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User ID: 2225
dovetailing
5mo ago
I am once again asking you to have a little empathy for people you find disgusting
Let's start with an easier case.
I find male homosexuality disgusting. The idea of two men having sex makes my stomach turn. Even something like two men kissing makes me a bit queasy. And, separately, because I'm a Christian and take Christian sexual ethics seriously, I think it is (along with many other things) morally wrong.
It would be very easy for me to decide that, therefore, all gay men are sick perverts. There's more than ample evidence for that if I were inclined to take that position: bathhouse hookups, near-nudity at Pride parades, piss orgies. Case closed, right?
But I think we're all aware that that's not the whole story. When two men want to get gay-married, they are not, apparently, doing so merely to indulge in (and force society to be complicit in) some perverted sex act. Apparently, gay men actually fall in love, and actually form romantic attachments to each other. I know this because they say so, and because homosexually attracted men who think it's immoral talk about how hard it is, and because who on earth thinks getting married and tying yourself to another person is the easiest way to indulge in some perverted sex act; come on.
So I can have empathy for gay men. I know what it's like to be infatuated with a woman, to fall in love, to want to get married (I'm married myself) -- and, yes, to be sexually attracted and want to have sex, too. And I can imagine how insanely hard that would be, to have something wrong with your brain so that instead of having sexual and romantic attraction to the opposite sex, you have it to the same sex. And how hard it would be to have all those feelings of eros, of being-in-love, that scream to you from the rooftops that this is right and good and beautiful and what I'm meant to do, except unnaturally directed towards another man.
So yeah, I think that being homosexual means there's something mentally wrong with you, and that men having sex with men is sinful, and that it's not a good thing that we've normalized these things in our society. But I can also have empathy and understanding for their situation, and not insist at every turn that they're all perverted sickos who want to inflict their perversion on the rest of us.
But this post isn't about gays.
I keep seeing in these threads people talking about transsexuals as though they are all sick perverts who want to inflict their fetish on the rest of us. They can marshal evidence, of course, because, yes, there are trans people who are in fact doing something a lot like that. It's not as much evidence as in the case of gay men, but sure, it's there.
And it's not wrong that there's some sexual elements to transition. If you've not heard of Blanchard's typology of male-to-female transsexuals, here's the short version: There are, broadly speaking, two types of males who want to become female so badly that they will try to do it as best they can.
The first type are very effeminate males; they are attracted solely to men, they act like girls from a very early age, and they feel, often very intensely, that they are in the wrong body, to the point that it causes them enormous distress; in fact, their actual bodies are often somewhat androgynous. They have a good case that they have some prenatal hormone or endocrine issues that caused this cross-sex psychology. This type is very rare, probably less than one in ten thousand in the general population.
The second type are different. They are almost always attracted to women. They rarely displayed overtly feminine behavior as young children, and their personalities run the entire gamut of the male distribution. They often don't develop the level of distress (or obsession) that drives them to transition until later in life (though with the threshold for how motivated one has to be to transition coming down, more and more of them are transitioning earlier). This type is much more common, forming the majority -- and an increasing one, as barriers come down -- of males seeking to transition.
But the unique and startling attribute of this second type is that they find the idea of being or becoming female sexually arousing. This attribute Blanchard named autogynephilia, and to it he attributed the ultimate cause of their desire to transition.
Most "trans women" are autogynephiles.
But just as it's wrong to attribute the desire of gay men to get gay-married to their getting horny in perverted ways, it's wrong to attribute autogynephiles' desire to transition to the same. Insisting on doing so betrays the same lack of empathy that results in street preachers who think yelling at the gays about how they're sick freaks is the way to fix anything.
I don't want autogynephiles to transition. I think the messaging they are getting about how "wanting to be a girl is the number one sign of being a girl" (yes, an actual statement I've seen) is destructive and leads to foolish delusions about what they really are. I think most of them would be much happier -- and make those around them much happier -- if they would not indulge, not try to transition, not let this stuff blow up their lives and relationships. And I think that making your best disgusted face and yelling "it's a fetish" is the second-worst thing you can do, second only to the active encouragement they're getting from the trans movement.
