WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
5mo ago
In countries that recognize a right to Free Speech, you are under no obligation to recognize any Church's titles as legitimate
Under no legal obligation. But it would still be the polite thing to do if you ran into a nun at the grocery store. There is a very great difference between laws and social norms. I believe we should have a social norm of using trans people's preferred pronouns; I do not think it should be a crime not to. I am in favor of a world where journalists typically use a trans person's preferred pronouns if they're writing a piece about them, as opposed to a world where they typically do the reverse - I am not saying I want journalists to be legally mandated to write the story either way.
I mean I don't believe that gender exists, so I'm not sure that's true
I don't know what sort of 'gender' you don't believe exists, but I promise, I very probably don't believe in it either.
WandererintheWilderness
5mo ago
if you demand society follow suit you need to actually prove that being trans had nothing to do with the cult or murders
No I don't. You're the one making a non-obvious positive claim; the burden of proof is yours. You have to prove relevance, not ask your opponent to prove irrelevance.
Also, I didn't mean 'Ziz's biological sex had no causal influence on her crimes'. I meant 'Ziz's biological sex is not of public interest in and of itself once Ziz's crimes have been established'. If someone picks a person in a crowd at random and asks you to bet on whether they've committed violent assault, sure, you should give slightly higher odds if it's a man. But if he's already holding a bloody knife and trying to hop the border, it's tendentious at best to call everyone's attention to the fact that he's a man as if it's some crucial point of the case.
a system which worked fine for everyone except 0.3% of the population
I am struggling to word a reply to this that doesn't sound like 'right, so you're just a heartless monster, got it'. I guess I could make a desperate appeal to some kind of decency or compassion within you by pointing out that 0.3% of 350 million people is still a staggering amount of people. Or point out that you're discounting the uncountable number of people who would counterfactually have transitioned and led much happier lives if the option had been on the table. Or ask what makes you so sure that the current arrangement ruins more than 0.3% of the population's lives - if hundreds of thousands of oppressed trans people's lives are an acceptable sacrifice, why not hundreds of thousands of cancelled and witch-hunted right-wing curmudgeons? But frankly I don't hold high hopes of getting through to you.
WandererintheWilderness
5mo ago
This is untrue. It requires acknowledgement of the ideological concept of non-binary genders, of gender itself, and of an entire sociological theory.
I don't think it does, any more than I have to believe in God to address a nun as 'Sister So-and-so' rather than 'Mrs'. Which I guess may be what you meant by "being owed self-declared titles". I guess I bite that bullet. If it doesn't imply lying about actual physical reality then I support a social norm that you should call people what they want to be called, in general, or else not interact with them at all.
Though I also have a more pointed objection. I don't think I have any different beliefs about object-level reality than you do regarding 'gender'. This sort of thing gets very twisty with how self-referential it all is, but genuinely, my only factual belief about the 'ze' person is 'they like it when I call zir ze, and ze doesn't like if I call zir a she'. This is an observable fact about zir behavior, which you can observe as easily as I; and it is literally all I mean if I tell you 'zir gender is non-binary'.
(We might have a value disagreement about whether it's bad to go against zir wishes; we might have a political disagreement about whether it's good for society to have lots of non-binary people in it. But when I say 'that guy over there is non-binary', as a statement about the world, I truly don't think you factually disagree with any part of what I mean by that sentence. So I wouldn't be asking you to lie if I asked you to repeat it.)
WandererintheWilderness
5mo ago
Nonbinary people are still either men or women -- he/her. Asking for ze is asking for a lie.
Only in a very exotic sense that I just can't fathom. No one is asking you to pretend that a single cell in that person's body is arranged differently than you believe it to be. Your beliefs about physical reality are perfectly aligned with the 'ze's. You have a disagreement about social norms but the trans person isn't asking you to lie about what you believe to be the ground-level truth. I brought up the non-binary thing because in the case of e.g. a trans woman, you can kinda sorta argue that you're being asked to act-as-though this person has a vagina, even if you're not being asked to believe that they really physically do. But a non-binary person? There's nothing there.
WandererintheWilderness
5mo ago
I think that's a reason to think less of the Catholic Church as an organization, but not of random Catholic laypeople, or Christianity as a belief system in general.
(I almost wrote: "or of Catholicism as a belief system", which isn't true, but only because Catholicism is inherently self-referential, affirming the holiness and infallibility of the Church as an article of faith. The basic points of gender ideology in no way imply, let alone rely on the assumption, that today's trans activists and community leaders are heavenly-appointed and infallible.)
WandererintheWilderness
5mo ago
I'm aware, but, for a couple of reasons that isn't a position I have a lot of respect for; sorry if the following two-point reply is a bit on the curt side.
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First, because it relies on a kind of obtuse definition of "lying" that breaks down completely as soon as you look at, for example, non-binary people. 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.
