aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
11mo ago
A good friend of mine's mother is a flat earther, they do exist. They are crazy for several other reasons though.
aqouta
11mo ago
The boycotters are not concerned with Budlight finding itself with no way back and diving back into woke, they are sending a message to others that they actually do have teeth, an idea mocked as ridiculous just before this whole thing blew up, and not to even consider the math on whether it's worth provoking the backlash.
aqouta
11mo ago
And if your idea of idea suppressing is one of these great bad ideas? Precisely how much do you trust that it'll be the wise government that chooses which of these ideas is bad and which is not? We have better ways to remember now than ever and technology is nothing else is moving us forward. Lets not bet it all that we'll pick the right ideas to freeze in amber for all of time.
aqouta
11mo ago
They're perverting the very reason the lock in is required. The whole point is so that the people on the annual pass have to give up the bikes to people who are paying the higher per ride cost. You're not even supposed to be able to use the ebikes on the annual pass.
aqouta
11mo ago
I don't think the idea of adults vs teens is that there is animosity, it's that adults, by dint of being at the game where they're actively contributing to society and thus have money, have many privileges set up to let them trade off this productivity to save time. As kids have very little productivity and quite a bit of time they frequently take the opposite end of that trade. Situations like the free bikes are supposed to enforce this time vs productivity trade off. Most kids do respect this, but these teens in particular are defecting on the system.
aqouta
11mo ago
I do think there’s a very good point you’re making about the risks of allying with people who are ostensibly after the same end goals but for completely different reasons; but I think the differences between say, your position on firearms and one motivated by self-defence are smaller than between you and someone pro gun control. Ideological purity is a fractal and I don’t think it’s possible to agree 100% with any individual on policy or societal goals, but that doesn’t mean there’s not individuals with whom you agree more than others.
I think you've missed the point that I was emphasizing from @ymeskhout's OP. It's not just about whether it's tactically sound or not, it's a question of what people in our position are supposed to do when there is a significant difference between the popular variant of a movement and the many competing variants that are actually reasoned. Especially when the popular one in its confused way prescribes things then more reasoned variant wouldn't. We might believe that the popular variant is harmful itself and it's worth addressing it and trying to oppose it and engaging with these other variants is not necessary for that. But at the same time these variants are often brought up as defenses of the whole, deployed at their strongest points, even though they can't all fit together cohesively in a way that justifies the greater movement. If as you've said gender and sex incongruencies are entirely separate issues, one is physical and one is something that might not exist on a deserted island then we can't use the sexual dysphoria as an argument for gender affirming care and yet this move is constantly made, and when it's made the movement is disagreeing with you because you are not useful to it at the moment.
This all has the effect of every trans discussion being several long posts drilling down on what a particular interlocutor actually believes and at some point the thread dies when it becomes necessary for the TRA poster to actually start throwing some of the popular trans movement under the bus for ideological consistency. It's a tactic that produces a movement that can argue for or against anything whenever it is convenient.
I do understand the concerns with surgeries on minors, but the number is very low (56 genital surgeries between 2019-2021, 776 top surgeries) and my experience is that there is a significant amount of gatekeeping
I do not trust the gatekeepers, I have seen their "yeet the teet" advertising, I am unimpressed.
Calling it “mutilation” is emotionally charged language that brings to mind violent traumatic maiming, when the end goal is a surgery that improves the patient’s life.
In the cases where it was not necessary, which are the cases analogous to school shootings, it is a violent and traumatic maiming. There isn't a way to sugar coat unnecesarilly flaying a healthy person's penis that would not have ever desired the procedure if not exposed to this idea. The question of what percentage of patients this describes is of course up for debate but the horror it should invoke can't and shouldn't be sugar coated. I understand why you flinch away, I have the same reaction to pictures of dead kids being used to argue against my position, but the instinct is a weakness.
Your attempt at the Turing test is mostly correct except for the comparison to a BID patient getting an arm amputated; no pro-trans rights person would make that point.
