acting as the cult leaders. These are places where teenage angst will be helpfully interpreted as a sign you're probably trans, and doubt about transitioning framed as internalised transphobia, or a need to stop listening to others or going to other places on the internet and just stay on 'trans-friendly sites'.
I think the current ideology has cult like manifestation but that it's better described as a culture-bound syndrome, or egregore, though that's a more nebulous concept.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
That number is likely an undercount -- even the most comprehensive data provider, Komodo, acknowledges this in their reporting-- and regardless why is the number important, or why is the fact that some people are particularly exercised by it an issue? Also your comparison is off, at least the way youve worded it -- you need to compare the number of adolescents who are already receiving puberty blockers with their baseline population, not just the annual figure of those who start puberty blockers.
Moral panic? The reality is numbers of dysphoric adolescents and those receiving blockers and hormones is rising exponentially. When something changes rapidly, some people are curious why -- there is an inherent urgency implied in understanding rapid change. And the sphere of influence, and age of influence of these ideas has gotten wider and younger, so depending on where you live and whether legislative changes occur, it will likely continue to grow. Unless individuals act to do something.
Some people have children (autistic children even) who are entering an education system where they will learn that they don't have a sex until they decide what it is, so they have actual skin in the game. We're also talking a legal, and progressive campaign to change society wholesale fundamentally, with people effective being compelled to accept unproven ideas around gender in the workplace, in medical clinics, in education. Factually inconsistent and wrong ideas about sex are spreading through medical institutions and acadme. I agree that this is just one manifestation of problems in science, academia, medicine and psychology, but it is a flagshap example and to paraphrase Blake, one where you can see the whole world-- progressive attempts at social engineering, post-modernist queerying of categories and truth, transhumanism, philosophical relativism and nihilism leading to bad ideas. Plenty of people are witness to transitioning children and adolescents and a growing number of parents are grieving there children and dealing with dissonance of being in a completely unemphatetic environment to their plight, all while kindness and inclusivity are preached.
Relative to drug addiction, gun and road deaths, yes it's small but rareness doesn't exonerate wrongness, and it's possible to care to varying degrees, or at least have an informed opinion about, many different issues at once.
This is a canary in the coalmine as part of woke progressive social engineering (along with anti-whiteness etc), so a lot of people have an interest. I would argue it's an important manifestation of where we are at as liberal societies with rising mental health issues for children and youth and a pervasive lack of meaning broadly.
Also, you're always interested in responding, so it's a funny charge to make when you are just as focused on the issue.
ShariaHeap
8mo ago
What do you mean, the gender identity ('born in the wrong body') is justifying the surgery. Also the gender identity stuff is an incoherent belief system that is being taught in schools and mandated in workplaces.
The irony is that having a sex category, being an immutable fact, allows for any manner of expression. It is gender identity where the individual is forced to show social proof of membership, typically confirming to regressive sex stereotypes in order to do so.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
The underlying nihilism of 4chan means that what starts as larping actually reifies the ideas in the community. They lose track of the meta, which reminds me of the quote, "The trouble with propaganda is you forget where you hid the truth".
I think that truscum, while I prefer it to transtrender (trans as a human right/existential lifestyle choice), still just begs the question of whether that is the best way to treat dysphoria. Ive noticed its being talked about less in any case these days with a preference for trans rights or existential transcendence narratives.
The low regret rates apply to a different cohort, being studies on older adults, mainly MtF and we don't know the rates for the recent so-called ROGD cohort. We know from one study that most of those with gender dysphoria who do not transition, desist from having dysphoria, with most of those turning out to be gay and in a recent study it was found that 30% of those prescribed hormones were found to have stopped them within 4 years.
Clearly we don't know enough to identify 'true trans', or 'true truscum' and given that early treatment with puberty blockers followed by hormones will result in infertility we have a high ethical bar, even for research. We know rates of mental illness are increasing rapidly in this cohort also and that there is frequently overlap with other conditions such as autism, OCD, anorexia/eating disorders, self harm, generalised anxiety etc.
I don't see why dysphoria is able to claim special status when it may only be a component of the actual condition the individual is caught in. Autism could easily involve a distorted self concept at its root, as well as a fastidious compulsiveness, and gender dysphoria be just the culture-bound manifestation of this for autistic people. Similarly we could think of the desire to be something different as resulting from some underlying OCD mechanism, with the gender content available to be the focus.
As I've said before, the rationale you raise for younger transition, indicates already that attempts to appear as the opposite sex are not necessarily effective in resolving dysphoria, especially when there are any cosmetic concerns. We don't know if some degree of persistent dysphoria, or dis-ease might be apparent in later in life, even for good-passers.
After all there is something existentially fragile about the reliance on passing in the first instance and I would speculate a fear perhaps of not being authentic could always be a risk.
As I've said before, this wish for young transition starts to fall into a transhumanism paradigm, as you acknowledge with your queering of the normative of puberty in human development. It's obviously better to treat somebody while causing the least harm. This is a normative claim we could all agree on surely. The big question beg is what's to say there won't be better treatments that don't involve risks to fertility or altering body parts? Lobotomy was also justified on their being no good alternative but then they discovered antidepressants/anti-psychotics.