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Second, because treating that as the genuine crux yields an insane position which only a few contrarians have ever endorsed. Are you seriously saying you're fine with a man getting bottom surgery, breast implants and estrogen shots, renaming himself 'Alice', and wearing dresses - but once he demands to be addressed as 'she', that's where you draw the line? Really? I'm sorry but I just don't believe this could be any serious person's root objection to transgenderism.
While covering for bad actors in your ingroup is certainly a normal thing to do, I will die on the hill of insisting it is unprincipled and ultimately unproductive.
I don't disagree. I'm just saying: everyone does it, from queers to Pentacostals. It tells you very little about the moral integrity of the average member of the group, and ~0 about the merits of their ideology. So you shouldn't let this stuff affect how you think of trans rights qua trans rights, unless you're prepared to throw overboard any position whose proponents commit this kind of epistemological sin.
(And let's be fair. Literal concentration camps for trans people might be science fiction, but a plurality of conservatives would proudly own up to wanting to make crossdressing/being-publicly-transgender illegal, and a majority would at least want it to be socially shunned. Calling that "genocide" might be hyperbolic but trans activists can't be faulted for worrying about it a fair bit.)
WandererintheWilderness
5mo ago
Please use more paragraph breaks, it was a challenge to make my way through this.
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.
I have hope that this will sort itself out through better education and general osmosis at about the same rate that the "use a trans person's preferred pronouns" social norm will spread. In the meantime, if we think it's relevant, I'm fine with saying "LaSota, born male…", calling her "biologically male", or whatever.
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.
Okay, but... I don't think über-progressive journalists are actually fully cognizant of that fact. The 'people may interpet trans woman backwards' thing, in particularly, is so deeply at odds with progressive vernacular that it genuinely doesn't register. I'm aware of it intellectually, which is more than most, but still hadn't thought of it in relation to this question until you brought it up! '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.
Above all else, though:
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.
This is where you lose me from the start. The premise fundamentally repels me. I cannot and will not subscribe to this rad-fem-descended idea that being a biological male is some sort of dreadful disease so potentially dangerous to bystanders that you inherently harm them by keeping your maleness from them. Men aren't fucking werewolves. I'm not just offended by this approach on behalf of trans women, I'm offended by it for myself as a cis man.
Are men more muscular and more aggressive on average? Yes. But those are fringes. The furthest edges of trend lines. "This person is a man" isn't some all-important piece of information that the public absolutely must know about some weird cult-leader who escaped to Mexico. 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.
Ziz's transness, so far as I can tell, is not relevant to her crimes. 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? (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?
To me, complaining about the potential ambiguity of 'she/her'-ing Ziz LaSota isn't like taking Clinton to task for being a smartass about the meaning of "sexual relations". It'd be like taking him to task for off-handedly mentioning he used to play "football" in the same public address without clarifying that he meant soccer and not American football. Yeah sure a lot of listeners might get the wrong idea, so what.
WandererintheWilderness
5mo ago
And the thing is, I realize that only a small fraction of trans women do things like this, but the rest of them, and their defenders, seem determined to justify such behavior. It makes it a lot harder to believe the line about trans people who "just want to live their lives."
I understand your frustration. If it were up to me, there would certainly be a lot less sweeping-under-the-carpet of genuine bad behavior from trans folks. But still: let he whose in-group has not closed ranks around a problematic tribe-mate, rather than let the lynch mob have him, cast the first stone. It's a natural tribal instinct, particularly when you think your community is facing an existential risk.
Maybe your beef is only with trans women who happen to genuinely be sexual predators; but if trans activists have reason to believe that there is a genuine political will in America to tar them all with that exact brush to - to classify all trans people as perverts and sex offenders by definition - are you going to publicize their existence? Are you going to give conservative media the satisfaction, are you going to give them the ammo to oppress you?
(If you're a prominent Jew in early-20th-century Germany and you find conclusive evidence that this Jewish banker you know has been defrauding some goyim clients, you would be insane to publicly accuse him and call the state police. Even if you're pretty sure the law enforcement personnel who'd handle that specific case aren't particularly anti-Semitic. Now, personally I think "trans genocide" is an ill-chosen phrase, but its merits don't matter here: this is the world trans activists think they live in, so of course they act accordingly.)
The theory that transgenderism as a movement is secretly very permissive of sexual assault on cis women doesn't survive contact with reality. The purity spirals of highly trans spaces from Tumblr to leftist Discord servers are infamous for good reason. Making excuses for trans predators is nothing more or less than a PR move - call it desperate or call it craven - it's nothing more than bog-standard respectability politics.
But I wonder if there are any people here who are willing to explicitly defend trans language norms as a more universal principle
There are. Hello! AMA! (I'm not trans myself, just very, very committed on this issue.)