I was mainly comparing them on the mechanism for an unexplainable physical "wrongness" of the body, I wasn't actually trying to compare the outcome itself. That said I honestly would take losing a limb over being reduced to the trans version of my sex, in my case an FTM. I would rather not have a leg than be FTM. I do not think this is an unusual position.
But going on the rest of the statement of belief, how do you bridge or do you not bridge support for trans women in women's sports?
aqouta
11mo ago
If It's not offensive to you, and let me know if it is and I'll switch to something else, I'm going to call the physical dysphoria variant transsexual and the social variant as transgender because this comment was difficult to make readable without two terms.
Do you mean that you shouldn’t give gender affirming care (i.e. medical treatments) if someone has only social dysphoria and no physical dysphoria? I agree with that and from what I can see that’s the general position many trans people have.
No I mean something different. Because both the transsexual people and the transgendered people are under the same umbrella term of "trans" every discussion on the topic has the group under discussion shift as is convenient to the argument. And it's not clear the mainstream trans position actually ever bothers to differentiate between these groups. Puberty blockers are frequently pushed as something all kids who identify as trans should get, with trans being inclusive of transgender kids. But this is an insane thing to suggest for a social phenomenon, even if it might make sense if we had some reliable way to detect transsexuality(which I do not believe we do). If I oppose blockers, which I do for a number of reasons, it may as well be as if the transgender segment doesn't even exist. And as I said above, I do not trust the gatekeepers on this, they do not seem to share your belief that there are different segments here.
I'd like to just comment on how confusing this must be to kids going through the normal discomfort of their bodies changing during puberty. Combined with normal teenage insecurity and identity formation and you have a perfect storm for false positives that will stick. I am incredibly unimpressed with how unserious the movement takes this massive potential hazard.
I think from the start I have tried to be clear that I don’t agree 100% with all of the modern day trans rights beliefs?
Yes and I believe you. It's not that you agree 100% with them, it's that we don't have a choice between what you believe and what we(We being broadly the trans skeptical side) believe. The choice is between what the mainstream trans side proposes and what the mainstream trans skeptical side proposes - and I also don't 100% agree with the main stream trans skeptical side.
So we can go back and forth given this bifurcation of trans and maybe reach a raesoned compromise but what is that worth if you're not at all representative of the movement? At the end of the day we're either confiscating guns or not and it has nothing to do with either of our positions. So when arguing against things like puberty blockers, it might be worth it just for the exercise and curiosity to find how your unique position feels on the topic but if the mainstream position is going to be to add them to the k-12 water fountains(hyperbole) then your more sane position isn't really useful.
The difference is that a kid being shot is always a horrifying thing, while gender affirming surgery can sometimes be horrifying, and sometimes the best thing to happen to someone.
The life saving gender affirming care in this metaphor is akin to a good shoot that saved lives.
Perhaps that is the cause of our disagreement regarding gender reassignment surgeries, you hold having a normal sex life as an incredibly important thing while I do not?
It's not just the sex life it's being thrown entirely off of the normal life path. I can have my own children, have normal parameters in all other areas of my life without a leg. It's difficult to fully explain all the differences it would make. What would you give up to have been born a woman?
aqouta
11mo ago
I'm kind of surprised you are surprised. I was permanently ip and device banned from reddit for using the /r/place thing the way it was intended to be used because an admin had a personal bone to pick with the community associated with the logo, a community that really is less objectionable than other allowed logos like 4chan. The whole phenomenon is why it was important for us to get off of reddit, they want an echo chamber and will have one. Only controlled opposition, complete with admin politically aligned moderators in control, is allowed and it's been that way for years.
aqouta
11mo ago
I have said before that one of the reason I enjoy reading old books and primary sources is that they lay bare just how little changes in a century or more. The old men have always been complaining about "kids these days" the devil has always been in the details. Some might find this percieved lack of progress frustrating or even frightening but I can't help but find it comforting. All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again
I see this sentiment all the time and while there is some truth in that as humans don't change our very human derived issues will continuously re-emerge I think this gives people more comfort than is warranted. People may not change but the environment we share surely does as novel technology is produced. The wars of the 20th century may be just modern examples of human treaties and human failures and human triumphs but surely the mechanization and scale has changed their character. Surely the Atom bomb and intercontinental missiles have raised the stakes beyond what was once conceivable. Surely social media has made the old natural human social tendencies show us a fresh new facet. And what horrors may yet hide in the yet unrevealed facets?
