WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
yet by the standards of the leftist community, bringing up desistance or detransition is itself transphobic
Not all of us. The sentiment is sadly common, but I wouldn't call it a consensus, there's very much an alternative, more positive viewpoint floating around - e.g. the whole "Cis+" concept.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Well, I don't think mainstream Blues in America have "we should make all Christians renounce the faith and ban indoctrinating children into Christianity" as an explicit or even implicit goal in the way that a lot of mainstream Reds would proudly endorse "we should make all transgenders detransition and ban indoctrinating children into questioning their gender" as reflective of their agenda and beliefs. And as I said, I think that such large-scale policies are much better grounding for a cultural-genocide claims that acts of individual violence - i.e. whatever degree of validity the "trans genocide" case enjoys, it rests on the existence of political will towards dissolving trans identity, not on anecdotal claims of thugs beating people up.
But certainly, to the extent that policies intended to erase Christians as a cultural identity exist, there is a valid case that they would fit the bill of "cultural genocide" as leftist theory defines it. For example, I think that to the extent that the application of "genocide" to crimes that aren't literal mass murder is ever reasonable, it's reasonable to call Muslim jihadis genocidal even if they ideally want to forcibly convert all infidels rather than slaughter them.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
My understanding is that defendants have tried to use it, although it's not actually been used to successfully get away with murder in the way activists have tried to claim. If there were actually idiots with one Jewish great-great-grandmother who tried to get off on a religious-freedom technicality by repeating the blood libel, I think most actual Jews would be in favor of banning that line of argument, whether or not any judges had ever bought it. I agree things would be different if the defense only existed as a paranoid trans fantasy, but that doesn't seem to be true.
Similarly, I wouldn't say "the trans genocide is overblown", I'd say "the trans genocide is fictitious".
Better to say, I think, that the trans genocide is a motte-and-bailey. What queer theorists mean when they discuss "trans genocide" among themselves is rarely anything to do with the murder rate - the actual analogy is to residential schools, not Auschwitz; cultural genocide, forced assimilation and reeducation, an attempt to stamp out trans as an identity. I think it's hard to argue that this isn't happening, given that a majority of conservatives on and off this forum would openly advocate for it. There's just a root disagreement about whether it's actually a bad thing or not.
(There's also a terminological dispute about whether it's ever appropriate to use "genocide" to talk about processes that don't involve literal mass murder, or if that's always, inherently, motte-and-bailey. I can see both sides of that argument, but I don't think we should over-focus on it in the trans case, because advocates of the "trans genocide" terminology are ultimately just drawing on what is, as per the Wikipedia link, a widespread use of the term in their intellectual milieu. They're doing a separate disingenuous thing when they try to bring up the sloppy statistics to justify the trans-genocide thing, deliberately blurring the line between genocide-as-murder and genocide-as-assimilation more than they need to.)
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Do you mean that the relevant states banned a defense that no one had actually used? Or a defense that had never been successful? If the latter, I still think it makes sense to ban it even if it hadn't historically bought its claimants as much leniency as the activists claim. More sense, even. No more time should be wasted on a legal strategy that rests on mistaken assumptions and doesn't even work. (See also "the Devil made me do it".)
As ever, misleading hyperbole is a tempting Faustian bargain when you're dealing with a problem that is widespread but not intense enough to spark much outrage if you stick to the facts. The same thing happened with rape-culture discourse - the real problem that made activists' blood boil was the staggering number of women who get socially pressured into sex they didn't really want, but calling that out for what it is is difficult without sounding either mealy-mouthed and unconvincing, or hysterical and overreacting. So they gesture at an epidemic of violent rape that just didn't exist to the degree they needed to, in an attempt to reconcile public feeling to how unbearable things felt to them.
I think this is exactly the devil's bargain trans activism has struck with these laughable statistical manipulations - trans people feel unsafe in a generalized, exhausting way, but by any rational accounting, outside of specific circumstances like sex work or prison, most of what they're feeling is inchoate intimidation, not an ongoing bloodbath. So people don't care and they feel they "have" to doll up the story in lurid claims about murder rates to get their emotional pain taken seriously. If it bleeds, it leads.
Unrelated:
Various US states have passed laws banning defendants from using the "trans panic" defense (i.e. the defendant was so shocked upon discovering that an object of their sexual desire was transgender that they lost control of their faculties) in murder trials, under the historically dubious claim that this defense has resulted in vastly reduced sentences or even outright acquittals.