The transhumanist desire for transcendence through technology along with anti-natalism is part of the broader frame of understanding the culture bound syndrome we are seeing expressed. We need to understand the cultural level if we are to remedy peoples distress in this regard as it's more and more apparent to me we are all stuck in a lack of meaning.
ShariaHeap
8mo ago
It's difficult because yeah, probably are some genuinely transgender kids out there
I strenuously deny this assertion. There are gender non-conforming children, gay children, those who struggle to develop a gendered identity in a social world, and ultimately those who struggle with body or gender dysphoria but there is no evidence that there are 'trans-children'.
The blind acceptance of this frame by both sides is something we need to challenge if we want medical professionals to start caring about child-safeguarding.
The idea of a trans child was unknown 20 years ago when trans(sexual) identification was the domain of adult males with autogynephilia
Who is providing the language and ideas for these children to use?
ShariaHeap
4mo ago
But if you make all the low IQ people slaves again, most of them would be white men.
Is that really what white supremacy is arguing for these days?
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
You should look into the individual cases. The three I looked at via podcasts, docos all had the same characteristics: no real evidence beyond child's testimony, leading and irresponsible questioning techniques (now considered disreputable), widespread parental panic -eg active and suggestive questioning of them now considered a process of suggestion and false-memory creation, shonky experts, escalating numbers of children reporting over the period with outrageous child testimony (drinking blood, murders enacted, ritualistic abuse, macabre acts that would have entailed serious physical injury where none was present, large groups of people involved, impossible sequences of events etc.). These events were all supposed to have gone on repeatedly with multiple children over long periods of time in a public daycare with staff, parents oblivious and no reports of any concern prior to the initial satanic panic event that blew up. Sometimes unrelated people were caught up in it, in one case a policeman who happened to be there.
The police and prosecution for their part formed their view from day one and bought entirely into the thinking of the times (believe the child) in the US McMartin case completely relying on one untrained, unlicensed counselor who with puppets and leading questions would forcefully get testimony from the children.
For all the cases I looked at the defendants were ultimately exonerated, though after lengthy battles. Often children involved have recanted their evidence.
This doesn't rule out that some children were abused in a more typical sense - the Canadian CBC documentary points to one likely case. But there's little doubt that the vast majority of charges are created from a condition of social mania.
The interesting thing is that many of these children do believe they were abused even when it's most likely they weren't. It is actually possible to implant memories through suggestion. And so in a very real way these children were abused by a failed system.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
While obviously the right-wing machinery has activated the response, I think it's a mistake to view it solely as right-wing. I may be optimistically overestimating my demographic, but there's a growing tranche of people whom the left has left, who would gladly take an opportunity to picket against the cultural hegemony of the woke liberal left.
Also, the trans issue is not just another culture war issue. It's a strange and dark turn towards Orwellianism. Gender ideology asks people to assert things that aren't actually true and to accept this untruth promulgated through public institutions, including education of their children. While other excesses are also concerning, you can't get much more fundamental than 'queering' the truth that sex is binary. Beyond this just lies nihilism and complete post-capitalist decay.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
I think there is a lurking leftist middle that probably exists here, at least I am one, and I certainly don't believe in HBD as it's typically used. The difficulty is that the world is complex and it's hard to build and formulate the kind of critique necessary to capture nuance and rebut the plethora of arguments hoarded by the HBD side.
I think the tribal thing is overdone with left v right, the problem is the failure of people to think for themselves. I mean your claim that all blue is pro-immigration seems unlikely, or is evidence of some serious group-think. Immigration is a complex, and contextual issue. If half the population has one view on it, that's stupid.
I'm broadly in favour of diversity and different cultures existing as a plurality but words like multiculturalism and for that matter diversity are ruined for me as they have a monolithic group think sense about them.
I see this site as having plenty of people from the left who escaped from this kind of mindless group think.
HBD isn't mentioned all that much these days.
ShariaHeap
8mo ago
Well thank him and move on with your life. This fetish around purity codes and whether people are 'good' or 'sinful' is very tiring. It must be latent Protestantism. Take what you like, for my mind he's been extraordinarily prescient in gender issues and wokism broadly, introduced elements of religion, myth and psychology to me and been burned up in the culture war, though seems to be quietly recovering.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
I know that there is a tendency for some topics, in some weeks, to dominate, but I fail to understand this critique.
I'm frequently impressed with the depth, breadth and back and forth of some of the discussion I've seen here. Even on familiar topics, some of the ideas are frame breaking enough they lead me to question some unexamined prior.
Even the HBD and white nationalism stuff has merit in uncovering widely held views and pointing to the critique of liberalism moment we are in.
Also, as a majority single issue focus poster, it's called culture war and I resent people telling me to move on just because they have reached their peace. I'm sure you have issues that stir you and there's a gate-keepy flavour with pointing out topics that are 'overdone' that triggers me back to days of college, where no-one at parties wanted to talk philosophy with me...
I recognise some stuff gets repeated and may feel overdone, but it's easy to minimise main threads. I think even in frequently posted issues, there can be new levels of analysis/synthesis that evolve over time.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
What is the interesting stuff?