No, I am not comforted by the re-occurrence of old human foibles because they had old human solutions. I look back and I see some foibles ripe to return and fear for what tools we have sown for them to reap.
aqouta
11mo ago
Where are the scholarships? Where are the outreach programs? Why was none of the gender uplift social architecture ever designed to work in the general case and not just the specific cases where women were disadvantaged?
aqouta
11mo ago
Wait, I thought it was well known that gay men tend to be economically ahead of straight men?
aqouta
11mo ago
I figure that most people in this community are good rationalists and dismiss UFOs/UAPs/"non-human intelligences" out of hand. Does this kind of evidence change your mind at all? What would?
Out of hand? No. But I'd need to actually see something. Finding out that there are aliens that have been here would be such a massive revelation with such widespread implications that I need more than hearsay. My mind is open and I've never fully ruled it out but the wolf cries have been numerous and my perception remains entirely devoid of wolves.
aqouta
11mo ago
Honestly this all seems super unnecessary. No one is actually confused at all about this stuff. Human beings naturally break into two groups if not fucked with by some unfortunate mutation/condition or fucked with by the various means of mimicking the other category. As cliche as it is, human beings naturally have two legs we don't need to blow up this useful assumption because of amputees or people with disorders that caused them to grow some other number of legs. The only reason these unusual conditions are brought up at all is because trans advocates want to conflate these unusual conditions with the intentional efforts used to mimic the opposite sex that trans people undergo. If we drop the abnormal conditions it just collapses to "sex is what you are identified as if you don't intentional put substantial effort into changing that perception", which is what everyone, even trans people and their advocates actually use as a category. If it wasn't the case then trans people wouldn't need to put in the effort and the concept of 'passing' would be incoherent. The major disagreement is on to what degree this mimicking should be humored.
You're definitely getting well ahead of yourself on this. He's not even the fourth biggest name going into what looks to be a crowded field of bombastic attention grabbers. The democratic party is almost certain to not even acknowledge his existence in any large way.
there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.
Normal doesn't mean "accounts for all cases". There is little doubt that those with very unusual disabilities or those that put substantial effort into mimicking the opposite sex are not normal. And that can be fine, people don't have to be normal. Abnormal doesn't even strictly mean bad. I do not understand this impulse some have to destroy the concept of normal to spare obvious outliers the small pain of accepting the obvious truth that they are not normal. Or at least the reasoning that does make sense for this impulse is very uncharitable.
To take just one example, being left-handed is a variation that occurs in a minority of humans. Is it an "unfortunate mutation" or a "normal variation"?
Sure, being left handed can be abnormal. It is either a, very slightly, unfortunate mutation or maybe a, very slightly, fortunate mutation in some rare cases like fighting or tennis where it can throw your opponent offguard. No one is surprised when a tennis couch says "normally when the ball is here and your opponent is here you'd expect it to come back in so and so way, but with a lefty so and so". These sexual mutations are much more straightforwardly unfortunate as they carry practically no benefit and quite a bit of downside.
We can be descriptive and speak in generalities, but in a lot of cases I don't think we have a sound basis to say something like, "A human body should work this way, but yours is working wrong."
In some cases sure, but being sterile is very clearly not how the body is supposed to work. The purpose of the reproductive system is to produce offspring, if it can't do that then it is defective. Being defective is about as dead center of a sound basis for declaring something not working correctly as I can imagine. If you can't rule this as abnormal then I question what you actually think normal could possibly mean.