I am a little confused as to how this fits into your argument. Surely this is a sound legal decision in the world where transphobic hate crimes aren't meaningfully a thing (so murderers shouldn't get to appeal to a supposed widespread, sympathetic understanding of "who among us would not feel compelled to strangle a tranny if we saw one up close?", because it's not true), just as it is in the world where transphobic hate crimes are widespread (and are thus a plague that needs to be stymyed by throwing the book at bigots).
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Granted, and I think many more still might just make a doomed attempt to make everyone get along, one big family Thanksgiving dinner that never ends. My point is just that a liberal woman having a rule against dating conservative men isn't necessarily purely about personal preferences/purity standards; it can be a practical matter on a level with "I have three cats, swipe left if you're allergic".
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
I think this depends on the woman's social circle and what kind of behavior "conservative opinions" entail. If you have enough queer friends then you just can't be in a long-lasting relationship with someone with anti-LGBT views, for example - something's got to give.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
While I can sympathize with the plight of men who want children more than they want romance, I object in the strongest possible terms to a dichotomy that writes off love as a Disneyan fantasy and otherwise irrelevant. It is in fact perfectly reasonable to want one's romantic partner in one's life primarily because one is deeply in love with them. Being deeply in love with someone is indeed fun and wonderful - for men and women alike. And if what you're looking for is such a relationship, rather than a transactional arrangement geared towards child-rearing, then it is perfectly reasonable to reject a partner who is offering the latter and uninterested in the former. This isn't a gendered thing - it's the same reason men are afraid of their wives turning out to be gold-diggers. They don't regard themselves as buying sex and kids for a fair price (in which scenario "wife" and "gold-digger" would be synonymous), they want to be married to someone who loves them.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
Having good intentions and believing their policies are especially good are not necessarily the same thing. They may believe, for example, that they're doing good simply by holding a given office, taking up space that could have gone to that bastard who ran against them.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
Not me I would think, except insofar as some would object to me being here at all. But abstracting that fact away, I don't think so.
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
I'm not claiming that dancing doesn't or shouldn't act as a mating ritual. I'm saying that dancing is supposed to be fun in and of itself, to the extent that some people do it for its own sake - not a chore you need to slog through to get to the good bit. (Compare: sex, procreation.)
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
You cannot do these things and not have relationships with men at all.
Sure you can. The obvious zinger is that you can have relationships with women instead (though as mentioned elsewhere in the thread this is, of course, no guarantee of an abuse-free relationship). But also, you can dress skimpily and go clubbing for you own enjoyment with no intention of pursuing sexual or romantic relationships of any kind. For one thing, there are certainly people who enjoy dancing and getting hammered in a crowd - going to the club is, in fact, meant to be an enjoyable experience in itself, not some cumbersome prerequisite protocol for finding a mate.
(As for the skimpy clothing, setting aside the possibility that they just feel more comfortable with more skin showing - and we cannot underestimate that; naturist camps are attractive to non-swingers! - there are also people who enjoy feeling like a center of attention in a crowd, but don't particularly want that diffuse attention to translate into one-on-one flirtation.)
Naturally doing all those things increases one's odds of being sexually assaulted by strangers. But Peglow's whole point was that this effect is less than you'd think, and the bigger abuse risks are in established relationships. So the takeaway can actually be "what you've been told is backwards: you're more likely to be abused if you go steady with a boy than if you party without settling down". It's a bold point but a perfectly coherent one, and it's certainly not isomorphic to conservative sexual mores.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
Mind you, what a politician risks when taking a bribe is a tiresome lawsuit and some PR damage. What an informant risks when leaking an extremist militia's secrets is a bullet to the brain. In theory, it makes sense that the latter would demand greater hazard pay.
WandererintheWilderness
18d ago
Or we can do the modus ponens and say that if trans-identified males are allowed to share their creepy fantasies about murdering TERFs on Reddit, then incels, racists and homophobes should be allowed to as well.
That would be my view, yes. (As befitting a Mottizen, I should think, almost by definition.)
I think you're constructing a strawman in an effort to make me sound like an authoritarian and an opponent of free speech (…) I don't appreciate it.