So let me help you have some empathy. As it turns out, I have autogynephilia. (And no, before you ask -- I have never cross-dressed, not even in private. Not everyone is the same.) Let me tell you why -- in spite of the fact that I think it's wrong, and in spite of the fact that I know damn well that it doesn't actually work to change sex, I've been tempted by the siren song of transition. Here's a hint: it's not because it would help me to have orgasms.
I'm going to come back to the analogy of being in love. Not because it's exactly the same -- it isn't, not really -- but because it's the closest thing that most people have experienced to the emotions I'm trying to get at, and has many of the same complicating sexual factors. I'm going to assume you are a straight guy, because I am, and so are most of the people here. If you're not, feel free to fill in the sexes appropriately.
Let's say you develop an infatuation with a girl. You enjoy thinking about her. You want to spend time with her. Being near her is pleasant, and comforting, and a little exciting. You want her, just her, not instrumentally, not to do anything in particular, just her, for no reason and every reason. Holding her hand is electric. You just want be with her forever, to sweep her into your embrace, and damn it, why the f&!k are you getting a boner right now, you were having this pure and chaste and beautiful reverie and now you're thinking about sex.
So yeah, it's kinda like that. Sometimes there's a pure lust thing, too, just like a guy will imagine some girl and masturbate while thinking about her. But the primary thing, the reason transition has any appeal at all, is not that, any more than simple horniness is the reason a man in love wants to marry his beloved.
Sometimes -- during some periods in the past, at any time the thought would occur to me, which was quite often -- I want to be female. (And to be clear: although the intense desire to be female is not uniform, and it's less common now because I don't indulge it as deeply -- I've almost never wanted to be what I actually am, male, except instrumentally.) It's almost a primitive, axiomatic thing; a simple fact, not to be questioned despite its strangeness. My "ideal self" would have long hair and breasts and a round, sweet face, would wear dresses (but not makeup and heels, those suck), would not have a penis and testicles but a vagina and a womb and ovaries. Why? I don't know why, that's just what is. Sucks to be me that I'm actually male, unlike half the human population.
(Downthread someone mentioned the social attitude of "man bad, woman good"; unironically this is my own deeply felt and instinctive emotional response.)
For about a decade and a half of my lifetime, roughly between adolescence (maybe before; I don't remember) and when I got engaged, if you'd given me a magic button that would have instantly and permanently made me fully female, with all the right parts and functions and everything -- I would have pressed that button so damned hard you have no idea. I wouldn't do it now -- because I'm married, and I love my wife even more, and also because I have some concept for why my feelings on the matter are wrong -- but I'd still be sorely tempted.
Interestingly, I never really hated my actual body, as such. I don't like it; I don't like seeing myself in the mirror, I don't like my "equipment". But I don't have the kind of revulsion that some people report. Maybe I'm lucky after all; I mostly disliked my male body only because it wasn't a female one. But if I'd spent another decade single and investing in the fantasy of becoming a woman, instead of focusing on loving my wife and resisting those thoughts? Yeah, I'd probably be so miserable with my actual body, and so fixated on the fantasy, that I'd be willing to accept transition (hormones and surgeries and all) as the best I could do.
So anyway, next time you see some dude in a dress, with long hair and breasts but a face and voice obviously male despite his best efforts, think about what kind of emotions must have driven him to that place, and have a little empathy.
dovetailing
5mo ago
I'm not going to deny that such people exist --- there's apparently a fetish for everything --- but I've never seen evidence that this is an appreciable fraction of the population in question. Do you have any?
dovetailing
5mo ago
I do not think that describing trans women as 'men with a cross dressing fetish' is very close to reality.
There is a small fraction of people who are genuinely very uncomfortable with their biological gender. They sometimes take hormones, get surgery and go through byzantine legal processes to change their legal gender. They kill themselves at elevated rates when forced to conform to their biological gender. This is not just some kink.
I've been arguing for something similar elsewhere in the thread so it's only fair that I push back gently on this too.
First, pedantic point, you mean "biological sex". The people who get suicidal are uncomfortable with their bodies. That aside:
A large fraction of MtFs have autogynephilia. Even before the recent (20 yrs) runup, it was most likely more than half; now, it's probably more like 90%. This is even when you include only the people who get some form of medical transition; if you include all the "dude shaves his legs and wears a skirt" crowd it's probably even higher (though at that point you probably just start getting general weirdos who aren't in the same clade as people who seek medical transition).