Normal has a purpose, it lets us treat special cases as special cases and suspend normal treatment as necessary. Which is, possibly uncharitably, what I think is behind this whole shell game. You want trans people to be treated not just as normal, but as normal for their desired sex. Those of us objecting to this want to be able to treat trans people as abnormal members of their natal sex. And I think we have tremendously better reasons to do so. I think you want what you want for laudably empathetic reasons, you see them as suffering and that they deeply want to be treated as normal members of the opposite sex. But this violence you're doing to the concept of normal to try and force them to fit is ridiculous and cannot stand. It is wrong to enforce an incoherent worldview, even if done out if empathy. It can't even stand in its own legs, the norm of cis female needs to exist in order for trans women to even emulate it.
aqouta
11mo ago
This downside pales in comparison to the downside that puberty might be one of the most likely things to naturally resolve the issue in the first. The false positive rate is hugely important here.
aqouta
11mo ago
I'm saying that puberty may be what cures some large amount of people of their gender dysphoria. The studies showing how few kids who go on blockers desist are evidence to this. And while not being able to orgasm is quite a problem I'd rank the possibility that we're committing many people who would have desisted to be trans anyways even higher.
aqouta
11mo ago
Hormones literally alter your brain structure, almost certainly more than altering whatever is causing dysphoria would. I can understand someone who has been trans for a while and has built up an identity around it, but once we have a pill that just removes the dysphoria that should be the last generation of trans people.
aqouta
11mo ago
Notice all the people downthread who insist it is obvious what a woman is, that everyone knows, but apparently cannot articulate whatever it is everybody (themselves included presumably) knows.
I understand not wanting to read all the comments but if you aren't going to please refrain from commenting on their contents.
aqouta
11mo ago
A woman is one of the two natural categories that humans develop into if they don't have a very rare disorder or spend significant effort to specifically and intentionally to emulate men. Women are the thing that trans women are attempting to emulate. For trans woman to be a meaningful concept at all you must acknowledge that 'women' is not a null pointer and that the subset of people who you define as 'trans women' are some delta away from the core concept of "women", follow the vector of that delta back and you intersect "man".
It's maddening because while the actual concept is simple there is this shell game you can play. Where you pretend to not know about the thing you have to know about in order for transgenderism to even be a meaningful concept and then poo poo any simple definition with the weirdest edge cases imaginable because your strategy is just to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Oh yeah, "who are we to guess at how many limbs a human has?" or "we can't even decide if left handedness is variation or abnormality". As if the fact that no one has to time to write a definition that can cover 8 Billion cases at every possible intersection means we should give up on the entire idea of categories and just use whatever is politically expedient. Oh yeah, and by the way those things you called "women's sports" instead of "unaltered natal female sports" - that linguistic difference that no one ever considered before? We're going to go the direction opposite of what was the original intended purpose.
aqouta
11mo ago
Can you tell me more about these natural categories?
Human beings, like all mammals, reproduce sexually. The process requires contributions from two distinct categories of humans. The process output is a human who will develop to resemble and be one of these two distinct catagories unless interfered with by a disease or intention effort. This is all fundamental to human reproduction, it is a fact about humans. We call one of these groups, the ones who develop overaries, female or women. Without this process humans would cease to exist and this process requires there to be a meaningful distinction.
I don't really see how the pro-trans crowds goal is to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Indeed, it seems a central feature of their (our) arguments that there is a meaningful category called "women" and that it includes trans women. The anti-trans crowd clearly does not like this fact but it seems obvious to me the pro-trans crowd is not anti-categorization in some general way. We just want more complete and accurate categorizations for the purposes we think they should be put towards.
I suppose it would be more clear for me to say you want to discredit the concept of natural categories. That categories can be facts about the world. You favor treating catagories as totally arbitrary so that you can draw the boundaries wherever you please. But it's wrong, natural categories exist. It's not just arbitrary whim that causes us to differentiate oxygen from carbon dioxide and there are whole processes, that are very important to humans, that rely on these differences. If you give humans carbon dioxide instead of oxygen they will die. If you don't give plants carbon dioxide they will die.
