aqouta
No bio...
Friends:
User ID: 75
aqouta
5d ago
Yudkowsky's Harry Potter reads like an MIT freshman, or maybe a dorky high school senior. He does not think or act like a child. Draco talks frankly about rape in his introduction.
I mean yeah, I don't think the idea of HPATMOR was that is was supposed to be a realistic protrayal of children. It was a vehicle for delivering Yud's philosophy. I found it grating myself but not really for this reason.
aqouta
5d ago
Perhaps an embarrassing fact about me: I listened to Harry Potter almost every single night from the ages of 8 to 18. I probably got through the series about once a year. This has given me almost no material advantages in my life, other than providing a very convenient series that I can use to supercharge my language learning.
This is actually nearly true of me as well actually. had them on tapes and fell asleep to them.
aqouta
5d ago
I think it's instructive that the debate has already baked in "coerce" and "means of reproduction and little else," though, which feel like complete non sequiturs. If women increasingly delay childbearing through (imho entirely reasonable) economic anxiety and difficulties finding a suitable partner, it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force, or if you don't want to, guess we'll just have to replace all y'all hoes with robot uteruses," rather than, you know, making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.
Is it not possible that the fact that you think these are the bounds of the debate is the result of negative polarization in a world where practically everyone who has heard of the problem has spitballed their own cause and solution? People retweet the most ghoulish posts by their outgroup back to their ingroup, not the reasonable proposals.
aqouta
5d ago
Organisms that can adapt to their environment will reproduce. Those that can't will die off. So it always has been, so it always will be.
When the organism is a society the means of adaption is memetic. The ability to struggle about the birthrate and find a solution is fitness. Societal conversations and self correction isn't socialism, it's a much older thing that's at least as old as religion. I'm perplexed why you seem to want to bring socialism vs capitalism into the conversation, even by your loose definition of socialism here as when the government does things socialists do not have a better track record on birthrates and your remedy of evolution is not kind to their societies.
aqouta
5d ago
Honestly I think it's your definition of discrimination that is invalid, you seem to think it must have a negative connotation. A discriminating taste means you choose well what to include and exclude. Discrimination isn't inherently bad and you seem to reflexively think it is likely because you've internalized some progressive dogma.
My skepticism about what's going on with the trans phenomenon doesn't really depend on detransitioners as much as other skeptics tend to but this fits well within my model of things. The piece uses the term "identity" 33 times and I think defining that term is at the heart of this whole thing. Identity has a few factors and all importantly interact with what trans even is.
Rule in criteria: This is the most discussed one on this topic for obvious reasons. The whole point of much of the debate is what should be the rule in criteria of the identities man/woman. Which naughty bits you have is the traditional criteria but some want to identify with these identities that would be excluded by this criteria. But that isn't the only identity being discussed here. There is the general LGBTQIA++ bucket that practically everyone involved in any way in this study claims membership to. There is the identity of trans or TGD itself. I think the stickiness of these markers and the fear someone who went whole hog into trans identity would fear losing access to them and the community surrounding them is a big part of the dynamic at play. Being ruled out hurts especially to an identity that you had at one point held on to tightly.
Malleability: This is heavily contested and in the linked post referred to as fluidity. There isn't general agreement on the trans affirming side of the fence on whether gender is actually malleable. The medicalists claim the existence of a real fact of the matter that is gender where if your body deviates from it you should to experience gender dysphoria which acts as proof that your body is the problem to be corrected. Another, seemingly more dominant with LGBTQIA++ circles, sees gender as a kind of basic expression. The binary can and should be queered. If you were born a male but think the truest expression of your inner light is to identify and present as a bearded woman with bolt on tits and any other random assortment of gendered markers then that's what you are and people should respect it.
To the unmalleable medicalist detransitioning is troubling, you have a person who seems to have felt dysphoria with their birth sex and transitioned but found the grass was not in fact greener on the other side. The only thing you have to work with is this idea of gender dysphoria so it being able to lead you astray is terrifying. Because we're all only blessed with one perspective and can't directly compare experiences of things like gender dysphoria to find out if that person just had a bad understanding of what gender dysphoria is then from the perspective of a rational person who feels what they believe to be gender dysphoria what are you to take from the existence of people who claim to have tried what you are considering and report it didn't work or in fact was quite bad? Could the people reporting a happy transition be subject to the sunk cost fallacy and in a counterfactual world where they hadn't transitioned and learned to live with their birth gender they might be even happier? There's genuinely no way to know. But there wouldn't be a way to know if there weren't any detransitioners either, detransitioners are just evidence.
The gender queer people can handle the existence of detransitioners more easily. They were always of the opinion that gender can change and if some people went a little too far then that's fine, that's life.
Salience: Salience is how tightly bound up your self conception is in an identity. Two people born in the same city in Texas, one might bind tightly to the identity of a Texan, attend rodeos, wear a cowboy hat/boots and exaggerate their accent, the other might act indistinguishably from what one might expect from a midwesterner. Both are by rule in criteria Texans but one holds the identity much more tightly. The low salience Texan might move to Chicago and feel no real loss, the high salience Texan might refuse to even visit other, inferior, states. People can bind to identities with a wide variance of salience depending on circumstance and nothing seems to encourage tight binding more than opposition. As a young kid I once bound my identity up with not liking a certain type of food in response to my parents attempting to make me eat it. It seemed genuinely important to preteen-aqouta that I wasn't the sort of person who ate cheese burgers - cringe I know.
So another element to the trans question is how salient should your sex and gender really be to your identity? Trans activism seems caught up in raising the salience of gender, many of their detractors would like to lower the salience of gender. Detransitioning seems like a kind of crisis in the salience of gender in an individual. This can be very hard on a person, especially if they perceive the identity to be besieged and that losing the salience of that identity would give the hated enemy ammunition. I don't think this conflict happens consciously in most people.
Conclusion: So what should those of us on the outside think of the existence of these different types of detransitioners? It's hard to say. If we could be confident that there is such a thing as hard gender dysphoria then we should advocate for better screening of people who were led to believe they have it but don't really. But false positives are probably unavoidable. We should recognize that this same identity formation dynamic happens in many other areas of life, that it's confusing particularly from the first person and hopefully we can extend grace to people living through that confusion.
Yes, no one wanted them to keep those weapons, and yet giving them up seems an obvious mistake in hindsight.
More options
Context Copy link