Do you perceive bad actors and slippery slopes to be a problem? If so, how do you defend against them?
It depends on what you mean by "bad actors" and "slippery slopes".
When you say "bad actors": are we talking about cis perverts pretending to be trans? About trans women pretending to be be cis women? About trans women who are genuinely trans, insofar as that means anything, but for whom it's more of a sex thing than they admit?
The liar in the breastfeeding story sounds like an example of a genuine bad actor of the second type. Lying bad. Hot take, I know. But that's just it: the problem with that behavior was the lying. The 'taking advantage's of people's sympathy on false pretenses'. The fact that the pervert was lying about biological sex is incidental. An infertile cis woman lying about having lost a child would be just as scandalous, to me. And more to the point, while I haven't been following the story very closely, I don't see what it has in common with the Zizians. 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. Not that it matters.
And as a side-point which I feel is worth mentioning, re: "fulfilling some sort of fantasy to which the women were made non-consenting participants"… I mean, tough. I don't believe in thoughtcrime. Calling the moral brigade because someone somewhere might be having Dirty Thoughts about a woman is rightly derided as one of the worst excesses of a certain brand of feminism: this should apply here too. Yes, being perceived as a sexy woman is a sex thing for some trans women. (Not all of them; I know many trans women who are straight-up asexual. But a good number.) …So? Men aren't asked if they're foot fetishists before they're allowed on beaches where women go barefoot. Women who take men to task for the suspicion that the men are imagining them with their clothes off, even if the men in question don't make a single suggestive remark, are universally viewed as crazy puritans by anyone who doesn't share their neuroses. Let trans women jerk off about being trans women in the privacy of their own home, if they're not being indecent in public it's their own business. The mothers in the Facebook group chat have a perfectly valid grievance about being lied to, but whether the liar's motive was sexual or not in the privacy of their own mind, won't magically change the level of harm if the 'victims' couldn't tell at the time.
If they never actually explained in the first place to a non-DEI bureaucrat, why should they continue to get more money before having to justify it to a non-DEI bureaucrat?
Given the place this thread started, I thought it was obvious that the answer is "because letting a few useless diversity programs persist for a few months before they're inevitably shut down is a lesser evil than interrupting good programs in needlessly disruptive ways". I think it's trivially the lesser evil ethically; it might very well be the lesser evil economically too, depending on how costly it is for good programs to make up for lost time once they get the green light, e.g. restarting studies from scratch or finding replacements for people who quit for lack of pay and found other employment in the private sector. (See Scott Aaronson arguing that every week the NSF is frozen harms American science's future prospects as postdocs either quit their academic career, or move abroad rather than stay in the US - something in which the most competent, most valuable researchers-in-training will be more successful than the rank and file, selecting for mediocrity among the people we'll have left once the gridlock ends.)
And they won't have to if the formerly-DEI bureaucrats are the arbitrators of such-and-such buzzwords being sufficient evidence of goodness or not, which is what you have if you insist that they review all the programs and decide which one to cut rather than let their senior executive branch leadership circumvent them and do things like cut.
I am saying that DOGE should review all the programs and decide which ones to cut. It's not that much work.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
This implies that the programs did not have to actually explain before they were given money to spend.
They previously had to explain it to DEI bureaucrats who thought "we will abide by such-and-such buzzwords" was a good justification. The standards have changed. There is no reason to think the grifters are able to fool people who do not think "but [woke value]!!!" is a conversation-stopper; they've never had to.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
I think you can argue that behaviors can be gay as distinct from people being gay - so those girls would be doing gay stuff, but if it's just a one-off thing rather than something they pursue regularly, they aren't themselves gay. The phrase "Men who have sex with men" however, implies men who habitually have sex with men, not just "Men who fooled around with another man at some point". Bisexuals notwithstanding, it's easier to argue that that is essentially synonymous with "gay".
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
Were you exclusively attracted to men, or to women as well? If the latter, wouldn't that make you ex-bisexual? If not, does this mean you also became attracted to women at a certain point, or have you wound up asexual?
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
And literally every single program will say that, resulting in nothing changing, and nobody knowing there's anything that should be cut. Again, what good is letting them do that? Or put another way: how does that plausibly lead to cutting away the waste?
Because the programs will have to actually explain how they're supposed to be worth the money spent, and useless ones trying to obfuscate their uselessness can simply have their request for an extension denied. The denial process can be unilateral and impossible to appeal, if we want, and that would still be much better than freezing everything Day One while giving grifters no more of an out.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
We're talking about months-long trials that were already ongoing when everything was suddenly put on hold with no forewarning. Obviously no one should be starting any more trials for the time being; and doubly-obviously, any doctors trying to blackmail the government by suddenly adding dangerous procedures to an ongoing trial should be sued with extreme prejudice. (They shouldn't be hard to catch, the whole deal with clinical studies that get government funds is that you register what you said you were going to use the money for in advance.)