You can of course propose other methods of categorization but you won't be cleaving reality nearly as neatly at the joints. In fact, as I said before your definition of "woman" necesarily contains my definition to avoid being totally circular, you've just tacked on a "also anyone who we would call a man but identifies as a woman" at the end.
But what you can't do is, after making this new arbitrary categorization, name it the same thing as the category we've been using with my definition this whole time and retroactively apply all the systems and assumptions we've built up under the original definition without having to get wide societal buy in. Women's sports were conceived and are predicated on my definition of woman, not your new one. If you want trans women in women's sports you need to make that case, not just play around with words. People do not like being manipulated and this tactic is so transparent.
Different people... do have different numbers of limbs!
But humans naturally have 4 limbs. Instances of people with some other number are exceptions where things have gone wrong. If nothing had gone wrong it would be in their nature to have 4 limbs. For the same reason a centipede with 4 limbs has had its nature subverted. This does not make the centipede more human like, it makes it an exception to centipedes. A man who mimics a woman is an except of the man case, not the woman case because it is in his nature to develop as a man. We can call this man a trans women if you'd like and if people are so inclined they can decide to use she/her pronouns - I myself would and have - but she is not a woman and cannot become one.
I am not sure what the "original intended purpose"
This is where it gets maddening. Are you seriously expecting me to believe you cannot fathom why we created woman's sports leagues?
aqouta
11mo ago
Can you be more specific? What is it these humans develop to resemble?
Sure. The two natural categories of human develop different features to facilitate their different contributions to reproduction. Most primarily and obviously the woman side develops ovaries and eggs and the equipment around which to facilitate the man category's ability to get sperms in contact with these eggs as well as structural differences to allow for the incubation of the offspring, wider hips and a pelvis capable of pass a baby. In addition to these primary traits women also develop secondary traits that also aid in the production of offspring, one of which the category of mammal gets it's name from, mammaries or breasts to feed young infants. Men naturally develop a different set of features in order to perform their role in reproduction primarily the prostate and semen as well as the equipment meant to aid in getting the semen in contact with the woman's eggs.
All these natural differences cause the two groups to have distinct appearances.
I'm also a little unclear on what is meant by "disease" in your description. I read "disease" as a stand in for "anything that causes humans to be different than my model of normal", which seems like it makes your definition tautological.
Disease is the deviation from natural development that impedes healthy function and development. Heart disease is the category of things that prevent, or reduces the ability for, the heart from perform it's vital task of pumping blood throughout the body. Likewise anything that interferes with humans to develop in such a way that their reproductive ability is prevented or retarded is a disease.
It's not just different, it's different in a way contrary to the function that the organs developed, or would have developed if not prevented from developing, to support. If lack of key nutrients caused an infant's heart to not pump blood resulting in the infant dying we do not conclude that hearts aren't necesarily meant to pump blood because in some situations they fail to. Nor do we say that the infant didn't have a heart. They did, just not a functioning one. We say that hearts are meant to pump blood but can fail, if the heart did not fail then it would have become a healthy heart that pumps blood. Likewise if there is some intersex condition we identify what went wrong in development to cause it, because something must have gone wrong.
I think I have been clear since the beginning I don't believe in natural categories, but not believing in natural categories doesn't make categories arbitrary.
This just strikes me as confused. Do you agree that there are facts about the world? Because these facts necesarily imply categorization. If we agree that atom exist and that atoms can have different stable configurations and that these different stable configuration constitute different materials and those materials have different properties then a categorization system simply follows. Carbon is different than oxygen. This is a natural category.
Categories like "oxygen" and "carbon dioxide" are very useful, because the particular atoms and molecules so described share many properties that let us make useful inferences about them and manipulate them in various ways to our ends.
Carbon and oxygen do not need you to acknowledge their natural category to have one. Carbon and oxygen have been behaving as distinct things far before there were any humans to name them and will continue to do so if we are no longer here. The same is true of mammalian sex. There is no kangaroo word for woman and yet the joeys find the self in their mother's pouch anyways. In communication we are forced to use words which are only maps of reality, but the purpose of the words is to faithfully describe reality. Reality contains categories. You are using language for a reason other than to describe reality for some means you find just. I get it, people appear to be suffering from a condition and desperately wish reality was different - I see the temptation to just lie about the mapping between words and reality. But it's a lie, a kind of linguistic defection.