Do the AGP MtFs who seek medical transition and official name changes fit your description? Maybe! Depending on exactly how you cash out terms like "dysphoria" (or your "very uncomfortable"), possibly the vast majority of them! But also.... AGP has a sexual element. Almost nobody medically transitions because it gets them off to do so, that's completely crazy (and sometimes they get surgeries to remove their genitals or reconstruct them as pseudo-female-genitals, come on; and sometimes they find that cross-sex hormones prevent them from getting off and still continue to transition). But at the same time... if you've got AGP, then you do have an arousal response to the idea of being female, and for many AGPs, this is especially triggered by cross-dressing. So there's a sense in which a lot of MtFs... do, in fact, have a cross-dressing fetish, if you look at it that way. It's not why they're transitioning, in the sense that they wouldn't be doing it if it was just a fetish, but it's there. I've heard it becomes less... stimulating... once they've been doing it for a long time, though. It's complicated.
dovetailing
5mo ago
Why do you suppose suddenly they are a major front in the culture war?
You're not wrong, but I think it's several reasons:
- As you mention, that community has defended and/or denied the existence of obvious bad actors, especially sex pests who either are or claim to be trans (there's high profile examples of both).
- There's been an enormous growth (like, orders of magnitude) in the number of people transitioning medically (as in cross-sex hormones and/or surgeries) and an even bigger growth in the number of people self-identifying as "trans" in the last ~15-20 years, which has resulted in:
- A lot more "visibly trans" people, who a lot of people find disturbing (especially MtFs),
- The demands made by the movement getting louder and applying more frequently.
- A lot of "holy crap what is happening" reaction as people's family members get (apparently suddenly) sucked in to the movement and often start doing things like changing their names, insisting on being referred to as the opposite sex, even things like taking cross-sex hormones and getting irreversible surgeries.
Even without the bad actors issue, I think this would be a major CW front. Maybe bathrooms specifically wouldn't be as big of a flash point, but there was always going to be something.
dovetailing
5mo ago
AIUI this is pretty much the "tucute" vs "truscum" (what is wrong with people and these juvenile names?) debate, which the "tucute" side won in the mainstream (how on earth did we get to the point that any of this is mainstream?) trans movement.
dovetailing
5mo ago
this is the same thing as saying 'men who commit to physical transition don't do so for AGP reasons'
No, this claim (not the one you place in quotation marks, but your claim that that statement is equivalent to the claim that transitioners are not "just acting out a fetish") is exactly what I'm disagreeing with! Saying that AGP is "just a fetish" --- at least as a blanket claim; it may be for some cases --- is reductive to the point of being nearly as wrong as the people who deny its relevance. You might as well say if someone is sexually attracted to their spouse that they only got married just because they're horny.
dovetailing
5mo ago
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5mo ago
I checked out that archival link to 4chan. I have to say, there definitely is a heavy selection effect going on there, but at least it's a different one than the the other places I've looked.
I find 4chan slang and culture to be extremely offputting, but a certain subset of the population there at least has the "brutally honest" thing going. (Or maybe they're being hyperbolic or making shit up for fun. Hard to tell sometimes...)
dovetailing
5mo ago
Sure, but the "uses women's bathroom" behavior doesn't add any additional strangeness on top of the "made permanent changes to body and lifestyle" part.
dovetailing
5mo ago
Maybe we're talking past each other but the thing I think is unlikely --- conditional on his making permanent changes to his body --- is that the whole thing is just acting out a fetish. Most people with fetishes don't make permanent changes to their bodies or try to constantly act on them in public, and the ones who do are generally disturbed and disregulated enough that they'll get themselves into trouble with undeniably inappropriate behavior pretty quickly.
dovetailing
5mo ago
I was objecting to the implication that we're evolved to see women as morally superior, not to the corresponding claim that "protect women" is to an extent hardwired.