I didn't intend to, and apologize for giving that impression. I didn't refer to you by name and, indeed, wasn't directly replying to you at all, but to Maiq, himself replying to magicakittycat. My purpose was to pick apart the epistemics of the question; I wasn't trying to specifically condemn any one position, let alone any one poster.
that logically implies that Western governments are getting far too worked up about incel-inspired violence
Yes, as per the above, I would agree with that. Certainly, with respect to school shooters, I think it's such a specific behavior, shared by people from such disparate ideological backgrounds, and so far from what a vast majority of those ideologies would recommend even when they endorse some forms of terrorism (!), that trying to blame any particular movement for a given shooting is almost always a mistake.
A fair reply, but,
This chain leads back to FtttG talking about how trans spaces ought to be given a spring cleaning of terrorist propaganda
I still don't think that's been demonstrated, for multiple reasons.
First, the point of Chinese Robbers is not merely that you shouldn't discriminate against the Chinese as a whole just because they have a significant minority of robbers among them. The point is that it is a statistical illusion. There is not, in fact, a particular reason why so many Chinese become robbers - you would be mistaken to organize any interventions predicated on the notion that there is some specific reason why the Chinese are more likely to become robbers than anybody else, even if you avoid the most egregious mistake of treating any randomly-chosen Chinese person as meaningfully likely to become a robber. Whether popular Chinese media depict stealing in a positive light is irrelevant because there's nothing there to actually be explained. They're not more likely to become robbers than any other human beings; there's just way more Chinese than Belgians, so all else being equal you numerically end up with more Chinese than Belgian robbers worldwide. All that has been shown here is that there are a fair few trans shooters - but nobody has tried to show that it's a statistically significant number relative to the total number of shooters. I'm not claiming it's not statistically significant, but leaping from "there's been like, six of them!" to proposed interventions without actually running the numbers is just plain bad epistemics.
Second, it also hasn't been demonstrated that violent rhetoric in trans spaces is responsible. Insofar as disturbed individuals from varied backgrounds and ideologies converge on becoming school shooters, it seems fallacious to point to anything violence-related in a specific set of shooters' background and blame that. Compare "many mentally-disturbed young males become trans, some mentally-disturbed young males become shooters, some online trans spaces include violent rhetoric - is the violent rhetoric to blame?" to familiar moral panics like "many mentally-disturbed young males are gamers, some mentally-disturbed young males become shooters, some video games include violent content - are violent video games to blame?". Lots of people consume various forms of violent content, and it is a favorite trick of censors to lean on Chinese Robbers situations to blame whatever kinds of violent content they don't like by claiming that the correlation shows that this time the violent content directly led to real-world harm. Me, I'm skeptical of the entire framework. AFAIK basically no trans spaces encourage their members to go forth and kill random children to prove they're the übermensch. The Zizians' private Discord server, maybe, but come on, that's not the kind of "violent rhetoric" that's lurking on regular trans subreddits. If we were talking about an epidemic of Kirk-style killings I might find the argument more persuasive, but here you can only point at a much hazier blob of "violence", and I think that's a stretch.
Third, even if violent rhetoric in trans spaces were in some way causally responsible through normalization, it has not been demonstrated that this relationship is so direct as to make the peddlers of violent rhetoric legally responsible for the shootings to a degree that nullifies their First Amendment rights. How many people read this violent rhetoric without becoming school shooters? My guess is "an overwhelming majority". Stochastic terrorism might be an interesting thought experiment but I do not believe a country can simultaneously have free speech and legally recognize the concept - the slippery slope from "don't publish anything that could motivate the right crackpot out of millions to kill people" to "don't ever criticize anybody too harshly" is so steep it's a cliff-face.
WandererintheWilderness
19d ago
Isn't this textbook Chinese Robbers Fallacy? There are a lot of humans. Even a relatively niche online subculture might have tens of thousands of members. A half-dozen violent criminals out of that number doesn't really prove anything, let alone provide sufficient grounds to condemn the subculture itself. The question, at that level, is not whether all mass shooters like speed skating, but how many speed skaters turn into school shooters.
Teenaged male, terminally online, obsessed with anime
Didn't even have to get to the 2nd paragraph to know the pronouns.
That seems a stretch. Surely there's still a massive contingent of old-fashioned weebs, many of whom aren't even left-wing - last week's thread had an extensive discussion of conflict between woke anime dub localizers and anti-woke anime fans! (Is your argument that these people are all a little older, and all the teenagers are very woke? That would be surprising.)