I disagree.
You disagree that your definition of woman necessarily contains mine?
What is stopping me from doing this?
I suppose nothing is stopping you from trying. Just like nothing is stopping you from attempting to enforce a category of "healthy food" inclusive of human excrement. But I'm not going to eat it uncoerced.
sterile women are still women and we had a concept of "woman" long before we knew anything about chromosomes or gametes.
Sterile women, if not afflicted by a disease, would have developed into healthy non-sterile women. They are unfortunate exception that do not in any ways undermine the category.
Who is "we"? I am skeptical that every women's sport league that ever was created was for the same reason.
Give me three different plausible justifications.
aqouta
11mo ago
So what do you do when a trans woman manages to emulate womanhood better than many real women?
This is nearly meaningless. There is more to womanhood than being attractive to men. There are other people in this thread arguing about whether trans women can "pass", I don't find that question all that interesting.
I'll split this into two parts and you can respond to both, either or neither as you please.
If you're making a coherent argument or at least making a good faith attempt at a coherent argument I do think I owe you actual arguments in return and the follow section will contain those. That said it actually does matter that your faction has decisively lost the mainstream and that the people driving the movement call you 'scum' precisely because of some of the axioms your arguments rest on in order to remain coherent.
To reverse the tables at least on myself. I believe in the importance of gun rights because they are a ward against tyranny. I don't particularly find self defense reasoning all that compelling. If it turned out that my pro-gun position was an extreme minority that would not get its way if not for the self defense position, and the self defense position ends up being bogus then I think that should matter politically. The people making the wrong argument about self defense should rightfully be convinced against their position(again assuming it's wrong) and I should actually have to convince those people of my position as well. If I fail then I fail and the power wielded in my interest by my larger faction was never mine to wield at all. Now it might be the case that these other people, even if convinced against the self defense portions of gun control might fall back to my ward against the tyranny of the state position but if they frequently called people who believe my argument 'wardscum', because I wasn't in favor of policies that might aid in self defense but not have any impact as a ward against tyranny like more guns in schools, well that's evidence against the possibility.
Again, you may philosophically owe me an actual argument against my position but if, given everyone heard all the arguments, you have the votes and I don't then you win. If I only have the votes for reasons totally unrelated and unsupportable by my position then I've only gotten lucky and this should concern me because, if for no other reason, my luck could change.
The problem with this being a 'weak man' is that it's the majority opinion espoused both by practically every expert and every activist. While I may owe you an argument we both know the arguments that would defeat the majority of the movement and we both know that they're resistance to the arguments has nothing at all to do with them having a coherent and workable worldview. And while from your perspective the world where they rule, warts and all, is worth it for your own reasons from my perspective there are a lot of kids who will be mutilated by these people on this pyre. Just like many kids will die in school shootings for lack of gun control I have a hard bullet biting answer for it being worth it but I recognize I'm biting quite a bullet here.
Let me see if I can pass the ideological turing test on your position and let me know where I fail:
You believe, bolstered especially by your personal experience, that there is a condition similar to body integrity disorder centered on primary and secondary sex characteristics. You call this 'sexual dysphoria' and believe the best treatment is hormones and possibly surgery as analogous to a BID patient getting an offending arm amputated. It's a rare and unfortunate condition that we wish we could solve without these drastic actions but this is unfortunately the best we can do. We should all do our best to accommodate people, like yourself.
Further for historically contingent reasons there are many behaviors and practices that society "genders" with two categories which have traditionally people have been assigned to at birth by their sex. These behaviors are largely arbitrary, in the past boys were associated with pink and now girls are. These barriers are silly and limiting. Society would be better to rid itself of them and treat everyone as they want to be treated.
I have problems with this position but I'd like you to correct/bolster it where wrong before I got off arguing against something you don't believe.
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