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5mo ago
Surely it's less strange than all the other stuff he's done to get to this point, right? Like, a random guy in drag insisting on using the women's room, that's separately a strong signal of weirdness/sketchiness. But if he's convinced himself that he's a woman at this point, and (quite possibly, though I couldn't say for sure) been on hormones and had surgeries to get there, then surely that's the strange part, not the part where he subsequently wants to use the women's restroom.
dovetailing
5mo ago
The voice is, yes, usually a giveaway. But there are a lot of masculine-looking actual women out there (even some with deeper voices) due to genetics / endocrine issues, to the point where I'd be often be uncomfortable guessing --- certainly from looks alone --- whether a given person is a lucky MtF or an unlucky actual woman if encountered out of context.
dovetailing
5mo ago
Have you never heard of gynecomastia? Estrogens produce breast growth in men, too, sometimes quite a bit of it. There are boys who have to get mastectomies because of endocrine issues, even! McBride seems to have been "trans" ever since his early 20s more than 10 years ago, so while that amount of growth would be unusual, it's not unheard of.
It's relevant because your point seems to be that McBride is just acting out a fetish in which he expects the whole world to be involved, as evidenced by his "wear[ing] fake breasts" (I assumed you meant prosthetics, though maybe you mean implants?), and if he's actually on hormones for 10 years, and made permanent changes to his body, I don't think that's very likely.
I don't think you need to insist that every MtF transsexual is just acting out a fetish in order to have a good argument against blanket letting any man who claims to be a woman into women's bathrooms. I actually agree with you on the conclusion! Bathrooms are vulnerable places and women are uncomfortable when men are in the bathroom with them, and that's a good enough reason to forbid it. You don't need to assume the worst about people in order to make the point.
(FWIW, on priors I wouldn't bet against McBride being AGP, but that's not always the same thing as just a fetish, and I would not expect someone who just has a crossdressing fetish to commit literally his whole life to the bit.)
dovetailing
5mo ago
I'm not sure we have "evolved as a species" to see women as morally superior. Plenty of societies in antiquity (and even more recently than that) treated women as basically defective (morally, intellectually, and physically) men whose sole redeeming quality was babymaking. Even when Christianity (with a much more egalitarian attitude, at least on the "morally" front) became widespread, it took a long time to purge those ideas from the zeitgeist, to the point that you can find them even in some early Christian writers.
dovetailing
5mo ago
You... may be an outlier. (Not disagreeing that it's good to keep men out of women's bathrooms, even with stalls, though.)
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5mo ago
Do you know that McBride wears fake breasts vs. being on estrogen (which produces natural breast growth; yes, even in biological males)? I couldn't discover either way from a quick search, and ... weirdly ... this seems relevant for your point.
dovetailing
5mo ago
Red hot CW, but it's a limited-scope question (I hope).
How can I find out the profile(s) for marginal MtF transitioners?
A few definitions:
- MtF transitioner: a male who does at least one of the following:
- Goes on HRT (cross-sex hormones) for long enough to begin to develop female sex characteristics like breast growth
- Gets surgery related to transition (including facial feminization, vocal, genital, but not including non-invasive procedures like hair removal)
- Changes name and presents full time as a woman
- In particular, I'm not counting cross-dressing, deliberate androgyny, a "second identity" as a woman, etc. unless accompanied by one or more of the above, even if the person considers himself "trans".
- Marginal meaning the usual thing, which could cash out in something like one of the following:
- Is "on the bubble" about transitioning in the above ways, narrowly doing so (or narrowly not, but that's harder to measure)
- Wouldn't have transitioned in similar circumstances, in the cultural climate of, say, 20+ years ago, (i.e. comparing to counterfactual of born 20 years earlier, making decision 20 years ago, not comparing to past self) but did transition in recent years (or is about to start transition now)
- Profile meaning:
- Demographics pre-transition, especially including age both at beginning to transition and age when first considering transition (if those are different)
- Motivation: why, in terms of consciously experienced motivation (no psychoanalysis or "no you really did it for X reason", but also not "what theory of themselves do they subscribe to"), did they choose to transition
- Religious and/or ideological background in early life (not immediately prior to transition, as I expect possible ideological shifts to bring beliefs in line with actions)
- Personality / interests
- Psychological comorbidities
I'm not asking for your personal theories (unless you uniquely have an insider or reliable source of knowledge about it); I have my own and most people's ideas about this are half-baked at best and ludicrously ideologically motivated at worst. What I want to know is where I can find one of:
- Many such people (unguardedly) talking about themselves, in places accessible on the public internet.