I'm not asking you to answer "yes", just pointing out that by definition, a proponent of race-blind multicultural states over ethnostates is going to answer "yes" - so it doesn't make sense to imagine an outside observer trying to decide which of ethnostates or cosmopolitan countries are 'better' on that criterion. It's like trying to rank apples vs oranges on the metric "how much do they taste like apples".
WandererintheWilderness
22d ago
I never liked the proverb that goes like hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue (why is paying a tribute a compelling metaphor here?)
I think "paying tribute" is here meant in the sense of "homage", not in the sense of a literal tax. The idea is that by aping the appearance of virtue, vice is implicitly praising virtue, i.e. paying homage to virtue, i.e. paying tribute to virtue.
WandererintheWilderness
22d ago
the original Canadians
You're assuming the conclusion. If you think the long-term welfare of "the original Canadians" as an ethnic group is the paramount metric of success for the country, then you've already decided you like ethnostates better than cosmopolitanism and looking at outcomes on any time scale becomes redundant.
WandererintheWilderness
23d ago
Wait, is the claim that the localizers would have inserted ostensibly sexist dialogue into the material as some sort of false-flag operation allowing them to then decry the work itself as problematic? This seems, uh, yet another claim from the more straightforward (and contradictory) accusation that some localizers alter dialogue to make the work itself seem more woke than it really is.
WandererintheWilderness
23d ago
Actually, I was thinking of underwater swimming, the kind that fish evolved to do in the same way that humans evolve to speak natural language, and which elephants would struggle to match. But fair cop on the fact-check regardless, my fault for putting pithiness over precision.
Though I thank you for the breakdown, this doesn't really address my observation. I don't dispute that, based on the linked articles, some localization choices are motivated by political correctness. What bothers and bemuses me is that some of the linked articles seem to see no difference between clear instances of politically motivated rewrites - e.g. turning a crossdressing he/him character into a trans girl to win representation points - and perfectly anodyne use of clearly-non-political American slang where it might not literally correspond to the word-by-word Japanese dialogue - e.g. talking about a character "yeeting" another. Is it truly the case that only politically-biased translators make those kinds of alterations too, while more literal-minded translators are also the ones who don't try to warp the political overtones of the source material?
But even then, surely it shouldn't be a binary choice. Surely there are anime fans who would prefer naturalistic, idiomatic, non-maximally-literal localizations just so long as they weren't politically biased? Indeed, I'd have naively guessed it'd be a majority of dub consumers; after all, surely purists who want textual fidelity above all else and are sufficiently well-versed in Japanese culture that they don't need to gloss a cultural nuance like "gyaru" as something more familiar to Americans would, in any case, prefer subs to dubs? So what's going on?
Side note: your example is kind of baffling to me; I've got one of the most left-wing social circles here and I've never heard anyone in my online circles treat "That's my girl" as some kind of taboo, inherently misogynistic phrase. My guess would be that the localizer, in this case, simply picked a common American phrase that people actually say in this situation over a purely literal translation so that the dialogue would sound natural. I agree the localizer could equally well have chosen "That's [FMC] for you", but I would assume that they happened to pick "That's my girl" because they viewed it as an equally innocuous, unremarkable idiom. Which it is. But eh, for all I know woke anime localizers might indeed be plugged into specific echo chambers where everyone agrees that "That's my girl" is an eeeevil microaggression; I merely caution you not to assume this is some kind of mainstream consensus on the Left. I'd never heard of it before.
(Like, yes, sure, if you get a critical theorist talking, they'll explain that the fact that we casually call grown women "girls" is belittling and a sign of structural sexism in the English language blah blah blah. But get a critical theorist talking about anything and they'll explain how it's secretly a tool of systemic oppression. "That's my girl" is not uniquely regarded as some sort of dogwhistle where if you make a cartoon character say it, it's supposed to immediately scan as a boo light signaling that they're an evil sexist. That's not a thing. Hell, search for "that's my girl" on Tumblr or Bluesky and you'll get tons of hits showing casual usage by very woke users!)
Well, that's one thing. What I'm saying is that there's no consensus on equating personal detransition with questioning the overall construct. There are trans spaces where even "I thought that I was trans but I'm not" is viewed with suspicion, but equally, there are many where it's viewed as a perfectly valid thing to say, so long as it doesn't entail doubting other people.
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