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
That would seem to somewhere marginalise the concept of child development, which we have consistently taken into account in applying other restrictions on choice as a society, alcohol, driving, joining the army.
But I can see the framing as being sufficient at a first, say libertarian, brush.
The problem of course, as you point to, is that the systems of trust advising on these matters are captured and are being grossly negligent in providing accurate information.
I kind of see myself at a privileged place in history, in that it's actually really easy to get information. 10 hours of reading on substack will get you all you need to know to have a visceral experience of concern. In the past, the systems of trust were limited. Also we understand biases and self deception much better than previous generations.
I met the parent of a three year old who told me their child gets to decide every day if she is a boy or a girl. Schools are responding to this Manchausens by proxy parental abuse by... obliging them... Surely an average person would look at this and say, hmmmm, that's not right? Are three year olds now masters of their own destiny?
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
I don't think a typical hobby group credibly meets the threshold of cult-like, although some would have their own characteristics, you must like X thing and not Y etc.
Agreed, the second part of what you talk about is what I am referring to by a culture bound syndrome, but there's also explicit manifestations that if not exactly characteristic of cults, are cult like. It's a modern social construction/transhuman cult perhaps. Religious belief is another relevant paradigm. I feel like we're arguing in the margins.
ShariaHeap
8mo ago
I think it's healthy to take breaks from social media at different points so qdos. I suspect I might be a different age from you because my expectations are very low for this kind of site (at the same time I really enjoy it).
From my perspective any sense of a 'community' in such places is already illusory, which doesn't mean there's not connection, shared perspectives etc but it's not real life and for me it's at the level of infotainment - sometimes very good infotainment, but not really anything to get hung up about.
The best thing about the motte, is the lack of censoriousness. People are free to express ideas people might find odious but that is what free speech is. I'm taken aback somewhat by the views some people have landed with but I'm not adversely affected by them.
Something that shifted for me with 'ideas' was at around age 40 i read some Jung and became intensely interested in the bodily feeling of being triggered by other peoples ideas. I started to actively lean in to this and it has helped me become more detached from various debates because I am also interested in my own thoughts, ideas and reactions and other peoples commentary is in fact fuel for this process. It also goes along with Haidt's moral tastebuds ideas. I may not agree with someones ideas but if I'm not triggered I'm actually in a better place to perhaps see where they're coming from. Perhaps it's an age thing.
Practically and without wanting to sound condescending, I scroll through a lot here without reading much. I'm not inclined to care enough about us politics, HBD paradigms or atheist argument chains. There's also stuff I don't comment on because I have no particular insight but I enjoy reading, such as law, history, economics etc. And then there's a few nuggets that resonate really well each week as well as my own culture war pet topics. I know the sense of despair that people seem so at odds but I guess that's just the world?
On comparison with Scotts community i don't actually believe 'niceness' is a value though it may coincide with one at times. I suspect there must be a lot of interesting discussion wherever he is but am guessing it would be prone to status games and idolatry. The motte is good because it's like that semi-grotty pub in the wrong part of town where you engage, or overhear, people not like you. And I'd warn against people mimicking Scotts style. I see it here often falling flat and adding unnecessary word count.
ShariaHeap
6mo ago
As a meta-comment on all the hawkish hot takes, I'd love it if we could gather all motte hot-takers in a no-holds barred cage fight so we could distinguish between the psychopaths, veteran fighters and pissant weaklings who try to compensate for their inferiority complex with words. I think we have to be alert to the possibility that people that talk a big game could easily wet their pants in real world life and I'd love to see who those people are.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
I don't have time for the back and forth research game, but why the conviction?
How did major international reviews find the evidence to be inconclusive and low quality but you state the opposite as fact?
Some studies that have been held up as gold standard such as the early Dutch puberty blockers studies have been shown to have major methodological flaws such as not accounting for the fact that people would transition in the pre/post survey instrument, thus rendering some of the items equivocal/unreliable. Recent studies have shown that even on its own merits it is inconclusive on showing improvement.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
In some ways trans, at least in adults, is peripheral - an increasing number of trans, or for that matter lesbian, gays, intersex people share the feeling something is awry.
Rareness doesn't exonerate wrongness. And the enabling environment and other ideas (pregnant people, pride months for LGBT though actually mainly T these days) are ubiquitous, or haven't you noticed?
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
Well that's sad to me but I sense it, and it becomes reinforcing- as less people are having children society seems to have also become less accommodating of having children. I have to say it's a stressful business in the current age.
How much is fear of global catastrophe? I wonder if all the environmentalism has curbed the instinct, or is it that we've become more online and less physically connected.
Could it be they farm for getting above a threshold -- some subs have a minimum karma for posting or commenting -- and the farmers sell on to Guerilla marketing for the product placement con job that amazingly many don't see through.
It is a miracle that anyone volunteers to use Reddit at all given the degree of fake corporate slime, censorship and totalitarian level groupthink.
Of course I browse it a lot and only have the dopamine addiction to blame. I have given up commenting as it's lower resolution than ChatGPT4.
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