The place where Elon's people draw the line doesn't have to be accepted by the woke activists, though. DOGE can just come up with a common-sense criterion that makes sense to them, and if someone tries to argue in obvious bad faith that their bullshit study is on the right side of the line, they can just say "no it isn't; you may not appeal this decision; goodbye, please don't email us again". This would undoubtedly still cause a ruckus, and it might even have a few false positives, but it would still be immeasurably better than not having common-sense exceptions at all, and I genuinely think it should be trivial for DOGE to implement if they really have the stuff.
Like, why are you acting as though trivial word-salad smoke-and-mirrors would leave them helpless and befuddled? Isn't cutting through the obfuscation and identifying the good government programs from the woke hustlers supposed to be what they're for? If they're not up to this then one wonders why an elite crack team led by one of the most successful men in the world is needed for this job. You could get the same effect if you told an AI to cut all government programs no matter what, gave it access to a government email, and let it loose.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
Coordination is hard. I think it's unsurprising for liberals' position to be "we have a coordination machine, it's called the government, please give it back instead of making us build a second one for no reason". (Even if there are obvious rejoinders.)
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
Probably something like 99% of the anal sex is being had by gay men.
The poll I linked specifically polled heterosexuals. Thirty percent of male respondents would have to have lied about being straight (and thirty percent of female respondents would have to have lied about having had it at all) for this to fit the data.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
If you think HIV does spread readily from heterosexual sex, then why hasn't it?
I'm not particularly invested in proving that it does, I just specifically wanted to point out what I believed to be a really weird jump in reasoning.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
HIV doesn't readily spread from heterosexual sex. There is essentially zero risk from vaginal intercourse the way that 99% of Americans will experience it
This is a heck of a non sequitur. Whether you like it or not, a lot of straight men like anal sex - with women. The first Google hit found that in 2013 about a third of heterosexuals in 20 US cities they polled admitted to having had anal sex in the past year. Now, I've never seen the appeal myself, and you're welcome to say it's against nature for all the same reasons as gay sodomy if you want to be all Catholic about it - but it's a thing, massively so. Promiscuous gay men might be a small minority of the American population, but it doesn't follow that the remainder only have wholesome church-approved missionary sex, and you'd have an even harder time trying to change that than trying to walk back gay acceptance.
OP isn't talking about whether these things needed to continue to be funded indefinitely. The problem is that instead of "we will fund no further studies, no argument" the order literally caused studies to be halted midway through. Which would be fine if the study was a passive observation of the mating habits of roofing bats in the wild; less fine when it means the volunteers have already begun potentially dangerous treatment regimens, and are now being dumped out into the world. (It's not even as though they can continue taking experimental drugs on their own dime to avoid withdrawal; if the study's over the study's over.)
Lots of people answer this kind of talk with "it was a clean break, or the tiniest amount of leeway being used by everyone and their dog until the whole DOGE died by a thousand paper cuts". But come the fuck on. Leaving clinical-study volunteers hanging is ridiculously evil in principle, and I just can't accept that it was this or setting such a precedent for leniency as to scuttle the entire DOGE endeavor. Really now. The genius entrepreneur's elite crack team can't come up with a clearly-worded directive that accounts for "don't dump medical volunteers in the street with experimental equipment inside their bodies" without giving gender activists an out? Really?
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
(b) given their loud, performative feminism, which annoys anti-feminists, of course the latter will delight in crowing about their downfall
I would add that for isomorphic reasons the actual feminists will disavow him as loudly as they can, adding to the overall prominence of the story.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
It's common knowledge (I hope this point is simply consensus so that I can't be accused of building one) that far-left, white-hating, anti-colonial Jews are often, perhaps usually, also anti-Israel
But are they then distinguishable in any way from non-Jewish far-left white-hating anti-colonialists? If not, then what explanatory power does harping on about their Jewishness bring to the equation?
I just don't agree that predicting violence is the main point of the man/woman binary. I guess this is Scott's Thrive/Survive dichotomy in action: I'm trying to identify the optimal social norms for generally pro-social law-abiding people to adopt among themselves to ensure their mutual happiness and fulfillment - you're trying to design the social structures that best minimize risk in a cutthroat world where you're always calculating the chance that a stranger in the street wants to gut you like a fish. I'm asking what's nicer, you're asking what's safer.
Which world Current Year most resembles, and in what direction we're moving, are always going to be in the eye of the beholder. But when we're talking about principles rather than making policy, I think you need to set your sights on the ideal world, not on the making-the-best-of-a-bad-situation compromises. 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. That's what it means for me to be a Progressive.
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