- High quality data gathered on this topic by people who are not just trying to grind their ideological axes / prove their pet theories.
So far I've read through a bunch of stuff on the sorts of subreddits where I'd expect to find such people, such as /r/mtf, /r/trans, /r/egg_irl. But I suspect that may not be a representative slice of the population I'm interested in.
dovetailing
5mo ago
Matushka Olga of Alaska (1916 - 1979), who's community considers her a saint
As of last year, this includes the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America. I'm not sure if all the proper preparations and rite have taken place yet, but soon (if not already) she'll be considered a saint by the Orthodox Church more generally.
dovetailing
7mo ago
Given the content at the links this reads like thick irony.
dovetailing
7mo ago
Enjoy your updoot; this is not said enough. You know that 10% giving pledge Scott promoted? I know plenty of Christians who give 10% just to their church (and aside, as much as people like to call this "paying for services", it's really not, even when a lot of it does go to paying the pastor and maintenance -- the priest/pastor has a real role in serving the people who are not financing the operation, and most churches turn around and donate to both local poverty relief and international aid and/or missions), plus more to international charity. (Not to toot my horn but because it's the only numbers I know exactly, my wife and I give 10% of our gross to our local parish, plus about 1% to US charity and 2% to international charity, and we plan to increase the last one in the future.)
dovetailing
7mo ago
I suppose they also have the issue that their leadership class is mostly celibate as well (including female religious), which also opens them up to accusations like, "Of course you don't empathise, you will never have to deal with this".
One of those convenient sticks to hit the dog with. Of course the Orthodox and Eastern Catholics have married priests (and even some widower Bishops with adult children, at least in the Orthodox church) and are just as pro-life, which somehow doesn't come up. (And you can find plenty of pro-life Evangelicals even in the squishier groups that ordain women.)
dovetailing
8mo ago
Maybe this is just local conditions but in my (heavily convert) Orthodox parish a supermajority of people have converted as couples or families, and I've not noticed anything like the conditions you are describing among those who are/were single. If anything it's been the single young women who have been most desperate to get married -- which they are succeeding at. (Though I wouldn't read as much into that part, the sample size is pretty small.)
dovetailing
8mo ago
I agree, but I'd go one step further: the best would be to stop worrying not only about conserving vs changing things, but about what counts as "right" vs "left". Align yourself with What Is Good and work for that, regardless of whether it is present or absent in your culture, ancient or new, "left" or "right", progressive or reactionary. The moment you take your eyes off The Good and start choosing your values based on political alignments is the moment you lose your way. Politics ought to never be anything more than merely instrumental.
I dunno about schizo-post (and I don't drink) but my post in this edition was definitely written in the middle of the night because I couldn't sleep and was pissed at some people downthread (mostly Stellula) and had a harebrained idea that maybe I could persuade people to -- however much they can't stand the activists and are put off by all the trans weirdos -- respond with compassion instead of contempt. Whoever said that I was being sloppy about my usage of "empathy" is correct; I was trying to help inspire empathy in order to elicit more compassion. @urquan, as usual, had the right of it in this comment.
The odd thing is that --- and I'm surprised that it wasn't clear from the post --- I'm actually pretty far on the conservative side as regards what I think about the political/social demands of the trans activists, as well as what I think about the entire culture and ideology surrounding it as a movement. In some ways I'm probably more opposed to the trans movement than a lot of the people who were getting upset with me about the post. It's just that I both have an "inside view" about what's driving it, and I get really frustrated when people round off the experience of people they think are their enemies to the nearest sneer instead of seeking to understand and be compassionate.
I didn't respond to all the replies back when it was posted because I was not in a good way emotionally, and didn't have the wherewithal to deal productively with all the hostility I was sensing. I decided to take a hiatus from TheMotte instead (and will probably only visit infrequently from now on, to be honest). And now I'm posting this here instead of in the main thread or elsewhere because I don't want to have to get into a giant debate about it. Ah well.
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